The working-class waitress is a professional activist employed by the George Soros dark money orbit. That’s not a good look for a politician desperately seeking to attach herself to a populist tide as she decries “career politicians and elitists who are out of touch.” But Wisconsin US House Democrat nominee Rebecca Cooke is the latest blue candidate to display a signature trait found among young and middle-aged progressives seeking elective office. They yearn to be embraced as fellow commoners by the very people they have demonized and willfully shut out from their ideological bubbles.
“Cooke has portrayed herself as a working-class outsider, touting her experience as a waitress, small business owner and nonprofit leader raised on a dairy farm,” Fox News reported Aug. 29. “But a personal financial disclosure released two days after Wisconsin’s Aug. 13 primary shows she received more than $5,000 apiece for work with Third Way and the Pipeline Fund, two left-leaning organizations with financial ties to George Soros’ Open Society network.”
We’re a world away from milking cows here.
“The Open Society network awarded $1 million to Third Way’s nonprofit research arm between 2023 and 2024, while the Pipeline Fund received $1.4 million directly from the Open Society Action Fund in 2024,” Fox noted.
Working Tables With a Dash of Soros on the Side
The persistent promotion of repeated claims that are so easy to expose make Cooke’s case especially interesting. Before the Aug. 11 Democrat primary captured by Cooke, it was all apparently too much even for the progressive Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the largest newspaper in Wisconsin.
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“Cooke spent about half of 2025 working with Third Way,” the paper reported in April. “Cooke appears on the website as a fellow. Cooke was paid about $30,000 for her work by the organization, which consisted mainly of talking to rural working-class voters about issues impacting them. She used the conversations to compile reports for Third Way.”
A campaign spokesperson tried to explain away the awkward revelations in a novel manner.
“During her part-time work for Third Way, Rebecca maintained her waitressing job, taking shifts almost every weekend at $8 an hour plus tips. Like many people in western Wisconsin, she knows what it’s like to wear many hats to pay the bills,” the aide told The Journal Sentinel.
Taking tens of thousands of dollars from Soros is not the act of a careerist progressive. It’s simply the kind of side hustle too many working stiffs are forced to resort to these days as they struggle to get by on one paycheck. You see? It’s so relatable when put that way.
There’s much more. The Journal Sentinel also damningly related how Cooke spent years as a “professional fundraiser” for candidates running in multiple states. “As far back as 2012, Cooke served as finance director for four congressional races in Minnesota, Michigan, Colorado and California, raising $3.7 million in one of those contests alone,” the article continued. “In 2015, she registered Cooke Strategy LLC, a Democratic political and fundraising consulting firm. FEC records show the firm advised eight state and federal campaigns between 2015 and 2021.”
‘He Told Me I Didn’t Seem Like a Politician’
Give Cooke points for brazenness. The person who despises perpetual politicians was strutting her Average Gal bona fides in all these same ways when she mounted a failing race for the House in 2024.
In 2023, in the lead-up to her candidacy, the former fundraising consulting firm owner told a local radio host that she hates having to raise money to run for office. “I mean it’s unfortunately a part of our political process and our political system. It’s like who raises the most dollars is the most viable, right?” she exclaimed.
A March 2024 article published by the Wisconsin Examiner is even more audacious. First, note that The Examiner proudly declares it is “part of States Newsroom.” And just what is that?
“Before 2019, the Newsroom Network was a fiscally sponsored project of the Hopewell Fund, a left-of-center 501(c)(3) funding and fiscal sponsorship nonprofit managed by the Washington, DC-based consultancy firm Arabella Advisors, which manages multiple high-dollar left-leaning philanthropic organizations. In 2019, States Newsroom re-branded and received independent nonprofit status,” watchdog website Influence Watch reports.
George Soros has long been a major donor to Arabella Advisors’ various ventures.
And here is the “independent” States Newsroom-affiliated Wisconsin Examiner “reporting” on the Soros dark money recipient turned blue-collar House candidate in 2024:
“Cooke tells a story of a Republican voter she met at the Richland County fair last summer who at first wasn’t interested in talking to her because of her identification as a Democrat. She says she was able to connect with him because she could talk about the needs of people in the district. She says that after talking about her parents’ experience traveling to Mexico to get cheaper dental care and how that makes her believe in expanding Medicare to cover dental and vision, he opened up.
“‘We had this long conversation, he told me he voted for Donald Trump and that I didn’t seem like a politician,’ she says. ‘And that’s because I’m not one and I think that that’s what people in this district are really looking for, is someone that has shared a lot of those lived experiences, is also pragmatic in the types of policies that they’re putting forward.’”
This shouldn’t be laughed off because it is only going to get worse. Yes, politicians have lied for as long as there have been elections held in this tainted world. But this is lavishly funded, highly networked deceit as industry norm. Cooke’s misrepresentations highlight what has become a defining aspect of a modern American political process so thoroughly dominated by money. Professional activists funded by dark money billionaires with loaded agendas are posing as humble, grounded Americans while they toil as paid soldiers in service to elitist outsiders who despise everything the voters they seek to dupe hold dear.
