One of the largest and most politically active unions in America gave $40,000 to a group that registers Virginians to receive absentee ballots in an effort to bolster Democratic turnout for the gubernatorial election. Read More
Many important questions have recently arisen again about the roles of the public and private sectors in securing societal well-being—including the nature and scope of those roles, the extent of authority exercised by those filling them, the degrees to which the sectors can and should interact with each other, and the standards of accountability to which they should be held as they do so. Read More
In the second part, we discuss the political construction of philanthropy and charity, current strains on that construction, a potential revival of mutual aid, and what it might mean for our us all as a nation. Read More
So hip, savvy, mostly young conservatives have been talking about pills and being “pilled” in various ways for a while now. Join us in stopping to pretend to know—and trying to learn, and even tentatively apply—what they’re talking about. During a dramatic scene in the 1999 sci-fi film The Matrix, from whence this all comes, mysterious rebel leader Morpheus (played by Laurence Fishburne) offers main character Neo (Keanu Reeves) the choice between a red pill and a blue pill. Risking oversimplification, the red pill represents a willingness to learn an unsettling and potentially life-changing truth, but taking it—gaining the inconvenient awareness—would mean living in an uncertain and likely much more difficult “reality of truth.” Alternatively, the blue pill allows its taker to remain in the contented, comfortable ignorance of the machine-generated Matrix’s status quo—believing whatever he or she wants to believe. Once the choice is made, of course, there’s no turning back; it’s irrevocable. Read More
For the increasing unaffordability of housing in much of America, observers offer a variety of explanations and remedies. Numerous factors are at play. The housing market is, after all, a market, and a complex one at that. Its current state has been characterized as “supply and demand on steroids.” Although proposals may vary, the goal for all is common: Get people into homes they can afford, whether rented or owned. Read More
The Council on Foundations had a little bit of a challenge—or, as strategic-planning consultants might say, an opportunity—in preparing and presenting its new strategic plan last month. Philanthropy, along with individual mega-billionaires and other multibillion-dollar institutional endowments in higher education, is unpopular and under attack. Both progressives and populists trust big foundations less than they used to, and well, don’t seem to like them much either. Read More
The Conservative Case for [Liberal Thing]” is a punchline. These “conservative cases” are drafted by think-tankers in the metaphorical hot-take mines who in many cases are paid to do so by a left-of-center foundation seeking to bamboozle Republican policy-makers and conservative supporters into empowering liberal interest groups, undermining long-standing conservative principles, or just doing whatever liberals want to do anyway. Read More
Since the turn of the 20th century, progressivism and liberalism have been pushed for an increasingly massive state and burdensome government restrictions on personal conduct (outside the bedroom, at least) on a simple premise: It’s for the good of the people. Listening to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) or Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) today, one hears the same claims, with the socialist Left arguing that government should run health care to serve those who cannot afford it, or that the Postal Service should provide banking to serve those whom commercial banks do not. Read More
Braun recently has conducted research about the role of establishment grantmakers and their nonprofit grant recipients in the massive and growing problem of homelessness in Los Angeles—a problem to which we at The Giving Review, for some time, have tried to pay attention for what it can teach us about the role and effects of certain kinds of giving. Last week, for the most-recent example, L.A. attorney Elizabeth Mitchell had a conversation with us about the issue, during which she said we need to “understand the negative impact of philanthropy.” Read More
America’s liberal plutocrats’ “philanthropy” is more political than charitable and utterly disconnected from its roots in Christianity’s love for one’s fellow man. It isn’t only the Ford Foundation or George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, either. Across the nation, a host of community foundations—groups which are supposed to aid their local communities—serve as funnels for liberal billionaires to fund national causes, such as environmental activists, get-out-the-vote groups, litigation nonprofits, labor union fronts, and mass immigration advocacy. Read More