Another week, another reminder that the Capital Research Center is not a serious research organization. It’s a partisan hit operation — and this week, it published the quiet part out loud.
On Sunday, CRC re-published an essay by Steven F. Hayward arguing that tax-exempt philanthropies funding “insidious ideological projects” should lose their tax-exempt status. The piece singles out the Mellon Foundation for the sin of “prioritizing social justice in all of its grantmaking.” It warns of a “stranglehold” over humanities research, of scholarship blurring into activism. It calls for redefining “partisan activity” to sweep in the foundations whose viewpoints CRC doesn’t share.
That’s the tell. CRC doesn’t have a problem with ideology in philanthropy. It has a problem with ideologies it disagrees with. The Bradley Foundation, the Scaife Foundation, DonorsTrust — these are some of the most ideologically driven funders in American politics, and they write CRC’s checks. CRC isn’t calling for them to lose their tax-exempt status. The essay even concedes that redefining “partisan activity” could “sweep up many conservative foundations.” They know. They just don’t think the rules will apply to their side.
And the work itself? It’s not research. It’s opposition research — smear jobs dressed up with citations. CRC’s InfluenceWatch database has profiled a Buddhist hunger charity, a podcast about the meaning of life, a transit advocacy group, and a scholarship fund for low-income students — and treated them all as suspicious. They labeled more than 150 organizations “pro-terrorism” for protesting a foreign government’s military operations. They called homelessness service providers fronts for extremism. Their own researcher, Ryan Mauro, went on Glenn Beck’s show and bragged that one of his reports contained “smoking guns” the president could “use to go after Soros’s network of hate.” That’s not a researcher describing findings. That’s an operative describing a weapon.
And CRC delivers those weapons directly to the people who use them. President Scott Walter has personally briefed senior White House officials on progressive donors and nonprofit groups, pushing the administration to “take effective actions against left-wing groups.” CRC coordinated with a small group of White House officials working to “identify targets and vulnerabilities inside the Democratic ecosystem.” Glenn Beck said he’d hand-deliver CRC’s report to the president himself. And hours after CRC released its Soros report, Trump designated Antifa a “major terrorist organization” and called for investigating “those funding Antifa.”
So when CRC publishes an essay asking whether “ideological” philanthropy deserves tax-exempt status, understand what’s actually happening. This isn’t a policy paper. It’s viewpoint discrimination with a footnote. CRC is building the intellectual scaffolding for the government crackdowns it’s already helping to coordinate — and the only viewpoints it wants the government to crack down on are ones its donors oppose.
Walter has testified before Congress three times since Trump’s inauguration — at hearings with titles like “NGOs Gone Wild” and “How Leftist Nonprofit Networks Exploit Federal Tax Dollars.” One of CRC’s board members is married to Trump-appointed SEC Chairman Paul Atkins. This is not an organization worried about ideology in philanthropy. This is an organization that uses ideology as a weapon — but only against groups fighting for racial justice, environmental protection, reproductive freedom, and economic fairness.
No serious journalist should cite this organization. No policymaker should treat their output as research. And no one should let a partisan operation funded by anonymous ideological donors lecture anyone else about the dangers of ideology in philanthropy.
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