Funders of the Left & Right

Overview

This section of DiscoverTheNetworks examines the immensely wealthy charitable foundations that provide financial backing for leftist groups and causes. These foundations — sometimes called endowments or charitable trusts — are nongovernmental, nonprofit entities whose assets are provided by donors and managed by their (the foundations’) own officials, who earmark portions of their assets each year for what they consider to be socially useful purposes. Most of these foundations can be classified under the following categories:

Community Foundations, which build their endowments through contributions from many donors within a given geographic region, and typically focus on local needs
Corporate Foundations, which are private foundations established by for-profit corporations but legally separate from the parent corporations
Family Foundations, in which the original donor or the donor’s family plays a significant role in governing the foundation
Independent Foundations, which are private foundations, usually endowed by one source such as an individual’s bequest
Operating Foundations, which are private foundations that use most of their income to provide charitable services or programs of their own, rather than making grants to outside organizations
Public Foundations, which are public charities that operate significant grantmaking programs

The DiscoverTheNetworks database currently identifies and profiles scores of major foundations whose political and philanthropic orientations are generally leftist. Some of the foundations described in this section are so large that they have single-handedly shaped entire cultural and political movements. (See, for example, the Ford Foundation‘s role in underwriting The Open Borders Lobby.

Several of the massive, tax-exempt entities profiled in this section — most notably the Tides Center, the Liberty Hill Foundation, and the Proteus Fund — are pass-through operations designed to mask the relationship between donor and gift. That is, they take money from donors who specify the precise groups and causes for which they want it earmarked, and in turn funnel that money to those recipients, allowing the donors avoid being publicly associated with the groups being funded. The funds transacted in this manner are called donor-advised funds. (The JEHT Foundation, which closed its doors permanently in 2009, was yet another pass-through.)

Many recipients of foundation money today are the immensely influential activist organizations popularly known as Section 527 Committees. Dedicated to promoting political candidates and agendas, 527s are, by definition, private, nonprofit groups that are less regulated and require less disclosure than other types of nonprofit groups engaged in electioneering. They need not register with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) as “political organizations.” Consequently, they do not have to observe the FEC’s strict limits on political contributions. The 527s may collect as much “soft money” as they like from individuals and corporations.

This section of Discover The Networks examines the assets and the grant-making patterns of many foundations that are among the leading donors to leftist causes. It also documents the degree to which donations made by such foundations exceed those made by their conservative counterparts. Moreover, this section examines the diverse and interrelated agendas of leftist foundations and the organizations they bankroll. These include such agendas as:

promoting the view that America is institutionally an oppressive nation
portraying Israel as an apartheid state that grievously violates the human rights of its Arab neighbors and residents
promoting the election of leftist political candidates throughout the United States
opposing virtually all post-9/11 national security measures enacted by U.S. government, particularly the Patriot Act
depicting American military actions as unjust, unwarranted, and immoral
advocating America’s unilateral disarmament and a steep reduction in its military spending
promoting open borders, mass immigration, and a watering down of current immigration laws
promoting a dramatic expansion of social welfare programs funded by ever-escalating taxes
promoting social welfare benefits and amnesty for illegal aliens
defending suspected anti-American terrorists and their abetters
financing the recruitment and training of future activist leaders of the political Left
promoting socialized medicine in the United States
promoting the tenets of radical environmentalism, whose ultimate goal is the demolition of technological/industrial civilization
bringing American foreign policy under the control of the United Nations
promoting racial and ethnic preferences in academia and the business world alike
promoting socialism as an economic system preferable to capitalism