Who comes to mind in the following scenario? A wealthy, reclusive businessman with far-Left political leanings establishes a New York-based philanthropy that donates large sums of money to Leftist groups who act, at times violently, in the name of progressive social change. That would be George Soros, right? Well, that’s right.
But unfortunately, there’s another one. His name is Neville Singham. Like Soros, he helps bankroll the current disorder in our streets. Unlike Soros, who still clings to the myth that he supports an “open society,” Singham lives in China and is openly aligned with the Chinese Communist Party.
Singham is not nearly as well-known as Soros. But he should be. Since 2017, he’s headed a New York-based nonprofit network whose member organizations are overtly wedded to Marxist-Leninist principles of socialist revolution. Certain members of Congress want details. Obtaining them won’t be easy.
Who is Neville Singham, this international man of mystery? Why does he subsidize nonprofits that endorse trespassing and rioting to achieve their goals? Why has he chosen to live as an expatriate in Shanghai? A number of people in Washington, are seeking some answers. On July 10, 2024, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and then-Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., sent a letter to then-U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland requesting information on what the Department of Justice was doing to monitor Chinese government propaganda disseminated by U.S. nonprofits. The senators cited 18 Singham-supported organizations that may have violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) through a Chinese Communist Party (CCP)-connected media company. The effort yielded little if any useful information. Then again, plenty of information already is in plain sight.
Neville Roy Singham, now 71, was born in the U.S. to a Sri Lankan father and a Cuban mother. Raised mainly in Jamaica, he was in a sense destined for radicalism. His father, Archibald Singham, was a renowned Leftist political scientist who taught at Brooklyn College, was a resident scholar at the Martin Luther King Jr. Institute for Nonviolence, and served as an adviser to the UN on Third World development. His son Neville took to radicalism soon enough. At 17, he joined a Maoist labor group, the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, and found work at a Chrysler auto plant in Detroit. In time, he would be investigated by the FBI, which cited his background, emotional instability and activity in groups “inimical to the U.S.” Sometime after graduating from Howard University in 1978, he started an equipment-leasing consulting firm. Had he made peace with capitalism? Sort of.
In 1989, Singham created ThoughtWorks, a Chicago-based software consulting firm that incorporated in 1993. The company was profitable, attracting blue-chip clients such as Microsoft and Oracle. Yet he remained enamored of Leftist collectivism. At a media conference in 2008, he rationalized: “As a socialist, I believe the world should have access to the best ideas in software for free. My goal is a technically superior infrastructure to solve the world’s problems.” This grandiose declaration ignored the reality that nothing is free when doing business.
In this century, Singham, increasingly politically engaged, delegated his executive duties at ThoughtWorks while staying on as chairman. He sold his company stake in 2017 to a London-based, global private equity firm, Apax Partners, for $785 million. Though he remained far less wealthy than George Soros, he now was positioned to indulge his passion for socialist revolution.
He dived in quickly, bankrolling organizations possessed of a “Third World first, America last” worldview. Like the Soros network, his “philanthropy” is a tax-exempt cover for political activism. But the two men differ in a significant way. Where George Soros denies the importance of nation-states in favor of a happy-clappy, open-borders globalism, Singham is an admirer of party-line Communism, particularly the post-Mao Chinese version, a fact underscored by his Shanghai residence. His connections to the Beijing government, in fact, go far deeper than admiration.
For one thing, Singham shares an office suite in Shanghai with the Maku Group, a media and public relations firm that produces Chinese government-approved news and opinion for foreign markets – like ours. In effect, Maku is a propaganda mill, spinning stories to convey a positive image of China. According to a New York Times investigative report of a couple years ago, Singham’s “ties to the propaganda machine date back at least to 2019, when, corporate documents show, he started a consulting business with Chinese partners. Those partners are active in the propaganda apparatus.” The article noted that Singham-funded nonprofit groups had donated nearly $1.8 million to Maku. The relationship seems sealed with more than a handshake and a signature. The Maku website, at least at the time of publication, showed a gathering of young people in Singham’s office, facing a banner that reads, “Always Follow the Party.”
Singham’s close relationship with China by then had been well-established. During 2001-08, he served as a consultant to Huawei Technologies Co., a Chinese telecommunications/5G giant generously subsidized by the Chinese government, and, as evidence strongly suggests, spies on its users on behalf of the government’s ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Indeed, in 2012, a Huawei spokesperson admitted before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence that the CCP maintains a committee within the company.
