An organization funded by leftist megadonor George Soros’s nonprofit network runs a program paying students to protest “the Military Industrial Complex” on their campuses.
Dissenters, a Chicago-based activist group, invited college students “impacted by war and militarism” to apply for an “Anti-Militarist Organizing Fellowship” by Aug. 7 in a July 31 Instagram post. The program provides stipends of $2,500 or $3,000 for the fall semester, or $6,000 for a yearlong commitment, with participants expected to spend at least 15 hours per week “organizing and participating in fellowship activities,” Dissenters said in the post.
Dissenters received $305,000 between 2020 and 2023 from Soros’s Foundation to Promote Open Society via four grants, according to those years’ tax filings. Three of the grants went toward Dissenters’s fellowship program or overall work with college students, while a fourth helped the group “promote a more inclusive, just, and accountable national security framework in the U.S. and globally,” the foundation’s filings show.
The Foundation to Promote Open Society funneled the grants through two organizations sponsoring Dissenters: the Center for Third World Organizing in California and the Watershed Center in New York. The two groups and the press team for Soros’s Open Society Foundations did not respond to the Washington Examiner’s requests for comment.
“We uplift the leadership of people directly impacted by systems of war, policing, and militarism,” Dissenters said in its post. “Candidates with directly impacted identities are strongly encouraged to apply.”
The students’ work will include advocating campuses to stop doing business with “companies complicit in the Military Industrial Complex,” preventing the U.S. military and defense manufacturers from recruiting at schools, and a separate “campaign of your own design,” Dissenters said. In addition to funding, the fellowship provides “the fundamentals of anti-militarist organizing,” “deep leadership development, coaching and community,” according to the group.
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Dissenters previously drew criticism from the conservative watchdog Capital Research Center for co-authoring a “Black and Palestinian Solidarity Organizing Toolkit” with an image of what appeared to be a Hamas paraglider flying toward a border wall. The guide also featured a picture of Palestinian activist Leila Khaled, who gained iconic status among left-wing circles for hijacking planes in 1969 and 1970.
The Soros-funded group has been spreading its mission on campuses via the student fellowship since 2021, according to its website.