Most people know her as the Mayor of Los Angeles, and some remember her botched handling of this year's wildfire crisis.
But there’s a lot more beneath the surface. Let’s dig in. ⬇️
1️⃣ Karen Bass once served as Vice Chair of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a U.S. government-funded NGO notorious for meddling in foreign governments under the banner of "promoting democracy."
Translation: soft power regime change.
2️⃣ NED has been exposed repeatedly for funding color revolutions, pushing Western-aligned NGOs, and helping topple governments that don’t play ball with U.S. interests.
Bass was right in the middle of it.
3️⃣ And then there’s the scholarship scandal.
LA County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas got federally indicted for receiving a scholarship from USC’s School of Social Work and allegedly trading favors.
Bass? She received the exact same scholarship.
But no charges. Not even a slap on the wrist.
4️⃣ Why the double standard?
When you're part of the machine... when you’ve got D.C. connections, NGO backing, and ties to the intel-adjacent nonprofit world: you get protection.
She’s not a DEI figurehead - she's in the system.
5️⃣ This thread will walk through her career, her quiet rise through soft power institutions, and how she became a key player in the globalist swamp.
Big thanks to @HTWardish for the lead.
Let’s get into it. (Patience as I construct this thread live)🔻
Karen Bass' political career started early. She volunteered in Robert Kennedy's political campaign in middle school.
She studied philosophy at San Diego University from 1971 to 1973, but she was already a full-fledged political activist by then.
At the age of only 19 years old, she was already visiting Cuba every six months as a part of a group called the Venceremos Brigade. These visits would continue to the mid-1970s.
The Venceremos Brigade was a joint effort from the Castro government - she was working at the behest of a quasi-governmental NGO backed by Castro.
If you are asking yourself why and how so many activists are raised - this is a common pattern. They "go after" extremist university students and these students become NGO careerists.
This is why a top priority of the Trump administration must be to kneecap NGO and foreign influence in colleges.
Bass was so indoctrinated in Castro doctrine that she ended up embracing the more authoritarian aspects of his ideology and ironically rejecting the hippie movement.
In the late 1980s, Bass founded Community Coalition in South Los Angeles - more commonly known as "CoCo."
Their EIN is 954298811, and they have since grown to possess 31 million in assets and get 9 million dollars in revenue. About 3 million of that is government grants.
CoCo's mission statement: community organizing through "building grassroots leadership." Their main service appears to be holding townhalls. The vast majority of their expenditures are in salaries and benefits.
And, yes, they receive federal grants. All the while drug use in LA has skyrocketed.
Bass' leadership in Coco would see her be elected to represent California's 47th Assembly District. She became the first Black woman to serve in CA state legislature.
She was re-elected in 2006 and 2008, and then her term limit expired.
She became appointed as majority whip in 2005- quite a prominent position early on. I'm trying to dig into that.
Bass became elected to the US House of Representatives in 2011, where she would stay until 2022. While in the House of Representatives, she served as a ranking member of the Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health, Global Human Rights and International Organizations.
A biography notes she traveled to Africa 30+ times. In short, she never stopped being a global activist - this doubtlessly made her an attractive target for NED.
In 2018, she was a featured speaker at the World Movement for Democracy, which probably deserves a thread all on its own as it was founded by NED. @MikeBenzCyber
@MikeBenzCyber Bass served on NED from 2014, just three years after she became elected to the House of Representatives - which is a remarkably short timeframe. Even all the more startling as appointments are typically Senators. Representatives are not appointed nearly often enough.
@MikeBenzCyber Bass' long tenure in NED allowed her to become Vice Chair in 2021, while being an active member of Congress.
As a reminder, NED receives 350+ million dollars annually, almost all of it federally taxpayer funded.
@MikeBenzCyber Bass was a never passive member of NED - she was deeply involved in democracy building throughout the world.
@MikeBenzCyber Bass also went on diplomatic trips with the Obama administration.
@MikeBenzCyber In 2022, a federal corruption case indicted Los Angeles City Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas. His crime: steering money into the university in exchange for his son receiving a scholarship at the same univeristy.
@MikeBenzCyber The other recipient of scholarship bribes? Karen Bass.
She was not investigated at all. Not even on their radar.
@MikeBenzCyber She was considered HUD Secretary for the Biden administration. Instead, she nominated the person who would become the actual HHS Secretary - California Attorney General Xavier Becerra.
That's right. Bass is responsible for Xavier Becerra being in the HHS Secretary position.
@MikeBenzCyber Let's put it this way: Xavier Becerra prioritized human traffickers above child safety. He pushed placement of children so aggressively that his own ORR Director, Cindy Huang, herself a career migrant activist tried to blow the whistle on him. Instead, she resigned under duress.
Overall, Karen Bass has a mild-mannered image. Her mishandling of the LA Wildfires caused her to be labeled as a DEI mayor.
I think that is a mischaracterization. She is terrifyingly effective at what she does best: leftist activism. She is entrenched into the system at a global level.
She mishandled the wildfires not because she was incompetent, but she doesn't care about LA residents.
@MikeBenzCyber In fact, her Ghana trip during the wildfires that she was so criticized for ?
She wasn't there to party. She was there as a representative of the Biden administration to honor the inauguration of their new President!
@MikeBenzCyber TL;DR, Karen Bass was raised from cradle to be a part of the globalist network - and continues to ignore the actual needs of LA residents to promote leftism at a global stage.
/ Thread end.
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🚨 THREAD: What do Mike Pence, Mike Pompeo, John Bolton, and Elaine Chao have in common? They were all paid by a Marxist-Islamist Iran group that was designated as terrorist until 2012.
No, this is not a joke.
Mojahedin-e-Khalq (MEK) was founded by leftist Islamists to oppose the western-backed Pahlavi, and participated in his 1979 overthrow. Khomeini barred MEK afterwards. MEK was implicated in multiple bombings, including that of Americans, and remained an openly armed group until 2003.
Since they got de-listed as a terrorist organization in 2012 on procedural grounds, MEK and their fronts have been actively recruiting US politicians selling themselves as a moderate alternative to Khomeini. But RAND Corporation says MEK meets the qualifications for a cult, citing criteria such as forcing their members to work 16+ hour days and forced divorces.
Polls of the Iranian-American community shows that they do NOT accept Rajavi, MeK's leader, as legitimate, with a 46-point net disapproval - numbers nearly as bad as the existing regime.
As Pence's former Chief of Staff, Marc Short, has already weighed against Trump deal, it's helpful to recall this.
Receipts below. As always, patience as I pull the thread together.👇
In an interview with @ItsYourGov , National Council of Resistance of Iran director and MeK representative Alireza Jafarzadeh was asked directly: "Is your group involved in any sort of lobbying or payments for speeches to prominent individuals such as Mike Pompeo?"
NCRI-US said "absolutely not."
@ItsYourGov Jafarzadeh is the registrant contact on FARA Registration #6171 for NCRI-US for Iran, on behalf of MeK.
🧵 THREAD: Shashank Joshi, a foreign think tank careerist, has a 16-year record of attacking US foreign policy... and now he's lecturing our military leadership on how to take the oath. Why does he still have a work visa?
He's an Indian national who arrived in April and is already the loudest critic of the Pentagon on social media.
The Economist's new Washington Bureau Chief — an Indian national on a visa who just arrived in April — went on a Canadian national security podcast literally titled "The Problem of America" and said this about US military operations:
"They have attacked scores of small boats in the Pacific and the Caribbean. They've killed dozens of people in a campaign that is, by most accounts, quite illegal and contrary to international law."
That's Shashank Joshi, @shashj . Defence editor turned bureau chief. Two months in the country and he's already built a 16-year paper trail calling American power "malevolent," "predatory," and "quite illegal" — while sitting on the advisory board of a UK think tank funded by the European Commission, BAE Systems, and the US State Department.
And he's now lecturing our military leadership on what it means to take the oath.
I have the receipts.
As always, patience as I pull together the thread. 👇
Shashank Joshi has been in DC for two months, and is already lecturing our military officials on what their oaths mean… even though his entire record is criticizing the US military.
He's an Indian national. Cambridge. Enrolled in a Harvard PhD program... but his public profiles list no doctorate, suggesting he dropped out. Senior Research Fellow at RUSI, the world's oldest defence think tank. Then a stint at the Tony Blair Institute. The Economist hired him as Defence Editor in 2018. Promoted to Washington Bureau Chief, April 2026.
Everyone has their opinion on the Iran war or Israel. Maybe that opinion is enough to deter them from supporting Trump. I may not agree with it, but I understand where it comes from and it's a free country.
But when that turns into allying with Communists - that's when I have to speak up.
Institutional left-wing populism IS Communism. I'm not using it as a slur as in everyone to the left is a Communist. I mean it literally.
