The People Setting America on Fire 🧵 How are all anti-Israel protests alike? We followed the money to find out. From the article by Park MacDougald 1/23

Georgia, 2023: prosecutors bring RICO charges against anarchists involved in the “Stop Cop City” protests in Atlanta. The indictment identified a network of fraudulent nonprofits, fiscal sponsors, and bail funds that were, in reality, front groups controlled by three anarchist

Where did the money come from? From donations solicited through left-wing fundraising and organizing networks. One of those networks was the Climate Justice Alliance (CJA), an umbrella group for more than 80 “community organizations,” including the Grassroots Global Justice

CJA is a subsidiary of the Movement Strategy Center, a California-based 501(c)(3) that has received funding from the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Tides Foundation, and various branches of the Open Society network. But it has another financial supporter, one

The first hint that recent far left protests are not entirely organic is their striking resemblance to previous rounds of organized far-left agitation, from the “uprising” of summer 2020 to the rolling antifa vs. Proud Boys brawls of 2016-17. The creation of “liberated” or

Familiar, too, is the governance of these zones, with masked security details prohibiting filming from outsiders and directing reporters to trained media representatives. During clashes with police or with counterprotesters, students and their allies have deployed classic “bloc”

These resemblances are no accident. Footage from Columbia showed the professional “protest consultant” Lisa Fithian, a veteran of Occupy, BLM, Standing Rock, and Stop Cop City, teaching students at Columbia how to barricade themselves into Hamilton Hall. When police cleared out

They also include various communist and Marxist-Leninist groups, including the Maoist Revolutionary Communist Party, the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), and the International ANSWER coalition, a PSL front group that worked with several Muslim groups to organize the Jan.

On April 29, for instance, shortly before masked assailants stormed Columbia’s Hamilton Hall and barricaded themselves inside, The People’s Forum—a Manhattan event space affiliated with the PSL and funded by Neville Roy Singham, a wealthy businessman who “works closely with the

These groups typically operate in a decentralized manner, using successful tactics drawn from decades of anarchist organizing and spread through left-wing activist networks via word-of-mouth, as well as through formal trainings by professionals such as Lisa Fithian or the

There is no one decision-maker; rather, decentralized “affinity” groups work together toward a shared goal, coordinating out in the open via social media and Google Docs. This can create an impression of centralized planning. Matching tents that have cropped up on a number of

The “movement,” in turn, while it recruits from among students and other self-motivated radicals willing to put their bodies on the line, relies heavily on the funding of progressive donors and nonprofits connected to the upper reaches of the Democratic Party. According to

JVP is, in essence, the “Jewish”-branch of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, backed by the usual big-money progressive donors—including some, like the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, that were instrumental in selling Obama’s Iran Deal to the public. JVP and its

SJP, by contrast, is an outgrowth of the Islamist networks dissolved during the U.S. government’s prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation (HLF) and related charities for fundraising for Hamas. SJP is a subsidiary of an organization called American Muslims for Palestine (AMP); SJP

Today, however, National SJP is legally a “fiscal sponsorship” of another nonprofit: a White Plains, New York, 501(c)(3) called the WESPAC Foundation. A fiscal sponsorship is a legal arrangement in which a larger nonprofit “sponsors” a smaller group, essentially lending it the

Run by the market researcher Howard Horowitz, WESPAC reveals very little about its donors, although scattered reporting and public disclosures suggest that the group is used as a pass-through between larger institutions and pro-Palestinian radicals. Since 2006, for instance,

WESPAC, however, is not merely the fiscal sponsor of the Hamas-linked SJP but also the fiscal sponsor of the third group involved in organizing the Columbia protests, Within Our Lifetime (WOL), formerly known as New York City SJP. Founded by the Palestinian American lawyer

A full list of the group’s provocations would take thousands of words, but it has been the central organizing force in the series of “Flood”-themed protests in New York City since Oct. 7, including multiple bridge and highway blockades, a November riot at Grand Central Station,

Abdullah Akl, a prominent WOL leader—indeed, the man leading the “strike Tel Aviv” chants in the video linked above—is also listed as a “field organizer” on the website of MPower Change, the “advocacy project” led by Linda Sarsour. MPower Change, in turn, is a fiscal sponsorship

Tides, you might have noticed, is a name that keeps coming up again and again. The Tides Nexus, of which the Tides Foundation is a part, is one of largest progressive dark-money networks in the country, controlling upward of a billion in assets; its list of major donors is an

The Arab Resource and Organizing Center (AROC), which organized an illegal blockade of the Port of Tacoma in November and an anti-Israel walkout of high school students in San Francisco—where AROC contracts with the unified public school district—is a fiscal sponsorship of the

Tides has become tightly integrated with the ascendant Obama faction of the Democratic Party. Tides board member Cheryl Alston, for instance, was appointed by Obama to serve two terms on the advisory committee of the federal Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation. Board member

When I asked Shideler for his opinion on why not only the IRS, but federal and local law enforcement, seemed reluctant to act against what seemed to be clear violations of the law, he offered me a quote from The Wire: “If you follow drugs, you get drugs and drug dealers. If you

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