This article is Part Two of a seven-part investigative series. The series is drawn from a briefing report assembled over more than a decade of embedded observation, direct participation, and systematic documentation. If you missed Part One, start there — it establishes the INGA framework that everything in this series builds on. If you want to read the complete investigation in full without waiting for each instalment, the book is available now on Apple Books: **. 100% people-funded. No sponsors. No institutional backing. If it is useful to you, share it.
PART TWO: THE PLAYERS Who Built This and Why They Were Built to Be Invisible
In Part One, we established the framework. INGA — the Integrated Networked Governance Architecture — is not a conspiracy in the traditional sense. It requires no secret meetings, no single commander, no unified chain of authority. It is a system that achieves coherence through alignment: of ideology, of funding, of personnel moving between institutions, carrying methods and relationships with them. It is built to be resilient. It is built to be durable. And it is built, above all, to be difficult to see.
That last quality is not accidental. It is engineered. And nowhere is that engineering more deliberate than in the selection and positioning of the players who make the system function.
What follows is not a directory of organisations. It is a structural anatomy. Each entity described below has been selected and sequenced not by size or public profile, but by functional significance within the network architecture — prioritising those whose roles are least understood and most consequential to the system’s operational continuity. The most visible actors are rarely the most important. It is at the less-examined nodes that the connective tissue of this infrastructure is most clearly revealed.
We begin not with the most powerful player, but with the most instructive one. Start at the node that was built to be invisible, and the entire architecture becomes legible.
The Movement Research Unit (MRU) The Node Built to Be Invisible
At the operational edge of the system sits the Movement Research Unit — a small, East London-based research collective that most people reading this will never have heard of. That obscurity is not a coincidence. It is the point.
Founded in 2022 by Joe Todd — an experienced political organiser with roots in both the Corbyn-aligned People’s Momentum network and the broader Bernie Sanders political ecosystem in the United States — the MRU presents itself as a volunteer-driven research collective. Its stated mission is benign: supporting workers, renters, and advocacy groups engaged in campaigns around social, economic, racial, and climate justice. Read that description in isolation and it sounds like dozens of other small civil society organisations operating in any major city. Place it within the broader architecture, and its role becomes more precise and far more consequential.
The MRU functions as a force multiplier. Through structured events it calls “research hacks,” it embeds analytical capacity directly into active movements — producing actionable intelligence, corporate targeting frameworks, and campaign support tools in near real-time. This is not passive academic output. It is applied infrastructure, designed to enhance the operational effectiveness of movements while they are in motion.
Its most significant output to date is the Watermelon Index — a database explicitly designed to connect corporate activity with coordinated worker-led pressure campaigns tied to geopolitical narratives, most prominently the Palestinian solidarity movement. The Index does not simply document corporate behaviour. It maps targets for coordinated economic pressure at the intersection of labour action and international political advocacy. That is not research in any conventional sense. It is a targeting tool.
The founding lineage is not incidental. Todd’s connections to both the Corbyn and Sanders movements position the MRU at a precise junction — connecting UK labour politics, US progressive infrastructure, and the transatlantic architecture that links them. Those two political projects share one institutional legacy above all others: the co-founding of Progressive International. And it is through that connection that the MRU moves from a small East London collective to a node in a globally coordinated system.
The MRU was not built to be seen. It was built to deliver — and to do so while remaining below the threshold of scrutiny applied to more visible organisations. It is, in this sense, a precision instrument rather than a blunt one. Small enough to maintain the credibility of independence. Connected enough to deliver outputs directly into globally coordinated campaigns. And structured in a way that places it firmly within the domain of research — a designation that provides legal and reputational insulation that overtly political organisations do not enjoy.
Start here. Because once you understand what the MRU is and why it was built the way it was built, every other player in this architecture becomes easier to place.
Progressive International (PI) The Ideological and Strategic Command Layer
If the MRU represents the operational edge, Progressive International represents the command layer — the institutional structure that provides ideological coherence, strategic direction, and international coordination across the entire network.
