This is the third installment in a multi-part series titled “Fantasy Land”. In the last installment, I explained how everyone in the charity ecosystem caters to the “800-pound gorilla”.
I closed that post with a key question, and I’m paraphrasing, but:
What won’t they do for the 800-pound gorilla?
Use race as a criteria for who you help?
Prioritize illegal immigrants over citizens?
Enforce an ideology on kids?
Your favorite local charity is desperate for money. Their sole instinct is for survival, not solving poverty or ending hunger.
Don’t believe me? Ask them the questions on how they’ve managed to address the problem.
They’ll share stories about the number of beds filled in the shelter, the number of food boxes provided, or the number of teens they serve at the local community center.
What they can’t provide is hard data on how they’ve decreased the number of households in poverty. They can’t show how many people getting food boxes have jobs and no longer need food boxes. They can’t tell you how many of those teens shooting hoops at their gym or in their afterschool program become financially self-sufficient in their 20’s.
They measure activities.
Not results.
The 800-pound gorilla (government funding) talks about “outcomes”, or what a businessperson may refer to as “the bottom-line” or results. Outcomes can be very vague and subjective, while possessing a veneer of quantitative allure. It’s data without substance or meaning.
In essence, the outcomes they track are flexible and forgiving.
But they aren’t free.
This is where the interests of your favorite charity and the 800-pound gorilla converge.
The government realizes that patronage and money equals power and control. The non-profits in your community are more than happy to play along with this, because what they desire is money to survive.
The government offers that. They keep the money flowing into the trough, but there are strings attached.
Charities are more than happy to play their part and let the 800-pound gorilla pull the strings.
What exactly will they do?
Discriminate Based on Race
“We’ll give you money if you serve primarily ‘black and brown’ people.”
I don’t use “black and brown” in a derogatory or demeaning way. This is how people in Fantasy Land talk. Rarely a week goes by where I’m not in some meeting where someone either from a non-profit or the government utters the phrase “black and brown people”.
A community college in our area received a large state government grant to run a workforce development initiative. The string? At least 60% must be a minority. When we meet with them, they refer to needing to recruit more “black and brown” students to meet the grant criteria.
When they needed more time to meet the grant requirements and requested an extension, our state government sent them another million dollars.
Government funding is the “coin of the realm”, so to speak, so instead of providing them more time to complete the work of the original grant, they doubled the amount of money provided thinking that throwing more money at the problem will solve it.
Footnote, they eventually did receive the extension.
The larger point here being that I can attest that there are plenty of low-income, at-risk people in our community that would benefit from this program, but because skin color is a limiting factor for who gains entry, many will be out of luck.
Support Law Breaking
“We’ll give you money if you help immigrants.”
What’s left unsaid is that typically, this means undocumented immigrants, also known as “illegal immigrants”. Language is fluid in Fantasy Land, as a result, it changes regularly and loses all meaning.
During the pandemic, illegal immigrants were a frequent subject in my community. Various municipal government drones and local charities stressed the need to provide them support. Various words from “undocumented” to “migrants” to “Latinx” were employed to describe the group in question. And, just like I referred, in Part 2, to the unethical practice of capturing Census data on this group without disclosing their status, many non-profits seek to gain funding to serve them without disclosing their illegal status.
And sadly, many funders, government or otherwise, are more than happy to comply in supporting and expanding an illegal immigration pipeline.
When red-state governors began shipping busloads of illegals to “sanctuary cities”, I was part of a meeting that wanted to plan what our community would do to support any illegals who might end up here. No one raised the uncomfortable question of should we be doing it at all, or the fact that we have plenty of citizens experiencing homelessness and poverty already.
Or the inconvenient fact that these resources were being used for lawbreakers.
“Force Behaviors”
“Enforce this mandate or you lose your funding.”
And this is probably the most dystopian and frightening of them all.
While I write this from a “charity” or “non-profit” perspective, we aren’t the sole occupants of Fantasy Land.
