Even after an ‘Atlanta Forest Defender’ shot a Georgia state trooper in the stomach and his comrades set off race riots in the city, the leftist group at the center of it all is still fundraising.
This comes months after the leftists threw Molotov cocktails at police and nearly burned an elderly driver to death. Multiple members of the ‘occupation’ have been arrested on domestic terrorism charges. And yet the IRS and Georgia’s Secretary of State have done nothing.
Even Twitter suspended ‘Scenes from the Atlanta Forest’, an account calling for a “Night of Rage” and “reciprocal violence to be done to the police and their allies”, but the IRS has yet to take action to stop the ‘Atlanta Forest Defenders’ from taking in tax-deductible donations.
In Atlanta, small business owners are sweeping away broken glass and police have recovered explosive devices from some of the rioters. Yet the ‘Atlanta Forest Defenders’ are still raising money through Open Collective: a 501(c)(3) nonprofit fundraising platform that Front Page Magazine had previously exposed for providing fundraising for assorted ecoterrorists including the ‘Just Stop Oil’ vandals who glued themselves to ‘The Girl with the Pearl Earring’ painting.
That is despite the fact that Open Collective’s terms of service prohibit illegal activities.
The Open Collective Foundation has received funding for digital infrastructure grants from the Ford Foundation, George Soros’ Open Society and Pierre Omidyar’s Omidyar Network.
Meanwhile ordinary people have been suffering through another wave of leftist terror.
In November, an elderly man passing by the area was attacked. When he stopped his truck, “these people started coming out of the woods in camouflage stuff and blocked me in.”
Then they set the truck on fire.
“It seemed to me like they were going to burn the truck with me in it.”
Nobody’s fundraising for the man who lost his truck and now suffers from a medical condition, but the IRS is continuing to enable this domestic terrorist campaign. In Atlanta, rioters had marched chanting, “If you build it, we will burn it.” The riots show that they mean it.
A previous affidavit for the arrest of Atlanta Forest Defenders describes them as “participating in actions as part of Defend the Atlanta Forest (DTAF), a group classified by the United States Department of Homeland Security as Domestic Violent Extremists”. It went on to describe a variety of crimes including, “throwing molotov cocktails, rocks and fireworks at uniformed police officers; arson of public buildings” and “shooting metal ball bearings at contractors”.
Members of the ‘occupation’ charged with domestic terrorism were ordered not to maintain “contact with Defend Atlanta Forest on social media”. Despite that, neither Georgia nor the IRS, have revisited the legal status of Defend the Atlanta Forest, its fund and its fiscal host.
