Nov. 13: Dem Dark Money Giant Funded Terror Front in 2023

CIA agent arrested for Iran leaks; Trump's new cabinet picks; The dawn of the DOGE

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The Big Story

The Tides Foundation, the grantmaking arm of the Tides Nexus, donated nearly $300,000 in 2023 to a nonprofit fiscal sponsor of a front for terrorist group the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, according to tax records reviewed by Andrew Kerr in The Washington Free Beacon. 

The Tides Nexus—which has several Obama administration alumni on its board and has received millions of dollars from George Soros, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Ford Foundation, and other progressive institutional donors—has been among the most active dark-money groups in sponsoring anti-Israel and pro-terror organizations. The Tides Nexus’ fiscal sponsorship arm, the Tides Center, fiscally sponsors Adalah Justice Project, Arab Resource and Organizing Center, and the Community Justice Exchange, which is the bail fund used to spring anti-Israel protesters out of jail. The Tides Foundation has, in the past, issued grants to the WESPAC Foundation, the fiscal sponsor of Students for Justice in Palestine and Within Our Lifetime. 

The foundation’s latest IRS Form 990 shows that in the past year, Tides gave $286,127 to the Alliance for Global Justice (AfGJ), the fiscal sponsor of Samidoun Prisoner Solidarity Network, which in October was jointly designated by the U.S. Treasury Department and the Canadian government as a “sham charity that serves as an international fundraiser for the PFLP.” While the purpose of the grant was listed as “Sustainable Environment,” the legal structure of AfGJ/Samidoun is such that the two organizations are indistinguishable. As the author of this newsletter wrote for Tablet in May (emphasis added):

A fiscal sponsorship is a legal arrangement in which a larger nonprofit “sponsors” a smaller group, essentially lending it the sponsor’s tax-exempt status and providing back-office support in exchange for fees and influence over the sponsorship’s operations. For legal and tax purposes, the sponsor and the sponsorship are the same entity, meaning that the sponsorship is relieved of the requirement to independently disclose its donors or file a Form 990 with the IRS.

In other words, according to the tax law currently on the books, the Tides Foundation has donated money directly to an “international fundraiser” for a State Department-designated foreign terrorist organization. Under 18 U.S. Code § 2339A, it’s a federal criminal offense to provide “material support or resources” to a terrorist group, and 18 U.S. Code § 2333 establishes the right of any U.S. national “injured in his or her person, property, or business by an act of international terrorism” to sue those responsible in civil court. Both would be good options to pursue. 

Finally, while we have not had time to scrape through Tides’ entire Form 990, we did find another small donation that, at the very least, suggested the sprawling reach of the progressive nonprofit empire and the ways in which different psyops are connected. In 2023, the Tides Foundation donated $35,000 to the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), which is the U.K. Labour Party-affiliated nonprofit that ran point on the Biden administration’s attempts to organize advertiser boycotts against alternative news sources such as ZeroHedge and The Federalist and to deplatform Joe Rogan from Spotify for spreading “misinformation” about COVID-19. Paul Thacker and Matt Taibbi reported last month that recently leaked CCDH documents show that the group has listed “kill [Elon] Musk’s Twitter” as the top item on its list of “annual priorities” every month since January. The group has also cultivated extensive ties with the senior leadership of the Biden White House, congressional Democrats, and Democratic Party-aligned nonprofits. As Thacker and Taibbi wrote (emphasis added):

According to documents provided to both publications along with interviews with CCDH whistleblowers, an invitation-only conference held this past summer in Washington underscores the group’s priorities. Attendees at CCDH’s private event included a slew of liberal groups now organizing against Musk including a senior advisor at the White House, a Democratic Party staffer in the office of Congressman Adam Schiff, Biden/Harris State Department officials, Canadian MP Peter Julian (recently tweeted “Boycott all advertisers on Twitter”) and Media Matters for America (a Democratic party-aligned watchdog now locked in a lawsuit with Musk).

