There are grifters on the left too, of course

The so-called “left” has its own fear-and-outrage economy. It’s not a charity bake sale; it’s a professionalized stack of donor funnels, media brands, nonprofits, PACs, newsletters, and merch drops that turn anxiety into profit just like their counterparts on the right. Different villains, same CRMs and KPIs.

I use these terms left and liberal to describe what is fundamentally the Democratic Party machine, which is neither really left nor very liberal from my perspective. Both sides of this fear game are driven by political parties whose true power is in the corporations that back them, and whom they then reward. Both parties represent corporate culture, and embrace corporate welfare. Corporations with some social consciousness are still corporations, and corporate values are amoral, not left. But corporations with no social consciousness are evil. 

But I digress. My use of the term “the left” in this context creates an understandable contrast to the money grubbers goosing the right wing. 

Donor funnels and “dark money,” with more social consciousness.¹ 

Sixteen Thirty Fund is a 501(c)(4) progressive advocacy nonprofit that functions as a fiscal-sponsorship and funding hub, channeling donor money into issue campaigns, ballot measures, and advertising while providing back-office services for rapid “pop-up” projects. Because (c)(4)s are not required to disclose donors, the group is frequently cited in debates over “dark money.”¹ They posted revenue of $410 million 2020. Critics see an anonymized influence machine; supporters call it efficient infrastructure for modern advocacy.

The Sixteen Thirty Fund complex primarily fuels issue ads, ballot measures, and progressive infrastructure that indirectly props up Democratic candidates in the same states where Senate and House fights live. It’s not “Biden HQ,” but the electoral beneficiaries are obvious enough to anyone who can read a calendar and a map.⁴⁸

Vendor-routed “dark money” alignments.

The Sixteen Thirty Fund is part of Arabella Advisors is a Washington, DC–based, for-profit philanthropy consulting firm. They don’t give the money; they help wealthy donors and nonprofits decide where to park it, then handle the back-office plumbing so the money moves fast and quietly. Think strategy, grantmaking ops, fiscal sponsorship support, compliance, HR, and vendor wrangling for a big constellation of progressive nonprofits.

The payment rail that never sleeps.

ActBlue is the Democratic money hose. Structurally a conduit, it clips a standard 3.95% processing fee at scale,² and it moved about $3.8 billion in 2023–24 while taking political heat and a federal probe ordered in April 2025.³ ⁴ ActBlue itself isn’t the candidate, but the Democratic campaigns and committees (DNC, DSCC, DCCC, state parties, and candidates riding that rail are the winners.⁴⁵

Movement orgs and the “accountability hangover.”

Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation raised about $90 million in 2020 and then wrestled with the comedown: drawdowns, investment losses, and transparency blowback — including the now-infamous $6 million Los Angeles property framed as a content hub.⁵ ⁶ Disclosures show the foundation spending more than it took in for 2021–22 and carrying reduced assets into later years. Recent audited reports continue the paper trail and underline that this is a professionally run nonprofit with all the joys of scrutiny that come with rapid growth, real estate, and seven-figure budgets.

Super-PAC-scale plans.¹¹

Planned Parenthood political arms: Planned Parenthood’s political apparatus announced a $40 million 2024 battleground program, which inevitably translated into media, field firms, data, and digital.²⁸ ²⁹ The program explicitly aimed to boost Biden/Harris and key congressional Democrats in battlegrounds.⁴⁶ ⁴⁷ That money didnʻt magically turn into babies and rainbows; it turns into media, field, and legal pressure that benefits those candidates.

Perpetual Fundraising.¹⁰

Media Matters/MoveOn: standard-issue liberal watchdog orgs like Media Matters and advocacy hubs like MoveOn run through high-seven to low-eight figure budgets year after year.³⁰ ³¹ 

Partisan media as a growth business. Real money for partisan content.⁷–⁹

The Young Turks venture capital round was a professionalization milestone years ago.²³ They took $20 million in venture funding to scale subs-plus-ads.⁷ Chapo Trap House now sits near the top of Patreon’s earnings leaderboard.⁸ Heather Cox Richardson’s Substack newsletter business is widely estimated to be seven-figure-plus annually, and some analyses peg it much higher.²⁶ ²⁷ ⁹ 

Watchdogs, wonks, and liberal media nonprofits.

