Follow the Money
The Secret Billionaire Network Bankrolling America’s Spontaneous Riots
By Staff
They want you to believe it’s organic. They want you to believe that when a Foot Locker burns in Los Angeles or a federal courthouse is besieged in Portland, you’re watching the spontaneous eruption of grassroots anger a raw, unfiltered cry of the marginalized rising up against injustice.
Seamus Bruner calls bullshit.
The Director of Research at the Government Accountability Institute has spent years doing what the legacy press refuses to do: following the money. And what he found isn’t a movement. It’s a machine. A professionally staffed, lavishly funded, three layer industrial complex that turns billionaire cash into televised chaos all while hiding behind the halo of “charity.”
“It’s not just a story about violence and chaos,” Bruner told President Trump during a White House briefing attended by Attorney General Pam Bondi, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, and FBI Director Kash Patel. “It’s a money story.”
And what a money story it is.
Let’s start with Neville Roy Singham, because his story is the thread that unravels the whole sweater.
Singham was an American tech entrepreneur who sold his IT consulting company for $785 million. That kind of money buys freedom. Singham used his to move to Shanghai, where he now shares office space with Maku Group a Chinese state media outfit engaged in what congressional investigators dryly call pro CCP propaganda.
The FBI investigated Singham all the way back in 1974 for ties to groups inimical to U.S. interests. He consulted for Huawei from 2001 to 2008. He’s attended Chinese Communist Party propaganda training sessions. And from his perch in Shanghai, he has built what House Ways and Means Chairman Jason Smith now calls the Singham CCP Network a $100 million system of nonprofits, shell companies, and donor-advised funds that simultaneously push Beijing’s talking points and fund the very organizations organizing riots on American streets.
How does the money move? Congressional testimony laid it bare: funds originate with Singham in Shanghai, flow through his private LLCs, get transferred to donor advised funds managed by Goldman Sachs, then pass through his own nonprofits entities like the Justice and Education Fund and the People Support Foundation before landing at groups like the People’s Forum and BreakThrough News.
The People’s Forum has received over $20 million from Singham and his wife, Jodie Evans. Evans happens to be the co-founder of CodePink. The People’s Forum happens to be one of the loudest voices encouraging anti-ICE demonstrators to take to the streets. Within hours of Hamas massacring 1,200 civilians on October 7, the People’s Forum was already posting justifications for the slaughter.
When rioters in Los Angeles needed organizing infrastructure, the Party for Socialism and Liberation was there. The PSL a self described communist political organization that fields presidential candidates is connected directly to the People’s Forum through Singham’s funding. When a man associated with PSL allegedly killed two people outside the Capital Jewish Museum while chanting free Palestine, the dots weren’t hard to connect. They were sitting there in plain sight, connected by a money trail that runs straight to Shanghai.
The House Oversight Committee has now raised potential violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Singham, conveniently, lives beyond the reach of a congressional subpoena.
George Soros didn’t invent the donor-advised fund, but his Open Society Foundations perfected it as a weapon.
Between 2020 and 2021 alone, Open Society poured $25.8 million into the Tides Foundation. Some of that money was earmarked for pro-Palestinian causes. Some of it wasn’t earmarked for anything publicly traceable at all. That’s the beauty of the donor-advised fund: the original donor gets the tax deduction immediately, but the money can sit and be disbursed later with no public paper trail connecting Soros to whatever cause eventually cashes the check.
Soros has been the godfather of this model for decades. Open Society funds Tides. Tides funds Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow. Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow organize the campus occupations. The campus occupations generate the footage that fuels the outrage cycle. And George Soros’s name never appears on a single protest permit.
The Tides Laundromat
If this were a drug cartel, Tides would be the money laundering front. Instead, it’s a 501(c)(3) public charity based in San Francisco with over $1.4 billion in assets under management. It was founded in 1976 by Drummond Pike, and it has perfected the art of what Bruner calls fiscal sponsorship providing institutional cover for money that donors would rather not have traced back to them.
Here’s how it works. A billionaire wants to fund something radioactive say, legal defense for rioters, or an organization that provides material support to designated terrorist groups. He doesn’t cut a check directly. He routes it through Tides. Tides, a respectable public charity, then makes the grant to the end recipient. The billionaire’s name disappears. The tax deduction is secured. And the money arrives clean.
What has Tides actually funded with this system?
Palestine Legal, for starters. The organization provides legal representation to anti-Israel rioters and has, by its own senior attorney’s admission, represented or advised hundreds of students since October 7, 2023. When rioters get arrested, Palestine Legal is there. Tides launched Palestine Legal as a project.
Then there’s the Alliance for Global Justice, which received $286,000 from Tides in 2023. Alliance for Global Justice serves as the fiscal sponsor for Samidoun designated a terrorist entity by Canada and Israel, and sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department in October 2024 as a sham charity for providing material support to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a group that participated in the October 7 Hamas attacks.
Tides also funds CAIR. It funds Code Pink which, remember, was co-founded by Jodie Evans, Neville Roy Singham’s wife. It funds the Westchester County Peace Action Committee, which supports Students for Justice in Palestine and American Muslims for Palestine.
The Rockefeller Brothers Fund contributed nearly $1 million to Tides in 2023, earmarking the majority for Palestine Legal. The Ford Foundation is a donor. The money pools together from the titans of American philanthropy and flows out to the street level operators who turn it into chaos.
And then there’s the taxpayer money.
USAID awarded more than $27 million in grants to the Tides Center. That’s your money. Funneled through the same institution that bankrolls the legal defense of rioters and provides fiscal sponsorship to groups tied to designated terrorist organizations.
