The Hewlett Foundation’s mission to divide and rule the right

Divide et Impera — “Divide and rule.” Such was the slogan of Macedonian King Phillip II and the Roman emperors who would adopt his approach to controlling the Mediterranean world in antiquity. By dividing the peoples that were to be conquered against themselves, the Macedonians under Phillip and the Romans under Pompey and the Caesars found domination much easier than if they had to contend with united defenders. Imperial successors took the lesson.

For those who would fundamentally transform America into a sclerotic, European-style socialist glorified retirement home with no air conditioning, “divide et impera” is a lesson well-learned. And none do it better than the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, a left-wing behemoth that funds the typical left-wing Big Philanthropy patronage cast of environmentalists, abortion-access advocates, racial agitators, and Bidenomics alumnae.

Were its grantmaking limited to the “usual suspects,” the Hewlett Foundation would be bad enough. But it learned from King Phillip and the nabobs of the East India Company: if the adversary is for sale, buy low and hold until you conquer. If there is a faction claiming to be on the American right that is in the newspapers and cocktail circuit for breaking with the conservatism of the “grill dad Republican” and backing bog-standard progressivism, then there’s a very good chance the Hewlett Foundation is integral to keeping the organization’s lights on and the spokespeople’s suburban-Virginia mortgages paid.

The goal is stark: Displace the American conservative movement’s commitment to strength in foreign affairs, free(ish) market capitalism, and social traditionalism. Conservativism’s commitment to these principles has helped prevent the United States from becoming Canada. Destroying conservatism would be a great victory for those who wish to see America become a passive dependent of the United Nations, a socialist welfare state aiming not for Mars but for Net Zero, and a place where abortion protesters are jailed for silent prayers.

Most foundations dedicate themselves to electoral…er, “nonpartisan educational” efforts to beat conservatism on the open field of ideological combat. But the Hewlett Foundation throws its massive financial weight—by annual grants, Hewlett is more than ten times larger than the conservative Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation—toward dividing and occupying the right. Hewlett has funded the “Never Trump” movement, the “eco-right” who are responsible for seeding watermelon-environmentalism (green on the outside, socialist Red on the inside) into the American right, left-of-center policy focus interests within American Protestantism, and American Compass and aligned think tanks that oppose traditional conservative pro-capitalist economic policies.

Hewlett’s early years: from electronics to environmentalism

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Packard made population control central to his grantmaking, writing that the “highest priority of our foundation must be to do what can be done to get the worldwide population growth” below two percent per year.

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The Hewlett Foundation owes its existence to Hewlett-Packard, a major electronics (and later computer- and computer-peripherals) firm founded by William R. Hewlett and David Packard in 1939. Its founders, who by the late 1960s had proven quite successful in the electronics industry and had become wealthy, both founded major philanthropic institutions: William Hewlett’s William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and David Packard’s David and Lucile Packard Foundation.

While independent from each other, both foundations were influenced by the then-trendy cause of combating overpopulation through the mass distribution of contraceptives and expanding access to abortion. Packard made population control central to his grantmaking, writing that the “highest priority of our foundation must be to do what can be done to get the worldwide population growth” below two percent per year.

The Hewlett Foundation’s opening grants in 1967 included gifts to Planned Parenthood for population control efforts, asserting that “current population trends constitute one of the major threats to human happiness and fulfillment.” The Foundation also supported California-based higher education, public broadcasting, and the arts in San Francisco.

Hewlett expanded population-control giving into the broader environmentalist movement through the 1970s and 1980s. Grantees included the Sierra Club, the Oceanic Society, Worldwatch Institute, Centre for Population Activities, Center for Population Options, and National Alliance for Optional Parenthood. The foundation continued funding abortion-access groups like Planned Parenthood and its research associate, the Guttmacher Institute.

David Gardner, the former president of the University of California, worked as the foundation’s president in the 1990s. He continued the practice of funding pro-abortion groups, adding Catholics for Choice (CFC) to Hewlett’s grantee portfolio.

Catholics for Choice is an early example of a divide-and-rule institution targeting conservatism. It exists to present the appearance of division on the morality of abortion, which the Catholic Church strongly opposes.

Catholicism has an advantage in dealing with outside-funded Fifth Columnists in its ranks that movement conservatism does not. Catholicism is hierarchical and monarchical, and the hierarchy has the authority to denounce and expel those who falsely claim the Church’s authority to oppose its teachings. The Church’s formal bodies in the United States have exercised this power repeatedly against Catholics for Choice. While most American Catholics do not practice the letter of Church teachings on reproduction, CFC as an institution is today recognized as little more than a surrogate of liberal, pro-abortion Big Philanthropies such as Hewlett, the Susan T. Buffett Foundation, and the Ford Foundation.

