Progressive Billionaires' Curious Way of Giving
There have been some deeply important investigative and news reports this year and last, none of which have attracted the kind of follow up pieces in the mainstream media that they deserve.
In May, for instance, Breitbart published a story identifying the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation as having contributed, since 2008, hundreds of millions of dollars to the New Venture Fund (NVF), an organization that Influence Watch describes as a “nonprofit that makes grants to left-of-center advocacy and organizing projects and provides incubation services for other left-of-center organizations.” It’s reported that NVF received $975 million in total revenue in 2020!
Also in May came a Federalist story about a lawsuit in Wisconsin against the Mark Zuckerberg-funded Center for Tech and Civic Life. The gravamen of the lawsuit is that CTCL, which received over $400 million from Zuckerberg, contributed funds to city officials in Wisconsin in 2020 in a way that greatly increased the vote among Democrats but not Republicans. They did this, in part, by signing contracts with the cities that required them to deploy ballot drop boxes. Almost a year earlier RealClearInvestigations produced a comprehensive report on the way “Zuckerbucks” were used to fund CTCL’s 2020 operations nationally.
Not to be outdone, George Soros and his affiliated political action committees spent more than $17 million between 2015 and 2019 on local District Attorney races in support of left-wing candidates like George Gascon in LA, Chesa Boudin in San Francisco, and Kim Foxx in Chicago. According to the New York Post “that number is expected to top $20 million in the last two years.” Soros delivered these funds not directly but through PACs and left-wing nonprofit organizations.
And just last month Tablet magazine published a deeply researched and disturbing report on members of the Pritzker family titled “The Billionaire Family Pushing Synthetic Sex Identities.” J.B. Pritzker, the current governor of Illinois, and his cousin Jennifer (birth name James) have donated tens of millions of dollars “to transition Americans from a dimorphic definition of sex to the broad acceptance and propagation of synthetic sex identities.”
But enough of this, you get the point. Or do you? The lesser takeaway from these reports is that some of the richest people in the world harbor left-wing political and cultural views, and contribute the kind of money in furtherance of them that only billionaires have at their disposal. But the more important aspect of these reports is the way, and to whom, they’ve contributed.
At least since passage (and judicial repeal) of McCain-Feingold, vast numbers of words have been spent on stories centered on contributions made to candidates for political office. Stories, for instance, like the CNN piece last year titled “Meet the people who write the biggest checks in federal elections.”
But note: None of the munificent contributions mentioned above are of that sort. None are direct contributions to candidates for federal office or PACs that exist for that purpose. And it is this fact that is the most important and challenging aspect of what the moneyed progressives are doing.
As shown, they are directing gargantuan sums to nonprofit organizations which in turn direct those funds to other people or organizations. In other words, they are using their extraordinary wealth not to gain direct influence with, or to help elect, governors, congressmen or senators, but to promote pet causes.
Bill and Melinda Gates have directed hundreds of millions of dollars to the left-wing and behemoth New Venture Fund (the “Giving Pledge” indeed) effectively erasing their direct responsibility for the acts or agenda of the ultimate recipients, like the thuggish Media Matters for America.
In the Soros case the funds were given to PACs or nonprofits to elect DAs who would purposely use their offices to go easy on criminals by, for instance, treating felonies as misdemeanors and doing away with cash bail.
Mark Zuckerberg didn’t direct his $400 millions to politicians or PACS, but to a nonprofit organization that employed strategies with those funds that had the practical effect of undermining election laws and benefitting Joe Biden and other Democrats.
And the Pritzkers spread their wealth widely “in the techno-medical complex, (and among) big banks, international law firms and pharmacy giants—to solidify the idea that humans are not a sexually dimorphic species.”
The naming of these people and organizations is not to defame them. On the contrary, if one’s ideological and cultural views are akin to theirs, one might positively admire them for their single-mindedness and imagination.
But if you are, instead, a Republican or conservative who is concerned about the issues these people are promoting, some ideas immediately come to mind. One is to start contributing to nonprofit groups who will in turn contribute to other organizations who will actively promote specific policies in the public sphere.
In the main this is not being done now. Republicans generally just contribute to candidates for public office directly, while conservatives give to candidates for office directly and to conservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation.
There’s nothing wrong with these kinds of giving, I hasten to add, but it is not enough at a time when our media and purveyors of culture will not even look at issues or reports that come from the right or even the center-right.
To put it in a nut shell, conservatives and Republicans need to look beyond the election of politicians to effective ways of promoting their own political and cultural ideals outside of congress and state houses, something they could do right now with an adjustment to the way they make contributions.
Patrick Maines is the president emeritus of a Washington think tank and the driving force behind Free Speech Week, a national celebration now in its nineteenth year.
