Sinclair Local Stations Push Report Linking Anti-Flock Critics to Pro-China Activist Network

The Sinclair-syndicated package relied on a disputed white paper that did not mention the 'No Kings' protests named in its headline

At least 40 local television stations across America have run the same segment telling viewers that opposition to Flock surveillance cameras is the work of a far-left network with links to China.

The package, titled 'Report: Far-left network behind "No Kings" protests targeting AI data centres, Flock cams', was produced by The National News Desk, a syndication arm of Sinclair Broadcast Group, and ran over the weekend of 5 and 6 September 2026.

It rests largely on a white paper published days earlier by a lobbying organisation whose funding sources are not fully disclosed. Technology journalist Jason Koebler identified the stations carrying it and traced the claims back to their source.

The Segment and the 40 Markets That Carried It

The scale of the syndication is what makes the segment unusual. 404 Media identified at least 40 local markets running the package, among them Birmingham, Little Rock, Fresno, Washington DC, West Palm Beach, Boise, Las Vegas, Columbus, Tulsa, Portland, Charleston, Austin, El Paso, Salt Lake City and Green Bay.

Sinclair is the common thread. The National News Desk supplies content to dozens of Sinclair-owned stations nationwide, allowing a single segment to appear as local news in markets that have no editorial connection to one another. The company has a long record of distributing centrally produced conservative commentary through its local affiliates.

One detail sits awkwardly with the headline. The No Kings protests are not mentioned in the underlying report, and neither the Sinclair package nor the Fox News article that preceded it explains how the protest movement is connected to opposition to licence plate cameras beyond noting that some groups present at those protests have also posted about Flock.

The Lobbying Paper Behind the Coverage

The source document is a white paper called The Compute War At Home, published by Consumer Action for a Strong Economy, a lobbying group that advocates deregulation on free-market grounds. Its foreword was written by Rob Joyce, the former head of the National Security Agency.

The paper argues that opposition to Flock and to AI data centres is being driven by what it calls China-linked activist networks. Its evidence centres on Neville Roy Singham, an American technology millionaire who lives in China and funds left-wing organisations, and on the fact that groups receiving his money, including the Party for Socialism and Liberation and BreakThrough News, have published or posted about Flock.

The paper also acknowledges that 81 per cent of politically classifiable posts linking Flock and data centres came from right-wing, conservative or libertarian accounts, and argues that the left has effectively persuaded the right to adopt its position. 'He only needs to accept the surveillance-state frame and repeat it,' the paper says of the typical conservative critic.

Two things about the document are worth noting. Consumer Action for a Strong Economy does not publicly disclose all of its funding sources, while IRS filings show it has received grants from organisations including the Consumer Brands Association, Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America and the NCTA–The Internet & Television Association. 404 Media also ran the text through the AI detection tool Pangram, which flagged almost everything apart from the closing citations as likely machine-written, and reported that the cover art shows signs of AI generation.

A Strategy Flock's Chief Executive Already Abandoned

The company at the centre of the dispute tried a version of this argument and retreated from it. Flock chief executive Garrett Langley told Forbes that DeFlock, a crowdsourced map of automated licence plate reader cameras, was a terroristic organisation closer to Antifa than anything else. He later apologised for the remark.

He had made a similar case privately. Emails obtained through a public records request show Langley wrote to the police chief of Staunton, Virginia, as the city considered cancelling its Flock contract, saying the company and its law enforcement partners were under coordinated attack from activist groups seeking to defund the police and normalise lawlessness.

The chief did not accept it. Writing back after 41 years in policing, 22 of them as chief, he said he did not believe any attack was under way. 'What we are seeing here is a group of local citizens who are raising concerns,' he wrote, describing residents pressing him and elected officials for answers and concluding that it amounted to democracy in action.

The political spread of Flock's critics does not neatly match the description. Elected officials who have moved against the cameras include Republicans Ron DeSantis, Josh Hawley and Thomas Massie, alongside Democrats Josh Shapiro, Ron Wyden and Ed Markey.

DeFlock was built by a single programmer in his twenties. HaveIBeenFlocked, a database of Flock searches, has helped expose police misuse, including cases resulting in arrests.

The political picture can also be distorted in the opposite direction. Government intelligence bulletins have documented online activity by a neo-Nazi accelerationist group encouraging sabotage of Flock cameras, while also tracking lawful anti-Flock organising.

The reporting does not establish that the accelerationist group actually carried out camera attacks. Flock has also sharply increased its political giving: The Intercept reported that its donations to partisan associations representing mayors, governors and attorneys general had risen 700 per cent since 2025.

A lobbying paper became local news in 40 American cities in a single weekend, while the report it summarised never mentioned the protests named in the headline.