It’s ten in the morning and you're on the road. Traffic isn’t moving and you stick your head out the window. In the distance, you see an asshole with a sign. Maybe you agree with the sign, maybe not. It doesn’t matter, because whatever the sign is asking you to do — end a war, stop a pipeline, legalize this or criminalize that — is something only a handful of people with power can do, and you know they can’t see the sign from the cruising altitude of their private jets. It’s happened in LA, New York, Chicago, at Burning Man, and on San Francisco's Bay Bridge, just to list a few examples from 2023. It’s almost certain that by the end of 2024, we’ll have a new list.

But why?

Shutting down a highway or a bridge is a disruption to everyday life and commerce that conveys a sense of grassroots urgency and desperation. In reality, these events are almost always coordinated by longstanding, well-funded advocacy organizations, many of which are bankrolled by giant, billionaire-funded NGOs called “donor-advised funds.” Essentially, these are tax-exempt organizations that funnel money into donor-chosen causes, allowing donors to take immediate tax write-offs for money that can be distributed at a later date. Since money is usually pooled but can be earmarked, donor-advised funds also function to obscure exactly which organizations donors are personally funding. In recent years, donor-advised funds have been behind traffic shutdowns promoting BLM and environmental issues. For example, the 2019 “Extinction Rebellion” protests that shut down traffic in DC were partly funded by the Climate Emergency Fund, which has links to many wealthy donors, including members of the Kennedy clan.

Of course, climate change is no longer the issue du jour. Since the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war in October, many traffic shutdowns have been organized by groups funded by Tides. This NGO conglomerate has six organizations under its umbrella: the Tides Foundation, the Tides Network, Tides, Inc., and Tides Two Rivers Fund. Collectively, they have assets totaling over $1.4 billion, according to a 2022 internal audit. One of the earliest donor-advised funds, Tides was created in 1976 by philanthropists Drummond Pike and Jane Bagley Lehman, the latter being heir to the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company fortune. In more recent years, it’s received millions from extraordinarily wealthy left-wing billionaires, such as George Soros, who gave the NGO $22 million in 2021.

Like most donor-advised funds, Tides distributes grants to outside organizations. In Tides’ case, the money mostly goes to left-wing activist groups. For example, the Tides Foundation has donated to Jewish Voice for Peace — the "largest progressive Jewish anti-Zionist organization in the world," according to their website — which on November 3rd organized a protest in Durham, North Carolina that blocked rush-hour traffic for three hours in support of a cease-fire between the Israeli military and Hamas. Of course, Durham residents stuck in traffic that day had about as much power over Middle Eastern diplomacy as commuters stranded on the Bay Bridge did two weeks later. That protest, which blocked traffic into San Francisco for hours on November 16th, was also organized by an activist outfit funded by Tides, the Arab Resource Organizing Center (AROC).

But to call AROC merely Tides-funded is an understatement. Although AROC describes itself as “one of a handful of grassroots organizations building power in the SWANA/Arab community,” it's anything but grassroots. Legally, it isn’t even an independent non-profit organization. Instead, it's a “fiscally sponsored project” of the Tides Center, which essentially means it is legally indistinguishable from Tides. For example, AROC’s website compels readers to make out checks to “Tides Center- Arab Resource and Organizing Center.” Since AROC isn’t a legally distinct organization, the Tides Center isn’t legally required to report how much money donors earmark for it, nor how much it allocates to AROC on a discretionary basis. This legal structure makes AROC's financials a black box.

AROC's lack of independence from Tides also makes it impossible to see who has made large donations to AROC, something that, prior to a Supreme Court Case in 2021, they would have been required to disclose under California state law. However, a recent Pirate Wires investigation has revealed the identity of at least one donor: the San Francisco taxpayer.

According to our public records request, since 2016, Tides — which again is already in receipt of over $1.4 billion in assets — has received over $800,000 earmarked for AROC from the city of San Francisco, through both the Mayor's Office of Housing and Community Development and the Office of Civic Engagement and Immigrant Affairs. The services rendered for these funds run the gamut. Although AROC has received money for ostensibly apolitical projects like census outreach and social service connection, since 2020, it has also received grants totaling over $190,000 for “coalition building [with] Arab-serving organizations citywide." This is a drop in the bucket in terms of wasted taxpayer money in San Francisco, to be sure, but it's absurd an activist group that’s legally indistinguishable from an NGO with a $1.4 billion war chest should receive any public money at all.

