Bill Gates has made himself the face of billionaire philanthropy. With a world-spanning public relations campaign, he has created the impression that his vast wealth is being funneled into charity. Some of it is. But much of it goes to Woke causes – to the agenda of the political and cultural Left.
Often, this involves what is effectively the mixing of Gates Foundation money with government funds. When this happens, taxpayers, through government grants, contracts and tax exemptions, end up financing causes that they find wasteful or abhorrent.
The stream of funding for the Woke network of charities and government agencies is complex because it has to be complex, so that people can’t keep track of the cash flow. Hence the hysterical, hateful response to Elon Musk and his DOGE team, who – how dare they! – are following the money.
To understand how this works, consider the case of the Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors (RPA), funded with many tens of millions of dollars from the Gates Foundation and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
RPA promotes “green,” pro-abortion, anti-police, and anti-MAGA propaganda, and, perhaps most significantly, leads a USAID effort to influence the media around the world and censor what leftists label as “disinformation.”
The Gates Foundation has donated at least $244 million to RPA. Early in the relationship, in 2009, the foundation paid $3.5 million to RPA to set up a new nonprofit to run an astroturf (fake grassroots) campaign promoting Gates’s ideas on education. The Washington Post reported that “The leaked proposal for [the Gates project] reads like a how-to manual for big-budget astroturfing.”
But Gates’s organization is just one of RPA’s backers. RPA claims that it “currently advises on and manages more than $400 million in annual giving by individuals, families, corporations and major foundations.” In 2022, it reported revenue of more than $681 million, expenses of about $521 million, and assets of $882.5 million. RPA claims to have “incubated and funded philanthropic initiatives in more than 70 countries.” RPA’s current president is the former executive director of Planned Parenthood Global, who formerly worked at USAID.
RPA channels contributions to various causes on the left. The watchdog site Influence Watch notes that the organization “engages in research, writes papers, and creates coalitions for purposes of guiding donors and foundations. Twenty-three donor guides have been created, addressing donors who focus on issues like gender and climate change . . .”
Much of RPA’s work focuses on abortion (such as the Reproductive Health and Women’s Rights Collaborative) or the “climate crisis.” RPA’s Art for Justice Fund supports artistic narratives depicting police and the U.S. justice system as targeting “people of color.” RPA backed the After Party, an effort to drive a wedge between religious conservatives and supporters of President Trump. It helped launch an awards program promoting the development of “social justice leaders,” “ethnic studies for social justice,” and “bilingual DEI learning.” And it sponsored the ‘In Our Name’ campaign, an anti-Israel effort launched in 2024 during Israel’s war with Hamas.
RPA has received funding over the years from the U.S. government, including from the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of the Army/Department of Defense. The total is around $60 million in grants (and another $12 million in obligations), and some $5 million in contracts. Of those amounts, some $20 million from USAID is for RPA’s International Fund for Public Interest Media, which in turn funds journalistic entities on every inhabited continent.
The purpose of the IFPIM grant to RPA was described in bureaucratic gibberish: “Ensuring the viability of public interest media is central to the aim of USAID’s democracy, human rights, and governance strategy to support the consolidation of inclusive and accountable democracies to advance freedom, dignity, and development,” with the RPA’s IFPIM, announced in December 2021, as a “marquee deliverable” to that end.
RPA described IFPIM as supporting “media organizations as well as experiments and innovations at the media ecosystem level.”
Money for IFPIM has come from the leftwing Annenberg Foundation, which backs FactCheck.org (and launched BarackObama’s political career in Chicago); from the leftwing nonprofit created by Craigslist’s Craig Newmark, who’s on the board of the Columbia Journalism Review; the leftwing Ford Foundation; the Google News Initiative (which partners with the parent of PolitiFact); and Microsoft.
At least two organizations that financially support IFPIM – Luminate, created by leftwing eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, and the USAID-funded National Endowment for Democracy – also back the Global Disinformation Index, which seeks to label news sources as trustworthy (on the “inclusion list”) or untrustworthy (on the “exclusion list”). The Washington Examiner reported that GDI was “part of a stealth operation blacklisting and trying to defund conservative media, likely costing the news companies large sums in advertising dollars,” with GDI’s 10 most-approved news outlets all left-leaning and its 10 most-condemned all on the conservative side.
In May 2024, National Legal and Policy Center filed a complaint with the IRS against the Disinformation Index, Inc. and the AN Foundation (formerly the Disinformation Index Foundation), the U.S. components of GDI. The complaint details a multitude of blatant violations of IRS disclosure rules regarding their respective Form 990 annual disclosure reports filed over several years. Violations include a failing to disclose funding sources, hiding officers’ identities, and paying excessive executive compensation to its president, as first reported by Gabe Kaminsky in the Washington Examiner.
Co-chair of the IFPIM board is Sir Mark Thompson, chairman and CEO of CNN Worldwide and former chief executive of the BBC and The New York Times Company. Board members include Pascal Lamy, director general of the World Trade Organization; Bettina Tucci Bartsiotas, former assistant secretary-general of the United Nations; and Stefan Löfven, former prime minister of Sweden and current president of a group that brings together “social democrats” in Europe.
That list screams “independent journalism,” doesn’t it?
Do you see how this scam works, for Gates and people like him? When he makes obviously political donations, such as the $50 million he gave to a Michael Bloomberg-backed nonprofit behind Kamala Harris, Gates is properly held accountable in the eyes of the public. He gets praise from one side, negative criticism from the other. But when he funnels money through “philanthropy,” he gets to paint himself as a heroic figure – even when he’s doing harm, as when he promotes censorship.
Gates has as one of his top priorities the suppression of information that governments and powerful people consider “disinformation.” Indeed, the second episode of Gates’s 2024 series on Netflix, “What’s Next? The Future with Bill Gates,” is essentially an argument for the suppression of online Free Speech. Almost all the opinions expressed in the program are along the lines of a comment by journalist Kara Swisher, that “Free Speech was not conceived on such a scale, and therefore it gives enormous power to malevolent players.” In the documentary, the Russians, the Tea Party movement, Senator Rand Paul, and Trump supporters are depicted as purveyors of disinformation, and Anthony Fauci is seen heroically resisting disinformation. Journalist Tucker Carlson is shown as promoting disinformation with a story about Gates backing “sun-dimming” technology – a story that was actually true and that was widely reported by news media and by science and environmental publications.
Gates has called for using artificial intelligence to stop certain views from being “magnified” online, to prevent “various conspiracy theories like QAnon or whatever [from being] blasted out,” and to fight “polarization and lack of trust.” He suggested, “You’ll have to take AI into consideration” to “solve the digital misinformation [problem].” AI, he said, can be used to block harmful views on such topics as climate change and when “people deny the validity of election results.” Solving this problem is critical, he said last September, because ”Political polarization may bring it all to an end; we’re going to have a hung election and a civil war.”
To be clear, the Gates Foundation’s donations to RPA haven’t been designated specifically for the promotion of censorship. Gates money has gone to RPA for a variety of stated purposes, from “a new initiative that mobilizes resources for global Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights causes” to supporting “the creation of gender equitable faith-focused entertainment media content that improves the health and livelihood outcomes for adolescent girls and young women in Kenya and Nigeria.”
But money is fungible. From different accounts, much of it effectively ends up in one pot. Bill Gates is in favor of Wokeness and censorship; USAID bureaucrats are in favor of Wokeness and censorship; Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors gets a king’s ransom from each, and promotes Wokeness and censorship.
The Government-Nonprofit Complex feeds on this kind of comingling involving countless millions of dollars. How much corruption is there? Measure it in the howls of those exposed by Musk and DOGE.
