Foundation of American Folly: The Ford Foundation Has Spent Decades Tearing the Country Apart, Tax Free

N.S. Lyons, City Journal, Spring 2024

It’s November 2023, and, following the October 7 attacks by Hamas terrorists that killed some 1,400 Israelis and at least 31 Americans, thousands of demonstrators march through New York City, calling for the destruction of the Jewish state. Chants of “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” echo through the streets, along with “there is only one solution: intifada revolution.” Among the crowd is the infamous Palestinian American activist Linda Sarsour, who warns through a megaphone that a cabal of wily Jews has conspired to place “their little posters” (of kidnapped Israeli civilians) across the city, seeking to entice people to rip them down. While many onlookers might look like “ordinary people,” she says, the Jews have “their little people all around the city,” surveilling others. Sarsour is there to deliver such rhetoric in part because she’s been paid to be there: her nonprofit, MPower Change, has received $300,000 in grant funding from the Ford Foundation “to build grassroots Muslim power.”

It’s May 2023, and protesters have stormed the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., to demand that lawmakers not accept spending cuts during negotiations to lift the debt ceiling. Many are so disruptive that the police arrest them and drag them out. These are activists of the Center for Popular Democracy, an extreme left-wing organization that has collected $35.2 million from the Ford Foundation since 2012. Four months later, they will be imitated by 150 youth activists from the “climate revolution” group the Sunrise Movement, 18 of whom will be arrested after occupying the Speaker of the House’s office. The Sunrise Movement also receives Ford Foundation money—$650,000 for “training and organizing.”

It’s April 2023, and, a world away, the China Development Research Foundation (CDRF), a think tank set up and directed by the Chinese state, is hosting a conference in Beijing to discuss how to “promote the formation of an internationally accepted ESG system with Chinese characteristics,” including through China’s globe-spanning influence and infrastructure plan, the Belt and Road Initiative. But this effort by America’s top geopolitical adversary isn’t too far afield for the Ford Foundation to fund; it has given CDRF $600,000 to help realize its ambitions.

These examples from just the last year—collected via a semi-random tour of the Ford Foundation’s vast Grants Database—represent a tiny fraction of the nearly $1 billion that the foundation gives away yearly, on average. Almost a century old and sitting on a mountainous $16.4 billion endowment in 2022, the foundation is a “philanthropic” giant—one of the five largest in the U.S. If it were a for-profit firm, its market capitalization would rank it among the Fortune 500. Instead, “guided by a vision of social justice,” as its mission statement puts it, the Ford Foundation’s enormous flood of untaxed money flows annually to an immense ecosystem of overwhelmingly left-wing—and often outright revolutionary—causes.

Yet the foundation’s activities remain largely below the public’s radar, the extent of its malign history mostly unknown. This should change. America today faces a multitude of escalating sociopolitical crises that are rapidly tearing apart the body politic: a rapacious strain of tribal identity politics; spreading legal, cultural, and moral chaos; lawlessness in the streets; and the entrenchment of an oligarchic managerial elite, increasingly willing to cast aside any remaining shred of democratic or national sovereignty in its pursuit of top-down global “progress.” Behind every one of these fractures, one finds the ongoing work of the Ford Foundation.

In 2020, following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, a “racial reckoning” swept the United States, kindling fiery riots across the nation, abrupt moves by municipalities to defund police departments, and the near-wholesale capitulation of public institutions—from universities to government agencies to major corporations—to a culturally revolutionary ideology of identitarian grievance and racial separatism. To some, this came as a shock. To the Ford Foundation, it marked the fulfillment of decades of effort.

The foundation has long seen itself as uniquely dedicated to progress and social justice, its stated mission from as early as the 1950s being the “general purpose of advancing human welfare” and to “eradicate the causes of suffering” worldwide. But after current president Darren Walker took the helm in 2013, it began more fully to embrace a public identity as a “social justice foundation” and reoriented its mission to “disrupt the drivers of inequality” in every sphere of life and across the globe.

Thus, the foundation directed a record sum of more than $3 billion to “racial justice” and “racial equity” groups and programs in 2020–21—more than any other nonprofit or individual philanthropist (Mackenzie Scott was the next biggest donor, at $2.9 billion), or any corporate giant (JPMorgan Chase, at $2.1 billion). And it went out of its way to celebrate the successes scored by its lengthy roster of “fearless warriors for equality and justice,” such as those in Minneapolis who had pledged “to dismantle the police department” and in Los Angeles “to divest $250 million of the LAPD’s budget”—both described as “monumental steps in the right direction.”

The Ford Foundation could claim not only to have responded to the “racial reckoning” but also to have propelled it. After 2013, the foundation began funding many of the groups that would coalesce around the label “Black Lives Matter,” as well as the violent “antifascist” (Antifa) radicals who would take to the streets.

In 2016, for example, the Ford Foundation gave $200,000 to help start up the Southern Vision Alliance (SVA), a creation of the Workers World Party, a revolutionary Marxist-Leninist group founded in 1959. The SVA and its subsidiary, Charlotte Uprising, then went on to perform one of the first illegal teardowns of a historic monument in the United States—in Durham, North Carolina—and would be instrumental in coordinating similar acts of iconoclasm across the country in the years that followed.

When the SVA activists involved were charged with rioting and property damage, lawyers from the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, also funded by the Ford Foundation, defended them pro bono. Apparently pleased by SVA’s alignment with its own objective of “disrupting systems to advance social justice,” the foundation handed the organization another $1 million in 2018–19. Southern Vision Alliance activists would stage attacks at the Republican National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, in August 2020, resulting in injuries to dozens of police and bystanders. Following this, the foundation tripled its contribution to SVA, to $3 million. In 2023, Charlotte Uprising/SVA activists were among those charged with domestic terrorism for the extreme violence of their organized attacks on law enforcement during a months-long Antifa siege of “Cop City,” a planned police-training facility outside Atlanta.

The Ford Foundation’s history of funding radical, even openly violent, racial identitarian groups extends back far earlier than the 2010s. One could even say that the foundation helped invent American identity politics as we know it today.

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