[W]hether it’s Black Lives Matter or Occupy, in the American political discussion, there’s a tendency to assume that people sort of arrive politically, that there are these gatherings and there’s no agenda, there’s no leadership, this [is] always an assumption of the media, then they browbeat, saying “where are the leaders, why don’t they have an agenda?” Well, actually underneath each of these…there are networks, there…is this infrastructure of confidence-building. There are organizers who are involved, many of them have been organizers for decades and have great experience in knowing how to build a movement.

Vijay Prashad, executive director of the Marxist media group Tricontinental, 2016 (interview in CounterPunch)

The infrastructure that supports the pro-Palestinian demonstrations and encampments that have swept cities and campuses is virtually identical to the one that has sustained the Black Lives Matter (BLM) organizations since the birth of the movement. The BLM riots and protests in 2020 were the largest in U.S. history,REF and they transformed America in profound ways. Members of this infrastructure say they understand that the 2020 protests introduced millions of Americans to a new leftist worldview, and one key member even says that “the ability for mass struggle” now exists inside the United States.

It is in this context that one must understand what a top pro-Palestinian activist means by telling students on campus that “we are going to change this country forever,” and another when he says that the goals of the protests is “getting rid of America, getting rid of the West.” America’s most implacable enemies, including China and Cuba, are not merely cheering from the sidelines, but they are enmeshed in this protesting infrastructure and, in Cuba’s case, training members.

This infrastructure can be best understood if broken down into four interrelated components: (1) the activist organizations that plan and carry out the protests; (2) the fiscal sponsors that give these organizations legal coverage and afford them opaqueness; (3) the often deep-pocketed donors that fund the activist organizations through the fiscal sponsors; and (4) radical media groups that amplify the protests and promote them on social media, and also routinely air propaganda for U.S. adversaries such as China, Cuba, or Russia. In a clear sign that it is not concern for the oppression of Muslims that drives their pro-Palestinian efforts, these media outlets and their officials routinely ignore or even denyREF the genocide of Muslim Uyghurs in China’s northwestern province of Xinjiang, an ongoing outrage that has failed to capture campus attention.

None of the donors, sponsors or media groups in the ecosystem focus exclusively on the Middle East, or issues of race, for that matter. Rather, they opportunistically seize on these concerns when they arise in the news to pursue a long-term agenda that is often openly anti-capitalist and anti-democracy. This infrastructure, which in this Special Report is called “the revolutionary ecosystem,” is global in reach and vocation, and some of its entities have links to the Chinese Communist Party and other U.S. enemies, such as the Cuban and Venezuelan regimes. They are also connected, though to a lesser degree, to South American groups that support agitation against Argentine President Javier Milei.

The revolutionary ecosystem packs a powerful punch in culture as well as government in terms of policy choices. America has changed in fundamental ways since the creation of BLM in 2013, changes that rapidly accelerated after the BLM riots of 2020. These changes include, but are not limited to: the ubiquitous addition of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) training and principles to all areas of life; defunding the police and the election of rogue prosecutors who refuse to prosecute crimes;REF and the lowering or elimination of standards in everything from middle school gifted-and-talented programsREF to medical school admissions.REF The gatekeepers of America’s cultural institutions accepted at face value unexamined fallacies, such as the assertions that America is “systemically racist,” that it imposes an “oppressive social order,” or that it operates in a “regime of white supremacy,”REF and accepted the policy remedies of those disseminating these dubious concepts.

It is too early to see how the street action supported by the ecosystem in 2024 will change policy toward Israel and the Middle East in general. The college encampments and protests, however, have already put pressure on President Joe Biden to take measures against Israel. This demonstration of irresolution has in turn emboldened members of the international community, from the United Nations to the International Criminal Court, to take their own measures against the Jewish state. Far too many people, again, have bought into the radical Left’s slogans, such as that Israel is a “settler state” and that it practices “genocide.” There has also been a worrying rise in antisemitic incidents in the U.S.REF More of all of this is sure to come.

One of the reasons why the revolutionary ecosystem can so deeply transform the culture and government policies is that mainstream media—see the opening quotation by Vijay Prashad, the Marxist who heads the radical media group Tricontinental—does not vet it, examine who benefits, or even report on it, instead presenting the results of the ecosystem’s hidden activities as spontaneous outpourings of popular support for a cause. The media repeatedly described the BLM riots of 2020 as a “racial reckoning,”REF words that President Biden echoed at his Morehouse College commencement address on May 19, 2024.REF

There are exceptions. The online magazine Tablet has done a stellar job of shining a spotlight on the system supporting the pro-Palestinian protests, as has the Network Contagion and Research Institute (NCRI). (See, for example, NCRI’s May 2024 report.REF) Journalists such as Aaron Sibarium, Joseph Simonson, and Andrew Kerr at The Washington Free Beacon, and, in stalwart fashion, author and filmmaker Christopher Rufo, have also distinguished themselves in this area. The Capitol Research Center has catalogued the interlocking connections of the revolutionary ecosystem for decades. The same can be said for the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, whose fellow Jonathan Schanzer is a nationally recognized expert on this topic and has testified to Congress.

Aside from these happy but few examples, however, the mainstream press, the networks, and most cable channels—which garner the lion’s share of the viewing and reading public—mostly act as though the revolutionary ecosystem does not exist. The American people and their leaders can only become aware of what is happening if someone exposes their activities. That is what this Special Report does.

The Elements of the Revolutionary Ecosystem

While not an exhaustive list, following are the activist groups, fiscal sponsors, donors, and radical media groups that are most prominent in the United States.

Activist Organizations. The following 15 organizations are the most prominent activist groups of the ecosystem.

1. American Muslims for Palestine (AMP)—an anti-Israel organization that serves as a U.S. front for Hamas.
2. Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP)—college student organization in the U.S., Canada, and New Zealand; supports Hamas’s October 7 massacre of Israeli civilians.REF
3. Samidoun: Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network—an international network of organizers and activists with several chapters in the United States; praised October 7 as “Palestinian resistance”; the Alliance for Global Justice is a fiscal sponsor.REF
4. The People’s Forum—New York–based organization directly involved in the Columbia protests; facilitates relationship among BLM, pro-Palestine movement, Cuba, and Chinese Communist Party (CCP)-linked entities.
5. The Act Now to Stop War & End Racism (ANSWER) Coalition—an anti-capitalist organization funded by a multi-millionaire based in Shanghai, Neville Roy Singham; serves as a front for the Party for Socialism and Liberation.
6. Jewish Voice for Peace—left-wing anti-Zionist organization; supports the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel.
7. Within Our Lifetime—a militant group that explicitly supports Hamas and other terrorist organizations; has organized protests that shut down the Brooklyn Bridge; fiscally sponsored by WESPAC until at least 2022.
8. International People’s Assembly—a Singham-funded global alliance of 200+ anti-capitalist organizations; facilitates interaction among BLM, the pro-Hamas movement, the CCP, Cuba, Venezuela, and more.
9. Grassroots Global Justice—an alliance of more than 60 U.S.-based groups, including the Palestinian Youth Movement; closely linked to the U.S. Social Forum.
10. Al-Awda—Singham-funded pro-Palestine protest group linked to Hamas and the Syria-based Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP); shares some officials with Within Our Lifetime and Samidoun.
11. Palestinian Youth Movement—a transnational group that advocates the destruction of Israel; fiscally sponsored by WESPAC.
12. IfNotNow—U.S.-based anti-Israel protest group funded by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.
13. Adalah—an Israel-based pro-Palestine legal organization funded by the Open Society Foundations (OSF) and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund; advocates for pro-Gaza protesters in Israeli courts, including by siding with groups labeled terrorist by the Israeli government due to their connections with the PFLP.
14. Palestinian Community Network—a U.S.-wide pro-Palestine network that raises money to support Gaza and advocates against U.S. Israel aid; organizes protests along with BLM Grassroots, Students for a Democratic Society (a new network bearing the same name as the leading organization of the 1960s New Left, reconstituted in 2006), and Students for Justice in Palestine; supports the BDS movement.
15. Black for Palestine—a national network of black pro-Palestinian activists; signed a statement advocating a cease-fire in Gaza that was also signed by prominent members of BLM.

