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lots $ to Tanton FAIR  ~immigration network

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Meet the ‘dead industrialists’ funding climate denialism

:{By Scott Waldman | 06/26/2020

Some of the most prolific funders of today’s climate science denial groups died decades before the general public knew climate change was transforming the planet.

Sarah Mellon Scaife and Daniel C. Searle. University of Pittsburgh/Historic Pittsburgh (Scaife); Searle Freedom Trust

Some of the most prolific funders of today’s climate science denial groups died decades before the general public knew climate change was transforming the planet.

While much of the attention on opposition to mainstream climate science has focused in recent years on funding from fossil fuel companies, there’s growing support for foes of carbon regulation from conservative foundations that are not widely known.

Foundations formed by now-dead industrialists have been instrumental in promoting rollbacks of regulations that protect the public from deadly air pollution and spreading misinformation around climate science.

Fueled by hundreds of millions of dollars in assets, the foundations have supported groups that worked with the Trump White House to roll back vehicle emissions standards and to ease restrictions on power plant pollution and water protections, public tax filings show. They have quietly funded presidential advisers who worked to conduct a hostile White House review of climate science and to restrict EPA’s use of scientific research when crafting public health protections.

Among the foundations, which operate independently but bankroll many of the same groups, are the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Searle Freedom Trust and the Sarah Scaife Foundation.

Robert Brulle, a Drexel University sociologist who studies and tracks climate denial funding, said such foundations have been quietly shaping public life for decades. They offer a way, he said, for "dead industrialists" to transfer economic power into cultural and political power that can last in perpetuity. The power of such foundations lies in their ability to operate for generations without any check on their power, he said.

"These foundations are totally unaccountable to anybody," he said. "A foundation can pretty much do whatever the hell it wants regardless of the consequences. Foundations have undemocratic and plutocratic power."

None of the foundations responded to requests for comment.

The foundations fuel more than just climate policy battles. They also support media organizations that promote misleading climate information and create confusion around climate science. That includes the conservative Daily Caller News Foundation as well as the Prager University Foundation.

The Daily Caller News Foundation provides articles for the Daily Caller, the conservative website founded by Fox News host Tucker Carlson. A Prager University video series has featured climate deniers saying that global warming concerns are overblown and that NASA, NOAA and the world’s major science agencies are wrong.

They have pumped millions of dollars into groups that have worked closely with the Trump administration and Congress to weaken climate policy and create confusion around climate science, including the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), CO2 Coalition, Heritage Foundation, Heartland Institute, Cato Institute and Texas Public Policy Foundation.

And the foundations have been a source of "baseload" funding for organizations that have battled the government for the last 40 years, said Kert Davies, director of the nonprofit Climate Investigations Center.

Even before fossil fuel companies and the Koch brothers began pumping money into organizations that oppose climate regulations, the foundations were quietly supporting such work, he said. And as the fossil fuel industry faces increasing scrutiny over its role in climate misinformation and has backed away from some public funding, the foundations have continued their support, Davies noted.

"They don’t have any material interest in fossil fuels, but they are fundamentalists about hating the government, hating regulation and trying to stop any progress on things like climate change because they see it as almost a step toward communism, it’s almost that stark," he said.

To be sure, not all foundations linked to dead industrialists oppose climate science. The fortune of John D. Rockefeller of Standard Oil is now funding climate action. The Rockefeller Brothers Fund spends more than $10 million annually supporting climate causes and funding groups that promote regulation of fossil fuel.

3 big donors

One of the largest donors to anti-climate policy causes is the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, which has spent millions of dollars annually on groups that try to sow doubt about climate change and that work to weaken climate regulations.

Public tax filings show that the Wisconsin-based foundation has assets of about $1 billion and was named for two brothers — Lynde, who died in 1942, and Harry, a member of the far-right John Birch Society, who died in 1965. The family made its fortune in electronic controls.

The foundation was expanded into a conservative powerhouse in 1985, when a sale of the family company expanded the foundation’s assets to $290 million.

In recent years, the foundation has pumped millions of dollars into groups that worked closely with the Trump White House to roll back most of the Obama administration’s climate policy; to increase the voice of industry researchers in order to diminish air pollution regulations; and to steer federal agencies such as the Interior Department, EPA and the Department of Energy toward the interests of fossil fuel companies.

Last year alone, the Bradley Foundation spent more than $2 million funding CEI, the Cato Institute, the CO2 Coalition, the Heritage Foundation, FreedomWorks, the Texas Public Policy Foundation and the American Legislative Exchange Council. Former employees of those groups have served in senior positions at the White House, Interior, DOE and EPA, and on President Trump’s transition teams for those agencies.

