“Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants,” Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis famously said in 1913. Indeed, our exposure of the network of organizations supporting pro-Hamas demonstrators is now helping a member of Congress pressure the Internal Revenue Service to investigate these groups.
Rep. Jim Banks, R-Ind., sent a letter June 27 to IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel urging him to “immediately begin an audit” of organizations that are part of the network and have 501(c)(3) or 501(c)(4) tax-exempt status.
Specifically, Banks focused on two groups: the Alliance for Global Justice and the Westchester People’s Action Coalition.
Banks referenced a Heritage Foundation Special Report the two of us released last month detailing the vast network that supports America’s protesters—an ecosystem with links to American enemies such as China, Cuba, and Venezuela that we call the Revolutionary Ecosystem.
This ecosystem, which today supports pro-Hamas demonstrators, is virtually the same as the one that supported the Black Lives Matter organizations that emerged in 2014 and 2020.
On the surface, these two causes may seem unrelated. But, as our report details, America’s radical leftist groups are intricately connected through a Marxist network of activists, funders, fiscal sponsors, and media groups.
The Alliance for Global Justice and the Westchester People’s Action Coalition, or Wespac, are both key parts of this ecosystem.
The Alliance for Global Justice started out as the Nicaragua Network, which spent its time supporting the Marxist Sandinista revolutionaries in Central America before eventually deciding to rebrand and incorporate in Washington, D.C., under its current name.
Since then, the alliance has had its finger in almost every leftist pie across the globe. According to InfluenceWatch, it fiscally sponsors 107 groups “advocating numerous foreign and domestic far-left and extreme-left causes, including eliminating the state of Israel, supporting convicted violent leftist extremists, and advancing various labor union efforts.”
The Alliance for Global Justice fiscally sponsors several chapters of Black Lives Matters and previously sponsored the Movement for Black Lives, a key BLM umbrella. At the same time, the alliance fiscally sponsors Samidoun, a pro-Palestinian activist organization that serves as a front for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a terrorist group.
The Alliance for Global Justice connects these radical activists to equally radical funders such as the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Tides Foundation, and billionaire financier George Soros’ Open Society Foundations. All three organizations, as we note in our report, have given substantial amounts to the alliance.
In 2001, the Alliance for Global Justice founded the ANSWER Coalition, an anti-war, anti-Israel group that has coordinated protests across the U.S., including a march that brought a crowd of 400,000 to Washington.
Nor do the alliance’s ties to the Revolutionary Ecosystem end there. It also coordinates the efforts of Marxist organizations across the country. The alliance frequently hosts events for leftist groups such as the Democratic Socialists of America and the Party of Socialism and Liberation.
The Alliance for Global Justice links radicals both inside and outside the U.S. It partners with Code Pink, an activist organization with close ties to the Chinese Communist Party through its co-founder Jodie Evans and her husband, Neville Roy Singham, who reside in Shanghai, China’s largest city.
The alliance also supports Marxist-Leninist regimes around the world, praising dictatorial governments such as those in China, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, and Brazil.
Likewise, the Westchester People’s Action Coalition has its tentacles in every corner of the leftist movement. Wespac fiscally sponsored Within Our Lifetime, an activist organization that openly supports terrorist groups such as Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis. It also sponsors the
Grassroots Global Justice Alliance, a vast network that includes the Palestinian Youth Movement and other activist groups.
Most organizations in the Revolutionary Ecosystem don’t exclusively focus on the specific cause in question. Rather, as we write in our report, “they opportunistically seize on these concerns when they arise in the news to pursue a long-term agenda that is often openly anti-capitalist and anti-democracy.”
These issues all fit into what the Alliance for Global Justice describes as an “interwoven struggle for liberation from empire”—an ideological phrase meaning simply that they all pursue the ultimate Marxist goal: the overthrow of the United States, which they view as an oppressive state structure.
This fits directly into the schemes of America’s enemies, who have eagerly seized on these opportunities to destabilize the U.S. As we write in our report: “Enemy regimes, such as China, Cuba, and Venezuela, are increasingly a part of this ecosystem—and their goal is to weaken America.”
Nor are the organizations that comprise this ecosystem shy about acknowledging their ties to the larger progressive Marxist movement.
For example, Jewish Voice for Peace, one of the organizers of the Columbia University campus protests, described itself as part of a broad progressive movement that makes the connections between the struggle in Israel/Palestine and all struggles aimed at justice, dignity, freedom, and equality for all—from the Black Lives Matter movement to the struggle for immigrant rights, from work against mass incarceration to opposing U.S. militarism around the world, and many others.
It’s time for us to take these activists at their word and acknowledge the vast underlying ecosystem bent on destroying our society.
Once we do that, we may be able to make progress toward destroying the Revolutionary Ecosystem instead.
Banks’ letter to the IRS commissioner is a step in the right direction.
