No Kings? No problem.
The weekend protests called “No Kings” produced crowds of a few thousand in some reliably “blue” cities like Portland, Boston, Seattle, and others, but not much else. Tragically, though, a killer who was once a political appointee of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz shot and killed the former state House speaker and her husband and seriously wounded a state senator and his wife — and killed his dog — in an act of politically motivated violence.
On the latest episode of The Drill Down, co-hosts Peter Schweizer and Eric Eggers look at the protest campaign and follow the money behind it.
Los Angeles had eight days of violent rioting, 500 arrests, and looting spawned from protests of arrests made by federal immigration authorities. But the violence happened when professional demonstrators got into the mix, and the groups that organized the protests are well funded and have suspicious allegiances.
The Party of Socialism and Liberation (PSL) is an openly communist group that receives money from an American-born billionaire who lives in and is allied with the Chinese Communist regime. Neville Roy Singham has given millions to PSL and another group, called the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, both of which were active and visible during the protests. Singham’s efforts were deeply exposed in Schweizer’s most recent book, Blood Money.
“These groups have pledged allegiance to the Chinese,” Schweizer says, and their participation in the violent protests suggests “an effort at destabilization.”
Vast sums from multiple sources including George Soros has gone into dark-money funding groups. Between 2019–2023, the network underneath Arabella Advisors funneled at least $114.8 million to “No Kings” protest organizers and affiliates, according to financial disclosures analyzed by the Government Accountability Institute. Indivisible, the official organizer of the “No Kings” protests, received $14.06 million in contributions in 2023 alone, including from dark money intermediaries like Arabella’s Sixteen Thirty Fund.
Schweizer calls Arabella “the Wall Street of billionaire lefties.”
George Soros’s Open Society Foundations also provided more than $8 million in funding to Indivisible; Swiss billionaire Hansjörg Wyss channeled $2.5 million to Indivisible through his political action fund. Soros and Wyss are both crucial Arabella funders, as GAI’s research shows.
The funding pays for things like professionally printed signs, masks, and even a “No Kings songbook” shared with protesters. Eggers notes that one songbook ditty reworked the words of a negro spiritual from “Satan, your Kingdom must fall” to “Trump, your kingdom must fall.”
During the L.A. riots, a prominent participant was a group called the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA), which received money from Arabella but also millions in taxpayer dollars from both the federal government (under former President Joe Biden) and the city of Los Angeles, supposedly for “citizenship education.” The group claimed its protest activities were under a separate “action” group that received no government funds.
Schweizer is unpersuaded. “The personnel are the same, and the office is the same,” he notes.
Where is this all headed?
Many commentators have noted the disarray within the Democrat Party which has struggled to find a message other than being against President Donald Trump. Street level protests allow some of that rage to find a common space and purpose. Schweizer calls it a “life raft for demoralized Democrats.”
Also, it’s hard to miss the financial effects of what the ICE raids in L.A. disrupted. Immigration czar Tom Homan noted that his agents there broke up what amounted to a money-laundering operation that used illegal immigrants to launder fentanyl proceeds back to the Mexican cartels. As GAI and others have pointed out, the illegal fentanyl trade thrived during Biden’s period of open borders; closing its operations hurts the pocketbooks not just of the cartels, but also of their Chinese “senior partners” that provide it the precursor chemicals for the drug, pill presses, and logistical and communications support.
So, you have an alliance between drug pushers, hostile state actors, frustrated Democrats, and a cabal of left-wing billionaires who seek to transform America into something else.
The tragic shootings in Minnesota on the same day are another sign of the harmful effects of heated political rhetoric from both sides of the political divide, but no excuse for it.
The murderer, Vance Boelter, had a stack of “No Kings” flyers in his car, but his motivations are still not clear as he appears to have been a Trump voter. He was apprehended by the largest dragnet in Minnesota state history Monday morning.
“I believe you are responsible for what you do, but the rhetoric certainly doesn’t help,” Schweizer says.
As for reining in the protests, Schweizer and Eggers both believe in free speech and that the radicalism of the protests will be their downfall. “They alienate more people than they attract, so let them do it,” Schweizer says.
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