Who Funds that?

I’m Sarah Lee, and this is the Influence Watch podcast. With news last month that Visa and Mastercard had paused a plan to track gun purchases, and last year’s SCOTUS decision that struck down a New York law that put restrictions on concealed firearms used for self-defense, conservatives seem to be winning on the gun issue. In fact, more women and minorities – and even progressives – are buying gu...

I’m Sarah Lee, and this is the Influence Watch podcast. Yesterday, three years after the COVID pandemic lockdowns began, American Federation of Teachers union president Randi Weingarten, who many feel was the public face of extended school lockdowns, testified in front of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic. Weingarten, who had spent most of her time during the pandemic loudl...

If the “ESG”—environmental, social, and governance—movement had a guiding text, it would the Proxy Preview. Put out by the corporate social responsibility investing nonprofit As You Sow, the Proxy Preview details all the ESG “shareholder resolutions” that activist shareholders, government worker and labor union pension funds, and left-of-center nonprofits want American businesses to adopt. Joining...

The Athenai Institute is a college student-led organization that seeks to limit the influence of the Chinese Communist Party on U.S. college campuses. Since their inception in 2020, they have worked to help young people understand not only the often-underreported billion dollar financial relationship between the U.S. academic sector and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), but how the CCP exports th...

National Public Radio is adamant: Nobody is going to make you eat the bugs. In fact, NPR says that believing governments and environmentalist activists want to make you eat the bugs is a conspiracy theory! Oh, and if you don’t want to eat the bugs, you’re little different than Europeans who would not eat indigenous American foods during the period of colonization. But is that really the case? Do m...

This week, a spree shooter killed six people at The Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee; our thoughts and prayers are with the families of the victims and the others affected. Now, even as they have campaigned to take away gun rights in response to similar spree shootings, left-wing interest groups have pushed to remove school resource officers—cops who work directly with the school community—...

What connects the disruptive protests against a conservative judge’s speech to Stanford Law and the arrests of over two dozen demonstrators outside Atlanta? Both involved people aligned with the National Lawyers Guild, a radical-left association of attorneys, law students, legal workers, and jailhouse lawyers. Joining me to discuss the NLG is our colleague Robert Stilson, who has written and resea...

To readers of the Capital Research Center or InfluenceWatch, none of the findings reported by New York Post columnist Karol Markowicz and stay-at-home mother, children’s book editor, and political commentator Bethany Mandel in their book Stolen Youth: How Radicals are Erasing Innocence and Indoctrinating a Generation will be that surprising; capture of institutions ranging from school boards to th...

In late 2021, following a class action suit in which the Supreme Court decided some college athletes should be allowed to earn money off their image and likeness, a Biden administration lawyer with the National Labor Relations Board named Jennifer Abruzzo issued a memo clarifying that some college athletes could now be considered employees of state universities. This memo led to breathless article...

Thirty years ago, Al Gore took office as Vice President of the United States. Over the intervening period, he has lost a campaign for President and reinvented himself as the Nobel Peace Laureate-branded conscience of the climate movement. But years removed from his film An Inconvenient Truth and with countries like Germany following his environmentalist policy prescriptions, has Gore’s vision born...

Are America and broader Western Civilization in crisis? Today’s guest, author Spencer Klavan, says yes, and he has written How to Save the West: Ancient Wisdom for 5 Modern Crises to outline the problems facing the West and the philosophical resources that its defenders have to fall back on in its defense. Links: Making Meta Mandatory: https://capitalresearch.org/article/making-meta-mandatory/ How...

We’re doing something a little different this week: We are joined by Rusty Brown of the Freedom Foundation for a bit of government-worker union wonkery. Brown and his colleagues have been researching certain financial products that the National Education Association markets to its members, and they have many questions about how it all works and whether members are being taken for a ride. Links: Fi...

The recent Supreme Court case New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen that curtailed a state's ability to infringe on Americans' right to carry publicly for their own self defense has brought the 2nd Amendment fight back to the headlines as defenders celebrate and gun control activists plan to counter the ruling. Larry Correia, a firearms expert and successful novelist, chose this t...

