The “Vast Left-wing Conspiracy”: George Soros’s Democracy Alliance remains a potent force in the 2014 elections

I have an article in the October 2014 issue of Foundation Watch.

It's called The “Vast Left-wing Conspiracy”: George Soros’s Democracy Alliance remains a potent force in the 2014 elections.

It is embedded below:

The “Vast Left-wing Conspiracy” George Soros’s Democracy Alliance remains a potent force in the 2014 electi...

Soros Network Ready to Boost Radical Groups

My article from the July 11, 2014 issue of FrontPage magazine:

Soros Network Ready to Boost Radical Groups

By Matthew Vadum

Amidst internal dissent, George Soros’s shadowy political funding powerhouse is planning to execute a $200 million fundraising campaign this election cycle in order to benefit key groups pushing for a permanent radical left-wing Democrat majority.

The billionaire members of the elite fundraising empire known as the Democracy Alliance have reportedly funneled $500 million or more into leftist and pro-Democrat organizations. The goal of the Alliance is to foster a permanent political infrastructure of left-wing nonprofits, think tanks, media outlets, leadership schools, and activist groups.

Among the groups benefiting from the Alliance’s largesse are the John Podesta-founded Center for American Progress, Media Matters for America, America Votes, and Organizing for Action (an outfit that grew out of the Obama campaign and used to be known as Organizing for America).

Much of the money being spent by groups that enjoy support from the Democracy Alliance is being devoted to class warfare and the vilification of right-leaning billionaires Charles and David Koch in order to distract from President Obama’s failed policies. Members of the Alliance are “obsessed with” the Kochs’ funding network, according to Politico‘s Ken Vogel.

“Conservatives, particularly the Koch Brothers, are playing for keeps with an even more pronounced financial advantages [sic] than in recent election cycles,” according to a 62-page briefing book Democracy Alliance donors received before the annual spring of the group at Chicago’s luxurious Ritz-Carlton hotel.

“The briefing book reveals a sort of DA-funded extra-party political machine,” Vogel writes, “that includes sophisticated voter databases and plans to mobilize pivotal Democratic voting blocs, air ads boosting Democratic candidates, while also — perhaps ironically — working to reduce the influence of money in politics.”

As Vogel reports, the Democracy Alliance is embracing a series of projects its leadership believes help to advance the leftist cause.

According to internal documents, at the Chicago meeting the Alliance recommended increasing annual funding of the alleged “conservative misinformation” watchdog Media Matters for America from last year’s level of $2.4 million to $3 million in order to back the group’s “Metis” software for “tracking conservative smears.”

The Alliance also supports training for “acts of civil disobedience” by groups such as the New Organizing Institute, and funding for the Progressive Leaders Network, which has been described as the left-wing counterpart to the American Legislative Exchange Council. ALEC, which writes model legislation that it promotes in state legislatures, suffered mightily in past years as a result of false accusations of racism that the Van Jones-founded group Color of Change level at it based on ALEC’s previous support for voter ID laws.

Billionaire Leftists Attack Your Gun Rights

My article from the May 28, 2014 issue of FrontPage magazine:

Billionaire Leftists Attack Your Gun Rights

By Matthew Vadum

Gun control advocates hoping to capitalize on the tragic incident this weekend in Santa Barbara, California have a powerful asset in their corner this year: Second Amendment-hating billionaires led by George Soros are gearing up for a fresh assault on your constitutional right to defend yourself, your family, and your property.

The Democracy Alliance, a donors collaborative of well over 100 far-left venture capitalists, heirs and heiresses, Hollywood moguls, and unethical bankers, is throwing millions of dollars at left-wing gun-control groups in hopes of preventing the increasingly likely Republican takeover of the U.S. Senate this November.

Soros and other progressive plutocrats plan to send upwards of $175 million to leftist organizations this year to push gun control and the rest of the Left’s agenda, according to documents left behind at a recent Democracy Alliance meeting in Chicago.

Some of the left-wing groups slated to receive hefty donations from Democracy Alliance members include: America Votes ($4 million); American Constitution Society ($1.5 million); Brennan Center for Justice ($2.7 million); Catalist ($750,000); Center for American Progress ($5.5 million); Center for Community Change ($3 million); Center for Budget and Policy Priorities ($2.5 million); Media Matters for America ($3 million); New Organizing Institute ($1 million); Organizing for Action ($1 million); Progress Now ($1.9 million); and State Voices ($2 million).

The mentally unstable head of fake watchdog group Media Matters, former journalist David Brock, himself reportedly has paranoid fantasies that conservatives are trying to kill him. Brock, whose group beats the drum loudly for gun control, also flouts the District of Columbia’s tough gun restrictions. Brock armed his assistant with weapons to protect him from would-be right-wing assassins, a felony in D.C. 

Other groups, many of which focus on the Second Amendment, were listed in a found document called “Democracy Alliance Progressive Infrastructure Map.” The document contains a roster of groups that have previously been approved for funding by the Alliance or that appear to have been deemed eligible for such funding.

Big Labor Taking Over Soros Piggybank

My article from the May 8, 2014 issue of FrontPage magazine:

Big Labor Taking Over Soros Piggybank

By Matthew Vadum

An ultra-secretive left-wing money machine for super rich radicals is bringing more representatives of Big Labor into the fold in order to prevent the likely Republican takeover of the U.S. Senate this November.

