Katie Ledecky has proven to be an American powerhouse in the pool all by herself.

She’s the most decorated female Olympian in history with 14 total medals, including nine gold. She also has a record 18 individual gold medals at the World Aquatics Championships. It’s safe to say that she knows a thing or two about representing Team USA on the world stage.

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The 29-year-old Stanford grad was asked in an interview with “60 Minutes” what she learned about the U.S. while representing her country.

“What I’ve learned over time as a member of Team USA is that we are a nation of strivers that embraces competition of all sorts,” Ledecky said. “We are a very prideful nation in how we compete. Where that striving and competitive spirit, when harnessed correctly, brings out the best in us and shows us the best of the human spirit.

“I’ve learned that sports tests our determination, our resilience and our discipline. Sports teach us every day that anything is possible. That when we try and give our best effort, that we can overcome obstacles.”

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Ledecky recalled going from town to town for swim meets in different local communities when she was growing up.

“And what I’ve seen in so many different communities is that sport in America is at its best when its joy and fun, and yes, its challenges, bring us together,” she added.

She will be pushing to solidify herself as a member of Team USA once again for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics.

Ledecky won gold medals in the 800-meter free and 1,500-meter free at the Paris Games in 2024. She also won a silver in the 4×200-meter free and a bronze in the 400-meter free.

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The Commonwealth of Virginia, once the cradle of American liberty and the home of the Bill of Rights, is witnessing a historic betrayal in real time.

On March 14, the Virginia General Assembly wrapped up their 2026 legislative session and rammed through over 15 pieces of anti-gun legislation.  In just 60 days, the anti-gun left has nearly undone gun rights for millions of law-abiding Virginia residents.

Their crown jewel of tyranny? SB 749 and HB 217, two so-called “assault weapons” ban bills.

These identical bills landed at the desk of newly elected Democrat Gov. Abigail Spanberger during the final days of the legislative session and are currently awaiting her signature.

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She has promised to sign them into law.  

For years, Gun Owners of America (GOA) and our dedicated members have stood against these unconstitutional infringements as they’ve popped up in state legislatures all around the country.

Just a few weeks ago, through overwhelming grassroots activism and pressure from gun rights organizations like GOA, a similar “assault weapons” ban was defeated in New Mexico. And last year in Virginia, former Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin vetoed over 27 anti-gun bills – including an “assault weapons” ban.

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But with the election of billionaire Michael Bloomberg-backed Spanberger in November 2025, the governor’s seat is now occupied by a rubber stamp for the radical gun control lobby. Anti-gun Democrats also flipped over a dozen pro-gun seats in the Virginia House of Delegates while also maintaining a slim majority in the Virginia Senate.

And within hours of gaining control of the governor’s mansion and legislature, anti-gun lawmakers began drafting numerous gun control measures, promising to ram them through the General Assembly at warp speed.

Make no mistake: SB 749/HB 217 have nothing to do with “safety” and everything to do with removing your Second Amendment rights. This legislation targets the most popular firearms in America — tools used by millions of law-abiding citizens for self-defense, competition and sport. According to the FBI, nearly twice as many people are murdered with hands/fists than rifles of any kind. And over three times as many with knives. Yet anti-gun radicals want us to believe semi-automatic firearms must be banned.

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But by arbitrarily labeling semi-automatic rifles, pistols and shotguns as “assault firearms” based on common features like folding stocks or threaded barrels, the anti-gunners are actively removing your ability to defend yourself and your family with the tool of your choice.

Furthermore, the legislation takes aim at standard-capacity magazines, labeling anything over 15 rounds as a “large capacity ammunition feeding device.”

The proponents of SB 749 point to similar laws that exist in other states, yet the Supreme Court’s Bruen decision made it clear: the government must prove that a firearm regulation is consistent with this nation’s historical tradition.

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There is zero historical tradition of banning the most commonly owned firearms in the country. There is zero constitutional basis for targeting certain semi-automatic firearms and using the power of the state to punish anyone who buys, sells or transfers one after July 1, 2026.

The anti-gun Democrats’ argument that these are “weapons of war” is a lazy buzzword term. These weapons are the modern-day equivalent of the musket — the standard arm of the citizen-soldier.

