US Political News and Views

Two Democrat representatives have defied the minority leader and broke ranks:

www.foxnews.com

Democrat rebels defy Jeffries to hand GOP critical win just before midterms

House Democrats Jared Golden and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez broke ranks to rescue a Republican rule vote, dealing a fresh blow to Hakeem Jeffries.
www.foxnews.com www.foxnews.com

The way the system was set up to work is that representatives are supposed to represent the interests of their constituents. Somewhere along the way both parties have become little more than mob bosses and if you did not vote the way you were told to, you paid the price for it politically. Nancy Pelosi made damn sure of it.

In this case, this is simply another data point that Hakeem Jeffries is just the minority leader in name only; that AOC and the Squad runs the party now. I actually applaud the two for standing up.
 
AZ_HighCountry said:
Two Democrat representatives have defied the minority leader and broke ranks:

www.foxnews.com

Democrat rebels defy Jeffries to hand GOP critical win just before midterms

House Democrats Jared Golden and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez broke ranks to rescue a Republican rule vote, dealing a fresh blow to Hakeem Jeffries.
www.foxnews.com www.foxnews.com

The way the system was set up to work is that representatives are supposed to represent the interests of their constituents. Somewhere along the way both parties have become little more than mob bosses and if you did not vote the way you were told to, you paid the price for it politically. Nancy Pelosi made damn sure of it.

In this case, this is simply another data point that Hakeem Jeffries is just the minority leader in name only; that AOC and the Squad runs the party now. I actually applaud the two for standing up.
Click to expand...
Ask Rep. Thomas Massie and MTG how innocent the power brokers in the Republican party are.
 

Insurrection Barbie​




Read distraction-free on Substack

Follow the Money: How a Shanghai Fortune Bought a U.S. Protest Infrastructure​

An investigative brief on the Singham network's four-layer laundering architecture and its convergence with the Cuban revolutionary apparatus​

Insurrection Barbie
Jul 21, 2026
89
27

Something worth doing this month: read the International Peoples’ Assembly brief alongside the State Department’s Cuba: The Capital of 21st-Century Communism, published July 20. The first is a granular accounting of the roughly $65 million that Neville Roy Singham — an American software millionaire who now lives in Shanghai — has moved into left-wing organizing since 2017. The second is the first official U.S. government document to name the American nonprofits, media outlets, and political formations that Havana runs as its stateside instruments.

Neither report cites the other. They describe the same infrastructure from opposite ends.

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For a decade the question of what it looks like when a hostile foreign power actually buys American protest capacity — the buildings, the payroll, the streaming studios, the translators, the campus organizers — has been treated as either paranoid or unanswerable. It is neither. The Singham network is what it looks like. Rubio’s report, without ever using Singham’s name, describes the American terminus of the same pipeline.

What follows traces the money hop by hop and prices each transfer that has surfaced in public reporting. The legal question underneath all of it is narrow. The Foreign Agents Registration Act does not care how much foreign money crosses the border; it cares whether a foreign principal is directing what the American recipient says and does. The evidence that Singham crossed that line is not missing. It sits in an email cache the Delhi Police pulled off NewsClick’s servers in 2021 — and it is exactly what the Rubio report leaves out.





Layer 1: The source​

Singham sold his software consultancy, Thoughtworks, to the private equity firm Apax Partners in August 2017 for a reported $785 million (The New York Times). Within months he had married Jodie Evans, the co-founder of CODEPINK, and moved to Shanghai. He now advises Huawei’s overseas messaging arm, sits in on ideological workshops run by Communist Party organs, and works out of an office that, according to the Times, shares a floor with a CCP propaganda outfit.

Start there, because nothing downstream makes sense otherwise. The money that funds the network originates with one American citizen who lives in the People’s Republic of China, does business with a company on the U.S. Entity List, and makes no secret of sharing the CCP’s strategic worldview. If that person cut personal checks to American socialist nonprofits, the paperwork would land on a FARA desk at Justice and an exam file at the IRS inside a quarter. So he doesn’t.

Layer 2: The donor-advised fund firewall​

Singham’s giving flows almost entirely through two channels that are legally distinct but functionally identical: donor-advised funds, primarily the Goldman Sachs Philanthropy Fund, and shell LLCs — Worldwide Media Holdings, LLC (Delaware), GSPAN LLC, and Centro Popular de Mídias in Brazil (Daily Beast, May 28, 2023; InfluenceWatch: People’s Forum).

