MAPPING THE LEFT: THE REYNOLDS FAMILY CONNECTIONS

 

The following two articles give insight into a detailed history of the far reaching left-wing groups in North Carolina that are having an impact throughout our country.  Mapping the Left (www.mappingtheleft.com) was created as an online database that helps to  “follow the dots”  that connect the left-wing groups and the activists that are attempting to  influence public policy.      Nancy 
NC CAPTIAL CONNECTION    www.nccapitolconnection.com

David Neal and the Reynolds Family Connections

This is part one of a three-part series

Susan Myrick

EXCERPT FROM THIS ARTICLE:  His (David Neal) first involvement was starting at the top as the executive director of the Fair Trial Initiative from 2000 to 2006. The Fair Trial Initiative is a nonprofit activist group established to continually introduce “innovative approaches to the defense of death penalty cases.” Neal founded the group with, among others, Jonathan Soros, son of liberal billionaire George Soros, one of the wealthiest and most powerful liberal activists in history. Jonathan Soros is vice chairman and director of his father’s multibillion-dollar Open Society Foundation, a linchpin of left-wing activism across the globe.

It can be very difficult to grasp or visualize the vastness of the network of left-wing groups in North Carolina. But one way to start is with the key group on the left, the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation – and the family that dominates it.

There are literally hundreds of liberal/progressive groups from different areas of the political, public, private and nonprofit sectors. Moreover, groups with different interests and missions work together at a moment’s notice to advocate for each other’s goals, as long as they serve the larger vision of the Left. In addition, many of these groups have carefully selected names that, while not completely lying about their mission, tend to cloak their true intent.

It is for all these reasons that we created Mapping the Left, an online database which helps make it easier to visualize the groups and the activists that make them work. Of special importance, Mapping the Left’s graphics illuminate the connections among these seemingly unconnected groups. The connections are so numerous and so deep that it is necessary to use images to help illustrate them.

Our research has confirmed that the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation has changed radically from its inception as a tribute to Zachary Smith Reynolds, the son of R.J. Reynolds. (Zachary was shot dead in a mysterious incident at their home in Winston-Salem when he was 20.) Over time the foundation has abandoned its original mission and has turned into an organization bent on reshaping NC governance, culture and society. Once it was one of North Carolina’s oldest and most well-regarded philanthropic foundations, known for building schools and hospitals all across our state. But in the latter half of the 20th century, it morphed into a radical activist organization that now leads the charge for public policy that will grow government, increase regulation and weaken the family.

The foundation’s board members have connections to various left-wing organizations, making it not only a microcosm of the liberal/Left in our State, but an integral part of the national progressive movement. Our challenge in the Mapping the Left project is to illustrate these connections, and where better to begin than with the members of the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation Board of Trustees: They were, and are, unquestionably the most important single force behind the liberal/progressive movement in North Carolina.

David Neal, Hillsborough NC

DavidNeal-citywebsite    Let’s start with an individual at the core of this group and its drive to reshape North Carolina.

That would be David Neal, a member of the Reynolds family and the founder of Blueprint NC – the organization that rallied the Left in North Carolina to “eviscerate, litigate, mitigate, cogitate and agitate” the state’s leaders.

David Neal calls himself an “accidental philanthropist,” but a look at his resume suggests otherwise. While Neal is not a direct descendant of R.J. Reynolds or the Z. Smith Reynolds family, he is related. His great-great grandmother, Mary Joyce Reynolds, was R.J. Reynolds’ sister. Neal is the immediate past president of the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation’s board of trustees (2010-2014), and has been a board member since 2001.

His life is interwoven with liberal causes and organizations. After graduating from Oberlin College in 1995, Neal served as a volunteer in the Peace Corps in the former Soviet country of Turkmenistan. On his return to North Carolina, he started law school at the University of North Carolina in 1998 and began his active involvement in the work of left-wing nonprofits, inside and outside of North Carolina.

His first involvement was starting at the top as the executive director of the Fair Trial Initiative from 2000 to 2006. The Fair Trial Initiative is a nonprofit activist group established to continually introduce “innovative approaches to the defense of death penalty cases.” Neal founded the group with, among others, Jonathan Soros, son of liberal billionaire George Soros, one of the wealthiest and most powerful liberal activists in history. Jonathan Soros is vice chairman and director of his father’s multibillion-dollar Open Society Foundation, a linchpin of left-wing activism across the globe.

Neal also was a staff member for another nonprofit activist group, the Center for Death Penalty Litigation, from 2001 to 2003. The Center for Death Penalty Litigation is a law firm in Durham that provides representation for inmates on death row. Both the Fair Trial Initiative and Center for Death Penalty Litigation are members of the Z. Smith Reynolds-established and -funded Blueprint NC. (More below.)

