Dark Money Fears & Hollywood’s Box Office Nightmare

Welcome back to The Daily Courant, your afternoon capsule of what’s new at Puck.

Today, Teddy Schleifer returns from South Florida with the blueprints for a fledging G.O.P. plan to outflank the likes of  Laurene Powell Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, and now MacKenzie Scott by taking a legislative sledgehammer to Silicon Valley’s most cherished dark money vehicles.

Plus, below the fold: Matt Belloni discusses how Hollywood studios are grappling with the post-pandemic fallout of America’s streaming love affair on a new episode of The Town. And stay tuned, later tonight, for Dylan Byers’ private email, In the Room, featuring the latest news and notes from Zaslav’s Day Three.

The Right's MacKenzie Scott Problem

After decades of G.O.P. dark-money supremacy, the arrival of liberal mega-billionaires like Scott and Zuckerberg is fueling a MAGA-inspired woke backlash that threatens the institution of philanthropy itself.

Conservatives have traditionally had a fondness for the corporate elite, trusting in the likes of Jack Welch, Charles Koch, and the rest of the Reaganite overclass to govern the country’s affairs and steer civic life. Philanthropy, for generations, was core to that invisible hand, rooted in their widely held belief that Wall Street could better allocate America’s resources than Washington. The prevailing wisdom across the American right was to unshackle the mega-donor class, within reason—incentivizing them to send their billions to tax-exempt institutions, and allowing them to make larger political contributions, too, often without disclosure. Largely conservative institutions from neighborhood churches to Americans For Prosperity reaped the windfalls. 

The arrival on the political scene of the likes of Reid Hoffman, Laurene Powell Jobs, Melinda French Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and most recently, MacKenzie Scott, has changed the game. This crew, along with a dozen other liberal billionaires, have ideological instincts that skew more to the Democracy Alliance than the Chamber of Commerce. And they have established their own rival philanthropic program that in some ways outpaces the right. Conservatives may still love the rich in principle, but in practice they now believe that they are losing the money wars. Among the ten wealthiest people in America today, all but one made their fortune in Silicon Valley, and almost all of them are Democrats. For some on the right, this new cohort represents an almost existential threat: A financial-political-cultural cabal that melds do-gooder charity with D.E.I. activism to advance a pro-immigration, pro-gay rights, pro-woke political agenda under the guise of nonpartisanship...

FOUR STORIES WE'RE TALKING ABOUT