When Oleg Atbashian described the “Professional Left” he might well have been describing the way in which Wikileaks funds itself. That is, professionally and with great secrecy. Atbashian takes the reader on a tour of an economic sector that can boom in a recession: the paid Left. That whose name must never be mentioned.
Of all the slips of the tongue and unintentional admissions by this administration, Robert Gibbs’ ‘Professional Left’ comment may well be the one they wish they could squeeze back into their collective windpipe. … I hear these people saying (Obama) is like George Bush. Those people ought to be drug tested. … I mean, it’s crazy. … The Professional Left … will be satisfied when we have Canadian health care and we’ve eliminated the Pentagon. That’s not reality. … They wouldn’t be satisfied if Dennis Kucinich was president. …
It would seem that Robert Gibbs broke the first rule of the Professional Left, which is, you do not talk about the Professional Left.
Well what is this secret thing? It’s a network of people who have are gainfully employed in negotiating, finding funding for and advancing the Leftist agenda. It’s not just a cause, it’s a job. “There is a class of people with radical leftist views who have made it their job – with the help of abundant grants, foundations, and trusts – to carry out propaganda campaigns, indoctrinate, subvert, and plant the seeds of the leftist worldview in people’s minds through the arts, media, education, blogging, and street protests. For many it’s the only income they’ve had in years.”
Take Wikileaks. Although it styles itself as a rag-tag organization, Wikileaks funds itself through a system that is professionally designed to cover its tracks, sources of funding and modes of direction. The Wall Street Journal says “the controversial website WikiLeaks, which argues the cause of openness in leaking classified or confidential documents, has set up an elaborate global financial network to protect a big secret of its own—its funding.” Using methods familiar to sharp operators and money launderers, they’ve set up shell organizations in juristidictions which prohibit disclosure; created levels of cutouts and cultivated unnamed private donors. Although the media describes Wikileaks as an idealistic, whistle-blowing organization it has the form, if not the function, of a criminal organization.
The linchpin of WikiLeaks’s financial network is Germany’s Wau Holland Foundation. WikiLeaks encourages donors to contribute to its account at the foundation, which under German law can’t publicly disclose the names of donors. Because the foundation “is not an operational concern, it can’t be sued for doing anything. So the donors’ money is protected, in other words, from lawsuits,” Mr. Assange said. …
The German foundation is only one piece of the WikiLeaks network.
“We’re registered as a library in Australia, we’re registered as a foundation in France, we’re registered as a newspaper in Sweden,” Mr. Assange said. WikiLeaks has two tax-exempt charitable organizations in the U.S., known as 501C3s, that “act as a front” for the website, he said. He declined to give their names, saying they could “lose some of their grant money because of political sensitivities.”
Mr. Assange said WikiLeaks gets about half its money from modest donations processed by its website, and the other half from “personal contacts,” including “people with some millions who approach us and say ‘I’ll give you 60,000 or 10,000,’ ” he said, without specifying a currency.
By contrast, the “Amateur Right” as Atbashian calls them, is “a loose amalgamation of free-roaming conservatives and libertarians who engage in political activism in their spare time – and on their own dime.” And because the professional Left is so pervasive, that dime often winds up in Leftist hands. If you’re a conservative philanthropist you can’t even give away your money without he Left taking their cut. Take the Chicago Annenberg Challenge.
Obama’s entire career has been about organizing, sustaining, and advancing the Professional Left and their operations. One such undertaking involved the processing of $50 million given by the conservative Annenberg Foundation to reform Chicago public schools from 1995 to 2001. …
The abuse of the Annenberg Challenge wasn’t the only example of conservative funding being hijacked by the Professional Left and used to destroy conservatism. It’s how the Professional Left make a living. Converting other people’s money into hot air is their raison d’être; everything else is a side effect.
Atbashian says Barack Obama examplifies someone who has spent nearly his whole career inside the professional left, going from grad school to the Presidency of the United States without ever doing a normal day’s work in his life. The professional structure of the Left eventually creates a common organizational culture. One of the reasons that the Left does so well working with foreign intelligence agencies, Islamic extremists and even criminal syndicates and crooked unions is that they architectured like them. The Left has a version of every process a conspiratorial organization possesses. From rites of initiation — which may consist in the case of menial, repetitive tasks like selling the Daily Worker at a streetcorner to ‘making their bones’ the Left has a conveyor belt geared towards controlling admission into a cherished inner sanctum. It is a process that appeals naturally to snobs. When Kim Philby was asked why he betrayed his country to join the KGB he gave a remarkably candid answer. “One does not look twice at an offer of enrollment in an elite force.”
The disdain for peons who ‘cling to guns and religion’ or who watch the NASCAR races is not based not an appeal to ideology, but class. In almost every Western country where the Professional Left gains power it becomes synonymous with snobbery. From the inflated salaries at the EU to the private jets to environmental conferences, to vacations which never end, to hobnobbing on a weekly basis with the stars, what is there not to like about being a professional leftist? In the phrase “revolutionary elite”, it is the “elite” part that matters. Because the Left partakes in the internal structures of power they are not going away soon; certainly not in 2010 or 2012. The Left is baked into the system. “Every time you buy a corporate product or service … you also feed the Professional Left. All of these, and most other big companies have donated to leftist groups and causes … Guess who is best positioned today to appropriate billions of tax dollars in stimulus slush funds, and to process them into organic, locally made hot air?” They may never, ever go away.
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The Left, along with the other power structures of our society are our secret rulers. The disquiet created by the information revolution stems from the fact that it has allowed the “amateurs” to briefly glimpse the professionals at work, perhaps for the first time in their lives. The options facing the amateurs are either to create their own Towers of Power, knowing that the first efforts to do this will be criminalized, or to tear the conspiracies around them down. Most amateurs aren’t interested in dominance over others. Their greatest weakness of the amateurs is that like the Hobbits of the Shire, that they are more interested in tilling gardens than in ruling.
America was conceived as an experiment in creating a land run for amateurs. The Founding Fathers appear to have taken the view that the Towers of Power would always be with us, but attempted to keep them low. They tried craft a society in which the power of elites would limited, with no established religions; no runaway central authority; hedged with prohibitions on government. It was an attempt to enshrine amateurism as a means of pre-empting the establishment of Byzantine structures that would eventually encrust the majority will with their own agendas. One of the reasons for the reaction against President Obama’s agenda is the perception that the elites are about to succeed, perhaps forever; that the experiment of July 4, 1776 is at an end. Elitism by it’s very nature emphasizes its aversion to the mass and is therefore under no obligation to be loyal to anything but itself. It’s rules of admission are internal. Once an elite is created there is no reason in principle why an alien can’t rule over a population. In the age of Kings it was quite common. In recent times the original Bolshevik Party was dominated by outsiders. Two thirds of Bolsheviks hailed from ethnic minorities in the Russian empire. The Internationale recognizes only one flag. The Party’s.
The Left has always been just another kind of establishment. Their “revolution” was a term of art for a campaign for dominance of over other elites. To fight Hitler for Stalin was noble. To fight Stalin for Russia merited death. By contrast all true revolutions are attempts to assert the primacy of the ordinary and of the individual over the powers and principalities of the world. In practice most revolution is not about the wretched of the earth overthrowing their masters. It is about the ordinary man trying to keep from being told what to do by self-appointed and highly paid busybodies. It is a struggle that will probably continue to the end of the human race between those with the will to rule; and on the other hand those who simply wish to to be left alone. The most revolutionary thing in the world is to try to live your life as you want to. If you dislike this path, then run, don’t walk to join “an elite force”. In their own way “it is the uniforms” that turn the Left on.
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