A “Section 527 Committee” is a tax-exempt entity organized under Section 527 of the Internal Revenue Code to raise money for political activities other than “express advocacy” for the election of a particular federal (i.e., House, Senate, or Presidential) candidate. (Express advocacy is considered to be the domain of Political Action Committees, or PACs, whereas 527s are technically supposed to be independent of, and unaffiliated with, any candidate.) Most 527s are run by special-interest groups and are used for raising “soft money,” which they are permitted to collect from donors in unlimited amounts, and which they can subsequently funnel to the political party (not to the candidate) of their choice – also in amounts unbound by any legal limits.
The terms “soft money” and its counterpart, “hard money,” date back to the 1970s, when the financing of political campaigns was altered dramatically by the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1974 (FECA). This Act strictly limited the amount of money which any donor could give directly to any single candidate or PAC in a federal election – no more than $1,000 per year to any candidate, and no more than $5,000 per year to any PAC. Such donations – earmarked for the “express advocacy” of a specific candidate’s campaign – became known as “hard-money” donations.
“Soft-money” donations, by contrast, were those given to political parties (not to candidates or PACs) for purposes other than express advocacy for a specific candidate — e.g., “voter education and mobilization,” “issue-oriented” political advertising, “party-building” activities, and other such nebulous enterprises. Unlike hard-money contributions, there were no legal limits on the amounts of soft money that any individual or PAC can give to a party.
A footnote in the Supreme Court’s 1976 Buckley v. Valeo decision defined the precise circumstances under which hard and soft money could, and could not, be used by a party to bankroll political advertising. The Buckley footnote identified a set of “magic words” which, if used in conjunction with a candidate’s name in political ads, would signal that those ads would have to be paid for with hard money rather than soft. The “magic words” included: “vote for,” “elect,” “support,” “cast your ballot for,” “for Congress,” “vote against,” “defeat,” and “reject.” Many political operatives assumed that unless their advertising used these exact words, they technically were not engaged in express advocacy and thus were not bound by FECA’s restrictions governing hard-money collection.
But the distinction between outright electioneering (i.e., express advocacy) on the one hand, and “voter education” or “party-building” on the other, was often difficult – even impossible – to discern. For example, as noted above, a political party was required to use hard-money contributions, which were limited and regulated, to pay for a TV ad that explicitly urged voters to cast their ballots for a specified candidate. However, if the ad simply displayed an image of that candidate without mentioning him or her by name, and simultaneously encouraged voters to support that candidate’s party, soft money could be used to pay for the ad.
In 2002, the newly passed McCain-Feingold campaign-finance reform bill forbade political parties from collecting any soft money at all from individual donors. To mitigate the impact of this prohibition, the bill raised the limit on individual hard-money contributions from $1,000 per candidate each year to $2,000.
However, McCain-Feingold — which would be invalidated as an infringement on free speech by the Supreme Court in 2010 — failed to address the issue of 527s, which, unlike PACs, remained free to continue raising soft money. At that point, Democrats took the lead in making extensive use of 527s — which are sometimes referred to as “stealth PACs” — as major fundraising vehicles with which to circumvent the constraints imposed by McCain-Feingold. The Democrats reasoned that as long as they (a) refrained from coordinating their candidates’ activities directly with those of the 527s, and (b) refrained from uttering the “magic words” as defined by Buckley, they could raise as much money as they wanted through 527s.
Indeed it was the Democrats — and George Soros in particular — who had been pushing McCain-Feingold for years. They knew the law’s loopholes and weaknesses intimately, and were ready to exploit them the moment the legislation was passed.
What Are “527” Groups?
By Richard Poe
2004
The Influence of Section 527 Committees
By Discover The Networks
2011
Follow the Money
By Chris Suellentrop
June 26, 2005
527s: Advocacy Group Spending in the 2010 Elections
By Open Secrets
October 13, 2009
On September 17, 2020, President Donald Trump announced his intention to create a “1776 Commission” which would serve as an advisory committee on the need for American schools to provide “patriotic education” and to counter the America-hating narrative of Critical Race Theory. Trump officially established the Commission by executive order on November 2, 2020. The 16-member panel included historians, attorneys, professors, scholars, authors, and former elected officials and public servants. It was chaired by Churchill historian and Hillsdale College President Larry P. Arnn, and vice-chaired by Carol M. Swain, a retired professor of political science. The Commission released a document titled The 1776 Report on Martin Luther King Day — January 18, 2021 — two days before the end of Trump’s term in office. The Commission was subsequently terminated by President Joe Biden on his Inauguration Day, January 20, 2021.
California State University professor emeritus Victor Davis Hanson, who served on the 1776 Commission, published an overview of the Commission, its perspectives on American history, and its January 18 report. Wrote Dr. Hanson:
“The newly formed President’s Advisory 1776 Commission just released its report…. Whether because the report was issued by a Donald Trump-appointed commission, or because the conclusions questioned the controversial and flawed New York Times-sponsored 1619 Project, there was almost immediate criticism from the left. Yet at any other age than the divisive present, the report would not have been seen as controversial.
“First, the commission offered a brief survey of the origins of the Declaration of Independence, published in 1776, and the Constitution, signed in 1787. It emphasized how unusual for the age were the Founders’ commitments to political freedom, personal liberty, and the natural equality endowed by our creator—all the true beginning of the American experiment.
“The commission reminded us that the Founders were equally worried about autocracy and chaos. So they drafted checks and balances to protect citizens from both authoritarianism, known so well from the British Crown, and the frenzy of sometimes wild public excess.
“The report repeatedly focuses on both the ideals of the American founding and the centuries-long quest to live up to them. It notes the fragility of such a novel experiment in constitutional republicanism, democratic elections, and self-government—especially during late 18th-century era of war and factionalism.
“The report does not whitewash the continuance of many injustices after 1776 and 1787—in particular chattel slavery concentrated in the South, and voting reserved only for free males. Indeed, the commission explains why and how these wrongs were inconsistent with the letter and spirit of our founding documents. So it was natural that these disconnects would be addressed, even fought over, and continually resolved—often over the opposition of powerful interests who sought to reinvent the declaration and the Constitution into something that they were not. Two of the most widely referenced Americans in the report are Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King Jr. Both argued, a century apart, for the moral singularity of the U.S. Constitution. Neither wished to replace the Founders’ visions; both instead demanded that they be fully realized and enforced.
“The report details prior ideological and political challenges to the Constitution…. Some were abjectly evil, such as the near-century-long insistence that the enslavement of African Americans was legal—an amorality that eventually led to more than 600,000 Americans being killed during a Civil War to banish it. Some ideologies, such as fascism and communism, were easily identifiable as inimical to our principles. Both occasionally won adherents in times of economic depression and social strife before they were defeated and discredited abroad.
“Perhaps more controversially, the commission identified other challenges, such as continued racism, progressivism, and contemporary identity politics. The report argued how and why all those who insisted that race might become a basis from which to discriminate against entire groups of people were at odds with the logic of the declaration…. Often they sought to curb the liberties of the individual, under the guise of modernist progress and greater efficiency.
“The commission was no more sympathetic to the current popularity of identity politics or reparatory racial discrimination. It argued that the efforts to insist that race, ethnicity, sexual preference, and gender define who we are, rather than remain incidental in comparison to our natural and shared humanity, will lead to a dangerous fragmentation of American society.
“Finally, the commission offered the unifying remedy of renewed civic education. Specifically, it advocates far more teaching in our schools of the declaration and the Constitution, and other documents surrounding their creation. It most certainly did not suggest that civic education and American history ignore or contextualize past national shortcomings. Again, the report argued that our lapses should be envisioned as obstacles to fulfilling the aspirations of our founding.”
Some key excerpts from The 1776 Report include the following:
1. INTRODUCTION
The declared purpose of the President’s Advisory 1776 Commission is to “enable a rising generation to understand the history and principles of the founding of the United States in 1776 and to strive to form a more perfect Union.” This requires a restoration of American education, which can only be grounded on a history of those principles that is “accurate, honest, unifying, inspiring, and ennobling.” And a rediscovery of our shared identity rooted in our founding principles is the path to a renewed American unity and a confident American future.
The Commission’s first responsibility is to produce a report summarizing the principles of the American founding and how those principles have shaped our country. That can only be done by truthfully recounting the aspirations and actions of the men and women who sought to build America as a shining “city on a hill”—an exemplary nation, one that protects the safety and promotes the happiness of its people, as an example to be admired and emulated by nations of the world that wish to steer their government toward greater liberty and justice. The record of our founders’ striving and the nation they built is our shared inheritance and remains a beacon, as Abraham Lincoln said, “not for one people or one time, but for all people for all time.”
Today, however, Americans are deeply divided about the meaning of their country, its history, and how it should be governed. …
Comprising actions by imperfect human beings, the American story has its share of missteps, errors, contradictions, and wrongs. These wrongs have always met resistance from the clear principles of the nation, and therefore our history is far more one of self-sacrifice, courage, and nobility. America’s principles are named at the outset to be both universal—applying to everyone—and eternal: existing for all time. The remarkable American story unfolds under and because of these great principles.
Of course, neither America nor any other nation has perfectly lived up to the universal truths of equality, liberty, justice, and government by consent. But no nation before America ever dared state those truths as the formal basis for its politics, and none has strived harder, or done more, to achieve them.
Lincoln aptly described the American government’s fundamental principles as “a standard maxim for free society,” which should be “familiar to all, and revered by all; constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated.” But the very attempt to attain them—every attempt to attain them—would, Lincoln continued, constantly spread and deepen the influence of these principles and augment “the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere.” The story of America is the story of this ennobling struggle. …
2. THE MEANING OF THE DECLARATION
The United States of America … is a republic; that is to say, its government was designed to be directed by the will of the people rather than the wishes of a single individual or a narrow class of elites. Republicanism is an ancient form of government but one uncommon throughout history, in part because of its fragility, which has tended to make republics short-lived. Contemporary Americans tend to forget how historically rare republicanism has been, in part because of the success of republicanism in our time, which is derived in no small part from the very example and success of America. …
There was no United States of America before July 4th, 1776. There was not yet, formally speaking, an American people. There were, instead, living in the thirteen British colonies in North America some two-and-a-half million subjects of a distant king. Those subjects became a people by declaring themselves such and then by winning the independence they had asserted as their right.
They made that assertion on the basis of principle, not blood or kinship or what we today might call “ethnicity.” […] [T]he newly formed American people were … neither wholly English nor wholly Protestant nor wholly Christian. Some other basis would have to be found and asserted to bind the new people together and to which they would remain attached if they were to remain a people. That basis was the assertion of universal and eternal principles of justice and political legitimacy. …
The American founders understood that, for republicanism to function and endure, a republican people must share a large measure of commonality in manners, customs, language, and dedication to the common good. …
At the time of the American founding, the most widespread claim was a form of the divine right of kings, that is to say, the assertion that God appoints some men, or some families, to rule and consigns the rest to be ruled.
The American founders rejected that claim. As the eighteen charges leveled against King George in the Declaration of Independence make clear, our founders considered the British government of the time to be oppressive and unjust. They had no wish to replace the arbitrary government of one tyrant with that of another.
