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The targeted assassination of guilty people is ethically superior to war. The assassination-by-drone policy of the Trump regime is ethically bad for the same reason, and therefore morally wrong, and libertarians are right to condemn it.

Over at the Washington Examiner a great online site that promotes conservative, libertarian, and fusionist views inside the Beltway Philip Klein has an article on what at first glance looks like an inconsistency in libertarian thought.(1)

On the one hand, Klein writes, prominent libertarians of the past (including presidential candidates Ron Paul and Harry Browne) long advocated assassination as a better alternative to war.

On the other hand, Libertarians were among the most vocal critics of President Trumps decision to order the killing of Iranian terrorist leader Qassem Soleimani by drone assassination this month. Klein is clearly referring to, not constitutional objections about the lack of congressional authorization, but the normative or ethics-based substantive criticism of whether its a good idea to take out a prominent foreign leader the way the Trump administration did.

Klein is correct about both hands. But there is no inconsistency. A libertarian can consider assassination a better option than war not just better strategically, but also better ethically while condemning Soleimanis killing, and indeed the Trump regimes whole policy of assassination by drone, as being ethically unacceptable.

Not only are the two positions compatible, but they are consistent. Both follow from a fundamental libertarian principle: killing innocent people is ethically wrong.

By Kleins account, Browne relied on exactly that principle to make his case for assassination:

Browne, who was the Libertarian presidential nominee in 1996 and 2000, explicitly argued that the United States should offer a bounty on the heads of our enemies. In Why Government Doesnt Work, the manifesto for his 1996 campaign, he made the case against the first Iraq War for its toll on innocent victims. Assume Saddam Hussein really was a threat, he posited. Is that a reason to kill innocent people and expose thousands of Americans to danger? Isnt there a better way for a President to deal with a potential enemy?. He wrote: Would the President be condoning cold-blooded killing? Yes but of just one guilty person, rather than of the thousands of innocents who die in bombing raids.

Soleimanis funding and arming of terrorist groups like Hamas made him an enabler of terrorism. Since terrorists and their enablers kill innocent people, they themselves are not innocent people; therefore, killing them does not violate the prohibition on killing innocents. If a libertarian bystander at the airport where Soleimani died, or a sniper stationed a mile away, had shot the terrorist enabler, there would have been no violation of libertarian principles.

In contrast, a war with Iran would invariably involve the use of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). By WMD I mean weapons that are designed to kill indiscriminately: Bombs dropped on cities by airplanes (the predominant means by which the U.S. government wages war today) qualify as WMD under this definition. It is possible to use WMD without killing innocents in some cases such as bombing a military convoy in a desert but the odds of bombing a city without killing even one innocent (one child, for example) are astronomically low. This makes a targeted assassination clearly superior to the bombing campaigns that would inevitably occur in a war. If one can accomplish a goal X by two methods, A (which means killing innocents) and B (which avoids killing innocents), then B is the ethical alternative: B is exactly what a libertarian should do.

Similarly, when Paul called for issuing letters of marque and reprisal (a term he used to mean authorizing acts by both U.S. Special Operations troops and private contractors) against terrorist leader Osama Bin Laden, he

proposed a bill that would have allowed Congress to authorize the President to specifically target Bin Laden and his associates using non-government armed forces.

The words specifically target are all-important: Paul advocated targeted killing of specific individuals, on the grounds that they were terrorists who were guilty of shedding innocent blood. Paul did not advocate the killing of innocents, but the fatal use of force against certain non-innocents and no one else.

It is virtually impossible to stretch this libertarian idea of assassination to include killing by drones. Drones carry bombs, and bombs carried by drones are no less WMD than bombs dropped from airplanes. Their use is always ethically questionable, and they should be used only in cases where innocent blood is not spilled along with the guilty.

Were any innocent lives killed in the bombing attack that killed Soleimani? I dont know; I doubt that anyone knows. I do know, by listening to the Trump administrations statements on the killing, that they do not care: whether they killed innocent people was simply not a consideration for them. That alone is enough to make Soleimanis assassination objectionable to a libertarian. While the drone attack was ethically better than bombing an Iranian city, since it killed less innocent lives, and even possibly no innocent lives at all, being ethically better does not make it ethically good. It remains an ethically bad, or wrong, action, and the U.S. policy of drone assassination that led to it remains ethically bad, or wrong, policy.

Unfortunately, Klein touches on the use of drones and bombs only tangentially and not by name, and only to shrug it off with a But:

There are specific circumstances surrounding the Soleimani killing that may make it particularly objectionable to libertarians. But the idea of targeting bad actors as an alternative to large-scale bombing raids is not incompatible with noninterventionist foreign policy sentiments.

From the standpoint of libertarian principles (as opposed to noninterventionist sentiments), the targeted assassination of guilty people of those who have themselves shed innocent blood is ethically superior to war. At the same time, the assassination-by-drone policy of the Trump regime, and the Obama and Bush regimes, is ethically bad for the same reason, and therefore morally wrong and libertarians are right to condemn it.

(1) Philip Klein, Prominent libertarians once advocated assassination as an alternative to war, Washington Examiner, January 8, 2020. Web, Jan. 24, 2020. https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/prominent-libertarians-once-advocated-assassination-as-an-alternative-to-war

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Libertarianism and assassination - Nolan Chart LLC

Peter Thiel. Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images

In mid-January, at the conclusion of a special meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society, the venerable free-market organization, after appearances by Condoleezza Rice and Niall Ferguson, Peter Thiel was slated to give closing remarks on Big Tech and the Question of Scale. The keynote was the latest in a series of public remarks and interviews in which the PayPal founder and Facebook investor showed his prominence in conservative politics.

Thiel has long been a political donor; in 2016, he gave $4million across various campaigns, including $1 million to a super-PAC supporting Trump, on whose behalf Thiel spoke at the Republican National Convention. Hes known to have funded right-wing hoaxer James OKeefe and has been an enthusiastic sponsor of organizations for activists and intellectuals, like The Stanford Review, a conservative publication he founded in the 1980s. Earlier this month, he announced an investment in a Midwest-focused venture-capital fund led by Hillbilly Elegy author and social conservative J.D. Vance.

But unlike other major right-wing donors, Thiel seems intent on being known for his intellect as much as his wallet. Over the past year, he has played the role of outraged patriot, endorsing Trumps trade war and bizarrely accusing Google of seemingly treasonous behavior in its China dealings. He intermittently lectures at Stanford. Vanity Fair has written about his hot-ticket L.A. dinner parties, where guests (including, at least once, the president) hold deep discussions about the issues of the day. Last year, George Mason University professor and economist Tyler Cowen called Thiel the most influential conservative intellectual with other conservative and libertarian intellectuals.

This emerging Republican macher is a far cry from the ultralibertarian seditionist who used to encourage entrepreneurs to exit the United States and start their own countries at sea. But Thiel is no stranger to inconsistency. For decades, he cultivated a reputation as a radical Silicon Valley anti-statist; in 2009, he wrote that Facebook, in which he was an early investor, might create the space for new modes of dissent and new ways to form communities not bounded by historical nation-states. Yet, six years earlier, he had co-founded the most aggressively statist company in the 21st century: Palantir, the global surveillance company used, for example, to monitor Iranian compliance with the nuclear deal. Can you really claim to uphold individual freedom if youre profiting from a mass-surveillance government contractor? Are you really a libertarian if youre a prominent supporter of Trump?

It would be easy enough to chalk up the seeming contradiction of Thiels thought to opportunism or pettiness (he famously funded a lawsuit, in secret, to bankrupt Gawker, my former employer) or perhaps even a mind less ambidextrous than incoherent. But its worth trying to understand his political journey. Thiels increasing prominence as both an intellectual in and benefactor of the conservative movement and his status as a legend in Silicon Valley makes him at least as important as more public tech CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg. In fact, he still holds sway over Zuckerberg: Recent reports suggest Thiel was the most influential voice in Facebooks decision to allow politicians to lie in ads on its platform. What Thiel believes now is likely to influence the next generation of conservative and libertarian thinkers if not what the president believes the next day.

How to square Thiels post-national techno-libertarianism with his bloodthirsty authoritarian nationalism? Strangely, he wants both. Todays Thielism is a libertarianism with an abstract commitment to personal freedom but no particular affection for democracy or even for politics as a process by which people might make collective decisions about the distribution of power and resources. Thiel has wed himself to state power not in an effort to participate in the political process but as an end run around it.

If we wanted to construct a genealogy of late Thielism, one place to start might be a relatively little-read essay Thiel wrote in 2015 for the conservative religious journal First Things. Thiel is a Christian, though clearly a heterodox believer, and in Against Edenism, he makes the case that science and technology are natural allies to what he sees as the inborn optimism of Christianity. Christians are natural utopians, Thiel believes, and because there will be no returning to the prelapsarian paradise of Eden, they should support technological progress, although it may mean joining with atheist optimists, personified in the essay by Goethes Faust. At least Faust was motivated to try to do something about everything that was wrong with the world, even if he did, you know, sell his immortal soul to the Devil.

Thiel suggests that growth is essentially a religious obligation building the kingdom of heaven today, here on Earth and that stagnation is, well, demonic the chaotic sea where the demon Leviathan lives. This binary appears frequently in Thiels writing, where progress is always aligned with technology and the individual, and chaos with politics and the masses. If Thiel has an apocalyptic fear of stasis, you can begin to see why his politics have changed over the past few years, as it has become less clear whether the booming technology industry has actually added much to the economy or to human happiness, let alone demonstrated progress.

Where some of his fellow libertarians have moved toward the center, attempting to build a liberaltarianism with a relatively strong welfare state and mass democratic appeal, others have found themselves articulating a version of what Tyler Cowen, in a recent blog post, called state capacity libertarianism, a concept he says was influenced by Thiels thinking. In its essence, its the admission that strong states remain necessary to maintain and extend capitalism and markets. Where Thiel would differ with state-capacity libertarians like Cowen is that he isnt merely a believer in strong states in the abstract as agents of economic progress. He is purported to be a specifically American national conservative, at least per his conference-keynote schedule. Thiel has suggested in the past that such a conservative nationalism is the only thing that can provide the cohesion necessary to re-create a strong state. Identity politics, he suggested in an address at the Manhattan Institute, the free-market think tank, is a distraction that stops us from acting at the scale that we need to be focusing on for this country. MAGA politics is the only way to grow.

This is the context in which it makes sense for a gay, cosmopolitan libertarian like Thiel to throw his support behind a red-meat conservative like Senate candidate Kris Kobach of Kansas. The technological progress Thiel associates with his own personal freedom and power is threatened by market failure and political chaos. A strong centralized state can restore order, breed progress, and open up new technologies, markets, and financial instruments from which Thiel might profit. And as long as it allows Thiel to make money and host dinner parties, who cares if its borders are cruelly and ruthlessly enforced? Who cares if its leader is an autocrat? Who cares, for that matter, if its democratic? In fact, it might be better if it werent: If the lefts commitment to identity politics is divisive enough to prevent technological advancement, its threat outstrips the kind of bellicose religious authoritarianism that Kobach represents. A Thielist government would be aggressive toward China, a country Thiel is obsessed with while also seeming, in its centralized authority and close ties between government and industry, very much like it.

There is, of course, another context in which it makes sense for Thiel to join forces with social conservatives and nationalists: his bank account. Thiels ideological shifts have matched his financial self-interest at every turn. His newfound patriotism is probably best understood as an alliance of convenience. The U.S. government is the vessel best suited for reaching his immortal techno-libertarian future (and a lower tax rate), and he is happy to ride it as long as it and he are traveling in the same direction. And if it doesnt work out, well, he did effectively buy New Zealand citizenship.

