Exposing Mackenzie Scott: The Woke and Anti-White Left’s new Sugar Mama

Few "philanthropists" have done more damage with money they didn't even earn

NOTE: I wrote the piece below, an expose of the “philanthropy” of Mackenzie Scott (ex-wife of Jeff Bezos) in June of 2021, but for a variety of reasons, I ultimately didn’t publish it. At the time I was hoping (unsuccessfully) to put more attention on Scott’s particularly toxic form of “giving back.” by doing a deep dive into the details of her efforts.

I have not really edited the piece since I first wrote it so I FULLY ACKNOWLEDGE that some elements of this (in terms of current advisors, favorite charities etc.) may no longer be completely current. But they were definitely current and accurate when I wrote them, and they give a damning portrait of damage done by Scott’s giving.

Scott’s donations are again in the news, and it now seems that others (like Elon Musk) are taking an interest in them, so I am publishing this piece here, because it has a lot of original research in the public interest.

Enjoy! And if you like what you read here, please SHARE this piece and SUBSCRIBE at the links above. Basic subscriptions are free and welcomed, but I particularly appreciate paid subscribers, who keep the lights on, get full access +exclusives and who ultimately fund, and thus help create, original reporting like the piece below.

I don’t have Scott’s billions, but with your help, I can fight back against the damage she is causing— sunlight remain the best disinfectant.

I’m sure that Mackenzie Scott doesn’t think she’s a bad person.  And if we’re being strictly honest, compared to the average billionaire, she probably isn’t.

The world’s third richest woman and the ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, with a net worth of around $60 Billion after their divorce settlement, seems to be sincere in her desire to achieve positive social change as she sees it.   Not a jetsetter, she remarried this year, to a Seattle high school science teacher. (Note: they would subsequently divorce). A self-described introvert who has written and published two novels, Scott doesn’t sound like a candidate to be the female George Soros, the long-time bête noire of the American right and nationalists everywhere.

Yet it would be hard to name anyone, probably not even Soros, who has recently caused as much potential damage to the body politic as Scott has done with her donations in the last year of a staggering $8.6 billion dollars to almost 800 organizations, many with far-left ties to the racist, identity politics left. [Note, this number has grown to $16.5 Billion since this was written] The average size of the donations to each of these groups is more than $11 Million.  Simply put, nobody has given more money in service of dividing America than Scott. “Discrimination against ethnic and religious minorities has been deepening,” she writes in a note that accompanies one tranche of donations.  This is absurd.  Every empirical metric we have says exactly the opposite. 

And as Scott acknowledges, she’s giving away money she hasn’t even earned.  She’s simply gotten it as a function of our bizarre and dysfunctional “community property” divorce laws in states like Washington, which could have granted Scott half of Bezos’ fortune, though her contributions to Amazon, while not insignificant, in no way justified her walking away with anything remotely in the billions of dollars. Scott settled out of court amicably for “only” 25%, making her America’s first left-wing community property oligarch.

With Scott pledging to give away her money “until the safe is empty” her current giving simply the down payment on an “investment” that will cause tremendous damage to the fabric of American society. While it’s a free country and Scott can give her money to whomever she wants, it’s time for the right to give Scott and the recipients of her largesse the serious scrutiny they deserve.

Born to a well-off family, Scott graduated from the ultra-elite Hotchkiss School before moving on to Princeton, the toniest of the Ivy League schools. From there it was on to D.E. Shaw, a prestigious New York-based hedge fund where she would meet her future husband, Jeff Bezos.  Shortly thereafter, they moved to Seattle and Bezos started Amazon—While Scott has emphasized that she worked extensive hours at Princeton to help pay for tuition due to a family financial reversal, the fact remains that she has been immersed in our most “elite” institutions from her earliest days.

And like most wealthy, white, left-wing elites, Scott is fully dedicated to the “do as I say, not as I do” school of philanthropy. She raised her kids in Medina, Washington, a city with 0.3% African American and 2.6% Hispanic population that records the license plates of any cars entering the town on video and checks them against a police database. For Scott, it’s defund the police for thee and fund the video cameras for me.

Unlike Soros, Scott doesn’t seem maniacally and explicitly focused on electoral politics. And she has made significant donations to undoubtedly worthy organizations: Food banks, Goodwill, Easter Seals, and Meals on Wheels to name a few.

But much of her philanthropy has gone almost exclusively to left and far left groups to such an extent, relative to their budget that many of the groups must ultimately at this point be seen as fronts for Scott’s opinions

Of the 176 Scott donations identified by size by the philanthropy tracking organization Candid, the smallest was $750,000.  Sixty-two of the Grants were for $10 Million or more and eighty-one were for $5 million or more. Seventy one of the 176 donations (40%) represented half or more of the organization’s previous annual revenue while 10% exceeded the annual revenue of the entire organization the previous year.

Over $3.4 Billion of the first two tranches of Scott’s donations were to minority communities including $881 Million directed to African-American causes(the vast majority of the funds were given to NGOs claiming to minority communities generally, without specific reference to race) an amount that represented more money than was given to economically disadvantaged. Given that the number of white Americans living in poverty is almost as many as the number of African-Americans and Hispanics in poverty combined, Scott’s single-minded focus on minorities is troubling.

