By SUZANNE DOWNING
Sept. 15, 2026 – A donor supporting Mary Peltola’s campaign for US Senate helped establish a political action committee with Shaun King, the nationally known Black Lives Matter activist.
Federal Election Commission records show Michael Kieschnick of Palo Alto, Calif., contributed $2,000 to Alaskans for Mary, Peltola’s campaign committee.
Kieschnick, the co-founder of CREDO Mobile, was also among the founders of Real Justice PAC, a national political organization created with Shaun King and other progressive activists to elect prosecutors committed to changing policing, bail and prosecution policies, and to recall those who did not support catch-and-release policies.
King, a prominent activist associated with the Black Lives Matter movement, spoke at the University of Alaska Anchorage during Black History Month in February 2017. UAA promotional material advertised King as a civil-rights activist and New York Daily News senior justice writer. He is better known now as a “Defund the Police” activist.
Real Justice PAC has invested in races for district attorney across the country, supporting prosecutors who favor eliminating or limiting cash bail, reducing incarceration and restricting police and prosecution practices.
Its targeted candidates have included Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner and former San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin. Krasner is known for telling his assistant prosecutors to stop asking for cash bail for nonviolent felonies. His prior career was a civil rights lawyer and public defender representing anti-war and social justice protesters pro bono, including members of Black Lives Matter and Occupy Philadelphia.
Shaun King helped establish the Grassroots Law Project, which joined an effort to defeat the 2022 recall of Boudin. San Francisco voters ultimately removed Boudin from office amid a wider public debate over crime, drug dealing, and prosecutorial policies.
Kieschnick is not the only Peltola donor with connections to organizations that advocated defunding police departments.
Steve Phillips, a San Francisco political donor and founder of Democracy in Color, contributed to Alaskans for Mary. Phillips directly endorsed the defund movement in an April 2021 article for The Nation titled “Democrats Should Talk Even More About Defunding the Police.”
“If Democrats want to hold onto control of the House and Senate in 2022, they should talk more about defunding the police, not less,” Phillips wrote. He argued that Democrats could strengthen their support among younger and more progressive voters by embracing Black Lives Matter and its demand to defund police departments.
Another Peltola donor, Adelaide Park Gomer of Ithaca, New York, contributed $3,000 to the campaign. Gomer is president of the Park Foundation, which has provided five consecutive years of general operating grants to the Color of Change Education Fund.
Those grants totaled $625,000: $75,000 in 2020, $100,000 in 2021 and $150,000 in each of 2022, 2023 and 2024.
Color of Change was one of the national organizations calling for taking funds away from police departments. In a petition hosted by MoveOn, the organization declared: “We must defund police departments” whose officers or practices do not value Black lives.
Phillips personally and explicitly advocated defunding the police. Gomer leads a foundation that funded the educational arm of an organization that supported defunding the police. Kieschnick co-founded a PAC with King that backed catch-and-release prosecutors and became closely associated with defunding the police.
MoveOn, a Democratic-aligned group that has been anti-police and anti-ICE, endorsed Peltola in 2024.
4 thoughts on “Peltola donors tied to Black Lives Matter activist Shaun King, ‘defund the police’ network”
I would not be shocked to hear she had received mutiple donations from Al Queda or even the IRG as long as it was spendable in US dollars as she cares less who.
If there was ever a poll taken in all rural Alaskan villages one would learn that there is overwhelming support for defunding any sort of police or even village public safety officers and extreme disdain for Alaska State Troopers as they all tend to disrupt the “normal” way of life and what is acceptable to them.
They see law enforcement as “White Mans law” that doesnt apply to their way of life as it was for the past centuries and even go so far as to blame white men for their alcohol and drug abuse.
Anybody that has spent any time in rural villages learns this quickly.
“Normal way of life” in the villages. Getting drunk, lots of drugs, raping Native women, stealing snow machines and four-wheelers, still learning how to spell Murkowski, watching lots of porn and CNN, lots more drinking. Oh, and blame white man. He’s responsible for all of the sh*t in the villages.
Banish this traitor skwa.
Shaun King,better known as ” Talcum X”.