Kings of Dark Money
‘No Kings’ propaganda is well-funded and Beijing couldn’t be happier.
ET
Jonathan Alpert makes a good case that “No Kings” events are bad group therapy for the highly credentialed. So who’s paying for these destructive therapy sessions? Former Wall Street Journal reporter Asra Nomani reported Saturday for Fox News:
A network of about 500 groups with an estimated $3 billion in combined annual revenues is behind the coordinated nationwide “No Kings” protest Saturday, including communist groups who are using the day to call for a “revolution,” according to a Fox Digital News investigation.
According to a copy of the permit for the “flagship” march in St. Paul, Minn., Indivisible, a national well-heeled Democratic political advocacy organization funded by billionaire George Soros, is the lead coordinator for the protest.
But Fox News Digital has also identified key participation by a network of radical socialist and communist organizations funded by Neville Roy Singham, an American tech tycoon and avowed communist living in China.
Over nearly a decade, Singham has financed a constellation of activist institutions that promote revolutionary socialist politics and frequently collaborate in protest campaigns, including the People’s Forum in New York, the Party for Socialism and Liberation, the ANSWER Coalition and CodePink, whose co-founder Jodie Evans is married to Singham. These groups work closely with the Freedom Road Socialist Organization.
In a separate recent story, Ms. Nomani reported on the constellation of organizations linked to Mr. Singham and described an event he co-sponsored last year along with “the Shanghai-based East China Normal University, and administered by the Chinese Communist Party. The university features a School of Marxism and teaches ‘Marxist journalism.’ Singham… and conference attendees closed the conference, standing at attention as ‘The Internationale,’ a communist anthem played, attendees pumping their fists in the air in solidarity.” Ms. Nomani continued:
Fox News Digital has identified at least 200 organizations in Singham’s network of about 2,000 organizations that directly work on propaganda that parrots the anti-American messaging of the Chinese Communist Party but is dramatically homegrown in digital shops from New York City to Los Angeles.
The investigation found that three Singham-linked U.S. nonprofits sent a total of $9.1 million in seven payments to a pro-China propaganda firm, Shanghai Maku Cultural Communications Co. Ltd. The payments haven’t been reported before…
Eleven U.S. nonprofit organizations form a core hub of the work that pumps pro-China, anti-America propaganda into the world, with a total of about $401 million flowing from Singham and his network into these organizations. The organizations didn’t respond to requests for comment…
That network has matured into a transnational protest and media machine… its infrastructure is visible on American streets, coordinated, funded and amplified by groups built quietly, deliberately and in plain sight. Singham and Evans didn’t respond to requests for comment.
For some reason other major media outlets seem to have lost interest lately in tracking this vast funding machine. Back in 2023 Mara Hvistendahl, David Fahrenthold, Lynsey Chutel and Ishaan Jhaveri reported for the New York Times on “a lavishly funded influence campaign that defends China and pushes its propaganda. At the center is a charismatic American millionaire, Neville Roy Singham, who is known as a socialist benefactor of far-left causes.” In their blockbuster report, the Timesfolk noted:
What is less known, and is hidden amid a tangle of nonprofit groups and shell companies, is that Mr. Singham works closely with the Chinese government media machine and is financing its propaganda worldwide.
From a think tank in Massachusetts to an event space in Manhattan, from a political party in South Africa to news organizations in India and Brazil, The Times tracked hundreds of millions of dollars to groups linked to Mr. Singham that mix progressive advocacy with Chinese government talking points.
Some, like No Cold War, popped up in recent years. Others, like the American antiwar group Code Pink, have morphed over time. Code Pink once criticized China’s rights record but now defends its internment of the predominantly Muslim Uyghurs, which human rights experts have labeled a crime against humanity.
… Mr. Singham, 69, himself sits in Shanghai, where one outlet in his network is co-producing a YouTube show financed in part by the city’s propaganda department. Two others are working with a Chinese university to “spread China’s voice to the world.” And last month, Mr. Singham joined a Communist Party workshop about promoting the party internationally.
Mr. Singham says he does not work at the direction of the Chinese government. But the line between him and the propaganda apparatus is so blurry that he shares office space — and his groups share staff members — with a company whose goal is to educate foreigners about “the miracles that China has created on the world stage.”
Would readers not find this subject highly relevant in current coverage of protests in the United States? Yet for some odd reason Mr. Singham’s name is now extremely hard to find in stories from large U.S. media outlets that often purport to be highly concerned about “dark money” in U.S. politics.
One would think it’s a news story when events presented as opposition to kings are so supportive of commissars.
No comments:
Post a Comment