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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. @PunchbowlNews would you like to comment on this business model I've reversed engineered of how you keep @LeaderJohnThune in line?
@PunchbowlNews @LeaderJohnThune Punchbowl, would you also like to comment on how virtually every major sponsor of yours has donated to John Thune for a total of 1.2 million?
@AndrewDesiderio , any comments?
@PunchbowlNews @LeaderJohnThune @AndrewDesiderio By the way ... the only people who are sponsoring me on this are my $3/month subscribers. I don't know any heavy hitter here who's been approached to go against SAVE America Act.
I'd been looking at PAC contributions when I should have been looking at the people who actually have daily access to the Capitol - the media. The true lobbyists.
Punchbowl News represents a whole lot of powerful industries and they are unflinching admirers of Senate Majority Leader John Thune.
John Thune is the "paid influencer ecosystem." 𝕏 merely exposed how that machinery works in the Senate.
Just look at the posts of @AndrewDesiderio , their senior Senate "correspondent." Almost every single one is about defeating the SAVE America Act and praising Thune.
Punchbowl isn't shy about where their money comes from. Founder Jack Sherman himself admitted that 90% of Punchbowl's revenue is from "corporate sponsorships." They made 10 million dollars in revenue their first year... what kind of "journalist" company pulls that off?
The podcast featuring them outright describes their business model as getting their money from "sponsorships bought by trade groups and companies looking to get their public affairs messaging in front of those making and influencing policy."
Punchbowl got in ethical hot water when they treated a whole bunch of lobbyists to luxury box seats at a NFL game.
If you want to know why SAVE America Act is being slow-walked...
Start with @PunchbowlNews .
. @AndrewDesiderio do you want to share which of your employer's clients are against the SAVE America Act, or should I figure it out myself?
Thune access timeline documented: Five distinct confirmed Punchbowl-Thune interactions between Sept. 2025 and March 2026, including two Fly Out Day appearances. Punchbowl's Feb. 26, 2026 piece declaring the "talking filibuster dead" was the key conventional wisdom-setting event, published before Trump's March 9 ultimatum, using Thune's framing and characterizing SAVE Act supporters as a caucus "tearing itself apart."
🛰️ New Article: Building an OSINT Pipeline to Cut Through the Iranian Conflict Noise.
SPOILER ALERT: We're winning.
I just published a long-form analysis on the Iran conflict and the strategic dynamics around it. Sorry for the Substack-only publication; the article itself was far too long and complex in formatting to publish with 𝕏 tooling. (Feedback to the 𝕏 team - if you can just make full Markdown capability, I would be thrilled.)
Before anything else: I'm only a civilian data analyst, not a military officer or intelligence professional. This piece is the result of two weeks of intensive work where I did something unusual.... I built and experimented with an AI-assisted OSINT synthesis pipeline using military doctrine, think tank research, and public reporting.
Part of the goal was to produce something useful for readers.
But honestly, the bigger goal was education for myself, forcing a structured process to sort signal from noise in an information environment that's chaotic right now.
The pipeline pulls from sources like CSIS, ISW, CEPA, ISIS nuclear reporting, CENTCOM and IDF briefings, plus open-source economic and energy data. Where I step beyond what those sources explicitly state, I mark it clearly as [ASSESSED] and try to show the reasoning.
This article is the first full output of that process.
If you have expertise in:
🔹 air campaign planning
🔹 nuclear nonproliferation
🔹 Middle East security policy
🔹 energy markets
🔹 OSINT methodology
I would genuinely welcome corrections, critiques, or improvements. The entire point is to make the analytical process more rigorous over time.
The pipeline itself will keep evolving. Bring on the rotten tomatoes.
🧵WOLF IN SHEEP'S CLOTHING: Meet David Pascoe, candidate for SC Attorney General. He's running as a Republican. But is he actually a Democrat?
Joe Biden is in South Carolina today.
Which makes this the perfect moment to introduce you to David Pascoe, candidate for SC Attorney General, running as a Republican, and what he said about Joe Biden in January 2020:
"He is the most decent man I have ever met in American politics. Joe has been a role model of mine for many years. He is someone my sons look up to. Joe is the first and only candidate I have ever endorsed for public office."
That's not only a Democrat who voted for Biden. That's a Democrat who hosted Biden's campaign fundraiser at his own annual oyster roast, endorsed him for president, and was Biden's frontrunner to become US Attorney for South Carolina.
David Pascoe spent 20+ years as an elected Democrat, 6 consecutive terms as SC First Circuit Solicitor. He pushed DEI-style racial quota systems for SC judges as recently as December 2023. Six months before his "conversion," he endorsed a Democratic state rep who voted against banning gender procedures on minors.
And here are the receipts. 👇
As always, patience as I pull together this thread.
David Pascoe spent 20+ years as an elected Democrat, 6 consecutive terms as SC First Circuit Solicitor. On April 10, 2025, he switched to the GOP. SC Dem Chair Christale Spain says he "has been trying to find a lane to run for higher office."
Pascoe switched parties in April 2025.
Pascoe launched his AG campaign in August 2025.
That's 4 months, in a state where no Democrat has won a statewide race since 2006.
You do the math.
If you're a subscriber, enter your oppo research request below! I haven't scaled it out yet, so can only do about 3 a day. It also helps if you pair a name with a focus (e.g., investigate connections to so-and-so entity)