Joy Pullmann of the Federalist documents the left’s political deployment of philanthropic dollars.

Many Americans are awakening to the fact that we seem to have no local control of a lot of local things: public schools, our terms of employment, local governments, local elections. …

… 2020 election chaos was part of an effective and well-funded plan to help Democrats win by rigging the playing field. One key strategy deployed to that end has become default on the left yet still often goes unremarked and unchallenged. It’s called “advocacy philanthropy.”

In the 2020 election, Facebook zillionaire Mark Zuckerberg used this strategy to deploy nearly half a billion dollars to help Democrat activists infiltrate local government election apparatuses, literally paying for election equipment and the salaries of partisans who counted ballots. This kind of tax-exempt political interference is now standard practice for the world’s far-left ultra-rich, and it’s affecting a whole lot more than elections. It’s constructed essentially a shadow government that pits elected officials against their voters on behalf of moneyed interests.

In the past two decades, large foundations have begun to “engage more directly with the political process by supporting advocacy organizations, investing in the implementation of major policy reforms, and ensuring that their research investments are targeted to advance specifc policy priorities,” document politics professors Sarah Reckhow and Megan Tompkins?Stange in a 2018 paper. These large foundations are predominantly run by leftists, including Bill and Melinda Gates, Zuckerberg, and George Soros. …

… Traditional charity focuses on clear, concrete human needs: Food. Clean water. Sports equipment. Teachers. Missionaries. And so forth. It also provides, say, funding for big projects that would be difficult for the non-rich to raise in a timely manner, such as capital funding for schools, churches, and libraries.

Advocacy philanthropy, on the other hand, focuses on not directing private money to charitable ends, but on using private money to affect what government entities do. In other words, it’s tax-exempt political activism.