More fundamentally, having cast off their political connection to England, our founders needed to state a new principle of political legitimacy for their new government. As the Declaration of Independence puts it, a “decent respect to the opinions of mankind” required them to explain themselves and justify their actions.
They did not merely wish to assert that they disliked British rule and so were replacing it with something they liked better. They wished to state a justification for their actions, and for the government to which it would give birth, that is both true and moral: moral because it is faithful to the truth about things. …
The core assertion of the Declaration, and the basis of the founders’ political thought, is that “all men are created equal.” From the principle of equality, the requirement for consent naturally follows: if all men are equal, then none may by right rule another without his consent.
The assertion that “all men are created equal” must also be properly understood. It does not mean that all human beings are equal in wisdom, courage, or any of the other virtues and talents that God and nature distribute unevenly among the human race. It means rather that human beings are equal in the sense that they are not by nature divided into castes, with natural rulers and ruled.
Thomas Jefferson liked to paraphrase the republican political thinker Algernon Sidney: “the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.” Superiority of talent—even a superior ability to rule—is not a divine or natural title or warrant to rule. George Washington, surely one of the ablest statesmen who ever lived, never made such an outlandish claim and, indeed, vehemently rejected such assertions made by others about him.
As Abraham Lincoln would later explain, there was no urgent need for the founders to insert into a “merely revolutionary document” this “abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times.” They could simply have told the British king they were separating and left it at that. But they enlarged the scope of their Declaration so that its principles would serve as “a rebuke and a stumbling block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.” The finality of the truth that “all men are created equal” was intended to make impossible any return to formal or legal inequality, whether to older forms such as absolute monarchy and hereditary aristocracy, or to as-yet-unimagined forms we have seen in more recent times.
Natural equality requires not only the consent of the governed but also the recognition of fundamental human rights—including but not limited to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—as well as the fundamental duty or obligation of all to respect the rights of others. These rights are found in nature and are not created by man or government; rather, men create governments to secure natural rights. Indeed, the very purpose of government is to secure these rights, which exist independently of government, whether government recognizes them or not. A bad government may deny or ignore natural rights and even prevent their exercise in the real world. But it can never negate or eliminate them.
The principles of the Declaration are universal and eternal. Yet they were asserted by a specific people, for a specific purpose, in a specific circumstance. The general principles stated in the document explain and justify the founders’ particular actions in breaking off from Great Britain, and also explain the principles upon which they would build their new government. These principles apply to all men, but the founders acted to secure only Americans’ rights, not those of all mankind. …
We confront, finally, the difficulty that the eternal principles elucidated in the Declaration were stated, and became the basis for an actual government, only a relatively short time ago. Yet if these principles are both eternal and accessible to the human mind, why were they not discovered and acted upon long before 1776?
In a sense, the precepts of the American founders were known to prior thinkers, but those thinkers stated them in entirely different terms to fit the different political and intellectual circumstances of their times. For instance, ancient philosophers appear to teach that wisdom is a genuine title to rule and that in a decisive respect all men are not created equal. Yet they also teach that it is all but impossible for any actual, living man to attain genuine wisdom. Even if wisdom is a legitimate title to rule, if perfect wisdom is unattainable by any living man, then no man is by right the ruler of any other except by their consent.
More fundamentally, by the time of the American founding, political life in the West had undergone two momentous changes. The first was the sundering of civil from religious law with the advent and widespread adoption of Christianity. The second momentous change was the emergence of multiple denominations within Christianity that undid Christian unity and in turn greatly undermined political unity. Religious differences became sources of political conflict and war. … [I]t was in response to these fundamentally new circumstances that the American founders developed the principle of religious liberty.
While the founders’ principles are both true and eternal, they cannot be understood without also understanding that they were formulated by practical men to solve real-world problems. For the founders’ solution to these problems, we must turn to the Constitution.
3. A CONSTITUTION OF PRINCIPLES
… The bedrock upon which the American political system is built is the rule of law. The vast difference between tyranny and the rule of law is a central theme of political thinkers back to classical antiquity. The idea that the law is superior to rulers is the cornerstone of English constitutional thought as it developed over the centuries. The concept was transferred to the American colonies, and can be seen expressed throughout colonial pamphlets and political writings. …
To assure such a government, Americans demanded a written legal document that would create both a structure and a process for securing their rights and liberties and spell out the divisions and limits of the powers of government. That legal document must be above ordinary legislation and day-to-day politics. That is what the founders meant by “constitution,” and why our Constitution is “the supreme Law of the Land.”
Their first attempt at a form of government, the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union, was adopted in the midst of the Revolutionary War and not ratified until 1781. During that time, American statesmen and citizens alike concluded that the Articles were too weak to fulfill a government’s core functions. This consensus produced the Constitutional Convention of 1787, which met in Philadelphia that summer to write the document which we have today. It is a testament to those framers’ wisdom and skill that the Constitution they produced remains the longest continually-operating written constitution in all of human history.
The meaning and purpose of the Constitution of 1787, however, cannot be understood without recourse to the principles of the Declaration of Independence—human equality, the requirement for government by consent, and the securing of natural rights—which the Constitution is intended to embody, protect, and nurture. Lincoln famously described the principles of the Declaration (borrowing from Proverbs 25:11) as an “apple of gold” and the Constitution as a “frame of silver” meant to “adorn and preserve” the apple. The latter was made for the former, not the reverse.
The form of the new government that the Constitution delineates is informed in part by the charges the Declaration levels at the British crown. For instance, the colonists charge the British king with failing to provide, or even interfering with, representative government; hence the Constitution provides for a representative legislature. It also charges the king with concentrating executive, legislative, and judicial power into the same hands, which James Madison pronounced “the very definition of tyranny.” Instead, the founders organized their new government into three coequal branches, checking and balancing the power of each against the others to reduce the risk of abuse of power.
The intent of the framers of the Constitution was to construct a government that would be sufficiently strong to perform those essential tasks that only a government can perform (such as establishing justice, ensuring domestic tranquility, providing for the common defense, and promoting the general welfare— the main tasks named in the document’s preamble), but not so strong as to jeopardize the people’s liberties. …
More specifically, the framers intended the new Constitution to keep the thirteen states united—to prevent the breakup of the Union into two or more smaller countries—while maintaining sufficient latitude and liberty for the individual states. …
While the Constitution is fundamentally a compact among the American people (its first seven words are “We the People of the United States”), it was ratified by special conventions in the states. The peoples of the states admired and cherished their state governments, all of which had adopted republican constitutions before a federal constitution was completed. Hence the framers of the new national government had to respect the states’ prior existence and jealous guarding of their own prerogatives.
They also believed that the role of the federal government should be limited to performing those tasks that only a national government can do, such as providing for the nation’s security or regulating commerce between the states, and that most tasks were properly the responsibility of the states. And they believed that strong states, as competing power centers, would act as counterweights against a potentially overweening central government, in the same way that the separation of powers checks and balances the branches of the federal government.
For the founders, the principle that just government requires the consent of the governed in turn requires republicanism, because the chief way that consent is granted to a government on an ongoing basis is through the people’s participation in the political process. This is the reason the Constitution “guarantee[s] to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government.”
Under the United States Constitution, the people are sovereign. But the people do not directly exercise their sovereignty, for instance, by voting directly in popular assemblies. Rather, they do so indirectly, through representative institutions. This is, on the most basic level, a practical requirement in a republic with a large population and extent of territory. But it is also intended to be a remedy to the defects common to all republics up to that time. …
The main causes of prior republican failure were class conflict and tyranny of the majority. In the simplest terms, the largest single faction in any republic would tend to band together and unwisely wield their numerical strength against unpopular minorities, leading to conflict and eventual collapse. The founders’ primary remedy was union itself. Against the old idea that republics had to be small, the founders countered that the very smallness of prior republics all but guaranteed their failure. In small republics, the majority can more easily organize itself into a dominant faction; in large republics, interests become too numerous for any single faction to dominate.
The inherent or potential partisan unwisdom of a dominant faction also would be tempered by representative government. Rather than the people acting as a body, the people would instead select officeholders to represent them. This would refine and enlarge the public views, by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations. [Federalist 10]
And the separation of powers would work in concert with the principle of representation […] One important feature of our written constitution is the careful way that it limits the powers of each branch of government— that is, states what those branches may do, and by implication what they may not do. This is the real meaning of “limited government”: not that the government’s size or funding levels remain small, but that government’s powers and activities must remain limited to certain carefully defined areas and responsibilities as guarded by bicameralism, federalism, and the separation of powers.
The Constitution was intended to endure. But because the founders well knew that no document written by human beings could ever be perfect or anticipate every future contingency, they provided for a process to amend the document—but only by popular decision-making and not by ordinary legislation or judicial decree.
The first ten amendments, which would come to be known as the Bill of Rights, were included at the demand of those especially concerned about vesting the federal government with too much power and who wanted an enumeration of specific rights that the new government lawfully could not transgress. But all agreed that substantive rights are not granted by government; any just government exists only to secure these rights.
It is important to note the founders’ understanding of three of these rights that are decisive for republican government and the success of the founders’ project. Our first freedom, religious liberty, is foremost a moral requirement of the natural freedom of the human mind. … Faith is both a matter of private conscience and public import, which is why the founders encouraged religious free exercise but barred the government from establishing any one national religion. The point is not merely to protect the state from religion but also to protect religion from the state so that religious institutions would flourish and pursue their divine mission among men.
Like religious liberty, freedom of speech and of the press is required by the freedom of the human mind. More plainly, it is a requirement for any government in which the people choose the direction of government policy. To choose requires public deliberation and debate. A people that cannot publicly express its opinions, exchange ideas, or openly argue about the course of its government is not free.
Finally, the right to keep and bear arms is required by the fundamental natural right to life: no man may justly be denied the means of his own defense. The political significance of this right is hardly less important. An armed people is a people capable of defending their liberty no less than their lives and is the last, desperate check against the worst tyranny.
4. CHALLENGES TO AMERICA’s PRINCIPLES
… [G]reat reforms—like abolition, women’s suffrage, anti-Communism, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Pro-Life Movement—have often come forward that improve our dedication to the principles of the Declaration of Independence under the Constitution.
More problematic have been movements that reject the fundamental truths of the Declaration of Independence and seek to destroy our constitutional order. The arguments, tactics, and names of these movements have changed, and the magnitude of the challenge has varied, yet they are all united by adherence to the same falsehood—that people do not have equal worth and equal rights. … It is the sacred duty of every generation of American patriots to defend this priceless inheritance.
Slavery
The most common charge levelled against the founders, and hence against our country itself, is that they were hypocrites who didn’t believe in their stated principles, and therefore the country they built rests on a lie. This charge is untrue, and has done enormous damage, especially in recent years, with a devastating effect on our civic unity and social fabric.
Many Americans labor under the illusion that slavery was somehow a uniquely American evil. … But the unfortunate fact is that the institution of slavery has been more the rule than the exception throughout human history.
