All these people that do the No Kings Protest, the Free Palestine, the ones taking sides with Iran Are Mostly ALL Paid Protesters! https://t.co/vZZT05Luwv
— Johnny Midnight ⚡️ (@its_The_Dr) October 6, 2026
The $80,000 figure is real payroll, not a Craigslist gag. The checks do not go to every person holding a sign. They go to the staff who book the permit, print the signs, train the crowd, and then call it grassroots.
Eighty Grand to Hold the Megaphone: The Payroll Behind the Democrat Protest Machine
Whatfinger News
A video that blew up on X this weekend put a salary on the people Democrats keep calling neighbors with handmade signs. Wall Street Apes posted it Sunday, October 4. By Monday it had cleared 19,000 likes and a quarter million views. The claim was blunt. Two organizers tied to The People’s Forum in New York are paid about $80,000 a year each. On the protest group’s own books they can show up as unpaid. A sister charity, the Justice and Education Fund, carries the payroll. That fund is part of the network built by Neville Roy Singham, the American tech mogul who sold Thoughtworks, moved to Shanghai, and has spent years bankrolling the same socialist storefronts that turn out for every anti-ICE, anti-Israel, and anti-Trump march in the city.
The megaphone has a W-2. People’s Forum Form 990 pay for the three staffers filmed running the same New York protests. Fuleihan’s on-camera total, with the extra $8,649, lands near $78,600.
The tax forms back the pay scale even when the pass-through story gets slippery. People’s Forum Inc. listed education director Layan Fuleihan at $70,000 on its latest Form 990, organizing director David Chung at $67,600, and general manager Ryan Hamby at $61,030. On-camera reporting put Fuleihan’s total compensation near $78,600 once the extra pay was counted, which is where the round “$80,000 protester” line comes from. Nate Freeman has filmed the same staffers at protest after protest, loading signs into vans and running the chants. One earlier filing had executive director Manolo De Santos at about $71,000 in 2018 and at zero in 2024, still listed as full-time. That is the trick the October 4 post was pointing at. Sister charities strip the donor’s name off the public return, and a professional shop gets to look like a potluck.
Four pipes into one crowd. Singham, Soros, Murphy’s PAC, and Arabella. Periods stay on the cards so nobody adds 2017–2022 to a December 2025 check.
Singham is not a rumor. The New York Times mapped him in August 2023 as the principal funder behind this cluster of nonprofits. House Ways and Means Chairman Jason Smith has said The People’s Forum admitted taking his money, and public reporting puts more than $20 million into that one group between 2017 and 2022, run through shell companies and donor-advised funds. Senator Chuck Grassley has put the figure at $20.4 million. The Justice and Education Fund, whose principal officer is Sung Mo Chung, took in $15.3 million in 2019. Almost all of it arrived as one grant from the Goldman Sachs Philanthropy Fund, which is how a donor stays off the recipient’s Form 990. The fund also took $50,000 from Tides. Fox News correspondent Asra Nomani later tallied roughly $401 million moving through eleven Singham-linked U.S. nonprofits, with the Justice and Education Fund alone at about $74 million. Goldman has said it shut Singham’s donor-advised fund in 2024. The storefronts did not close.
That is the foreign-money half. The taxpayer half runs through a different door, and it is why the USAID years still matter.
The taxpayer door. State and USAID into Tides, the 97 percent donation split, and the 2024 grant to the lawyers who represent the people who get arrested.
The Daily Caller reported in February 2025 that the State Department and USAID had awarded more than $27 million to the Tides Foundation and the Tides Center across several presidencies. Tides is the fiscal sponsor Democrats use when they do not want their name on the check. It funds groups that supply lawyers to people arrested at left-wing protests, including activists under federal investigation. A later Daily Caller review found the Tides Center reporting more government money in the year before Trump’s return than in any year of the prior decade, and sending $48,500 in 2024 to the Civil Liberties Defense Center, which represents Antifa-aligned protesters and is now suing the administration over rules at ICE facilities. Your foreign-aid agency was writing checks to the same network that bails out the riot.
USAID did not need to hand a protester a per diem to feed the machine. It trained the staff and then dumped them into it. The Washington Examiner found well over 100 USAID alumni working at Arabella-linked groups, Soros philanthropies, the DNC, the Center for American Progress, and Planned Parenthood. The Daily Wire counted 97 percent of reported USAID employee political donations in the 2024 cycle going to Democrats. After Trump shut the agency, former officials stood up DemocracyAID, an invite-only shop teaching federal employees resistance case studies, including the Danish underground. They called it democracy work. The job description was organizing against the elected president.
The sister charity. Justice and Education Fund, the door that takes the Goldman Sachs Philanthropy Fund grant so the donor’s name stays off the protest shop’s return.
