Liberal billionaire gave at least $33 million in one year to groups that emboldened activists
By Kelly Riddell -
The Washington Times
There’s a solitary man at the financial center of the
Ferguson protest movement. No, it’s not victim
Michael Brown or Officer Darren Wilson. It’s not even the Rev. Al Sharpton, despite his ubiquitous campaign on TV and the streets.
Rather, it’s liberal billionaire
George Soros,
who has built a business empire that dominates across the ocean in
Europe while forging a political machine powered by nonprofit
foundations that impacts American politics and policy, not unlike what
he did with MoveOn.org.
Mr. Soros spurred the
Ferguson
protest movement through years of funding and mobilizing groups across
the U.S., according to interviews with key players and financial records
reviewed by The Washington Times.
In all,
Mr. Soros
gave at least $33 million in one year to support already-established
groups that emboldened the grass-roots, on-the-ground activists in
Ferguson, according to the most recent tax filings of his nonprofit
Open Society Foundations.
The financial tether from
Mr. Soros
to the activist groups gave rise to a combustible protest movement that
transformed a one-day criminal event in Missouri into a 24-hour-a-day
national cause celebre.
“Our DNA includes a belief that having people participate in government is indispensable to living in a more just,
inclusive, democratic society,” said Kenneth Zimmerman, director of
Mr. Soros‘
Open Society
Foundations’ U.S. programs, in an interview with The Washington Times.
“Helping groups combine policy, research [and] data collection with
community organizing feels very much the way our society becomes more
accountable.”
No strings attached
Mr. Zimmerman said OSF has
been giving to these types of groups since its inception in the early
‘90s, and that, although groups involved in the protests have been
recipients of
Mr. Soros‘ grants, they were in no way directed to protest at the behest of
Open Society.
“The incidents, whether in Staten Island, Cleveland or
Ferguson,
were spontaneous protests — we don’t have the ability to control or
dictate what others say or choose to say,” Mr. Zimmerman said.
“But
these circumstances focused people’s attention — and it became
increasingly evident to the social justice groups involved that what a
particular incident like
Ferguson represents is a lack of accountability and a lack of democratic participation.”
Soros-sponsored organizations helped mobilize protests in
Ferguson, building grass-roots coalitions on the ground backed by a nationwide online and social media campaign.
Other
Soros-funded
groups made it their job to remotely monitor and exploit anything
related to the incident that they could portray as a conservative
misstep, and to develop academic research and editorials to disseminate
to the news media to keep the story alive.
The plethora of organizations involved not only shared
Mr. Soros‘
funding, but they also fed off each other, using content and buzzwords
developed by one organization on another’s website, referencing each
other’s news columns and by creating a social media echo chamber of
Facebook “likes” and Twitter hashtags that dominated the mainstream
media and personal online newsfeeds.
Buses of activists from the
Samuel Dewitt Proctor Conference in Chicago; from the Drug Policy
Alliance, Make the Road New York and Equal Justice USA from New York;
from Sojourners, the Advancement Project and Center for Community Change
in Washington; and networks from the Gamaliel Foundation — all funded
in part by
Mr. Soros — descended on
Ferguson starting in August and later organized protests and gatherings in the city until late last month.
Broaden issue focus
All
were aimed at keeping the media’s attention on the city and to widen
the scope of the incident to focus on interrelated causes — not just the
overpolicing and racial discrimination narratives that were highlighted
by the news media in August.
“I went to
Ferguson
in a quest to be in solidarity and stand with the young organizers and
affirm their leadership,” said Kassandra Frederique, policy manager at
the Drug Policy Alliance, which was founded by
Mr. Soros, and which receives $4 million annually from his foundation. She traveled to
Ferguson in October.
“We
recognized this movement is similar to the work we’re doing at DPA,”
said Ms. Frederique.
“The war on drugs has always been to
operationalize, institutionalize and criminalize people of color.
Protecting personal sovereignty is a cornerstone of the work we do and
what this movement is all about.”
