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The Dirty Dozen Funders of Climate Misinformation
A dozen of the largest nonprofits donated $47.8 million to the leading climate denial organizations, accounting for 88% of the funds CMD was able to track down using FY 2014-20 federal tax returns.
Half of the traceable funding came from DonorsTrust and Donors Capital Fund, two donor-advised fund sponsors that pass along their clients’ donations to other charities approved by their boards of directors. While the two funds give exclusively to conservative causes, no restrictions are apparent within that ideology. For instance, CMD was first to report that DonorsTrust is by far the biggest known funder of American white nationalist hate groups.
Among the “Dirty Dozen” climate denial financiers are foundations established by the right-wing Bradley, Koch, Mercer, Searle, and Scaife families. The Kochs, Mercers, and other Republican megadonors pour additional money into political groups and electoral campaigns focused on electing right-wing candidates who oppose meaningful action on climate change and often support expanding and deregulating the fossil fuel industry.
The funders named in this report have also financed a broader right-wing political strategy to misinform the public about a number of issues and increase GOP voter turnout.
“Bad actors are using a tried and tested playbook to weaken public mandates and create confusion [about] viable solutions going forward,” notes Jennie King, head of civic action and education at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, an independent nonprofit dedicated to protecting human rights and reversing polarization, extremism, and disinformation around the world. “This includes weaponizing climate response within a broader ‘culture wars’ frame and conflating it with any supposed controversy, from Covid-19 lockdowns and vaccine mandates to critical race theory, trans rights, or geopolitics.”
Leading non-ideological donor-advised fund sponsors connected to the Vanguard and Fidelity financial firms are also among the Dirty Dozen climate misinformation funders.
“We cannot solve the climate crisis until we solve the climate misinformation crisis,” U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) told CMD. “It is disappointing that mainstream organizations are still keeping ties with groups that have attacked climate science and legislative solutions. We need to be calling this behavior out publicly, so Americans know which organizations are linked to climate denial efforts.”
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.
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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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MMA
Glenn Beck says the FBI sought his advice on how to target antifa — here's who he wants them to go after
Written by Matt Gertz
Published 10/16/25
Glenn Beck has spent a decade and a half trying to make the case that various progressive organizations, activists, and funders are radicals bent on destroying the country. The right-wing commentator is a constant font of conspiracy theories who famously illustrates purported connections — often extraordinarily tenuous — between various entities on his chalkboard. But now, according to Beck, his rantings against longtime enemies are garnering attention from federal law enforcement.
“The FBI showed up to my house to discuss my TV show exposing Antifa's network,” Beck posted to social media on Monday, referencing the umbrella term for a broad and decentralized grouping of militant far-left activists who say they oppose fascism. “If you are a member of Antifa or providing material or financial support for Antifa, I might be a little concerned because the FBI is DEADASS serious about investigating you.”
Beck appended a clip from his radio show in which he said that he had met for two hours on Saturday with agents sent at the behest of extremely online FBI Director Kash Patel.
“This is information that I first gave on Fox years ago,” he added. “Let me just say this: Finally, we have an administration and an FBI director that is willing to go in deep.”
Beck’s claim of FBI interest in his antifa report comes as President Donald Trump and his administration are attempting to reframe the concept of antifa as a framework to target their political enemies. Trump responded to the September killing of MAGA activist Charlie Kirk by seeking to implicate as many of his political opponents as possible, and he has ordered federal law enforcement, including the FBI and its Joint Terrorism Task Forces, to target nebulously defined “organized political violence.” In recent days, Republican officials have sought to blur the distinction between antifa activists and protesters who plan to participate in Saturday’s “No Kings” rallies.
On October 8, at Trump’s White House roundtable on antifa, Patel promised that his bureau would “find every single seed money, donor organization and funding mechanism that we have.”
That same day, Beck published to YouTube his “off the cuff” review of what he mocked as “ANTIFA’s ‘De-centralized’ Network.” He explicitly pitched his work as “a starting point for people at the FBI or Justice Department as they begin investigating leads.”
Beck’s list of purportedly antifa-linked organizations worthy of federal investigation meshed well with reports about the administration’s targets of interest, including Democratic megadonor George Soros’ Open Society Foundations and ActBlue, the platform Democratic candidates and affiliated organizations use to marshall small-donor fundraising.
Video file
Video
Citation
From an October 8, 2025,
posted to Glenn Beck's YouTube account
Beck claimed to have “split antifa up into three different categories: street groups and soldiers, support groups, and funding sources.” He said that the first category had caused “carnage,” but that any investigation into antifa must go further.
