Why Has America become So Right-Wing? Tax-Free Conservative Foundations

Over the past 30 years a small group of wealthy conservative philanthropies have quietly funded a movement to change the social, legal, educational, media and political landscape of the United States. Using tax-exempt funds these philanthropies have coordinated their giving to create a suppy-side machinery for implementing their mostly Republican agenda.

Various organizations have reported on this phenomenon. In 1996 People for The American Way wrote the first in depth examination in a report titled "Buying a Movement: Right Wing Foundations and American Politics"

Clearly there was nothing even remotely resembling this on the left, perhaps justifiably so, since these philanthropies were achieving political goals with tax-exempt monies -- which is theoretically against the law, since "there is no social interest in the underwriting of one or another of the political parties"

The second major report on this movement was provided by the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP), an umbrella group of liberal-oriented philanthropies. It's 1997 report, "Moving A Public Policy Agenda: The Strategic Philanthropy of Conservative Foundations" for the first time examined the grantmaking activities of the 12 top conservative philanthropies, complete with a three-year analysis of their grants, and, more importantly, a structure for understanding both the philosophical underpinings of the movement, and its action plan.

Media Transparency is the most complete resource available for providing research data and information about the money behind the conservative movement. Only Media Transparency provides an online searchable database of the grants made by the 12 leading conservative philanthropies over the past 15 years. Currently our free database contains 21,000 plus grants to more than 2,000 recipients -- an amount in excess of $1.25 billion.