Ms. Frederique works with Opal
Tometi, co-creator of #BlackLivesMatter — a hashtag that was developed
after the killing of Trayvon Martin in Florida — and helped promote it
on DPA’s news feeds. Ms. Tometi runs the Black Alliance for Just
Immigration, a group to which
Mr. Soros gave $100,000 in 2011, according to the most recent of his foundation’s tax filings.
“I
think #BlackLivesMatter’s success is because of organizing. This was
created after Trayvon Martin, and there has been sustained organizing
and conversations about police violence since then,” said Ms.
Frederique. “Its explosion into the mainstream recently is because it
connects all the dots at a time when everyone was lost for words. ‘Black
Lives Matter’ is liberating, unapologetic and leaves no room for
confusion.”
#BlackLivesMatter
With the backing of national civil rights organizations and
Mr. Soros‘
funding, “Black Lives Matter” grew from a hashtag into a social media
phenomenon, including a #BlackLivesMatter bus tour and march in
September.
“More than 500 of us have traveled from Boston,
Chicago, Columbus, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, Nashville, Portland,
Tucson, Washington, D.C., Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and other
cities to support the people of
Ferguson and help turn a local moment into a national movement,” wrote Akiba Solomon, a journalist at Colorlines, describing the event.
Colorlines
is an online news site that focuses on race issues and is published by
Race Forward, a group that received $200,000 from
Mr. Soros’s foundation in 2011. Colorlines has published tirelessly on the activities in
Ferguson and heavily promoted the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag and activities.
At
the end of the #BlackLivesMatter march, organizers met with civil
rights groups like the Organization for Black Struggle and Missourians
Organizing for Reform and Empowerment to strategize their operations
moving forward, Ms. Solomon wrote. OBS and MORE are also funded by
Mr. Soros.
Mr. Soros gave $5.4 million to
Ferguson and Staten Island grass-roots efforts last year to help “further police reform, accountability and public transparency,” the
Open Society Foundations said in a blog post in December. About half of those funds were earmarked to
Ferguson, with the money primarily going to OBS and MORE, the foundation said.
OBS
and MORE, along with the Dream Defenders, established the “Hands Up
Coalition” — another
so-called “grass-roots” organization in Missouri,
whose name was based on now-known-to-be-false claims that
Brown
had his hands up before being shot. The Defenders were built to rally
support and awareness for the Trayvon Martin case and were funded by the
Tides Foundation, another recipient of
Soros cash.
Hands
Up Coalition has made it its mission to recruit and organize youth
nationwide to start local events in their communities — trying to take
Ferguson nationwide.
Years and weekends of ‘resistance’
Hands
Up Coalition has dubbed 2015 as “The Year of Resistance,” and its
outreach program strongly resembles how President Obama’s political
action committee — Organizing for Action — rallies youth for its causes,
complete with a similarly designed Web page and call to action.
Mr. Soros,
who made his fortune betting against the British pound during the
currency crisis in the early ‘90s, is a well-known supporter of
progressive-liberal causes and is a political donor to Mr. Obama’s
campaigns. He committed $1 million to Mr. Obama’s super PAC in 2012.
Mr. Soros‘
two largest foundations manage almost $3 billion in assets per year,
according to their most recent respective tax returns. The Foundation to
Promote
Open Society managed $2.2 billion in assets in 2011, and his Open Society Institute managed $685.9 million in 2012.
In
comparison, David and Charles Koch, the billionaire brothers whom
liberals often call a threat to democracy — and worse — for their
conservative influence, had $308 million tied up in their foundation and
institute in 2011.
One of the organizations that
Mr. Soros funds, and which fueled the demonstrations in
Ferguson,
is the Gamaliel Foundation, a network of grass-roots, interreligious
and interracial organizations. Mr. Obama started his career as a
community organizer at a Gamaliel affiliate in Chicago.
The Rev.
Traci Blackmon of Christ the King United Church of Christ in Florissant,
Missouri, which is part of the Gamaliel network, said in one of the
group’s webinars that clergy involved with Gamaliel must be “protectors
of the narrative” of what happened in
Ferguson.