It was the Western world’s repudiation of slavery, only just beginning to build at the time of the American Revolution, which marked a dramatic sea change in moral sensibilities. The American founders were living on the cusp of this change, in a manner that straddled two worlds. George Washington owned slaves, but came to detest the practice, and wished for “a plan adopted for the abolition of it.” By the end of his life, he freed all the slaves in his family estate.
Thomas Jefferson also held slaves, and yet included in his original draft of the Declaration a strong condemnation of slavery, which was removed at the insistence of certain slaveholding delegates. Inscribed in marble at his memorial in Washington, D.C. is Jefferson’s foreboding reference to the injustice of slavery: “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that His justice cannot sleep forever.”
James Madison saw to it at the Constitutional Convention that, even when the Constitution compromised with slavery, it never used the word “slave” to do so. No mere semantics, he insisted that it was “wrong to admit in the Constitution the idea that there could be property in men.”
Indeed, the compromises at the Constitutional Convention were just that: compromises. The three-fifths compromise was proposed by an antislavery delegate to prevent the South from counting their slaves as whole persons for purposes of increasing their congressional representation. The so-called fugitive slave clause, perhaps the most hated protection of all, accommodated pro-slavery delegates but was written so that the Constitution did not sanction slavery in the states where it existed. There is also the provision in the Constitution that forbade any restriction of the slave trade for twenty years after ratification—at which time Congress immediately outlawed the slave trade.
The First Continental Congress agreed to discontinue the slave trade and boycott other nations that engaged in it, and the Second Continental Congress reaffirmed this policy. The Northwest Ordinance, a pre-Constitution law passed to govern the western territories (and passed again by the First Congress and signed into law by President Washington) explicitly bans slavery from those territories and from any states that might be organized there.
Above all, there is the clear language of the Declaration itself: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” The founders knew slavery was incompatible with that truth.
It is important to remember that, as a question of practical politics, no durable union could have been formed without a compromise among the states on the issue of slavery. Is it reasonable to believe that slavery could have been abolished sooner had the slave states not been in a union with the free? Perhaps. But what is momentous is that a people that included slaveholders founded their nation on the proposition that “all men are created equal.”
So why did they say that without immediately abolishing slavery? To establish the principle of consent as the ground of all political legitimacy and to check against any possible future drift toward or return to despotism, for sure. But also, in Lincoln’s words, “to declare the right, so that the enforcement of it might follow as fast as circumstances should permit.”
The foundation of our Republic planted the seeds of the death of slavery in America. The Declaration’s unqualified proclamation of human equality flatly contradicted the existence of human bondage and, along with the Constitution’s compromises understood in light of that proposition, set the stage for abolition. Indeed, the movement to abolish slavery that first began in the United States led the way in bringing about the end of legal slavery.
Benjamin Franklin was president of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, and John Jay (the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court) was the president of a similar society in New York. John Adams opposed slavery his entire life as a “foul contagion in the human character” and “an evil of colossal magnitude.”
Frederick Douglass had been born a slave, but escaped and eventually became a prominent spokesman for the abolitionist movement. He initially condemned the Constitution, but after studying its history came to insist that it was a “glorious liberty document” and that the Declaration of Independence was “the ring-bolt to the chain of your nation’s destiny.”
And yet over the course of the first half of the 19th century, a growing number of Americans increasingly denied the truth at the heart of the founding. Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina famously rejected the Declaration’s principle of equality as “the most dangerous of all political error” and a “self-evident lie.” He never doubted that the founders meant what they said.
To this rejection, Calhoun added a new theory in which rights inhere not in every individual by “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” but in groups or races according to historical evolution. This new theory was developed to protect slavery—Calhoun claimed it was a “positive good”—and specifically to prevent lawful majorities from stopping the spread of slavery into federal territories where it did not yet exist.
“In the way our Fathers originally left the slavery question, the institution was in the course of ultimate extinction, and the public mind rested in the belief that it was in the course of ultimate extinction,” Abraham Lincoln observed in 1858. “All I have asked or desired anywhere, is that it should be placed back again upon the basis that the Fathers of our government originally placed it upon.”
This conflict was resolved, but at a cost of more than 600,000 lives. Constitutional amendments were passed to abolish slavery, grant equal protection under the law, and guarantee the right to vote regardless of race. Yet the damage done by the denial of core American principles and by the attempted substitution of a theory of group rights in their place proved widespread and long-lasting. These, indeed, are the direct ancestors of some of the destructive theories that today divide our people and tear at the fabric of our country.
Progressivism
In the decades that followed the Civil War, in response to the industrial revolution and the expansion of urban society, many American elites adopted a series of ideas to address these changes called Progressivism. Although not all of one piece, and not without its practical merits, the political thought of Progressivism held that the times had moved far beyond the founding era, and that contemporary society was too complex any longer to be governed by principles formulated in the 18th century. …
More significantly, the Progressives held that truths were not permanent but only relative to their time. They rejected the self-evident truth of the Declaration that all men are created equal and are endowed equally, either by nature or by God, with unchanging rights. … Instead, Progressives believed there were only group rights that are constantly redefined and change with the times. Indeed, society has the power and obligation not only to define and grant new rights, but also to take old rights away as the country develops.
Based on this false understanding of rights, the Progressives designed a new system of government. Instead of securing fundamental rights grounded in nature, government—operating under a new theory of the “living” Constitution—should constantly evolve to secure evolving rights.
In order to keep up with these changes, government would be run more and more by credentialed managers, who would direct society through rules and regulations that mold to the currents of the time. Before he became President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson laid out this new system whereby “the functions of government are in a very real sense independent of legislation, and even constitutions,” meaning that this new view of government would operate independent of the people.
Far from creating an omniscient body of civil servants led only by “pragmatism” or “science,” though, progressives instead created what amounts to a fourth branch of government called at times the bureaucracy or the administrative state. This shadow government never faces elections and today operates largely without checks and balances. The founders always opposed government unaccountable to the people and without constitutional restraint, yet it continues to grow around us.
Fascism
The principles of the Declaration have been threatened not only at home. In the 20th Century, two global movements threatened to destroy freedom and subject mankind to a new slavery. Though ideological cousins, the forces of Fascism and Communism were bitter enemies in their wars to achieve world domination. What united both totalitarian movements was their utter disdain for natural rights and free peoples.
Fascism first arose in Italy under the dictatorship of Benito Mussolini, largely in response to the rise of Bolshevism in Russia. Like the Progressives, Mussolini sought to centralize power under the management of so-called experts. All power—corporate and political—would be exercised by the state and directed toward the same goal. Individual rights and freedoms hold no purchase under Fascism. Its principle is instead, in Mussolini’s words, “everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.” Eventually, Adolf Hitler in Germany wed this militant and dehumanizing political movement to his pseudoscientific theory of Aryan racial supremacy, and Nazism was born.
The Nazi juggernaut quickly conquered much of Europe. The rule of the Axis Powers “is not a government based upon the consent of the governed,” said President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. “It is not a union of ordinary, self-respecting men and women to protect themselves and their freedom and their dignity from oppression. It is an unholy alliance of power and pelf to dominate and enslave the human race.”
Before the Nazis could threaten America in our own hemisphere, the United States built an arsenal of democracy, creating more ships, planes, tanks, and munitions than any other power on earth. Eventually, America rose up, sending millions of troops across the oceans to preserve freedom.
Everywhere American troops went, they embodied in their own ranks and brought with them the principles of the Declaration, liberating peoples and restoring freedom. Yet, while Fascism died in 1945 with the collapse of the Axis powers, it was quickly replaced by a new threat, and the rest of the 20th century was defined by the United States’ mortal and moral battle against the forces of Communism.
Communism
Communism seems to preach a radical or extreme form of human equality. But at its core, wrote Karl Marx, is “the idea of the class struggle as the immediate driving force of history, and particularly the class struggle between the bourgeois and the proletariat.” In the communist mind, people are not born equal and free, they are defined entirely by their class.
Under Communism, the purpose of government is not to secure rights at all. Instead, the goal is for a “class struggle [that] necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat.” By its very nature, this class struggle would be violent. “The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims,” Marx wrote. “They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution.”
This radical rejection of human dignity spread throughout much of the world. In Russia, the bloody Bolshevik Revolution during World War I established the communist Soviet Union. Communism understands itself as a universalist movement of global conquest, and communist dictatorships eventually seized power through much of Europe and Asia, and in significant parts of Africa and South America. …
But Communism’s relentless anti-American, anti-Western, and atheistic propaganda did inspire thousands, and perhaps millions, to reject and despise the principles of our founding and our government. While America and its allies eventually won the Cold War, this legacy of anti-Americanism is by no means entirely a memory but still pervades much of academia and the intellectual and cultural spheres. The increasingly accepted economic theory of Socialism, while less violent than Communism, is inspired by the same flawed philosophy and leads down the same dangerous path of allowing the state to seize private property and redistribute wealth as the governing elite see fit. …
Racism and Identity Politics
The Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, passed after the Civil War, brought an end to legal slavery. Blacks enjoyed a new equality and freedom, voting for and holding elective office in states across the Union. But it did not bring an end to racism, or to the unequal treatment of blacks everywhere.
Despite the determined efforts of the postwar Reconstruction Congress to establish civil equality for freed slaves, the postbellum South ended up devolving into a system that was hardly better than slavery. The system enmeshed freedmen in relationships of extreme dependency, and used poll taxes, literacy tests, and the violence of vigilante groups like the Ku Klux Klan to prevent them from exercising their civil rights, particularly the right to vote. Jim Crow laws enforced the strict segregation of the races, and gave legal standing in some states to a pervasive subordination of blacks.
It would take a national movement composed of people from different races, ethnicities, nationalities, and religions to bring about an America fully committed to ending legal discrimination.
The Civil Rights Movement culminated in the 1960s with the passage of three major legislative reforms affecting segregation, voting, and housing rights. It presented itself, and was understood by the American people, as consistent with the principles of the founding. “When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir,” Martin Luther King, Jr. said in his “I Have a Dream” speech. “This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
It seemed, finally, that America’s nearly two-century effort to realize fully the principles of the Declaration had reached a culmination. But the heady spirit of the original Civil Rights Movement, whose leaders forcefully quoted the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the rhetoric of the founders and of Lincoln, proved to be short-lived.
The Civil Rights Movement was almost immediately turned to programs that ran counter to the lofty ideals of the founders. The ideas that drove this change had been growing in America for decades, and they distorted many areas of policy in the half century that followed. Among the distortions was the abandonment of nondiscrimination and equal opportunity in favor of “group rights” not unlike those advanced by Calhoun and his followers. The justification for reversing the promise of color-blind civil rights was that past discrimination requires present effort, or affirmative action in the form of preferential treatment, to overcome long-accrued inequalities. Those forms of preferential treatment built up in our system over time, first in administrative rulings, then executive orders, later in congressionally passed law, and finally were sanctified by the Supreme Court.
Today, far from a regime of equal natural rights for equal citizens, enforced by the equal application of law, we have moved toward a system of explicit group privilege that, in the name of “social justice,” demands equal results and explicitly sorts citizens into “protected classes” based on race and other demographic categories.
