Pieter Friedrich
@FriedrichPieter • 105,493 subscribers
Investigative journalist covering ethnonationalism, transnational repression, South Asian geopolitics. Author of four books. Former Christian nationalist.
Videos
Why is US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Bethany Poulos Morrison meeting Indian paramilitary RSS at Hudson Institute today? The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh is a Hindu nationalist paramilitary. The US government’s own USCIRF recommended sanctions against it fifty days ago, on March 4, 2026. Today, a sitting US State Department official is scheduled to share a Hudson Institute panel with Ram Madhav — a member of the RSS National Executive. Who at Department of State authorized this? Secretary Marco Rubio? Hudson Institute
Pieter Friedrich105,292 次观看 • 2 个月前
On June 30, 2026, I walked into a congressional advocacy day to sit down and listen. Within seconds, I was surrounded and grabbed — by the president and vice president of CoHNA, the Coalition of Hindus of North America — while I asked, over and over, one thing: to sit and listen. They shoved a poster in my camera. They accused me of “terrorizing children.” They called me an antisemite. Then they called the Capitol Police on me. And when the officer asked them how, exactly, I had threatened anyone — their answer, on camera, was that I was filming. That’s it. That’s the threat. A journalist with a camera. CoHNA (Coalition of Hindus of North America) is the group behind the “Hinduphobia” resolution, H.Res. 69. It’s named in a Rutgers report on the RSS network in America. Its officers founded the PAC funding this legislation. And this week I’ve been documenting all of it. So when I walked into their event and asked to listen, this is what they did — on camera, with their own hands, the same week they’ve been telling Congress that they’re the ones under attack. I recorded the whole thing. Start to finish. Walking in, being grabbed, the accusations, the police, all of it. Nothing is cut out. Watch it and decide for yourself who was intimidating whom. They set up a table in the halls of the people’s Congress. The journalist got grabbed and thrown out. That’s the whole story in one hallway.
Pieter Friedrich11,375 次观看 • 6 天前
RSS’s Ram Madhav Runs from Questions About Rape, Immolation, and Massacre Outside Hudson Institute Ram Madhav, president of the India Foundation and member of the RSS National Executive, walked out of Hudson Institute today after speaking on an American policy panel with a sitting US State Department official. I asked him on camera — about the RSS’s record, and about his presence in the United States. About the RSS’s record: — What do you have to say about the RSS burning Christians alive? — What do you have to say about the RSS gang-raping Muslim women? — What do you have to say about the RSS massacring Christians and Muslims in India? — What do you have to say about the RSS lynching people for eating beef? — What do you have to say about the RSS raping Christian nuns? And about his activity on American soil: — Why are you in America, Mr. Madhav? — What is your agenda in this country? — What are you attempting to influence in American politics? — Who are you meeting with? — Are you reporting it? He said nothing. He got in the car. He drove off. With him: Vijay Chauthaiwale, BJP Head of Foreign Affairs. And Adapa Prasad, the BJP’s FARA-registered foreign agent in the United States. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh is a Hindu nationalist paramilitary founded in 1925. It has been banned three times by the Indian government — after Gandhi’s assassination, during the Emergency, and after the Babri Masjid demolition. On March 4, 2026, the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom recommended the RSS be sanctioned by the US government. Fifty days later, Hudson Institute put the RSS’s General Secretary on a Washington stage. Ram Madhav was there as the co-panelist with a sitting US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State, Bethany Poulos Morrison. Hudson Institute is a US tax-exempt 501(c)(3), subsidized by the American public. Its Washington offices sit four blocks from the White House. It has been in a formal thirty-month partnership with the India Foundation — led by the son of India’s National Security Adviser, its board including sitting Indian government ministers, its president a member of the RSS National Executive. The Department of Justice, the Internal Revenue Service, and the congressional committees with jurisdiction over foreign influence and tax-exempt organizations have a responsibility to examine this partnership. USCIRF did its job on March 4. The question today is whether the rest of the American government will do theirs. Filmed outside 1201 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington DC at Hudson Institute headquarters.