Millions of dollars to the same groups has also flowed from the Searle Freedom Trust, public tax filings show. The trust was founded by Daniel C. Searle, who died in 2007 and was a fourth-generation CEO of a family pharmaceutical company that was sold to Monsanto.

In 2018 alone, tax filings show, the Searle trust gave more than $2 million to groups that worked with the Trump administration to roll back environmental regulations, including the CO2 Coalition, CEI, Cato and the Heritage Foundation.

In addition to policy support, the foundation funds public outreach for climate denialism. In 2018 alone, it spent more than $300,000 on groups that publish and promote climate misinformation, including the Daily Caller News Foundation and the Prager University Foundation, tax filings show.

The work of the Bradley Foundation and Searle trust is complemented by funding from the Sarah Scaife Foundation, which is named after Sarah Mellon Scaife, an heiress to the fortune of her father, Richard Mellon, a banker and industrialist.

Scaife, who died in 1965, focused her support on funding for hospitals, disability and poverty issues, and environmental causes. Her money was even used to fund the University of Pittsburgh laboratory where the polio vaccine was developed by Dr. Jonas Salk in the early 1950s.

After Scaife’s death, her son, Richard Mellon Scaife, turned the foundation into a powerhouse for conservative issues, spending tens of millions of dollars on the Heritage Foundation alone before his death in 2014. Scaife steered the family’s fortune toward conservative causes so thoroughly that Hillary Clinton once pinpointed him as the figurehead of a "vast right-wing conspiracy."

The Sarah Scaife Foundation now funnels millions to groups that oppose environmental regulations and that attack climate science. That includes more than $3 million in its most recent filing, including to Cato, CEI, the CO2 Coalition, FreedomWorks, the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, and the Energy and Environmental Legal Institute, according to tax filings.

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SNIP

2025

https://ecollections.law.fiu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1743&context=lawreview

Uncharitable Think Tanks 207

Institution—also led in the earlier one, with only slight shifts otherwise.229 • From 2010 on, the top funders were Donors Trust, Donors Capital Fund, and the Scaife, Bradley, and Koch family foundations. The Devos family foundations rose to join the ranks of the top ten. • Grants channeled through Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund accounted for 13.7% of the total. • 74% of all contributions came from completely unidentified sources. • }:}:

After AEI, Heritage and Hoover, the largest recipients were Cato, the Manhattan Institute, the Hudson Institute, the Mercatus Center, the Acton Institute, the State Policy Network, the Reason Foundation, Heartland, and the Americans for Prosperity Foundation. From 2003 to 2018, Brulle and his co-authors tallied total gifts to this cohort of $9.77 billion 230—a sum that refutes the mistaken notion that charitable giving is small dollars, and influential only at the margin. Now for the thought experiment.

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We unraveled the $122 million web of climate denial, political extremism, and Trump ties to Project 2025

Mapped: How 6 Billionaire Family Fortunes Fund Project 2025 - DeSmog

As scrutiny of Project 2025 continues to grow, defenders of the Heritage Foundation-led initiative, which would reshape federal governance and give the next Republican president unprecedented new powers, say it’s the criticism — not the 922-page plan itself — that’s too extreme.

In a piece published last month, Fox News cited prominent conservatives who feel there’s “nothing radical” about the endeavor. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board has accused detractors of “panic-mongering” and tried to reframe Project 2025’s sprawling “Mandate for Leadership” blueprint as more boring than scary — a milquetoast white paper that simply “melds the work of some 400 scholars and analysts from an eclectic mix of center-right groups.” This echoes Heritage’s insistence that Project 2025, while conservative, is anything but fringe.

But the findings from DeSmog’s recent investigation into Project 2025’s funding sources tell a very different story. Our wide-ranging analysis of public financial disclosure forms found that the groups on Project 2025’s advisory board — whose experts largely helped to draft the plan — are heavily funded by just six family fortunes. Since 2020, foundations linked to these billionaire families have contributed over $122 million to Project 2025 groups, including at least 290 individual donations to 49 nonprofits that contributed to the Mandate for Leadership documents or are on the initiative’s advisory board. We’ve mapped the funding ties between the billionaire families and the Project 2025 individuals and organizations in an interactive graphic, below.

