Investigation reveals Democratic groups with $2.1B behind #NoKings protests

Early Tuesday evening, as National Guard troops faced off against protesters and rioters on the streets of Los Angeles, powerful teachers’ union president Randi Weingarten hosted a virtual town hall with Democratic Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear.and two leading political operatives in Democratic Party politics, Leah Greenberg, founder of a political nonprofit, Indivisible, and Rev. Al Sharpton, founder of another political nonprofit, National Action Network. 

Greenberg hailed an upcoming wave of protests this Saturday — set to sweep through even “really red areas of the country,” marked with mostly Republican voters — as a stand against President Donald Trump. Throughout the call, Weingarten beamed, excited. Sharpton phoned in his enthusiasm about people with “different political beliefs” uniting. They touted Saturday’s campaign as the “#NoKings” protest.

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But what they didn’t detail is the massive network of Democratic organizations funding and orchestrating this supposedly spontaneous uprising.

As editor-in-chief of the Pearl Project, a nonprofit journalism initiative I founded in honor of my friend and colleague, Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, I’ve spent the past two decades investigating how ideology, identity politics, and sectarian hatred can turn violent. Radicalized Pakistani militants brutally murdered Danny after kidnapping him in 2002 on the streets of Karachi, Pakistan, and demonizing him as an American, a Jew and a grandson of Israel. I have warned about an unholy alliance between far-left radicalism and Islamist extremism, and it has now come home to the streets of the United States.

In my 2023 book, “Woke Army,” I documented how this alliance has morphed into a new threat inside our institutions, from higher education to politics — weaponizing identity and cause-based activism, like immigration, to undermine civil society. 

The #NoKings protest is the latest front in this propaganda war.

According to new research by the Pearl Project, the #NoKings protest is being organized by an estimated 198 groups, all of which are aligned with the Democratic Party and many of which claim tax-exempt, “nonpartisan” nonprofit status. Collectively, these groups take in $2.1 billion in annual revenues. 

Here is the breakdown of 198 “partners” listed in the official publicity material for the financial and political machine behind #NoKings:

• Three official entities of the Democratic National Committee: College Democrats of America, Manhattan Young Democrats and Westside Democratic Headquarters in Norwalk, Calif.
• 16 Democratic political action committees, or PACs, including Friends of Bernie Sanders, Progressive Democrats of America and Vote Blue — with about $19.4 million in spending power for Democratic political candidates.
• 18 Democratic-aligned 501(c)(5) labor unions, including lead organizer, the American Federation of Teachers, along with the United Auto Workers, the Communications Workers of America and the National Treasury Employees Union, with a total of $1.1 billion in revenues, most of their political contributions going to Democratic candidates.
• 76 Democratic-aligned 501(c)(4) political nonprofits, including the ACLU, Sierra Club, League of Conservation Voters, Working Families Organization Inc., Human Rights Campaign, Planned Parenthood Action Fund and lead organizer Indivisible Project, all with another $734.3 million in revenues.
• 47 501(c)(3) nonprofits, legally restricted from partisan advocacy, including innocuous-sounding groups like the Unitarian Universalist Association, Accountable US and the American Humanist Association, with $286.7 million to the cause.
• 38 additional Democratic-aligned groups, including Michigan Resistance Coalition, Families Over Billionaires, 50501, Tax the Greedy Billionaire and Mennonite Action, with undisclosed financials.

I’ve made the research public in an online database that I am working on making into a user-friendly digital encyclopedia for the protest industry, so everyone from parents to police officers can understand the organizations fomenting chaos from our streets to our campuses. 

I’ve been tracking the anti-Trump protesters since 2017 when #Resistance became the buzzword for activists like Palestinian American Linda Sarsour, leading the Women’s March against Trump. Since Trump’s inauguration this past January, I’ve investigated the companies behind the #TeslaTakedown, #HandsOff and #MayDay protests that have marked “resistance 2.0” over the past several months against the Trump administration.

The groups include several organizations, including Jewish Voice for Peace and Sarsour’s MPower Change Action Fund, that represent the unholy alliance of Islamist sympathizers and leftists who have fueled fiery protests against the existence of the state of Israel, following the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks by Hamas on Israelis. I’ve identified 1,500 groups in the anti-semitism protest industry.

Most certainly, this week’s protests and the protests coming up are not an organic, citizen-led “resistance.”

This is top-down political warfare, branded as grassroots activism but actually an AstroTurf political operation. 

