As pro-Palestinian college protests continue nationwide, questions are being asked about the authenticity of the demonstrations—and who is funding them.
In the earliest days of the encampments, photos showing rows of identical tents quickly appeared online, prompting many observers to ask if some of the sit-ins were not orchestrated by students.
Indeed, according to NYPD statistics, almost half of those arrested at the height of the Columbia University and City College of New York protests were not students but outside agitators.
While stridently leftist outlets like The Washington Post have scoffed at the idea that these demonstrations are anything but grassroots, other legacy outlets have done some digging. What they’ve found is alarming, to say the least.
According to the New York Post, “at three colleges, the protests are being encouraged by paid radicals who are ‘fellows’ of a Soros-funded group called the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR).”
The Post notes that USCPR pays its fellows, including current and former students at major universities, up to $3,660 “in return for spending eight hours a week organizing ‘campaigns led by Palestinian organizations.’”
At least $300,000 has made its way to USCPR from George Soros’ Open Society Foundations since 2017, and another $355,000 was donated by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund since 2019, according to the Post.
Politico unearthed similar funding streams in a bombshell article that is no doubt causing a major headache for the Biden campaign.
“Pro-Palestinian protesters are backed by a surprising source: Biden’s biggest donors,” reads the headline of the article, which has gone viral on all major social media platforms.
The Politico piece begins:
President Joe Biden has been dogged for months by pro-Palestinian protesters calling him ‘Genocide Joe’—but some of the groups behind the demonstrations receive financial backing from philanthropists pushing hard for his reelection.
The donors include some of the biggest names in Democratic circles: Soros, [David] Rockefeller and [Nick] Pritzker.
Jewish Voice for Peace, an anti-Zionist organization, and IfNotNow are two of the organizing groups supporting the protests, says Politico—and both are supported by the Tides Foundation, which was seeded by George Soros and has previously enjoyed financial backing from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
According to Politico’s research, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund has also given almost half a million dollars to Jewish Voice for Peace over the last five years.
However, for everyday Americans, there is a bigger story here that rises above shadowy political actors.
Cultural commentator Michael Young , who goes by the alias Wokal Distance, has published a fascinating thread on X explaining the inner workings of radical groups like those running these encampments on American university campuses.
“Want to know how Woke activists take over buildings, smash windows, trash university campuses, and still have the press call them ‘non-violent’?” he begins.
Young suggests that, far from being spontaneous, what Americans are witnessing across the nation is very well-planned organizing from highly-trained activists using calculated tactics to drum up support for their cause.
In short, the organizers aim to put their target in a “decision dilemma” by using a method of protest that leaves the target without any good options: “No matter how the target reacts they look bad.”
If university leadership and law enforcement let protesters take over and occupy entire buildings, as they have done on many campuses, the protesters gain the upper hand. However, if police engage, the protesters “play victim and use the optics to look like sympathetic martyrs for the cause,” even though they are the aggressors.
Putting sympathetic characters on the frontline and releasing footage to media outlets that presents protesters as victims and the targets as aggressors are all part of the strategy.
It’s straight out of the Saul Alinsky playbook. Alinsky remains one of the most influential authorities on the (largely left-wing) phenomenon known as “community organizing.” In his 1971 book Rules for Radicals, Alinsky outlined 13 rules that have served as a template for generations of activists.
“The real action is your target’s reaction” is a famous Alinsky tactic—and one that is self-evidently at play in the current college protests.
The takeaway for ordinary folks?
Wise up to the tactics of the organizers. Don’t take everything you see for granted. Keep asking questions about who is leading and funding the high-profile events being broadcast on the nightly news.
Like the Wizard of Oz or the Emperor’s New Clothes, the power of these protests is mostly in the illusion. Shrug that off, and we can get back to an authentically functioning republic—surely a non-negotiable for an election year.
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Image credit: Public domain
4 comments
4 Comments
Ezgi
May 9, 2024, 3:44 pmThis rheroric is widely used by all nationalists, racists worlwide.The sad thing is an outlet such as Intellectual Takeout spreading a similar message when it conflicts with its benefits, when it contradicts with Israel s benefits. It is easy to label people as foreign spies, traitors or put everything on Soros as Russia and other authoritarian regimes are doing for years.Why you don't question the violence those protesters are facing with ? Or did you ever thing that even no one funds people will still protest because we are witnessing GENOCIADE in Palestine
REPLYC@Ezgi
May 10, 2024, 6:46 amAlright, Ezgi,
1. Show HOW protesters exhausted every possible avenue to publicize their concerns before resorting to their destructions of uninvolved properties.
2. Show the ways protesters were in open support of Palestine before October’s violence.
3. Explain the reasons YOU believe Hamas was justified in their October attack.
4. In their extensive planning, after of course striving in repeated meetings with Israel (please document) to resolve their issues but frustrated by the unrelenting lack of agreements, did Hamas then calculate that their vicious attack would be uncompensated?
5. How do YOU justify any instance of collateral damage?
6. In what ways do protesters differ from Hamas?
7. As documentation leads to universities’ and corporate supports of Israel and demands are made to cut them, do you think the public isn’t similarly uncovering leftist monetary sources and rerouting that supply?
Come, let us reason together :
REPLYAFCz
May 9, 2024, 5:08 pmGreat article exposing the anti-American, anti-Semitic funding of staged demonstrations to expose the venom of the Hamas and the Moslem Brotherhood. The USA is simply experiencing hundreds of mini-9/11s in damage to property and prestige with the assault on lives soon to commence in full throated support of the Islamic Chapter of the Final Solution of their Little Satan concurrent with Islam’s Great Satan.
REPLYDacian
May 10, 2024, 10:44 amMahlburg, more of this, please! This commentary you brought us is so valuable because it clearly exposes the covert machinations and lies fomented, funded, and spread by anti-human Bolshevik billionaires like Soros; CCP-lovin' Gates; and old-school scum like the Rockefellers.
(Another dangerous tool used by these paid agitators is the use of large black umbrellas, which were very prevalent during the Hong Kong demonstrations before mainland China quashed them.) It's the serious students that pay lots of $ to study at these campuses who suffer greatly from all these intentional disruptions by professional agitators (just watch the way they use their bullhorns to instruct their useful idiots to surround and threaten normal students who are simply trying to make their way across campus.) How disappointing for these authentic young adults and their proud, supportive families when they were informed by cowardly and feckless university administrators that their in-person graduation ceremonies would be canceled.
One silver lining of these funded campus color wars is that so-called elite schools will lose potential future students, with many high school graduates now seriously considering applying to vocational career instruction instead.
REPLY