*This article appears in the January 20, 2020, issue ofNew York Magazine. Subscribe Now!

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Peter Thiels Latest Venture Is the American Government - New York Magazine

Atheists are quick to criticize God for His alleged deficiencies, claiming His tyrannical nature prevents people from living without fear. According to atheists, Gods behavior mirrors many of the worst dictators in history, which should preclude anyone from worshiping Him.

This criticism is flawed for several reasons; the first of which is the atheists presupposition of an objective morality. By operating under the assumption that tyranny is bad, atheists are assuming there is an objective standard by which all actions should be measured. As I pointed out in a previous article, its impossible to establish an objective standard of morality without God. Any attempt to establish a secular moral framework inevitably leads to arbitrary rules guided by our feelings rather than reality.

Theres another problem with the atheists charge that may be more appealing to libertarians. If God exists, He owns everything, including us. If one is operating under a private property framework, then God is completely justified in setting the rules we should all live by. If He created us, why wouldnt He have a say over how we live our lives? On a libertarian view of private property, God is justified in using His property as He sees fit. It would be incoherent to claim God should abide by our own morality when He is the source of any property we have acquired, including our own bodies.

Fortunately, for our sake, God is not a tyrant; He is the author of freedomand not just under a libertarian theory of private property but because of Gods very nature. There is a biblical defense of free willone of the many gifts God has given us. Romans 2: 6-8 is just one example, but Id rather focus on how Gods nature points to freedom to head off any controversy over biblical interpretations, and because I believe appealing to Gods nature is a stronger argument in defense of free will for people who dont belong to a particular faith.

God loves us by His very nature. If we define God as a maximally great being, it follows He has no imperfections. He is perfect love, which leaves no place for unrighteous hate. God is also omniscient or all-knowing. His moral perfection and perfect knowledge mean God knows true love requires freedom. Love cannot involve coercion. It would be illogical to claim God forces us to love Him because love requires an act of the will. Its not just a feeling. Its a choice.

While its a joy to know God gives us the freedom to love Him, were also free not to love Him. And this is an important insight into why hell exists. Hell is a place where we are eternally separated from God. Hell exists because God does not force people to love or unite with Him. Put another way, God does not send people to hell. People choose hell because of their own free desire not to love God. Imagine if a suspect claimed they kidnapped a random stranger because they loved the personand used that as a defense in court. All rational people would find this defense ludicrous.

What political implications can we draw from Gods love for us? If God is unwilling to take away our freedom even at the risk of some people ending up in hell, then this should give us caution in constructing a political system that undermines our own freedom. If God permits free decisions that could produce eternal consequences, why should we be so eager to limit the freedom of others to avoid the problems of the temporal?

Theres an obvious objection to this: Government should order itself to ensure people make it to heaven, and thats more important than a vague notion of freedom. Its the noblest of goals. But I see at least two major problems with this view.

First, it puts government dangerously close to playing God. If God is willing to permit free choicesregardless of the outcomewhy should we think the government of all institutions is in a position to organize society in way that will steer people to choices that will give glory to God?

Everything we know about government suggests it will fail to achieve its desired outcome, assuming there is an alternate universe in which government majorities primarily care about their constituents afterlife.

Government officials are ill-equipped to organize society in a way that will maximize the number of people who choose to love God. Given the law of unintended consequences, its reasonable to assume government direction of our behavior could lead to fewer people being saved. Good intentions are just not enough to justify government coercion, especially when the issue involves salvation of souls.

A government that protects our free choicesprovided they dont violate the rights of othersis the best political system we can devise. Whether we come to God is not a matter for government. Rather, its decision we need to freely make on our own or with the help of those prepared to give a defense of the hope that lies within.