Thanks to a Democracy Alliance member’s oversight, Americans are getting a sense of what the nation’s wealthy left-wingers have in store for the fall elections and beyond.

As Lachlan Markay of the Washington Free Beacon reported, leftist billionaire George Soros’s son Jonathan left behind a partial membership list of the Democracy Alliance at a meeting in a fancy Chicago hotel last week.

The names on the document suggest that organized labor is becoming increasingly influential within the left-wing plutocrats’ invitation-only club.

New Democracy Alliance members from the labor movement include Noel Beasley, president of Workers United, a textile union affiliated with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), and Keith Mestrich, president of the union-owned Amalgamated Bank. 

Other new members from Big Labor include Larry Cohen, president of the Communications Workers of America, and Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. CWA senior director George Kohl and Michelle Ringuette, Weingarten’s assistant, also secured memberships in the Democracy Alliance.

But not all new members are professional parasites. Business people joining the Democracy Alliance recently include Adam Abram (insurance and real estate), Rick Segal (financial services), and Paul Boskind (psychology, behavioral health).

De-Imagining America

My article in today's FrontPage magazine:

De-Imagining America

By Matthew Vadum

A little-known consortium of radical groups, public-funded universities and the federal government is quietly seeking to transform the arts and other academic disciplines into vehicles of left-wing extremism and indoctrination. The initiative, called “Imagining America,” embraces the philosophy of Communist historian Howard Zinn, famous for manipulating historical fact to fit Marxist paradigms of human “progress” and to plant the seeds of radicalism in unsuspecting youth.

Imagining America is headquartered at taxpayer-funded Syracuse University in upstate New York and was virtually unknown until Glenn Beck threw some light on it in a broadcast. Beck described Imagining America and another group that calls itself “The U.S. Department of Arts and Culture” as an “effort to rewrite our history and catalyze a new culture for America.” This “department” isn’t actually part of the U.S. government but describes itself as “the nation’s newest people-powered department, founded on the truth that art and culture are our most powerful and under-tapped resources for social change.”

Active in both groups are “the people that will be teaching and influencing your children” through “art and music and film and history books,” Beck said.

America’s neo-communist radicals figured out a long time ago how to have their cake and eat it, too. U.S. taxpayers have been funding subversive left-wing groups like the now-defunct Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) and Saul Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation since the Johnson administration. They advance their objectives, erode civil society, and send you the bill. 

Such is also the case with Imagining America, which occupies a cushy niche at the intersection of taxpayer-funded universities, government agencies and wealthy far-left non-profit organizations.

Imagining America grew out of executive action. President Bill Clinton created the White House Millennium Council by Executive Order 13072 on Feb. 2, 1998. One of the council’s tasks was to “[p]roduce informational and resource materials to educate the American people concerning our Nation’s past and to inspire thought concerning the future[.]” The veritable cultural warfare council was headed by then-First Lady Hillary Clinton.

Soros and Hillary Take on America

My Oct. 29, 2013 article from FrontPage Magazine:

Soros and Hillary Take on America

By Matthew Vadum

Radical anti-American billionaire George Soros is going all-in for Hillary Clinton’s yet to be officially declared run for the presidency in 2016.

And because Soros’s wealthy leftist friends often follow his lead, a tsunami of early money may be poised to swamp the former U.S. secretary of state’s zygotic campaign.

Soros is lending his name to the “Ready for Hillary” super PAC, giving $25,000 to snag a co-chair post on the organization’s National Finance Committee. Soros’s political director Michael Vachon confirmed Soros’s involvement with the super PAC.

“George Soros is delighted to join more than one million Americans in supporting Ready for Hillary,” Vachon said. “His support for Ready for Hillary is an extension of his long held belief in the power of grassroots organizing.” (Soros also gave $2,300 to Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign.)

After pledging for the umpteenth time to abandon electoral politics, Soros keeps allowing himself to be pulled back in. A currency speculator and convicted inside-trader, Soros is a practiced hand-wringer who frequently tells gullible reporters he is getting out of electoral politics altogether. This is his mantra between elections even though he never actually follows through on the threat.

Soros is now spreading his wealth around to help a slew of Democrats in future elections.

In addition to the “Ready for Hillary” donation, so far In 2013 Soros has given: $1,500 to challenger Sean Eldridge (D-NY19); $2,600 to Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.); $2,600 to Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.); $20,000 to Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee; and $2,500 to Sen. Al Franken’s (D-Minn.) campaign, along with a separate $2,500 to the political committee, Franken MVPs.

Soros has also given more than $100 million to groups that support “immigrant rights,” immigration amnesty, and open borders since 1997. The idea is to flood America with reliably Democratic future voters who will support Soros’s extreme policy agenda.

Amnesty and the Attack on American Workers

My article from the June 19, 2013 issue of FrontPage Magazine:

Amnesty and the Attack on American Workers

By Matthew Vadum

The “dangerous” immigration bill working its way through the U.S. Senate will devastate America’s labor marketplace and “guarantee” the country will have to grant “another amnesty” in the future, says Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Alabama).

“This legislation is not going to work,” Sessions told Breitbart News. He described the measure sponsored by the bipartisan so-called Gang of Eight in the Senate as a “surrender to illegality that will guarantee we’ll be back in this position again.”

“We have no indication whatsoever that this administration will have renewed [its] commitment to follow whatever law is passed,” Sessions said. “This Senate bill is very, very dangerous. It won’t work, and I hope the American people will dig into it and follow the details of it.”

