Thread by @DataRepublican

🧵 THREAD: The history of Medea Benjamin, co-founder of CODE PINK

Jodie Evans gets most of the attention as the co-founder of CODEPINK and Neville Singham's wife. But Medea Benjamin's history may be more interesting.

While creating the linked thread below, I dived into Medea Bejamin briefly - who had an interesting history of speaking to Chinese media.

She co-founded Global Exchange with her husband, Kevin Danaher, which goes on a number of "Reality Trips" to various closed countries - Cuba, Venezuela, among others.

If you've followed me long enough ... you know that's a big red flag. State-facilitated exchange trips are one of the most common "soft power" tools that countries have in exporting their ideology to others.

Benjamin, per SFGate, has been a career activist since her college years, spending much of her time overseas in Africa. The Wikipedia page says that she joined Students for a Democratic Society in college - if so, this makes her yet another homegrown career NGO-ist.

The prior thread mentioned briefly that she went to Cuba from 1979 to 1983 to work as a translator for their official Communist Party newspaper. She lauded their comparative social equality, describing it as "I died and went to heaven."

She got deported after writing an anti-government article, having overestimated Cuba's taste for freedom of speech.

In 1988, she co-founded Global Exchange. The SFGate article credits her father as having backed it with hundreds of thousands of dollars, despite them disagreeing vehemently on the issue of Palestine.

Global Exchange engages in "people-to-people" diplomacy by taking it on various tours of countries. But these type of trips are often done so with government backing. For instance, the Cuban trips are done with "Cuban Institute of Friendship with Peoples" as the hosting institution.

Cuban Institute of Friendship with Peoples (ICAP) was formed by Fidel Castro himself in 1960. So, Medea is literally taking people on Cuban tours to a state-linked institute formed by Castro himself.

Another "Reality Tour" country which Global Exchange has visited is Nicaragua. I had to go back to the web archives to find the itinerary ... and it talks about meeting with representatives of Sandinistas.

The Sandinistas are a left-wing political party which was once at the center of a CIA coup. It is the party which Daniel Ortega belongs to.

So, yes, Medea Benjamin's Global Exchange took others on a trip to Nicaragua to meet the left-wing activists there.

There is no United States embassy in Iran, so it is notoriously difficult to visit there. Yet, Medea Benjamin herself was able to take a 28-person "people-to-people" delegate to Iran and speak to government officials there.

In fact, the Global Exchange delegation to Iran was so unusual that Medea Benjamin came under FBI scrutiny for it. This was reported in Tehran Times, an Iranian state-controlled news outlet.

Global Exchange also went to China. An article mentioned meeting with NGOs there but I could not find specifics.

Global Exchange also visited Venezuela - back then, Venezuela was promoting luxury people-to-people exchanges with the tourists meeting Chavez himself.

Medea Benjamin's affiliation with Venezuela goes beyond making tours. She was one of the activists squatting at the Venezuelan embassy in 2019 to support the installation of Maduro as President.

Hugo Chavez himself actively worked through Medea Benjamin by creating its own mouthpiece, Venezuela Information Office, and tapping into Global Exchange for activism.

In short, Medea Benjamin and Global Exchange have been working with adversarial foreign governments all over the world. Not only that, but they have been at the center of many protests - per last post, the 1999 Seattle WTO riots among them.

Perhaps a FARA investigation is in order.

And never forget: the Democratic party has a foreign subversive problem.

Thread end.

I lied. Global Exchange is a 501(c)(3) - EIN 94-3066686. 26 U.S. Code § 501(c)(3) prohibits political activity for nonprofits. This includes foreign contexts as well. Looks like I'll be writing another stern letter tomorrow.

Stern letter written.