Since October 7, 2023, New York City has witnessed over 1,000 protests.
That’s not civic engagement. It’s something entirely new: A permanent protest movement funded by billion-dollar foundations and foreign governments. Much like during 2020, officials look the other way as the rule of law and social norms have dissolved. 2024 brought an alarming normalization of behavior that most New Yorkers would have considered completely unacceptable before the horror show that was the summer of 2020, when Mayor de Blasio told police to stand down for 8 nights of looting and riots.
Just look at the horrific behavior we have normalized post-October 7th.
A vigil for Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah was held in Washington Square Park. Terrorist flags waving in front of the Nova Festival exhibit, just blocks from the 9/11 memorial. Masked protesters stormed Grand Central Station and the Brooklyn Museum. Bridges and tunnels are blocked. Embassies targeted. Call me crazy, but a non-political New Yorker grabbing groceries shouldn’t have to walk through a crowd chanting “Strike, Strike Tel Aviv” in the middle of Union Square, yet here we are.
My gripe, and the point of this article, is that this is not about Israel or Gaza. It’s about the revolution that’s degrading our quality of life for every New Yorker, including those with agnostic views on the Middle East who are just trying to live their lives.
The city’s criminal-justice “reforms,” its tolerance for disruptive demonstrations, and the erosion of public order aren’t isolated. They’re symptoms of something deeper that no public official has yet to address: New York City has been captured by the radical-left activist class.
The roots run through the city’s outsized nonprofit sector. As journalist Armin Rosen notes in Tablet, nonprofits now employ nearly 17% of the city’s private-sector workforce—far above the national 10%. Between 2017 and 2022, nonprofit wage growth outpaced the rest of the private sector, increasing by 29.3% compared to 25.3%.
No surprise, then, that the nonprofits are officially where the real power is, and arguably have more power than our elected officials. The nonprofit sector is the professional home of NYC’s most radical (employed) activists. Our City Council backs them with discretionary funds in exchange for votes, endorsements, and social justice street cred. Yet their main source of funding is the deep pockets of the Open Society Foundations, the Ford Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation—all of which are headquartered here.
These billion-dollar foundations don’t just bankroll protests. They also shape elections. The Working Families Party, the state’s most powerful Dem voter machine, relies on the same billion-dollar philanthropies that fund the permanent protest movement, as well as their lawyers and bail funds. Investigative reporter Sam Antar has highlighted fresh IRS red flags and traced how Open Societies and the Tides Foundation keep the WFP flush with millions.
Follow this same money trail behind elections, and you find the same foundations behind the nonprofits that pushed every major policy shift that’s weakened public safety.
Sanctuary-city policies that limit law-enforcement contact with undocumented immigrants? Make the Road pushed them.
Drug-decriminalization? VOCAL-NY, the Drug Policy Alliance, and OnPointNYC.
Bail reform? Bronx Defenders, the Vera Institute, the Legal Aid Society, and others. All bankrolled by the same handful of progressive-left foundations.
Who do you think put up $1M to back Alvin Bragg on his promises to not prosecute most crimes after his horrific day one memo?
For every single effort that destabilizes public order, the far-left nonprofit sector is front and center. For every tax return, the same 4-5 foundations provide the majority of the cash flow. Even attempts to limit police response to violent protests trace back to the same network.
An estimated 1,132 social-justice nonprofits operate in New York City. According to the Comptroller’s Office and independent sector reporting, they represent roughly 1% of the city’s entire nonprofit workforce—a workforce that itself dominates private employment at around 17%. Integrate these nonprofits with the estimated 10,000 active members of NYC’s Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), and this is how you get hundreds of nonprofits that are influenced and/or controlled by hard-left activists. Who do you think has more power? A nonprofit with $1M in the bank that can do whatever they want every day with no oversight, or the local city council member who has to worry about term limits and being primaried by someone even further left?
This is the real machine running New York, not our elected leaders.
The DSA isn’t just in the process of capturing City Hall; it has already pulled the state’s entire political apparatus from progressive to revolutionary.
And with Attorney General Letitia James—herself a proud progressive and a WFP alum—there’s no interest in course correction. When the watchdogs share ideology with the actors they’re meant to police, the machine will do whatever it wants, which at this moment seems only to want more power.
The real-world result of this machine’s self-interest and lack of respect for the general public can be seen everywhere. A frayed sense of public order. A city that feels less livable. A political class more responsive to professional activists than to ordinary New Yorkers. The subways are filled with mentally ill homeless people, streets hijacked by demonstrations, emboldened criminals, and our local government is both unwilling and uninterested in defending basic civic norms.
This is not a call to muzzle dissent or dismiss the good that some nonprofits do. It is a call for balance, accountability, and order. A healthy civil society certainly needs some advocacy groups, but waving Hezbollah flags in Union Square is certainly not that. NYC also needs elected officials willing to enforce the law, protect public space, and keep billion-dollar foundations from becoming unaccountable shadow governments.
New Yorkers deserve a city where you can walk to Whole Foods without being shouted at by protesters glorifying terrorism. Where public-safety policies actually protect the public.
Where elections are decided by voters, not a syndicate of tax-exempt institutions and permanent activists.
The question is simple. Does NYC have the political courage to break the activist class’s grip? Until we do, the revolution won’t play out at the ballot box. It will play out in our streets, our subways, and in the halls of power.