When Manolo De Los Santos, the director of The People’s Forum, urged Columbia University protesters to “give Joe Biden a hot summer” and make “the politics of usual untenable to take place in this country,” he had more than $12 million funneled through the charitable arm of Goldman Sachs behind him, according to a recent story in The Washington Free Beacon by Joe Simonson. Mr. Simonson is an experienced political reporter, “alumnus” of the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization (AHI) as one of its undergraduate fellows, and 2015 graduate of Hamilton College.
He writes of the meeting, based on Free Beacon’s access to it via Zoom:
“More than 100 masked and keffiyeh-clad activists convened in the People’s Forum’s Manhattan office [on April 29] to plan their next moves as anti-Israel protests reach a fever pitch across the country. The meeting … was delayed to give protesters from Columbia time to make it downtown.”
“Once the Columbia protesters arrived,” Los Santos “urged the group to ‘give Joe Biden a hot summer’ and ‘make it untenable for the politics of usual to take place in this country.’ Los Santos praised Columbia students for ‘decid[ing] that resistance is more important than negotiations,’ and urged those assembled at the People’s Forum to ‘support our students so that the encampments can go for as long as they can.’”
“Los Santos also ranted about the ‘Zionist’ Columbia administrators who ‘want to be more like their masters in Israel.’”
He also said, Mr. Simonson reports: “The moment the call goes out, we have to go back out,” and “We have to be the bodies willing to stand between the police and our students.”
The meeting included sessions “focused on organizing new methods of ‘resistance’”—and hours later, “activists smashed the windows of Columbia’s Hamilton Hall and barricaded themselves inside.” Los Santos wanted “to re-create the violent protests of ‘the summer of 2020,’” referring to violence in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd.
Mr. Simonson explains that The People’s Forum, a registered charity that describes itself as
“a movement incubator for working class and marginalized communities,” has been, in his words, “a mainstay at anti-Israel protests since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack.” Just a day later, the group “organized a Times Square protest where attendees celebrated Hamas and waved posters with anti-Semitic slogans and imagery.”
The People’s Forum operations “are made possible in large part by a $12 million donation from Goldman Sachs’s charitable arm,” according to the Free Beacon story, published on May 1. Mr. Simonson writes that it probably originated with an American businessman living in China—who reportedly has “‘long admired Maoism.’”
A spokesman for Goldman Sachs, a major global banking and investment firm, commented for the story: “As with any donor advised fund, the prior donation was made with the client’s money, at the client’s direction.”
Mr. Simonson suggests that the radical organization may risk legal exposure:
“Groups like the People’s Forum stand to lose their charity status if they are found to be party to riots and violent protests, experts told the Free Beacon. The IRS’s charity guidelines state that groups may lose their charity status if they engage in ‘planned activities that violate laws’ or ‘induce the commission of crime.’”
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