I'm talking about PSL, CODEPINK, Singham groups. The movements on the left that are anti-globalist are overwhelmingly Marxist.
🚨🧵 BREAKING: Former DHS Chief Miles Taylor's prank site collected death threats against the President and 4,000+ people's personal data. Then exposed them through all an open API. 🚨
Two days ago, I showed you how Miles Taylor's GTFO ICE site exposed 17,000+ people's data on an open API. That site halted sign-ups and is still "under construction."
But Taylor's organization DEFIANCE[.]org didn't just build one leaky site. They built two. On the same server.
UndoTrump[.]org — launched April 1, 2026 as an "April Fools' joke" — collects names, emails, and political messages from people signing up for fictional "Removal Parties" at government buildings. The White House Ballroom. The Kennedy Center. The DOJ. Battleships.
4,000+ signup records. 3,300+ unique people. Same vulnerability. Same API. Same zero authentication.
And this one has death threats against a sitting President in the database.
The man who was deputy chief of staff for the department that houses the Secret Service couldn't secure a sign-up form. Again.
As always, patience as I pull together the thread. 👇
Here's a video of Miles himself soliciting PII in sign-ups. He implies he's not saving the user data... but he did.
Same server. Same IP address. 34.111.179.208. Google Cloud Platform. Same React 19 frontend. Same Express.js backend. Same registrar. Domains registered 13 days apart.
This wasn't two mistakes. This was one codebase deployed twice. Name.com
🧵🚨 BREAKING: Miles Taylor: "Anonymous," former DHS Chief of Staff, Google security executive launched a website called GTFO ICE that collects your full name, email, phone number, and zip code to join an anti-ICE "rapid response network." And publishes the user infromation via a public API. 🚨
17,662 people have signed up.
The sign-up data is exposed on a public REST API. No true authentication. No rate limiting. Full records: names, emails, phone numbers, zip codes, timestamps.
The man who ran the third-largest federal department (250,000 employees, $60 billion budget) who oversaw election security architecture and led counterterrorism operations, then served as Google's Head of National Security Policy...
...can't secure a sign-up form. But he does milk hundreds of thousands of NGO dollars on these credentials. While freeloading off his fame as the person who wrote the infamous NYT article "I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration."
And despite me pinging @MilesTaylorUSA about this 12 hours ago, the REST API is still wide open and exposed as of now. Everything has been turned over to FBI, HSI, ICE, and more agencies.
As always, patience as I pull together the thread. 👇
Taylor's security clearance was suspended by presidential memorandum in April 2025. Trump called his conduct "treasonous." Five months later, Taylor launched DEFIANCE dot org. Five months after that... GTFO ICE.
GTFO ICE is a coalition of three orgs:
1. DEFIANCE dot org : Miles Taylor + Xander Schultz 2. Save America Movement : Steve Schmidt (yes, of the Lincoln Project) 3. Project Salt Box
🧵 THREAD: You've heard the phrase "OUR DEMOCRACY" a million times. But what exactly is "OUR DEMOCRACY"? 🤔
When they say "democracy," they don't mean a republic. They don't mean consent of the governed. They don't mean your right to choose your own leaders.
They mean a system where "institutions" - NGOs, multilaterals, the permanent bureaucracy - advance a set of values they consider settled: equality, social justice, cosmopolitanism, global governance. These values aren't proposals to be voted on. They're treated as moral prerequisites that must be true *before* your vote counts.
Despite what they say, they aren't for checks and balances. Checks and balances limit what government can do to you. This limits what you can do to *them*. The brakes are on accountability, not power. The institutions that set the boundaries of acceptable policy have put themselves beyond the reach of the electorate, and they call that arrangement "democracy."
Trump has been an existential threat to this system since the moment he said "drain the swamp" ... because the swamp IS the system. When he threatened those institutions, he didn't threaten the republic. He threatened their immunity from it.
And they said so. On camera. At their own events. In their own words.
As always, patience as I pull together the thread.👇
Robert Kagan:
"I would say there is an argument for saying give me some smoke filled rooms... they weeded out the Donald Trumps of this world."
Backroom deals instead of primaries. Because primaries are how you got Trump... and the old gatekeepers would have stopped him.
Think Kagan's an outlier? Here's Brookings senior fellow William Galston at the National Endowment for Democracy's (NED) most prestigious annual lecture.
He explains that "liberal democracy" requires "some abridgement of majoritarianism."
Translation: democracy means limiting what the majority can do.