CODEPINK or CODERED?
Beijing’s Influence in an American “Peace” Movement
The Covert CCP Campaign on American Streets
INVESTIGATIONS—Thursday, June 26th, 2025: By Walter Curt
In the current climate of social unrest, a startling nexus has been uncovered linking ostensibly grassroots American activism to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). At the forefront are Code Pink – the self-styled anti-war women’s peace group – and a New York City-based nonprofit called The People’s Forum. These organizations, led by veteran activist Jodie Evans (Code Pink’s co-founder) and heavily funded by her husband, tech billionaire Neville Roy Singham, are facing intense scrutiny for their alleged role in funneling foreign influence into U.S. protest movements. Evidence from financial records, leaked documents, and international investigations paints a complex web of financial and logistical support behind recent demonstrations – from pro-Palestine rallies to anti-war protests – that appears to trace back to networks aligned with the CCP’s propaganda machinery.
Investigators and policymakers suspect that what presents itself as organic progressive activism may in fact be a covert CCP influence campaign operating on American streets. The money trail points to a worrying possibility: that The People’s Forum – under the guise of social justice advocacy – and Code Pink have been channeling funds and resources into protests that align with Beijing’s geopolitical interests. This apparent exploitation of American activism for foreign agendas raises urgent questions about the autonomy and transparency of domestic protest movements. As more evidence emerges, the picture comes into focus: what seems like homegrown dissent – from pro-Palestinian marches to anti-“U.S. imperialism” rallies – may actually be nurtured and directed by an international influence operation with deep CCP ties.
The People’s Forum and Code Pink at the Helm
One of the clearest examples of this nexus is the role of The People’s Forum, a self-described “movement incubator” nonprofit in Manhattan. Since its founding in 2017, The People’s Forum has quietly become a key organizer and sponsor of high-profile protests – including several large pro-Palestine demonstrations following the Hamas terror attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Notably, The People’s Forum helped coordinate the massive “National March on Washington: Free Palestine” on Nov. 4, 2023, and other “Shut It Down for Palestine” protests. On social media, the group urged followers to go “all out for Palestine,” circulated slogans like “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” and even bragged when activists stormed the lobby of BlackRock’s NYC headquarters during a protest on Nov. 9.
Crucially, The People’s Forum does not operate in isolation – it shares both leadership influence and funding sources with Code Pink. Jodie Evans, co-founder of Code Pink, sits on the board and is a central figure in The People’s Forum’s network. In fact, Neville Roy Singham – Evans’s husband – has been the main financial backer of The People’s Forum since its inception. According to investigative reporting by The Free Press, Singham and Evans have bankrolled The People’s Forum from day one, providing its $3.9 million seed funding in 2017 and millions more in subsequent years. Singham, a former tech entrepreneur, sold his software company ThoughtWorks for $785 million in 2017 – the same year The People’s Forum launched – and channeled a portion of that windfall into this new “movement incubator” for left-wing causes.
“Since 2017, Singham has been the main funder of The People’s Forum, which has co-organized at least four protests after 1,400 innocent Israelis were slaughtered….” – The Free Press (report by Frannie Block)
Financial documents and nonprofit disclosures corroborate this arrangement. By some accounts, Singham (often via pass-through entities) contributed nearly all of The People’s Forum’s funding between 2017 and 2022. Public IRS filings show that in its early years, The People’s Forum’s revenue came almost entirely from a few large gifts and grants – a telltale sign of a single patron behind the scenes. In an unusual admission, The People’s Forum itself once acknowledged meeting “Roy Singham, a Marxist comrade who sold his company and donated his wealth to nonprofits focusing on political education”. That “donated wealth” appears to have sustained the organization’s rapid growth and its numerous programs, which include courses on Marxism and imperialism, a radical bookstore, and full-time staff organizing rallies.
