When Alex Soros became chairman of the Open Society Foundations three years ago, he stated that he was “more political” than his predecessor – that is, his multibillionaire father, George Soros. The elder Soros long had funded the Left. But Alex had been hinting about closing ranks with the Democratic Party. He’s now moved toward making that a reality. On May 20, the nonprofit announced that it would donate $300 million over five years to focus on electoral politics. “Our new investments,” the younger Soros announced, “will tackle these twin challenges of improving economic well-being and expanding rights so that opportunity and freedom are finally both defining features of American life and democracy.” Democrats no doubt are applauding. A darker possibility is that terrorists, here and abroad, also are applauding. And not for the first time.
The New York City-based Open Society Foundations (OSF), with roughly $25 billion in assets, was founded by the Hungarian-born George Soros over 30 years ago. Soros, now 95, having accumulated enormous wealth through his hedge fund, established the OSF to advance the cause of a utopian global commonwealth, one in which national identity and interests give way to racial diversity, social equality and open borders, all under the label “democracy.” Over the decades, he’s transferred more than $32 billion to this IRS-approved 501(c)(3) philanthropy, most of it distributed during the past 10 years.
Donald Trump’s election as president in November 2016 triggered this splurge. The elder Soros saw Trump as a threat to everything he stood for (and he was probably right!). In his imagination, jackbooted Nazis could be marching down the streets of Washington, D.C. within a few years, just as actual Nazis had marched into Budapest during his youth. To head off such a scenario, in October 2017 Soros transferred $18 billion of his own money to the Open Society Foundations to save America from becoming a “closed” totalitarian society. Last fall, Forbes magazine estimated his net worth at $7.5 billion, so he’s still got plenty of money to give away. Meanwhile, he’d been contemplating a succession plan to keep the operation in the family.
Alexander Soros, who turned 40 last October, is the second youngest of George Soros’ five adult children. The holder of a Ph.D. in international relations from the University of California, Berkeley, he assumed the helm of a Washington, D.C.-based “527” organization, Democracy PAC, early in 2022; his father had founded the political action committee in 2019 to raise funds for progressive Democratic Party candidates. Alex was getting a promotion. Soon he’d be getting another one. In June 2023, George named Alex the new board chairman of the Open Society Foundations, giving him the nod over Alex’s half-brother Jonathan.
The recent $300 million donation is intended to protect supposedly vulnerable racial, gender and religious minorities from the wrath of the Trump administration and Republican lawmakers. Its leaders see tyrannical intent in their opponents and are vowing to resist. “We are continuing our work unabated,” stated Laleh Ispahani, Open Society Foundations managing director of U.S. operations. “We will not be intimidated into silence.” Ispahani, affiliated with OSF for almost 20 years, views Republicans as a threat to human rights and rule of law.
The evidence, at least to those with sound political instincts, leads to a much different assessment. Let’s go back to 2020, the Year of George Floyd. Large mobs, possessed of a bottomless loathing for America, rioted in city streets across the U.S., creating fear and destruction in their wake. The riots eventually died down. But the calm aftermath proved deceptive. In 2024, professional radicals and their rapt audiences, incensed that Israel actually would retaliate against Hamas terrorists who had massacred over 1,200 Jews the previous October, organized anti-Israel occupations of several university campuses. They’ve been whooping it up ever since, especially in the wake of Donald Trump’s reelection as president. The mass protests against the Trump administration’s deportations of illegal immigrants are less about “grassroots” spontaneity than about managed revolution. Large chunks of money from the Open Society Foundations to radical nonprofit groups made much of this possible.
Anti-Trump protestors know they have legal and moral backing from sympathetic public officials, lawyers, judges, journalists, philanthropists and other people in high places. That is why “mostly peaceful” demonstrations so often dissolve into riots; the participants are confident they won’t suffer any consequences. The deaths of two such rioters in Minneapolis this year came as a terrible shock to the Left. The Trump administration was thwarting their rainbow dreams. The one-sided and false narrative about those deaths – that they were cold-blooded government murders – served to strengthen the radicals’ resolve and grow their numbers. All immigration, legal or not, should be promoted, they proclaimed, because it enriches our country – especially when it comes to Somalian people of color who scam taxpayers out of billions of dollars. Realizing that the Trump administration was not caving in, the radicals’ dug in and escalated combat.
