Promoting revolution never goes out of business, and lately, business is booming.

Activists in the revolutionary ecosystem that organize street mayhem are veering sharply from anti-deportation actions to pro-Iran ones. They may have to swap in flags of the Islamic Republic for the Mexican ones they’ve been waving in Los Angeles, or the Hamas ones they waved earlier, but so be it.

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Unless, that is, the ceasefire that President Donald Trump announced late Monday sticks. In that case, the organizations in the ecosystem will move on to the next crisis, manufactured or not, that offers an opportunity to tear down society.

Who are these organizations lining up behind Iran’s theocracy? Some are committed to the anti-Israel cause, sort of a raison d’être for the Tehran regime at this point. But many others are secular, Marxist organizations that just want the destruction of the West in general.

The Party for Socialism and Liberation; the Act Now to Stop War and End Racism Coalition; Black Lives Matter groups, especially the LA and Grassroots branches, the most radical BLM groups now; Code Pink: Women for Peace; Students for Justice in Palestine, the most active of the activist organizations in last year’s campus encampments; the Palestinian Youth Movement; Samidoun: Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network; Al-Awda: The Palestinian Right to Return Coalition; etc., have all sharply swung to defend Iran.

This is only rank opportunism. Last week, these same groups were protesting Immigration and Customs Enforcement actions in Los Angeles and other cities, where they brandished Mexican flags while carrying out violent attacks, to the point that Trump had to federalize the California National Guard and send in Marines.

Prior to that, these same groups were busy organizing pro-Hamas riots on U.S. streets and campuses. And before that, they were part of the tightly knit network that supported the BLM riots that rocked our streets in 2020 after George Floyd’s death, and before that, Ferguson, Missouri, after Michael Brown’s death, and every year in between.

And, of course, before that, they were involved in the Occupy Wall Street movement, protests against former President George W. Bush’s Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and the 1999 anti-globalization Seattle riots. In fact, some of these organizations are fiscally sponsored or funded by remnants of the Nicaragua Network, which opposed President Ronald Reagan’s efforts to keep Central America free of malign Cuban and Soviet influence.

That’s close to half a century ago, folks.

Take Samidoun, one of the groups condemning “in the strongest terms the Zionist aggression against the Islamic Republic of Iran.” It is at the center of an intricate web that illustrates the interconnectedness of the revolutionary ecosystem.

Western intelligence agencies have identified Samidoun as a front for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The PFLP is a secular terrorist group described as “pan-Arab” and “Marxist-Leninist” — not the Mullahs’ cup of tea, one would think.

But the Iranian regime, bereft of real friends and allies in the region and the world, has long relied on terrorist proxies such as Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and the PFLP. Now that Iran’s last client state, Bashar al Assad’s government, has fallen, Syria’s new leaders have recently expelled the PFLP leader from the country.

In the West, Samidoun’s “leadership has declared solidarity with a variety of far-left causes worldwide, including militant Black and Native American activism in the United States,” according to Influence Watch.

It was incredibly active in the campus encampments that interrupted university life last year. The Wall Street Journal reported that Samidoun held “Resistance 101” virtual training for Columbia University students in March 2024. Samidoun coordinator Charlotte Kates addressed the students, as did her husband, PFLP Central Committee member Khaled Barakat.

Samidoun, recognized as a terrorist organization in this country, came to Iran’s defense on the same day that Israel launched Operation Rising Lion and started bombing military targets in Iran. It said in a statement that “Iran is being targeted today because it stands with Palestine and the Resistance.”

Added Samidoun: “The moment requires clear and explicit solidarity and action to confront the Zionist-imperialist war machine.”

Samidoun’s members have been instigating action. U.S.-based law professor Helyeh Doutaghi, fired by Yale Law School in March for belonging to Samidoun, has been calling for Iran to target U.S. military bases in the Middle East, and “any state that enables aggression by allowing its airspace or territory to be used for attacks against Iran.”

Doutaghi is deeply enmeshed in the ecosystem, having been co-chairwoman of the self-styled International People’s Tribunal on US Imperialism: Sanctions, Blockades, and Economic Coercive Measures.

Other members of the “Tribunal” belonged to the Communist Party of Kenya, the ANSWER Coalition, and The People’s Forum. The last two are part of a network funded by an American millionaire who lives in Shanghai and has connections to the Chinese Communist Party.

Zohran Mamdani, another activist embedded in this ecosystem, just won the New York City Democratic Party primary for mayor. Mamdani cofounded Bowdoin College’s chapter of SJP, while his father, Mahmood, delivered the keynote address for the organization’s first national conference in 2011, at Columbia University, where he teaches.

Samidoun itself is fiscally sponsored by the Alliance for Global Justice, which Mary Mobley and I called “the very embodiment of the ecosystem” in a Heritage Foundation paper last year.

AFGJ is the funnel through which funders such as the Tides Foundation, George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, the Arca Foundation, the Surdna Foundation, and the Brightwater Fund — all of which also fund BLM — send money to radical activists and fund BLM.

Also a fiscal sponsor of BLM’s Movement for Black Lives, AFGJ “is so Marxist that it started out life in the 1980s in Managua under the rule of the Sandinistas, calling itself the Nicaragua Network back then,” we wrote.

GLOBALIZING THE INTIFADA IS BECOMING A LITMUS TEST ISSUE IN DEMOCRATIC PRIMARIES

AFGJ’s leaders wrote, “The Sandinistas always told the Nicaragua Network, ‘What you can do to most help us is to change your own government.’ We took that instruction to heart.”

This goes a long way to explain why groups hop from one cause to the next — this month Gaza, next ICE raids, next Iran. As the late David Horowitz used to say, in the 1960s, the slogan was, “The issue is never the issue; the issue is the revolution.”

Mike Gonzalez is the Angeles T. Arredondo senior fellow on E Pluribus Unum at the Heritage Foundation and the author of NextGen Marxism: What It Is and How to Combat It. Heritage is listed for identification purposes only. The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect any institutional position for Heritage or its board of trustees.