Greenfield: Antifa Shares a Fundraising Platform With the DNC

Antifa, like the Democrat Party, is built on the model of nonprofit support infrastructure.

In the party, that means everything except the most direct campaign activities are outsourced to networks of nonprofits that use tax-deductible donations for everything from voter registration and outreach, media and messaging, to funding election infrastructure ‘Zuckerbucks’ style.

Unlike its Black Lives Matter allies, the Antifa networks aren’t funded by a single nonprofit. Antifa’s illegal activities and the radical tendencies of its participants, many of whom are involved in a variety of radical groups, some of them domestic terrorist organizations, makes that a non-starter. However, unlike conservative groups which have been ‘debanked’ from Big Tech fundraising platforms, Antifa gains support through leftist 501(c)(3) and (c)(4) groups which includes fundraising platforms, bail funds, street medics and promotional media organizations.

One of the worst examples also operates arm in arm with the Democratic Party.

The International Anti-Fascist Defence Fund raises money through crowdfunding platforms like GoFundMe, Patreon and FundRazr (also utilized by the Harvard Kennedy School and the University of Cambridge) despite clear bans on raising money for illegal or criminal activity.

But its primary fundraising platform is also utilized by the Democratic National Committee.

Connected by a shortlink titled ‘DefendAntifa’, the International Anti-Fascist Defence Fund, its fundraising page flying the Antifa flag and bearing a banner “Free All Antifa Prisoners” describes itself as providing “direct, immediate support to anti-fascists” including medical bills, legal defense and an “antifa prisoner fund”, uses the Action Network: a leftist 501(c)(4) and (c)(3).

The Action Network boasts that “after three months of using Action Network the DNC shattered all sorts of fundraising records.” The Antifa defense fund, which claims to have dispensed $75,000 in three years, is apparently also doing well with the overlapping DNC donor base.

What is the Antifa defense fund raising money for?

While the Action Network home page shows off a picture of Biden to promote its DNC fundraising, the International Anti-Fascist Defence Fund’s blog features a story about helping out during the Biden inauguration riots featuring of black masked antifa thugs bearing a banner featuring an AK-47 and the message, “We don’t want Biden, we want revenge.”

The International Anti-Fascist Defence Fund post describes how “stuff got vandalized and Dak, one of the sole arrestees, was left holding the bag, taking a plea deal that kept him out of prison but also left him on the hook to pay for all of the property damage done in both actions – nearly $50,000USD in all!.That’s a lot of money for anyone to come up with. A donation page has been set up to help with those costs and the Defence Fund… decided to help contribute directly.”

This would appear to refer to the Biden inauguration riots in Portland during which the windows of the Democratic Party of Oregon headquarters were smashed and vandalized with the anarchist ‘A’. Police seized “Molotov cocktails, knives, batons, chemical spray and a crow bar”.

Is a fundraising platform used by the DNC also raising money for antifa rioters smashing Democrat offices? If so it would be one of many examples of Democrats incubating the leftist radicals who are destroying their party and the country.

The Action Network was set up by Senator John Kerry’s digital director during the Occupy Wall Street riots, is emblematic of the relationship between the Democrat establishment and the most extreme elements of the Left. As is an antifa defense fund raising money for a defendant in the Biden inauguration riots using the Action Network whose home page features Biden’s picture.

Beyond the DNC, the Action Network is the fundraising platform for the AFL-CIO, Black Lives Matter, the Women’s March, the DSA and Communist Party USA. The spectrum reflects the growing extremism that the Democrats have become complicit in and even directly support.

The Action Network is a 501(c)(4) and while the C4 status comes with greater freedom to engage in lobbying, it does not sanction any involvement in illegal activities.

The International Anti-Fascist Defence Fund is quite cheerful about them.

One post on the Antifa defense fund’s blog is titled, “Found Out” and features a photo of a man’s bloody head while raising money for the perpetrators.

The Antifa defense fund claims that the police “decided to charge someone, someone who asked us to help with their legal defense. And help is what we did. Because teaching people like Adam Kelly how the sentence ‘Fuck around…’ ends is never a crime.”

The legal system disagrees. The DNC and the Action Network clearly do not. But does the IRS?

Raising money to finance illegal activity is illegal for anyone, but nonprofits have their status regulated by the IRS.

IRS regulations state that, “not only is the actual conduct of illegal activities inconsistent with exemption, but the planning and sponsoring of such activities are also incompatible with charity and social welfare.” For example, “Rev. Rul. 75-384 holds that an organization formed to promote world peace that planned and sponsored protest demonstrations at which members were urged to commit acts of civil disobedience did not qualify for IRC 501(c)(3) or (4) exemption.”

“G.C.M. 36153, dated January 31, 1975, states that because planning and sponsoring illegal acts are in themselves inconsistent with charity and social welfare it is not necessary to determine whether illegal acts were, in fact, committed in connection with the resulting demonstrations or whether such a determination can be made prior to conviction of an accused.”

These rules have not been applied to the Left in some time. But they ought to be.