The libertarian organization couldn’t survive the populist shift in the Republican Party.
Luke Mullins at Politico:
FreedomWorks, the once-swaggering conservative organization that helped turn tea party protesters into a national political force, is shutting down, according to its president, a casualty of the ideological split in a Republican Party dominated by former President Donald Trump.
“We’re dissolved,” said the group’s president, Adam Brandon. “It’s effective immediately.” FreedomWorks’ board of directors voted unanimously on Tuesday to dissolve the organization, Brandon said. Wednesday will be the last workday for the group’s roughly 25 employees, though staffers will continue to receive paychecks and health care benefits for the next few months. The development brings to a close a period of turmoil for the organization. FreedomWorks laid off 40 percent of its staff in March of 2023, and as a result of a drop in fundraising, its total revenue has declined by roughly half, to about $8 million, since 2022, Brandon said. In an exclusive interview with POLITICO Magazine, Brandon said the decision to shut down was driven by the ideological upheaval of the Trump era.
After Trump took control of the conservative movement, Brandon said, a “huge gap” opened up between the libertarian principles of FreedomWorks leadership and the MAGA-style populism of its members. FreedomWorks leaders, for example, still believed in free trade, small government and a robust merit-based immigration system. Increasingly, however, those positions clashed with a Trump-aligned membership who called for tariffs on imported goods and a wall to keep immigrants out but were willing, in Brandon’s view, to remain silent as Trump’s administration added $8 trillion to the national debt. “A lot of our base aged, and so the new activists that have come in [with] Trump, they tend to be much more populist,” Brandon said. “So you look at the base and that just kind of shifted.” This same split was creating headaches in other parts of the organization as well. “Our staff became divided into MAGA and Never Trump factions,” Brandon said in an internal document reviewed by POLITICO Magazine. It also impacted fundraising. [...]
In an interview with POLITICO Magazine last September, an ex-FreedomWorks employee claimed that the organization under Brandon’s leadership had turned its back on its values while Trump was in office; during this period, for example, the organization issued tweets spreading election conspiracies and deflecting criticism of the Florida legislation that came to be known as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill. “He let a bunch of right-wing nutjobs turn FreedomWorks into a MAGA mouthpiece,” the former FreedomWorks staffer said.
Brandon said he “did my best to balance the two competing ideologies.” In the midst of this turmoil, FreedomWorks launched an effort last fall to rebrand itself as a more centrist organization, one that could target the independent voters that its leaders believe would be more receptive to libertarian ideals. But the effort failed to get traction, Brandon said, largely because the independent voters viewed FreedomWorks as a right-wing group. As a result, Brandon and the board began discussing the possibility of shutting down FreedomWorks altogether. “This has been my life for so long and to turn the lights off, it’s a real emotional thing,” said Brandon, who joined FreedomWorks in 2005 and has been president for about a decade. “The problem is that it’s just not the best vehicle for our [libertarian] principles and values set.” FreedomWorks, which was founded in 1984, grew out of the Koch-funded group Citizens for Sound Economy. FreedomWorks split apart from the Koch political network in 2004.
Right-wing libertarian-flavored organization FreedomWorks closes it doors. The organization rose to stardom during the Tea Party era and faded as Trumpism took over the party.
