Who Funds that?

A new presidential administration does not typically mean new management at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, but typically the incumbent FBI director did not oversee the FBI when it raided the President-elect’s house. Given that fact and other standing disputes with the Bureau, it is not surprising that President-elect Donald Trump and Senator Chuck Grassley have informed FBI Director Christop...

The Groups, the justly maligned nonprofit and otherwise-professional activist groups whom moderate Democrats blamed for the failures of the Biden administration on the economy and immigration, are back and bolder than ever. Joining us today is our colleague Robert Stilson to discuss his profile on one of the most well-funded and radical The Groups you’ve probably never heard of: PolicyLink. The as...

Minnesota was liberal to begin with: It has the distinction of “voting blue, no matter who” since Jimmy Carter led the Democratic ticket, joining only the District of Columbia in refusing to give its electoral votes to President Ronald Reagan in 1984. For a while, the Hubert Humphrey model of Big Government, strong labor unions, and a business community that operated with a “social conscience” wor...

Arabella Advisors, we hardly knew ye. The once obscure, multi-billion dollar, private-equity-owned machine of leftist funding has gone the way of the dinosaurs. Or has it? Arabella, an organization we here at CRC worked diligently to help bring into the light, has in fact, after being rather publicly and unceremoniously dumped by the Gates Foundation in June, simply split, been restructured, been...

What makes a journalistic outfit “completely independent”? According to Drop Site News, the outlet is exactly that, and “reader-supported” to boot. But recent Open Society Foundations spending reports suggest that the outlet is not completely  reader-supported: George Soros’s philanthropy spent $250,000 to support the creation of a “MENA desk” for the group through a fiscal sponsorship cut-out. Jo...

It can seem infuriating: Leftist demonstrators wantonly violate the law, only to face no or negligible consequences because the powers that be either support or refuse to oppose their disruptive tactics. But as a famous progressive politician was fond of saying, “The arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice.” Last month, a North Dakota jury awarded Energy Transfer, the company building...

A defining feature of the creeping leftism the country has experienced over the last several years is just that: It’s creeping, coming in on padded feet behind the scenes until Americans began to see it everywhere, in boardrooms, schoolrooms, and entertainment options. Now, there’s real concern that emerging technology like AI is embracing the ideology of woke on the sly, bringing it into the very...

Regular listeners might remember that earlier this year, a North Dakota jury awarded $667 million to Energy Transfer, the company building the Dakota Access Pipeline, for damages caused by Greenpeace. Because that poses an existential threat to the environmentalist activism group, Greenpeace has vowed to appeal pending final court action, and supporters published a mass open letter of 400 fellow a...

In Washington, D.C., the “government shutdown” continues as Democrats demand that Republicans expand subsidies for Obamacare in exchange for lifting a filibuster on a “clean continuing resolution” that would reopen the government through approximately Thanksgiving. What listeners might not know is that there are is a big, well-known advocacy group and major corporation that look to benefit from th...

It has been a lousy couple of years for one of the leftist factions most deserving of a lousy couple of years—no, not organized labor, institutional transgender activism. Great Britain, home to noted critic of transgenderism J.K. Rowling who not long ago faced odds as impossible as those of the Britons defending Rorke’s Drift in the 19 th century, issued the Cass Report condemning activists’ prefe...

Last week, radical-left terrorist and cop killer Joanne Chesimard, better known by her nom de guerre Assata Shakur, died in exile in Communist Cuba. You would think that leftists, even radical leftists, would let Chesimard go quietly, especially with the hot lights of public scrutiny on left-wing political violence. But the Chicago Teachers Union, one of America’s most powerful and influential rad...

That left-wing violence is on the rise is undeniable; even The Atlantic , the bien-pensant left-wing magazine propped up by liberal heiress Laurene Powell Jobs’s billions has published a piece admitting it. But how high does support for such violence go, and how do violent left-wing extremists obtain resources? Our colleague Ryan Mauro, an expert in extremist networks, recently issued a report sho...

