This is going to be a long thread beginning with the story of Leah Hunt-Hendrix, an oil heir and left-wing activist, and then branching out to other left bourgeoisie in her orbit and their project of social entrepreneurship in general.🧵
First, some background on me: after the 2016 election, I sought out the most radical orgs on the electoral left, leading me to follow the work of Justice Democrats and related orgs to which Leah was central.
Since then my politics have grown and I've come to see the limits of Leah's theory of change. Beyond that I don't intend to disparage Leah, her associates, or her orgs, but I think even the most "progressive" actors in the non-profit industrial complex should be open to scrutiny.
Back to Leah's orgs, she is integral to Justice Democrats, Sunrise Movement, Data for Progress, Indivisible, Movement for Black Lives, Debt Collective, Resource Generation, and Standing Rock protests; and founded Way to Win, Way to Lead, Way to Rise, Solidaire, and Emergent Fund.
Leah's primary relationship to those orgs is as a fundraiser from her fellow bourgeoisie in Democracy Alliance, which was the liberal answer to the Koch network. She advocates for long-term, community-centric movement funding beyond electoral cycles.
insidephilanthropy.com/home/2020/7/30…
According to LinkedIn, Leah's a senior advisor at the American Economic Liberties Project, the antitrust project tied to Omidyar Network, and she's on the boards of ACRE and the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.
linkedin.com/in/leah-hunt-h…
Leah was formerly on the boards of The Worker's Lab, New Economy Coalition, Free Speech for People, and EDGE Funder Alliance (not Edge Foundation); associate fellow at Institute for Policy Studies; and Director, New Economics Initiative at ThoughtWorks.
linkedin.com/in/leah-hunt-h…
During the 2020 primary, I remember that Leah's orgs stayed neutral in Sanders vs. Warren until very late in the campaign when they backed Sanders. Her associate Max Berger worked for Warren but other people from her orgs were working for Sanders.
Leah followed in the philanthropic footsteps of mother Helen LaKelly Hunt, who was central to Women's Funding Network and founded Women Moving Millions with sister Swanee Hunt, the former Ambassador to Austria. Helen is close friends with Gloria Steinem.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_LaK…
Helen is married to Harville Hendrix, the famous author of "Getting the Love you Want." Together they created Imago Relationship Therapy. Harville has appeared on Oprah 17 times. Their other daughter is Hunter Hunt-Hendrix of the black metal band Liturgy.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harville_…
Helen's father and Leah's grandfather is the oil baron H. L. Hunt. Hunt was believed to have been a lifelong racist who funded the Minutemen, John Birch Society, Elijah Muhammad, and conspired with George Wallace.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._L._Hunt
H. L. Hunt figures in a JFK assassination conspiracy theory and inspired the J. R. Ewing character on the TV show Dallas. I think I remember a podcast discussing how that show distracted from a revelation, e.g. the House Select Committee on Assassinations report in March 1979.
H. L. Hunt had 15 children from 3 wives, 2 simultaneous. One child, Lamar founded the AFL football league, MLS, WCT, several professional teams, and resorts. Another, Ray Lee had Kurdish oil rights. Another, Nelson Bunker had Libyan oil rights.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamar_Hunt
Another son of H. L. Hunt, William Herbert tried to corner the silver market with brothers Lamar and Nelson Bunker.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nelson_Bu…
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_H…
Cornel West advised Leah at Princeton. In the late 2000s, she studied in Egypt, Syria, Israel, and Palestine. Her dissertation was on solidarity movements. She was arrested at a 2008 anti-Iraq War protest on Bush White House lawn.
salon.com/2012/03/17/occ…
web.archive.org/web/2021041421…
In late 2011, Leah participated in Occupy Wall Street. Generation Occupy by Occupied Wall Street Journal editor Michael Levitin devotes a few pages to her. The next spring, she, Max Berger, and Brooke Lehman regrouped to launch their orgs at the Occupy Manifest retreat.
Brooke hosted the retreat at The Watershed Center. She was also a wealthy heir, daughter of Orin Lehman (of the Lehman Brothers family) and Wendy Vanderbilt. She had a long history of activism as a founder of the anti-globalization Direct Action Network.
thewatershedcenter.org/who-we-are/
While I'm sharing the rest of the pages about Brooke, I should note that her father Orin Lehman's ex-wife was Jane Bagley, granddaughter of R. J. Reynolds and co-founder of Democracy Alliance member Tides Foundation.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orin_Lehm…
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tides_Fou…
David Graeber, another prominent Occupier and Direct Action Network member, was friends with fellow DAN member and anthropologist Stuart Rockefeller, grandson of Nelson Rockefeller. Stuart researches Bolivian social movements.
humanrightscolumbia.org/education/stua…
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_Ac…
Hard to escape signs of new age spirituality and foreign meddling on Watershed's website and another book found online, which has numerous references to Esalen and says the former UN Director of Leadership and Capacity Development facilitated the retreat.
books.google.com/books?id=zI7QC…
Ultimately, the retreat, which cost $3,500 per individual to attend, led to the founding of Solidaire and the Momentum movement incubator, both inspired by "color revolutions" abroad. Together they launched Sunrise Movement and a number of other orgs.
vice.com/en/article/8xw…
Sunshine Movement co-founder and Occupier Evan Weber attended the same prep school as President Obama and Democracy Alliance donor Pierre Omidyar. He also did aid work with the Turkish Army in Syrian refugee camps in 2012 and previously in Croatia.
