But as captivating as Flo is, some BizPac Review readers who have purchased Progressive’s auto insurance may be surprised to learn where some of their money goes.
Progressive’s single biggest individual shareholder is board Chairman Peter Lewis, who co-founded the firm with his father. Lewis is now worth about $1.6 billion, according to Forbes magazine. You would think a man who made an immense fortune through America’s entrepreneurial system would be grateful to capitalism, not finance “progressive” causes that endanger free enterprise. But you would think wrong.
Lewis is a major contributor to far-left causes, much like his buddy, George Soros, reaching his stride in the early to late part of the last decade. According to a Jan. 6, 2006, Fox News segment, Lewis poured $25 million over the prior five years into the ACLU, opposed by many conservatives because it spearheads opposition to war on terror policies and opposes the Patriot Act at every turn.
The Capital Research Center reported that Lewis was “the second largest single donor in the 2004 election cycle to non-party groups known as 527s.” Get a gander at the other groups Lewis has given money to, and how much: $2.5 million to Moveon.org; $16 million to an umbrella funding entity — the Joint Victory Fund — that distributed money to America Coming Together (a front for the SEIU union), Center for American Progress and The Media Fund; a direct contribution of nearly $3 million to America Coming Together; $485,000 to the Marijuana Policy Project; and large sums to the Stonewall Democrats United, PunkVoter.Inc and the Sierra Club.
In 2004 alone, Lewis’ total contributions to leftist causes totaled $23,247 million, according to the History Commons website. To his credit, Lewis also supports non-political groups such as universities and art museums.
This is a guy who collects and hangs in his home paintings of Mao Tse-tung, the former communist dictator who reportedly arranged for the killing of perhaps 70 million subjects.
Lewis is part of a billionaires club that has plotted to build a left-wing political infrastructure and a deeper progressive bench, to undermine and destroy the future of conservative causes.
Authenticating the existence of this under-the-radar grand plot — to build progressive political institutions to “counter the conservative ascendency” and “to foster progressive ideas and people” — London’s Financial Times reported in January 2005 that several of America’s left-wing billionaires were politically conspiring with one another after President Bush’s re-election. The Times reported that Lewis, Soros and other billionaires held a closed-door meeting in San Francisco in December 2004. The billionaires “asked their aides to leave the room” as they discussed strategy and financial commitments, according to the Times. The president of the Service Employees International Union was working behind the scenes at the time to include organized labor in the cabal.
In his book “Culture Warrior,” commentator Bill O’Reilly reported that in 2006, Soros and Lewis were “working feverishly to ensure that the progressive battalions are supplied with plenty of resources and firepower to pursue their radical domestic agenda.”
The Wall Street Journal even confirmed the scheme, reporting in 2010: “The progressive left has spent the better part of a decade building an archipelago of tightly linked third-party groups. … Bankrolled in large part by billionaires like George Soros and Peter Lewis, … organized labor and the environmental lobby, these organizations are effectively a shadow party that operate outside the ambit of the Democratic Party.”
The next time you see Flo on TV asking you to buy insurance from Progressive, think about what some of your money will end up supporting, if it ends up in Lewis’ pockets.