In 2000, new leadership gave Hewlett a new grantmaking strategy. Paul Brest, the dean of Stanford Law School, took the reins and committed it to “strategic philanthropy,” which supporters identify as a science-based philosophy for “maximizing the social impact of foundation grants to nonprofit organizations.”

Defenders of “strategic philanthropy” focus on its employment of social science to find “best practices” rather than the practices that made donors happy. Critics cautioned that it overestimates the rigor of social science itself and rejects learned knowledge of on-the-ground relief groups.

After 12 years on the job, Brest stepped down and was replaced by one of his successors as Stanford Law dean, Larry Kramer. A former clerk for arch-liberal Supreme Court Justice William Brennan, Kramer was an avowed liberal-progressive legal scholar, notable for promoting “popular constitutionalism” as a rival to the conservative-leaning “originalist” school of constitutional interpretation. In a New York Times piece, legal writer Jeffrey Rosen detailed the theory:

Now that it seems clear that Republicans will control the courts for the foreseeable future, canny liberals are beginning to wean themselves of the romantic idea that judges inevitably favor liberal values. And now these liberals have a rallying cry — “popular constitutionalism” — which appears in the title of a book published this year by Larry Kramer, the new dean of Stanford Law School. In the early 90’s, Kramer became interested in the idea that the public might do a better job of protecting its rights than the courts. He became convinced that the framers of the Constitution expected it to be interpreted not by unelected judges but by the people themselves — through petitions, juries, voting and civil disobedience.

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[L]iberals should resurrect political tools for controlling the courts that presidents from Jefferson to Lincoln embraced — from Congressional filibusters of controversial nominees to efforts to strip the court of jurisdiction to hear controversial cases.

Hewlett’s grantmaking and strategic vision under Kramer would fit with his progressive partisanship.

Left-wing policy grants

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Hewlett’s “U.S. Climate Strategy” sites it comfortably within the “watermelon” environmentalist coalition.

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Hewlett is a huge pool of resources available to left-of-center ideology and advocacy, with special notice due those in the environmentalist movement, the abortion-advocacy effort, post-“summer of love” racial agitation, and anti-capitalism. Its grantmaking in 2023 exceeded $648 million, and its assets exceeded $13.3 billion.

Climate: By the foundation’s own accounting, it made $240.9 million in grants for environmentalist causes and advocacy in 2024, with focuses on climate change mitigation and western-lands conservation in the United States.

Hewlett’s “U.S. Climate Strategy” sites it comfortably within the “watermelon” environmentalist coalition. It focuses on the power of government to enforce decarbonization through central planning (under the euphemism “industrial policy”), government purchasing, and regulatory programs. And it presses for extremely aggressive policies such as the war on cars, endorsing “binding commitments for 100% clean energy or clean car and truck standards that are more ambitious than those promulgated by the federal Environmental Protection Agency.” (This would be the Biden administration’s EPA, which was in power at the time of the strategy’s publication.)

Notable Hewlett Foundation environment program grantees include ClimateWorks Foundation, the Energy Foundation, RF Catalytic Capital, the Arabella Advisors network (Windward Fund), Center for Strategic and International Studies, Hispanic Access Foundation, and Just Transition Fund, among others.

Abortion access and gender ideology: Critics of the Hewlett Foundation cannot complain that it has failed to carry out its donor’s intent with regard to abortion advocacy. The group has consistently, from its very inception, upheld William Hewlett’s support for Planned Parenthood and other abortion advocacy groups and campaigns.

The foundation maintains two separate complementary strategies focused on abortion and contraception; one directed overseas and one focused domestically. The “U.S. Reproductive Equity Strategy” aims to “ensure that people in the U.S. — particularly those facing the greatest barriers — have the freedom and resources to access the abortion care and contraception they need and want to achieve their life aspirations.”

The Hewlett strategy on pregnancy and abortion is explicitly committed to the Left’s gender ideology. It affirms: “We have intentionally shifted to using the word ‘people’ to be inclusive of cisgender women and girls, transgender, and nonbinary individuals.”

Notable recent grantees for the so-called “Gender Equity and Governance” program area include Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors’ Care for All with Respect and Equity (CARE) Fund, If/When/How: Lawyering for Reproductive Justice, the Arabella Advisors-managed Hopewell Fund’s State Abortion Access Network project, NEO Philanthropy’s Healthy and Free Tennessee project, the Pew Charitable Trusts, and the Abortion Care Network.

While abortion access is the principal interest of the Gender Equity and Governance program, the Hewlett Foundation has also funded the Transgender Law Center, URGE: Unite for Reproductive & Gender Equity, Proteus Fund’s “Transparency and Accountability Initiative: Gender-Just Economy Collaborative Learning Platform,” and Funders for LGBTQ Issues, all of which are at least tangentially related to transgenderism and “gender ideology.”

