
Red Devil Buckeye
15.2K posts

Red Devil Buckeye
@reddevilbuckeye
Dad. Former Army Space officer. Space enthusiast. “Space is Hard!” Ohio State alumni and avid Buckeye football fan.





GPS, IP geolocation, bot detection, 990 tracing, and organizational network mapping — are all standard forensic tools. This is a fascinating and genuinely significant story. O’Leary’s team has done what most developers never bother to do — actually trace the opposition back to its source. What they found confirms a pattern that’s been hiding in plain sight. 🔍 Reconciling Our Data With What O’Leary’s Team Actually Uncovered The core finding isn’t that every local protester in Box Elder County is a paid Chinese agent. That’s the caricature the media rushed to construct. The real finding is more structural and harder to dismiss: A network of progressive advocacy organizations — Alliance for a Better Utah, Better Utah Institute, Grow the Flow Utah, Friends of Great Salt Lake, Elevate Utah, Center for Biological Diversity, and others — are funded through the Arabella Advisors dark money network, which manages pass-through vehicles like the Sixteen Thirty Fund, New Venture Fund, Hopewell Fund, and Windward Fund. This isn’t tin-foil-hat territory. Here’s why: 🏦 The Arabella Architecture The four nonprofits managed by Arabella collectively raised approximately $5 billion between 2019 and 2022. In November 2025, the fiscal sponsorship arm rebranded as Sunflower Services, and Arabella itself became Vital Impact — same operation, fresh paint. The structure works like this: - Swiss billionaire Hansjörg Wyss, through his Berger Action Fund, has funneled $245 million to the network since 2016 — over 30% of traceable Sixteen Thirty Fund revenue - George Soros’s Open Society network contributed $153.5 million to the four main Arabella nonprofits between 2018 and 2022 - Americans for Public Trust has documented more than $500 million in foreign money flowing through the Arabella architecture - The pass-through structure is designed to make the rest untraceable When a local Utah group says, “our funding is public, look it up,” what they’re not telling you is that the trail dead-ends at a donor-advised fund that shields the original source. That’s the entire point of the architecture. 🌎 This Isn't Just Utah — It's a National Playbook The scale is staggering once you zoom out: View the image below. The American Energy Institute traced $39 million in foreign dark money flowing into 12 separate advocacy organizations opposing data centers. Power the Future identified 188 local opposition groups across 24 states and has formally requested Congress open investigations. 🧩 The Pattern The playbook is identical from Loudoun County, Virginia, to suburban Detroit to Box Elder County, Utah: 1. Same talking points — water consumption, grid strain, noise pollution, climate impact 2. Same legal strategy — Earthjustice and Troposphere Legal filing contested cases 3. Same funding architecture — Arabella/Sunflower pass-throughs → local environmental nonprofits → coordinated campaigns 4. Same rapid timeline — local "grassroots" groups materialize with professional staff, websites, and legal representation within weeks The Data Center Opposition project openly describes itself as “infrastructure for coordination” — not a neutral measurement tool, but a platform designed to help communities “connect and organize.” It tracks 268 groups with approximately 360,000 followers and publishes its dataset monthly. 🇨🇳 The China Angle — More Nuanced Than Headlines Suggest O’Leary’s initial “CCP proxies” framing was rhetorically aggressive, and his CEO, Paul Palandjian, has since walked it back somewhat, clarifying they’re “not alleging that any particular individual is acting as a foreign operative.” The demand is simpler: full donor transparency. But the China connection isn’t as far-fetched as the media mockery implies. Consider: - The Bitcoin Policy Institute report identifies three channels of Chinese influence: state media (CGTN, China Daily), U.S.