The main battle lines over immigration lately have shifted to New Jersey – more specifically, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center in Newark known as Delaney Hall. Radical protestors, triggered by highly specious allegations of inhumane conditions, for weeks have been conducting daily demonstrations just outside the facility. “Riots” might be a more appropriate word. Many protestors have verbally and physically assaulted ICE agents and local police. Dozens of rioters have been arrested. Even New Jersey’s Leftist governor, Mikie Sherrill, has distanced herself from the worst of these self-righteous world savers. “My top priority is keeping New Jerseyans and our communities safe – and an increased ICE surge in the area outside of Delaney Hall is a threat to public safety,” she stated. “We know that lives would be at risk were that to happen. And I will not accept that risk.” She also criticized out-of-state agitators who are escalating the conflict. Such comments have not endeared her to the protestors, some of whom have accused her of spreading “MAGA propaganda.”
Arguably the prime mover behind anti-ICE protests, in New Jersey and elsewhere, is a 501(c)(4) nonprofit called Indivisible Project, or simply Indivisible. The group has two affiliates: 1) a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, Indivisible Civics; and 2) a political action committee, Indivisible Action. National Legal and Policy Center wrote extensively about this Washington, D.C.-based operation last March. Formed in the aftermath of the 2016 elections by a young married couple, Ezra Levin and Leah Greenberg, Indivisible and its many statewide and local chapters are dedicated to the proposition that Donald Trump, and those supportive of him, represent a mortal threat to democracy. Its rhetoric, patriotic on the surface, is short on facts and long on demagoguery. But it has won over many among the uninitiated. Grants from the Open Society Foundations have explained much of this.
Last year’s NLPC article revealed that during 2017-23, OSF provided Indivisible with a little over $7.6 million. Fully $3 million of that arrived in 2023 in the form of a two-year grant to “support the grantee’s social welfare activities.” Mercifully, no funds were delivered in 2024. That’s a small consolation given that previous rounds of funding have been applied to Indivisible’s street theater. It was Indivisible, aided by an ad hoc group, Tesla Takedown, who masterminded nationwide protests near or at Tesla auto dealerships across the country on March 29, 2025. Some of these supposedly peaceful assemblies included arson and vandalism of motor vehicles – take that, Elon Musk! Indivisible also coordinated the “No Kings” rallies of June 14, 2025, October 18, 2025 and March 28, 2026, and the “May Day Strong” general strike of May 1, 2026. Each event was geared toward discrediting President Trump and those allied with him.
To Ezra Levin and other organizers, Trump governs like an absolute monarch. As such, he must be overthrown. Levin justifies this desired outcome in describing Indivisible’s “action kit”:
Trump is an authoritarian. He’s a convicted rapist who’s all over the Epstein files. His secret police force has murdered Americans. His regime serves billionaires and himself at the expense of everyone else. He violates the Constitution constantly, including recklessly starting a war with Iran.
Actually, what’s reckless is everything in this statement, a recklessness amplified by the irony of denouncing billionaires while accepting loads of cash from George Soros. Of special interest here is the effect of this rhetoric on followers. Cole Tomas Allen, for one, comes to mind.
Allen, a 31-year-old Southern California resident, came close to assassinating President Trump and key administration officials at the quickly canceled White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner on April 25 at the Washington, D.C. Hilton. According to his sister, he attended at least one No Kings protest in California and was highly prone to making off-the-cuff radical statements. Allen rationalized killing Trump as the best hope for saving our country. After his capture, federal agents discovered an online manifesto explaining his actions. He’d emailed this missive to family members just 10 minutes before invading the hotel, sprinting through a U.S. Secret Service security checkpoint, and running toward the stairs leading to the ballroom. Here is the revealing passage:
And I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes. (Well, to be completely honest, I was no longer willing a long time ago, but this is the first real opportunity I’ve had to do something about it.)
While I’m discussing this, I’ll also go over my expected rule of engagement (probably in a terrible format, but I’m not military so too bad.) I would still go through most everyone here to get to the targets if it were absolutely necessary (on the basis that most people “chose” to attend a speech by a pedophile, rapist, and traitor, and thus are complicit) but I really hope it doesn’t come to that.
The confessional first-person voice aside, the tone of this manifesto resembles Ezra Levin’s litany of grievances. While Levin formally disavows violence in favor of “joyful nonviolence,” his overheated denunciations of Trump are less designed for debate than they are for the manufacture and mobilization of mass discontent. It is language with an instinctive appeal to perpetually aggrieved persons with a “loser” psychology. George Soros subsidizes them, if indirectly.
There can be no doubt as to Cole Tomas Allen’s intentions. He traveled to Washington for the purpose of killing President Trump and other senior administration officials. He didn’t travel light. At the time of his arrest – after shooting a Secret Service officer who, luckily, was wearing a protective vest – Allen was in possession of a Mossberg Maverick 88 12-gauge pump action shotgun, a Rock Island Armory 1911 .38 caliber pistol, dozens of rounds of unspent 12-gauge shotgun ammunition, .38 caliber ammunition, two knives, four daggers, multiple sheaths, multiple holsters, needle nose pliers and wire cutters. He would be indicted on four counts by a federal grand jury 10 days later.