In a time of high unemployment, record food-stamp dependency, and economic stagnation, a minimum of 11 million immigrants will immediately be given Social Security cards that will allow them to compete for government and blue collar jobs. The legislation puts “tremendous pressure” on the job market and makes it harder for workers to find jobs and leave welfare programs.

Although amnesty remains deeply unpopular among the American public at large, the activist Left wants the estimated 11 million illegal aliens present in the U.S. to be processed because they see them as future Democratic voters. In addition, many labor unions, such as SEIU (which has executives focused solely on immigration issues) see today’s illegals as future union members. Business lobbies favor amnesty because they crave the cheap, largely unskilled labor.

The Left’s goal with the current immigration bill, which a Heritage Foundation study found would add $6.3 trillion to the nation’s budget deficits over the coming 50 years, is the same as with most of its major policy initiatives over the past half century: To destroy the American system.

Double-Voting for Obama

My piece from the Feb. 13, 2013, issue of FrontPage Magazine:

Double-Voting for Obama

By Matthew Vadum

After publicly boasting that she voted twice for President Obama in November, a left-wing Ohio activist associated with a George Soros-funded group claims she did nothing wrong by double-voting.

“There’s absolutely no intent on my part to commit voter fraud,” said Melowese Richardson, a longtime Cincinnati poll worker and Democratic activist whose unlawfully cast ballot canceled out a lawful ballot and thereby deprived another citizen of his or her right to vote.

Voter fraud, also known as vote fraud, election fraud, and electoral fraud, refers to the specific offenses of fraudulent voting, impersonation, perjury, voter registration fraud, forgery, counterfeiting, bribery, destroying already cast ballots, and a multitude of crimes related to the electoral process.

Having already incriminated herself in front of a TV news camera, Richardson said she’ll contest criminal voter fraud charges. “I’ll fight it for Mr. Obama and for Mr. Obama’s right to sit as president of the United States,” she said nonsensically.

Hamilton County, Ohio, records reportedly indicate that Richardson voted by absentee ballot on Nov. 1. Ten days later she told an official she also voted at a polling place out of fear that her absentee ballot would not count.

County records also accuse Richardson, who has registered thousands of people to vote, of being disruptive and hiding “things from other poll workers on Election Day after another female worker reported she was intimidated by Richardson.” An investigation revealed that the perpetrator’s granddaughter, India Richardson, also voted twice in November.

All of this is fine with the activists of the Left who only care about observing laws and technicalities when they advance their cause.

Voter Fraud Redefined

Here's my November 8, 2012 column from American Thinker:

Voter Fraud Redefined

By Matthew Vadum

Voter fraud ain’t what it used to be.

Left-wingers have been deliberately dumbing down the definition for years.

In all my years as a journalist covering American politics, I have understood that voter fraud, a phrase coined by lawyers, was a blanket term that refers to a host of election-related offenses.  Lawyers frequently make up terms for specialty areas — for example, elder law, environmental law, probate law, and wrongful dismissal law.

Voter fraud, also known as vote fraud, election fraud, and electoral fraud, refers to the specific offenses of fraudulent voting, impersonation, perjury, voter registration fraud, forgery, counterfeiting, bribery, destroying already cast ballots, and a multitude of crimes related to the electoral process.

A quick internet search reveals a comparable definition.  One online reference site counsels:

Electoral fraud is illegal interference with the process of an election. Acts of fraud affect vote counts to bring about an election result, whether by increasing the vote share of the favored candidate, depressing the vote share of the rival candidates or both. Also called voter fraud, the mechanisms involved include illegal voter registration, intimidation at polls and improper vote counting.

Lawyers say that fraud is the most difficult crime to prove because showing that the act complained of actually happened is not enough.  It must be proven that the perpetrator had intent to defraud.  

Like any fraud, voter fraud is by its nature generally very difficult to detect and prosecute.Voter fraud in the form of actual fraudulent balloting is especially hard to demonstrate in court.  A prosecutor must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the person voted without having the right to vote, used fraud (deception) in the process, and intended to defraud the victim (in this case, the public).  These facts can be hard to establish after the voter leaves the polling place.

For years now the left has been trying to muddy the waters by applying a far stricter definition of voter fraud, moving the semantic goalposts in order to define the problem out of existence.  Fraudulent registrations, of course, open the door to fraudulent voting, something the left vehemently denies.  

They deny it because the left depends on voter fraud in order to get left-wing candidates elected.  This helps to explain why they bent over backwards in recent years to defend ACORN, the voter fraud empire that filed for bankruptcy on Election Day 2010. 

Left-wing activists and think-tanks constantly churn out studies and reports financed by George Soros, purporting to prove that voter fraud is as unreal as Cookie Monster.  They claim that those on the right want to crack down on voter fraud solely as a means of preventing the poor and minorities from voting.

“Nobody claimed that voter fraud was a myth until the last couple of years,” my work colleague at Capital Research Center, Dr. Steven J. Allen, J.D., Ph.D., told me.

As Allen, who grew up amidst Alabama’s dubious politics many decades ago, observes: 

Everyone in politics openly discussed voter fraud for hundreds of years of American history. Politicians, political reporters, and everyone involved in politics openly discussed how widespread voter fraud was. Only when Republicans took over legislatures in states that had long been ruled by Democrats and where fraud was prevalent and began to do something about this problem did this myth emerge that voter fraud was nonexistent. Remember that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed specifically to prevent voter fraud which was endemic back then.