The
Gamaliel affiliate in St. Louis — Metropolitan Congregations United —
organized the “Weekend of Resistance” in October, in which clergy
members from around the nation were called to come to
Ferguson to protest.
Clergy involvement
Representatives
of Sojourners, a national evangelical Christian organization committed
“to faith in action for social justice,” attended the weekend. The group
received $150,000 from
Mr. Soros in 2011.
Clergy
representatives from the Samuel Dewitt Proctor Conference, where the
Rev. Jeremiah Wright serves as a trustee, also showed up. Mr. Wright was
Mr. Obama’s pastor in Chicago before some of his racially charged
sermons, including the phrase “God damn America,” forced Mr. Obama to
distance himself. SDPC received $250,000 from
Mr. Soros in 2011.
During
Gamaliel’s weekend protest event, Sunday was deemed “Hands Up Sabbath,”
where clergy were asked to speak out about racial issues, using packets
and talking points prepared for them by another religion-based
community organizing group, PICO.
PICO is also supported by the
Open Society Foundations, according to its website.
The
weekend concluded Monday, when clergy members were asked to lead in
acts of civil disobedience, prompting many of them to go to jail in the
hopes of gaining media attention.
It worked, as imagery of clergy
members down on their hands and knees in front of police dominated the
mainstream news cycle that day — two months after
Brown’s shooting.
“After
the initial shooting, we were all hit in the face with how blatant
racism really is,” said the Rev. Susan Sneed, a Gamaliel organizer who
helped stage the October weekend event. “We began quickly hearing from
our other affiliates offering support.”
At the end of August, Gamaliel had a large organizational meeting to discuss its
Ferguson strategy, Ms. Sneed said.
It
had its affiliates in New York and California handling the St. Louis
Twitter feed and Facebook page, helped in correcting any inaccurate
stories in the press and promoted their events, she said.
“When we
started marching down the street, saying, ‘hands up, don’t shoot,’
those images reached all over the world,” said Ms. Sneed, referring to
the moment she realized
Ferguson
was going to become a movement. “The Twitter images, Facebook posts of
burning buildings — it’s everywhere, and the imagery is powerful. And
the youth — the youth is so engaged. They’ve found a voice in
Ferguson.”
National activists descend
Larry Fellows III, 29, a Missouri native, did find his voice in the chaos of
Ferguson with the help of outside assistance backed by
Mr. Soros.
Mr. Fellows is co-founder of the Millennial Activists United, a key source of video and stories developed in
Ferguson by youth activists used to inspire other groups nationally.
Mr. Fellows explained how he started his organization in an interview with the American Civil Liberties Union (another
Soros-backed entity that sent national representatives to Missouri) in November.
“Initially,
it would just be that we would show up for protests, and the next day
we’d clean up the streets. A lot of the same people were out at the
protests and going out to lunch and talking about what was happening.
That became a cycle until a lot of us figured out we needed to have a
strategy,” Mr. Fellows explained to the ACLU, which posted the interview
in its blog.
“Then a lot of organizers from across the country
started to come in to help us do the planning and do the strategizing.
That helped us start doing it on our own and planning out actions and
what our narratives were going to be,” he said.
MAU has listed on
its website that it has partnered with Gamaliel network churches.
They’ve also received training on civil disobedience from the
Advancement Project — which was given a $500,000 grant from
Mr. Soros
in 2013 “to build a fair and just, multi-racial democracy in America
through litigation, community organizing support, public policy reform,
and strategic communications,” according to the Foundation’s website.
The Advancement Project, based in Washington, also arranged the meeting between community organizers in
Ferguson and Mr. Obama last month to brief him on the situation in
Ferguson and to set up a task force that examines trust between police and minority communities.
In addition, the Advancement Project has also dedicated some of its staff to lead organizations in
Ferguson,
like the Don’t Shoot Coalition, another grass-roots group that preaches
the same message, links to the same Facebook posts and “likes” the same
articles as DPA, ACLU, Hands Up Coalition, OBS, MORE and others.