Code Pink, for its part, has functioned as both a collaborator and beneficiary in this nexus. The group’s name appears alongside The People’s Forum on protest organizing materials, and it formally endorsed major demonstrations like the November 4 Washington march. More significantly, a quarter of Code Pink’s own funding since 2017 – over $1.4 million – came from two nonprofits linked to Singham. This staggering statistic (first revealed by The New York Times) means that by taking Singham’s money, Code Pink became financially intertwined with the same network that fuels The People’s Forum. It’s therefore no surprise that these two groups often march in lockstep. Both promote identical messaging on foreign policy and both staunchly defend regimes hostile to the U.S. – chief among them Beijing. While positioning themselves as champions of “peace” or “social justice,” Code Pink and The People’s Forum have effectively become vehicles for amplifying China’s talking points on the global stage.
The leadership overlaps are also notable. Evans herself serves as a bridge – a veteran Democratic activist and anti-war organizer who moved from mainstream politics into this new China-friendly activism. (She once worked as a California political adviser and even co-chaired Jerry Brown’s 1992 presidential campaign, underscoring how Beijing’s influence can penetrate even established political circles through well-connected figures.) Meanwhile, The People’s Forum’s executive director, Manolo De Los Santos, has publicly praised anti-Israel protests and run cover for Hamas’s sponsors. De Los Santos and Evans co-hosted a 2021 conference series that, tellingly, framed anti-Asian hate and U.S. imperialism as intertwined – a narrative that conveniently mirrors Chinese state messaging about American racism being the real threat, not China’s policies. Little wonder that Senator Chuck Grassley, in an April 2025 letter to federal authorities, accused both The People’s Forum and Code Pink of “acting in service of the Chinese Communist Party” and urged an inquiry into whether they should register as foreign agents.
Both groups vehemently deny taking orders or money from Beijing. “We have never received funds from the Chinese government,” The People’s Forum’s director De Los Santos insisted, dismissing the allegations as “politically motivated attacks aimed at silencing our advocacy”. Code Pink likewise claims it is “neither funded nor influenced by any foreign government” and is simply a non-partisan voice for peace. But the pattern of evidence tells a different story – one of dark money, coordinated narratives, and uncanny alignment with CCP interests, all centered around Singham’s fortune. As Grassley put it bluntly, “Public reporting and evidence suggests The People’s Forum and Code Pink are financially connected and influenced by Neville Roy Singham and elements of the communist Chinese government”.
Neville Singham’s Red Money Network
To understand how an American peace activist group could become entangled with an authoritarian superpower, one must follow the money. Neville Roy Singham, now 69, is the linchpin of the entire operation. A charismatic American tech mogul-turned-Marxist benefactor, Singham has spent the past several years building and funding a global web of organizations that promote Beijing’s view of the world. An extensive New York Times investigation in 2023 revealed the astonishing scale of Singham’s influence campaign: reporters “tracked hundreds of millions of dollars” flowing through U.S. nonprofits to groups across Asia, Africa, and the Americas – all of them mixing progressive advocacy with Chinese government talking points.
What the Times uncovered is a “lavishly funded influence campaign that defends China and pushes its propaganda worldwide”, with Singham at its center. After selling ThoughtWorks in 2017, Singham ostensibly “donated” his newfound wealth into a maze of foundations and charities. In reality, much of that money was deployed with a strategic purpose: to seed pro-China messaging in Western left-wing movements and media. For example, Singham bankrolled:
No Cold War, a group opposing U.S. pressure on China;
The Tricontinental Institute, a Massachusetts think tank led by Marxist historian Vijay Prashad (which received Singham’s funds and whose experts echoed Chinese positions in outlets like NewsClick);
Activist media in the Global South, such as Brazil’s Brasil de Fato and South Africa’s now-defunct New Frame, which pushed “anti-imperialist” content aligned with Beijing;
And, notably, Code Pink and The People’s Forum in the United States.
These groups span different countries and causes, but they share an uncanny synchronicity: a tendency to parrot Beijing’s stances on contentious issues – from denying the persecution of Uyghur Muslims, to blaming NATO for Russia’s war in Ukraine, to decrying Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protests as CIA ploys. The Times found that Singham’s network has been so effective that Chinese state media outlets routinely amplify its voices: Chinese government social media accounts have retweeted individuals or organizations tied to Singham at least 122 times since 2020. In other words, Beijing’s propagandists recognize Singham’s proxies as valuable mouthpieces. It’s the realization of a strategy Chinese officials call “smokeless war” – disguising propaganda as independent, grassroots content.