As election law expert and New York Times bestselling author J. Christian Adams has explained, “[l]iberal foundations, public interest law firms and advocacy groups have created a permanent network of experts and organizations devoted to an arcane but critical task: monopolizing the narrative on election laws and procedures. Cloaking their actions in the rhetoric of civil rights and the right to vote, they seek to affect the outcome of the election. They challenge any effort to protect the integrity of the ballot box by denying the possibility of vote fraud and crying ‘Jim Crow.’”

Let’s look at some of the more prominent voter fraud deniers on the left.

Ari Berman of the Nation describes “election fraud” as an “extremely rare occurrence” and argues that only illegal voting constitutes voter fraud.  When South Bend, Indiana prosecutors charged local Democratic officials with faking 22 petitions to get President Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John Edwards on the 2008 Indiana ballot, Berman dismissed the incident as insignificant.  “[T]here’s no evidence that the alleged forgeries played a decisive role in getting the Democratic candidates on the Indiana ballot in 2008 or determining the outcome of the primary or general election,” Berman wrote.

This is the same line of reasoning adopted by Congressman Jesse Jackson, Jr. (D-Ill.) after the names of several Dallas Cowboys showed up on voter rolls in Nevada in 2008.  “Obviously it’s not right for a fake ‘Tony Romo’ to be registered in Las Vegas … but remember the basic point[:] it’s not voter fraud unless someone shows up at the voting booth on Election Day and tries to pass himself off as ‘Tony Romo.’”  How reassuring.

Adam Serwer of Mother Jones, writing in the Washington Post, agrees with Berman that “[v]oter fraud is a virtually nonexistent problem” and blames conservatives for “blurring the distinction between voter registration fraud — which is as easy as filling out a registration form incorrectly — and the actual act of casting a fraudulent ballot.”  Oh, the irony.

Brentin Mock of Colorlines goes farther, denying the very existence of the problem.  “Voter fraud as a thing has been exposed by civil rights watchdogs and a wide range of journalists as pure conspiracy theory,” Mock writes.

Of course, all of this leftist rhetoric is pure sophistry.  Even if a person “only” commits voter registration fraud, that is a necessary step along the way to fraudulent voting, and it should be prosecuted in order to protect the integrity of the electoral system.  Registration fraud is a gateway to fraudulent balloting, and it must be prosecuted.  Police don’t let a bank robber go free because he forgot to load his gun.

No single group in American history ever outdid ACORN in terms of voter registration fraud.  At least 52 individuals who worked for ACORN or its affiliates, or who were connected to ACORN, have been convicted of voter registration fraud.  ACORN itself was convicted in Nevada last year of the crime of “compensation.”  Under the leadership of ACORN official Amy Adele Busefink, who was also convicted of the same crime, ACORN paid voter registration canvassers cash bonuses for exceeding their quotas.  This is illegal because it gives people an incentive to commit fraud by adding Mickey Mouse and Mary Poppins to the voter rolls.

Under Busefink’s leadership, ACORN and its affiliate Project Vote generated an impressive 1.1 million voter registration packages across America in 2008.  The problem was that election officials invalidated 400,000 — that’s 36 percent — of the registrations filed.  It is highly unlikely that typographic and other innocent errors alone generated so much bogus paperwork.  And this is only one activist group’s fraudulent activities in one election.

It is irresponsible for law enforcement officials to view those 400,000 registrations as mere mistakes.  All 400,000 bogus registrations should be presumed to constitute individual attempts at fraudulent voting that got caught early.  The hundreds of thousands of incidents of voter fraud that occur during every national election should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

Left-wingers and Democrats are more likely than conservatives and Republicans to commit voter fraud.  Sometimes they justify the behavior on so-called social justice grounds.

Republican voters tend to be middle-class and not easily induced to commit fraud, while “the pool of people who appear to be available and more vulnerable to an invitation to participate in vote fraud tend to lean Democratic,” according to Larry Sabato and Glenn Simpson.  “Some liberal activists that Sabato and Simpson interviewed even partly justified fraudulent electoral behavior on the grounds that because the poor and dispossessed have so little political clout, ‘extraordinary measures [for example, stretching the absentee ballot or registration rules] are required to compensate’” (Who’s Counting, by John Fund and Hans von Spakovsky, pp. 8-9).

Should we not punish bad behavior just because it is more likely to be done by someone who is poor?  The left seems to suggest precisely that.

‘Panicked’ Soros Bankrolls Obama Campaign

My article from the October 1, 2012, issue of Front Page Magazine:

‘Panicked’ Soros Bankrolls Obama Campaign

By Matthew Vadum

George Soros is airdropping bushels of cash to the Obama campaign because the preeminent funder of the Left is reportedly “panicked” that Mitt Romney could win in November and halt America’s ongoing slide into socialist chaos and civil unrest.

Soros’s alarm at the prospect of a Romney victory may also have led him to squelch a report in the Soros-funded Mother Jones magazine that revealed his desperate state of mind.

“Is there possibly some panic among the liberal elite that the media are not telling us about? Amazingly, Mother Jones might have accidentally provided a clue – and then quickly covered it up,” opines Big Journalism.

After Romney pulled even in recent national polls –and after pledging for the umpteenth time to get out of electoral politics– America’s anxious would-be undertaker committed to spending an extra $1.5 million on reelecting Obama and helping congressional Democrats. Soros previously bankrolled a leftist scheme called the Secretary of State Project that aspired to rig elections from coast to coast. He also indirectly funded Occupy Wall Street.

