How the EPA Turned into a Toxic Leftist Social Justice Slush Fund

By Daniel Greenfield May 08, 2023 @ Sultan Knish Blog 

When the EPA announced that it was launching a completely unnecessary Office of Environmental Justice, the move was hailed by Beverly Wright: the head of the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice. And the EPA’s press release quoted the leftist activist.

Now the new office will be sending at least $10 million to the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice as part of billions in a slush fund to be distributed to leftist groups.

The Biden administration’s incredibly corrupt $740 billion ‘Inflation Increase Act’, which badly worsened the nation’s economic situation, was a black hole of grift and graft.

And Senate Democrats had to pass it for everyone to find out just how bad it was.

The $3 billion in “justice block grants” were supposed to go to organizations that would improve air quality. But an initial $177 million in environmental justice grants are going to assorted leftist activist groups and their academic allies. With 17 organizations dividing up $177 million, there’s $10 million and change for all of them. And less money for those being taxed to pay for it.

The $177 million is to be used to turn the organizations into ‘Environmental Justice Thriving Communities Technical Assistance Centers’ which is a fancy way of saying that they’ll help leftist groups apply for grant funding and, in the process, be able to shape who gets what.

With billions of dollars at stake, the $177 million stolen from taxpayers by corrupt politicians is only the first of a massive fortune in government spending that is feeding inflation and diverting money that should be going to shore up Medicare and Social Security to Biden’s leftist allies.

Wright conveniently sits on Biden’s White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council, she co-founded the National Black Environmental Justice Network, which worked with the Biden campaign, and had claimed that, “Donald Trump becomes the first President to champion environmental racism and injustice.”

The original executive director of the National Black Environmental Justice Network was Damu Smith. The black nationalist was a longtime supporter of Marxist guerrillas abroad, especially in Latin America, and had addressed a Farrakhan rally by telling members of the racist hate group that, “white men are wreaking havoc in our community.”

Damu Smith had founded Black Voices for Peace after 9/11 to oppose bombing Al Qaeda and blamed the Islamic terrorist attacks on our foreign policy. As part of his anti-Israel hate campaign, Smith had been in the Jewish State when he fell ill and later died.

Another recipient of one of the EPA’s big checks is West Harlem Environmental Action or WE ACT headed by Peggy Shepard: the former press secretary for Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaign and a local Democrat activist. Like Wright, Shepard sits on Biden’s Environmental Justice Advisory Council, and even acts as its co-chair.

The Biden administration is dispensing massive grants to members of its own council.

Peggy Shepard had denounced Trump and had aggressively pressured Biden for money.

Biden had agreed to the Justice40 pledge which meant that 40% of a proposed $2 trillion in spending on the political hoax of global warming would go to minority groups.

“I’m very concerned about how that 40 percent is administered,” Shepard had claimed.

With that much looted money at stake, carved out of the flesh and blood, the earnings, savings and futures of Americans, by greedy special interests, we should all be very concerned.

Amazon’s former boss Jeff Bezos, and the owner of one of the world’s largest ‘mega-yachts’ supplied by a fleet of choppers, also runs a $10 billion Bezos Earth Fund. The Fund had pumped millions into the lefty activist groups to help them take American taxpayer money.

The Bezos money was to be used to “hold the Biden administration accountable for carrying out its Justice40 initiative.” $4 million from Wright’s Deep South Center for Environmental Justice and $6 million from Shepard’s West Harlem Environmental Action were to be used to “ensure federal funding from Justice40 ‘goes where it’s intended.’”

Invest four or six million and get back ten million plus. It’s a good investment strategy.

To add to the blatantly partisan nature of this slush fund, the Biden administration’s big meeting of environmentalists had included Shepard, alongside Tom Steyer, a Democrat presidential candidate, and John Podesta, the chairman of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, who was picked by Biden to oversee the $370 billion in “environmental” spending from the ‘Inflation Increase Act’.

How will a Democrat political operative possibly direct all of that green environmental cash?

The EPA was already a piggy bank for leftist causes: Biden’s Justice40 initiative cuts his black nationalist allies in on the action. Instead of only white leftists profiting from environmentalism, 40% of the loot will be passed on to the black Democrat activists who helped put Biden in the White House. And could there be anything ‘cleaner’ and ‘greener’ than billions in payoffs?

Intersectional exercises like ramming an environmental justice office into the EPA are about creating a more complex network of graft under the guise of intertwined leftist causes.

Away from the green grift and graft, real environmental disasters continue to unfold. Last week, a truck carrying 40,000 pounds of toxic soil from East Palestine overturned on the highway.

“We know that so many communities across the nation have the solutions to the environmental challenges they face. Unfortunately, many have lacked access or faced barriers when it comes to the crucial federal resources needed to deliver these solutions,” EPA boss Michael Regan claimed. “Today we’re taking another step to break down these barriers.”

Regan wasn’t talking about East Palestine, whose residents have the wrong politics and skin color, but his agency’s racial grants. The racist EPA boss had taken over two weeks to visit East Palestine and only stayed long enough to assure them that everything was fine before getting back to his day job of claiming that only black people can be the victims of environmental hazards.

Back in East Palestine, many residents are leaving. They don’t trust his empty reassurances.

East Palestine and Justice40 both form a picture of what real environmental racism looks like.

Under the Biden administration, the EPA has become more of a leftist slush fund than ever, and the real victims of environmental racism, like those in East Palestine, are the ones left behind. 

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. 

Thank you for reading.