I can imagine the disingenuous narrative. I was trying to see or understand if there was a realistic or genuine one.

Honestly, I don't even think it goes that far and looking any deeper is probably giving them way too much credit. Their only goal is to make their opponents look bad and/or fan the flames of a conspiracy theory their base is rabid about (not that those two things are mutually exclusive, mind you).

Either way, it's manufactured outrage: nothing more, nothing less. They have no policies (or principles, shame, or integrity for that matter, but I digress) so they engage in this pointless garbage to keep their base afraid and angry.

Some of them are just plain stupid, yes, but the rest know exactly what they're doing.

Also I could be wrong but a $600K contribution to a research lab doesn’t sound like it would go very far.

But that's $600K in Freedom Dollars™, so after conversion, it's like 200 billion, trillion dollars /s.