In 2006, Neal entered the national scene with an appointment to the board of the Proteus Fund (2006-2012). “Discover the Networks” describes the Proteus Fund this way:

Proteus is structured like a money-laundering firm. It provides cover for people who don’t wish to be identified with the causes they support, either because the causes themselves are controversial, or because the donors wish to ‘Astroturf’ causes by presenting them as arising from broad-based public support, rather than the product of professional, funded activism.”

In 2007, the State Strategies Fund, a project of Proteus, presented the “Report on Six Emerging Collaborative State Projects” The report hailed projects led by state activists who were attempting to build an integrated progressive infrastructure that would achieve comprehensive social change. North Carolina’s contribution to the report was Blueprint NC.

Blueprint NC is the North Carolina nonprofit that gained infamy in 2013 for a leaked confidential strategy memo that instructed its members to “eviscerate” the state’s leadership. Left-leaning groups themselves claim Neal is a key player in creating Blueprint NC. The Southern Scan Research Project was backed by three liberal organizations, including the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation-funded Institute for Southern Studies. The project published a 2009 report, “Social Justice Organizing In the U.S. South,” in which David Neal is identified as THE founder of Blueprint NC.

That is crucial because Blueprint NC is no ordinary liberal group. It is the central organizing and coordinating nexus for general coordination, lobbying and political activities among groups on the Left in the state. Blueprint NC coordinated much of the Get-Out-the-Vote (GOTV) activities leading up to the 2008 presidential election in NC. (Read more here on Blueprint.)

Neal has served on an array of other liberal nonprofits, including the NC Conservation Network (Blueprint NC member), the Common Sense Foundation, and the Orange County ACLU.

David Neal is married to Jennifer Weaver. She works as a researcher for another North Carolina nonprofit that receives funding from the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation — Clean Water for North Carolina. This is one of those groups that has a benevolent-sounding name but spends a lot of its time and money supporting a so-called “Water Justice Campaign” and supporting action by the UN on Human Rights and Genocide. A good name does not necessarily translate into more clean drinking water for anyone, just more liberal/progressive policies. Clean Water for North Carolina is guided by these supposed Principles for Environmental Justice.

Neal is no ordinary lawyer or heir to family money. He is the quintessence of a liberal activist and he very much enjoys the access his family money and connections give him to politicians and activists. He has stated that he loves to go to Moral Monday protests. He also is sometimes prominently featured in photos of leaders on the Left holding press conferences or making pronouncements.

Neal and Barber
David Neal, with gray beard in upper right corner of photo, listens to William Barber speak.

David Neal is emblematic of how the heirs of a world-renowned industrialist have decided how to use the wealth he provided for them. They do this as a family and with the assistance of others on the board and the many nonprofits they have established and funded. Their connections and influence may be hard to trace at first, but Mapping the Left will show how they collaborate on turning North Carolina to the left.

 

mappingtheleft.com/tag/mary-mountcastle/

Mary Mountcastle and the Reynolds Family Connections Post

This is part two of a three-part series (click here for part 1)

Susan Myrick

EXCERPT FROM THIS ARTICLE:  Mary Mountcastle also currently serves on the board of trustees for Demos, an ultra-liberal policy nonprofit based in New York. Another noteworthy member of the Demos board of trustees, Van Jones, was President Obama’s adviser to the White House Council on Environmental Quality and a self-avowed communist and 9/11 truther petition signer

 

It can be very difficult to grasp or visualize the vastness of the network of left-wing groups in North Carolina. But one way to start is with the key group on the left – and the family that dominates it.

Our research has confirmed that the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation has abandoned its original mission and has turned into a foundation bent on reshaping NC governance, culture and society. Our challenge in the Mapping the Left project is to illustrate these connections, and where better to begin than with the members of the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation Board of Trustees: They were, and are, unquestionably the most important single force behind the liberal/progressive movement in North Carolina.

We have already discussed David Neal and now we will look at another Reynolds family member who has a longer history and has helped to shape the transition of the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation to an activist giver within North Carolina, while also being instrumental in the larger liberal/progressive movement outside the state through her work on the board of the foundation named after her grandmother – the Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation.

Mary Mountcastle – Durham, NC

mountcastlemontage

Family ties and connections are very important to the Reynolds family heirs. This is evident in the work of the family members on foundation boards and in the groups funded by the various Reynolds family foundations.

Mary Mountcastle’s great-grandparents were R.J. Reynolds and his wife, Mary Katharine Smith. They had a daughter, Mary Katharine Reynolds (Mary Babcock Mountcastle’s grandmother), who was Z. Smith Reynolds oldest sister. In 1936, Mary Katharine Reynolds inherited $30 million from R.J.’s estate, and at the time she was described as one of the richest women in the world. She went on to marry Charles Henry Babcock.

Mary Katharine and Charles Henry Babcock had a daughter, Mary Katharine Babcock, who went on to marry Kenneth Franklin Mountcastle Jr. They had a daughter who they named Mary.

The above names are a little hard to follow but illustrate how important family and heritage is to the Reynolds heirs and how they like to emphasize the family roots and relations.

