Who Funds that?

Hello I’m Michael Watson and this is the InfluenceWatch Podcast. In much of the country, the cops can take your stuff even if they aren’t able to convict you of a crime through a process known as civil asset forfeiture. This week’s guest, Scot Turner, executive director of the advocacy group Eternal Vigilance Action, tried to fix this when he was serving in the Georgia State Legislature; today he...

It’s the biggest story of the week in Washington. Following a nearly unprecedented breach of the Supreme Court’s institutional security, Politico published a draft of a possible majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito that would overturn Roe v. Wade, returning questions of abortion regulation to the states. The leak of a draft opinion is unheard of; observers of and former clerks for the...

“Governing for Impact.” Behind that innocuous name is a powerful yet secretive interest group backed by liberal billionaire George Soros and his Open Society Foundations network that has already generated executive actions ordered into federal policy by the Biden administration. Joining me to discuss Governing for Impact and its…impact…is my colleague Parker Thayer, who uncovered the group’s exist...

Local news: It’s in decline, but people trust it more than national news by all accounts. And this creates an opening for big national organizations to get into the local news game to influence states and localities. One such big national organization is “States Newsroom,” a relatively recent spinoff from the Arabella Advisors network of liberal, dark-money-funded advocacy entities. Now, this nati...

This week, the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the consumer price index measure of inflation had surged to 8.5 percent year-on-year. Accelerating inflation and surging gas prices have led numerous states to take action to ease the pain, but few have taken the unusual steps Illinois has to ensure the state’s political class gets the credit it thinks it deserves for it by requiring...

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We’ve discussed the Protecting the Right to Organize Act on the show before—it’s a laundry list of bad ideas pushed by Big Labor and its allies in Congress that would increase unions’ power to coerce workers into joining and paying dues and increase their power to disrupt national economic and social life. But for supporters of individual employee rights, there is now an alternative model of labor...

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Two years ago this week, the federal government announced “two weeks to slow the spread” — a campaign of lockdowns and closures that would metastasize into ongoing restrictions on civil liberties that failed to control the spread of COVID-19. Thanks to the power of teachers’ unions, no public institution would be more affected by the shutdowns and subsequent mask mandates than America’s public sch...

In 2020 as the coronavirus hit and governments ordered mass lockdowns of length and scope unprecedented in American history, Congress passed the “Paycheck Protection Program” or PPP to help small businesses maintain their payrolls with forgivable loans. But before 2021, labor unions were not supposed to receive funds from PPP; my guest, the Freedom Foundation’s Maxford Nelsen, documented as many a...

Most Americans have heard the term "woke," and many have heard it attached to businesses. But what American consumers may not know is that there's a man behind the "woke boardroom" movement that is very powerful, controls a lot of money, and has shown an interest in investing his clients' money in China rather than the U.S. His name is Larry Fink, and he's the CEO of BlackRock, a very large money...

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Subscribe to the podcast on your platform of choice at: https://influencewatch.fireside.fm/ Follow our socials: • Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/capitalresearchcenter • Twitter: https://twitter.com/capitalresearch • Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/capitalresearchcenter • YouTube: https://bit.ly/CRCYouTube • Rumble: https://rumble.com/capitalresearch • Gettr: https://gettr.com/user/capital...

In 2020, the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation raked in tens of millions of dollars from personal and corporate supporters of the Black Lives Matter movement amid demonstrations after the murder of George Floyd in police custody. Since that time, many have wondered where all that money went: Today’s guest, Andrew Kerr of the Washington Examiner, was one of them. And when he went digging...

The American Federation of Teachers has a public image problem, as increasing numbers of parents become aware of the union’s involvement in prolonging destructive restrictions on schoolchildren in the name of “protecting” them from coronavirus—most notably school lockdowns, which despite widespread evidence that they did not control viral spread and harmed students’ educations possibly permanently...

Since Mark Zuckerberg provided hundreds of millions of dollars to assist governmental agencies in administering the 2020 elections through the private Center for Tech and Civic Life, state legislatures have considered and in many cases taken action to prevent future billionaires from privately funding the administration of elections. This week, Capital Research Center president Scott Walter testif...

Elections have consequences, as the country learned last year when the Biden administration took office and as Virginians are learning now that Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin has taken office to replace Democrat Ralph Northam. Youngkin’s election against the partisan alignment of the increasingly Democratic state has been credited to his emphasis on parental power in education—and his opponent...

If you listen to the metropolitan press, the radical-Left ideology of critical race theory is not taught in public schools. But across the country, parents are objecting to curriculum material and education practices that are clearly informed or inspired by the precepts of critical race theory and promoted to school districts by consultancies and advocacy groups backed by the biggest names in Big...

Parents of America, it’s happened again. Right after a period in which teachers union officials, most prominently American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten, conducted a preposterous public relations campaign to make themselves the supposed driving forces of post-COVID school reopenings, teachers unions are shutting schoolhouse doors again. The fiercest battle against the most entr...

Congress has been receptive to the push, with Democrats proposing a bill to fine companies $20,000 each day if they do not have such an “equity audit” in any given two years. Joining me to discuss this proposal and the powers behind it is Santi Ruiz, reporter for the Washington Free Beacon. • Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/capitalresearchcenter • Twitter: https://twitter.com/capitalresearch •...

Since the identification of the “Omicron Variant” of COVID-19, the left and paternalist factions of the right at home and abroad have returned to their favorite policy packages: Harsh lockdowns and tyrannical mandates. And while the American President has ruled out lockdowns “for now,” his party comrade Bill de Blasio, who remains Mayor of New York until the New Year, instituted the most severe va...

I’m Michael Watson and this is the InfluenceWatch Podcast. Our guest today is a Time Magazine Hero of the Environment who at age 16 raised money for the Rainforest Action Network and at 17 “lived in Nicaragua to show solidarity with the Sandinista socialist revolution.” But our guest, author Michael Shellenberger, isn’t your typical Bill McKibben or Bernie Sanders type: He is a campaigner for the...

By now, the story is familiar. Mark Zuckerberg (https://www.influencewatch.org/person/mark-zuckerberg/) financed the administration of the 2020 elections through the Center for Tech and Civic Life (https://www.influencewatch.org/non-profit/center-for-tech-and-civic-life/). Eric Holder and an army of Democratic lawyers ensured that liberals would compete on favorable district lines and with favorab...

Liberal special interests have effective control of many municipal governments and government arms. The most notable case: school boards. Thanks to “three exploits” of block voting, nonpartisan races, and off-cycle elections, teachers unions gain a structural advantage beyond their ideological support in electing the people who set standards, enforce policies, and fund public school systems. Joini...

Last month, the National School Boards Association threw a grenade into debates surrounding local school policy by sending a letter to the Biden administration asking for a federal investigation of behavior at school board meetings, even suggesting the Justice Department invoke the PATRIOT Act anti-terrorism law. Outrage descended from numerous quarters after the Biden Justice Department issued it...