Eventually this regime of formal inequality would come to be known as “identity politics.” The stepchild of earlier rejections of the founding, identity politics values people by characteristics like race, sex, and sexual orientation and holds that new times demand new rights to replace the old. This is the opposite of King’s hope that his children would “live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” and denies that all are endowed with the unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
5. THE TASK OF NATIONAL RENEWAL
All the good things we see around us—from the physical infrastructure, to our high standards of living, to our exceptional freedoms—are direct results of America’s unity, stability, and justice, all of which in turn rest on the bedrock of our founding principles. Yet today our country is in danger of throwing this inheritance away. … Above all, we must stand up to the petty tyrants in every sphere who demand that we speak only of America’s sins while denying her greatness. …
The Role of the Family
By their very nature, families are the first educators […] For the American republic to endure, families must remain strong and reclaim their duty to raise up morally responsible citizens who love America and embrace the gifts and responsibilities of freedom and self-government.
Teaching America
The primary duty of schools is to teach students the basic skills needed to function in society, such as reading, writing, and mathematics. … [O]ur founders also recognized a second and essential task: educators must convey a sense of enlightened patriotism that equips each generation with a knowledge of America’s founding principles, a deep reverence for their liberties, and a profound love of their country. … Like any love worthy of the name, it must be embraced freely and be strong and unsentimental enough to coexist with the elements of disappointment, criticism, dissent, opposition, and even shame that come with moral maturity and open eyes. But it is love all the same, and without the deep foundation it supplies, our republic will perish. …
By studying America’s true heritage, students learn to embrace and preserve the triumphs of their forefathers while identifying and avoiding their mistakes.
States and school districts should reject any curriculum that promotes one-sided partisan opinions, activist propaganda, or factional ideologies that demean America’s heritage, dishonor our heroes, or deny our principles. Any time teachers or administrators promote political agendas in the classroom, they abuse their platform and dishonor every family who trusts them with their children’s education and moral development. …
A Scholarship of Freedom
Universities in the United States are often today hotbeds of anti-Americanism, libel, and censorship that combine to generate in students and in the broader culture at the very least disdain and at worst outright hatred for this country.
The founders insisted that universities should be at the core of preserving American republicanism by instructing students and future leaders of its true basis and instilling in them not just an understanding but a reverence for its principles and core documents. Today, our higher education system does almost the precise opposite. Colleges peddle resentment and contempt for American principles and history alike, in the process weakening attachment to our shared heritage.
In order to build up a healthy, united citizenry, scholars, students, and all Americans must reject false and fashionable ideologies that obscure facts, ignore historical context, and tell America’s story solely as one of oppression and victimhood rather than one of imperfection but also unprecedented achievement toward freedom, happiness, and fairness for all. Historical revisionism that tramples honest scholarship and historical truth, shames Americans by highlighting only the sins of their ancestors, and teaches claims of systemic racism that can only be eliminated by more discrimination, is an ideology intended to manipulate opinions more than educate minds.
Deliberately destructive scholarship shatters the civic bonds that unite all Americans. It silences the discourse essential to a free society by breeding division, distrust, and hatred among citizens. And it is the intellectual force behind so much of the violence in our cities, suppression of free speech in our universities, and defamation of our treasured national statues and symbols. …
Reverence for the Laws
… Patriotic education must have at its center a respect for the rule of law, including the Declaration and the Constitution, so that we have what John Adams called “a government of laws, and not of men.” […]
6. CONCLUSION
On the 150th Anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, President Calvin Coolidge raised the immortal banner in his time. “It is often asserted,” he said, “that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776 … and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning cannot be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions.”
America’s founding principles are true not because any generation—including our own—has lived them perfectly, but because they are based upon the eternal truths of the human condition. They are rooted in our capacity for evil and power for good, our longing for truth and striving for justice, our need for order and our love of freedom. Above all else, these principles recognize the worth, equality, potential, dignity, and glory of each and every man, woman, and child created in the image of God.
Throughout our history, our heroes—men and women, young and old, black and white, of many faiths and from all parts of the world—have changed America for the better not by abandoning these truths, but by appealing to them. Upon these universal ideals, they built a great nation, unified a strong people, and formed a beautiful way of life worth defending. …
We must renew the pride and gratitude we have for this incredible nation that we are blessed to call home. …
The 1776 Report
By The President’s Advisory 1776 Commission
January 2021
It’s Fake News That the 1776 Commission Report Whitewashes America’s Past
By Victor Davis Hanson
Trump’s “1776 Report” Goes Down the Memory Hole
By Mark Tapson
February 3, 2021
Return to the Table of Contents
HARRIS: Thwarting Pro-Life Legislation in Conservative States
During her 2020 presidential campaign, Senator Harris said that her Medicare-for-All plan would establish a list of politically conservative states that would be required to get pre-approval from the Justice Department before they would be permitted to pass any pro-life legislation.
HARRIS: Outraged by Supreme Court Overturning Roe v. Wade
On May 2, 2022, Politico reported that a leaked draft majority opinion, written by Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, indicated that the Court had decided to strike down the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, and to return the regulation of abortion rights to each individual state. In response, an outraged VP Harris said that “the rights of women are under attack,” and that “opponents of Roe want to punish women and take away their rights to make decisions about their own bodies.”
HARRIS: Omits the Declaration’s Guarantee of Right to “Life”
VP Harris delivered a pro-abortion speech on January 22, 2023, wherein she referenced the Declaration of Independence but omitted any mention of that document’s explicit guarantee of the “unalienable right” to the “Life” that the “Creator” had gifted to all human beings. Harris’ words were as follows: “America is a promise…. A promise we made in the Declaration of Independence that we are each endowed with the right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
HARRIS & BIDEN: Forcing Pro-Lifers to Pay for Abortions
On March 22, 2023, LifeNews.com reported that the Biden-Harris administration was “trying to strip away the rights” of employers to refuse to comply – because of their own moral concerns — with a government mandate requiring businesses, under the terms of Obamacare, to offer their workers health-insurance plans that would cover the costs of abortifacients, contraceptives, and sterilization.
HARRIS & BIDEN: Suing Texas Over “Fetal Heartbeat” Law
On September 8, 2021, the Biden-Harris administration sued the state of Texas over its recently enacted “Heartbeat Act,” which prohibited physicians from performing or inducing an abortion after a fetal heartbeat had been detected.
HARRIS, BIDEN, & DEMOCRATIC PARTY: Public Funding for Abortions
Advocating the repeal of the Hyde Amendment, which since 1976 had barred the use of public money to fund abortions, Senator Harris in 2019 said that “no woman’s access to reproductive health care should be based on how much money she has.”
During her 2020 presidential campaign, Senator Harris announced a “Medicare-for-All” plan that would cover comprehensive abortion services for all women.
In 2019, then-Democrat presidential nominee Joe Biden, who had formerly supported the Hyde Amendment, announced that the Amendment “can’t stay” because “times have changed.”
In January 2015, House Republicans introduced the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act, which sought.to permanently prohibit federal funds from being used to pay for abortions or for health insurance plans that covered abortion-related procedures. When the bill came up for a vote:
The official Democratic Party Platform of 2020 stated: “We will repeal the Hyde Amendment, and protect and codify the right to reproductive freedom.”
HARRIS, BIDEN, & DEMOCRATIC PARTY: Forcing Doctors to Perform Abortions Even if They Have Moral Objections
On July 28, 2022, the National Catholic Register reported: “The Biden administration proposed a new rule this week that legal experts say, if finalized, would force hospitals and doctors to perform gender-transition surgeries and abortions,” and “would reverse Trump-era conscience protections which sought to allow medical professionals to opt out of performing procedures against their beliefs.”
On January 29, 2015, House Republicans introduced the Conscience Protection Act, which aimed to prevent the government from penalizing healthcare providers and insurers who wished, for moral or ethical reasons, not to participate in, or pay for, abortions in any way. When this bill came up for a vote in July:
HARRIS & DEMOCRATIC PARTY: Infanticide for Babies Who Survive Abortions
During her 2020 presidential campaign, Senator Harris opposed legislation that would have compelled doctors to provide, for infants who survived abortions, the same degree of care as would normally be given to any infant of the same gestational age who was born in a non-abortion setting.
In January 2023, House Republicans introduced the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, which stipulated that in cases where a baby somehow managed to survive an attempted abortion procedure, medical practitioners would be required to try to preserve its life. When the bill came up for a vote:
HARRIS & DEMOCRATIC PARTY: Opposed to the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act
In 2020, Senator Harris, along with all but two of her fellow Senate Democrats, opposed the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, legislation designed to prevent the performance of abortions starting at 20 weeks after conception — at which time, according to scientific evidence, in-utero babies can feel pain. The bill allowed exceptions for abortions deemed necessary in order to protect the life or health of the mother, or where the pregnancy was the result of rape or incest.
BIDEN: Pledge to Codify Roe v. Wade if Democrats Win Midterms
At a Democratic National Committee event in D.C. on October 18, 2022, President Biden vowed to codify Roe v. Wade into law as his first legislative act after the midterms if Democrats were to succeed in retaining their control of both the House and Senate. “The court got Roe right nearly 50 years ago and I believe the Congress should codify Roe, once and for all,” he said. “The first bill I will send to the Congress will be to codify Roe v. Wade,” he added.
BIDEN: Executive Orders to Protect Abortion Rights
On July 8, 2022 – two weeks after the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade – President Biden issued an executive order titled “Protecting Access to Reproductive Health Care Services.” A White House Fact Sheet about the executive order said it would “safeguar[d] access to reproductive health care services, including abortion and contraception.”
On August 3, 2022, President Biden issued a second executive order designed to protect abortion rights in the wake of the June 24 Supreme Court ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade. The order said, in part: “I am directing my Administration to take further action to protect access to reproductive healthcare services … relating to pregnancy or the termination of a pregnancy.”
WALZ: Abortion-on-Demand
Tim Walz believes that all women should have an unrestricted right to abortion-on-demand at any stage of pregnancy – subsidized by taxpayers, in cases of economic hardship.
WALZ: Abortion-on-Demand (January 2023)
On January 31, 2023, Governor Walz signed the Protect Reproductive Options (PRO) Act — a bill enshrining a woman’s “right” to abortion without limits. The legislation read: “Every individual has a fundamental right to make autonomous decisions about the individual’s own reproductive health, including the fundamental right to use or refuse reproductive health care.” “Today,” said Walz, “we are delivering on our promise to put up a firewall against efforts to reverse reproductive freedom.”
The Minnesota Family Council stated that in addition to ensuring that abortion would remain legal through the very end of a pregnancy, the PRO Act would: (a) “forc[e] all Minnesotans to pay for all abortion services through Medical Assistance”; (b) “repea[l] the law protecting children born [alive] during [failed] abortion surgery, thereby legalizing infanticide”; and (c) “repea[l] statutes which ensure that pregnant women give informed consent prior to abortion.”
