This newsletter exists to investigate the people, organizations and networks working to undermine civil society: extremist and conspiracy-driven movements, foreign influence campaigns, organized harassment, and the institutions that enable them.

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I’m Tom Joscelyn, president of the Civil Defense Institute, which publishes this newsletter. I served as a senior professional staff member on the House January 6 committee, and I was one of the principal authors of the committee’s final report.

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Overview

• Heritage has advocated for school choice and directing public funds to private education, while also promoting a network of private schools affiliated with the Association of Classical Christian Schools (ACCS).

• More than 300 schools in Heritage’s online directory are affiliated with ACCS. ACCS was co-founded by Douglas Wilson, whose views on Christian theocracy, women’s voting rights, LGBTQ people and the Confederacy have drawn extensive public scrutiny.

• Heritage’s leadership has direct ties to ACCS. Kevin Roberts, Heritage’s president, has spoken at an ACCS event, hosted its president on his online show, and publicly praised institutions associated with Wilson, while claiming ACCS’s work “is the key to saving Western civilization.”

KEVIN ROBERTS, the president of the Heritage Foundation, believes America’s K-12 school system is in the middle of a “revolution.” And he may be right. For decades, the Heritage Foundation has argued that the Department of Education should be shuttered. Today, that goal is closer to becoming a reality than ever before, as mass layoffs and drastic program cuts have hollowed out the department. Heritage has also led the way in advocating for universal school choice policies in states across the country. Such policies, long favored by conservatives, allow parents to use public funds for their children’s private schooling. Dozens of states have adopted school choice legislation, creating a boom in private education enrollment.

But Roberts’s “revolution” comes with a catch. As Heritage has worked to upend public K-12 schooling, it has also promoted a network of private schools co-founded by Douglas Wilson, a self-described Christian nationalist.

Since 2024, Heritage’s website has directed parents to nearly 900 “classical schools,” which Roberts and others argue are superior to America’s public schools. In 2025, Heritage launched an online search tool to help parents and lawmakers locate nearby schools.

Civil Defense examined Heritage’s data and found that more than 300 of the schools are affiliated with the Association of Classical Christian Schools (ACCS), including Wilson’s own Logos School in Moscow, Idaho. Wilson co-founded Logos in 1981. Wilson also co-founded the ACCS in 1994 to accredit like-minded schools. Dozens of these same schools are now eligible to receive public funding thanks to the success of school choice legislation campaigns.

Wilson’s “extremist views” have been widely reported. He argues that America should become a theocracy and wants to repeal women’s right to vote, installing a system of household voting in its place. This is part of the patriarchal authority he advocates for the home. Wilson has described himself as a “paleo-Confederate,” arguing “the South was right on all the essential constitutional and cultural issues surrounding the [Civil] [W]ar.” Wilson claims to disavow racism but has been more critical of abolitionists than of slaveholders. He has used slurs to describe LGBTQ individuals and believes homosexuality should be criminalized.

Below, readers can find a more detailed explanation of how Heritage has promoted ACCS-affiliated schools to parents, lawmakers and others. Prominent examples of the controversies surrounding some of these schools are also examined. For instance, one mother described the ACCS-accredited school her children attended as a “scholastic cult.” That same school is listed on Heritage’s website, as are all the other K-12 schools referenced in this investigative report.

Although ACCS has rhetorically distanced itself from Wilson in the past, claiming he has “no formal authority,” Civil Defense found that he still holds significant ideological sway within the organization — at a minimum. For example, Wilson has served as a featured speaker at ACCS’s annual conference each year. “Our work in ACCS is a crucial front in our modern culture war,” Wilson declared during the 2024 ACCS event.

Finally, Civil Defense assessed Kevin Roberts’s own views and relationship with ACCS. Roberts has praised Wilson’s Christ Church and other institutions as “[p]reserving our way of life.” He took part in a Canon Press production that argued “institutions must be hammered to the right.” Wilson founded Canon Press, sits on its board, regularly records videos for its YouTube channel and was featured in the same video as Roberts that Canon Press published.

Roberts has spoken at ACCS’s annual conference, telling those in attendance that their work was “the key to saving Western civilization.” ACCS’s president, David Goodwin, has also appeared on Roberts’s online show. Goodwin explained that his goal is “to pull” education “back to what it was in the Middle Ages.” Roberts didn’t disagree. Instead, Roberts explained that he believes “universal school choice” policies will create additional “opportunities” for classical schools, like those affiliated with ACCS, within the public school “system.”

Indeed, such opportunities are part of Heritage’s “revolution” in K-12 schooling.

How Heritage Promotes ACCS Schools to Parents and Lawmakers

In April 2025, Heritage released a searchable “classical schools database” to “inform parents, teachers, school leaders, lawmakers, and citizens interested in the revival of classical liberal arts education.” Roberts is listed as one of the chief contributors to the project. The search page, which remains online, touts the “renaissance” of such schools, claiming they are “among the fastest-growing—and most promising—developments in K–12 education today.” Heritage’s search tool provides parents with an easy way to locate a school in their area.

Civil Defense has examined Heritage’s database, which was last updated in September 2025, and cross-referenced its entries with the more than 500 member and accredited schools listed on the ACCS’s website. ACCS’s database also displays schools “transitioning to classical” education as well as startups. And some schools belong to ACCS while also being accredited or members of other associations.

As of July 2026, 325 of the 895 schools in Heritage’s database are affiliated with ACCS. Wilson’s Logos School is one of them. As can be seen on the map below, these schools are located throughout the country.

Heritage’s search page includes a passing reference to ACCS as one of the “nine largest classical school associations,” but does not mention Wilson or his role in inspiring the association that accounts for more than one-third of the schools in its data. Heritage’s flagship online publication, the Daily Signal, also marketed the database upon its release as a “guide” that “allows parents to search by state, city, county, and ZIP code for their ideal school.” But the Daily Signal also failed to mention Wilson.

Heritage’s searchable database was a follow-up to an earlier report promoting the supposed benefits of private classical schools as opposed to public schools. That report, published by the foundation in August 2024, was written by Rachel Alexander Cambre, then a visiting fellow at Heritage’s B. Kenneth Simon Center for American Studies and the Center for Education Policy.

“American parents are recognizing the gravity of” the “crisis” in education, Cambre wrote, but “their response has been impressive.” Over “the past four years, droves of American parents have withheld or withdrawn their children from the public school system—and state legislatures have noticed.” State lawmakers had responded to this “parental demand” with new “education choice programs,” Cambre wrote.

Cambre presented her paper as an “inquiry” into the “model of education” employed at “classical liberal arts schools” around the country. She explained that “[m]embership in two of the largest classical school associations—the Association of Classical Christian Schools (ACCS) and the Institute for Catholic Liberal Education (ICLE)—has doubled and tripled, respectively, over the past 10 years.”

While touting the growth of these associations, however, Cambre’s report provided no details about the ACCS’s origins or relationship with Wilson, despite her inclusion of a brief section on the religious instruction offered at the schools. Nor did she discuss Wilson’s well-documented extremist views. Instead, Cambre briefly mentioned Wilson in a footnote, describing him as one of the “contemporary thinkers inspired by” British novelist Dorothy Sayers’s work on classical education.

Cambre’s paper included an appendix of more than 880 K-12 schools that served as the basis for Heritage’s online search tool published the following year.

Reported Controversies at ACCS Schools in Heritage’s Database

In March of this year, CNN’s Pamela Brown profiled an ACCS school and its associated church, which belongs to Wilson’s Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC), a nationwide network of religious establishments. That school, the Koinonia Classical Christian School, is one of the 325 ACCS-affiliated schools in Heritage’s database.

“Each morning at this school, they even pledge allegiance to the Christian flag, not the American flag,” Brown explained. “And at the core of what they teach their children is a belief central to CREC.”

Brown asked: “So do you teach the kids here this is a Christian nation, this was founded as a Christian nation?”

“Absolutely. Yes,” Jeff Ripple, the pastor of Christ Fellowship Church (a CREC church) and history teacher at the school, replied. Caleb and Erin Ripple, the headmaster and headmistress of the school, respectively, also agreed with Brown that the school’s mission is to “make this a Christian nation.”

The school teaches a “strict and literal biblical worldview,” Brown told the audience. Evolution is taught to students, Caleb Ripple explained, but merely as “what some people believe, laughably.”

Brown asked David Goodwin, the president of ACCS, if it can be a “sin” for parents to place their children in public schools. “Yeah, I think it is because in most areas, the education is coming from the state,” Goodwin said. “And that was not what God intended from the beginning. They don’t raise children in the fear and admonition of the Lord.”

Brown also asked Goodwin if ultimately he wanted to see the “dismantling of the Department of Education, and ultimately getting rid of public schools.” Goodwin replied: “Yes.”

Koinonia is just one of hundreds of ACCS-affiliated schools around the country today. In the mid-1990s, Wilson helped spawn a revolution in classical Christian education, using his own Logos School as a model for other schools.

Controversies surrounding Wilson and the Logos School

Wilson himself has long been criticized for how he and his community in Moscow, Idaho have handled allegations of abuse. In 2015, for instance, Rod Dreher of the American Conservative criticized the way the Moscow “community handled the sexual abuse of minors” and Wilson for having “knowingly married a young woman to a convicted pedophile.” (emphasis in original)

Wilson responded to Dreher’s post, and other related accusations, on his blog. According to CNN’s Brown, Wilson “decries abuse and says his teachings should never be used to excuse it.”

In September 2021, Sarah Stankorb of VICE News published a piece alleging that Wilson’s Christ Church had a “culture of abuse and social control.” VICE “interviewed 12 former and current church members and Logos students, and reviewed court and medical documents, church correspondence, and business filings.” Former members of Wilson’s community (known as “ex-kirkers”) described “a punitive community in which women are told they must defer to church leaders and cannot say ‘no’ to their husbands, men are taught to strictly control their homes, and those who speak out can be isolated and harassed.”

One former Logos student interviewed by VICE alleged that a male teacher “would feel up” female students in the hallways and that another had been “accused of sexual abuse with a student.” Another former student told VICE that she was “spanked with a wooden paddle in 6th grade, once by a female administrator, once by a male principal,” which “haunted her dreams.” In all, VICE reported that at least 27 victims had alleged “some sort of abuse (spiritual, physical, emotional, sexual) from within the church or its schools.”

Logos is among the 325 ACCS-affiliated schools in Heritage’s database. Other schools in the database have been the subject of controversy as well.

Opposition to LGBTQ rights

Consistent with Wilson’s teachings, the ACCS is hostile to LGBTQ rights. In January 2020, Goodwin released a study of alumni that was intended to demonstrate the supposed benefits of a classical Christian education.

“[Alumni] respect the authority within the church, and are more likely to believe the Bible is infallible, and much less likely to believe it has errors with regard to science and history,” the study reads. “They are less likely to accept gay marriage.”

A table in the study summarized “7 Life Outcome Profiles,” offering parents a “dashboard for those considering the importance and impact of school.” Under a subheading, “Traditional & Conservative,” the table indicates that ACCS alumni are more willing to believe there are “no errors in Bible,” and “more likely to know LGBT but less likely to accept LGBT lifestyle.”

Separately, at least two ACCS-affiliated schools in Heritage’s database have reportedly expelled students for being gay.

“[Alumni] respect the authority within the church, and are more likely to believe the Bible is infallible, and much less likely to believe it has errors with regard to science and history. They are less likely to accept gay marriage.”

—David Goodwin

Goodwin’s study of alumni was intended to demonstrate the supposed benefits of a classical Christian education.

In October 2020, Tony Jeffrey, the headmaster of Covenant Christian Academy in Colleyville, Texas, expelled a high school senior, Devin Bryant, after the student came out as gay. Bryant had attended the school since pre-kindergarten. “We believe the Bible to be the infallible, inerrant word of God that has the final say in all matters of faith and practice,” Jeffrey said in a statement. “The expression of human sexuality is appropriate only within the boundaries of a marital relationship between one man and one woman.”

Months later, in May 2021, it was reported that the Whitefield Academy in Kansas City, Missouri, had asked faculty to expel students who came out as gay.

White Nationalism

In late 2022, Thomas Achord, the headmaster of Sequitur Classical Academy in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, was fired after he was outed as the author of an anonymous Twitter account that included multiple antisemitic and racist posts. According to the Daily Beast, Achord explained that he wanted to use the “classical Christian education” school to train white nationalists, as he sought to provide “resources for white-advocates to take back the West for white peoples.” At the time, Achord cohosted the Ars Politica podcast alongside Stephen Wolfe, the author of “The Case for Christian Nationalism,” a book published by Canon Press.

Alleged abuse by faculty members and administrators

In August 2025, the Ormond Beach Police Department announced that it had opened an investigation into allegations of abuse dating back to the early 2000s involving the Riverbend Academy and the Riverbend Community Church. The “Elders” of the church released a statement saying they “were not aware of these things and are brokenhearted to learn about egregious sin in [our] church’s past.” They wrote that they “condemn abuse” and “stand against any actions to cover up or conceal sin.” According to a police report posted by Roys Report, a Christian media outlet, the authorities “determined that several sex offenses did occur within our jurisdiction.” However, the police found that they were “unable to criminally prosecute as the statute of limitations has expired.”

Civil Defense found other allegations of abuse levied at the staff of ACCS-affiliated schools in Heritage’s database. Since 2023, at least three former teachers or administrators at ACCS-affiliated schools in Heritage’s database have been charged with child sexual exploitation or child solicitation. One of them, a former teacher, pleaded guilty to attempting to entice a minor to record a sexual abuse video and was sentenced to 15 years in prison.

A “scholastic cult” in which some fathers allegedly “orchestrate courtship” between their graduated daughters and teachers

In July, The Spokesman-Review re-published an investigation into The Oaks Classical Christian Academy in Spokane Valley, Washington. The investigation, which was conducted and first published by FāVS News, was based on interviews with former students, a parent and a former teacher. Oaks was accredited by the ACCS in 2007 but is not accredited by the state of Washington.

Jill Wright, the mother of two former Oaks students, described it as a “scholastic cult” with a “rigid” curriculum and an “off theology.” Wilson’s ongoing influence over the curriculum was apparent early on, Wright explained. She “watched her sons suffer years of what she now calls emotional and spiritual harm” at the school, with her eldest son “eventually suffer[ing] a physical and mental health crisis.” The Wrights “moved their sons into public schools to finish their education.”

Rev. Carter Smith-Stepper, who taught history at Oaks from 2015 to 2018, told FāVS News that fathers would sometimes “orchestrate courtship” between their graduated daughters and teachers. Smith-Stepper described the marriages between former students and teachers to be “an ick.” He said the school reinforced gender roles, including through Civil War reenactments in which women were not allowed to be generals. The school also taught a “both-sides” view of slavery and portrayed the antebellum South as a “Christian civilization.” (His description of the school’s curriculum is consistent with Wilson’s own writings on the Civil War.)

While the school markets itself as offering a “classical education,” Smith-Stepper said, people should not “believe what’s on the label” because it’s really an “ideology…orbiting the culture war from a Christian right perspective.”

Smith-Stepper added: “A fundamentalist is still a fundamentalist.”

Doug Wilson’s Relationship with ACCS

Wilson clearly still holds ideological sway within ACCS. “Our work in ACCS is a crucial front in our modern culture war,” Wilson told the audience attending ACCS’s annual “Repairing the Ruins” conference in 2024. Just “as you cannot fight a naval war without ships, or conduct tank warfare without tanks,” Wilson continued, “so it is impossible to have a culture war if we are missing a culture.” Wilson added: “The ACCS is therefore in [sic] the front lines of a most necessary rearmament. We are a cultural munitions factory and the situation is dire...”

“Repairing the Ruins” is an annual event hosted by ACCS, which it describes as the “largest national conference on classical Christian education (CCE) with around 80 vendors and over 1000 educators in attendance.” ACCS has promoted Wilson’s leading role at the conference each of the last six years. (See, for example, ACCS’s promotional material for 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025 and 2026.) At the 2023 conference, Wilson was introduced as a “founding board member” of ACCS. Wilson served as a “featured keynote” speaker at the most recent conference, held in Atlanta, Georgia, in late June. The ACCS website also references Wilson’s work as inspiration for the growing classical Christian school movement.

Wilson’s Logos School promotes its leadership role in the ACCS network. For instance, a parent/teacher handbook for the 2021-2022 school year explains that Wilson’s 1990 book, Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning, “produced so much interest in the classical approach” that “several Logos staff members helped form the Association of Classical and Christian Schools (ACCS).” Logos is “[o]ne of the first schools to be accredited by ACCS” and “is a charter member” of the organization. In addition, Logos “annually sells many of its administrative and curriculum materials to these schools and other people around the United States, as well as having its staff train other teachers and administrators.”

The Logos School’s website also notes its role in founding ACCS, as well as its charter membership and accreditation by the organization. A profile produced by the school lists ACCS as its only accreditation.

In early July, Wilson’s Logos School held an “intensive” teacher training program “for those seeking to acquire and improve their skills as classical Christian educators, administrators, and board members.” It has been conducting such training since 1995, and the instructors are “Logos teachers, administrators, and board members.” The training “is officially endorsed by ACCS (the Association of Classical Christian Schools),” the Logos website reads.

Heritage’s Relationship with ACCS

According to its website, the ACCS “joined forces” with Turning Point Education (an arm of Turning Point USA), the Heritage Foundation “and several other groups” at the beginning of 2025. Their alliance is unsurprising.

Roberts and Goodwin, ACCS’s president, were both appointed to a committee in Oklahoma charged with overhauling the state’s social studies curriculum. Both men are also listed as signatories on a statement declaring that education is “inherently political” and “classical education is at odds with modern education politically.”

In his 2024 book, “Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America,” Roberts rails against “many of America’s institutions,” calling for them to be “burned.” He specifically cites “[e]very Ivy League college,” the Department of Education, “80 percent of ‘Catholic’ higher education,” and the Loudoun County Public School System (in Virginia), among others, as the types of institutions he believes should be demolished.

In contrast, Roberts praises Wilson’s institutions in Moscow, Idaho as replacements for America’s mainstream education system. Roberts writes that Wilson’s Christ Church, New Saint Andrews College and Canon Press are among the “new institutions” that “have begun to form their own flourishing ecosystem” and are “[p]reserving our way of life.”

“Attending to America’s future often means starting families, planting churches, and founding communities of our own, just like in Moscow,” Roberts writes.

In September 2023, ACCS president Goodwin was one of the panelists who spoke at a Heritage Foundation conference titled, “How Classical Education Can Preserve Our American Freedoms.” Goodwin co-authored a book with Pete Hegseth (then a Fox News host and currently the secretary of defense) the previous year. In their book, “Battle for the American Mind: Uprooting A Century of Miseducation,” Goodwin and Hegseth argue that “cultural Marxists…control every strong point, every choke point, and every inch of high ground in the realm of American education, and by extension, American culture.” They recommend that those who agree with them become insurgents against the educational establishment. “Our only option is insurgency,” Chapter 11 of the book (which was authored mainly by Hegseth) reads. “Our only chance is to become educational insurgents in our own country.”

“You represent the last best hope for the West…”

—Kevin Roberts

At an ACCS conference in 2024

Goodwin has employed similar language elsewhere. For instance, he has explained that he came to believe “insurgency was the right answer” because “basically insurgencies operate underground and they undermine the power structure of the progressives, but they do so in subtle, quiet ways.”

In June 2024, Roberts spoke at ACCS’s “Repairing the Ruins” conference, praising the educators in attendance while reiterating his call for “utterly eliminating” the Department of Education. (As mentioned above, Wilson spoke at the same conference.)

“I’m here this week because I believe that the work that you’re doing in addition to its obvious other benefits is the key to saving Western civilization,” Roberts told the ACCS educators and others in attendance. “You represent the last best hope for the West,” Roberts continued. “That’s right, not just America but all of Western civilization.”

Weeks later, in July 2024, Roberts hosted Goodwin on an episode of his own online show titled “The Classical Education Revolution.” Roberts introduced Goodwin as a “good friend in the movement,” “an all-around great American” and “one of the leaders of the classical education movement in the country.”

At no point in their conversation did Roberts disagree with Goodwin’s ideological worldview, even as the ACCS head said he wanted “to pull” education “back to what it was in the Middle Ages.”

Roberts explained Heritage’s school strategy at length. Unlike other “politically conservative policy organizations,” Roberts said, Heritage has been focused “on the content of the education” in addition to “getting the proper delivery mechanism, which is universal school choice.” Roberts said that “once we started having success in the center right movement on universal school choice, in the states, we came to the realization, well, there have to be schools where you actually” want people to use their “education savings accounts,” on schools that are “worthy of that kind of investment by the public.” This “led us here [at] Heritage…to be full-throated supporters of classical education,” Roberts said.

Roberts asked Goodwin if he thought “classical education” as the ACCS “understands it” could be “fully realized within the public school system.” Goodwin demurred, saying he did not “know about the public school system” because the “two worlds” are “inherently in conflict.” But Roberts argued that “universal school choice,” which Heritage and its allies have worked “to muscle through” in states across the country, will create “opportunities” in the coming years “in ways that we can’t even fathom.” Roberts believes that “classical schools,” like those belonging to ACCS, will operate “within that [public school] system.”

“What do we do about the separation of church and state, which of course is completely misunderstood, at least in its origins in the United States?” Roberts asked, indicating that Goodwin knew what he meant. “I don’t know how we sort through that,” Roberts said, adding that he was optimistic.

Goodwin credited Roberts and Heritage with the explosive growth of private schools like those affiliated with ACCS, saying the surge was caused in “no small part to your work in school choice.” This has resulted in “hundreds of new schools right now,” Goodwin claimed, adding it has led to so many that “it’s straining our system to be able to bring them up to speed.” Goodwin said that they are “working on ways of scaling that are…effective,” and that they were trying to “deliver a product” that was “better than anything that has been out there in the last 100 years.”

“I think we can do that with classical Christian education,” Goodwin said.

“I’m convinced of it,” Roberts replied.

Toward the end of their discussion, Goodwin promoted ACCS’s website as a place where people could locate schools “nearby.” As explained above, more than 300 of the schools listed on ACCS’s website are included in Heritage’s data.

Goodwin also explained that there were “six, seven major curriculum providers,” which have formed “a cottage industry,” which now has “its own system.” Roberts underscored Goodwin’s point, saying it’s “a very tight-knit network with overlapping social circles and once you enter it you make the best friends you’ll ever have.”

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Founded in 2026, the Civil Defense Institute is a nonpartisan investigative research organization. We research people, organizations and networks whose conduct undermines civil society and Americans’ freedom to participate in public life. Our work examines extremist and conspiracy-driven campaigns, foreign influence, organized harassment and the institutions that enable them.

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Overview

The Claremont Institute is a 501(c)(3) conservative nonprofit and think tank founded in 1979 and based in Upland, California. Through its publications, fellowships, litigation arm and political projects, the Claremont Institute has attempted to build an intellectual and ideological foundation for the policy agenda of Trump’s second term. The Claremont Institute has published op-eds arguments casting an electoral defeat for Trump as an existential crisis and urging Republicans to “fight” the results of the 2020 election while votes were still being counted. The Claremont Institute condemned the disbarment of lawyer John Eastman, who helped devise a plan for Vice President Mike Pence to reject or delay electoral votes and keep Trump in office after his 2020 defeat.

The New York Times guest essayist Thomas Edsall described the Claremont Institute as part of “the substantial intellectual infrastructure that has buoyed the Trumpist right, its willingness to rupture moral codes and to discard traditional norms.” Its influence is especially visible in the staffing of the second Trump administration. In January 2026, POLITICO identified at least 70 alumni of Claremont fellowships from the preceding decade who held or had held posts in Trump’s second administration. Its agency breakdown included at least 23 in the White House, 11 at the Justice Department, seven at the State Department and five at the Department of Homeland Security.

Claremont Institute President Ryan Williams told POLITICO that Claremont had become “a reliable piece” of Trump’s larger network. The Claremont Institute served on the advisory board for the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 presidential transition plan. Notable graduates of Claremont fellowships currently serving in the Trump administration include Russell Vought, Director of the United States Office of Management and Budget; Michael Needham, Deputy National Security Advisor of the United States; and Michael Ellis, Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

The Claremont Institute’s founders–Peter Schramm, Larry Arnn, Chris Flannery and Tom Silver–were students of Harry V. Jaffa, a political theorist and speechwriter for Senator Barry Goldwater (R-Ariz.) Jaffa argued that the Declaration of Independence was an outgrowth of natural rights, and that citizens had the right to abolish their governments if they failed to live up to the inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Claremont’s current political role reflects a conscious change in historical positioning. Board chairman Thomas Klingenstein said that, after Trump entered the 2016 race, the board decided to become “a little more ‘small-p’ political” and “put our philosophy into practice.” He also claimed that “if there is… a kind of intellectual justification for Trump, it comes from Claremont.”

• Tax classification — 501(c)(3)

• Location — Claremont, CA

• Founded — 1979

• Annual revenue — $13,212,080 (FY 2025)

• EIN — 95-3443202

• Notable connections — Ryan P. Williams (President); Thomas D. Klingenstein (Board Chair); Larry P. Arnn (Vice Chair)

Activities

Publications and political argument

The Claremont Institute’s principal activities are publishing the Claremont Review of Books (CRB), a quarterly publication that typically includes book reviews and essays on conservatism, political philosophy, literature and history, as well as the American Mind, an online publication “dedicated to the ideas that drive our political life.”

In September 2016, CRB published Michael Anton’s “The Flight 93 Election,” which cast a possible Democratic victory in the 2016 election as an existential threat to the United States. The American Mind published Curtis Yarvin’s “The Clear Pill” as a five-part series. Yarvin advocates replacing democracy with “absolute monarchy.” In 2020, the American Mind published “The Fight Is Now,” an editorial arguing Republicans needed to “fight” — while votes were still being counted in November 2020 — to prevent Joe Biden and Kamala Harris from winning the election.

The outlets have also carried internal dissent. In fall 2021, CRB published an extensive conservative critique by Joseph Bessette of John Eastman’s 2020 election memoranda, which argued the vice president could block certification of electoral votes. Bessette wrote that the memos gave the vice president a “vast reservoir of uncontrollable power and discretion” to alter the outcome of the election, and faulted the institute for rallying around Eastman.

Fellowships and the personnel pipeline

Claremont runs selective fellowships for different professional cohorts, followed by alumni networking opportunities and, during the Trump presidency, job matching. Williams told POLITICO that Claremont maintains a database of alumni interested in administration jobs and that Annalyssa Rogers, its Washington-based vice president of education, helps match them with open positions. Being a Claremont fellow functions as an informal vetting signal for Trump administration job applicants: Eric Teetsel, a former Claremont Lincoln fellow who leads the Center for Renewing America, told POLITICO that when choosing between candidates, knowing one has participated in a Claremont fellowship “tells you something.” Two alumni, speaking anonymously to POLITICO, argued that Claremont’s recent fellowships had grown more ideologically dogmatic and aligned with the president. Williams contested these accounts, saying the programs teach founding principles and their application “in the regime today,” and that “what alumni from our fellowship programs glean from it is up to them.”

Litigation and state-level political capacity

The Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence (CCJ) is the public-interest legal arm of the Claremont Institute. CCJ carries the institute’s arguments into court through “friend-of-the-court” amicus briefs — filings by non-parties intended to inform judges. John Eastman, the disbarred lawyer who advised Donald Trump and advanced false claims about the 2020 election, is the founding director of CCJ. The institute’s 2025 annual report said CCJ filed 14 Supreme Court briefs that year, constituting 20 percent of the Court’s cases.

A January 2024 investigation from The New York Times investigation described a Claremont facilitated a network of activist groups at think tanks, political groups and assorted operatives that opposed diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs in at least 12 states. Participants exchanged model legislation, published state reports, sought philanthropic support and coordinated with advocacy groups. One such program is Action Idaho, a proposed state media project. Scott Yenor, a Washington Fellow at the Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life, circulated a 2021 budget proposal for Action Idaho from his Boise State University email account. Yenor sought $155,000 for a website, email lists and editorial staff. He aimed to turn anti-critical-race-theory and anti-lockdown activism into a movement that would “shape the primaries” before the 2022 midterm elections.

Structure & Affiliations

Related Organizations

In its fiscal year 2025 990 filing, the Claremont Institute reported no related organizations.

Affiliations

Ryan Williams is president of the Claremont Institute, a position he has held since 2017. Larry Arnn, president of Hillsdale College, serves as vice chairman of the institute and Thomas Klingenstein serves as chairman of the board. Williams is listed as the publisher of the Claremont Review of Books and the American Mind.

Despite its name and its origins among doctoral students at Claremont Graduate University, the institute has never been affiliated with the Claremont Colleges, a consortium of five undergraduate colleges and two graduate institutions in Claremont, California. The institute maintains offices in Upland, California, the Dallas-Fort Worth area and Washington, D.C.

