The Daily Signal - Are Soros' Money and Influence Starting to Dwindle?

Episode Date: August 29, 2025

“I’m Sorry, Dave.” It's not that George Soros was born in 2008 but he became part of the political zeitgeist that year as we learned about how he helped raise a fortune for the Presidential aspirations of a young Senator from Illinois named Barrack.  Ever since then the specter of Soros and his money has hung over every discussion about democracy in the United States. Last year he announced that he was stepping back from the day-to-day operations in favor of his son Alex, who he calls far more politically active than he ever was, taking over. The fear in Conservative circles was that a more politically aggressive, more targeted Soros organization at Open society would be harder to even keep up with, never mind defeat. The Soros organization is the key pole underneath the tent of a fundraising machine called  Arabella Advisors. They are a philanthropic consulting company that oversees a handful of nonprofits, all of which oversee a multitude of left-leaning projects and organizations. When accounting for the seven nonprofits in the Arabella Network, they provided nearly $1 billion in grants in 2023 alone.  One group that has done an exquisite job all the way to the point of publishing a book on who Arabella Advisors are is the Capital Research Center. Kristen Eastlake, Senior Vice President of the CRC sits down with us at the State Policy Network annual meeting to tell us breaking news that George and more importantly Alex Soros may not have the money they used to have. Keep Up With The Daily Signal   Sign up for our email newsletters:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.dailysignal.com/email⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠     Subscribe to our other shows:    The Tony Kinnett Cast: ⁠https://megaphone.link/THEDAILYSIGNAL2284199939⁠ The Signal Sitdown: ⁠https://megaphone.link/THEDAILYSIGNAL2026390376⁠   Problematic Women:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠https://megaphone.link/THEDAILYSIGNAL7765680741⁠   Victor Davis Hanson: ⁠https://megaphone.link/THEDAILYSIGNAL9809784327⁠     Follow The Daily Signal:    X:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠https://x.com/intent/user?screen_name=DailySignal⁠ Instagram:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.instagram.com/thedailysignal/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠  Facebook:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.facebook.com/TheDailySignalNews/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠  Truth Social:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://truthsocial.com/@DailySignal⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠  YouTube:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/dailysignal?sub_confirmation=1⁠    Subscribe on your favorite podcast platform and never miss an episode. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Thanks for listening to this bonus episode of The Daily Signal podcast. I'm your host, Joe Thomas, Virginia correspondent for The Daily Signal. Before we dive into today's interview, I want to thank you for tuning in today. If you're a first-time listener, The Daily Signal, brings you fact-based reporting and conservative commentary on politics, policy, and culture. And I hope you join our band of regular listeners to our podcast. If you enjoy the show, please subscribe and also take it. a moment to rate and review us wherever you get your podcast. You can find additional content

at DailySignal.com. Now, let's get started with today's conversation right after this. We are at the State Policy Network annual meetings in New Orleans and all of us here from the Virginia Institute. It's been an incredible time for me. I've never been. It's literally a convention center full of people just like the Virginia Institute for Public Policy. from all the states and all the unions, federalism on the march. One of our good friends from the Capital Research Center is Kristen Eastlick back on the program because she has enormous news. And there, I haven't oversold it.

Have I, Kristen? I don't think so. No, this is pretty important. Okay, guys, I didn't want to kind of, you know, overdo it and then kind of make it, I really truly believe this. So why don't you tell everyone what happened just this week? while we're all been here at the state policy network meeting. Well, it actually happened barely 12 hours ago.

This reporter at the New York Times, who is great on nonprofit issues, he just announced that Bill Gates has decided to stop running money through a large consultancy, a large Democratic consultancy that has been causing a lot of problems for liberty-minded people nationwide. It's an organization called Arabella Advisors. And it works by having a number of fiscal sponsors so that you don't always know what group is responsible for the kinds of campaigns that they're running. And it's campaigns for everything. It's everything from trying to drive voters to into the election based on how they're going to vote, which is something that isn't allowed by the IRS. Partisan advocacy isn't allowed.

They fund abortions, abortion advocacy, they fund climate advocacy. They have funding for pretty much any project that is out there that threatens our liberties that threatens a free economy. And they are now going to lose. Up till now, Gates Foundation has given them $450 million, and they are going to stop doing that. So that last number, because I was going to ask you, because I was going to ask you, because I like to be that guy in the room. I was going to ask you, are we sure it's the same Bill Gates?