Perhaps the clearest illustration of Singham’s closeness to the CCP propaganda apparatus is his relationship with a Shanghai-based company called Maku Group. Maku, nominally a media and “cultural communication” firm, serves to “educate foreigners about the miracles that China has created on the world stage,” according to its mission statement. Singham works out of the same Shanghai office, sharing staff and space with Maku. On Maku’s own website (before it was scrubbed), photos showed young activists gathered in Singham’s office under a red banner reading “Always Follow the Party,” flanked by a portrait of Xi Jinping. Singham has even co-produced a YouTube show with Maku, reportedly financed in part by the Shanghai municipal propaganda department. By July 2023, he was attending closed-door workshops with CCP officials on “promoting the party internationally” and brainstorming how to “break through the Western monopoly on discourse”. In short, the line between Singham’s activism and the CCP’s information warfare is so blurred as to be almost indistinguishable.
How does the money actually flow? U.S. nonprofit filings and Congressional investigators provide some clues. Singham allegedly set up a “dark money” architecture involving entities like the United Community Fund and the Justice and Education Fund, which have almost no public profile. Through these and donor-advised funds, he funneled money into aligned organizations while obscuring the original source. For example, House Oversight Committee leaders revealed that nearly $1.8 million flowed from Singham-linked nonprofits into the Chinese company Maku Group – effectively exporting American-raised funds to underwrite Chinese propaganda efforts. Other sums went from those nonprofits into activist groups that Singham supports. By operating under U.S. nonprofit laws (and not directly on behalf of a foreign government), Singham’s network largely evaded FARA (Foreign Agents Registration Act) requirements, which would normally compel groups to disclose foreign sponsorship. “None of them has registered under FARA,” the Washington Free Beacon noted about Singham’s web of organizations, calling it “an unusual case” of stealth influence that exploits legal loopholes.
One such loophole is that Singham’s donations often arrived via progressive charitable intermediaries. The Tides Foundation, a liberal philanthropy conduit, reportedly gave a large grant to Code Pink in 2020 using funds traceable to Singham’s network. Similarly, donations to The People’s Forum were routed through a web of shell nonprofits to mask their origin. This elaborate funding maze allowed Singham to support political activism in the U.S. that aligns with Beijing’s interests, without any of the recipients formally acknowledging foreign direction. As Senator Marco Rubio wrote in an August 2023 letter to the Justice Department, “It appears that organizations tied to Neville Roy Singham… have been receiving direction from the CCP” via this dark money system. Rubio specifically named The People’s Forum, Code Pink, and Singham’s propaganda outlet Dongsheng News as subjects meriting a FARA investigation.
From Singham’s perspective, he denies being anyone’s agent but his own. “I categorically deny and repudiate any suggestion that I… take orders from any political party or government,” he told the NY Times, insisting he is only “guided by [his] beliefs”. Indeed, Singham has long identified as a socialist true believer – the son of a Marxist academic who was deeply sympathetic to revolutionary regimes. But altruistic intent is not a defense for secretly propagating a foreign power’s line. And Singham’s “beliefs” seem conveniently aligned with the CCP’s.
The India NewsClick Affair
The global reach of Singham’s network – and its potentially subversive intent – is perhaps best exemplified by the unfolding scandal in India. There, authorities have cracked down on a media outlet called NewsClick, alleging it served as a propaganda front covertly funded by Singham to push pro-China narratives in Indian politics. The case has cast a harsh light on how the same pool of money and operatives entangling Code Pink and The People’s Forum has also been manipulating foreign media and protest movements half a world away.
NewsClick was a seemingly independent left-wing digital news site in India. But in August 2023, the NY Times exposed that NewsClick had received large sums from Singham, and in return, was “incorporating Chinese government talking points” into its content. Indian investigators took those revelations seriously. By October 2023, Delhi Police arrested Prabir Purkayastha, NewsClick’s founder and editor-in-chief, along with the outlet’s HR chief, on charges of anti-India activities and a suspected illegal foreign funding scheme. India’s Enforcement Directorate (ED) – the financial crimes agency – had already been probing NewsClick under money laundering laws since 2021, following raids that uncovered suspicious wire transfers.
