There is a scene that has repeated itself across the Western world in recent years, with the choreographed reliability of a well-rehearsed play. The banners appear overnight. The chants are co-ordinated. The social media amplification is immediate and professional. And the television cameras, almost as if summoned, arrive before the crowd has fully assembled. What looks like the spontaneous eruption of civic conscience turns out, on closer inspection, to be something rather more organised.

What Happened in Minnesota

In January 2026, the city of Minneapolis became the epicentre of the most significant anti-government demonstrations the United States had seen in years. Federal immigration enforcement under Operation Metro Surge had expanded ICE operations across Minnesota, and within days tens of thousands of people were in the streets in subzero temperatures, businesses were closing in solidarity, and student unions and labour organisations were calling for what some described as a general strike.

On its face, it looked like a city rising up. The sort of thing you read about in history books, when ordinary people are moved by conscience to extraordinary action.

But look a little closer.

The demonstrations were not, in any meaningful sense, spontaneous.

The New York Post reported that the organising infrastructure traced back to a series of well-funded nonprofits, some with connections to international donors including networks linked to China.

The Neville Roy Singham network, which funds the People’s Forum and the Party for Socialism and Liberation, was active in promoting the protests. The Indivisible Project, which received millions from George Soros’s Open Society Foundations between 2018 and 2023, provided critical organisational backbone through its local branch, Indivisible Twin Cities. Senator Josh Hawley wrote to the Attorney General urging a full investigation, noting the “geographic simultaneity, messaging uniformity, and logistical sophistication” of the operations, which he described as “strongly suggestive of centralised planning and financing inconsistent with lawful domestic advocacy.”

Capital Research Center, which tracks nonprofit spending, found that the ecosystem of groups participating in the anti-ICE movement and associated “No Kings” protests had most recent annual revenues exceeding 425 million dollars. These are not grassroots organisations in any conventional sense of the term. They are professional advocacy enterprises sustained by major foundations, including the Ford Foundation and the Tides Foundation. They maintain rapid-response hotlines. They retain communications staff. They rotate seamlessly from one cause to the next, whether immigration enforcement, climate activism or anti-Israel protest, pivoting with the confident efficiency of a well-run corporation.​

Scott Walter of Capital Research put it plainly: what is new is not the money, but the coalitions. “Truly extreme Communist splinter groups” are now appearing alongside mainstream institutions like the American Federation of Teachers and the Ford Foundation, in a way that would previously have been thought impossible, even undesirable, by those involved.​

The Machinery of Moral Urgency

There is something in this that ought to disturb people who care about democracy, regardless of where they sit on the political spectrum.

Democracy requires authentic public sentiment. It requires that the weight of opinion in the streets roughly reflects the weight of opinion in the community. When protest is manufactured, when it is professionally choreographed and donor-funded rather than genuinely felt, it corrupts that signal. It tells politicians and editors and business leaders that the public is angrier, or more unified on a cause, than it actually is.

This is not a counsel against protest. Protest is among the most honourable of traditions. There are moments in history when ordinary people, acting on genuine conscience, have changed the world. The American civil rights movement was not funded by foundations. It was funded by the courage of people who had nothing left to lose. That is what authentic protest looks like, and it commands a respect that manufactured outrage cannot.

What is being described here is something different. It is the professionalisation of dissent. The industrialisation of moral urgency. The creation of a product that looks like civic engagement but functions more like political advertising, paid for by people with agendas and operationalised by people with salaries.

Peggy Noonan, writing in The Wall Street Journal about ICE workplace raids in 2025, captured the essence of the dilemma with characteristic clarity, arguing that hard-liners and agitators alike risk losing the American public if they push enforcement or resistance beyond what ordinary people actually feel. The authentic centre of public opinion is always the place that organised activism, whether of the left or the right, is least interested in representing.​

Australia Is Not Immune

Australians are inclined to view American political dysfunction as a kind of spectator sport, something happening on the other side of the Pacific that reflects uniquely American pathologies.

This is a comfortable delusion.