Fiscal Sponsors. The following five groups are the most prominent fiscal sponsors of the ecosystem.

1. Alliance for Global Justice—fiscally sponsors BLM chapters and Samidoun; helped to found ANSWER, hosts events from the Democratic Socialists of America and the Party for Socialism and Liberation; funded by Rockefeller Brothers Fund and OSF.
2. Tides (both Advocacy and Foundation)—the Tides Foundation funds BLM, the Progress Unity Fund, and Jewish Voice for Peace, and it funneled money from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund to the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL); Tides Advocacy fiscally sponsors Solidaire Action and the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights Action, which trained anti-Israeli protesters in U.S. campuses in 2024.
3. Westchester Peace Action Committee (WESPAC)—fiscally sponsors Students for Justice in Palestine, Within Our Lifetime, and the Palestinian Youth Movement; receives funding from Grassroots International and other liberal donors.
4. Common Counsel Foundation—fiscally sponsors M4BL; funnels money to M4BL from the OSF and Rockefeller Brothers Fund; funds WESPAC, which fiscally sponsors Students for Justice in Palestine; receives millions from the OSF, Tides, and Groundswell Fund and donates to WESPAC.REF
5. Thousand Currents—heavily funds Grassroots International; previously fiscally sponsored BLM GNF.

Donors. The following six groups are the most prominent donors of the ecosystem.

1. Open Society Foundations—set up by billionaire George Soros, funder of various far-leftist causes, including JVP, M4BL (through Common Counsel), Grassroots Global Justice (GGJ), the Alliance for Global Justice (AFGJ), and others.
2. Solidaire (both Network and Action)—Closely linked to the Pritzkers; funds IfNotNow, the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM), BLM chapters, Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity (BOLD), and M4BL; its partner, Solidaire Action, is fiscally sponsored by Tides Advocacy and funds Jewish Voice for Peace Action (the political arm of JVP, also sometimes called Jewish Vote for Peace Action), and U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights.
3. Grassroots International—has given money to Common Counsel to pay for Palestinian causes.
4. Kataly Foundation—a Regan Pritzker–funded organization; funds organizations in both the BLM network and the pro-Palestine network, including BLM, BOLD, JVP, IfNotNow, and GGJ.
5. Rockefeller Brothers Fund—funds M4BL (through Common Counsel and Tides), the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights, Alliance for Global Justice, Jewish Voice for Peace, and IfNotNow.
6. Libra Foundation—founded by the Pritzker family; funds GGJ, BOLD, Grassroots International, and M4BL; helped to launch Democracy Frontlines Fund, which funds Black Futures Lab and M4BL.

Radical Media Groups. The following five groups are the most prominent racial media groups of the ecosystem.

1. BT Media — left-wing news outlet that receives funding from The People’s Forum and other Singham-linked entities.
2. Common Dreams—pro-BLM, pro-Hamas news outlet.
3. The Grayzone—A radical media site founded by Max Blumenthal, son of Clinton confidant Sydney Blumenthal. Publishes Chinese, Cuban, and Russian propaganda and supports BLM and the pro-Palestinian demonstrations.
4. FightBack!—news outlet run by the Marxist Freedom Road Socialist Organization.
5. Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research—Singham-linked media outlet that publishes news and articles supporting global Marxism; collaborates with Dongsheng News.

The Activist Organizations and How They Fit in the Ecosystem

The activist organizations coordinate the protests, sit-ins, encampments, and marches that shut down campuses, cities, and highways. They form the frontlines of the movement, and this Special Report explains the ecosystem mostly through their participation in it. In 2020, the main activist organizations—which coordinated some 12,000 protests and 630 riotsREF—belonged to the BLM and antifa umbrellas. One of the largest of these organizations, the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation (GNF), boasted that it sent 127 million e-mails in 2020.REF But BLM benefited greatly from the support of the activist groups outlined below and from two communist parties: the Party of Socialism and Liberation (PSL) and the Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO). And, of course, BLM tapped into exactly the same sources of funding that today’s groups do, and their activities were amplified by the same radical media outfits.

Today, the activist organizations are still the ones coordinating the street protests and training the student protesters. Tablet reports, for example, that the campus encampments were pitched immediately after an April 15 “economic blockade” that saw demonstrators choke off critical infrastructure from Wall Street to the Golden Gate Bridge. “Calls to participate in the ‘A15 Action’ were disseminated widely in anarchist and far-left networks, while Palestinian and Islamist groups—SJP, AMP, CAIR [Council on American Islamic Relations], and Within Our Lifetime—simultaneously called for an April 15 ‘Strike 4 Gaza,’” wrote Park MacDougald in Tablet.REF “Given reporting that nationwide campus ‘liberation zones’ and ‘encampments’ were planned as early as November 2023, it seems likely that the timing of the university protests was decided by ‘the movement’ well in advance.”

There is clear evidence that the members of the activist organizations not only took part in the campus protests, often directing them, but that they also planned the protests and trained the students. The Wall Street Journal reports that one of the main activist groups, Samidoun—which Western intelligence services say is a front for the Syria-based Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PLFP), an outfit designated by the U.S. government as a terrorist organization—held a “Resistance 101” virtual training for Columbia University students in March 2024, just a few weeks before the encampment was set up on campus. At this training, Samidoun coordinator Charlotte Kates addressed the students, according to the Journal.REF

Kates’s husband, PFLP Central Committee member Khaled Barakat, also addressed the Columbia seminar, Tablet added.REF A few hours before the takeover of Columbia’s Hamilton Hall on April 30, 2024, the Manhattan office of The People’s Forum, another activist organization, held a rally attended by more than 100 protesters, who had made the trip down from the Columbia campus to be trained in “resistance.” A full third of those arrested at Hamilton Hall later that night were discovered to be outsiders (as opposed to university students).REF

It is of more than symbolic significance that Lisa Fithian was present both at Columbia, instructing students on how to barricade themselves in Hamilton Hall hours before New York Police Department (NYPD) freed the building, and on the ground at Ferguson in 2014—just as she was in Seattle in the anti–World Trade Organization (WTO) protests in 1999 and in New York during Occupy Wall Street in 2011. Fithian is a 63-year-old self-styled “protest consultant”—a “professional agitator,” according to the NYPD—who received training from 1960s radical Abbie Hoffman. In Fithian’s own words, “I create crisis, because crisis is that edge where change is possible.” A 2003 New York Times feature described Fithian in this manner: “You don’t go to Fithian when you want to carry a placard. You go to her when you want to make sure there are enough bolt cutters to go around.”REF

Vladimir Lenin is said to have bragged that “useful idiots” with little understanding of Bolshevik aims were vital to the success of the 1917 Russian revolution. There is ample indication that activists who focus both on the Palestinian issue and on achieving a global Marxist revolution have manipulated for their own aims the emotions of students who were already indoctrinated to see the world through an “oppressor v. oppressed” prism (which itself is a Marxist concept). “Maybe some of the students involved don’t understand what they are involved in,” said New York Mayor Eric Adams on May 1, a day after some 300 protesters were arrested at Columbia and City College.REF BLM, too, manipulated a desire for social justice in 2020 (and in the seven years prior). Given these similarities in method and goal, it is hardly surprising that the same substructure of activist groups, funders, sponsors and media outlets feeds both endeavors.

