© Tides Foundation
We recently broke the story that the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation — the leading group in the radical, Marxist-led movement that has inspired waves of riots and demands that cities "defund the police" — transferred ownership from its fiscal sponsor Thousand Currents to the Tides Center, effectively confirming that this "spontaneous" movement is controlled by professional left-wing activists.
This also makes the leading group of Black Lives Matter (BLM) just one more face in the $636 million "dark money" web known as the Tides Nexus, already infamous for sponsoring the creation of new activist groups in a process called "incubation."
Tides Anti-Police Projects
But BLM and its "defund the police" slogan is far from the only campaign Tides has launched against American law enforcement. The Tides Center's 501(c)(4) lobbying "sister," Tides Advocacy, runs the Fund for Fair and Just Policing — a leading group in the campaign to overturn the "stop and frisk" policy enacted by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg (D) in the early 2000s.
Like all Tides-sponsored groups, the Fund for Fair and Just Policing is a product of the professional Left's nonprofit netherworld. It was ginned up in 2011 with funding from billionaire George Soros's Open Society Foundations and Atlantic Philanthropies, a Bermuda-based foundation that also poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the U.S. to push Obamacare through Congress and transform our immigration system — the latter via yet another Tides Advocacy project.
Unsurprisingly, Atlantic Philanthropies bestowed the Fund for Fair and Just Policing with $2.2 million "to reform the stop and frisk practices of the New York Police Department." The fund in turn passed along $8 million to Communities United for Police Reform, a far-left "defund the police" group whose membership includes Black Lives Matter NYC, Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, Color of Change, and the local SEIU branch.
Another Tides project, Fair and Just Prosecution, bills itself as a moderate reform organization. In reality, it employs lawyers from the activist Left and Obama administration aiming to fundamentally transform the criminal justice system by demanding removal of police officers from schools, decriminalizing drugs, expanding the "definition of profiling" to include "sexual orientation" and "gender identity," and forcing police and prosecutors to "acknowledge and apologize for decades of racially disparate policing and criminal justice practices."
A Detour into Gardner v. McCloskey
Fair and Just Prosecution made headlines this week when it was revealed that the group paid for unreported trips by St. Louis circuit attorney Kim Gardner, the litigator who brought charges against local homeowners Mark and Patricia McCloskey for brandishing firearms against a mob of BLM supporters who invaded the couple's front yard in June "screaming death threats" at the couple. Gardner's failure to report the trips — to Portugal, Connecticut, and Alabama — is allegedly a violation of the law, according to the journalists who conducted the investigation.
Besides paying for her trips, in a July 22 press release, Fair and Just Prosecution painted Gardner as a hero above politics for prosecuting the McCloskeys. "It is both disturbing and dangerous to see the vicious attacks against an elected prosecutor duly carrying out her job," the group's executive director wrote, adding in a separate open letter that "we stand with Circuit Attorney Gardner."
Leftists for "Justice"
No one should be fooled by Black Lives Matters' calls for "justice" when the facts — and the money trail — are plain to see: This is leftist politics at work.
About the Author:
Hayden Ludwig is an Investigative Researcher at Capital Research Center. He is a native of Orange County, California, and a graduate of Sonoma State University.
Unfortunately there are still too many people relying solely on mass media, especially television, for all their information - which just makes the technocrats schemes easier for them to accomplish.