You're Not An Activist. You're An Extra Playing A Part In Someone Else's Script.
How a billionaire with CCP ties turned Western protest into professional theatre - and why the performers have no idea they're on stage.
You showed up thinking you were the director. Turns out you’re background talent who doesn’t even get a credit.
I’ve got video. London. A paid protest leader organising a demonstration -Nate Friedman.
Not volunteer coordination. Not grassroots mobilisation. Paid. As in: someone’s getting a wage to manage you whilst you’re there thinking you’re being authentic.
That’s not activism. That’s casting.
And it’s not one isolated incident. It’s infrastructure. Professional. Funded. Coordinated across cities, causes, countries. The same operation running “Hands Off Venezuela” protests also ran pro-Palestine campus demonstrations. Same money. Same organisational structure. Different flags.
You thought you were grassroots. You’re astroturf. And someone else is billing for the installation.
The Production Company You’ve Never Heard Of.
The People’s Forum. Sounds harmless, doesn’t it? Community organisation. Civil society. Democratic participation.
It’s a funding vehicle bankrolling protest movements across the West with laser-focused precision on causes that just happen to align with Chinese Communist Party interests.
Venezuela? The People’s Forum organised the demonstrations defending Maduro’s regime. Palestine campus protests? Same organisation. It’s the same tour operator running different destinations.
They announce an event. Provide the banners. Coordinate transport. Deploy paid organisers to manage the crowd. You arrive, collect your placard, march where you’re told, chant what they’ve written, photograph yourself for Instagram, go home feeling authentic.
The performance was flawless. The script was tight. You just didn’t realise you were in a show.
Meet Your Executive Producer.
Neville Roy Singham. Billionaire. Former tech entrepreneur. Self-described Marxist.
When he was young, he joined a Black nationalist-Maoist group. The FBI investigated him in 1974 as “potentially dangerous” because of his “activity in groups engaged in activities inimical to the U.S.” That’s FBI-speak for “this one’s trouble.”
He founded ThoughtWorks in the late 1980s. Spent seven years as strategic technical consultant for Huawei—you know, the Chinese telecoms company the West keeps trying to ban. Sold his IT consulting firm in 2017 for $785 million. Then moved to Shanghai and started working directly with the Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda apparatus.
Normal retirement plan, obviously.
In 2017, Singham married Jodie Evans. Code Pink co-founder. Former Obama campaign bundler. Deep Democratic Party connections—the kind where you host fundraisers in Hollywood and everyone knows your name.
Before their marriage, Evans criticised China’s authoritarian government. Demanded they “stop brutal repression of their women’s human rights defenders.” Strong stuff. Principled stance.
Then she married a billionaire who works for Beijing.
Now? She calls Uyghurs “terrorists.” Denies evidence of forced labour camps. When asked if there’s anything negative she could say about China, she replied: “I can’t, for the life of me, think of anything.”
Since their marriage, Code Pink receives 25% of its funding from Singham-linked groups.
Funny how that works.
Singham’s funding network channels millions into organisations like The People’s Forum. His media ventures echo Beijing’s foreign policy talking points. This isn’t conspiracy theory. The New York Times investigated it. Indian authorities investigated it. The FBI is investigating it.
Your anger is useful. Your outrage is deployable. Your presence in the street achieves objectives you’re not even aware of.
That video from London? That’s what the ground operation looks like. Paid organisers managing crowds who think they’re leading a movement. The People’s Forum provides the infrastructure. Singham provides the funding. You provide the bodies.
How The Mechanism Actually Works.
Right. Let’s apply some proper analysis here, because this is where it gets interesting.
I use five diagnostic lenses to examine institutional dysfunction. Think of them as looking at the same crime scene from different angles. Each one shows you something the others miss.
First: Follow the institutional self-interest. The People’s Forum is an organisation. Staff. Salaries. Office space. Career progression. Those paid protest organisers? They need protests to keep happening. Their employment depends on sustained conflict, not resolution. There’s no incentive to actually solve anything. The worse things get, the more essential their services become.
That’s not conspiracy. That’s how organisations work. They exist to perpetuate themselves.
Second: Look at the 80/20 distribution. About 80% of this protest infrastructure is funded by 20% of sources—primarily Singham’s network. Within any protest, 20% do the actual organising whilst 80% show up thinking they’re grassroots participants. The vast majority of “spontaneous” effect is created by a tiny professional core.
That’s not organic. That’s industrial production.
Third: Never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence—but watch for pattern limits. Individual participants? Probably genuine. But coordinated mobilisation across multiple countries, consistent funding sources, systematic alignment with specific geopolitical interests?
That’s where the stupidity explanation breaks down. Patterns at scale aren’t accidents.
Fourth: Check if anyone’s been promoted beyond their competence. Professional activism rewards attendance numbers, media coverage, social media engagement. Not actual change. Not measurable improvement. Just performance metrics.