So, while we’re not saying that everything you read in the news is ultimately an astroturf information operation traceable to a handful of Democratic operatives meeting in a conference room somewhere, it’s not a bad first assumption either. 

IN THE BACK PAGES: Modern America is reinventing the 19th-century Russian alliance between bourgeois progressivism and political terrorism, writes Anna Geifman. It didn’t go well the first time.

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The Rest

→The Federal Bureau of Investigation has arrested a CIA official and charged him with leaking classified Israeli war plans to Iran, The New York Times reports. The FBI arrested Asif W. Rahman—who holds a top-secret security clearance and has been described in media reports only as “working overseas for the agency”—in Cambodia on Tuesday and brought him to Guam, where he will face two counts of willful retention and transmission of national defense information. Not much has been reported about Rahman, but as we noted on Oct. 21, when news of the leaks first broke, divulging Israeli plans to Iran has been official U.S. government policy under the Obama and Biden administrations, so the identity of the leaker is almost immaterial. Better to sacrifice a pawn now than leave loose threads for the Trump Department of Justice to pull on. 

→On Wednesday, Trump confirmed reports from earlier in the week that he had selected Florida Senator Marco Rubio as his Secretary of State, and made two other major picks: former Hawaii Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence and Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz for Attorney General. Rubio is sound. Gabbard is a potential issue, given her past enthusiasm for Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, though her views on the Middle East seem to have improved over the past year and at any rate Trump will be the one setting foreign policy. Our first reaction to Gaetz, on the other hand, was to assume the pick was a joke (like the fake announcement of Tucker Carlson as press secretary circulating on X earlier in the day), and then to try some deep breathing. We’ll see if Congress will play along with it.

→Quote of the Day: 

“This is not some mystical land that can be dismissed,” Hegseth said in a 2016 interview with the Jewish Press when asked about seeing biblical and historical sites in Israel. “It’s the story of God’s chosen people. That story didn’t end in 1776 or in 1948 or with the founding of the UN. All of these things still resonate and matter today.”

That’s from a Times of Israel story on Pete Hegseth—the Bronze Star veteran and Fox News host selected on Tuesday as Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of defense—in which Hegseth delivers a heavy dose of traditional Bible Protestant philosemitism. Hegseth, a vocal critic of military DEI programs who has also floated bombing Iran if it doesn’t give up its nuclear program, was one of several nominees announced by the president-elect on Tuesday. Others included former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe as head of the CIA, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem as Homeland Security secretary, and Florida Congressman Mike Waltz as national security advisor.

→Tehran appears to be taking notice that the incoming administration is going to be considerably less friendly than the current one. On Aug. 13, Iranian officials told Reuters that “only a cease-fire deal in Gaza … would hold Iran back from direct retaliation against Israel.” Iran subsequently hit Israel with a ballistic missile barrage and had promised further retribution for Israel’s retaliatory airstrikes. On Wednesday, however, Iranian sources told Sky News Arabia that “the Iranian response against Israel is postponed until negotiations with President Trump begin.” 

→Trump also announced on Tuesday evening that he was assigning Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to lead the Department of Government Efficiency. According to a Trump post on Truth Social, DOGE will “dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies.” We’ll believe it when we see it, but judging by Elon’s X posts, he’s at least looking at the right things: 

→Speaking of wasteful spending, the Kamala Harris campaign donated $500,000 to MSNBC host Al Sharpton’s nonprofit weeks before Harris sat for a friendly interview with Sharpton, Chuck Ross reports for The Washington Free Beacon. On Sept. 5 and Oct. 1, the campaign donated $250,000 to Sharpton’s National Action Network, part of a package of $5.4 million in donations to “black and Latino advocacy groups” that also included a $2 million donation to the National Urban League. The use of campaign funds as a coffer for patronage payouts to party-aligned nonprofits helps explain how the Harris campaign, the wealthiest in history, ended up in debt following the worst electoral defeat for the Democrats in two decades. We still think the Rev. Al might’ve informed the public that when he was giving Harris a softball interview on Oct. 20, he was doing so as a financial beneficiary of the Harris campaign. 

