Madison Forum member Phil Kent spoke to Forum members and guests at the regular breakfast meeting on Saturday, June 30, 2007, discussing his latest book Foundations of Betrayal.
Mr. Kent said he labels himself as a Constitutional Conservative. He is not a Republican or Democrat, but he does sometimes use candidates and parties as a vehicle for conservative constitutionalist thought. He said when he was growing up it was explained to him that both parties were really inimical to American interests. He didn’t understand what his father was saying when he told about the Constitution, and about limited government, and individual responsibility. His father told him the Republican Party is controlled by the Rockefellers and these elites, and we’ve got to fight them, and that’s why we’re for Barry Goldwater. Mr. Kent said he wore ea Goldwater button in the fifth grade. He said as he grew older he understood what happened, because the Republican Party was not as conservative party before 1964, and you had to fight for that party if you were a Constitutional conservative. Republicans didn’t win every battle until about 1980 when Ronald Reagan became president. And then what’s happened since 1994, a heady year, the Contract with America. We thought that conservative constitutional government would sweep the land with Republican control. We had a good ride for awhile until, as some of your Republican Congressmen have said, we lost our way, referring to the Republicans in the Congress. The Republican Party is no longer a constitutionalist conservative party. He thinks we need to remember and teach that if we want to effect change within the Republican Party we are going to have to retake the party. He says it’s a wonderful opportunity, very unique if you are a political scientist, because in both parties it’s kind of open season for all the candidates. So, he said, be very discerning, whether it’s at the local, state, or national level as to whom you pick and support. He said that what he likes abut the Madison Forum, because we do exercise discernment when it comes to policy issues sand with regard to candidates.
Mr. Kent spoke about his new book and how much he learned when he got into the world of the private, left-wing, tax exempt foundations. He said it’s stunning how so many of these huge foundations, founded by the captains of capitalism, were hijacked by not just pleasant intellectually honest liberals, but by actually radical globalists who actually hate American and they undermine America. They really are foundations of betrayal. There are probably about 68,000 private, tax-exempt foundations in this country. There were only about a dozen a hundred years ago. Middle America, the vast middle class, is shouldering the tax burden because theses liberal super-elites are dodging the taxes and not really doing the charitable, donor intent that they are required to do but pushing their own agendas and undermining America.
Mr. Kent said, think of the names, Ford, Carnegie, Rockefeller, Pew, he could go on and on, and the book does, high-jacked to supports the very things that our Founding Fathers tried to instill in us and we try to promote. What he listed on the back of his book are the major foundations high-jacked to attack capitalism. He said the Green Agenda can be very dangerous, because the left super elites have not figured out how to basically control America and destroy our sovereignty. But they may have found it with the gospel of Al Gore. He said it’s amazing what these foundations are doing just in the world to promote green propaganda. Of course all of this is exaggerated, and it’s funded by the major foundations – Rockefeller, Ford, Carnegie, Hewlett – it’s amazing who is funding what. Because you have to follow where the money goes. And what’s especially shocking for those people of faith is that a lot of these atheist, super elites like Ted Turner in Atlanta or George Soros, who is a very evil, hateful, and anti-American. Mr. Kent said these are atheists that are funding religious Christian groups to promote eco-propaganda. They are replacing the Holy Bible with the gospel of Al Gore, literally with their Sunday school materials, with their religious materials. And they want to divide the people of faith in this country. Mr. Kent said it’s plain because it’s not something that’s been going on the last ten years. Rockefeller, Ford, Carnegie, and others have been doing this for the last fifty years, and the newcomers, like Soros, and Teresa Heinz Kerry, who’s a big villain in the book. He said the National Association of Evangelicals is particularly targeted. Some of the leaders of the Evangelicals, including very popular, best selling author Rick Warren, are buying in to the climate change propaganda. He said the ultimate goal of the left-wing super elites and the invisible government that they represent, and yes it is an invisible government, and more powerful, he thinks, than foreign countries, and sometimes even our own Congress. He said this is the only way, through implementation of their eco-agenda, which we will pretty much have a one world, controlled by the United Nations, billion dollar bureaucracy that controls our emissions and emission caps, and it will level the American economy down to that of other countries. It is to lose our sovereignty; it is to bring us down.
Mr. Kent said if we were to read the publications of these foundations and the one world groups, or they can be called globalists or internationalists, they really don’t believe in the U.S. Constitution or American sovereignty. A lot of people say, sincerely and innocently, why would President George W. Bush sign an agreement with Canada and Mexico to merge our economies together and to even plan to run a super toll highway through middle America, and it’s never discussed in the U.S. congress, hardly. Mr. Kent said he thinks it’s very simple. George W. Bush and hid Dad are globalists. They are internationalists. They believe in it. And the foundations keep fueling this and pressuring the Executive, the Legislative, and the Judicial branches, and if they don’t get what they want there with court decisions and with elections, they just keep on keeping on with the grants. He said it is incredible, if you look at what they are doing in various fields. He goes into all the fields. The cultural field, the field of sex education, how that has changed in the American education system in just the last 20 years. We have the Ford and Carnegie foundations literally supporting mergers with the Soviet Union, that communism is just a different system economically than our own free enterprise system. And we actually had a huge battle over what was being taught in the schools, that all cultures are equal. He said that’s crazy. All cultures are not equal. But that’s what the foundations have been preaching. And when you look at the attacks on our free enterprise system, they’re not just coming from countries that don’t like us; they’re coming from some of our major universities and the media. He said it pains him to sees what has happened in his own profession in the last 25 to 30 years. It is dominated by political liberals. There’s no question that the universities are dominated by political liberals, even Marxists, un-Americans. Why it is any surprise that the private tax-exempt foundations would be targeted by folks who don’t believe in our traditional core values and are dominated by them.
