PARIS — Vice President Kamala Harris will have one foot stateside as she arrives in Paris for a week of face-to-face meetings with European leaders, delivering prerecorded remarks at the George Soros-backed Democracy Alliance annual donor summit, according to a White House official, for an audience of prominent liberal megadonors.
The two-day virtual event includes a “Discussion on Critical Race Theory” led by Kimberlé Crenshaw, the scholar credited with coining the term, which asserts that American society and institutions are imbued by racism, and Terrance Woodbury, a Democratic pollster, according to Puck News. Harris’s appearance at the “Saving our Democracy” confab was first reported by the outlet.
Issues of race and equity have been a prominent focus of the Biden administration, which promised to deliver the “most diverse Cabinet” in American history. By contrast, French law largely prohibits data collected on a person’s race, ethnicity, or religion.
Critical race theory and its derivatives have become something of a political albatross for the Democrats in recent elections, dragging down support from independent voters and centrists. This includes last week’s election in Virginia, where Republicans cruised to victory statewide. It has also stoked opposition from French President Emmanuel Macron, with whom Harris is meeting on Wednesday.
In an interview with Elle magazine, Macron said that imported American “woke culture” was “racializing” France.
HARRIS WILL TRAVEL TO FRANCE TO MEND FENCES WITH MACRON AND MEET WORLD LEADERS
In Virginia last week, parents flocked to political newcomer Glenn Youngkin over concerns that school officials were using critical race theory to drive classroom pedagogy. Voters balked at former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s remark in the final debate when he said, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach,” catapulting Youngkin ahead.
An adviser to McAuliffe, who ran for a second term against Youngkin, told the Washington Examiner that he raised the alarm internally over the issue but was ignored.
“They didn’t see it,” he said.
Biden won the state by 10 percentage points during the 2020 presidential race, suggesting Democrats’ failure to recapture their advantage.
The McAuliffe adviser said that Democratic leaders are out of touch with the electorate. “You’ve got educated elites running the party, who happen to be white, mostly, and want a progressive push on everything.
“Do you know anybody who talks about autocracy and authoritarianism? Cancel culture and ‘communities of color’? That’s not how people speak,” he continued. “People speak, ‘black,’ ‘white.’ They talk about kitchen-table issues.”
Democrats have raised concerns that these ideas are alienating large swaths of Democratic and independent voters over the years to marginal effect.
Speaking at the Democracy Alliance donor summit in 2019, former President Barack Obama warned that his party was pushing left beyond the bounds of average people. “Even as we push the envelope and we are bold in our vision, we also have to be rooted in reality,” Obama said Friday at the time. “The average American doesn’t think we have to completely tear down the system and remake it.”
His remarks were seen as a veiled attack on far-left candidates running for the Democratic Party presidential nomination, including Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, who were viewed as front-runners at the time.
Obama had warned a month earlier about the party’s leftward bent. “This idea of purity — and you’re never compromised, and you’re always politically woke, and all that stuff — you should get over that quickly,” he said. “The world is messy. There are ambiguities. People who do really good stuff have flaws.”
Campaigning for McAuliffe this year, Obama dismissed parents’ concerns over education in Virginia as “fake outrage.”
“We don’t have time to be wasted on these phony trumped-up culture wars, this fake outrage, the right-wing media’s pedals to juice their ratings,” Obama said while stumping for the Democrat.
The McAuliffe adviser said activists’ push to make school curriculum and workplaces responsive to racial issues and critical race theory was broadly unhelpful, even if some Democrats were loath to admit it.
Diversity training doesn’t result in more diverse workplaces or thinking, he said. “It doesn’t work that way, and I think we are seeing a backlash,” he added. “I cannot tell you how many times I heard from people in Loudoun [County] and Northern Virginia, ‘I’m sick and tired of people telling me that I am racist and my kids are racist just because we are white.”
Macron is attempting to counter woke ideas through targeted means. The French president has tasked Education Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer with the effort, including through a government think tank launched last month.
“Our country has become a target of the woke movement,” said Pierre Valentin, an expert with Le Laboratoire de la République, during an opening event. “If there were a vaccine against the woke virus, it would be French, and the leaders of the movement know that.”
In the United States, Democrats have moved further to the left, aided by the Democracy Alliance’s vast, deep-pocketed network.
Co-founded by billionaire George Soros and the late Progressive Insurance chairman, Peter Lewis, the Democracy Alliance has advised Democratic donors to invest in groups that obscure their funding from the public.
One of those groups, the Sixteen Thirty Fund, has directed tens of millions of dollars to causes at the state and federal levels, including a slew of successful ballot measures, spending $141 million during the 2018 midterm election year, nearly doubling the $79 million it spent in 2017.
Midterm elections aren’t the only time the organization spends big. The Sixteen Thirty Fund spent more than $137 million in 2019, the last year for which public data are available online.
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The Sixteen Thirty Fund is one of several groups tied to Arabella Advisors, a Washington, D.C.,-based consulting firm that funnels dark money throughout its network. In 2019, Arabella raised $715 million to boost liberals.
Some of the biggest donors and organizations in Democratic politics have links to these groups, including White House deputy chief of staff and former Biden campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon.
Dillon’s Precision Strategies took in more than $1.2 million from the Sixteen Thirty Fund in 2019.
