Ever since the October 7 attack on Israel, the global Left has—very loudly and publicly—lost their collective minds. Major protests have rocked London, Berlin, and New York repeatedly as pedestrians block city centers. The latest wave of protests, however, taking a cue from the climate alarmist handbook, has seen agitators shutting down highways. They stand in the middle of highways and simply refuse to let traffic proceed.
In Seattle, anti-Israel activists shut down a freeway for over 3 hours, in an eerie echo of the infamous 2020 “Summer of Love” protests after the death of George Floyd, and mirroring the climate activists gluing themselves to roadways. The “Summer of Love” is turning into the “Winter of Hate”—and riot season isn't even here yet.
Seattle officials privately agreed to let the activists snarl traffic unimpeded, forcing police and Coast Guard to stand down. Ambulances full of injured or critically ill people, fire trucks on their way to save lives and homes, or police en route to crime scenes would have been stuck on the road along with everyone else.
In Los Angeles, a riot was declared as agitators for a ceasefire in Israel (read: a de facto Israeli surrender) blocked the road to Los Angeles International Airport (LAX). Officials branded the “protest” an “unlawful assembly” and the protesters were subsequently cleared, but not after travelers were forced from their cars onto the road in desperate, pedestrian efforts to make their flights.
But none of this – none of this – holds a candle to what has happened, and what continues to happen, in New York. Firstly, last Wednesday, travelers to JFK Airport were forced to get out of their cars and walk after protesters blocked the road. Fortunately, as in Los Angeles, arrests were made. Less fortunately, the protesters came back for more.
Agitators blocked not only the East River crossings between Manhattan and Brooklyn as well as the Holland Tunnel connecting New York and New Jersey under the Hudson River. This occurred simultaneously, clearly a coordinated effort. Their intention was to show New Yorkers what it felt like to be “trapped” in Gaza by Israeli forces (even though, as far as we know, none of the protesters gave New Yorkers advance warning or a chance to evacuate, as Israel did).
Many protesters will soon have plenty of occasion to contemplate what it’s like to be arrested for terrorism like their darling Hamas: over 300 were arrested. It's doubtful, however, amid the criminal friendly laws of New York City, complete with the abolition of cash bail, that any of these delinquents will serve jail time. The City of New York has paid out millions to protesters during the George Floyd riots in 2020. LA and Seattle did the same thing.
The lesson is: tantrums pay out. But it's not just the cities that are forking over the cash. The agitators are subsidized by very powerful people. The protesters who blocked the bridges and the Holland Tunnel have demonstrable financial ties to the Ben & Jerry’s Foundation, the Rockefeller family foundation, and to the charitable arm of investment company Charles Schwab. Two of these are unsurprising: Ben & Jerry’s has never found a left-wing cause celebre too half-baked for them. Schwab Charitable, meanwhile, has a track record of funding the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement going back to 2016. But Rockefeller is concerning.
In 2017, Tablet Magazine blew the whistle on the fact that the Rockefeller Brothers Fund (RBF) was funding BDS. At the time. BDS activists took this to be evidence that their movement – once deservingly treated as too fringe and left-wing for respectability – was entering the American mainstream. They could not have known how right they were. However, powerful though RBF is, it is not the same organization as the Rockefeller family foundation.
In 2021, Rockefeller family foundation president Rajiv J. Shah issued a public apology for the foundation’s former role in promoting eugenics research. “Our past does inform our present efforts to bolster humanity with advances in science and technology, and to reimagine the future,” Shah wrote ominously. “We will do everything we can to ensure that future is brighter, more equitable, and more sustainable—for everyone.”
Mere PR boilerplate? Perhaps. But at minimum, what this reveals is that the liberal panic which occurred after Trump’s election permitted fringe left-wing groups like BDS to gain funding from fonts of liberal respectability like the Rockefeller network, and that now those same liberal establishment organizations have been backed into funding “protests” which come perilously close to domestic terrorism, on the part of antisemitic Leftists. At best, this is the fruit of too much willingness to support anyone and everyone who agrees that “Orange Man Bad,” and these foundations should learn from that. It hardly needs saying, but they should pull their funding for the organizations responsible immediately.
These are not merely Leftist agitators like the climate freaks or the George Floyd Covid-crazed anti-racists; they are organized to become an occupying force. While the agitators might believe they are doing this to show the evils of occupation, it is nonetheless troubling that foundations like the Rockefeller family foundation are paying them to develop the capacity to occupy highways in and out of major cities; really, it’s distressing that they’re learning to occupy anything other than their parents’ basements.
We know that it's possible to stop this—we see average citizens pulling agitators off roadways from Italy to Brooklyn—yet we see no effort from leaders to make these kinds of protests that endanger public safety stop. And the movement is only growing. Arrests are happening, and we welcome that, but if prosecutors do not follow through on those arrests, they mean nothing. So if those prosecutors — and all other elected officials — continue to let these disruptive demonstrations happen, weekly, daily, with no repercussions, we must conclude that they want them to happen. We're not conspiracy theorists at Human Events, far from it, but when actions are taken that have specific results, the actors can only be assumed to be undertaking those connected, coordinated, organized actions because the emerging results are the ones they seek.
