The Not-So-Vast Right Wing Conspiracy

As Keith Olbermann had an anecdote on his Countdown podcast , where he described briefly dating Laura Ingram.

The interesting bit was not the dating, but the fact that she revealed to him that what Hillary Clinton called the, "Vast right-wing conspiracy," attempting to get Bill Clinton impeached for a blow job was not vast.

It was not much more than a dozen people.

Now the good folks at Mother Jones have discovered that only a few billionaires are funding almost the entirety of the right wing political edifice.  (I guess that they have an edifice complex)

It ain't a dozen.  It's four people, so they could play a game of bridge and no one would be left out:

In early 2021, Stephen Miller—former White House senior adviser to Donald Trump and architect of the 45th president’s hopeful second-term mass deportation agenda—announced his next venture: America First Legal (AFL).

Paraded as “the long-awaited answer to the ACLU,” AFL fights for Trumpist values in the legal system. And the group is prolific: In its three years of existence, AFL has taken on more than 100 legal actions—between lawsuits filed, complaints lodged with the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), and court briefs written, according to the Washington Post.

………

The strategy has worked. In 2022, AFL brought in $44 million. Its revenue shot up by nearly 600 percent compared with the previous year. But less scrutinized has been how AFL has secured its haul. More than 60 percent of its funding came from a little-discussed entity: the Bradley Impact Fund. In 2022, Bradley doled out more than $27 million to AFL, according to the organization’s most recent available tax filing.

And AFL is far from the only culture-war donation the Bradley Impact Fund has dispensed.

That same year, according to tax filings, Bradley gave $7.8 million to Turning Point USA and $1.8 million to Project Veritas, the conservative outfit founded by provocateur James O’Keefe that mounts sting operations. The year prior, both organizations ranked at the top of the fund’s list of recipients, receiving $7.4 million and $2.1 million, respectively. (Before 2019, such contributions were limited to a few thousand dollars.) Another group to benefit from the fund has been America’s Future—led by Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn—which received a $500,000 gift in 2022.

Over the last few years, the Bradley Impact Fund has experienced massive growth, emerging as one of the key bankrollers of the coterie of organizations and apparatchiks hoping to create institutions that carry out Trump’s ideological agenda. In the process, Bradley fuels the culture wars and undermines faith in democracy by stirring election denialism—all while keeping its donors secret.

Created in 2012, the Bradley Impact Fund is a donor-advised fund (DAF) “aligned” with the Milwaukee-based Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, which has a long history of conservative influence and, of late, has become a source of money for organizations pushing Republicans to change election laws. Donor-advised funds, such as the Bradley Impact Fund, collect donations from various contributors and then make often untraceable gifts to other organizations. An increasingly popular charity tool—receiving a quarter of all individual giving in the United States—DAFs offer donors “multiple layers of anonymity,” explains Brendan Fischer, deputy executive director of the investigative watchdog Documented.

DAFs operate like private foundations but are classified as public charities. This allows the funds to give money without the same transparency requirements. And the donors, who can recommend where their contributions should go, are still awarded the publicly subsidized tax breaks associated with charitable giving.

 ………

This work is being enabled by an extraordinarily small universe of donors. Bradley boasts about cultivating a network of contributors across 44 states. But more than 75 percent of contributions to the Bradley Impact Fund in 2022 came from just four sources, according to an audited financial statement filed with the California Department of Justice that the nonprofit research organization Accountable US shared with Mother Jones.

(Emphasis mine)

The Bradley Impact Fund received roughly $108 million in contributions and grants that year, including three donations of $36 million, $20 million, and $18 million, respectively. At least another $12 million came from a different donor-advised fund, DonorsTrust, the “dark money ATM” of the conservative movement. By its own admission, DonorsTrust is a convenient conduit for benefactors wishing to provide “gifts funding sensitive or controversial issues.” (In an email, Lawson Bader, president and CEO of DonorsTrust, declined to comment on the reasons behind the grant to the Bradley Impact Fund, saying the implementation of the gift is left to the recipient. “Grants from one DAF provider to another are infrequent and certainly not nefarious,” he added.)

We need to find out who these entities are, and name and shame them.

Also, we recognize that every billionaire is a policy failure, and that increasing inequality is an existential threat to our society.

More generally, charity law needs to be changed to prevent this sort of opacity in funding.