The Man Who Stopped the Interview

The interview was going fine until it wasn't. Nate Friedman was working a free-Palestinian-prisoners rally in Manhattan, talking to a young Moroccan guy from Astoria who wanted to recommend pastry shops on Steinway Street. The neighborhood is called Little Egypt, the kid said, but by demographics it should be Little Morocco. Try Hashem Pastries. Then a man stepped in and ended it. "You're a propagandist and a hack," he told Friedman. "All the stuff you say in your videos, it's like half wrong." Asked to name one wrong thing, he said he'd get back to him.

The man was Kei Pritsker. Friedman's new investigation, released this week, argues that Pritsker is not a protester who happens to interrupt interviews. He is, in Friedman's telling, a professional: a journalist, party member, documentary co-director, and salaried participant in the network that Friedman has spent months mapping, the one that runs through a single address on West 37th Street and back to the bank accounts of Neville Roy Singham.

The Resume

Pritsker's footprint is not hard to find, because he is in front of cameras for a living. Friedman's video catalogs it: photographing from the stage at a Times Square rally. Protesting at a congressional hearing alongside Code Pink and the ANSWER Coalition. Marching with an Antifa flag. Listed first among the arrests at a college sit-in at the Ronald Reagan Building, where Friedman says he held a sign comparing border officers to Adolf Eichmann and was charged with unlawful entry. Posing as security outside the Venezuelan embassy, where a friend told a reporter he'd been standing guard all day, every day, for a week.

Before his current job, Pritsker worked as a producer at RT America, the Russian state-funded channel. Then he co-directed The Encampments, the documentary about the Columbia protest camps. He didn't just cover them. He lived in them for 12 days. The film's poster carries a sponsor credit: BreakThrough News. Which is also Pritsker's employer, and has been, by his own telling, since the ground floor six years ago.

"At Breakthrough, we embrace that and we actually want to tell the side of the story that's not being told by the mainstream media."

BreakThrough's YouTube page says it is free of bias. Pritsker, quoted in the video, says the opposite: the outlet embraces its side, the Palestinian side, the side against colonialism. On October 8, 2023, the day after the massacre, he stood in Times Square and described the attack as Palestinians boldly declaring that Zionism will never win, the beginning of taking back stolen land. That is not analysis after the fact. That is same-day messaging.

The Money

Here is the part Friedman has receipts for. BreakThrough News is a tax-exempt nonprofit. In 2020 it took in $225,000 from the Justice and Education Fund. The next year, $442,000. By 2024 the fund dropped $977,000 in a single year, bringing the total to $1.9 million. The man behind the Justice and Education Fund, who has put more than $68 million into it, is Neville Roy Singham: the same tech billionaire who gave the People's Forum $20 million.

The geography is the tell. The People's Forum sits at 320 West 37th Street. So does BreakThrough News. So does 1804 Books, which sells a from-the-river-to-the-sea coloring book marketed to children as young as six, with pages celebrating Ghassan Kanafani of the PFLP. Friedman's prior reporting caught paid organizers loading printed protest signs into vans outside that address, and identified People's Forum staff earning close to $80,000 a year. Manolo De Los Santos, Pritsker's co-director on The Encampments, shows up at zero dollars from the People's Forum and $90,000 a year from the Justice and Education Fund. Same money, different door.

The institutional family tree is tight. BreakThrough was founded by Ben Becker and Eugene Puryear, both founding members of the Party for Socialism and Liberation. Ben Becker's father is Brian Becker, who teaches socialism classes at the People's Forum and runs the ANSWER Coalition's protest operation. Pritsker's own bio on Liberation News identifies him as a PSL member. The journalist, the party, the protest machine, and the funder are not adjacent. They are the same several people.

The Expansion

This network is not winding down. Friedman reports the People's Forum recently bought a $5 million office building 20 blocks from its headquarters and plans to put another $5 million into renovating it. 1804 Books announced a merger with Liberation, the PSL's publishing arm. And the political climate is friendly: prediction markets give strong odds that the Mamdani administration opens a city-owned grocery store by 2028. The infrastructure that produced the encampments is buying real estate.

Back at the rally, after Friedman identified himself, Pritsker delivered a closing speech about genocide and the world waking up. Friedman looked around and noted that the tens of thousands Pritsker invoked were not present. Maybe a hundred people, on a cold street, with a man who would not say what he does for work standing in front of a camera he wanted turned off. He had already answered the question. It was on the tax filings.

Related investigations

People's Forum, Cosecha NJ, and the Cuba-China Funding Trail Behind ICE Protests
The Mamdani Administration: A Network Map of DSA Appointees
Delaney Hall: Who's Really Running the ICE Protests
Active Measures: How Russia Weaponizes the American Right

Source material: Nate Friedman Show video investigation (June 2026). Dollar figures and biographical claims as documented in Friedman's reporting and cited tax filings.

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