Rolling anti-ICE rallies set to occur on President Trump’s birthday coincide with an outpouring of anger about mass deportations. At least one of those rallies is being bankrolled by a taxpayer-funded union with an interest in undermining them.
The AFL-CIO, which is the largest federation of unions in the U.S., is the primary sponsor behind the “No Kings” rally set to take place on Saturday, June 14 and will featuring Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as its headliner. Although the left-leaning union is a well-known player in Democratic politics, less appreciated is the flow of federal dollars into its bank account through another entity.
A nongovernmental entity known as the Solidarity Center is a “soft power” diplomatic arm of the federal government, having reported receiving at least $72 million in 2022 and 2023. DataRepublican, who researches the connection between liberal advocacy groups, artificial protests, and the government, was the first to publish the results of his investigation into the NGO’s connection to the AFL-CIO.
A 2022 filing by the union shows an nearly equal amount of funding from the government in 2022: $69 million, compared to just $34 million collected in membership dues, most unions’ primary source of funding. The Solidarity Center on its website bills itself as an “independent, global human rights and democracy organization” unaffiliated with the AFL-CIO’s progressive bent.
Mike Benz, former head of the Foundation For Freedom Online, earlier this year predicted that government funding sent to the Solidarity Center would eventually make its way to the AFL-CIO, a prediction that appears will be realized at Saturday’s rally in St. Paul.
“One of the main things I think is likely to destabilize the U.S…. rent-a-riot, pop-up protests that can completely destabilize a country,” he said in a March interview. “When workers are walking out, they’re blocking the highways, they’re provoking the police, so you’re left with either authoritarian crackdowns or [a] police precinct burns to the ground, as what happened in Minneapolis.”
Benz has previously published research on both liberal and conservative groups, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, that have relied on rentable street protestors in recent years, including during the 2020 elections. He cites work by the National Endowment for Democracy — a CIA cutout which houses the Solidarity Center — and its attempt to foment artificial protests in Belarus against the conservative president Aleksandr Lukashenko.
“Bluntly: AFL-CIO is one of the key taxpayer-funded organizations in effecting regime change all over the world,” DataRepublican wrote in summary in a lengthy thread on X. “That AFL-CIO is openly involved in sponsoring the No Kings rally should raise extreme concerns as to the rally’s true purpose.”
Other groups aligned with the Democratic Party have been found to be behind some of the protests in Los Angeles, which later turned violent.
On Tuesday, U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) sent a letter to an L.A.-based group that received tens of millions of dollars from the Biden administration for immigrant resettlement and has been organizing some of the protests in the city.
In the U.S. House, Nancy Mace (R-NC) has introduced legislation that would choke off federal funding to sanctuary cities and states that refuse help from the federal government to quell violent protests like those seen this week, as well as during the 2020 riots following the death of George Floyd.
