Democrats’ Nonprofit Problem

A vast, monied network of activist groups keeps the public inflamed.

By Barton Swaim. Excerpts:

"The Democrats’ nonprofit problem began more or less in 2010, when a cap-and-trade bill died in the Senate. Wealthy foundations and donor-class ideologues, animated by fears of global catastrophe, decided they couldn’t achieve their goals by democratic persuasion and had to create an army of nonprofit groups to wage legal and political war on the imagined enablers of climate change.

The money soon flowed to other areas, as money does. Particularly since the pandemic and the George Floyd riots in 2020, the progressive donor class has spread its largess to advocacy and activist organizations pushing social justice, immigrant rights, Palestinian statehood, LGBTQ rights, indigenous people’s rights and—as ever—climate sustainability. MacKenzie Scott, ex-wife of Jeff Bezos, has given $26 billion since 2019. Other billionaires with left-leaning proclivities—Michael Bloomberg, Pierre Omidyar, George Soros, Tom Steyer—have pumped enormous sums into progressive nonprofits."

"the anti-ICE protests in Minneapolis aren’t primarily, or maybe at all, the spontaneous uprisings of an outraged citizenry. Gov. Tim Walz . . . urged viewers to record ICE operations on their phones."

"Ordinary people don’t do that. Nor do they park their cars to obstruct law-enforcement operations or gather outside hotels in the wee hours to chant and bang drums because those hotels rented rooms to ICE agents. Activists do these things."

"The campus protests since 2023 were similarly orchestrated by a latticework of “anti-Zionist” organizations, many larded with money from left-wing foundations: Open Society, Kaphan, Tides and others."