The founder of the left-wing group Code Pink, whose members are best known for screaming, yelling, and waving signs to disrupt congressional hearings, once criticized China's oppressive communist regime. That was before she married socialist millionaire Neville Roy Singham.
In 2015, Code Pink founder and former Democratic adviser Jodie Evans said her group demands that "China stop brutal repression of their women's human rights defenders" and posted a photo with a Chinese dissident, according to a damning New York Times exposé published Saturday.
After Evans married Singham in 2017, though, she—and the ostensibly "anti-war" Code Pink—took a hard pro-China turn. She now portrays the authoritarian regime as "a defender of the oppressed and a model for economic growth without slavery or war," the Times wrote.
That turn came as two groups linked to Singham poured money into Code Pink's coffers to the tune of $1.4 million, according to the Times. All told, Singham has given "hundreds of millions of dollars" to a vast network of far-left nonprofits that "echo Chinese government talking points, echo one another, and are echoed in turn by the Chinese state media," the Times wrote. None of them has registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
Singham, who has "long admired Maoism," himself lives in China, where he "works closely with the Chinese government media machine and is financing its propaganda worldwide," according to the Times.
Just last month, Singham "attended a Chinese Communist Party propaganda forum," where he jotted in a "notebook adorned with a red hammer and sickle," the paper found.
While the Times prided itself on being "the first to unravel" Singham's network, other wealthy leftists have long meddled in American politics. Swiss billionaire Hansjörg Wyss, for example, has evaded U.S. bans on foreign donations to fund the shadowy left-wing network Arabella Advisors, the Washington Free Beacon reported.
Singham's wife, Evans, has embraced her husband's pro-Beijing attitudes since their marriage. She has gone so far as to defend China's genocide of the Uyghur people in the Xinjiang province, calling the Uyghurs "terrorists."
Code Pink activists in June showed up at the office of Rep. Seth Moulton (D., Mass.), where they "denied evidence of forced labor in Xinjiang and said the congressman should visit and see how happy people were there," the Times reported.
A Times analysis found that "Chinese state media accounts have retweeted people and organizations in Mr. Singham's network at least 122 times since February 2020." Most of those people and organizations have connections either to Code Pink or to another of Singham's pro-China groups, No Cold War.
When a YouTube commenter asked Evans in June if "there was something negative you could tell us about China," the Code Pink founder answered, "I can't, for the life of me, think of anything."
Evans later came up with one complaint: The Chinese, she said, "don't take American credit cards."