The president of a leftwing magazine that tied slain conservative icon Charlie Kirk to Nazis with false information denied Vice President JD Vance’s accurate claims that George Soros funds the outlet.
Vance’s comments about radical leftwing billionaire financier George Soros funding The Nation follows its publication of a column by former Gawker editor Elizabeth Spiers comparing the slain Turning Point USA founder to Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbles and labeling Kirk “an unrepentant racist, transphobe, homophobe, and misogynist.”
As Breitbart News reported, the latter name-calling appeared in the lead paragraph only of the 1000-word essay under the headline: “Charlie Kirk’s Legacy Deserves No Mourning.”
The publication is well-funded by Soros to amplify radical leftwing propaganda, Vance said Monday.
“The Nation isn’t a fringe blog,” Vance said while guest hosting The Charlie Kirk Show. “It’s a well-funded, well-respected magazine whose publishing history goes back to the American Civil War. George Soros’s Open Society Foundation funds this magazine.”
The president of The Nation quickly disputed Vance’s claims, seemingly using well-chosen wording to hide the magazine’s connection to Soros.
“I’m not sure where he’s getting his information, but JD Vance is lying about The Nation magazine,” Bhaskar Sunkara, who identifies as a “democratic socialist” in his profile, posted to X Monday. “We’d welcome donations from anyone who respects our editorial independence, but we’re not funded, not one dime, by Soros or Open Society Foundation.”
Despite Sunkara’s denial, the outlet has received funding running into seven figures from Soros. Media Research Center’s NewsBusters reports:
Up until 2019, The Nation was directly affiliated with the nonprofit media outfit The Nation Institute, which had in fact received at least $1,349,000 from Soros’s organizations between 2004 and 2019, according to Foundation Directory Online data. In January 2019, it was announced that The Nation Institute was officially rebranding to become the Type Media Center to expand beyond its connections to the magazine.
Type Media Center Executive Director and CEO Taya Kitman, said in a statement then that “When the Nation Institute was founded more than 50 years ago, we were a modest organization affiliated with the Nation Magazine — but that name no longer reflects the breadth and impact of what we do today.” Apparently, there is still a connection between the organizations.
The MacArthur Foundation, another leftist donor organization, described the relationship this way in a 2023 grant for $325,000 to the Center: “Type Media Center is a nonprofit organization that supports journalism and nonfiction writing through book publishing, fellowship programs, and The Nation magazine.”
Conservatives quickly attacked Sunkara for his seemingly disingenuous defense.
“Your non-profit took over $1 million from George Soros, then you slandered my friend Charlie Kirk while his body was still warm,” top Trump advisor Alex Brusewitz posted on X. “You are a horrible person.”
“Total lie,” another popular conservative commentator, Ryan Girdusky, called Sunkara, posting “the Nation’s non-profit arm ‘the Nation Institute,’ which paid its journalists salaries, got $1.3 milllion from Soros.”
The Nation‘s arrangement is a “standard leftist media tactic to hide the money they take from far-left NGO’s,” Jack Posobiec, a popular conservative and friend of Kirk’s posted to X.
Soros’s funding of The Nation did not end at its rebrand, according to NewsBusters. Its report shows a recent grant to the Center in 2022 of $150,000 was awarded to “build a more equitable future in the field of public interest journalism by strengthening publishing and independent media.”
While guest hosting Kirk’s show, Vance also dismantled the false claims Spiers, the author of the controversial article, made to justify her accusations, correctly explaining that Kirk “made an argument for judging people of all races and backgrounds by their own individual merits” in the argument cited by Spiers.
He said that with “the very evidence she provides, this hack of a writer shows that she lied about a dead man, and yet she wrote it, an esteemed magazine published it, it made it through the editors and, of course, liberal billionaires rewarded that attack.”
The Nation later admitted their mistake in a correction, writing the article “attributed a quote to Charlie Kirk incorrectly.”
Gawker, where Spiers worked prior, filed for bankruptcy in 2012 after a judge awarded Hulk Hogan $115 million in punitive damages for having published a sex tape with him and a friend’s wife back in 2012. Another $25 million was also awarded to Hogan a week later, bringing the total to $140 million.
Bradley Jaye is Deputy Political Editor for Breitbart News. Follow him on X/Twitter and Instagram @BradleyAJaye.
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