How The Left Got Fucked, part five

The capitalist plot against left-populism

Clinton’s strategy was to paint Sanders’ left populism — and the millions his economic focus mobilized — as inherently racist and sexist, and the woke “left” was happy to help her in this task. To give any attention at all to the working class meant you were a “class reductionist” who didn’t care about black or disabled or trans people, and those of us still actively involved in the “old left” at the time were quickly smeared as such.

Clinton and the DNC didn’t create this rift between the old left and the woke in 2016; rather, they were exploiting a rift that capitalists — including George Soros — and Obama’s DNC had been fueling through “dark money” since Occupy. By funneling millions of dollars into non-profits and individuals focused on social justice issues over the preceding years, they’d built up a reserve army that could be activated whenever needed. But here, the state of emergency warranting the DNC’s call-up of those reserves wasn’t some external threat, nor even the ascendant popularity of Trump (remember — Clinton wanted him to be her Republican challenger). Instead, the threat was the sudden resurgence of a broad economic populism with leftist characteristics inspired by an aging Jewish senator from Vermont.

This is the fifth essay in this series. The first is free for all readers.

---

Recently, explaining how I feel about a certain billionaire capitalist, I’d said to someone that I, as a thoroughly homosexual Marxist, would much sooner perform cunnilingus on French nationalist Marine Le Pen than ever take a single cent from George Soros.

And then, by an amusing twist of both fate and irony, I learned few days later that an event I’d been invited to was, in fact, a Soros-funded event.

I’ll not give any details about the event, as I greatly adore and respect the organizer. But you’ll perhaps understand why I kindly declined the invitation.¹

I’ve written quite a bit already regarding the way that money funneled through front organizations created the “left” as we know it now. In the 50s and 60s, the major channel for this sabotage was the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), well-documented as a CIA front organization. The CCF funded a long list² of influential artists, philosophers, theorists, and other cultural figures, and very few of them were aware of who, exactly, was paying the piper.

While we know more about the extent of this funding now, what’s still quite difficult to trace is the full consequences of this money. Take, for example, just one of the many groups funded this way: the Frankfurt School. I’ve written multiple essays already on the influence of “Cultural Marxist” ideas on the left, and especially how their ideas undermined the focus on class and material conditions, but their influence is still unfolding. Particularly, the view of Adorno & friends regarding the psychological and cultural roots of authoritarianism (what most people actually mean when they use the word “fascism”) still plays out even now.

We must be clear, though: though the CIA funded these figures, they didn’t actually come up with their ideas. But that wasn’t their goal anyway. Instead, the point of the CCF and other funding mechanisms was to give prominence to “leftist” ideas that were more in line with the continuation of American imperialism and capitalist expansion — and thus more inimical to collective worker struggle and anti-imperialist agitation.

To remind you of how this worked, recall the garden metaphor I provided in the very first installment of this essay:

Let’s say you’ve got a very small garden plot and four different seeds. You plant them, and then you decide you’ll only water and fertilize one of the resulting seedlings, while you’ll let the three others rely only on unpredictable rainfall and whatever nutrients are already available.

That seed you’re feeding and watering is obviously going to do a lot better. And if the area is small enough and the other seedlings are rather close to that one, the one that’s getting the extra help is going to start choking out the others. The leaves and the roots of the faster-growing one will eventually take away what the others need and they’ll die, leaving only the one that got the extra help.

And now, let’s say that you show the plants to someone else, but you don’t tell them that you were helping one of them but not the others. Instead, you give the impression that they were all growing in equal conditions. That person would be likely to conclude that the taller plant was merely more successful, while the others had defects or were inherently weaker.

That metaphor tells you exactly how the New Left was born, but you have to replace the word “seedlings” with “leftist tendencies” and “fertilizer and water” with “money from the CIA.”

Officially, the CIA stopped funneling money through front groups to anti-Marxist (that is: anti-worker) “leftists” at the end of the 60s after the CCF’s origins were revealed. We’ve no reason to actually believe this to be the case: all we can be really certain of is that the CCF itself officially no longer exists. Most of it was dismantled, and many of the journals it created and funded (except for The Paris Review) soon died. Meanwhile, most of its affiliate branches eventually closed or were merged into other organizations.

The most notable of that last instance, though, is really worth your attention. In 1991, the Foundation for European Intellectual Mutual Aid, created by the Congress for Cultural Freedom to fund anti-communist intellectuals in Europe, was taken over by a Hungarian billionaire named George Soros, who folded it into his own “foundation,” now called the Open Society Foundation (OSF).³

Yes. That’s the same organization funding this event to which I and quite a lot of really fascinating and brilliant people were invited. But again, the organizer of the event — whom I adore and deeply respect — isn’t himself part of the OSF. That’s not how these things work.

The OSF officially gives grants to organizations and individuals whose work furthers the goals of the “open society” as iterated by Karl Popper and reiterated by George Soros. That’s quite a broad mission, of course, and just as broad (and often nonsensical) is the list of individuals and groups that have received Soros money. For instance, in 2022, we find a 75,000 dollar grant to a group called the Black Male Yoga Initiative⁴ and $670,000 to a suburban woman’s “anti-extremism” group called “Red Wine & Blue.⁵”

But where tracking OSF money starts to get interesting is when you start to follow its grants to other foundations. For example, in the same year, OSF awarded 1.4 million US dollars to Fusion Partnerships, a social justice advocacy foundation, which used the money to help “birthing persons” and the “over-policed.” Much larger grants went to “incubator” organizations like Equis Labs⁶ ($18.7 million), the 1630 fund ($15 million), and the New Venture Fund 9.3 million.

Incubator foundations are what are accurately referred to — on the left or on the right — as “dark money,” and they function quite similarly to the way a VPN does. Just as a VPN creates an anonymized shield and substitute access point between a computer user and the information being accessed, an incubator creates a shield between massive amounts of “philanthropic” cash⁷ and groups that want that money.

This VPN relationship isn’t really to protect the groups getting the funding, however. Instead, it’s for the funders. It allows them to channel their money into political projects that benefit them without having their names attached to it.

This is exactly the same relationship that the CIA had with the Congress for Cultural Freedom, and the parallels don’t end here. When you look at the focus of these incubator groups, you quickly notice that social justice issues (that is, social justice identitarianism) are one of the most common project themes.