The allegations, now part of an official First Information Report (FIR) in India, are striking. Between 2018 and 2021, NewsClick received approximately ₹ 86 crore (over $10 million) in foreign funds from entities linked to Singham, purportedly as “export income” for services that investigators suspect were a sham. For instance, one infusion of ₹ 9.59 crore came in 2018 from a U.S. shell company that shut down immediately after sending the money. NewsClick claimed some funds were payments from U.S. and Brazilian nonprofits – but the ED found no evidence those donor entities actually existed. In other words, Indian authorities believe Singham’s network fabricated transactions to conceal that the money was really coming from China. The ED has called these transfers “fraudulent foreign funding” aimed at pumping Chinese propaganda into Indian media, in violation of India’s foreign exchange and charity laws.
By late 2023, the ED had amassed enough evidence to label Singham a key accused in the NewsClick case. They formally summoned him – a U.S. citizen in Shanghai – for questioning under India’s anti-money-laundering law. (Chinese authorities, tellingly, refused to serve the initial summons on Singham, effectively sheltering him from Indian jurisdiction.) The ED also froze NewsClick’s assets, attaching a ₹ 4.52 crore luxury apartment linked to Purkayastha as alleged proceeds of crime. Emails obtained by investigators reportedly show Singham directly strategizing with Purkayastha on how to frame content favorably about China. Indian news outlets have referred to Singham bluntly as NewsClick’s “China link” and even “a close confidant” of Purkayastha.
The crackdown reached a crescendo in early October 2023 when over a dozen NewsClick-associated journalists and staff were detained for questioning, and the outlet’s YouTube channel was abruptly shut down by police for “broadcasting anti-national content”. The message from Indian authorities was clear: they view Singham’s funding of NewsClick as part of a global Chinese propaganda conspiracy – one that merited sweeping law-enforcement action. In court filings, investigators even coined a term for Singham: “Chinese emphasizer.” It’s alleged that through NewsClick (and perhaps other channels), Singham emphasized and amplified CCP narratives under the cover of independent journalism.
This Indian saga is highly relevant to the Code Pink story. It reveals a template: use of progressive causes and media as vehicles to disseminate Beijing-friendly narratives, lubricated by opaque foreign funding. What allegedly happened with NewsClick in India – clandestine CCP sponsorship of a local outlet to influence public opinion – mirrors what we now suspect is happening with certain activist groups in the U.S. In both cases, Singham’s money is the common denominator. In India, it bought favorable news coverage for China; in America, it appears to be buying protest banners, conference halls, and bullhorns for activists who will denounce U.S. “imperialism” while muting criticism of China’s own abuses.
It’s also telling that after the Indian investigation heated up, several Singham-linked organizations around the world suddenly closed up shop or went dark. The NY Times noted that in South Africa, New Frame – a media outlet quietly bankrolled by Singham – shut down just weeks after reporters contacted it about Singham’s funding. Maku Group’s website likewise disappeared for “maintenance” once journalists started asking questions. Such behavior suggests a network scrambling to cover its tracks, consistent with an operation that knows it has been caught red-handed. It underscores that these entities were not simply benign philanthropies, but cogs in a coordinated propaganda machine.
In sum, the NewsClick affair underscores the global scope of the CCP’s information offensive – and its willingness to subvert democratic societies by stealth. India’s proactive response stands in contrast to the slower awakening in Washington. But that may be changing, as U.S. lawmakers now draw direct parallels between NewsClick and groups like Code Pink and The People’s Forum. As one Indian commentator quipped, “Beijing’s red funding doesn’t stop at the ocean’s edge – it’s lapping at American shores too.”