Media Matters and MoveOn raise and spend in the high-seven to low-eight figures year after year.¹⁰ Planned Parenthood’s political arms routinely budget eight-figure independent expenditures; in 2024 they announced a $40 million battleground plan.¹¹

The ad-tech layer you weren’t supposed to notice.

Liberal outside-spending groups and aligned PACs treat Meta, Google/YouTube, and TikTok like industrial pipes. Online political ads across the spectrum topped roughly $1.35 billion in 2024; the fee meters don’t ask which team you’re on.¹²

Messier cases the left would rather forget.

Some progressive-branded figures have been called out for sloppy stewardship or self-dealing; the moral is boring and true: money pooled in a panic is money at risk. The receipts are in filings and audits, not the spicy tweets.⁵

The actual incentive. Same as the right: attention is cash, fear is retentive, and platforms optimize moral-emotional content. When abortion, climate, voting rights, or Gaza is on fire, dread outperforms nuance. Call it “grift” if you need the catharsis. “Incentive compatibility” is more accurate.

Where does the money go?

None of this proves the left is uniquely venal. It proves the left learned the same industrial politics the right perfected.

If you follow the dollars instead of the tweets, you find a machine that converts attention into invoices. The progressive ecosystem has its ideals, sure. It also has account managers. What donors imagine as “movement work” often lands in the ledgers of payment processors, media buyers, list brokers, compliance shops, and digital agencies whose incentives are to maximize throughput, not necessarily outcomes.

Start with the rails. Every dollar that hits a campaign or PAC through the big blue conduit rides a fee. That’s the model. ActBlue publicly lists a standard 3.95 percent processing fee.¹³ That fee touches billions. OpenSecrets reports roughly $3.82 billion raised through ActBlue entities in that cycle.¹⁴ Layer on the 2025 federal and congressional probes into alleged “straw donor” and foreign-source abuse on online platforms, and you add legal spend and compliance overhead to the tab, regardless of how those probes resolve.¹⁵ ¹⁶ ¹⁷

Then there’s the “sponsorship” layer that is not really sponsorship. Fiscal sponsors and umbrella funds provide speed and cover for pop-up projects, but throughput at scale creates its own gravity. The Sixteen Thirty Fund’s 2020 cycle illustrates the magnitude: north of $400 million disbursed and spent in one election year.¹⁸ That’s legal and often useful, and it also centralizes vendor relationships and gatekeeping. Centralization reduces friction for funders and increases bargaining power for the intermediaries who sit in the flow.

The ad and analytics complex remains the biggest single sinkhole for cash. Despite a decade of “TV is dead” slide decks, broadcast and cable still soak up the lion’s share in competitive races. The Wesleyan Media Project documented multibillion-dollar ad buys in 2024 with television dominant, while digital surged.¹⁹ ²⁰ Separate estimates place online political spend at least in the $1.35–$1.9 billion band for 2024 across the biggest platforms.²¹ ²² That isn’t “waste” by definition. It does mean that when the left sets its hair on fire, Meta, YouTube, and the rest sell more water.

Content factories monetize the same fear loop. Venture-funded partisan outlets and member-supported podcasts convert outrage to subscriptions, which then fund more content that sustains outrage. 

Movement nonprofits and their political arms are structurally permanent campaigns. The program line items look like they should: canvassing, research, field, litigation, independent expenditures. But the spend still resolves to vendors. 

The heat map of that spending is familiar: salaries, benefits, tech stacks, legal, fundraising, list growth, and yes, more ads.

