With Matt Drudge’s recent revelation that John Kerry is as faithful to his second wife as he was to his old Vietnam “brothers,” the senator’s presidential campaign may depend more than ever on the actions of his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry. While the mainstream media has thus far overlooked the alleged infidelity, media outlets have also overlooked a far more important story: The former Mrs. John Heinz is also in bed – financially – with the radical Left.

Teresa Heinz Kerry has financed the secretive Tides Foundation to the tune of more than $4 million over the years. The Tides Foundation, a “charity” established in 1976 by antiwar leftist activist Drummond Pike, distributes millions of dollars in grants every year to political organizations advocating far-Left causes. The Tides Foundation and its closely allied Tides Center, which was spun off from the Foundation in 1996 but run by Drummond Pike, distributed nearly $66 million in grants in 2002 alone. In all, Tides has distributed more than $300 million for the Left. These funds went to rabid antiwar demonstrators, anti-trade demonstrators, domestic Islamist organizations, pro-terrorists legal groups, environmentalists, abortion partisans, extremist homosexual activists and open borders advocates.

During the years 1995-2001, the Howard Heinz Endowment, which Heinz Kerry chairs, gave Tides more than $4.3 million. The combined Heinz Endowments (composed of the Howard Heinz Endowment and the Vira I. Heinz Endowment, with net assets of more than $1 billion in 2001) donated $1.6 million to establish the Tides Center for Western Pennsylvania, a Pittsburgh office of the San Francisco-based Tides Center. Since that time, the local branch has tirelessly pushed an anti-business agenda in the name of “preserving the environment.” However, it is the Tides Foundation’s national organization whose connections are most disconcerting.

The Tides Foundation is a major source of revenue for some of the most extreme groups on the Left. Tides allows donors to anonymously contribute money to a host of causes; the donor simply makes the check out to Tides and instructs the Foundation where to forward the money. Tides does so, for a nominal fee. And who are the beneficiaries of this money?

The Antiwar Movement

Senator John F. Kerry has gone far with his, err, highly nuanced view of Operation Iraqi Freedom. He voted for the war resolution but specified a litany of conditions the Bush administration must meet before he would support combat, then proceeded to vote against funding troops already in harm’s way – then claimed he had always supported the president when Saddam Hussein was captured. The grant recipients of the Tides Foundation, to which Kerry’s wife has steered more than $4 billion in “charitable” funds, understand no such nuance.

Tides established the Iraq Peace Fund and the Peace Strategies Fund to fund the antiwar movement. These projects funded such hysterical protest organizations as MoveOn.org, the website that recently featured two separate commercials portraying George W. Bush as Adolf Hitler. (Howard Dean, not Kerry, won MoveOn.org’s “virtual primary.”)

The antiwar movement often boasted that MoveOn.org and Indymedia provided them “alternate media coverage” from a leftist perspective. Indymedia, an enormous news and events bulletin board with local pages in most of the world’s major cities, provided a vital link for activists to coordinate their activities. Indymedia received $376,000 from the Tides Foundation.

The Institute for Global Communications is another leftists communications facilitator that received Tides grant money. IGC, which during the 1990s was the leading provider of web technology to the radical Left, links to “recommended sites” such as the War Resisters League (a group whose purpose is enabling peaceniks to refuse to pay taxes) and the leftist American Friends Service Committee. Most disturbing is the link to Ramsey Clark’s International Action Center, which has supported Slobodan Milosevic and North Korean strongman Kim Jong-Il. The IAC is the force behind International ANSWER, which sponsored the major antiwar (and anti-Bush) rallies before the invasion of Iraq. Once ANSWER was outed as a radical organization, organization of the rallies was given to the newly founded United for Peace and Justice, headed by longtime Communist Party member Leslie Cagan. UFPJ is also a Tides grant recipient.The Tides-funded “A Better Way Project,” which opposed war in Iraq, also coordinated efforts of United for Peace and Justice and the Win Without War Coalition. The celebrity-laden Win Without War Coalition, along with the Bill Moyers-funded Florence and John Schumann Foundation, ran full-page ads in the New York Times opposing the War on Terrorism. This will not be the last overlapping of far-Left causes.

The Islamist Front

Immediately after 9/11, Tides formed a “9/11 Fund” to advocate a “peaceful national response” to the opening salvos of war. Part of the half-million dollars in grants the 9/11 Fund dispersed went to the New York Gay and Lesbian Anti-Violence Project to protect the rights of homosexual Arabs. The Foundation replaced the 9/11 Fund with the “Democratic Justice Fund,” which was established with the aid of George Soros’ Open Society Institute. (Currency speculator and pro-drug advocate Soros is, like Teresa Heinz Kerry, a major contributor to Tides, having donated more than $7 million.) The Democratic Justice Fund seeks to ease restrictions on Muslim immigration to the United States, particularly from countries designated by the State Department as “terrorist nations.”