But the Soros network’s funding of Leftist organizations involved in or openly supportive of terrorism goes far deeper than any single deed. A report released last September by the Washington, D.C.-based Capital Research Center (CRC) concluded that the Open Society Foundations during 2016-23 gave more than $80 million to groups “tied to terrorism or extremist violence.” Co-authored by CRC Senior Fellow Ryan Mauro and writer-editor Scott Walter, the study cited seven groups that were awarded a combined more than $23 million “that directly assist domestic terrorism and criminality” in the U.S, including engaging in or providing material support to “violence, property destruction, economic sabotage, harassment” and other crimes meeting the definition of terrorism. Another more than $50 million went to grantees that endorse terrorist organizations or have cultivated links to them. And yet another $9 million-plus went to groups that, though not openly supportive of terrorists, have materially aided allied front groups and individuals.
This includes the Center for Third World Organizing, which the Capital Research Center indicates as having received $400,000 in general support from OSF. The CTWO specializes in “direct action” (i.e., violent confrontation) and boasts, “We trained thousands, supported over 100 organizations,” during the “uprisings” of 2020-21. Its “training,” conducted with help from anarcho-communist groups such as the Ruckus Society and the BlackOUT Collective, consisted of teaching the finer points of sabotage and vandalism. On a far larger scale, the Soros network provided the Movement for Black Lives, a coalition of well over 100 black-led organizations, including Black Lives Matter, with a whopping $18 million in 2021 through a pair of fiscal sponsors, the Common Counsel Foundation ($15 million) and NEO Philanthropy, Inc. ($3 million). Another recipient was a 501(c)(4) group, the Sunrise Movement, which received at least $2 million from the Soros network. Sunrise activists used much of that money to partner with Antifa in the Stop Cop City/Defend the Atlanta Forest Coalition, a campaign, as the CRC noted, “in which activists currently face over 40 domestic terrorism charges and 60 racketeering indictments.” The Sunrise Movement received a combined $750,000 in 2020 from Democracy PAC (at the time headed by George Soros) and the Sixteen Thirty Fund, a 501(c)(4), Soros-supported dark money group.
Soros-funded terrorism, true to its commitment to open borders, operates internationally. Through 2023, for example, the CRC noted that the Open Society Foundations had donated $2,350,540 to Al-Haq Europe, a Brussels-based affiliate of a West Bank Palestinian “human rights” group. Al-Haq has close ties to the terrorist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), and was sanctioned last September 4 by the U.S. State Department. Other large, globally-oriented grants from the Soros network include: 18 Million Rising, or 18MR, an advocate for Asian ethnic rights in America and a vociferous opponent of “Zionist influence” ($3,524,000); Voces de la Frontera, a Milwaukee-based advocate for Hispanic mass immigration ($1,625,000); the Islamic Society of North America ($500,000); Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice, a New York City-based LGBTQ global activist nonprofit ($5,182,230); Al Qaws for Sexual and Gender Diversity in Palestinian Society ($545,000); Palestine Institute for Public Diplomacy ($665,000); Palestinian Performing Arts Network ($1.8 million); 7amleh: The Arab Center for Social Media Advancement ($975,000); Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network ($1,041,974); and Makan, a UK-based advocate for Palestinian nationalism ($505,277).
Note the preponderance of Palestinian activists – and that’s just a sample of such groups cited in the CRC report. Many are openly aligned with Hamas, the PFLP or both. This support may extend to Soros-funded organizations whose names bear no apparent relationship to Palestinian interests. The Center for Constitutional Rights, a Lower Manhattan-based legal advocacy group co-founded in 1966 by radical lawyer William Kuntsler, defended the legality of the murderous October 7, 2023 Hamas surprise attack on unarmed Israeli Jews, claiming that the victims did not qualify as civilians. “Under international law, armed groups, such as Palestinian resistance fighters, can lawfully carry out attacks on military targets,” the CCR has stated. For such utterances, the Soros network provided the Center with $7,165,000 during 2016-23.
Put bluntly, the Open Society Foundations is a paymaster for a culture of domestic and foreign terrorism, and the deceptive rationalizations for it. As such, it is almost impossible to avoid concluding that OSF operates outside of its tax-exempt designation. At the very least, the IRS should revoke OSF’s tax-exempt status. Willfully providing financial aid to organizations that engage in criminal activity is grounds for stripping a donor of its nonprofit tax status. This principle is spelled out clearly in IRS regulations. A tax-exempt nonprofit entity must be operated exclusively for charitable or educational purposes. Blocking traffic, blocking commercial shipping, and seizing or vandalizing property are criminal disruptions. Funding such activities, fully aware of them, is a serious crime in itself, whether or not the donor is physically involved.
