Who Funds that?

Donald Trump has made quick work of nominating potential cabinet members, and many of those picks – while controversial – are being met with nods – albeit sometimes lukewarm nods -- by both conservative voters and Republican legislators. One pick, however, stands out as being not only controversial but downright anti-conservative. Lori Chavez-DeRemer, Trump’s choice for Secretary of Labor, is a no...

For us at the Capital Research Center, Christmas comes in mid-November. Not because of election results or an inability to read the calendar, but because of the Internal Revenue Service’s deadline for filing nonprofit tax returns after exhausting the automatic extensions. This means we get new insight into how the left-wing dark money networks that we track every mid-November, and no left-wing dar...

The Wall Street Journal called it the “sleeper issue” of the 2024 election—“progressive transgender coercion.” But our guest today argues that it wasn’t the “sleeper issue”—it was the central  issue. Now that the election is behind us, May Mailman, director of the Independent Women’s Law Center, joins us to discuss how the left-wing push on transgender issues has drawn public blowback. Links:  How...

As the nation awaits the final results in a few dozen House races, the subject of gerrymandering has once again reared its head. This little understood – and often misunderstood – process of drawing congressional maps has been a subject of discussion in state legislatures and activist enclaves since the practice began in the early 1800s. Both right and left routinely accuse each other of manipulat...

As political parties, candidates, and the increasingly relevant party-aligned but technically independent activist groups that have come to dominate the post-McCain-Feingold world work to draw Americans out to the polls, new innovations  have raised the hackles of observers and left citizens asking, “Can they actually do that?” Joining us to make sense of some of the more prominent innovations is...

Will the 2024 election be administered more effectively and more fairly than the 2020 election? There’s reason to believe in many states that it might be, and advocates have made election integrity—making it easy for citizens to vote and hard for politicians to cheat—a key focus of their efforts. Joining us to discuss efforts to protect election integrity in the upcoming and in future elections is...

This week marked the first anniversary of the October 7th, 2023 attacks against Israel by Iranian-backed terrorist groups, most prominently Hamas. Unfortunately, in addition to solemn remembrance, the anniversary was marked by more demonstrations by the activists some might call Hamas-glampers who have come to support irredentist Palestinian nationalism. Our colleague Ryan Mauro, an expert on poli...

As the country moves through a contentious election season, where the state of the economy and worries over inflation have been a major talking point, a new economic hazard has appeared on the horizon threatening to hammer the American consumer just as Hurricane Helene threatened – and then did – hammer the Southeast: the International Longshoreman Association, a union of dockworkers who manage th...

Anybody who has scoffed at the proliferation of t-shirts bearing the image of Che Guevara, the famous associate of Fidel Castro who among other things oversaw purges of political opponents following Castro’s seizure of power, on college campuses knows that sectors of “elite” American society have an unhealthy appreciation for the repressive Communist dictatorship that has ruled Cuba since 1959. Bu...

Immigration policy is an absolute mess—such a mess, that it can be hard for non-specialists to know even what is going on. And that’s where I for one sit regarding the so-called “CHNV parole” program, a Biden administration initiative to admit half a million or so people from Cuba, Haiti, Venezuela, and Nicaragua on so-called “parole authority” to temporary informal legal status in the United Stat...

We’ve covered “megaphone philanthropy”—the emphasis some left-wing activist groups and their multi-million or even billion-dollar funders place on street-protest imagery, often featuring people yelling through bullhorns—and the Ford Foundation, one of the Left’s multiple billion-dollar funders. Our colleague Ken Braun joins us today to link them, as he has just concluded a deep investigation of th...

The Internal Revenue Service rule regarding charities in voter registration is explicit: “voter education or registration activities with evidence of bias that (a) would favor one candidate over another; (b) oppose a candidate in some manner; or (c) have the effect of favoring a candidate or group of candidates, will constitute prohibited participation or intervention.” Now questions are being rai...