But I don't know if some guy named Bill Gates in Indiana has that kind of scratch. That's, you know, and so Arabella, we've talked, you've been on the program before. You guys at the Capital Research Center really have Arabella down cold for all of the spider web that it goes out into. But this is George Soros. This is open society. This is where they go. If you ever watch James Bond and, you know, and there's Christoph Wals, you know, as Blofeld,

and he's got the room with all the people around the meeting table, that's basically what, you know, I want you to imagine when you think of Arabella. This is that room full of global, you know, the nice white hat wearing ones or the World Economic Forum ones, and the Black Hat ones are the ones that don't ever want their name spoken. We like to describe this as kind of a pyramid of information. So sitting at the top is Arabella. And then the second tier, they manage organizations that are non-profits.

So some of them are classified as charities, 501C3s. Others are classified as social welfare groups, and they can do unlimited lobbying. They can also tell people who to vote. vote for, they can pursue party politics, but these groups often work in tandem. So the charity part of the group, the education fund angle, will put out the studies. They will build some sort of infrastructure. They'll get people talking about an issue, like let's say healthcare for America now. That's stuff that works for the C3, and then they have the healthcare action now that then

gets to lobby on health care issues. It gets to push Medicaid expansion, or it gets to give money to campaigns to help elect people who will do those things. So that's the layer in the middle. And what happens is that the healthcare for American out, they're at the very bottom of the pyramid. And it's hundreds and hundreds of groups. One of these nonprofits, the one that gets a lot of Gates money is the New Venture Fund. It was the Arabella's president or New Venture Fund's president admitted that Gates gives 2% of their entire revenue through New Venture Fund.

That's the group that would run health care for America now. So when you tell you, and the difference is, you know, the C3, C4, you know, and then you become a political action committee. But unlike in our space where the political action committee is like Spirit of Virginia and everyone knows it, and they, you know, and you've seen their placards and whatever else, these are 501C4s that nobody has ever said. their name except for Kristen and the other folks at Capital Research Center out there and they don't want it because they want all of these groups, pardon me, to appear grassroots.

Oh, it's just a bunch of old, you know, cute kids from college saying we want health care and we want it now when it really is. Exactly. And the interesting that why would the Gates Foundation? who can give money directly to a 501C3 charity. And they do that. Why would they need to pass the money through a Democratic consultancy? And it's because there's a lot of coordination that happens between and amongst these groups.

You can have a situation where there's a letter out there supporting some public policy issue, and it has 20 signers that are all Arabella-related entities. So it looks like you're absolutely right. It appears as though we call this AstroTurf. and the scale of the way that this organization operates, it's usually per political cycle, a roughly $2 billion organization, give or take a few million.

And again, they do receive money from many, many foundations that could otherwise give directly to the organization. And when you talk about foundations, we're talking about Rockefeller, we're talking about Carnegie, we're talking about a lot of these 20th century industrialists whose families continue to run their fund. I call it laundering their reputation.

Whatever you want to call it, this is where the Rubenstein Foundation. All these folks are out there giving money to this group. How does this, I mean, to me, this really puts a serious crimp into the activities of a group like Arabella, this close to the midterms. You know, if a conservative group pulled out of some, you know, make America great pack. This would be front page news. Bad news for the midterms, you know,

big, whatever. So codify that for me. What does this mean for the midterms? Well, first let's explain what we're talking about by this money being withheld. First, they announced that they are going to be not making new investments with Arabella-related organizations. They are also going to not renew existing grants. And they are going to explore possibly pulling back money that has not yet been it's pledged but it's not been spent yes and it's like what Trump did with the rescission budget isn't it is it is very close but that is a signal to other progressive funders that there's going to be a distancing so in order to now placate the Gates Foundation some funders will stop working with and again I'm

not saying this this is being said by the reporter who is explaining it in the story that now there is a distancing of other entities from Arabella and And there's more of an open acknowledgement that these groups are acting in ways that are designed to or packaged as nonpartisan while actually participating in democratic advocacy. One other thing to mention is that the, no one was really talking about this organization before 2019. There had been some stories about the 1630 Fund. And there was some acknowledgement that there was many different campaigns housed under one.