A currency speculator and convicted inside-trader, Soros is a practiced hand-wringer who frequently tells gullible reporters he is getting out of electoral politics altogether. This is his mantra between elections even though he never actually follows through on the threat.

Soros openly favors the collapse of the greenback and the decline of America in general. “The main obstacle to a stable and just world order is the United States,” he has said. He has also said European-style socialism “is exactly what we need now.” He praises Communist China effusively, saying the brutal totalitarian nation that literally cuts babies from unauthorized pregnancies from the wombs of their mothers and runs over eminent domain resisters with steam-rollers, has “a better-functioning government than the United States.”

Soros also seems to suffer from messianic delusions, describing himself as “some kind of god, the creator of everything.” During World War II, Soros accompanied his guardian around Nazi-occupied Hungary as he confiscated the property of Soros’s fellow Jews. Years later he referred to that time as “probably the happiest year of my life” and “a very happy-making, exhilarating experience.”

Soros will give $1 million to Priorities USA Action, the super PAC that produced the infamous TV ad in which ex-steelworker Joe Soptic falsely blamed his wife’s tragic cancer death on Romney. Soros is splitting $500,000 between Majority PAC and House Majority PAC, both of which back Democrats seeking congressional office, the New York Times reports.

The Obama campaign also appears to be panicking. Chicago’s mayor, the ruthless former Obama White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, is exiting the Obama campaign to help raise money for Priorities USA Action. If anyone can put together an ad more loathsome than the Soptic spot, Emanuel’s the man.

The new donations were announced by Soros spokesman Michael Vachon at a luncheon Thursday hosted by the Democracy Alliance, an invitation-only club for radical plutocrats. (Former President Bill Clinton and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi were also in attendance.) Members of the ultra-secretive Democracy Alliance have committed to swamping Democrats and President Obama’s re-election campaign in an ocean of cash this year. Donations could easily reach $100 million or much more before Election Day, especially because other Democracy Alliance members are following Soros’s lead.

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, delivering the nation to Greek-style socialist mayhem. The group has directed untold hundreds of millions of dollars to left-of-center causes.

To quell rumors that he was unhappy with Obama, Soros sent an email to other luncheon guests saying, “I fully support the re-election of President Obama.” Soros wrote that he was “appalled by the Romney campaign, which is openly soliciting the money of the rich to starve the state of the money it needs to provide social services.”

This new $1.5 million is over and above the $1 million that Soros pledged to America Votes, a get-out-the-vote group, and the $1 million he pledged to American Bridge 21st Century, a super PAC headed by the legendarily sleazy gossip columnist and admitted serial liar David Brock.

Meanwhile, Mother Jones, the media outlet that described Soros as “panicked” because Obama has yet to deliver a knockout blow to Romney, offered what looks like a case study in media corruption. The magazine posted a hard-to-believe retraction of the online story that contained the otherwise perfectly believable description of Soros’s state of mind. (Big Journalism has a screen grab of the article that you may read here.)

Integrity is in short supply at Mother Jones, which recently published the Romney “47 percent” video in an effort to help Obama even though possibly critical minutes of the off-the-cuff speech were missing. 

The magazine was founded by the same Marxists, hippies, and Sixties leftovers who facilitated America’s suicide attempt more than 40 years ago.

The article appeared on the magazine’s website for a while Thursday but was abruptly spiked. A notice 

indicated, “The story was based on information provided by a source; the source contacted us after the story was published and said the information was incorrect.”

The article quoted an unidentified friend of Soros saying, “I was really dumbfounded when I heard his voice on the other end of the phone. He was the last person I ever expected to hear from, given how antithetical he was to the big money slopping around the system. But he said that he was panicked about the fact that Romney could win this.”

An unidentified Democratic strategist –it’s not clear if it’s the same person as the unidentified friend— was described as saying, “What I find amazing about liberals and progressives is that they always wait till the last minute. It hadn’t dawned on this group of people before that this was a tight race. It stupefies me.”

It seems likely that Soros or someone close to Soros complained to Mother Jones and the story was pulled.

I tried to find out what happened.

The author of the article, Andy Kroll, referred my inquiries to Clara Jeffery, the magazine’s co-editor-in-chief. Jeffery denied being pressured. In an email she said:

Not sure what else I can add without repeating the error. Basically a source in a position to know about Soros’ donation (the fact of which has been previously reported far and wide), told us details that they then realized they’d been in error about. The source admitted the fault was theirs, and not Andy Kroll’s. We took the story down immediately upon hearing from source and issued the correction. To do otherwise would, in our opinion, [have] been journalistically irresponsible. We did not hear from Mr. Soros or his representatives.

With that said, it is a fact that the magazine’s 501c3 nonprofit, Foundation for National Progress, has received funding through Soros’s philanthropies, Open Society Institute ($225,000 since 2008) and Foundation to Promote Open Society ($100,000 since 2010).

Democracy Alliance chairman and Taco Bell heir Rob McKay was a member of the magazine’s board. 

Through the McKay Foundation he has given the Foundation for National Progress $165,000 since 1999.

Democracy Alliance member and RealNetworks CEO Rob Glaser has given FNP $211,329 since 1999. Another member, Stephen M. Silberstein, has given $117,000 since 2001 through his eponymous foundation. The Soros-funded Tides Foundation, founded by Democracy Alliance member Drummond Pike, has kicked in $126,417 since 2003.