The activist groups organizing the anti-Israel protests can be roughly divided into two clusters (alluded to by Tablet): an Islamist cluster, created expressly for anti-Israel agitation; and a Marxist cluster, which consists of full-service organizers and jumps on the bandwagon of the Israel-Palestine conflict when it presents itself in the news. However, even the most strictly pro-Palestine groups are also deeply intertwined in the revolutionary ecosystem and emphasize in their rhetoric a general Marxist outlook. Whether they do this for organizing reasons or out of true belief is, of course, impossible to ascertain.

American Muslims for Palestine (AMP). American Muslims for Palestine was formed in 2005 by individuals who belonged to groups shut down by the U.S. government for being fronts for the Islamic terrorist group Hamas. Thus, AMP itself is a Hamas front. It employs Marxist rhetoric—probably because it knows that this is the new cultural matrix on which today’s college students operate—and it took a direct role in rallying students at the encampments. AMP executive director Osama Abu Irshaid spoke on May 23 at the encampment on the campus of George Washington University, saying, “They are trying to destroy you before you succeed in bringing this imperialism to an end.” America and its “elite colleges,” he said, “are only structures in an imperial project. Israel is only another structure in an imperial project. Zionism is no less evil than white supremacy or any other type of supremacy.” Abu Irshaid promised students that “we are going to change this country forever…to take back America.”REF

The rousing speech, a version of which Abu Irshaid gave at the Columbia University encampment two days earlier, continued along these lines, and provides an example of how even though AMP is steadfastly anti-Israel, it nonetheless casts its struggle as part of a larger “anti-imperialism” and “anti-white supremacy” crusade.

AMP is a reconstitution of the Holy Land Foundation (HLF) and the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP), earlier groups that served as conduits between Hamas and America. Former Treasury official Jonathan Schanzer explained to the House Ways and Means Committee on November 15, 2023, how that reconstitution took place: In December 2001, authorities “raided HLF and froze its assets. Ultimately, five individuals were convicted and sent to prison for providing material support to Hamas.” The IAP also ran into trouble. Schanzer, now a fellow with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, added, “The family of a slain American teenager named David Boim ultimately sued the Islamic Association for Palestine for its Hamas support. IAP was found civilly liable,” with a judge awarding the family $150 million in damages. “The last of the Hamas front groups closed shop,” said Schanzer.REF The people associated with these organizations did not give up, however, and founded AMP in 2006. “At least nine individuals who worked for or on behalf of these shuttered charities came together to run a new organization called American Muslims for Palestine,” Schanzer told Congress. One of these individuals was Abu Irshaid himself, who had earlier run an internal newspaper for IAP.

Where American Muslims for Palestine Fits in the Revolutionary Ecosystem. AMP has direct ties to BLM that date back to the origins of BLM in 2013 and 2014. AMP was one of four organizations to organize a 200-strong Palestinian contingent that traveled to Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014 when thousands of leftist activists from around the country converged on the St. Louis suburb after the police shooting of Michael Brown to form BLM into an international network.REF At the height of the George Floyd violence in spring and summer 2020, AMP played an active role in organizing protests for BLM and supporting BLM in other ways.

According to AMP’s own 2020 annual report, “AMP supported legislative efforts to end police brutality, initiated a monthly series of webinars to increase our community’s understanding of anti-Black racism, and hired an experienced organizer as a consultant to increase Black-Palestinian solidarity work.”REF BLM returned the favor, helping AMP to coordinate protests by tens of thousands. In one of them, Black Lives Matter DC leader Anthony Lorenzo Green spoke at an AMP rally of some 35,000 at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, on May 29, 2021. “I’m your comrade,” he told them. “Our struggles are connected. From the river to the sea and from Ferguson to Palestine,” he added.REF AMP also works with other activist members of the revolutionary ecosystem. In January 2024, for example, it worked with the ANSWER Coalition to organize a huge march that brought 400,000 people (an organizer estimate) to Washington, DC.REF ANSWER, discussed below, has organizational ties to the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), an American communist party. AMP is registered in Illinois but is not a tax-exempt organization; that is why it uses as the Americans for Justice in Palestine Educational Foundation as its fiscal sponsor.REF

Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). An AMP affiliate, SJP is arguably the most active and the most powerful of the activist organizations. It was one of the three principal organizers of the Columbia campus protests that became the epicenter of the movement in April 2024 (the other two being Jewish Voice for Peace and Within Our Lifetime, discussed below). The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) calls SJP “the primary organizer of anti-Israel events on campus, with dozens of chapters,” noting that it is “AMP’s main partner on campus.”REF Park MacDougald at Tablet writes that SJP in fact has no “‘formal corporate structure of its own but operates as AMP’s campus brand,’”REF quoting a suit filed on May 1 by the law firm Greenberg Traurig against AJP Educational Fund, the fiscal sponsor of AMP.REF

SJP says it has around 250 chapters across the U.S., which are loosely affiliated with their parent organization, National Students for Justice in Palestine (NSJP).REF According to The New Yorker, the NSJP formed after some initial chapters had been created “to organize conferences, and…to provide more robust support to students.” However, The New Yorker noted, “[T]he decentralized spirit still exists.”REF The NSJP says on its website that it “seeks to empower, unify and support” the student chapters. In recent months, the NSJP says that the chapters have continued to grow. Carrie Zaremba, a member of NSJP’s national steering committee, told The New Yorker that the NSJP has received more than 80 requests from students seeking to found new chapters. The ADL is skeptical of the 250 number, however, saying that “a 2018 review of major social media platforms found that the majority of SJP chapter social media accounts showed no significant activity for at least 12 months.”REF

SJP was founded at Berkeley University in 2001 but did not constitute itself nationally until different campus chapters came together in 2006 under the umbrella of the Palestine Solidarity Movement (PSM). Following the demise of the PSM, AMP began to concentrate its attention on SJP, said the ADL.REF Both AMP and SJP were founded by Berkeley Arab and Arab American Studies Professor Hatem Bazian, who also serves as AMP chairman and who previously spoke at fundraising dinners for KindHearts, another organization dissolved by the U.S. Treasury for fundraising for Hamas.REF

SJP is so virulently antisemitic and anti-Israel that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) asked the state’s universities to close its chapters after the October 7 Hamas terrorist attack on Israel. The ADL reprinted the messages that several SJP chapters around the country wrote after October 7, in which the SJP justified the ensuing massacre by rejecting any distinction between “civilian” and “militant,” “settler” and “soldier.” According to the ADL, the George Washington University SJP wrote: “A settler is an aggressor, a soldier, and an occupier even if they are [sic] lounging on our occupied beaches.”REF

Where Students for Justice in Palestine Fits in the Revolutionary Ecosystem. SJP is deeply enmeshed in the revolutionary ecosystem. Like AMP, SJP participated in bringing the large Palestinian delegation to Ferguson in 2014,REF meaning it has also been tied to BLM since BLM’s birth. SJP is also linked to the ecosystem through its fiscal sponsor, the Westchester Peace Action Committee (WESPAC),REF which is essentially a Marxist go-between that passes money from the deepest-pocketed funders on the hard Left (including George Soros’s Open Society universe,REF the Elias Foundation, the Sparkplug Foundation, and Grassroots InternationalREF) and pro-Palestinian causes and other Marxist activist groups, including, of course, BLM groups. Founded in 1974, WESPAC is involved in the whole gamut of leftist causes, from dismantling the prison system, to racial and sexual politics, to climate, to the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Spread across its website is a picture of activists holding up a sign that reads, “Another World is Possible,” a phrase that serves a dog whistle for entities that want to advertise their Marxism to the cognoscenti without openly embracing Marxism.