And let’s be clear — the Second Amendment was not written for deer hunting; it was written to ensure that the “body of the people” would always have the means to resist a tyrannical government.

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When George Mason wrote the Virginia Declaration of Rights, he did not mince words when it came to our right to own firearms. “That a well regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, trained to arms, is the proper, natural, and safe defense of a free state, therefore, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed…”

It’s easy to see where the inspiration for the Second Amendment to the U.S. Bill of Rights originated from.

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By stripping Virginians of these tools, Spanberger and her allies are intentionally shifting the balance of power from the people to the state and jeopardizing liberty and freedom in the process. It’s clear they have forgotten, or worse yet, are purposefully ignoring the motto of this great commonwealth: “Sic semper tyrannis” which translates to, “thus always to tyrants.”

Make no mistake — Gun Owners of America will not idly stand by while the Spanberger-led government of Virginia tosses our gun rights into the trash.

Gun Owners Foundation — the legal wing of GOA — is already working with our friends at Virginia Citizens Defense League to challenge these infringements in court. No law-abiding Virginian should be subject to such heinous and un-American laws.

The political and legal fights to restore gun rights in Virginia which lay ahead will be long and difficult, but GOA will continue on until every single word of gun control is repealed. And as we fight, we carry the words of the great Founding Father and lifelong Virginian Patrick Henry with absolute resolve, “The great object is that every man be armed. Everyone who is able may have a gun.”

Part 1 of a five-part Fox News Digital series investigation follows the money that created the “Revolutionary Base” for a transnational network of organizations allegedly waging cognitive warfare on U.S. citizens on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party.

As far-left American activists flood Cuba to support its flailing communist regime, U.S. officials have opened a sprawling investigation into an anti-America, pro-China nonprofit network forged during a wedding celebration in late February 2017, off Runaway Bay on Jamaica’s northern coast.

There, beneath a canopy of palm trees, an elite cadre of activists, intellectuals, celebrities, political organizers and comrades in a global Marxist-Leninist-Maoist movement assembled to celebrate the “Revolutionary Love” of two luminaries, both 62 at the time: Neville Roy Singham, an American-born tech tycoon living in Shanghai, and Jodie Evans, a red-haired veteran activist and co-founder of CodePink Women for Peace.

Like the opening scene of “The Godfather,” where powerful families consolidate power, the wedding celebration was about much more than the union of two people. 

Over four days of dancing, lectures and late-night conversations in venues from the Flavor Beach Bar to Sharkey’s Seafood, celebrating the bond of “Roy and Jodie,” alliances were formed that would shape protests, unrest and political agitation over the next decade, from the fiery 2020 scenes in Minneapolis to demonstrations today supporting the regimes in Cuba and Iran.

That weekend, Vijay Prashad, an academic described in the official wedding itinerary as a “Marxist intellectual,” spoke on a panel, “The Future of the Left.” Medea Benjamin, Evans’ friend and CodePink co-founder, danced barefoot at the wedding in a bright Indian outfit.

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According to sources, the wedding attendees invoked the teachings of Mao Zedong, the 20th century Chinese Communist Party leader who ruled China with an iron fist, inspired by Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin, and they discussed how to mobilize the masses to wage a Maoist “People’s War.” 

“The revolutionary war is a war of the masses,” Mao said in 1934.

Many were themselves relics of the Cold War, growing up before the Soviet Union was dismantled in 1989.

A monthslong Fox News Digital investigation pinpoints the Jamaica wedding as a starting point for launching a network of organizations that is today waging a new “People’s War” on America, aligned with the Chinese Communist Party’s geopolitical ambitions to eclipse the U.S. as a superpower through economic programs like the “Belt and Road” initiative, realizing the vision of China’s ideological godfather, Mao, through trade partnerships, economic deals and pro-China propaganda.

National security experts call it cognitive warfare.

Over almost a decade, Fox News Digital has learned, Singham and Evans have activated a global network that now numbers an estimated 2,000 hard-left organizations that parrot anti-U.S. propaganda supporting autocratic regimes leading China, Russia, Iran, Cuba, North Korea, Venezuela and Gaza. Within activist circles, far-left critics refer to leftists who align with authoritarian regimes as “tankies.” Many groups and leaders from Singham’s network, including Evans and Benjamin, are part of the pro-communist convoy now in Cuba.