Groups that received funds from the six family fortunes are far from the political mainstream, according to DeSmog’s analysis, including entities that actively deny the science of anthropogenic climate change — as well as organizations that have been classified as hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center. DeSmog’s review also uncovered additional ties between the six families and the Trump/Vance ticket, though both candidates have tried to distance themselves from the initiative in recent months. Indeed, Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein — the billionaire founders of the Uline packaging company, whose charitable donations tie them closely to Project 2025 — are among the former president’s biggest donors.

Project 2025 styles itself as populist, moderate, and far from the politics of Washington. Heritage Foundation President Kevin D. Roberts hails it as a plan for the perennially downtrodden, hard-laboring folks “who shower afterwork instead of before.” Its funding sources — elite, extreme, and closely tied to the Trump campaign — suggest exactly the opposite.

The Donors

Though the Mandate pledges to “prioritize the economic prosperity of ordinary Americans” and pry influence away from “America’s corporate and political elites,” the funding that produced it comes from the upper echelons of the billionaire class.

And not just any billionaires. The six family dynasties providing significant support to Project 2025 — Bradley, Coors, Koch, Scaife, Seid, and Uihlein — all have long histories of fighting for financial and environmental deregulation. Three of the six families have promoted climate denial consistently enough to appear in DeSmog’s Climate Disinformation Database, which tracks the people and organizations doing the most to undermine decarbonization efforts.

They include oil and gas magnate Charles G. Koch and his Koch Family Foundations; the Scaife Family Foundations, which tap vast wealth from the Mellon aluminum, oil, and banking fortune; and chemicals-and-electronics industrialist Barre Seid, whose recent, record-setting $1.6 billion gift to a nonprofit controlled by Federalist Society co-chair Leonard A. Leo has been a major source of Project 2025 money.

While the Heritage Foundation suggests a diverse conservative coalition gave rise to the Mandate for Leadership, the six family fortunes’ giving patterns were remarkably similar. Of the 49 Project 2025 groups, 37 percent received funding from at least three of the six families. 70 percent of the 49 groups received funding from at least two of the families. (In a few cases, the donations were to sister 501(c)4 lobbying arms that share offices and staff.) The average donation was over $420,000.

*Related:See DeSmog’s coverage of Trump Megadonor Tim Dunn’s Plan That’s More Extreme Than Project 2025

Links to Climate Denial

For decades, oil and gas magnate Charles G. Koch and his late brother David fought vigorously for environmental deregulation, including by supporting groups that sow doubt about the science of manmade climate change. Foundations linked to Koch gave at least $9.6 billion to 15 Project 2025 groups since 2020. But four of the lesser-known families — Bradley, Scaife, Seid, and Uihlein — gave even more, and all six family fortunes helped to fund Project 2025 groups that have denied the science of manmade climate change.

Of the 10 groups that the six families funded most heavily, seven are in DeSmog’s Climate Disinformation Database. That includes more than $11 million to the Heritage Foundation; $8.3 million to Turning Point USA, which has provided a platform for well-known climate deniers like Alex Epstein; and $4.6 million to the Texas Public Policy Foundation, which in 2015 published an op-ed claiming warming is “obviously not initiated by the burning of fossil fuels”. In total, foundations linked to the six families gave to 15 Project 2025 groups with entries in DeSmog’s Climate Disinformation Database.

That wasn’t the only form of extremism DeSmog uncovered. Four Project 2025 organizations that received donations from the six billionaire fortunes since 2020 are classified as hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a leading civil rights watchdog group. These include the Alliance Defending Freedom, an anti-LGBTQ group that received over $1.6 million in donations from Bradley and Koch; The Center for Immigration Studies, an anti-immigrant group that received $650,000 from Scaife; Eagle Forum, an anti-government and anti-immigrant group that received over $100,000 from Koch and Uihlein; and Family Research Council, an anti-abortion group that received $25,000 from Seid.

Of the six billionaire families, only Coors-linked foundations — run by heirs to the Coors brewing fortune — did not donate to at least one SPLC-designated hate group.

Links to the Trump Campaign

For months, Donald J. Trump has publicly disavowed Project 2025, claiming to know nothing about the initiative. That stance conflicts with subsequent media reports, including resurfaced video of the former president and current Republican presidential nominee saying, as a keynote speaker at a 2022 Heritage Foundation event, that Heritage would “lay the groundwork & detail plans for exactly what our movement will do.” The Washington Post reported that Trump flew in a private plane to the event with Heritage President Kevin Roberts.