Pieter Friedrich87,007 次观看 • 2 个月前
As we protested Modi near White House, Utsav Chakrabarti of VHP-America (US wing of India’s militant VHP) showed up to snoop & take pictures of protesters, so I asked him why he was there. @ootzchakra, are your pics for Indian embassy? Indian intelligence? Who? #ModiNotWelcome
Pieter Friedrich595,587 次观看 • 3 年前
The Coalition of Hindus of North America presents itself as a civil rights group. Its leadership has documented ties to India's Hindu nationalist movement and a registered foreign agent of India's ruling party. CoHNA built an operation in Maple Grove in 13 months — securing the police chief, a council member, and a state senator. The council deserved to know who they stood with. #HinduNationalism #CoHNA #MapleGrove #Minnesota #Hindutva #Modi #CityCouncil #Hinduphobia
Pieter Friedrich36,684 次观看 • 3 个月前
On May 24, 2026, a car rally assembled outside Rakhi Israni's Excel Test office in Fremont to oppose her run for Congress in California's 14th District. Israni is not an ordinary candidate, and the speakers came to say why. She has served as Joint General Secretary of the VHPA, the American wing of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, and as Legal Director of HinduPACT, a VHPA initiative, helping build the organizational infrastructure of the Hindu supremacist movement in the United States over the course of decades. Her campaign has drawn $351,954 from out-of-state donors tied to that same network, which raises the question the rally put plainly: is she running for the people of California, or for the politics of the RSS? This video is that question, in their words. #RakhiIsrani #CA14 #RSS #VHPA #HinduPACT #Hindutva #HinduNationalism #Fremont #BayArea #TransnationalRepression #ForeignInfluence #Congress2026
Pieter Friedrich19,085 次观看 • 1 个月前
The US government knows how Christians in Manipur are being slaughtered, but refuses to act. As violence skyrockets, across India, why is even the American Church asleep to the persecution of Indian Christians? It's past time to wake up & speak on behalf of Indian Christians.
Pieter Friedrich203,833 次观看 • 3 年前
A foreign ethno-nationalist movement from India is moving aggressively into U.S. politics. American discourse fixates on Chinese Communist Party interference and Russian disinformation. Hindutva — the supremacist Hindu nationalist movement that powers India's ruling government — barely registers in the conversation. Three of its collaborators sit in U.S. Congress. Capitol Hill's Hindutva Squad — Suhas Subramanyam, Shri Thanedar, and Raja Krishnamoorthi — have spent years making common cause with the American arms of this movement. VHP America and CoHNA pushed H.Res. 69, the so-called "Hinduphobia" resolution. Thanedar authored it. Subramanyam and Krishnamoorthi cosponsored. The same network has funded all three of their campaigns and worked to kill state-level legislation built to protect Americans from transnational repression. Krishnamoorthi shared a stage with RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat at the 2018 World Hindu Congress in Chicago, then keynoted the RSS's birthday celebration in 2019 before a photograph of M.S. Golwalkar — the second RSS chief, whose 1939 book held up Nazi Germany's treatment of Jews as "a good lesson" for India. Later that year, Krishnamoorthi was the only Indian American member of Congress to attend Howdy Modi in Houston — a rally for a man then banned from the U.S. for over a decade for orchestrating the 2002 anti-Muslim Gujarat pogrom. Thanedar escorted Modi to his June 2023 joint address to Congress. Then in February 2026, the middleman in India's plot to kill an American citizen on American soil pled guilty in a New York court. One month later, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom recommended Washington sanction India's RSS — the paramilitary force at the heart of that government — for egregious violations of religious freedom. These three keep cozying up anyway. The full record is in the video. Suhas Subramanyam, Shri Thanedar, Congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi #HindutvaSquad #Hindutva #HRes69 #VHPA #CoHNA #RSS #TransnationalRepression #USCIRF #ForeignInfluence #CapitolHill
Pieter Friedrich20,394 次观看 • 2 个月前
Before Pakistan slid into "military rule with a civilian facade," India, the world's largest democracy, was heading towards fascism under the reign of the Nazi-inspired RSS paramilitary. Imran Khan (now jailed for 500 days) called the RSS out at the UN in 2019. #FreeImranKhan
Pieter Friedrich117,687 次观看 • 1 年前
The Modi regime is silent, but so too is our Biden administration here in America. Yet we will not be silent. We will stand up, speak out, & scream for the sake of those who are being slaughtered in #Manipur & for the sake of the survivors. #StandWithKukiWomen #ManipurViolence
Pieter Friedrich191,520 次观看 • 2 年前
Vijay Prabhakar is a longtime activist with the Overseas Friends of the Bharatiya Janata Party — the international wing of India's ruling Hindu nationalist party, registered with the U.S. Department of Justice as a Foreign Agent since August 2020. He also sits on the Campaign Finance Committee of U.S. Congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi, to whom he has personally donated more than $15,000. In May 2022, at a Democratic Party primary debate at Bloomingdale Public Library in Illinois, Congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi was asked one question about the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh — the fascist Indian paramilitary at the heart of the BJP. Prabhakar erupted. Shouting "Stop it! Stop it!" at the camera, he lunged to block the lens and laid both hands on Krishnamoorthi's shoulders to physically walk him out of the room. The OFBJP entourage closed around them. Krishnamoorthi did not answer. He let himself be removed. At least four other OFBJP activists and leaders flanked the congressman that night, including a former OFBJP National Vice-President and the organization's Chicago Coordinator. Krishnamoorthi sits on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. A foreign-agent network around a sitting member of the U.S. House Intelligence Committee, caught on camera in 2022. Krishnamoorthi remains in office today as one of three cosponsors of H.Res. 69, the so-called "Hinduphobia" resolution pushed by VHP America and CoHNA — both extensions of the same Hindu nationalist movement OFBJP works to advance. The full record is in the video. #HindutvaSquad #Krishnamoorthi #OFBJP #ForeignAgent #FARA #RSS #BJP #ForeignInfluence #Hindutva #HRes69
Pieter Friedrich17,581 次观看 • 2 个月前
We are calling for our own US government to stand up, and speak out, and put a halt to this ongoing massacre – slaughter of Christians in the streets of Manipur – before it is too late. Before the violence gets out of control and spreads beyond the borders of Manipur.
