The legal foundation that brought the suit is called the New Civil Liberties Alliance. NCLA has only been around since 2017, when it was founded with a one million dollar grant from the Charles Koch Foundation. Here is the banner of NCLA’s Form 990 tax return for 2017, showing it took in $1.65 million in 2017:
And here’s the 2017 contribution of the Charles Koch Foundation:
When you put in that amount, it’s your organization. Welcome (back) to Massachusetts, Charles Koch.
There are other donors. The Thomas W. Smith Foundation, another giver to right wing causes, kicked in $333,333. A trustee of the Smith Foundation is Stephen Moore, paid $105,000 for his services. Readers may be acquainted with Moore as a failed Trump nominee for the Federal Reserve Board. New York Magazine captured his nomination precisely with this headline:
The Woodford Foundation for Limited Government has donated $10,000 in 2016, 2017, and 2018. The National Philanthropic Fund gave $200,000 in 2017 but as a donor advised fund (often used by folks like Koch to hide their true donations) we’ll never know who was behind that money.
The real story here isn’t the restaurant owners and ministers. It’s that Mass Fiscal/Fiscal Alliance has once again turned to a Koch operation. It has done this before, brought suits with legal representation tied to Koch and the far right Mercer family. The evidence of MassFiscal’s ties to Koch is mounting as is the Koch political operation in Massachusetts. The Reopen movement itself has strong whiffs of Koch and Mercer.
It’s interesting how the media handles Mass Fiscal. In the first story out of the box today, Bruce Mohl of Commonwealth Magazine didn’t mention Fiscal Alliance at all, and there is no good reason to give any legitimacy to that dark money operation. The Globe’s Matt Stout recognized that Koch put up the seed money for NCLA with a link to The Koch Foundation 2017 tax return. He also described FAF/MFA as a conservative nonprofit known for shielding its donors. Neither Worcester Telegram & Gazette nor Boston Herald (predictably) mentioned the Koch connection at all.
What we have here is a Koch funded attack on the legitimacy of state government. but so few see it. .
Addendum: The 2018 Form 990 tax return for Charles Koch Foundation shows another $1,000,000 contribution to New Civil Liberties Alliance.
We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” – Louis Brandeis
[Full disclosure: as an educator in the UMass system, I am a union member. I write about dark money.]