WALZ: Permitting Babies to Die after a Botched Abortion (May 2023)
In May 2023, Walz signed a bill that altered the wording of a Minnesota law which had been on the books since 1976. That 1976 law was reaffirmed in the Born Alive Infants Protection Act of 2015, which stated: “A born alive infant as a result of an abortion shall be fully recognized as a human person, and accorded immediate protection under the law. All reasonable measures consistent with good medical practice, including the compilation of appropriate medical records, shall be taken by the responsible medical personnel to preserve the life and health of the born alive infant.” (Emphasis added)
By contrast, the legislation that Walz signed in May 2023 said: “An infant who is born alive shall be fully recognized as a human person, and accorded immediate protection under the law. All reasonable measures consistent with good medical practice, including the compilation of appropriate medical records, shall be taken by the responsible medical personnel to care for the infant who is born alive.” (Emphasis added)
Paul Stark, communications director with the pro-life group Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life, said: “The concern is that the law no longer requires that lifesaving measures be taken. It only requires ‘care.’ So the law as it’s now written could allow a baby to be left to die, even a baby who could be saved with appropriate lifesaving measures.”
Republican state Rep. Jeff Backer explained that the legislation signed by Walz required only the administration of “comfort care” rather than aggressive efforts to save the baby’s life. “Comfort care means lay on a hard surface, maybe a blanket,” said Backer. “Comfort care is not medical lifesaving care.”
WALZ: Widespread Dispensation of Abortion Pills
In March 2023, Walz was one of 14 Democrat governors who signed a letter pressuring the leaders of major U.S. pharmacies to make abortion pills (like Mifepristone) widely available.
WALZ: State Constitutional Amendment Enshrining Abortion Rights
In January 2024, CBS News reported that Governor Walz “says he is open to putting a constitutional amendment protecting abortion rights on the November ballot.”
WALZ & DEMOCRATIC PARTY: Opposed to the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act
In October 2017, Rep. Walz voted against the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act (PCUCPA), legislation designed to prevent the performance of abortions starting at 20 weeks after conception — at which time, according to scientific evidence, in-utero babies can feel pain. The bill allowed exceptions for abortions deemed necessary in order to protect the life or health of the mother, or where the pregnancy was the result of rape or incest.
TRUMP: Spoke at The March for Life
In January 2018, Donald Trump became the first sitting U.S. President ever to speak at the March for Life, a massive pro-life rally held annually in D.C. He spoke again at the March for Life rallies in 2019 and 2020.
TRUMP: Opposes Late-Term Abortions
At the 2018 March for Life, Trump said: “Right now, in a number of states, the laws allow a baby to be [torn] from his or her mother’s womb in the ninth month. It is wrong; it has to change.”
TRUMP: Protect the Right of Doctors To Eschew Abortion for Moral Reasons
At the 2018 March for Life, Trump said: “Today, I’m announcing that we have just issued a new proposal to protect conscience rights and religious freedoms of doctors, nurses, and other medical professionals.”
In May 2019, the Trump administration’s Department of Health & Human Services issued a Conscience and Religious Freedom rule designed, as KFF Health News put it, “to protect the religious rights of health care providers and religious institutions by allowing them to opt out of procedures such as abortions, sterilizations and assisted suicide.”
TRUMP: Believes Abortion Policy Should Be Decided by Each State
Trump agrees with the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision of 2022, which ruled that each separate state should decide for itself what its abortion policies should be.
TRUMP: Favors Exceptions for Rape, Incest, & Mother’s Life
Trump favors exceptions on abortion restrictions in cases where a pregnancy results from rape or incest, or where the life of the mother is endangered by the pregnancy.
TRUMP: Opposes a National Abortion Ban
During his 2024 presidential campaign, Trump has repeatedly stated that he would not sign any bill calling for a nationwide ban on abortions. On October 1, 2024, he expanded that pledge by affirming that even if such a ban were to be passed by Congress, he would veto it. As Trump wrote on Truth Social: “Everyone knows I would not support a federal abortion ban, under any circumstances, and would, in fact, veto it.”
network, noun: 1. An openwork fabric or structure in which cords, threads, or wires cross at regular intervals.
— American Heritage Dictionary, 4th Edition
What This Site Is About
Welcome to DiscoverTheNetworks, a project of the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This website is a “Guide to the Political Left.” It identifies the individuals and organizations that make up the left, and also the institutions that fund and sustain the left; it maps the paths through which the left exerts its influence on the larger body politic; it defines the left’s (often hidden) programmatic agendas; and it provides an understanding of the left’s history and ideas.
The site is made up of two principal data elements along with a powerful search engine to locate and explore the information stored. The first of these elements is a database of PROFILES of individuals, organizations, and institutions. The PROFILES provide thumbnail sketches of histories, agendas, and (where significant) funding sources. The information has been culled from public records readily available on the Internet and in books and other sources whose veracity and authenticity are easily checked.
The second data element of this site consists of a library of articles, both scholarly and journalistic, which analyze the relationships disclosed in the database and the issues they raise. These articles have been entered into the database and linked at the bottom of the PROFILE pages. The judgments that inform these analyses are subjective, reflecting informed opinion about the matters at hand. In every case possible, their authors and sources are identified so that users of the database can form their own judgments and opinions about the reliability and value of the analyses.
DiscoverTheNetworks is an ambitious undertaking that would not have been possible before the creation of the Internet, with the storage capacities and data linkage features that digital space affords and that such an undertaking requires. As a result of the information that these technologies make available, a user of this site can follow the networks described in the database to arrive at a new understanding of the forces that define our social reality and shape our collective futures.
The database will readily answer many questions that previously would have required volumes of printed text to establish. The primary question is: “Is there a left?” Since the early 1970s, radical activists began referring to themselves as “liberals” (in part to distance themselves from their failures as a socialist left). A sympathetic media culture went along with this deception, with the result that the word “left” has all but disappeared from the political lexicon. The spectrum of views is now regularly described in the media culture as extending from “liberal” to “moderate” to “conservative” or “right,” as though a left did not exist or was so marginal as not to matter.
By browsing this database, and familiarizing oneself with the agendas of the individuals and organizations it contains, with the scope of their activities, and with the countless millions of dollars available to support them, a user of this base will find ample evidence for the existence of this left and for the fact that it is a major player in the political destinies of the nation.
As we are committed to minimizing the possibility of any inaccuracies creeping into our database, corrections can be submitted to discoverthenetworks@gmail.com. We will take immediate steps to correct any factual inaccuracies that are brought to our attention.
Other concerns are certain to be raised that we will not regard as legitimate but rather as veiled expressions of distress over the factual information revealed on the site. Such responses reflect an anti-intellectual attitude that seeks to embargo the political debate before it takes place.
Every effort has been made in the creation of DiscoverTheNetworks to avoid conflating subjective judgments about policy differences with factual descriptions of attitudes expressed by the individuals and organizations listed on this site. Individuals and organizations identified as “Marxist” or “socialist,” or as having agendas sympathetic to America’s adversaries, are so identified on the basis of their explicit, and self-stated, commitment to these agendas. Their profiles are generally linked to analytic articles whose authors and sources are clearly identified.
DiscoverTheNetworks is not by intent or design or consequence a “snitch file,” as the former lieutenant governor of Colorado absurdly proposed. To whom would the site be snitching, and about what criminal activity? Is the lieutenant governor implying that the leftists identified in this site are hiding something that should not be submitted to public scrutiny? Is she aware of some governmental authority with an official list of forbidden viewpoints ready to impose penalties on the subjects in this base for having offensive ideas?
The purpose of the DiscoverTheNetworks site is not to stifle free speech but to clarify it. We recognize that people are not always candid in what they say in public life, particularly in the arena of political discourse. “Truth in political advertising” would be a more accurate description of our intentions in assembling this data.
The problem of deceptive public presentation is common enough to all sides in the political debate but applies with special force to the left, which has a long and well-documented history of dissembling about its agendas. In the past, for example, the Communist Party operated through “front” groups that concealed the radical agendas of those who controlled them. In the 1948 elections, the Party created an entire electoral front — the Progressive Party — to run a candidate in Henry Wallace who opposed the Cold War against Stalin. During the congressional investigations into the covert activities of the Communist Party, its leaders appeared before government panels to proclaim their patriotism and to describe themselves as avid defenders of free speech, denying that they had any radical agendas at all. In fact the Communist Party was an organization dedicated to the overthrow of the American political system, the establishment of a proletarian dictatorship, and the elimination of free speech for those whom it regarded as the “class enemy.”
The disingenuous tradition of the political left has continued into the present. In the 1960s, for instance, the radical organizers of the mass anti-war demonstrations pretended that their only interest was to “Bring the Troops Home,” when in fact their agendas embraced a radical menu that was anti-capitalist and welcomed a Communist victory. In the campaign against the war in Iraq, a similar pattern emerged, as the information provided in this database clearly demonstrates. In this realm and many others, DiscoverTheNetworks lays bare the connections that tie today’s left to the left of ages past.
network, noun: 1. An openwork fabric or structure in which cords, threads, or wires cross at regular intervals.
— American Heritage Dictionary, 4th Edition
What This Site Is About
Welcome to DiscoverTheNetworks, a project of the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This website is a “Guide to the Political Left.” It identifies the individuals and organizations that make up the left, and also the institutions that fund and sustain the left; it maps the paths through which the left exerts its influence on the larger body politic; it defines the left’s (often hidden) programmatic agendas; and it provides an understanding of the left’s history and ideas.
The site is made up of two principal data elements along with a powerful search engine to locate and explore the information stored. The first of these elements is a database of PROFILES of individuals, organizations, and institutions. The PROFILES provide thumbnail sketches of histories, agendas, and (where significant) funding sources. The information has been culled from public records readily available on the Internet and in books and other sources whose veracity and authenticity are easily checked.
The second data element of this site consists of a library of articles, both scholarly and journalistic, which analyze the relationships disclosed in the database and the issues they raise. These articles have been entered into the database and linked at the bottom of the PROFILE pages. The judgments that inform these analyses are subjective, reflecting informed opinion about the matters at hand. In every case possible, their authors and sources are identified so that users of the database can form their own judgments and opinions about the reliability and value of the analyses.
DiscoverTheNetworks is an ambitious undertaking that would not have been possible before the creation of the Internet, with the storage capacities and data linkage features that digital space affords and that such an undertaking requires. As a result of the information that these technologies make available, a user of this site can follow the networks described in the database to arrive at a new understanding of the forces that define our social reality and shape our collective futures.
The database will readily answer many questions that previously would have required volumes of printed text to establish. The primary question is: “Is there a left?” Since the early 1970s, radical activists began referring to themselves as “liberals” (in part to distance themselves from their failures as a socialist left). A sympathetic media culture went along with this deception, with the result that the word “left” has all but disappeared from the political lexicon. The spectrum of views is now regularly described in the media culture as extending from “liberal” to “moderate” to “conservative” or “right,” as though a left did not exist or was so marginal as not to matter.
By browsing this database, and familiarizing oneself with the agendas of the individuals and organizations it contains, with the scope of their activities, and with the countless millions of dollars available to support them, a user of this base will find ample evidence for the existence of this left and for the fact that it is a major player in the political destinies of the nation.
As we are committed to minimizing the possibility of any inaccuracies creeping into our database, corrections can be submitted to discoverthenetworks@gmail.com. We will take immediate steps to correct any factual inaccuracies that are brought to our attention.