Grassroots International, one of WESPAC’s donors, is itself heavily funded by Thousand Currents and the Libra Foundation, two other organizations committed to bankrolling far-Left causes. Thousand Currents was the long-time fiscal sponsor of BLM Global Networks Foundation, and for several years included on its board the notorious convicted terrorist Susan Rosenberg, who belonged to the Weather Underground and the May 19th Communist Organization. Both set off bombs in the U.S. in the 1970s and 1980s. Libra receives money from the Pritzker family, and the co-president of its board is Regan Pritzker. Libra funds four BLM groups: the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity (BOLD), Black Youth Project 100 (BYP100), and Black Futures Lab.REF

Samidoun: Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network. Samidoun, as noted, is identified by several Western governments as a front group for the PLFP, a Marxist-Leninist U.S.-designated terrorist group. It is based in Vancouver, British Columbia, and publicly celebrated the October 7 massacre in Israel, in which PLFP members took part.REF This has led to Samidoun being banned in Germany, where its offices were raided by police.REF The group has also been “banned by PayPal and other payment platforms due to its terrorist connections,” wrote Alana Goodman in The Washington Free Beacon, which pointed out that Samidoun “has helped organize and promote dozens of anti-Israel rallies around the world in the wake of Hamas’s mass-casualty terror attack.”REF

According to Influence Watch, “The group’s leadership has declared solidarity with a variety of far-left causes worldwide, including militant Black and Native American activism in the United States.”REF As mentioned, Samidoun trained the Columbia students on “resistance” in the run-up to the encampments.

Where Samidoun Fits in the Revolutionary Ecosystem. Acting through another of its affiliates (Dream Defenders), Samidoun’s Middle East parent, the PFLP, brought BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors to the West Bank in January 2015, just a few weeks after the riots in Ferguson.REF There, Cullors made videos in which she and other members of her delegation repeated the genocidal “from the river to the sea” slogans. Dream Defenders is a part of the BLM movement (it is a member of M4BL’s United FrontREF), that, according to the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, provides “an outlet for the PFLP to influence civil rights groups inside the United States, therefore promoting ‘agenda laundering’ for a U.S.-designated terror organization.”REF

Samidoun itself also promoted participation in the BLM riots of 2020, writing on its Facebook page in June of that year: “We support the uprising in Minneapolis, the intifada of people subjected to an ongoing, vicious and structural racism.”REF Samidoun’s January 1 to 7 “National Week of Action for Palestine” was endorsed by BLM-Chicago, Code Pink, and the Freedom Road Socialist Organization.REF

Samidoun also taps directly into the revolutionary ecosystem through its fiscal sponsor, the Alliance for Global Justice (AFGJ), also a BLM sponsor that is the very embodiment of the ecosystem. A fiscal sponsor of M4BL until 2021, 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. As the AFGJ says in its “Our History” page, “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 in 1990 when the Sandinistas lost an election.”REF Following the advice of the Sandinistas, a Marxist guerrilla group that took over Nicaragua, and whose leader Daniel Ortega is president today, the Nicaragua Network relocated in the 1990s to “the belly of the beast,” that is, Washington, DC. Because its work had expanded to the full range of anti-capitalist activism (including organizing the foundational 1999 anti-WTO riots in Seattle), and no longer focused solely on Nicaragua, the leaders created a new organization and transferred the assets from the Nicaragua Network to a renamed Alliance for Global Justice.REF Again and again, American Marxists follow the “advice” of foreign leaders.

Today, the AFGJ is an “anti-capitalist” organization that, according to Influence Watch, “functions as a fiscal sponsor for more than 100 left-wing activism projects related to race, LGBT, open borders, the pro-Palestine cause, and other issues.”REF That is, it takes money from funders who often earmark those funds for a specific project at a chosen activist organization. AFGJ acts as the go-between for radical activists and funders, such as the Tides Foundation, Soros’s Open Society Foundations, the Arca Foundation, the Surdna Foundation, and the Brightwater Fund (all of which also fund BLM).REF AFGJ also partners with Code Pink, which (as discussed below) has unsavory ties to the People’s Republic of China. The AFGJ website has reprinted propaganda, apparently written by the same author, from the Workers’ World Party, a U.S. Marxist-Leninist party, praising the gulag state of North Korea.REF AFGJ also actively supports Marxist dictatorships, such as those in Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, and says that “liberal democracy is a sham” since it is “the governing principle of the US/NATO Empire, which serves global capitalism.”REF

Aside from its previous sponsorship of M4BL, AFGJ is currently the fiscal sponsor for BLM chapters in Louisville and Oklahoma City.REF Its Global Justice Center hosts events for the Democratic Socialists of America and the Party for Socialism and Liberation, two Marxist political parties deeply embedded in the revolutionary ecosystem, the first of which has members in the U.S. Congress associated with it, such Representatives Alezandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–NY), Rashida Tlaib (D–MI), and Jamaal Bowman (D–NY).REF Lastly, the AFGJ has ties with the U.S. Social Forum, another U.S. network that was created at the urging of another Marxist dictator, this time Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, to set up a beachhead “in the belly of the beast.”REF

The People’s Forum (TPF). The People’s Forum takes direct part in the anti-Israel campus demonstrations and played a decisive role in the most dramatic moment of the encampment movement, the violent takeover of Columbia University’s Hamilton Hall on the night of April 30, 2024. The group was founded in New York City in 2018 by Dominican-born Manolo De Los Santos as a “market incubator” for “socialist and internationalist ideas.”REF Its website says that TPF refuses to “host or provide space” for organizations that promote “capitalism/imperialism.”REF De Los Santos, TPF’s executive director, trained in communist Cuba, according to The Wall Street Journal’s Mary O’Grady,REF an island he first visited in 2006 when he was taken there by the far-Left Pastors for Peace.REF On May 3, 2023, he tweeted a photo of himself from the island with the head of the Cuban regime, President Miguel Diaz-Canel. The tweet read: “Leaving Cuba after 10 days learning with its people & President Miguel Diaz-Canel. Young people in the U.S. have great tasks ahead of them. We have a responsibility to defeat, once & for all, this genocidal blockade [referring to U.S. sanctions on the Cuban regime] for the survival of the Cuban people & the future of humanity!”REF He again tweeted a photo of himself with the Cuban dictator during the latter’s visit to New York for the U.N.’s General Assembly in September 2023.

