Foundation Watch
Revving up the race card
Here is my oped from the Friday edition of the Washington Times:
A George Soros-funded pressure group is behind a new drive to teach Democratic congressmen how to smear their opponents as racist.
Last week House Democrats were tutored by the radical, left-wing, racial spoils group known as the Center for Social Inclusion. The group was brought in “to address the issue of race to defend government programs,” Joel Gehrke reported in the WashingtonExaminer.
“The prepared content of a Tuesday presentation to the House Democratic Caucus and staff indicates that Democrats will seek to portray apparently neutral free-market rhetoric as being charged with racial bias, conscious or unconscious,” Mr. Gehrke wrote.
Trainer Maya Wiley of the Center for Social Inclusion lectured the assembled lawmakers that “conservative messages” are “racially ‘coded,’ ” and suggested ways to combat this sinister subliminal messaging cooked up by the Wile E. Coyotes of the Republican National Committee.
Facts don’t matter in Ms. Wiley’s estimation. “It’s emotional connection, not rational connection that we need,” she said.
Ms. Wiley argued that Newt Gingrich labeling President Obama a “food stamp president,” cannot possibly be “a race-neutral statement, even if Newt Gingrich did not intend racism.” In other words, even though the federal food stamp program has ballooned under the Obama administration, all criticism of Mr. Obama for that increased welfare spending – however seemingly legitimate – is rooted in racism.
Ms. Wiley, who in leftist parlance is a “civil rights” lawyer, also happens to be the daughter of the late George Wiley. As leader of the now-defunct National Welfare Rights Organization, Mr. Wiley worked closely with radical academic activists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven to recruit people onto welfare rolls, as I note in “SubversionInc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers.”
The notorious group ACORN began as a National Welfare Rights Organization experiment in 1970 and as Americans now know, President Obama worked for ACORN in various capacities during his time as a community organizer.
Ms. Wiley was also a consultant for two of Mr. Soros’ philanthropies and now chairs the board of the Soros-funded Tides network of nonprofits.
Socialism is the theme of the website for the Center for Social Inclusion. “For more than a quarter century, right-wing rhetoric has dominated debates of racial justice – undermining efforts to create a more equal society, and tearing apart the social safety net in the process,” the site opines. Of course, that endangered social safety net must be made out of Kevlar. About $16 trillion has been blown on the hopeless War on Poverty since it was launched in 1965 and Mr. Obama wants to waste another $10 trillion more.
The Center for Social Inclusion is caught up in the toxic brew of Marxism coupled with identity politics. This pabulum that passes for serious thought on the nation’s university campuses holds that America is a morally depraved, structurally racist country that systematically oppresses everyone who is not Caucasian.
Is it a coincidence that the center arrived on Capitol Hill now that the Democratic National Committee is headed by Patrick Gaspard, a longtime Service Employees International Union-ACORN organizer who follows the Saul Alinsky playbook? Mr. Gaspard, not DNC figurehead Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Florida Democrat, runs everyday DNC operations as executive director. Mr. Gaspard came to the DNC from the Obama White House, where he served as political affairs director.
Ms. Wiley’s group gets its money from anti-American philanthropists such as Mr. Soros. The Soros-funded Tides Foundation has given $879,800 to the group since 2005. Mr. Soros’ Open Society Institute has donated at least $75,000 to the group since 2002.
The Center for Social Inclusion may also be hiding something. The group’s tax returns, which are supposed to be publicly available at the GuideStar disclosure website, are not available. This is highly irregular at least and a violation of federal law at worst.
It has long been axiomatic that when liberals are fretting about possibly losing power they scream “racist!” repeatedly at the top of their lungs as if sheer repetition of the smear will somehow make it true.
But teaching sitting representatives of the people whose salaries are paid by the taxpayers how to deploy malicious slanders to shut down open debate over government spending is surely a new low.
Matthew Vadum is a senior editor at Capital Research Center and author of “Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts Are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers” (WND Books, 2011).