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Opinion: God, Not Government, Is the Author of Freedom - The Libertarian Republic

The task seemed easy enough. I want a CT scan of your neck, the specialist told me. After months of tonsillitis, sore throats, and unnerving fatigue, Id grown edgy about the hard lump on my neck enough to make an appointment with him in December, before my health insurance had even kicked in. Hed looked down my gullet, but held off on running any tests, telling me to come back in January when it wouldnt cost me so much. A month later, he now agreed, it was time for some advanced imagery of the mass, just to be sure.

This shouldnt be hard. The insurance policy Id gotten for $557 a month, on the Healthcare.gov exchange, since I worked remotely for my employer as a contractor, sans benefits covered the hospital across the street, operated by my specialists healthcare group; I could walk over, get the scan, and he could access the imagery instantly.

Sharing the full story, not just the headlines

But of course, as hundreds of millions of Americans know, nothing in our privately managed healthcare system is that easy. The radiologist across the street considered me a hospital outpatient, so my insurance treated the office as an out-of-plan provider, which would cost me thousands upfront. The radiologist, however, did offer me a cash self-pay rate of $300 for the procedure.

Wait a minute, I said. How come self-pay is so much cheaper than if I use my insurance?

Self-pay is based on the lowest negotiated rate, the phone representative told me, which is the Medicare rate. Medicare, the government program that covers some 60 million American seniors and young people, has immense price-bargaining power, more than any private insurer. Its almost enough to make one wonder why Americans dont demand Medicare for all.

However, there was a catch to paying in cash, the phone rep told me: Reading the imagery would cost extra, and he couldnt tell me how much.

Fox News audience support Sanders Medicare for All proposal

So began a day-long odyssey of calling clinics and insurance reps, getting numerous approvals, reconciling conflicting and sometimes seemingly made-up information, just to find someone who could provide a fancy X-ray of the unwelcome swelling in my throat without bankrupting me.

As I worked my way through corporate phone trees and asked pointed questions to which there were apparently no answers, I live-tweeted the experience, and it apparently resonated with social media users (to the tune of 4.7 million impressions, a figure thats almost as inscrutable to me as my policys copay for in-plan advanced imaging.) Americans shared my viral thread, adding their own billing, pre-approval, and care-delay horror stories to it; foreigners replied too, expressing their disbelief that such a basic medical need, provided to them at low or no cost by their governments, could become so costly or time-consuming.

I was not always so dogged in dealing with healthcare costs. When I went off to college, I became the first member of my immediate family to have medical insurance. My father was a self-employed laborer with a middle-school education; my mother was a homemaker. There was no employer to provide insurance, and no extra money to pay for a policy. I never went to doctors as a kid unless I was sick as hell, and then we went to a doc in the box, an urgent-care clinic. The first time I remember seeing a dentist was when I joined the Navy. During enlistment, I was asked for the name of my primary care physician; I needed someone to explain what that was to me. The concept of having a dedicated doctor seemed like a wild luxury.

Despite my relative inexperience, I was a healthy young white man, free from most wants, and I assumed the system in which I grew up was the best of all possible systems. I spent those early years in college as an Ayn Rand-loving libertarian who believed in freedom over safety, individualism over collectivism, and false dichotomies over nuanced understandings. America was great not in spite of its worship of the almighty dollar, but because of it: Corporations, I imagined, didnt need regulations and laws to be honest, transparent, and decent to their consumers. The desire to make a profit kept us honest.

Healthcare was no exception to this fiscal-based ideology of mine. You got what you paid for, and medical innovation didnt come cheap. Rich people get better care? They earned it, Id tell people. To rely on government to provide your healthcare or cover its costs, I believed, was to give up your agency and dignity.

But if youre an American and youre reading this, be honest: Whens the last time you looked around in a clinic lobby, a specialists office, or a hospital waiting room, and saw agency and dignity?

We are all numbers insurance IDs, group plan numbers, medical billing codes, far-into-the-future appointment times. All our lives, we have been told that long waits, impersonal care, incompetence, and indignity are the province of other countries socialized healthcare systems.

What, then, do you call the Kafka-esque 21st century American medical badlands?

