On June 4, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced new economic sanctions on several Cuban organizations and officials, specifically citing the threat of communist “influence operations” on American national security. Among other effects, the sanctions prohibit “U.S. persons” from “the making of any contribution or provision of funds, goods, or services by, to, or for the benefit of any blocked person and the receipt of any contribution or provision of funds, goods, or services from any such person.”
On Fox News, journalist Peter Schweizer quickly connected those sanctions to a name that wasn’t mentioned in the State Department’s sanction order:
Neville Roy Singham is sort of an international man of mystery, not typically granting interviews or maintaining a high public profile (with a very few exceptions), but he’s also a recognizable social type whose background and political views aren’t a surprise. Like the gentry socialist New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Singham is the son of a foreign-born leftist academic, a political scientist who was a critic of colonialism. Archibald Singham was born in Burma to Sri Lankan parents, then emigrated to the United States to attend and then teach at American universities, spending his adult life expressing distaste for America. You can watch video of Archibald being a predictable and pompous far-left dullard here, if you feel the need.
Archibald’s son Neville was born in Connecticut and attended college at the top-ranked HBCU Howard University, where Archibald taught for a while. As a young software engineer, Neville Singham founded the software design and technology consulting company Thoughtworks, which now makes a point of saying that their radical founder has had no involvement in the company since he sold it in 2017.
The sale of the company is an important inflection point to notice in Signham’s life. While the terms of the deal were initially not disclosed, reporters from the New York Times would later write that they had seen the private deal sheet and could name the sale price: $785 million. Singham is often described as a billionaire – as the Government Accountability Institute does in the post embedded above – but Forbes doesn’t list him as one, and the sale of Thoughtworks appears to be the only significant source of his personal wealth.
Also in 2017, Singham married Code Pink co-founder Jodie Evans, whose Facebook page celebrates her marriage to “this adorable comrade.” Note the social fact of people with at least a nine-figure net worth who call each other “comrade,” the phenomenon that Tom Wolfe called “radical chic.”
In one of the only pieces published under his own byline, Singham does the same, using “comrade” as a term of affection: Discussing his membership in the League Of Revolutionary Black Workers, he mentioned “the fantastic work of comrade Carolyn Baker.” (Regarding the byline, Singham goes by his middle name.)
Singham’s wedding in Jamaica was attended by both a co-founder of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream and the author of the Vagina Monologues, conforming precisely to the cultural format of gentry radicalism. As the New York Times reported, the wedding ceremony was preceded by a panel discussion with Marxist intellectuals.
One other thing appears to have happened in 2017, though Singham has never publicly discussed the exact timing or circumstances: He relocated to China, establishing a home and an office in what’s usually reported to be Shanghai. A red-diaper baby turned ex-CEO with a new fortune and a radical wife, Singham apparently turned to full-time activism from his new home in the People’s Republic of China.
Spending American-made money from Shanghai as a far-left activist, Singham supports a wide range of narrative-influencing operations. As a philanthropist, he seems to be mostly a storyteller, believed to fund (for example) the Peoples Dispatch website. Covering global news, that site tells stories about American imperial depravity, the cruelty of global capitalism, and the brave international left that rises to confront them both. Sample of a recent headline: “South Africa’s Conference of the Left issues a bold call for working-class unity.”
You can call Singham a bridge that connects us across our partisan divide, because he increasingly provokes a nervous reaction on the at-least-somewhat-sane American left and right. A long investigative story from the New York Times in 2023 ran under this headline: “A Global Web of Chinese Propaganda Leads to a U.S. Tech Mogul.” That story warned that Singham funded “a financial network that stretches from Chicago to Shanghai and uses American nonprofits to push Chinese talking points worldwide.”
Similar reporting from Fox News warns that organizations funded by Singham “may be sowing discord in the U.S. by promoting communist propaganda and anti-American rhetoric.”
Similar reporting has appeared in India.
Reviewing the public records of American organizations funded by Singham, the Times described them as “UPS store nonprofits” that listed shipping company storefronts as their business addresses. You can easily take a tour through those nonprofits yourself, looking at their funding and purpose through the window provided by their publicly available financial reporting.
The Justice and Education Fund last reported that they received contributions totaling $5,574,289 in 2024, describing their work like this:
TO RAISE AWARENESS THROUGH EDUCATION AND DISSEMINATION OF INFORMATION ABOUT PRESSING PROBLEMS OF SOCIETY AND HOW TO EFFECT SOCIAL CHANGE. THE ORGANIZATION CONDUCTS ACTIVITIES DESIGNED TO EDUCATE AND INFORM THE PUBLIC ABOUT ISSUES AFFECTING SOCIETIES WORLDWIDE AND THEIR IMPACT ON POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC SYSTEMS.
Political storytelling, the thing Rubio describes as “influence operations.” Strangely enough, one of their other reported activities is “INSTRUCTION IN MAKING SOAP.”
The People’s Forum, Inc. last reported having received contributions totaling $5,789,498 in 2024, with Jodene Evans – better known as Jodie, Singham’s wife – listed as the “principal officer.” Mercifully skipping the use of all-caps, that organization describes itself like this:
People’s Forum, Inc. hosts accessible educational programming that 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. Their education programming includes topics such as: history, political economy, social theory, racial/gender/LGBTQIA/immigrant justice, collective strategies for organizing, liberation theology, and many others – with an internationalist focus.
Again, political storytelling: left-intellectual education about the dispossessed.
Both organizations list Manolo De Los Santos as a senior staff member. As an example of the people allegedly funded by Singham, you can read about De Los Santos in the New York Post: professional radical, frequent visitor to Cuba, career protest organizer, big fan of Hamas.
The provable picture about Singham is that a man who grew up with radical parents made a bunch of money and then began funding organizations that represent his sincere and long-held political views. But the frequent media framing about Singham’s alleged role in “Chinese propaganda” could become a legal problem for him if it turns out to be true. Federal prosecutors routinely bring charges against people who engage in fairly simple foreign-influenced media work without registering as foreign agents, and a search of the Justice Department’s FARA database suggests that Singham hasn’t registered as an agent of the Chinese government.
Cases brought under the Foreign Agents Registration Act for publication and advocacy work are frequently criticized on First Amendment grounds, and the available evidence suggests that Singham funds the expression of opinions with his own money. A growing number of critics depict his philanthropic efforts in darker terms. The potential outcome of that intensifying scrutiny remains unclear.
