It’s not just Soros and Tides.

…this is the first time that these donor-funded radical networks have gone to war with a Democratic president. Shideler speculates that whatever the ultimate goal of funding the anti-Israel protests, it is to be found closer to home than Gaza. “It has more to do with domestic politics, and we can see this by the language targeting Joe Biden explicitly, even though he and his administration have already handled the conflict in an exceedingly anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian way.” One reason to target Biden is that it provides his administration cover to ignore a weakened but still influential block of pro-Israel Democrats—allowing the president to claim, in essence, that his hands are tied. But it may also reflect a power struggle within the party, between what was formerly an insurgent progressive fringe—now backed by a murderer’s row of billionaire donors and energized by young cadres rising through the professional-managerial cursus honorum—and what remains of the teetering old Clintonian establishment. Or, rather, it is a display of force by the faction that has already won, complete with a message for the losers: This is who we are now. Get in line or be destroyed.

It is here that the outsize role of Tides in funding the protests may be especially significant. More than any of the dark-money giants on the left, 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 Dylan Orr worked in Obama’s Department of Labor, becoming the first “openly transgender person appointed to a U.S. presidential administration.” Board member Tim Wang is a managing partner at the Westley Group, a clean-energy venture capital firm founded by Steve Westley, the former California co-chair of Obama for America whom Obama nearly appointed as Secretary of Energy. Board member Lori Chatman serves as president of the capital division of Enterprise Community Partners, a housing and “racial equity” nonprofit helmed by Shaun Donavon, who served as Obama’s secretary of housing and urban development and director of the Office of Management and Budget. And the former secretary of the Tides boards, Suzanne Nossel, served as deputy assistant secretary of state for international organizations in the Obama administration.

Maybe it is a coincidence that a dark-money philanthropy empire tied to Obama would be bankrolling a protest movement designed to undercut American support for Israel’s war on Hamas—which just happened to be the White House nickname of one Ben Rhodes, the man responsible for building the media-NGO echo chamber that would initially sell the Iran deal and later be repurposed for domestic political warfare during the Trump years. Perhaps it is a coincidence that an Israeli victory in this war, which started with a grisly terrorist attack planned and sponsored by Iran, would deal a crushing blow to the Obama-Biden project of realignment with Iran, which remains the current administration’s real but unacknowledged policy in the Middle East. That realignment has in turn required seeding the generally pro-Israel and anti-terror American public with the idea that Israel isn’t actually a friend but rather a sectarian ethnostate with a pushy domestic lobby bent on dragging American boys into another pointless Mideast war, all so the Jews can continue kicking around the poor Palestinians—just like those bitter whites in flyover country who vote Trump because they want to kick around the Blacks and Mexicans. Which seems, in what is no doubt another coincidence, to be precisely the message of the protesters, who explicitly liken Zionism to domestic white supremacy.

Thus do we find ourselves in a regular lattice of coincidence.

…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 that may come as a surprise: You, the American taxpayer. In November, the Environmental Protection Agency announced that it was entrusting $50 million in federal grant money under the Inflation Reduction Act to the CJA, to be distributed in sub-grants to fund “environmental justice” projects by “community-based nonprofit organizations.”

“Every person has a right to drink clean water, breathe clean air, and live in a community that is healthy and safe,” Vice President Kamala Harris said in a statement on the EPA grant. “For too long, however, low-income communities, immigrant communities, Native communities, and communities of color have endured disproportionate levels of air, water, and soil pollution. That is why President Joe Biden and I have put equity at the center of our nation’s largest investment in climate in history. Today’s announcement puts that commitment into action by ensuring critical resources to fund environmental justice projects across the country reach the organizations that know their communities best.”

Harris—give her credit—is an artist of such officialese, which is meant to signify precisely nothing to the average citizen. It comes as a shock to learn, inadvertently, and due to honest but perhaps naive efforts of some red-state prosecutor, what the vice president means when she says her administration is “ensuring critical resources to fund environmental justice projects across the country reach the organizations that know their communities best.” What she means is that the federal government is funneling tens of millions of dollars of public money to a group that understands “environmental justice” to imply the abolition of policing, the perpetual struggle against “white supremacy,” and the liberation of Palestine.

It’s remarkable what one can find from pulling on such threads. Which may be why, to date, there has been very little political will to pull on them.

Related.

These people are evil.