Since my Atlas Shrugged-reading days, Ive spent nearly two decades in the American workforce. I moved and changed jobs often, changing (or losing) insurance plans each time. Ive been misdiagnosed by specialists running the same tests and reinventing the same wheels over and over again. Ive lost weeks of my life and work productivity being an advocate for my own health, and, at times, my familys, in a system that does you no favors and often insists that there is no easy answer to the question: How much will this cost me?

Theres that old saw about how a conservative is a liberal whos been mugged by reality. Like most of the workers I know in my millennial generation, I've been mugged, beaten, and left for dead a couple of times by reality, but it's made me a believer in radical change. What Ive concluded is that you can care about people, or you can care about maximizing revenues, but not both. America is the proof.

The American health system is an insane patchwork of privileged, cash-hoovering cartels and fiefdoms, and everyone knows it. I worry about its ability to address my health, sure, but more to the point, I worry about its capacity to bankrupt me and the people I love. And I worry about a thin, pale version of national patriotism that believes the fault lies with the underemployed, sick and afflicted, rather than the system that's supposed to tend to them.

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I used to be a libertarian. Then the US healthcare system taught me how wrong I was - The Independent

For decades, Charles Koch has been committed to radically changing American society into a libertarian paradise, free from taxes and regulations, in which the wealthiest oligarchs, like himself, can destroy the environment, exploit their workers, and reap astonishing profits.

His "Structure of Social Change," first introduced by his top strategist, Richard Fink in the late 1970s, was a plan to weaponize philanthropy by using three areas of influence that would, together, gradually push far-right economic ideas into the American mainstream. The strategy begins with the funding of free-market university programs, something the Charles Koch Foundation has done at hundreds of higher education institutions including George Mason University, Florida State, and Western Michigan University, to produce the "intellectual raw materials" for libertarian policies. Then, Koch and his wealthy allies fund think tanks and policy shops that would convert the academic literature into usable policy proposals, which, in the third stage, Koch-funded advocacy groups promote to government officials and the greater populace.

Koch's strategy has been a wild success, but it may not have been as effective without another avenue of influence: favorable media.

A CMD investigation has found that the family foundations of Charles Koch and a number of similarly-minded right-wing megadonors, along with two donor-advised fund sponsors that they use to shepherd their charitable contributions and receive special tax breaks, have donated at over $109 million to media operations since 2015, nearly all of them conservative.

DonorsTrust and Donors Capital Fund (DCF), the connected donor-advised fund sponsors, have sent more than $45.7 million of their clients' money to finance media nonprofits, including the Media Research Center, Real Clear Foundation, and the National Review Institute, since 2015.

Longtime right-wing funders such as the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Sarah Scaife Foundation, the Charles Koch Foundation, and the Charles Koch Institute have showered many of the same media groups with millions of dollars over the same period. The recipients range from the nonprofit behind The New Criterion, a magazine that runs lengthy think pieces from conservative intellectuals, to the libertarian Reason Foundation, to James OKeefe's far-right smear operation, Project Veritas.

The host of conservative media outlets have faithfully met the needs of their often billionaire funders. The Daily Caller, heavily funded by the Charles Koch Foundation, printsopinion piecesfrom senior fellows at the climate change-denying Heartland Institute claiming the idea that human-caused climate change is destroying the earth is a "delusion." The Media Research Center's CNS News site printsessaysby right-wing personality Ben Shapiro attacking critics of free-market capitalism. Reason.com promotesthe wonders of capitalismand makes podcastsextolling the legacy of the late David Koch, a longtime Reason Foundation trustee. Project Veritas attempts tosmearthe presidential campaign of economic populist Bernie Sanders andearns praisefrom President Donald Trump. The Motion Picture Institute produces films thatattack regulationand achildren's video seriesin which an economics professor who is affiliated withseveralKoch-fundedprogramsteaches kids about the value of free-market economics. And PragerU publishes five-minute videos attackingsocialism,climate science,socialized medicine, andthe leftin general.