Projected over her full donation to date, Scott gave an estimated $5 billion to minority communities with $1.3 Billion specifically targeted to black-focused charities. This is actually an underestimate because some of her largest grants, to non-political organizations like the YMCA and United Way, will likely end up in organizations given that that have embraced wokeness and intersectionality and who will likely redistribute some of it to leftist race-oriented group groups. Not that Scott’s damage is limited to race. In addition to “racial equity,” her first tranche of $1.7 billion alone gave $133 million to “gender equity” organizations “organizations another $46 million to “LGBTQ+ equity”

In effect, Scott is the great white billionaire astroturfer. For several years, she will be singlehandedly funding enormous portions of the budget for a variety of leftist groups that will claim to speak on behalf of poor women, LGBT, and minority communities.  The corporate media of course, will be happy to quote these groups, as representing their communities, whereas in many cases, their continued existence as organizations is almost exclusively determined by Scott and her fellow cadre of largely white billionaire-run foundations.

For comparison, the Claremont Institute, where I work (which has been independently ranked as one of the ten most influential conservative think tanks in the United States) annually takes in about 1/1000^th as much as Scott has given to “Racial equity” *alone* with these gifts.  That gives you a sense of the scale of the money we are talking about as well as the difficulty of the task for those of us on the right to expose it when Scott can pay for armies of her astroturf NGOs to flood an already sympathetic corporate media with activism, article-ready quotes, and position papers. 

Scott’s primary philanthropic advisors are elite liberals ripped straight from the pages of a Tom Wolfe book.  According to reports, Scott’s giving was principally advised by the Bridgespan Group, a nonprofit consultancy very closely tied to Mitt Romney’s Bain and Company. Bridgespan is run by Jeff Badach, who taught at Harvard Business School and was the worldwide managing director for Bain, one of the most elite management consulting firms.

Bridgespan’s perspective on philanthropy can be gleaned from their commentary on Black Lives Matter that sounds like a defendant’s guilty plea from a Stalinist show trial.

“The dehumanization and systemic racism faced by Black people, and other communities of color, must be challenged in every instance, rooted out, and eliminated. We recognize that racism permeates American society and infects us all, including Bridgespan. . .Words feel utterly inadequate to address the injustice and inequity in the United States right now. Yet silence is its own form of violence.”

Not having sufficiently abased themselves, Bridgespan goes on:

 “The criminal justice system that has terrorized the lives of people of color since this country’s founding . . .repeatedly fails to provide justice for all. See the relentless voter suppression that aims to leave voiceless and vote-less so many Black citizens.”

This is the radical philosophy that underpins the giving of America’s most prolific philanthropist today.  These are people more in need of cult deprogramming than access to a multi-billion-dollar checkbook.

As for the groups themselves, Many of whom are blandly named enough to obscure their radical political agenda. Those listed below are just a small number, which this author researched on their web sites and through influencewatch.org, an invaluable research program of the Capital Research Center that provides information thousands of nonprofits.

The Campaign Legal Center has been a leading supporter of the “For the People” Demcorat voting bill.  They previously sued the FEC for failing to investigate President Trump.  Community Change works for immigrant rights, free childcare for all and “housing justice”.  The International Trans Fund and Transgender Law Center both support radical transgender activism. The Millennial Action Project pushes for “expanding immigration and gun control.”
 

The Movement for Black Lives, stood at the center of the George Floyd Protests and the Black Lives Matter movement.  The Solutions Journalism Network encourages journalist to pump out left-wing policy advocacy, rather than facts, in their reporting. Southerners on New Ground may win the identity politics Olympics.  Among many activist causes, they train “Black queer, trans, and gender non-conforming identified organizers” to lead Black Lives Matter chapters and similar groups.

The Groundswell Fund focuses on “increasing access to low-cost or government-funded abortions” The Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under the Law has pushed to have the federal government control local zoning, pushing mail-in-voting and removing requirements for proof of citizenship when voting, ending cash bail, and investigating “Right-wing extremism.” The Art for Justice Fund seeks to reduce the prison population in the United States through radical approaches to criminal justice reform.

Race Forward, claims K-12 schools are pushing white supremacy and that the Trump Administration pushed white Nationalism.

And the list goes on.

“Putting large donors at the center of stories on social progress is a distortion of their role,” wrote Scott in a note accompanying one of her donation announcements.

 But it is Scott herself who is doing the distorting, including distorting the body politic by distributing billions of dollars that she didn’t earn to radical political activists.

“Philanthropy is supposed to be devoted to the benefit of others, but philanthropists are primarily concerned with their own benefit,” George Soros, who is many things, but not stupid, once observed.

Scott should ponder her philanthropy and consider whether it is really about helping the groups she claims to care for or whether it is about her own self-image or enacting a psychodrama around her own white guilt.

And in the meantime, conservatives must expose her astroturf charities for what they are—extensions of a billionaire’s vanity that will profoundly harm this country with their dangerous “solutions” for problems of their own creation.