Follow the Money, Part Two: The Heritage Foundation’s Pipelines

Billionaires, Dark Money, and the Machine That Bought American Democracy

The Hungarians voted. Magyar won.

The receipts are coming out of Budapest. But the receipts don’t stop there.

Part One followed Russian oil money through Hungarian state institutions across the Atlantic to Heritage’s front door. See article here:

Part Two follows what happens once it’s inside.

Because Heritage isn’t just a think tank that took some meetings. It’s a financial hub, a talent pipeline, an ideological laundromat, and it has been running on dark money and billionaire patronage since 1973. Understanding who funds it, how they move the money, and who the key players are isn’t a political science exercise.

It’s a map.

How the Money Gets In

Heritage claims it takes no government money and that no single donor controls its agenda. Their own website says corporate support amounts to less than two percent of all contributions and celebrates its broad base of “500,000 members.”

That framing is working overtime and collecting a paycheck it didn't earn.

Financial tracking shows that the bulk of Heritage’s revenues came from organizations, rather than individuals. Roughly 96 percent is attributed to organizational funding, leaving only 4 percent to individual contributions. So when Heritage says it has half a million members protecting it from undue influence, understand what that means. Most of the actual money isn’t coming from your neighbor with a Heritage bumper sticker. It’s coming from foundations, donor-advised funds, and pass-through vehicles specifically engineered to obscure who wrote the check.

More than $120 million from six ultra-wealthy families has powered Heritage and the groups behind Project 2025 since 2020. Those families — the Coors, Koch, Uihlein, Scaife, Seid, and Bradley networks, aren’t writing checks to Heritage because they believe in limited government. They’re writing checks because Heritage writes policy that makes them assholes richer while simultaneously keeping them untouchable.

Let’s Meet The Money. The Founders and Their Heirs.

Heritage was initially funded by Joseph Coors of the Coors beer empire and Richard Mellon Scaife, heir of the Mellon industrial and banking fortune. Scaife died in 2014 but two foundations he once controlled, the Sarah Scaife Foundation and the Allegheny Foundation, continue to give heavily to conservative causes, including to groups involved in climate change denial.

The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation has sent at least $52.9 million to Heritage-affiliated organizations. The Adolph Coors Foundation publicly declares itself a long-time funder of the Heritage Foundation and remains one of the few major donors still openly disclosing that support. ExxonMobil and Walmart have contributed in the past. Shell USA’s foundation donated to at least fourteen groups on Project 2025’s advisory board, including Heritage.

Oil money. Beer money. Retail money. Banking money. All of it laundered through the language of conservative principle.

The Dark Money Machine

The money machine is criminal-adjacent because the system runs through donor-advised funds. Financial vehicles that let wealthy donors take an immediate tax deduction, then route the money to nonprofits of their choosing, with their identity hidden.

donorstrust.org logo

The biggest one is DonorsTrust, which operates as what investigators have called the “dark money ATM of the right.” In 2022, DonorsTrust alone funneled more than $16.5 million to organizations on Project 2025’s advisory board. The year before, $15 million. And DonorsTrust has a confirmed taped conversation, with an undercover reporter, in which it acknowledged it could anonymously channel money from a fictional Middle Eastern oil and gas company to U.S. climate skeptic organizations.

Now, wait a goddamn minute. What did these assholes say?

The dark money ATM of the American right confirmed it could secretly launder foreign oil money into American politics. And nobody went to jail. The Man Behind the Curtain Since 2021, Leonard Leo’s network, has funneled over $50.7 million to Project 2025 advisory groups through key vehicles including The 85 Fund, the Concord Fund, and DonorsTrust.

Leo is the Federalist Society co-chair who personally managed Trump’s judicial nominations and didn’t just shape the conservative Supreme Court supermajority, he fucking built it.

He’s the man who whispered John Roberts and Samuel Alito into George W. Bush’s ear. But Bush was a warm-up act. When Bumble-fuck Trump stumbled into Washington in 2017, Leo was already there, had always been there, knew every name on every door. He counseled Trump, hand-selected Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett, then shepherded all three through confirmation like a man who’d done it in his sleep because he basically had.

Three justices. One guy. And that’s just the top floor.

