RUTHFULLY YOURS

The “People’s Climate March” in Washington, D.C. featured tens of thousands of demonstrators, drawn to another opportunity to show their opposition to President Trump.

There were no less than 55 groups who helped organize the march. According to the Media Research Center, 18 of those groups received $36 million from George Soros over the last decade, proving once again the billionaire Democratic donor’s influence on liberal activists.

Washington Times:

The People’s Climate March scheduled for Saturday has a powerful billionaire behind it: Democratic Party donor George Soros.

Mr. Soros, who heads the Open Society Foundations, contributed over $36 million between 2000 and 2014 to 18 of the 55 organizations on the march’s steering committee, according to an analysis released Friday by the conservative Media Research Center.

Six of the groups received during that time more than $1 million each: the Center for Community Change, the NAACP, the Natural Resources Defense Council, People’s Action, Public Citizen and the Union of Concerned Scientists.

The People’s Climate March, which comes a week after another climate-themed anti-Trump event, the March for Science, is scheduled to run along Pennsylvania Avenue and end by surrounding the White House in order to “drown out all of the climate-denying nonsense that has been coming out of this Administration.”

While some of its partners are climate-change organizations like NextGen Climate, founded by top Democratic donor Tom Steyer, the march is also heavily backed by labor unions and social-justice groups such as Color of Change, which is also backed by Mr. Soros.

Only three of the six organizations on the steering committee — NRDC, Public Citizen and UCS — “actually have anything climate-related in their individual missions,” the MRC reported.

“The presence of many non-climate related organizations leading the march indicated that this climate march (just like the March for Science and the Women’s March) is not about a single issue, but about attacking the new administration,” MRC’s Aly Nielsen said.

She pointed to the march’s “usual checklist of liberal policy priorities,” such as labor-union rights, a minimum-wage increase, and a halt to “attacks on immigrants.”

People’s Climate March organizers have made no secret of their antipathy for President Trump, calling for “climate, jobs and justice” as an alternative to “Trump’s disastrous agenda.”

In the most recent Gallup poll, just 4% of Americans identified environmental problems as the “Most Important” issue facing the country. While the turnout for the march was impressive, it is a legitimate question whether this sort of astroturfing by liberal donors has any effect on the ordinary voter.

The marchers are largely people who never met an EPA regulation they didn’t think needed defending. This is especially true of climate change regulations that have needlessly cost thousands of jobs and made energy more expensive. The ignorance about the EPA demonstrated by the marchers was appalling. The bureaucrats and managers are not “protecting” anything. They have adopted bullying tactics while seeking to expand the agency’s reach into the lives of American citizens. There is little sanity in the EPA’s actions over the last 8 years and bringing back a reasonable approach to protecting our environment is long overdue.

Soros sees climate change as an opprotunity for increasing his influence and power internationally. That’s why he funds so many of these groups. They are ignorantly playing into his hands as he and a very small cadre of billionaires gin up support for their agenda by artificially creating what appears to be a groundswell of grassroots politics.

But their efforts rarely, if ever, pay off at the polls. Far left liberal groups represented in the March yesterday are, after all, far left liberal groups with a radical agenda that is mostly rejected by ordinary Americans. In that sense, Soros is wasting his time and money. But it won’t discourage him from continuing his assault on reason and commonsense environmental policies.