Other concerns are certain to be raised that we will not regard as legitimate but rather as veiled expressions of distress over the factual information revealed on the site. Such responses reflect an anti-intellectual attitude that seeks to embargo the political debate before it takes place.
Every effort has been made in the creation of DiscoverTheNetworks to avoid conflating subjective judgments about policy differences with factual descriptions of attitudes expressed by the individuals and organizations listed on this site. Individuals and organizations identified as “Marxist” or “socialist,” or as having agendas sympathetic to America’s adversaries, are so identified on the basis of their explicit, and self-stated, commitment to these agendas. Their profiles are generally linked to analytic articles whose authors and sources are clearly identified.
DiscoverTheNetworks is not by intent or design or consequence a “snitch file,” as the former lieutenant governor of Colorado absurdly proposed. To whom would the site be snitching, and about what criminal activity? Is the lieutenant governor implying that the leftists identified in this site are hiding something that should not be submitted to public scrutiny? Is she aware of some governmental authority with an official list of forbidden viewpoints ready to impose penalties on the subjects in this base for having offensive ideas?
The purpose of the DiscoverTheNetworks site is not to stifle free speech but to clarify it. We recognize that people are not always candid in what they say in public life, particularly in the arena of political discourse. “Truth in political advertising” would be a more accurate description of our intentions in assembling this data.
The problem of deceptive public presentation is common enough to all sides in the political debate but applies with special force to the left, which has a long and well-documented history of dissembling about its agendas. In the past, for example, the Communist Party operated through “front” groups that concealed the radical agendas of those who controlled them. In the 1948 elections, the Party created an entire electoral front — the Progressive Party — to run a candidate in Henry Wallace who opposed the Cold War against Stalin. During the congressional investigations into the covert activities of the Communist Party, its leaders appeared before government panels to proclaim their patriotism and to describe themselves as avid defenders of free speech, denying that they had any radical agendas at all. In fact the Communist Party was an organization dedicated to the overthrow of the American political system, the establishment of a proletarian dictatorship, and the elimination of free speech for those whom it regarded as the “class enemy.”
The disingenuous tradition of the political left has continued into the present. In the 1960s, for instance, the radical organizers of the mass anti-war demonstrations pretended that their only interest was to “Bring the Troops Home,” when in fact their agendas embraced a radical menu that was anti-capitalist and welcomed a Communist victory. In the campaign against the war in Iraq, a similar pattern emerged, as the information provided in this database clearly demonstrates. In this realm and many others, DiscoverTheNetworks lays bare the connections that tie today’s left to the left of ages past.
Popular mythology says that the conservative movement is awash in money while the Left, starved for cash, lacks the means to effectively disseminate its message to the American public. But in fact, precisely the opposite is true. Funding for the Left dwarfs the funding that is received by the political Right. This page contains links to a series of charts that examine various aspects of Left and Right funding.
Some highlights:
One of the more noteworthy charts shows that the combined assets of the top 115 “progressive” (i.e., left-wing) foundations exceed $104 billion. Among these funders, which underwrite a vast network of advocacy “think tanks” and grassroots radical groups, are such well-known giants as the Ford, Gates, MacArthur, Rockefeller, and Tides Foundation, along with the Open Society Institute of the ubiquitous George Soros.
In stark contrast, a second, related chart identifies 83 leading conservative foundations whose combined assets amount to a mere $10.3 billion—in short, a 10-to-1 ratio in favor of the Left. Not a single conservative foundation has assets exceeding $1 billion, whereas 14 progressive foundations do.
A third illuminating chart shows that the combined assets of the 64 foundations and philanthropic organizations which comprise the left-wing Peace and Security Funders Group (PSFG) total an astounding $29 billion—a sum larger than the defense budgets of Greece, Colombia, and Poland combined. PSFG grew out of the Ploughshares Fund, which, during the Cold War, pushed for unilateral American disarmament and supported the nuclear-freeze movement, a Soviet-sponsored initiative that sought to further solidify the nuclear and military superiority which the USSR had recently gained. PSFG’s agendas today are a natural extension of its parent group’s objectives—drastic reductions in the U.S. defense budget coupled with massive American commitments for international humanitarian relief and economic-development programs.
A fourth chart identifies more than 550 progressive environmental groups whose combined assets amount to about $9.3 billion. These groups—which include such long-established left-wing stalwarts as the Nature Conservancy, the World Wildlife Fund, the Natural Resources Defense Council, Environmental Defense, the Sierra Club, and Greenpeace—contend that global warming (now “climate change”) is a fact of crisis proportions; that it is caused chiefly by human industrial activity; that businesses and corporations are major environmental despoilers; that government regulation of business is the solution; that drastic revisions of American law are required to promote the necessary remedies; that litigation in behalf of green agendas is in order; that many natural resources (fossil fuels, land) must be put off-limits to as large a degree as possible; and that human beings are inherently toxic to the natural environment. Notably, such groups do not derive their revenues solely from the largesse of foundations. Taxpayer dollars play an enormous role as well, as evidenced by a fifth chart showing that the federal government awards more than $560 million per year to at least 225 progressive environmental groups.
A fifth vital chart shows that there exist scarcely 40 conservative environmental groups; i.e., groups that: share preferences for property rights and free-market solutions to environmental problems; seek to preserve the rights of people to hunt and fish; regard the issue of global warming as controversial rather than “settled”; regard the theory of mankind’s culpability for global warming as questionable or, at best, unresolved; advocate clean coal mining, responsible drilling, and the replanting of trees after logging; and do not oppose alternative energies but seek to strike a balance with economic realities. The total combined assets of these groups are just $44.7 million, and only 7 of them receive any type of government funding at all.
Progressive immigration groups—which typically refer to illegal aliens as “undocumented immigrants” and seek to grant them rights traditionally reserved for legal citizens—form the focal point of a sixth chart. The combined assets of these groups—among which are such influential entities as the National Council of La Raza, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and the League of United Latin American Citizens—exceed $194 million. In addition to the rivers of cash that pour into their coffers from left-wing foundations, these organizations, again, siphon enormous sums of money from the bank accounts of American taxpayers. Indeed, the federal government funnels more than $325 million per year to at least 110 progressive immigration groups.
By contrast, another chart shows that there exist a mere 16 conservative immigration groups; i.e., groups that support traditional immigration policies focusing on border security and the enforcement of immigration laws. The combined net assets of these 16 entities total only $17 million, and the federal government gives money to just one of them.
Assets & Grants of Progressive & Conservative Foundations
* Progressive Foundations: Assets and Grants Awarded
* Conservative Foundations: Assets and Grants Awarded
* Summary of Comparative Assets and Grant Expenditures of Conservative and Progressive Foundations
Government Funding of Progressive Foundations
* Government Funding of Progressive Organizations
Assets & Revenues of Environmental Groups
* Progressive Environmental Groups: Assets & Revenues
* Conservative Environmental Groups: Assets & Revenues
* Summary of Comparative Funding of Conservative and Progressive Environmental Groups
Government Funding of Environmental Groups
* Government Funding of Progressive Environmental Groups
* Government Funding of Conservative Environmental Groups
* Summary of Comparative Government Funding of Conservative and Progressive Environmental Groups
Assets & Revenues of Immigration Groups
* Progressive Immigration Groups: Assets & Revenues
* Conservative Immigration Groups: Assets & Revenues
* Summary of Comparative Funding of Conservative and Progressive Immigration Groups
Government Funding of Immigration Groups
* Government Funding of Progressive Immigration Groups
* Government Funding of Conservative Immigration Groups
* Summary of Comparative Government Funding of Conservative and Progressive Immigration Groups
ARTICLES
Conservative Donors: Wake Up!
By Heather Mac Donald
Summer 2023
Additional funders of Brave New Films include the Baytree Foundation, theBohemian Foundation, the California Wellness Foundation, the Firedoll Foundation,the Herb Block Foundation, the Jacob and Valeria Langeloth Foundation, the Leif Nissen Foundation, the Lotus Foundation, the Stephen M. Silberstein Foundation, and Voqal.
Additional funders of Brave New Films include the Baytree Foundation, theBohemian Foundation, the California Wellness Foundation, the Firedoll Foundation,the Herb Block Foundation, the Jacob and Valeria Langeloth Foundation, the Leif Nissen Foundation, the Lotus Foundation, the Stephen M. Silberstein Foundation, and Voqal.