→In our Nov. 7 Big Story, we highlighted some suspicious vote totals in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, that one of our most accurate election modelers, X user @TonerousHyus (aka “Latinx Adjacent Dr PhD”), had flagged as potentially fraudulent. Since then, X user and statistician @ShylockHolmes has raised further questions about late-night ballot dumps affecting the Wisconsin Senate race in Milwaukee County, Winnebago County (home of Oshkosh), and Dane County (home of Madison). In a Tuesday X thread (read it here), @ShylockHolmes notes, among other anomalies, that the updates in Dane and Winnebago had “6 of the 9 most improbable sequences out of 1,175 races nationwide with at least 8 updates,” with the updates becoming relatively more favorable to the Democrats after about 10 p.m. on Election Day, when Republicans had taken the lead nationally. “All of these patterns individually have other potentially innocent explanations,” they write. “But the combination of all of them, across different metrics and methodologies, across multiple counties, requires a very large set of coincidences to explain.”

On Tuesday, Wisconsin Republican Senate candidate Eric Hovde released a video acknowledging these abnormalities, telling his voters:

Since last Wednesday, numerous parties have reached out to me about voting inconsistencies, such as certain voting precincts in Milwaukee having turnout of over 150% of registered voters, and in some cases over 200%. Additionally, in 2020 President Biden received 10 million more votes than Vice President Harris did last Tuesday, yet in Milwaukee, even though the population of Milwaukee has declined and registered voters [have] declined by 26,330, and early voting numbers were down, somehow, Harris received only 1,100 less votes than Biden did, which is not consistent with most major cities. This was accomplished by same-day registration that surged by almost 50% on a rainy day. 

Hovde has promised to explore his legal options, though we should note that, according to @TonerousHyus, the potentially fraudulent ballots in Milwaukee were likely not enough to account for Tammy Baldwin’s margin of victory. Still, we hope Hovde looks into it. Perhaps all the ballots were legitimate, and what we’re looking at is merely a set of strange statistical anomalies. Then again, maybe they weren’t, and we’re not.

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Russian Terrorists and Their ‘Progressive’ Allies

Modern alliance between bourgeois progressivism and political violence was born in 19th-century Russia. It didn’t end well.

by Anna Geifman

The birthplace of modern political terrorism was prerevolutionary Russia. There, in the first decade of the 20th century, terrorists of various left-wing leanings—from anarchist to Marxist—executed an unprecedented 23,000 attacks, of which 17,000 yielded injuries and deaths. Political assassinations were not a Russian invention, of course; they may be traced to the late 11th century, when the infamous Assassins (Hashashin), an offshoot of the Ismaili Shi'a sect, were arguably the first regularly to employ murder as a weapon against their enemies among Muslim and Christian elites. These targeted killings—like those across the world in the eras to come—counted in single-digit numbers. In contrast, by the early 1900s the tactics of the Russian terrorists degenerated from persecution of designated influential adversaries to systematic, indiscriminate political violence carried out en masse.

Modern terrorism entails intentional, unselective brutality against civilian targets to attain political objectives. The key word here is “intentional,” as opposed to collateral, unintended damage inflicted upon noncombatants, emphasizes the Israeli scholar Boaz Ganor. For the first time in history, the Russian extremists sought to destabilize the sociopolitical environment via random violence. The subversives swapped traditional ethical norms for ideological purposes; they recognized any principles only insofar as they served revolutionary goals. In their disregard for human life, the terrorists of the early 1900s were the forebears of the communists, the Nazis, and other dogma-driven oppressors. The Russian radicals heralded the propinquity of totalitarianism, a gruesome trademark of the 20th century.

