Could we get Fox News to bring back Glenn Beck and his chalkboard for a two-hour special? Because what began with a seemingly minor item Friday in the Washington Examinerhas exposed a direct connection between congressional Democrats and the radical network Beck so vividly described, involving George Soros, ACORN, SEIU and, yes, the notorious “Cloward-Piven Strategy.”
Before we get to the exclusive breaking news part of the story, let me recount how these dots got connected: Yesterday, I linked Joel Gerhke’s Examiner story in a post titled “Great: Corporate America Now Paying Democrats to Call Americans Racist,” which mentioned that the 2010 annual report for Maya Wiley’s Center for Social Inclusion (PDF, see Page 13) “lists many of the usual suspects, including George Soros’s Open Society Institute and the Soros-funded Tides Foundation.”
Operating in “file-and-forget” mode, I moved on to other stories until last night, when I was having fun on Twitter with the #ObamaBedtimeStoriesmeme, and one of my jokes got re-Tweeted by my friend, investigative reporter Matthew Vadum. Because Matthew is perhaps the nation’s leading expert on the ACORN/SEIU/Soros connection, it occurred to me he might be able to get some data on the Soros connection to what Gehrke had reported. So I sent him a couple of Tweets about it. By the time I got up about 7 a.m. today, Vadum had sent me a spreadsheet listing foundation contributions to Wiley’s outfit. Quickly adding up the numbers and doing additional research online, within two-and-a-half hours I’d filed this brief report for The American Spectator:
A non-profit organization that provided training last week to House Democrats, portraying Republican opponents as racially motivated, has received significant funding from foundations linked to controversial left-wing multibillionaire George Soros.
Soros’s Open Society Institute has given $75,000 to the Center for Social Inclusion, which has also received more than $850,000 from the Soros-connected Tides Foundation/Tides Center since 2005, according to documents obtained by The American Spectator.
In a training session for House Democrats and their congressional staffers last week, Center for Social Inclusion founder and president Maya Wiley described “conservative messages” as being “racially coded,” and suggested that Democrats “raise racial disparities” in public policy discussions, Joel Gerhke of the Washington Examiner reported. . . .