But no one really was saying the name Arabella. I think there was maybe one good media story about them back in the day because they were a good employer. They were sort of on one of those lists of favorite places to work or something like that. But we started explaining this in 2019. My boss actually wrote a book on Arabella advisors that not... I have a copy of it. Not coincidentally. We just came out with the paperback version in July.

So we have it freshly updated. Obviously, it's already out of date. I'll describe the cover for you. It's a very dark cover, and it's got three faces. The first face is Mark Zuckerberg. The middle face, the largest face is George Soros. And then the third face is Bill Gates. And so now two of those three faces has stepped away.

Mark Zuckerberg has changed his giving strategy altogether, so he's giving more on science and things like that, and has been kind of open in his divorce from some of these policies. But this is the second to fall. So is this correlation or causation of the administration, for the first time, not being afraid to call out news coverage that's 99% biased one way, campaign funding that's 99% because some of these groups, they're really sneaky. They'll find some middle of the road Republican,

throw a few shekels into their campaign, and they'll say, oh, no, we're bipartisan when 99%. And Trump has been very vocal about calling out these 99% groups. Is this correlation or causation? So I definitely think that this attention to bigness, attention to all of how these big institutions have been captured by the left. It's been happening for many years. And as it kept happening with not a lot of pushback, you know, the agencies that are

covering this, the IRAs doesn't have a lot of interest in getting into these politically partisan issues. They really don't. So they don't do a lot of enforcement in this space. Which is funny because it's their law that sets up all these windows. They're like, oh, no, we're a 501c4. We can do whatever we want. And they're all IRS code. And when things do happen, they wind up punishing the right for doing things that the left tends to do without question. You may recall when the T parties all wanted to start and they were all getting their 501C4s held up so they couldn't hold rallies, they couldn't talk to candidates. That was that whole 2010 ugliness that was going on at the IRS. And they're not doing it now.

Right. So now that the attention is on all of these big institutions and how do we recapture them, the Trump administration has just made it very clear that they're not playing, they're playing hardball on, no, let's get these organizations operating again in the middle from the center or from a place of nonpartisanhip. And that's where I think we are now. And this is just another example of people being exposed to how partisan things are and figuring out ways to break that,

or at least turn it back to neutral is a way to phrase it. Well, and a lot of people ask, well, who is George Soros? Where does he get his money from? Now, he's a resorts and hotelier, a famous story in 2008, when he gave $100 bonuses to all the maids and the butlers and all the people at his resorts with a little note saying, this is a bonus for your great work. However, it would really make me happy if you gave half of this,

importantly, $50. And these were overseas, but they were $50. So they stayed underneath the radar as it were. And I remember that story thinking, man, that's just the greasiest thing I've ever heard. And that's where a lot of his influence, and that's what they do, they come in and say, certainly we won't tell you what your group should be working towards, but we'd really appreciate it if you did this, that, or the other thing. With his Democracy Alliance, which is not, George Soros' Democracy Alliance isn't a non-profit in and of itself.

It's kind of just a convening spot where all of these big donors, it takes, at one time it was $200,000 just to be at the table. I don't know that price now, and it has some of the biggest institutions, the big union, bosses are all or many of them are at that table so you pay 200 to be in the room and then the the Democracy Alliance folks will figure out the campaigns and we'll design the strategies to move forward on all of these issues here's one of my I love this story so in 2016 when the Trump wins surprised everyone Democracy Alliance has two meetings a year they have a spring meeting and they have a fall meeting and of course their materials are put together months in advance

So with the assumption that there was going to be a Hillary Clinton win, they had this great big program of information with all of these, how we're going to capture this moment, how we're going to codify all of these things. And so they had to do, oh, no, what do we do now? So there was this great memo written, and it talks about how, in order for us, we clearly got it wrong, in order for us to turn this back, we have to start civic engagement, which is, of course, the euphemism for, voter turnout to benefit Democrats.

That's exactly what civic engagement means. And so they took this, they had these plans and they were going to start up eight different groups. One was going to be focused on certain states. One was going to be focused on Latino, get out the vote, black get out the vote, climate action fund or climate funding. One for each thing, one for each insular thing.