Jodie Evans and Code Pink
No figure embodies the transformation – some would say corruption – of idealistic activism by CCP influence better than Jodie Evans of Code Pink. Evans co-founded Code Pink in 2002 as a feminist anti-war group protesting the Bush administration’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. For years, Code Pink was known for its flamboyant disruptions of Capitol Hill hearings and its strident critiques of U.S. foreign policy. It even criticized China at times: in 2015, Evans called out China’s “brutal repression” of women’s rights activists, posing with a Chinese dissident and demanding Beijing improve its human rights record. All of that changed, dramatically, after 2017 – the year Evans married Neville Roy Singham.
Following her marriage to Singham (and the influx of his funding), Evans and Code Pink executed a remarkable pivot: from vocal critics of the CCP to passionate defenders of Beijing’s narratives. By 2021, Code Pink launched a dedicated China outreach program under the slogan “China Is Not Our Enemy”, featuring webinars and social media campaigns that downplay or ignore CCP abuses. Evans became an unabashed Sinophile in public. She began portraying China’s authoritarian regime as “a defender of the oppressed and a model for economic growth without slavery or war,” according to the NY Times exposé. Essentially, the organization that once lambasted China’s jailing of feminists now sings Beijing’s praises as a misunderstood peacekeeper.
That about-face neatly coincided with the $1.4 million+ that Singham-tied entities poured into Code Pink’s coffers from 2017 onward. As the Washington Free Beacon dryly observed, “that turn came as two groups linked to Singham” made up roughly 25% of Code Pink’s donations. Money talks – and in this case, it seemingly rewrote Code Pink’s mission statement. The group’s website and events now routinely echo Chinese government positions. They protest U.S. military aid to Taiwan, but never China’s military threats. They decry American “imperialism” in Asia, but say nothing of China’s expansionism in the South China Sea. And on the gravest of human rights issues, Code Pink’s leadership has effectively taken up the CCP’s line.
Evans herself has been shockingly blasé about the genocide of Uyghur Muslims in China’s Xinjiang province. In one Code Pink YouTube livestream, a viewer asked if there was “something negative [Evans] could tell us about China.” Evans responded: “I can’t, for the life of me, think of anything.”. The only complaint she eventually offered was that Chinese businesses “don’t take American credit cards.” This flippant dismissal of well-documented atrocities (which the U.S. government and others have labeled a genocide) is astonishing for the founder of a human rights-oriented NGO. Even more appalling, Evans has parroted Beijing’s propaganda by calling Uyghur detainees “terrorists”, effectively justifying their mass incarceration. Multiple sources confirm that Code Pink activists, under Evans’s guidance, have lobbied U.S. lawmakers to deny evidence of forced labor in Xinjiang and to accept China’s claims that Uyghurs are “happy” in re-education camps. In June 2023, Code Pink sent a delegation to the office of Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA) where they flatly rejected reports of Uyghur slave labor and invited the congressman to “go see how happy people were” in Xinjiang’s heavily surveilled cities.
Such stances are indistinguishable from CCP propaganda. Chinese state outlets have delightedly cited Code Pink’s campaigns as proof that Americans “oppose anti-China policies”. The CCP’s official China Daily and even the Global Times (a Communist Party mouthpiece) have given positive coverage to Evans’s “China Is Not Our Enemy” protests, using them to suggest a growing U.S. popular movement against confronting China. In effect, Code Pink has become a de facto PR agency for Beijing, lending an American face and voice to Chinese state narratives. What makes this so pernicious is that Code Pink still wraps itself in the language of peace and justice – it tells progressive Americans that supporting the CCP’s line is an enlightened anti-war position. This conflation of authentic peace advocacy with apologism for a totalitarian regime is precisely how foreign propaganda can penetrate and distort domestic debate.
Even beyond China issues, Code Pink’s agenda aligns with authoritarian interests. The group has taken notably soft stances on other regimes Beijing counts as friends. For instance, Code Pink was an outspoken critic of Hong Kong’s 2019 pro-democracy protests, echoing Beijing’s claim that the movement was a U.S.-sponsored “color revolution.” The organization also frequently opposes sanctions or criticism against countries like Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, and Russia – positions that conveniently dovetail with Chinese foreign policy (which opposes Western sanctions and intervention on principle). While Code Pink justifies these positions under a broad anti-imperialist ideology, the consistency with which they favor the CCP’s allies and ignore the CCP’s sins is striking.