Project 2025

Project 2025 originated as an initiative of the Heritage Foundation designed to equip the next Republican president with a 900-page governing agenda, a database of vetted personnel, training and a plan for immediate implementation. Its manual called for stronger presidential control over the executive branch, revived Schedule F-style plans that would make some career employees easier to remove and assigned the presidential personnel office responsibility for directing hiring and firing. Heritage listed the Claremont Institute among the project’s 100 advisory organizations. Although the manual did not attribute a chapter to the Institute itself, four chapter authors were Claremont Lincoln Fellowship alumni: Russ Vought, who wrote the chapter on the Executive Office of the President; Dustin Carmack, who wrote the intelligence community chapter; Bernard McNamee, who wrote the chapter on the Department of Energy; and Kent Lassman, who co-authored the chapter on trade with Trump advisor Peter Navarro. Claremont senior fellow Michael Anton was also credited as a contributor to the chapter on the White House Office.

The Society for American Civic Renewal

The Claremont Institute helped incubate and fiscally sponsor the Society for American Civic Renewal (SACR), a Christian nationalist organization that the Guardian described as an “exclusive, men-only fraternal order” intent on replacing the U.S. government with an “authoritarian ‘aligned regime.’” SACR’s internal mission statement said members believed in a “particular Christianity” and were prepared to secure the permanent “political and social dominance” of their beliefs. Its objectives included preferential treatment for members in hiring, promotion and contracting, cultivating local elites prepared to exercise authority and assembling potential employees for an “aligned future regime.” The document also sought men who understood “the nature of authority and its legitimate forceful exercise.” Experts interviewed by the Guardian described the project as extreme Christian nationalist in nature and an attempt to build a religious autocracy.

Claremont Institute president Ryan Williams and fellow Scott Yenor helped lead SACR. In its fiscal year 2021 990 filing, the Claremont Institute reported a $26,248 grant for “support for civic advancement.” Williams said in an email to the Guardian that the institute’s collaboration ended after SACR established itself as an incorporated 501(c)(10), a tax-exempt status granted by the Internal Revenue Service to domestic fraternal societies that operate under the “lodge” system. Williams added that he remained on SACR’s board in his “personal capacity.”

Another SACR leader, Charles Haywood, is a wealthy former shampoo entrepreneur who has written about becoming a “warlord” leading an “armed patronage network” after the collapse of the United States. In a 2023 discussion hosted by Manhattan Institute senior fellow Christopher Rufo, Haywood promoted a “no enemies to the right” strategy that urged conservatives not to criticize extremists within their coalition. In that same discussion, he said that conservatives should cooperate with a hypothetical white nationalist who wielded real political power “in order to destroy the power of the left,” and defended dictators Francisco Franco, Augusto Pinochet and António de Oliveira Salazar, claiming they had saved more people than they killed.

Controversies

Crisis rhetoric and executive power

In September 2016, Claremont Review of Book’s (CRB) website published Michael Anton’s essay “The Flight 93 Election” under the pseudonym “Publius Decius Mus” (Anton was revealed as the essay’s author in February 2017, when he was working in the first Trump administration as the president’s Deputy Assistant for Strategic Communications). Its opening command—“charge the cockpit or you die”—cast a Hillary Clinton victory not as an ordinary political defeat but as certain national and civilizational ruin. Acknowledging what he saw as Trump’s “vulgarity” and “obvious shortcomings,” Anton wrote, “Trump is worse than imperfect… So what?”

The essay quickly became a rallying cry for Trump’s supporters. Powerful conservatives such as Rush Limbaugh promoted it as an answer to Republicans reluctant to support Trump, reading extensive portions to his national radio audience and presenting Trump and his supporters as the passengers trying to overpower Democratic “hijackers.” Anton continued the argument in his 2020 book “The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return,” which imagined Democratic rule ending in authoritarianism, national collapse or secession. Even after the January 6 attack, Anton and Fox News host Laura Ingraham, a Claremont Institute Publius Fellow in 1984, defended the Flight 93 thesis and attacked conservative critics who said it had excused Trump’s conduct. Rich Lowry, then editor of the conservative magazine National Review, described the essay as a “signature statement of Trumpism” and argued that its emergency logic made character and political norms irrelevant and justified nearly any means of retaining power.

In September 2019, the American Mind published Curtis Yarvin’s “The Clear Pill.” Yarvin is a neo-reactionary writer who advocates abolishing American democracy and replacing it with one-man rule. Yarvin has described his preferred ruler as a monarch, a “sovereign CEO” and a “benevolent dictator”—an executive freed from ordinary legislative, judicial, bureaucratic and electoral constraints. In the series, he argued that democratic public opinion is managed by an unelected elite, portrayed Congress as an obstacle to “real democracy” and treated constitutionalism, progressivism and fascism as competing formulas for elite rule.

Eastman and 2020 election denial

On November 5, 2020, while votes were still being counted, the American Mind published “The Fight Is Now” under the collective byline “The Editors” and labeled it a statement from the publication. It declared that an attempted theft of the election by Democrats was “well underway” and urged rallies, protests, lawsuits, FBI scrutiny and aggressive investigations. Signaling institutional support for these unfounded allegations, the statement was signed by institute president Ryan Williams, vice president Matthew Peterson, Center for the American Way of Life executive director Arthur Milikh, executive editor James Poulos and the magazine’s editors.

Eastman was serving as director of the Claremont Institute’s litigation program, the Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence, when he advised Trump as his private lawyer in December 2020. Eastman authored a two-page memorandum that proposed Vice President Mike Pence exclude electoral votes and either declare Trump re-elected or send the contest to the House, acting “without asking for permission.” In a longer memorandum, Eastman laid out multiple scenarios, including unilateral vice-presidential determinations producing a Trump victory, and ended by urging Pence to exercise the claimed authority without seeking permission.

In a January 18, 2021, American Mind article, Eastman claimed Pence had been asked only “to pause the proceedings” — though this later characterization was narrower than his written memoranda. The article carries a correction acknowledging that an earlier version incorrectly claimed. Wayne County, Michigan, had more votes cast than registered voters. In April 2026, the California Supreme Court disbarred Eastman after disciplinary review affirmed culpability on 10 of 11 charges of egregious and deceitful conduct. The order imposed a $5,000 sanction.

The Claremont Institute has not distanced itself from Eastman. As of September 2026, it continues to list Eastman on its board of directors as founding director of the CCJ, and issued a press release condemning the disbarment, which Williams called “profoundly un-American lawfare.” The episode involving Eastman’s memoranda regarding the vice president’s role in counting electoral votes led to internal debate within the institute. CRB published Bessette’s detailed critique of the memos, and The New York Times Magazine reported that board members split over Eastman, with institute leaders describing his legal representation of Trump as a private matter.

Birthright citizenship

Claremont scholars developed the argument that the Fourteenth Amendment does not guarantee citizenship to every child born on U.S. soil and that the government may exclude the U.S.-born children of undocumented or temporary-status parents. That work supplied the constitutional theory that the Claremont Institute’s litigation center used to defend Trump’s 2025 executive order denying those children citizenship.

In a 2006 Heritage Foundation memorandum, Eastman urged Congress to reassert authority over the Citizenship Clause. Senior fellow and institute board member Edward J. Erler argued in a 2015 op-ed in National Review that Congress could act through ordinary legislation. In 2016, Erler joined Andrew C. McCarthy III and the institute’s Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence in submitting an amicus brief about citizenship in American Samoa. The brief argued that the founders rejected “birth-right ligeance” in favor of a social compact — the theory that citizenship rests on mutual consent between the individual and political community rather than mere place of birth. In 2025, the center filed an amicus brief supporting Trump’s petitions defending the executive order, expressly identifying work by Erler, Eastman and Thomas West as the scholarship behind its position. Eastman was identified as counsel of record.

The Supreme Court rejected the arguments advanced by the Claremont Institute’s fellows. On June 30, 2026, the Court held in Trump v. Barbara that U.S.-born children of parents unlawfully or temporarily present are subject to U.S. jurisdiction and are citizens at birth, rejecting the executive order’s core constitutional position.

Finances

Revenue & Expenses

The Claremont Institute’s revenue rose from $4.8 million in fiscal year 2018 to $13.2 million in fiscal year 2025, a 176.5 percent increase. Contributions and grants grew from $4.3 million to $12.1 million. Expenses exceeded revenue in fiscal years 2022 and 2023 before the Claremont Institute returned to surpluses in fiscal years 2024 and 2025.

Funders

The largest identified institutional funder is board chairman Thomas Klingenstein’s philanthropic fund. The Thomas D. Klingenstein Fund reported seven consecutive annual grants to Claremont totaling $18.7 million from 2018 through 2024. Its latest grant, $4.35 million, was roughly one-third of the institute’s latest annual revenue, though the reporting periods do not align exactly. Public filings do not reveal a complete donor list because nonprofit contributor schedules are not public and donor-advised funds do not identify underlying funders.

Grant Recipients

The Claremont Institute is not a significant grantmaker. Its latest filing reported $98,500 in grants to individuals, mostly fellowship stipends and a $44,000 prize to board chairman Thomas Klingenstein. It also disclosed a $26,248 grant to the Society for American Civic Renewal (SACR) in fiscal year 2021. The SACR grant was small relative to the institute’s budget but notable within such a sparse grantmaking record.

Assets and Liabilities

After falling from $13.5 million in 2021 to $10.3 million in 2023, year-end net assets rebounded to $16.8 million in 2025.

Compensation

Senior fellow Michael Anton was the highest-paid individual listed on the latest return, with total compensation of $281,857 for calendar year 2024. John Eastman was listed as working 32 hours per week and received $186,663. The Claremont Institute separately paid $55,062 for legal services to the Constitutional Counsel Group. According to the institute’s 990 filing from fiscal year 2025, Eastman owns 50 percent of Constitutional Counsel Group.

Program Expenses

In fiscal year 2025, program services accounted for about 71 percent of total expenses, fundraising for 21 percent and management for eight percent. Salaries and benefits made up just over half of spending. The Claremont Institute reported $114,100 in direct lobbying and no grassroots lobbying or political campaign expenditures on Schedule C.

Board of Directors

• Ryan P. Williams, President, Publisher of the Claremont Review of Books and The American Mind

• Charles Kesler, CRB Editor

• John Eastman, Senior Fellow

• Christopher Flannery, senior fellow

• John Marini

• Larry P. Arnn, Vice Chair

• Keith Carlson

• Roy E. Crummer

• Robert Curry

• Edward J. Erler, Senior Fellow

• Joel H. Farkas

• James E. Higgins

• Brian T. Kennedy, Senior Fellow

• Thomas D. Klingenstein, Chair

• Larry G. Mattson

• Robert Nelson

• Bruce C. Sanborn, Chairman Emeritus

• Thomas West, Senior Fellow

• Michael Malone

• Scott Glabe

• Robert Kasprzak

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Founded in 2026, the Civil Defense Institute is a nonpartisan investigative research organization. We research people, organizations and networks whose conduct undermines civil society and Americans’ freedom to participate in public life. Our work examines extremist and conspiracy-driven campaigns, foreign influence, organized harassment and the institutions that enable them.

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Overview

1. The Heritage Foundation recently screened a racist film based on the white nationalist “great replacement theory.”

2. The film was released by Tucker Carlson’s network.

3. Heritage’s relationship with Carlson has led to a series of defections by staff, board members and trustees.

On September 16, 2026, The Heritage Foundation screened the documentary “Replacing Europe: Following the World’s Deadliest Migration Route,” released by Tucker Carlson’s network. The Mass Deportation Coalition (MDC), a group supported by dozens of conservative and Republican organizations nationwide, promoted the event on X. Heritage and Muckraker, the media outlet that produced the film, are both MDC coalition partners.

Carlson’s site promotes the film with the line: “The replacement is real.” The trailer claims that Western governments scheme to make native Europeans minorities in their home cities.

What is the racist “great replacement theory”?

This premise invokes the great replacement conspiracy theory, a racist and xenophobic belief that elites seek to replace white Europeans (and Americans) with non-white immigrants. In the last decade, mass shooters professing belief in the great replacement theory have carried out a string of attacks around the world, and is considered to be one of the most dangerous conspiracy theories in circulation today.

In an interview with Anthony Rubin, Muckraker’s founder and one of the filmmakers behind “Replacing Europe,” Carlson made the thesis of the supposed racial “replacement” explicit. Carlson claimed that “mass migration” to Europe has “reshuffled the cultures of Europe completely” and “in many cities, natives are now the minority.” He also claimed this was part of a plan: “This was not an accident” and it “didn’t happen organically.” Carlson also claimed postwar refugee rules were designed to eliminate Europe’s white-majority countries, which he described as the bedrock of “our civilization.”

Rubin, speaking about African migrants in Europe, claimed that “if you point a camera at them, look if there’s no police around, they will slit your throat.” Rubin likened groups of people of different races to fish that cannot share an aquarium, saying that “there are great people from Africa … but on the whole, certain fish don’t mix in the same aquarium.” Carlson agreed, saying that “there’s a real difference between someone from El Salvador and someone from Sierra Leone …on many levels.”

Heritage president has defended Tucker Carlson

In October 2025, Heritage president Kevin Roberts defended Carlson after the former Fox News host conducted a friendly two-hour interview with white nationalist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes. Carlson did not challenge Fuentes over his racist beliefs or push back when Fuentes spoke of “organized Jewry in America.” Roberts’s defense of Carlson led to a series of defections by Heritage trustees, board and staff members. Although Roberts apologized to his staff, Heritage’s decision to screen a film produced by Carlson’s network shows that the foundation has not broken with the controversial commentator.

Ryan Neuhaus, who calls himself a “Builder” of the MDC, promoted the screening on his X account, calling it “an incredible film.” Neuhaus was Roberts’s chief of staff at The Heritage Foundation and wrote the script for the video defending Carlson.

At the MDC’s July yacht party, organizers planned to show the film’s trailer. According to the MDC, the boat company refused because it did not “meet their standards.” In September, Heritage hosted a screening of the whole film.

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Founded in 2026, the Civil Defense Institute is a nonpartisan investigative research organization. We research people, organizations and networks whose conduct undermines civil society and Americans’ freedom to participate in public life. Our work examines extremist and conspiracy-driven campaigns, foreign influence, organized harassment and the institutions that enable them.

Subscribe now

Overview

• Neville Singham, an American expatriate living in China, is reportedly under criminal investigation in the United States.

• Singham has been tied to a network of nonprofits that promotes narratives friendly to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

• Civil Defense has profiled the nonprofits, finding that several of them regularly promote or defend the CCP.

Speaking at a conference in Shanghai, China in late 2025, Neville Roy Singham, a wealthy American expatriate, explained why he needed to rewrite the history of World War II. Singham criticized the “international rules-based order,” saying it was “created” by a “lie.”

“If we want to therefore have a new world’s [sic] order that is based on multilateralism that President Xi [Jinping] and CPC [Communist Party of China] and China have proposed, we have to undo the ideological damage that has been done by the narrative of World War II,” Singham said.

Indeed, Singham trumpeted his own revisionist history at the conference. In it, he primarily credits the communists and socialists of the Soviet Union and China with victory during the Second World War, downplaying what he described as the contributions of “Anglo-American capital,” meaning the United States and the United Kingdom.

Singham’s advocacy for Xi Jinping’s foreign policy is conspicuous but unsurprising.

Years earlier, major investigations by media outlets, including New Lines Magazine and The New York Times, connected a network of nonprofits allegedly funded by Singham to the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) media apparatus. A series of congressional inquiries and investigations followed.

Then, in July 2026, news broke that Singham is under criminal investigation by a grand jury in the Southern District of New York. Authorities are reportedly investigating whether he has violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) and also whether he lied on 990 tax forms filed with the Internal Revenue Service. The central question is whether Singham is not just a benefactor of far-left causes but is also working with the CCP.

In 2023, for instance, The New York Times concluded that Singham is at the “center” of a “lavishly funded influence campaign that defends China and pushes its propaganda.” Singham “works closely with the Chinese government media machine and is financing its propaganda worldwide,” the Times reported. (Singham has denied working under the direction of any government.)

Singham’s favorable views of the CCP (also known as the CPC) and other far-left authoritarian regimes have long been known. “China is teaching the West that the world is better off with a dual system of both free-market adjustments and long-term planning,” he told CNN in 2008. During the same interview, Singham praised Venezuela as a “phenomenally democratic place.” (At the time, Venezuela was ruled by Hugo Chavez, who transformed the country from a democracy into an autocracy during his reign from 1999 until 2013.) “I have been following China since I was 14 years old,” Singham wrote in a 2021 email. “The Chinese and Cuban revolutions defined my generation’s attraction to liberation and socialism.”

In 2017, Singham sold his software company, Thoughtworks, for $785 million. He moved his businesses to Shanghai and began funding several nonprofits in the United States. These nonprofits are central to the reported investigation into his activities.

Civil Defense has published organizational profiles for eight nonprofits that have been connected to Singham. They are: CODEPINK, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, The People’s Forum, BreakThrough News, the United Community Fund, the Justice and Education Fund, People’s Welfare Association and the People’s Support Foundation. Below, Civil Defense takes a closer look at the media and educational materials produced by the first four of these nonprofits.

The profiles rely on primary sources, including the IRS tax filings that are reportedly under investigation, as well as other extensive reporting. The tax filings and other evidence establish that the nonprofits connected to Singham are part of a close-knit network, with overlapping personnel and funding flowing between them. Readers can click on each of the profiles to explore these relationships further.

As detailed below, personnel working for these nonprofits have dismissed claims that the CCP is an “authoritarian” regime, undermined claims of Taiwanese independence, whitewashed the CCP’s oppression of Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in the western Xinjiang province, falsely claimed the 1989 Tiananmen massacre was not in fact a massacre of peaceful protesters and echoed known CCP talking points about its supposed economic successes.

While such rhetoric alone does not prove that these nonprofits are working with or for the Chinese government, it does demonstrate, in part, why suspicion of foreign ties has fallen on the nonprofits — and on Singham himself.

CODEPINK

The best-known nonprofit in Singham’s orbit is CODEPINK, an anti-war protest organization that first gained widespread attention opposing the 2003 Iraq War. Over time, CODEPINK mixed its anti-war campaigning with messaging that portrays the CCP in a positive light, often solely blaming America for tensions between the two countries.

CODEPINK’s co-founder, Jodie Evans, married Singham in 2017. The Times reported that CODEPINK received $1.4 million from other nonprofits connected to Singham in the years that followed. (In response, Evans denied following the “direction of any political party, my husband or any other government or their representatives,” adding that she has “always followed my values.”)

Claims that the CCP is not “authoritarian” and China is a “local democracy”

One of CODEPINK’s ongoing campaigns, “China Is Not Our Enemy,” consistently portrays the United States as the aggressor in a rivalry with the CCP. The campaign’s bias is obvious, as its main web page alleges that the U.S. government is driving toward war and “continues to manipulate the minds of US citizens to support the war,” while the “media drives baseless narratives of fear and hate.” A piece on the organization’s website credits Evans with launching the campaign in circa 2019 and reads:

“The truth is that China is not our enemy. The only enemy is U.S. imperialism, war itself, and the spinning gears of propaganda that drag us into it, time and time again.”

—Megan Russell

CODEPINK’s “China is Not Our Enemy” Campaign Coordinator

After a trip to China in 2023, Evans spoke for more than an hour about her experiences on a CODEPINK livestream. She dismissed the idea that the CCP is an “authoritarian” regime, claiming that China is a “local democracy,” with a “really direct intimate relational democracy on the ground.”

Independent accounts contradict Evans’s glowing review of the CCP’s rule. For instance, Freedom House reports that “China’s authoritarian regime has become increasingly repressive in recent years,” as it “continues to tighten control over all aspects of life and governance, including the state bureaucracy, the media, online speech, religious practice, universities, businesses, and civil society associations.”

During that same 2023 livestream, Evans praised China’s “peace economy culture,” which she contrasted with America’s supposed “war economy culture,” claiming it was refreshing to be in a country where she felt “safe.” When asked if she had anything “negative” to say about China, Evans struggled to find an answer: “I can’t for the life of me think of anything right now.” Evans eventually explained that she had trouble paying for things because “they don’t take American credit cards.” That was her only criticism of the CCP-ruled country. Evans also lauded her time in China in a piece for CODEPINK’s website.

In November 2023, CODEPINK helped organize another visit to China as part of its “China Is Not Our Enemy” campaign. One participant, Dee Knight, described his visit in an essay for the organization’s website. “Taiwan is part of China,” Knight wrote. He asserted that China “seems to have [a] more genuine democracy” than Hong Kong and Taiwan, which he described as “parts of the country” that the United States “has been trying to strip away.”

Whitewashing the CCP’s ethnic repression in western China

In a separate piece, “Eyewitness Xinjiang,” published at another publication, Knight dismissed reports that the CCP is using ethnic Uyghurs (a predominately Muslim minority) for “slave labor” as “western accusations…to create a scandal that’s used to try and [sic] isolate China and strangle its economy.”

In fact, CODEPINK consistently downplays the CCP’s human rights abuses against ethnic minorities in the western Xinjiang province, even though the regime’s repression has been thoroughly documented by independent groups such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, as well as by the United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner.

In its China FAQ, for example, CODEPINK avoids blaming the CCP for any human rights violations against ethnic Uyghurs or any others in western China. “Any violation of their human rights is of concern to us,” CODEPINK writes. The very next sentence blames America: “At the same time, we call out the US government for using Xinjiang’s human rights situation to drive war with China.”

Evans has also blamed the United States for the CCP’s crackdown in Xinjiang. During a 2021 livestream, she alleged that “the Saudi king” admitted that he was paid by the United States to “take Wahhabism to the Uyghurs in China so that the U.S. would have a flank on China.” She described Uyghurs as “the most fierce fighters in Yemen and Syria” who “come home and bomb shopping centers.” China is “trying to deal with the situation,” she added, “I’m sure it’s not pretty…but is it a reason to go to war on a billion and a half people?”

While some Uyghurs have joined al-Qaeda and ISIS-affiliated terrorist groups, those jihadists are not part of a plan concocted by the United States and the Saudi monarchy. In fact, U.S. forces have struck Uyghur jihadists in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Syria. Moreover, counterterrorism concerns cannot justify what Human Rights Watch has described as the CCP’s system of “mass arbitrary detention, unjust imprisonments, intrusive surveillance and forced labor” — all of which have systematically repressed “hundreds of thousands” of civilians.

Messaging amplified by state-controlled media

Chinese state-controlled media outlets have amplified CODEPINK’s messaging on multiple occasions. In September 2020, China Daily Global quoted Evans as claiming that China “has taken 850 million people out of poverty, without invading other countries, or enslaving other people” and the American elite were “terrified” by such success. In July 2021, China Daily Global quoted Evans as saying that the United States was engaged in a “multi-pronged hybrid war” against China. In 2022, the People’s Daily Online highlighted CODEPINK’s role, alongside other groups, in protests outside of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office as she prepared to visit Taiwan.

In March 2024, Evans was featured in a China Global Television Network segment in which she accused the U.S. government of dividing the Korean Peninsula into two nations but did not criticize the CCP for its sponsorship of North Korea. South Korea, backed by the United States, is a democracy. North Korea, backed by the CCP, is ruled by a dictator. While Evans accused the United States of committing “a crime against humanity” on the Korean Peninsula, she was silent when it came to the CCP’s well-documented support of Kim Jong Un’s repressive regime. “My life is about stopping this monstrous regime that is the United States of America that thinks it’s okay to murder people,” Evans said in the CGTN segment.

Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research

Tricontinental is a Marxist research institute. Singham chairs Tricontinental’s International Advisory Board and his son, Nathan, has worked as a researcher for the organization.

Vijay Prashad, Tricontinental’s executive director, has described Singham as “[o]ne of my oldest & dearest friends.” In a thread posted on Twitter (now X) in December 2021, Prashad praised Singham as “a Marxist with a massive software company!” Prashad explained that Singham sold his company “a few years ago and decided to give away all the money toward political education for a new generation of radicals.” Prashad added: “Those funds – now largely in non-profits – were the original source for @tri_continental’s endowment, & other projects, which we hope will last for at least a generation.”

In response to The New York Times’s 2023 investigation, Prashad stated: “We do not and have never received funds or instructions from any government or political party.”

In November 2025, Tricontinental published Singham’s revisionist study (discussed above) of World War II. It is titled “The 80th Anniversary of the Victory in the World Anti-Fascist War.” A version of Singham’s study was also published by Guancha, a news outlet that Reporters Without Borders has described as a “Chinese propaganda media” outlet. In his study, Singham credits “socialist leadership and mass heroism,” not the Allied powers, for the victory over the fascist Axis powers. He claims that China and the Soviet Union fought fascism while “Washington and London would rather count profits,” and that the Allies’ “hatred of communism and love of their colonies outweighed their anti-fascist principles.” Singham describes the Soviet Union’s relocation of industry while under attack by Nazi Germany as something that “only a socialist-led society could achieve,” adding that the Soviet military’s success was due to “the fusion of Marxist science with mass creativity.”

In November 2025, Singham spoke about his study at an event hosted by the Global South Academic Forum in Shanghai, explaining that dozens of others contributed. Tricontinental served as one of the event’s sponsors, with Prashad delivering a keynote address. In his own brief remarks, Singham accused the West of spreading the “fascist lie” that there is “a battle between fascism, democracy, and communism” when, in his view, “fascism is actually a face of capitalism and imperialism, as is colonialism.” (Singham credited Prashad for elaborating on this view.)

In October 2026, Jodie Evans is releasing a new book, China Is Not Our Enemy. (CODEPINK’s ongoing campaign, discussed above, shares the same name.) Evans’s book was coauthored with Mikaela Nhondo Erskog, a researcher at Tricontinental. Erskog’s bio says she “is also part of Dongsheng, an international collective of researchers interested in Chinese politics.” According to The New York Times, Singham introduced Dongsheng News to his friends in 2020, claiming it “provides unique progressive coverage of China that has been sadly missing.” The Times added: “Drawing stories from the state media,” Dongsheng News “blends lighthearted news with bureaucratic prose.”

The People’s Forum

The People’s Forum, which is based in Manhattan, describes itself as a “movement incubator for working class and marginalized communities.” In a 2021 social media thread, the organization described Singham as “our funder.” The group has denied “allegations of Chinese government funding,” claiming they “are not only false but part of a dangerous escalation to crush dissent, target activists, and silence peace and anti-war movements.”

The People’s Forum’s educational activities include classes on Marxist-Leninist communism, as well as an annual “Red Books Day,” during which readers celebrate the “Manifesto of the Communist Party” by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. The People’s Forum’s educational programming has often portrayed the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in a sympathetic light. Several examples follow below.

Conferences cohosted with the Qiao Collective

In August 2020, The People’s Forum cohosted a virtual event with the Qiao Collective titled “Socialism vs. Barbarism: Understanding the New Cold War on China.” The webpage for the event reads: “This class will equip socialists and anti-imperialists with an analysis of U.S.-China relations within a longer history of U.S. imperialist aggression; the nature of socialism with Chinese characteristics; and China’s vision of multilateralism as an alternative to U.S. unilateralism.”

The Qiao Collective, the event’s cohost, says its mission is to serve “as a bridge between the U.S. left and China’s rich Marxist, anti-imperialist political work and thought in order to foster critical consideration of the role of China and socialism with Chinese characteristics in contemporary geopolitics.”

On September 18, 2021, The People’s Forum cohosted another conference in conjunction with the Qiao Collective, as well as Monthly Review and CODEPINK. The conference, titled “China and the Left: A Socialist Forum,” was intended to “provide a forum for those invested in Chinese socialism and internationalism” and “for those invested in challenging [the] rise in the U.S.-led imperialist aggression on China to meet, strategize, and discuss.” The conference’s home webpage chastised “self-avowed leftist organizations and thinkers” who had supposedly “abandoned an anti-imperialist analysis of China in favor of equivocating narratives about Chinese ‘authoritarianism’ and ‘hegemony.’”

Tricontinental’s Vijay Prashad delivered the keynote address at the September 2021 conference. His speech was titled, “What’s the Left to Do in a World on Fire?” During his remarks, Prashad harshly criticized the United States, including the American left, while defending the CCP. “This is supposed to be about China,” Prashad said of the conference, “why is he talking about the United States? Because friends, frankly, the United States does not have the right to judge anybody.” Prashad continued: “The U.S. left does not have the right to judge anybody. Because what gives the U.S. left the right to do anything?” Only after the U.S. left “build[s] power here, then let’s talk…otherwise you’re just a college professor, or you’re somebody who has nothing better to do than go on the internet and harass political forces outside the United States,” Prashad said.

“I really don’t think this is an issue of what you feel about the Chinese Revolution,” Prashad said. “I really don’t think that’s the point right now…because all I want from you, all I’m asking of you is to campaign…against this war.” (Needless to say, there was no war.)