And guess what? the C3 of that organization was going to be run through New Venture Fund, the C4 of that entity, whatever it is, Latino Action Fund, Latino Youth, was going to be run out of the 1630 Fund. So George Soros laid out 15 different entities that Arabella was going to be running. And if I'm not mistaken, we've talked about Arabella before Kristen is on, Kristen Eastlake from the Capital Research Center. But one of the things I remember us talking about in our discussions about Arabella is that by the gravity of the amount of money they have, they're attracting all the, quote, best and brightest. This is where the Jedi ready to go over to the dark side goes to. These are the guys who can make the Internet sing. And I was watching this during 2008. The emails that I was getting from Barack Obama. And I knew they weren't coming from Barack Obama, but maybe 80% of the population is like,

oh my gosh, Barack Obama emailed me. Yeah, and it works, and they're still doing it. That's really one of the other sides of Arabella is the brain trust. So one of the interesting things in the outcome of this election is that more people actually understand. Like Ezra Klein even has had commentary on this, that what happens is there is a non-referral. profit industrial complex. And so you've got people who serve in an administration who then need to have a job and this nonprofit complex will employ them and they're now building a resume, they're building up some wealth, they're doing, they're running the Center for American

Progress like near a Tandon did. And then when the, their people are back in the administration, they come back out and build it up with a whole new set of new younger people doing those things. So it is really a works program. A lot of this nonprofit world is a works program for political operatives, political actors, they are in there and they just, they just wrote, it's, talk about a revolving door with lobbyists. This is basically a revolving door with NGOs and with NGO leadership. And so that's why it could be argued that this is right to start pulling the threat on these NGOs, stop the federal funding going into them, changing that, I mean, you, I don't know if

you heard about this, but a bunch of families. foundations came to rescue NPR, which it makes you question, well, shouldn't you have been doing that in the first place? It's been a long time. Yeah. And that's the thing that you look at why some of these foundations, some of the foundations, like I said, I think they're laundering great-grandpa's reputation. But some of them are currently active organizations. what is their angle? And then you look at, you know, the trial lawyers and the insurance industry, you know,

and these union, the pensions, if you have pensions in a union, that's where a lot, oh, man. So they want something for this investment, too, don't they? Well, one good thing, I mean, I'm so happy that you're talking about this, and I'm going to hijack this to help us. So we actually run a website called Influence Watch where we try to do a profile on many, many of the actors. Most of it is organizations, but we do a lot of individuals too, the people whose money went into the organization, or the people who run it and are going in and out of government. Do you know somebody found me on Influence Watch?

Because I'm on the board of a group called Government Accountability and Oversight, and they're like, hey, I thought this only went after left-wingers. I'm like, no, influence, watch means whoever's in the space of working, you know, in policy. We want to have both sides because, you know, there are a lot of things that are said about the group, people in this room that have either been, that are incorrect or have been misread. So we try to give very even-handed. We try to source from sort of the center right and the center left all through the spectrum, all through the spectrum. And it is more important for us to have objective information out there than for us to, say, help one side or the other.

And what we do is we have a lot of the people in this room are on Influence Watch 2. People are like, well, there are more people on the left than the right. And I'm like, yes, that is because there are more organizations on the left than on the right. More people need web design and that kind of thing. And, you know, to be fair, somebody might be sitting there saying, well, it sounds just like what the state policy network does, yeah, but we're doing it out in front of everybody. I don't recall anyone saying, hey, I'm going to be broadcasting live from the Arabella annual conference.

This stuff has been, and a lot of it, I remember Kristen the first time you and I talked about this, you know, I got people saying this is ghost chasing, this is, you know, I actually had somebody send me a roll of tinfoil because we were, oh, the scary, because that was George Soros' first defense was, I'm not. I'm just an old guy. I'm not doing all these scary things. And like all these other conspiracy theories, we like to use the phrase around my radio show.

We're not conspiracy theorists. We're conspiracy analysts. And which is what you've been, you can steal that at the Capitol Research because you guys do such a great job of connecting. You know, you see those procedural detective shows with the bulletin board with the red string. That's what I imagine.

Yeah, exactly. That's what I see when I imagine Kristen and all the folks at the Capitol Research. Thank you for saying that. Thank you for saying that. We just really enjoy explaining this world to people so that they can grasp it and understand it. That'll do it for today's show. Don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss out on new episodes from The Daily Signal. Every weekday you can catch top news in 10 to keep up with the day's top head. in just 10 minutes and every weekday afternoon catch Victor Davis Hanson's thoughtful analysis for the Daily Signal. If you like what you hear on this show, would you take a minute and leave us comment? We love hearing your feedback. Thanks again for being with us today.