The circumstances under which a revolutionary was justified in killing a tyrant or avenging oppression by his senior associates was a customary discussion topic in the Russian antigovernment milieu. Yet, although most 19th-century radicals did take ethical considerations seriously, incidents of extreme brutality revealed the budding totalitarian thinking and behavior. Sergei Nechaev stopped at no lie, fraud, manipulation, and intimidation to secure leadership in a small antigovernment student circle; in 1869, he provoked a brutal beating and murder of a comrade, who had challenged his authority. The “black sheep of the revolutionary family,” Nechaev was not alone; in a shocking 1876 episode of terrorist vengeance, several enraged radicals poured sulfuric acid over the face of a suspected informer, N.E. Gorinovich, leaving him blind and permanently disfigured.

The sporadic brutality of the late 19th century was but a prelude to routine violence of the 1900s, which was “carried out without weighing the moral questions posed by earlier generations,” noted the historian Norman M. Naimark. Countless terrorist acts plunged Russia into a bloodbath: “Everything that could be blown up exploded,” recalled a former police official—from liquor stores to gendarme offices; from coffee houses to houses of worship. Manufacturing of homemade bombs became an open secret, with school children assembling explosive devices from empty sardine cans, nails, bolts, and drugstore supplies.

Leaders in the antigovernment camp recognized that mass-scale terrorism had exposed the “seamy side” of the liberation movement, having attracted and become a breeding ground for numerous radicals qualified as “a merger of revolutionary and bandit.” Many of them dismissed the goals of social justice and equality with utter cynicism; their partaking in political violence revealed a befuddled mindset—a brew of primitive radicalism and sheer criminality.

Terrorist Ivan Lidzhus killed about 30 “enemies of the revolution”; among them was at least one personal rival. Lidzhus also took part in “revolutionary robberies,” the so-called expropriations, or “exes,” to procure funds for his organization but also for his own needs. The new-type radicals did not see such behavior as contradictory. One expropriator outlined a private ethical compromise: He would use half of the loot from an armed assault to help the poor and the other half to treat himself to an estate on Lake Geneva. He fully sympathized with the socialists, he confirmed, but their hope for a just social order seemed to him entirely unattainable. He hated the bourgeoisie, but he “could not help but envy it.”

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By the early 1900s, a new type of terrorists had come to dominate the revolutionary camp, both numerically and spiritually. They might have called themselves Socialist Revolutionaries, Social Democrats, or anarchists, but often they acted like gangsters, preoccupied primarily with robberies and extortion for personal profit. Some revolutionary leaders acknowledged that nine-tenths of all “exes” were sheer banditry. Adhering to no clear ideological trend, many perpetrators, while referring to themselves as bandits, employed exalted rhetoric to vindicate their lucrative, if risky, trade.

Numerous self-proclaimed “freedom fighters” had criminal records prior to their involvement in terrorism and were recruited into radical organizations while serving terms for nonpolitical crimes. Grigorii Frolov, the assassin of the Samara governor, initially met "true revolutionaries" in prison and soon partook in Socialist Revolutionary terrorist enterprises “to find out what kind of party it was.” Murder or robbery was a product of oppression and exploitation, not a crime, the radical inmates comforted potential recruits among the incarcerated thugs. Moreover, acts of banditry undercut the despicable regime and were therefore “socially progressive.” Welcomed as comrades in the antigovernment camp, convicted felons embraced the opportunity to return to the path of crime as heroes under the revolutionary banner. Zealous to validate his new identity as a born-again fighter against injustice, Frolov said he was ready to kill even the best governor.

An archetypal radical of the new type might have been initially imprisoned for thievery, several years later be convicted as a terrorist, and eventually end up behind bars again for a common crime. Thus, members of one anarchist gang active in the Moscow area contrasted sharply with a romanticized image of the revolutionary idealist. The band’s chief was a navy deserter, who claimed responsibility for 11 murders yet did not understand and had no interest in the anarchist agenda. He admitted that he yearned only for action and the resulting material profits. Among his crew were his girlfriend, a registered prostitute, another fugitive sailor sentenced to hard labor for taking part in killing a priest and robbing a church, and that convict’s mistress—a thief with a police record.