NARAL Pro-Choice America has also received funding from the following entities:
Abramson Family Foundation
Allende Foundation
Altman/Kazickas Foundation
Arie and Ida Crown Memorial
Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation
Avenir Foundation
Baltimore Community Foundation
Bagley and Virginia Wright Foundation
Barbara M. Zalaznick Foundation
Baskes Family Foundation
Berkshire Taconic Betsy & Alan D. Cohn Foundation
Bernard & Anne Spitzer Charitable Trust
Bernard G. and Rhoda G. Sarnat Family Foundation
Bluhm Family Charitable Foundation
Blair Foundation
Blum-Kovler Foundation
Bohemian Foundation
Boston Foundation
Bydale Foundation
Capital Group Companies Charitable Foundation
Chambers Family Fund
Chrysopolae Foundation
Cleveland Foundation
Colorado Trust
Community Foundation
Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta
Community Foundation for the National Capital Region
Community Foundation for Southeast Michigan
Community Foundation of Greater Memphis
Connie and Bob Lurie Foundation
Cumming Foundation
Dallas Foundation
Daniel and Joanna S. Rose Fund
Daniel M. Neidich & Brooke Garber Foundation
Daryl & Steven Roth Foundation
Demartini Family Foundation
Denver Foundation
Dr. Gerald J. and Dorothy R. Friedman Medical Foundation
Draper Foundation
East Bay Community Foundation
Edna Wardlaw Charitable Trust
Eli & Edythe Broad Foundation
Elizabeth B. and Arthur E. Roswell Foundation
Ellen & Gary Davis Foundation
Enterprise Foundation Trust
Ettinger Foundation
Fairfield County Community Foundation
Frank and Deenie Brosens Foundation
Fribourg Family Foundation
George Gund Foundation
Gill Foundation
Goldsmith Family Foundation
Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation
Greystone Foundation
Healy Foundation
Hellman Family Foundation
Hillman Family Foundations
Horizons Foundation
HRK Foundation
Hurst Family Foundation
IF Hummingbird Foundation
Irving Harris Foundation
Jacob and Valeria Langeloth Foundation
Jay and Rose Phillips Family Foundation of Minnesota
Jerome & Lorraine Aresty Charitable Foundation
Jerry and Emily Spiegel Family Foundation
Jerry Gart Family Foundation
JFM Foundation
John and Barbara Ogelstein Foundation
John and Lisa Pritzker Family Fund
John Merck Fund
Joseph and Florence Mandel Foundation
Kohlberg Foundation
Laney Thornton Foundation
Leonard and Evelyn Lauder Foundation
Libra Foundation
Lisa and Douglas Goldman Fund
Loeb Family—Third Point Foundation
Lois and Andrew Zaro Family Charitable Trust
Lostand Foundation
Lovett/Woodsum Family Charitable Foundation
Lumpkin Family Foundation
Lynch Family Foundation
Margot and Thomas Pritzker Family Foundation
Marin Community Foundation
Marjorie & Clarence E. Unterberg Foundation
Marshall B. Coyne Foundation
Mary A. H. Rumsey Foundation
Mary Wohlford Foundation
May and Samuel Rudin Family Foundation
MBIA Foundation
Mimi and Peter Haas Fund
Moriah Fund
Mousetrap Foundation
Naomi and Nehemiah Cohen Foundation
Neisser Family Fund
New Hampshire Charitable Foundation
New Prospect Foundation
New York Community Trust
Norcliffe Foundation
NoVo Foundation
Oak Hill Fund
Olive Bridge Fund
Otto Bremer Foundation
Overbrook Foundation
Patterson Family Foundation
Pearson-Rappaport Foundation
Peierls Foundation
Peggy and Millard Drexler Foundation
Peter A. and Deborah L. Weinberg Family Foundation
Philadelphia Foundation
Phoebe Snow Foundation
Pittman Family Foundation
Poses Family Foundation
Prentice Foundation
Pritzker Foundation
Pritzker Traubert Family Foundation
Quixote Foundation
Ramsay Family Foundation
Rattner Family Foundation
Ray and Dagmar Dolby Family Fund
Rey-Vaden Family Foundation
Ripple Foundation
Rita J. and Stanley H. Kaplan Family Foundation
Robert Sterling Clark Foundation
Ronald and Deborah Ratner Family Foundation
Rosenstiel Foundation
Rosenthal Family Foundation
Rotasa Foundation
Rotonda Foundation
Roy A. Hunt Foundation
Ryna and Melvin Cohen Family Foundation
S.D. Bechtel, Jr. Foundation
San Diego Foundation
San Francisco Foundation
Seattle Foundation
Seinfeld Family Foundation
Sidney Stern Memorial Trust
Silicon Valley Community Foundation
Sirus Fund
Stainman Family Foundation
Stephen and Tabitha King Foundation
Stephen Bechtel Fund
Sternlicht Family Foundation
Susan & Robert Wislow Charitable Foundation
Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation
Temple Hoyne Buell Foundation
Timothy & Bernadette Marquez Foundation
Tisch Foundation
Tomorrow Foundation
Tosa Foundation
Triangle Community Foundation
Vicki and Michael Gross Foundation
Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation
Wallis Foundation
WestWind Foundation
William B. Wiener Jr. Foundation
Winslow Foundation
Wisch Family Foundation
Women’s Project Foundation
(Information courtesy of the Foundation Center)
NARAL Pro-Choice America has also received funding from the following entities:
Abramson Family Foundation
Allende Foundation
Altman/Kazickas Foundation
Arie and Ida Crown Memorial
Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation
Avenir Foundation
Baltimore Community Foundation
Bagley and Virginia Wright Foundation
Barbara M. Zalaznick Foundation
Baskes Family Foundation
Berkshire Taconic Betsy & Alan D. Cohn Foundation
Bernard & Anne Spitzer Charitable Trust
Bernard G. and Rhoda G. Sarnat Family Foundation
Bluhm Family Charitable Foundation
Blair Foundation
Blum-Kovler Foundation
Bohemian Foundation
Boston Foundation
Bydale Foundation
Capital Group Companies Charitable Foundation
Chambers Family Fund
Chrysopolae Foundation
Cleveland Foundation
Colorado Trust
Community Foundation
Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta
Community Foundation for the National Capital Region
Community Foundation for Southeast Michigan
Community Foundation of Greater Memphis
Connie and Bob Lurie Foundation
Cumming Foundation
Dallas Foundation
Daniel and Joanna S. Rose Fund
Daniel M. Neidich & Brooke Garber Foundation
Daryl & Steven Roth Foundation
Demartini Family Foundation
Denver Foundation
Dr. Gerald J. and Dorothy R. Friedman Medical Foundation
Draper Foundation
East Bay Community Foundation
Edna Wardlaw Charitable Trust
Eli & Edythe Broad Foundation
Elizabeth B. and Arthur E. Roswell Foundation
Ellen & Gary Davis Foundation
Enterprise Foundation Trust
Ettinger Foundation
Fairfield County Community Foundation
Frank and Deenie Brosens Foundation
Fribourg Family Foundation
George Gund Foundation
Gill Foundation
Goldsmith Family Foundation
Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation
Greystone Foundation
Healy Foundation
Hellman Family Foundation
Hillman Family Foundations
Horizons Foundation
HRK Foundation
Hurst Family Foundation
IF Hummingbird Foundation
Irving Harris Foundation
Jacob and Valeria Langeloth Foundation
Jay and Rose Phillips Family Foundation of Minnesota
Jerome & Lorraine Aresty Charitable Foundation
Jerry and Emily Spiegel Family Foundation
Jerry Gart Family Foundation
JFM Foundation
John and Barbara Ogelstein Foundation
John and Lisa Pritzker Family Fund
John Merck Fund
Joseph and Florence Mandel Foundation
Kohlberg Foundation
Laney Thornton Foundation
Leonard and Evelyn Lauder Foundation
Libra Foundation
Lisa and Douglas Goldman Fund
Loeb Family—Third Point Foundation
Lois and Andrew Zaro Family Charitable Trust
Lostand Foundation
Lovett/Woodsum Family Charitable Foundation
Lumpkin Family Foundation
Lynch Family Foundation
Margot and Thomas Pritzker Family Foundation
Marin Community Foundation
Marjorie & Clarence E. Unterberg Foundation
Marshall B. Coyne Foundation
Mary A. H. Rumsey Foundation
Mary Wohlford Foundation
May and Samuel Rudin Family Foundation
MBIA Foundation
Mimi and Peter Haas Fund
Moriah Fund
Mousetrap Foundation
Naomi and Nehemiah Cohen Foundation
Neisser Family Fund
New Hampshire Charitable Foundation
New Prospect Foundation
New York Community Trust
Norcliffe Foundation
NoVo Foundation
Oak Hill Fund
Olive Bridge Fund
Otto Bremer Foundation
Overbrook Foundation
Patterson Family Foundation
Pearson-Rappaport Foundation
Peierls Foundation
Peggy and Millard Drexler Foundation
Peter A. and Deborah L. Weinberg Family Foundation
Philadelphia Foundation
Phoebe Snow Foundation
Pittman Family Foundation
Poses Family Foundation
Prentice Foundation
Pritzker Foundation
Pritzker Traubert Family Foundation
Quixote Foundation
Ramsay Family Foundation
Rattner Family Foundation
Ray and Dagmar Dolby Family Fund
Rey-Vaden Family Foundation
Ripple Foundation
Rita J. and Stanley H. Kaplan Family Foundation
Robert Sterling Clark Foundation
Ronald and Deborah Ratner Family Foundation
Rosenstiel Foundation
Rosenthal Family Foundation
Rotasa Foundation
Rotonda Foundation
Roy A. Hunt Foundation
Ryna and Melvin Cohen Family Foundation
S.D. Bechtel, Jr. Foundation
San Diego Foundation
San Francisco Foundation
Seattle Foundation
Seinfeld Family Foundation
Sidney Stern Memorial Trust
Silicon Valley Community Foundation
Sirus Fund
Stainman Family Foundation
Stephen and Tabitha King Foundation
Stephen Bechtel Fund
Sternlicht Family Foundation
Susan & Robert Wislow Charitable Foundation
Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation
Temple Hoyne Buell Foundation
Timothy & Bernadette Marquez Foundation
Tisch Foundation
Tomorrow Foundation
Tosa Foundation
Triangle Community Foundation
Vicki and Michael Gross Foundation
Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation
Wallis Foundation
WestWind Foundation
William B. Wiener Jr. Foundation
Winslow Foundation
Wisch Family Foundation
Women’s Project Foundation
(Information courtesy of the Foundation Center)
ProgressNow is also funded by the:
Bohemian Foundation
Boston Foundation
Brett Family Foundation
Colorado Trust
Community Foundation – Boulder County
Dallas Foundation
Denver Foundation
Ettinger Foundation
Gill Foundation
Lotus Foundation
PBL Fund
Prentice Foundation
Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors
Stephen M. Silberstein Foundation
Vanguard Charitable Endowment Program
(Information on granters courtesy of The Foundation Center, GuideStar, ActivistCash, the Capital Research Center and Undue Influence)
ProgressNow is also funded by the:
Bohemian Foundation
Boston Foundation
Brett Family Foundation
Colorado Trust
Community Foundation – Boulder County
Dallas Foundation
Denver Foundation
Ettinger Foundation
Gill Foundation
Lotus Foundation
PBL Fund
Prentice Foundation
Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors
Stephen M. Silberstein Foundation
Vanguard Charitable Endowment Program
(Information on granters courtesy of The Foundation Center, GuideStar, ActivistCash, the Capital Research Center and Undue Influence)
Additional Supporters of the Berghof Foundation for Conflict Studies:
(Information on grant-makers courtesy of The Foundation Center, GuideStar, ActivistCash, the Capital Research Center and Undue Influence)
Additional Supporters of the Berghof Foundation for Conflict Studies:
(Information on grant-makers courtesy of The Foundation Center, GuideStar, ActivistCash, the Capital Research Center and Undue Influence)
Additional funders of the Brennan Center for Justice include the Atlantic Foundation of New York, the Clark Foundation, the Deer Creek Foundation, the Gerbode Foundation, the Gimbel Foundation, the Goldsmith Foundation, the Heron Foundation, the Kansas City Community Foundation, the New York Community Trust, the New York Foundation, the Rosenberg Foundation, the Rubinstein Foundation, the Sprague Educational and Charitable Foundation, the Starr Foundation, and the Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Krantz Foundation.
Additional funders of the Brennan Center for Justice include the Atlantic Foundation of New York, the Clark Foundation, the Deer Creek Foundation, the Gerbode Foundation, the Gimbel Foundation, the Goldsmith Foundation, the Heron Foundation, the Kansas City Community Foundation, the New York Community Trust, the New York Foundation, the Rosenberg Foundation, the Rubinstein Foundation, the Sprague Educational and Charitable Foundation, the Starr Foundation, and the Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Krantz Foundation.
