What Karlyn Borysenko Gets Wrong
Last month, an article published here highlighted the work of Karlyn Borysenko. This is a woman who has a unique voice and is not afraid to use it, including praising her own work. Most of that work is valuable, but there are things she gets wrong, starting with the funding of extreme left communist and so-called anti-fascist groups, Antifa in particular.
Karlyn says they are funded mostly through mutual aid – book sales, on-line fund-raising and small donations from their members. While this does happen, she decries or even ridicules the claim that George Soros and the like fund them. This claim is verifiably false, they are so funded, but the sources of funding are disguised and for the most part indirect.
One major donor to left wing and violent causes is the Tides Foundation, which according to its website currently has assets of $875 million. Part of their blurb reads “Through our social justice-focused tools and partnerships, we build connections and move resources to the tenacious leaders fighting for justice on the ground”.
The phrase “social justice” means socialism. And fighting for justice on the ground means? Clearly no tax-exempt foundation can openly advocate violence, but to “radical” groups, fighting on the ground means literally fighting – fighting the police, usually, and trashing the neighbourhood – think the Summer of 2020 and the riots that followed the death of a certain small time criminal and drug addict in Minneapolis.
The National Lawyers Guild is another organisation that supports Antifa, this time directly. They are the men and women in green hats at the sites of demonstrations who donate their services pro bono, but who pays them? This is not to say that all their work or even most of it is on behalf of those who would destroy our way of life, but this is another channel of support.
Karlyn’s claim that Antifa is decentralised and has no leaders is also not entirely true, although this is what the movement would like you to think. Many movements are decentralised; the Catholic Church isn’t, but many branches of Christianity and other religions have no formal structure and do not always see eye to eye, the same can be said of the so-called anti-fascist movement. In any case, every movement, every organisation or club however small or innocuous always has a leader or committee making its important decisions.
Antifa has an official handbook, published in 2017. Its author is Mark Bray, an accredited academic. Bray is one of the leading Antifa supporters who has fled the country since the Trump Administration branded it a terrorist organisation. You can expect many more to follow.
What is true of Antifa is also true of many socialist/communist groups. A major source of their funding was US A.I.D. This was gutted by Donald Trump and Elon Musk earlier this year. A general observation may be made of many non-profits, NGOs and even government sources of funding on both sides of the Atlantic is that for the most part they appear to be staffed by leftists or people who are sympathetic to left wing causes, everything from violent street activity to the promotion of sexual perversion and the corruption of the young. This is something that can be traced back decades.
There are conspiratorial explanations for this but a simpler one is that foundations in particular are started by extremely wealthy people and staffed initially by people who share their Weltanschauung but over time, leftists are appointed to their boards or infiltrate them and purge non-leftists. If you are not familiar with the way extreme leftists in general work, listen to or read The Evolution Of No-Platform.
There are other things Karlyn gets wrong, the claim for example that communists want to abolish prisons. One of the things Black Lives Matter claims to campaign for is prison abolition. Have they called for the falsely convicted Derek Chauvin? Of course not. They and other communists don’t want to abolish prisons, they simply want to rename them re-education camps.