The 'No Kings' Machine Has a New Target: America's AI Data Centers and Police Cameras

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A Protest Network Finds a New Cause

For the past two years, a familiar cast of activist groups has shown up at nearly every major left-wing demonstration in the United States. They organized against President Trump's early moves to cut federal spending, rallied against Israel, and marched under banners reading "No Kings" and "Hands Off."

Now, according to a new report and reporting by Fox News Digital, many of these same organizations have pivoted to a different fight: blocking the construction of AI data centers and turning public opinion against Flock, the license-plate-reading camera system used by thousands of U.S. police departments.

The report, titled "The Compute War at Home," was commissioned by Consumer Action for a Strong Economy, a free-market nonprofit based in Alexandria, Virginia. It draws on social-media analysis from the Washington-based firm Arken Intelligence.

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Follow the Money: The Singham Connection

At the center of the network sits Neville Roy Singham, a wealthy technology entrepreneur who made his fortune with the software company Thoughtworks before relocating to Shanghai. Singham has spent years funding a web of nonprofits and media outlets, including CodePink, the People's Forum, the Party for Socialism and Liberation, ANSWER Coalition, and BreakThrough News.

Singham and the groups he funds have repeatedly denied acting on behalf of any government or political party and say they have not been charged with any crime.

That denial is now being tested in court. As Fox News Digital first reported, a federal grand jury in the Southern District of New York opened an investigation earlier this year into Singham's financial network. According to Just the News, the probe was authorized by then-Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and is examining an estimated $278 million that reportedly moved through shell companies and donor-advised funds since 2017.

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Three Phases of a Repeatable Playbook

Reporting from street protests over the past two years points to a pattern that repeats itself in city after city. Activists identify a local grievance, connect it to a bigger national narrative, and then use activist media to carry the message into new communities.

Phase one began around Trump's January 2025 inauguration, with "Tesla Takedown" protests against Elon Musk. That effort grew into the broader "No Kings" and "Hands Off" demonstrations, along with campaigns defending the governments of Cuba, Iran, and Venezuela.

Phase two redirected that same organizing machine toward American data centers. Over the past year, CodePink built a national anti-data-center campaign, while roughly 70 local chapters of the Party for Socialism and Liberation pushed near-identical messaging. The party's outlet, Liberation News, publicized local victories such as construction moratoria and project cancellations.

Phase three merged that fight with a separate, more bipartisan concern: Flock surveillance cameras. Activists began framing license-plate readers, artificial intelligence, and data centers as one interconnected threat.

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The Numbers Behind the Surge

The scale of the shift is striking. According to the Arken Intelligence analysis cited in the report, social-media posts mentioning both Flock cameras and data centers jumped from 639 in the ten weeks before May 19, 2026, to 9,009 in the ten weeks after — a more than fourteen-fold increase.

Interestingly, the report found that 81% of posts with an identifiable political leaning came from right-leaning or libertarian accounts, suggesting the messaging successfully spread far beyond its original activist base.

"Issue pairings rarely multiply fourteen-fold in a matter of weeks without a catalyst," the report states, pointing to the coordinated timing as evidence of deliberate strategy rather than organic growth.

Former NSA cybersecurity director Rob Joyce told Fox News Digital that this kind of influence operation doesn't need Americans to become pro-Beijing outright. It only needs them to argue for outcomes that happen to serve Chinese Communist Party interests — including slowing down the American technology sector that competes directly with China.

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Not Every Critic Is Part of the Network

It's important to note what the report does not claim. It explicitly states that not everyone who opposes Flock cameras or data centers is connected to Singham's network. Concerns about privacy, data retention, and government contracts with private surveillance companies are widely shared across the political spectrum.

That much has become clear in Florida. Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis ordered Flock cameras removed from state highways within 30 days, citing what he called an "out of control" surveillance apparatus, according to NBC News and ABC News. Texas has moved in a similar direction, and Republican Sen. Josh Hawley has opened his own investigation into Flock's practices.

What the report argues is different: left-wing organizers, some tied to Singham-funded groups, appear to have deliberately fused these separate concerns into a single, more powerful narrative — one that paints all AI infrastructure as inherently dangerous.

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How the Fusion Happened, Step by Step

The report traces a documented timeline of coordination. Last September, BreakThrough News published an article describing Flock as authoritarian tracking infrastructure. A month later, People's Dispatch — since merged into BreakThrough News — covered a Denver anti-data-center campaign using imagery and quotes from the local Party for Socialism and Liberation chapter.

By May, that Denver chapter had partnered with Indivisible, a nonprofit network backed in part by Democratic donor George Soros, and the Sunrise Movement to host a forum linking mass surveillance and data centers as twin tools that "serve the needs of billionaires."

Days later, the same chapter launched a petition opposing new data centers, explicitly framing the fight in socialist terms. In July, a North Carolina chapter published anti-Flock messaging and directed readers to a newly, anonymously registered website opposing data centers in the state. And in Arizona, local Party for Socialism and Liberation activists joined a "deFLOCK Tucson" event billed as "It's ALL Connected."

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Flock's Actual Footprint — and Its Symbolic Power

One detail in the report stands out: Flock's real computing footprint is tiny. According to Rahul Sidhu, the company's chief strategy officer, Flock uses less than 0.1% of the capacity of a single large data center.

Yet the report argues that Flock's political value to organizers has little to do with computing power. A single camera on a street corner is a visible, local, and emotionally potent symbol — one that's far easier to rally a neighborhood against than an abstract debate about national cloud infrastructure.

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Congress and the Justice Department Are Watching

The scrutiny on Singham's network extends well beyond this single report. The Senate Judiciary Committee has asked the Justice Department and FBI to examine whether CodePink and the People's Forum should be required to register as foreign agents under FARA. The House Oversight Committee has requested records tied to Singham's funding, and the House Ways and Means Committee has issued subpoenas to BreakThrough News, Tricontinental, and the People's Forum — all of which have refused to comply, calling the probes a "witch hunt."

Meanwhile, the SDNY grand jury investigation, first reported by Fox News Digital and later confirmed by Just the News, is reportedly examining possible wire fraud, bank fraud, and money laundering. No charges have been filed as of this writing.

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Outlook: A Debate That No Longer Splits Neatly by Party

What began as a niche activist cause has evolved into a genuinely cross-partisan flashpoint. Republican governors are now echoing language once confined to the far left — warning against an "AI surveillance state" — even as investigators dig into whether that very language was seeded, in part, by a network tied to Chinese money.

The coming months will likely bring more clarity. The SDNY grand jury investigation is ongoing, congressional subpoenas remain unresolved, and state-level actions against Flock cameras are spreading beyond Florida and Texas. Whatever the outcome, the episode illustrates how a single well-funded activist ecosystem can shape a national conversation — regardless of who ultimately picks up the argument.

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SOURCES

1. https://www.foxnews.com/politics/no-kings-protest-network-fight-against-ai-data-centers-flock-cameras
2. https://www.foxnews.com/politics/doj-launches-grand-jury-probe-marxist-mogul-neville-roy-singhams-funding-leftist-groups
3. https://justthenews.com/nation/states/grand-jury-subpoenas-target-left-wing-megadonors-nonprofit-network-new-york
4. https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/florida-bans-flock-license-plate-readers-state-highways-rcna595420
5. https://abcnews.com/US/florida-remove-flock-cameras-state-highway-roads/story?id=136118376

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