According to Zack Rosen, founder of California YIMBY and the Abundance Network, the problem with politics is Americans being too involved. Bemoaning the rise of small-dollar political donations in fundraising documents leaked to the Prospect, Rosen is blunt: “Small dollar internet fundraising makes politics dumber.” Rosen misses what he considers to be a bygone era of elite dominance. Lamenting the current state of democratized influence, Rosen says “the old gatekeepers were political professionals who could count cards; small dollar donors today are amateurs yanking the handles of ActBlue slot machines.”
This sentiment is laid out in substantial detail, filling 31 pages across two separate documents obtained by the Prospect. In an email exchange, Rosen confirmed the documents’ legitimacy.
Rosen and his allies have no need for small-dollar donations or mass-membership politics: They come to do political battle with $260 million annually (yes, each year!) from billionaire benefactors, one document asserts. This “Abundance Capital Stack” is being deployed to organize in all 50 states and consists of a $120 million annual commitment from ex-hedge fund manager and current Meta board member John Arnold, $40 million from Facebook/Meta co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, and $100 million from Steve Ballmer, the L.A. Clippers owner and former Microsoft executive. Ballmer, who is currently embroiled in a scandal surrounding alleged off-book pay for NBA star Kawhi Leonard, was not previously known as a funder of the abundance movement.
And fuck Ezra Klein too
Rosen misses what he considers to be a bygone era of elite dominance. Lamenting the current state of democratized influence, Rosen says “the old gatekeepers were political professionals who could count cards; small dollar donors today are amateurs yanking the handles of ActBlue slot machines.”
Abundance adherents often bristle at the suggestion that the project is orchestrated by Silicon Valley elites. But as the leaked documents demonstrate, Rosen and his colleagues clearly view it as such, and even frequently use the word “elite” by choice.
ROSEN OPERATES AT THE NEXUS of tech titans’ “hostile takeover” of San Francisco politics through a “grey money” network, documented in reporting from The Guardian and Mission Local. The Phoenix Project has dubbed this overlapping set of organizations and campaigns the “Astroturf Network” and detailed its operations in a set of reports and a pair of influence maps.
These people are villains.
100% and the astroturfing/state policy model, not to mention the manifesto, seems to be a knockoff of Heritage Foundation’s Mandate for Leadership (Project 2025) and their offshoot organization State Policy Network (SPN). Honestly have to wonder how many wealthy people are jumping ship from Heritage now that it seems to be going the way of the dinosaur?
Regardless, a future where the broligarchy replicates or is simply integrated into the wealthy Conservative network that’s been slowly destroying quality of life and dismantling the federal government in the U.S. since the 1970s, is a dystopia so unthinkably bleak, it makes everything else that’s come before it look like sunshine and rainbows.
It seems hard to believe they would put all their eggs into one basket, so if you think of the Abundance movement as similar to SPN and targeting policy at the state level, what is the equivalent Heritage Foundation targeting the Federal level?
Are they’re banking on the U.S. collapsing and the Federal government no longer existing in a few years anyway? If each state were to become an independent territory, what happens to all of the resources at the city and state levels that rely on federal funding to maintain?
Do the wealthy just buy them all up as an act of “charity,” and control whatever area depends on those resources like their own lil’ monarchy?
Like, hey, we heard you like public roads and clean water. We now own those resources, and since you depend on them for survival, we own you.
We also own all the surveillance systems installed throughout the majority of cities, and thanks to Palantir, we can conveniently integrate all that surveillance into one platform and combine it with all the other data and private information we bought once the federal government was liquidated. Good luck revolting, peasants.
Wealth ≠ intelligence