A donor-advised fund is the perfect firewall for this purpose. The donor irrevocably contributes assets to a sponsoring public charity (Goldman Sachs Philanthropy Fund is technically a 501(c)(3)), immediately claims the full tax deduction, and then “advises” the fund on where to grant the money. On paper, every downstream recipient receives money from Goldman Sachs Philanthropy Fund, not from a Shanghai-based donor. The sponsoring organization is under no legal obligation to disclose who originated the money and generally does not. Recipients can — and do — truthfully state that their grants came from a mainstream American philanthropy.

The shell-LLC layer serves the same function for grants that don’t pass through the DAF, particularly overseas transfers to Tricontinental’s Brazilian arm and to the Chinese-language content operation (The New York Times, 2023; Daily Beast, 2023). Worldwide Media Holdings alone has been used to fund the news site Dongsheng and to underwrite operations in São Paulo.

Layer 3: The pass-through conduits​

Between the DAF and the operating groups sit three ostensibly independent nonprofits that function as almost pure conduits: the Justice and Education Fund (JEF), the United Community Fund (UCF), and the Partnership for Urban Futures (PUF). Their 990s show minimal independent programming and grant-making patterns that closely track the network’s operating priorities (InfluenceWatch: Justice and Education Fund; InfluenceWatch: United Community Fund).

The most revealing single transaction on the public record is a $8.33 million grant from JEF to UCF in 2019 — the year The People’s Forum acquired its $28 million Manhattan headquarters building on West 37th Street. UCF, in turn, granted $3 million to People’s Forum and $700,000 to Tricontinental. JEF granted $483,000 directly to BreakThrough News; PUF added another $15,600. Goldman Sachs Philanthropy Fund granted $540,000 directly to BreakThrough News, bypassing the intermediaries in a rare case where the donor evidently didn’t need the extra layer (Fox News investigation, 2026; InfluenceWatch: People’s Forum).

Layer 3 solves the chain-of-custody problem. Even if a prosecutor were to establish that Goldman Sachs Philanthropy Fund distributions ultimately traced to Singham, the additional hop through JEF/UCF/PUF makes it materially harder to argue that Singham “directed” the operating recipient. Each intermediary has its own board minutes, its own grant-making procedures, its own paper trail of ostensibly independent decision-making. Direction-and-control evidence has to survive the dilution of multiple discretionary hand-offs.



Layer 4: The operating recipients​

Four organizations do the visible work.

The People’s Forum, founded in 2018, is the flagship — a Manhattan “movement incubator” running out of a $28 million building on West 37th Street. Roughly $22.4 million of that lifetime funding traces to Singham vehicles (Fox News; Guardian). Its co-founders are Manolo De Los Santos, who the Rubio report says “was based out of Cuba for many years” before returning to New York to run the operation (State Department, Ch. VII), and Claudia de la Cruz, the Party for Socialism and Liberation’s 2024 presidential candidate. De la Cruz now also runs the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization — the group Rubio identifies as the main U.S. logistical arm for evading the Cuba embargo.

Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research does the intellectual work. Vijay Prashad, the Marxist historian, directs it out of offices in São Paulo, New Delhi, Johannesburg, and Buenos Aires. By 2023 the institute had built a $14 million-plus endowment (InfluenceWatch) — a number it discloses without ever telling its readers where the money came from. Revenue in 2019 alone hit $13.2 million. That was the year the network went on its buying spree.

BreakThrough News is the media arm. It launched in 2021 with staff pulled from the wreckage of RT America, and in its early years pulled $483,000 from JEF, $540,000 directly from Goldman Sachs Philanthropy Fund, and $15,600 from PUF (Daily Beast). Its editorial line on China, Ukraine, Iran, and Venezuela is close enough to the Global Times and RT that a reader flipping between them would struggle to name the difference.

CODEPINK, which Jodie Evans co-founded in 2002 as an anti–Iraq War group, is the case that gives the whole operation away. Since Evans married Singham in 2017, roughly a quarter of the group’s annual budget has come from his vehicles (The New York Times). Its focus quietly migrated with the money: less about ending Middle East wars, more about defending Beijing’s line on Xinjiang, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Former members have said as much on the record.

