Don’t Fall For Billionaire John Arnold’s Conservative Costume

(Photo by BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images)

There’s a well-worn playbook in Washington for buying your way into the right. Hire some former Republican staffers with dusty Hill credentials. Retain lobbyists who can occasionally get a meeting in a GOP office. Wrap everything in the language of “data” and “evidence-based solutions.” Sprinkle just enough donations to Republican candidates to muddy the trail. Repeat until the press calls you “bipartisan.”

Billionaire John Arnold is executing this playbook to perfection — and conservatives need to stop falling for it.

Arnold is a former Enron trader who pocketed an $8 million bonus — the largest in the company’s history at the time — just before the whole thing collapsed. He parlayed that into a hedge fund fortune, then reinvented himself as a philanthropist through Arnold Ventures, a sprawling LLC with over 100 employees and a motto of bloodless technocratic pablum: “evidence-based policy solutions that maximize opportunity and minimize injustice.” Translation: we’re going to push left-wing policy but dress it up like a McKinsey presentation so you don’t notice.

And push left-wing policy they do. Arnold Ventures bankrolls gun control research, underwrites ranked-choice voting nationwide — the same........

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