TPF wasted no time throwing all this Cuban training and general revolutionary zeal training behind Hamas. The Washington Free Beacon reports that one day after the October 7 attack, the group organized a demonstration in Times Square, “where attendees celebrated Hamas and waved posters with anti-Semitic slogans and imagery. One protestor waved a picture of a Nazi flag on his cellphone.”REF From that moment on, TPF has been one of the leading protest organizers. TPF’s ultimate goal, however, has always been the destruction of the U.S.: “When we defeat Israel and the U.S. Empire, we will…know how to dismantle capitalism here in the United States,” De Los Santos posted on Instagram in December 2023.REF

The group is perhaps best known, however, for the rally that it hosted for more than 100 keffiyeh-clad protesters at its Midtown Manhattan office on the fateful night of April 30. The Free Beacon, whose reporter watched the gathering on Zoom, says that the meeting was delayed to give some straggling protesters time to arrive from Columbia University. De Los Santos gave a rousing, Cuban-style speech to those gathered, urging them to repeat 2020, “give Joe Biden a hot summer,” and “make it untenable for the politics of usual to take place in this country.” The Columbia students, he said, had decided that “resistance is more important than negotiations.” He urged those present to “go back out. We have to be the bodies willing to stand between the police and our students.” Breakout sessions on “resistance” followed De Los Santos’s rant and the overall meeting concluded at 9:30 p.m., three hours before protesters stormed Hamilton Hall by breaking through its windows.REF

Where The People’s Forum Fits in the Revolutionary Ecosystem. When De Los Santos told the gathered protesters to recreate the violence of “the summer of 2020,” he spoke from experience. He was studying liberation theology in Cuba in early 2014 when the BLM Ferguson riots took place, but he told an interviewer in 2015 that he avidly followed everything on state TV. “Every evening on the news, this story is one of the top stories. We hear about our brothers and sisters being killed and assassinated on a regular basis,” said De Los Santos, who is black.REF Five years later, he was in the U.S. and promoting BLM’s protests. Barely two weeks after George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis, and as America was rocked by street violence, De Los Santos, along with Claudia de la Cruz of the International People’s Assembly (IPA), co-authored a long essay urging revolutionaries to use the moment to seize power, writing,

We have been a country at war, domestically and internationally. The United States government has been in a prolonged and vicious war against poor people since its inception. The capitalist system of the United States is upheld by oppressive and exploitative systems like racism and white supremacy. It is a class war with racism at its very core!REF

Later, he became a conduit between BLM and communist Cuba, taking a BLM Grassroots delegation on a 10-day visit to Cuba (jointly organized with the IPA) to learn from government officials about “the experiences of the Cuban people building socialism.”REF In 2021, he, along with the ANSWER Coalition and Code Pink, organized the writing of a letter—published by The New York Times on July 13, 2021—urging President Biden to undo President Donald Trump’s actions against Cuba. This letter was signed by Black Lives Matter GNF and 400 people, including the actors Danny Glover, Susan Sarandon, Jane Fonda, and Mark Ruffalo.REF TPF also rallied support for BLM by joining the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) and the IPA in calling for the release of PSL members arrested in riots, a petition also signed by outfits in Cuba and the ALBA Movimientos, an organization that works to stop the reforms of Argentine President Milei.REF ALBA stands for Alianza Bolivariana para los Pueblos de Nuestra América (Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America), referring to Hugo Chavez’s “Bolivarian” Marxist movement. TPF’s education coordinator, Tajee Bounds, is a member of the Paterson, New Jersey, chapter of BLM.

TPF is funded by Neville Roy Singham, a tech multi-millionaire who lives in Shanghai and has strong connections to the CCP. Singham, for eight years a strategic technical adviser to China’s tech giant Huawei, used Goldman Sach’s charitable entity to channel $12 million to TPF, for example.REF Singham set up the People’s Support Foundation (PSF) with the proceeds of the 2017 sale of his Chicago software consultancy Thoughtworks, which made him $785 million, and PSF makes many of the grants to other projects.REF Singham, directly or indirectly, also funds IPA, the ANSWER Coalition, and many other Marxist entities.REF These are among the seven convenors in the Shut It Down for Palestine (SID4P) movement, “an anti-capitalist, antipolice, and anti-government protest movement that emerged after October 7, 2023. It functions as a hybrid online/real-world network for mobilizing frequent demonstrations as well as gradually escalating direct-action campaigns targeting critical infrastructure and public spaces.”REF

The Act Now to Stop War & End Racism (ANSWER) Coalition. Another Singham-funded group, ANSWER is a front operation for the Party for Socialism and Liberation. The Marxist group was founded three days after 9/11 to organize street protests against a U.S. response to the planners and supporters of the terror attack. ANSWER’s two main founders were Chuck Kaufman of the Nicaragua Network/Alliance for Global Justice and Brian Becker, co-founder of the PSL.REF A one-time host for Vladimir Putin’s Sputnik Radio—Russia’s propaganda outlet in the U.S.—Becker is now leader of both the PSL and ANSWER, serving as national coordinator for the former and national director for the latter. The PSL is an old-style communist party that continues to pine for revolution. U.S. democracy, it says, is a façade, behind which “the United States today is a dictatorship of the capitalist class. This reality will not change without a socialist revolution.”REF

ANSWER has organized numerous anti-Israel protests since its founding, but it is also deeply committed to the anti-capitalist struggle that uses the Palestinian issue just as it uses race, sex, the environment, or Native American issues when they are convenient. It has demonstrated considerable mobilization capabilities, bringing tens of thousands onto the streets again and again, often by busing demonstrators in from other cities. As described earlier, AMP chose ANSWER to organize a massive protest march in Washington, DC, on January 13, 2024.REF On March 2, 2024, ANSWER worked with other Marxist groups all over the world, including BLM outfits, to organize protests in dozens of cities from San Antonio to Saipan to Sao Paulo. These protests were cosponsored or endorsed by the PSL, Al-Awda, JVP, SJP, AMP, Code Pink, TPF, CAIR, ALBA Movimientos, the Black Alliance for Peace (a BLM group whose advisory committee includes BLM co-founder Opal Tometi and professor Cornel West), and BLM’s Charleston chapter.REF

An ANSWER organizer at a mid-March demonstration provided one of the best comments on how the activists view the protests, when he was captured on YouTube remonstrating with an interviewer. “You’re not doing this for what the actual conversation is, which is getting rid of this country,” the ANSWER activist said. When the YouTuber asked incredulously, “Getting rid of this country?” The activist set him straight: “Getting rid of America, getting rid of the West. This is what this is for. Yes. Everyone here understands that at some level we need to get rid of America, completely.”REF

Where ANSWER Fits in the Revolutionary Ecosystem. ANSWER is fiscally sponsored by The Progress Unity Fund (PUF), which is closely tied to the Workers World Party, from which the PSL split in 2004. The Workers World Party is also linked to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, whose speeches it publishes.REF PUF is funded by the Tides Foundation, according to the Capitol Research Center’s Influence Watch.REF It also receives funding from Singham, according to NCRI, and the office that PUF and ANSWER share in San Francisco is often used as a venue by PSL officials.REF PUF also fiscally sponsors Pivot to Peace, an organization which the NCRI report says has ties to the CCP. PUF, ANSWER, and Pivot to Peace overlap and share personnel both with each other and with Code Pink, De Los Santos, and others.

ANSWER’s own cooperation with BLM also dates back to the latter’s founding. ANSWER took a delegation of nine activists and organizers to the original meeting of the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) on the campus of Cleveland State University from July 24 to 26, 2015. ANSWER said that the nine “participated in the full range of the conference, sharing our insights gained from over a decade in the struggle against injustice in the United States and abroad. Our delegation was made up of those who are participating actively and in some cases leading important Black Lives Matter struggles in their cities.”REF ANSWER has also organized protests with BLM. In 2022, for example, ANSWER, the BLM Indianapolis chapter, and the PSL organized a protest demanding the prosecution of a policeman who had kicked an arrested man.REF

Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP). JVP was one of the three principal organizers of the Columbia University encampment and participated in the seizure of Hamilton Hall—even though the university had previously suspended its JVP and SJP chapters.REF It has also co-sponsored rallies with ANSWER, SJP, and the PSL. Thus, while JVP itself focuses on the Israel–Palestine conflict, it also occupies a comfortable position on the socialist spectrum and within the revolutionary ecosystem. According to its own portal, JVP “fight[s] for the liberation of all people. We believe that through organizing, we can and will dismantle the institutions and structures that sustain injustice.”REF Its name purposely intends to dispel the notion that the pro-Palestine movement is antisemitic—even though activists shout the slogan “From the River to the Sea,” which means that Jews should be removed (read: ethnically cleansed) from Israel. The Anti-Defamation League says that JVP has active chapters on 12 American campuses.REF JVP has sponsored or co-sponsored dozens of rallies since October 7, actively promoting them on social media accounts, adds the ADL. According to Influence Watch, JVP once hosted a convicted PFLP terrorist to speak at one of its conferences in 2017.REF

Where JVP Fits in the Revolutionary Ecosystem. JVP receives funding from the best-known stars in the leftist funders firmament: the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Open Society Foundations, the Tides Foundation, the Kataly Fund, the Elias Foundation, and many others, according to NGO Monitor and the foundations’ own grant databases.REF All these foundations have given millions to BLM organizations. The money they give to JVP is passed through a white-shoe array of anonymous donor-advised groups, from Schwab Charitable Fund to Fidelity Investment Charitable Gift Fund, Morgan Stanley Global Impact, Vanguard Charitable Endowment Program, and the Tides Foundation itself, which both grants and receives funds.

JVP has also maintained a long and direct collaboration with the BLM world. It was a pioneer in the push to ensure that the two revolutionary movements were linked, stating in May 2015 (just a few months after the Ferguson riots) that

JVP is part of a broad progressive movement that makes the connections between the struggle in Israel/Palestine and all struggles aimed at justice, dignity, freedom, and equality for all—from the Black Lives Matter Movement to the struggle for immigrant rights, from work against mass incarceration to opposing US militarism around the world, and many others.REF

After the creation of M4BL later in 2015, JVP became an endorsing organization of the group. The following year, it gleefully endorsed the M4BL’s Vision for Black Lives platform and its call for BDS against Israel.REF

Within Our Lifetime (WOL). Founded in 2015 by Nerdeen Kiswani, a Jordanian-born Palestinian who lives in the heavily Palestinian Bay Ridge neighborhood of Brooklyn, WOL is one of the most militant activist groups. The term “within our lifetime” refers to the destruction of Israel. WOL collaborates closely with SJP, and Kiswani herself served as SJP president at the City University of New York Law School, as well as at Hunter College and College of Staten Island.REF Kiswani was arrested—along with dozens of other WOL activists—on April 16, 2024, one day after the encampment went up at Columbia. That protest shut down critical infrastructure in the New York City boroughs of Manhattan and Brooklyn, including the Brooklyn Bridge. Protesters flew the flag of the Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah and burned the American flag. After her release, Kiswani led chants of, “There is only one solution, intifada revolution!”REF Intifada is an “uprising” (read: slaughter of Jews), such as through the suicide bombings and other attacks in the first intifada (1987–1993) and the second intifada (2000–2005) in Israel.

The Anti-Defamation League accuses WOL members of “[s]ome of the most heinous antisemitic rhetoric and incidents seen at New York City protests.”REF The ADL adds that “as of April 2024, WOL has hosted or co-sponsored at least 78 anti-Israel rallies many of which included explicit support for violence against Israeli civilians by U.S. designated foreign terrorist organizations such as Hamas, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), Hezbollah, the Houthis and affiliated individuals.”REF Kiswani said in a YouTube video in 2021, “I hope that pop-pop is the last noise that some Zionists hear in their lifetime!” and posted on Instagram 2017, “Israel must be annihilated.”REF

Where Within Our Lifetime Fits in the Revolutionary Ecosystem. WOL was fiscally sponsored by WESPAC until at least 2022, though WOL today makes no mention of WESPAC.REF BLM promotes WOL in various ways, such as by distributing the WOL “Rally Toolkit” in its BLM At School initiative, which dozens of schools use nationwide.REF Angela Waters Austin serves both as director of operations for Black Lives Matter Grassroots and as co-chair of WOL’s Network Communications Working Group.REF

International People’s Assembly (IPA). The IPA, yet another Singham-funded outfit, has organized several large rallies since October 7, including one near the National Mall in Washington, DC, and in several other cities on November 5.REF It also organized protests on college campuses.REF A collection of more than 200 global organizations dedicated to collective action through “mobilization, political training, social research and media,”REF the IPA is one of the key links in the revolutionary ecosystem and in the Singham world that links Americans to the CCP, Cuba, Venezuela, and other U.S. enemies. The NCRI report calls the IPA “the least visible of the Singham-linked SID4P Convenors.” It adds that its official social media accounts, which are a key part of its contribution to the ecosystem, were opened in 2021, just after the BLM riots a year earlier, and that its Instagram profile is based in Brazil. “Many of its audio-visual and textual productions appear in Spanish and Portuguese alongside English, facilitating conveyance of its target narratives to Latin America and Latino activist circles within the US,” says NCRI.REF

The IPA developed as a sort of offshoot of Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (MST), a Marxist undertaking with many connections on the Left. In 2012, one year before she co-founded BLM, a starry-eyed Alicia Garza was sent to Brazil to report on the MST and wrote, “For those of us who are working hard to build transformative resistance in the belly of the beast, we look to social movements like the MST for hope and inspiration, for ideas on practice, strategy and method, and as proof that collective and direct action gets the goods.”REF Since its founding in 1984, the MST has spent its years harnessing liberation theology and Marxism as its activists occupy private land in Brazil, openly drawing inspiration from the Cuban revolution. In its drive to globalize these efforts, it organized several “Dilemmas of Humanity” conferences—the second of which witnessed the birth of the IPA in 2015 as an “international framework for defining common strategies raised by popular movements and political organizations around the globe.”REF

The IPA’s 44-page political platform says it is devoted to the struggle against capitalism, representative democracy, the “failed bourgeois state,” imperialism, Zionism, and the patriarchy.REF In other words, it is a full-service communist organization that coordinates efforts across the globe. In South America, for example, it collaborates with ALBA Movimientos, a front for the Marxist dictatorship of Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela.REF ALBA is a group that actively opposes conservative leaders like Argentine President Milei and Brazil’s former president Jair Bolsonaro, and supports Marxist regimes like that of Brazil’s President Inacio Lula da Silva, and with whom the IPA organizes events and releases statements.REF ALBA was founded by a treaty signed between Cuba and Venezuela on December 14, 2004.

Today, the IPA and its components organize gatherings and release statements. In late 2023, the IPA released a statement expressing “solidarity with Palestine and…rejection of the Zionist massacre in Gaza,” which received signatures from groups across the world, including the PSL, the Palestinian People’s Party, and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine.REF In April 2024, IPA component ALBA organized a massive gathering of 300 delegates from 60 countries in all continents in Caracas, Venezuela. President Maduro told the gathering that “Zionism is the spearhead of fascism in the world and is getting into Latin America. Be alert! What I can tell you is this: in Venezuela they will not come in, this people will prevail against fascism and the Zionism.”REF

How the International People’s Assembly Fits into the Revolutionary Ecosystem. The IPA ties directly to many of the organizations that comprise the revolutionary ecosystem. As noted, the De Los Santos June 2020 essay asking the George Floyd protesters to seize the moment and unleash revolution was co-authored with IPA’s Claudia de la Cruz. The following year, in a webinar talk in which she ranted about the “anti-racist, anti-capitalist, anti-patriarchal, and anti-imperialist” struggle, de la Cruz boasted about how “we, black and indigenous women, were there…during the massive anti-racist protests in mid-2020.”REF Like The People’s Forum, another Singham-funded entity, the IPA serves as a conduit for Havana, BLM, and the general leftist movement. In 2023, it worked with De Los Santos to transport delegations from BLM Grassroots, the Palestinian Youth Movement, the PSL, and other groups to Cuba—in violation of U.S. sanctions—to “learn from the Cuban people” and their “everyday work to eliminate historic oppression.”REF The year prior, the IPA and De Los Santos organized the same week-long trip to Havana, taking students from the ANSWER Coalition, The People’s Forum, Code Pink, and the BLM-associated Black Youth Project 100.REF