Equal treatment under the law, regardless of race: One would think that all could agree on that principle, but in states and localities across the country—even in Republican-controlled states—that principle is giving way to programs that restrict eligibility based on skin color. Joining my colleague Sarah Lee and I to discuss these programs and how to challenge them legally is Glenn Roper, an atto...

In 2022, Arizona passed one of the most comprehensive school-choice programs in the nation. But later that year, the state elected Katie Hobbs a governor who is backed by the teachers’ unions, and she has targeted that program for elimination, even as other states like Iowa and Texas consider similar expansions to school choice programs. Joining my colleague Hayden Ludwig and I to discuss Arizona’...

It is well known that George Soros and his Open Society Foundations are major funders of left-wing advocacy, but a new report from Media Research Center shines the light on one facet of that advocacy. According to MRC’s research, Soros and his associated philanthropies have funded 253 organizations involved in activist media worldwide. Joining me and my colleague Sarah Lee to discuss Soros’s fundi...

If you believe Axios and the Washington Post, this is just the latest GOP and conservative culture war: A ban on gas stoves proposed by the Biden administration-controlled Consumer Product Safety Commission. But like so many things that the media tells us aren’t happening, until they are, and then you’re a bigot for opposing them, the Left is coming for gas stoves—and all gas appliances, if not co...

In 1968, Paul Ehrlich claimed that “the battle to feed all of humanity is over” and that mass starvation was imminent. He was completely, utterly, and totally wrong. But because Ehrlich is a leader of the environmentalist movement, just last week, “60 Minutes” brought him back to make more predictions of imminent doom unless we vastly reduce our quality of life. Joining me and my colleague Sarah L...

**We're reupping this podcast discussing Blackrock and ESG as we take a little time for the holidays. Enjoy relearning the truth about Blackrock's and Larry Fink's shenanigans. The power of the ESG—environmental, social, and corporate governance—investing movement is propelled by powerful allies among funds managers, perhaps none more prominent than BlackRock, which manages over eight trillion dol...

The Near East is the place of origin of the three Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Unfortunately, political developments in that region have led to declines in inter-religious pluralism in much of the region, and the Christian communities that have lived in the region since the origins of the Christian religion have dwindled. Joining us to discuss the prospects for Christian...

Hello, I’m Michael Watson and this is the InfluenceWatch Podcast. Few professions have earned as low approval ratings as lawyers—in Gallup polling on the public’s perceptions of professions’ ethics, lawyers are underwater, alongside journalists, business executives, and non-federal politicians. But despite the public’s relatively low opinion of the profession, the trial bar maintains a massive “la...

Over the past week, new Twitter CEO Elon Musk has directed the release of “The Twitter Files,” internal documents detailing controversial decisions made by senior Twitter staff before Musk’s takeover. The first batch, reviewed and released on Twitter by independent left-leaning journalist Matt Taibbi, concerned the previous Twitter management’s most controversial decision: The suppression of repor...

This month, three African-American writers/activists with widely different political views published a book together entitled "Crisis in the Classroom" (Skyhorse Publishing). Despite their many differences, the authors teamed up to insist that the civil rights issue of today is the failure to educate young Americans. The three authors are Benjamin Crump, Esq., a prominent civil rights attorney who...

This month, three African-American writers/activists with widely different political views published a book together entitled "Crisis in the Classroom" (Skyhorse Publishing). Despite their many differences, the authors teamed up to insist that the civil rights issue of today is the failure to educate young Americans. The three authors are Benjamin Crump, Esq., a prominent civil rights attorney who...

Hello, I’m Michael Watson and this is the InfluenceWatch Podcast. A few months ago, President Joe Biden announced that the government would “forgive” up to $10,000 per borrower in federal student loan debt with at best dubious legal justification, with a cost to the Treasury estimated at $300 billion if it were to go into effect. Lawsuits immediately flew. One such lawsuit was filed in Texas with...