Spoiler Alert: Gates Foundation, Twitter’s @Jack Dorsey and a lot more…
Yesterday video footage of a U-Haul truck filled with signs and gear for rioters in Louisville attracted significant attention online. In fact, one of the Twitter accounts that reported on this initially had its account temporarily suspended. Several Twitter feeds captured scenes of apparent Black Lives Matter personnel unloading the truck with the assistance of a blond-haired white woman inside the bed of the vehicle. Follow-up investigation showed that the woman in question was almost certainly Holly Zoller who admitted to having rented the vehicle during a recorded phone conversation.
Zoller is a local Louisville representative for an organization called the Bail Project, which raises money to bail out individuals arrested for criminal offenses. The organization operates nationwide. The fact that this organization is raising money on the representation that the funds will be used to bail out the indigent and that at least some of that money is apparently being used to equip rioters is of significant interest. It suggests that the organizations funding bail for rioters like the Bail Project are in effect functioning as a support apparatus for an ongoing Marxist insurrection.
The Bail Project
The Bail Project, the organization that apparently just assisted in arming rioters in Louisville in preparation for a disturbance in which two police officers were shot, is not some storefront operation getting by with unpaid volunteers and donations from local charities. The Bail Project, like so many of the organizations tearing the heart out of this great country, is a nationwide, well-endowed organization backed by many of our richest and most powerful.
The Bail Project is headed up by Robin Steinberg, an American lawyer and social justice advocate who previously founded the Bronx Freedom Fund, a similar organization but limited to the New York Metropolitan Area. The Bail Project is simply the extension of what Steinberg was already doing in the Bronx to the country as a whole. Steinberg is joined at the Bail Project by a whole raft of very wealthy and very influential individuals, among who are:
Lilie Lynton, co-founder and operating partner of The Dinex Group, which manages 17 Daniel Boulud branded restaurants. She previously co-founded Telebank, an Internet bank sold to E*Trade in 1999. Lili is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Business School.
Liz Luckett, the Managing Partner of The Social Entrepreneurs’ Fund, an impact venture fund investing in software to help low income communities. Previously, she served as the Director of Impact Investing at the Pershing Square Foundation and Senior Vice President at Citigroup. She co-founded and served as the Executive Vice President of Fulcrum Analytics (formerly, Cyber Dialogue).
Lisa Gersh, who was most recently the Chief Executive Officer of Alexander Wang, a fashion brand based in New York City. Prior to Alexander Wang, Ms. Gersh had served as the CEO of Goop, Inc. and Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, Inc. She was President of Strategic Initiatives at NBC, served as the Managing Director of the Weather Channel Companies for NBC Universal, and co-founded Oxygen Media.
Michael E. Novogratz, , the CEO of Galaxy Investment Partners. He was formerly a principal and a member of the board of directors of Fortress Investment Group LLC and Chief Investment Officer of the Fortress Macro Fund. His net worth is estimated in excess of $1 billion.
The actor Danny Glover.
The singer John Legend.
Richard Branson, owner of, among other things, Virgin Atlantic, Virgin Galactic and Virgin Voyages. His net worth is somewhere north of $4 Billion.
The donors to the Bail Project are equally as impressive:
The Clara Lionel Foundation, founded by entertainer Rihanna in partnership with Twitter and Square CEO Jack Dorsey‘s #startsmall initiative, has announced grants totaling $11 million in support of efforts to advance racial equity, with a focus on criminal justice and policing reform.
Blue Meridian, a joint venture of the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation and other donors to create a giant non-profit dedicated to supporting socially progressive causes. The almost endless list of organizations involved reads like a Who’s Who of American philanthropic organizations. Cumulatively, these organizations kicked in $1 Billion to invest in supporting leftist causes.
Blue Meridian has a massive list of other philanthropic donors with whom it partners to pursue its agenda. These include, predictably enough, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Collectively, this grouping of wealthy, liberal foundations brings to bear literally billions of dollars to support the causes they consider worthy and to make the changes they believe necessary to American society.
In addition to the money it receives from individuals and entities associated with Blue Meridian, the Bail Project also gets funding from a number of other incredibly wealthy donors. Laura and John Arnold, for example, run Arnold Ventures. Most Americans have no idea who they are, but the Arnolds are worth something like $3.3 Billion, most of that earned by John as a hedge fund manager.
The Audacious Project is another collaborative funding initiative whereby a number of liberal non-profits and social entrepreneurs have pooled their resources in order to maximize the impact they can make on our society and our political system. To date, this project alone has raised $280 million.
In short, the Bail Project receives massive support from an almost endless list of entrepreneurs and foundations. Collectively, these organizations command many billions of dollars. They also represent an entire strata of American society, which while it has enriched itself in our capitalist system to an extent unimaginable by most Americans, is increasingly ideologically hostile to the existing social, political, and economic structure. Put simply, they now increasingly despise and want to destroy the system that worked so greatly to their benefit.
Many of us have accepted for some time that there are portions of our society, which are no longer supportive of the American dream and the average American. Academia, of course, comes readily to mind. This, though, is something fundamentally different and much more dangerous.
In years gone past, we have always assumed, for better or worse, that the wealthy capitalists among us were fully and completely committed to the prosperity of this great nation and its continued existence. Even if much of that commitment was more self-interest than anything else, it could be relied upon, nonetheless. That is increasingly not the case.
Just as we have seen wealthy Americans taking the side of Beijing and the Chinese Communist Party against their own nation, we now see rich Americans siding with the mob and advocating radical change. It may be the man with the gun shooting at the police in the street who commands immediate attention. The greater danger may, however, be the rich people that rent U-Hauls.
Updated: This article was updated 25 September, to reflect that while police officers have been killed in the three-plus months of rioting, the two police officers shot in Louisville were not killed – thankfully.
