Soros' Open Society Foundations Announce $50 Million Push Just in Time for the 2024 Election
CORRECTION, Feb. 16, 2024: George Soros is founder of the Open Society Foundations. An earlier title for this article had a different name for the organization.
If you say that billionaire George Soros and his empire is trying to shape American politics by injecting scads of money into it, you’re portrayed as some kind of hyperventilating, hyper-fixated conspiracy theorist who sees shadowy intent behind everything the Hungarian-born financier and his Open Society Foundations does.
Unless, of course, you’re a representative of the Open Society Foundations who notes that Soros’ empire is injecting scads of money into American politics — while insisting it’s “nonpartisan.” Then, it’s just news.
According to an Associated Press article published Tuesday, the Open Society Foundations — now run by George’s son Alex Soros — says “it will commit $50 million to increase civic engagement among women and young people over the next three years as part of its strategy to support democracy in the U.S.,” the wire service reported.
“In the early stages of the Trump administration, philanthropic support for organizations seeking to protect and defend progressive policy wins and to counter democratic suppression efforts surged,” Alex Soros said in a statement.
“But groups dedicated to the civic engagement of women and young people did not see similar increases in levels of support.”
According to the AP, Soros’ message was that “advocacy from women and younger generations is essential to stopping the advancement of authoritarianism.”
But, apparently with a straight face — I can’t see behind her laptop, after all — the AP’s Thalia Beaty actually typed this out: “The new funding is explicitly not timed to influence the 2024 presidential election, said Laleh Ispahani, the executive director of Open Society-U.S., emphasizing that the funding is nonpartisan.”
“We want them at the forefront of informing a new agenda for any administration,” Ispahani said.
“We want them to be there if there is a resistance again. They are important no matter what.”
It’s absolutely “nonpartisan.” They’re going to provide $50 million to groups ranging from leftist to far-leftist to are-you-kidding-me-I-can’t-believe-you-could-go-this-far-left-leftist.
Again, I’m not sure if Beaty has a wicked sense of humor or is the biggest naïf working for straight news on the AP or any wire service, because after echoing Ispahani’s contention that the money wasn’t intended to influence the 2024 presidential election and that it was being disbursed in a totally nonpartisan fashion — then including her “resistance” quote which should have been dispositive of the fact that was a farcical lie of astronomical proportions — she listed some of the groups that will benefit from this largess.
“Grantees include Planned Parenthood, the National Women’s Law Center, the Alliance for Youth Action, Run for Something, and Power Rising, a member of the Black Women’s Leadership Collective, which led a campaign to support the nomination of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson to the U.S. Supreme Court last year,” the piece read.
Really, she could have just stopped at “Planned Parenthood,” and we would have all gotten the idea. It probably didn’t hurt either that Beaty’s piece noted several paragraphs prior that OSF’s “wide range of issues” they seek to meddle in include “reproductive justice, climate change, voting and gun safety.”
She also cited Shawnda Chapman, who is described as the “director of innovative grantmaking and research for the Ms. Foundation for Women.” Research by Chapman’s group “advocating for more financial support for women and gender nonconforming people of color leading nonprofits on the frontlines of social justices issues” was asserted as proof of how urgently this $50 million injection into the American political system — but in a way that was totally nonpartisan, everyone! — was needed.
“At this moment, when women and women’s bodies and gender nonconforming folks are being attacked on a daily basis, are they willing to move 10 percent to us?” said Teresa Younger, the president and CEO of the Ms. Foundation, speaking of her organization and others like it.
“Are the bodies of black and brown women and gender nonconforming folks valuable enough for them to continue to feel uncomfortable about the dollars that are sitting in their endowments and move those dollars to the field?”
I quote so heavily from this article because it’s half-wire service report, half-Babylon Bee piece. I was reading one of P.G. Wodehouse’s “Jeeves and Wooster” novels in bed this morning, along with some old “Calvin and Hobbes” strips, and no piece of media I’ve consumed today has induced involuntary snickering on my part as much as Beaty’s piece did. Sadly, I don’t believe that was her intent.
And by the way, all this talk about “nonpartisan” funding on the Soros’ part includes prior commitments “like $220 million for black-led organizations working for racial justice, $100 million to Latino organizations to support civic engagement and immigrants’ rights and $52.6 million for organizations that work in Indigenous and Asian communities,” as Beaty puts it.
This also ignores the Soros’ nakedly partisan history of dumping money onto progressive causes in order to affect radical change, most notably in attempting an overhaul of the U.S. criminal justice system by electing prosecutors who don’t believe it’s their job to, um, prosecute people not named Donald Trump.
Somewhat mercifully, a few of these prosecutors have been relieved of their jobs, either by voters — witness Chesa Boudin, the former district attorney who was so ineffective in his post that the voters of San Francisco got fed up with his progressivism and recalled him — or by governors sick of seeing jurisdictions go to pot under these purportedly enlightened folk.
However, it’s a mockery of real journalism to say that this money is being spent in a “nonpartisan” fashion — or that the OSF and Soros have ever been nonpartisan players on the American political scene, or that they’re not trying to influence the outcome of the 2024 election. Even a Brezhnev-era editor for Pravda might find these prevarications a bit much to stomach. But Thalia Beaty and her gatekeepers at the AP either 1) really think their readers are that dim or 2) are laughing their posteriors off by passing along the obvious lies of Soros and the OSF and reporting them as straight news.
I hope it’s the second. I fear it’s the first.
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