The Soros Activist at the Heart of California’s $800 Billion Slave Reparations

By Daniel Greenfield May 23, 2023 @ Sultan Knish Blog  

In 2021, the Equal Justice Institute celebrated a settlement with the University of California in which the system agreed to stop using SAT and ACT test scores, objective merit-based metrics, in college admissions, until 2025. The racialist lawsuit claimed that test scores violate the California Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause as “indicators” of race.  The “SAT is a barrier to equal opportunity”, Lisa Holder, a counsel with the Equal Opportunity Institute, claimed.

Like a lot of destructive leftist activists, Lisa Holder received a Soros Justice Fellowship from the radical billionaire’s Open Society Foundation. The similarity in the names of the Equal Justice Society and Soros’ Open Society Foundation is more than strictly coincidental as Soros was one of the EJS’ founding donors.

Beyond drawing six figures in compensation from the Equal Justice Society, Lisa Holder has her own law practice that focuses on racial issues and occasionally draws a check for teaching at UCLA.

Holder is also a member of California’s Reparations Task Force which has proposed to bankrupt the state and its taxpayers with as much as $800 billion in racial reparations in a state that was never a slave state. Among the various aging machine politicians (along with Kamala’s minister) who staff the task force, she may be the most important and effective racial campaigner on it.

Lisa Holder had fought to end California’s ban on racial discrimination through affirmative action in a proposition backed by $1 million from George Soros’ Open Society Policy Center, along with former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, the wife of Netflix CEO Reed Hastings and major corporations and nonprofits. Despite all the billionaires and companies in her corner, Californians turned down the proposition to legalize racial discrimination.

What voters wouldn’t go for, California’s extremist one-party legislature did. Holder claims credit for drafting two bills, AB 241 and 242, which mandated indoctrination in racist woke ideologies for doctors, lawyers and judges. Implicit bias training has been linked to all sorts of racist ideas and discriminatory practices associated with critical race theory including ‘white privilege’. It has also been shown to encourage medical professionals to dispense treatment and prioritize triage based on race rather than medical need potentially using racial discrimination to kill people.

AB 242 claimed that “all persons possess implicit biases”, but that “most people have an implicit bias that disfavors African Americans and favors Caucasian Americans” and “other socially stigmatized groups, such as Native Americans, immigrants, women, people with disabilities, Muslims, and members of the LGBTQ community”.

Conveniently, Lisa Holder is also “recognized racial justice scholar and equity consultant”.

The reparations proposal is a whole lot bigger than legalizing racial discrimination through affirmative action or forcing doctors and lawyers to hear about their white privilege.

Racial reparations had also been a longtime Soros cause. In 2021, former Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, since dispatched as Biden’s ambassador to India after an aide’s sexual misconduct scandal, revealed that the Soros network had offered funding for a racial reparations program in Los Angeles. The billionaire’s extremist network has also funded a variety of reparations activists including Nkechi Taifa, a senior policy analyst in the Soros network, described as a “principal player and catalyst in the reparations movement” and a “founding member of the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America” (N’COBRA)

Taifa is also a commissioner with the National African-American Reparations Commission (NAARC). Another NAARC commissioner, Cheryl Grills, is also a member of the California Reparations Task Force. Jeremiah Wright, the bigoted Obama mentor who cheered 9/11, is an honorary member of NAARC.

While it was a foregone conclusion that the panel would vote themselves millions of dollars, the real controversy within the reparations movement and the dozens of organizations that have sprung up to lobby for free money was whether it would be limited to the descendants of slaves or would be given out to all black people or perhaps all Africans: which might include Elon Musk.

The California task force brought in members from both camps. The National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America has vocally argued that all black people should get reparations. NAARC claims support for this position from BLM and other racist hate groups. That is also N’COBRA’s position. However groups like the National Assembly of American Slavery Descendants and the American Descendants of Slavery have forcefully made the argument that only the descendants of slaves should be eligible for a check. This is at least legally tenable.

In January, the split commission voted to limit reparations to descendants of slavery by 5 to 4. That is the position of the more established black community and it was championed by chairwoman Kamilah Moore, but opposed by Lisa Holder and Nkechi Taifa. And the debate is still going on with pro-race activists claiming that tracing genealogy is unworkable and that black immigrants should be eligible for reparations because America is so fundamentally racist.

With a $22.5 billion deficit in the state, the difference between limiting reparations to those who can prove that they descended from slaves and everyone with the right skin tone could be massive. The $800 billion estimate widely discussed is based on the state’s over 2 million black residents. Limiting reparations to the descendants of slaves would produce a smaller, but likely still wildly unworkable number.

Cheryl Grills of NAARC condemned the “preoccupation with a dollar figure”, but the dollar figure remains the best argument for those advocating for limiting reparations to those whose ancestors were enslaved along with their contention that purely race-based reparations would be shut down by the courts. The Soros network’s activists however remain committed to universal reparations and $800 billion in payouts.

While the debate has largely played out within the black community, the intervention of the Soros network on the side of the most destructive and impossible position is typical.

The Soros networks, like all leftists, seek destruction, not healing, and making reparations as universal and as unworkable as possible would stimulate the most outrage and anger.

And that would further divide the races and tear apart not only California, but America.  George Soros has dedicated his life to dividing people of all nations and backgrounds. With California’s racial reparations, the activists he has supported have turned black people against each other.

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. And click here to support my work with a donation.  Thank you for reading.