The respectable wing of the same business is Indivisible. George Soros’s Open Society Foundations has given it $7.61 million since 2017, including a $3 million grant in 2023 for data and communications with participants in the No Kings protests. Indivisible held the permit for the main march at the Minnesota State Capitol. In December 2025, Senator Chris Murphy’s American Mobilization PAC sent Indivisible $100,000 in two payments. Murphy’s own site said the money was for training staff and volunteers, materials, recruiting, and permits, and for building “durable mass mobilization capacity.” A sitting Democratic senator put campaign money into the group coordinating anti-ICE unrest and then let the press call the crowds organic. Jonathan Choe caught the local version in Seattle in January: North Seattle Progressives at a high school, groups affiliated with Indivisible, handing out whistles and recruiting.
Peter Schweizer’s Government Accountability Institute ran the Arabella numbers for the No Kings partners and came up with at least $114.8 million from that dark-money network between 2019 and 2023. Arabella also put nearly $5 million into two nonprofits tied to the Los Angeles anti-ICE riots. One of them, Community Change Action, posted protest tips in Spanish. Taxpayers were already in the stack. Arabella groups take government grants, then spend alongside Soros money. The weekend march is the advertisement. The grant is the business.
None of this requires the fairy tale that every retiree in a pink hat cashed a check. Fact-checkers have swatted the dumb version for years. The Craigslist ad offering $6,500 to $12,500 a week for “extremely tough, brave men” was a prank, and Tulsi Gabbard should not have waved it around. Crowds on Demand, the California firm that will rent you a crowd, is a real company, and its chief executive has said the day rate runs from the low hundreds into a few hundred dollars. Separate from that, X users keep surfacing the mid-tier gigs. Paul Szypula posted video in February of a man caught paying people at a Democratic Socialists of America protest in New York, with the going rate described as high as $4,200 a month for about 20 hours a week. Another post that week flagged a LinkedIn listing in the same band, $3,500 to $4,200 a month to “demonstrate.” Wall Street Apes had already tied The People’s Forum, and its $20 million Singham haul, to the January protest outside the Brooklyn jail holding Nicolás Maduro. Same shop. New headline.
The structure is the story. A billionaire in Shanghai funds the hall and the trainers. A donor-advised fund hides his name. A senator’s PAC pays for the permits. Soros pays for the email list. USAID and State, in the years before the axe fell, paid Tides, and Tides paid the lawyers. The person on the evening news with the cardboard sign may well believe every word they are shouting. The person who handed them the sign has a W-2, a health plan, and a nonprofit that will still be there when the chant moves on to the next outrage.
Democrats spent a decade calling that arrangement a movement. The 990s call it a job. They have robbed us all blind for many years, with the Deep State backed scams in USAID. Many of the scams still are operational, only now at the State Department where they can hide them, as Elon Musk hinted, and said of the billions he and DOGE found stolen from Americans. Elon fears for his life if he outs them, so when the richest man on Earth is scared of being killed by the Deep State, and you know they’ve already killed at least one president and toppled others…. well, now you know why America is STILL the fraud capital of Earth. Democrats do the bidding of the Deep State and they want us robbed.
Sgt. Pat: Same faces, same vans, same signs, new grievance. If it were a neighborhood, you would not need a Shanghai payroll to keep it staffed.
— The Whatfinger News Team: Alex and Luke, with Grok on edits and graphics
Weekly Specials
Election Links – Nov 3rd is just a few blinks away!
- Whatfinger Polls – ALL POLLS – Plus Polymarket. On Desktop view scroll down for all of the latest polls from all sources – plus we label them as they should be. Fox Polls are NOT Republican, they are always ‘mixed’. – Whatfinger Polls
- Election Maps – Past Elections (2000 to 2024 – more from past added tomorrow)
- Election Maps – Make your own – put on your site – Fantasy scenarios – up to you
Top Features and Vids across all Whatfinger sites
- How insane is this company? Louisiana Utility Companies Want To Charge People For The Power They DON’T USE.
- Chaos On Southwest Flight As Woman Strips, Screams At Passengers
- The Left Is King of Gaslighting. What is gaslighting and the origin of it so you know. Many do not know this
- Must Watch, please don’t Skip. 5 mins of knowledge YOU need. It gets better and better with more info over 5 mins
- President Trump Holds a Rally in Vandalia, OH
Our Projects…
- FingerJam is up – discover music, listen tou the top songs from all decades, much more
- Robots Of Dawn – Latest tech, robots you can buy now, what’s coming… Top players
- Joe Rogan Mysteries🛑
- NEW: Whatfinger Deals – Best Prices – Amazon, Walmart, Home Depot, Target on select items.
- FingerPlay is up: search a game, get the official trailer and player clips, score it with Fingers, and run the lists — Out Now through From the Past, plus RPGs, shooters, and each console.
- Whatfinger Hate Hoax File – You wanted the better research, here you go🛑
- The list — Survival Command: Grid-Down Survival & Weapons – save this link – it might save your life one day!
- We Built the Movie And TV Page Rotten Tomatoes Is Afraid Of – And FREE! – Whatfinger News’ Flick
