The Latest Leftist Protest Mobs—Funded with Your Tax Money

Jun 13, 2025
Jeff Reynolds
Open Borders | America First
Image via X

Destructive riots burning down American cities are anything but "grassroots."

As the Trump administration begins enforcing immigration laws, radical leftists have responded by forming mobs and rioting in city streets. The corporate media mouthpieces for the Left have called these riots mostly peaceful, as Democratic lawmakers refer to them as grassroots demonstrations against what they call unjust mass deportations. In reality, these are not protests, but violent and destructive street takeovers. Marches have quickly devolved into assault on police officers and ICE agents. Images of burning vehicles, property damage, looting, and graffiti have taken over the nightly news—if they choose to report it at all.

The striking feature of these destructive riots? How they came about. According to most polls, a majority of Americans support Trump reversing the Biden border invasion. America has every right to enforce the laws on the books to close the border to illegal immigration and return those who came here without authorization back to wherever they came from. So the mass marches, protests, and riots don't represent a majority of Americans. They only increased in destructiveness and size with the help of subversive funders and organizers dedicated to undermining the Trump administration.

As many have pointed out, the groups did not spring up organically among the citizens—they were fomented by the worst of Big Philanthropy.

Not only do these "nonprofits" get significant tax breaks due to their IRS status as "charities," they also receive significant funding from taxpayers in the form of state and federal grants.

And now they've announced over 1,800 protests across America on June 14, during the "No Kings" rallies.  

DataRepublican Brings the Receipts

Jennica Pounds, who runs the @DataRepublican account on X, has published an interactive database of the public funding sources for the No Kings protests. On June 11, she released a growing database on her website, which includes helpful visualizations and flow charts showing the multiple connections between organizations and the federal grants they've received.

For instance, the Tides Center is all over this database. Understandable, since they've funded Indivisible and many other resistance groups since the beginning of Trump's first term. DataRepublican's flow chart for Indivisible reveals a sizeable network of interchangeable funds going back and forth to dozens of direct action groups organizing the protests. What's remarkable about this, though, is that it's not just their endowment or their donor advised funds. This just tracks the federal grants they've used to fund these operations.

Check out the screenshot, and note the "High Taxpayer Funds Alert" boxes for recipients of federal grants that then funnel funds to Tides. These are some of the biggest nonprofit foundations in the United States, passing taxpayer money back and forth to undermine American society.

tides-center-datarepublican.jpgImage via DataRepublican.com/nokings

The site has breakdowns of a few dozen more foundations that use similar tactics to funnel taxpayer funds into the subversive No Kings protests.

Of course, the No Kings website also contains a helpful list of their corporate and philanthropic sponsors for their thousands of "organic" protests.

The Trump Team Has Noticed

In a briefing on June 12, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt announced the FBI had arrested the man who handed out hundreds of face shields to anti-ICE rioters in Los Angeles.

To his credit, when asked about the mass protests planned for the Army's 250th birthday on June 14, President Trump scoffed, saying, "No kings? I don't feel like a king. I have to go through hell to get stuff approved."

Beyond that, the Trump administration seems ready to investigate these organizations and possibly bring further criminal charges.

Whatever the legal fallout, the revival of the 2020 riots—the "Summer of Love" 2.0—has very little to do with public opinion about enforcement of our immigration laws, and much more to do with the radical left's well-worn professional playbook. It's the same playbook they've trotted out many times going back at least to the Occupy Wall Street movement.

The more America tolerates these lawless and destructive tactics, the further they seem to push us towards a point of no return. The Trump administration must take decisive action to put down these insurrections and investigate the organizers. Once that's done, America needs to take a long, hard look at Big Philanthropy and determine what benefits it brings to our society. To the extent that tax-exempt foundations foment societal subversion, they should face the full weight of criminal investigations and freezes on their funding— including taxpayer funded grants as well as tax exempt status.  

Jeff Reynolds is Senior Editor for Restoration News, specializing in energy and science policy, as well as dark money. Jeff is an author, editor, strategist, and public speaker. A prolific researcher and writer, he authored the book Behind the Curtain in 2019, which details the billionaires and foundations responsible for the radical left's ascension in American politics. Jeff graduated from Connecticut College with a bachelor's in Zoology.

Email Jeff HERE

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