Thomas W Smith Foundation

Thomas W. Smith, President & Chairman

Thomas Smith is a managing member of Prescott General Partners LLC, which manages the Prescott Associates LP and Prescott International Partners LP hedge funds. Prescott General Partners’ portfolio is worth over $1.45 billion according to its quarterly holdings report for the period ending on June 30, 2022. 

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filed sanctions against Prescott General Partners in 2018 after finding that the firm “willfully violated Rule 204(b)-1 under the Advisers Act” by failing to file certain financial reports that are investment firms are required to provide if they manage over $150 million in assets. The SEC charged the firm a $75,000 fine for failing to produce these documents between 2012 to 2016.

The foundation is primarily funded by Smith’s personal wealth and capital gains income. Smith has given over $65.9 million to the foundation since 2016, contributing over $12 million in 2020 alone. 

Smith sits on the board of trustees at the conservative think tank the Manhattan Institute, which received over $1.3 million from the Thomas W. Smith Foundation in 2020 alone. 

Smith also serves as board chair of American Transparency, a government spending watchdog organization founded during the Obama administration. Smith’s foundation gave American Transparency $330,000 in 2020. The group tracks public spending by Republicans and Democrats, but focuses much of their attention on attacking Democrats and issues important to progressives, such as racial justice. American Transparency is led by Adam Andrzejewski, a former Republican candidate for governor of Illinois. 

• The group runs a website called OpenTheBooks.com to track public spending. Former U.S. Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK), a notoriously ultraconservative lawmaker, was the honorary chairman of OpenTheBooks.com until he died in 2020. Coburn was a climate changer denier and staunchly opposed same-sex marriage. He also opposed abortion and “favored the death penalty, even for doctors who performed abortions.”

• In October 2022, OpenTheBooks.com published an article depicting a Department of Defense employee’s racial justice work as a “radical ideology” that improperly influences her professional work.

• In 2017, the Department of Defense Education Activity — a DoD subagency that runs educational programs for children of servicemembers — chose Kelisa Wing, a U.S. Army veteran and a former educator, to serve as chief of its diversity, equity, and inclusion initiative. OpenTheBooks accused Wing of pushing “left-wing indoctrination and activism” into schools. The “ideology” disputed by OpenTheBooks refers to Wing’s series on racial justice and Black history, and her focus on ending the school-to-prison pipeline that disproportionately affects Black children.

• OpenTheBooks also accused teachers’ unions of supposedly “rigging school board elections” to prevent schools from resuming in-person learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Smith previously served on the board of the Jack Miller Center for Teaching America’s Founding Principles and History, one of the academic centers in the “Koch Brothers Academy” that espouses “theories and principles aligned with the Kochs’ convictions about economics and public policy.” The Thomas W. Smith Foundation donated $100,000 to the Jack Miller Center in 2020.

Thomas Smith keeps a low profile, and his online footprint is minimal. However, amid the COVID-19 pandemic in April 2020, he wrote a piece for the Manhattan Institute telling state and local officials to ignore recommended social distancing guidelines and stay-at-home orders. He called on them to “remove restrictions as fast as prudently possible.” 

• Smith, a multi-millionaire, said governments should lift restrictions because business closures and social distancing restrictions would harm families and workers. Yet, in the same article, he argued against government relief bills, saying, “the political class never seems to understand that spending taxpayer dollars can be counterproductive.”

• He also tried to make the case that far fewer people were dying of COVID-19 than was initially projected while casting doubt on the scientifically proven role that social distancing measures played in flattening the curve. 

According to publicly available FEC data, Smith regularly donates to Republican campaigns and organizations. 

James Piereson, Trustee/Director

James Piereson is a trustee and director at the Thomas W. Smith Foundation. He was the foundation’s highest-paid employee in 2020, receiving $350,000 for his 25 hours of work per week. Piereson is a notable figure in the conservative philanthropic scene and holds leadership positions at multiple right-leaning institutions. In addition to his role at the Thomas W. Smith Foundation, Piereson serves as: 

• Vice-chair of Donors Trust, the “dark-money ATM of the right” that backs the most influential groups in the conservative movement.

• Chair of the Foundation for Cultural Review, which publishes The New Criterion, a monthly publication that touts itself as “on the front lines of the battle for culture.” The publication has been described as the “cultural wing of the neoconservative movement” and received over $5.1 million from the Bradley Foundation.

• Chair of the American Spectator Foundation, a right-wing publication known for its role in promoting the “Clinton body count” conspiracy theory, which alleged that the Clintons murdered numerous political enemies.

• Board member at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, which promotes conservative thought on college campuses.

• Board member at the Center for Individual Rights, a right-wing legal group that supported the Boy Scouts of America’s effort the exclude gay men from leadership and argued against affirmative action in significant cases before the Supreme Court.

• Board member at the Hoover Institution, an influential conservative think tank dubbed “one of four leading policy institutions that pulled the nation’s economic policy to the right in the early 1980s.”

• Board member of the Philanthropy Roundtable, a network of wealthy conservative donors and foundations.