Finally, the fundraising supply chain cannibalizes its own base when left to pure performance metrics. A cottage industry of digital agencies and acquisition shops has spent years optimizing for short-term ROAS with alarmist copy and deceptive UX. Democrats and allied platforms have begun tightening policies, and the party has publicly signaled a crackdown on abusive tactics.³² ³³ But the churn-and-burn habit took root because it “worked” on spreadsheets. The cost isn’t only donor goodwill; it’s opportunity cost when trust degrades and retention collapses.

So the money goes into a system of pipes, platforms, and professionals designed to move money and message at scale. This ecosystem is not uniquely corrupt; it’s structurally incentive-compatible with modern campaign finance and corporate dominance of politics and elections. 

None of this indicts the work. It just clarifies the incentives: attention is revenue.

Who benefits?

What remains of the cash flows into races with power attached. 

• Presidential tier. The single biggest beneficiary in 2024–25 has been Kamala Harris, via the Democratic megasuper PAC Future Forward USA, which raised and spent roughly half a billion dollars boosting her and hammering her opponent.³⁴ ³⁵
• Senate firewall seats. Industrial-scale outside spending has concentrated around the blue wall of incumbents and key pick-ups:
• Sherrod Brown (OH) benefited from tens of millions in pro-Brown/anti-GOP outside spend, including Senate Majority PAC’s barrage against Bernie Moreno.³⁶ ³⁷
• Jon Tester (MT) drew colossal independent expenditures on both sides; even in a loss, the money river flowed through him.³⁸
• Tammy Baldwin (WI) sat in another nine-figure outside-spending slugfest.³⁹
• Bob Casey (PA) vs Dave McCormick attracted one of the cycle’s largest outside-spend tallies.⁴⁰
• Add Jacky Rosen (NV), Elissa Slotkin (MI) and Ruben Gallego (AZ) to the map where aligned outside groups plowed cash into pro-Democrat efforts.⁴¹ ⁴² ⁴³
• House “frontline” and flips. House Majority PAC carpet-bombed competitive districts. Just a slice of their target list shows who “benefited” in the spreadsheet sense (money “for”) and who “benefited” by having opponents buried in negative ads (money “against”): Sue Altman (NJ-07), Janelle Bynum (OR-05), Yadira Caraveo (CO-08), Matt Cartwright (PA-08) and others received pro-D spends.⁴⁴

Meanwhile, Republicans like Tom Barrett (MI-07), Scott Baugh (CA-47), Laurie Buckhout (NC-01), Anthony D’Esposito (NY-04) and a long list more were hit with PACs spending more millions “against,” which, functionally, benefits their Democratic opponents.⁴⁴

None of this says the left is uniquely venal. It says the left learned to run the same industrial politics the right perfected, with different villains and more podcasts. If you build a media-political ecosystem that rewards attention spikes and moral alarm, you will get a lot of attention spikes and moral alarm. 

And plenty of people, from movement nonprofits and donor-advised funds to podcasters and newsletter-magnates, will make a perfectly legal living converting that panic into revenue. The only surprising thing here is that anyone will be surprised.