Among antifa “support groups,” Beck included the National Lawyers Guild, which he identified as the “legal arm for antifa” because its members monitor the law enforcement response to protests for abuses, and the Community Justice Exchange, which he criticized for “bailing people out” in 2020 during the “George Floyd riots.”
Based on those extraordinarily tenuous claims linking the National Lawyers Guild and Community Justice Exchange to antifa, Beck went on to identify organizations that fund those two groups as antifa “funding sources.” Those included Beck’s old enemy the Tides Foundationfor having a relationship with the Community Justice Exchange; the Alliance for Global Justice, in large part for giving the National Lawyers Guild “over a million dollars from 2018 to 2019 alone”; and Soros’ Open Society Foundations on the grounds that it funded the Alliance for Global Justice.
Beck also listed the Fidelity Investments Charitable Gift Fund and Schwab Charitable Fund. These are both donor-advised funds that allow individuals to donate their own money to charities using an online portal managed by a financial institution — though Beck suggested that the financial institutions themselves were financing antifa in some way, saying, “If I had my money in Schwab or Fidelity, I don't know if I would have it. They’re giving to the people who are supporting these people.”
Beck further listed crowdfunding platforms including ActBlue, Patreon, and others, but he did not indicate the channels by which money had moved through those platforms or to whom.
“I’m not accusing anyone here. I’m just saying. This is pretty much off the top of my head. I’m just showing the connections that have a very strong odor attached to them,” Beck concluded. He added, “This one chalkboard alone is enough for the Trump administration just to start.”
And the Trump administration, according to Beck, was apparently interested.
The FBI calling on Beck’s expertise is both a comical revelation about the ineptitude of Kash Patel’s bureau — and a five-alarm fire for civil liberties. The Trump administration’s methods may be unserious, but its leaders are extremely focused on punishing their political opponents at all costs.
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10/15/25 10:35 AM EDT
06/30/11 4:06 PM EDT
07/23/10
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The Big Money Behind Chris Rufo’s Right-Wing Agitating - EXPOSEDbyCMD
MAY 2024
*This piece was produced in partnership withImportant Context.
Chris Rufo has been racking up wins lately. Fresh off of tanking the tenure of Harvard’s first Black—and first Black woman—president, Claudine Gay, with a scandal over alleged plagiarism, the far-right activist has set his sights on National Public Radio.
Last month, Rufo dug up tweets from NPR CEO Katherine Maher that she posted before she was a journalist. The tweets revealed that Maher is a liberal Democrat who supported Biden’s campaign and called Donald Trump a racist. The revelations came on the heels of an op-ed by Uri Berliner published by The Free Press, the media company of conservative columnist Bari Weiss, in which the veteran NPR editor claimed that his outlet had “lost America’s trust” through a left-wing slant and an absence of viewpoint diversity. Berliner subsequently resigned from his position.
Rufo has an undeniable knack for stoking right-wing outrage. Depending on who you ask, he is either a conservative wunderkind—a culture warrior taking big swings at the liberal establishment—or a troll working to tear down decades of social progress, including in public education and higher learning. Extremist and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon even called him “an American hero.” Rufo is credited as the architect of the right’s demonization of “critical race theory” and a major contributor to its moral panic over LGBTQ+ inclusivity in public schools. But it’s not just right-wing audiences he plays to.
The professional culture warrior is equally gifted at seeding stories to legacy media outlets like The New York Times, which published a guest essay in July 2023 arguing for the abolition of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” programs at public universities. The paper ran five front-page pieces on a single day on Gay’s plagiarism scandal. It wasn’t long before The Gray Lady had picked up Rufo’s scoop about Maher as well.
A one-time documentary filmmaker who pivoted right around 2015, Rufo has benefited both financially and professionally from the support of right-wing billionaires and dark money. The media coverage of Rufo and his activities often notes his ties to various right-wing think tanks. However, few outlets have explored the funding behind those organizations to see just who is pulling the strings behind Rufo’s career. But now, an investigation by Important Contextand The Center for Media and Democracy offers some answers.
Through federal tax filings, we were able to identify a handful of right-wing billionaire donors and major right-wing foundations funding Rufo-affiliated groups. However, the original sources of the money behind the organizations are difficult to trace, as much of the cash came through donor-advised funds—third parties that manage money for client donors, distributing it with their input and often anonymously.
In recent years, these operations have become increasingly popular vehicles in American philanthropy, in large part because clients can transfer appreciable assets into their charitable funds without having to pay capital gains taxes that would ordinarily accompany stock sales and similar transactions. Donors have flocked to donor-advised funds to facilitate their funding of far-right and controversial causes such as hate and anti-vaccine groups, likely because donations routed through these funds are attributable only to the funds themselves. In other words, they allow wealthy financiers of unsavory causes to mask their political influence.
