New McCarthyite Campaign Against Mamdani and DSA

They’re being labeled a “threat vector” and agent of foreign adversaries

Zohran Mamdani behind a DSA banner

A watchdog group that bills itself as crusaders against “disinformation” is calling on the Justice Department to investigate the Democratic Socialists of America, the organization that helped to propel Zohran Mamdani to victory last year.

The nonprofit Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) just rolled out a 29-page report accusing DSA of “convergence with hostile foreign states,” the operative word here being “convergence” because coordination isn’t shown. Instead, the researchers used things like AI modeling to argue that the DSA's talking points on things like sanctions and election integrity "synchronize" with the narratives of the Venezuelan, Cuban, and Chinese governments. This along with some DSA delegation visits to these countries was enough for the report to demand a Justice Department investigation into whether they are foreign agents.

The report is pure McCarthyite guilt-by-association, dressed up in 21st-century tech. It employs charts and graphs to give an air of rigor to claims that essentially boil down to: if your tweets sound like someone else’s, you must be working together. NCRI points to "in-kind benefits"—like a stay at a posh hotel in Caracas—as the hook for a FARA inquiry, turning a political junket into a potential federal crime.

It’s a classic anti-communist throwback, but with a creepy data-science twist that major outlets like The New York Times are increasingly buying into, judging from how often these major media outlets cite NCRI.

Screenshot of NCRI’s report on DSA

The DSA report formed the basis of testimony to Congress today, by NCRI founder Adam Sohn. After acknowledging that there’s no evidence of direct foreign funding of DSA, he went on to allege a more nebulous “threat vector” that he links to the growing public opposition to ICE.

“This testimony does not allege that the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) received direct foreign funding,” NCRI founder Adam Sohn told Congress . “It documents a distinct and increasingly consequential threat vector: the combination of foreign-facilitated access, in-kind benefits, narrative synchronization, and domestic operational activation directed at U.S. enforcement institutions.”

By “enforcement institutions,” he’s referring to ICE; the idea being that the anti-ICE protests in Minneapolis and across the country are somehow the result of foreign adversaries manipulating groups like DSA.

Here’s what Sohn told Congress:

“NCRI has documented DSA chapters play[ing] a central organizing role in nationwide anti-ICE protests … they explicitly linked domestic law-enforcement activity to U.S. foreign policy toward Venezuela, Cuba, and China, using shared slogans such as ‘No ICE, No War,’ ‘Hands Off Venezuela,’ and ‘ICE Out for Good.’ This pattern reflects a consistent anti-legitimacy and moralized resistance framing applied across both foreign and domestic contexts. NCRI’s analysis finds that the same narrative structures used by DSA to defend sanctioned authoritarian regimes abroad are redeployed to delegitimize U.S. enforcement institutions at home, particularly Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security. Large-language-model–based classification of DSA-affiliated texts shows dominant blame attribution toward U.S. institutions across ICE-related activism and foreign policy solidarity content, indicating convergence rather than issue-specific framing.”

When I reached out to NCRI to see what precipitated their interest in DSA, co-founder Finkelstein said it was simply motivated by a “search for the truth.”

“The [DSA] report was not produced under the influence of any politician or agency,” Joel Finkelstein, NCRI’s director and “chief science officer,” told me via email. He maintains that the organization receives no government funding and that its donors—all U.S. citizens—simply support a “search for the truth” that “sometimes frustrates political people on both sides of the aisle”.

But one group certainly isn’t frustrated: right-wing lawmakers are already using the report to fuel the Trump administration’s broad assault on free speech and civil liberties. This crackdown is formalized under NSPM-7, a national security directive targeting “anti-American” sentiment and “organized political violence”.

The report took center stage today during a House Ways and Means Committee hearing titled, “Foreign Influence in American Non-profits: Unmasking Threats from Beijing and Beyond.” NCRI founder Adam Sohn used the platform to present the institute’s findings as evidence of a “threat vector” inside the U.S..

Committee Chairman Jason Smith (R-MO) has explicitly leaned on NCRI research to justify investigations into the tax-exempt status of what he calls “radical” and “anti-American” nonprofits. By adopting the same chilling rhetoric used in NSPM-7, the committee is signaling its desire to strip tax protections from organizations that deviate from the administration’s ideological line.

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The Network Contagion Research Institute is a New Jersey-based organization that describes itself as dedicated to exposing “how foreign and domestic actors engage in malicious narratives” in order to “destabilize institutions and divide communities.” It utilizes pseudo-scientific language like “foreign-facilitated access,” “narrative synchronization,” and “domestic operational activation” to sound authoritative. Just as Finkelstein labels himself its Chief Science Officer, it purports to use data analysis of social media to discover hidden sentiment and manipulation of the public.

In recent months, the NCRI has set its sights on left-wing groups like DSA, casting Mayor Mamdani as some kind of nefarious extremist.

In October, NCRI linked DSA to Mamdani in a release because DSA held a summit that the scientific organization says espoused “narratives closely aligned with North Korean state propaganda.” It went on to call DSA a “radical political organization to which NYC mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani has been deeply involved in for years.”

Then in September, NCRI issued another release highlighting the DSA, Mamdani, and their opposition to Zionism.

“The DSA, which counts Zohran Mamdani among its endorsed candidates, has been overtaken by a radical ‘anti-Zionist’ resolution that seeks to delegitimize Judaism’s historical and religious connection to Israel while imposing exclusionary and discriminatory membership conditions,” the release said.

The timing of its vibe shift is not accidental, given that Russian disinformation no longer sells. And Mamdani is a new fruitful target for NCRI. As part of the national security panic over the Mayor and his views and affiliations, the Coolidge Reagan Foundation has already filed criminal referrals with the Department of Justice and the Manhattan DA, alleging his campaign accepted roughly $13,000 in “foreign” donations—a sum that includes a $500 contribution from his mother-in-law in Dubai.

While Mamdani’s campaign has noted that the vast majority of these donors are U.S. citizens living abroad, the “national security” framing allows politicians like Rep. Andy Ogles (TN-5) to go further, calling for the DOJ to “denaturalize and deport” the Mayor.

Asked how the report on DSA was funded, NCRI’s Finkelstein told me in an email: “The resources which funded this DSA report are the same resources that funded our work exposing Nick Fuentes,” referring to the openly anti-Semitic conservative commentator, also the subject of another report.

I’ve always thought the obsession with the threat of “disinformation” is a stupid moral panic masquerading as some defender of the public rather than what it is: an agent of censorship and control. The disinformation industry emerged in 2016 as a way for liberals and others traumatized by the election of Donald Trump to explain away his victory with the belief that Russian influence somehow played a determinative role.

Over the past decade, disinformation has become Washington’s catch-all explanation for what’s wrong with everything from the decline of the mainstream media to youth disaffection, to the emergence of voices (like Mamdani’s) that don’t fit a world of sanctioned thought. NCRI is the worst of this ilk, pretending to use math to determine intent, and then pretending to uncover “influence” to explain away political views that are deemed unacceptable. In other words, it is a tool of censorship.

— Edited by William M. Arkin