The Left’s Oligarchy

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Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) are taking their socialist ‘Fighting Oligarchy’ show on the road, holding rallies across the United States. The purpose of the tour, Senator Sanders explained, is to discuss “how we move forward to take on the Oligarchs and corporate interests who have so much power and influence in this country.”

Senator Sanders and Representative Ocasio-Cortez have singled out Elon Musk, the Left’s current bête noire. But they are also aiming their fire more broadly at corporate billionaires whom they lump together as a corrupt oligarchy. They are offering their socialist brand of economic populism to rev up the left-wing base of the Democratic Party. They also are seeking to lure working-class voters who voted for President Trump back to the Democratic Party’s side and help Democrats win back the House of Representatives, Senate, and the White House.

However, people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. Sanders and AOC are aligned with a party that is run like an oligarchy, where left-wing billionaires have used their money to control the Democratic Party’s selection of candidates and much of its policy agenda.

Once the billionaire donors to Joe Biden’s reelection campaign cut off any further contributions while he remained in the race, for example, the former president’s days as a viable candidate were numbered. The Democrat oligarchs helped to engineer a coup within the Democratic Party to force out the 2024 presidential candidate who had won the most votes in the Democrat primaries. They turned to Kamala Harris, who never won a single primary vote in a presidential campaign. Billionaires bankrolled her failed presidential campaign. As of October 30, 2024, according to a Forbes tally, 83 billionaires supported Harris and 52 backed Trump.

Forbes also noted that Federal Election Commission (FEC) filings through November 4th “show super PACs have spent approximately $668.9 million supporting Harris since the beginning of July, while PACs have spent approximately $194.6 million supporting Trump during that same period.” (Emphasis in the original) Super PACS “aren’t beholden to the FEC’s $6,600-per-person limit for direct campaign donations, which is where Trump has more of a cash advantage.”

More broadly, the relationship between left-wing, progressive oligarchs and the left-wing, progressive recipients of their money can be described as a vicious, self-reinforcing loop. The oligarchs fund certain dark money groups. These groups fund left-wing, progressive movements, whose political operations on the ground need more and more money to survive and grow – money that the Left’s oligarchs are only too happy to continue supplying. We almost need one of Kamala Harris’s Venn diagrams to keep track of all the interconnections.

Take, for example, a for-profit consulting firm known as Arabella Advisors. “Year after year the undisputed kings of dark money — the Arabella Advisors network — rake in over a billion dollars to fund their radical leftwing policy pushes across the country,” Americans for Public Trust Executive Director Caitlin Sutherland explained in a statement.

The for-profit Arabella Advisors works through a web of not-for-profit groups. One of the groups that Arabella Advisors manages is the Sixteen Thirty Fund. Politico described the Sixteen Thirty Fund as a “left-leaning, secret-money group,” which “doled out a whopping $410 million in 2020, aiding Democratic efforts to unseat then-President Donald Trump and win back control of the Senate.”

Tech billionaire Pierre Omidyar and his wife have been large contributors to the Sixteen Thirty Fund. Billionaire George Soros has also been a major donor through his Open Society Foundations, as well as to other left-wing causes. The Sixteen Thirty Fund has used the donations it has received to fund various progressive causes, including attack ads against Republican lawmakers and advocacy of left-wing positions in state ballot initiatives.

Not all the donations to the Sixteen Thirty Fund and other left-wing groups within the Arabella Advisors network of not-for-profit organizations have come from American billionaires. For example, Hansjörg Wyss, a Swiss billionaire, used his group known as the Berger Action Fund to funnel at least $243 million into the Sixteen Thirty Fund. Together with his separate Wyss Foundation, Mr. Wyss has managed to funnel nearly half a billion dollars through dark money networks for the purpose of pushing U.S. politics and public policy in a left-wing, progressive direction.

According to a July 2023 investigative report by the Americans for Public Trust, “For years, Swiss billionaire Hansjörg Wyss has flooded the American political system with hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign dark money.”