1. Sixteen Thirty Fund, 2020 cycle scale (≈$410M). OpenSecrets profile and filings.
2. ActBlue. “Account Structure and Fees.”
3. OpenSecrets. “ActBlue: 2023–2024 Cycle Totals” (≈$3.82B raised).
4. “Trump Takes Aim at Democratic Fundraising Apparatus.” Wall Street Journal, April 24, 2025.
5. “BLMGNF Raised About $90M in 2020; Subsequent Filings Reviewed.” Associated Press, 2022–2023.
6. “Inside BLM’s $6 Million House.” New York Magazine, 2022.
7. “The Young Turks Raises $20 Million.” Variety, 2017.
8. Graphtreon. “Chapo Trap House Patreon Earnings.” Accessed 2025.
9. “Heather Cox Richardson’s Newsletter Revenue Estimate.” Press Gazette, 2023.
10. ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer. “Media Matters for America”; “MoveOn.org Civic Action.”
11. “Planned Parenthood’s $40 Million 2024 Plan.” TIME, 2024.
12. OpenSecrets (with Brennan Center/Wesleyan Media Project). “Online Political Ad Spend in 2024” (≈$1.35B).
13. ActBlue. “Account Structure and Fees” (processing rate reference).
14. OpenSecrets. “ActBlue: 2023–2024 Cycle Totals” (volume reference).
15. “Trump Orders Probe of Online Fundraising ‘Straw Donors.’” Wall Street Journal, April 24, 2025.
16. “Trump Wants an Investigation of Democrats’ Fundraising. His Own Campaign Has Issues.” Associated Press, May 27, 2025.
17. Politico. “House GOP Ramps Up ActBlue Investigation,” June 25, 2025.
18. Sixteen Thirty Fund, 2020 disbursements and role as fiscal sponsor. OpenSecrets profile and 990s.
19. Wesleyan Media Project. “$4.5B+ in Political Advertising in 2024” (TV dominant).
20. Wesleyan Media Project. “Digital Ad Spending Nearly Even With TV in Presidential, 2024.”
21. OpenSecrets/Brennan Center/Wesleyan Media Project. “Online Ad Spend in 2024 Election Reached ≈$1.35B.”
22. OpenSecrets/Brennan Center/Wesleyan Media Project. “Online Ad Spend Totals Updated to ≈$1.9B,” July 2025.
23. “The Young Turks Raises $20 Million.” Variety, 2017.
24. Graphtreon. “Chapo Trap House — Creator Page and Rankings.”
25. Graphtreon. “Monthly Ranking for Patreon Creators.”
26. Nieman Lab citing Press Gazette. “Highest-Earning Substacks,” 2023.
27. Growth in Reverse. “How Heather Cox Richardson Built a 7-Figure Newsletter,” Oct. 27, 2024.
28. PBS NewsHour. “Planned Parenthood to Spend $40 Million Ahead of November,” June 24, 2024.
29. Planned Parenthood Action. “2024 Electoral Program Announcement,” June 24, 2024.
30. Media Matters for America. IRS Form 990 (FY2023), public disclosure.
31. MoveOn.org Civic Action. IRS Form 990 and financial profile.
32. The Bulwark. “Democrats Crack Down on Scam/Spam Fundraisers,” Aug. 10, 2025.
33. Coverage of deceptive digital fundraising practices and platform policy tightening (roundups, mid-2024 to 2025).
34. OpenSecrets. “Future Forward USA Action: Outside Spending Profile,” 2024 cycle.
35. OpenSecrets. Targeting breakdown showing spending aligned “for Democrats” tied to Harris.
36. OpenSecrets. “Senate Majority PAC: Overall Spend and Ohio Targeting (Brown vs. Moreno).”
37. OpenSecrets. “Independent Expenditures ‘Against’ Bernie Moreno Aiding Sherrod Brown.”
38. OpenSecrets. “Montana Senate 2024: Outside Spending Totals (Tester race).”
39. OpenSecrets. “Wisconsin Senate 2024: Outside Spending Totals (Baldwin vs. Hovde).”
40. OpenSecrets. “Pennsylvania Senate 2024: Outside Spending (Casey vs. McCormick).”
41. OpenSecrets. “Nevada Senate 2024: Finance and Outside Spend (Rosen).”
42. OpenSecrets. “Michigan Senate 2024: Open Seat (Slotkin) — National Spend Maps.”
43. Stateline (Pew). “Arizona 2024 Battleground Status and Outside Spending Context.”
44. OpenSecrets. “House Majority PAC: Independent Expenditure Ledger (Altman, Bynum, Caraveo, Cartwright; ‘Against’ Barrett, Baugh, Buckhout, D’Esposito, etc.).”
45. OpenSecrets. “ActBlue: 2024 Cycle Summary (≈$3.82B Raised).”
46. PBS NewsHour. “Planned Parenthood’s $40M Program to Boost Biden and Key Democrats,” June 24, 2024.
47. PBS NewsHour follow-up segments on battleground targeting (June–Oct. 2024).
48. OpenSecrets. “Sixteen Thirty Fund: Role in Progressive Electoral Infrastructure and Issue Campaigns.”