4,000 attendees. 300 organizations. Elected officials, a mayor, a member of Congress, a Columbia agitator, and speakers demanding the end of “the idea of America.” A CCP-adjacent front group ran the show.
Detroit. Labor Day weekend, 2025. Huntington Place Convention Center. Roughly 4,000 people from more than 300 organizations packed the hall for the second annual “People’s Conference for Palestine.” The billing said solidarity. The programming said something else.
Stu Smith of the Manhattan Institute spent the weekend documenting it. Without his live coverage, most of what happened on that stage would have stayed in the room. Read Stu on X if you want the raw feed. What follows is the pattern he pulled out of the noise.
Who Ran It
The event was co-sponsored by the Palestinian Youth Movement and American Muslims for Palestine. Both have been named in federal filings and congressional inquiries for their alleged financial and organizational ties to Hamas-linked networks. Neither is fringe. Both operate as visible surface layers for a much larger infrastructure funded through the same donor-advised architecture we have mapped in our reporting on Neville Roy Singham and the People’s Forum. If you want the master frame, start here: From Soros to Singham: How ‘No Kings’ Became a Tool for CCP Influence in America.
That is the money side. Now the stage.
The Red-Green Speech
Raja Abdulhaq, president of the Tamkeen Movement and co-founder of Quds News Network, gave the keynote framing for the weekend. He told the room to abandon elections, protests, and lobbying as “crumbs from the empire.”
Then he named the coalition he wanted built.
“This is the time where we come together. Leftists, Islamists, socialists. I don’t care what ideology you have. What matters is we are united under one idea, which is beating imperialism and capitalism.”
That is not activism. That is a doctrine. It has a name. It is the Red-Green Alliance, and it is not new. It has roots that run from the KGB’s Cold War active-measures shops through the pipeline that produced Liberation Theology in Latin America. We laid out how that pipeline was built in The KGB’s Holy War: How Soviet Intelligence Created Liberation Theology. The mechanics have not changed. The delivery system has.
Abdulhaq closed with the operational instruction: “The only way to undo a violent settler colonial project is through resistance.” He praised Hamas, Hezbollah, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad by name.
The Campus Cadre
Sachin Peddada, a PhD student at UMass Amherst and a research coordinator for the Marxist-aligned Progressive International, stepped to the microphone and said the quiet part.
“We have to destroy the idea of America in our heads, in our neighbors’ heads, in our comrades’ heads.”
Peddada called the United States “an evil country.” He quoted a deceased Palestinian militant to close his remarks.
Then came Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University Apartheid Divest organizer who was arrested during the 2024 campus takeover. He was not treated as a panelist. He was treated as the headliner.
“Israel must stand exposed as a pariah state until its genocidal project collapses.”
He called Gaza “a compass for revolution.”
The crowd roared.
Peddada at UMass Amherst. Khalil at Columbia. Neither is an accident of biography. Both are outputs of the same institutional pipeline. We have written the full architecture of it here: How America Lost the Campus. And How to Take It Back.. Universities. Student groups. Social media. NGOs. Campaigns. Government. This conference is where several of those stages meet in one room.
The Mayor
Eduardo Martinez, the mayor of Richmond, California, took the stage next. When asked directly about supporting Hamas, Martinez did not deflect. He identified with them.
“That part of me that couldn’t endure the abuse anymore would be Hamas.”
A sitting American mayor. A taxpayer-funded elected official. The crowd cheered.
This is what the pipeline delivers. Not a protest sign. A mayor.
The Union Boss
Chris Smalls, the founder of the Amazon Labor Union and a fixture of the post-2020 progressive labor scene, played the moment for a laugh.
“I’m a part of the BDS movement. Hamas, surprise.”
Smalls is banned from Israel. He has publicly bragged about his listing on the Canary Mission watchlist. The organized-labor movement in this country now has surface figures who treat a U.S.-designated terrorist organization as a brand affiliation.
The Congresswoman
Then Rep. Rashida Tlaib.
Tlaib is a sitting member of the United States Congress. She was censured in 2023 for her Israel rhetoric. She did not moderate. She escalated.
“Every genocide enabler, look at this room motherfuckers, we ain’t going anywhere.”
Read that quote back. Read where it was delivered. Read who else was on the program. A member of Congress calling her political opponents “genocide enablers” at a conference featuring speakers who called for the destruction of “the idea of America” and praised Hamas by name.
That is not activism. That is coalition maintenance.
What This Actually Is
The 2025 People’s Conference for Palestine was not a protest. It was a status meeting.
The infrastructure showed up. The academics showed up. The union figureheads showed up. The elected officials showed up. The propagandists showed up. A congresswoman showed up. And they all said the same thing in different registers.
America is the target. The coalition is being built. The money is already in place.
None of the individual speeches were new. Abdulhaq gave a Red-Green speech that could have been delivered in Moscow in 1978. Peddada gave the graduate seminar version. Khalil gave the campus-organizer version. Martinez gave the local-officeholder version. Smalls gave the labor-branding version. Tlaib gave the congressional version.
What was new was the room. Every one of those roles was represented in the same building. That is a pipeline reaching full assembly.
The Question the Press Will Not Ask
Who paid for the hall? Who paid for the travel? Who paid for the security? Who signed the contracts with Huntington Place?
Section 117 filings for U.S. universities are one paper trail. IRS filings for the sponsoring nonprofits are another. Federal grand jury activity around the Singham network is a third. The receipts exist. They are not hard to pull.
The press has decided the story is not worth reporting.
We disagree.
The Unredacted Rule
Do not panic. Do not exaggerate. Do not make claims you cannot prove.
Name the money. Name the sponsors. Name the speakers. Name the elected officials. Name the campus organizers. Name the union figureheads. Name the congresswoman. Then let readers draw the line themselves.
The pipeline does not hide anymore.
It hosts conferences.
The Unredacted covers the institutional pipeline that turns campus politics into governing power. Universities, foreign-funded academic partnerships, activist legal groups, DSA infrastructure, and municipal political operations are all part of one system.
Credit where due: Stu Smith of the Manhattan Institute did the on-the-ground documentation that made this piece possible. Follow him at @thestustustudio.
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