BlackRock, Inc., a multinational investment company and one of the world’s largest asset managers with a $10 trillion portfolio, has been deeply involved in pushing the politically aligned environmental, social, and governance – or ESG – agenda for the last several years. Now secretaries of state in Mississippi and Indiana have hit the company with summary cease-and-desist orders accusing them of...

Protesting, always a feature of the 1 st Amendment right to free speech in America, has become quite the fashion lately among the American left, possibly even more than it was during the height of the anti-war protests of the 1960s. But these new protests – from enflamed government buildings to tent cities on campus, to blocked traffic on major streets, to terrorist flag-waving congregations – see...

Hollywood and the entertainment industry are leftist; it has been since before actual Communists tried to infiltrate it in the 1930s and 1940s. But if you’ve noticed that entertainment has shifted from merely having a liberal worldview to being indistinguishable from Big Philanthropy-funded leftist agitprop, that might be because  a big proportion of it is  Big Philanthropy-funded leftist agitprop...

Left-wingers have been losing at the Supreme Court in recent years thanks to the intellectual success of the conservative legal movement, audacity in Republican management of judicial confirmations, and the aid of the Fates. But progressives are not taking these setbacks lying down; the hot new advocacy cause, led by the classically Everything Leftism-branded Arabella Advisors spinoff Demand Justi...

Environmental, social, and governance or ESG: What is it, what does it mean for the public? Our guest today, Paul Mueller of the American Institute for Economic Research, argues that ESG strategies “undermine freedom, political self-determination, and economic prosperity.” He joins us to explain how and why. Links: The Threats Posed by Environmental, Social, and Governance Policies ESG Activism 20...

There’s an ongoing policy war being waged between those who favor a weather dependent wind and solar approach to energy consumption and those who look to nuclear power and efficient electrical grids as the answer to future energy needs. And the dividing line between the two isn’t as easy to determine along ideological lines as people might think. While left-leaning charitable organizations and act...

How did universities become dens of sympathy for ideologies and factions implacably opposed to America and her allies, most recently demonstrated by the “Hamas glamper” protests at various elite campuses? Many have argued that funding of American universities by rival foreign governments and allies of America’s enemies, perhaps most prominently the People’s Republic of China and the State of Qatar...

I’m Sarah Lee and this is the Influence Watch podcast. Joining me today is my colleague Parker Thayer because sitting in the hot seat is our regular host Mike Watson, and we’re going to be grilling him on a 5 part series he wrote on the American elite, about which there has been much discussion over the last several years. They are a semi-mythical class made up of an American socio-political creat...

Is it, or at least should it be , charitable to fund political-advocacy protest over controversial sociopolitical issues? Our colleague Robert Stilson calls it “megaphone philanthropy,” and perhaps the prototypical practitioner of “megaphone philanthropy” is the Marguerite Casey Foundation, the $800 million funder of some of the most radical activists within American politics’ Overton Window. Robe...

NewsGuard: It’s a teachers-union approved tool purporting to rate information sources on how “nutritious” to one’s information diet they are, but the teachers’ union seal of approval should lead readers to question just what the NewsGuard “Nutrition Label” is actually rating. Joining us to discuss NewsGuard and its links to the left is Illinois-based conservative activist John Tillman.  Links:  Ne...

You’ve heard of Mike Bloomberg; those longer in years might remember Tom Steyer; deep readers of Capital Research Center might remember Fred Stanback; the billionaire environmentalist donor is a repeating figure. But you’ve probably not  heard of C. Frederick Taylor, a reclusive California billionaire who drives millions to the environmentalist movement. Joining us to discuss Taylor, his Sequoia C...

The Freedom of Information Act was supposed to ensure public access to federal government documents, including written communications by senior officials. But the law has been wantonly circumvented; perhaps most notably by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s “homebrew” email server, but more recently it has come to light that aides of former National Institutes of Health official and de fa...

Note: This episode contains discussions of subjects that may not be suitable for children. Parental discretion is advised.   Everybody’s doing it—sex education. And as American sexual mores have grown more permissive, the organizational institutions devising sex education curriculums have pushed the Overton Window of sexual permissiveness to its maximum. Joining us to discuss the rise of contempor...