US Secretary of State Marco Rubio told senior ministers from more than 60 countries that left-wing political violence by groups like Antifa was the result of a “unique evil rooted in a deep resentment towards civilization.”
Rubio told ministers that threat from Islamic militancy was “severely diminished” because of international cooperation, but that rising left-wing violence was still a “blind spot.”
“This is a distinctive and unique evil. It has always been driven by a hatred above all else, a hatred for civilization itself,” Rubio told the assembled leaders. “It is a revolt of the worst against the best, a revolt of the weak and the cowardly against the strong and the good. It is perpetrated by those who cannot build, who cannot create, who cannot achieve great things, and take their revenge upon the world for their own inadequacy by seeking to destroy those who can.”
Commenting on Rubio’s efforts, GAI’s Seamus Bruner told The Daily Wire, “Secretary Rubio ran through all these foreign countries that are funding these Antifa groups overseas. There is a foreign terror connection. In some forms, this is state-sponsored terrorism. And it’s a great thing to see the administration taking it so seriously.”
At a White House roundtable last September, Bruner presented President Trump, Rubio, and both the Attorney General and the Director of the FBI with GAI’s report on the funding sources for Antifa and other sometimes violent protest organizations in the US. “Riot, Incorporated,” GAI’s report detailed money transfers from large philanthropies such as the Tides and Gates foundations, George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, and dark money funneled through the Arabella funding network supporting violent agitators who stirred protest in American cities against immigration enforcement by ICE.
Bruner explained the international connections to the Daily Wire’s Cabot Phillips.
“You’ve got Antifa and Antifa-adjacent groups all across Europe, in Italy, Greece and other countries,” he said. “They have names like ‘Antifa,’ or names similar to that. They call themselves ‘anti-fascists,’ but they’re really communists. And, as Secretary Rubio said, they just want to destroy things.”
“We call it Riot Inc., the protest industrial complex,” Bruner said.
Bruner walked through GAI’s continuing research into the money trail, naming the Beijing-based American billionaire Neville Roy Singham as having funneled $278 million into this network. Swiss billionaire Hansjorg Wyss has put in more than $200 million, Bruner said. “They fund the legal groups — the National Lawyers Guild and the ACLU – who get [the rioters] back onto the streets even after they assault law enforcement.”
On Friday morning, CBS News reported that Singham is under criminal investigation by a grand jury in the Southern District of New York, according to multiple sources with knowledge of the matter.
Phillips asks: “Why designate groups like Antifa as not just domestic terror groups, but foreign terror groups?”
A lot of people have valid concerns about designating a group as a ‘domestic terror group,’” Bruner said, because it can be misused to criminalize dissent. “In the case of Antifa, we know that that’s an actual extremist group. A cell [12 defendants who were all members of Antifa] in North Texas was just convicted to a total of 450 years in prison for targeting ICE officers and trying to assassinate them,” he said. “We’ve had so much violence at the hands of Antifa across the country, in Minnesota and recently in Newark.”
But he noted that Rubio’s effort to enlist other countries in designating Antifa an international terrorist group “brings in all kinds of intelligence-gathering tools, and brings in the Treasury Department,” which is critical to follow the money here,” Bruner told Phillips. “Treasury Secretary Bessent has been phenomenal on this issue of mapping the money flows to groups overseas, from Cuba and Iran.” He explained the types of funding mechanisms that Treasury will be investigating.
“A lot of this is dark money, a lot of this is in cash,” Bruner said, mentioning apps such as Venmo and Cash App. “There’s a whole network of what’s called ‘mutual aid’ that is the main way the Antifa funds itself, through these kind of cash app cryptocurrency exchanges. They actually have their own version of ‘GiveSendGo’ or ‘GoFundMe’ equivalent called ‘Open Collective,’ he explained.
“We found groups like Soros, the Tides Foundation, the Arabella funding network created the infrastructure for these ‘Open Collective’ mutual aid funding mechanisms for Antifa,” Bruner said. “We leave it up to law enforcement to determine whether that’s a crime. I’m sure the Soros and Tides foundations have got the best lawyers to make sure that it’s not. But sunlight is the best disinfectant.”
