Portugal’s six-year-old populist right-wing party Chega recently submitted a recommendation to the ‘centre-right’ government to make an official request to the U.S. administration for detailed information regarding USAID funding in Portugal.
USAID has operated in Portugal since 1975, even before democratic elections were held. Chega pointed to the agency’s exorbitant budget, for decades spent with very little oversight. The party further underlined that the organisation has been exposed for extremely biased priorities in its funding, which Chega classified as “ideological crusading.”
The recommendation mentions a number of scandals connected to the agency and stresses its role in funding projects aimed at censoring conservatives all over the world under the guise of “fighting disinformation,” including outright paying journalists.
It is an established fact—exposed by then-Senator, now U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio—that LGBT and drag queen festivals in Portugal were subsidised by USAID. These festivals included screening movies featuring homosexual acts with minors, for instance.
Chega’s recommendation, submitted in March, calls for all USAID funding to be accounted for, in governmental, academic, media, and NGO activities in Portugal. This would have some consequences in Portugal yet, if part of a Europe-wide effort, such requests may contribute to exposing and diminishing left-wing and Democratic Party influence over the Old Continent. Who can forget, for one, the Samantha Power-led USAID’s efforts, at interfering in Hungary’s electoral process?
While Portugal’s NGO sector is fairly weak compared to regions such as Central and Eastern Europe, the influence of foreign progressive internationalism has also been felt in the Iberian republic. George Soros is an inevitable presence, considering the vast amounts of money the multi-billionaire activist has poured into the transnational network of political influencing.
For instance, Soros funds the Poynter Institute which certifies ‘official fact-checkers.’ Poynter has certified Polígrafo, an entity quoted as an authority on ‘truth’ by some of Portugal’s biggest media outlets, such as the SIC TV franchise and the newspaper Expresso. Polígrafo does not even conceal its mission as denouncing—exclusively—lies uttered by politicians. If ‘disinformation’ is propagated by the people paid to tell the truth—journalists—Polígrafo has nothing to say. Additionally, Polígrafo is also financed by Meta, one of the biggest purveyors of online political censorship. Both SIC and Expresso are owned by one of the founders of PSD (Partido Social Democrata) and are regarded as the voice of the centre-right in Portugal. For the Lisbon-based media and PSD, being ‘centre-right’ means extolling the virtues of Barack Obama and employing pundits such as Carmo Afonso, who petitioned the Constitutional Court for the banning of Chega. In Expresso, Carmo Afonso also praised the Black Lives Matter race riots and expressed admiration for BLM’s successful extortion of multinationals such as Mark Jacobs through vandalism. More directly, George Soros also funds the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) which released the Panama Papers, Paradise Papers, Pandora Papers, and others. In Portugal, the Consortium’s contact is an Expresso journalist…Soros’s Open Society Foundations have also been reported as funding the UK-based organisation Hope Not Hate (HNH). HNH claims to fight extremism but admits that it only looks at ‘right-wing extremism.’ In fact, HNH’s ties to leftist violence are such that a report by the Swedish Institute for Defence Studies—a think-tank of the Swedish military—identified HNH as part of an international network of activist entities dedicated to the harassment, intimidation, and incitement against political-ideological foes in the ‘Extremist and Violent Propaganda’ chapter of said report. In Expresso, Hope Not Hate is mentioned as a credible source of journalism.
Even if the Chega proposal is heeded, uncovering where all the USAID money went would still only be showing the tip of the iceberg—or one of the tentacles of the octopus—of all the foreign money currently promoting extremism in Portugal and subverting Portuguese sovereignty. One can only hope that the Trump administration’s actions will throw more light on the contamination of the West by transnational radical lobbies.