Public humor promptly reflected that it was nearly impossible to separate extremist politics from criminal behavior: “How does a murderer become a revolutionary?” ran a popular riddle. “When Browning in hand, he robs a bank. How does a revolutionary become a murderer? In the same way!”

Cruelty, bordering on sadism, permeated the revolutionary camp. Amid routine bloodshed, human life quickly lost all value, as the perpetrators of violent acts, allegedly for the sake of ideological goals, frequently stopped at nothing to achieve their less lofty aims, such as personal vendetta. To extort a few rubles, the extremists did not shun from brutal beatings of “greedy bourgeois.” They tortured suspected spies to death, slashing throats, cutting off ears and noses, decapitating them as punishment, and excising their tongues as a “symbolic gesture.”

Not infrequently, mental instability seemed to be a catalyst for the terrorists’ viciousness; amid raging political crisis, aberrancy and perversions, including sadism, assumed revolutionary forms. Emotionally damaged individuals gravitated toward extremism, confirming an established connection between psychological imbalance and aggressive impulses. Psychosis was almost as exceptional among the radicals as it was in a nonrevolutionary milieu, but terrorists did suffer from a variety of other mental conditions, such as acute paranoia, depression, hysteria, and recurrent manic episodes. Some experienced emotional breakdowns and were patients in psychiatric hospitals; others would not miss a chance for a random act of aggression, which, of course, received ideological interpretation.

“Unbalanced,” “turbulent,” “completely abnormal,” “mentally deranged,” and “crazy” the revolutionaries called their psychologically deviant comrades—“cannibals,” in one reference, due to their proclivity for uninhibited brutality. Precisely because of their aberrant aggressiveness, recruiters often sought to enlist them for terrorist enterprises. A famous case in point is the “Caucasian bandit” Semen Ter-Petrosian, nom de guerre Kamo, who required clinical treatment for mental illness, and whose wild temper the Bolsheviks exploited to ensure constant inflow of stolen cash for their party. The “idealistic robber” worshipped Lenin but knew literally nothing about the Bolshevik program. Once present at a dispute on a theoretical issue, he quickly lost his temper: “What are you arguing with him for?” he asked his Bolshevik comrade and offered, pointing at his staggered opponent: Just “let me cut his throat.” In 1911 Kamo proposed a creative solution for cleansing the Bolshevik ranks of police informers—to stage a bogus detention of leading party activists: Dressed in police uniforms, he and his associates would “arrest you, torture you, run a stake through you. If you start talking, it would be clear what you’re worth.” The Bolshevik leaders tabled the plan discreetly, so as not to aggravate the passionate fighter or, as the celebrated writer Maxim Gorky titled him, “artist of the revolution.”

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Gorky’s sympathy for the liberation cause was entirely conventional: By the early 20th century, perpetrators of political violence invariably found understanding and support among the Russian intelligentsia and the educated strata at large. The trend may be traced to January 1878, when revolutionary Vera Zasulich shot and wounded the governor-general of St. Petersburg to avenge mistreatment of an imprisoned comrade. In a sensational verdict, the liberal court jury found her not guilty of attempted murder. Carried out of the courtroom by jubilant admirers, she instantly became a symbol of selfless sacrifice. In a poem-in-prose, “Threshhold,” renowned writer Ivan Turgenev extolled the revolutionary vigilante as “a saint.” The “Zasulich affair” endorsed the idea of political violence as virtue.