• President of the William E. Simon Foundation, a private foundation that has doled out millions of dollars to conservative groups, including the Manhattan Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, and DonorsTrust. The William E. Simon Foundation also gives to charitable causes such as community groups and medical research centers.

In addition to his current leadership roles, Piereson is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank that runs the right-wing outlet City Journal. He is also a fellow at the Jack Miller Center, a conservative academic center based outside of Philadelphia that sponsors university civic centers and summer programs using funds from the Koch network.

Piereson served for 20 years as executive director of the John M. Olin Foundation, “one of the largest financiers of the intellectual right” before it closed. 

Piereson has written numerous columns rejecting any notion that charitable organizations have a part to play in racial or economic equality, which he calls “radical causes.” 

• In an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal, Piereson lambasted liberals for funding causes including “abortion rights, climate change, income inequality, immigrant rights, regulation of the internet, the elimination of ‘hate,’ and other social and identity-based projects.” Piereson said right-leaning donors must provide a “counterbalance” to liberals’ charitable giving, or else “private money [will] flow even more asymmetrically toward ever more radical causes.”

• Piereson opposes efforts to increase diversity among professors and students on college campuses, saying, “diversity-promotion efforts on campus actually increase resentment on the part of both white and minority students.” According to Piereson, claims of “racial bigotry and violence against women” on college campuses are absurd and based on “irrational fears.” 

Piereson is the author of the 2014 book The Inequality Hoax, which he wrote as a counter-argument to Thomas Piketty’s book Capital in the Twenty-First Century. In his book, Piereson defends lower tax rates for the rich and criticizes Piketty’s proposal for redistributing wealth.

Diane G. Smith, VP/Trustee

Diane Smith is the wife of Thomas Smith and the vice president of their foundation. According to LittleSis, Diane has donated to multiple conservation organizations and politicians over the years, such as the Republican National Committee, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH), and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL). 

Stephen Moore

Former Trump advisor Stephen Moore is a consultant at the Thomas W. Smith Foundation. The foundation paid Moore $100,000 for consulting services in 2020. 

Stephen Moore and James Piereson are both grant advisors at Searle Freedom Trust, another mainstay conservative funding organization.

Former President Donald Trump nominated Moore for a position on the Federal Reserve Board in 2019, but Moore ultimately withdrew his name from consideration after his history of disparaging comments about women surfaced, and he lost Republicans’ support. 

Hypocritical Attacks On “Ideological” Influence In Education

The Thomas W. Smith Foundation is a major financial backer of the conservative movement’s falsified depiction of a liberal takeover of education. The foundation donates millions of dollars to conservative groups attacking so-called “critical race theory” in schools. Its board trustee and director, James Piereson, frequently attacks universities’ academic programs about social issues. Meanwhile, the foundation spends millions of dollars financing academic centers that espouse libertarian principles on college campuses, and Piereson has worked at many organizations that do similar work.

Piereson is an outspoken opponent of university programs that explore social issues like women’s studies, racial and ethnic studies, and queer studies. In a 2016 article for the Washington Examiner, Piereson criticized universities for having these academic departments and dismissed them as legitimate fields of study. He claimed programs on these topics “[make] up in ideological vigor what they lack in academic rigor.”

However, Piereson’s objections to “ideological” programs in schools do not seem to apply to promoting a free-market ideology.  

• The Manhattan Institute, where Piereson is a senior fellow, created the Veritas Fund for Higher Education to fund programs espousing limited government ideals to college students. According to Veritas, these students “could someday reach the upper echelons of Fortune 500 companies and key government posts—where they will be influential in promoting the vitality of free markets.” Piereson told the New York Times in 2008 that these educational programs “are not ideological courses.” Contrary to his insistence that the programs are non-ideological, Piereson also said Veritas’ programs “work against the thrust of programs and courses in gender, race and class studies, and postmodernism in general.”

• Piereson has also stated that Vertitas’ explicit goal is to influence college curriculum, telling the Times, “what we’re trying to do is actually go onto the campus and fund professors who have the support of their deans, provosts and colleagues and try to influence the undergraduate curriculum.”

• Piereson also served for 20 years as executive director of the John M. Olin Foundation, “one of the largest financiers of the intellectual right” before it closed. The New York Times reported that “decades of money from Olin and similar foundations helped create a kind of shadow university of private research institutes” in response to the perceived dominance of liberals in academia.

The Thomas W. Smith Foundation directly funds several conservative programs at universities, including the Manhattan Institute’s “MI on Campus” project, which “sends MI senior fellows to campuses across the country at no cost to the host.” The program’s website lists James Piereson as an available speaker for the program. In 2020, the foundation gave over $1.3 million to the Manhattan Institute, earmarked as a grant for “education” on the foundation’s tax filing. 