The anti-Trump protest industry is very broad, and these are some additional findings:

• Along with the 198 groups behind #NoKings with revenues of $2.1 billion, there are another 267 groups that have been organizing protests against Trump with revenues of $1.3 billion.
• That makes a total of about 465 groups aligned with the Democratic Party with combined revenues of $3.4 billion organizing protests against Trump since January.
• The #TeslaTakedown protests included an estimated 32 local and state affiliates of the Democratic National Committee, from Florida to California, who put Tesla CEO Elon Musk in their crosshairs.

These organizations are not your local knitting club. They are professional protest organizers.

For the #NoKings protest, the “Indivisible Digital Asset Management” team has assembled an online digital “brand folder” with 29 brand “assets” in a folder marked “Flyers, Rally Signs, & Printed Materials,” 25 “assets” in a “Graphics” folder, 8 “Templates,” two logos, a brand palette of four vibrant branding colors, easy-to-read fonts and engaging “design elements.”

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Indivisible also created a 12-page digital “NO KINGS Toolkit for Hosts,” shared on Google Docs, with “messaging,” “NO KINGS Mobilization Tactics,” “sample event agenda” and tips on “getting media attention.” Its tips noted: “Identify at least 1 group member to be responsible for firing up the crowd…” I’m including various parts of this orchestrated protest in an online protest industry folder.

Some of the sample messages for signs: “NO KINGS IN AMERICA!,” “Stop the Shakedown!” and “We are Not For Sale!” They will be repeated across the country.

The templates have been leveraged to now create a cookie-cutter production of graphics on social media orchestrated around the hashtag #NoKings.

Importantly, just as the mainstream media examines the dynamics of “white supremacy,” “fascism” and “MAGA,” we must not be naïve about the ideological undercurrents driving “progressive” protests to violence. 

A while back, The New York Times exposed a wealthy tech tycoon, Neville Roy Singham, for funding and promoting Chinese Communist Party propaganda, and he has been tied to funding many of the groups – Party for Socialism and Liberation, the People’s Forum, the Answer Coalition and CodePink — engaged in the most confrontational protests in recent days and months against Israel and the United States. These groups are proudly self-described socialist organizations stoking discontent to push an anti-capitalist, anti-American agenda.

While Singham doesn’t yet appear to have his fingerprints directly on the #NoKings protest, the ideological DNA is the same.

The #NoKings protest is likely to be the next playing field for the anti-ICE, anti-Trump agitators. Indeed, #ResistTrump, one of the “partners” for Saturday’s protests, promotes an “orientation” slide deck that itemizes the elements of “expressing political dissent” from “voting to violence.” While the group claims to promote “non-violence,” it includes – without comment – “political violence” as a part of the continuum of protest, including “armed revolts,” “riots,” “terrorism” and “insurrections.”

#ResistTrump outlines a “theory of change” to “remove or replace Trump” and realize a “future without Trump.”

As an investigative journalist, I am reporting on the protest industry and its propaganda, because these protests are not just political statements. They are well-financed, orchestrated performances—designed to generate viral imagery, manipulate public perception and blur the line between civic engagement and ideological agitation.

Fairfax County resident Lissa Kenkel, a researcher who helped me cull data for the #NoKings protest, has been studying protests since the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks by Hamas in Israel, and she said: “The irony is staggering about the groups driving the NoKings uprisings.”

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“The very people bankrolling and leading these so-called grassroots movements are the crowned royalty of the non-profit world, sitting in their air-conditioned offices, collecting six-figure salaries, while encouraging the common folk to torch their own cities in the name of ‘saving democracy,” she said. “It’s manufactured chaos, sold as revolution, by people who wouldn’t last five minutes in the rubble they’re creating.”

Sharpton, founder of the National Action Network, based in New York, earned $648,786 in annual income from the group, according to his group’s latest tax filing. At the American Federation of Teachers, Weingarten raked in $474,951, according to its last IRS filing. At the ACLU, its executive director, Anthony Romero, collected $1.3 million, according to the group’s latest tax filing.

This is what is behind these protests: elite partisan leaders in ideologically motivated networks using the mask of social justice to wage political and cultural warfare in America. For too long, we’ve underestimated the power of identity politics fused with institutional influence. The streets of Los Angeles, Chicago, and Washington, D.C. are now the stages for these manipulations.

We must not be fooled. True protest rises from the people. This? These are the kings and queens of the Democratic political machine summoning their minions to take to the streets to feign a fake people’s revolution.

ASRA NOMANI