Jeffery suggested the money played no role in the retraction:

The individuals (or their foundations) you mention are among the many people and institutions who have donated money to the FNP over the years; some of those you mention have not donated to the FNP in many years.  Nevertheless, when we’ve had occasion to write about them, or the Democracy Alliance, or OSI, we disclose this to our readers.

When I pressed Jeffery, asking her if the source specifically took back the claim that Soros “panicked,” she refused to answer, writing, “Sorry Matt, [I] just don’t have anything to add past what I’ve told you and what we’ve posted.”

Who knows how many more intrigues, cover-ups, and October surprises the Soros-funded magazine has waiting in the wings.

Occupy at One Year

My article from the September 17, 2012, issue of Front Page Magazine:

Occupy at One Year

By Matthew Vadum

The violent anti-American radicals of Occupy Wall Street plan to celebrate the anniversary of their neo-communist movement today by shutting down the New York Stock Exchange and hitting dozens of corporate targets.

The anniversary comes days after an operative for the Anonymous computer hacker group was arrested for allegedly threatening a federal agent. Barrett Brown, a self-described spokesman for Anonymous, which is allied with the Occupy Wall Street movement, boasts that he carried out cyber-attacks against Visa and MasterCard.

These Bolshevik banditos plan to begin the day with occupying “Wall Street with non-violent civil disobedience and flood[ing] the area around it with a roving carnival of resistance,” according to adbusters.org. The group will “surround access to [the NYSE] with the People’s Wall sit-in” and then conduct “a swirl of mobile occupations of corporate lobbies and intersections.” Operation Latte Thunder will then “Storm Wall Street and demand it stop bankrolling climate change.”

As always the leaders of Occupy Wall Street are lying about non-violence. The violence is the whole point of the demonstrations. When he interviewed OWS protesters in lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park last year Democratic pollster Douglas Schoen discovered that 31 percent of the movement supported using “violence to advance their agenda.”

And as Arnold Ahlert writes there have been at least “6,990 documented arrests in 114 cities across the nation directly associated with the OWS movement.” Apologists for the movement, especially the mainstream media, treat all these antisocial behaviors as freak occurrences, as if the Occupiers themselves were victims of saboteurs and dirty tricksters. “[B]ut thousands of arrests in hundreds of cities, coupled with instances of anti-semitism, sexual assaults (including rape), vandalism, and even murder can hardly be attributed solely to ‘fringe’ or ‘rogue’ elements ‘hijacking’ an otherwise peaceful movement.”

The reason the movement exists “is to disrupt the normal course of everyday life at every opportunity and to turn ‘one percent’ of Americans into literal enemies of the nation,” Ahlert writes.

It is true that the Occupy Wall Street movement has petered out since it was launched on September 17, 2011, amidst photos of defaced ten-dollar bills showing Founding Father Alexander Hamilton with black hair and a Hitler mustache. Its stated goal at the time was to condemn “greed” and “profit over and above all else” and to undermine economic freedom.

That protest was originally promoted as a “US Day of Rage” named after the so-called Days of Rage that took place in Chicago in 1969. That tumultuous year, members of what was later to become known as the Weather Underground, the terrorist organization of Obama pals Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, provoked four days of riots and demonstrations against “The System.” Leftists continue to insist that Occupy Wall Street was inspired largely by last year’s Arab Spring, a series of popular uprisings against authoritarian Middle Eastern governments that many mistook for a desire for democratic rule. To provide cover for his radical friends leftist pseudo-intellectual Cornel West refers to OWS as “a democratic awakening,” the same expression he used to describe Hugo Chavez’s brutal communist revolution in Venezuela. Leftists say it’s not true democracy unless they win.

Last year’s US Day of Rage was heavily promoted by the Vancouver, Canada-based Adbusters Media Foundation, the nonprofit behind the “anti-consumerist” magazine. The foundation is funded by organizations associated with George Soros’s Democracy Alliance, a radical billionaires’ club that wants to turn America into Greece. Soros is a convicted criminal who prefers Communist China’s government over America’s and who openly aspires to bring European-style socialism to the United States. He told Newsweek earlier this year that he was delighted with the violence and civil unrest percolating across the fruited plain. “In the crisis period, the impossible becomes possible,” he said, echoing Saul Alinsky’s adage that a good crisis is a terrible thing to waste. Since 2001 Adbusters has received $317,773 from the Soros-funded Tides Foundation and $176,500 from the Glaser Progress Foundation, which was created by Alliance member and RealNetworks founder Rob Glaser.

Occupy Wall Street was organized by various far-left organizations including a constellation of ACORN front groups, labor unions, and anarchist collectives, and hailed by President Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, various Communist and neo-Nazi parties, and America’s enemies abroad. The movement came on the heels of what ACORN’s neo-communist founder Wade Rathke called an “anti-banking jihad,” an SEIU-led effort aimed at destabilizing the nation’s financial system. SEIU organizer Stephen Lerner promised to “bring down the stock market” through a campaign of disruption.

Despite being endorsed by left-wing politicians from coast to coast the movement never evolved into a major player in U.S. politics today — but it has nevertheless had a lasting impact on the American body politic.

Through endless repetition of the terms “the 99 percent” and “the one percent,” Americans have begun to view their society through a Marxist lens. They have absorbed this central Big Lie of Marxist thought through a kind of osmosis.