So you get professional protesters brilliant at organising events and useless at achieving stated objectives. Because achieving the objective would end the career. Bit of a problem, that.
Fifth: Every organisation eventually develops an oligarchy. Small group at the top making decisions. Everyone else thinking they’re participating in collective action. The People’s Forum presents as grassroots coordination.
What it actually is: billionaire funding filtered through professional managers controlling mass participation. You’re not part of a democratic movement. You’re in a hierarchy. You just can’t see it from where you’re standing.
Put those five lenses together and you’ve got the full picture. This isn’t grassroots uprising that happens to have funding. It’s top-down operation that’s very good at looking bottom-up.
What It Achieves.
Look at which movements get funded and when. Venezuela—strategic oil and US influence. Palestine—Middle East destabilisation. Campus protests—radicalising students and capturing institutional spaces. The timing coincides with geopolitical friction points.
Here’s what it delivers: Institutional exhaustion. Universities managing encampments instead of functioning. Police deployed to protests instead of actual crime. Media bandwidth consumed by demonstrations instead of investigating Beijing. Trust erosion. Professional operations masquerading as grassroots poison the well for genuine activism. Narrative control. Fund the discourse and you control its boundaries. Democratic discreditation. Make Western societies look chaotic whilst promoting authoritarian alternatives.
Is that the intended objective? All of them? Some of them? Just opportunistic chaos-funding?
Here’s my framework: Is it practical? Yes—measurably happening. Is it logical? Multiple coherent objectives, all plausible. What’s the likely outcome? That’s where certainty ends.
Maybe it’s strategic destabilisation. Maybe it’s testing infrastructure. Maybe it’s narrative inoculation—fund enough movements and genuine dissent gets dismissed as manufactured. Maybe it’s all of them. Maybe there’s a strategy document I haven’t seen.
But here’s what I can prove: You’re attending protests organised by paid leaders, funded by a billionaire with CCP ties, advancing objectives you haven’t examined, participating in a production where you don’t know the script.
The Credits You Never See.
Cards on the table.
I can show you the money trail. I can show you the organisational structure. I can show you the paid leaders, the shell nonprofits, the CCP connections. What I can’t show you is the PowerPoint presentation from the strategy meeting where they decided which specific outcome they’re aiming for.
Could be all of them. Could be opportunistic—fund the chaos, see what breaks, exploit the opportunities.
Doesn’t matter. The mechanism works regardless.
You’re showing up to events organised by people you don’t know, funded by money you can’t trace, advancing objectives you haven’t questioned. The billionaire got what he paid for. The organisers got their wage. Beijing got another day of Western attention focused inward instead of outward.
And you? You got the Instagram post. You felt authentic. You made your statement.
Worth it?
Whilst someone else called every shot from casting to final cut.
Further Reading: The Columbia University Connection.
Singham’s network isn’t just funding street protests. It’s embedded in institutions. Operating inside them.
Columbia University matters because it was ground zero for the 2024 campus encampment protests that spread across America. When Columbia’s protests made global headlines, Singham’s operatives weren’t observers. They were organisers.
But here’s the deeper play: Columbia isn’t just any university. It’s where America manufactures its elite. Presidents, Supreme Court justices, senators, governors—they went to Columbia. This is old money. Establishment families. Future decision-makers.
Singham isn’t recruiting street activists. He’s capturing the next generation of American power. Get them young, radicalise them through “social justice centres” embedded in the divinity school, send them out into government, judiciary, corporate boards carrying Beijing-aligned worldviews.
The children of American establishment, ideologically shaped by CCP-funded operatives, before they inherit their parents’ seats in Congress.
That’s not protest funding. That’s long-term institutional capture.
In August 2024, the New York Post revealed that nine of fourteen staff members at Columbia University’s Kairos Centre for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice have direct connections to Singham or his nonprofits. They’re being paid through his Justice & Education Fund whilst working inside an Ivy League divinity school.
Let that sink in. Paid operatives. Inside Columbia. Organising.
The Kairos Centre’s executive director led a political discussion at Singham’s wedding. The operations director is treasurer of The People’s Forum and lists Singham as his mentor. Another staffer co-hosts a podcast called “Gravediggers Unite!” referencing the Communist Manifesto’s claim that capitalism will produce “its own gravediggers.”
These same people helped organise the Columbia encampment protests.
This isn’t distant funding. This is institutional capture. They’re not outside throwing rocks at the gates. They’re inside, teaching the courses, running the centres, shaping the curriculum.
Sen. Marco Rubio stated: “We must stop this infiltration of our education system.”
Good luck with that.
Read the full investigation: China-linked tech tycoon Neville Singham has secret group of operatives at Columbia University
John Langley is an independent blogger and satirical commentator operating thealmightygob.com, applying his analytical framework to institutional dysfunction and political theatre across the UK, and around the planet.