Formally established in 2020 following a joint initiative between the Sanders Institute and Yanis Varoufakis’s DiEM25 — itself founded in 2016 around a core of European left-wing political figures — PI defines itself as a global anti-capitalist coalition. In practice, it operates as a convening authority: linking political leaders, trade unions, activist networks, and advocacy organisations across continents into a unified framework that shares doctrine, synchronises messaging, and coordinates campaigns across jurisdictions simultaneously.
Its structure is deliberately hybrid. It exists as both an association and a UK-registered private company — Progressive International Services Ltd. — allowing it to operate fluidly across jurisdictions while sitting outside the direct regulatory oversight of the United States. Its leadership and advisory bodies include sitting heads of state, former presidents, and globally recognised intellectual figures including Rafael Correa, Gustavo Petro, Álvaro García Linera, Mariela Castro, Noam Chomsky, and Naomi Klein. This is not a think tank. This is a structure with the political weight of heads of government and the operational flexibility of a private company, registered on British soil, coordinating activity on multiple continents.
The ideological position is explicit and unambiguous. PI’s foundational doctrine rejects capitalism as a systemic failure and calls for structural transformation that extends beyond electoral politics — stating directly that institutional change cannot be achieved through elections alone. This is not a reform agenda. It is a transformation agenda, and the distinction matters enormously for understanding how the network it anchors chooses to operate.
What distinguishes PI is not simply its rhetoric but its consistency of alignment. Its positions across geopolitical events — whether opposing U.S. foreign policy, challenging NATO structures, supporting specific interpretations of the Palestinian conflict, or coordinating international responses to domestic political developments in member countries — reflect a coherent worldview that is propagated through its network with remarkable discipline. This creates ideological continuity across movements that otherwise appear disconnected, aligning domestic protest narratives in the United States with activist campaigns in Europe, South America, and beyond.
The legal positioning is the single most important structural feature of Progressive International and the one most consistently overlooked. A UK-registered private company, operating outside direct US regulatory oversight, co-founded by the political infrastructure of a US presidential campaign, with a global council of sitting heads of state, formally partnered with a UK research unit producing corporate targeting tools — and doing all of this in plain sight, with public documentation, founding declarations on its website, and not a single serious regulatory inquiry on either side of the Atlantic.
That is not an oversight. That is a jurisdictional strategy. And it is working.
The AFL-CIO and the Solidarity Center The Institutional Spine
If Progressive International provides the ideological architecture, the AFL-CIO provides the institutional muscle — and it does so at a scale that no other actor in this ecosystem can match.
The AFL-CIO represents approximately 15 million workers across the United States. It is the largest labour federation in the country, with the institutional permanence, the political relationships, the legal infrastructure, and the mobilisation capacity that come with more than a century of organised existence. Its involvement in contemporary protest movements — including its explicit co-organisation of the No Kings protests — is not peripheral endorsement. It is structural participation, mobilising union membership into coordinated street-level activity through dedicated labour delegations at protests across the country.
But it is the AFL-CIO’s international arm, the Solidarity Center, that is the most consequential and least scrutinised component of its operation.
Established in the post-Cold War period through the consolidation of earlier labour institutes — themselves with documented historical ties to CIA covert operations abroad, acknowledged by NED’s own co-founder Allen Weinstein in a 1991 Washington Post interview — the Solidarity Center operates in over 60 countries, maintains a global network of union partnerships, and runs a budget of approximately $78 million annually. The source of that budget is the single most significant financial fact in this entire report: over 96 percent of the Solidarity Center’s funding comes directly from the U.S. federal government — primarily through USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy.
Read that again. The international arm of America’s largest labour federation — the organisation co-ordinating No Kings protests and backing BLM infrastructure domestically — receives over 96 percent of its international operating budget from the United States government. It has done so for decades. The total since 1983 exceeds one billion dollars.
This funding was not disclosed to AFL-CIO members. It was not a matter of public record in any meaningful accessible sense. It was revealed not through investigative journalism or congressional oversight, but through a court filing made under pressure of financial collapse when USAID funding was suspended in early 2025. The Solidarity Center faced potential bankruptcy within weeks, with 26 global field offices threatened with closure. That fragility did not reveal a weakness in the Solidarity Center specifically. It revealed the structural dependency of the entire global network on a single federal funding spine.
AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler also sits on the board of the National Endowment for Democracy — the body that funds the AFL-CIO’s own Solidarity Center. The leader of America’s largest labour federation sits simultaneously inside the government funding body that finances her organisation’s international operations. This is not a conflict of interest in the conventional sense. It is a structural fusion of organised labour, state funding, and international civil society operations under a single institutional actor — and it has operated without serious public scrutiny for the entirety of its existence.
The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) The Government Funding Spine
The NED was established in 1983 as a bipartisan instrument of U.S. soft power — a public-facing mechanism for channelling congressional funding into civil society development abroad. Its own co-founder acknowledged in 1991 that a lot of what NED does today was done covertly by the CIA twenty-five years earlier. That is not a fringe allegation. It is a documented statement from the institution’s own architect.
Its reach spans more than 100 countries. Its stated mission is promoting democratic governance. Its operational reality, as documented throughout this report, is the construction and maintenance of a global civil society infrastructure that is ideologically consistent, institutionally connected, and increasingly oriented toward domestic political outcomes in the United States as well as abroad.
The financial dependency of downstream organisations on NED-linked funding is the clearest single illustration of how central it is to the entire architecture. When the Trump administration moved to dismantle USAID and suspend NED disbursements in early 2025, the reverberations were immediate and global. Organisations that had publicly presented themselves as independent civil society actors were revealed within weeks to be structurally dependent on a single federal funding source. The independence was, in significant part, a presentation. The dependency was structural.
Arabella Advisors / Sunflower Services The Dark Money Engine
If the NED represents the government funding layer, the Arabella network represents its private-sector counterpart — and it operates at a scale that makes every other funding mechanism in this ecosystem look modest by comparison.
Founded by Eric Kessler, a Clinton administration alumnus, Arabella Advisors constructed a network of seven interlocking nonprofit organisations — including the Sixteen Thirty Fund, the New Venture Fund, and the Hopewell Fund — that function as financial pass-through vehicles. The mechanism is straightforward but extraordinarily effective: funds enter through philanthropic or individual contributions, are distributed through layered nonprofit entities, and emerge at the operational level as support for campaigns, ballot initiatives, and advocacy efforts — with donor identity shielded at every stage.
In the 2020 election cycle alone, these entities processed $2.4 billion. That number exceeds the combined fundraising of the Democratic and Republican National Committees. By 2022 the figure had risen to $3 billion. These are not donations to political parties. They are not subject to the disclosure requirements applied to political committees. They move through the nonprofit infrastructure of the American civil society sector and emerge on the other side as operational political capacity — untraceable in any practical sense to the individuals and institutions that originated them.
The foreign dimension is where this becomes a matter of national security rather than simply campaign finance reform. Swiss billionaire Hansjörg Wyss — a foreign national legally prohibited from donating directly to U.S. political campaigns — directed $245 million into the Sixteen Thirty Fund and New Venture Fund. Those vehicles in turn spent over $130 million on U.S. state ballot measures. The prohibition on foreign nationals influencing U.S. elections is one of the foundational principles of American campaign finance law. The gap between that prohibition and the operational reality documented here is not a grey area. It is a structural failure of the regulatory framework — one that has been identified, documented, and not closed.
In November 2025, under increasing regulatory and political scrutiny, Arabella Advisors rebranded as Sunflower Services. The network of seven interlocking nonprofit vehicles remained intact. The financial architecture remained intact. The operational capacity remained intact. The name changed. Nothing else did.
Indivisible, 50501, and MoveOn The Public Face
At the visible edge of the system are the organisations most people actually recognise — the public-facing mobilisers of large-scale protest activity. Indivisible, 50501, and MoveOn serve as the translation layer: where strategy, funding, and ideology are converted into mass participation that appears, from the outside, to be spontaneous.
Indivisible was founded by former Democratic congressional staffers. It operates with clear political intent, framing its mission around countering perceived authoritarianism. Its funding sources include $7.61 million in documented grants from Soros-linked foundations and $350,000 from the Tides Network — both of which connect it directly into the broader financial ecosystem this series has been mapping. 50501 illustrates a different pathway: originating as a decentralised online concept before rapidly professionalising, demonstrating how digital mobilisation can be absorbed into structured frameworks with remarkable speed and minimal public awareness of the transition. MoveOn, with its longstanding ties to donor networks and its institutional memory stretching back to the Clinton impeachment era, provides the continuity that newer organisations lack.