Given that the Soros network is aware of the law and of its own actions, top OSF officials and many of their recipients also should be made accountable. Since when is a commitment to “equity,” “social justice” or “nonviolence” a license to make war by proxy? Ostensibly good intentions are not free passes to destroy public order. The term “nonviolence” in particular is disingenuous. Threatening people or annexing their residential or working space is a felony even without physical assault. Germany “nonviolently” annexed Austria and Czechoslovakia in the 1930s, too.
The administration is taking this issue seriously. On September 22, 2025, President Trump signed legislation designating Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization. Three days later, on September 25, he issued a multi-agency Memorandum (“Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence“) making clear that nonprofit groups that fund criminal operations such as Antifa are not above the law. The violence in the streets, the president wrote, “is a culmination of sophisticated, organized campaigns of targeted intimidation, radicalization, threats, and violence designed to silence opposing speech, limit political activity, change or direct policy outcomes, and prevent the functioning of a democratic society.” Breaking up these campaigns, Trump emphasized, requires that law enforcement agencies investigate and dismantle these groups’ financial, logistics and communications networks.
Toward this end, President Trump ordered the National Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) and its local branch offices to devise a coordinated strategy to disrupt organizations and individuals that promote political violence. The JTTF would take the lead in investigating “institutional and individual funders, and officers and employees of organizations, that are responsible for, sponsor, or otherwise aid and abet the principal actors engaging in the criminal disorder.” Each probe must include “an identification of any behaviors, fact patterns, recurrent motivations, or other indicia common to organizations and entities that coordinate these acts in order to direct efforts to identify and prevent potential violent activity.” Additionally, the Treasury Department, in coordination with the U.S. Attorney General, would have the power to gather information on illicit financial flows and to assist financial institutions in filing Suspicious Activity Reports. The FBI and the IRS a half-year ago, in fact, formed a partnership to identify tax crimes.
Some leading members of Congress are also on the case. Last November 6, House of Representatives Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, along with the chairman of that committee’s Subcommittee on the Constitution, Chip Roy, R-Tex., sent a letter to Open Society Foundations President Binaifer Nowrojee, requesting information about one of OSF’s beneficiaries, the Alliance for Global Justice, which had received a grant of $250,000 in 2020. Republicans on the committee were concerned that one group in particular for which the Alliance had served as fiscal sponsor, Refuse Fascism, had been working with Antifa in organizing violent protests. The letter requested that the OSF provide documentation dating back to January 1, 2017. The Soros network, predictably, replied, “We are a human rights organization that opposes all forms of violence, including terrorism and violent protests.” That’s a nice disavowal. But actions still speak louder than words.
House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith, R-Mo., also wants some answers about nonprofits with a questionable tax-exempt status. Joined by every GOP member of the committee, Smith wrote a letter dated January 20, 2026 to Treasury Secretary-Acting Internal Revenue Service Commissioner Scott Bessent and Social Security Commissioner-IRS Chief Executive Officer Frank Bisignano, requesting that the IRS “implement a new approach for the nonprofit sector when it comes to updating its systems and communication with state agencies.” The massive Somalian fraud in Minnesota had just come to light, especially the one perpetrated by a nonprofit charity, Feeding Our Future. The busted scam by then already had resulted in the prosecution of 80 individuals. Feeding Our Future, as it turned out, had its tax exemption revoked in February 2020 yet continued to reap the benefits of exemption because the IRS had not updated its tracking system. Chairman Smith’s letter also brought up evidence that a sizable portion of the funds sent to this and other Somali-oriented philanthropies in Minnesota in turn were transferred to the Somalia-based Al-Shabaab terrorist group.
Coming full circle, one wonders what Soros network executives plan to do with the new five-year, $300 million commitment. Aware that the heat is on, the Open Society Foundations’ most logical course of action would be to concentrate on getting preferred political candidates elected. Bankrolling domestic and foreign terrorists is risky and could jeopardize OSF’s existence. From the OSF’s standpoint, electing a Democratic majority in both houses of Congress this year, and then electing a Democratic president in 2028, should be the main priorities for now. Alex Soros’ wife, Huma Abedin, a confidante of Hillary Clinton, might play a key if unofficial role.
The Open Society Foundations is unlikely to embrace nonviolence indefinitely. Its leaders realize that the uncouth street protestors it subsidizes are doing their dirty work. A surge in financial support for these misfits seems more a case of “when” than “if.” Most likely, the Soros network will ramp up donations to them once President Trump leaves office. For now, let the investigations proceed.
Carl F. Horowitz is a NLPC senior fellow.
