Who Funds that?

Over the past week, Los Angeles has been rocked by demonstrations against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that have been punctuated by violent riots, with rioters throwing bricks at police vehicles and standing atop burned-out cars waving Mexican flags. But who is behind the demonstrators, as reports emerge of activists handing out brand-new face shields and the usual preprinted sig...

Regardless of his recent falling out with President Trump over the size of the “Big Beautiful Bill” tax and spending package or personal beefs, Elon Musk and his “Department of Government Efficiency” team performed at least one extremely useful public service: They highlighted the extent to which the “nongovernmental organization” (NGO) sector is actually the “basically governmental organization”...

The second Trump administration has conducted an aggressive campaign against Harvard University, targeting its use of racial considerations in admissions and hiring and its apparent lack of concern for the rights of its Jewish students. Among the proposals the administration is considering to retaliate against Harvard is taking away its charitable tax status; our guest today sees that not as an en...

At one point, in the minds of its writers and supporters, perhaps The Bulwark really was about providing a “bulwark” for “conserving conservatism” in opposition to the right-populism of once and future President Donald Trump. But as our colleague Ken Braun recounts in his series on the evolution of the publication, The Bulwark has become little more than just another outlet regurgitating Democrati...

In an era when fewer than six percent of private-sector workers are union members, it’s easy to forget how forceful Big Labor’s activists can be when they’re out rooting for dues and political power. Joining us to discuss how Unite Here has exercised its coercive power over working Americans is Patrick Semmens, vice president of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation. Influence Watch...

Before we begin, a programming note: Starting this week, we will be releasing the podcast on Tuesday mornings. For over seven years, InfluenceWatch.org has served the interested public as a resource on the groups and people influencing (see what we did there?) public policy. But now, Capital Research Center is launching a toolkit to help educators introduce their students to our behind-the-scenes...

It’s 2025 in America, but news reports of antitrust lawsuits which, if successful, could potentially lead to at least a partial breakup of some of the biggest tech companies in the world, hearken back to the early 1900s when Standard Oil was fundamentally restructured and the Federal Trade Commission was created. Names like Meta, Google, Amazon, and Apple – they’re all being examined for potential...

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...

Hello, I’m Michael Watson joined by Robert Stilson and this is the InfluenceWatch Podcast. There’s an odd thing about the loud demonstrators protesting Israel in the year and a half since the Hamas attacks on the country in October 2023: They don’t like America much either. And now, there’s documentary proof to go along with the suppositions derived from protest literature, marchers’ signs, and id...

While we at Capital Research Center may not have a favorite Internal Revenue Service regulation, we do find one to be particularly relevant to our work on nonprofits in the public policy process: “Restriction of political campaign intervention by Section 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organizations.” Long story short, if you’re a public charity, you’re free to be ideological, but you cannot endorse or suppo...

Sixty billion dollars—that is the estimate of foreign funding of American universities that Americans for Public Trust released earlier this week. Of that $60 billion, $20 billion went to just ten prestigious schools including Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, MIT, Yale, and Columbia, among others. Joining us to discuss the findings and the implications of the foreign funding of these major...

To quote our colleague and guest for the week, Parker Thayer, the nonprofit voter registration industry “might not sound like a particularly exciting or important topic, and in an ideal world it wouldn’t be either, but unfortunately, it’s both.” Earlier this week, Parker testified to the Michigan House Election Integrity Committee on the nonprofit voter registration industry, which he has studied...

We here at CRC try not to wade into the more salacious soap opera stories that quite frankly infest the DC political world. But when a story intersects with work we already do, well, we’re not above getting down into the dirt a little. Such is the case with the report that dropped a few days ago that Connecticut liberal Senator and Biden mouthpiece Chris Murphy has recently left his wife and taken...

Addiction breaks lives, breaks families, and on a mass scale can break societies, but breaking an addiction is quite difficult. There are two main schools of thought for how to help addicted people: Abstinence, or the cessation of drug (or alcohol, or other addictive vice) use, or “harm reduction”—the practice defined by the National Institutes of Health as “interventions aimed to help people avoi...

Today a Senate Committee voted to advance former Oregon Representative Lori Chavez-DeRemer, Trump’s controversial pick for Labor Secretary, to a full floor vote, so Americans would do well to begin preparing for an impending onslaught of labor-related news, especially since, as my colleague Mike Watson will likely make clear in this episode, the new courtship of Big Labor coming from the right mad...

How much did the U.S. government spend on illegal migrants and dubious asylum claimants over the past four years? That is the question that many people are asking after Elon Musk, who is the frontman for the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency teams, claimed that FEMA had spent $59 million on “luxury hotels” to house migrants. Unfortunately for taxpayers, as our guest Simon...

The new Trump administration has set its Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) at the institutional bureaucracy with a mandate to streamline government operations and target wasteful spending or spending contrary to administration policy. Here at Capital Research Center, our “DOGE Files” are highlighting federal grantmaking to nonprofit organizations that DOGE, the rest of the administration,...

Big Philanthropy and the so-called “good government” groups that it funds have a “solution” (I’m making air-quotes) to partisan gerrymandering: The “independent redistricting commission.” With funding from left-of-center groups like the Sixteen Thirty Fund, the National Redistricting Action Fund, the SEIU, the NEA, and the Quadrivium Foundation, a supposed political neophyte named Katie Fahey (who...

The Trump administration is dismantling DEI within the federal workforce and ESG is slowly morphing into one of the most irritating terms in corporate governance. But conservatives, sensing there may be more work yet to do, might wonder if there is anything they can do individually to help end these discriminatory and counter-productive policies once and for all. Turns out, there is. A new effort...

On its way out the door, the Biden administration provided a number of exit gifts for its allies amongst left-wing groups: feminists and abortion-rights activists received a legally toothless declaration that the Equal Rights Amendment, which had a ratification deadline that expired no later than 1982, was validly ratified; Native American activists and the extreme-left saw American Indian Movemen...

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 incoming second Trump administration has vowed to take on “diversity, equity, and inclusion” policies in the federal government and in federally supported programs. In that, the incoming administration is following the model of conservative-led states like Texas, which have adopted policies restricting left-wing racial ideologies and race-conscious practices. Joining us to discuss Texas’s expe...

Well, 2025 is here. And while it came in rather tragically in the South – and we do extend our condolences to the victims of the terrorist attack in New Orleans– the new year also brings a new presidential inauguration. This incoming administration promises big changes both in how government functions and how it funds, and these changes could have immediate effects on the world of grantmaking, phi...

As the incoming second Trump administration prepares to target government waste with the “Department of Government Efficiency” commission and activists hope that Trump’s administration will root divisive left-wing racial ideologies out of government, Parents Defending Education has released a report relevant to both. The advocacy group identified $1 billion in federal grants from the Biden Departm...

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...