Empowerment in Name Only

What happened

In October 2026, Empowering Black Americans PAC reported $1,538,000 in independent expenditures in three transactions — every dollar of it opposing Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Michigan. The largest single buy, $778,000 for television and radio on October 21, ran through a media vendor, Spearpoint Strategies LLC.

The PAC’s FEC reports through September 30 show just $25,000 in contributions for the entire cycle. Whoever paid for the October campaign does not have to be disclosed until the post-general report, due December 3 — nearly a month after the election it is trying to influence.

Michigan’s Senate race is not its only target. In August, the PAC reported spending against Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D) in Michigan’s 12th district. In 2024, the same network spent against Reps. Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush — both lost primaries dominated by pro-Israel money.

Who’s behind it

Empowering Black Americans PAC is listed as a “related organization” on the tax filing of the National Black Empowerment Action Fund (NBEAF).

NBEAF’s president, Richard St. Paul, sits on AIPAC’s national council. Its senior adviser, Darius Jones, spent nine years at AIPAC — five of them as the lobby’s African American constituency director.

NBEAF was created in 2022 with a $670,000 grant from the New York Solidarity Network, a pro-Israel donor group with close ties to New York’s Jewish establishment. The PAC’s 2024 funders included hedge-fund billionaire Daniel Loeb and Ronald Lauder — $100,000 each. Its only disclosed 2026 contribution, the $25,000 in its FEC reports, came from AIPAC donor Herbert Shear.

Some of the money around the operation never sees daylight at all: NBEAF has taken $125,000 from the Ardleigh Impact Corporation, a dark-money group that funnels money into Republican super PACs, and $100,000 last year from another dark-money organization, Our American Future Action.

One paperwork note, for the record: the PAC’s treasurer, Cassie Tinsmon, is also treasurer of record for J Street Action Fund. That is a shared compliance role; no funding or coordination link between those two committees is documented, and we do not claim one.

The Michigan objective

This did not start in October, and it did not start with EBAP. In the Democratic primary, AIPAC’s super PAC, the United Democracy Project, spent $30,638,639 in Michigan’s Senate primary alone — 57% of everything UDP spent in 2026: $20,139,904 opposing El-Sayed and $10,498,735 supporting Haley Stevens, across 49 FEC transactions between June 9 and July 30. PoliVion documented that operation in our Michigan case study.

El-Sayed won the primary anyway and is now the Democratic nominee. And the primary ads made the same choice EBAP’s ads make: UDP’s spots praised Stevens’s record on immigration enforcement and said nothing about Israel — as we reported at the time, citing The Forward.

So read EBAP’s October $1,538,000 for what it is: the same objective — Michigan, and stopping El-Sayed — continued into the general election, this time through a vehicle branded in Black voters’ name instead of AIPAC’s.

What they say

Defending the campaigns, Jones argues that focusing on a “foreign conflict” won’t “lower health care or housing costs for a Black senior in Detroit.” The group’s ads tell Black voters that Tlaib “cares more about her agenda than she does about us.”

Maurice Mitchell, national director of the Working Families Party, which backs the targeted candidates, describes the model this way: “There is a whole subgenre of political spending by pro-Israel interests that are too embarrassed to profess their interests out loud and will use different brands.”

Our read: the scarcity play

Start with what is true. Scarcity in Black America is real — housing, health care, wages, schools, squeezed for generations, much of it by design. That pain is the lever this operation pulls. The pitch is always the same: your life is hard because your candidate is looking at Gaza instead of you. It takes a real wound, and it aims it.

But look at what the people funding it actually want. Nothing in this network’s documented record is about housing costs in Detroit or a Black senior’s health care. Its leaders are AIPAC’s people. Its seed money and its checks come from the pro-Israel donor world. And its targets — El-Sayed, Tlaib, Bush, Bowman — are the candidates who criticize Israel, who also happen to be the candidates running on the housing, health-care, and wage policies the ads claim to speak for.

So the scarcity never gets relieved. It gets harvested. If the operation works, Black voters are turned against the candidates closest to their own material interests, and the only thing that changes hands is power — to donors whose actual agenda never appears in the ads. The community whose name is on the door of the PAC gets nothing back. That is exploitation in the plain sense of the word: a vulnerability, used, for somebody else’s benefit.

And there is an older version of this move. For years, the shield has been Judaism itself: criticize the Israeli government’s politics and the charge comes back as antisemitism — a faith held up in front of a state, so the state cannot be touched. EBAP is the same strategy with a different shield: another minority’s identity, another community’s real grievances, held up in front of the same agenda. The community changes. The agenda doesn’t.

And the voters being spoken to in Black America’s name cannot see who is paying to speak. Not until December 3, a month after they have voted.

What happens next

Empowering Black Americans PAC is on PoliVion’s donor watch. Its post-general report is due December 3, 2026; when the October funder is disclosed, we will name them here, on the dashboard, and on the network map — where NBEAF, its leaders, and its funders are now charted.