The point of this layer is legitimacy. These are 501(c)(3)s with American boards, American staff, American bank accounts, and American branding. Donations are tax-deductible. Speakers get booked at universities. Organizers testify at city councils. Producers land on cable news as peace activists or independent journalists. By the time anyone in that pipeline touches the money, Shanghai is three hops behind them, and nothing in the paperwork says otherwise.










How big is it, really​

The $65 million number that New Lines Magazine landed on, and that most follow-up reporting has used, covers what could be documented flowing to Singham’s most visible American recipients between 2017 and roughly 2023. It’s a floor, not a ceiling. Fox News, working the story across a 2026 multi-part investigation, put the global figure at $591 million between 2017 and 2025, with $401 million of it going to organizations based in the United States (Fox News). The House Ways and Means Committee, cross-referencing five years of IRS 990 filings, came in at the same order of magnitude (Ways and Means, Sept. 3, 2025).

Pick the number you trust. None of them describe a scrappy protest movement getting by on bake sales. What they describe is a capitalized institution: a Manhattan headquarters, a translation and streaming stack, real estate on the books, and something like two thousand affiliated groups worldwide organized under the International Peoples’ Assembly umbrella (Peoples Dispatch).

Why build it this way​

Nothing about this structure is efficient. Genuine philanthropists move money in one or two hops because more hops cost more in legal fees, filing burdens, and lost tax efficiency. Four layers of donor-advised funds, offshore LLCs, and pass-through nonprofits exist to make one specific thing harder to prove: that a foreign principal is directing what the American recipients say and do.

That is the operative language of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, 22 U.S.C. § 611(c). Foreign money in American politics is not itself illegal. What FARA requires is that anyone acting in the U.S. “at the order, request, or under the direction or control” of a foreign principal — to influence policy, opinion, or elections — register with the Justice Department, open their books, and stamp their output as foreign-agent material.

Ordinary philanthropy sits outside that regime. Write a check to a nonprofit, let the nonprofit’s board decide what to do with it, and you are exercising First Amendment rights that don’t depend on your passport or your politics. The load-bearing element is the recipient’s discretion.

The Singham operation is engineered to look like ordinary philanthropy from the outside and function as something else from the inside. Each of the four layers puts distance between the donor and the operating group in a way that a FARA case would have to unwind hop by hop — assuming a prosecutor could get near the internal communications, which for most of this network’s history has been the actual problem.

For most of this network’s history. Not all of it.





The Delhi cache​

In 2021, Indian tax authorities opened a fraud investigation into NewsClick, the English-language outlet that anchors Singham’s South Asia operation and that shares personnel and editorial direction with Prashad’s Tricontinental. During the raid that followed, the Delhi Police pulled an internal email archive off NewsClick’s servers. The New York Times obtained portions and reported them in August 2023. Indian outlets have published more.

The emails show Singham corresponding directly with NewsClick founder Prabir Purkayastha and with Prashad about what stories to run and how to frame them. In one exchange, on COVID-19 origins, he tells them to “actively pursue the China line” and “peddle the Chinese version” (The New York Times).

That is not a donor being briefed on grantee activity. It is a foreign principal writing assignments. It is also, verbatim, the kind of contemporaneous written record that FARA cases are built on and rarely get. Indian authorities used it. Purkayastha was arrested under India’s Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act in October 2023, and NewsClick’s operations have been substantially degraded since. The U.S. Department of Justice, which would have subpoena reach into the American end of the same correspondence, has not moved.

The Rubio report’s Chapter VII, “Front Groups and Fellow Travelers,” names People’s Forum, CODEPINK, IFCO, and DSA — but on the Cuban side of the ledger, which is the report’s brief. It doesn’t address Singham, Prashad, Tricontinental, NewsClick, BreakThrough, or the IPA framework, because the Chinese vector is a different case file. A full FARA prosecution against these organizations would need both files on the desk. Rubio’s team delivered the harder one — the government has never before named this many American organizations as instruments of a hostile foreign state. The China half is still open.

Two principals, same nodes​

The Cuban part of this is not news. The FBI documented Havana’s American front-group work through the entire Cold War, and the Rubio report is in many places surfacing material that has existed inside the government for decades. What’s new is that the same four organizations now serve as the American terminus for both Havana and — via Singham — Beijing.

