SEATTLE (NewsNation) — A report from two conservative think tanks alleges that members of antifa, the decentralized antifascist movement, have embedded themselves within the homeless industrial complex and not only in Seattle’s homeless services sector.
NewsNation came to Seattle to investigate and found evidence supporting the report’s claims, with activists confronting volunteers and disrupting encampment cleanup efforts.
The report, presented to President Donald Trump in early October by the Capital Research Center and Discovery Institute, claims militant activists intentionally disrupt homeless encampment clearances and perpetuate street disorder to advance antigovernment objectives.
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Jonathan Choe, a researcher with the Discovery Institute who contributed to the report, told NewsNation the homeless crisis is a vehicle for political destabilization. “They want to take advantage of that chaos and move in and cause even more havoc and mayhem to destabilize the current system,” Choe said.
“It’s the same faction of people who link up and protest and do the black bloc, and they’re often the same people we see working inside social services, either as mutual aid or also employed there in the large nonprofits,” Andrea Suarez told NewsNation.
Suarez, a Seattle Democrat who founded the volunteer organization “We Heart Seattle” to clean parks and encampments, said she has faced physical confrontations while doing cleanup work. “I’ve been attacked, my staff has been attacked, we’ve been pushed into traffic,” Suarez said.
“They’re like territorial over the homeless. They don’t want people to actually get help,” Suarez said. “They don’t want the city cleaned. Who in their right mind would come after a middle-aged woman for picking up trash?”
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Suarez said some individuals participate in both protest activities and work within social services organizations.
She cited a flier titled “Plot Twist” that stated activists were shifting from property destruction to feeding homeless individuals and organizing mutual aid to “prove police obsolete.” The flier described creating “a world based on compassion and mutual aid” while warning that windows would still be broken at businesses deemed racist or those involved in homeless encampment removals.
Mike Solan, president of the Seattle Police Officers Guild and a 26-year department veteran, said connections between activist groups and homeless advocacy organizations are evident. In 2020, the police union building was firebombed during civil unrest.
“The connection between the homeless industrial complex and the tie-in to antifa, it’s there, clear as day,” Solan said. “People that align themselves with socialist political ideology are the ones that are causing a lot of the energy around the anti-police, pro-homeless agenda, that aren’t interested in solving the problem.”
Multiple major nonprofit organizations providing homeless services in Seattle did not respond to requests for comment.
The Trump administration designated antifa as a terrorist organization last month. The movement has no publicly known central leadership structure, though smaller groups identify as antifascist and organize protests.