It was not always thus. Longtime observers note that Code Pink’s earlier campaigns (pre-2017) did include criticism of Chinese repression – such as Tibet or the detention of Nobel Peace laureate Liu Xiaobo. All of that vanished after Evans’s marriage and Singham’s patronage. To many, this dramatic shift reeks of ideological capture. The China Media Project, which analyzes Chinese influence in foreign media, bluntly concluded that Code Pink’s China messaging “might be taken more seriously as a call for peace if its narratives were not so closely aligned with those of the Chinese party-state”. The same analysis noted that the integrity of Code Pink’s mission is now in doubt, given the heavy financial backing from Singham’s network and the conscious parroting of CCP talking points. In short, what began two decades ago as a principled anti-war protest group has, in some respects, degenerated into a propaganda vehicle for a foreign authoritarian government – all while enjoying nonprofit status and respect in some progressive circles.
From Tech to Protests
The infiltration of Code Pink and allied groups did not happen overnight or in a vacuum. It is part of a broader CCP strategy to co-opt Western institutions – even private companies – to extend Beijing’s soft power. Neville Roy Singham’s trajectory illustrates this. He built ThoughtWorks, a successful software consulting firm, and expanded it in China with hundreds of employees. When he sold the company and moved to Shanghai, ThoughtWorks China continued under local leadership. (Its CEO until 2024, Guo Xiao, is a Chinese national who had long run ThoughtWorks’ China operations.) While ThoughtWorks itself isn’t overtly involved in propaganda, its Chinese branch’s very survival depended on complying with CCP dictates – as any tech entity in China must. This meant cultivating connections and trust within the regime.
One can see Singham’s life in two halves: the first building a tech empire bridging the U.S. and China; the second spending that fortune to bridge the American far-left and the Chinese Communist Party. It is a continuum enabled by globalization. Notably, Singham’s presence in China and his access to the regime’s inner circle likely benefited from his prior business footprint (ThoughtWorks had offices in several Chinese cities). In a sense, Western tech wealth was repurposed to fund anti-Western activism, an ironic twist emblematic of Beijing’s savvy in exploiting open systems. As of 2023, ThoughtWorks’ operations in China – still ongoing under CCP oversight – symbolize how intertwined Western businesses can become with China’s agenda. Meanwhile, Singham used the freedom and legal loopholes of the U.S. nonprofit sector to advance CCP “information warfare” goals on U.S. soil. This two-pronged approach (leveraging both corporate influence and activist networks) is very much by design.
U.S. national security officials are increasingly aware of this playbook. Mike Gallagher, chair of the House Select Committee on CCP Competition, warned that “The Chinese Communist Party uses tools like Confucius Institutes on college campuses, TikTok’s addictive algorithm, and organizations like those Mr. Singham funds to divide and weaken America.”. It is a sobering realization: the CCP’s influence operations range from high-tech platforms to grassroots protest movements. On the surface, a TikTok video promoting anti-Israel protests and a nonprofit organizing a march in Times Square might seem unrelated. But dig deeper, and you might find the algorithm favors certain messages, while the march’s lead sponsor gets funding from Shanghai. The common objective is to fray U.S. social cohesion and undermine confidence in American policies, be it in the Middle East or the Pacific.
Even establishment voices are alarmed. In November 2024, Senator Marco Rubio and others pressed the Department of Justice to investigate Singham’s network and whether it constitutes unregistered foreign agency. A month later, Senator Grassley followed with his request that the FBI scrutinize The People’s Forum and Code Pink for possible FARA violations. And in June 2025, the House Oversight Committee dispatched a lengthy inquiry letter to Singham directly, demanding documents about his nonprofits and interactions with CCP officials. That letter did not mince words: it explicitly accused Singham of using dark money to assist “far-left groups, such as Code Pink, that oppose U.S. interests and support U.S. adversaries.” The letter even highlighted the “Always Follow the Party” banner incident in Singham’s office as emblematic of his allegiance. Bipartisan concern is emerging too – while the loudest warnings have come from Republicans, any American who cares about the integrity of our civil discourse should be concerned at these findings.