Additional Funders of the Century Foundation:
Bader Foundation
Broad Foundation
Commonwealth Fund
Knight Foundation
Leonard Lieberman Family Foundation
New York Community Trust
Retirement Research Foundation
Sagner Family Foundation
(Information on grantors courtesy of The Foundation Center, GuideStar, ActivistCash, the Capital Research Center and Undue Influence)
Additional Funders of the Century Foundation:
Bader Foundation
Broad Foundation
Commonwealth Fund
Knight Foundation
Leonard Lieberman Family Foundation
New York Community Trust
Retirement Research Foundation
Sagner Family Foundation
(Information on grantors courtesy of The Foundation Center, GuideStar, ActivistCash, the Capital Research Center and Undue Influence)
The Erikson Institute has also received funding from such philanthropies as the A.L. Mailman Family Foundation, the Adie and Ira Crown Memorial, the Aon Foundation, the Baskes Family Foundation, the Bell Family Foundation, the Blum-Kovler Foundation, the Buffett Early Childhood Fund, the Canning Foundation, the Caterpillar Foundation, the Chicago Community Trust, the Circle of Service Foundation, the CME Group Foundation, the Community Memorial Foundation, the Colonel Stanley R. McNeil Foundation, the Crain-Maling Foundation, the D & R Fund, the Duke Charitable Foundation, the Edwardson Family Foundation, the Elizabeth Morse Genius Charitable Trust, the Evelyn and Walter Haas Jr. Fund, the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, the Field Foundation of Illinois, the Foundation for Child Development, the Fulk Family Foundation, the Grand Victoria Foundation, the Harris Family Foundation, the Herr Foundation, the Hunter Family Foundation, the Irving Harris Foundation, the James and Catherine Denny Foundation, the John and Lisa Pritzker Family Fund, the Joseph and Bessie Feinberg Foundation, the JP Morgan Chase Foundation, the Judd A. and Marjorie G. Weinberg Family Foundation, the Kalmanovitz Charitable Foundation, the Kovler Family Foundation, the Lloyd A. Fry Foundation, the Mayer and Morris Kaplan Family Foundation, the McDougal Family Foundation, the Michael L. Keiser and Rosalind C. Keiser Charitable Trust, the Michael Reese Health Trust, the Motorola Solutions Foundation, the Musk Foundation, the New Prospect Foundation, the Northern Trust Company Charitable Trust, the Offield Family Foundation, the Patrick G. and Shirley W. Ryan Foundation, the PNC Foundation, the Polk Brothers Foundation, the Prince Charitable Trusts, the Pritzker Family Foundation, the Pritzker Foundation, the Pucker Family Foundation, the Renee and Edward Ross Foundation, the Reva and David Logan Foundation, the Robert and Jamie Taylor Foundation, the Robert W. Galvin Foundation, the Seedlings Foundation, the Sidley Austin Foundation, the Sirius Fund, the Smart Family Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, the Theodore G. Schwartz Foundation, the Topfer Family Foundation, the W. Clement & Jessie V. Stone Foundation, the Walden W. & Jean Young Shaw Foundation, the Walsh Foundation, the William Blair & Company Foundation, the William T. Grant Foundation, and the Zell Family Foundation.
(Information courtesy of the Foundation Center)
The Erikson Institute has also received funding from such philanthropies as the A.L. Mailman Family Foundation, the Adie and Ira Crown Memorial, the Aon Foundation, the Baskes Family Foundation, the Bell Family Foundation, the Blum-Kovler Foundation, the Buffett Early Childhood Fund, the Canning Foundation, the Caterpillar Foundation, the Chicago Community Trust, the Circle of Service Foundation, the CME Group Foundation, the Community Memorial Foundation, the Colonel Stanley R. McNeil Foundation, the Crain-Maling Foundation, the D & R Fund, the Duke Charitable Foundation, the Edwardson Family Foundation, the Elizabeth Morse Genius Charitable Trust, the Evelyn and Walter Haas Jr. Fund, the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, the Field Foundation of Illinois, the Foundation for Child Development, the Fulk Family Foundation, the Grand Victoria Foundation, the Harris Family Foundation, the Herr Foundation, the Hunter Family Foundation, the Irving Harris Foundation, the James and Catherine Denny Foundation, the John and Lisa Pritzker Family Fund, the Joseph and Bessie Feinberg Foundation, the JP Morgan Chase Foundation, the Judd A. and Marjorie G. Weinberg Family Foundation, the Kalmanovitz Charitable Foundation, the Kovler Family Foundation, the Lloyd A. Fry Foundation, the Mayer and Morris Kaplan Family Foundation, the McDougal Family Foundation, the Michael L. Keiser and Rosalind C. Keiser Charitable Trust, the Michael Reese Health Trust, the Motorola Solutions Foundation, the Musk Foundation, the New Prospect Foundation, the Northern Trust Company Charitable Trust, the Offield Family Foundation, the Patrick G. and Shirley W. Ryan Foundation, the PNC Foundation, the Polk Brothers Foundation, the Prince Charitable Trusts, the Pritzker Family Foundation, the Pritzker Foundation, the Pucker Family Foundation, the Renee and Edward Ross Foundation, the Reva and David Logan Foundation, the Robert and Jamie Taylor Foundation, the Robert W. Galvin Foundation, the Seedlings Foundation, the Sidley Austin Foundation, the Sirius Fund, the Smart Family Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, the Theodore G. Schwartz Foundation, the Topfer Family Foundation, the W. Clement & Jessie V. Stone Foundation, the Walden W. & Jean Young Shaw Foundation, the Walsh Foundation, the William Blair & Company Foundation, the William T. Grant Foundation, and the Zell Family Foundation.
(Information courtesy of the Foundation Center)
Additional funders of the Institute for America’s Future have included: the 21st Century ILGWU Heritage Fund, the Agnes Gund Foundation, the Andler Family Supporting Foundation, the Angelica Foundation, the Bernard & Audre Rapoport Foundation, the Boston Foundation, the Catalyst Foundation, the Coydog Foundation, the Edwards Mother Earth Foundation, the Enfranchisement Foundation, the General Service Foundation, the George Gund Foundation, the Goldman Sachs Philanthropy Fund, the Irene Diamond Fund, the Jewish Communal Fund, the JKW Foundation, the Marisla Foundation, the Max & Anna Levinson Foundation, the New York Community Trust, the Ottinger Foundation, the Overbrook Foundation, the Philip D. & Tammy S. Murphy Foundation, the Retirement Research Foundation, the Robert and Patricia Switzer Foundation, and the Seattle Foundation.
Additional funders of the Institute for America’s Future have included: the 21st Century ILGWU Heritage Fund, the Agnes Gund Foundation, the Andler Family Supporting Foundation, the Angelica Foundation, the Bernard & Audre Rapoport Foundation, the Boston Foundation, the Catalyst Foundation, the Coydog Foundation, the Edwards Mother Earth Foundation, the Enfranchisement Foundation, the General Service Foundation, the George Gund Foundation, the Goldman Sachs Philanthropy Fund, the Irene Diamond Fund, the Jewish Communal Fund, the JKW Foundation, the Marisla Foundation, the Max & Anna Levinson Foundation, the New York Community Trust, the Ottinger Foundation, the Overbrook Foundation, the Philip D. & Tammy S. Murphy Foundation, the Retirement Research Foundation, the Robert and Patricia Switzer Foundation, and the Seattle Foundation.
Additional Funders of the National Council of La Raza / UnidosUS include the following:
Aurora Foundation
BBVA Compass Foundation
Best Buy Children’s Foundation
Boston Foundation
BP Foundation
Bravo Foundation
Bridgestone Americas Trust Fund
Buffett Early Childhood Fund
Caesars Foundation
California Endowment Foundation
Caterpillar Foundation
Cedar Tree Foundation
Chartwell Charitable Foundation
Chicago Community Trust
Chrysler Foundation
Citi Foundation
Coca-Cola Foundation
Columbus Foundation and Affiliated Organizations
Comcast Foundation
Communities Foundation of Texas, Inc.
Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta
Community Foundation for Greater New Haven
Community Foundation for the National Capital Region
ConAgra Foods Foundation
Cracker Barrel Old Country Store Foundation
CrossCurrents Foundation
Dallas Foundation
Darden Restaurants, Inc. Foundation
Dominion Foundation
Dwoskin Family Foundation
Eastman Kodak Charitable Trust
Eli Lilly and Company Foundation
Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund
Ford Motor Company Fund
Francis Family Foundation
General Motors Foundation
Gill Foundation
Healthcare Georgia Foundation
Hess Foundation
J. Willard and Alice S. Marriott Foundation
John S. and James L. Knight Foundation
Johnson & Johnson Family of Companies Contribution Fund
Kansas City Community Foundation
Levi Strauss Foundation
Lockheed Martin Corporation Foundation
Mailman Family Foundation
MetLife Foundation
Naomi and Nehemiah Cohen Foundation
NIKE Foundation
PepsiCo Foundation
PMI Foundation
Pritzker Family Foundation
Rockwell Automation Charitable Corp.
San Diego Foundation
San Francisco Foundation
Silicon Valley Community Foundation
Silva Watson Moonwalk Fund
Sprint Foundation, the Stoneman Family Foundation
Triangle Community Foundation
UPS Foundation
Wal-Mart Foundation, Inc.
Walton Family Foundation
Weingart Foundation
Wells Fargo Foundation
Yum! Brands Foundation.
(Information on granters courtesy of The Foundation Center, GuideStar, ActivistCash, the Capital Research Center and Undue Influence)
Additional Funders of the National Council of La Raza / UnidosUS include the following:
Aurora Foundation
BBVA Compass Foundation
Best Buy Children’s Foundation
Boston Foundation
BP Foundation
Bravo Foundation
Bridgestone Americas Trust Fund
Buffett Early Childhood Fund
Caesars Foundation
California Endowment Foundation
Caterpillar Foundation
Cedar Tree Foundation
Chartwell Charitable Foundation
Chicago Community Trust
Chrysler Foundation
Citi Foundation
Coca-Cola Foundation
Columbus Foundation and Affiliated Organizations
Comcast Foundation
Communities Foundation of Texas, Inc.
Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta
Community Foundation for Greater New Haven
Community Foundation for the National Capital Region
ConAgra Foods Foundation
Cracker Barrel Old Country Store Foundation
CrossCurrents Foundation
Dallas Foundation
Darden Restaurants, Inc. Foundation
Dominion Foundation
Dwoskin Family Foundation
Eastman Kodak Charitable Trust
Eli Lilly and Company Foundation
Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund
Ford Motor Company Fund
Francis Family Foundation
General Motors Foundation
Gill Foundation
Healthcare Georgia Foundation
Hess Foundation
J. Willard and Alice S. Marriott Foundation
John S. and James L. Knight Foundation
Johnson & Johnson Family of Companies Contribution Fund
Kansas City Community Foundation
Levi Strauss Foundation
Lockheed Martin Corporation Foundation
Mailman Family Foundation
MetLife Foundation
Naomi and Nehemiah Cohen Foundation
NIKE Foundation
PepsiCo Foundation
PMI Foundation
Pritzker Family Foundation
Rockwell Automation Charitable Corp.
San Diego Foundation
San Francisco Foundation
Silicon Valley Community Foundation
Silva Watson Moonwalk Fund
Sprint Foundation, the Stoneman Family Foundation
Triangle Community Foundation
UPS Foundation
Wal-Mart Foundation, Inc.
Walton Family Foundation
Weingart Foundation
Wells Fargo Foundation
Yum! Brands Foundation.
(Information on granters courtesy of The Foundation Center, GuideStar, ActivistCash, the Capital Research Center and Undue Influence)
* Additional Supporters of the National Immigration Forum:
East Bay Community Foundation
Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund
Foundation to Promote Open Society
Grove Foundation
John S. and James L. Knight Foundation
New York Community Trust
Piper Charitable Trust
San Francisco Foundation
Unbound Philanthropy
(Information on grant-makers courtesy of The Foundation Center, GuideStar, ActivistCash, the Capital Research Center and Undue Influence)