China-linked tech tycoon Neville Singham has secret group of operatives at Columbia University
The notorious Shanghai-based Marxist millionaire behind a sprawling anti-U.S and anti-Israel disinformation network has a cadre of operatives embedded at Columbia University, The Post has learned.
Neville “Roy” Singham poured the huge fortune he made off the $785 million, 2017 sale of his software company, ThoughtWorks, into at least a dozen nonprofits, including the communist People’s Forum in Midtown.
The groups helped organized many of the protests that raged across the city and nation since Hamas’ Oct. 7 raid on the Jewish state.
Documents The Post obtained show multiple apparatchiks from these organizations work at the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice, operating under the auspices of Union Theological Seminary, the affiliated divinity school of Columbia.
Sen. Marco Rubio, who has urged the Justice Department to probe the Singham network, said the gravy train has to end for groups that advance the interests of America’s enemies.
“I have warned of efforts by Communist China to sow discord in the United States, including Neville Singham’s role in it,” said Rubio (R-Florida).
“We must stop this infiltration of our education system.”
In total, nine of the 14 staff members listed on the center’s website have a connection to Singham or to one of his groups. They include:
- Rev. Liz Theoharis, Kairos’ executive director, who led a political discussion at Singham and Evans’ wedding. In her writing, Theoharis has attacked American efforts to secure its supply chains and access to computer chips as “further inflaming a rising cold war with China.”
- Chris Caruso, operations director for the Kairos Center, treasurer and member of the board of directors at the People’s Forum — and Theoharis’ husband. Filings by the Justice & Education Fund, another Singham nonprofit, list him as a “curriculum developer” with a $72,800 salary. He formerly held a job at ThoughtWorks, and named Singham as one of his mentors in his graduate school dissertation.
- Ciara Taylor, cultural strategies organizer and educator at Kairos, previously served as cultural strategy director for CODEPINK, an anti-military group founded by Singham’s wife Jodie Evans, which the tech tycoon has showered with nearly $1.5 million, records show. The Justice & Education Fund’s disclosures listed her as a curriculum developer with a $60,800 salary, and she has identified herself repeatedly as a co-founder of the People’s Forum. She has also hosted two podcasts —including one called “It’s Not You, It’s Capitalism.”
- William “Willie” Baptist serves simultaneously as coordinator of poverty scholarship and leadership development at Kairos and chairman of the board at the People’s Forum, where he also worked as an instructor at various seminars on radical politics. He also co-hosts a podcast with Taylor called “Gravediggers Unite!”— a title which in its inaugural episode Baptist declared “we are referencing the manifesto of the Communist Party,” which claims capitalism will produce “its own gravediggers.”
- Charon Hribar, the Kairos director of cultural strategies and also a People’s Forum instructor. In a post co-authored with Baptist, the two lamented the characterization of the Soviet Union as totalitarian, and claimed “we have for a long time been kept [in] ignorance of these processes, particularly those that actually took place and reconstructed Russia, Vietnam, China, and Cuba.”
“It appears that the ‘foxes are in the hen house,’” observed Alex Goldenberg, director of intelligence at the Network Contagion Research Institute, an independent New Jersey center that monitors extremism on both sides of the political spectrum.
“The People’s Forum and other Singham-linked entities, such as Breakthrough News, were on the ground during the Columbia encampment unrest.”
Located inside Hastings Hall on Broadway in Morningside Heights, Kairos launched in 2004 as the “Poverty Initiative,” intended to train leaders and faith liaisons for various left-wing movements.
Today, it runs The Poor People’s Campaign, which advocates pulling money from the defense budget to push toward domestic initiatives.
It also operates the People’s Church of the Poor, which over Easter hosted Israel-bashing lefty “Squad” member, Rep. Cori Bush (D-M.O.), who gushed: “I just want you to know how much I admire, I deeply admire you, and I appreciate all the work, the commitment to humanity, that you all are able to accomplish.”
Roughly $2 million in donor funds have flowed through Union Theological Seminary into the center over the past decade, tax documents show, though The Post could not find a gift from a Singham-linked organization with Kairos’ name on it.
But following the tumultuous semester at the Ivy, Kairos updated its website to identify its fiscal sponsor as the Tides Center, a half-billion-dollar incubator of various left-wing causes — part of the Tides Network into which liberal billionaires George Soros and Mackenzie Scott, the ex-wife of Jeff Bezos, have poured millions of dollars.