linkedin.com/in/evanlweber
Forgot to mention that another training org that grew out of Occupy Manifest was The Wildfire Project.
wildfireproject.org
Leah co-founded Solidaire, her movement grantmaking org with Farhad Ebrahimi, a participant in Occupy Boston, board member of Democracy Alliance, and founder of Chorus Foundation.
chorusfoundation.org/about/
yesmagazine.org/democracy/2015…
Farhad inherited a lot of money from his father, Fred Ebrahimi, the former CEO of Quark Software, and is trying to give it all away quickly to confront the climate crisis, though he expects to receive additional inheritances.
boldergiving.org/stories.php?st…
insidephilanthropy.com/home/2016/2/2/…
Fred was "son of a landlord from a minority group" in Iran (Azeri?). He moved to the US in 1959, studied cybernetics, become an entrepreneur, returned to Iran, and built a computer college. After the Revolution he went back to the US and bought into Quark.
economictimes.indiatimes.com/cityzen-quark-…
Fred later moved to India to offshore Quark's workforce to a planned community in Punjab called Quark City. Farhad's mother Patty's story was not dissimilar. Her family, originally from Iowa and Ireland, left Cuba for Peru during that Revolution.
maxwellpdunne.com/obituary/19179…
In 2012 Farhad's parents worked with Tim Gill, the Quark founder and Democracy Alliance member, on the PR campaign to normalize relations with Cuba. Gill previously won a similar campaign for marriage equality and flipped Colorado government to the Dems.
motherjones.com/politics/2015/…
Fred's sister
legacy.com/us/obituaries/…
Gara LaMarche directed more resources to Leah and Farhad's types of orgs when he took charge of Democracy Alliance.
forgeorganizing.org/article/philan…
insidephilanthropy.com/home/2022/5/13…
And I should note that David Callahan, who runs Inside Philanthropy, is part of Democracy Alliance. He co-founded Demos, wrote a book on Democratic donors called The Givers, and advocates philanthropy toward these types of orgs via his new media outlet Blue Tent.
If it could scale, it might bring the US closer to a modern democracy. Leah and Max Berger's plan from 2020 was about as radical as one could expect for a Democratic electoral strategy.
plantogovern.us/beyond-trump/
But I think it's limited by the contradictions a Democratic donor base in the "new economy" that tilts more toward the interests of Omidyar's business partner Jeffrey Skoll, the alter-globalization Brooke Lehman is familiar with, and those described in Left Behind by Lily Geismer
That is, community development harmonized with international, where philanthropists and governments make start-up investments to social entrepreneurs, measure impact toward sustainable but unequal development, and eventually build into asset classes for traditional investors
All with movement branding, as demonstrated by this report from the Hewlett Foundation, which is also one of the top funders of the Federalist Society (to fix Congress, they say).
ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/…
art.coop/report/
At the end of the day, NGOs and tech are privatizing forces, forms of state decentralization and social control long used internationally. And sustainable development plans and investors are rooted in maintaining capitalism more than solving the climate crisis or inequality.
The result is bipartisan support for a weak nation state, weak international institutions, depoliticized administration, and imperialism, as advocated by Anne-Marie Slaughter and New America, with a side of backsliding human rights.
foreignaffairs.com/articles/1997-…
newamerica.org/political-refo…
There's a history of this kind of politics on the US left. The consumer and environmental movements that Direct Action Network grew out of were spurred by postwar funding from big foundations and cultural shifts toward apolitical communalism and "populism."
David Graeber of Direct Action Network was also a member of Adbusters, whose Micah White launched Occupy. Micah's father in law was the former ambassador to Turkey, among other things.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_J….
Micah wanted to create a coalition with the Tea Party. He attended the WEF and helped launch neofascist-friendly Five Star in Greece (fun fact: one star symbolized sustainable development).
endofprotest.com/news/this-is-h…
micahwhite.medium.com/im-an-activist…
thewublies.wordpress.com/2021/07/09/ful…
I don't have all the answers, but I do think left-wing movements should do their own homework when it comes to getting into the right relationship with the world--not rely on top-down direction from the bourgeoisie.
Here are some more links (not factually verified) for people who want to do a deeper dive than I have:
muckrack.com/leah-hunt-hend…
spitfirelist.com/for-the-record…
alyalexandra.medium.com/links-1-the-gr…
wrongkindofgreen.org
A bonus "populist" alliance: The Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a Koch/Soros partnership on whose board Leah sits, seems to get a lot of good will for being relatively "anti-war," but regularly publishes CIA agents like Graham Fuller.
responsiblestatecraft.org/author/gfuller/
Graham is former Kabul station chief, Ruslan Tsarnaev's father in law, inspired Iran Contra, interviewed with a LaRouche pub, wrote the book on exploiting nationalism and coopting the Zapatista movement, and may have Gülen ties.
drive.google.com/file/d/133ZIVB
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_E.…
🤔
Adding screenshots of a few tweets that are showing up as unavailable sometimes.
Fuller in 2003
Sorry, meant Italy of course.
Forgot to mention Leah seems pretty integral to base-expanding efforts like New Georgia Project, mentioned in her recent op-ed on "inclusive populism."
politico.com/news/magazine/…
Oops, meant Sunrise
Since this covered old (and tech) money in Democracy Alliance, I'd be remiss not mentioning Anne Bartley, a co-founder of Democracy Alliance, America Votes, and Threshold Foundation, and step-daughter of Winthrop Rockefeller, Nelson Rockefeller's brother and governor of Arkansas.
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