The same infrastructure exists here, albeit in forms suited to Australian conditions. GetUp, established in 2005, has raised millions from donors and positioned itself as a grassroots progressive movement while operating with the sophistication of a professional lobbying organisation.

It has received foreign donations, including from international progressive networks.

It campaigns on climate, refugee policy and electoral outcomes in marginal seats, presenting these positions as the authentic voice of “everyday Australians” while pursuing an explicitly political agenda funded through structures designed to limit transparency.

In 2024 and 2025, continuous protests outside the offices of Immigration Minister Tony Burke in Punchbowl and in Melbourne ran for more than 100 days, calling for permanent visas for temporary protection visa holders.

These were partly genuine movements, involving people living genuinely precarious lives after more than a decade in limbo under a broken fast-track process. Their grievances were real.

But the organisational ecosystem surrounding those protests, including the Human Rights Law Centre and the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre, operates on philanthropic funding and maintains extensive communications infrastructure. The authentic suffering of individuals is real. The machinery that frames it, amplifies it and directs it toward specific political outcomes is not organic.​

Meanwhile, Australia’s environmental movement has demonstrated the same capacity to mobilise professional protest infrastructure around corporate and policy targets. When the Albanese government sealed a deal with the Greens to pass EPBC reform, it was the culmination of years of sustained activist pressure, coordinated by organisations with legal teams, public relations professionals and international connections, while corporate Australia, as has been noted in these pages before, was still lobbying like it was the 1990s.​

Dark money flows to Teal candidates through the Australia Institute and the Sunrise Foundation mechanisms that obscure donor identity. The phenomenon is not unique to the progressive left. But it is worth being clear: what is being described is an industry, not a movement.

And in Australia almost all of it is on the Left.

What This Does to Democratic Life

The important question is not which side is doing it. The important question is what the normalisation of industrialised protest does to the quality of democratic life.

When ordinary people see demonstrations that purport to represent broad community sentiment and later discover that the logistics were funded by offshore billionaires, the effect is not indifference. It is cynicism. A deep, corroding cynicism about whether any of it is real. Whether any expressed public position is authentic. Whether democracy itself is functioning as described.

This is the real cost. Not any particular policy outcome. Not any individual organisation’s agenda. The cost is the slow erosion of the public’s faith that the signals sent through democratic participation mean what they appear to mean.

There is, in this, something that a thoughtful Menzies Liberal should recognise and name. Robert Menzies built his political philosophy on a belief in the “forgotten people,” the great mass of ordinary Australians who went about their lives, worked hard, paid their taxes and asked only that their institutions function honestly on their behalf. His concern was not primarily with the powerful, but with the integrity of the space in which ordinary Australians exercised their citizenship.

The protest industrial complex is a threat to that space. It is a mechanism by which well-resourced actors on every side capture the appearance of public sentiment and use it as a political instrument. The forgotten people, as ever, are the ones left carrying the cost.

A Note on the Legitimate and the Manufactured

None of this is to say that every protest is manufactured.

None of this is to say that immigration enforcement in the United States is above criticism, or that Australia’s treatment of temporary protection visa holders is without fault.

Reasonable people hold strong views on both matters.

The argument here is narrower and more specific. It is that the apparatus which has grown up around legitimate grievances, the foundations, the nonprofits, the rapid-response networks, the professionally coordinated messaging, has become so large and so powerful that it now shapes public perception in ways that are not always connected to the underlying reality of public opinion.

When Senator Hawley notes that protest operations reflect “centralised planning and financing inconsistent with lawful domestic advocacy,” he is identifying something real, regardless of what one thinks of his politics.

When Capital Research documents that 35 nonprofits connected to the anti-ICE movement have combined annual revenues exceeding 425 million dollars, when the Sunrise Foundation accepted nearly double that in the last three years, that is a fact about power, not about justice.

Power, wherever it resides, deserves scrutiny. This is especially true when it wears the clothing of the powerless.

The first obligation of honest public discourse is to see things as they are. The second is to say so.