Billionaire George Soros has provided financing to or has close relationships with at least 56 “partners” of Saturday’s “Women’s March on Washington,” according to a report at a website affiliated with the New York Times.
Writing the website for Women in the World, a summit in a joint venture with The New York Times, former Wall Street Journal reporter Asra Q. Nomani relates her findings on the Soros ties to the march. The Women in the World site is hosted by the Times.
By my draft research, which I’m opening up for crowd-sourcing on GoogleDocs, Soros has funded, or has close relationships with, at least 56 of the march’s “partners,” including “key partners” Planned Parenthood, which opposes Trump’s anti-abortion policy, and the National Resource Defense Council, which opposes Trump’s environmental policies. The other Soros ties with “Women’s March” organizations include the partisan MoveOn.org (which was fiercely pro-Clinton), the National Action Network (which has a former executive director lauded by Obama senior advisor Valerie Jarrett as “a leader of tomorrow” as a march co-chair and another official as “the head of logistics”). Other Soros grantees who are “partners” in the march are the American Civil Liberties Union, Center for Constitutional Rights, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. March organizers and the organizations identified here haven’t yet returned queries for comment.
In response to the report, a spokeswoman for Soros’s Open Society Foundations released a statement – included in an update to Nomani’s article – denying the group was “funding protests” in the wake of the presidential election. Nomani, however, did not charge that Soros was funding protests; she documented the numerous Soros-funded groups that were “partners” to the protest march.
The Open Society statement reads:
“There have been many false reports about George Soros and the Open Society Foundations funding protests in the wake of the U.S. presidential elections. There is no truth to these reports. We support a wide range of organizations — including those that support women and minorities who have historically been denied equal rights. Many of whom are concerned about what policy changes may lie ahead. We are proud of their work. We of course support the right of all Americans to peaceably assemble and petition their government—a vital, and constitutionally safeguarded, pillar of a functioning democracy.”
Last week, Breitbart News reported the march is backed by a who’s who of far-left organizations, including scores of groups financed by Soros.
Activists Gloria Steinem and Harry Belafonte are serving as honorary co-chairs.
In 2005, Belafonte founded the Gathering for Justice group, which has since been the recipient of numerous grants from Soros’ Open Society Foundations.
Open Society also supported the New York production of a play starring Belafonte titled “The Exonerated” about wrongly convicted death row inmates. Soros’ foundation sponsored a series of “talk back” conversions after the play “where justice advocates and death penalty experts from across the country will speak and field questions from the theater audience.”
Belafonte serves on the board of the Advancement Project, which was one of four primary recipients of money from a group created in 2008 called the Election Administration Fund. The Fund reportedly raised between $5.1 million–$1 million from Soros’ Open Society Institute.
Meanwhile, the official partner’s list for the Women’s March on Washington reads like a who’s who of the far-left, including groups such as CODEPINK, the Southern Poverty Law Center and 350.org.
Many of the march “partners” are financed by Soros, including: Sierra Club, Amnesty International, MoveOn.org, NAACP, Green For All, Center for Constitutional Rights, Human Rights Watch, MoveOn.org, NARAL Pro-Choice, People for the American Way and Planned Parenthood.
The march is led by the following four co-chairs:
- Tamika D. Mallory, whose bio says she “has worked closely with the Obama Administration as an advocate for civil rights issues, equal rights for women, health care, gun violence, and police misconduct.” She also served on the transition committee of NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio.
- Carmen Perez, who served as the executive director of Belafonte’s Soros-financed The Gathering for Justice.
- Linda Sarsour, a self-described “Brooklyn-born Palestinian-American-Muslim racial justice and civil rights activist,” who serves as “the Executive Director of the Arab American Association of New York, co-founder of Muslims for Ferguson, and a member of Justice League NYC,” her march bio relates.
- Bob Bland, the CEO and founder of Manufacture New York (MNY), which his bio describes as “a social enterprise that is rethinking the fashion ecosystem (design, development, distribution) and creating a new, vertically-integrated business model that will transform apparel & textile production for the 21st century.”
Aaron Klein is Breitbart’s Jerusalem bureau chief and senior investigative reporter. He is a New York Times bestselling author and hosts the popular weekend talk radio program, “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio.” Follow him on Twitter @AaronKleinShow. Follow him on Facebook.