Left-wing activists funded by Democratic megadonors like Laurene Powell Jobs and George Soros are calling for a "domestic front of resistance" and saying it's "wartime" against the U.S. "empire."
Organizers at the National Black Radical Organizing Conference laid out their vision for revolution at its biennial event last week. Kamau Franklin, the founder of Community Movement Builders, said that "part of our work is to open up a domestic front of resistance … because if the empire is busy battling here, it can't do as much over there."
"We think of ourselves as part of a worldwide revolution," said Franklin, according to video published by Manhattan Institute investigative analyst Stu Smith.
🚨 Community Movement Builders leader calls for a "Domestic Front of Resistance" against the United States, rejects the civil-rights framework, and calls for "Wartime" against the goverment
On a call featuring Kamau Franklin (Community Movement Builders), Erica Caines (Black… pic.twitter.com/d1QaU0eEl0
— Stu Smith (@thestustustudio) January 16, 2026
Laurick Ingram, an organizer with Black Men Build, called on the movement to treat the political landscape as a state of war.
"We're dealing with an empire, we're dealing with wartime," Ingram said. "They understand it's wartime, so our movement should reflect that as well."
While the organizers spouted radical rhetoric and called for socialist revolution, both Community Movement Builders and Black Men Build are funded by prominent mainstream Democratic and center-left organizations.
Powell Jobs, the widow of Apple founder Steve Jobs and owner of the Atlantic, has given $1.5 million through 2024 to Community Movement Builders, the Washington Free Beacon reported. Google cofounder Eric Schmidt donated $783,000 to Franklin's group through 2024, and California gubernatorial candidate Tom Steyer's charity, TomKat Foundation, has contributed $30,000. The New Georgia Project, the voter registration group founded by failed Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams and Sen. Raphael Warnock (D., Ga.), has contributed $50,000 to Community Movement Builders.
Black Men Build, which offers "self-defense" and firearms training for its members, is also funded by a number of prominent philanthropies.
The NBA Foundation, a charity founded by the professional basketball league that aims to "drive economic opportunity in the Black community," donated $600,000 to Black Men Build in 2023. George Soros’s Open Society Foundations gave $1 million to support Black Men Build in 2023 and $100,000 in 2022, according to tax filings.
Community Movement Builders and Black Men Build are two members of the National Black Radical Organizing Conference, held every two years to help organizers "train for the fight" to advance the "movement for Black liberation."
While Franklin did not directly call for violence against the government during the forum, he has condoned political violence before. Last May, Franklin cosigned a letter that hailed Elias Rodriguez, the anti-Israel activist who assassinated two Israeli diplomatic staffers outside the Jewish National Museum in Washington, D.C., as "morally righteous" and "fully justified."
Community Movement Builders, which Franklin founded in 2015, organized a rally in Atlanta on Oct. 7, 2023, the day of Hamas's attack on Israel, in "solidarity with the Palestinian struggle." In November 2023, the group decried "the illegal occupation of Palestine by the so called 'i$raeli' occupation entity," promoting a common anti-Semitic trope about Jewish people and money.
In his remarks at the National Black Radical Organizing Conference, Ingram called for a nationwide celebration of Assata Shakur, the former Black Liberation Army member who murdered New Jersey state trooper Werner Foerster in 1972. Shakur escaped prison in 1979 and fled to Cuba, where she died last year.
"That's a national hero for us," Ingram said of Shakur. "So what does it look like to celebrate a national hero? … She should have parades, she should have a memorial, she should have all of these things. It should have been shut down, everything, all over the U.S. when she passed."
Franklin envisioned domestic and foreign revolutionaries coming together to "destabilize" the American government, to which he referred repeatedly as "the empire." He said foreign organizations should work to "destabilize empire internationally because it should allow us to open up a bigger fissure here within the States to cause problems for the empire."
"So we think of ourselves as part of a worldwide revolution," Franklin said. "Not just organizers, but revolutionaries that are part of a resistance struggle."
But Franklin lamented that leftist revolutionaries are not as en vogue as in prior eras, when the Soviet Union led a socialist bloc that harbored American revolutionaries.
"There's not a lot of friends that we have that can protect us," Franklin said. "There are not a lot of socialist states that have the power, let's say, [that they had] back … when there was actually a left bloc or a socialist bloc. So we are not going to receive a lot of support."
"The propaganda … remains so strong and blinding that in a lot of ways it has impaired us from being able to put forth militant-left radical ideas that are [resonating] with our people," Franklin went on.
Franklin concluded his remarks by teasing plans to protest America's 250th birthday celebration this year.
"People are going to be easily propagandized into believing these ideas that the 250th anniversary of the United States is something to celebrate, as opposed to be disgusted by," he said.
Community Movement Builders and Black Men Build did not respond to requests for comment. None of their donors responded to comment requests.
