[Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”]
The Soros clan, along with other family foundations of the liberal elite, Knight, MacArthur, Ford, Omidyar, and the Rockefellers, have announced that they’re teaming up to fight investigations by the Justice Department.
While Alex Soros, George’s son, bragged that he would not give in, “over my dead body”, the presidents of the MacArthur and McKnight Foundations have declared that everyone needs to dust off their “crisis plans” and put their “legal teams on speed dial” ahead of a crackdown.
What are they afraid of?
The Unite in Advance coalition was formed so quickly by the big liberal grantmaking groups funding radicalism to form a ‘united front’ that it didn’t even have the time to build a site.
While Unite in Advance’s joint letter mentions the Charlie Kirk assassination and subsequent investigations of Antifa and other radical groups, an initial version of this ‘unity’ push had come out back in April with over 700 leftist groups, led by the MacArthur Foundation and, despite the claims of ‘non-violence’ included signatories like the Ben & Jerry’s Foundation, where a key figure supported Hezbollah, the Soros network, which has provided money to extremist and terrorist front groups, and BLM funders like the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.
The latest incarnation of what the radical leftist funders are billing as the ‘Freedom to Give’ complains that they are being portrayed as “contributing to those acts of violence” and accuses unnamed figures, seemingly conservatives and the Trump administration, of plotting to “silence speech, criminalize opposing viewpoints, and misrepresent and limit charitable giving.”
These same titans of the nonprofit sector had no objections when the Obama and Biden administrations used the IRS to go after conservative groups, including the David Horowitz Freedom Center, which faced a 6-year IRS investigation incited by the media, and debanking by the Southern Poverty Law Center, funded by some of these same groups.
After decades of trying to censor, ‘debank’ and ban conservative groups, the funders of these efforts are suddenly hailing a “freedom to give” when the investigation risks turning their way.
It’s nice that the Knight Foundation, a major SPLC donor, and which also provided millions to fund ‘disinformation’ research which was used to deplatform and silence opposing groups, has suddenly come around to believing in the value of free speech. But only when it’s their speech.
But speech, on either side, isn’t a crime. Funding domestic terrorism however is.
The frantic calls for unity, the 700+ signatories of the April letter and the 200 plus and counting foundations that have signed on to the ‘Unite in Advance’ letter are rightly worried about their legal exposure to funding foreign and domestic terrorist groups, rioters and others engaged in criminal activities that, as Freedom Center Investigates has shown over the years, violates their nonprofit status.
Take the Climate Emergency Fund, a 501(c)(3), funding some of the environmental vandalism in America and around the world, which received a founding grant from the Aileen Getty Foundation. The Getty Foundation bragged about “Greta Thunberg and disruptive groups like Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion” which vandalized art masterpieces around the world.
Then there was the financial backing for the BLM movement from big nonprofit players like the Ford Foundation and W.K. Kellogg. And there’s the Soros backing for groups involved in the campus pro-Hamas riots and the more recent anti-ICE riots. Even the legal ‘non-violent’ No Kings protests can fall afoul of the tax-exempt nonprofit status of an organization depending on how they are being conducted.
Free speech is sacrosanct, but that doesn’t cover burning down neighborhoods, assaulting police officers, attacking Jewish students on campus or vandalizing art museums. Nor, for that matter, does it cover blocking roadways, shutting down Congress and other illegal activities that have been billed as ‘civil disobedience’ but that serve as grounds for loss of tax-exempt status.
The big lefty foundations assumed that they could not and would not be held accountable. Now they’re panicking because the Trump administration is moving to finally impose accountability.
The billionaire funders of leftist hate and violence have taken to pretending that they’re “charitable giving organizations” that contribute to “communities”, helping “new parents and elders, veterans and school children, hospitals and libraries.”
The reality is that the vast majority of their ‘giving’ is political.
You don’t go to George Soros if you’re hungry. The Open Society Foundations describe giving grants to “movements, coalitions, networks, collectives and even informal groups”.
Not soup kitchens.
The MacArthur Foundation lists categories such as ‘climate solutions’ and ‘criminal justice’. The first signatory to the Unite in Advance letter is the Action for Transformation Fund which announced that it’s “moving resources to trans-led organizing”.
Other signatories include the Foundation for Systemic Change that works to “highlight ongoing economic, political, social, racial, ethnic, and environmental inequities”, the Fund for Nonviolence, which ironically helped unleash a crime wave, and iF, A Foundation for Radical Possibility, which focuses on ‘systemic racism’.
None of this is charity, it’s leftist political organizing, and the refusal by the signatories to come out and say so, or to hide behind smaller local nonprofits, is dishonest and shameful.
If these big foundations had been funding soup kitchens, hospitals and libraries, rather than political organizing and radical violence, they wouldn’t need to preemptively form a ‘Unite in Advance’ front. And the heads of the MacArthur and McKnight foundations wouldn’t be urging foundations to “stand in solidarity”, organizing for mutual defense against “threats”.
They’re not afraid of being busted for feeding the poor, but for feeding violence and hate.
Now the groups that tried to shut down their political opponents are rallying to the Constitution and the First Amendment, things they never believed in and had worked to destroy, but suddenly rediscovered just in time to become born-again patriots and lovers of freedom.
But no one is buying it.
When these leftist groups had the chance, they tried to eliminate the political opposition. Now they’re terrified of having the actual laws, not imaginary laws about ‘disinformation’, but actual tax code regulations and domestic terrorism laws, being enforced against their activities.
And wouldn’t that be a shame.