The 21 conservative donor nonprofits researched by CMD for this report are:

The donors investigated by CMD provided more than half of the contribution revenue over the researched time period for several conservative news operations, including the Lucy Burns Institute and the American Media Institute.

Here are some of the biggest recipients of grants from these funders.

TheLucy Burns Institute, a Madison, Wisconsin-based nonprofit and member of the right-wing State Policy Network, received the most money from these nonprofit donors out of all media recipients. From 2015-18, the Institute took in nearly $13.4 million, mostly from DonorsTrust and DCF but also from the Coors Foundation, Bradley Foundation, the Sarah Scaife Foundation, and the Searle Freedom Trust. The Institute's 2018 tax return is not yet publicly available, but grants from these six donors amounted to 76 percent of the Institute's contribution revenue from 2015-17.

The Lucy Burns Institute runs the mainstream political database Ballotpedia. Its president, Leslie Graves, is married to GOP operative, Koch and Tea Party allyEric O'Keefe, and Institute staff have beentrained by Koch institutions.

The Lucy Burns Institute Board of Directors has members who are fixtures in the Koch-backed conservative political movement. Director Tim Dunn, the founder and CEO of an oil and gas company in Texas, is chairman of theEmpower Texans Foundation, a group funded by DonorsTrust that has worked with Koch's Americans for Prosperity, and vice chairman of the Koch-funded Texas Public Policy Foundation. Board member Jack McHugh is senior legislative analyst at the Koch-backed Mackinac Center for Public Policy.

Director Todd Graves is an attorney who represented the Wisconsin Club for Growth, a Koch network nonprofit whose leadership includes board member O'Keefe, the founder of the media group now known as theFranklin News Foundation, in Wisconsin's John Doe investigations. Plaintiffs in the case accused then-Gov. Scott Walker of illegally coordinating with the Wisconsin Club for Growth. Conservative nonprofits researched by CMD gave over $1.1 million to the Franklin News Foundation, which publishes conservative news wire and websiteThe Center Square, from 2015-18.

Brent Bozell'sMedia Research Centerwas also a major recipient of right-wing foundations' cash from 2015-18, scoring nearly $11.2 million from nine nonprofits tracked by CMD. The family foundation of Breitbart financier Robert Mercer gave $7 million to the Center from 2015-17, and DonorsTrust ($1.3 million) and the Sarah Scaife Foundation ($1.3 million) have given large amounts since 2015. The nine donors provided 27 percent of the Media Research Center's contribution revenue from 2015-17.

The Media Research Center, which operates conservative sites such as CNSNews.com and Newsbusters and bills itself as a media watchdog, is a huge favorite of right-wing politicians and media personalities. In its2018 annual report, the Center boasts of accolades from the likes of Vice President Mike Pence, Trump fanatic and Fox News host Sean Hannity, and Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.

The Center's work is "a fundamental element of my show prep daily; they always have been and they always will be," said talk show host Rush Limbaugh.

Libertarian think tank the Reason Foundation received close to $9.6 million from eight nonprofits researched by CMD, including $3.8 million from the Searle Freedom Trust and nearly $1.7 million from the two Charles Koch nonprofits, from 2015-18. The late David Koch was a Reason trustee.

The Reason Foundation publishes Reason Magazine and Reason.com, which includes podcasts and a video series by libertarian media personality John Stossel.

Right-wing propaganda organizationProject Veritas, the group that took down ACORN and smeared Planned Parenthood, receives nearly one-third of its contribution revenue from DonorsTrust. From 2015-18, DonorsTrust funneled over $7.8 million to Project Veritas, accounting for 31.3 percent of its contribution revenue. The Bradley Impact Fund added $31,000 during that time period.

James O'Keefe and his Project Veritas attempt "stings" on Democratic politicians, liberal nonprofits, and media companies, most of which fail to prove anything close to the malfeasance O'Keefe hopes to expose. Perhaps most notably, the group tried to lure Washington Post reporters into writing about a woman who pretended to have had an underage affair with Alabama Senate candidate and right-wing extremist Roy Moore, but the reporters were able to sniff her out.