Federal law prohibits foreign nationals such as Hansjörg Wyss from contributing to federal, state, and local candidate elections. Mr. Wyss has gotten around this prohibition by exploiting a loophole in current U.S. law that allows foreign nationals to fund ballot issue campaigns and other political initiatives in the U.S. that would advance their left-wing, progressive agendas.

Mr. Wyss has a home in the United States. But he is not a U.S. citizen and has no interest in becoming one. He has said that he “never felt the need to become an American.”

Yet according to a biography of Mr. Wyss that his sister wrote, Mr. Wyss’s goal is to “(re)interpret the American Constitution in the light of progressive politics.” We already have enough activist judges in the U.S. who are busy doing just that. We do not need a foreign national to fund efforts to reinterpret the Constitution to suit his ideological preferences.

Contrast Elon Musk, the Left’s favorite target today for their attacks, with Hansjörg Wyss. Mr. Wyss has no interest in becoming an American citizen but hides in the shadows and uses dark money channels to influence America’s political and public policy debates. Elon Musk, on the other hand, is proud to be a U.S. citizen and to serve his country.

Mr. Musk has been fully transparent about his support for Donald Trump during the presidential campaign. He volunteered his time and resources to lead a government-wide initiative to root out waste, fraud, and abuse in government spending at Mr. Trump’s request. After President Trump’s resounding victory, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) team has been hard at work in service to the American taxpayers, at great personal sacrifice. They are examining all government agencies to fix inefficiencies such as incompatibilities among numerous obsolete computer systems and the utter lack of financial controls to monitor government spending. This includes the Pentagon, which has failed several audits.

Democratic Socialist Bernie Sanders must have a very short memory. Last December, Senator Sanders praised Mr. Musk’s plans to find ways to cut defense spending, posting: “Elon Musk is right.” Now Senator Sanders is painting Mr. Musk as a power-hungry, villainous oligarch.

Yes, Elon Musk is the richest man in the world today. But on his way to the top, he has built innovative companies that have achieved amazing breakthroughs in a variety of fields. Recently, his SpaceX company rescued two astronauts who were stuck on the International Space Station for nine months. Last year, SpaceX provided Starlink terminals to North Carolina in the wake of a devastating hurricane to help with relief efforts.

And, of course, there is Tesla, which designs and produces electric vehicles in the United States. Elon Musk was the darling of the Left when his company began rolling out the Tesla electric vehicles. Green New Deal progressives loved his car. But now, because of Mr. Musk’s association with President Trump and DOGE, progressives are avoiding Tesla vehicles like the plague. Senator Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), for example, proudly announced that he had unloaded his electric Tesla and replaced it with a gas-guzzling Chevy Tahoe. So much for this hypocrite who once wrote, “We gotta get off fossil fuels.”

“Tesla Takedown” protests were held across the globe on March 29^th to urge a boycott of Mr. Musk’s company. The anti-Tesla movement has been bankrolled in part by Karla Jurvetson, a wealthy Californian who is reported to have contributed more than $500,000 to anti-Tesla protests through Indivisible Action. Indivisible is an organization that promotes left-wing progressive values. Its billionaire megadonors include George Soros and Hansjörg Wyss, who have each contributed millions of dollars to fund such Indivisible Action activities as providing a toolkit with graphics for signs including one that reads: “GTFO Musk.”

Some left-wing activists have gone much further than peaceful demonstrations and boycotts. They have committed acts of violence, vandalism, and destruction of property aimed at Tesla dealerships and Tesla vehicle owners. Most Democrat politicians and megadonors have turned a blind eye as the Left’s storm troopers damaged Tesla vehicles, fired bullets through a Tesla dealership window, planted incendiary devices, and threatened Tesla drivers.

Senator Sanders, AOC, and their comrades fight for candidates and causes that are richly funded by the Left’s oligarchs, while railing against conservative billionaires who donate to candidates and causes that they support.

Phil Boas, a columnist for Arizona Republic, succinctly described this hypocrisy in his column entitled “Oligarchy is fine when Bernie Sanders and AOC do it, according to Democrats.” Mr. Boas wrote, “Oligarchy is great when they’re our oligarchs. Oligarchy is evil when they’re not.”