People’s Forum’s senior ranks include people the State Department describes as Cuba-embedded operatives (Ch. VII). IFCO/Pastors for Peace, per the same chapter, has been the logistical backbone of the “Friendshipment Caravans” — the material shipments that have moved humanitarian and dual-use goods to Cuba in defiance of U.S. sanctions since 1992. The National Network on Cuba, coordinating about forty solidarity groups, published a “National Rapid Response Plan” in June 2026 that names 1,335 U.S. military facilities as targets for protest and disruption, using a map produced by the Black Alliance for Peace. And Rubio’s report is careful on DSA: the group’s foreign-policy positions track Havana’s not because DSA answers to Cuban intelligence — “the group is [not] controlled by Cuban agents, per se” — but because Havana’s line has become “the de facto policy orthodoxy on the American far left.”

Manolo De Los Santos and Claudia de la Cruz are where the two funding streams touch the same people. Both run People’s Forum. De Los Santos spent years living in Cuba. De la Cruz runs IFCO and was PSL’s presidential nominee in 2024. On one side of their desk, Singham-network money underwrites the payroll. On the other, Cuban political direction shapes what the payroll is asked to do. No one has to have coordinated anything. Both principals put money and attention into organizations that were already good at moving American opinion in useful directions, and the organizations were happy to take both.

What the file actually proves​

Read together, the two documents say three things.

Rubio establishes that a network of U.S. organizations operates as a de facto extension of Havana’s foreign policy and is not registered under FARA. The IPA brief establishes that a China-based American citizen has been capitalizing much of the same network through a four-layer structure engineered to defeat direction-and-control analysis. The Delhi emails establish that the direction-and-control exists in writing anyway.

Any one of those, in a previous decade, would have opened a Justice Department file. None has yet. Rubio’s report is the first time in a generation that the U.S. government has been willing to name specific American organizations as instruments of a hostile foreign state’s foreign policy. The Chinese half of the same picture — the Singham file, the Delhi cache, the IPA architecture — has not yet gotten its own report. Whether it does, and who writes it, is the follow-up question this document leaves on the desk.

The bottom line​

This is not an activist subculture that happens to attract foreign donors. It is a foreign-capitalized political infrastructure with an American activist subculture painted on the front. The four laundering layers exist because each one blocks a specific line of inquiry — donor identity at the DAF, chain of custody through the intermediaries, foreign-agent scrutiny at the operating groups.

The distance between what the Rubio report established on July 20 and what a full FARA case would need is one email archive that a foreign police service has already collected and that American reporters have already partially quoted. That is a much shorter distance than the coverage of either document has suggested. Closing it is the American national-security story of the next year.

 
Trump is angry and visibly frustrated. Clearly, it’s been a terrible week for him.

On Monday, the Supreme Court blocked his attempt to impose new mail‑in voting restrictions ahead of the midterms. The ruling ensures the U.S. Postal Service will keep delivering ballots as usual. That was a huge setback for him.

On Tuesday, Seven House Republicans broke ranks and joined Democrats to pass a resolution limiting Trump’s war powers in the Iran conflict. He’ll veto it, but the public defiance from his own party is the part that stings..

Also Tuesday, Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon appeared together at the Pro‑Human Assembly summit, calling for strict AI guardrails, an unexpected alliance that dominated headlines Trump didn’t want.

And now comes Wednesday (today), potentially the worst day of all. Market participants see an 87% chance that the Federal Reserve will raise interest rates by 0.25%. Trump has been loudly demanding rate cuts, but the reality is that his own policies. First the trade war with much of the world, and now the war with Iran have contributed to rising inflation. The Fed has little choice but to tighten.

A rate hike at this moment would be brutal. The housing market is already on the brink. Borrowing costs for businesses will rise. And all of this is unfolding right in the middle of the midterm election season, a nightmare scenario for Republicans.

Trump promised from day one that he would “fight for the American people,” but his actions have helped push inflation higher across the board. Housing, vehicles, groceries, and everything is more expensive. Diesel is averaging $6.31 per gallons, the highest unadjusted price in U.S. history, and that alone is massively inflationary. Gasoline is everaging $4.37 per gallon nationwide, adding even more pressure.

In short: Trump is facing a cascade of political, economic, and policy failures and all of them are hitting at the worst possible time for his party.
 