“I literally don’t care what your assessment is of the Communist Party…of Xi Jinping,” Prashad told the audience. “I don’t even care if you’re racist against the Chinese people. I honestly don’t care.” Prashad defended the CCP’s track record, claiming it “just helped eradicate absolute poverty” and did a better job of managing the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in China, than Western governments. Prashad criticized people for calling the Chinese government’s “project…authoritarianism.”

CODEPINK’s Jodie Evans touted Prashad’s remarks, including his criticisms of the American left, in posts on her Twitter (now X) account. She also thanked Prashad for his “shout out” to CODEPINK “while calling out the USofA as [the] biggest criminal and terrorist on the planet.”

Course commemorating the 75th anniversary of the Chinese communist revolution

In October 2024, The People’s Forum released a three-part series to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Chinese communist revolution titled “When the People Stand Up: 75 Years of the Chinese Revolution.” The reading packet for the first course in the series reprints Mao Zedong’s September 21, 1949, speech, “The Chinese People Have Stood Up!,” which apparently served as the inspiration for the name of the course. The course whitewashed the CCP’s history, including Mao’s disastrous rule.

The course’s reading packets include essays by Ken Hammond, who is a professor of East Asian and Global History at New Mexico State University. Hammond is a member of the Party for Liberation and Socialism and is also listed as an advisory group member for the Friends of Socialist China, which describes itself as a “platform based on supporting the People’s Republic of China and spreading understanding of Chinese socialism.” Hammond has praised the “leadership” of the CCP and Xi Jinping in state-controlled media.

In his essays for The People’s Forum’s course, Hammond portrays Taiwan as a rogue “island province” of mainland China, falsely claiming that it “remains under the control of the Nationalists to this day.” In fact, the nationalists are just one political party in Taiwan, which evolved into a liberal democracy while mainland China remains under one-party rule. Hammond also whitewashes the April 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, declaring “it was not a massacre of peaceful protesters by the army.” Human rights groups beg to differ, as the massacre has been amply documented, as has the imprisonment of tens of thousands of others. Indeed, the CCP continues to cover up the Tiananmen Square massacre, relying on a shifting official narrative and continuing to ban events dedicated to the innocent lives lost.

1804 Books

In 2021, The People’s Forum launched its own online bookstore, 1804 Books. It has since published works by authors known for their favorable views of the CCP.

One of them, “China’s Revolution and the Quest for a Socialist Future,” is authored by the aforementioned Ken Hammond. 1804 Books’s promotional page for the book describes China as “long the most prosperous and sophisticated country in the world,” which “was subjected to the military, economic, and political domination of Western imperialism.” China “has achieved great things in education, health care, and the provision of other social services” since the 1949 communist revolution, the promotional page reads, but “the process of socialist construction remains an unfinished and ongoing venture, and the future of the revolution is very much a work in progress.”

Another work published by 1804 Books is “China’s Great Road,” which is a collection of articles written by the author and economist John Ross. The webpage advertising the book claims that “Ross has cut through the anti-Communist and Sinophobic narrative of China perpetuated by Western media to give readers a clear view of what is possible for socialist countries around the world.” In 2016, Ross appeared in a video that the Chinese government aired in Times Square as part of a media campaign asserting its control over the South China Sea. Ross is senior fellow at the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies of the Renmin University of China and has also authored a series of articles for CGTN, which the U.S. State Department has designated as a Chinese state media outlet.

BreakThrough News

Founded in 2020 and based in New York City, BreakThrough News maintains a presence across multiple social media platforms, including X (formerly Twitter), Instagram and YouTube. It has more than 1 million subscribers on YouTube alone. Much of its coverage is friendly to the CCP’s point of view, with a narrative framing that is intended to delegitimize criticisms of its one-party rule.

BreakThrough News has decried a congressional subpoena seeking information on its activities as a “witch-hunt” that infringes on its First Amendment rights.

In early 2022, New Lines Magazine reported that BreakThrough News was “pressing Uyghur genocide denial” through its correspondent, Rania Khalek. New Lines described Khalek as “an apologist for Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad,” who was subsequently deposed from power in 2024, and reported that Khalek’s “previous media ventures, Redfish and Soapbox, were both exposed by journalists as cutouts of Russian state-funded media.”

Khalek remains BreakThrough News’s “chief correspondent.” She and the outlet have not only sought to downplay or whitewash the CCP’s oppression of Uyghurs, but have also pushed other CCP-friendly talking points.

In a September 2021 episode of her show, for instance, Khalek hosted Tings Chak of Tricontinental to discuss a “groundbreaking report” Chak had authored. (Chak’s X account indicates that she is based in Beijing.) “China is a poor country of 1.4 billion yet it eradicated extreme poverty while in the rest of the world poverty is on the rise,” a post promoting the episode reads. “What’s behind China’s success? Socialism!” Another promotion for the show claimed that “what China has accomplished is huge & full of lessons for socialists.”

That claim echoes the CCP’s propaganda, as Xi Jinping declared “complete victory” over extreme poverty in February 2021. Independent observers pointed out that even based on its own figures, the CCP had set a “low bar” for defining poverty and there were multiple problems with the claim. Nevertheless, BreakThrough News has woven Xi’s supposed success in ending poverty throughout its coverage, including by using it to argue that the U.S. government should spend more on alleviating domestic poverty instead of supporting Taiwan.

In an October 2022 video, Brian Becker decried what he called the “endless demonization of Xi Jinping,” claiming “every time you read an article or a headline in the western media about China…it’s always the authoritarian Xi Jinping, the authoritarian this, the authoritarian that.” Becker described Western media coverage as “non-stop demonization.” Along with his guest, Tricontinental’s Chak, Becker discussed the CCP’s supposed success in eradicating poverty. Becker claimed that China’s “form of governance,” including “bringing people out of that extreme poverty and at the same time building all this infrastructure,” is an “incredibly important success story.” Chak replied there was “no doubt about that.”

Another BreakThrough News journalist is Amanda Yee, who hosts the outlet’s “China Report” show on YouTube. Yee describes the show as an effort aimed at “helping you sort through all the propaganda with an independent view of the country that we’re taught to hate but know so little about.” In reality, “China Report” often promotes CCP-friendly narratives.

In a November 2025 episode of her show, Yee discussed “People’s Democracy in China.” A social media promotion for the show reads: “Western media calls China ‘authoritarian.’ But what if its political system actually has practices that are MORE democratic than the US’s?” Yee declared that “so much of the western framing around China is just fear-mongering over its political system.”

Other episodes of the “China Report” have sought to delegitimize Taiwanese independence, defend the CCP’s ethnic unity law (foreign policy analysts and human rights activists have criticized the law, finding that it has harmed ethnic minorities) and promote China’s “revolution and development model” as a paradigm for governments throughout Latin America. Elsewhere, Yee has defended the CCP’s conduct during the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, claiming it is a “fabrication” that has been “exploited by the West for over 30 years as evidence of the ruthless, authoritarian nature of the CPC to justify imperialist aggression against China.”

BreakThrough News has produced other controversial content as well. For example, in January 2023, Khalek released a friendly interview with Sheikh Naim Qassem, the deputy secretary-general of Hezbollah, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization. The interview was conducted in Beirut, Lebanon. Nearly five years earlier, in May 2018, the United States and several partner nations throughout the Middle East designated Qassem and other senior Hezbollah figures as terrorists.

Conclusion

It is beyond the scope of this report to determine whether the nonprofits described above, each of which has been connected to Neville Roy Singham, are working with the CCP. And the brief summary above is not intended to be exhaustive. There are additional examples of how each of these nonprofits has advanced narratives favorable to the CCP. These organizations also cover topics other than China, its relations with the world and the CCP’s governance.

Still, it is remarkable how often each of these nonprofits echo the CCP’s messaging.

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Founded in 2026, the Civil Defense Institute is a nonpartisan investigative research organization. We research people, organizations and networks whose conduct undermines civil society and Americans’ freedom to participate in public life. Our work examines extremist and conspiracy-driven campaigns, foreign influence, organized harassment and the institutions that enable them.

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Overview

• Bo French sparked controversy with his xenophobic social media posts about UT Austin.

• Days earlier, he made similar remarks on a panel sponsored by the Mass Deportation Coalition.

• Leading conservative think tanks support the Mass Deportation Coalition.

On September 13, Bo French, a candidate for Texas railroad commissioner, sparked controversy. French posted an image of mostly nonwhite, male students at the University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin) celebrating their football team’s stunning fourth-quarter comeback victory over Ohio State. French wrote that he had “heard UT graduation year looked like this … the problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined.” He later posted the same image with a different caption, claiming “social media is exposing how many Americans have been displaced by foreigners.” French reiterated: ”It’s everywhere and far worse than any of us could imagine.”

French’s xenophobic posts were widely criticized, including by other Texas Republicans. Sen. John Cornyn called on his fellow Republicans “to condemn the intolerance and racism” in French’s posts.

While French’s posts on X (formerly Twitter) garnered widespread attention, his controversial remarks just days earlier went largely unnoticed.

Bo French’s Controversial Remarks at a Panel Sponsored by the Mass Deportation Coalition

On September 9, French spoke on a panel sponsored by the Mass Deportation Coalition (MDC), a group that is supported by dozens of conservative and Republican organizations around the nation. The MDC pressures President Donald Trump and his administration from the right, with its X account’s (@Phase2Deport) bio stating that the president “CAN keep his promise to ‘carry out the largest deportation operation in American history,’” starting “with 1M deportations in 2026.”

During the September 9 event, French boasted that he was “maybe the first person in Texas to talk about the fact that we needed to probably deport 100 million people.” (The total number of noncitizens living in the United States was just 22 million people in 2023, and approximately 14 million of them were unauthorized immigrants. Using these figures as an estimate, French’s call to deport 100 million people would necessarily include millions of legal residents and American citizens.)

French complained about immigrants “who bring this sort of third world mentality with them where they feel entitled to scam our systems.” He claimed that the “left” is “clearly trying to import more people that they can call voters” (language that invokes the racist great replacement theory) and separately said that “in order to preserve our culture we obviously have to ramp these things up,” referring to mass deportations. French said assimilation “is the exception, not the rule,” and that “leftism” is engaged in a “war against order” by bringing “tens of millions of people … who view those things that we hold dear as evil.” In his closing remarks, French claimed that “we are in a spiritual battle” against the “demonic” left’s “version of right and wrong.”

French’s comments from the panel discussion remain online in a post on the X account @ApplytoForum, which notes that the event was “sponsored” by the MDC.

Several Leading Conservative Think Tanks Support the MDC

The MDC’s webpage lists several leading conservative think tanks as its “coalition partners,” including: The Heritage Foundation, The Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life and the Federation for American Immigration Reform. Mike Howell, president of the Oversight Project, identifies himself as the “Captain” of the MDC in his X bio. The MDC also lists several prominent individual supporters, including Blackwater founder Erik Prince, conservative activist Jennica Pounds (who posts as @DataRepublican on X), former Assistant Attorney General Jeff Clark (who supported efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election) and former U.S. Pardon Attorney Ed Martin.

The MDC has not distanced itself or criticized French’s posts or remarks on its official X account or webpage. Instead, some figures affiliated with the MDC have endorsed and amplified his claims.

Ryan Neuhaus, one of the public-facing leaders of the MDC, reposted French’s post alleging that Americans had been “displaced” and defended him in a subsequent post. Neuhaus, the former chief of staff to Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, identifies himself as a “Builder” of the MDC (@Phase2Deport) in his bio on X.

Former Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) Commander Gregory Bovino, who was the featured speaker at an Indiana “Mass Deportation Rally” promoted by the MDC, thanked French for “highlighting” the topic, saying “mass deportations will solve it in very short order.” Similar to French’s comment during the September 9 MDC-sponsored event, Bovino has claimed that there are “107 million illegal aliens in the U.S.,” which is false, and would amount to nearly one-third of the U.S. population.

Bo French has a History of Controversial and Racist Remarks

French has a long history of using controversial and outright racist rhetoric. In October 2025, he used an apparent racial slur to refer to Black people in a post celebrating delayed SNAP benefits. According to The New York Times, he once asked his X followers whether Muslims or Jews are a “bigger threat” to the United States, saying he believed Islam “is the bigger threat.”

In December 2025, French replied to a fan account for Nick Fuentes, a white supremacist and Holocaust denier, agreeing that “mass migration” and “feminism” were “killing our country.” French used an antisemitic trope when disagreeing with the fan account’s post about the supposed threat posed by the “Jewish oligarchy,” writing: “My Jewish friends are good at business. Muslims are openly conquering America via jihad. Big difference.”

French has demonized Muslims. In a July 2026 post, he argued that mass deportations should “prioritize” Muslims, saying “they are actually the most dangerous to our nation … they all must go.” He has claimed Muslims want to “conquer our country and replace our culture with Islam” or make the United States “into a Sharia Superpower.” In reality, Muslims make up only slightly more than 1 percent of the population of the United States. According to the Cato Institute, the vast majority of Muslims also adopt American social values.

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Founded in 2026, the Civil Defense Institute is a nonpartisan investigative research organization. We research people, organizations and networks whose conduct undermines civil society and Americans’ freedom to participate in public life. Our work examines extremist and conspiracy-driven campaigns, foreign influence, organized harassment and the institutions that enable them.

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Overview

• Martin Sellner, a white nationalist and former neo-Nazi, spoke virtually at an Indiana rally promoting mass deportation.

• The rally was organized by a partner of the Mass Deportation Coalition, which promoted it.

• Sellner, who is banned from entering the United States, endorsed the racist “great replacement” conspiracy theory and promoted “remigration” in his speech.

An invitation-only Indiana rally hosted Martin Sellner, an Austrian white nationalist with a neo-Nazi past, on the same program as two of the state’s top elected officials, a Republican state lawmaker and a former senior federal immigration official.

The rally was sponsored by the Mass Deportation Coalition, whose partner list includes the Heritage Foundation, the Federation for American Immigration Reform and the Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life.

Sellner addressed the August 1 rally by prerecorded video, as did Indiana Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith and state Attorney General Todd Rokita. Former U.S. Border Patrol Commander-at-Large Greg Bovino spoke in person, as did Anthony Rubin, founder of media outlet Muckraker, another MDC partner.

Sellner told the audience he had to appear remotely because he cannot legally enter the United States. U.S. authorities canceled his visa-waiver travel authorization in 2019 following the revelation of his connection to Brenton Tarrant, the Christchurch mosque shooter. Tarrant, who murdered 51 people at two mosques in New Zealand, had donated approximately 1,500 euros to Sellner in 2018. The two also exchanged several emails, with Sellner suggesting they meet for coffee or beer if he visited Vienna.

Sellner used his MDC address to promote “remigration,” a concept he has popularized, and urge attendees to remain in the streets until “millions have left your nation.”

“From Indiana to Vienna, we have the same problem: unhindered replacement migration,” Sellner said in his prerecorded video. “We also demand the same solution: remigration.”

The concept of “remigration” originated with European neo-Nazis and white supremacists. Remigration advocates seek to force non-white immigrants to leave predominantly white nations, including the United States and countries across Europe. Remigration is directly tied to another white nationalist belief, the great replacement theory, which holds that elites are deliberately replacing white citizens with non-white immigrants.

For Sellner, “remigration” goes far beyond deporting undocumented immigrants. His proposals include revoking citizenship from some dual nationals, restricting Muslims’ religious and political expression and pressuring citizens he considers insufficiently assimilated to leave their own country. Germany’s Federal Administrative Court found the program would reduce those citizens to second-class status and violate their human dignity.

Sellner ended his address by urging attendees to organize around those ideas.

“First the streets, then the parliaments,” he said. “Go on the streets. Don’t leave the streets until millions have left your nation. And, by God, we will have our homelands again.”

Who Is Martin Sellner?

Sellner is a leading figure in Europe’s Identitarian movement, an ethnonationalist network that promotes the racist great replacement conspiracy theory.

As a teenager, Sellner was involved with Austrian neo-Nazi groups, although he says he later renounced Nazism. At 17, he placed swastika stickers on a synagogue near Vienna and was required to serve community service.

Sellner has repeatedly faced restrictions on international travel. British authorities permanently excluded him on security grounds, and U.S. authorities canceled his visa-waiver travel authorization in 2019. Authorities in Germany imposed a three-year entry ban against Sellner in 2024, but the order was later suspended. Less than four weeks after his Indiana address to the MDC, Canada did not grant him travel authorization in time for an August 29 conference on remigration. Sellner addressed that gathering by prerecorded video as well.

The Coalition Behind the Rally

Bovino, once the public face of the Trump administration’s deportation campaign, appeared in person as the rally’s principal speaker. He was demoted in late January following two fatal shootings by federal agents during operations he oversaw in Minneapolis. He retired from the Border Patrol in March.

Save Heritage Indiana, which hosted the rally, is also an MDC partner. The event page lists the coalition as a “Gold Level” sponsor.

As of publication, MDC continued to list the Heritage Foundation, FAIR and the Claremont center as coalition partners. Civil Defense found no public statement from any of them condemning Sellner’s appearance, distancing themselves from his remarks or expressing regret that the coalition sponsored the event.

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Founded in 2026, the Civil Defense Institute is a nonpartisan investigative research organization. We research people, organizations and networks whose conduct undermines civil society and Americans’ freedom to participate in public life. Our work examines extremist and conspiracy-driven campaigns, foreign influence, organized harassment and the institutions that enable them.

Subscribe now

Overview

The America First Policy Institute (AFPI) is a right-of-center 501(c)(3) that combines policy development with litigation, state organizing, personnel training and a related political advocacy affiliate. Created after the 2020 election, it describes itself as a “non-profit, non-partisan research institute.” AFPI alumni hold many senior posts in the second Trump administration, and one of its signature projects was stripping dismissal protections from designated career civil servants. The Trump administration implemented that policy amid a sharp contraction of the federal workforce.

AFPI reported rapid growth from $14.2 million in revenue in 2021 to $51.1 million in 2024. It spent $37.9 million in 2024, ended the year with $22.5 million in net assets and reported 105 employees and 1,500 volunteers. As of September 2026, AFPI’s leadership webpage listed Larry Kudlow as board chair and Greg Sindelar as interim president and CEO.

• Tax classification — 501(c)(3)

• Location — Fort Worth, TX

• Founded — 2020

• Annual revenue — $51,061,493 (FY 2024)

• EIN — 85-4202763

• Notable connections — Greg Sindelar (Interim President and CEO); Larry Kudlow (Board Chair); Brooke Rollins (Co-founder and former President and CEO); Linda McMahon (Co-founder and former Board Chair)

Activities

Preparing for and staffing a second Trump term

Before the 2024 election, AFPI performed many of the functions of a presidential transition team. It ran workshops for prospective appointees, including sessions on overcoming policy resistance from career federal employees, and prepared a staffing-and-policy binder for every major agency. Brooke Rollins, then AFPI’s president, said the group had 298 draft executive orders “ready for day one of the next president.” AFPI maintained that it did not speak for Trump, his campaign or the transition. Nevertheless, Trump’s Save America leadership PAC reported a $1 million contribution to AFPI in June 2021, with no more specific purpose disclosed.

The New York Times and NPR reported that AFPI and the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 were competing hubs of planning for a possible second Trump administration. AFPI served as an institutional home for former Trump officials between administrations, maintaining a policy network and a pool of prospective appointees. The Times reported that AFPI benefited from its roster of former Trump officials and closer relationship with Trump’s campaign. AFPI claimed that as of May 2025, at least 73 alumni worked for the administration. As of September 2026, federal biographies and notices posted to government websites independently confirm that at least 16 officials and appointees have AFPI experience: eight at the Department of Education; two current Cabinet secretaries, including Brooke Rollins, who currently serves as Secretary of Agriculture; two USDA appointees; two White House staffers; and U.S. ambassador to NATO Matthew Whitaker, who previously served as AFPI’s co-chair for the Center of Law and Justice. Pam Bondi, included in the tally above, served as the U.S. Attorney General after she had led AFPI’s litigation arm and Florida chapter.

AFPI serves as more than a conventional think tank publishing research: it also recruits former officials, develops policies and personnel for government, places alumni in office, and absorbs departing officials with current governing experience. In June 2026, former acting ICE director Todd Lyons and former Justice Department chief of staff Chad Mizelle joined AFPI as senior fellows, while former White House media affairs director Sonny Joy Nelson joined its communications operation. Officials from the first Trump administration who now work for AFPI include Carla Sands, the former U.S. ambassador to Denmark, and Robert Lighthizer, the former U.S. trade representative.

Removing civil-service protections

AFPI made restoring Schedule F a central priority in the years between Trump’s first and second terms. James Sherk, director of AFPI’s Center for American Freedom, helped develop the policy while serving on the White House Domestic Policy Council during Trump’s first term. In 2022, while working at AFPI, he published an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal arguing that Trump’s Schedule F executive order, which President Biden rescinded, “could—and should—be reissued by another president.” In January 2025, he returned to the White House as a special assistant to the president for domestic policy as the administration revived the plan.

Schedule F—later renamed Schedule Policy/Career—removes certain adverse-action procedures and Merit Systems Protection Board appeal rights for designated career employees, making them easier to fire. The proposal grew from Trump’s frustration that career officials had resisted parts of his first-term agenda. Trump and his allies described that resistance as obstruction by ideologically hostile bureaucrats. Civil service defenders argued that career officials also have obligations to the Constitution and federal law, including a duty to assess whether political directives are lawful.

Trump first created Schedule F by executive order in October 2020, but President Joe Biden revoked it before broad implementation. Trump recreated the policy as Schedule Policy/Career on Inauguration Day in 2025. The Office of Personnel Management published the final rule in February 2026, and it took effect the following month. Executive Order 14410 transferred designated positions into the category that June. Trump described the policy in more sweeping terms, placing it within a plan to “dismantle the deep state” and promising to “wield that power very aggressively.”

Litigation

AFPI’s legal work advances an expansive view of presidential control over executive branch institutions. In June 2025, after the D.C. Circuit stayed a district court ruling that had reinstated U.S. Institute of Peace leaders, AFPI described statutory claims of independence as “rejecting government accountability.” In a written commentary, AFPI said the reasoning could let Trump remove “radical left administrators and bureaucrats without further impediment—critical in draining the swamp.” The article also noted AFPI’s own litigation over the administration’s takeover of USIP.

Structure and affiliations

Related organizations

AFPI’s 2024 Form 990 identifies two related organizations: America First Works, EIN 87-3510461, a 501(c)(4) advocacy organization; and America First Policy Institute–Pennsylvania, EIN 93-3815082, a 501(c)(3). AFPI and the current America First Works reported sharing employees, facilities and other costs. AFPI paid America First Works $67,500 for facilities, $725,874 for shared employees and $24,943 in reimbursements. It reported $88,806, $179,588 and $19,779 from AFW to AFPI under the corresponding categories.

The current America First Works is distinct from an older organization with the same name and EIN 81-5137380. That older entity granted AFPI $3 million in 2021—about 21 percent of AFPI’s revenue that year. The amount closely matches AFPI’s audited disclosure that one unidentified organization supplied about 21 percent of its 2021 contributions, but public records do not conclusively establish that the two disclosures refer to the same grant.

Affiliated organizations

AFPI shares senior personnel history with the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF). Brooke Rollins led TPPF for 15 years before founding AFPI, which has described TPPF as the “model and aspiration” for the new organization. In March 2025, TPPF chief executive Greg Sindelar became AFPI’s interim president and CEO.

AFPI has also worked with other organizations in the Trump-aligned policy and personnel network. In 2021, it announced a joint policy coalition with the Center for Renewing America and the Conservative Partnership Institute. America First Works later named America First Legal and the National Faith Advisory Board among more than 100 “Pathway Partners.” AFPI’s tax returns show a $100,000 grant to the National Faith Advisory Board in 2023 and a $337,000 grant in 2024 to Personnel Policy Operations, an organization that trains and provides legal support to conservative public servants.

Controversies

Election litigation and election denial

AFPI’s election-related work extends beyond its state network. In 2024, its Center for Litigation represented Julie Adams, a Republican member of the Fulton County Board of Registration and Elections, in a suit seeking declarations that board members could refuse to certify results and were entitled to election information. A Georgia trial court ruled that certification was mandatory and that officials could not refuse or abstain. It also said that officials should receive unprotected election information, but the Georgia Court of Appeals ordered the trial court to reconsider the scope of that access under state law. The appeals court otherwise affirmed that officials must certify corrected results even if they discover error or fraud and must report the facts to the appropriate district attorney.

In May 2024, AFPI separately sued to block a 2021 Biden executive order directing federal agencies to promote voter registration and access to election information. AFPI argued that the initiative would disproportionately increase Democratic turnout and sought emergency relief shortly before the 2024 election. U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk denied a temporary restraining order, concluding that the plaintiffs at that stage had supplied “no direct evidence” for the claimed partisan effect and had alleged only generalized partisan harm. AFPI voluntarily dismissed the case after Trump returned to office and rescinded the order.

AFPI’s director of “election integrity,” Thomas Lane, had previously worked on the Trump campaign’s effort to assemble alternate slates of electors after the 2020 election. In 2022, Lane received a subpoena from the FBI during its investigation of that effort. The Washington Post reported that video appeared to show Lane distributing paperwork at the Arizona Republican Party’s alternate-elector signing in December 2020. AFPI later said Lane had drafted portions of the original SAVE Act while serving as elections counsel to the Republican majority on the House Committee on House Administration. In February 2026, Lane authored an AFPI brief advocating for the expanded SAVE America Act.

AFPI launched its first state chapters in 2024 in Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia and Pennsylvania. The chapters included several leaders and senior team members who had participated in efforts to overturn or discredit the 2020 election results. Former Representative Doug Collins (R-Ga), who was selected to lead AFPI’s Georgia chapter in 2023, joined 125 other Republican House members in urging the U.S. Supreme Court to hear Texas v. Pennsylvania. The suit sought to prevent Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin from certifying presidential electors or allowing those electors to vote in the Electoral College, claiming that state courts and election officials had unlawfully changed voting rules. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed the lawsuit, but the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the case because Texas lacked standing to challenge how other states conducted their elections.

Several of AFPI’s state chapter leaders made false statements about the 2020 election. Pam Bondi, who led AFPI’s Florida chapter, declared that Trump had won Pennsylvania while ballots were still being counted. She later alleged that “fake ballots” were arriving to the polls and that the campaign had evidence of Democratic cheating. Pressed on whether the ballots were fraudulent, Bondi acknowledged that she did not know. AFPI California chapter leader Melissa Melendez accused Democrats of trying to “cheat and steal this election” the day after voting ended. Carla Sands, then the Trump-appointed U.S. ambassador to Denmark and later chair of AFPI’s Pennsylvania chapter, claimed Pennsylvania had failed to count her absentee ballot. The New York Times reported that Pennsylvania’s tracking system showed the ballot had been received and counted in Cumberland County, although it was unclear when the online status had been updated.

On August 18, 2026, Trump shared a U.S. Census Bureau report on Truth Social that alleged a significant number of noncitizens had voted in the 2020 election. WIRED later reported that two AFPI staffers, Matthew Jensen and Jeff McCrea, helped author the unsigned report while working in the federal government on temporary assignments from AFPI. Trump cited data in the report as evidence supporting his false claim that he won the 2020 presidential election. Two former Census Bureau officials interviewed by WIRED questioned the report’s methodology. John Abowd, a former Census Bureau associate director for research and methodology and chief scientist, called the report “statistical nonsense” in a post on LinkedIn. Amy O’Hara, who formerly led the bureau’s administrative-data linkage unit, said the source files were “really hard to join and deduplicate,” particularly across multiple years.

Heidi Overton’s policy record

In August 2026, Trump nominated former AFPI chief policy officer Heidi Overton to lead the Food and Drug Administration. At the time, Overton served as deputy director of the White House Domestic Policy Council—her nomination to the position of FDA commissioner requires Senate confirmation. At AFPI, Overton co-authored a brief that called abortion “corrosive to children, women, and society broadly” and advocated requiring in-person examinations before patients could receive medication for abortions. She later co-authored a column promoting AFPI’s HOPE (Health, Opportunity, Prosperity, Empowerment) Agenda. The agenda proposed mandatory ultrasounds and three-day waiting periods before abortions, parental involvement in reproductive decisions for minors and diverting funding from Planned Parenthood.

In her role as deputy director, Overton publicly defended an executive order that narrowed the list of recommended childhood vaccines. The order also called for splitting MMR vaccines into individual vaccines for measles, mumps and rubella and, when feasible, giving childhood immunizations at separate medical visits.The Associated Press reported that developing the individual products would likely take years and require new studies as well as manufacturing facilities, while offering drugmakers little commercial incentive. Merck and GSK, two of the largest pharmaceutical companies, defended their combination vaccines; neither company discussed plans to separate them. Republican Senator Bill Cassidy, a physician who chairs the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, which is considering Overton’s nomination as of September 2026, called her participation in the vaccine order “almost disqualifying.”

