Yes, some protests have been peaceful, engaging in constitutionally protected speech. But, unlike the concerned parents who simply decided to get more involved in local politics, the groups behind the protests—violent and peaceful ones—want to dismantle society. And things could turn even more violent this summer.
Authorities—not just the Federal Bureau of Investigations, but law enforcement at all levels—have presumably been keeping tabs on who’s taking part, who broke the law, who are the nonstudents sneaking into university property to agitate, etc. If they haven’t, Congress ought to weigh in.
The arrests in New York and Los Angeles, where police entered UCLA early on May 1, will furnish the identities of many. Other technology, such as police drones that flew over the encampments, and the geofencing that tells authorities who used a phone within a space, should also help.
Most importantly, law enforcement must investigate who is funding these well-organized and well-orchestrated protests. This is particularly the case if it is a foreign power such as Iran or its terrorist proxy Hamas (which, again, would mean Iran). And if the funders are domestic, aiding and abetting violence across state lines is a federal crime.
We already know that some of the street protests have been organized by the ANSWER Coalition, which claims credit for a march in Washington that it says brought out 400,000, many bused in from other states. (ANSWER stands for Act Now to Stop War and End Racism.)
The ANSWER Coalition is a fiscally sponsored project of Progress Unity Fund, a tax-exempt, 501(c)(3) organization with a long history of promoting society’s most radical causes.
The Progress Unity Fund is closely tied with the Workers World Party, described by Discover the Networks as a “Marxist-Leninist vanguard” party. Capital Research Center notes that ”ANSWER’s director is Brian Becker, who is also [a] key figure within the Party for Socialism and Liberation, yet another communist group that split from the Workers World Party in 2004.” This leftist party says U.S. democracy is a “façade.”Progress Unity Fund has received money from the far-left, deep-pocketed Tides Foundation, according to Influence Watch. ANSWER, according to Research Gate, also gets money from George Soros’ Open Society Foundation, which is also very far left and very wealthy.
ANSWER organized the march in Washington, D.C., with American Muslims for Palestine, which gives guidance and financial support to Students for Justice in Palestine. According to Columbia professor Shai Davidai and many others, the Muslim group has strong links with Hamas.
Students for Justice in Palestine, which also has supported Hamas and posts poisonously anti-Semitic tweets regularly, has organized and led many of the campus protests.
In our recent book “NextGen Marxism: What It Is and How to Combat It,” Katharine Cornell Gorka and I describe Students for Justice in Palestine as having been so vile in its support for Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre and gang rapes of Jewish women in Israel that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis “ordered the Florida universities to disband SJP chapters.”
Students for Justice in Palestine receives funding from American Muslims for Palestine but is itself a fiscally sponsored project of the Westchester People’s Action Coalition Foundation, another far-left funder. When you visit WESPAC’s website, you find a photo of earnest activists holding up a sign that reads “Another World is Possible.” This is a well-known slogan used by organizations that despise capitalism but think they must cloak their communism.
Ryan Mauro of Capital Research Center, whose work tracking these networks is invaluable, emailed me to say that the Westchester People’s Action Coalition Foundation “funds various revolutionary far-left/anti-Western groups.” But because it acts as Students for Justice in Palestine’s fiscal sponsor, there’s no transparency.
“All donations transit through WESPAC and they aren’t required to publicly reveal anything about that relationship,” Mauro said.
But we can get a sense, from other disclosures, of who funds both WESPAC and American Muslims for Palestine. Mauro tells me that those who have given to the Westchester People’s Action Coalition Foundation include the Elias Foundation ($100,000); the Sparkplug Foundation (about $100,000); Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors ($80,000); George Soros’ Open Society ($40,000); and the Groundswell Foundation (about $32,000). The Zakat Foundation, meanwhile, has given $25,000 to AMP.
How influential have these groups and their NextGen Marxist ideas on decolonization, the “oppressor vs. oppressed” paradigm, and anticapitalism been on protesters? We can get a sense from the three spokesmen who faced the media on April 30 at Columbia University before the NYPD dislodged them from Hamilton Hall. They have been much derided, but their background is instructive.
The main spokesperson was Johannah King-Slutsky. According to Jordan Schachtel of “The Dossier” podcast, King-Slutsky is a doctoral candidate at Columbia, where she studies “theories of the imagination and poetry as interpreted through a Marxian lens.” She wrote in her now-deleted Columbia bio that her goal is to “write a prehistory of metabolic rift, Marx’s term for the disruption of energy circuits caused by industrialization under capitalism.”
Another spokesperson was Cameron Jones, an activist with Jewish Voice for Peace, a virulently anti-Semitic far-left group. It receives funding from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Open Society Foundation, among others.
The third spokesperson was Maryam Alwan, a leader at Students for Justice in Palestine.There has to be enough here for the FBI, Congress, and other leaders to investigate who has been organizing and funding these protests—before they metastasize and further endanger society.
Originally published by the Washington Examiner; reprinted by permission from The Daily Signal, a publication of The Heritage Foundation.