Fox News Digital has established a documented $278 million that flowed from Singham into organizations that “sow discord” in the U.S., as House Ways and Means Chair Jason Smith put it recently at a hearing on foreign malign influence in the nonprofit industry.

According to the data, Singham created a base from which the U.S. is now one of the world’s most prolific exporters of radical pro-China communist ideology. Singham and Evans didn’t respond to requests for comment.

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Xi Van Fleet, a Chinese American who survived Mao’s purge of innocents during the Cultural Revolution, told Fox News Digital that Singham and Evans are following the communist dictator’s playbook.

“Neville Roy Singham and his wife, Jody Evans, are bringing into the 21st century Mao’s dream for a People’s War,” Van Fleet said.

Mao’s doctrine of the People’s War emphasized long-term struggle through decentralized networks, ideological indoctrination and the mobilization of civilian institutions rather than direct military confrontation. 

“They are bringing to the streets America’s worst nightmare of a Red Army that is seeking to destroy the United States and make China more competitive on the world stage,” said Van Fleet, the author of “Made in America: The Hidden History of How the U.S. Enabled Communist China and Created Our Greatest Threat.”

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Singham grew up familiar with Mao’s dictates.

He was born in mid-May 1954 in Middletown, Conn., the son of Archibald Singham, a Marxist-Leninist scholar of Sri Lankan heritage, and Shirley Hume, who also adhered to far-left ideology. By his own account, he joined the League of Revolutionary Black Workers as a teenager and worked at a Chrysler assembly line in Detroit. 

FBI agents once attempted to interview him at the Chrysler Eldon Avenue Plant, noting in their report that he was “potentially dangerous” because of his “background, emotional instability” or role in groups involved in harmful activities “inimical to U.S.,” according to a copy of the FBI report released by the House Ways and Means Committee.

According to the FBI report, Singham told the agents, “I don’t want to talk to you,” and walked away.

Singham quietly built his Thoughtworks technology company through the 1990s. Meanwhile, Evans was campaign manager for Democratic politician Jerry Brown’s losing 1992 California governor’s race. 

After they exchanged vows in Jamaica, Evans called Singham her “adorable troublemaker,” her “darling Roy” and “adorable husband” in Instagram posts. 

Fox News Digital analyzed 223 transactions that moved $591 million in total across five continents from 2017 through 2025, the latest year available, and found the money flows through five concentric rings of an ideological pipeline that spreads pro-China propaganda:

Last November, Singham walked through the doors of the Golden Tulip hotel in Shanghai for one of his rare public appearances, a two-day “Global South Academic Forum” conference blessed by the country’s ruling Chinese Communist Party, which the government officially calls the Communist Party of China, or CPC.

Videos and images from the conference provide a rare public window into the messaging, symbolism and participants of a network that otherwise operates opaquely.

The opening talk featured Prashad, Singham’s wedding guest, releasing a 172-page treatise written by Singham, chairman of the “International Advisory Board” of Tricontinental, a think tank Singham had funded and one of the conference sponsors. Another co-sponsor was the East China Normal University, which is administered by the Communist Party of China.

In the report, “80th Anniversary of the Victory of the World Anti-Fascist War: Acknowledging Who Truly Saved Human History and Restoring Historical Truth,” which Fox News Digital has uncovered, Singham rewrote the history of World War II to elevate the role of China and the “Global South” in defeating Nazi Germany.

On page 61, Singham blasted the West but held out hope it could be defeated. 

“Socialist peoples and leadership can defeat imperialism in any form – fascist then, hyper-imperialist now – despite every material disadvantage,” he argued. “That victory required genius, courage and unimaginable sacrifice. It also proved something imperialism cannot accept: ordinary people, organised and led with brilliance, can defeat any empire.”

Singham then quoted Mao, saying that the brutal leader “crystallized this truth” in his book “On Protracted War,” when he wrote, “The richest source of power to wage war lies in the masses of the people.”