The IPA was also a key participant in the 2022 People’s Summit for Democracy, an event that brought together more than 3,000 attendees representing groups such as ALBA, ANSWER, Code Pink, BLM LA, Black Alliance for Peace, and Black Alliance for Just Immigration.REF Speakers at the event included radical left-wing professor and activist Cornel West, and BLM Grassroots leader Melina Abdullah, as well as Tricontinental’s Vijay Prashad, Code Pink’s Medea Benjamin, and Oscar Lopez Rivera, a Puerto Rican terrorist who spent 32 years in prison for his involvement in a group that perpetrated more than 100 bombings in several U.S. cities, including New York and Chicago.REF Lopez Rivera was released from prison by President Barack Obama.

Other Activist Groups. These eight groups comprise the bulk of the mobilization capacity of the activist group network, but there are others. Among those with the greatest capacity to turn people out to protest, and with one of the best pedigrees in Marxian movements, is the Grassroots Global Justice (GGJ) alliance. The GGJ has organized anti-Israel protests, as it did in December 2023, when it coordinated an illegal protest at the Rotunda in the U.S. Capitol, at which 50 activists were arrested.REF GGJ executive director Cindy Wiesner is a fixture of leftist circles, participating in many of the U.S. Social Forum gatherings alongside BLM founders Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi. All four were at the founding conference of the US Social Forum in Atlanta in 2007, for which GGJ served as the initial fiscal sponsor. GGJ is, in fact, is a creature of the Social Forum movement, having been founded after the 2002 World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil, when U.S. organizers decided to create a venue to connect American Marxists with like-minded “social movements outside the United States.”REF According to the report written after the 2007 foundational U.S. Social Forum, “GGJ is a national alliance of grassroots organizations based in the U.S. GGJ was founded through the WSF process. GGJ helped to initiate the USSF [U.S. Social Forum].” REF

Al-Awda is another Singham-funded project, which means it has CCP connections, and it also has links to Hamas and the PFLP. Charlotte Kates of Samidoun and Neerden Kiswami of Within Our Lifetime are also officials in al-Awda.

IfNotNow is another group that, like JVP, pretends to represent Jews who hate Zionism. The NGO Monitor says that IfNotNow is funded by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and “has been highly active and visible with anti-Israel activities including protests and other disruptions. Its main target has been the mainstream US Jewish community.”REF

Many of these groups are bona fide brick-and-mortar organizations—ANSWER, for example, shares a San Francisco office with PUF, an address that also serves as a venue to the PSL. The People’s Forum is headquartered on West 37th Street in Midtown Manhattan. Others are more hybrid outfits, with strong online presences and perhaps only a P.O. box in the physical world. They are not less powerful in promoting propaganda or mobilizing protestors for it. The radical media groups that amplify the revolutionary ecosystem operate exceedingly well at this level.

Radical Media Groups

The radical media organizations that have given the pro-Palestinian protests wall-to-wall coverage also did the same for BLM’s many groups, helping them to manufacture crises whenever the opportunity arose. In times between, these outlets give full airing and support to the positions taken by Cuba, China, Iran, Russia, Venezuela, or any other U.S. enemy. Among these outlets figure names like Tricontinental, BreakThrough News, Common Dreams, FightBack!, and others, all of whom collaborate with the top personalities of the activist groups. The state organs of America’s adversaries—such as Russia’s Sputnik News, Venezuela’s TeleSur, or Cuba’s Prensa Latina—are also always there to amplify.

Neville Roy Singham’s intricate skein of nonprofits stands behind much of the radical news and social media networks that promote propaganda and mobilize militants. This network is a deliberately murky haze. As The New York Times put it in a long August 2023 feature on Singham and his wife, Code Pink co-founder Jodie Evans:

While other moguls slapped their names on foundations, Mr. Singham sent his money through a system that concealed his giving. At its center were four new nonprofits with dust-dry names like “United Community Fund” and “Justice and Education Fund.” They have almost no real-world footprints, listing their addresses only as UPS store mailboxes in Illinois, Wisconsin and New York.REF

The information sites funded by the nonprofits, adds the New York Times, “operate in coordination. They have cross-posted articles and shared one another’s content on social media hundreds of times. Many share staff members and office space. They organize events together and interview one another’s representatives without disclosing their ties.”REF

BreakThrough (BT) News exemplifies many aspects of this radical media network. It is one of the top platforms for leftist news. Today, it focuses primarily on anti-Israeli agitation and propaganda (agitprop), but before October 7, it prioritized other leftist causes, including issues related to BLM, and always offered the CCP perspective on all issues, as well as that of Moscow, Havana, Tehran, or any other U.S. enemy. According to a study contained in the NCRI report, “Since October 7, 2023, BTNews’ narrative focus has undergone a quantifiable shift away from other far-left causes and towards the war in Gaza.” In the six months following Hamas’s attack on Israel, BT News’ YouTube channel’s top keywords were “Palestine,” “Gaza,” and “Israel.” In the six months preceding October 7, the top keywords were “Cuba,” “president,” and “strike.”REF Of 60 videos displayed on BT’s YouTube Channel on June 3, all but 16 were on the Palestinian issue, and the rest were mostly about the developing world, and one was about the fourth anniversary of George Floyd’s death.REF Since it joined YouTube in February 2020, BT News has heavily covered BLM, promoting the protests that year since they started with Floyd’s death in late May.REF To this day, BT Media still proudly proclaims on its portal, “We fully support and advocate for Black Lives Matter, BIPOC [black, indigenous, and other people of color], and LGBTQIA+ rights.”REF

BT News also exemplifies the internal coordination among all the tentacles of the Singham network and of the ecosystem, in general. It is housed, for example, at The People’s Forum office on 37th Street in Manhattan. NCRI says that BT “shares numerous fiscal and organizational connections with other core organizations of the Singham Network…. Moreover, the People’s Forum provided grants to BT Media in 2021 and 2022, in addition to significant financial support that BT Media received from other Singham-linked entities.”REF The overlap with other parts of the ecosystem is intricate. One of the activists that ANSWER took to Cleveland in 2015 to participate in the creation of M4BL was Eugene Puryear, who today is one BT News’s top hosts. NCRI says BT News is “known for promoting pro-CCP geopolitical interests.”REF

Another recipient of Singham’s largesse is the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research, where TPF’s De Los Santos also works as a researcher and where Singham himself serves as chairman of the International Advisory Board. Tricontinental produces newsletters, articles and videos on global Marxist issues. The outfit’s name speaks volumes about the ambition and breadth of its founders: It is a tribute both to the Tricontinental Conference held in Havana in 1966, which brought together Marxist delegates from 82 countries, and to the Institute for Social Research set up in Frankfurt in the 1920s in Germany by Marxist intellectuals to probe why communism was failing in Western Europe, otherwise known as the Frankfurt School.

Tricontinental describes itself as not just Marxist, but also Gramscian—that is, it subscribes to the ideas derived from Italian communist Antonio Gramsci, which emphasize cultural indoctrination through a country’s institutions. It writes on its mission page that “the main epistemological basis for such an approach to knowledge is derived from Karl Marx’s ‘11th Thesis on Feuerbach’: ‘philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.’”REF Tricontinental adopts Gramsci’s idea of the “new intellectual,” who comes from the working class and understands its conditions.

