A lot of the $640 million in recent charitable donations Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ ex-wife MacKenzie Scott is doling out will go to nonprofits pushing extreme left-wing causes, including helping migrants who commit crimes and boosting male-born transgender athletes who want to compete against women.
Scott will provide 67 migrant-advocacy organizations a combined $122 million for legal aid and other assistance, according to an evaluation of 361 awards she announced Tuesday through her foundation Yield Giving.
The large winners include the Florida Immigrant Coalition, which vehemently opposes Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ crackdown on migrants who commit crimes; and the Tennessee Immigrant & Refugee Rights Coalition, which is fighting that state’s efforts to increase illegal-migrant enforcement. Each scored $2 million awards.
Scott’s other awards include $117 million to 67 prisoner-advocacy groups and other organizations helping jailbirds and ex-cons; and $72 million to 43 groups promoting “gender identity,” “sexual orientation” and other LGBTQ causes – similar to championing the rights of biological boys who discover as transgender girls to compete in female sports.
She’s also earmarked one other $18 million to 10 groups pushing clean energy.
“Bezos’ wife is using the profits he made through capitalism to [fund] the rope that may hang capitalism,” said Mike Gonzalez, a senior fellow on the conservative Heritage Foundation, drawing on former Soviet revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin’s famed quote: “’The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we are going to hang them.”
Scott’s use of Bezos’ money is one more example of woke philanthropic groups created through the fruits of capitalism – similar to the leftist Rockefeller Foundation – using their dollars to undermine free-market principles, added Gonzalez.
“This stuff that she’s donating money to – whether it’s transgender ideas, helping illegals, prisoner rights, climate change – they’re all trying to transform our system away from capitalism,” he said.
Scott — an writer of two novels and the third wealthiest woman within the US — was married to Bezos for nearly 25 years and has 4 children with him. She parted ways with Bezos in 2019 with a jaw-dropping $38.3 billion in Amazon stock.
Prior to Tuesday’s announcement, she handed out $16.5 billion of her fortune to groups she and her team researched and chosen.
In December 2022, she launched a database of her charity under the name Yield Giving.
Scott then began soliciting applications from community-led nonprofits looking for financial assistance. Applicants were required to have budgets between $1 and $5 million and missions “to advance the voices and opportunities of people and families of meager or modest means,” Yield Giving said on its website.
The $640 million awarded by Yield Giving during its first round of handouts is greater than double what Scott pledged, with 361 of the 6,350 charities who applied getting awards of either $1 million or $2 million.
Megan Peterson, executive director of Gender Justice, cheered Scott’s $2 million “gift” to her nonprofit, saying in a press release it “couldn’t come at a more crucial time” with “a conservative legal movement threatening our fundamental rights here in Minnesota, North Dakota, and across the US.”
“Constructing and sustaining a world freed from gender barriers requires community organization, education, and changing the ways we talk and take into consideration gender,” added Peterson, whose group recently won lawsuits regarding access to emergency contraception and the rights of trans youth to play sports that are usually not their biological gender.
Of the $72 million Scott handed out for LGBTQ causes, at the very least $16 million went to nonprofits leading the charge for transgender athletes in female sports, including ACLU of Alabama, Baltimore-based Soccer without Borders and OutFront Minnesota.
Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-Staten Island/Brooklyn), who has backed laws looking for to maintain fairness in female sports by ensuring biological boys aren’t participating, said Scott’s spending on such lefty causes is “unlucky — but it surely’s her personal money.”
“Democrats running cities across America do that day by day with our money, and that’s the true battle we want to keep fighting,” she said.
In a note on her website, Scott wrote she’s grateful to Lever for Change, the organization that managed the award-selection process, and evaluators who’re vital “agents of change.”
Reps for Lever for Change and Scott didn’t return messages.
Elon Musk blasted Scott for her past charitable donations in an X post he has since deleted: “Super wealthy ex-wives who hate their former spouse should . . . be listed amongst ‘Reasons that Western Civilization died.’”