You’ve heard of “Soros DAs”—prosecutors, whose campaigns were financially backed by George and Alexander Soros, who seek election on promises not to prosecute. But the anti-criminal-justice movement is bigger than one eccentric progressive billionaire and his nepo-baby son. Today’s guest, Sean Kennedy of the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund, focuses on one previously hidden link in the anti-crim...

Before it was pushed from the headlines by the horrifying assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, the major national crime story was the murder of Iryna Zarutska, a Ukrainian woman stabbed to death on public transportation in Charlotte, North Carolina in late August whose killing was captured on graphic surveillance video. The suspect in the killing had an extensive criminal record, a...

After widely publicized revelations of highly ideological nonprofits receiving federal funds and spending them on highly ideological  projects, the Trump administration (and now, through the “rescissions” package and “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” passed before Congress went on its August district work period, also even Congress) has started cutting off some of those nonprofit-led projects. What doe...

I'm Michael Watson joined by Parker Thayer and Sarah Lee and this is the InfluenceWatch Podcast. We're recording a special episode from the SPN Annual Meeting because there's big news from the world of Arabella Advisors: The New York Times is reporting that Bill Gates and his Gates Foundation are cutting off grantmaking to the Arabella network. We discuss the report, how the Arabella name has beco...

The Smithsonian Institution, the federal government-created and funded entity that manages the national museums in D.C., is under a very political review courtesy of the Trump administration. Progressives decry the move as improper interference in what is supposed to be an independent entity, but perhaps such a move is necessary? Joining us today to present the case for some political supervision...

At the beginning of August, Trump took to social media and informed the world he had instructed the Department of Commerce to immediately begin work on “a new and highly accurate CENSUS based on modern day facts and figures and, importantly, using the results and information gained from the Presidential Election of 2024.” Most notably, he wrote, “People who are in our Country illegally WILL NOT BE...

Almost everyone can look at the education landscape in America today and see that something has gone very, very wrong. Spending per student has increased, and there is no evidence that this increased spending has improved student performance outcomes. But what if there are factors eating up the budget and keeping the student performance outcomes stagnant? Factors such as the rise of teachers union...

The Biden administration pursued a number of “whole of government” initiatives to advance the Everything Leftism that its staff brought with them into government. Some, like the initiative to promote union organizing, were highly publicized and formal. But others, like the online censorship regime the administration’s operatives sought to build, were more quietly constructed. With a new administra...

Back in the 1960s, the teachers’ unions, especially the United Federation of Teachers in New York, had a reputation for being strongly Jewish. But today, the teachers unions—especially the National Education Association—are deeply entrenched in an Everything Leftist movement that has made Palestinian nationalism that often strays into antisemitism a core value. Joining us today to discuss the teac...

The Southern Poverty Law Center, trading on a reputation it earned suing the remnants of the organized Ku Klux Klan in the 1980s, claims to be an honest watchdog of extremism on the political right. But our guest Tyler O’Neill, a senior editor at the Daily Signal, has written a book on how the organization went from an indigent legal-defense organization (a poverty law center, as it were) to the w...

Ranked Choice Voting, or RCV, the process by which voters rank candidates by preference, has been in and out of the news for the last several years, as advocates and critics on both sides of the political aisle debate the merits and pitfalls of a system that many on the left – and increasingly some on the right – seem to think is the way elections should be handled. Most recently, NY City candidat...

Over the past several years, the public has become familiar with the concept of “lawfare,” the process of using the legal system to gain political ends regardless of the validity of the underlying case. Environmentalist groups have long been practitioners of aggressive lawfare, but who exactly is funding litigation challenging the ability of energy companies to make energy? The U.S. Senate suspect...

As Second Amendment policy returns to the national spotlight under a second Trump administration, one provision buried in a massive reconciliation bill could spell the beginning of the end for suppressor regulations under the National Firearms Act. The House version removes them from the tax scheme entirely, while the Senate version goes even further—potentially gutting the $200 tax on other NFA-r...