“Community Empowerment” is a Smokescreen for a Naked Power Grab

For most Americans, the assumption is that private charities are set up to serve the public good.  Increasingly, a large group of foundations and wealthy individuals have decided to make it their objective to use charitable organizations to engage in thinly-veiled electoral power politics, using what used to be merely “get out the vote” projects and turning them into “community empowerment” undertakings.

The Ford Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Soros-controlled Open Society Institute and a range of others are working together to make this happen.

These “community empowerment” undertakings are, more often than not, defined by target populations defined by race and class. And even more frequently defined by immigration status. It involves using various funding vehicles to create a huge array of small activist “front group” operations to tackle all sorts of “equality” issues. 

Of course, mass immigration helps create income inequality.  And income inequality fuels the faux outrage that powers the politics of the left. Therefore, immigration-driven income inequality is being advanced now by the left – and boy is it ever.  It forms the basis of their demands for massive redistribution and a restructuring of society.

Looking at major grants of the Ford, the Open Society Institute and the others, it’s clear to see that the “social justice” agenda is really about trying to reorganize society around demographic transformation and political empowerment – mostly clearly targeted at the Democrats. Getting a mass amnesty for over 10 million illegal aliens is vital to that agenda. Moving them into the voting booth is the end goal, and of course, on the left the ends always justify the means.

In her new book, Open Borders, Inc., (Regnery), Michelle Malkin ambitiously lays out how this mentality has now pervaded all of America’s elite institutions, including a huge swath of our nation’s major foundations.  The obsession with delegitimizing the nation-state and its right to secure borders – and especially its right to apprehend illegal aliens in the interior – has become a matter of quasi-religious doctrine. 

In this manner, the existence of immigration restrictions becomes intolerable; our laws now take on the character of a “white hegemonistic power structure,” and “colonization,” and the sooner this can be altered or eliminated the better. 

Hundreds of millions of dollars in grants yearly are now provided to “community organizing” and the provision of legal services for illegal aliens. The size of that population is now affecting not only our political system, but our philanthropy and the public square.  It provides unending “voiceless people” for social change advocates to manipulate in service of a relentless ideology. 

These large foundations and related institutions may find that they are sowing the wind, and will soon reap the whirlwind.  They are creating activist entitles that use bullying, demonization, harassment and, sometimes, violent protest to attack and demonize their opponents.  These activists do not use language to achieve consensus in the American political tradition, they use it to attack and malign in an effort to intimidate and drive those with differing views into the shadows.

But it’s never that simple. Once this force is unleashed, it will be hard to control. The same large foundations and the institutions they support may suddenly find that they themselves become the victims of the attacks, as these activist groups attack all forms of wealth and privilege regardless of politics.

Recently, the Whitney Museum came under fire for having on its board of directors Warren Kanders, someone who manufactures law enforcement equipment.  Radical foundation-funded activists called it “tainted money” and demanded “decolonization,” a strategy sure to chill funding for major cultural institutions in America.  Isolated by the very creations of same foundations, Kanders was forced to resign from the Whitney board.  More will follow.

In advancing a naked “power agenda,” as they call it, these foundations are pushing a dangerous narrative that engenders a mentality that a flawed system is responsible for all people’s problems or society’s inherent inequalities in outcomes. 

Because pushing to abolish all immigration controls is an easy first project for the social justice warriors, the creators of this monster are being lulled into a sense of complacency.  They may soon find the talons of an uncontrollable political force turned back on them – indeed as the Democratic Party is beginning to learn right about now in the 2020 primary process.