Leo has been quietly seeding the entire federal judiciary for decades — circuit courts, district courts, every rung of the ladder — with enough ideological consistency to outlast any president, any election, any wave of public outrage.

In 2022, a 90-year-old manufacturing billionaire named Barre Seid transferred his entire fortune to Leo’s Marble Freedom Trust. That donation is believed to be the single largest political donation in American history. $1.6 billion. To one man. To spend however he wants, with almost no disclosure requirements. Leo controls The 85 Fund, which operates under the names Judicial Education Project and Honest Elections Project. That fund gets most of its money from DonorsTrust, which wealthy conservatives use to write big checks and then anonymously route money to groups like The 85 Fund.

It’s money laundering.

But, this dickhead calls it philanthropy. The 85 Fund is a 501(c)(3), which means it enjoys tax-exempt status and is theoretically supposed to remain nonpartisan. There is nothing nonpartisan about Leo or his fund. Recent beneficiaries include organizations collaborating on Project 2025. Meaning your tax dollars effectively subsidized a detailed blueprint for dismantling the federal government and replacing it with loyalists.

Let me say that again: YOUR TAX DOLLARS EFFECTIVELY SUBSIDIZED A DETAILED BLUEPRINT FOR DISMANTLING THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT AND REPLACING IT WITH LOYALISTS.

Are we awake yet?

The Man in Charge and His Hungarian Problem

Kevin Roberts was appointed Heritage president in 2021 and immediately began remaking Heritage’s priorities with a distinctly pro-Orbán bent, opening Heritage as a vehicle for Hungarian influence in the U.S. In a 2022 interview, Roberts said “Modern Hungary is not just a model for conservative statecraft, but the model.” In 2023, he brought Heritage into formal partnership with the Danube Institute, a conservative think tank funded by Orbán’s government.

Heritage says they receive zero dollars from foreign governments… Lies.

What they don’t address is the ideological pipeline. The Danube Institute has paid more than $1.64 million to foreign collaborators, primarily Americans, over three years , commissioning articles for specific U.S. outlets, funding fellows to carry Orbán’s policy framework home, and co-hosting conferences with Heritage leadership. The arrangement may contravene America’s foreign lobbying laws but appears to fall outside the technical scope of FARA enforcement — which means we have no legal mechanism to find out how deep it goes.

Magyar knows. And he’s pulling the thread.

What the Network Buys

This money doesn’t just fund research papers. It bought a $953,920 annual salary for Kevin Roberts in 2023. It bought Project 2025. It bought a personnel database of government loyalists assembled years before Trump declared a second candidacy. It bought CPAC Hungary. It bought Rod Dreher’s Budapest fellowship, Tucker Carlson’s platform, Jordan Peterson’s legitimacy tour, and a Heritage workshop where MCC presented its plan to dissolve the European Commission. As one investigator put it, this legal version of money laundering is being used to restructure the entire American judiciary to the far right. And not just the courts. The agencies. The civil service. The regulatory apparatus. Every institution that stands between billionaire donors and unregulated power.

But, The Model Is Broken

What Magyar’s win actually exposed was that Heritage sold an idea. They called Hungary the “proof-of-concept,” the living evidence that illiberal democracy works, that you can gut institutions and consolidate power and the economy will hum and people will be fine and God will be pleased. What Orbán actually created was crony capitalism and a collapsing economy, with concentrated economic power flowing to loyalists and a widening gap between the powerful and everyone else. The Hungarians just ran the experiment all the way to its conclusion. 138 seats to 55. The model failed. Spectacularly.

The proof-of-concept is gone. The funding pipeline from Budapest is closing. And the network of American billionaires and dark money architects who used an autocrat’s playbook to write their own is suddenly holding a blueprint without a working prototype.

So, what exactly is Heritage selling now? Well, follow the money long enough and you always end up at the same place: a small group of very rich, very insecure assholes who are afraid of what happens when everyone else has power too. Every pipeline, every pass-through, every donor-advised fund, every fellowship in Budapest — it’s all the same transaction.

They are buying the right to be ungovernable. We are the ones paying for it.

Don’t blink, America. The receipts are still coming.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ Stay tuned.

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