This is insidious (think, termites gnawing at the foundations) but definitely worth a read.

A lot of these NGO’s, lobby groups and individuals, I’ve never heard of (except Murdoch the younger) but the article is instructive as to the mind numbing, interconnectedness between them and how they operate.

They’re extremely well funded, organised and effective.

Using words as weapons, they understand the power of framing the message and triggering emotion, particularly in young people.

The billionaire takeover of civil society    https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/01/29/the-billionaire-takeover-of-civil-society/

“….If one accepts what ‘givers’, like Omidyar (founder of EBay) et al, say, it becomes apparent that rather than participating in traditional acts of charity, like founding a hospital for the needy, they are attempting to engage in ‘social engineering’ – that is, using their resources to artificially change the structure of society to what they think it should be.

If successful, this would amount to an extreme circumvention of democracy, utilising money not just to win elections, but to substitute paid or subsidised content for actual support, and thereby flip an entire political culture on to a different track by amplifying some voices and drowning out others.

Moreover, just to keep things interesting, this is viewed in quite explicit investment terms – and investors tend to expect a return on their investment.

The ‘engineered’ aspect of many of these social-change organisations comes through in myriad ways. For example, members frequently refer to ‘how-to’ manuals and books for creating social change (of any kind) according to a fairly technical blueprint.

On one level, it is great that young people are taking part in politics. But on another level it is incredibly fake. The youthful participants aren’t so much being empowered as instrumentalised.

After all, they are part of the portfolio of an investment fund that is using them to ‘shift power’, with part of the strategy being to shame politicians for not being nice enough to hysterical children.

To sum up: We have a conveyor belt of political organisations that includes activist groups like Sunrise, research operations like Data and Society and More in Common, focus-group operators like Avalanche Insights, and vote turn-out and candidate-support services like Run for Something, all operating under a dense web of funding, partnering and referrals. It truly is its own end-to-end ecosystem.

These organisations constantly cite each other’s work, recycle the same personnel and fund, ‘support’ and ‘partner with’ each other’s projects on multiple different levels…”