How George Soros Has Taken Over Your Local Government
Jose Nino
|
Cities and counties across the nation are witnessing George Soros-backed networks push race-based policies in order to disrupt localities.
According to Luke Rosiak of the Daily Caller, these groups in tandem with local politicians are “redrawing school boundaries to dismantle schools with too many white or Asian students.”
Some of these proposals are so radical that even casual, left-leaning constituents are starting to worry. The justification of these policies is done under the guise of “equity.”
Margaret McCreary, a parent in Fairfax County, Virginia, said that “School board meetings suddenly became like Mad Libs. They started repeating certain phrases, jamming them into every sentence. It was very odd.” She was referring to a proposal that board members put forward that would have McCreary’s children moved out of her school district.
“It seemed like they were all in cahoots to do something, but at first we didn’t know what to make of it, because we didn’t know what they were talking about,” McCreary continued.
Fairfax was one of the first counties to pass drastic measures that required every policy to be viewed “through the “lens” of race.” The justification for these changes came from research that the University of Southern California (USC) conducted. This USC research argued that these racial policies would benefit the cities and could gain them “billions of dollars” if USC’s policy suggestions were carried out.
The Daily Caller News Foundation found that these policy proposals being shoved down local governments’ throats are funded by a network of groups with similar funders, which include George Soros. According to DCNF, “One of those groups alone is active in 33 cities and counties covering 1 in 10 Americans.”
A group affiliated to USC called the Program for Environmental and Regional Equity (PERE) works to conduct research — at their funders’ request — that will allegedly rake in billions of dollars of economic growth. Other groups provide research to individual cities and counties, where it is used to justify “equity” mandates in all policymaking.
Then the government follows advice from a third set of groups who want local governments to implement radical policies that they are supposedly obligated to carry out.
These groups share funders and board members who work together to share information in a synergistic fashion.
Fairfax County was originally sold on this radical policy after county employees participated in a 2014 conference associated with a group called the Local and Regional Government Alliance on Race and Equity (GARE). At the event, GARE assisted unelected bureaucrats in influencing the elected politicians they worked for by substituting “politically difficult” language with the more neutral “equity.”
A history of this project in Fairfax expanded on what this project entailed:
Collaborating with GARE also helped [Fairfax employees Karla Bruce and Karen Shaban] make the transition from focusing on ‘disproportionality,’ a concept and language that could be politically difficult, to a focus on equity and opportunity. As Bruce comments, ‘If we hadn’t made the shift from disproportionality to equity, we never would have gotten the elected officials on board.
The groups in question showed Fairfax’s county board and school board an extensive proposal called “Equitable Growth Profile.” Convinced by the hype of increased economic activity, “Fairfax’s county board and school board enacted an unprecedented arch-policy that would control all other policies” by July 2016. Ultimately, this was a sweeping manifesto filled with vague language that parroted the buzzwords of the Equitable Growth Profile. It was titled “One Fairfax.”
“Research institutes PolicyLink and the Program for Environmental and Regional Equity at the University of Southern California studied the economic impact of inequity in Fairfax County. It found that the county’s gross domestic product would have been $26.2 billion higher in 2012 if its racial gaps in income were closed,” Fairfax stated on its web page explaining the policy’s intent.
Despite such lofty economic promises, there were some economists that did not buy into the hype.
Independent Institute economist Richard Vedder told the DCNF “There’s no discussion of how you’d attain equal incomes, it’s just saying assume equal income.”
Vedder added, “There’s no evidence provided about how to get there. If this approach is valid, why don’t we just say we want to triple the incomes of the minorities instead of double, and raise the GDP even more?”
The economist continued, “The whole idea is sort of bizarre. I don’t see how you could equalize income without causing dislocation to the economy. If you make the wages of blue-collar workers equal to white-collar workers, the white collar workers either demand that their pay increase, or they leave. If we dropped money out of airplanes, the nominal number of dollars in circulation might rise, but you’d have inflation.”
However, sound economics was never even considered by these activists.
They proceeded to float the idea of re-drawing school boundaries in the Fairfax area. However, Fairfax residents immediately pushed back against this policy proposal.
Reports of more than 100 residents of different racial and socioeconomic status protested at a school board meeting in July 2019. They argued that their property values would drop by hundreds of thousands of dollars and even local minority activists were demanding that the school not be rezoned along demographic lines. A vote on this policy change was postponed for the time being.
At the top of the Left’s political correctness agenda is an obsession with all things based on race. To justify blatant overreaches in power, they will draw up on tribalistic rhetoric to confuse people into accepting certain power grabs like the one mentioned in this case.
Like every other issue they focus on, the Left takes a local approach to pushing these kinds of measures. After all, people are less politically active at the local level and are more likely to let their guards down.
Share: