A former moderator for the Clinton Global Initiative’s (CGI) forums slammed the organization’s event and the Clinton Foundation on this week’s “Slate’s Political Gabfest” podcast, calling many of the events “gross.”
Adam Davidson, a journalist who writes for New York magazine and hosts a show on NPR, said that many of the events are “all about buying access.”
“It seems, to me, that it is all about buying access. It is incredibly expensive just to go to the thing, it’s $100,000-something,” said Davidson in the podcast.
Davidson is no stranger to CGI events: he has moderated several CGI panels for the past few years, including last year, but notes that he is unlikely to be invited back again because of his comments that The Daily Caller reported.
He then described how these types of events foster pay-to-play schemes.
“There’s sort of these explicit ways in which you get access,” he said. “You pay more money to get more access to political leaders and to really rich people and to big corporate leaders.”
“It just feels like the worst version of an elite selling access to the aspirational, creating this theatre of doing good, but it’s all about something else. It really feels gross,” Davidson continued.
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