And now this Marxist meme, long banished to the academy and union halls, is everywhere. To the delight of radical socialists it is impossible to turn on conservative talk radio without hearing hosts explain issues using this false dichotomy of the one percent versus the 99 percent. To use the loaded language of the Left is to accept the Left’s premises.

Certainly there has long been vague talk of “the rich,” “the poor,” and “the middle class,” but Occupy Wall Street somehow managed to get Americans to see their society in Marxist terms, something more than a hundred years of Progressive agitation could not do. This in itself is a huge and unwelcome development because it allows the Left to define and set the parameters of political discourse. Instead of talking about cutting taxes and reducing government spending, now right-wingers get distracted arguing about make-believe issues like income inequality and social justice. Only time will tell if this meme will fade away eventually.

But there is still room for optimism. Occupy’s very success has laid the foundation for its own destruction.

The movement has provided a valuable service to the American public. Occupy Wall Street has been a yearlong, Obama administration-approved, media-saturated exercise in consciousness-raising.

It has helped to remind Americans just how dangerous, lawless, and out of touch the modern, Occupy-embracing Democratic Party is. The anti-American Occupy Wall Street movement has also helped to reinforce the message of the patriotic Tea Party movement which supports Americans’ unalienable rights, limited government, fiscal restraint, and the rule of law.

For this, Americans who love their country should be grateful to the rabble of Occupy Wall Street.

Soros Election-Rigging Scheme Collapses

My Front Page Magazine article from July 31, 2012:

Soros Election-Rigging Scheme Collapses

By Matthew Vadum

A George Soros-backed scheme that paved the way for Al Franken’s 2008 theft of a U.S. Senate seat has collapsed months ahead of the critical November elections.

Rumors of the death of the Secretary of State Project had been circulating for months. Michael Kieschnick, co-founder of the Secretary of State Project, confirmed that his group has shut down in an interview at the recent “Take Back the American Dream” conference in Washington, D.C.

Although the so-called 527 political committee “still exists” on paper, “2010 was terrible so we’ve switched our efforts,” said Michael Kieschnick wearing a tee shirt reading “ORGANIZER” in block capital letters. Section 527 of the U.S. Internal Revenue Code allows the group to accept unlimited financial contributions.

The idea behind the Secretary of State Project was that in most states the secretary of state runs elections and that a relative pittance can help swing these little-watched state contests, allowing even small donors to play a big role in installing a powerful state official who can tilt the playing field in favor of Democrats.

George Soros has visited the White House 5 times

Radical philanthropist George Soros has visited the White House on at least five occasions since Barack Obama became president.

Perhaps Soros has some influence over Obama administration policy. Soros co-founded the ultra-secretive Democracy Alliance, a billionaires’ club that wants to radically transform America. He has said that European-style socialism “is exactly what we need now” and favors American decline. Soros, a currency manipulator with an insider-trading conviction, praises Red China effusively, saying the totalitarian nation has “a better-functioning government than the United States.”

The data appears in the White House’s online visitor access database. It is possible that Soros, the preeminent funder of the activist Left, visited the Obama White House more than five times because records of visits between January 20 and September 15, 2009 are not available in the database.

Here are the details of the visits:

On February 25, 2009 Soros visited David Lipton, then a White House economic adviser. (file #U70808)

On February 25, 2009 Soros visited Lawrence (Larry) Summers, who at the time was chairman of the White House U.S. National Economic Council for President Barack Obama. (file #U71032)

On March 24, 2009 Soros visited Christina “Tina” Tchen.  (file #U80165) Tchen is Director of the White House Office of Public Engagement. According to her online bio from the White House website:

Tchen was previously a partner in corporate litigation at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP. In that capacity, Tchen represented public agencies in state and federal class actions, including the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services, the Illinois Department of Public Aid, and the Chicago Housing Authority. Tchen is the recipient of many awards, including the Leadership Award from the Women’s Bar Association of Illinois (1999); “Women of Achievement” award from the Anti-Defamation League (1996); and Chicago Lawyer “Person of the Year” (1994).

On March 25, 2009 Soros visited Lipton again. (file #U80759)

On February 16, 2010, Soros visited Summers (again) . (file #U79042)

Soros hasn’t spent anywhere near as much time at the White House as former SEIU president Andy Stern but five visits is still a lot.

Orrin Hatch weighs in on the Brett Kimberlin menace

Sen.  Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), who was once a victim of a vexatious lawsuit filed by convicted terrorist bomber Brett Kimberlin, today weighed in on the ongoing Kimberlin saga. As Kerry Picket of the Washington Times reports,  when he was a prisoner Kimberlin sued Hatch baselessly blaming the senator for his failure at the time to win parole. The suit went down in flames. Hatch's office issued the following statement:

Senator Hatch has had run ins with Brett Kimberlin before and they weren't pleasant. So it's certainly no surprise that Mr. Kimberlin has now taken to harassing and targeting conservative bloggers. Needless to say, efforts to silence and chill political speech are contrary to the values of our Constitution and First Amendment.

VIDEO: Vadum discusses terrorist Brett Kimberlin on TV's The Source

I discussed the exploits of left-wing terrorist bomber Brett Kimberlin on "The Source" with Ezra Levant yesterday on Sun News Network (Canada). Here is the video clip of the interview:

Brett Kimberlin and the Hall of Fame of Leftist Terrorists

Here is my article from today's Front Page Magazine:

 Brett Kimberlin and the Hall of Fame of Leftist Terrorists

By Matthew Vadum

The Left has a long history of embracing unrepentant, manipulative sociopaths, felons, terrorists, and mass murderers – anything goes, provided that they share the same political ideology.