In response to our press inquiry asking why big money might support his work, Rufo would only say, “I billionaires.”
American Studio
Rufo is the founder of a nonprofit called American Studio, which he began after dissolving his previous filmmaking venture, the Documentary Foundation, to produce videos for his followers. The foundation had been heavily funded by dark money, as The Intercept reported, and American Studio is no different.
The nonprofit has received significant, untraceable money through donor-advised funds, including mainstream charities associated with major financial institutions. Between July 2021 and June 2023, American Studio received more than $400,000 through Schwab Charitable Fund, a donor-advised fund affiliated with financial services titan Charles Schwab. Meanwhile, from July 2021 and June 2022, the group got $122,000 through Fidelity Investments Charitable Gift Fund, the nation’s largest grant-making organization, which is affiliated with Fidelity Investments, $18,500 through the Vanguard Charitable Endowment Program, affiliated with investment giant The Vanguard Group, and $5,000 through the Morgan Stanley Global Impact Funding Trust, a donor-advised fund tied to Morgan Stanley.
American Studio pulled in cash from right-wing donor-advised funds as well. Between 2021 and 2022, American Studio received $370,000 through DonorsTrust, which is a preferred funding conduit for right-wing billionaire families like Koch, Mercer, and DeVos and a major source of funding for Southern Poverty Law Center-identified hate groups. It got an additional $26,000 in 2022 from the National Christian Charitable Foundation, which similarly funds hate.
Not all of the money was anonymous. Private foundations of wealthy individuals also bankrolled American Studio. The Edelman Family Foundation, the private foundation of billionaire hedge fund manager Joseph Edelman, which funds groups like Dennis Prager’s Prager University and the far-right parents’ rights group Parents Defending Education, gave $150,000. Meanwhile, the private foundation of Thomas W. Smith, founder of the hedge fund Prescott Investors and a major financial backer of anti-critical race theory propaganda and climate denial, gave $50,000.
Rufo’s salary from American Studio was over $240,000 in 2022, according to the organization’s latest IRS Form 990.
Manhattan Institute for Policy Research
Rufo is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, a New York-based right-wing think tank founded in 1978 by prolific libertarian activist Antony Fisher and future CIA Director William Casey. Originally known as the International Center for Economic Policy Studies, the institute has long been aligned with and bankrolled by wealthy right-wingers and corporate interests. As journalist Matthew Cunningham-Cook noted, it “has played a critical role in dismantling the social safety net and criminalizing the poor under the guise of promoting ‘welfare reform’ and ‘broken windows’ policing.”
The institute’s leadership includes Wall Street executives like hedge fund billionaire Paul E. Singer, who profiteered off of the 2008 financial crisis and serves as the institute’s chairman. Since 2020, its donors have included right-wing billionaire power brokers Charles Koch and Richard Uihlein, who are known for funding climate denial and attacks on organized labor. Others include Singer, conservative legal activist and Trump “judge whisperer” Leonard Leo, Prescott Investors’ Smith, and billionaire GOP mega donor Bill Oberndorf, who bankrolled the successful recall against progressive San Francisco District Attorney Chesapeake Boudin in 2022.
From December 2019 to November 2022, Singer’s private foundation gave $3.8 million. The Ed Uihlein Family Foundation gave $175,000 between 2020 and 2021, and in 2022, Leo’s The 85 Fund gave $450,000.
Other private right-wing foundations gave big money to the institute. The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, for example, donated to the tune of $1.6 million between 2020 and 2022. Between 2021 and 2022, the Edelman Family Foundation gave $675,000. The Adolph Coors Foundation, the private foundation of the Coors brewing family, gave $30,000 in 2021.
Like American Studio, the Manhattan Institute took in a substantial amount of money in anonymous donations from donor-advised funds. For example, it received more than $630,000 through Schwab Charitable between July 2019 and June 2023, representing Schwab’s 2020 to 2023 fiscal years. It got more than $1 million through Vanguard Charitable, $1.9 million through Fidelity Charitable, $100,000 through Morgan Stanley Global Impact Funding Trust, and $77,000 through the Goldman Sachs Charitable Gift Fund from July 2019 to June 2022. The American Endowment Foundation funneled $22,000 to the institute between 2020 and 2021.
The institute received funding through right-wing donor-advised funds as well. It raked in nearly $600,000 from DonorsTrust between 2020 and 2022. Another $30,600 came through the National Christian Charitable Foundation and $70,000 from the Bradley Impact Fund, a donor-advised fund affiliated with the Bradley Foundation which Mother Jones recently reported represents mostly money from just four large donors.