Mr. Kent spoke about George Soros. He said he calls him the Dr. Evil of the world’s foundations. He’s number two and trying harder. He names the Ford Foundation as the number one anti-American foundation, a traitor in our midst. He said those are harsh words, but the Ford Foundation literally has been funding so many things world wide. It has assets of $11 billion, and think of all the grants that have been going into the eco-propaganda, going into the open borders propaganda. They’re actually funding radical Islamic charities including the Arab American, the anti-American research institute which defends suicide bombers, Ford Foundation grants, and Rockefeller Foundation grants. The American Civil Liberties Union has not been known as a conservative group. The ACLU does do some good work in very few limited areas in terms of privacy and in terms of perhaps free speech, but other than that, Mr. Kent said he can’t think of anything else that they do very well. He said he thinks constitutionalists sometimes forget the Fourth Amendment, the search and seizure amendment, and of course, free speech. Free speech is not under attack from the political right, as some of these goofy liberals we sometimes hear from Creative Loafing or the Atlanta Journal Constitution think. It’s under attack from the hard left. Look no further than two students at Georgia Tech. They are two members of the College Republicans, one a Jewish student and one a Christian student, and they were actually stifled with their free speech. They were told that they could not put up their booth, and they had to actually go to court, and to beat down the speech code. Just like there are speech codes at a lot of these universities we’re trying to fight. The First Amendment doesn’t apply.
Mr. Kent said this is just a snapshot of what’s going on here and what the agenda is. Again, knock down traditional values, knock down national sovereignty. Keep pushing it, no matter what. These people don’t give up. He said he likes the Madison Forum, because we don’t give up, either.
Mr. Kent quoted George Soros who said, “The main obstacle for a just and stable world is the United States of America”. He said this guy doesn’t just hate George Bush, he hates the United States of America. George Soros has foundations in just about every country in Europe. He has the Open Society Institute which is very influential in America. He became prominent in 2004 by spending $4 million in anti-Bush radio ads alone. Mr. Kent says the man has his own agenda. Again, the green exaggerated climate change propaganda, to make sure the United Nations actually does have a carbon emissions trading control system where all the economies would have to work in sync under the United Nations bureaucracy. He actually has an agenda of open borders, free passage of goods and people. So naturally they would be supporting things like the European Union of a North American Union. So again, Mr. Kent said, this shouldn’t be surprising when you look at the overall agenda of, again, he calls the invisible government of the foundations.
Mr. Kent talked about Greenpeace. Greenpeace has offices all over Europe and North America. According to their web site, their big mission is to undermine the United States of America’s troops around the world. He said they take their boats into the Netherlands or Spain and they try to block our supplies from going into the Middle East or anywhere else around the world. That’s their big thing. They hate us. And they are funded, again, by all the big foundations.
Mr. Kent said that studying the Federal 990 Forms is the only way to figure out what the private, tax-exempt, super rich, elites are doing, by following where the money goes. The Ford Foundation gave the seed money to set up the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund in 1968. He said the Ford Foundation has nothing to do with the Ford Motor Company. He said Henry Ford II quit in disgust in 1977 when he said this is not the intent of what my family wanted.
Mr. Kent said that that the Attorneys General of all 50 states have a lot of power with regard to tax exempt foundations. He said we could put pressure on our own Attorney General in Georgia to start making these foundations accountable. Are they doing what their donor intent says they are supposed to do? Are they violating the 501(c)3 IRS tax code in engaging in illegal partisan lobbying? Of course the answer is that a lot of them are, and the Liberal bureaucracy and the IRS, which is supposed to police the tax exempt foundations, really turn a blind eye. He told about the Attorney General of Michigan, Mike Cox, who initiated a two-year probe, which is still going on, and he has really caused the super rich elites of the Ford Foundation a lot of sleepless nights and headaches, and he has actually forced them to do what a charitable foundation is supposed to do, help poor people, help educational facilities, help medical facilities. Foundations with political agendas spend a lot of money and yet they are not pouring billions into school reform or medical research. He points to Bill and Melinda Gates, who are not conservatives, although Melinda is pro-life. Their foundation is accountable, it has achievable goals, and they have benchmarks for where their grants go and if they are done properly. They have targeted the eradication of the top 20 diseases in the world. And to their credit, they have been funding in the United States as a top priority charter education. They are doing their donor intent, their charitable intent, unlike the Ford Foundation. The Ford Foundation has been so embarrassed by the Michigan Attorney General’s questions and probes into their grants that they have said they are going to go back and fund charities in Detroit and in Michigan where the foundation first started, where Henry and Edsell Ford had originally wanted a large share of the money to go for true charities. Mr. Kent said Detroit is one of the poorest cities in the country and yet the super liberal elites ignored the poor people so they could fund the radical Islamic charities and open borders and radical green groups. They claim to be for the poor and downtrodden, but they are not.
Mr. Kent suggested that we talk to Attorney General Baker to see what he is doing to make foundations more accountable. Also we should talk to members of Congress and ask for an investigation of the left-wing tax exempt foundations and make them accountable. He said the last meaningful Congressional investigation of the foundations was in 1953-54. He said he thinks it’s time for another one, and he thinks there would be Democrats and Republicans who would want to do this.