Racial Justice: Hewlett adopted a “Racial Justice Strategy” for a ten-year grantmaking program in 2022. This occurred after a “racial justice” commitment as part of the 2020 “Summer of Love” following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis Police custody. The strategy heavily leans on early-2020s approaches of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) that have been challenged by the Trump administration for violating the plain text of civil rights laws.

Notable grantees include Race Forward, which was pledged $3.8 million over three years in 2025; Defending American Values Coalition, which was pledged $1 million over three years; the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, which was pledged $500,000 over three years; Liberation Ventures, which was pledged $484,220 over 20 months; the NAACP, which was pledged $5 million; and Pop Culture Collaborative‘s Becoming America Fund under Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, which was pledged $1 million over three years.

Anti-capitalism: Opposition to American capitalism, derided as “neoliberalism” in the language of Larry Kramer and Hewlett leadership, has become an increasing focus of Hewlett’s activities.

Jennifer Harris launched Hewlett’s Economy and Society project. She entered the Biden administration at its beginning in 2021, became one of the architects of Bidenomics at the White House National Economic Council, and then transitioned back to Hewlett’s anti-capitalism project in 2023.

Our colleague Robert Stilson took note of Kramer’s anti-capitalism when he announced his intention to step down as Hewlett’s head. Stilson writes:

In short, Kramer believes that the free market has failed, and will continue to fail, to produce the economic, social, and political outcomes that he considers to be most desirable. He outlined his criticisms in a December 2022 article entitled “We Need to Talk About Capitalism,” though he went into greater depth in an earlier memo to the Hewlett Foundation’s board of directors. To Kramer, the dominance of “neoliberalism” as championed by Milton Friedman and his many intellectual followers has produced such levels of income and wealth inequality—which in turn has led to a variety of negative societal externalities—that it must be replaced with a new economic philosophy. “The upshot,” he wrote, “is that the 20th-century free market paradigm has reached the end of its useful shelf life.”

The role of the Hewlett Foundation, as envisioned by Kramer, is to fund the intellectual development of such an alternative system. A comprehensive 2020 grantmaking strategy for the foundation’s Economy and Society program spells out the details, but it succinctly defines the overarching goal as being “to develop a new ‘common sense’ about how the economy works, the goals it should promote, and how it should be structured to serve those goals.” Income and wealth inequality are perhaps Hewlett’s biggest concerns with the current economy, though climate change and racism also feature prominently. The explicit presumption underlying the program—through which Hewlett paid out $34 million in 2022 [$33.2 million in 2024]—is that free-market capitalism “has outlived whatever usefulness it might once have had” and today “causes more problems than it solves.” The Hewlett Foundation simply believes that capitalism offers “no credible solutions for society’s biggest challenges.”

The grant recipients from the Economy and Society Initiative are a litany of statist and even outright socialist institutions. PolicyLink, a racial-advocacy group with socialist policy proposals, received $500,000 for its “Toward a Thriving Multiracial Democracy and Equitable Economy project.” The ClimateWorks Foundation, which also receives funding from Hewlett’s environmentalist programs, received $3.5 million in pledges from Economy and Society “for support of U.S. Foreign economic policy for global green industrial policy.” The Arabella Advisors-managed New Venture Fund received $1 million over three years to support its Groundwork Collaborative.

Other recipients included American Economic Liberties Project, a regulation-loving advocacy group with close ties to the Biden administration, and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities—a liberal think tank better identified as the “Center for Government Priorities.” Showing that no area of the economic left is excluded from Hewlett’s largesse, the think tank of Randi Weingarten’s American Federation of Teachers union (the AFT Education Foundation) was given $400,000.

Divide and rule the right

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If this bet pays off, then Hewlett’s environmentalist, racialist, and socialist progressivism will win the day, regardless of what Americans vote for.

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But to truly wreck the Right’s nominally capitalist economy agenda, Hewlett needs to subvert from within.

Hewlett once ran the “Madison Initiative,” a grantmaking program dedicated to “an effort to strengthen the values and institutions of American democracy in a time of polarization.” It funded groups across the political spectrum that sought to improve the functioning of Congress and other representative institutions.

That program has lapsed, and right of center (nominally) groups funded by Hewlett today are participating in a campaign by progressives to divide and rule the right. For Hewlett, the benefits of breaking the conservative three-legged stool of a tough foreign policy, free(ish) markets, and social traditionalism are obvious.

One striking feature of Hewlett’s work in this space is that they don’t trust voters to behave as they wish.