While the institute did not respond to a request for comment on Rufo’s salary, and the activist was not forthcoming, top senior fellows can earn over $400,000 according to the group’s latest IRS Form 990.
Hillsdale College
Rufo is also a distinguished fellow at the right-wing Hillsdale College. Hillsdale is a small, Christian liberal arts school in Michigan with a separate campus in Washington, D.C. that has become a central player in the world of right-wing politics. Hillsdale is known as an incubator for conservative operatives and for its ties to Donald Trump. For example, following Trump’s criticisms of the The New York Times’ “1619 Project,” Hillsdale released a “1776 Curriculum.”
In the aftermath of Trump’s defeat, for example, The New York Times reported that Hillsdale’s top brass promoted the Big Lie, and got involved in the scheme to keep him in power. The school has also given fellowships to right-wing contrarian doctors like Stanford professor Jay Bhattacharya.
Hillsdale has gotten big money from a number of foundations of wealthy right-wingers. For example, from December 2019 to November 2022, the Adolph Coors Foundation gave $662,000. The Charles Koch Foundation gave $116,000 and the Ed Uihlein Family Foundation gave $80,000 from 2020 to 2022. $157,000 from Thomas Smith’s foundation.
The school has also received millions in untraceable funding through mainstream donor-advised funds. Hillsdale got nearly $12.2 million through Schwab Charitable Fund between the fund’s 2020 and 2023 fiscal years, running July 2019 to June 2023. It got $4.4 million through Vanguard Charitable, $9.8 million through Fidelity Charitable, nearly $2 million through Morgan Stanley Charitable Fund, and $10,000 through the Goldman Sachs Charitable Gift Fund between those donor-advised funds’ 2020 and 2022 fiscal years.
DonorsTrust funneled more than $2.6 million and the National Christian Charitable Foundation gave $2.2 million to Hillsdale from 2020 to 2022. The Bradley Impact Fund dished out $44,000 between 2021 and 2022.
Neither Rufo nor Hillsdale responded to our question about payment for the fellowship.
The Heritage Foundation
In 2020, Rufo was a visiting fellow for domestic policy studies at the Heritage Foundation, one of the most influential right-wing think tanks in the country. It has worked to undermine climate science, public health amid the COVID-19 pandemic, organized labor, and voting rights.
The foundation’s donors represent some of the largest corporate and wealthy interests in the country, including names like Koch, Uihlein, Thomas Smith, and the Coors family. They include Leonard Leo’s The 85 Fund and the Bradley Foundation.
Over the years, Heritage has taken millions in untraceable money from donor-advised funds—Fidelity Charitable, Schwab Charitable, Vanguard Charitable, Morgan Stanley Global Impact Funding Trust, the Goldman Sachs Charitable Gift Fund, DonorsTrust, the Bradley Impact Fund, and the National Christian Charitable Foundation.
The Claremont Institute
After his stint at Heritage, Rufo was a Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute, another major right-wing think tank which the New York Times has called a “nerve center of the American Right.” Claremont’s vice chairman is Hillsdale College’s president, Larry P. Arnn, who promoted 2020 election denial and worked to pressure former Vice President Mike Pence to block the certification of the results. Meanwhile, Claremont scholar John Eastman, who served as part of Donald Trump’s legal team, was a legal architect of the so-called fake elector scheme.
Like Heritage, the institute has been supported by big right-wing donors including Smith. It also receives big money through donor-advised funds.
The Discovery Institute
Rufo similarly had a research fellowship at the Discovery Institute, a Christian right think tank that opposes the theory of evolution. The institute supported Rufo’s work even after his departure, giving his now-defunct Documentary Foundation $225,000 in 2021.
The institute has received money from billionaire Charles Koch’s foundation. However, most of what it took in came through donor-advised funds. Nearly $5.8 million came from DonorsTrust and about $2.5 million from the National Christian Charitable Foundation. Between July 2019 and June 2022, Fidelity Charitable funneled over $760,000 to the institute. From July 2019 to June 2023 Schwab Charitable passed along more than $1 million.
About Walker Bragman
Walker Bragman is a reporter and co-founder of the OptOut Media Foundation
All articles by Walker Bragman
About Alex Kotch
Alex is a former investigative reporter with the Center for Media and Democracy. A campaign finance expert, Alex helped launch money-in-politics website Sludge, and his work has been published by more than two dozen media outlets including The American Prospect, The Nation, and Vice.com. As of fall 2022, he was executive director of the OptOut Media Foundation, a nonprofit charity he co-founded that maintains a news aggregation app for independent news and offer other services to assist financially independent media outlets.
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