Trump’s running mate, Ohio Senator JD Vance, has also been the subject of intense scrutiny for numerous ties to Project 2025 — including writing the foreword to Roberts’ forthcoming book. DeSmog’s investigation also uncovered numerous ties between Vance and Project 2025 advisory groups, including a previously unreported 2017 keynote speech at a Heritage event.

But while the candidates continue to downplay any Project 2025 connections, one link is unavoidable: a billionaire family that heavily supports Project 2025 groups is among their campaign’s biggest donors, according to Federal Election Commission data.

In May, Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein, the founders of the Uline packaging company, each donated $5 million to Make America Great Again, Inc., a super PAC supporting Trump’s reelection. That’s not including the more than $48 million Richard contributed to Restoration PAC, a pro-Trump political action committee, last quarter alone. Restoration PAC has spent over $12.9 million this year on political advertising, including ads supporting Trump and attacking his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris.

Since 2020, the Ed Uihlein Foundation, which is run by the Uihleins and named in honor of Richard’s father, has donated at least $13.4 million to 13 different Project 2025 groups.

The map below is interactive. Click on a donor to see the groups it funded with dollar amounts, or a nonprofit to see which of the six family fortunes made donations.

[GFX]

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https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/dark-money-investigations/global-warming-policy-foundation-net-zero-watch-koch-brothers/

pix 

Steve Baker MP, a trustee of the lobby group, has led the opposition to the government's net-zero policies

An influential Tory-linked lobby group leading the backlash against the UK government’s net-zero policy has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from an oil-rich foundation with huge investments in energy firms, openDemocracy can reveal.

The Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), which also campaigns as Net Zero Watch, has also received more than half a million dollars through a fund linked to the controversial billionaire Koch brothers.

The GWPF has long refused to disclose its donors and claims it willnot take money from anyone with an interest in an energy company.

But tax documents filed with US authorities and uncovered by this website reveal the network of dark money behind it for the first time – including the $30m shares in 22 companies working in coal, oil and gas that are held by one of its donors.

shadow climate secretary Ed Milibandsaid: “US right-wing groups with links to big oil are desperate to stop action against the climate crisis. Now they are trying to extend their reach into UK political debate."

A registered UK charity, the GWPF is one of the most vocal groups in British politics opposing the government’s ‘net zero’ plans and has been at the forefront of recent calls to restart fracking.

The Tufton Street-based group’s trustees include former chancellor Nigel Lawson and Steve Baker, who leads the ‘Net Zero Scrutiny’ group of backbench Tory MPs and was recently criticised for sharing a paper by the group that denied the climate crisis.

Over four years the GWPF’s US arm, the American Friends of the GWPF, received more than $1.3m from US donors. At least $864,884 of this has been channelled to the UK group, with some being held back for expenses.

Of the £1.45m that the GWPF has received in charitable donations since 2017, at least 45% has come from the US.

American ideological groups are trying to interfere in British democracy

The Global Warming Policy Foundation’s US ‘friends’ group did not have to declare the sources of this so-called ‘dark money’ – but openDemocracy has discovered through the filings of other groups that:

“It is disturbing that the Global Warming Policy Foundation is acting as a channel through which American ideological groups are trying to interfere in British democracy,” said Bob Ward, policy and communications director at the LSE Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment.

Founded by Lawson and university lecturer Benny Peiser in 2009, the GWPF has long been accused of promoting climate denialism.

Last week, Peisermade the unfounded claim that Putin has “colluded with the green movementin Europe and all over the world”.

The GWPF – which Greenpeace UK said has “spent the last twenty years campaigning to preserve our addiction to fossil fuels” – has become increasingly prominent in recent years.

The group was forced to set up a new non-charitable organisation for its political lobbying in 2014 after the Charity Commission found its stance on climate change breached charity rules.

Labour MP Graham Stringer sits on its board of trustees, while two of Global Warming Policy Foundation’s staff recently became advisers to Tory MP Craig Mackinlay. Another trustee, Terence Mourdant, is a long-standing Tory donor who gave £25,000 to Boris Johnson’s leadership campaign.

Steve Baker, who joined the GWPF last year and has called on Boris Johnson to resign over partygate, is a long time admirer of US libertarians. He has previously received expenses-paid trips to conferences organised by US conservative groups that have been accused of opposing environmental action.

‘Net Zero Watch’

In October last year, the UK government announced its strategy for reducing carbon emissions to net zero by 2050.

The same month, the GWPF’s campaigning arm – the similarly-named Global Warming Policy Forum – rebranded itself as Net Zero Watch, a name it continues to use alongside the original moniker.