American electoral factions can only expect to control the federal executive half the time. Since George Washington left the presidency, the Federalist-Whig-Republican and Jeffersonian-Democratic political traditions have each won 29 presidential elections. If an ideological faction wishes to rule regardless of how the electorate may choose, then victory requires undermining the opposition and turning it to your side without changing yourself.

“Divide et impera” isn’t just a model for Hewlett but a command to aim its enormous grantmaking at co-opting and dividing the American right. If this bet pays off, then Hewlett’s environmentalist, racialist, and socialist progressivism will win the day, regardless of what Americans vote for.

American Compass is the most prominent, effective, and notorious of the grantees taking Hewlett money for this purpose. Nominally a “right of center” group, American Compass is influential with certain members of the Trump administration and a handful of U.S. Senators. Since 2020, Hewlett has pledged or granted $3.2 million to American Compass as part of the state-socialist “Economy and Society” program.

Hewlett hasn’t hidden what it wants from the investment in American Compass.

“Project 2025,” the Heritage Foundation-led coalition project to devise a governing agenda for a potential future presidential administration, first came to public attention in 2023. Left-wing critics noted that Hewlett had funded American Compass, which played a deplorable role in developing Project 2025’s “Mandate for Labor Error.”

Hewlett, without declaring an intention to “divide and rule” conservatism, defended itself against the left-wing critics:

Both articles are misleading in conflating our support for a conservative nonprofit, American Compass, with the work of a coalition of more than 80 conservative organizations, Project 2025, to provide a policy blueprint for the next Republican administration.

American Compass is in our Economy and Society Initiative portfolio, in part, because of their work to move conservative thinking in a more worker-friendly direction — which is what they were doing in contributing to the labor section of Project 2025’s policy agenda. American Compass’ work on that chapter does not reflect, or even imply, endorsement of anything else in Project 2025. While Hewlett does provide grants to American Compass, we do not provide grants to Project 2025. Indeed, there are many ideas in Project 2025 that Hewlett does not agree with, including some in the chapter on labor. [Emphasis in original.]

So, Hewlett was pleased that its strange bedfellow was admitted into the conservative tent, but only so the Hewlett agenda, not conservatism, may advance.

Divide et impera.

American Compass is not alone. Other nominally right of center grantees benefiting from Hewlett’s socialist “Economy and Society” program have included:

• American Moment, a staff-development network with a mission “to identify, educate, and credential young Americans who will implement public policy that supports strong families, a sovereign nation, and prosperity for all.”
• The Intercollegiate Studies Institute, once dedicated to teaching “the core ideas behind the free market, the American Founding, and Western civilization,” which took $350,000 “with the aim of developing new economic paradigms.”
• American Affairs, a nationalist-populist journal of political economy.
• The Foundation for American Innovation, a technology advocacy group that joined the Teamsters union as a presenting sponsor of American Compass’s 2025 gala.

Evangelical Christian institutions have also been subjects of divide et impera grantmaking. Megan Basham, a right-of-center journalist focused on evangelical Protestant internal deliberations, reported that Christianity Today accepted more than $1 million from Hewlett, including $600,000 for elections reporting. Basham alleged that the magazine had published material downplaying opposition to abortion since taking the funding and published pieces in advance of the 2024 election encouraging evangelical Christians to abstain from voting.

That evangelicals lean strongly Republican cannot be ignored. Encouraging a strong demographic for one’s opposing party not to vote is denounced as “voter suppression,” at least when conservative Republicans do it.

Older dividing factions are also Hewlett projects. The foundation propped up the “eco-right” faction of environmentalists seeking to encourage left-wing environmental policies like carbon taxes among conservatives. And before the organized “Never Trump” faction all-but-formally defected to the Democratic Party, Hewlett funded the Bill Kristol-associated networks.

“But this wolf comes as a wolf”

The quote “but this wolf comes as a wolf” is best known in politics from the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s dissent in Morrison v. Olson, a case in which the Court upheld the creation of the “independent counsel” officer in the Justice Department unaccountable to the President. Scalia’s point was that the constitutional vandalism the independent counsel law committed, and the Court was upholding, was obvious.

The vandalism to conservatism the Hewlett Foundation commits comes as a wolf. Allegiance to the progressive platform makes one a candidate for what Hewlett laughably calls “dialogue across difference.” It’s not difference from progressivism. It’s division within the political movement that has made America most distinct from Canada, the United Kingdom, and the European Union, where the only questions in politics (until the recent rise of populism) have been how quickly to reach Net Zero, how fervently to disarm while opening the borders, and how strictly to regulate speech, religious expression, and economic life.

America is different. Keeping her different means the right-center needs to reject the Hewlett Foundation’s agenda.

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/the-hewlett-foundations-mission-to-divide-and-rule-the-right/