When private companies close thousands of stores for an afternoon to conduct anti-bias training it usually doesn’t affect American taxpayers, but in Starbucks’ case it does. In addition to approximately $400,000 in U.S. government contracts, the global coffeehouse chain has received millions of dollars from Uncle Sam for a coffee yield improvement project in Colombia, records uncovered by Judicial Watch show.
Additionally, the anti-bias curriculum that was recently forced upon 175,000 employees was designed by a nonprofit that’s largely funded by leftwing billionaire George Soros. The group’s (Perception Institute) leadership has close ties to Democratic party politics, including Planed Parenthood and the Obama administration, Judicial Watch’s investigation found.
The special training was called to order after a manager at a Philadelphia Starbucks called police on two black men who sat in the store without buying anything. The men were eventually arrested for trespassing and the race card was quickly played. Starbucks responded by closing 8,000 stores in the U.S. for four hours “to come together for a conversation and learning session on racial bias.”
The goal, according to the company, was to take a foundational step in renewing Starbucks as a place where all people feel welcome. “Starbucks partners shared life experiences, heard from others, listened to experts on bias and racial anxiety, reflecting on the realities of bias in our society and talking about how all of us can work together to create public spaces where everyone feels like they belong,” the company wrote in a statement. A national newspaper described it as a “dramatic move toward racial reconciliation.”
At the helm of this so-called racial reconciliation was the Perception Institute, which lists Soros’ Open Society Foundation among its major supporters. The group’s executive director, Alexis McGill-Johnson, co-founded the Democrat marketing firm Brand Architects and is a former board chair for Planned Parenthood. She was also the political director for Russell Simmons’ Hip-Hop Summit Action Network and executive director of Citizen Change, a nonprofit founded by rapper Sean “Diddy” Combs.
Perception Institute’s director of research, Rachel Godsil, was “the convener for the Obama campaign’s Urban and Metropolitan Policy Committee” and an advisor to Obama’s Housing and Urban Development (HUD) transition team. New York Mayor Bill de Blasio appointed Godsil chair of the city’s Rent Guidelines Board. Years ago, Judicial Watch obtained documents exposing de Blasio’s dark past as an active supporter of a brutal communist regime well known as one of Latin America’s worst human rights abusers.
The Perception Institute’s research advisor, DeAngelo Bester, is a renowned leftist who served as a project manager with the National People’s Action, an Alinskyite community-organizing group dedicated to progressive social change and economic and racial justice. Besides advising the nonprofit that helped conduct Starbucks’ racial sensitivity training Bester is executive director of the Workers’ Center for Racial Justice, a Chicago nonprofit founded by a group of unemployed and formerly incarcerated black workers.
In 2015 the group co-sponsored a Black Lives Matter protest at the International Association of Chiefs of Police convention along with the Malcom X Grassroots Movement, the International Socialist Organization and similar leftwing groups. A few years ago, the New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice received a $250,000 grant from Soros’ Open Society Foundation.
Soros dedicates monstrous sums of money to spread his radical globalist agenda by funding liberal media outlets, supporting leftwing politicians, advocating for open borders, fomenting public discord and influencing academic institutions. In the United States Soros groups have pushed a radical agenda that includes promoting an open border with Mexico and fighting immigration enforcement efforts, fomenting racial disharmony by funding anti-capitalist black separationist organizations, financing the Black Lives Matter movement and other groups involved in the Ferguson Missouri riots, weakening the integrity of the nation’s electoral systems, opposing U.S. counterterrorism efforts and eroding 2nd Amendment protections.
He has also funded a liberal think-tank headed by former Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta and the scandal-ridden activist group Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), so corrupt that Congress banned it from receiving federal funding. Judicial Watch recently published an investigative report exposing the connection between U.S.-funded entities and Soros’ Open Society Foundation to further the Hungarian philanthropist’s efforts in Central America. Last year Judicial Watch published an investigative piece about the U.S. government’s multi-million-dollar secret collusion with Soros to destabilize the democratically elected, center-right government in Macedonia.