Davey Crockett said:

WOMAN AND THE REPUBLIC​

A SURVEY OF THE WOMAN-SUFFRAGE MOVEMENT IN THE UNITED STATES AND A DISCUSSION OF THE CLAIMS AND ARGUMENTS OF ITS FOREMOST ADVOCATES BY​

HELEN KENDRICK JOHNSON​


www.gutenberg.org

Woman and the Republic A Survey of the Woman-Suffrage Movement in the United States and a Discussion of the Claims and Arguments of Its Foremost Advocates

www.gutenberg.org

en.wikipedia.org

Helen Kendrick Johnson - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org

In 1897 Helen wrote what is often considered the best summary of the arguments against woman suffrage: Woman and the Republic, in which she argued that women didn't need the vote to establish more legal, economic and other equality and that women's role in the domestic sphere was essential for maintenance of the American republic.
Click to expand...
Helen Johnson was a woman of her time, shaped by a society where women had almost no legal protection, no political identity, and were expected to align with their husbands’ views. Her husband was a leading anti‑suffrage activist, so it’s reasonable to understand hrr writing within that male‑dominated environment.

Her worldview relies on the “separate spheres” model, men handle politics, women stay home. That model simply doesn’t function in a modern economy. Women are nearly half of the U.S. workforce and even with men and women working, the US. still faces labor shortages. We issue 85,000 H‑1B visas every year, import farm labor, nurses, tech workers, and seasonal workers because the economy cannot meet demand with domestic labor alone.

If half the population stayed home, the economy would collapse. GDP would fall, shortages would explode, and essential industries would fail. Women also need to work to earn Social Security and retirement benefits, her model is incompatible with modern economic reality.

And today, the idea of repealing the 19th Amendment is fringe. Not only do the overwhelming majority of Americans support women right to vote, the overwhelming majority of Republicans do as well.

Referencing Johnson doesn’t strengthen the argument, it just shows how outdated her assumptions were.
 
Davey Crockett said:
View attachment 212920
Click to expand...
The meme isn’t about economics, it’s just ideology. It uses a classic propaganda trick: two rising lines on a chart. If you plot federal debt, the number of Starbucks stores, or the number of smartphones, all of them rise over time. That doesn’t mean Starbuck or iPhones caused the debt.

If the meme is claiming women caused the federal debt, then it’s also claiming women are somehow more powerful than the 80–95% male Congress that approved the biggest spending spikes--Cold War buildup, Iraq/Afghanistan, tax cuts, bailouts, COVID stimulus, and even the Trump administration’s Iran war, which many people widely believe was heavily influenced by Netanyahu. All of these decisions were made by overwhelmingly male leadership.

Women are only about 30% of Congress today. Men still cast the overwhelming majority of votes on everry spending bill. The chart is just political scapegoating dressed up as a graph.

Anyway, these arguments are getting pretty far‑fetched and honestly a little bit hilarious, so I think it’s best we just agree to disagree. If this mindset works for you, that’s your right. I’ll leave it there. No hard feelings.
 
AZ_HighCountry said:
The Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1952 also gives him very specific powers regarding immigration and who to declare as persona non grata, including I might add, based on religious background as well. The Democrats fought him tooth and nail on that during his first term.
Click to expand...
AZ_HighCountry said:
The Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1952 also gives him very specific powers regarding immigration and who to declare as persona non grata, including I might add, based on religious background as well. The Democrats fought him tooth and nail on that during his first term.
Click to expand...
I think there may be a misunderstanding about what the INA of 1952 actually allows. Section 212 does give a president broad authority to suspend entry of certain classes of foreign nationals, but it does not allow discrimination based on religion. The First Amendment protects religious freedom, and no statute including the INA can override the Constitution.

This is also why the first two versions of the Trump travel order were struck down in courts. The early versions included language and effects that were interpreted as religious discrimination, since all listed countries were Muslim‑majority and there were references to prioritizing certain religious groups. Only the third version was upheld, and that was because all religious references were removed and two non‑Muslims countries were added, making the policy facially neutral and based on security criteria rather than religion.

So just to clarify, the president does have authority to restrict entry for national‑security reasons, but he cannot deny entry or any immigration benefit solely based on religion. The Constitution simply doesn’t allow that.
 
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