As Neville Singham sees building bridges with the Chinese government as a top priority, he believes America should be the lead builder. Arguably the epicenter of his nonprofit network is Columbia University, an institution whose faculty leans leftward even by Ivy League standards. During the spring of 2024, scores of students and outsiders pitched tents on Columbia campus grounds, and occupied it for weeks, demanding that the university divest itself of all Israel-related assets and declare its support for Palestinian “liberation” groups, especially Hamas. For weeks, administrators tacitly encouraged the protestors’ illegal trespassing, discouraging NYPD cops from clearing the area. It was only when the university realized that it was jeopardizing $400 million in federal funds withheld by the Trump administration that it reversed course.
Less publicized in this morality play was the prominent role of a New York City-based, Singham-subsidized, 501(c)(3) nonprofit, The People’s Forum. Formed in 2017, the Forum had received more than $20 million from Neville Singham and his wife (more on her later) by 2022 via shell companies and donor-advised contributions. It used some of those donations to fuel the occupiers’ indignation over Israeli “genocide” against Gaza civilians. Arguably, it created the occupation.
In March 2024, The People’s Forum co-sponsored with the Palestinian Youth Movement a highly one-sided live symposium at the New York Society for Ethical Culture. The event, “Free Mahmoud, Free Palestine,” named after the chief organizer of the occupation, Mahmoud Khalil, featured a parade of speakers calling for resistance to Israel and its ostensible partner in crime, the Trump administration. An outdoor campus occupation began on April 17, the culmination of radical activism that had begun immediately after the October 7, 2023 Hamas invasion of Israel. Later that April, a group of protestors, some of them Columbia students, took over Hamilton Hall and barricaded themselves inside that campus building, temporarily trapping two security guards.
The People’s Forum was the main organizer of Singham-funded activist groups that infiltrated Columbia. Alex Goldenberg, director of intelligence at the Network Contagion Research Institute, a New Jersey-based organization that monitors both left- and right-wing extremism, concluded: “It appears that the foxes are in the hen house. The People’s Forum and other Singham-linked entities, such as BreakThrough News, were on the ground during the Columbia encampment unrest.”
In 2025, the People’s Forum turned its attention to Los Angeles. The Trump administration was making good on its promise to deport illegal immigrants, of which there were plenty in that city. The People’s Forum and one of its beneficiaries, the Party for Socialism and Liberation, enraged over this supposed injustice, organized downtown demonstrations in June to prevent ICE agents from arresting illegal aliens. Hundreds of protestors, a large portion of them rioters, over several days blocked traffic and engaged in vandalism, arson and assault. Had President Trump not deployed heavily-armed National Guardsmen to the area, things could have turned far uglier.
Housed at 320 West 7th Avenue in Manhattan, The People’s Forum proudly waves its radical flag. Its mission statement, a typical mixture of AI language programming and egalitarian sentimentality, reads: “We are a movement incubator for working class and marginalized communities to build unity across historic lines of division at home and abroad. We are an accessible educational and cultural space that nurtures the next generation of visionaries and organizers who believe that through collective action a new world is possible.” Its online bookstore features titles such as Socialist Reconstruction: A Better Future for the United States, Comrade of the Revolution: Selected Speeches of Fidel Castro, and, for the kids, From the River to the Sea: A Colouring Book.
The Forum puts its words into action. Its founding and current executive director, Manolo De Los Santos, a New Yorker born in the Dominican Republic, may be America’s most vocal supporter of Communist Cuba, having been radicalized there as a teenager some two decades ago while on a group visit sponsored by a far-Left religious group, Pastors for Peace. Lately it’s the prospect of a Palestinian victory over Israel that sends him into paroxysms of joy. At a January 2024 rally in New York City, De Los Santos declared: “When we finally deal that final blow to destroy Israel, when the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism in our lifetime.” He dismissed subsequent criticism of his speech as “a propaganda trick by the apologists for (Israeli) genocide.” Later that month, he was among those arrested for his role in attempted shutdowns of the Brooklyn Bridge and JFK Airport.
The People’s Forum is a prominent component of the Singham network, but far from the only one. The following are brief summaries of a few other related groups.
Justice and Education Fund. This New York City-based nonprofit, in its own words, “serves a vision of the world where all people can participate in the decisions that affect them, share equitably in the knowledge, wealth, and resources of society, and are free to achieve their full human potential.” The fund is committed to starting and operating “Popular Education Schools” in the Global South and the United States. Curriculum content spoiler alert: Manolo De Los Santos sits on its board of directors.
Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL). Formed in 2004 as a splinter group of the Workers World Party, the Party for Socialism and Liberation’s name reflects its mission of overthrowing capitalism and liberating its alleged victims. This Marxist-Leninist entity, like Communist parties everywhere, employs rigid, top-down organization to foster ideological unity. The PSL, as mentioned earlier, organized the violent anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles in June, assisted by another Neville Singham-supported group, ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) Coalition. Aided by Singham’s financial largesse, the party by 2024 had grown to over 50 chapters. Current projects include defunding local police in favor of designated “violence interrupters” (some of whom are active gang members), nationalization of the 100 largest U.S. corporations, a mandatory 30-hour work week, universal (i.e., government monopoly) health care, reparations for blacks, and an end to fossil fuel and nuclear energy sources. A more effective strategy for destroying our economy would be hard to imagine.