 In fairness, most liberals do not feel affection for the worst of the worst among leftists such as Mao Zedong, Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot, Che Guevara, or Peoples Temple founder Jim Jones.

 But there are a few domestic radicals who have attained a kind of folk hero status in left-wing circles. Convicted cop killer and Black Panthers member Mumia abu Jamal, would-be GOP convention bombers David Guy McKay and Bradley Neil Crowder, ACORN founder and cyber-terrorism advocate Wade Rathke, Obamacare architect and convicted swindler Robert Creamer, Earth Day booster and murderer Ira Einhorn, imprisoned terrorist lawyer Lynne Stewart, Weather Underground leaders Jeff Jones, Bill Ayers, and Bernardine Dohrn, just to name a few.

“Speedway Bomber” Brett Kimberlin isn’t famous enough yet to have a cult following on the Left but give the determined, energetic activist time. A few short years after his release from federal prison the radical leftist has been embraced by all the right people, winning grants from the George Soros-funded Tides Foundation and wealthy celebrities.

He’s earned the confidence of leftist luminaries such as Teresa Heinz Kerry and Barbra Streisand who have sent money to his activist group, the Justice Through Music Project. The seven-year-old Bethesda, Maryland-based 501c3 nonprofit entity buys into the radical environmentalist agenda, supports the goals of the Occupy Wall Street movement, and claims to have registered 100,000 people to vote. (See its latest IRS Form 990 [tax return] here.)

This Maryland resident is a political trailblazer of sorts. Kimberlin is a tactical innovator whose tried and true methods would have impressed the father of modern community organizing, Saul Alinsky. The late conservative Internet entrepreneur Andrew Breitbart recognized Kimberlin’s unique talents last fall, tweeting that the convicted terrorist and his confederates needed “exposure.”

VADUM: Revving up the race card: Democrats’ backers deploy radical tactics to expand welfare state

Here is my oped from the Friday edition of the Washington Times:

VADUM: Revving up the race card: Democrats’ backers deploy radical tactics to expand welfare state

A George Soros-funded pressure group is behind a new drive to teach Democratic congressmen how to smear their opponents as racist.

By Matthew Vadum

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 “Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers.”

Soros-Funded Alinsky Smear Machine Invades Congress

My article from today's Front Page Magazine:

Soros-Funded Alinsky Smear Machine Invades Congress

By Matthew Vadum

George Soros is behind a newly uncovered effort to teach Democratic congressmen how to smear their opponents as racist.

Last week House Democrats invited the radical, left-wing, Soros-financed group called the Center for Social Inclusion “to address the issue of race to defend government programs,” according to documentation reviewed by Joel Gehrke of the Washington Examiner.

“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,” Gehrke writes.

According to Gehrke, trainer Maya Wiley of the Center for Social Inclusion blasted “conservative messages [that are] racially ‘coded’ and had images of people of color that we commonly see used” and suggested ways to combat Republicans’ supposedly racially-coded rhetoric.

Facts don’t matter in Wiley’s estimation. “It’s emotional connection, not rational connection that we need,” she said.

Wiley offered that Newt Gingrich calling Obama a “food stamp president,” cannot be “a race-neutral statement, even if Newt Gingrich did not intend racism.” In other words, all criticism of Obama is rooted in racism.

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.

Soros Election-Rigging Project Dies?

My article from the May 1 edition of the American Spectator:

Soros Election-Rigging Project Dies?

By Matthew Vadum on 5.1.12 @ 6:08AM

Whatever happened to the left-wing Secretary of State Project liberals promised would save our elections from the dirty tricks of those dang lowdown, yellow-bellied, lily-livered Republicans?

The evidence now suggests that the election-stealing, George Soros-funded so-called "527" political committee is dead, or perhaps just deeply sedated. This group that section 527 of the U.S. Internal Revenue Code allows to accept unlimited financial contributions was created solely to rig elections for Democrats.

It accomplishes this by electing permissive liberal Democrats as secretaries of state. In most states the secretary of state is the chief elections officer, so putting left-wingers in the often-overlooked but critically important office allows these political radicals to manipulate the electoral process. This is what liberals call "election protection."

Billionaire donor Soros, whom Saturday Night Live has mocked as the "owner" of the Democratic Party, underwrote the Secretary of State Project in order to help Democrats gain an unfair advantage on Election Day. Soros and progressives all across the fruited plain believe with a religious fervor that right-leaning secretaries of state helped the GOP steal the presidential elections in Florida in 2000 (Katherine Harris) and in Ohio in 2004 (Ken Blackwell).

For years Soros's ultra-wealthy colleagues in the Democracy Alliance, a billionaires' club that funds left-wing political infrastructure, opened their wallets to help secretary of state candidates endorsed by the SoS Project. They helped to elect Saul Alinsky-inspired community organizer Mark Ritchie, the ACORN-loving Minnesota secretary of state who presided over Al Franken's theft of incumbent Republican Norm Coleman's U.S. Senate seat in the 2008 election cycle.

Until a year and a half ago the Secretary of State Project was doing well. Before the 2010 cycle it took credit for electing 11 of the 18 left-wingers it endorsed since it began funding candidates in 2006.