Soros Opens the Spigot

My article from today's Front Page Magazine:

Soros Opens the Spigot

By Matthew Vadum

George Soros is once again putting his money where his mouth is.

The Left’s favorite Wall Street billionaire and a cohort of his radical confederates are promising to contribute as much as $100 million to help the Democratic Party win this November so it can lay the groundwork for the destruction of what’s left of American civil society.


News of the trust fund tidal wave comes after the Soros-funded Democracy Alliance opted to drown Democrats and President Obama’s re-election campaign in an ocean of cash this year. The ultra-secretive group, founded in 2005, is a financial clearinghouse that recommends to its wealthy members projects and groups that aspire to dismantle America as we know it, transforming the nation into a European-style socialist state. The group has directed untold hundreds of millions of dollars to left-of-center causes.

Citizen Soros: Suppressing Conservative Ideas (Part 2 of 3) by Matthew Vadum

(Continued from Part 1)

Recap: Radical philanthropist George Soros gave $1 million to Media Matters for America, a well-funded slander shop that roots out “conservative misinformation.” It’s all part of his campaign to suppress conservative ideas that stand in the way of pushing America even farther to the left.

The left has been hyperventilating about Beck ever since he moved from CNN to Fox News in early 2009 and quickly became the Obama administration’s most vociferous high-profile critic. In particular, liberals could not abide Beck righteously fulminating against the shadowy Tides Foundation, a pass-through entity that allows wealthy individuals to give to radical causes anonymously.

Eric Boehlert, a so-called senior fellow at Media Matters, seized an opportunity when a deranged would-be shooter named Byron Williams jumped into the headlines last year. After a shootout with the California Highway Patrol, Williams said he had been on his way to shoot up the San Francisco offices of Tides in hopes of sparking a revolution. Williams was never actually much of a threat to Tides. When police pulled him over on a Sunday when the Tides offices were closed, the inept insurrectionist was drunk.

Media Matters argued that Beck had blood on his hands because Williams claimed Beck’s program was one of his favorite TV shows. Boehlert blogged that Beck “has routinely smeared the low-profile entity [i.e. Tides] for being staffed by ‘thugs’ and ‘bullies’ and involved in ‘the nasty of the nastiest,’ like indoctrinating schoolchildren and creating a ‘mass organization to seize power.’” Williams “wasn’t able to open fire inside the offices of the Tides Foundation, an organization ‘nobody knew’ about until Glenn Beck started targeting it.”

Aside from the rhetorical flourishes, Beck had provided a more or less accurate picture of the Tides Foundation, its sister groups, and many of its grant recipients.

As Trevor Loudon wrote in the October 2010 Foundation Watch, “The Tides Foundation and Tides Center are the radical left’s best kept secret. Together they provide tens of millions of dollars annually to some of the most extreme, destructive charities in America. Their money has gone to an assortment of questionable groups including ACORN, Media Matters for America, and the Center for Constitutional Rights.” (The Center was profiled in the September 2006 Organization Trends.)

American Hero and Badass for Liberty Glenn Beck to End Fox TV Show

(originally posted at NewsReal)

The man who ignited grassroots opposition to the hideously un-American Big Government policies of President Barack Obama when virtually no one else cared will end his highly rated show on Fox News Channel in December. Glenn Beck and Fox News Channel announced Wednesday they had agreed to let their contract run out. “Glenn intends to transition off his daily program, the third highest rated in all of cable news, later this year,” they said in a joint release.

America owes a debt of gratitude to Glenn Beck. Whatever his foibles, in the dark days of early 2009 as patriotic Americans began to realize that America was (and still is, for that matter) being transformed into a socialist state by the nation’s Community Organizer-in-Chief, Beck was there, exposing and harassing Obama and his cadre of radicals. (Note: Rick Santelli of CNBC also played a big role in fighting Obama but it was Beck who sold the idea to the viewing masses and fomented a glorious rebirth of patriotism.)

I am personally thankful for Beck for giving me the opportunity to appear on his show multiple times (see above photo) to discuss my research into ACORN, the Cloward-Piven Strategy, and the Tides Foundation. Beck even let me help him design one of his famous tree diagrams.

Beck, it’s also worth noting, is a secret badass. Although you can’t tell it from the above picture, the white dots on his tie are winged biker-style death’s heads. (I blew the image up from another photo taken a few seconds later and posted it below.) Maybe after a Jean Paul Gaultier tie featuring tiny stylized dollar signs woven in black and red silk that I used to wear, it was the coolest necktie I’ve ever seen.

It is entirely fitting for a trailblazer like Beck: He’s a badass for liberty. He lives his life by the noble credo of Epictetus: “If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid.” Or as skiers say, If you’re not falling down you’re not trying hard enough. Sometimes people have to risk scorn for the greater good and Beck has done it over and over again, sometimes losing, but usually winning.