Another academic program that the Thomas W. Smith Foundation has supported is the Political Theory Project at Brown, an “ideological project” of the Koch network. The Thomas W. Smith Foundation gave the Political Theory Project $1 million in 2007. The group also accepted over $3.8 million from Koch-affiliated organizations between 2005 and 2019. Nancy MacLean, a professor at Duke University who researches the Kochs’ and other right-leaning donors’ influence in academia, called the professors at Brown’s Political Theory Project “foot soldiers in an ideological project.” She also said that when it comes to university centers funded by Koch and libertarian money, “if you dig into what the actual ideology that is being taught, you are looking at the radical right of this country.”

As another example of the foundation and Piereson’s hypocrisy, Thomas Smith’s “greatest influence” is a neoliberal economist and philosopher Friedrich Hayek who helped organize the network of millionaires who financed academic positions and departments to spread a free-market, limited government ideology.  In a 2013 interview, Smith said, “my foundation is primarily focused on promoting Hayek’s philosophy.”

• Friedrich Hayek has been described as the “intellectual guru of President Ronald Reagan’s free-market policy-makers.”

• In 1947, Hayek founded the Mont Pelerin Society, an organization aimed at spreading neoliberal doctrine, backed by millionaires and their foundations. These wealthy donors funded a series of prominent right-leaning think tanks “which would refine and promote the ideology,” including the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, and the Adam Smith Institute. They also funded academic positions and departments at the universities of Chicago and Virginia.

• The Mont Pelerin Society has continued to embed itself in academia. For example, the Free Market Institute at Texas Tech University serves as the administrative headquarters for the Mont Pelerin Society. 

The Thomas W. Smith Foundation has ties to several conservative think tanks, advocacy organizations, and funding groups through its leadership. Its closest ally, however, appears to be the Manhattan Institute.

Manhattan Institute

Thomas Smith sits on the board of trustees of the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank that received over $1.5 million from the Thomas W. Smith Foundation in 2020 alone. James Piereson is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and he also received $140,000 from the institute in 2019 for independent contracting services.

Smith’s foundation sponsors a fellowship program at the Manhattan Institute. As of October 2022, right-wing columnist Heather Mac Donald was the Thomas W. Smith Foundation fellow at the Manhattan Institute. 

• Mac Donald is a contributing editor at the Manhattan Institute’s conservative outlet City Journal. The publication was the launch pad for right-wing activist Christopher Rufo, who formulated the conservative movement’s weaponization of “critical race theory.”

• Mac Donald has spent over a decade writing articles and books denying the role of anti-Black racism in the U.S. carceral system, a theory that is widely accepted by academics as the driving force behind mass incarceration.

• In her testimony before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary in 2015, Mac Donald invoked a racist talking point that “racial differences in offending, account for the disproportionate representation of blacks in prison.” The Southern Poverty Law Center and criminal justice reform organizations have demonstrated how beliefs such as Mac Donald’s invoke racist stereotypes and cherry-pick information to make it appear as though non-white people are inherently more violent. 

The Thomas W. Smith Foundation also started the Manhattan Institute’s Hayek Book Award, named after neoliberal economist and philosopher Friedrich Hayek. 

“Anti-Critical Race Theory” Groups

The Thomas W. Smith Foundation has provided significant financial support to the right-wing organizations crusading against “critical race theory.” Popular Information reported that between 2017 and 2019, the Thomas W. Smith Foundation granted at least $12.75 million to 21 organizations spurring “anti-CRT panic.” These groups include, among many others, the Manhattan Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the American Legislative Exchange Council, the Federalist Society, and the American Enterprise Institute.

University Programs

Thomas W. Smith Foundation director and trustee James Piereson told The New York Times in 2008 that the foundation “started paying for scholarly centers on campuses,” foreshadowing the conservative movement’s larger project of funding nonprofit academic centers on university campuses. 

In 2020, the Thomas W. Smith Foundation gave over $3 million to university centers and other organizations promoting libertarian and conservative policies on college campuses. These grants include:

• $700,000 to the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, a libertarian think tank that has been criticized for using its considerable funding from the Koch network to block climate change policy.

• $100,000 to the Jack Miller Center, an academic center within the “Koch Brothers Academy” that “bankroll[s] academic programs” for at least 45 higher education institutions. The Center’s programming promotes “theories and principles aligned with the Kochs’ convictions about economics and public policy.”

• Over $1.3 million to the Manhattan Institute, earmarked as a grant for “education” on the foundation’s tax filing. The Thomas W. Smith Foundation funds the Manhattan Institute’s “MI on Campus” project, which “sends MI senior fellows to campuses across the country at no cost to the host.” The program’s website lists James Piereson as an available speaker for the program.

• $150,000 to the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, which promotes conservative thought on college campuses.

• $460,000 to the Institute for Humane Studies, a Koch-backed libertarian program at George Mason University. In her 2016 book Dark Money, investigative journalist Jane Mayer wrote, “the aim of the IHS was to cultivate and subsidize a farm team of the next generation’s libertarian scholars.”

• $105,000 to Hillsdale College, a private, Christian liberal arts school that is “a leading force in promoting a conservative and overtly Christian reading of American history and the U.S. Constitution.”

TOTAL CONTRIBUTIONS TO RIGHT-WING CAUSES IN 2020: $11,013,928