Democrats’ Nonprofit Problem
A vast, monied network of activist groups keeps the public inflamed.
ET
The unfolding debacle in Minneapolis captures an underappreciated fact about the Democratic Party: It is configured to react in unreasoning rage to everything President Trump does. The challenge of “messaging”—how to condemn roundups of illegal migrants without defending protesters’ lawlessness—is only a symptom of the problem. The problem itself arises from the Byzantine network of activist nonprofits created and fostered over the past decade and a half by liberal foundations and progressive billionaires.
The Democrats’ nonprofit problem began more or less in 2010, when a cap-and-trade bill died in the Senate. Wealthy foundations and donor-class ideologues, animated by fears of global catastrophe, decided they couldn’t achieve their goals by democratic persuasion and had to create an army of nonprofit groups to wage legal and political war on the imagined enablers of climate change.
The money soon flowed to other areas, as money does. Particularly since the pandemic and the George Floyd riots in 2020, the progressive donor class has spread its largess to advocacy and activist organizations pushing social justice, immigrant rights, Palestinian statehood, LGBTQ rights, indigenous people’s rights and—as ever—climate sustainability. MacKenzie Scott, ex-wife of Jeff Bezos, has given $26 billion since 2019. Other billionaires with left-leaning proclivities—Michael Bloomberg, Pierre Omidyar, George Soros, Tom Steyer—have pumped enormous sums into progressive nonprofits.
A cynical observer might consider Mr. Trump a gift to left-wing nonprofits. He inspires their ire and gives them dragons to slay. They might also thank Joe Biden, whose neglect of the southern border created sufficient political demand for his successor to remove illegal border crossers one way or another.
About half of the electorate disapproves of the arrests and deportations carried out by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers. But the anti-ICE protests in Minneapolis aren’t primarily, or maybe at all, the spontaneous uprisings of an outraged citizenry. Gov. Tim Walz, in a televised address that sounded like a narration of Kristallnacht—“they’re breaking windows, dragging pregnant women down the street, just plain grabbing Minnesotans and shoving them into unmarked vans, kidnapping innocent people with no warning and no due process”—urged viewers to record ICE operations on their phones.
Ordinary people don’t do that. Nor do they park their cars to obstruct law-enforcement operations or gather outside hotels in the wee hours to chant and bang drums because those hotels rented rooms to ICE agents. Activists do these things.
A revealing detail, which I credit the Washington Free Beacon for finding: The Sunrise Movement, a group founded to stage disruptive climate protests, wants a piece of the anti-ICE action. Sunrise is training activists to plague hotels and car-rental companies that do business with ICE. Open Society Foundations (Mr. Soros’s organization) has given Sunrise $2 million since 2019. The Ford Foundation has given it $700,000 over the past two years, the MacArthur Foundation $250,000 in 2024.
Another detail, this one from Karl Zinsmeister’s new book, “Sweet Charity,” which defends the virtues of charitable giving and deplores its politicization by lefty foundations and billionaires: “The ‘No Kings’ protests orchestrated by left-wing nonprofits in dozens of cities during the fall of 2025 were heavily funded by a variety of activist philanthropies.” Mr. Zinsmeister tallies 203 separate nonprofit protest sponsors.
The campus protests since 2023 were similarly orchestrated by a latticework of “anti-Zionist” organizations, many larded with money from left-wing foundations: Open Society, Kaphan, Tides and others.
Donor-class progressives no doubt believe they’re helping Democrats and hurting Mr. Trump by shoveling so much money at left-wing nonprofits. Are they? I suspect most Democrats who ran for office in 2024 found that the screaming antisemites crowding the quads of elite colleges didn’t make their campaigning easier. Plainly the protests complicated Kamala Harris’s task of finding a running mate.
Many Democrats seem to think the ICE roundups are a net political positive, and probably they are. But the protests are not. Professional nuisances harassing Christian worshippers and cursing at law-enforcement agents cancel much of the advantage Democrats stand to gain from the raids. These busybodies force their intended Democratic beneficiaries to stop talking about affordability and healthcare and instead defend loudmouth lawbreakers and inflame voters with stories of fascistic thuggery. Mr. Trump’s aggressive policies may invite the protests, but he may reasonably conclude that he will attract protests no matter what. So why not go for it? All that money meant for protest must find things to protest.
This is the world wealthy liberals created when they decided climate change and, later, systemic racism and abortion restrictions and Israeli “genocide” were all existential menaces requiring marches and sit-ins and other extrademocratic disruptions. It amounts to a subtler and more effective attack on democracy than anything Mr. Trump has attempted.
No comments:
Post a Comment