Conservatives, Meet Pierre Omidyar
Conservatives should add another mega-donor to their radar: Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay. Nonprofits that Omidyar funds and leads poured out over $1.1 billion between 2004 and 2020, most of…
Tides Foundation
“Dark Money” Networks on the Left Pulled In $3.7 Billion in 2020
In 2020 alone, six networks raked in a stunning $3.7 billion in “dark money,” funds used largely for political activism whose donors are difficult—if not impossible—to trace. Some of these…
Unearthing the Tides Nexus: “Dark Money” Pioneer
The modern pass-through funding model dates back to the mid-1970s, when entrepreneurial political activist Drummond Pike created the Tides Foundation, launching the pass-through scheme that now dominates the nonprofit netherworld.
Unearthing the Tides Nexus: The Tides Nexus
Since the 1970s, Tides has become a brand that now encompasses eight distinct organizations, seven 501(c)(3) public charities and one 501(c)(4) advocacy group, collectively referred to as the Tides Nexus.
Unearthing the Tides Nexus: Incubation
While the Tides Foundation actually started incubating new groups in 1979, it spun off its fiscal sponsorship services into the Tides Center in 1996, possibly to insulate the main group…
Unearthing the Tides Nexus: Pushing Policy
Tides Advocacy combines the pass-through and incubation efforts of the Tides Foundation and Tides Center in order to service 501(c)(4) groups, which are allowed to spend significantly more on lobbying…
The Hypocrisy of Unmasking Fidelity’s Leftists
Unmasking Fidelity is a coalition of far-left “social justice” groups aiming to choke off donations to conservative nonprofits through the country’s biggest grantmaker, Fidelity Investments Charitable Gift Fund, which is…
Grassroots Organizing Gone Corporate
America’s uber-rich have found a crafty alternative to creating grassroots activism from scratch: using their money to buy influence over local groups that already exist. During the 2020 election cycle,…
Senate Democrats’ Dark Money ATM
Majority Forward, the 501(c)(4) arm of the Democrats’ partisan Senate Majority PAC, is a “dark money” behemoth. You wouldn’t know it from the group’s nondescript website, but Majority Forward spent $515,000 backing Joe Biden…
SEIU Throws Weight Behind Mail-In Voting
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…