Blacks complain about Biden’s open borders, and Democrats’ foundations silence them By Monica Showalter
Mickey Kaus has spotted an interesting article that ran in Tablet magazine by Michael Lind, about the smothering effect monied leftist foundations are having … on the left.
Lind’s argument is this:
The centralized and authoritarian control of American progressivism by major foundations and the nonprofits that they fund, and the large media institutions, universities, corporations, and banks that disseminate the progressive party line, has made it impossible for there to be public intellectuals on the American center left. This is not to say that progressives are not intelligent and/or well-educated. It is merely to say that being a progressive public intellectual is no longer an option, in an era in which progressivism is anti-intellectual.
If you are an intelligent and thoughtful young American, you cannot be a progressive public intellectual today, any more than you can be a cavalry officer or a silent movie star. That’s because, in the third decade of the 21st century, intellectual life on the American center left is dead. Debate has been replaced by compulsory assent and ideas have been replaced by slogans that can be recited but not questioned: Black Lives Matter, Green Transition, Trans Women Are Women, 1619, Defund the Police. The space to the left-of-center that was once filled with magazines and organizations devoted to what Diana Trilling called the “life of significant contention” is now filled by the ritualized gobbledygook of foundation-funded, single-issue nonprofits like a pond choked by weeds. Having crowded out dissent and debate, the nonprofit industrial complex—Progressivism Inc.—taints the Democratic Party by association with its bizarre obsessions and contributes to Democratic electoral defeats, like the one that appears to be imminent this fall.
We all know that these monster leftist billionaire-bankrolled outfits conspire to create chaos, as well as ostracize anyone who thinks differently on the right.
But it turns out, they’ve made any exchange of ideas on the left into an absolute dead zone. There’s no thinking, no debate, no exchange of ideas that’s going on in the left. The left takes its talking points from the “program officers” of far-left money behemoths such as George Soros’s Open Society Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Omidyar Foundation, or a few Silicon Valley-ish others. That’s why all of a sudden, borders must be open, gay marriage is no longer open to debate, transgender indoctrination is de rigeur, and greenie nonsense and critical race theory permeate all fields of public policy no matter how tenuous the connection. Anyone, including anyone on the left, who might just prefer a more nuanced interpretation of the proclamation or be concerned about cost-benefit analysis, is dubbed an instant bigot, and all the foundation cash upon which the little magazine, or the university endowment, or the activist organization is dependent, is swiftly cut off. That keeps them in line and the “program officers” in firm control.
What a dumpster fire.
The item that sticks out in Lind’s piece is this:
At a conference sponsored by the Ford Foundation that I attended more than a decade ago, an African American community activist complained to me privately: “Immigration is hurting the people in the neighborhoods we work in. The employers prefer illegal immigrants to young Black workers. But if we say anything about it, Ford will cut off our money.”
So that’s been going on, under the radar — leftwing community organizers have been willingly silent or else silenced, whenever the issue of open borders comes up. They are the ones who are hurt the most as Joe Biden opens the border but have gone dead silent as the big foundation money that runs some of their community organizations holds the whip over them.
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That’s sellout behavior, for sure. But it’s also why Joe Biden feels free to open the border, and his Homeland Security Secretary feels free to simply ignore U.S. law, all with just a few measures to conceal the activity from the public. They know the left will say nothing. They’ve actually got it made. It certainly explains the brazen arrogance and detachment from reality that we are seeing in the failing Biden administration.
Yet on some level, these Bidenites also know that the bought-silence of the activists isn’t the sentiment on the leftist “street.” They do, after all, pay lip service to border enforcement, claim to be enforcing Title 42 (which they are doing only sporadically now), and employ night flights to sneak illegal aliens into cities across America without too much crowd visibility for the Fox News cameras. They don’t like minorities to see these things and draw their own conclusions about what it means for their prospects. Anyone who’s at the lowest rung of the economic ladder and trying to get a leg up is completely undercut by mass illegal migration, which is either heralded on the left or else covered up with complainers silenced.
That one quoted remark from the leftwing community organizer, describing how minority communities are hit the hardest by the influx of cheap, subliterate, third-world labor, and are angry about it, but unable to voice that anger, tells us a lot about just why huge numbers of black and Latino voters are moving sharply towards Republicans as the midterm approaches. They literally have no leaders, no advocates, no spokespeople, nobody speaking up for their economic interests, and it’s on an issue that affects them fundamentally. They’ve all been sold out to the Soros penny, because those who take the Soros penny, do the Soros bidding.
It’s ugly stuff. What it will take to detach a leftist activist from his love for Soros money is an open question. Right now, it seems that only the mass exodus we are seeing now to the GOP is the potential wake-up call, but only if the big foundations run out of cash and lay off leftists as a result. Then we’ll start to hear some truth-telling in the silenced communities. It may just be an issue for Republicans to take up as they take power after the next mid-term — ending the tax breaks, zero-financial transparency, and naked partisan political activity, of the non-profits and forcing them to live like the rest of us. Along with social media, and cash-fattened universities, these silencing foundations should be a prime target.
Image: World Economic Forum, swiss-image.ch/Photo by Sebastian Derungs // CC BY-SA 2.0. Image filtered with Graphite by BeCasso.
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