A Ford Foundation press release on April 14 proclaimed, “Ford Foundation Adds $60 Million in New Funding to Strengthen Democracy.”
The sub-headline for the release states that “Grants will support nonpartisan nonprofits and veterans organizations working to protect the rule of law, fortify voting rights, and increase civic participation.” (Emphasis in original.)
Rule of law, voting rights, civic participation: sounds great, yes? However, as Humpty Dumpty told Alice in Through the Looking Glass, “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.” And when folks at the Ford Foundation use words such as “rule of law,” “voting rights,” and “civic participation,” we can be sure from past experience that they mean something very different from most Americans’ understanding of those words.
Poll after poll (Gallup, Pew, Monmouth, Rasmussen, Center Square) shows that a huge majority of American voters (80 percent of Americans overall, including 62 percent of Democrats, 87 percent of Independents, and 91 percent of Republicans) support requiring photo identification for voting. But the Ford Foundation and the NGOs it funds consider this basic security measure, which is required in almost every other country, to be a form of “voter suppression,” claiming that it discriminates against “people of color,” as if acquiring a government-issued photo ID is an insurmountable obstacle and an active measure of “racial oppression.”
The Ford press release proudly boasts, “In the last ten years alone, the foundation’s Civic Engagement and Government program has provided more than $1 billion in grants to nonpartisan organizations within the United States.” It further notes that “among the organizations receiving funding are Pillars of the Community, Veterans for all Voters, All Voting is Local, Campaign Legal Center, and We the Veterans Military Foundation.”
Let’s look at the self-proclaimed “Pillars of the Community,” which is co-chaired by Ben Ginsberg (Republican) and Bob Bauer (Democrat). This duo is “nonpartisan” in the sense that both men are longtime servitors for the Repub-Demo Uniparty that has beguiled the American public into believing that alternating between a Democrat and a Republican in the White House demonstrates real citizen empowerment and honest government.
Ginsberg has been a veteran counselor to the George H.W. Bush-Mitt Romney wing of the GOP, serving as counsel to the Republican National Committee (RNC) and many other GOP organizations. He also served as national counsel to the George W. Bush-Dick Cheney 2000 and 2004 campaigns, as well as to the Romney campaigns in 2008 and 2012. Ginsberg was a signatory to the amicus curiae brief in support of same-sex “marriage” submitted to the U.S. Supreme Court in the 2013 Hollingsworth v. Perry case. President Barack Obama selected Ginsberg and Bauer to chair the Presidential Commission on Election Administration, which was supposed to investigate election problems. Their report was a whitewash. Not surprisingly, Ginsberg became a vocal never-Trumper RINO and was one of the principal GOP voices disputing and disparaging efforts to expose the massive voter fraud of the 2020 elections.
Bob Bauer, Ginsberg’s co-chair at Pillars of the Community, is the perfect Uniparty counterpart. He was Obama’s personal attorney, general counsel of Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, and Obama’s White House Counsel. Following his White House stint, Bauer returned to private practice with the now-notorious Perkins Coie law firm. Perkins Coie, while representing the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC), funneled $168,000 from the Clinton campaign and the DNC to Fusion GPS, which then paid for the phony Steele dossier that was used to foment the “Russia, Russia, Russia” campaign against Trump.
Skewing Elections
“For 90 years, the Ford Foundation has been steadfast in its commitment to advancing the ideals and principles of democracy,” said Heather Gerken, president of the Ford Foundation, in announcing the $60 million funding spree. “As we look ahead, it is an honor to deepen this commitment and support the remarkable work taking place around the United States to strengthen democracy and the rule of law at this urgent moment.”
Some of the “nonpartisan” groups Ford has funded over that 90-year period include the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Planned Parenthood, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), the NAACP Legal Defense & Education Fund, Amnesty International USA, the National Immigration Law Center, Democracy Now Productions, the Tides Foundation, the Black-Led Movement Fund (BLMF, affiliated with Black Lives Matter), the Brookings Institution, Public Citizen, Friends of the Earth, Rainforest Action Network, the Center for Reproductive Rights, the National Organization for Women (NOW), Make the Road New York, the Feminist Majority Foundation, the Center for Popular Democracy, the National Council of La Raza, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF), the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, the Migration Policy Institute, the Urban Institute, Oxfam America, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), and numerous UN organizations and UN-related NGOs.
While not as large as the $418 million infusion of “Zuckerbucks” injected into the 2020 election by Meta/Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, to nonprofits such as the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) and the Center for Election Innovation & Research (CEIR), the Ford infusion will similarly aim at skewing the elections in the same leftward direction.
Real Role of Tax-exempt Foundations
For the better part of a century, the Ford Foundation has been a leading force among the big tax-exempt foundations in funding subversive organizations and individuals bent on the destructive transformation of the United States into a mere cog in a collectivist New World Order. By the 1950s, the funding records of foundations such as Ford, Rockefeller, Carnegie, and others had become so alarming that the House Select Committee to Investigate Tax-Exempt Foundations was set up under Representative B. Carroll Reece (R-Tenn.). These foundations, the committee found, “promote ‘internationalism’ in a particular sense — a form directed toward ‘world government’ and a derogation of American ‘nationalism.’” The 2,086-page Reece Report also observed that major foundations “have actively supported attacks upon our social and government system and financed the promotion of socialism and collectivist ideas.”
As we reported in 2017, “One of the most astounding revelations to come out of the Reece Committee investigation came from Ford Foundation President H. Rowan Gaither (a Council on Foreign Relations member), who admitted, in a private meeting with committee investigator Norman Dodd, that he and others inside and outside of government were working ‘to so alter life in the United States that we can be comfortably merged with the Soviet Union.’ When the shocked Norman Dodd asked if he would repeat that statement in public testimony, Gaither replied, ‘This, we would not think of doing.’”
For a synopsis of the tax-exempt foundation threat (and particularly that of the Ford Foundation), see “Foundations: Cutting Off the Toxic Funding Flow” and “Silk Hats and Brown Berets.”
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