Thread by @EliClifton

Yesterday’s @washingtonpost smear piece on @QuincyInst by @BrookingsInst fellow Jamie Kirchick has an interesting money-in-politics narrative buried inside. (And perhaps an undisclosed conflict of interest by the author.) <thread> washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/…

Kirchick writes:

“Eli Clifton blames three Jewish billionaires for President Trump’s decision to exit the Iran nuclear deal.”

Two issues with that statement.

A.) I never identified their religion in the article he references.

Kirchick did.

I wrote about Sheldon Adelson, Paul Singer and Bernard Marcus because of their outsized roles in funding Trump’s campaign, his inauguration and the network of groups that opposed the Iran Deal.

B.) Kirchick doesn’t disclose that his career in Washington over the past decade has largely been funded by these three billionaires.

He joined the hawkish Foundation for Defense of Democracies in 2011.

Adelson, Marcus and Singer were FDD’s biggest donors in the years leading up to Kirchick’s hiring.

Together, they contributed over $15 million. But Kirchick’s ties to these donors doesn’t end when he left FDD.

His next place of employment was the now defunct Foreign Policy Initiative. While their funding remained largely hidden in their years of operation, their primary donor was revealed when they shuttered in 2017.

How significant was Singer’s $ to Kirchick’s employer?

“Singer ‘decided to reduce the amount of money he was giving to FPI to a very low amount, and all the board members came to the conclusion that there was no point in continuing,’ this source said.” theatlantic.com/politics/archi…

When Kirchick implies that any mention of his funders’ role in politics is anti-Semitic and critics of militarism are “isolationists” he’s deflecting serious questions about his funders’ role in promoting a hawkish US foreign policy and his own role in promoting those policies.

That avoidance of accountability for promoters of militarism, endless war and the disastrous foreign policy of the past two decades is something that motivated me to help found @quincyinst.

And if the announcement of Quincy’s formation is troubling to people who enjoyed careers as beltway advocates for endless wars, then that says a great deal about their own fears of accountability and real debate about US foreign policy.