In a statement announcing the change, Peiser claimed that in a “net zero future you will be poorer and colder” and “that a political backlash is long overdue” in response to the policy.

Net Zero Watch has repeatedly claimed that the cost of living crisis is the result of net-zero policies.In a report published in March, it said that renewable energy is responsible for the crisis and called for the government to reintroduce coal power plants and restart fracking.

Climate policy researchers said that the group is spreading “misinformation and propaganda” about net zero rather than providing analysis.

Net Zero Watch has found allies in Parliament among a group of 20 Tory MPs and Peers, who formed the Net Zero Scrutiny Group,  a cadre of backbench Conservative MPs modelled on the European Research Group that has emerged as a staunch critic of Boris Johnson’s net-zero plans.

Net Zero Scrutiny Group members include former work and pensions secretary Esther McVey; Robert Halfon, a former schools minister; and Tory peer Peter Lilley, who is a former trustee of the GWPF.

Craig Mackinlay and Steve Baker, the MPs leading the group, are regularly quoted on press releases from Net Zero Watch and have repeated some of its lines on the economic cost of net zero word-for-word.

In February, Harry Wilkinson, currently head of policy at Net Zero Watch, and Ruth Lea, a former GWPF trustee, began working for Mackinlay as parliamentary advisers. Wilkinson has previously tweeted that “The ‘climate crisis’ is a religious belief, nothing to do with science.”

The GWPF shares its Tufton Street address with a number of anonymously funded think tanks who have become increasingly vocal in their opposition to climate change mitigation policies.

Earlier this year, Nigel Farage announced he was forming a new campaign for a referendum on net zero.

Farage’s financial backers include the private equity billionaire Jeremy Hosking who openDemocracy recently revealed has huge financial interests in fossil fuels.

The GWPF disputed that the Sarah Scaife Foundation has an interest in oil companies,telling openDemocracy: “The wealth that ultimately created the Scaife Foundation was created at the end of the nineteenth century and the start of the twentieth. It would be ludicrous to suggest that three generations on, it represents an oil company interest.”

Steve Baker MP said: "I understand the GWPF has already given a response to these allegations, which appear to be ridiculous.

It is an extraordinary fact that the same newspapers and commentators who would usually be the first to protest any kind of poverty are wasting the public's time with these attempts to distract from the real issues at hand. It would be better if the political world focused their attention on how our current energy strategy has driven up energy prices and contributed to the terrible cost-of-living crisis that so many are experiencing.”

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CMD 3 22

All nonprofits identified by CMD that gave $10,000 or more to the top climate misinformation groups from 2014–20 are listed in the table below.

tABLE 2

Top Nonprofit Climate Denial Funders, 2014-20

Numerous charities, private foundations, and trade associations have bankrolled the climate misinformation movement.

 Page 1 of 4  

Table with 9 columns and 53 rows. Currently displaying rows 1 to 15.

Donor    2014 2015 2016   2017 2018   2019 2020   TOTAL

1 DonorsTrust/Donors Capital Fund $3,293,850 $3,816,850 $3,676,750 $2,422,000 $3,830,200 $2,101,732 $1,416,500 20,557,882

2 Searle Freedom Trust $839,500 $589,500 $1,140,000 $940,000 $1,096,000 $754,000 $985,000 6,344,000

3 Sarah Scaife Foundation $350,000 $610,000 $842,000 $875,000 $960,000 $715,000 $1,245,000 5,597,000

4 Mercer Family Foundation $885,000 $100,000 $1,075,000 $970,000 3,030,000

5 Dunn Foundation $1,200,000 $250,000 $325,000 $200,000 $350,000 $350,000 $350,000 3,025,000

6 Bradley Foundations $344,376 $318,876 $458,500 $519,000 $280,000 $475,000 $110,000 2,505,752

7 American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers $365,000 $275,000 $470,000 $400,000 1,510,000

8 Koch Foundations $100,128 $431,891 $333,028 $413,016 $84,000 $99,049 $18,749 1,479,861

9 Vanguard Charitable Endowment Program $38,500 $228,500 $265,000 $230,000 $235,000 997,000

10 Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund $35,525 $21,350 $27,867 $241,355 $212,310 $231,055 $201,952 971,414

11 National Philanthropic Trust $150,000 $175,000 $175,500 $176,000 $200,000 876,500

12 Bartley J. Madden Foundation $45,000 $270,000 $270,000 $250,000 $30,000 865,000

13 Thomas W. Smith Foundation $150,000 $175,000 $200,000 $200,000 725,000

14 The 85 Fund $700,000 700,000

15 Ed Uihlein Family Foundation $10,500 $129,000 $35,000 $115,000 $115,000 $140,000...

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Koch Foundations Increased Media Investments in 2018

by Alex Kotch | November 26th, 2019

Billionaire Charles Koch's two foundations spent nearly $3.5 million on media grants and contracts in 2018.