The High Stakes of Foreign “Smokeless War”
The revelations about Code Pink, The People’s Forum, and Neville Singham’s network serve as a wake-up call. They reveal how vulnerable open societies are to covert influence from authoritarian adversaries. Through a combination of financial stealth, ideological appeal, and exploitation of legal gray areas, the CCP (via Singham and his associates) managed to insert itself into the heart of American activism – that sacred arena of democratic expression – and bend it toward its own ends.
Consider the implications: a protest in Washington, D.C., ostensibly about Palestinian rights, ends up echoing messaging favored by the Chinese Communist Party. An antiwar group that once championed human rights ends up whitewashing concentration camps in Xinjiang. A New York community space preaching socialism takes money originating in a one-party state. These are not hypotheticals but the reality unfolding right now. As one analyst observed, it’s as if Beijing found a way to deploy a “fifth column” within America’s own activist community, turning idealism and dissent – qualities vital to a healthy democracy – into weapons against that democracy.
All this is happening without many of the participants even realizing it. Most rank-and-file Code Pink members or pro-Palestine marchers have no idea who Neville Singham is, let alone that their banners and buses might be indirectly paid for by him. They march out of genuine conviction. The tragedy is that this genuine energy is being cynically harnessed to serve the interests of a foreign government that despises dissent (just ask a Chinese protester). It’s the ultimate information warfare jiu-jitsu: turn your enemy’s open society and freedoms into the very tools that advance your authoritarian agenda.
To be clear, highlighting this CCP influence is not meant to delegitimize all anti-war or pro-Palestinian sentiment – people can and do hold those views sincerely. But the integrity of these movements matters. Are they driven by authentic grassroots impulses, or astroturfed by unseen benefactors in service of an ulterior motive? The evidence mounting in the case of Code Pink and The People’s Forum leans disturbingly toward the latter. When foreign cash, hidden affiliations, and coordinated propaganda are in the mix, activists and supporters deserve full transparency so they can decide for themselves what causes to back.
There are signs of accountability on the horizon. Congressional scrutiny is tightening. Media investigations continue to shed light. Even the Department of Justice – prodded by lawmakers – may compel disclosures or take enforcement actions under FARA if it finds willful foreign agency. At minimum, public awareness is growing. The name Neville Roy Singham, once obscure, is now synonymous with CCP influence from Shanghai to San Francisco. Code Pink’s credibility has been severely undermined by these ties, and its leaders will likely face hard questions from their own progressive base about their pro-Beijing apologetics.
Ultimately, this saga is a cautionary tale. It urges vigilance from civil society: activists must scrutinize the origins of their funding and the influences on their messaging. If a cause is worth fighting for, it is worth keeping independent from authoritarian taint. The CCP’s “smokeless war” thrives on ignorance and complacency; it falters under sunlight and scrutiny. The story of Code Pink and The People’s Forum being entangled in red threads is a rare glimpse into how that smokeless war is waged on U.S. soil. It should stiffen our resolve to ensure that American movements – left, right, or center – remain answerable to the American people and their own conscience, not the diktats of a one-party state half a world away.
As Beijing’s ambitions mount on the world stage, there is little doubt it will continue seeking inroads into U.S. public opinion. But armed with knowledge of cases like this, citizens and leaders can better guard the ramparts. In the end, defending democracy requires not just opposing enemies abroad, but also unmasking and expelling the enemy within – even when it wears the friendly face of a peace activist.
Sources:
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Block, Franchesca. “The American Multimillionaire Marxists Funding Pro-Palestinian Rage.” The Free Press, Nov. 14, 2023 (summarized in Fox Business).
Revell, Eric. “American multimillionaire couple funds Marxist group coordinating anti-Israel protests.” Fox Business, Nov. 15, 2023.
Grassley, Sen. Chuck. Letter to DOJ and FBI re: Code Pink & The People’s Forum, Apr. 16, 2025.
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Salzmann, Karl. “Code Pink Used To Criticize China on Human Rights… Then Its Founder Married a Propagandist for the Regime.” Washington Free Beacon, Aug. 7, 2023.
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