Maybe the most important lesson we learned in 2025 from Data (small-r) Republican's efforts was that the Left's "grassroots" efforts are funded by a tangled web of NGOs siphoning your tax dollars, but what if I told you that there is an actual grassroots anarchist organization helping organize the insurrection in Minnesota?
"Anarchist organization."
Heh.
But I digress.
Doing some excellent amateur journalism this week — and stick a pin in that thought because I'll come back around to it shortly — X user Kristen Mag dug deep into CrimethInc (get it?), a "private-donor funded site with a known history of fueling extreme activism." The group "clearly state[s] that the goal of these anti-ICE Signal groups is to increase confrontation and coordination in order to facilitate illegal harassment and obstruction of ICE agents."
More:
Counter-surveillance has long been a critical element of their mission. Protesters and observers meticulously stalk and record ICE agents’ vehicles while maintaining a comprehensive searchable database of license plates.
This database is actively weaponized to target and illegally harass federal agents.
Mag found it "incredibly unsettling to see this extremist site aggressively promote ‘infectious courage’ while discouraging ‘overcautiousness," all while "praising protesters who ‘use their bodies’ and violently attack federal agents."
You can read more at the CrimethInc website, including its guide to "Rapid Response Networks in the Twin Cities."
Each chunk of the city (Southside, Uptown, Whittier, and so on) has rotating shifts of dispatchers, who admin a running Signal call throughout operational hours. Sometimes, multiple dispatchers overlap to split up the extra tasks of watching the chat, relaying reports to other channels, and checking license plates. Dispatch also helps people evenly distribute patrols across an area, takes notes, and assists people through confrontations. All patrollers in cars and on foot and stay on the call throughout their patrol. There is a constant flow of information, allowing other cars to decide whether they are well-positioned to join in, take over tailing the car, or continue searching for additional vehicles.
Independent journalist and longtime Antifa foe Andy Ngo described CrimethInc as "an online 'collective' for Antifa," calling them "extremely dedicated anarchist revolutionaries."
"They are heavily involved in any far-left insurrection in the U.S.," Ngo continued, "mostly through creating guides and reports for organizers to use. They usually stay just out of criminality by guiding others to the violence."
Cowards.
Anti-ICE surveillance and "resistance" is well-organized, but in CrimethInc's case, doesn't need to be well-funded.
I did a little digging myself, including at DataRepublican.com, and found no evidence that CrimethInc receives grant money from any of the usual foundations, no corporate sponsors, no investment income (so presumably no large sums tucked away), and no government or NGO funding.
CrimethInc appears to be genuinely grassroots. It also appears to be small and mostly informal. There's a small publishing nucleus — materials like their To Change Everything anarchist's guide — surrounded by a larger, loose, decentralized ecosystem of contributors and adopters. Their conferences, according to GPT, sometimes attract between 200 and 300 attendees.
What's maybe most interesting to readers is that while CrimethInc is genuinely grassroots, they don't exactly indulge in any transparency. Everything you've read about them here is basically everything I could find.
What interests me the most is that it's yet another citizen-journalist with the scoop. When was the last time a major news organization broke a yuge story, bigly? Sure, the bigs can sic a bunch of big-name byline reporters on a story, and dig up eyewitness accounts or those gem anecdotes you might not find anywhere else. But when was the last time they exposed something like CrimethInc, or performed a real public service like Data Republican's ever-growing database?
It seems like forever ago, maybe never. Now our so-called professional journalists just run cover for anarchists and communists.
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