As CodePink co-founders Jodie Evans and Medea Benjamin ended their activist group’s pilgrimage to communist Cuba yesterday, their sojourn reflected a strategy years in the making: a “united front” aligning far-left, socialist and communist revolutionaries across borders. In late October 1944, Chinese Communist Party leader Mao Zedong delivered a speech, outlining a strategy to unite disparate groups under a shared ideological framework, telling followers: “For this struggle a broad united front is indispensable.”
More than two decades later, in 1966, Cuban leader Fidel Castro convened revolutionaries in Havana for the Tricontinental Conference, where he pledged “support to any revolutionary movement in any corner of the earth,” And more recently, an American-born Marxist businessman named Neville Roy Singham sold his technology company, Thoughtworks, for an estimated $785 million in 2017, and a Fox News Digital investigation reveals that he set about building his own version of Mao’s united front. The investigation, using large language models to analyze hundreds of pages of tax records, organizational messaging, online content and historical records, found Singham pumped at least $278 million into a layered network of 2,000 nonprofits, think tanks, activist groups and media organizations with shared messaging and ideology matching the communist ideals of Mao and Castro, operating across borders while appearing independent. What emerges isn’t a loose coalition but a tightly-knit system.