-based nonprofits linked to Shanghai-based businessman Neville Roy Singham, and foreign philanthropic funding tied to billionaire-backed foundations - Christopher Hohn’s Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF) funneled $553 million into U.S. advocacy groups from 2014-2023 — and his hedge fund has significant exposure to Chinese markets - Senator John Fetterman called the Sanders/AOC data center moratorium bill a “surrender flag to China” Here’s the strategic logic O’Leary is pointing at: If China is racing to dominate AI and compute capacity, slowing American infrastructure buildout is a direct strategic objective. You don’t need sleeper agents taking orders from Beijing. You just need a funding ecosystem in which foreign-connected money flows into advocacy groups whose policy preferences happen to align perfectly with Chinese strategic interests. The response from the targeted groups has been revealing. Elevate Strategies posted a Substack calling O’Leary “the only foreign actor here” — a Canadian billionaire. Alliance for a Better Utah posted a fundraising video with Chinese-sounding music playing underneath. They’re treating it as a joke. Meanwhile, they refuse to disclose who’s actually funding their anti-data-center campaigns beyond the shell organizations. 💧 The “Grassroots” Framing vs. Reality The media narrative presents this as plucky locals vs. a billionaire developer. Here’s what that framing omits: The project details: - 40,000 acres in Box Elder County’s Hansel Valley (private, vacant land) - 7.5-9 gigawatts at full buildout with on-site natural gas generation - Direct access to the Ruby Pipeline - Closed-loop cooling that reuses water — not drawing from the Great Salt Lake basin - ~4,000 construction jobs over 10-15 years - Primarily military/intelligence compute needs — not just commercial AI The approval process: - The Box Elder County Commission approved it May 4, 2026, with "guardrail provisions" including noise limits and agricultural use agreements - The project was transferred to MIDA (Utah’s Military Installation Development Authority), an entity exempt from open access laws for public-private partnerships - Hundreds attended the meeting — and the commission had to retreat to another room and livestream their vote The opposition funding: - A website created this month (unnamed authors) traces “a layered network connecting Utah progressive advocacy to Arabella Advisors-managed dark money vehicles” - The Sixteen Thirty Fund, New Venture Fund, and Sierra Club Foundation collectively received over $13 million from pro-environmental donors - Food & Water Watch, the named civil-society backer of the Sanders/AOC moratorium bill, is funded through the Park Foundation, Columbus Foundation, and donor-advised funds — the same model they’ve used for a decade 🎯 The Bigger Picture This isn’t really about one data center in Utah. It’s about whether the United States can build anything at scale anymore. The same dark money architecture that killed pipelines, blocked fracking, and delayed nuclear plants has now pivoted to data centers. The Soufan Center has documented a spike in online rhetoric, and in 2026, there have already been multiple incidents of escalating threats — including bullets left at a council member’s door. The coordination is professional-grade: - 188 groups across 24 states with identical messaging - $156 billion in projects stalled or blocked in 2025 alone - A federal moratorium bill was introduced within months of the coalition forming - Full-page newspaper ads from organizations that don’t legally exist (“Citizens of Wyoming” — no such entity registered) When a project that would double a state’s energy capacity gets approved in a single county commission vote with no environmental impact study, that’s a legitimate concern. But when the opposition to that project is funded through an opaque network of pass-through foundations with foreign billionaire money, that’s also a legitimate concern — and a far less reported one. O’Leary’s delivery has been characteristically bombastic, but the underlying demand is correct: follow the money, make the donors public, and let people see who’s really behind the “grassroots” campaigns. If the funding is clean, transparency only strengthens their case. If it’s not, we all deserve to know.












This is probably a long shot, but if anybody happens to be in DC this weekend and plans on visiting Arlington, I would love to see a fresh photo of my husband’s grave in Section 60. SSG Alan W. Shaw Section 60, Grave 8451 B Co 1/12 Cav, 1st Cavalry Division November 10, 1975 - February 9, 2007 There’s just something about knowing people still stop by, still say his name, still remember. 🇺🇸⭐🇺🇸

@PassagePress This is ludicrous. Civil trials don’t adjudicate guilt, only liability. Parties settle suits every day for a million and one reasons. the City most likely decided it wasn’t worth spending tax dollars to undergo a lengthy and expensive trial

@shannonsayshi2 @TJ_Harker fascinating. i now have some followup questions like what is norfentanyl where does it come from and how would someone have such a large amount of it present in their tox screen?