International People’s Assembly (IPA). This organization is dedicated to realizing the Singham network’s global ambitions. “We are a dynamic process of people’s organizations, social movements, political parties, and trade unions,” declares the IPA website. “We are the peoples of the world in struggle.” The group coordinates activities of revolutionary movements in countries such as Bangladesh, Haiti, Nepal and Sudan. Needless to say, the common enemy is “U.S. imperialism.”
Neville Singham’s most passionate project, however, can be found in his marriage. His wife, Jodie Evans, is co-founder and president of the virulently anti-American women’s “peace” group, Code Pink, which made frequent headlines during the early years of our war in Iraq. Back then, she and her compatriots seemed to hate George W. Bush a lot more than they loved peace. Not much has changed. Evans and Singham, who married in 2017, have opened their pocketbooks for a wide range of radical causes. They donated a combined more than $20 million to The People’s Forum during 2017-22. Their donations to Code Pink are likewise prodigious. Roughly a fourth of its revenues, representing around $1.4 million, come from Singham-supported groups.
Evans’ Leftist zealotry is particularly noxious on the issue of the Israel-Palestine war. Last October, Evans co-wrote an article for the Code Pink website, “Our Feminist Future Includes a Liberated Palestine,” denouncing Israel’s “genocide” and “dehumanizing” of the people of Gaza – as if Hamas terrorists hadn’t dehumanized the more than 1,200 unarmed Jews in Israel they had murdered a year earlier. And just two days after pro-Palestine fanantic Elias Rodriguez, briefly a member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, ambushed and murdered a young Jewish couple this past May as they were exiting a Washington, D.C. museum, rather than condemn the murders, Evans announced on X (formerly Twitter) that she was “fasting for Gaza.”
“Evans, like her husband, is fully supportive of Chinese interests. Indeed, several years ago, she established a “China Is Not Our Enemy” campaign to conduct webinars to praise the achievements of that country’s government. “China took everyone out of poverty,” she notes. She, along with other Code Pink activists, also have coaxed members of the House Select Committee on China to advocate for that nation. If there are bad things to be said, Evans doesn’t want to hear them. She rejects, for example, the well-documented evidence that the Chinese government has forced much of the country’s Uyghur ethnic minority into slave labor.
Now for the grand question: Where is the George Soros-Neville Singham connection? A connection, of course, isn’t necessarily a conspiracy. But these two men do have a lot in common. They are extraordinarily wealthy; possess far-Left views; and use philanthropy, and corresponding tax laws, as a pretext to advance those views on a global scale. Why wouldn’t they enter into an arm’s length agreement to subsidize their favored organizations? In fact, there is at least one area of significant overlap, a New York City-based nonprofit, the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice.
The Kairos Center is a project of Union Theological Seminary, which in turn is affiliated with Columbia University. Formed in 2004 as a vehicle to train clergy and laity for advocacy of global socialism, Kairos serves as a theological bullhorn for the Singham network. Small wonder, then, that a probe by the New York Post concluded that nine of the group’s 14 board of directors have a link to Neville Singham or one of his groups. They include: Reverend Liz Theoharis, who led a political discussion at the Singham-Evans wedding; Chris Caruso, operations manager for Kairos who also serves as treasurer and a board member of The People’s Forum, and to top that off, is married to Rev. Theoharis; Ciara Taylor, who is Kairos’ cultural strategies organizer and co-founded The People’s Forum; William Baptist, who is Kairos’ coordinator of “poverty scholarship” and also The People’s Forum’s board chairman; and Charon Hribar, who doubles as Kairos’ director of cultural strategies and a People’s Forum instructor, and who avidly denies that the Soviet Union was totalitarian.
Here’s another reality: On the Open Society Foundations grantee website, clicking on “Kairos Center” reveals that the Soros-run OSF donated a combined $300,000 to Union Theological Seminary in 2021 and 2022, or $150,000 for each year. But clicking on the grantee name “Kairos” reveals those two donations and a lot of others for 2017-23. These additional grantees, with cumulative donations, are: Kairos Action ($679,618); Kairos Counter Club CIC ($306,000); and Allied Media Projects ($825,000). Grand total: $2,110,618.
Interestingly, following the Columbia University occupation, Kairos updated its website to identify its fiscal sponsor as the Tides Center, the San Francisco-based incubator and intermediary for countless radical nonprofits. As National Legal and Policy Center months ago described in detail, the Open Society Foundations donates heavily to Tides. The word kairos, by the way, is Greek for “the right or opportune moment.” Neville Singham and George Soros, if nothing else, know an opportunity when they see one.