The American Media Institute bills itself as an independent investigative news service, but from 2015-16, Donors Trust, Donors Capital Fund, the John William Pope Foundation, and the Sarah Scaife Foundation gave it nearly $6.1 million, which was more than two-thirds of its total revenue. The following year, the Institute's revenue dropped significantly, from $5.5 million in 2016 to $577,000 in 2017.

According to Media Matters, the Institute has "duped" mainstream news outlets into publishing its stories, which included one critical of the Clinton Foundation that originally didn't meet the standards of its publisher,Fusion.

The Real Clear Foundation, which funds investigative reporting for the site RealClearPolitics.com, is almost entirely funded by seven conservative nonprofits researched by CMD. DonorsTrust is the biggest donor, having given $3.8 million from 2015-18, and other contributors include Donors Capital Fund ($1 million), the two Charles Koch foundations ($458,000), the Ed Uihlein Foundation ($250,000), and the Thomas W. Smith Foundation ($100,000). The Koch total includes a$375,000 consulting contractpaid by the Charles Koch Institute in 2018.

The Daily Caller News Foundation (DCNF) funds much of the content of the Daily Caller website, a site that has several ties to white nationalists and was co-founded by now-Fox News host Tucker Carlson with $3 million from right-wing donor Foster Freiss. As of 2018, Carlson was secretary of the DCNF board of directors.

Charles Koch Foundation officialsmay express concernover the site's extremism, but the foundation is DCNF's biggest donor-by a mile. The Koch Foundation and the Charles Koch Institute combined to give over $3.3 million to the Daily Caller News Foundation from 2015-18, representing 37 percent of the group's contribution revenue during that time period. Including grants from DonorsTrust, the Sarah Scaife Foundation and others, conservative nonprofits researched by CMD provided the DCNF with 58 percent of its donation revenue.

Charles Koch alleges he is not a fan of Trump, butDaily Caller and other Koch grant recipientshas often been generous to the president. In fact, Daily Calleraccepted an estimated $150,000from the 2016 Trump campaign to rent its email list. Recently, reporting revealed that Trump family friend Tom Hicks, Jr. said last year that the Daily Caller editorcould be counted onto advance Trump's personal political goals regarding Ukraine.

An anti-Muslim nonprofit led by Daniel Pipes, the Middle East Media and Research Institute is another favorite of right-wing megadonors. The Institute, an organization at the "inner core" of the nation's Islamophobia network that "attempts to portray Muslims and Arabs as being inherently irrational and violent," according to the Council on American-Islamic Relations, took in $5.1 million-or 23 percent of its contribution revenue-from four conservative foundations from 2015-18: Sheldon and Miriam Adelson's family foundation ($4 million), DonorsTrust ($564,800), the Sarah Scaife Foundation ($450,000), and the Bradley Foundation ($70,000).

Other recipients of funding by the 21 groups that CMD researched include far-right propaganda video operationPrager University Foundation($4.2 million), theNational Review Institute($2.8 million), the American Enterprise Institutes magazine, National Affairs (over $1 million), theAmerican SpectatorFoundation ($663,000), and neoconservative magazineCommentary, Inc. ($125,000).

The Center for American Greatness, an extremist, pro-Trump group that has publishedalt-right-style posts online, has on staffa former Trump officialand an editor who won fellowships from the Earhart and Bradley foundations. The group earned its 501(c)(3) nonprofit tax status from the IRS in July 2017. The following year, DonorsTrust gave the Center for American Greatness $538,000, with the Bradley Foundation and Thomas W. Smith Foundation adding $150,000 and $50,000, respectively.

The Bradley Foundationwebsitedetails an additional $3 million that it gave to media groups such as the Center for American Greatness and Encounter for Culture and Education, the conservative publisher of Encounter Books, in the first nine months of 2019.

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Right-Wing Megadonors Are Financing Media Operations to Promote Their Ideologies - PR Watch