As the political and philanthropic network of billionaire libertarian Charles Koch employs its latest PR strategy, the Charles Koch Foundation (CKF) and the Charles Koch Institute (CKI) increased their giving to media organizations by roughly $1 million in 2018.

Koch has generally funded right-wing organizations such as the Daily Caller News Foundation, which funds much of the content on the Daily Caller website, and the Reason Foundation, which publishes libertarian-minded news and opinion on Reason.com. These and other donations continued in 2018, but the two foundations also contracted with conservative media outlet RealClearPolitics and two center-left publications, The Atlantic and Ozy Media.

Overall, CKF and CKI combined to spend nearly $3.5 million on media grants and contracts in 2018. This amount is a small, but growing, portion of the foundations’ annual donations. In 2018, CKF gave out $127.5 million in donations, mostly to fund Koch’s right-wing educational and political infrastructure.

Daily Caller News Foundation

CKF’s largest media grant in 2018, $746,250, went to the Daily Caller News Foundation. While less than the $960,000 it gave a year before, it was still Koch’s biggest contribution to a media organization last year, as it has been since 2015.

On Nov. 11, the Daily Caller News Foundation uploaded a mashup video to YouTube that included a clip of a neo-Nazi rapping about his support for President Donald Trump. In the verse of the original video that followed the clip used by Daily Caller, the neo-Nazi rapped about the “Great Replacement,” a central white nationalist propaganda theory that claims immigrants of color will replace white populations.

This wasn’t the first time the Daily Caller has been linked to white supremacy; it has published several white supremacists and antisemites and has had some on staff.

After a November 2018 Sludge report on the Koch foundations’ funding of pro-Trump media, three CKF top officials claimed to Washington Post opinion writer and Reason alumnus Radley Balko that, “they personally and the Kochs and their foundations more generally find the Daily Caller abhorrent, and feel the same way about Tucker Carlson.”The officials argued that the CFK funding went towards writer fellowships for articles that are made available by wire to a broader range of news outlets. It is not publicly known whether CFK has funded the Daily Caller News Foundation this year.

The Daily Caller New Foundation’s 2018 revenue numbers aren’t yet public, but CKF’s donations in 2016 amounted to 84 percent of the foundation’s annual contribution total.

RealClear

Two entities of the conservative media operation RealClear got money from the Koch foundations in 2018. The Real Clear Foundation, which funds RealClearInvestigations and “news aggregation and content creation that is in the public good,” according to tax records, received a $375,000 consulting contract from CKI.

RealClearPolitics, the company’s news, opinion, and poll aggregation website, and CKI teamed up to poll the public and veterans on military intervention and specific wars in 2017 and 2018. Also in 2017, the website published a piece critical of activists organizing against a Koch-funded center at Wake Forest University. RealClearPolitics accepts trainees from CKI’s Media and Journalism Fellowship program “with no strings attached.”

RealClearPolitics got $75,000 from CKF in 2018. Neither entity received money from the Koch foundations from 2015-17. RealClearPolitics published an op-ed from CKF official Will Ruger in October 2018 and another by Sarah Ruger, director of free expression at CKF, this June.

RealClear Foundation has been funded by right-wing megadonors for years. In fiscal year 2013, the sole disclosed donor was Nelson Broms, an insurance executive who co-founded the Koch-funded Manhattan Institute, who gave $50,000. By FY2016, the Real Clear Foundation had significantly increased its fundraising ability, getting $2,250,000 from the Koch-tied DonorsTrust. CMD has tracked over $5.5 million in Real Clear Foundation funding since April 2013, including $1 million from the similarly Koch-tied Donors Capital Fund and six-figure amounts from conservative megadonor foundations in the Koch funding network, such as the Ed Uihlein Family Foundation and the Sarah Scaife Foundation.

[graf]

RealClearPolitics co-founder John McIntyre is tied to the far-right Federalist website. He and his wife, Jenn, are listed as directors of The Federalist on a 2017 securities offering filing, alongside co-founders Ben Domenech, who is married to Meghan McCain, and Sean Davis. Jenn McIntyre is also listed as an executive for The Federalist, which is not connected to the Koch-funded Federalist Society.