Finances

AFPI began operations in 2021. Its revenue grew from $14.2 million that year to $51.1 million in 2024. Revenue increased about 260 percent while expenses increased about 250 percent. The sharpest expansion came in 2024, when revenue exceeded expenses by $13.2 million. Contributions supplied $50.8 million of AFPI’s $51.1 million in revenue that year; AFPI reported no program-service revenue during the four-year period.

Revenue and expenses

Assets and liabilities

Institutional funders and seed funding

AFPI does not publicly identify most of its donors. In December 2023, an AFPI spokesman said the organization had received gifts from 44,000 donors since 2021. Its audited statements show concentrated support: one organization supplied about 21 percent of 2021 contributions; one individual supplied about 31 percent in 2022; and two individuals together supplied about 31 percent in 2023.

Public IRS-filing data compiled by philanthropy.org identify $47.9 million across 143 grants from 78 funders to AFPI from 2021 through 2025. The largest reported sources include Fidelity Charitable ($8.0 million), the Pentecost Foundation ($6.5 million), DonorsTrust ($4.7 million), the older America First Works ($3.0 million), Goldman Sachs Philanthropy Fund ($2.5 million), the Greater Washington Community Foundation ($2.2 million) and National Philanthropic Trust ($1.8 million). The total includes grants routed through donor-advised-fund sponsors and therefore does not identify every originating donor.

Grant recipients

AFPI’s returns identify eight organizational grant recipients from 2021 through 2024. It gave $1 million in 2021 to Citizens United Foundation, a conservative legal and educational nonprofit. In 2023, it gave $250,000 to the Foundation for Government Accountability, a conservative state policy group, and $100,000 to the National Faith Advisory Board, a coalition of faith leaders founded by former Trump adviser Paula White-Cain. Its 2024 recipients were Personnel Policy Operations, which trains and provides legal support to conservative public servants ($337,000), AFPI–Pennsylvania, its state chapter ($227,857), Constitutional Coalition, a constitutional-education group ($50,000), Immigration Reform Law Institute, a nonprofit immigration-litigation group ($40,000) and Susan B. Anthony List, an anti-abortion advocacy organization ($33,200). AFPI reported no grants in 2022. For every named 2023 and 2024 grant, AFPI’s returns supplied the generic purpose “to further the organization’s mission.”

Program expenses

AFPI’s program-service expenses rose from $9.2 million in 2021 to $33 million in 2024. Salaries and benefits accounted for 39.3 percent of all 2024 expenses. AFPI also reported roughly $8.4 million in contract services in 2024, and 25 independent contractors each paid more than $100,000, indicating that its operating scale extended beyond its payroll.

Compensation

AFPI’s 2024 Form 990 reported the compensation figures above. It also listed 105 employees and $14.9 million in salaries and benefits. Rollins’s total included a $300,000 bonus.

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Founded in 2026, the Civil Defense Institute is a nonpartisan investigative research organization. We research people, organizations and networks whose conduct undermines civil society and Americans’ freedom to participate in public life. Our work examines extremist and conspiracy-driven campaigns, foreign influence, organized harassment and the institutions that enable them.

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Overview

The Heritage Foundation is a Washington, D.C.-based conservative think tank that has operated for more than 50 years. Heritage said its mission is to “formulate and promote conservative public policies based on the principles of free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values, and a strong national defense.”

Notable former presidents of the Heritage Foundation include former South Carolina senator Jim DeMint, who served as the president of the Heritage Foundation from 2013 until 2017. During this time, the Heritage Foundation adopted a more overtly political posture, which was continued by DeMint’s successors.

According to POLITICO, DeMint was removed from Heritage Foundation leadership because “some Heritage board members believe that DeMint…made the think tank too bombastic and political — to the detriment of its research and scholarly aims.” DeMint founded the Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI) after he was ultimately forced out in 2017 by the Board of Trustees on a unanimous vote.

Kevin Roberts, who has been the Heritage Foundation’s president since 2021, has sought to replace Heritage’s more traditional conservative orientation with a “MAGAfied national conservatism.”

The Heritage Foundation reported $133.9 million in revenue for 2024.

• Tax classification — 501(c)(3), research and public policy analysis

• Location — Washington, DC

• Founded — 1973

• Annual revenue — $133,868,147 (FY 2024)

• EIN — 23-7327730

• Notable connections — Barb Van Andel-Gaby, Chairman of the Board; Michael Gleba, Vice Chairman of the Board; Edwin Feulner, Founder and Former President; Heritage Action for America

Activities

Mandate for Leadership

Among Heritage’s longest-running initiatives is Mandate for Leadership, a series of policy blueprints prepared for incoming Republican administrations. Heritage says the Reagan administration adopted 60 percent of the 2,000 recommendations in the first edition, which was published in 1981. In January 2018, Heritage said the first Trump administration had embraced 64 percent of its policy recommendations during Trump’s first year in office.

In 2023, Heritage published Project 2025, the ninth edition of Mandate for Leadership. While other Mandates received less news coverage, Project 2025’s policy proposals were part of the narrative in the 2024 presidential election. According to the Washington Post, Project 2025’s lead Paul Dans urged Roberts to avoid “provocative media interviews” and “hyperbolic language” after the Trump campaign disavowed Project 2025. Subsequently, the Post said, Democrats “turned Project 2025 into a byword for Trump’s second-term agenda,” arguing voters should oppose it. Trump’s campaign thus “repeatedly disavowed Project 2025 and warned participants to stop talking to reporters about plans for a second Trump administration.”

After Trump was inaugurated, he appointed Project 2025 authors and contributors to high-ranking posts in his second administration. Project 2025 authors who assumed leadership roles included Brendan Carr, who became chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC); Peter Navarro, who was named a senior counselor after being released from prison on contempt of Congress charges; and Russ Vought, who became director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), among others. Vought had previously served as OMB director under Trump’s first term. In a fundraising email sent in June 2026, Heritage said the administration had implemented 53 percent of the plan’s proposals.

Heritage Action / The Sentinel Action Fund

Heritage Action for America is an affiliated 501(c)(4) social-welfare nonprofit that can lobby and engage in some electoral activity. The Sentinel Action Fund is a super PAC affiliated with Heritage Action.

Oversight Project

In March 2025, the Heritage Foundation announced that the Oversight Project, an initiative that requested federal government records, would operate as a separate 501(c)(4) organization. In March 2025, Heritage said the Oversight Project had filed over 100,000 government records requests and nearly 100 lawsuits since its establishment in 2022.

Innovation Prize/Freedom and Opportunity Academic Prize/Salvatori Prize

The Heritage Foundation created the Innovation Prize program in 2022 to fund nonprofits, paying approximately $1 million annually. The Heritage Foundation created the Freedom and Opportunity Academic Prize in 2023 to “support those in higher education who advance research aligned with Heritage’s values and mission” with awards between $5,000 and $25,000. Heritage also annually awards a Salvatori Prize for American Citizenship to individuals or organizations who “advance America’s founding principles or embody the virtues of the American Founding.”

Structure and Affiliations

Related Organizations

The Heritage Foundation’s 990 filings indicate that it is related to three tax-exempt organizations: Heritage Action for America, a 501(c)(4); The Heritage Institute, a 501(c)(3); and The Daily Signal Institute, a 501(c)(3).

Heritage’s filings also indicate that it is related to organizations taxable as a corporation or trust: The Daily Signal Media Group Inc. and American Dream Broadcasting Inc.

In addition, Heritage’s filings indicate that it has been related to the following disregarded entities: Intern Housing LLC, Massachusetts Avenue Properties LLC, 3rd Street Properties LLC and Education Freedom LLC.

“Related organizations” is a legal classification established by the Internal Revenue Service that is indicative of “organizations that stand in a parent/subsidiary relationship, brother/sister relationship, sponsoring organization of or contributing employer to a [Voluntary Employees’ Beneficiary Association], or supporting/supported organization relationship.”

Heritage Action for America

In 2010, Heritage created Heritage Action for America, a 501(c)(4) advocacy organization. Heritage Action advocates for specific legislation in line with the policies published and promoted by the Heritage Foundation. It also organizes a grassroots network with nearly 20,000 trained “Sentinels.” The Heritage Foundation provided Heritage Action with $1.6 million in grant funding between 2020 and 2024. Heritage Action subsequently reimbursed Heritage $4,575,105 in 2024.

The Daily Signal

The Daily Signal began as the Heritage Foundation’s media publication, launched on June 3, 2014, as “an alternative to the establishment press.” A decade later, the Daily Signal announced that it was “officially an independent media organization with our own leadership team and board of directors,” and that it would “complete the process of separating from The Heritage Foundation.” Heritage Foundation’s 990 filing for 2024 reported that the Daily Signal Institute received a $3.5 million grant from the Heritage Foundation that year. The Daily Signal Institute is noted by Daily Signal media company as its “affiliate.”

Controversies

Roberts’s defense of Carlson interviewing white nationalist Fuentes

In a video posted on October 30, 2025, Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts defended conservative news commentator Tucker Carlson against criticism that Carlson received from the American public for his interview with white nationalist Nick Fuentes. Roberts said, “The Heritage Foundation didn’t become the intellectual backbone of the conservative movement by canceling our own people or policing the consciences of Christians.” Roberts decried what he called the “venomous coalition” attacking the organization’s “friend” Carlson. Roberts said that he “disagree[s] with and even abhor[s] things that Nick Fuentes says,” but Roberts added, “canceling him is not the answer either.”

Following the release of Roberts’s video defending Carlson, the Washington Post reported of an “open revolt” against Roberts. As part of this revolt, there were at least five members of Heritage’s antisemitism task force who resigned in protest. Those members included distinguished fellow Chris DeMuth and senior visiting fellow Stephen Moore, who had been with Heritage for 12 years.

Roberts’s chief of staff, Ryan Neuhaus, whom Roberts credited with writing the script for the video, was moved into a lower-ranking role and then tendered his resignation. Roberts said Neuhaus was a “good man” who “made a mistake” in drafting the Carlson defense script.

Roberts later apologized to the Heritage Foundation staff at an all-hands meeting on November 5, 2025, for his video defending Carlson.

On December 21, 2025, law professor Josh Blackman published an open letter to Roberts in which he resigned as senior editor of the Heritage Guide to the Constitution. “Your initial remarks were indefensible. Your apology was underwhelming,” Blackman wrote to Roberts. “And the lack of any meaningful followup over the past three months has been telling. For reasons only you know, you aligned the Heritage Foundation with the rising tide of antisemitism on the right.”

Blackman also wrote that “the Heritage brand, once iconic, instantly became toxic,” that contributors had withdrawn from a planned signing of nearly 1,500 donated copies of the guide at the Federalist Society National Convention and that judges had told him they would no longer recommend that their clerks attend Heritage’s clerkship academy. Heritage’s Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, he wrote, “cannot survive under Heritage’s current leadership.” The next day, Advancing American Freedom (AAF) — Mike Pence’s organization — announced that the Meese Center’s director John Malcolm would be leaving Heritage to found the new Edwin Meese III Institute for the Rule of Law at AAF. Two other “senior Heritage Foundation leaders,” Richard Stern and Kevin Dayaratna, along with ten members of their team would also leave to join AAF.

Allegations of demeaning treatment towards women

On November 6, 2025, the Washington Post wrote that women staffers had reported “demeaning treatment” during Roberts’s tenure. The Post’s account drew from the allegations made by 22 current and former employees and senior Republican figures, recordings of Heritage meetings, drafts of policy papers and internal chat logs.

An anonymous letter sent to Heritage Foundation board members in February 2025, drafted by three employees of the Heritage Foundation and obtained by the Post, alleged that Roberts “favored Catholic employees and humiliated female employees by saying single women without children had ‘no skin in the game,’” as characterized by the Post. A Heritage Foundation spokesperson claimed that the information in the letter was “neither new nor noteworthy” and that “no real reporter would take it seriously,” dismissing the letter as a “malign[ed] and coordinated effort to silence Heritage and defame Dr. Roberts.”

In a separate instance, Roger Severino, the Heritage Foundation’s vice president of domestic policy, allegedly suggested to a former employee “that she and her husband should have six children, according to people familiar with the meeting.” Additionally, a former intern told the human resources department that Severino had “allegedly suggested during a mentorship session that she consider skipping law school in favor of motherhood.” Heritage declined to comment on the allegations. Severino told the Post: “When people ask me what I’m all about, I brag about my brilliant wife and the blessings of our six wonderful children and gladly share whatever life wisdom I have to those who seek my advice.”

In another instance, Derrick Morgan, an executive vice president who was Roberts’s chief of staff after Neuhaus’s ouster, called for summer interns to “make yourselves marriageable and go out and seek marriage” during a meeting with all of the Heritage staff. Shortly thereafter, the Heritage Foundation executive team received feedback from an attorney who advises on labor law who warned that “those ​​kinds of remarks created significant legal liability for Heritage.” Morgan defended his statements by referring to a quote from Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk encouraging marriage and children. Heritage displayed the quote at its headquarters. The Heritage Foundation declined to comment on the alleged actions of Morgan and Severino.

A draft Heritage policy paper reviewed by the Washington Post reflected similar views. The Post reported that the draft called for “robust incentives” for heterosexual married couples to have more children, even including proposals that would award “straight married couples an additional ‘half vote’ in federal elections for each of their children.” A Heritage Foundation spokesman denied that such a policy had been “announced” and claimed that Heritage “debated” “ideas and proposals…every day.”

The Heritage Foundation has also hired staff members with a history of deploying misogynistic rhetoric. Hires that received criticism include political scientist Scott Yenor, chair of Heritage’s American Citizenship Initiative. Four years before Heritage hired Yenor, he told a 2021 conference that women focused on their careers were “more medicated, meddlesome and quarrelsome than women need to be.” In recorded remarks reported by the Guardian, Yenor said the “optimal conditions for family formation” require laws under which “divorce would be difficult to get or proscribed.”

The Heritage Foundation also employs EJ Antoni as the chief economist at the Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies. Antoni was present at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, and reportedly ran an anonymous account from about 2017 to 2020 that “sexually denigrated” Kamala Harris. The Trump administration nominated Antoni to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) in 2025, but the White House withdrew his nomination after it drew scrutiny. Roberts continued to support Antoni despite the controversies, saying in a statement to POLITICO that Heritage was “proud to have him.” Antoni maintained his position with the Heritage Foundation after his nomination was withdrawn.

False Claims of Noncitizen Voting

In 2024, the Oversight Project, at the time still part of the Heritage Foundation, amplified misleading claims that there had been large-scale noncitizen voting in Georgia. The Oversight Project’s claims rested on a video recorded by two men affiliated with the organization who wore a hidden camera while knocking on doors at an apartment complex outside Atlanta. According to The New York Times, the men “claimed to represent a company helping Latinos navigate the election system” and recorded seven residents who claimed they were registered to vote despite not being citizens. Heritage then posted the footage to X and claimed that it was “‘staggering’ evidence” that more than 47,000 noncitizens were registered to vote in Georgia and that “the integrity of the 2024 election is in great jeopardy.”

At the time of The New York Times story’s publication, Georgia state investigators had found no evidence that any of the seven people filmed by the Oversight Project had registered to vote. Three of the seven interviewees later told The New York Times that they had “misspoken.” Weighing in on behalf of Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, a spokesman called the video “a stunt.”

Mike Howell, Heritage employee and president of the Oversight Project, doubled down on the footage, saying, “I am not surprised that when an individual admits to a crime on camera that they would later retract it when that video is made public.” Election experts told The New York Times that the methodology used in the research was “deeply flawed,” noting that the project appeared to have spoken to about 50 people before concluding that one in seven noncitizen residents of Georgia might be illegally registered. Georgia election officials said the state’s 2024 election was secure and that there was no evidence of widespread or election-altering fraud.

Roberts’s rhetoric: A “second American Revolution” and a “controlled burn” of America’s institutions

During a July 2, 2024, episode of Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast, Roberts, commenting on the 2024 election, said, “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” After an assassination attempt against Donald Trump later that month, Roberts again invoked similar rhetoric. Roberts said that Americans “are in the process of carrying out the Second American Revolution to take power back from the elites and despotic bureaucrats,” that “these patriots are committed to peaceful revolution at the ballot box” and that “it’s the Left that has a long history of violence, so it’s up to them to allow a peaceful transfer of power.”

Paul Dans, who was the head of Project 2025 until he left the Heritage Foundation in July 2024, condemned the language in an interview published by the Washington Post on October 16, 2024. Dans criticized Roberts for using “violent rhetoric” and called on JD Vance, then the Republican vice-presidential nominee, to withdraw the foreword he had written for Roberts’s book. “There’s no place for this sort of violent rhetoric and bellicose taunting, especially in light of the fact that President Trump has now been subject to not one but two assassination attempts,” Dans said. Dans added that there was “really no place for this level of rhetoric, let alone from the head of an august think tank,” and that Roberts had “essentially besmirched the professional reputations of everyone involved in Project 2025.” According to the Post, a lawyer for the Heritage Foundation rejected Dans’s characterization of Roberts’s remarks, claiming Dans was motivated by a dispute preceding his departure from working on Project 2025.

An earlier promotional version of Roberts’s book “Dawn’s Early Light” had the subtitle “Burning Down Washington” and featured an image of a match on the cover. According to drafts of the book reviewed by the Post, Roberts advocated for “a political revolution” to “overthrow today’s incarnation of the ruling class,” argued that the nation “must be destroyed and replaced,” and supported eliminating institutions including “the Ivy League, the FBI, Fairfax County (Va.) Public Schools and the Boy Scouts.” After the attempt on Trump’s life in Butler, Pennsylvania, the tone of the book’s promotional materials changed: The reference to overthrowing the ruling class was removed, the revolution was specified as “peaceful,” the language in the subtitle became “Taking Back Washington,” and the image of the match was removed from the cover. In August 2024, Roberts said he would delay release of the book by two months, which would be after the November election.

In the end, Roberts’s book did include JD Vance’s foreword. In the book, Roberts repeated his language that we were living “at the dawn of the Second American Revolution” and called for a “long, controlled burn” of many of America’s institutions. (For more, see Civil Defense’s profile of Kevin Roberts.)

Claims of election fraud

The Heritage Foundation has promoted claims of large-scale noncitizen voting that its own evidence does not support. Heritage first published its Election Fraud Map in 2017, presenting what it calls “a sampling of proven instances of election fraud.” As of December 12, 2025, the map recorded election fraud across states over the span of more than four decades.

The Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan democracy-focused think tank, reviewed the database shortly after its initial publication and found it “includes an assortment of cases, many unrelated or tangentially related, going back decades, with only a handful pertaining to non-citizens voting or impersonation at the polls.” Brennan concluded that Heritage’s data “undermines its claim of widespread voter fraud.” In an October 2020 statement published by Heritage, Hans von Spakovsky — then the manager of the Heritage Election Law Reform Initiative — said that the media had made false claims about the data and “mischaracterized its purpose.”

Later analysis from the Brennan Center indicated that the Heritage Foundation had “turned to desperate measures” to locate voter fraud and that it had been at the “forefront of pushing the lie that noncitizens are registering and voting in significant numbers.”

Investigation into January 6 and subsequent pardons

In June 2022, when discussing the House January 6 Committee, Kevin Roberts said, “What happened on Jan. 6 was wrong, but unlike the violent riots that did so much damage to our country during the summer of 2020, the events of Jan. 6 were subject to one of the largest investigations in our history.” Roberts called the committee hearings “made-for-TV” political theater and urged that Black Lives Matter protests be investigated.

On January 20, 2025, the day President Trump pardoned more than 1,500 January 6 defendants, a Heritage Foundation statement praised the move as “a clear rejection of the politicized double standards that have plagued our nation under left-wing leadership.” Roberts described the investigation as a “glaring double standard that turned peaceful dissent into a partisan witch hunt.” However, the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol was not peaceful. The chairman of the Capitol Police officers’ union said in January 2021 that approximately 140 police officers had been injured by January 6 rioters.

Finances

In 2024, the Heritage Foundation reported nearly $133.9 million in revenue — compared to roughly $101 million in revenue in 2023. Heritage Foundation’s 990 filing for 2024 noted more than $142.2 million of expenses and a more than $8.3 million deficit. Heritage’s revenue increased by more than $30 million in 2024, the same year when its Project 2025 was being widely circulated and discussed on the campaign trail.

Notable Donors

Joseph Coors, the president of the Coors Brewing Company, was an early donor to Heritage in the 1970s, donating $250,000 in seed funding and providing Heritage with $300,000 annual sums in the years that followed, according to reporting from the Guardian. Richard Mellon Scaife, the billionaire heir to the Mellon gas, aluminum and banking fortune, who was also former vice chairman of the Heritage Foundation board, provided “tens of millions” in funding for the organization starting in 1974 until his death in 2014. According to the Washington Post, in the first two years after Heritage’s founding alone, Scaife gave more than $500,000.

Heritage reported more than $632.6 million in contributions from 2018 through 2024. Among institutional funders identified in public filings, donor-advised funds provided the largest amounts; their filings name the recipient but generally not the original donor who recommended each grant.

The Sarah Scaife Foundation was one of the largest donors to the Heritage Foundation throughout Heritage’s history, giving the Foundation nearly $2 million in 2024. In 2023, Heritage announced a $25 million commitment from the Diana Davis Spencer Foundation, released in annual increments of $5 million from 2023 to 2027, which it called one of the largest gifts in its 50-year history. The Diana Davis Spencer Foundation is led by Abby Spencer Moffat, who resigned from the Heritage board on December 16, 2025, after Roberts defended Carlson’s interview with Fuentes.

Primary Grant Recipients

Heritage gave out approximately $9 million in grants in 2024. Its 2024 990 filing reports grants of $3.5 million to the Daily Signal Institute, $1 million to the Trump Vance Inaugural Committee and $1 million to the host committee of the 2024 Republican National Convention. Additional grantees included the Claremont Institute (whose senior fellow John Eastman helped devise Trump’s plan to block certification of the 2020 election), Heritage Action for America and Forge Leadership Network (“Developing future Christian conservative leaders”).

Heritage allocated $1.7 million in grants in 2023. Notable grantees, in addition to Heritage Action, include the American College of Pediatricians (which welcomed HHS Secretary Kennedy’s replacement of the CDC vaccine advisory panel and called for a “fresh look” at vaccine safety), Forge Leadership Network (“Developing future Christian conservative leaders”) and the National Association of Scholars (which advocates against multiculturalism, diversity policies and courses focused on race and gender issues in higher education).

The Heritage Foundation allocated nearly $1.7 million in grants for 2022. Notable grantees, in addition to Heritage Action, include Moms for Liberty (a conservative group focused on electing school board officials), the Texas Public Policy Foundation (which Heritage president Roberts had previously led),Forge Leadership Network (“Developing future Christian conservative leaders”) and the Alliance Defending Freedom.

Revenue and expenses

Assets and liabilities

Gifts of publicly traded securities

Heritage reported receiving 95 noncash contributions of publicly traded securities valued at $2,335,513 in 2024.

501(c)(4)

See our analysis of Heritage Action for America here.

Notable Vendors / Contractors

Heritage reported paying DPR Construction $8,916,586 in 2024. Its filing identifies DPR as one of Heritage’s five highest-paid independent contractors.

Board of Trustees

In its 2024 990 filing, Heritage reported 19 individuals on its Board of Trustees, including president Kevin Roberts, board chairman Barb Van Andel-Gaby and prominent Republican donor Rebekah Mercer.

Four new trustees were elected to the Heritage Foundation board in May 2026 following continued fallout from an internal dispute regarding Roberts’s defense of Tucker Carlson interviewing white nationalist Nick Fuentes. The new trustees included: the conservative political philosopher Yoram Hazony; Mollie Hemingway, editor-in-chief of conservative online magazine The Federalist; J.C. Huizenga, who owns manufacturing and packaging companies, and founded a charter school management organization; and Lawrence Blanford, former chief executive of Green Mountain Coffee Roasters. The Hill described the Heritage Foundation board elections as a step in an organizational “recalibration” known internally as “Heritage 2.0.”

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Founded in 2026, the Civil Defense Institute is a nonpartisan investigative research organization. We research people, organizations and networks whose conduct undermines civil society and Americans’ freedom to participate in public life. Our work examines extremist and conspiracy-driven campaigns, foreign influence, organized harassment and the institutions that enable them.

Subscribe now

Overview

Heritage Action for America is a 501(c)(4) advocacy organization affiliated with the Heritage Foundation. Founded in 2010, Heritage Action advocates for the Heritage Foundation’s policies before Congress and across state legislatures. Heritage Action also manages a legislative scorecard that assigns scores to lawmakers based on how they have voted for Heritage Action’s various legislative priorities.

Heritage Action is “an independent partner organization” of the Heritage Foundation with Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts serving as the president of both organizations.

Notable alumni of Heritage Action include Russ Vought, who was a Heritage Action vice president from 2010 to 2017 and served as the director of the Office of Management and Budget in both Trump administrations. ProPublica called Vought ‘Trump’s shadow president,’ reporting that he was a key figure in Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s policy blueprint, and led its transition component. Deputy national security advisor Mike Needham, who had previously served as chief of staff under Heritage Foundation’s co-founder and longtime president Ed Feulner, was CEO of Heritage Action before becoming chief of staff to Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) in 2018, later following him to the State Department.

Heritage Action reported more than $15.5 million in revenue for 2024.

• Tax classification — 501(c)(4) Nonprofit

• Location — Washington, DC

• Founded — 2010

• Annual revenue — $15,508,960 (FY 2024)

• EIN — 27-2244700

• Notable connections — Michael Needham, Deputy National Security Advisor and Former Heritage Action chief executive; Russell Vought, Director of OMB and former Heritage Action vice president; The Heritage Foundation

Activities

Heritage Action lists its activities on its 990 form as related to “grassroots advocacy & Capitol Hill outreach, and educational activities.” Its stated mission is to “fight for conservative policies in Washington, D.C. and in state capitals across the country.”

Heritage Action identifies two main programs on its website: a congressional scorecard and a volunteer network.

For its congressional scorecard, Heritage Action “identifies upcoming legislative fights,” while “the Heritage Foundation outlines the conservative policy positions.” Scores are published for every member of Congress based on their votes on Heritage Action’s identified policy priorities.

Heritage Action’s volunteer network is called Sentinel Nation. Its network mobilizes members through activist trainings on topics including letter writing and social media; a weekly strategy call where Heritage Action staff provide legislative updates; informational toolkits on various legislative mobilizations, including resources like sample tweets, talking points and social media shareables; a blog; and a Facebook group.

Heritage Action used its grassroots network to advocate for Republican lawmakers to vote against legislation that would fund the Affordable Care Act. In 2013, under the leadership of Mike Needham, Heritage Action endorsed and advocated for a government shutdown, which effectively shuttered the federal government for 16 days. Republican lawmakers criticized Heritage Action’s stance, saying the group had offered members “no viable alternative” or “plan B” if the Obama administration would not back down. About 22.3 million Americans were enrolled in Affordable Care Act Marketplace insurance plans as of 2025.

Heritage Action has consistently filed lobbying disclosure reports before Congress.

Structure and affiliations

Related Organizations

On Schedule R of its most recent 990 filing, under related tax-exempt organizations, Heritage Action lists The Heritage Foundation, The Heritage Institute and The Daily Signal Institute.

Under “related organizations taxable as a corporation or trust,” it lists The Daily Signal Media Group Inc. and American Dream Broadcasting Inc.

“Related organizations” is a legal classification established by the Internal Revenue Service that indicates “organizations that stand in a parent/subsidiary relationship, brother/sister relationship, sponsoring organization of or contributing employer to a [Voluntary Employees’ Beneficiary Association], or supporting/supported organization relationship.”

Heritage Action is the Heritage Foundation’s “campaign arm,” according to E&E News. Its LinkedIn page notes that there are 39 profiles associated with Heritage Action for America and 11–50 employees. In its 2024 tax filing, Heritage Action reported that it had 41 employees and six “voting members of the governing body.” The organization’s website lists Steve Chartan as its executive vice president but does not include mention of other staffers.

Affiliations

In April 2022, the Sentinel Action Fund launched as a super PAC partnering with Heritage Action. A press release issued by the Sentinel Action Fund said it would “advocate [for] the election of conservative candidates nationwide” through door-to-door canvassing and advertising.

Heritage Action’s 2022 990 filing noted that it provided $4.25 million to the Sentinel Action Fund, as well as $17,967 in non-cash assistance. FEC reporting notes that Heritage Action gave the Sentinel Action Fund $4,267,966.85 in 2022. There were no line items reported for the Sentinel Action Fund on Heritage Action’s 2024 990. FEC reporting notes that Heritage Action provided $576,094.76 to the Sentinel Action Fund in 2023 for the 2024 election.