Neville Singham isn’t necessarily collaborating with George Soros. He might not even know him personally. But given his boundless hostility toward American interests and his aggressive advancement of Chinese interests, he is attracting growing criticism, especially on Capitol Hill. In a September 4 letter to People’s Forum head Manolo De Los Santos, House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith, R-Mo., stated that the group’s activities, even if legal, are at odds with its tax-exempt status:
I write today to demand that The People’s Forum, a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization that you lead, provide certain documents to the Committee on Ways and Means…Since Hamas’ terror attacks against Israel on October 7, 2023, The People’s Forum has been responsible for an endless amount of chaos and disruption around the country. On October 8, 2023, just one day after the terrorist attacks, The People’s Forum organized a protest in Times Square “to stand with the People of Palestine, who have the right to resist apartheid, occupation & oppression” that even Kathy Hochul, New York’s Democratic Governor, condemned as “abhorrent and morally repugnant.” Even worse, while promoting the event on October 7 – the same day that the atrocities occurred – your organization justified the murder of over 1,200 civilians by saying that the terrorists responsible for the attack “have the right to resist.” Not only have you been involved in this and other incidents as part of your anti-Israel activism, some of which have led to violence, but your organization has also participated in the recent anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement riots in Los Angeles which resulted in violence and dozens of arrests as well as protests in response to President Trump’s strikes against Iran’s nuclear program.
Smith then clarified Singham’s role:
On December 21, 2021, The People’s Forum posted on X, formerly Twitter, admitted to receiving funding from Neville Roy Singham, a former United States technology mogul who now resides in Shanghai and is closely aligned with the Chinese Communist Party (“CCP”). Public reporting suggests that The People’s Forum has received over $20 million from Mr. Singham and his wife, Jodie Evans, the co-founder of CODEPINK between 2017 and 2022 through shell companies and donor-advised funds. Multiple reports have found that The People’s Forum is part of Mr. Singham’s network of nonprofit organizations that serve as his conduits to spread pro-CCP narratives. This network includes The People’s Forum, the organization you lead; Tricontinental, Institute for Social Research, a think tank that you work at as a researcher; and several media organizations, including The People’s Dispatch, which your website says your work appears regularly.
Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., chairman of the House Oversight Committee, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., chairwoman of the Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, and several other GOP House leaders, also are expressing concerns. In a September 15 letter to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, they wrote:
The Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is investigating Chinese Communist Party (CCP) efforts to sow discord in the United States, and is conducting oversight into the U.S. Government’s ability and efforts under existing law to combat such efforts. Specifically, the Committee is investigating influence operations that may fall within the purview of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA)…and other federal laws. We write today to request that the U.S. Department of Treasury and any relevant component thereof immediately undertake a formal evaluation to determine the applicability of federal sanctions laws or any other civil remedies or criminal penalties enforced by Treasury – to include the freezing or seizure of assets – with respect to certain far-left entities, organized and funded by Neville Roy Singham. It is imperative that we expeditiously halt the continued flow of funds and material support for malign activities conducted at the behest of the CCP.
The letter went on to emphasize that Singham’s elaborate dark money network allows him to make donations to the United Community Fund, the Justice and Education Fund, and various other revolutionary groups “that have almost no real footprints.”
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, likewise is warning of the dangers. “Secretive foreign lobbying and public relations campaigns by China and other adversaries undermines the political will and interests of the American people,” he wrote. “The People’s Forum and Code Pink’s reported role in advancing policies in favor of the Communist Chinese government is more than alarming and their potential obligation to register as foreign agents for purposes of FARA ought to be investigated.”
It’s hard to avoid concluding that Neville Singham and his beneficiaries, as functionaries of the Chinese government, represent a threat to our domestic and global security. Under Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping, the party is well-known for its “Strategy for Sowing Discord,” the practice of deepening internal disputes of an enemy nation through media manipulation. Can anyone deny America is a prime target?
If Singham, a U.S. citizen, is complicit in this effort, he almost certainly would have to register as an agent under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, even if he handles business through an intermediary. Moreover, if he refuses to comply with the subpoena issued on June 13 by the House Oversight Committee, he likely would be referred to the Justice Department for prosecution. The State and Treasury Departments, for their part, would have the authority to freeze or even seize his assets. It won’t be easy. Don’t expect any cooperation from the Chinese.
All this has implications for the far larger nonprofit network founded and bankrolled by George Soros, the Open Society Foundations. The OSF, like the Singham network, depends heavily on protecting the anonymity of donors who request it. If George Soros, son Alex, and top foundation managers are dark money functionaries of China or any other foreign government, they also would face the prospect of public accountability. It would be none too soon.
Carl F. Horowitz is an NLPC senior fellow.