San Francisco taxpayers also gave AROC $50,000 in 2020, and $80,000 in 2022 for “immigrant assistance.” This subsidizes legal services AROC offers to Arab and Muslims immigrants in the Bay area. According to AROC’s profile on the Immigration Advocates Network, this explicitly includes legal services for “individuals who are not in legal immigration status,” and “individuals with criminal histories.” I'm not a lawyer, but this sounds a lot like San Francisco taxpayers are helping underwrite legal efforts to stop (specifically) Arab and Muslim illegal immigrants and criminals from being deported.

And the grants AROC received for service connection and case management through the Office of Community Development — which formed the bulk of funds received — also raise questions.

Why would the city outsource immigrant and social services for the Arab community to a dark money, billionaire-funded far-left activist organization? The very idea that such services are needed for the Arab community specifically suggests that greater and swifter assimilation is needed. If this is true, AROC is more likely a stumbling block than a solution. Their mission statement — prominently featured on the landing page of their website — is in fact a contemptuous rejection of assimilation:

AROC envisions powerful and liberated Arab communities living with freedom and self-determination from the Bay Area to our homelands. We are abolitionists, feminists, and internationalists who believe that the liberation of SWANA (South West Asian North African) people is inextricably tied to the liberation of all oppressed people.

From Benedict Arnold, to Jonathan Pollard, to Omar Matteen, there is nothing more dangerous to national security than an American who sees his homeland in another country. Handing over immigrants to a group that emphasizes trans-continental ethnic solidarity is particularly unwise for a group in which the chances of that solidarity being expressed via terrorist attack are uniquely not zero. A second-generation Mexican immigrant who identifies more with people south of the border than his own countryman is a shame. A second-generation Afghan who identifies more with people in the Middle East than his own countrymen is a gunman at an Orlando gay bar. Assimilation always matters — for some more than others.

Much of that assimilation traditionally happens in public schools. But, troublingly, AROC has its fingers in the SF education system, too. Currently, AROC contracts with the San Francisco school district to provide workshops on leadership and cultural enrichment for Arab and Muslim students. In October, the group was accused of using their presence in several San Francisco public schools to organize a walkout in support of Gaza. A parent group called SF Guardians complained, alleging that the group had broken the rules of its contract by interfering with the students’ education, violating privacy laws by posting pictures of student protestors on its social media accounts, and creating a discriminatory environment against student groups by leading a “from the river to the sea” chant that SF Guardians considers antisemitic.

The school district says it’s currently investigating the allegations, but much like the grants AROC received from the city, the very existence of a contract (apparently unpaid) between SFSD and AROC was baffling from the start. The main page of AROC website currently features a multi-paragraph pop-up statement that opens with “AROC holds the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence we’ve witnessed across historic Palestine.” It continues:

While we understand the feelings of despair, confusion, and fear that may be gripping our families, friends, and community, we take this moment as an invitation to recommit ourselves to the revolutionary roots of Palestinian liberation—where the struggle to abolish apartheid, Zionism, and fascism in our homeland is one and the same with an international struggle for economic and political democracy, for education and healthcare for all, for right relations to land, for social justice, gender justice and climate justice, shaped in the interests of working people.

People, of course, can say whatever they want, but it's difficult to imagine that a group which openly advocated a similar list of right-wing political demands would be given public grant money and school contracts in San Francisco. And to be sure, there are right-wing activist groups funded by billionaires, as anyone who has heard anything liberals had to say about the Koch brothers during the 2010s surely knows. But to their credit, you never hear about right-wing astroturfed organizations blocking roads, probably because they recognize how bad it is for public opinion. I doubt anyone stuck for hours on the Bay Bridge came home more sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinian people, or knew that through their taxpayer dollars, they themselves were the ones paying to be dangerously inconvenienced (in addition to commuters, the protest held up an ambulance and other first responders for hours). If they did, perhaps the money from left-wing billionaires and San Fransisco taxpayers would dry up, and Mossad would have to pick up the slack.

– River Page

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Feature image — Steve Rhodes