Your local library. Your township. Your school district.
In some form or fashion, they all rely on the 800-pound gorilla to fund their budgets. For example, one of our local school districts was tens of millions of dollars in the red going into COVID. The various COVID relief packages closed that gap (though not completely), and what did we get?
Almost an entire year of remote school and almost no sports or extracurricular activities. Meanwhile, surrounding small towns here in Flyover Country largely had in-person learning with attempts to circumvent masking and other restrictions.
Without additional tax money (local) or state/federal funding, our school district will continue to struggle in the future, and now we’ve see what they’ll do to appease the government.
And that’s true for your community as well. They’ve gotten addicted to the state and federal government. They require that funding to even function and provide basic services.
But just like with the non-profits I work with in Fantasy Land, they’ve traded larger pools of funding in exchange for less control over their own activities at the local level.
That darn string again.
Local municipal governments, just like charities or our school district, don’t really serve their clients; they seek to please the state and federal government in order to secure ever larger shares of money, instead of meeting the needs of their residents.
Similarly, local school districts trade money for mandates. “No Child Left Behind”. “Social and Emotional Learning.”
Most insidiously, many are buying into “critical theory.”
In our state, many smaller, rural school districts sought to defy pandemic related mandates on masks, sports, etc., and just as frequently, most of them caved and backed down when their funding was threatened by our vindictive governor, in spite of mounting evidence in late 2020 and 2021 that kids were low-risk, and masks were basically useless.
I live among a lot of farmland and more conservative rural communities, though, an unhealthy blue streak invades our space, threatening the Flyover Country way of life. Did you know at one point, the Feds linked lunch money to implementing “non-binary” bathrooms? Imagine, being a rural school district surrounded by farmland, and whether low-income kids can eat lunch or not is predicated on you enforcing genderless bathrooms?
If these school districts bent the knee over foolish public health dictates, how much of a bulwark will they be against Critical Race Theory or Queer Theory?
I’ve already shown what our school district did when getting funding with strings attached.
Here's another string.
My fiancée shared with me today a Facebook post from a friend. Her 11-year-old 6th grader participated in a “scavenger hunt”. For each item they found/solved, they were to take the clue or the answer to the teacher, who would give them a piece of candy.
Know what the clues contained? Various gender identity terms and phrases.
The one shown on Facebook defined what “pansexual” is and gave examples.
So, the school “gameified” Queer Theory to make it “fun” for the kids, and without the parents’ knowledge.
Where would they get that idea??
I’m betting from state or federal bureaucrats or their union reps, who in turn got it from state or federal patrons.
They’re seeking to “force” certain behaviors and social engineer our kids.
When a funder gives you money, it’s important to know what strings are attached to it and what they’ll require of you by accepting the money.
The link above takes you to a Glenn Beck video. This 3-minute video clip from Twitter (which currently won’t embed into Substack posts) explains how Blackrock is “forcing behaviors”, and Beck speculates that given the fact that Blackrock owns 45 million shares in Fox, that perhaps one of the behaviors “forced” onto Fox was firing Tucker Carlson.
If money in the business world can be used to coerce organizations and people, it would be foolish and naïve to assume that our government is altruistic and would never do something similar. With a 31 TRILLION dollar deficit, Blackrock looks diminutive next to the kind of money the 800-pound gorilla can throw around to “force behaviors” through their proxies and seemingly with no debt ceiling to restrain them.
Frequently cities, schools, and non-profits rely on millions of dollars from the government, to the tune of 60, 70, 80% or more of their operating budgets. When you’re talking those sums of money and that much reliance on a specific entity, you’ll do whatever they ask to keep them happy. Look at the size of the federal budget and then look what they prioritize and where the money goes.
The government expects a return on their investment of all that dough.
It’s not solving social problems like poverty, fixing roads, improving infrastructure, or educating your 6th grader.
Those aren’t the results they desire. There’s only one thing they require.
It’s loyalty.