Soros Group Cash Dump Will Fund 'Black-Led Racial Justice Groups for Years to Come'
George Soros’ Open Society Foundations is placing a long-term bet on left-wing “Black-led racial justice groups for years to come.”
That’s according to a New York Times report on Monday that could shed a whole new light on the direction of the current upheavals going on across the country.
All right, you’re probably saying. That’s unsurprising. Of course, the political arm of the Soros empire was going to get involved in this somehow. What’s the big deal?
The big deal is that the long-term bet is worth almost a quarter of a billion dollars.
“The initiative, which comes amid national protests for racial equality and calls for police reform ignited by the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, will immediately reshape the landscape of Black political and civil rights organizations, and signals the extent to which race and identity have become the explicit focal point of American politics in recent years, with no sign of receding,” Astead W. Herndon wrote in The Times, reporting the foundation’s announcement. “Mr. Soros, who has at times faced smears and anti-Semitism over his role as a liberal megadonor, is also positioning his foundation near the forefront of the protest movement.”
Oh lordy, here we go.
First, anyone who considers Soros’ Jewish background a mark against him, please stand up so I can figure out the small coterie of basement-dwellers who are wasting carbon by doing this so we can disregard them for the rest of their natural lives.
If the Open Society Foundations wants to spend money ensuring any prominent “conservative” figure who uses anti-Semitic rhetoric against Soros never finds gainful employment again, I’d gladly offer a matching donation. Given Mr. Herndon doesn’t mention a single one and doesn’t particularly interested in ferreting them out, I don’t think I’ll be entering my PayPal login details any time soon.
Anyhow: “Of the $220 million, the foundation will invest $150 million in five-year grants for selected groups, including progressive and emerging organizations like the Black Voters Matter Fund and Repairers of the Breach, a group founded by the Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II of the Poor People’s Campaign. The money will also support more established Black civil rights organizations like the Equal Justice Initiative, which was founded by the civil rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson and depicted in the 2019 movie ‘Just Mercy,’” Herndon reported.
The Black Voters Matter Fund, as part of its mission, “advocate[s] for policies to expand voting rights/access, including expanded early voting, resisting voter ID, re-entry restoration of rights and strengthening the Voting Rights Act.” Most of these are boilerplate progressivism, if vague; “strengthening the Voting Rights Act,” for instance, could be parsed as a shot at Shelby County v. Holder, the 2013 Supreme Court decision that stated that certain jurisdictions no longer needed advance clearance to make changes to voting procedures.
The clearance provisions for some areas of the country had been added to the Voting Rights Act back during the charming era when people of color were asked to name the number of bubbles in a bar of soap as part of Dixie’s disenfranchising literacy tests. In the Shelby case, the Supreme Court wisely decided those days were long gone. To some — like, one assumes, the Black Voters Matter Fund — they aren’t.
Led by the Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, Repairers of the Breach is a kind-of, sort-of religious organization. On its website, it states, “We challenge the position that the preeminent moral issues are prayer in public schools, abortion, and property rights.”
“Instead, we declare that the moral public concerns of our faith traditions are how our society treats the poor, women, LGBTQ people, children, workers, immigrants, communities of color, and the sick — the people whom Jesus calls ‘the least of these.’”
There are some interesting, paternalist assumptions here — women, LGBTQ people, immigrants, communities of color and other groups might take issue with being called “the least of these brothers and sisters of mine,” as per Matthew 25 — but the obvious takeaway from the entirety of the page is that this the kind of organization that appeals to liberals who skimmed the Bible and came away with the words “judge not” and something about rich people, camels and the eye of a needle.
These are the revisionist Christian organizations liberals like — the ones that use Christian language and parables to marginalize and demonize Christians who actually take the rest of the gospel seriously. But they deserve to be marginalized, right?
There’s another $70 million, part of which will go toward the usual constellation of internships, training and civic engagement. However, the rest, according to The Times, will be spent on “local grants supporting changes to policing and criminal justice.”
This, like much of the Open Society Foundations‘ messaging, is caked in euphemism. When that money is spent to change “policing and criminal justice,” rest assured it won’t be as uncontroversial as that.
Patrick Gaspard, president of the Open Society Foundations, told The Times that the chaos that’s resulted in the wake of the death of George Floyd in police custody — amplified by the chaos that resulted from the wake of the coronavirus lockdowns, makes this “the moment we’ve been investing in for the last 25 years.”
“There is this call for justice in Black and brown communities, an explosion of not just sympathy but solidarity across the board,” Gaspard told the newspaper. “So it’s time to double down. And we understood we can place a bet on these activists — Black and white — who see this as a moment of not just incrementalism, but whole-scale reform.”
“The demands being made now will not be met overnight, and we know the gaze of media and elected officials will turn in other directions,” he added. “But we need these moments to be sustained. If we’re going to say ‘Black lives matter,’ we need to say ‘Black organizations and structures matter.’”
In fairness, conservatives should have expected it. Leftists are famous for never letting a good crisis go to waste, after all.
However, the political cupidity with which the Soros organization has used division in America in order to push its agenda is, well, striking. With nearly a quarter-billion dollars being given away by the Open Society Foundations, you might think it would be spent on helping the society that’s been ravaged by a pandemic and then, in certain cases, riots.
What the organization is doing instead is to use that money and those horrors to push for its agenda. Not only that, you get the feeling that if there was more unrest of the type we’ve seen over the past few months, the Soros crowd wouldn’t particularly mind that, either.
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