Billionaire George Soros’s radical leftism is spreading through America’s most populous county. Days after a Soros-backed prosecutor who vows to lock up fewer criminals became Los Angeles District Attorney, the city’s mayor is forcing all employees to undergo “implicit bias” training to be conducted by a group that receives funding from Soros and his Open Society Foundations (OSF). That makes L.A. County and its biggest city, the nation’s second-most populous, a stronghold of the powerful Soros machine that aims to promote the left’s agenda.
It started with Soros’s financial support for a controversial Black Lives Matter-endorsed District Attorney candidate, George Gascon, who has alienated career prosecutors throughout California with his renegade criminal justice reform initiatives. A former San Francisco District Attorney, Gascon announced upon being sworn in as L.A. County’s top prosecutor that his office will no longer pursue the death penalty, try juveniles as adults, add gangs and other enhancements to criminal complaints or seek cash bail for non-violent felonies or misdemeanors. It is worth noting that the L.A. County D.A. is the largest local prosecutorial office in the United States. The District Attorney in Sacramento recently blasted Gascon in a letter published by various media outlets in the state. “Your Special Directives are not just extreme but will undoubtedly wreak havoc on crime victims and their Constitutional rights,” the letter states. “Your lack of concern for their rights and safety concerns me greatly. Additionally, because crime has no boundaries, these Special Directives will have far greater impact than on Los Angeles County alone. Rather, victims across California will be negatively impacted and the safety of all Californians will be jeopardized.”
Now all the city’s 50,000 employees must participate in racial bias training conducted by the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State University (OSU). Judicial Watch dug up information on the group and uncovered deep ties to Soros and other notorious leftists. The center is named after a former OSU president appointed by California Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi to a prestigious Department of Education post. In addition to its “implicit bias” trainings, the institute’s research areas include racial wealth inequality, opportunity mapping, and health equity and disparities. As you would expect, its agenda is radically progressive. Policy proposals from Kirwan Institute products include, “significantly raise taxes on the ultra-wealthy,” a Congressional committee on reparations, guaranteed employment, and “Medicare for All.”
Until this month, the institute’s executive director was Darrick Hamilton, who left to head the Institute for the Study of Race, Stratification and Political Economy at the New School in New York. He is best known for being one of the developers of the “baby bonds” proposal in which the government provides a trust fund for every newborn based on parents’ wealth. Hamilton was an advisor to the Bernie Sanders campaign and a member of the Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force. OSU paid him $259,334.40 annually to run the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity. Other individuals associated with the institute include Kyle Strickland, who serves as senior legal analyst and Hasan Jeffries, an OSU professor who achieved notoriety for posting on social media that the Fraternal Order of Police has killed more black people than the white supremacist hate group Ku Klux Klan. Strickland is a Black Lives Matter supporter who is also deputy director of race and democracy at the Roosevelt Institute, which received more than $1 million from OSF in 2019 and lists Jonathan Soros as a senior fellow.
The Kirwan Institute has received an undisclosed amount of funding from OSF and the Soros conglomerate is listed as a financial supporter in its 2015-2016 Biennial Report. OSF is not specifically mentioned in the 2020 annual report however, it notes that the institute partners with Demos, the Roosevelt Institute, the Center for Community Change, and the Economic Security Project, all of which receive extensive funding from OSF. One of the institute’s partners, PolicyLink, is a liberal research and advocacy nonprofit in Oakland that received $500,000 from OSF in 2019.
The mayor of L.A., Eric Garcetti, claims the goal of enlisting this group is to “advance racial equity across city government.” Garcetti recently issued a directive that creates a racial equity task force and appoints racial equity officers throughout city government. “Our city is in pain, and we are hungry for change,” the mayor writes in the order “The demonstrations for racial justice in recent weeks have not exposed something new — they’ve laid bare the urgent and overdue demand to end structural racism. America’s tragic history of violent and persistent discrimination casts a long shadow over the challenges Blacks and other people of color confront today in housing, employment, and the criminal justice system.” The social, economic, and political inequities have created a “shamefully disparate and stratified society,” Garcetti asserts.
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Author: Judicial Watch
Judicial Watch, Inc., a conservative, non-partisan educational foundation, promotes transparency, accountability and integrity in government, politics and the law. Through its educational endeavors, Judicial Watch advocates high standards of ethics and morality in our nation’s public life and seeks to ensure that political and judicial officials do not abuse the powers entrusted to them by the American people. Judicial Watch fulfills its educational mission through litigation, investigations, and public outreach. Visit Judicial Watch at https://www.judicialwatch.org/