Together, these entities create the appearance of spontaneous civic action while operating within a coordinated environment shaped by upstream influences. Their function is not deceptive in isolation — each operates openly and legally. Their significance lies entirely in their position within the system. They are the public face of an infrastructure whose deeper architecture remains invisible to the overwhelming majority of people who participate in what they organise.
Home of the Brave The Bipartisan Dimension
Not all components of this ecosystem align along traditional ideological lines. Home of the Brave introduces a dimension that is essential to understanding how the network has insulated itself against the charge of partisan manipulation — and it is the dimension most likely to surprise readers who have been following this analysis from a conventional left-right framework.
Home of the Brave contributed $2 million across two No Kings campaigns and ran high-profile media campaigns across 300 newspapers nationally. Its board: Bill Kristol, the neoconservative architect of the Never Trump movement; Sarah Matthews, former Trump deputy press secretary turned critic; Barbara Comstock, former Republican congresswoman; and Susan Rice, who served in senior positions in both the Obama and Biden administrations.
This is not ideological alignment. It is operational alignment — establishment figures from opposing political traditions converging around a shared objective: the removal or delegitimisation of a specific political order. When former Republican officials and Democratic administration veterans fund the same protest infrastructure through parallel channels, the ecosystem has achieved something structurally significant. It has made opposition to the current political direction a post-partisan enterprise, which makes it considerably harder to characterise as a partisan operation and considerably easier to sustain across political cycles. That is not an accident. It is a feature.
Open Society Foundations (OSF) The Enabling Layer
Within the philanthropic tier, the Open Society Foundations occupy the position most people assign to them — but not for the reasons most people cite. OSF is not the control centre of this system. It does not direct. It does not command. It enables.
With operations in over 120 countries and more than $32 billion in distributed funding since its founding, OSF has created the enabling conditions under which the network’s operational components can function, expand, and persist. Its funding intersects with think tanks, advocacy groups, and policy institutions across both the United States and Europe — reinforcing the same ideological and operational frameworks documented throughout this series. Its Paris-based staff were actively engaged during the 2020 George Floyd protests in France. Its grants reach UK organisations operating in the same policy ecosystem as the MRU and Progressive International. Its $7.61 million in grants to Indivisible forms one strand of a much larger web.
In each case, OSF does not direct — it enables. The distinction matters analytically because it explains why reducing this entire system to “Soros” is not only inaccurate but actively counterproductive. It locates the source of the system’s power in a single individual who is, in structural terms, one enabling node among many — and by doing so, leaves every other node unexamined and unaddressed.
The key insight is not the presence of any single actor.
It is the convergence of all of them.
The Convergence
Lay these players out side by side and what you see is not a collection of independent organisations that happen to share broadly similar values. What you see is a system — each component serving a specific function, occupying a specific position in the architecture, and connecting to the others through documented financial relationships, shared personnel, formal institutional partnerships, and ideological alignment so consistent across so many jurisdictions that spontaneous convergence cannot explain it.
The MRU produces the research. Progressive International provides the coordination layer and the international reach. The AFL-CIO provides the domestic institutional muscle and the government-funded global infrastructure. NED and USAID provide the federal funding spine. Arabella provides the dark money vehicle that moves private capital without attribution. Indivisible, 50501, and MoveOn provide the public face and the street-level activation capacity. Home of the Brave provides the bipartisan insulation. Open Society provides the enabling philanthropic conditions across all of it.
Each one is individually explicable. Each one is individually legal. Together they form something that is neither simply explicable nor simply addressed — because it was built, deliberately and with considerable sophistication, to be exactly that.
The most visible actors are rarely the most important. It is at the less-examined nodes that the connective tissue of this infrastructure is most clearly revealed. ~Terpsehore Maras
Tomorrow| Part Three, we map the engine that keeps all of it running: the circular funding model — three interlocking financial loops involving government money, private dark money, and European state funding — and explain why it was never designed to be detected by the oversight frameworks currently tasked with detecting it.
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