A socialist organization with financial ties running back to a Shanghai-based tech mogul has opened or is preparing at least 28 indoor activist centers in communities across the country, from deep-blue Portland, Oregon, to the rural West Virginia panhandle, and the pace is picking up.
The Party for Socialism and Liberation, known as PSL, brands these spaces "Liberation Centers." They function as neighborhood staging grounds for protests against law enforcement and immigration enforcement, recruitment pipelines aimed at students and teenagers, and ideological training rooms stocked with Marxist literature. A Daily Caller News Foundation review of PSL's own online posts and local news reports identified the 28 spaces, open since 2021 or currently in preparation.
The group did not respond to requests for comment. It doesn't have to disclose its funding. And new locations are on the way, with grand openings scheduled in June for Houston and Washington, D.C.
Behind the PSL's activist ecosystem sits Neville Roy Singham, a former Illinois tech executive who sold his firm for $785 million in 2017 and has since poured tens of millions of dollars into a web of leftist advocacy groups. Singham is now based in Shanghai. The New York Times reported on his funding of organizations that share top officials with the PSL.
The Times and The Daily Beast documented multiple instances of Singham or activists he supports attending Chinese Communist Party propaganda events alongside Chinese officials. Singham also previously advised Huawei, the China-funded tech firm, The Daily Beast reported.
The PSL's own ideological alignment with Beijing is not subtle. The group's websites praise Mao Zedong for how he "liberated" China through the CCP's revolution. They deny the Chinese government's 1989 massacre of pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square.
That is the worldview being imported into strip malls and storefronts in American neighborhoods.
Stu Smith, an investigative analyst at the Manhattan Institute who researches left-wing activist networks, told the Daily Caller News Foundation that communities should pay close attention to how the PSL operates on the ground.
"Their model is simple; find a local grievance, radicalize it, and turn it into movement infrastructure. These centers are often staffed by semi-local organizers who cut their teeth elsewhere, then parachute into new communities."
Smith described a deliberate focus on young people. The PSL reaches out to teenagers, he said, encouraging school disruptions and walkouts and helping create what he called "mini-PSL pipelines disguised as harmless 'student unions.'"
A February Instagram post from the PSL's Columbus, Ohio, chapter illustrates the approach. The post called on students and parents to help arrange "walk outs" against Immigration and Customs Enforcement. "Join the PSL at the Columbus Liberation Center this Sunday for a student & parent organizing meeting to build connection between highschool organizers, discuss strategies for building the movement, and plan together on our next steps!" it read.
Other PSL social media posts show rooms with literature on "Trans Liberation," signs honoring late Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara, and workshops on "Prison Abolition, Marxist Perspective."
The centers are not confined to the usual progressive strongholds. Pennsylvania alone has seven: Lancaster, Pittsburgh, Reading, Phoenixville, Philadelphia, York, and the West Chester borough of Chester County. The PSL also operates a chapter in the West Virginia panhandle, hardly a hotbed of revolutionary socialism.
Two of the 28 spaces the DCNF identified operate under different names, a PSL-affiliated café in Durham, North Carolina, and a "Lancaster People's Center" in Pennsylvania, but serve the same event-hosting function.
The upcoming D.C. Liberation Center's website lays out a policy wish list that reads like a progressive fever dream: a 90 percent budget cut for the Metropolitan Police Department, cashless bail, "access to gender affirming care" for "trans youth," and "Guaranteed Income." The Louisville, Kentucky, chapter has been fundraising for its own center since at least 2024.
Because the PSL is not required to publicly disclose its financial backers, the money trail is difficult to trace from the outside. Several Liberation Centers claim to rely on volunteer staff and crowdfunding. The Albuquerque center calls itself "the fiscal sponsor of activists building working-class power in" the area, a phrase that suggests it functions as a financial pass-through for local organizing.
Smith emphasized that the PSL does not operate in isolation. He described an interconnected structure of overlapping organizations, causes, and public-facing projects, all reinforcing one another at the local level.
"It is not just one group or one campaign. It is an ecosystem of overlapping organizations, causes, and front-facing projects that all reinforce each other locally."
The PSL has organized protests against U.S. foreign policy decisions and against ICE enforcement operations. The group was also linked to organized anti-ICE activity that turned violent, as the Daily Caller previously reported on a riot connected to organized activist networks.
Smith told the DCNF that his own town has a nearby PSL center. He declined to reveal his location but offered a theory about why his community was targeted.
"I don't live in some massive activist hub, either. My guess is we ended up with one because the local radicals got especially rowdy during the [2020 Black Lives Matter] 'Summer of Love,' and PSL saw an opportunity to plant a flag."
That pattern, exploit unrest, establish a permanent presence, recruit locally, is the model Smith says the PSL has refined over the past several years. The 2020 protests gave the group a foothold. The Liberation Centers are designed to make that foothold permanent.
Smith did not mince words about what inaction looks like. He told the DCNF that anyone who wants "a foreign-maligned influence operation in your backyard, targeting your community and your children" should simply ignore the Liberation Centers.
The PSL itself is candid about its ambitions, even if it wraps them in activist jargon. A Wednesday Instagram post from the group's national chapter invited potential allies to channel their anger against "capitalism, racism, war" into organized political action.
"It's not enough to be angry, we must be organized!" the post declared.
The group frames its domestic work as building a "movement against racism, poverty and war," as the Atlanta Liberation Center's website puts it. That framing obscures the ideological core: a Marxist-Leninist organization that celebrates Mao, whitewashes Tiananmen Square, and operates within a funding network linked to a man who advises Chinese state-connected firms from his home in Shanghai.
Meanwhile, the broader network of Soviet-era and communist-aligned groups continues to cultivate American sympathies for authoritarian regimes. The PSL's Liberation Centers are one piece of a larger pattern: foreign-aligned ideological infrastructure dressed up as community activism.
Twenty-eight centers and counting. Grand openings in two more cities next month. Teenagers recruited for school walkouts. Marxist workshops behind storefront doors. And a money trail that runs, however indirectly, through Shanghai.
Americans don't need to be paranoid. They need to be paying attention, because the people opening these centers certainly are.
