Seth Klarman’s quiet activism

Seth Klarman is not terribly famous and he likes it that way. When he makes news, it’s probably for investing advice, not politics. But he’s quietly becoming one of the left’s megadonors.

Born to an economics professor and social worker in New York, Klarman was raised in Baltimore, graduated from Cornell, and went on to graduate from Harvard Business school. He settled down in Boston, founded a hedge fund, became part-owner of the Red Sox, and got a building named after him at Harvard. He also owns a horse racing stable where he gives horses names such as “Early Voting” and “Domestic Product.”

He’s bona fide Boston royalty, and a comically stereotypical member of the modern east coast elite, right down to a fondness for left-wing political virtue signaling that has been growing exponentially in recent years.

But Klarman wasn’t always so liberal.

FEC records show his political contributions once favored both sides of the aisle. He donated to Mitt Romney, Mitch McConnnell, and Bush-Cheney as well as Jeanne Shaheen, John Kerry, and Gore-Liberman. Klarman wasn’t a big spender, though, usually giving less than $10,000 at a time.

And then came the 2014 cycle when he contributed more than $1 million to the American Unity PAC, which was dedicated exclusively to backing Republicans favorable to gay marriage. This was his first major venture into political funding, and by 2016 he had given the PAC nearly $4 million. He might not have been conservative, but Klarman was a budding mega-donor with at least moderate tendencies.

The start of an obsession

Then Donald Trump became president.

Trump’s brash mannerisms did not sit well with Klarman, who completely abandoned his bipartisan giving habits after Trump won the 2016 GOP nomination. It was Trump’s populist policy agenda that really seems to have angered him at first. After the 2016 election Klarman wrote a highly publicized 17-page letter to his investors denouncing Trump and claiming Trump’s protectionism would be devastating to the economy.

“President Trump may be able to temporarily hold off the sweep of automation and globalization by cajoling companies to keep jobs at home,” wrote Klarman, “but bolstering inefficient and uncompetitive enterprises is likely to only temporarily stave off market forces.”

Since then, Klarman has drifted further left, to the point of becoming a reliable Democrat mega-donor. In 2018 he contributed a combined $3.6 million to the Democrat-run House and Senate Majority PACs. In 2019 he took a brief break from funding Democrats to max-out his contributions to former Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld’s hopeless campaign to try and wrest the 2020 Republican nomination from Trump. By 2020, Klarman was routinely writing five and six figure checks to the DNC while giving $1 million or more per year to prominent Democrat PACs such as Priorities USA and the afore-mentioned House and Senate Majority PACs.

The Klarman Family Foundation

As Klarman quickly grew to the status of megadonor, his philanthropic giving likewise became more political.

The Klarman Family Foundation will probably not attain the notoriety or size of George Soros’s Open Society Foundation, but recently Klarman has been using his philanthropic giving conduit in much the same way.

Initially, the Klarman Foundation’s giving was mostly focused on Israel, Jewish community organizations, Harvard, and medicine. These priorities have not changed. Through 2017, the most controversial thing the Klarman Foundation did was write a modest yearly check to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

But in 2018, the New Venture Fund (NVF) rocketed to the top of the Klarman agenda. As the Capital Research Center has reported, NVF is the flagship of the “dark money” left-wing Arabella Advisors network. The Arabella consulting firm specializes in obscuring the original source of funding so wealthy left-leaning donors can back pop-up AstroTurf activist groups.

The Klarman Family Foundation contributed more than $6 million in 2018 to NVF that was earmarked for election-related programs. This was the first time the Klarman Foundation had been meaningfully used for political work and NVF became one of its three largest grantees. Since then, the Foundation has contributed more than $50 million to NVF, nearly all of it for one of NVF’s election-related pop-ups.

In 2019, NVF hired Seth Klarman’s niece, Rachael Klarman, to run a project called Governing for Impact that helped the Biden Administration write regulatory policy from the shadows. (In 2022 the Capital Research Center was the first to discover and expose the secretive arrangement.) The project received at least $17 million from George Soros and bragged that the Biden Administration acted on more than 20 of its recommendations, covering everything from healthcare to Title IX, to coal emissions.

While none of the Klarman Foundation’s grants to NVF are described as being for Governing for Impact, the timing of Rachael’s hiring right after several massive grants from her uncle is certainly suspicious. One can imagine that a hedge fund manager might find it useful for his niece to be whispering regulations into the President’s ear.

We do know the following examples of Klarman support for Arabella projects since 2018:

• $33.7 million went to the Voter Engagement Fund, a shadowy NVF project that funds left-wing get-out-the-vote and voter registration groups.
• $9.5 million has gone to the Center for Secure and Modern Elections, an Arabella-led group dedicated to trying to change election administration policy.
• $3 million has gone to the Civic Responsibility Project, which encourages corporations to do get-out-the-vote work with their employees.
• $1 million was sent to the Trusted Elections Fund, an NVF project for “2020 election scenario planning and response.”
• $500,000 went to the Fair Representation in Redistricting Initiative, which focused on litigation and activism to make sure electoral maps were drawn as favorably as possible for the left.

There is a clear pattern. Klarman’s foundation is becoming increasingly political and hyper-focused on elections and not just electioneering through the get-out-the-vote loopholes that Democrats and their allies in big philanthropy often abuse. Klarman is also very interested in trying to influence election administration policies, perhaps more focused on it than any of the left’s other megadonors.

NVF’s pop-ups aren’t the only election policy groups that Klarman funds.

In 2022, the foundation announced a $25 million commitment as part of partnership with the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and Pew Charitable Trusts that would launch the Election Trust Initiative. The $100 million project claims a stated goal of “[strengthening] the field of election administration.” While this group has good intentions and is certainly trying to remain politically neutral, a $100 million project coordinated between several politically involved billionaires is as likely to increase trust in elections as gasoline is likely to put out a fire.

Klarman has also given at least $2 million to the Center for Tech and Civic Life and $400,000 to the Center for Election Innovation and Research. Mark Zuckerberg controversially used these groups during the 2020 election to distribute more than $400 million directly to state and local government offices for election administration.

Another $3 million was given by the Klarman Foundation to the Protect Democracy Project. The project has a department focused on election-related litigation and boasts of helping secure a $148 million defamation verdict against Rudy Giuliani, influencing parts of the 2022 Electoral Count Act, and generating “25,000 stories about democracy issues in top-tier outlets.”

Klarman has quietly carved out a powerful corner of the philanthropic sector for himself. This could become enormously influential in the coming years, but few have heard of him. He is a force to be reckoned with and belongs on the list of household names in left-wing political spending.

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/seth-klarmans-quiet-activism/