Before Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, there was the French Revolutionary Maximilien Robespierre. Max and his merry band of guillotiners were 50 years ahead of communism, but his economic philosophy of lopping the heads off of the rich and redistributing their wealth was very much in line with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
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Robespierre said, “The rich must be condemned to give to the poor all that they have.”
Robespierre was a fervent redistributor who believed a “fair” society required an equal economic footing. Before writing “The Communist Manifesto,” Marx and Engels argued in the “The Holy Family” that a “false consciousness” existed within the proletariat. In essence, they were telling the common man, “You don’t know how bad you have it.”
Robespierre lost his head, and then the French Revolution lost its footing when Napoleon declared himself “le boss.” The French Revolutionaries didn’t call themselves commies, but let’s be honest, they were. It took a hundred-plus years for communism to raise its ugly head. The Red Russians took over and started liquidating aristocrats and the bourgeois alike. 20 million-plus died at the hands of Lenin and his boy Stalin before the Soviet Union flamed out 74 years later. China and some other countries have continued to chug along with versions of hybrids — combining ardent commies in the middle with soft capitalists at the top.
In America, we have resisted socialist wealth redistributors (a/k/a commies), but their voices are getting louder. There are Bernie Bros, AOC numbskulls, and college undergrads demanding free everything. They are mostly just nuisances. Like cicadas, they are irritating and make a lot of noise but generally wilt into the underbrush. Still, it is the billionaire socialists (a/k/a closet communists) like George Soros who are threats. Deep threats. There is a billionaire who, for the most part, has gone under the radar pushing “reimagining capitalism.” His name is Pierre Omidyar. Omidyar was born in France to Iranian parents. He later moved to the United States, where he founded eBay.
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With over six billion dollars in personal wealth, he founded the Omidyar Network to influence not just the private sector but, more importantly, to inject human capital into the federal bureaucracy. His intent seems clear: to make structural changes. What type of changes? It’s no secret that Omidyar has his acolytes who are all-in on equal results, not equal treatment. In 2020, his Network produced a pamphlet titled: “Call to Reimagine Capitalism in America .” On its opening page, it calls for:
A more democratic economy is one in which the real creators – working people, consumers, individuals, small businesses, and families – can have equal voice, hold power, and get ahead.
Further into the manifesto, it laments that America is rife with badness:
“structural racism, colonialism, paternalism,”
It calls for:
“an explicitly anti-racist and inclusive economy.”
Further in, it is more plain to even the casual reader:
As activist and educator Angela Davis wrote, “This results in pressuring the poorest people in a society to find solutions to their lack of health care, education, and social security all by themselves—then blaming them if they fail, as ‘lazy.’” We see this starkly in the numbers, where wealth tends to get passed down through white families but diffuses across Black families.
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Quoting a life-long communist seems pretty on-brand. The Omidyar Network has injected a cadre of leftist ideologues into the federal government with the goal of “Reimagining Capitalism,” a/k/a socialism, a/k/a Chinese-styled communism — with a dash of capitalism.
The Daily Wire reports:
Omidyar was spending millions of dollars, largely funneled through dark money groups, to put Joe Biden in the White House. After his election victory, one of Omidyar’s groups, called Reset, explained how it would use the Biden presidency to implant its people to pursue its goals, specifically targeting agencies it believed had sway.
“Most promisingly, the Biden administration may open the door for specific actions on antitrust and competition policy in the Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission,” it said, adding that it would “support a constellation of organizations working on research, communications, and advocacy to ensure they are more than the sum of their parts.”
Three years later, the France-born Omidyar has succeeded to an extent seldom seen, with a vast swath of top FTC posts going to people who worked for his “constellation” of groups — and sometimes continued to do so even as they joined the federal government.
Since 2004, the Omidyar Network has spent $1.89 billion on social justice causes. Besides gobs of money, the Network and institutions within Omidyar’s constellation of influencers have injected ideologues into the body politic. Chief among these are the DOJ and, principally, the overly influential Federal Trade Commission.
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Biden’s FTC head is Lina Khan. Before the FTC, she was the legal director at the “Open Markets Institute.” The Open Markets Institute is funded by the Omidyar Network. Her chief of staff is Sarah Miller. Before joining the FTC, Miller was the Executive Director of the American Economics Liberties Project – also funded by the Omidyar Network.
At least 12 people from the Omidyar Network or entities it funds have worked or work in Biden’s White House. More are employed in the DOJ. All of them influence and inform policy.
The Daily Wire noted:
Omidyar has also heavily pushed the ability to vote by mail, and paid the reliably liberal Associated Press to write about AI and other journalists$50,000 to write about “reimagining capitalism.”
Omidyar has escalated his efforts since the emergence of Trump, writing that “Trump is a dangerous authoritarian demagogue” and “endorsing Donald Trump immediately disqualifies you from any position of public trust.”
Unsurprisingly, when the Daily Wire reached out for comment, no one from Omidyar called them back.
The top-heavy influence of the Omidyar Network and related and funded entities and the injection of ideologues is unknown. Soros has had a remarkable influence on local politics by targeting district attorneys and local politicians. Omidyar is influencing policy at the federal level.
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One imagines that Maximilien Robespierre, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels are looking up through the smoke and smell of sulfur and smiling.