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Foundation With Biden Campaign Ties Funding Leftist Agitators On U.S. Streets

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Last Sunday, the site of the Republican National Convention in Charlotte witnessed a night of violence leading to at least five arrests. Since Friday, Black Lives Matter activists terrorized the Queen City, including beating police officers, in an effort to intimidate GOP attendees and business owners.

By contrast, the Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee brought only a small gathering of peaceful activists, who declared: “We decided that it would make sense for us to make the emphasis of our action the one point of unity that deals with police crimes.”

Here we have a real “tale of two cities.” To understand the disparity of these two convention host cities separated by only a week, let’s examine some financiers of organizations fomenting the riots now taking place across the country.

Big Money, Connections to Top Democrats

Claiming to be America’s second-largest private foundation, the Ford Foundation has poured almost $2 billion into groups active in “disrupting systems to advance social justice,” according to its grant database.

The Ford Foundation boasts key members of the Joe Biden and Kamala Harris campaign as alumni executives. Harris’s sister and ex-campaign chairwoman Maya Harris served as the Ford foundation’s vice president alongside Biden’s now senior advisor, Cristóbal Alex, who served as its program director during the Obama presidency.

Some of Obama’s top staffers are now Ford Foundation’s top staffers. Taara Rangarajan, now Ford’s chief of staff, served as Obama’s national security advisor from 2013-2016. Before that, she served as a special assistant to Susan Rice during the Benghazi affair. Another Ford exec, Xavier de Souza Briggs, served as President Obama’s associate director of the Office of Management and Budget.

Funding for Communist-Connected Street Agitators

During the final months of the Obama presidency, Ford Foundation gave prominent leaders of the communist Workers World Party (WWP) funding to form the Southern Vision Alliance (SVA), a collective of activists that includes members of the group raining down terror in Charlotte last week at the RNC convention.

Shortly after getting $200,000 from the Ford Foundation in 2016, these activists performed one of the first violent and illegal teardowns of a historic monument in the country, in Durham, North Carolina. After the activists were arrested and charged for rioting and property damage, they are being defended in court, for free, by lawyers from another Ford grantee: the Southern Coalition for Social Justice.

Flush with Ford Foundation cash, these activists continue to promote property destruction and violence during demonstrations.

The Ford Foundation likes what it sees in the alleged criminal gang. This year, the wealthy nonprofit gave the group $750,000, more than tripling its inaugural donation, bringing Ford’s total contributions to SVA so far $1.2 million, according to the foundation’s website.

Millions for Marxists

Marxist-Leninist groups also get Ford Foundation support. Directed by Bernie Sanders’s senior advisor Phillip Agnew, the Dream Defenders group seeks the release of criminals from prison and the “end to the Capitalist system in the United States,” according to its now-scrubbed web page. The Ford Foundation has given the group $1.1 million, according to its grant database.

Social media accounts show the Marxist activists campaigning for Democrat mayors, state attorneys, and prosecutors in Florida who promise to end cash bail, defund the police, and free hardened criminals from jail.

Dream Defenders’ tactics vary: they shut down bridges in Florida, holding thousands of commuters hostage during rush-hour traffic; block entrances to Miami neighborhoods, threatening residents with unrelenting “civil unrest”; and shut down awards ceremonies for law enforcement, all in an effort to raise awareness for Democrats’ de-policing policies.

A tour through the Ford Foundation grant database shows Southern Vision Alliance and Dream Defenders to be a tiny part of these riot-fomenting groups agitating on American streets. While activists Ford funds desecrate cities and terrorize regular folks, the foundation gives millions to the “Defund the Police” movement.

As I reported in the National Pulse, Ford cheers the success of its anti-police campaign. From its website: “Already, we’ve seen our grantees at the forefront of the change that’s taken place over the last few days—from the City Council of Minneapolis’s pledge to dismantle the police department to reimagine public safety to Mayor Garcetti’s commitment to divest $250 million of the LAPD’s budget to support affected communities, to Minneapolis and Portland, Oregon voting to end the presence of police in their schools.”

Cities that have sought to cripple their police departments in acquiescence to such agitators’ demands have forced out police chiefs and seen officers leave the force. The result: murders and violent crimes, including shootings, assaults, and rapes, have increased exponentially in the nation’s biggest metros, according to multiple reports.

Accountable to No One

The Ford Foundation is financing a network of insurgents that intimidate elected officials and citizens to bring about dangerous political change. The FBI defines using intimidation and violence to achieve political ends as domestic terrorism.

Like other private foundations, Ford is governed only by basic IRS filing requirements and has virtually no public oversight. With woke leaders like Cisco’s CEO Chuck Robbins, Ford Motor Company’s Henry Ford III, and abortion giant Planned Parenthood’s former president Cecile Richards sitting on Ford’s board, be assured it will not cut off the funding to these Democrat street squads.