In the following era, Russian intellectuals cultivated the romanticized image of the revolutionary idealist. In a country where literature often shaped public opinion, fiction was a medium to construct the image of a selfless hero who sacrificed himself for the general good. Leonid Andreev’s widely read stories glorified “the martyrs” and inaugurated a new fad—public sympathy and admiration for the terrorists. Backing words with action, Andreev turned his summer house into a refuge for combatants, while Gorky converted his Moscow apartment into a bomb laboratory and financed extremist enterprises.

Following the writers’ example, scores of progressive citizens—university professors, teachers, doctors, journalists, and other educated professionals—also acknowledged and took upon themselves an ethical obligation to help the radicals. They provided money and shelter, procured for them proper documents, and offered their family homes for concealment of guns and explosives. Defense lawyers built high-profile careers upon winning lighter sentences for gangsters, whom they portrayed in fiery court speeches as Robin Hood-like champions of the poor.

Under the influence of the fabricated reverence for the extremists, support for them became exceedingly widespread among average Russians, who venerated portraits of terrorists as if they were icons. Shaken by vivid newspaper depictions of beautiful young women-martyrs, 16-year-old boys fell “madly, endlessly in love” with them. A teenager committed suicide, having found out that his idol, terrorist Maria Spiridonova had been sentenced to penal servitude in Siberia for life. Schoolgirls modeled themselves on famous female terrorists and dreamed of “revolutionary princes” worthy of their love. All girls “adored the bombists,” remembered a former student from the Crimea. In 1907, together with her girlfriends, she had smuggled packages to jailed extremists; the heroes were ready to give their lives for their ideals—“how romantic this was!”

An unequivocal condemnation of terrorism from the reputable Constitutional Democratic (Kadet) Party could have, its leaders later admitted, sobered many revolutionary enthusiasts who mindlessly followed the trend. Instead, while advocating more restrained tactics against the autocracy in public, self-designated liberals in Kadet circles privately welcomed terrorism. The party counted among its members “the flower of the Russian intelligentsia”; personally, they showed no proclivity for violence and affirmed their stand as peaceful opposition. At the same time, the undeclared Kadet policy was to march with the radicals because of a shared immediate goal—to overthrow the autocratic regime, demoralized by escalating terror. “ As long as the stronghold of autocracy has not been destroyed,” declared party leader Pavel Miliukov, “anyone who is fighting against it represents ... a great blessing.”

While not partaking in blood-spilling themselves, the Kadets invested a great deal in the common “urgency to uproot” the regime. They sponsored fundraisers to benefit terrorist enterprises. From the parliamentary floor of the Russian Duma, party delegates berated measures against “the poor terrorists and expropriators ... led to the gallows like cattle to the slaughterhouse.”

In their speeches and publications, the Kadets invariably depicted terrorists as altruists who were deeply “troubled by the injustice reigning in society” and could not stand aside. The rulers, not the terrorists, were the guilty party, the Kadets insisted, and bombs were a logical response from the victims of tyranny and lawlessness. The pure souls have been provoked to commit violent acts because they saw no peaceful way to influence the official “murderers ... these monsters.” All in all, therefore terrorism entailed “a certain social advisability.”

No demagoguery was excessive in the Kadet public effort to vindicate their radical allies: “Remember that Christ, too, was declared to be a lawbreaker and subjected to a shameful execution on the cross … The attitude towards political criminals is a similar act of violence on the part of the authorities.”

The illiberal progressives in prerevolutionary Russia patented a blueprint attitude toward terrorism: Throughout the 20th century, devotees of sweeping societal reconstruction would justify and sanctify political manslaughter time and again. Participants in terrorist solidarity rallies across the globe, extolling terrorists as “martyrs, not murderers,” have adhered to a spectrum of perspectives—from left-wing camaraderie of the 1960s, to political correctness of the 1980s and 1990s, to postmodern ethical relativism. The Russian paradigm warrants another glance across the temporal distance: The sociocultural milieu which came to validate terrorism disintegrated almost visibly, particularly since the early 1900s. After the collapse of 1917, Russia’s intelligentsia found itself victim of the totalitarian regime it had helped erect.