President Trump announced on social media that he would designate Antifa a terrorist organization and will recommend that the funding of Antifa be investigated:
Critics pointed out that there is no such thing as designation of a domestic terrorist organization, and anyway, Antifa is an “idea,” not an organization.
Antifa may be a loosely knit group, but an idea does not carry out 100 consecutive nights of rioting, as Antifa did in Portland. That takes both organization and funding. The same is true of other violent groups on the left. So, where is that funding coming from?
The Capital Research Center has investigated George Soros’s Open Society Foundation, and found that it provides substantial support to violent and even terrorist organizations:
Since 2016, George Soros’s Open Society Foundations (OSF), now run with his son Alexander, has poured over $80 million into groups tied to terrorism or extremist violence. The evidence is stark: Open Society has sent millions of dollars into U.S.-based organizations that engage in “direct actions” that the FBI defines as domestic terrorism. These groups include the Center for Third World Organizing and its militant partner Ruckus Society, which trained activists in property destruction and sabotage during the 2020 riots, and the Sunrise Movement, which endorsed the Antifa-linked Stop Cop City campaign, in which activists currently face over 40 domestic terrorism charges and 60 racketeering indictments. At the same time, Open Society awarded $18 million to the Movement for Black Lives, a group that co-authored a radical guide that glorifies Hamas’s October 7 massacre and instructs activists in the use of false IDs, blockades, and economic disruption.
That is bad, but the truth may be even worse:
Yet what we expose here is only that part of Soros’s network which he has allowed the public to see, because even these alarming figures come from Open Society’s own selectively published grant lists, which the foundation admits are censored and incomplete.
More specifically, this is what Capital Research found:
This investigation separates Open Society’s funding of extremist groups into three categories:
Grantees that directly assist domestic terrorism and criminality on U.S. soil. Open Society awarded at least $23,275,000 to seven groups that engage in or materially assist violence, property destruction, economic sabotage, harassment, and other criminality that meets the FBI’s definition of domestic terrorism.
Grantees that have endorsed terrorist attacks like those on October 7, 2023, and/or are directly linked to foreign terrorist groups or their known front groups. Open Society has provided at least $50,571,206 to 41 such groups. Unlike groups in the first category, these organizations do not openly encourage crimes to be committed in America.
Grantees that qualify as associates of terrorist groups or pro-terrorism groups. Open Society has provided at least $9,335,016 to five such non-profits. These groups do not openly support terrorism and may condemn attacks like those on October 7, 2023, but they continue to provide significant material assistance to pro-terrorism or terrorism-linked groups or activists.
Such support for criminal organizations could subject the Open Society Foundation and its principals to criminal liability. Also, the Open Society Foundation could lose its tax-exempt 501(c)(3) status:
Our October 2024 study, Marching Towards Violence: The Domestic Anti-Israeli Protest Movement, pointed out the little-known fact that a registered non-profit organization is ineligible under federal law for tax-exempt status if it intends to commit crimes of any kind. Acts of purported civil disobedience, as Daniel Greenfield observes, are not an exception.
As so often happens, President Trump may be off-base on some of the details, but he is fundamentally correct: his administration should investigate the funding and other support that allows violent, left-wing groups to exist and to commit crimes. Where appropriate, criminal prosecutions should be brought. And certainly, no organization that supports violence should continue to receive tax-exempt status.