Tricontinental collaborates with Dongsheng News, originally started by Singham as a newsletter and which is now a news site that covers Chinese news in several languages. Dongsheng means “The East is Ascending.” “Dongsheng’s editors, in China, come from Tricontinental, but its address leads to The People’s Forum,” reported The New York Times, which quoted Singham as defending Dongsheng’s China coverage by saying that it “provides unique progressive coverage of China that has been sadly missing.”REF

Tricontinental’s executive director, Vijay Prashad—the Marxist academic quoted at the beginning of this Special Report—explained Singham in a 2021 tweet as “a Marxist with a massive software company!” who sold it and decided to give that money to educate “a new generation of radicals.”REF When the Harvard Political Review asked him to describe himself, Prashad said, “I’m a Marxist. I’m a communist. I believe in women’s emancipation. I believe in gay rights. I believe in everything good, decent, and sensitive in the world.”REF He put on display his definition of what is “good, decent and sensitive,” by appearing alongside Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro and Manolo De Los Santos in a photo-op in which all three were giving the thumbs up.REF They were in Caracas on “the day of regional and local elections in which several Venezuelan opposition politicians had been banned from participating,”REF as was explained in a 2022 feature for New Lines Magazine, one of the first publications to document Singham’s investments in the several components of the revolutionary ecosystem.REF

Tricontinental focuses on third-world Marxist issues, and when it mentions BLM, the perspective is often about what BLM portends for the rest of the world—and lest one forget, one of the main BLM outfits, BLM GNF, has “Global Network” in its title. Prashad was in Ferguson in 2014, when global Marxists gathered to organize world revolution, writing for a number of publications, including Frontline, a leftist magazine published by The Hindu, and for Counterpunch, a popular U.S. far-left publication.REF In remarks that are ominously revelatory of the organizing Marxist mindset, Prashad told the LA Progressive in 2023 that the 2020 BLM protests “were the largest mass protests in U.S. history, much larger than the protests against the Vietnam War…. They brought millions of people into a political domain that’s reasonably Left…. The ability for mass struggle is here in the United States. But it’s a connection that has to be built patiently, with lots of love and care. Gardens don’t grow by themselves.”REF Today, Tricontinental focuses intensely on the Palestinian issue, but again on its connections to the third world, as Prashad did in an April 2024 newsletter on how peasants of Brazil’s Landless Movement were gathering food for Gaza.REF

Yet another media group that heavily supports the work of both BLM and the anti-Israel protesters is Common Dreams, which was founded in 1997 by former Democratic Party operative Craig Brown and his wife Lina Newhouser. Common Dreams has significant reach, with some of its staff members writing for more mainstream outlets, such as The Washington Post, or being quoted by The New York Times, and publishing leftist celebrities, such as The Nation’s Katrina Vanden Heuvel, Code Pink’s Medea Benjamin, and actress Susan Sarandon.REF It has given BLM wall-to-wall coverage, starting with its founding and then heavily promoting the Ferguson Marxist gathering in 2014. George Floyd had not been dead a week in 2020 when Common Dreams was telling its readers that “another uprising was inevitable.”REF Today, of course, Common Dreams devotes most of its stories to the Palestinian issue. It is not clear if Singham gives the outlet money, but his son Nathan, who works for Tricontinental in Sao Paulo, Brazil, writes for Common Dreams.

There is also the news site Fight Back! News, the party organ of Freedom Road Socialist Organization, which proclaims that it is “building towards the creation of a new Communist Party based on Marxism-Leninism.REF FightBack! does not just print communist agitprop but has also helped to organize campus protests in the U.S. and Canada. The link between Freedom Road and BLM is well established.REF

China’s Special Role

One distinguishing feature of these outlets and their personalities is that they all air content favorable to China, and deny CCP repression, especially the genocide perpetrated against the Uyghur Muslims. The 2022 feature for New Lines Magazine found that between 2017 and 2022, almost $65 million of the Singham wealth “filtered through various entities connected with people who have defended the Chinese government and downplayed or denied documented human rights violations committed by Beijing against the Uyghur and Turkic Muslim minorities.REF The New York Times reported that in June 2022, an editor for Singham start-up New Frame, Darryl Accone, “wrote a resignation letter criticizing New Frame’s soft coverage of China and Russia. The ‘unavoidable conclusion,’ he wrote, ‘is that this is an ideological directive emanating from above and outside New Frame.’”REF

BT News is also heavily involved in pressing China’s genocide denial. New Lines Magazine’s authors wrote that “this project is spearheaded by Rania Khalek, an apologist for Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, whose previous media ventures, Redfish and Soapbox, were both exposed by journalists as cutouts of Russian state-funded media.” New Lines added that

Soapbox’s parent group, Maffick, sued Facebook for libel in the U.S. District Court in California after the social media company labeled its subsidiaries “Russia state-controlled media.” But the case was dismissed, because the court agreed that Facebook “tendered a substantial amount of evidence in support of its view that Maffick is linked to the Russian government.”REF

The New York Times feature says that Singham “works closely with the Chinese government media machine and is financing its propaganda worldwide.” It said that Singham denies working at the direction of the CCP—which Prashad does as well—but that in reality, “He and his allies are on the front line of what Communist Party officials call a ‘smokeless war,’” whose goal since Xi Jinping came to power is “to disguise propaganda as independent content.”REF The NCRI report, for its part, says that the People’s Forum, IPA, and the ANSWER Coalition “are part of a network linked by close financial, interpersonal, and ideological ties to Neville Roy Singham and his wife Jodie Evans, a power couple within the global far-left movement with close ties to the CCP.”REF Singham network groups and the Party for Socialism and Liberation “demonstrate significant financial, personnel, and operational overlap,” according to NCRI. Evans, the co-founder of CODEPINK, an ostensibly “anti-war” group which nonetheless says very favorable things about China, is co-writing a book with a researcher at Tricontinental that will be titled, “China Is Not Our Enemy.” Evans sits on the board of TPF, and Singham sits on the board of Tricontinental.

Conclusion

As Vijay Prashad said in the 2016 interview for CounterPunch,REF the BLM organizations benefited from an “infrastructure of confidence-building” as they set off to change America in 2013, 2014, and, most decisively, 2020. The individuals who helped BLM to achieve its goal had “been organizers for decades and have great experience in knowing how to build a movement.” They came from “socialist traditions,” Prashad added. Now, as Prashad told the LA Progressive, “The ability for mass struggle is here in the United States,” and activists are building it patiently. The revolutionary ecosystem is what they have built. Today, it is being tapped by the anti-Israel protesters, but they aim to do much more than destroy Israel.

This revolutionary ecosystem is unknown to most Americans, who therefore do not press their elected leaders to do something about it. As they find out about it, however, they should ask themselves, “Do we want Marxist mass struggle in the United States?” While it may be that the individuals and legal entities in question are engaging in constitutionally protected practices, and within the remit of their tax-protected status, a future Administration must ensure that that remains so. (It is very unlikely that the Biden Administration will do so because, as Politico reported, the pro-Palestinian protesters are being funded by “Biden’s biggest donors.”REF) The involvement of China, Cuba, Venezuela, and other foreign adversaries must focus the mind of America’s elected leaders. Many are run by communist parties that want to see America humiliated—and destroyed.

Mike Gonzalez is Angeles T. Arredondo E Pluribus Unum Senior Fellow in the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy at The Heritage Foundation. Mary Mobley is a member of the summer 2024 Heritage Young Leaders Program.