A single $250,000 check in 1973 became the seed capital for a movement that now moves half a billion dollars in a single election cycle. Trace where the equivalent capital has gone for Black business, on every continent, and the ledger runs empty. (Part 2 of 6)
Heritage Foundation was not built by a movement.
That was the opening move in a fifty-year game, and the players kept compounding.
It was built by two men and one check.
Ed Feulner and Paul Weyrich founded Heritage in 1973, and Joseph Coors, of the Colorado brewing family, provided a $250,000 grant that got the organization off the ground. Richard Mellon Scaife, heir to the Mellon industrial, oil, aluminum, and banking fortune, gave Heritage $420,000 in 1976 alone, which was 42% of the organization's entire million-dollar budget that year.
Scaife had already been funding the American Enterprise Institute, the Hoover Institution, and the Center for Strategic and International Studies since 1963, a full decade before Heritage existed.
By 1976, more than half of the Scaife foundations' grant money was going to conservative organizations and causes. The Washington Post estimated in 1999 that Scaife alone had given $340 million to the right since 1974.
That was the opening move in a fifty-year game, and the players kept compounding.
The John M. Olin Foundation, established in 1953, pivoted its giving toward conservative politics in the late 1960s, in direct response to student uprisings and campus gains made by women and faculty of color.
Olin's executive director, James Piereson, called the approach the "beachhead strategy": plant small, permanently endowed programs inside elite universities, then let peer pressure spread the model to other schools.
By the time Olin spent itself out of existence in 2005, per the founder's own instructions, it had distributed roughly half of its $370 million in total assets funding conservative infrastructure on campuses and inside institutions including Heritage, AEI, and Hoover.
Noah Carmichael
Part 1 of 6
The Scaife family's giving compounded in parallel. Between 1985 and 2001, the Scaife Family Foundation alone sent $702,640 to Heritage and $590,000 to AEI.
The Sarah Scaife Foundation's biggest single recipient over multiple decades was Heritage, which received more than $23 million between 1985 and 2010, "probably much more in years prior to available records".
In 1993 alone, the Scaife and Carthage foundations together sent more than $17.6 million to conservative think tanks in a single year. After Richard Scaife's death in 2014, a significant portion of his personal assets flowed directly into the foundations, and the Sarah Scaife Foundation and Carthage Foundation merged, consolidating into one of the largest right-leaning foundations in the country.
Bradley Foundation took the same model and multiplied it by an order of magnitude through a single corporate transaction.
In 1985, Rockwell International bought Allen-Bradley Company for $1.65 billion, and the sale instantly multiplied the Bradley Foundation's assets twenty-fold, from roughly $14 million to approximately $290 million overnight.
That single transaction created a foundation that has since grown to nearly $1 billion in assets and distributed $1.3 billion in grants since 1985.
From 2001 to 2009, Bradley alone distributed nearly as much money as the seven Koch and Scaife foundations combined, and it has personally underwritten more than $500 million in conservative "public policy experiments" since 2000.
None of this stayed confined to research papers.
The Koch network, the most contemporary and best-documented version of this machine, spent nearly $550 million during the 2024 election cycle alone across a set of interlocking entities:
The Stand Together Chamber of Commerce funneled more than half a billion dollars into Americans for Prosperity between 2013 and 2023.
COMING UP...
Where the Equivalent Pipeline Should Exist for Black Business, and Does Not
This is not lobbying in the conventional sense, which is largely non-deductible under federal tax law. It is philanthropic and educational spending, structured to be tax-advantaged, that produces the same outcome lobbying would, at a scale conventional lobbying rules were never designed to touch.
The compounding effect of five decades of this behavior shows up directly in the current balance sheets.
