They call it a witch hunt. Congress calls it the job they were elected to do. When tax-exempt outfits sitting on tens of millions from a Shanghai-based Marxist start screaming about McCarthyism the second someone asks where the money came from, the pattern is familiar.
Hide the sources. Attack the questioners. Wrap yourself in the First Amendment while the rest of the country is left wondering how foreign-linked cash keeps fueling chaos on American streets.
Two of the groups at the center of the House Ways and Means Committee’s investigation into Neville Roy Singham’s funding network have now formally refused to comply with congressional subpoenas. BreakThrough News, a pro-China media outlet based in New York, and People’s Forum Inc., a socialist activist hub that has helped organize anti-ICE rallies and other left-wing actions, sent letters through their attorneys accusing lawmakers of reviving “Red Scare” tactics.
In nearly identical language, the lawyers declared that “a witch-hunt is not a valid legislative purpose” and claimed the committee’s public statements echo “the language of the Red Scare.”
The subpoenas, issued July 21 by Chairman Jason Smith, R-Mo., demand records on how money from Singham’s network reached these organizations, the structure of that financing, and any foreign influence involved. A third group, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, which roots its work in “national liberation Marxism,” also responded by the August 7 deadline.
According to Fox News Digital, the committee has traced roughly $40.3 million from Singham-linked sources to the three groups: $22.44 million to People’s Forum, $16.76 million to Tricontinental, and $1.098 million to BreakThrough BT Media Inc., the parent of BreakThrough News.
Smith is not buying the persecution narrative. In a statement to Fox News Digital he made the point that should have been obvious from the start:
“Make no mistake: Compliance with a congressional subpoena isn’t optional, and the Committee will use all tools it has available to investigate whether foreign actors are exploiting our tax code to sow chaos and create division.”
He added that tax-exempt status “is a privilege, not a right.” After months of stonewalling, he said he is “disappointed but not surprised to see yet another attempt by tax-exempt organizations connected to Shanghai Singham to evade scrutiny.”
Singham is the 72-year-old American who sold his software company ThoughtWorks for an estimated $785 million in 2017 and relocated to Shanghai. Reporting by Fox News Digital and others has documented at least $278 million flowing from his network into six core U.S. nonprofits that promote socialist, communist, and pro-China causes.
The money often moved through shell companies and donor-advised funds in ways that obscured the original source. A parallel federal grand jury investigation in Manhattan is examining possible tax and foreign agent violations tied to the same network.
The attorneys for BreakThrough News and People’s Forum, including Mara Verheyden-Hilliard of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, argue the subpoenas are overbroad and seek information protected by the First Amendment, including journalism, political advocacy, and donor associations.
They compare the probe to the House Un-American Activities Committee of the 1940s and 1950s. They leave the door open to cooperation only if the committee narrows its demands. Yet the committee’s stated purpose has been consistent: examine whether existing tax laws adequately account for foreign-linked funding arrangements and whether legislative changes are needed to close gaps that allow such influence.
As Scripture warns, “For every one that doeth evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved.”
The groups insist the investigation is about punishing their politics rather than following the money. That claim collapses under the simplest scrutiny. Tax-exempt status carries obligations. When hundreds of millions of dollars tied to a man living under the Chinese Communist Party’s shadow flow into American nonprofits that regularly amplify anti-American messaging and help organize disruptive protests, Congress has every right—and duty—to ask hard questions.
Just the News previously reported that the subpoenas followed nearly a year of unsuccessful attempts to obtain voluntary cooperation. Smith’s office has been clear that the panel is looking at whether America’s charitable sector has been exploited to advance CCP influence operations inside the United States. Similar concerns have been raised about potential Foreign Agents Registration Act issues, though the Ways and Means investigation centers on the tax code.
The left’s sudden rediscovery of civil liberties is selective. These same networks have little problem when government power is turned against parents at school boards, pro-life activists, or traditional churches. But when the spotlight turns toward funding streams that trace back to Shanghai, the cry of “McCarthyism” appears on cue.
History remembers that many of the people McCarthy targeted were, in fact, working for Soviet interests. The lesson was not that scrutiny is illegitimate. The lesson was that foreign influence operations are real and demand sunlight.
Chairman Smith and his committee are providing that sunlight. The nonprofits can continue to posture about free speech while refusing basic transparency about their finances. Or they can produce the records and let the American people see for themselves whether tax-exempt privileges are being used to advance interests hostile to this country.
One path respects the rule of law. The other treats congressional oversight as optional. The choice is theirs. The consequences will not be.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