Mary Mountcastle has served on the Z. Smith Reynolds Board of Trustees for decades, serving as president of the board at least twice. She also serves on the Board of the Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation, the foundation named after her grandmother. The Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation concentrates its philanthropic efforts outside of North Carolina, whereas the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation focuses its grant-giving within the state. Between 2004 and 2012, the Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation gave more than $76 million to mostly liberal organizations outside of North Carolina.

Mountcastle works closely with nonprofits in the Blueprint NC network and has served as the president of the Center for Responsible Lending and assistant director and president of the Center for Community Self-Help – both of which are members of Blueprint NC. In March 2010, Sean Higgins, writing for the Capital Research Center, said that the Center for Responsible Lending is

“intimately tied to some of the worst actors in the lending business and its advocacy has too often hurt, not helped, the people it claims to defend.” The actors he is referring to are Herbert and Marion Sandler, who are credited with creating the Center for Responsible Lending.”

The Sandlers have been connected to and accused by some of contributing to the housing meltdown of 2008. They sold their company Golden West Financial to Wachovia for $24 billion in 2006 at the height of the housing boom. This netted the Sandlers about $2.4 billion dollars. This purchase, with its large portfolio of risky housing loans, contributed greatly to the failure and subsequent sale of Wachovia, which at the time was the nation’s fourth largest bank. The Sandlers got billions and Wachovia shareholders were left holding the bag. The New York Times reported that Time Magazine ranked the couple in its list of “25 people to blame for the financial crisis.”

Mary Mountcastle’s connections go outside the Blueprint NC arena too: She is the former Vice President of Economic Development for MDC Inc. In 1967, MDC was formed from Gov. Terry Sanford’s NC Fund. In 1962, the NC Fund, with an ostensible goal to end poverty in North Carolina, was created with grant money from the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation, the Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation and the Ford Foundation, as well as grants from the federal government.

The Reynolds heirs, while having a very large influence on North Carolina, have also made it a point to be part of the larger national liberal/progressive movement.

Mountcastle has also served as a board member and as treasurer for the Tides Foundation, one of the foremost liberal/progressive funding organizations in the United States. The Tides Center grew out of the Tides Foundation and began as the Foundation’s Projects Program in the late 1970s. The center served to organize and grow new left-wing political advocacy groups and provide them with whatever help they might need in the way of staff and money. You can see this model of assistance used today by the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation: Blueprint NC was started in this way with funding by the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation, and was housed in the NC Justice Center for several years.

The Reynolds family ties run deep in the Tides Foundation. The foundation was founded in 1976 in San Francisco by Drummond Pike and Nancy Jane Lehman as a public charity that receives money from donors and then funnels it to the recipients of the donor’s choice – effectively laundering the money so donors can remain anonymous. What many people don’t know is that Nancy Jane Lehman’s grandfather was none other than R.J. Reynolds. Her mother was Nancy Susan Bagley, his youngest daughter and founder of the radical ARCA Foundation.

Scott Walter, in the summary of his article “The Tides Foundation and Center: Selling Foundation Philanthropy on the Idea of “Structural Racism” leaves no question as to Tides’ political philosophy:

“The Tides Foundation is a public charity designed to allow anonymous pass-through funding by donors, and the Tides Center acts as an incubator for radical advocacy nonprofits. But the whole is greater than the sum of Tides’ parts. The innovative structure of the Tides network is designed to secure funding for and nurture the growth of radical nonprofits along a wide range of issues. But the most important— and dangerous—Tides initiative is its effort to promote the concept of ‘structural racism.’”

Patrick Reilly, writing for Foundation Watch, wrote:

“Beyond environmental advocacy and anti-military efforts, Tides Center projects are involved in many issues and efforts to turn government, business and society leftward.”

Mary Mountcastle also currently serves on the board of trustees for Demos, an ultra-liberal policy nonprofit based in New York. Another noteworthy member of the Demos board of trustees, Van Jones, was President Obama’s adviser to the White House Council on Environmental Quality and a self-avowed communist and 9/11 truther petition signer.

She serves and has served on numerous other funder and philanthropy boards, including the Triangle Community Foundation, the Council on Foundations, and Lillian’s List. She is married to Jim Overton, who according to his bio on the NC League of Conservation Voters website, of which he is a member of the board, is on the executive staff of the Center for Community Self-Help – both organizations associated with Blueprint NC.

Mapping the Left

In North Carolina there are literally hundreds of liberal/progressive groups from different areas of the political, public, private and non-profit sectors. Moreover, groups with different interests and missions work together at a moment’s notice to advocate for each other’s goals. In addition, many of these groups have carefully selected names that, while not completely lying about their mission, tend to cloak their true intent.

It is for all these reasons that we created Mapping the Left, an online database which helps make it easier to visualize the groups and the activists that make them work, but especially because it illuminates the connections among this seemingly unconnected group. The connections are so numerous and so deep that it is necessary to use images to help illustrate them.

 

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