After a closed-door briefing with President Donald Trump, researcher Seamus Bruner stepped into the light with something deeply unsettling to tell the country: the protests shaking America’s streets aren’t spontaneous at all — they’re subsidized.
Bruner, Director of Research at the Government Accountability Institute, sat down with Iowa Politics to outline what he calls the “Protest Industrial Complex” — a web of professional activists, nonprofit intermediaries, and political operatives bankrolled by the same billionaire class that claims to hate capitalism.
His report traces public grants and federal reimbursements that, through a tangle of NGOs and shell charities, end up underwriting street actions that often turn violent. What looks like populist outrage is, in truth, an enterprise — funded, staffed, and sustained by America’s ruling class.
Bruner explains how the Department of Justice and Treasury investigators could use RICO statutes to pursue the money trail, identifying the financial enablers behind political unrest. “When billionaires bankroll chaos, and nonprofits launder the cause, that’s not civic engagement,” he said. “That’s organized corruption.”
The implications are profound. In Bruner’s telling, this isn’t a movement born of anger — it’s a business model built on it.
The mobs were never organic. They were organized.
Listen to the clip above.
