According to Fox News Digital, if you live in Troy, New York and you're annoyed that a license-plate reader is cataloguing every time you drive to the grocery store, congratulations — you are a footsoldier in Beijing's cognitive warfare against the United States. That is the argument, stated nearly that plainly, in a new investigation Fox published this week. Ron DeSantis ordered those same cameras pulled from Florida highways last year, so this is going to get complicated fast.
The Investigation, Such As It Is
Fox News Digital published what it calls a first-on-Fox investigation finding that the activist network behind 'No Kings' protests, Tesla Takedown demonstrations, and anti-ICE rallies has now turned its attention to data-center construction and Flock Safety license-plate readers. The story draws on a new report called 'The Compute War at Home,' commissioned by an Alexandria, Virginia outfit called Consumer Action for a Strong Economy, a free-markets nonprofit. The social media analysis inside the report was done by Arken Intelligence, a Washington, D.C. tech firm.
That's the sourcing. A free-markets advocacy group commissioned a report from a tech firm, and Fox News ran it as an investigation. Keep that in mind as we go.
The Singham Connection (Real, If Overstretched)
The throughline Fox is pulling here involves Neville Roy Singham, a Shanghai-based tech millionaire whose network of nonprofits and media outlets has genuinely attracted scrutiny from Congress and federal investigators. Organizations in his orbit — including CodePink, the Party for Socialism and Liberation, the People's Forum, and ANSWER Coalition — have appeared at protests across a remarkable range of causes over the past two years. That part is documented and real.
Fox reports that CodePink developed a national campaign against data centers, that Liberation News amplified local wins against data-center projects, and that the messaging across roughly 70 chapters of the Party for Socialism and Liberation was nearly identical. None of those organizations have been charged with any crimes. Singham and the groups deny taking direction from any foreign government.
So yes, there are left-wing organizations with foreign-funding questions that have been active in these protests. That is a legitimate thing to report. The leap Fox makes from there is where things get slippery.
The 14-Fold Social Media Spike (The Sexy Number That Needs Context)
The report's most concrete finding is that social media posts mentioning both Flock cameras and data centers jumped from 639 posts in a ten-week period to 9,009 posts in the following ten weeks — a 14.1-fold increase — after a burst of organizing activity around May 19. Fox presents this as evidence of coordinated influence operations.
Here's the part that lands with a thud: according to the same report, among posts that could be given a political classification, 81 percent came from right-wing, conservative, or libertarian accounts. The report interprets this as evidence that the left-wing organizers successfully infected the right. That is one reading. Another reading is that opposition to surveillance cameras is genuinely, organically popular across the political spectrum and that a 14-fold increase in posts might reflect, say, actual news coverage, or the fact that more cities started debating Flock contracts, or that people on the right were already mad about this for their own reasons.
Ron DeSantis, Chinese Asset
Fox notes, to its credit, that the report itself acknowledges opposition to Flock cameras has become 'genuinely bipartisan.' Florida Governor Ron DeSantis ordered license-plate readers pulled from state highways. Texas has moved to restrict the technology. Republican Senator Josh Hawley has launched a formal investigation into Flock over surveillance concerns.
So the article's own sourcing establishes that the governor of Florida and a Republican senator are doing the exact same thing the allegedly Beijing-influenced left-wing activists are pushing for. The article does not pause on this irony for very long. Rob Joyce, introduced as a former NSA cybersecurity director, is quoted explaining that 'foreign actors don't need Americans to become pro-China' — they just need them 'arguing for the outcomes Beijing wants.' Under that framework, DeSantis and Hawley are, at minimum, useful idiots for the Chinese Communist Party. Fox does not make that connection explicit. Funny, that.
What This Story Is Actually About
The Fox framing here is doing a specific and familiar job: taking a genuinely complex story about foreign influence operations, activist infrastructure, and legitimate civil liberties concerns, and collapsing it into a unified threat narrative. Worry about surveillance cameras? China. Oppose a data center in your county? China. Attend a protest? Probably China.
The influence-operation concerns around Singham's network deserve serious journalism. Congressional investigators have been looking at this for real reasons. But 'serious journalism about foreign influence operations' and 'any opposition to surveillance technology is Chinese cognitive warfare' are not the same story. Fox is writing the second one while gesturing at the first one for credibility.
The Dingo Take
You are supposed to believe that the throughline connecting CodePink, a protest in Troy, New York, Ron DeSantis, Josh Hawley, and 81 percent of right-wing social media posts is a Shanghai billionaire pulling strings for Beijing. That is the theory. Written down like that, it does not obviously hold together.
The Singham network is a real story. Foreign actors do run real influence operations, and some of the organizations involved in these protests have funding relationships that deserve scrutiny. None of that is invented. But 'some protests have been attended by groups with questionable foreign ties' has been stretched here into 'opposition to license-plate readers is a Chinese plot,' and those are not the same claim. When 81 percent of your social media surge is coming from conservatives and libertarians who were already skeptical of government surveillance before any left-wing organizer showed up, you have described a coincidence of interests, not an operation.
The tell is always who the framing conveniently protects. This story implies that concern about mass surveillance is something Americans only feel because foreign actors tricked them into it. That is an extraordinarily useful argument for anyone who wants to keep the surveillance infrastructure running without public debate. A free-markets nonprofit commissioned this report. Fox News ran it. Make of that what you will.
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