Tides has also given grant money to the Council for American Islamic Relations. Purportedly a “Muslim civil rights group,” CAIR is in fact one of the leading anti-anti-terrorism organizations within the Wahhabi Lobby. CAIR regularly opposes and demonizes American efforts to fight terrorism, claiming, for instance, that Homeland Security measures are responsible for an undocumented surge in “hate crimes.”

CAIR officials have reason to fight Bush’s anti-terrorism measures: all too many CAIR officials are on the record supporting terrorism. CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad openly stated in 1994, “I am a supporter of the Hamas movement.” Community Affairs Director Bassem K. Khafagi has been arrested for visa and bank fraud. Randall Royer, a Communications Specialist and Civil Rights Coordinator at CAIR, was arrested along with a group of Islamic radicals in Virginia for allegedly planning jihad. CAIR has defended terrorist “charities” shut down by the Bush administration. Every few months some CAIR campus official is arrested for aiding and abetting terrorism.

The Legal Matrix

The Tides Foundation has funded a number of the pillars of the radical legal establishment. Chief among these is the National Lawyers Guild. Once described as “the legal bulwark of the Communist Party,” the NLG continued its proud tradition at its most recent convention last October. The concluding speaker was Lynne Stewart, an NLG lawyer who was arrested for helping her client – convicted 1993 World Trade Center bombing mastermind Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman – communicate with his terrorist cells in Egypt. Stewart said she and her NLG comrades were carrying on a proud tradition of their forebears, past and present:

And modern heroes, dare I mention? Ho and Mao and Lenin, Fidel and Nelson Mandela and John Brown, Che Guevara who reminds us, “At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love.” Our quests like theirs are to shake the very foundations of the continents.

More recently, the NLG has endorsed the March 20 call to End Colonial Occupation from Iraq to Palestine & Everywhere” organized by International ANSWER, and has posted a petition for “Post-Conviction Relief” for convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal.

Tides’ Peace Strategies Fund has funneled money to the Center for Constitutional Rights. The CCR was stablished by the late Sixties radical William Kunstler, defender of the Chicago 8, and Arthur Kinoy. The two also had plans to establish a new Communist Party. Executive Director Ron Daniels has been honored by the Communist Party USA for his work. Daniels also has a long and cordial relationship with racist, anti-Semitic “poet laureate” Amiri Baraka. Since 9/11, CCR has channeled its efforts into fighting every effective Homeland Security measure. They have opposed increasing the government’s ability to wiretap Islamists suspected of plotting terrorism and moaned the sequestering of terrorist detainees at Guantanamo Bay was an unexcusable form of “racial profiling.” CCR President Marc Ratner has portrayed American soldiers as the offenders, guilty of 9/11 by their Middle East policy and guilty of keeping Islamist killers “shackled, hooded and sedated during the 25 hour flight from Afghanistan.” CCR has also defended Lynne Stewart’s “innocence” in aiding Sheikh Rahman’s Islamic Jihad.

Tides also funds the Alliance for Justice, a group dedicated to stopping Bush judicial appointees (a cause John Kerry can agree wholeheartedly endorse). Other Tides grants have gone to the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights and the Asian Law Caucus.

Environmental Extremism

The Tides Foundation has funded the Ruckus Society, a group of rowdy ultra-Greens who rioted and looted Seattle during the 1999 World Trade Organization riots. The Tides Center of Western Pennsylvania, established in Pittsburgh with Heinz Family funds, advocates for environmentalist measures that have helped put holes in the Rust Belt’s economy.

Lest one think only Tides’ money is going to radicals, not funds directly controlled by Teresa Heinz Kerry, remember that Heinz money has repeatedly found its way to the Earth Island Institute. On September 14, 2001, the Institute’s website bore the headline “U.S. Responds to Terrorist Attacks with Self-Righteous Arrogance.”

Heinz family philanthropic funds have also had some dubious effects on the presidential race. The League of Conservation Voters, a group financed by Heinz money, has recently endorsed John Kerry’s presidential campaign.

Teresa Heinz Kerry will play a potent role in saving her second husband’s presidential campaign now – as Hillary Clinton did in 1992 and again during her husband’s impeachment. Like Hillary, Heinz may demand a place at the table for her pet causes in return for her service. Consider yourself warned.