Remember the outrage from the left when Elon Musk and the DOGE crew uncovered all the fraud in the USAID program? Billions of our tax dollars going to leftist causes after being laundered through so-called non-profits. These were “charities” in the most basic and legal sense, but they were really partisan organizations using our tax dollars to advance a progressive agenda around the world.
While USAID spread money overseas, much the same scam is happening in the domestic “charity” world, too.
When I started at the Heritage Foundation in 2001, one of the first things I was told was that I was NOT to do anything even remotely political on their computers or during work hours. In the Clinton administration, Heritage had been audited nearly every year by the IRS – surely just a coincidence and NOT the early stages of Democrats weaponizing government, right?
With that history, even under a Republican administration, Heritage had a policy of erring on the side of caution. It wasn’t an issue for me, I was new in town and wouldn’t have even known how to conspire politically with anyone if I had wanted to. But that rule lorded over my time there – the fear of embarrassing a place I really loved, or damaging it, was always in the back of my mind.
Today, it doesn’t seem to be an issue for any non-profit. Where they are supposed to not engage in political activity or partisan activism, you can’t find an organization that is now actively wearing the uniform of one side or another.
For the most part, things started to change when Media Matters for America was launched by weirdo turncoat David Brock. Brock was once a “conservative journalist” who then became a liberal Democrat and founded Media Matters, which helped create cancel culture by going after advertisers on conservative talk radio.
They were a “charity non-profit,” which is supposed to mean non-partisan. But all they did was partisan activity, and they kept getting away with it (at least until they smeared Elon Musk and X, who are currently suing them into oblivion).
The left perfected the “non-profit as political organization” business model. Neera Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress – another left-wing non-partisan, non-profit that spends its time doing the bidding of the Democrat Party – is a regular defending of every Democrat and attacker of every Republican on television and has done campaign work for Democrats and a stint in the Biden administration. She left her non-profit to work for a partisan job (she couldn’t get Senate confirmation, so she ended up in a lower-level job), then she returned to a job that was, in 2020, paying her almost half a million dollars. Good work, if you can get it. (You can’t get it, don’t try, unless you’re an activist Democrat for a few decades first.)
There are very few “non-profits” that aren’t in the political game, in one form or another. A friend of mine sent me a list of upcoming Congressional hearings, and as a former health policy analyst, this one next week on health insurance affordability caught my eye.
The witnesses are all heads of health insurance companies, but only one is a non-profit: Ascendiun, which is the parent company of Blue Shield of California. Just for fun, I looked up to see how many of these companies may have donated to politicians, and they all had (of course), which is fine because they’re for-profit companies. Well, most are.
All had hits on Open Secrets for big donations to federal elected officials; the one that stuck out was Ascendiun, the non-profit.
A list of Republicans they’d given to showed up first, but they only gave them all $208 back in 2018, which was odd. Then there was a bunch of money to Democrats in more recent years – thousands of dollars to many Congressional candidates.
For fun, I decided to look up what kind of money the Blue Shield of California non-profit was tossing around in its home state. A lot, it turns out.
Blue Shield of California gave a half-million dollars to Gavin Newsom’s redistricting fight last year, another $50,000 to the state Democratic Party and a couple of hundred thousand more to various Democrats and liberal causes across the state. All of that was just in 2025.
They get massive tax breaks and use those savings to fund Democrats in their state? I hope some Republican asks about this at the hearing, and by “asks” I mean grills them.
One of the worst-kept secrets in DC is the fact that “non-profit” doesn’t mean non-partisan, and there are a lot of people making some pretty big profits from these “charities.” As tax season gears up, remember there are major organizations and corporations that laugh at April 15th…and you.
Derek Hunter is the host of the Derek Hunter Show on WMAL in Washington, DC, and has a free daily podcast (subscribe!) and author of the book, Outrage, INC., which exposes how liberals use fear and hatred to manipulate the masses, and host of the weekly “Week in F*cking Review” podcast where the news is spoken about the way it deserves to be. Follow him on Twitter at @DerekAHunter.
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