A stunning new report reveals how a leftist group is exploiting loopholes to allegedly drive taxpayer dollars to radical groups – including some of the very same organizations accused of taking part in the anarchist riots around the nation.
The Washington Free Beacon accused the progressive “incubator” group Tides Center of funneling some $170 million in government grants to far-left organizations.
“The Tides Center is as liberal and politically active as they come; its entire purpose is to create new activist groups,” Scott Walter, president of the Capital Research Center, told the newspaper.
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Indeed, the group’s website boasts that they’ve “scaled more than 1,400 social ventures” since their foundation and the list dozens and dozens of current “partners” and “tenants.”
Walter pointed out one, in particular, that’s bound to raise eyebrows.
“For example, we recently revealed that the Tides Center sponsors the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation,” he said.
This isn’t simply a civil rights group pushing for equality, something every American supports.
Walter claims it’s part of the movement’s “Marxist” wing, with a goal of bringing socialism to the United States. Critics have pointed out one of the co-founders of the movement identified as a “trained Marxist” — which has since been purged from the group’s history.
“It’s fair to question whether tax dollars sourced from all Americans should flow to nonprofits that have such an open ideological axe to grind,” he told The Examiner.
Conservatives were stunned by the news.
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“Who is funding America’s #Marxist street riots, which have now taken over a dozen lives and inflicted over $1 billion in property damage?” wrote Michael Johns, a former speechwriter for then-President George H. W. Bush. “At least in part, it’s the American taxpayer, which is to say: You are.”
The Tides Center is a leftist nonprofit that handles the cash of the Tides Foundation, both of which are part of the Tides Nexus. The Tides Nexus itself now has eight different groups under its umbrella, according to the Influence Watch website.
The Free Bacon reports that it often pushes money back and forth among those groups – which certainly sounds like someone is trying to make this is hard to follow as possible, aka a “dark money” scheme intent on trying to obscure both the sources of the cash and where it’s going.
In this case, much of the cash is being funneled into “incubators” for leftist causes.
In tech, “incubators” are when wealthy benefactors offer cash and often office space, among other perks, to help a potentially marketable idea – like a new gadget, or maybe an app – take off.
In politics and money, it’s the same way… except instead of trying to create the next hot tech device, they’re trying to create the next big leftist groups to hit the streets in protest or push a radical agenda.
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The Free Beacon says Tides has “acted as an incubation house for numerous environmental, anti-free trade, gun-control, and abortion-rights groups.”
The unusual “incubator” financial arrangement also has another benefit for those groups. The Free Beacon notes that it allows Tides to act as a “fiscal sponsor,” which in turn lets those groups in “incubation” duck registration with the IRS.
So much money is being passed around to so many groups from so many sources – and with so little direct oversight – that it essentially becomes impossible for anyone to track.
And while the biggest part of the scandal is the potential misuse of taxpayer money, the organization is also taking in piles of cash from other sources – including a few very familiar names.
Influence Watch reports that the Tides Foundation’s wealthy benefactors include the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation as well as George Soros’ Open Society Foundations.
— Walter W. Murray is a reporter for The Horn News. He is an outspoken conservative and a survival expert, and is the author of “America’s Final Warning.”