As the explosion of left-wing apoplexy unleashed by the passing of Margaret Thatcher intensifies, it appears the tilting-to-port Century Foundation didn’t get the memo from the activist left.
Harold Pollack of the New York-based Century Foundation is lauding the late British prime minister for her trailblazing response to the arrival of HIV/AIDS in the 1980s. He writes:
The Thatcher government responded rather effectively and humanely to the HIV/AIDS crisis. Embracing harm reduction measures such as syringe exchange and methadone maintenance, it saved thousands of lives. Indeed the words ‘harm reduction,’ anathema to American drug control policy until the Obama administration, were official watchwords of British drug policy.
Of course much of the rest of Pollack’s post is ahistorical drivel in which the writer regurgitates one of the Left’s most successful lies in recent decades, to wit, that the Reagan and Bush 41 administrations did nothing to combat HIV/AIDS.
Still, the left-wing attacks on the United Kingdom’s greatest leader since Winston Churchill seem misplaced. Thatcher was one of the few Members of the Westminster Parliament to vote to decriminalize homosexuality and to liberalize abortion.
The Century Foundation, by the way, was founded in 1919 by department store magnate Edward Filene. The nonprofit group describes itself as a “progressive non-partisan think tank.” It is funded by pillars of the left-wing philanthropic establishment, including George Soros’s Open Society Institute, Carnegie Corp. of New York, Ford Foundation, William & Flora Hewlett Foundation, John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and Rockefeller Brothers Fund Inc.
The Century Foundation is so far left that its board of trustees includes Melissa Harris-Perry, the Marxist luminary who recently attacked the idea that parents should be the sole arbiters of how their children are raised.