Commentary: Politicized, Progressive Big Philanthropy

Harvard Money

Steve Miller’s December 12 RealClearInvestigations article, “How Tax-Exempt Nonprofits Skirt U.S. Law to Turn Out the Democrat Base in Elections,” is both jarring and informative and helps frame many important questions facing philanthropy, conservatism, and conservative philanthropy.

Miller describes the general size and scope of activities being conducted a progressive nonprofit infrastructure that has “taken on an outsized part of the Democratic Party’s election strategy” and, specifically, how they “work around legal restrictions on nonprofits that accept tax-deductible donations by selectively engaging in nonpartisan efforts including boosting voter education and participation.”

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Commentary: Big Philanthropy Advances as a Big Player in the Private Funding of Public Elections

Echoing the private financing of public elections that critics saw as heavily favoring Democrats in 2020, some of America’s richest foundations are pouring money into a similar effort again, in the face of more organized conservative resistance.  

A nonprofit group called the Audacious Project, whose supporters include the Gates and MacArthur foundations and the Bridgespan Group, a consultant whose clients include Planned Parenthood, has committed $80 million to a progressive organization, the Center for Tech and Civic Life, to provide grant funding to run local elections.   

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Commentary: Big Philanthropy and the Battle Against ‘Systemic Racism’

Who would have thought the Gates Foundation would endorse tearing down statues of Christopher Columbus, Ulysses S. Grant, George Washington, and other dead white men?

Sure, you won’t find “mob violence,” “vandalism,” or “destruction of public property” in any grant applications, but the paroxysms of rage racking our country and the desire to rip racism from America by root and branch is the end-product of Big Philanthropy’s governing ideology.

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