Pieter Friedrich144,131 次观看 • 2 年前
Manipur is burning. Kuki-Zomi tribal Christians are under attack. Yet #Manipur's state govt is complicit, the central govt in Delhi is silent & our own US govt is more concerned with turning a profit than protecting the lives of innocent people. So what of the Church in America?
Pieter Friedrich137,624 次观看 • 2 年前
When BJP worker #PraveshShukla pissed on a tribal man, on camera, his atrocious behavior was obviously an extreme departure from the norm in Modi’s “New India.” His act was nothing more than an aberration. Admittedly, there have been a few other "aberrations" in recent days....
Pieter Friedrich132,505 次观看 • 3 年前
Speech in Ro Khanna's district: For Manipur, for the Kuki-Zomi people, for my Christian brothers and sisters who are being slaughtered: I will kneel, in pain, for Manipur. I will throw dust on my head, in lamentation, for Manipur. I will tear my clothes, in anguish, for Manipur. And then I, and we, in solidarity, will stand up and speak out. #ManipurHorror
Pieter Friedrich126,690 次观看 • 2 年前
Four days after Ram Madhav refused to answer for the RSS’s record, Hudson Institute's Walter Russell Mead also refused. I asked the Distinguished Fellow who hosted RSS leader Hosabale on April 23 about USCIRF’s sanctions recommendation, the India Foundation’s funding of his India travel, and his role in laundering the RSS. His answer to every question: “No comment.” On April 27, 2026, I encountered Walter Russell Mead leaving a Washington restaurant. Four days earlier, he had hosted Dattatreya Hosabale, the General Secretary of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, in a fireside chat on Hudson’s stage. The conference convened fifty days after the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom recommended the RSS for US sanctions. I asked Mead, on camera, about his role in hosting the RSS leadership. I asked him whether he was aware of the documented record of RSS-implicated violence against Christians, Muslims, and other religious minorities. I asked him whether he was aware of the USCIRF sanctions recommendation. I asked him how he felt about laundering and whitewashing the RSS for an American audience. I asked him whether the India Foundation — Hudson’s institutional partner since 2023 — pays for his trips to India. I asked him how long his relationship with Ram Madhav has lasted. I asked him whether it bothers his conscience to platform an organization whose members have been accused of assassinating Mahatma Gandhi, burning Christians alive, and gang-raping Muslim women. Mead’s response to every question: “No comment.” Walter Russell Mead is the Distinguished Fellow at Hudson Institute who moderated Hosabale’s April 23 fireside chat without challenging a single claim Hosabale made. He has written favorably about India and the BJP government in The Wall Street Journal for seven years. He has traveled to India under India Foundation hosting, including a November 2024 Hudson-India Foundation delegation to Tawang documented in his own WSJ column. On October 7, 2025, Narendra Modi personally hosted Mead at his residence in New Delhi. Asked directly about these institutional facts, Mead chose silence. Hudson Institute is a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organization. Its Distinguished Fellow declines to answer questions about hosting a foreign paramilitary’s leadership fifty days after USCIRF recommended that paramilitary for sanctions. He declines to answer questions about whether his Indian travel is funded by an Indian Foundation tied to the BJP and to India’s National Security Adviser. He declines to answer questions about his role in giving the RSS Washington’s policy stage. The April 23 conference was the test of whether anyone would do their job. Mead’s “no comment” is the answer.
Pieter Friedrich14,052 次观看 • 2 个月前