In the paper, Singham diminishes the deaths of U.S. and British troops and service members, writing that the Soviets and China really won the war with, “59.8% socialists dead, 13.1% colonised peoples dead – only 1% Anglo-Americans dead.”

He also condemns British leader Winston Churchill’s “genocidal impulses.”

About 23 minutes into his remarks, Prashad welcomed Singham on stage with two other colleagues and Singham took a bow to the applause of the audience members and said, “Thank you, comrades, friends.” 

In a video of the event, unearthed by Fox News Digital, Singham railed against “the fascist lie” of the West that “there is a battle between fascism, democracy and communism.”

Singham articulated a view of global power that challenges the Western understanding of World War II and the postwar international order.

“Fascism is actually a face of capitalism and imperialism, as is colonialism. These are the three faces of a system that is quite now becoming very dangerous for us.”

He didn’t identify “us.” 

In the clip, Singham describes a “rules-based international order” that he argues is built on a “lie” about democracy. The excerpt is included for the purpose of reporting and analyzing the content of his remarks.

He talked about the Americans and “their” failure to hold fascists accountable from the “anti-fascist” war. 

“If we want to, therefore, have a new world order that is based on multilateralism that President Xi and CPC and China have proposed, we have to undo the ideological damage that has been done by the narrative of World War II,” he said, using the acronym for the Communist Party of China, called CCP in the West.

He ended by recognizing Soviet and Chinese fighters who died during World War II, and he urged the group to “honor” them for their underappreciated sacrifice. 

“China has a very important role, and we, in this forum, have a very important role,” Singham said, “that to envision a new order, a new multi-polarity order, requires, quite frankly, the deconstruction, a restorationist history of what really happened, who really suffered. Of those who died, almost 70% of the people who died in World War II were in China and the Soviet Union.”

The comments reflect a broader ideology that reframes historical events and positions China’s communist system as the better alternative to Western “democracy.”

Asked about Singham, Liu Pengyu, a spokesman for the Embassy of the People’s Republic of China in Washington, D.C., told Fox News Digital, “I am not familiar with the specifics of this particular case.”

Pengyu added, “As a matter of principle, however, China consistently upholds the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries.”

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As part of this investigation, Fox News Digital tracked street protests from New York City to Berkeley, Calif., and built a database with thousands of pages of IRS tax filings, corporate records, social media posts, website content and other material. 

The investigation analyzed 1,663 events the People’s Forum hosted from early August 2018 and its most recent gatherings early this year. The events included academics and researchers from at least 225 colleges and universities that are being analyzed separately.

The scale of what the couple built goes far beyond anything previously documented, revealing a network that acts like a transnational, asymmetric propaganda machine. It features a central headquarters, substantial war chest, defined command structure, propaganda wing and street-level foot soldiers. Its operations extend beyond the United States into multiple overseas theaters.

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At a protest in Lower Manhattan in early January, David Chung, organizing director at the People’s Forum, and Hannah Priscilla Craig, art, culture and communications director at the People’s Forum, walked away from requests for interviews.

When approached by Fox News Digital at the People’s Forum offices in Manhattan, Brian Becker, a founder of the Party for Socialism and Liberation and the ANSWER Coalition, with operations at the People’s Forum, called the inquiries “witch hunting” and referred to a reporter as “a terrorist.” 

Manolo De Los Santos, executive director of the People’s Forum, compared the scrutiny to the era of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, who conducted congressional hearings into communist infiltration in the U.S. in the 1950s.

Becker’s son, Ben Becker, editor-in-chief of BreakThrough BT News, a propaganda wing of Singham’s network, watched silently.

Soon after, in mid-February, the Global South Academic Forum released a video, “The World Is Small, The South Is Vast,” featuring highlights from last fall’s conference at Shanghai’s Golden Tulip hotel. The video underscores how the Singham network has created a “Revolutionary Base” in which academic discussion blends with historical symbols tied to revolutionary communism.

In the last seconds of the video, Singham stands at attention as a global communist anthem, “The Internationale,” plays, his comrades punching the air with their fists in solidarity.

Niikolas Lanam, Kiera McDonald, Hannah Brennan, Mitch Picasso and Brooke Curto contributed to this report.