Bruner has documented how the Biden administration pushed a reported $100 billion in what he calls a “cash dump” before Trump’s inauguration money flowing through EPA grants, federal programs, and NGO networks that overlap substantially with the same protest infrastructure burning American cities.
Alongside Tides and Open Society sits the Arabella Advisors network a sprawling web of pass through entities that has moved hundreds of millions of dollars into activist operations. Arabella manages multiple nonprofits that function as fiscal sponsors and funding conduits, creating a labyrinthine structure where money enters from anonymous donors and exits into the hands of organizations that staff the protests, run the legal defense operations, and manage the PR strategy.
Bruner’s research maps how these networks aren’t competing with each other. They’re coordinating. The same organizations receive money from Tides, from Open Society, from Arabella, and from Singham’s network simultaneously. It’s not a conspiracy it’s an industry. And like any industry, it has its major players, its supply chains, and its profit centers.
The nonprofit designation is the key to the whole operation. These aren’t charities in any meaningful sense. They’re political operations wearing charity costumes for the tax benefits and the reputational cover.
This is what the cameras capture: the black bloc, the masked figures hurling projectiles at federal buildings, the Antifa affiliated chapters, the Socialist Rifle Association, the John Brown Gun Club. These groups maintain deliberately decentralized structures no central leadership, no single bank account to freeze, no CEO to subpoena.
Bruner’s research has identified how platforms like Open Collective still allow crowdfunding for these groups. The money flows in from small dollar donors who think they’re supporting the resistance, unaware that the organizational scaffolding, the legal support, the paid staff, and the logistics are all underwritten by billionaires hiding behind donor advised funds.
The decentralized structure isn’t a bug it’s the feature that makes financial tracking nearly impossible without subpoena power. A chapter of the John Brown Gun Club can receive money through a fiscal sponsor, spend it on equipment and logistics, and dissolve before anyone connects the dots. The people actually throwing the Molotov cocktails may think they’re autonomous revolutionaries. In reality, they’re the retail face of a wholesale operation funded from the top.
When Seamus Bruner sat down with President Trump, Pam Bondi, Kristi Noem, and Kash Patel, he didn’t come with conspiracy theories. He came with spreadsheets.
“I think we know that this is not just a story about violence and chaos,” Bruner said. “This is a money story. And at the Government Accountability Institute, we follow the money, and we followed it to the top of what we call the protest industrial complex.”
What he found: “It’s not just the Soros network, the Open Society network. It’s other funding networks the Arabella funding network, the Tides funding network, Neville Roy Singham and his network, foreign cash. And it’s also big, left wing funders. They’re pouring money into this entire ecosystem.”
The Trump administration’s response has been what they’re calling a whole of government approach. Bondi at Justice. Noem at DHS. Patel at FBI. The strategy isn’t just to arrest rioters though that’s part of it. It’s to choke off the money.
Because here’s the thing about an industry, cut off its revenue, and it dies. You can arrest rioters all day, but as long as the Tides Soros Singham Arabella pipeline keeps pumping millions into bail funds, legal defense, salaries, and logistics, there’s an endless supply of replacements.
The most insulting part of the whole operation is the word charity.
The Tides Foundation’s website talks about being a force for social justice. It highlights its $875 million in managed assets and its 4,000 plus grantees. It frames its work in the language of equity and community empowerment.
But when the House Ways and Means Committee started scrutinizing Tides for serving as a conduit to hide donor identities, and when Politico reported that Tides was funding the Columbia University campus occupations via Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow, the charity costume started looking pretty threadbare.
These aren’t soup kitchens. These aren’t homeless shelters. These are political operations that have figured out how to exploit the tax code to move unlimited, anonymous money into organized civil disruption and call it philanthropy.
Bruner’s work exposes the fundamental dishonesty at the core of the operation. The public sees riots and thinks they’re watching spontaneous rage. The reality is professional organizers drawing salaries, coordinated legal defense funds, paid advertising, and logistics all underwritten by a handful of billionaires who will never have to face a single consequence for the cities they’ve helped burn.
The congressional investigations are ongoing. Chairman Jason Smith’s committee is demanding records. The Oversight Committee is asking questions about FARA violations. The IRS is being pressed to examine whether these charities are violating the terms of their tax-exempt status.
But the fundamental challenge remains, the donor advised fund is a nearly perfect vehicle for anonymous political warfare. Until Congress closes the loopholes that allow billionaires to take tax deductions for funding civil disruption through untraceable intermediaries, the protest industrial complex will continue to operate.
Bruner’s closing message is simple. Follow the money. It’s all hiding in plain sight in the IRS filings, in the congressional testimony, in the grant records. The billionaires, the pass throughs, the street level operators. The whole machine.
You just have to be willing to look.
This article is based on research and public statements by Seamus Bruner and the Government Accountability Institute, congressional testimony and committee documents, and publicly available tax and grant records.
Sources:
Seamus Bruner Antifa funding dark money NGOs
Antifa Is Not a Movement. It Is an Industry - Government Accountability Institute g-a-i.org
Tides Foundation Antifa funding connection
[PDF] USAID’s Troubling Ties to the Left’s Dark Money Network oversight.house.gov
Tides Foundation - Wikipedia en.wikipedia.org
Neville Roy Singham CCP Antifa funding
Neville Roy Singham accused of running ‘CCP network’ at congressional hearing | Fox News foxnews.com
[PDF] June 13, 2025 Transmitted Electronically Neville Singham Dear Mr ... oversight.house.gov
Chairman Smith Exposes U.S. Nonprofit as Likely CCP-Funded ... waysandmeans.house.gov