Controversies

Elections

In 2021, Heritage Action launched what it called its first state advocacy campaign, which sought to change state election laws. Reporting on Iowa’s election law, the Sioux City Journal wrote: “Among those paying attention was Heritage Action, the advocacy arm of the national conservative Heritage Foundation think tank, whose leader bragged in a leaked video about its role in crafting voting restrictions across the country, including in Iowa.” The Heritage Foundation’s election “best practices” included requiring voter identification, limiting absentee voting, maintaining accurate voter rolls, prohibiting private funding of election administration and verifying voters’ citizenship. Heritage Action said it spent at least $1 million in Georgia to support Senate Bill 202, a wide-ranging 2021 election law that added identification requirements for absentee voting, limited ballot drop boxes and gave the State Election Board greater authority over local election administration.At least three lawsuits challenged the law, alleging that it disproportionately harmed Black voters, according to NPR and Georgia Public Broadcasting. Senate Bill 202 also led voting-rights groups to consider boycotts of major Georgia-based companies, including Delta Air Lines and Coca-Cola. In August 2023, a federal judge temporarily barred county officials from rejecting absentee ballots because of an omitted or incorrect birth date. In October, the court declined to block five other challenged provisions while the litigation continued. The Justice Department voluntarily dismissed its separate Senate Bill 202 claims in March 2025.

January 6

Heritage Action strongly criticized the House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. In a joint statement issued by Heritage Action executive director Jessica Anderson and Kevin Roberts (Heritage Action and Heritage Foundation president), Anderson called the U.S. House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the United States Capitol a “sham proceeding” while Roberts called it a “partisan fishing expedition.”

Finances

Heritage Action reported more than $15.5 million in revenue in 2024, of which nearly $12 million came from contributions and grants, $3.5 million came from program service revenue, $16,649 came from investments and $14,107 came from other revenue. The organization reported more than $14.8 million in expenses in 2024.

Between 2019 and 2024, annual expenses ranged from roughly $9.3 million to nearly $22 million. Heritage Action’s expenses peaked at $21.9 million in 2021 and remained elevated at $21.0 million in 2022. From 2019 to 2024, net assets have fallen from roughly $8.15 million in 2019 to $4.07 million in 2024. The lowest asset holdings were in 2023, when Heritage Action had nearly $3.4 million in net holdings. From 2019 to 2022, contributions and grants accounted for more than 95 percent of Heritage Action’s revenue.

In 2023 and 2024, Heritage Action had 72 percent and 77 percent of its revenue derived from contributions, respectively. In 2023 and 2024, most of the revenue not derived from contributions came from $3.5 million in annual program service revenue. The organization also reported smaller amounts of investment, asset-sale and other revenue.

Notable Donors

As a 501(c)(4) organization, Heritage Action is not required to publicly disclose its donors. The Concord Fund reported paying Heritage Action $5,187,883 between July 2020 and June 2024 for “General Operating.” American Action Network reported donating $2,235,875 to Heritage Action between July 2020 and June 2023 for “issue support.” The Heritage Foundation reported paying $1,600,000 to Heritage Action between 2020 and 2024 for “education” or “public policy education.” America First Works reported providing $994,000 to Heritage Action in 2020 for “issue support,” and Liberty University gave $300,000 in its fiscal year ending June 2019 for “issue based education.”

Three private family foundations also reported providing grants to Heritage Action. The Brian & Joelle Kelly Family Foundation reported $327,030 in funds across 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2022. The Liptak Family Foundation reported $150,000 in 2020, and the Eleanor & Raymond Bradley Foundation reported $25,000 in 2024. Additional donations were given by Consumers Defense, The 85 Fund and Finish the Fight, and from trade associations including the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America and the National Association of Broadcasters.

Former Heritage Action President Mike Needham noted in October 2013 that the Koch brothers had given Heritage Action $500,000.

Net assets (assets minus liabilities) fell from nearly $8.5 million at the end of 2020 to less than $3.4 million at the end of 2023, then rose to more than $4 million in 2024.

Notable Political Expenditures

Heritage Action reported $1,859,178 in political expenditures for 2024. Payments to non-employees for lobbying, which is not inclusive of lobbying by its own staff, were $55,569 in 2024 and were $5.1 million in 2021. For 2022, Heritage Action reported that it paid about $4.27 million for “section 527 exempt function activities” with internal funds, all of which went to the Sentinel Action Fund — the super PAC that Heritage Action launched in 2022.

Notable Vendors

Heritage Action works with multiple direct mail consultants. In 2024, Heritage Action reported spending $450,039 on three direct mail fundraising firms.

Compensation

Highest Paid Staff: 2024 990 Filing

Kevin Roberts, Heritage Action’s president, received $192,393 in total compensation from Heritage Action, in addition to $769,579 from the other related entities associated with Heritage Action. Daniel Mauler, general counsel, received $127,050 from Heritage Action and $296,450 from Heritage Action’s other related entities. Ryan Walker, the executive vice president, received $419,176 from Heritage Action. John Backiel, the treasurer, received $0 from Heritage Action, but received $399,573 from other related entities. Janae Stracke, vice president of outreach and advocacy, received $150,486 from Heritage Action and $183,929 from other related entities. Catherine Gunsalus, listed as the state advocacy director, received $187,885 from Heritage Action. Sarah Ursprung, director of House Relations, made $182,455. Stephanie Kreuz, Director of Sentinel Engagement, made $168,242 from Heritage Action.

Number of Staff and Total Line Item

There were 41 members of staff in 2024. Heritage Action reported “salaries, other compensation, employee benefits” as roughly $4.5 million.

Revenue and expenses

Assets and liabilities

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Founded in 2026, the Civil Defense Institute is a nonpartisan investigative research organization. We research people, organizations and networks whose conduct undermines civil society and Americans’ freedom to participate in public life. Our work examines extremist and conspiracy-driven campaigns, foreign influence, organized harassment and the institutions that enable them.

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Overview

The Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI) is a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that launches, funds and supports conservative organizations. From 2019 to 2024, CPI distributed more than $19.2 million to over 20 organizations, largely groups focused on what it calls “election integrity,” conservative staffing pipelines and legal support to conservative causes.

From its first tax year in 2017 through 2024, CPI reported $153.7 million in total revenue. Its largest increase came in 2021, when former Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows joined CPI as a senior partner and revenue rose from $6.2 million to $45.7 million — an increase of roughly 637 percent.

CPI describes much of its election work as defending “election integrity.” But Meadows, CPI senior legal fellow Cleta Mitchell and several CPI grantees have participated in efforts to contest or cast doubt on the 2020 election results. CPI’s largest reported grant recipient is the FAIR Elections Fund, which received nearly $6.84 million in 2023 and 2024. FAIR later reported a $300,000 grant to the American Principles Project Foundation, which ran ads in 2024 erroneously claiming that election certification was optional in several states.

CPI’s activities have also drawn scrutiny over compliance with restrictions on political campaign activity by 501(c)(3) organizations. Since 2022, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) and two watchdog groups have raised concerns or filed complaints alleging impermissible partisan activity. In 2022, a spokesperson for CPI said that the organization “fully complies with the IRS rules on tax-exempt organization activity.”

• Tax classification — 501(c)(3)

• Location — Washington, DC

• Founded — 2017

• Annual revenue — $34,490,626 (FY 2024)

• EIN — 82-1470217

• Notable connections — Jim DeMint, Chairman / Founder; Mark Meadows, Sr. Partner / Fmr. Trump Chief of Staff; Ed Corrigan, President / CEO

Structure and Affiliations

Jim DeMint, a former U.S. Senator from South Carolina, founded CPI in 2017 after the Heritage Foundation’s board asked for and received his resignation as president and CEO. Heritage said an independent review had identified “significant and worsening management issues that led to a breakdown of internal communications and cooperation.” DeMint remains CPI’s chairman. Ed Corrigan, who has led CPI since its founding, serves as president and CEO.

CPI sits at the center of two overlapping networks: organizations it formally controls and a broader collection of conservative groups it has helped launch, house or fund.

Related Organizations

On its 2024 tax return, CPI listed Conservative Partnership Initiative Inc. as a controlled tax-exempt organization. It also reported 13 disregarded LLCs, all described as real-estate holding companies, and Conservative Partnership Campus, a taxable related corporation providing event and real-estate services.

On Schedule R of its 2024 990 filing, under disregarded entities, CPI lists: 753 LLC, Brunswick Partners LLC, Clear Plains Holdings LLC, Federal Investors LLC, Houston Group LLC, Pennsylvania Avenue Holdings LLC, 116 Holdings LLC, Lakenhealth Associates LLC, Newpoint LLC, Huron DC Partners LLC, Amherst Associates LLC, Clear Plains LLC, 203R Associates LLC. All list “real estate holding” under primary activity.

On Schedule R of its 2024 Form 990, under related organizations taxable as corporations or trusts, CPI listed Conservative Partnership Campus, an “event services and real estate management” business that reported nearly $6 million in income.

Affiliated Organizations

CPI has funded, incubated or otherwise worked with America First Legal, the Center for Renewing America, the Election Integrity Network, the Foundation for Accountability Integrity & Research in Elections Fund (FAIR Elections Fund), the State Leadership Foundation, Personnel Policy Operations Inc., American Moment Inc. and Best in Ed Inc. The network’s work includes challenges to the administration and legitimacy of the 2020 election, advocacy for tighter immigration restrictions, legal support, government staffing, education and state-level organizing.

Some of the organizations also share leaders. Cleta Mitchell is a senior legal fellow at CPI, the founder of the Election Integrity Network, and president and a director of the FAIR Elections Fund. In a 2022 NPR interview, Grid reporter Maggie Severns described CPI’s network as a “complicated arrangement” and referred to America First Legal and the Center for Renewing America as “sister groups.”

Activities

In its 2024 tax filing, CPI says its mission is connecting “citizen leaders, the conservative movement, Members of Congress, congressional staff and scholars.” It describes its programs as educating the public and government and nonprofit leaders and staff, as well as advocating on Capitol Hill.

Capitol Hill Campus

From January 2022 through early 2023, CPI-linked companies bought nine properties near the U.S. Capitol for a combined $41 million, part of a planned campus CPI calls “Patriots’ Row.” In 2023, CPI appeared before a local government planning and zoning committee to close a public alley behind one of its properties, allowing CPI to combine and expand the site. One CPI-owned building later housed Christ Church D.C., a congregation affiliated with the Idaho church led by pastor Douglas Wilson.

The House Freedom Caucus holds its weekly meetings at CPI headquarters, which has been described as a “full-service nerve center” for right-wing political actors.

CPI also operates an on-site broadcast studio used by members of Congress and other prominent conservative figures. CPI reported 2,750 bookings during the studio’s first two years, 2021 and 2022.

CPI reported hosting 2,092 events and receiving 423 staffing requests in 2022, including requests from congressional offices.

Hill Training Program

CPI launched the Conservative Partnership Academy in 2023 to train future Capitol Hill staffers. The academy offers certifications in appropriations, statecraft, domestic policy and legislative process.

Legislative Advocacy

CPI states on LinkedIn that it “does not take positions on legislation or engage in lobbying or partisan campaign activities.” A search of federal lobbying records found no filings by CPI under the Lobbying Disclosure Act. In July 2022, CPI President Ed Corrigan certified to the House Ethics Committee that CPI “does not retain or employ a registered federal lobbyist or foreign agent.”

At the same time, CPI joins coalitions supporting specific legislation and publishes Compass, a weekly bulletin tracking bills aligned with its priorities.

Controversies

January 6, 2021

Mark Meadows and Cleta Mitchell both participated in efforts to contest the results of the 2020 presidential election. Meadows, who served as White House chief of staff at the time, was later indicted in Georgia under the state’s RICO statute for allegedly joining a conspiracy to “unlawfully change the outcome of the election in favor of Trump.” The charges against Meadows (and his co-defendants) were ultimately dropped. Mitchell was among the attorneys who advised the Trump campaign on its post-election legal challenges.

Text messages obtained by the United States House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the United States Capitol and published by CNN indicate that CPI hosted a November 9, 2020, meeting where Republican senators discussed Trump’s post-election legal strategy. After the meeting, Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) texted Meadows that Sidney Powell — an attorney who later filed lawsuits challenging the results in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin — had been the guest speaker. Lee wrote that his purpose was to “socialize with Republican senators the fact that POTUS needs to pursue his legal remedies.”

Mitchell joined CPI after resigning from law firm Foley & Lardner in January 2021. Her departure followed reports that she had participated in a call during which Trump pressed Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have.” Foley & Lardner said it was “concerned” by Mitchell’s participation in the call.

Arizona Election Audit

In 2021, CPI helped route funds from then-former President Trump’s PAC to the audit alleging impropriety in Arizona’s 2020 election results. Trump’s Save America PAC contributed $1 million to CPI on July 26, 2021. Two days later, a new organization called the American Voting Rights Foundation (AVRF) was registered with the Delaware Department of State. CPI reported granting AVRF just over $1 million that year.

Records obtained by American Oversight and analyzed by the Guardian and Documented indicate that on the day that AVRF was registered, Mitchell emailed AVRF treasurer Tom Datwyler, connecting him with Doug Logan, CEO of Cyber Ninjas — the Florida-based company leading a review of election results in Maricopa County — and audit spokesman Randy Pullen. Mitchell wrote that Cyber Ninjas’s leadership would send AVRF “invoices to wire $ to some AZ entities.”

The next day, Mitchell sent the AVRF treasurer another email, copying CPI President Ed Corrigan and Cyber Ninjas CEO Doug Logan. The email itemized $1 million in three payments to two entities supporting the audit and to individuals “working at the audit site.” The Cyber Ninjas review ultimately confirmed Joe Biden’s victory in Maricopa County.

In 2023, the Guardian and the watchdog group Documented described AVRF as a “shell company” that was “effectively controlled” by entities affiliated with CPI.

Election-Denial Organizations

In 2021, Mitchell launched the Election Integrity Network (EIN) under the CPI banner. CPI granted the network $525,000 for “mission and program support” in 2022 and another $20,000 in 2023. EIN describes itself as “a coalition of conservative leaders, concerned citizens and officials dedicated to election integrity” and says it is “building a nationwide network of citizen volunteers across all 50 states.” The network trains election observers whom The New York Times described as an “organized cavalry of activists.” As of August 2026, EIN continued to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the 2020 election results.

Mitchell also served as president and a director of the FAIR Elections Fund, according to the fund’s Form 990 filing for fiscal year 2025. CPI granted the FAIR Elections Fund $795,000 in 2023 and more than $6 million in 2024.

Heather Honey, now the Department of Homeland Security’s deputy assistant secretary for election integrity, served as the FAIR Elections Fund’s board vice president according to its Form 990 for fiscal year 2025. The FAIR Elections Fund provided grants and contracts to two organizations led by Honey: the Election Research Institute and Verity Vote. The FAIR Elections Fund granted $200,000 to the Election Research Institute in fiscal year 2025; at the time, Honey was serving as executive director of the Election Research Institute. The Fund also paid Verity Vote nearly $200,000 for consulting and research in fiscal years 2024 and 2025. In 2026, The New York Times described Honey as a “leader” in Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network.

Megan Frederick, another former EIN affiliate, works in the second Trump administration in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. She was listed as an attorney on the department’s 2025 complaint in United States of America v. District of Columbia Board of Elections. A document produced by Only Citizens Vote Coalition, an EIN “coalition partner,” identified an email address bearing Frederick’s name as a coalition contact.

Allegations of Impermissible Political Activity

Federal law allows 501(c)(3) organizations to advocate on public issues and conduct limited lobbying. It bars them, however, from supporting or opposing political candidates and from operating for private interests. Those distinctions frame the questions raised about CPI’s activities.

In August 2022, NPR reported that nonprofit-law experts saw warning signs in CPI’s close work with Republican candidates and organizations. The report cited payments from Republican campaigns described in federal filings as campaign or fundraising expenses, events featuring Republican candidates and social-media posts about candidates. NPR also reported that CPI removed every tweet posted before March 2022 after the outlet asked about one such post. CPI declined to answer detailed questions but said it “fully complies with the IRS rules on tax-exempt organization activity” and “does not engage in any political campaign activity.”

Later that year, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), then chair of the Senate Finance Subcommittee on Taxation and IRS Oversight, wrote a letter to CPI asking the organization to explain reports that it selectively provided facilities and services to Republican campaigns, featured Republican candidates at its events and online and allowed its Election Integrity Network to benefit the Republican Party and Republican National Committee.

The scrutiny widened in 2024. In February, Campaign for Accountability (CfA), a watchdog organization, asked the IRS to investigate whether CPI indirectly engaged in impermissible campaign activity through Compass Legal Group, which CfA described as CPI’s for-profit subsidiary. The complaint also raised questions about executive compensation, private benefit and undisclosed lobbying. In July, Accountable.US separately asked the D.C. attorney general to consider proceedings to dissolve CPI and Personnel Policy Operations (PPO). It alleged that CPI helped route money through PPO to a legal-defense fund serving Mark Meadows and other Trump allies. Public filings show that CPI gave PPO about $3.1 million from 2022 through 2024.

Compensation

In 2024, senior partner Mark Meadows was the highest-paid person named in CPI’s tax filing. CPI reported paying him $871,853 in compensation and $37,831 in other compensation, for a total of $909,684. That included a $300,000 bonus — six times the $50,000 bonuses reported for Chairman Jim DeMint and President Ed Corrigan. Earlier that year, Campaign for Accountability cited CPI’s executive pay in an IRS complaint, alleging that the organization paid “very high levels of compensation to several of its officers and executives.”

Finances

From its first tax year in 2017 through 2024, CPI reported $153.7 million in total revenue, almost entirely consisting of contributions and grants. CPI’s largest funding increase occurred in 2021, when revenue jumped from $6.2 million to $45.7 million.

That growth transformed CPI’s balance sheet. Its total assets increased from less than $1 million in 2017 to $72.3 million in 2024. By then, CPI reported $54.6 million in net land, buildings and equipment, reflecting its development of a substantial Capitol Hill campus.

As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, CPI is not required to publicly disclose its donors, but tax filings submitted by organizations that funded CPI provide a partial view of its financial support.

The largest publicly identifiable source of funding was The Signatry, a Christian donor-advised fund sponsor. Its two sponsoring entities—the Servant Foundation and the Signatry Charitable Trust — reported nearly $16.1 million in grants to CPI in the fiscal years ending in 2021 through 2025. DonorsTrust, another donor-advised fund sponsor, reported more than $3.8 million through 18 gifts from 2020 through 2024. Because these organizations sponsor donor-advised funds, their filings generally do not identify the individuals who recommended the grants.

Other prominent funders include the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, a major Milwaukee-based conservative grantmaker, which gave CPI $450,000 from 2020 through 2023. Its tax returns listed “C Mitchell” as secretary and a director throughout that period. The Guardian reported that Cleta Mitchell, CPI’s senior legal fellow, sat on Bradley’s board; the foundation’s current board listing no longer includes her. The Ed Uihlein Family Foundation, led by Uline co-founder and conservative megadonor Richard Uihlein, gave CPI $1.05 million through two grants in 2021. The family foundation of the late casino and gaming-machine entrepreneur Stanley Fulton reported another $500,000 grant.

Revenue and expenses

Assets and liabilities

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Founded in 2026, the Civil Defense Institute is a nonpartisan investigative research organization. We research people, organizations and networks whose conduct undermines civil society and Americans’ freedom to participate in public life. Our work examines extremist and conspiracy-driven campaigns, foreign influence, organized harassment and the institutions that enable them.

Subscribe now

Overview

The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) is a conservative 501(c)(3) non-profit whose mission is to restrict both unauthorized and legal immigration. FAIR was founded in 1978 by John Tanton, a Michigan ophthalmologist and population-control activist. Tanton’s writings reflected eugenicist and white nationalist beliefs: he wrote a paper titled “The Case for Passive Eugenics,” expressed alarm about declining white political power and argued that preserving European-American culture required a “clear” European-American majority.

FAIR portrays itself as a partner to lawmakers shaping immigration policy and works through litigation, legislation, investigation and education. FAIR claims to work closely with the second Trump administration. Robert Law, a former FAIR government relations director who later led immigration policy at the America First Policy Institute, was confirmed by the Senate in September 2025 as undersecretary of strategy, policy, and plans at the Department of Homeland Security.

FAIR’s founding was supported by Cordelia Scaife May, an heiress to the Mellon fortune and financer of early efforts to use population-control advocacy to prevent immigration. After May’s death in 2005, her Colcom Foundation remained a major funder of FAIR and other immigration restriction groups.

In 2025, FAIR attorneys urged the Supreme Court to allow immigration agents to rely on apparent race or ethnicity, Spanish or accented English, location and apparent occupation when making stops to inquire about immigration status. In a separate case before the Supreme Court, FAIR argued the Fourteenth Amendment does not confer citizenship on U.S.-born children unless their parents were federally authorized to reside in the country.

• Tax classification — 501 (c)(3)

• Location — Washington, DC

• Founded — 1978

• Annual revenue — $8,578,324 (FY 2025)

• EIN — 52-1136126

• Notable connections — Dale Wilcox (executive director and general counsel); Dan Stein (former president); John Tanton (founder)

Activities

FAIR engages in lobbying, research, communications, state advocacy and litigation activities.

In 2025, FAIR says it filed more than 80 briefs, including 10 at the Supreme Court; secured 18 favorable outcomes and 13 state legislative victories; and held more than 320 meetings with Congress and executive branch agencies. It also claims “a key role in drafting many of the cornerstone immigration policies” of President Donald Trump’s second term. The White House has cited FAIR’s research in fact sheets about immigration, and Trump cited a FAIR study on immigrant incarceration in a 2019 speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference.

FAIR has lobbied the federal government for more than 25 years. Recent disclosures show it lobbying on the Secure the Border Act, Laken Riley Act, SAVE America Act, Equal Representation Act, Mandatory E-Verify Act, One Nation, One Visa Policy Act and the DHS reconciliation package.

Census litigation

Since its founding, FAIR has called for reforming the constitutionally mandated Decennial Census of Population and Housing. The group sued the Carter administration in 1979, seeking to include a citizenship question on the 1980 census, which could generate estimates of unauthorized residents in each state. Courts rejected the effort. Dan Stein, FAIR’s president from 2003-2025, later said that the census and apportionment effort had “always been on the agenda.” Stein said excluding unauthorized immigrants from apportionment was “certainly part of our legislative plan for the new administration” in November 2016.

In his first term, President Trump unsuccessfully tried both adding a citizenship question to the U.S. Census and excluding undocumented residents from congressional apportionment. In his second term, he called for a new census excluding undocumented immigrants. FAIR alluded to Trump’s call as consistent with its longstanding effort to exclude undocumented immigrants from the population counts used to apportion congressional seats. In September 2026, the Census Bureau formally proposed excluding undocumented immigrants and other noncitizens without permanent status — including refugees, asylum seekers and people on temporary visas, all of whom the census has historically counted as residents — from the apportionment count. The Census Bureau said unauthorized immigrants lacked “sufficient tie[s]” and “allegiance” to qualify as “true inhabitants” and treated other excluded noncitizens as “less durable” than permanent residents. The Census Bureau, in pursuit of “develop[ing] and integrat[ing] new technologies,” said that it could add a question on legal status to the “short-form decennial” census form. The proposal, which could reshape the allocation of House seats and Electoral College votes, was not final at the time of publication and is expected to face legal challenges.

Backing so-called “Kavanaugh stops”

During a 2025 restructuring, the litigation program of the Immigration Reform Law Institute joined with FAIR, adding a legal operation to FAIR’s existing structure which litigates and files briefs in state and federal courts. One of its most consequential interventions concerned immigration sweeps around Los Angeles.

In Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo, a lower court barred agents from using four broad traits, alone or in combination, as the sole basis for a stop: apparent race or ethnicity, speaking Spanish or accented English, being at places where day laborers gather and appearing to work in fields such as construction, landscaping or agriculture. The government appealed that order to the Ninth Circuit and asked the Supreme Court to stay it pending appeal. FAIR filed an amicus brief supporting the government’s application. FAIR argued the four factors, considered together, could create reasonable suspicion that a person was unlawfully present — the legal threshold for a brief investigative stop.

Roving workplace and community sweep was a departure from decades of immigration-enforcement practices. Earlier strategies generally used intelligence to target identified people rather than sending agents into communities or worksites to question broad groups.

In an unsigned order, the Supreme Court temporarily stayed the lower court’s restrictions while the appeal continued. The order offered no reasoning, did not decide the merits and did not cite FAIR. Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote separately in a concurrence that ethnicity alone was not enough, but that ethnicity plus language, location and work could justify a stop. Kavanaugh wrote that the encounter with law enforcement would be brief: a citizen or lawfully present person “will be free to go after the brief encounter.”

FAIR published a response claiming victory, saying Justice Kavanaugh’s reasoning tracked its brief. Dale Wilcox, the executive director and general counsel of FAIR, said the district court had “intruded itself outrageously into federal immigration law enforcement.”

Despite Justice Kavanaugh’s description of a “brief encounter,” ProPublica found more than 50 Americans who were held after immigration agents questioned their citizenship. The newsroom described one citizen whom agents kept handcuffed for more than an hour after dismissing his REAL ID as fake. Its broader review found that more than 20 citizens reported being held for more than a day without being able to contact a lawyer or loved one; four American citizen children were held for weeks with their undocumented mother without access to the family’s attorney.

As of September 2026, the underlying lawsuit remained pending in district court. Plaintiffs returned to district court in July with agency records and sworn testimony that they say show that agents have continued making race-based stops.

Working to end birthright citizenship

The Fourteenth Amendment grants U.S. citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” On January 20, 2025, President Trump issued Executive Order 14160, directing federal agencies to deny citizenship documents to certain U.S.-born children whose mothers were unlawfully or temporarily present and whose fathers were neither citizens nor lawful permanent residents. FAIR backed the order before the Supreme Court, arguing in a January 2026 amicus brief to the Supreme Court that birthright citizenship applies only when a child’s parents had federal permission to reside in the United States.

In June 2026, in Trump v. Barbara, the Court rejected FAIR’s interpretation and held the executive order unconstitutional. FAIR responded by claiming that the Court had misread the Constitution. Executive director Dale Wilcox called birthright citizenship for children of undocumented immigrants a “ballooning negative consequence,” urged immigration enforcement “to the maximum possible extent” and said FAIR would redouble its efforts to end illegal migration and thereby “cancel this and all its other negative consequences.”

Leadership changes and government ties

FAIR changed leadership in 2025 while former officials continued moving between the organization, the Trump administration and allied policy groups.

FAIR’s board selected Dale Wilcox as executive director and general counsel in June 2025, and he took office July 16 after 11 years leading the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI).

Robert Law served as FAIR’s director of government relations before joining U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services during Trump’s first term. He later led immigration policy at the America First Policy Institute and returned to DHS as senior counselor to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. In September 2025, the Senate confirmed him as DHS under secretary for strategy, policy and plans.

Julie Kirchner — who had moved from FAIR into DHS during President Trump’s first term and then returned to FAIR — left for the America First Policy Institute, where she now directs its homeland security and immigration policy team.

Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach previously worked with FAIR’s affiliated litigation organization, IRLI. Politico described Kobach as “Trump’s immigration whisperer” during the 2016 presidential campaign. Kobach later told congressional investigators that he had discussed a census citizenship question with Trump campaign officials. In 2026, he urged Congress to pass a federal law addressing what he called “birth tourism.”

FAIR also hired retired Border Patrol agent Art Del Cueto as a border security adviser. FAIR said he would expand its relationships with Border Patrol officials, create a Border Advisory Council and train law enforcement officers to work with federal immigration authorities.

Related organizations and affiliations

Related organizations

FAIR reports two related tax-exempt organizations: the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI), a separate 501(c)(3) founded in 1986, and the FAIR Congressional Task Force, a 501(c)(4) incorporated in 1982 to develop and promote immigration policy. IRLI has long operated as FAIR’s legal affiliate. In 2025, IRLI transferred its litigation program to FAIR for it to administer, along with approximately $9.7 million in related assets and liabilities. The restructuring did not merge or dissolve IRLI, which retains its own tax exemption and employer identification number. FAIR’s audited statements consolidate all three entities because they are under common control and share an economic interest.

Affiliations

FAIR was only one part of John Tanton’s broader institution-building in the immigration-restriction movement. He founded, co-founded or helped incubate organizations that divided work among research, lobbying, grassroots mobilization, official-English campaigns and publishing.

U.S. Inc., which Tanton started in 1982 to raise money for his projects, helped finance Peter Brimelow’s work on “Alien Nation,” a book that later influenced the white supremacist movement. Brimelow went on to found VDARE, an anti-immigration website that reportedly promoted white identity politics and gave white nationalists a platform. Donald A. Collins Sr., a former FAIR director who later served on its board of advisers, published articles on VDARE from 2004 to 2016.

