They did not sneak in. They sat down on purpose.
On Tuesday, CodePink co-founder Medea Benjamin and two fellow activists walked into House Rayburn 2172 for a hearing titled “Trojan Horses: Covert Foreign Malign Influence Operations in America.” They planted themselves behind the witnesses in T-shirts backing the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Communist Party of Cuba. Then Benjamin turned to the official committee monitor, zoomed in on her own image, and started taking pictures. The whole stunt was built for the camera.
About thirty minutes in, at 2:39 p.m., South and Central Asia Subcommittee Chairman Bill Huizenga of Michigan stopped the hearing and had Capitol Police walk them out.
That is not a protest that got out of hand. That is a network that cannot help performing the thing Congress finally decided to name.
They’re coming in, trying to look like one thing, but we know that once they’re inside the gates that those doors are going to spring open, and there’s a whole other motivation for what they’re trying to do.
Huizenga told Fox News Digital the quiet part in one sentence. The horse is not wood anymore. It is a nonprofit, a Twitch stream, a campus rally, a pink T-shirt, and a donor-advised fund that looks American until you follow the wire.
Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.
The Show Was the Product
Huizenga did not treat the ejection as a surprise. He said the phones came out first. The crowd started filming. Then the disruption arrived on schedule.
This isn’t about discourse. This is about disruption. It’s all planned out. You see people in the crowd filming with their phones, getting ready. You knew something was going to happen because, all of a sudden, the phones would come out.
After police removed them, Benjamin was not finished. She posed by the House Foreign Affairs Committee placard. She pulled out a comb and fixed her hair before recording another clip. When Rep. Randy Fine of Florida left the room, she chased him down the hallway with questions while a teammate filmed. Two hours later CodePink posted a cleaned-up video and the wider network started passing it around. The hearing was the set. The hallway was the B-roll. Social media was the actual audience.
This is the same playbook that showed up a week earlier at the Institute of World Politics, when D.C. CodePink organizer Olivia DiNucci unfurled a “SANCTIONS KILL IN CUBA” banner and shouted about “global solidarity with Gaza and Cuba and ICE.” Security hauled her out. CodePink had the clip online within an hour and offered journalists “unbranded video footage.” Christine Balling, a former advisor to U.S. Special Operations Command South, said the quiet part then too.
CodePink – and other organizations like it – essentially act like Trojan horses. They burst in onto the scene, and they’re meant to disrupt and destroy from within.
Heritage Foundation fellow Mike Gonzalez put it even shorter before Tuesday’s hearing. He told Benjamin to stop shilling for a communist tyranny. She declined the invitation.
Shanghai Money With American Letterhead
The person behind so much of this is not a mystery. Neville Roy Singham is an American-born tech tycoon who lives in Shanghai, talks like a Marxist, and married CodePink co-founder Jodie Evans in Jamaica in 2017. Fox News Digital has traced hundreds of millions through that marriage and the nonprofits around it. One tally puts $285 million into six core groups beginning in 2017.
Another documents $278 million flowing into organizations that House Ways and Means Chairman Jason Smith has described as sowing discord inside the United States.
The named pipeline is ugly in its simplicity.
- About $22.44 million to the People’s Forum in New York
- About $16.76 million to Tricontinental
- About $1.33 million to CodePink
- About $1.098 million to BreakThrough BT Media
Those are not bake-sale totals. That is industrial-scale agitation dressed up as charity. In July, Smith’s Ways and Means Committee subpoenaed the People’s Forum, BreakThrough News, and Tricontinental after they produced, in the committee’s words, not a single responsive document. The groups called it a witch hunt and wrapped themselves in the First Amendment. Tax-exempt status is a privilege. It is not a cloak.
The Justice Department has gone further. In June, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York empaneled a grand jury to look at alleged money laundering, bank fraud, and wire fraud tied to Singham and the groups he funded. No charges have been filed.
Singham says he is acting on his own beliefs. Benjamin says CodePink does not take Chinese Communist Party money. Fine. Then register, produce the books, and stop acting shocked when Congress asks who is paying for the T-shirts.
Huizenga refused to treat the groups as separate little storefronts.
It’s a network. It’s not independent organizations or even people. You will see some of the same people at different organizations, rallies, or protests.
That network also includes the influencer circuit. Hasan Piker, the DSA-aligned Twitch star, posed in Havana with Evans on a CodePink Cuba trip that has drawn Treasury scrutiny. Huizenga has said adversarial nations use people like Piker as proxies to sell communism to Americans who think they are watching a homegrown rebel. The accent is American. The talking points are not.
The Horse Is Also Trying to Slow the Country Down
The T-shirt was theater. The policy damage is the point.
Sam Lyman, head of research at the Bitcoin Policy Institute and a former Treasury speechwriter, told the subcommittee that China-linked campaigns and Singham-backed organizers have helped stall or block about $23.6 billion in proposed U.S. AI and data-center investment. His research tracked 21 Party for Socialism and Liberation campaigns across 14 states.
The scoreboard is ten local moratoria, one permanent ban, and four rejected or withdrawn projects. Beijing lectures Americans about power bills and the climate while subsidizing its own compute. That is not environmentalism. That is industrial sabotage with a tote bag.
Rep. Darrell Issa of California said the quiet part about the other fashion of the moment, the sudden elite panic that America must “pace” its own machines.
Trojan horses are things like the announcement that we should slow down on AI. We are in a war in which the other side uses all the clandestine tools.
Fine called it cognitive warfare. Poison the platforms. Split the country. Make the protest look local. Keep the foreign principal off the chyron.
It’s a real issue, whether it’s on social media, influencers, protests, these things are all designed to destabilize our country.
Rep. Michael Baumgartner of Washington named the statute that already exists and almost never gets used with courage. If these groups are acting for foreign principals, they belong on a FARA filing at the Justice Department. If they will not file, refer them. America’s open system is a gift. It is also a door. A republic that will not ask who is standing in the doorway is not being tolerant. It is being looted.
Name the Who
Huizenga kept repeating one word because the rest of Washington has spent a decade pretending the word is rude.
Transparency. Transparency is the watchword. We really need to make sure that people know not only the why, but the who is behind all this.
That is not complicated. Americans can hold sincere views about war, sanctions, and police power. What they cannot do, and still call it grassroots, is take a Shanghai fortune, a Havana junket, and an Iranian slogan, then demand the cameras treat them as a church bake sale.
The ancient story did not end because Troy lacked feelings. It ended because Troy brought the gift inside the wall and refused to look in the belly.
And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove them.
Congress finally turned on the lights in Rayburn 2172. CodePink sat in the glow, smiled for the official feed, and then complained about the escort out. The horse is not outside the gates anymore. It has been living in the nonprofit corridor, the influencer queue, and the tax-exempt file cabinet. The only remaining question is whether the country will keep holding the door.
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.
