Posted on Thursday, April 3, 2025

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by Outside Contributor

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California under Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom has funneled around $18 million to the Tides Center, a dark money nonprofit that directs donor cash to various leftist projects, The Washington Free Beacon reported.

The San Francisco-based Tides Center and its sister nonprofits, the Tides Foundation and Tides Advocacy, direct money to in-house projects known as “fiscal sponsorships,” alongside separate nonprofit entities. This enables Tides to cloak which projects receive the money. The Golden State’s spending database shows that 18 agencies sent payments to the Tides Center, but the database does not reveal which projects received the money, the Free Beacon reported.

California officials told the Free Beacon that the database is missing information from some departments, meaning total payments to the Tides Center likely add up to more than $18 million.

A dozen state agencies either did not respond or told the Free Beacon that they couldn’t easily find records demonstrating exactly which program received the money in question. Six agencies, however, told the outlet exactly where the money went. Those six awarded only $4 million of the nearly $18 million—merely 22% of the money the Newsom administration sent to Tides.

For example, the California Air Regulatory Board gave the Tides Center $100,000 in a “community air grant” for “financial assistance.” An agency spokeswoman told the Free Beacon that the grant actually went to one of the Tides Center’s sponsored projects, the Oakland-based Hope Collaborative. The sponsored project says it works to “advance racial, economic, and health equity in Oakland’s food system.”

As governor, Newsom has raised more than $1 million for the Tides Center and more than $11 million for the Tides Foundation, the Free Beacon previously reported.

As I noted in my book, “The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government,” the Tides Center and its sister nonprofits form part of the Left’s dark money network, which funds the woke nonprofits that infiltrated and advised the federal government in the Biden administration, using the bureaucracy to force their ideology on the American people through regulations.

The Tides Foundation, Tides Advocacy, or the Tides Center have funded:

• the Center for American Progress (which fed more than 60 officials into the Biden administration, pushing both open borders and climate funding)
• the Natural Resources Defense Fund and the Sierra Club (which pushed a crackdown on oil and gas)
• the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the Southern Poverty Law Center (which pushed the weaponization of federal law enforcement agencies against conservatives)
• the American Civil Liberties Union (which pushed open borders in the Biden administration and is now suing to block President Donald Trump’s border policies)

The Tides Center launched an organization, Palestine Legal, that represents anti-Israel rioters in court and gives them legal advice. A Palestine Legal senior attorney told a leftist magazine in January that the group has “represented or advised hundreds of students” since Oct. 7, 2023.

The Tides Foundation and Tides Advocacy have together funneled more than $3 million to the Indivisible Project, which published guidance on how activists should protest Elon Musk and Tesla.

The Hungarian-American billionaire George Soros—who has funded nearly every leftist cause you’ve ever heard of—has also contributed to Tides.

Newsom, who appears to be mulling a run for president in 2028, has recently acknowledged the unfairness of males who claim to identify as transgender competing in women’s sports, though he has not championed any policy changes to address this concern.

Tyler O’Neil is senior editor at The Daily Signal and the author of two books: “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center,” and “The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government.”

Reprinted with Permission from The Daily Signal – By Tyler O’Neil

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of AMAC or AMAC Action.