U.S. English, founded by Tanton and former senator S.I. Hayakawa in 1983, pursued official-English laws in Congress and state legislatures. In 1988, a memorandum that Tanton wrote for WITAN, a private discussion group he organized around immigration, population and language issues, became public and sparked outrage for portraying Latino population growth as a threat to white political power. U.S. English president Linda Chavez resigned over the memo, and Tanton stepped down as chairman the same day.

The Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) operated briefly under FAIR’s nonprofit umbrella before becoming a separate nonprofit in 1986. It became an influential producer of research and congressional testimony. Writing in the Washington Post, historian Carly Goodman described the spin-off as designed to give FAIR’s research an independent, impartial appearance.

NumbersUSA was founded by Roy Beck, a Tanton protégé and former Washington editor of the Social Contract. It became a powerful grassroots pressure operation: The New York Times credited it with helping defeat the 2007 bipartisan immigration bill after its members sent senators more than one million faxes.

Social Contract Press, a U.S. Inc. publishing project, published Tanton’s journal, the Social Contract, and reissued “The Camp of the Saints,” the anti-immigrant novel discussed below; writers’ workshops associated with the journal featured VDARE founder Peter Brimelow and Ann Coulter. Donald A. Collins Sr., Sharon Barnes and Sarah G. Epstein, all former members of FAIR’s board, also wrote for the Social Contract.

Controversies

John Tanton, Founder: “The Case for Passive Eugenics”

FAIR has drawn criticism since its founding and has tried to distance itself from white nationalist writings by founder John Tanton. In an October 1986 memo for WITAN, a discussion group he convened, Tanton asked: “As whites see their power and control over their lives declining, will they simply go quietly into the night? Or will there be an explosion?” The memo asked whether the “present majority” would surrender political power to “a group that is simply more fertile,” whether Black Americans could maintain their position “in the face of the Latin onslaught,” and joked that “those with their pants up” would be caught by “those with their pants down.” It also asked whether Latin American migrants would import bribery and civic disengagement and questioned Hispanics’ “educability” by contrasting their dropout rates with Asian academic performance.

In an April 1975 paper titled “The Case for Passive Eugenics,” written the year he became president of the population-control group Zero Population Growth, Tanton argued that controlling the timing, spacing and number of births could produce more “desirable” children and eliminate unwanted characteristics. Anticipating charges of racism, he wrote that passive eugenics was “far from being racist or genocidal” and would “improve the potential of minority groups,” including by discouraging larger families and births outside what he called “the years of reproductive efficiency.” In a 1996 letter to eugenicist Robert Graham, he questioned leaving reproductive choices to individuals and asked, “what about the less intelligent, who logically should have less?” He continued: “Who is going to break the bad news … and how will it be implemented?”

According to The New York Times, FAIR “secretly accepted more than $1 million from the Pioneer Fund,” which the Times described as “embrac[ing] eugenics.”

Major FAIR Funder: Immigrants “Breed Like Hamsters”

Cordelia Scaife May, an heiress to the Mellon banking and industrial fortune, provided FAIR’s initial $50,000 seed grant after Tanton promised to make immigration restriction “a legitimate position for thinking people.” After a later $400,000 gift, Tanton called her the organization’s “single biggest supporter.” May’s private writings described the United States as “being invaded on all fronts,” said Cuban refugees “breed like hamsters” and endorsed research into “human differences” that The New York Times described as echoing eugenics.

May’s Laurel Foundation gave $5,000 to the Institute for Western Values to distribute an English translation of Jean Raspail’s “The Camp of the Saints,” a novel depicting Europe overwhelmed by poor migrants. Social Contract Press, which Tanton founded, later published an English edition. The New York Times described the book as an essential text in white nationalist circles and noted Steve Bannon’s repeated references to it. FAIR deputy director Matt O’Brien invoked Raspail’s dystopia in the organization’s 2025 Impact Report and contrasted it with “the ordered liberty envisioned by the Founding Fathers.”

Allegations of discrimination

In 2018, former FAIR press secretary Joe Gomez filed a complaint with the Office of Human Rights for the District of Columbia that alleged race- and disability-based discrimination and harassment. Gomez, who is Mexican-American and Black, alleged that a colleague repeatedly used a derogatory term for Latinos, that coworkers mocked him for not speaking Spanish and that a FAIR employee proposed portraying an undocumented Mexican immigrant by smearing herself with mud. Gomez alleged he was denied a promised bonus after a favorable review and that staff ridiculed the severe anxiety and uncontrollable shaking he said the job caused. FAIR denied the allegations and the parties settled in 2019. As part of the settlement, Gomez signed a retraction, but his lawyer disputed FAIR’s claim that the agency’s post-settlement dismissal vindicated the organization.

Finances

FAIR’s Form 990 for fiscal year 2025 reported $8.58 million in revenue and $8.20 million in expenses, producing a surplus of about $383,000. As of December 31, 2025, FAIR reported $39.39 million in assets and $2.71 million in liabilities, leaving $36.68 million in net assets.

Revenues and expenses

Assets and liabilities

Institutional funding

Colcom Foundation remains FAIR’s most visible institutional funder. The New York Times calculated that from 2005 through 2017, Colcom gave approximately $180 million to immigration-restriction and population-control groups, including $56.7 million to FAIR, $58.2 million to NumbersUSA, $17.6 million to the Center for Immigration Studies, $17.2 million to U.S. Inc. and $12.4 million to IRLI. Reviewing its filings, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette calculated that Colcom granted $40.015 million to FAIR and $8.985 million to IRLI from 2013 through 2018.Colcom’s return for the tax year ending June 2023 later listed separate general-operating grants of $2.6 million to FAIR and $2.3 million to IRLI.

Compensation

FAIR’s 2025 return reflects a leadership transition. The reported totals combine compensation reported by FAIR, related organizations and other sources.

Wilcox’s total compensation includes $201,743 from a related organization and $56,206 in other compensation. Because each listed role changed during 2025, these are transition-year amounts, not annualized current salaries.

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Founded in 2026, the Civil Defense Institute is a nonpartisan investigative research organization. We research people, organizations and networks whose conduct undermines civil society and Americans’ freedom to participate in public life. Our work examines extremist and conspiracy-driven campaigns, foreign influence, organized harassment and the institutions that enable them.

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Overview

CODEPINK, formally CODEPINK Women for Peace, is a California-based 501(c)(3) antiwar organization founded in 2002 by Jodie Evans, Medea Benjamin and other activists to oppose the planned U.S. invasion of Iraq. What began as an Iraq War protest movement has developed into a national activist network campaigning against U.S. military policy and American influence abroad. Evans serves as president of its board, while Benjamin is treasurer.

The organization stages demonstrations, sit-ins and disruptions of congressional hearings and offices. It maintains dozens of local campaigns, distributes protest and organizing materials and leads activist delegations to countries including China, Cuba, Iran, Venezuela and Bolivia. Its major campaigns include “China Is Not Our Enemy,” “Justice for Palestine,” “No War on Iran,” “U.S. Out of Africa” and “Divest From the War Machine.”

CODEPINK has made opposition to U.S. confrontation with China a major part of its work. Evans is married to Shanghai-based Marxist technology entrepreneur Neville Roy Singham. In CODEPINK programming and publications, Evans and other contributors have praised Chinese governance, promoted Beijing’s claim to Taiwan and cast doubt on reports of abuses in Xinjiang. The organization has also opposed U.S. sanctions on Cuba, organized delegations to the island and argued that U.S. and NATO policies helped provoke Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

• Tax classification — 501(c)(3)

• Location — Marina Del Rey, CA

• Founded — 2002

• Annual revenue — $1,789,935 (FY 2025)

• EIN — 26-2823386

• Notable connections — Jodie Evans, co-founder and board president; Medea Benjamin, co-founder and treasurer; Claudia De La Cruz, director; CODEPINK Action Fund

Activities

In its 2024 Form 990 filing, CODEPINK described itself as a “women-initiated grassroots peace & social justice movement working to end the wars in Iraq & Afghanistan, stop new wars & redirect our resources into healthcare, education, green jobs & other life-affirming activities.” CODEPINK’s website reiterates the organization’s identity but broadens its mission beyond Iraq and Afghanistan: “CODEPINK is a feminist grassroots organization working to end U.S. warfare and imperialism…”

As of August 2026, CODEPINK’s website identifies nine focus issues: “Justice For Palestine,” “No War on Iran,” “A Good Neighbor Policy” (in Latin America), “U.S. Out of Africa,” “China Is Not Our Enemy,” “War Is Not Green,” “A Local Peace Economy,” “Accountability: Exposing War Crimes” and “Divest From the War Machine.” In addition, CODEPINK’s website lists 11 active “Campaigns,” which include the organization’s nine focus issues along with “Cut the Pentagon” and “Bases Off Cyprus.”

In the fiscal year ended March 31, 2025, CODEPINK reported $2,609,208 in total program-service expenses. Of that amount, $1,938,017 supported its principal peace and antiwar activity. The filing also reported $175,344 for its “National peace and anti-war program for the Middle East region” and $123,031 for its “China Is Not Our Enemy” campaign. Elsewhere in the return, CODEPINK disclosed a $1.5 million grant to Environmentalism Through Inspiration & Non Violent Action, or ETINA, described as funding a “foreign policy think tank.” ETINA was listed at CODEPINK’s address, and the grant equaled about 52 percent of CODEPINK’s total expenses.

CODEPINK lists 36 “local campaigns”: one in London, England, one in Windsor, Ontario, Canada and the rest in the United States. CODEPINK also produces “Local Organizing Resources,” such as posters and legal guides, to assist community organizers with local protests.

CODEPINK and its local chapters organize a variety of events, including educational gatherings, film screenings, workshops and protests. The group organizes “delegations” of activists to countries including Iran, Cuba, Bolivia, Venezuela and China.

The group also organizes protests in Washington, D.C., including disruptions and sit-ins at congressional hearings and offices. CODEPINK’s demonstrations often receive broad coverage on social media and in mainstream outlets. Those demonstrations included a widely reported protest against President Donald Trump inside a Washington restaurant in September 2025, another restaurant protest against Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent in December 2025 and an antiwar protest outside the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in April 2026.

Related Organizations and Affiliations

Related Organizations

CODEPINK’s 2024 Form 990 lists one related tax-exempt organization: CODEPINK Action Fund, a California-based 501(c)(4) organization that describes its primary activity as “Educate public awareness about the cost of war.”

Affiliations

Jodie Evans, president of CODEPINK’s board of directors, has held positions on the boards of several other nonprofit organizations. The People’s Forum’s 2024 Form 990 listed Evans as secretary and interim treasurer. The People’s Forum is a New York-based 501(c)(3). The People’s Support Foundation, a Chicago-based private foundation, listed Evans as president of its board in its 2024 Form 990. Evans also served as vice president of the board of directors of the Schumacher Center for a New Economics, a Massachusetts-based 501(c)(3).

Claudia De la Cruz, who served on the board of directors of CODEPINK as of at least March 2025, also served concurrently on the board of The People’s Forum. De la Cruz also served on the board of directors of BreakThrough News between 2020 and 2023, listed as the secretary in each of these years’ filings. In 2024, De la Cruz ran for president as the candidate of the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL).

Medea Benjamin, the co-founder and treasurer of CODEPINK, sometimes listed as “Susan Benjamin,” was listed as president of the board of Arc of Justice, a Miami-based private foundation, on the organization’s most recent Form 990, which was filed in 2023. The foundation filed a Form 990-T in 2024. Arc of Justice, which was formerly known as the Benjamin Fund and based in San Francisco, California, listed “Medea Susan Benjamin” as president on its first nonprofit filing in 2003 and as recently as 2018. Between 2016 and 2022, according to Form 990-PF filings, Arc of Justice transferred $1,708,200 to CODEPINK in charitable donations. Each Arc of Justice filing acknowledges that CODEPINK and Arc of Justice share a common board member.

Controversies

Criticism of CODEPINK has focused in part on Jodie Evans’s shifting public statements about China. In 2015, Evans called for China to “stop brutal repression of their women’s human rights defenders.” Six years later, during a CODEPINK livestream, she used markedly different language about China’s treatment of Uyghurs.

In a 2021 livestream with Ben Norton of The Grayzone, titled “China Is Not Our Enemy,” Evans alleged that “the Saudi King” admitted he was paid by the United States to “take Wahhabism to the Uyghurs in China so that the U.S. would have a flank on China.” She described Uyghurs as “the most fierce fighters in Yemen and Syria” who “come home and bomb shopping centers” and said China was “trying to deal with the situation.” “I’m sure it’s not pretty,” she added, “but is it a reason to go to war on a billion and a half people?”

Amnesty International reported that, since 2017, the Chinese government has carried out mass internment, torture and persecution of Muslims in Xinjiang. In January 2021, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo determined that China had committed genocide against Uyghurs and other ethnic and religious minority groups in Xinjiang. The following month, the Canadian House of Commons voted 266-0 to recognize China’s treatment of Uyghurs as genocide.

A 2023 blog entry, posted on CODEPINK’s website, titled “Traveling to Prove China Is Not Our Enemy” — written by Dee Knight, the author of “Befriending China: People-to-People Peacemaking” — emphasizes a central Chinese Communist Party (CCP) talking point that “Taiwan is part of China.” Evans wrote of Knight’s book: “He reveals in so many ways that China Is Not Our Enemy….” Knight’s report also features a map displaying contested territorial claims in the South China Sea as part of China.

In a 2023 livestream, Evans effusively praised Chinese governance and society. She said “the idea that it’s an authoritarian system that controls everything” is a “crazy notion that we’ve been sold,” citing her personal experience as evidence.

CODEPINK and affiliated commentators, most notably co-founder and treasurer Medea Benjamin, have insisted they “have not tried to justify or excuse” Russia’s invasion of Ukraine but continually emphasize what they say is “the role the United States has played in fomenting the conflict.” CODEPINK condemned Russia’s invasion and called for Russian troops to leave Ukraine, while also blaming NATO expansion and U.S. policy for helping create the crisis. Benjamin has described Ukraine’s 2014 change of government as a U.S.-backed coup — a characterization also advanced by Vladimir Putin and disputed by independent reporting. CODEPINK organized multiple petitions opposing U.S. military support for Ukraine after the invasion.

Since late 2023, members of the U.S. House and Senate have repeatedly pressed CODEPINK and federal agencies for answers about the organization’s funding, advocacy concerning China and relationship with Neville Roy Singham. Singham is an American businessman who resides in Shanghai and is married to CODEPINK co-founder and board president Jodie Evans. The lawmakers’ requests have raised possible violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), restrictions governing tax-exempt organizations and, in one instance, the federal prohibition against providing material support to designated foreign terrorist organizations.

On November 16, 2023, members of the House Committee on Natural Resources wrote a letter to Jodie Evans raising concerns about potential ties between CODEPINK and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

In 2025, Sens. Jim Banks (R-Ind.), Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) separately asked the Justice Department and, in Grassley’s case, the FBI to examine whether CODEPINK’s activities and reported Singham-linked funding created obligations under FARA. Banks accused CODEPINK of “actively engaging in propaganda efforts to support the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) foreign policy aims.” He alleged that the organization “receives significant funding and likely receives direction from agents of the CCP” and concluded that it had “clearly become an agent of CCP influence in the United States.” Grassley asked whether CODEPINK and The People’s Forum should be required to register under FARA. Cotton additionally asked the Justice Department to investigate whether CODEPINK had provided material support to designated foreign terrorist organizations.

In June 2026, Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) asked the IRS to examine CODEPINK’s tax-exempt status. Scott alleged that the organization had engaged in excessive lobbying, and he raised questions about its reported financial relationships and possible coordination with foreign interests. His letter also referred to an existing Treasury Department inquiry concerning a CODEPINK trip to Cuba.

Separately, federal prosecutors in Manhattan have reportedly opened a grand jury investigation into possible foreign-agent, tax and financial violations involving Singham and his nonprofit funding network. Reporting indicated that investigators are examining whether Singham, organizations he funded or their leaders committed financial crimes. A Fox News report identified CODEPINK as one recipient of Singham-linked funding and said that Evans is also a target of the investigation. CBS News later reported that Singham is under criminal investigation for possible FARA and tax violations but did not identify Evans or CODEPINK as targets. Neither report identified CODEPINK itself as a subpoena recipient or target.

CODEPINK has responded to lawmakers’ allegations by filing ethics complaints with the Office of Congressional Conduct and the Senate Ethics Committee. On June 27, 2025, CODEPINK issued a press release announcing that the organization had filed ethics complaints against Grassley and Rep. Brandon Gill (R-Texas). On the question of whether the organization receives funding from outside the United States, the press release stated, “CODEPINK has repeatedly emphasized that it is funded exclusively by individuals and foundations and operates without influence or support from any foreign entity.” A statement from a CODEPINK spokesperson added, “We have repeatedly and publicly clarified that China or any foreign government does not fund CODEPINK, nor do we have any contact with the Chinese Communist Party.”

On March 9, 2026, CODEPINK issued a press release announcing it had filed an ethics complaint against Rep. Brian Mast (R-Fla.). Echoing its previous June 27, 2025, press release, the statement says, “CODEPINK has repeatedly and publicly clarified that China or any other foreign government does not fund CODEPINK, nor do we have any contact with the Chinese Communist Party or take direction from them.”

On June 17, 2026, Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) sent a letter to the chief executive officer of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) calling on the IRS to investigate whether CODEPINK is in violation of Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. The letter cites CODEPINK’s connection to “shady characters,” describes the organization’s alleged relationship with the CCP as “concerning” and claims that CODEPINK has been engaged in an excessive degree of lobbying activity.

Finances

In its 2024 Form 990 filing, CODEPINK reported $784,272 in net assets, with $1,789,935 in revenue and $2,898,277 in expenses. Almost all of CODEPINK’s revenue came from contributions.

CODEPINK received a total of $1,330,000 from Goldman Sachs Philanthropy Fund between 2017 and 2023. Reports, including one from The New York Times, have alleged that this philanthropic fund is connected to Jodie Evans’s husband, Neville Roy Singham. The connection between Singham and these gifts from the Goldman Sachs Philanthropy Fund is unverified. According to the philanthropy fund’s Form 990 filings, CODEPINK received $350,000 from the fund in 2017, $150,000 in 2018, $210,000 in 2019, $150,000 in 2020, $170,000 in 2021, $150,000 in 2022 and $150,000 in 2023. A Goldman Sachs spokesperson told Fox News Digital that Singham held an account with the fund that was active until August 2023 and closed in 2024. Because donor-advised funds do not disclose individual donors, it is not possible to publicly verify whether the payments made to CODEPINK were directed by Singham.

Between 2016 and 2022, CODEPINK received a total of $1,708,200 from Arc of Justice, according to Arc of Justice’s Form 990-PF filings. CODEPINK received $400,250 from Arc of Justice in 2016, $200,000 in 2017, $250,400 in 2018, $250,700 in 2019, $251,500 in 2020 and $355,350 in 2022.

The Justice and Education Fund (JEF), a New York-based 501(c)(3) organization, reported charitable contributions to CODEPINK totaling $490,886 between 2020 and 2022, according to JEF’s Form 990 filings. CODEPINK received $130,295 from JEF in 2020, $250,856 in 2021 and $109,735 in 2022. Each of JEF’s filings between 2020 and 2022 also reports grants or noncash assistance to The People’s Forum (TPF) and BreakThrough News. Jodie Evans, the president and co-founder of CODEPINK, has also served on the board of TPF with JEF Secretary Manolo De Los Santos, TPF’s executive director. Claudia De la Cruz also served on the boards of BreakThrough BT Media and CODEPINK, according to both organizations’ 2022 filings.

Compensation

In its 2024 Form 990 filing, which covered the period from April 2024 through March 2025, CODEPINK reported $0 in compensation for current “officers, directors, trustees, key employees, and highest compensated employees,” as defined in Part VII of Form 990. CODEPINK also checked the form’s box stating that neither the organization nor any related organization compensated any current officer, director or trustee. CODEPINK reported 16 employees and $823,255 in aggregate salaries, other compensation, employee benefits, and payroll taxes for the fiscal year covered by the return. The organization did not report compensation paid to any specific employees.

Board of Directors

CODEPINK’s 2024 Form 990 filing lists seven individuals on its board of directors:

• Jodie Evans, president

• Medea Benjamin, treasurer

• Claudia De la Cruz, director

• Dr. Patricia Y. Jones, director

• Vivien Lesnik Weisman, secretary

• Marjan Shallal, director

• Ann Wright, director

Advisory Board

• Christine Ahn, Women Cross DMZ

• Huwaida Arraf, Palestinian-American lawyer, activist

• Simone Chun, Korea Peace Network

• V (formerly Eve Ensler), V-Day and One Billion Rising

• Nimmi Gowrinathan, Politics of Sexual Violence Initiative

• Zaha Hassan, Middle East fellow at New America

• Kavita Ramdas, Global Fund for Women

• Fatemeh Keshavarz, Roshan Institute for Persian Studies

• Lindsay Koshgarian, National Priorities Project

• Salome, MC, musician, multimedia artist, educator and first female rapper of Iran

• Leila Zand, CODEPINK director of citizen diplomacy with Iran

• Kate Shim, National Association of Korean Americans

• Marjan Shallal, Busboys and Poets

• Susi Snyder, Don’t Bank on the Bomb

• Sussan Tahmasebi, director of FEMENA

• Amani al-Ahmad, Saudi women’s rights activist in exile

• Ali al-Ahmed, Gulf Institute

• Hassan El-Tayyab, Friends Committee on National Legislation

Revenue and expenses

Assets and liabilities

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Founded in 2026, the Civil Defense Institute is a nonpartisan investigative research organization. We research people, organizations and networks whose conduct undermines civil society and Americans’ freedom to participate in public life. Our work examines extremist and conspiracy-driven campaigns, foreign influence, organized harassment and the institutions that enable them.

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Overview

JEF says it supports educational programming about the “pressing problems of society and how to effect social change.” Many of its grants fund international programs.

Investigative reporting and congressional inquiries have linked JEF to activist Neville Roy Singham and alleged that the organization is part of a network connected to the Chinese Communist Party through him.

• Tax classification — 501(c)(3)

• Location — New York, NY

• Founded — 2018

• Annual revenue — $5,595,805 (FY 2024)

• EIN — 82-4975378

Activities

Grantmaking accounted for nearly 80 percent of JEF’s expenses in fiscal year 2024, when it reported more than $8.5 million in grants and similar amounts paid. JEF’s website describes this work as “strategic grant-making,” while its Form 990 says the grants support the “education, training and mobilization of marginalized communities.” JEF has funded foreign entities across five continents.

JEF says its educational activities include seminars, webinars, expert gatherings, multiday training, investigative journalism and “the elevation of voices not commonly featured in mainstream media.” It also says it will fund the creation and operation of “Popular Education Schools” in the Global South and the United States.

Public filings provide limited information about JEF’s overseas grantmaking. Its Schedule F disclosures generally identify recipients’ regions, grant amounts and broad purposes—not their names or the specific programs funded—making it difficult to determine which organizations ultimately received much of JEF’s foreign funding.

Related Organizations and Affiliations

Related Organizations

JEF did not report any related organizations in its most recent 990 filing.However, Schedule R of its 2023 filing identified a real estate company in São Paulo, Brazil, as wholly owned and directly controlled by JEF. The company, BZ Propriedades Culturais Ltda., was “treated as a partnership” that year, according to the filing.

JEF’s 2023 filing also identified two domestic real estate holding companies wholly owned by JEF, Brazil Holdings One LLC and Brazil Holdings Two LLC. Neither company reported income or assets in 2023.

JEF filed Schedule R only in 2023.

Affiliations

JEF is one of the most consequential funding sources in a tight network of nonprofits whose 990 filings between 2018 and 2024 reveal overlapping personnel, mutual financial support and aligned missions. Specifically, JEF has funded The People’s Forum, CODEPINK, the People’s Welfare Association (PWA) and Breakthrough BT Media Inc., which operates as BreakThrough News. Multiple JEF board members have held positions at these organizations.

Two JEF board members, David Chung and Manolo De Los Santos, appeared in The People’s Forum’s most recent 990 filing, which covered 2024. Chung, the JEF chair, is the organizing director at The People’s Forum (TPF). De Los Santos, the JEF board secretary, is The People’s Forum’s founding executive director. Chung and De Los Santos have maintained these affiliations concurrently since 2022.

JEF has also granted $148,730 to The People’s Forum since 2020.

In addition, De Los Santos has written for BreakThrough News. Its nonprofit operator, Breakthrough BT Media Inc., has received more than $2 million from JEF since 2020. In 2023 and 2024, JEF also granted nearly $2 million to Peoples Dispatch, which combined its editorial operations with BreakThrough News in June 2026 to form a single, unified text-and-video outlet.

As of February 2024, BreakThrough News co-founder Eugene Puryear was also the board treasurer of the People’s Welfare Association. From 2019 through 2024, PWA received $66.5 million in grants from the People’s Support Foundation (PSF), which also approved $23.6 million in grants for future payment during that period. PWA also received $17.5 million from JEF. JEF, in turn, received more than $5.3 million from the People’s Support Foundation in 2024.

Further, of the seven people reported as JEF directors in the organization’s fiscal year 2018 through 2024 Form 990 filings, three are affiliated with the think tank Tricontinental: Tings Chak, Maria del Pilar Troya Fernández and De Los Santos.

Chak chaired JEF in 2019 and served on the United Community Fund’s board until Aug. 31 of that year. JEF reported granting the United Community Fund $8.33 million in 2019 and another $170,000 in 2020.

Controversies

Much of the controversy surrounding JEF stems from the organization’s purported connections to Neville Roy Singham, an American businessman and social activist.

In an Aug. 5, 2023, article, The New York Times identified JEF as one of four organizations at the “center” of “a system that concealed [Singham’s] giving.” The article characterized this system as “a tangle of nonprofit groups and shell companies,” and claimed that Singham “[worked] closely with the Chinese government media machine and [financed] its propaganda worldwide.”

Three days after The New York Times published the story, then-Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) wrote to then-Attorney General Merrick Garland that “it appears organizations tied to Neville Roy Singham, a U.S. citizen, have been receiving direction from the CCP,” referring to the Chinese Communist Party. The letter named JEF specifically, alongside eight other organizations. Rubio claimed JEF was part of a “dark money system” created by Singham and asked Garland to investigate its “potential violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act.”

In September 2025, Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) and Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) echoed these concerns in a letter to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. Their letter asked Bessent to investigate 19 entities “alleged to have ties with Mr. Singham,” including JEF, TPF, PSF and Tricontinental.

“I categorically deny and repudiate any suggestion that I am a member of, work for, take orders from, or follow instructions of any political party or government or their representatives,” Singham told The New York Times in an email. Instead, Singham wrote, “I am solely guided by my beliefs, which are my long-held personal views.”

Separately, in a 2023 statement published by People’s Democracy, the weekly newspaper of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), PSF treasurer Jason Pfetcher described Singham’s financial role in the foundation, which later funded JEF. Pfetcher said he joined Singham to “assist him in his efforts to give away most of the proceeds” from the sale of ThoughtWorks and that “all funds donated to PSF came from the sale.” PSF’s tax filings independently document its grants to JEF. Taken together, Pfetcher’s statement and the filings indicate that Singham’s ThoughtWorks proceeds helped capitalize a foundation that later funded JEF.

JEF’s own filings also document a substantial relationship with a Shanghai media company. Since 2021, JEF has reported paying nearly $6.6 million to Shanghai Maku Cultural Communications Co., which operates publicly as the Maku Group, for the “production of [an] online news program.” This spending accounts for more than 11.2 percent of JEF’s total expenses over that period. The New York Times also reported that Singham shared an office in Shanghai Times Square with Maku, that his groups shared staff members with the company and that Maku’s website identified “tell China’s story well” as the company’s goal. The phrase “tell the story of China well” became an explicit directive under Xi Jinping at an August 2013 national conference on publicity and ideological work. Xi paired it with calls to strengthen international communications and develop new methods of external publicity.

Finances

Since its formation, JEF has reported more than $57.1 million in grants and similar amounts paid. In fiscal year 2024 alone, it reported more than $8.5 million in grants, including more than $4 million to recipients outside the United States.

JEF reported nearly $5.6 million in revenue and more than $10.7 million in expenses in fiscal year 2024, producing a deficit of more than $5.1 million. At year-end, it held $278,725 in assets and approximately $1.1 million in liabilities, leaving it with negative net assets of $827,340. That marked a sharp reversal from fiscal year 2022, when JEF reported nearly $20.7 million in revenue and net assets of more than $8.3 million.

Contributions have accounted for virtually all of JEF’s revenue. Between 2018 and 2023, approximately $68.8 million—87.7 percent of its contributed revenue—came through a Goldman Sachs donor-advised fund. Because donor-advised fund distributions generally identify the sponsoring organization rather than the original donor, the filings do not disclose who supplied the underlying money.

