Who Funds Antifa Protests? We all do

Last week, the city of Philadelphia agreed to pay $9.25 million to 343 left-wing protesters who claimed they suffered “physical and emotional injuries” when police used tear gas and pepper spray to injure them at a Black Lives Matter to clear a major downtown freeway -style direct action in 2020.

Videos taken at the time showed the mob closing down the freeway while vandalizing public property.

As a journalist covering the militant far left and its rioters, the question I’m most often asked is, “Who funds it?”

Some believe billionaire George Soros is responsible.

And they would be partially correct. Soros funds groups that are part of the support apparatus of left-wing militants – prosecutors, biased media and legal groups.

But his money doesn’t go directly into the pockets of militants on the streets.

In the end, who pays for left-wing extremists like Antifa? Too often, taxpayers like you and me.

Through a developed network of radical left legal groups such as the National Lawyers Guild, indictment against cities and police departments is the preferred method for payloads. At almost every leftist “direct action” or riot, you see NLG “rights monitors” going in and out with the mob to record the police. This “gathering of evidence” is propaganda made to paint the police in the worst possible light, while explicitly omitting any record of what their comrades are doing.

Independent press is attacked and robbed by other members of the group to maintain tight control of the narrative and all photographic evidence. Kyle Seraphin, a former FBI agent assigned to monitor Portland during the 2020 Antifa riots, says the green hat “legal monitors” were radio-linked to the mob and worked as additional counter-surveillance.

Seraphin told me, “My team has witnessed multiple instances of NLG hat-wearing ‘legal observers’ calling out the license plates of suspected surveillance personnel [over] Radios – sometimes accurate, sometimes not. These pleas were answered by 5-6 uniformly dressed Black Bloc individuals who attempted to intimidate the alleged “Fed”. ”

On March 5, an NLG member and attorney for the Southern Poverty Law Center named Thomas Juergens was charged with domestic terrorism for his alleged involvement in a violent Antifa attack on Atlanta police.

When arrested, NLG legal monitors and their comrades are immediately given free legal aid and connections for bail payments (rioters often write the NLG phone number on their bodies in anticipation of arrest).

And then the lawsuits come.

Last year, New York City agreed to pay tens of thousands to NLG members arrested in the Bronx in June 2020.

In Detroit, NLG members are suing the city for alleged wrongful conduct stemming from their 2020 police response.

Nearly every American city hit by mass protests and riots in 2020 ended up paying millions of dollars in taxpayers’ money to radical protesters who were said to have faced law enforcement violence.

Denver decided to pay $1.6 million to just seven people.

Austin paid $17.3 million.

The Democrat-led cities don’t even bother fighting the cases, preferring instead to write a check.

Not only does the settlement money reward the protesters, awarded inflated legal fees are used to reinvest in the rights groups to scale up the operation for the next cause. In addition, law enforcement officials’ morale drops when they are punished for their work.

But court settlements are not the only way militant protesters and riot suspects are paid. Bail money has become a lucrative source of cash as progressive prosecutors refuse to prosecute most cases of left-wing unrest.

In Portland, for example, suspects in 2020 riots who needed bail due to the seriousness of their crimes later got the money back when District Attorney Mike Schmidt declined to prosecute. I saw how this created an incentive for rioters to be arrested as outside groups would post bail and the suspect would keep the money returned if the case were dropped.

The NLG is just one of dozens of well-funded legal groups in the US operating to help the far left.

In Philadelphia, the Legal Defense Fund, which was one of the groups representing the plaintiffs in last week’s multimillion-dollar settlement, previously received a $1 million pledge from Soros’ Open Society Foundations.

The second most frequently asked question I’m asked is whether there will be mass unrest by the far left again. I can’t predict when, but the answer is yes.

The systems that provide legal, social and financial incentives to left-wing extremists, no matter how violent, have been better funded after 2020.

Andy Ngo is Senior Editor at The Post Millennial and author of the NYT bestseller Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy.