It Turns Out the Real ‘Outside Agitators’ Were Actually ‘Business Titans Looking to Shape U.S. Public Opinion’ About Israel
Benny Polatseck/NYC Mayoral Photography Office
New York Mayor Eric Adams has insisted that the pro-Palestine protests he ordered busted up at the hands of the NYPD at universities in the city over the last month were the handiwork of “outside agitators.” Columbia University in particular was a preoccupation for the mayor, who at the request of school president Minouche Shafik, sent in the cops to break up an encampment and then again to clear a building students had been occupying.
Even before the police had arrested the last protestor, Adams was adamant that these “children” had been corrupted by “outside agitators.” But when asked during media appearances how many of the arrestees fit the bill, the mayor refused to say because he did not know.
On Thursday, The Washington Post published a report stating that Adams held a video call about the protests with outside agitators of a very powerful kind: billionaires.
Not only did these billionaires urge Adams to take action against the protestors, they did so while floating campaign donations to his 2025 reelection effort.
“A group of billionaires and business titans working to shape U.S. public opinion of the war in Gaza privately pressed New York City’s mayor last month to send police to disperse pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University, according to communications obtained by The Washington Post and people familiar with the group,” begins the Post’s report, which says the group communicated in a WhatsApp chat started after the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks.
The lengthy piece describes how several business tycoons explored ways to undermine and even end the protests with the brute force of the police while boosting Israel’s image in the United States. These efforts included a 45-minute Zoom call on April 26 with Adams, Kind snack mogul Daniel Lubetzky, hedge funder Daniel Loeb, billionaire Len Blavatnik, and real estate magnate Joseph Sitt. According to the Post, the meeting occurred a week after Adams first authorized police to enter Columbia’s campus.
“During the call, some attendees discussed making political donations to Adams, as well as how the chat group’s members could pressure Columbia’s president and trustees to permit the mayor to send police to the campus to handle protesters, according to chat messages summarizing the conversation,” the report says.
A member of the WhatsApp chat told the Post he made the maximum donation of $2,100 to Adams’ campaign that month. The report further notes that some in the chat “offered to pay for private investigators to assist New York police in handling the protests.”
The chat in question ended up logging thousands of messages, including communications from “former CEO of Starbucks Howard Schultz, Dell founder and CEO Michael Dell, hedge fund manager Bill Ackman and Joshua Kushner, founder of Thrive Capital and brother to Jared Kushner, former president Donald Trump’s son-in-law.”
The Post states it obtained the messages from sources “with direct access to the chat log’s contents.” Those messages began when an aide to real estate mogul Barry Sternlicht, who only communicated through the aide, initiated the chat. That staffer said the group aimed to “change the narrative” to benefit Israel by highlighting “the atrocities committed by Hamas.”
“’He’s open to any ideas we have,’ chat member Sitt, founder of retail chain Ashley Stewart and the global real estate company Thor Equities, wrote April 27, the day after the group’s Zoom call with Adams,” the report states. “‘As you saw he’s ok if we hire private investigators to then have his police force intel team work with them.'”
Through a spokesperson, Sitt declined to comment to the Post.
Several group members confirmed to the paper their involvement in the group chat and multiple sources confirmed the names of other participants.
When reached for comment by the Post, the mayor’s office sent a statement by Deputy Mayor Fabien Levy accusing the Post of peddling anti-Semitic tropes:
“Any suggestion that other considerations were involved in the decision-making process is completely false,” Levy said. He added, “The insinuation that Jewish donors secretly plotted to influence government operations is an all too familiar antisemitic trope that the Washington Post should be ashamed to ask about, let alone normalize in print.”
The Post says members of the group chat “worked with the Israeli government to screen a roughly 40-minute film showing footage compiled by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) — titled ‘Bearing Witness to the October 7 Massacre’ — to audiences in New York City.” That footage was eventually shown at Harvard at a screening Ackman attended and promoted.
A spokesperson said Ackman had not participated in the chat since Jan. 10 and has never spoken with the mayor about matters related to Columbia or the protests. Though he “likes and is supportive of the mayor,” he has never donated to his campaign.
In the chat, some participants said they met with Israeli officials and received private briefings about the war in Gaza from war cabinet minister Benny Gantz, Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Michael Herzog, and former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett.
At one point, group chat members discussed how the NYPD could only enter Columbia’s campus upon receiving permission from the university. They discussed ways they might be able to pressure the administration to make such a request and “shut these protests down”:
One member asked if the group could do anything to pressure Columbia trustees to cooperate with the mayor. In reply, former congressman Ted Deutch (D-Fla.), CEO of the American Jewish Committee, shared a PDF of a letter his organization had sent that day to Columbia President Minouche Shafik calling on her to “shut these protests down.”
“Also in touch with the board,” Deutch wrote to the chat group. “So NYPD can return.”
When reached for comment by the Post, a spokesperson for Columbia stated that the university had “no knowledge” of the group chat and its activities.
During one ham-fisted bull session about potential outreach to Black people to help the cause, Lubetzky – the snack titan – spitballed ways to get “Black Leaders to condemn Anti-Semitism” and asked people in the group chat “if anyone knew Jay-Z, LeBron James or Alicia Keys.”
The Post states the chat was shut down earlier this month and paraphrased one member as saying the reason was that “the activities were moving beyond the initial objectives and the people who started it.”
Few if any of the same media outlets that uncritically amplified Adams’ claims about “outside agitators” will cover this Post story in a similar manner. Indeed, most will not speak of it at all. That’s because rich and powerful people working to shape policy and public opinion are taken not only as an immutable truism of American politics, but a perfectly natural means for effecting change. Meanwhile, protests by no-name college students with far fewer resources and influence are seen as an uncouth and ill-advised way to accomplish their aims, which, by the way, the media is all too happy to ignore in favor of bad-faith hysterics about anything that isn’t Israel’s intolerable war in Gaza.
CORRECTION: This article originally stated that the American Jewish Committee claimed to have no knowledge of the group chat and its correspondence. It has been corrected to state that the university claimed to have no knowledge of said group chat.
This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.