JEF’s largest identified domestic grantees have included the People’s Welfare Association, Breakthrough BT Media Inc. and Peoples Dispatch. Since 2020, JEF has reported granting more than $16.6 million to PWA, more than $2 million to Breakthrough BT Media Inc. and nearly $2 million to Peoples Dispatch. Its foreign-grant disclosures generally identify geographic regions, grant amounts and broad purposes rather than recipients’ names.

Compensation

JEF had 10 employees in 2024 and paid them a total of $828,444 in compensation and benefits.

Board of Directors

• David “Sung Mo” Chung, chair

• Manolo De Los Santos, secretary

• Karina Garcia, treasurer

• Maria del Pilar Troya Fernández

Karina Garcia, JEF’s board treasurer since 2023, was the 2024 candidate for U.S. vice president on the Party for Socialism and Liberation ticket.

Revenue and expenses

Assets and liabilities

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Founded in 2026, the Civil Defense Institute is a nonpartisan investigative research organization. We research people, organizations and networks whose conduct undermines civil society and Americans’ freedom to participate in public life. Our work examines extremist and conspiracy-driven campaigns, foreign influence, organized harassment and the institutions that enable them.

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Overview

BreakThrough News is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit media and educational organization founded in 2020. Zoe Alexandra, BreakThrough’s news director, co-founded and edited another media outlet, Peoples Dispatch. Peoples Dispatch merged with BreakThrough News in June 2026. BreakThrough editor-in-chief Ben Becker was previously an organizer with the ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) Coalition and is a founding member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL). Claudia De La Cruz, the PSL’s 2024 presidential nominee, served on BreakThrough News’s board of directors until 2023. Rania Khalek serves as chief correspondent, and Amanda Yee manages social media.

The House Ways and Means Committee subpoenaed BreakThrough News in 2026 after the organization failed to produce previously requested internal financial records.

• Tax classification — 501(c)(3)

• Location — New York, NY

• Founded — 2020

• Annual revenue — $1,547,233 (FY 2024)

• EIN — 84-5071181

• Notable connections — Benjamin Becker, executive director; Karla Reyes, board chair; Yari Osorio, treasurer; Rania Khalek, chief correspondent

Activities

BreakThrough News publishes articles and videos on its website, social media accounts and YouTube channel. Its Instagram account has more than 600,000 followers, and its YouTube channel has more than 1 million subscribers.

BT Live reports on “peoples liberation movements” around the world with a self-described “sharp left analysis.” On the podcast “Dispatches,” Rania Khalek comments on current events from a “left perspective.” Brian Becker, host of “The Socialist Program” podcast, offers “socialist commentary and education episodes.” Amanda Yee hosts the “China Report” podcast, which says it “helps you sort through the propaganda with an independent view of the country we are taught to hate.”

On the “China Report,” Amanda Yee often presents the Chinese Communist Party (CCP, also referred to as the CPC) favorably. Yee’s episodes have portrayed China — a one-party authoritarian state — as a democracy and delegitimized Taiwanese independence. Other episodes have defended the CCP’s ethnic unity law, which foreign policy analysts and human rights activists say harms ethnic minorities. The program has also promoted China’s “revolution and development model” in Latin America. Elsewhere, Yee has defended the CCP’s conduct during the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, claiming it is a “fabrication” that has been “exploited by the West for over 30 years as evidence of the ruthless, authoritarian nature of the CPC to justify imperialist aggression against China.”

In January 2023, Khalek released a friendly interview with Sheikh Naim Qassem, Hezbollah’s deputy secretary-general. The interview was conducted in Beirut, Lebanon. Nearly five years earlier, in May 2018, the United States and several partner nations throughout the Middle East designated Qassem and other senior Hezbollah figures as terrorists. The United States has included Hezbollah in its list of terrorist organizations since 1995.

Structure and affiliations

Related Organizations

BreakThrough News reported no related organizations on Schedule R in its 2020–2024 Form 990 filings.

Affiliations

BreakThrough News reported 320 West 37th Street in New York as its address in filings for 2020-2024. The People’s Forum used the same address in filings from 2017 until 2024.

Claudia De La Cruz has served on the board of directors of both BreakThrough News and The People’s Forum. De La Cruz referred to herself as a co-founder of The People’s Forum on X.

Controversies

Critical Reporting

In early 2022, New Lines Magazine reported that BreakThrough News was “pressing Uyghur genocide denial” through its correspondent, Rania Khalek. New Lines described Khalek as “an apologist for Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad” and reported that Khalek’s “previous media ventures, Redfish and Soapbox, were both exposed by journalists as cutouts of Russian state-funded media.”

In May 2023, The Daily Beast reported that “nearly all” of BreakThrough News’s “camera-facing personalities” were “veterans of Kremlin-backed outfits.” The Daily Beast listed: “former Radio Sputnik host Eugene Puryear; pundit Rania Khalek of video generator ‘In the Now;’ Kei Pritsker, Abby Martin, and Brian Becker of defunct propaganda organ RT America.” The Daily Beast also described Vijay Prashad, the executive director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, as a “controversial academic” who is “both a vociferous defender of China’s repressive policies toward its Uyghur minority and a recurring guest on BreakThrough and its international siblings.”

Congressional Investigations and Subpoenas

On September 15, 2025, Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, asked Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to open “a formal evaluation to determine the applicability of any relevant sanctions and 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.” The letter listed 19 entities alleged to have ties with Singham, placing The Party for Socialism and Liberation first, People’s Forum ninth and BreakThrough Media nineteenth. The committee rested its account of Singham on The New York Times reporting and on a Network Contagion Research Institute report. As of September 2026, the Office of Foreign Assets Control, an agency within the U.S. Department of the Treasury, had not publicly announced any action in response to the committee’s request.

In a separate letter dated February 9, 2026, the House Ways and Means Committee demanded that BreakThrough News “turn over certain documents.” The committee, which oversees tax-exempt organizations, questioned whether BreakThrough News was acting as a “foreign agent” or operating outside its tax-exempt purpose. The committee said it was “disturbed by the connections between BreakThrough News and Chinese Communist Party (‘CCP’) linked organizations.”

On July 21, 2026, the committee subpoenaed BreakThrough News. The subpoena said that the organization’s response did not “include a single responsive document and misrepresented both the scope and purpose of the Committee’s oversight.” BreakThrough announced the subpoena on July 22, calling it “a flagrant abuse of power, and a direct attack on our work as journalists and on the First Amendment generally.” It said it “already complies with all tax, audits and public reporting requirements” and is “not charged with any crime.”

BreakThrough responded to the committee through counsel on August 7, 2026, refusing to comply and arguing that the subpoena lacked a valid legislative purpose and violated First Amendment protections.

Alleged ties to Neville Roy Singham

The People’s Forum was among the “Chinese Communist Party linked organizations” named in the committee’s July letter. The New York Times reported that Singham funds the People’s Forum, which shares a New York address with Dongsheng News. Singham said it “provides unique progressive coverage of China that has been sadly missing.”

A report from March 2026 found that between 2017 and 2022, “more than $22 million dollars” went from donor-advised funds linked to Singham to The People’s Forum. The People’s Forum provided BreakThrough News with $80,575 in donated rent in 2021 and $318,596 in noncash office and studio space in 2022, for combined in-kind support of $399,171.

In May 2023, Singham was photographed at the opening of a media institute in Shanghai, seated next to Yu Yunquan, then President of a think tank unit within the CCP’s Central Propaganda Department. Singham also attended a CCP propaganda forum in July 2023 which included a breakout session he attended on how to promote the CCP abroad.

Finances

In 2024, BreakThrough reported more than $1.5 million in revenue, including more than $1.4 million in contributions. It spent $823,036 on salaries, other compensation and employee benefits, which cumulatively accounts for 55.4 percent of its $1,485,913 in total expenses.

Reporting from Fox News connected the Justice and Education Fund as well as the Goldman Sachs Philanthropy Fund to Mr. Singham. Despite a comment from Goldman Sachs’s spokesman Tony Fratto who said that Goldman had “terminated” Singham’s donor-advised fund in 2024, the extent to which Singham’s finances were connected to BreakThrough News is unclear.

In July 2026, following the House of Representatives Committee’s subpoena, BreakThrough News stated that “Our most important source of funding comes from our viewers and supporters, and we haven’t received a dime from any foreign institutions or states.”

BreakThrough’s returns from 2020 through 2024 did not include Schedule C, which is used to report specified political campaign and lobbying activities.

Compensation

BreakThrough’s website lists six people on its team: Zoe Alexandra, news director; Ben Becker, editor-in-chief; Matthew Belen, features director; Rachel Hu, community content and media education director; Rania Khalek, chief correspondent; and Amanda Yee, social media manager.

Part VII Section B of BreakThrough’s 2024 filing lists Rania Khalek as BreakThrough’s only independent contractor paid $100,000 or more, receiving $101,449. Benjamin Becker, as executive director, received $95,724: $67,779 in reportable compensation and $27,945 in other compensation.

BreakThrough News reported “Salaries, other compensation, employee benefits” to be $528,517.

Board of Directors:

• Benjamin Becker, Executive Director

• Karla Reyes, Board Chair

• Yari Osorio, Treasurer

• Michael Chrisemer, former board member

Revenue and expenses

Assets and liabilities

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Overview

The People’s Support Foundation, or PSF, is a private grantmaking organization that primarily disburses its funds to a handful of organizations with overlapping personnel, including the United Community Fund, the Justice and Education Fund and The People’s Forum.

Its funding stems from activist Neville Roy Singham, who started the foundation with a former employee in 2017 after selling his technology company ThoughtWorks for $785 million. Singham’s wife Jodie Evans, the co-founder of CODEPINK, is the president of PSF. The foundation has no paid staff and low operating expenses, spending almost all of its budget on charitable disbursements and making its revenue through investment income.

Both directly and indirectly, PSF funding has supported media organizations whose content aligns with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) messaging, according to The New York Times. PSF and its grantees have also drawn scrutiny from journalists and members of Congress over alleged connections to Singham, who is reportedly under criminal investigation by the Justice Department.

• Tax classification — 501(c)(3)

• Location — Chicago, IL

• Founded — 2017

• Annual revenue — $6,826,361 (FY 2024)

• EIN — 82-1202926

• Notable connections — Jodie Evans, president and director; Jason Pfetcher, treasurer and director; Layan Fuleihan, director; People’s Welfare Association; United Community Fund; The People’s Forum; Worldwide Media Holdings

Activities

According to its website, PSF is dedicated to “fund[ing] and build[ing] partnerships with progressive civil society organizations dedicated to advancing justice, peace and equality worldwide.” Its primary activity is distributing grants to other organizations, which accounted for about 96 percent of its expenses in 2024. PSF does not publish its grantmaking criteria and does not accept unsolicited grant proposals. (See “Finances” below.)

Beyond grantmaking, PSF reports funding “convenings” to bring together grantees and other partners. The organization spent $30,469 on travel, conferences and meetings in 2024, about 0.14 percent of total expenses.

While PSF appears to host a website, its 2024 tax filing lists “n/a” in the website field. There is no information on the website about the organization’s recent activities.

Related Organizations and Affiliations

Related Organizations

As of 2024, PSF did not identify any related organizations in its tax filing. In its 2018 filing, however, PSF identified United Community Fund, or UCF, as a related organization and reported granting it $6,171,000 that year. UCF is a 501(c)(4) social welfare organization whose fiscal year 2025 filing lists no website. In that filing, UCF says it supports “education and advocacy programs that promote human rights and social justice,” along with “civic engagement programs” and programs that promote “journalism that betters the lives of impacted communities.” It says those efforts focus “principally on foreign communities with large marginalized populations.”

Affiliations

PSF is one of the most consequential funding sources in a tight network of nonprofits whose 990 filings between 2018 and 2024 reveal overlapping personnel, mutual financial support and aligned missions.

In 2024, PSF granted $5 million to The People’s Forum, accounting for more than 86 percent of TPF’s contributed revenue and more than 70 percent of its total revenue for that year. Jodie Evans is both the board president of PSF and the board secretary of The People’s Forum. Layan Fuleihan joined the PSF board in 2023, one year before the foundation disbursed the grant to The People’s Forum, where she was listed as the highest-paid employee.

As of March 2023, Fuleihan was also the board treasurer of the United Community Fund, which received more than $6.1 million from PSF in 2018. UCF was listed as a “related organization” in PSF’s tax filing that year.

The majority of PSF’s itemized grants have gone to the People’s Welfare Association. Between 2020 and 2024, reported grants from PSF to the People’s Welfare Association amounted to nearly $64 million, accounting for at least 62.2 percent of PWA’s revenue. PSF has also granted more than $5 million to the Justice and Education Fund.

Controversies

Much of the controversy related to PSF stems from the organization’s purported connections to Neville Roy Singham, an American businessman living in Shanghai, China. In August 2023, The New York Times reported that PSF “donated at least $450,000 for training” at the Nkrumah School in South Africa. The Times recounted a training workshop at the school in which participants from around Africa were instructed that the “United States was waging a ‘hybrid war’ against China by distorting information about Hong Kong, Taiwan and the Xinjiang region where Uyghurs were held in camps.” Cebelihle Mbuyisa, a former employee who helped prepare materials for the workshop, said, “They’re being rounded up to be fed Chinese propaganda.” Mbuyisa also told the Times, “Whole social movements on the African continent are being hijacked by what looks like a foreign policy instrument of the Chinese Communist Party.”

In August 2023, then-Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) wrote to then-Attorney General Merrick Garland that “it appears organizations tied to [Singham] … have been receiving direction from the CCP,” referring to the Chinese Communist Party. The letter named PSF specifically, alongside The People’s Forum and the Justice and Education Fund, or JEF, another grantee. Rubio claimed PSF was part of a “dark money system” created by Singham and asked Garland to investigate its “potential violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act.”

Rubio’s letter referenced the aforementioned Times article, which was published days earlier under the title: “A Global Web of Chinese Propaganda Leads to a U.S. Tech Mogul.” The “mogul” referenced was Singham, who the piece alleges “works closely with the Chinese government media machine and is financing its propaganda worldwide.”

According to the Times article, Singham’s wealth — made through the sale of his tech company ThoughtWorks for $785 million in 2017 — flows through a network of nonprofits (including PSF) to entities around the world, creating a “seemingly organic bloom of far-left groups that echo Chinese government talking points.” Singham has also attended at least one Chinese Communist Party “propaganda forum.”

In its most recent tax filing, PSF claimed it did not “attempt to influence any national, state, or local legislation,” “participate or intervene in any political campaign” or “carry on propaganda” in 2024. However, nearly half of PSF’s expenses were cash grants to PWA, which reported spending close to $1 million on political campaign activity expenditures in fiscal year 2025.

In September 2025, Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) and Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) echoed Rubio’s concerns in a letter to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. Their letter asked Bessent to investigate 19 entities “alleged to have ties with Mr. Singham,” including PSF and its grantees UCF, TPF and JEF.

According to June 2026 reporting from Fox News Digital, a federal grand jury in New York was evaluating potential criminal charges against Singham based on financial crimes.

“I categorically deny and repudiate any suggestion that I am a member of, work for, take orders from, or follow instructions of any political party or government or their representatives,” Singham told The New York Times in an email. He wrote, “I am solely guided by my beliefs, which are my long-held personal views.”

The People’s Forum, a PSF grantee, publicly called Singham a “Marxist comrade” and said he had been involved with the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, a group inspired by Chairman Mao and Fidel Castro.

In a statement published by People’s Democracy, the official publication of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), Pfetcher called The New York Times article “slanderous.” But in the same statement, Pfetcher acknowledged Singham’s ties to PSF. He said that Singham wanted to “give away most of the proceeds he received from the sale” of ThoughtWorks, where Pfetcher used to work, so together they “created a private foundation … called the People’s Support Foundation.”

PSF has reported $0 in contributed revenue after its first available filing. Instead, interest and dividends from the investments secured with that seed — which Pfetcher identifies as Singham’s funds — account for the institutional revenue which PSF disburses via grants. (See “Finances” below.)

Finances

In 2024, the most recent year for which data was available, PSF held more than $111.6 million in assets. According to Pfetcher, the board treasurer, “all funds donated to PSF came from the sale of ThoughtWorks,” Singham’s company.

PSF’s annual revenue in 2024 was nearly $7 million, almost all investment income, while expenses were nearly $22.2 million. The foundation has reported $0 in contributed revenue after its first available filing.

In 2018 and 2019, PSF granted to a wide variety of organizations, including many international recipients. Since 2020, however, the organization’s institutional giving has significantly consolidated. Most of its itemized grants go to PWA. Other recipients since 2020 have included UCF, JEF and TPF. Just $185,000 of PSF’s reported grants in that time went to international entities, representing about 0.24 percent of its charitable disbursements.

TPF received $5,000,000 from PSF in fiscal year 2024. As of 2024, Manolo De Los Santos, the executive director of TPF, was also the secretary for the Justice and Education Fund and served on its board of directors. JEF received $5,370,000 in grants from PSF in fiscal year 2024. Tings Chak served as a director for both JEF and UCF in 2019, including serving as JEF’s board chair. UCF received $425,000 from PSF in fiscal year 2024. The current JEF chairman, David Chung, is the organizing director at TPF. And TPF reported giving a $100,000 grant to JEF in 2024, while JEF has granted $131,446 to TPF since 2020.

In 2023, PSF reported paying $142,154 in consulting fees to Shanghai Maku Cultural Communications Co., also known as the Maku Group. According to The New York Times translation of the Maku Group’s website, the firm’s mission is to “tell China’s story well,” which the Times identifies as language “commonly used for foreign propaganda.”

Board of Directors

As of 2024

• Jodie Evans, president

• Jo Anderson-Figueroa, secretary

• Jason Pfetcher, treasurer

• Carolyn Baker

• Layan Fuleihan

Evans, Pfetcher and Anderson-Figueroa were founding board members, while Baker and Fuleihan were first listed in 2023. As of August 2026, the People’s Support Foundation website did not list Baker in its board directory.

Evans, Singham’s wife, is a co-founder and board president of CODEPINK. She also serves on the board of The People’s Forum.

In addition to serving on the PSF board, Fuleihan is also the board treasurer for UCF and the education director at TPF, both PSF grantees. (See “Affiliations” and “Finances” above.)

Compensation

As of 2024, PSF did not have any paid staff and did not compensate its board members.

Revenue and expenses

Assets and liabilities

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Founded in 2026, the Civil Defense Institute is a nonpartisan investigative research organization. We research people, organizations and networks whose conduct undermines civil society and Americans’ freedom to participate in public life. Our work examines extremist and conspiracy-driven campaigns, foreign influence, organized harassment and the institutions that enable them.

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Overview

The People’s Welfare Association is a Madison, Wisconsin-based 501(c)(4) organization that operates primarily by receiving contributions and distributing those funds as grants outside the United States. Across the six fiscal years ending April 2020 through April 2025, PWA reported $102.7 million in contributions and $102 million in grants paid outside the United States.

Public 990 filings reveal that the People’s Welfare Association is a recipient in a network of nonprofit organizations, with about 82 percent of its total revenue originating from charitable contributions from two organizations: the Justice and Education Fund and the People’s Support Foundation.

Current and former PWA officers also have roles at far-left media, political-education and research organizations. Eugene Puryear, PWA’s treasurer, is an anchor and producer for BreakThrough News, a nonprofit media and educational organization. Puryear is also listed as an instructor at The People’s Forum, a New York political-education and cultural center. Mariana Miranda de Paula Assis served as PWA’s secretary from 2020 through November 2022. She was also listed as a director in fiscal years 2020 through 2023 of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, an international institute that says it is guided by popular movements and anchored in national liberation Marxism.

• Tax classification — 501(c)(4)

• Location — Madison, WI

• Founded — 2019

• Annual revenue — $12,038,800 (FY 2025)

• EIN — 83-4705654

• Notable connections — Eugene Puryear, Treasurer; Mariana Miranda de Paula Assis, Secretary (2020-2023)

Activities

In its Form 990 filings, PWA says its mission is to support education, advocacy, and journalism intended to empower marginalized communities, primarily outside the United States. PWA describes its “principal activity” as promoting “social welfare” through “strategic and financial support” to local, mission-aligned organizations.

In practice, the organization’s primary activity is issuing grants outside of the United States. From fiscal year 2020 to fiscal year 2025, PWA issued grants amounting to over $100 million to South and Central America, sub-Saharan Africa, Europe and the Caribbean. Form 990 filers are not required to publicly disclose the identities of foreign grant recipients on Schedule F, so PWA’s public filings do not provide a comprehensive list of its grant recipients outside the United States.

Related Organizations and Affiliations

Related Organizations

Across the six fiscal years ending April 2020 through April 2025, PWA reported no related organizations under the IRS’s Schedule R definition.

Affiliations

Public reporting has placed PWA within a broader group of nonprofit, media and educational organizations linked to Neville Roy Singham. Form 990 filings and organizational records document specific funding and personnel ties within the group, but do not establish formal affiliation or coordination among every organization. The group includes the People’s Support Foundation, the Justice and Education Fund, United Community Fund, The People’s Forum, Tricontinental, BreakThrough News, CODEPINK and PWA.

The People’s Support Foundation and the Justice and Education Fund were PWA’s two largest documented funders from 2019 through 2024. Together, their filings report $83,967,279 in grants to PWA: $66,476,279 from the People’s Support Foundation and $17,491,000 from the Justice and Education Fund. The filings also show both organizations making grants to others in the group. United Community Fund both received grants from these funders and made grants to other organizations.

PWA’s filings also demonstrate personnel links to other network organizations. Mariana Miranda de Paula Assis served as PWA’s Secretary through November 2022 and was listed as a director in Tricontinental’s 2019 through 2023 tax filings.PWA treasurer Eugene Puryear helped found BreakThrough News, according to its website, and was listed as an instructor at The People’s Forum.

Controversies

In 2022, New Lines Magazine published an investigation revealing that “almost $65 million has 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.” New Lines reports that the “funding has moved through a complex series of mostly tax-deductible investment funds and charities, all linked by virtue of their governance structures to one man…Neville Roy Singham.” New Lines noted that the Justice and Education Fund, another nonprofit in this network, had “contributed $876,000 to a new group registered in Madison, Wisconsin, called People’s Welfare Association.” And “one of the directors of that organization, until September 2019,” was Daniel Tirado Behrens, “an employee at Shanghai Luoweixing” – a Chinese consultancy company in which Singham has invested.

Finances

PWA’s six publicly available Form 990 filings cover fiscal years 2020 through 2025. For the fiscal year ending April 30, 2025, PWA reported $12,038,800 in revenue and $12,830,220 in expenses, down sharply compared to $19,887,919 in revenue and $19,646,799 in expenses in the prior fiscal year. PWA reported $324,050 in total assets at the end of fiscal year 2025.

Across the six filings, PWA reported $102.8 million in total revenue, nearly all from grants and contributions. Donor-side filings show that the Justice and Education Fund and People’s Support Foundation reported providing PWA with a combined $84 million—about 82 percent of PWA’s total reported revenue.

Over the same period, PWA reported approximately $102 million in grants and other assistance outside the United States, across South and Central America, sub-Saharan Africa, Europe and the Caribbean. Annual totals ranged from $12.6 million to $19.5 million. The fiscal year 2025 filing reported $12.74 million.

Compensation

All of PWA’s 990 filings indicate zero employees, and zero dollars issued as compensation to its Board of Directors.

Board of Directors

PWA’s current and former officers and directors listed in its Form 990 filings include:

• Kristine Teresa Krouth, president and director (FY2020–FY2025)

• Eugene Puryear, treasurer and director (FY2024–FY2025)

• Baruch Gottlieb, secretary and director (FY2023–FY2025)

• Ivan Orosa Paleo, treasurer and director (FY2020–FY2024)

• Mariana Miranda de Paula Assis, secretary and director (FY2020–FY2023)

• Daniel Tirado Behrens, secretary and director (FY2020)

Revenue and expenses

Assets and liabilities

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Founded in 2026, the Civil Defense Institute is a nonpartisan investigative research organization. We research people, organizations and networks whose conduct undermines civil society and Americans’ freedom to participate in public life. Our work examines extremist and conspiracy-driven campaigns, foreign influence, organized harassment and the institutions that enable them.

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Overview

United Community Fund, a 501(c)(4) organization based in New York, New York, is primarily a regranting organization that distributes the vast majority of its grants to other countries, though it has provided two grants to organizations in the United States. The majority of its charitable contributions were distributed between 2018 and 2020. United Community Fund has also been cited in multiple congressional investigations, as lawmakers have raised concerns about potential FARA violations (failure to properly register, disclose activities or report financial arrangements in relation to foreign actors). United Community Fund has overlapping board members and financial relationships with other nonprofits that appear to have connections to Neville Roy Singham, an American businessman and social activist who reportedly supports the Chinese Communist Party.

• Tax classification — 501(c)(4)

• Location — New York, New York

• Founded — 2018

• Annual revenue — $185,000 (FY 2025)

• EIN — 37-1913339

Activities

United Community Fund (UCF) states its mission as “support[ing] education and advocacy programs that promote human rights and social justice.” Additionally, UCF states, “it supports civic engagement programs to empower marginalized populations, and programs to promote journalism that betters the lives of impacted communities.” UCF also reports that it focuses its efforts “principally on foreign communities with large marginalized populations,” and provides “strategic and financial support to local organizations that support the organization’s mission.”

In practice, UCF’s primary activity is issuing grants, with fiscal year 2019 being the most active year in the organization’s history (FY 2019-FY 2025). According to its fiscal year 2019 filing, UCF distributed roughly $3.7 million to organizations within the United States and over $34.5 million to other countries (to sub-Saharan Africa, Europe, South America, Central America and the Caribbean).

Related Organizations and Affiliations

Related Organizations

United Community Fund indicated no related organizations in any of its 990 filings.

Affiliations

UCF sits within a network of nonprofits connected through shared funders, personnel and institutional ties. The People’s Support Foundation and Justice and Education Fund directly funded UCF, while UCF directly funded The People’s Forum and Tricontinental. JEF also funded BreakThrough News, CODEPINK and The People’s Welfare Association and PSF funded PWA. Personnel and operational links further connect the network: CODEPINK co-founder Jodie Evans has served as PSF’s president and director, former UCF secretary Tings Chak contributes to BreakThrough News and BreakThrough shares an address and programming with the People’s Forum.

United Community Fund has received financial support from both the People’s Support Foundation and the Justice and Education Fund, the two most consequential “funders” in the network. UCF has also provided grants to other organizations in the network.

UCF functioned as both a grant recipient and a grantmaker within the network. In 2019, it granted more than $3 million to The People’s Forum and $700,000 to Tricontinental. Tax filings covering 2018 through 2024 report approximately $21.9 million in grants to UCF from two organizations: $13.426 million from The People’s Support Foundation and $8.5 million from the Justice and Education Fund. Most of that funding arrived in 2018 and 2019.

United Community Fund also shares board members and key personnel with the rest of the network. Tings Chak served as the Secretary of the Board of Directors of UCF in fiscal year 2019. In the same year, Chak was listed as the chair of the Justice and Education Fund’s Board of Directors. Chak is also the co-coordinator of Tricontinental Asia and its art and culture department, according to Tricontinental’s website. Franziska Kleiner, the UCF president since 2018, is also a Tricontinental regional coordinator. Renata Porto Bugni served as UCF’s treasurer from 2019 to 2023 and was listed as Tricontinental’s Deputy Director between 2019 and early-2023. Layan Fuleihan, listed as UCF’s Treasurer between 2023 and 2025, was a board member of the People’s Support Foundation in 2023 and 2024. Fuleihan concurrently served as the Education Director at The People’s Forum in 2022 and 2024.

Controversies

An investigation by The New York Times into the network of nonprofits described above found a relationship between Shanghai-based American businessman and social activist Neville Roy Singham, who allegedly funds these groups, and propaganda aligned with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The New York Times claims UCF is one of “four new nonprofits” at the “center” of “a system” of nonprofits used by Singham “that concealed his giving,” adding that none of the nonprofits connected to Singham have registered under FARA. Singham denied controlling the four organizations, telling the Times, “I do not control them,” although he acknowledged giving money to unnamed intermediaries matching the descriptions of the four nonprofits.

Lawmakers have raised concerns that UCF, as a pivotal part of the network of entities outlined above, may have violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). Specifically, lawmakers have speculated that UCF has funded far-left organizations that oppose U.S. interests and support U.S. adversaries such as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Lawmakers also drew explicit connections between Singham and UCF, alleging Singham has provided funding to UCF.

On July 10, 2024, then-Senators Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) wrote a letter to then-Attorney General Merrick Garland to express their concern over “efforts by the [CCP] and its allies to sow discord in the United States.” The letter cites an investigation by The New York Times and asserts that Singham “has created an elaborate dark money network which allows him to send funds to a series of non-profits, such as the ‘United Community Fund’ and ‘Justice and Education Fund,’ that have almost no real-world footprints.”

