Demand Justice, the “Dark Money” Group Behind a $10 Million Campaign Against the Supreme Court

For over a year the American public has been deluged with sporadic negative coverage of the Supreme Court. The stories have ranged from retellings of decades old “ethics violations” that justices were cleared of long ago to stories about the flags being flown outside a justice’s house. ProPublica, the main purveyor of these repetitive and often conveniently timed stories even won a Pulitzer Prize for its work.

As many commentators have noted, new additions to the Supreme Court ethics saga often occurred in close proximity to important Supreme Court rulings, and the stories often featured comments from watchdog organizations that happened to be funded by donors who support packing the Supreme Court with liberal justices.

After the Court’s decisions in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo and Trump v. United States, the smear campaign kicked into an even higher gear with Demand Justice, the Left’s preeminent court packing “dark money” advocacy group, announcing a $10 million campaign against the Supreme Court. Not only will the money go toward advocacy and ads calling for “ethics reforms” while undermining the Supreme Court, the group announced it will also use the money for “opposition research” on future potential Supreme Court nominees.

In this way, Demand Justice is truly returning to its roots.

What Is Demand Justice?

Demand Justice was created in 2018 as a fiscally sponsored project of the Sixteen Thirty Fund, the flagship “dark money” wing of the sprawling Arabella Advisors network, the “undisputed heavyweight champ” of left-wing “dark money.” Today, the Arabella network raises over $1 billion per year and uses a roster of nonprofits to funnel money from anonymous sources to left-wing activist groups, while creating a host of pop-up fiscally sponsored projects that are meant to look like real grassroots groups. Demand Justice was one of these pop-up groups.

Led by Brian Fallon, the former press secretary for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, the group burst onto the scene in 2018 when it started pressure campaigns to push legislators and the public to oppose President Donald Trump’s judicial nominees. It was Demand Justice that turned the nomination and confirmation of Justice Brett Kavanaugh into a complete media circus. Among other things, Demand Justice:

• Lined the halls of the Senate with protestors dressed as characters from The Handmaid’s Tale, a pro-abortion TV series adored by radical feminist activists;
• Directly pressured Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) to vote against his nomination;
• Bought the website domain StopKavanaugh.com;
• Demanded that senators ask the National Archives to publish any documents it had pertaining to Justice Kavanaugh; and
• Demanded that George Mason University disallow Justice Kavanaugh from co-teaching a summer course in the future.

Since then, a lot has changed at Demand Justice, but the message and mission have remained reprehensibly the same.

In September 2023, Brian Fallon departed the organization he founded and became Vice President Kamala Harris’s communication director with the Biden Campaign. Shortly thereafter, reports emerged that a former employee had allegedly stolen nearly $300,000 while Fallon was executive director. With Kamala Harris now running for president, rather than vice president, Fallon’s move to become Harris’s communications director looks a lot more interesting. Demand Justice has also tried to distance itself from the Arabella Advisors network, progressing from a fiscally sponsored project to earning its own tax status alongside the Demand Justice Initiative, the group’s 501(c)(3) wing. In 2022, the organizations reported a combined revenue of $8.3 million.

Some of their revenue comes in as residual funding from the Arabella network, but much of the group’s funding now comes directly from prominent liberal megadonors and “dark money” groups that had once used the Arabella network to conceal their funding for Demand Justice. So far, the group has received:

• $4.5 million from the Open Society Policy Center, a “dark money” group belonging to George Soros;
• $2 million from the Fund For A Better Future, the “dark money” wing of the Resources Legacy Fund;
• $1.3 million from the League of Conservation Voters, which openly supports court packing; and
• $500,000 from Democracy Fund Voice, the “dark money” group of eBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar.

Any one of these donors, or a combination of several, could have forked over $10 million for this new ad campaign, but it seems likely Demand Justice found one or more new donors as their orchestrated smear campaign against the Supreme Court has captured the public imagination. Only time will reveal the source of this windfall.

What to Expect

Demand Justice is as hardcore as it gets. All day, every day for years, the group has been working hard at finding new ways to undermine the Supreme Court with conspiracy theories and insinuations, while steadily building support for court packing, a policy that was unthinkably radical just a few years ago. With a fresh $10 million in hand, a sum larger than the group has ever reported having in assets at one time, the damage it could do is hard to calculate. Demand Justice indisputably has the ear of the president and much of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and it has financial backing from some of the Left’s most influential donors and “dark money” groups. The pieces are in place for something drastic to occur, and Demand Justice is at the center of it all.

The announcement of this campaign, first reported by Heidi Przybyla of Politico, a reporter who has been likened to an Arabella Advisors PR representative, says that Demand Justice will use the money to “mobilize key constituencies affected by the court’s decisions, including women and young people, and to call out a network of far-right judicial activists that laid the groundwork for the conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court.”

In practical terms, this means nonstop ads, protests, stump speeches, and news reports—all bent on spreading mistrust in the Supreme Court and undermining the legitimacy of its rulings. Once that’s done, Demand Justice and its allies will happily report that trust in the Supreme Court is at an all-time low and that drastic reforms are needed—“reforms” that will coincidentally put liberal justices hand-picked by Demand Justice, of course, firmly in the majority.