When even Alex Soros says an organization is going too far with its anti-Israel advocacy, you know it’s extreme.
The son of billionaire financier George Soros made the criticism during an interview with New York Magazine, in which he discussed a variety of topics related to political advocacy. His comments were directed at the Sunrise Movement, a youth-led climate activism group based in the United States.
The organization has hundreds of local chapters across the US. Its members have organized protests, supported candidates, and generally advocated for climate-friendly policies. Yet, lately, it seems the group has fixated on the war in Gaza.
“What the hell did they do, by the way? We gave them money, and now all they do is talk about Palestine,” he said. “It’s ridiculous.”
His comments came in the middle of a discussion about left-wing nonprofit advocacy groups.
This past November, a postelection consensus began to congeal everywhere from the liberal New York Times to the progressive Nation to the Substacks of the “popularist” center: Blame the Groups. The argument: Nonprofit advocacy organizations had pressured the Democratic Establishment into unpopular left-wing positions on issues such as policing, gender, and immigration by claiming to speak for the party’s multiracial working class, when in reality they represented a highly educated sliver of the party. As a result, once-reliable blue-collar voters who disagreed with these positions rejected the Democratic Party and Donald Trump won the presidency.
The author discusses the criticism these groups face for pushing Democratic politicians into advocating for unpopular policies on immigration, gender identity, and others. Soros’ Open Society Foundation (OSF) has poured a considerable sum of money into these organizations.
Amid the right’s obsession with demonizing George Soros, there is scant mainstream understanding of what OSF actually does. One thing it does is fund the Groups. In the summer of 2019, eight progressive NGOs teamed up on a campaign to pressure the Democratic presidential field into pledging to decriminalize border crossings. They were United We Dream Action, Working Families, MoveOn, Indivisible, the Center for Popular Democracy Action, Women’s March, Sunrise, and Bend the Arc: Jewish Action. Though the policy polled poorly, eight of ten presidential candidates at a debate that June pledged their support for it. (Joe Biden and Michael Bennet did not.) OSF has funded seven of the eight groups. Later, a ninth group, Latino Victory Project, vowed to apply pressure on Biden. It also receives OSF funding.
Some OSF-backed groups focus on economic issues. But much of its U.S. budget flows to archetypal Groups “pressing for racial equity” or that aim to “support immigrants’ rights” or engage young voters on “voting rights, gun safety, reproductive freedom, LGBTQI+ rights, and climate change.” In 2020, the year of the George Floyd protests, OSF nearly doubled its annual U.S. budget, to $400 million.
As a decentralized movement, Sunrise’s local chapters operate independently of one another. Many chapters have been outspoken against Israel, even though its primary topic is supposed to be climate change. Its DC chapter announced in 2021 that it would boycott a voting rights rally that involved Zionist Jewish groups. In a statement, the group referred to Zionism as a “racist settler-colonial ideology.”
Soros has criticized the anti-Israel elements in the US, but this does not necessarily mean he supports the Jewish state either. He has been a proponent of the two-state solution and has routinely criticized the Israeli government over its treatment of Palestinian civilians – especially in the current war in Gaza.
Yet, the fact remains that the nonprofit groups discussed in the article did Democrats a tremendous disservice over recent years. The notion that they actually believed it was a good idea to tell politicians to support ridiculous ideas such as men becoming women and vice versa, along with coddling violent criminals, shows they are woefully out of touch with everyday Americans. This reality was on full display during the 2024 campaign – which is why Democrats lost big.
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