Eleven months later, on June 13, 2025, several members of the United States House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform sent two letters — one was addressed directly to Singham and the other to then-Attorney General Pam Bondi. The letters suggest that Singham, by providing financial support to a network of nonprofit organizations that include UCF, is aiding CCP efforts to “sow discord in the United States,” including by encouraging riots and violence in Los Angeles, California. The letter to then-Attorney General Bondi outlines Singham’s connections to the CCP and encourages the Department of Justice to investigate a list of nineteen organizations, including UCF, for potential FARA violations.

In addition, on September 15, 2025, Representatives James Comer (R-Ky.) and Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) sent a letter to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent highlighting their concern that Singham “may have acted as an agent for the CCP.” The letter requests that the Department of the Treasury evaluate the applicability of “federal sanctions law…or criminal penalties enforced by Treasury — to include the freezing or seizure of assets” with respect to the nonprofit organizations allegedly tied to Singham, like UCF.

Finances

In its fiscal year 2025 filing, UCF reported $131,366 in total assets, with $185,000 in revenue and $197,908 in expenses. In fiscal year 2024, UCF reported modestly higher total revenue with $425,000. The most significant year — by far — in terms of revenue for UCF was fiscal year 2019, during which it reported revenue of $39,959,903 and distributed $38,289,055 in grants. Of the $38 million UCF distributed in grants, over $34.5 million went to other countries: $22,863,055 to sub-Saharan Africa, $10,106,000 to South America, $1,555,000 to Europe (including Iceland and Greenland) and $50,000 to Central America and the Caribbean. No specific overseas grant recipients were identified in the filings. In addition, according to fiscal year 2019, UCF issued two grants to organizations in the United States: $3,015,000 to The People’s Forum in “general support” and $700,000 to Tricontinental for “operating costs.”

Tax filings by two network organizations report payments to UCF totaling approximately $21.9 million between 2018 and 2024. The Justice and Education Fund reported $8.5 million: $8.33 million in 2019 and $170,000 in 2020. The People’s Support Foundation reported $13.426 million, including $6.171 million in cash transfers in 2018 and 37 grants totaling $6.71 million in 2019. Its later returns report another $545,000 in grants during 2020, 2023 and 2024.

Collectively, between 2018 and 2024, the grants UCF received from the Justice and Education Fund and the People’s Support Foundation account for roughly 50 percent of UCF’s total revenue.

Assets and liabilities

Revenue and expenses

Compensation

Across its filings for fiscal years ending September 2019 through September 2025, UCF reported zero employees and no compensation paid by UCF to its directors.

Board of Directors

United Community Fund’s fiscal year 2025 filing lists three individuals on the Board of Directors: Franziska Kleiner (Director & President), Layan Fuleihan (Director & Treasurer) and Smangele Luvela (Director & Secretary). Across the organization’s history, six individuals have served on the Board of Directors:

• Franziska Kleiner, President (2018-2025)

• Layan Fuleihan, Treasurer (2023-2025)

• Renata Porto Bugni, Treasurer (2018-2023)

• Smangele Luvela, Secretary (2023-2025)

• Lucas Dos Santos Tinti, Secretary (2019-2023)

• Tings Chak, Secretary (2018-2019)

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Founded in 2026, the Civil Defense Institute is a nonpartisan investigative research organization. We research people, organizations and networks whose conduct undermines civil society and Americans’ freedom to participate in public life. Our work examines extremist and conspiracy-driven campaigns, foreign influence, organized harassment and the institutions that enable them.

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Overview

The People’s Forum (TPF) is a 501(c)(3) organization that hosts educational programming and community events in New York, New York. Much of the organization’s programming and activities reflect a far-left, socialist or Marxist-Leninist communist ideology. TPF has portrayed the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in a sympathetic light. For example, TPF co-hosted an event that was intended to “provide a space for those invested in Chinese socialism and internationalism.” Its educational materials have falsely asserted that the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre “was not a massacre of peaceful protesters by the army” and erroneously portrayed Taiwan, a liberal democracy, as an “island province” of mainland China that is still under the control of “Nationalists.” In a 2021 social media thread, TPF described Neville Roy Singham as “our funder.” In 2023, The New York Times reported that Singham is at the “center” of a “lavishly funded influence campaign that defends China and pushes its propaganda,” as he “works closely with the Chinese government media machine and is financing its propaganda worldwide.” Since 2025, the organization has been the subject of increased scrutiny because of congressional investigations relating to potential violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), though these allegations have not been verified.

TPF shared directors or staff with the People’s Support Foundation, Justice and Education Fund, United Community Fund and Tricontinental. In 2024, it received a $5 million grant from People’s Support Foundation and made a $100,000 grant to the Justice and Education Fund.

• Tax classification — 501(c)(3)

• Location — New York, NY

• Founded — 2017

• Annual revenue — $7,080,390 (FY 2024)

• EIN — 61-1844780

• Notable connections — Manolo De Los Santos, Executive Director; William Baptist Jr., Board Chair; Jodene Evans, Secretary and Interim Treasurer; Layan Fuleihan, Education Director; Claudie De la Cruz, Board Member; David Chung, Organizing Director

Activities

The People’s Forum (TPF) describes itself as “a movement incubator for working class and marginalized communities to build unity across historic lines of division at home and abroad.” According to its most recent 990 filing, filed in 2024, TPF states that its mission is to “provide a space for community forums, educational workshops, cultural performances, film screenings, literary commentary and review, and multimedia creations intended to raise awareness and opportunities for addressing injustice.” Furthermore, “TPF seeks to present and produce work for its community center that addresses the issues of social and economic inequality and educate the larger community about these issues.”

Based in New York City, TPF has three primary programmatic areas: it hosts educational programming, it promotes culture and the arts and it operates a kitchen and cafe. Nearly 80 percent of TPF’s programmatic spending in 2024 was devoted to its education program. Less than 15 percent of TPF’s programmatic spending in 2024 went to its cultural programming, and the remainder (about 5 percent) supported its kitchen and cafe.

TPF’s 2024 990 filing says that its education program “contributes to building and strengthening popular movements in New York City and beyond as well as a revitalized non-sectarian left intellectual culture rooted in the struggles of the poor and dispossessed.” Educational program spending accounted for $3.1 million out of roughly $3.88 million in total program service expenses, according to TPF’s 2024 Form 990. In practice, this means hosting educational courses including language classes in Spanish, Portuguese and Arabic. In addition, in 2026, TPF hosted events ranging from a “Fleet Week Open House,” in which participants could “speak with veterans and others about refusing unlawful orders, conscientious objection, and the history of active-duty resistance to illegal wars,” to a five-week series called “Socialist Summer School - The People Vs. Billionaires.”

Part of TPF’s educational programming is devoted to promoting Marxist-Leninist communism. For example, TPF hosts annual “Red Books Day,” during which participants have performed a virtual reading of the Manifesto of the Communist Party by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. In addition to Manolo De Los Santos, the founder and executive director of The People’s Forum, readers have included Jodie Evans (the co-founder of CODEPINK) and Vijay Prashad (the executive director of Tricontinental). As part of its “Red Books Day,” TPF has hosted screenings of the biopic, “The Young Karl Marx.”

In 2023, The People’s Forum held a three-week class titled “Lenin and the Path to Revolution.” A description of the class on the organization’s YouTube page reads: “Lenin’s theories and strategies continue to illuminate the path forward for people and movements committed to building working class power, showing the necessary steps for achieving worldwide socialist revolution.” The YouTube posting for the third class installment describes Lenin as “a well-loved revolutionary across countries and movements, whose name embodies the spirit of working-class internationalism.”

In a January 2, 2024, post on its website, The People’s Forum declared 2024 to be the “Year of Lenin & Cabral,” commemorating the “centennial of Lenin’s death.” In March 2024, The People’s Forum founder and executive director Manolo De Los Santos taught a class titled “The Communist International: Marxism in the Era of World Revolution.” The Communist International, or “Comintern,” was originally founded by Lenin as a means for the Soviet Communist Party to control international socialism. The People’s Forum webpage advertising the event described the Comintern as “a major contributor to worldwide anti-capitalist revolution, as well as a pioneer of a global, anti-colonial, anti-racist and anti-imperialist politics.” The page also notes that De Los Santos co-edited books such as: “Viviremos: Venezuela vs. Hybrid War,” “Comrade of the Revolution: Selected Speeches of Fidel Castro” and “Our Own Path to Socialism: Selected Speeches of Hugo Chávez.”

TPF’s educational programming has portrayed the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in a sympathetic light. For instance, in August 2020, The People’s Forum cohosted a virtual event with the Qiao Collective titled “Socialism vs. Barbarism: Understanding the New Cold War on China.” The page reads: “This class will equip socialists and anti-imperialists with an analysis of U.S.-China relations within a longer history of U.S. imperialist aggression; the nature of socialism with Chinese characteristics; and China’s vision of multilateralism as an alternative to U.S. unilateralism.” The Qiao Collective, the event’s cohost, says its mission is to serve “as a bridge between the U.S. left and China’s rich Marxist, anti-imperialist political work and thought in order to foster critical consideration of the role of China and socialism with Chinese characteristics in contemporary geopolitics.”

On September 18, 2021, The People’s Forum cohosted a conference in conjunction with the Qiao Collective, Monthly Review and CODEPINK titled, “China and the Left: A Socialist Forum.” The conference was intended to “provide a forum for those invested in Chinese socialism and internationalism” and “for those invested in challenging [the] rise in the U.S.-led imperialist aggression on China to meet, strategize, and discuss.” The conference’s home webpage chastised “self-avowed leftist organizations and thinkers” who had supposedly “abandoned an anti-imperialist analysis of China in favor of equivocating narratives about Chinese ‘authoritarianism’ and ‘hegemony.’”

In October 2024, The People’s Forum released a three-part series to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Chinese communist revolution titled “When the People Stand Up: 75 Years of the Chinese Revolution.” The first course reading packet reprints Mao Zedong’s September 21, 1949, speech, “The Chinese People Have Stood Up!” The course’s first reading packet also portrays Taiwan as a rogue province of mainland China, falsely claiming that the island nation is a “province” of mainland China and is still ruled by “Nationalists.” In fact, Taiwan evolved into a liberal democracy while mainland China remains under one-party rule. Another essay in the course’s reading materials sanitizes the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, declaring “it was not a massacre of peaceful protesters by the army.” Amnesty International found that between June 3 and June 9, 1989, Chinese troops killed at least 1,000 civilians—mostly peaceful protesters and bystanders. Several thousands were injured and a declassified British cable estimated at least 10,000 deaths. Tens of thousands more were arrested afterward.

The organization’s educational programming overlaps with its cultural events, which include book talks, film screenings and craft-making workshops. Cultural program spending accounted for $566,766 of TPF’s 2024 total program service expenses.

TPF’s third key program area is its kitchen and cafe, which serves as community space to provide “affordable and healthy options to their community.” Expenditures for the kitchen and cafe accounted for $209,034 of TPF’s total program service expenses in 2024.

TPF also operates a bookstore and press (1804 Books) at its midtown Manhattan address. 1804 Books describes itself as “your shop for socialist literature and revolutionary theory!” 1804 Books has published texts such as “China’s Revolution and the Quest for a Socialist Future” and “China’s Great Road: Lessons for Marxist Theory and Socialist Practices.” It has also published a volume titled “Lenin Selected Writings,” which was edited by Vijay Prashad, who is listed on Tricontinental’s website as the Executive Director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. Tricontinental’s 2024 Form 990, however, lists Prashad as the organization’s “Treasurer.” Manolo De Los Santos, the Executive Director of TPF, is also listed as a “Researcher” at Tricontinental.

Related Organizations and Affiliations

Related Organizations

TPF reported no related organizations on its Form 990s for fiscal years 2017 through 2024.

Affiliations

In December 2021, TPF stated in a social media thread on Twitter (now X) that it received funds from Neville Roy Singham, an American businessman living in Shanghai, describing him as “our funder.” In the thread, TPF stated: “A few years ago we met Roy Singham, a Marxist comrade who sold his company & donated most of his wealth to non-profits that focus on political education, culture & internationalism.” The next post in the thread read: “It seems to bother some folk that we receive funding that furthers our anti-imperialist politics. It seems to bother them even more that our funder is also a staunch anti-imperialist whose work goes back to the Black Panthers & the LRBW in Detroit.”

In 2024, TPF received a $5 million grant from People’s Support Foundation Limited, a private Chicago-based foundation. In 2023, Jason Pfetcher, who serves as Treasurer on the Board of Directors of the People’s Support Foundation, stated: “All funds donated to [the People’s Support Foundation] came from the sale of ThoughtWorks,” a technology company founded by Singham, which he sold in 2017 for $785 million. According to both organizations’ 2024 990 filings, Jodie Evans served as President of the Board of Directors of the People’s Support Foundation while concurrently serving as the Secretary and Interim Treasurer of TPF. As of 2024, Layan Fuleihan serves on the Board of Directors of the People’s Support Foundation and works as the education director of TPF. As of 2024, Jodie Evans is also President of the Board of Directors of CODEPINK, a California-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. Claudia De la Cruz also serves on the Board of Directors of both TPF and CODEPINK.

In 2024, People’s Support Foundation also made grants totaling $5.37 million to the Justice and Education Fund, a New York-based 501(c)(3) organization. Manolo De Los Santos, the Executive Director of TPF, and David Chung, TPF’s organizing director, both sit on the Board of Directors of the Justice and Education Fund. De Los Santos, who, according to TPF’s 2024 990 filing reports working an average of 30 hours per week with $0 in reportable compensation, is simultaneously listed as working an average of 40 hours per week for the Justice and Education Fund, with $80,000 in reportable compensation. According to its 2024 Form 990, TPF issued a $100,000 grant to the Justice and Education Fund for “Disaster Response and Relief.”

Controversies

Much of the controversy related to TPF stems from the organization’s connections to Neville Roy Singham. In 2026, Fox News Digital reported that Singham has issued a total of $22.4 million to TPF since 2017. However, Fox News Digital’s report does indicate how this figure was calculated, as the only explicit evidence cited is a $2.5 million grant to TPF in 2017 through a Goldman Sachs Philanthropy Fund, which does not publicly list Singham as a donor.

Multiple members of Congress have called for investigations into TPF, citing the organization’s relationship to Singham.

On April 16, 2025, Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) sent a letter to then-Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel calling on the Department of Justice to assess whether TPF and CODEPINK should register as foreign agents under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). In his letter to Bondi and Patel, Senator Grassley cites articles from The Free Press which allege “Singham has been The People’s Forum’s main financial contributor.” Grassley’s letter also highlights that Manolo De Los Santos, the executive director of TPF, appeared on the YouTube channel of CGTN, a Chinese state-owned media group. In his appearance on CGTN’s YouTube, De Los Santos described China’s political and economic system as putting “people first,” whereas the American system puts “profits over people.”

On September 4, 2025, Rep. Jason Smith (R-Mo.), the Chairman of the House Committee on Ways and Means, wrote a letter to Manolo De Los Santos demanding that TPF provide “certain documents” to his committee. The letter cites TPF’s December 2021 X thread, in which TPF described Singham as “our funder,” and describes him as “a former United States technology mogul who now resides in Shanghai and is closely aligned with the Chinese Communist Party.” The letter also cites an article from The New York Times and reads: “Multiple reports have found that The People’s Forum is part of Mr. Singham’s network of non-profit organizations that serve as his conduits to spread pro-CCP narratives.” The letter also highlights that TPF’s educational programming in 2024 included courses celebrating the Chinese revolution. Like Senator Grassley’s letter, Representative Smith’s letter expresses concern that TPF is acting as an “agent of a foreign principal” as defined by FARA.

On February 12, 2026, the House Committee on Ways and Means held a hearing to investigate “the money trail between foreign actors and tax-exempt organizations that have been fueling antisemitism, interfering in our elections, and spreading foreign government propaganda.” The Committee’s statement after the hearing referred to TPF as “one of the worst actors,” and “a major player in Roy Singham’s network, with strong connections to the CCP.”

In letters dated May 4, 2026, Representative Smith wrote to legal counsel for TPF, Tricontinental and BreakThrough News, demanding compliance with the House Ways and Means Committee’s requests for funding records. Smith’s letter states, “The People’s Forum has publicly acknowledged receiving funding from Mr. Singham,” and references a post from TPF on X from December 21, 2021, which reads: “For months we’ve been the target of a campaign that alleges our funding comes from ‘dark money’ / A few years ago we met Roy Singham, a Marxist comrade who sold his company & donated most of his wealth to non-profits that focus on political education, culture & internationalism.”

On July 21, 2026, Representative Smith issued a subpoena to TPF, compelling the organization to produce documents and communications related to foreign-linked funding. TPF dismissed the Committee’s subpoena as “a political witch hunt, modeled on the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) led by Senator [Joe] McCarthy.”

Fox News and CBS News also reported in June and July 2026, respectively, that Singham is under criminal investigation by a grand jury in the Southern District of New York. Although the investigation began as a probe for potential FARA violations, the scope of the investigation into Singham has expanded to “a criminal tax probe over whether money was unlawfully funneled through nonprofits he controls and whether he lied on the tax forms for those nonprofits, known as ‘990s.’” CBS News reported on July 16, 2026, that Singham had not been charged and quoted him denying that he belonged to, worked for, took orders from or followed instructions from any political party or government.

Finances

In 2024, TPF reported nearly $12.9 million in net assets, with almost $7.1 million in revenue and $4.9 million in expenses. That was a substantial increase from $1.3 million in 2023. The increase in revenue in 2024 was driven by a $5 million grant from People’s Support Foundation Limited.

Revenue and expenses

Assets and liabilities

Compensation

According to TPF’s 2024 990 filing, the organization paid $787,840 in salaries, other compensation and employee benefits to its 14 employees—up from $620,969 in 2023. The highest paid individual staff member listed in TPF’s 2024 Form 990 is Layan Fuleihan, TPF’s Education Director, who received $70,000 in reportable compensation and an estimated $8,649 in other compensation from “the organization and related organizations.”

Board of Directors

Multiple individuals listed on TPF’s 2024 990 filing—as directors or staff—held positions at other organizations. Manolo De Los Santos served concurrently on the Board of Directors of the Justice and Education Fund and was listed as a researcher at Tricontinental. David Chung was the chair on the Board of Directors of the Justice and Education Fund. Jodie Evans served concurrently as the President of the Board of Directors of both The People’s Support Foundation and CODEPINK. Claudia De la Cruz also served on the Board of Directors of both CODEPINK and BreakThrough News. Finally, Layan Fuleihan was listed as a member of the Board of Directors of both the People’s Support Foundation and United Community Fund.

The People’s Forum’s 2024 990 filing listed the following individuals on its board of directors:

• William Baptist Jr. - Board Chair

• Claudia De la Cruz - Board Member

• Ben Wilkins - Board Member

• Kenia Alcocer - Board Member

• Jodene Evans - Secretary, Interim Treasurer

• Manolo De Los Santos - Executive Director

• David Chung - Organizing Director

• Ryan Hamby - General Manager

• Layan Fuleihan - Education Director

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Founded in 2026, the Civil Defense Institute is a nonpartisan investigative research organization. We research people, organizations and networks whose conduct undermines civil society and Americans’ freedom to participate in public life. Our work examines extremist and conspiracy-driven campaigns, foreign influence, organized harassment and the institutions that enable them.

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Overview

Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit research and publication organization. Conceptualized in 2015 at a meeting in Brazil, Tricontinental officially launched in 2017. Tricontinental is based in Northampton, Massachusetts. The organization identifies its mission as “building knowledge from the experience of social and cultural transformations wrought by popular struggles.”

Tricontinental’s executive director is Vijay Prashad, a nonresident senior fellow at Renmin University of China’s Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies. Neville Roy Singham is the chairman of Tricontinental’s International Advisory Board.

Tricontinental has been the subject of scrutiny by congressional committees that allege the organization has received support from “foreign-linked funds.” Tricontinental was subpoenaed by Congress in July 2026 for failing to produce documents regarding its communications and finances.

• Tax classification — 501(c)(3)

• Location — Northampton, MA

• Founded — 2017

• Annual revenue — $857,945 (FY 2024)

• EIN — 82-2882135

• Notable connections — Vijay Prashad, Executive Director; Celina Stein-Della Croce, Secretary; Maria del Pilar Troya, Chair; Neville Roy Singham, Chairman of the International Advisory Board

Activities

Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research is a research institution that produces newsletters and publications. Tricontinental’s mission is to “build a bridge between academic production and political and social movements.” Its approach is based on “Karl Marx’s 11th Thesis on Feuerbach,” which calls on philosophers not only to interpret but also to “change” the world, and Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci’s term, the “permanent persuader,” meaning “the person who is devoted to working to alleviate the grievances of the people.”

Along with its research, Tricontinental produces “a weekly newsletter, a monthly dossier, and various studies.” Tricontinental states its research is “rooted in the dialectics of the human experience” and “the principle of hope.” Its weekly newsletter highlights research from “left intellectuals” and institutes.

On Tricontinental’s website, its studies and dossiers are separated by region: “Asia,” “Pan Africa” and “Nuestra América” (Our America). Its work is published in English, Spanish, Portuguese and Hindi. Since 2023, the institute has co-published an international edition of Wenhua Zongheng, which it describes as “a leading journal of contemporary political and cultural thought in China.”

Structure and Affiliations

Related Organizations

Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research is filed under the name Tricontinental Ltd. In its filings between FY 2018 and FY 2024, Tricontinental listed no Schedule R related organizations.

Affiliations

Tricontinental’s website refers to the International Peoples’ Assembly, a network of more than 200 political and social organizations around the world, as a “partner organization.” Tricontinental’s “About Us” page explains that the International Peoples’ Assembly, a media network called Peoples Dispatch, a network of political schools called the Internationalist Collective of Political Education and the research institute Tricontinental emerged from a 2015 meeting in Brazil called “Dilemmas of Humanity.”

Peoples Dispatch, formally established in 2018, has since evolved into BreakThrough News, a nonprofit media and educational organization. In its first two public tax filings, Peoples Dispatch listed Vijay Prashad as president of its board of directors. Tricontinental has collaborated with BreakThrough News on social media. For example, Tricontinental’s Instagram account has promoted an episode of The China Report, a BreakThrough News podcast. The episode featured Tricontinental’s Asia co-coordinator, Tings Chak, and BreakThrough News’s Amanda Yee discussing whether the prime minister of Japan will “drag the country into a war with China?”

Xiong Jie, whom Tricontinental lists as a researcher, has also written for Dongsheng News and is a founder of Shanghai Maku Cultural Communications. He has coauthored articles with Tricontinental Executive Director Vijay Prashad.

In 2020, Singham emailed friends to introduce a newsletter now called Dongsheng News, The New York Times later reported. He described the newsletter as providing “unique progressive coverage of China that has been sadly missing.” As reported in the Times, Dongsheng News covers stories about China, including stories from Chinese state media, in English, French, Spanish and Portuguese. Dongsheng’s editors, also based in China, originally worked with Tricontinental, the Times added. In 2021, Tricontinental and the Maku Group, a Chinese media company that shares an office in Shanghai with Singham, agreed to “work with” a university in Shanghai to “tell China’s story.” The Times pointed out that the goal to “tell China’s story well” is a phrase commonly used for foreign propaganda.

Dongsheng’s U.S. address has previously been connected to the same New York address of The People’s Forum, which also shares its address with BreakThrough News.

Controversies

On August 5, 2023, the New York Times published an investigation that found Neville Roy Singham was at “the center” of a “lavishly funded influence campaign that defends China and pushes its propaganda.” Tricontinental was mentioned in the piece as one of the nonprofits that had received funds from Singham. In a statement to the Times, Prashad said, “We do not and have never received funds or instructions from any government or political party.”

Congressional Investigations

On September 15, 2025, House Oversight Committee chair James Comer (R-Ky.) and Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) asked the Treasury Department to investigate Singham and 19 entities allegedly associated with him. Tricontinental was fourth on the list, Dongsheng News was 10th and BreakThrough Media was 19th. BreakThroughBT Media Inc is the official name of BreakThrough News in its 990 filings.

Separately, on February 9, 2026, House Ways and Means Committee chair Jason Smith (R-Mo.) sent Vijay Prashad, Tricontinental’s executive director, a letter demanding that the organization turn over records. Rep. Smith called for Tricontinental’s communications with Singham and with foreign governments and organizations since 2017 as well as a list of grant recipients outside the United States. Smith also raised concerns about Tricontinental’s ties to Maku Group, a Chinese media company. His letter said Maku’s stated goal — to “tell China’s story well” — was a slogan frequently used in Chinese Communist Party (CCP) propaganda.

Tricontinental’s lawyer, Andrew Herman, declined the initial request in a February 23 letter. The committee narrowed its demands on May 4, and Herman objected again on May 18. According to the committee, neither response included any of the requested records. On July 21, the committee subpoenaed Tricontinental and gave it until August 7 to respond.

The accompanying letter cited a March 23, 2026 Fox News investigation that reported $278 million moved from Singham through three organizations to six nonprofits, including Tricontinental. Citing the same report, the committee said more than $16 million had gone from what it described as Singham’s donor-advised fund—a charitable account that allows donors to recommend grants—to Tricontinental between 2017 and 2022. The fund’s IRS filings show that it gave Tricontinental $16.76 million during that period. But the filings do not identify the donor behind those grants, so Civil Defense could verify the payments but not that Singham was the donor.

Fox News later reported, citing an unnamed source familiar with the committee’s investigation, that Tricontinental responded by the deadline. Fox News did not obtain a copy of the response. BreakThrough News received its own subpoena and was also represented by Herman. It responded on August 7, arguing that it did not have to comply with the subpoena as written.

Vijay Prashad

In a series of tweets from 2021, Vijay Prashad described how he met Roy Singham and praised him as “a Marxist with a massive software company!” Prashad then wrote, “[Singham] sold that company a few years ago and decided to give away all the money toward political education for a new generation of radicals.” Prashad was a guest at Singham’s wedding to Jodie Evans. Prashad and Singham both attended a Global South Academic Forum in 2025 co-sponsored by Tricontinental and East China Normal University.

Outside of Tricontinental, Prashad, along with Maku founder and Tricontinental researcher Xiong Jie, wrote an article disputing the U.S. government’s characterization of the government of China’s abuses against Muslims living in Xinjiang. Prashad and Xiong wrote, “The US government’s information warfare against China has produced the ‘fact’ that there is a genocide in Xinjiang.”

In a tweet from November 21, 2021, Prashad posted a photo of himself giving a thumbs up alongside his Tricontinental colleague Manolo De Los Santos and then-Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, with the caption, “sovereignty against imperialism.” The photo of Prashad and Maduro was posted on the same day as regional and local elections in Venezuela. Venezuela invited the European Union to send election observers for the first time in 15 years, but while the EU mission found improved electoral conditions, it also found structural deficiencies. These included arbitrary candidate disqualifications, unequal media access and extensive use of state resources. The U.S. State Department later referred to Venezuela’s election as “grossly skewed” by the regime.

Finances

Tricontinental reported $857,945 in total revenue and $3,745,069 in total expenses for calendar year 2024. It has filed a Form 990 for each year from 2018 through 2024.

The Goldman Sachs Philanthropy Fund, a donor-advised fund that Fox News alleged was used by Singham in the past, granted Tricontinental $40,000 in 2017, $860,000 in 2018, $12,450,000 in 2019 and $3,410,000 in 2022.

Revenue and expenses

Assets and liabilities

Compensation

Tricontinental’s 2024 Form 990 reports one compensated officer, Celina Stein-Della Croce, who, as secretary, received $82,166 in compensation from the organization. Total salaries, other compensation and employee benefits for the whole organization came to $104,640 in FY 2024.

The other two people named in the 2024 return report no compensation. Maria del Pilar Troya, the chair, and Vijay Prashad, listed as treasurer, each report five hours a week and $0 from the organization. Prashad has reported $0 in reportable compensation from Tricontinental in each of its seven filed years.

Board of Directors

Tricontinental’s 2024 990 filing reported the following individuals on its board of directors:

• Celina Stein-Della Croce, Secretary

• Maria del Pilar Troya, Chair

• Vijay Prashad, Treasurer

Tricontinental’s website lists the following individuals as members of the International Advisory Board:

• Neville Roy Singham, Chairman

• Carmen Navas

• Madhav Kumar Nepal

• Neuri Rossetto

• Abdallah Al-Harif

• Cosmas Musumali

• Manuel Bertoldi

• Stephanie Weatherbee Brito

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Founded in 2026, the Civil Defense Institute is a nonpartisan investigative research organization. We research people, organizations and networks whose conduct undermines civil society and Americans’ freedom to participate in public life. Our work examines extremist and conspiracy-driven campaigns, foreign influence, organized harassment and the institutions that enable them.

Subscribe now