InfluenceWatch Podcast

Episode 173: The State of Redistricting

June 11th, 2021  |  21 mins 58 secs

conservative, culture, gerrymandering, left, liberal, libertarian, politics, progressive, redistricting, right

In this episode: Our regular podcast host, CRC’s Research Director Mike Watson, joins the show to discuss his latest report on redistricting, a four-part series that lives on the CRC website entitled, “The State of Redistricting 2022.” We take a look at the myths, history, and lies around “gerrymandering.”

Read more here: https://capitalresearch.org/article/the-state-of-redistricting-2022-part-1/

Episode 172: Using the Courts to Push Unpopular Policy (with guest Robert Stilson)

June 4th, 2021  |  16 mins 14 secs

climate change, conservatize, culture, environmentalism, law, left, liberal, libertarian, politics, progressive, right, society

In this episode: Radical environmentalists have a problem: Their policies are unpopular, and even a unified Democratic government aligned with them can only advance so many restrictions on personal choice, industrial activity, and employment opportunities before it provokes public revolt. But they have one weird trick to get around public opposition: The courts. Joining us to discuss the tactics that environmentalists are pursuing to have judges force their policies on the rest of us is Capital Research Center’s Research Specialist Robert Stilson.

Episode 171: Getting America Back to Work (with guest Megan Rose)

May 28th, 2021  |  15 mins 28 secs

As pandemic restrictions have begun easing in the states, employers are facing a new problem: labor shortages due to unemployment insurance bonuses that were intended to help people laid off from work during the pandemic. Many people are still collecting that benefit and it has led to a situation where employers are desperate to hire people making the rational financial decision to take a check over finding meaningful work.
Joining the InfluenceWatch podcast today is Megan Rose, a civil society fellow at the Manhattan Institute & CEO of a nonprofit organization called Better Together that works to provide a dignified way to prevent child neglect through programs that strengthen families and help keep kids out of the foster care system. As part of that work, Better Together provides compassionate “second chance” job fair programs. Rose began noticing attendance at their job fairs has dropped precipitously in the last year. She wrote an excellent piece at the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal about why she thinks that’s happening. It’s called, Jobs Without Takers, and in it she theorizes ways that America’s governors can help get people back to work to benefit the economy, individuals, and families.
Joining the InfluenceWatch Podcast today is Megan Rose, a civil society fellow at the Manhattan Institute CEO of a nonprofit organization called Better Together that works to provide a dignified way to prevent child neglect through programs that strengthen families and help keep kids out of the foster care system. As part of that work, Better Together provides compassionate “second chance” job fair programs. Rose began noticing that attendance at their job fairs have dropped precipitously in the last year. She wrote an excellent piece at the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal about why she thinks that’s happening. It’s called, Jobs Without Takers, and in it she theorizes ways that America’s governors could help get people back to work to benefit the economy and individuals and families.

Episode 170: Pennsylvania's "Zuck-bucks" (with guest Todd Shepherd)

May 21st, 2021  |  14 mins 11 secs

biden, conservative, ctcl, culture, election, law, left, liberal, libertarian, pennsylvania, politics, progressive, right, society, zuckerberg

In this episode: When people think “political billionaire,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is not the one who usually comes to mind. But after the 2020 elections, maybe he should. The Center for Tech and Civic Life, funded principally to the tune of a reported $350 million by Zuckerberg and his wife through entities the couple controls, provided millions of dollars in grants to counties to support their implementation of mail-in voting and other left-of-center election administration procedures. And there is strong circumstantial evidence that those grants may have favored Democratic counties over Republican counties, contributing to Joe Biden’s victories in battleground states. Joining us to discuss his analysis of these “Zuck-bucks” in Pennsylvania is Todd Shepherd, chief investigative reporter for the website Broad and Liberty, which covers Philadelphia city and Pennsylvania state-level news and politics.

Episode 169: A Democrat Takeover of Election Law? (with guest J. Christian Adams)

May 14th, 2021  |  13 mins 8 secs

bills, congress, conservative, elections, ideas, independent, law, left, libertarian, politics, progressive, right, senate, society, unions

In this episode: In this Congress, bad ideas don’t die—they get marked up by the Senate Rules Committee. And this week it was the turn of S 1, the Senate companion to HR 1, the Democrats’ federal-election-takeover legislation. Joining us today to discuss the potential consequences of HR1/S1 should they pass is J. Christian Adams, right-leaning elections lawyer extraordinaire.

Episode 168: The CDC and Lockdown Collusion

May 6th, 2021  |  16 mins 30 secs

cdc, conservative, culture, education, fee, guidance, kerry mcdonald, left, liberal, lockdowns, right, schools, society, unions

In this episode: The hard lockdownists and their allies in the Biden administration repeat the mantra as often as a chanting monk: “Follow the science,” invariably before proposing some policy that continues the ongoing tyrannies ostensibly intended to reduce the burden of COVID-19. But what happens when the science conflicts with the permanent lockdowns, as it does over school closures? Then stakeholders get involved, and the science need not be followed. That is exactly what happened when the CDC issued its guidance that supposedly would lead to school reopenings, which conflicts with the teachers’ unions position of “lockdown today, lockdown tomorrah, lockdown for-evah.” The New York Post and center-right group Americans for Public Trust obtained emails under an open-records request showing that the CDC and the American Federation of Teachers collaborated on issuing unnecessarily restrictive reopening guidance, with at least two of the union’s proposals being issued by the CDC nearly verbatim. Joining us to discuss this special-interest influence is Kerry McDonald of the Foundation for Economic Education.

Episode 167: Understanding China's University Influence

April 29th, 2021  |  18 mins 37 secs

america, ccp, china, confucius institutes, conservative, culture, education, foreign influence, funding, left, liberal, libertarian, nonprofits, politics, progressive, propaganda, rachelle peterson, radicalism, right, sarah lee, society, universities

In this episode: CRC’s Communications and External Relations Director Sarah Lee interviews National Association of Scholars Senior Research Fellow Rachelle Peterson about her work related to the Confucius Institutes, ostensible Chinese cultural education centers that function as propaganda arms of the Chinese Communist Party. NAS has been following the Confucius Institutes for years, observing how their funding by organizations and individuals tied to the CCP, and how they’re possibly beginning to rebrand themselves in light of recent criticism. The subject of American radicalism, donor privacy, and the role of nonprofits in national security all discussed. Check out both NAS’ and CRC’s work on the subject of Confucius Institutes and foreign funding of American nonprofits.

Episode 166: Foreign Billionaire Influences American Policy

April 23rd, 2021  |  16 mins 37 secs

billionaire, charity, conservative, environmental, foreign, left, liberal, libertarian, media, news, nonprofits, philanthropy, politics, progressive, right, swiss

In this episode: Federal law prohibits foreign nationals, except holders of permanent resident (or “green card”) status, from making political contributions in federal elections. But foreign billionaires are free to spend whatever they like on news organizations and advocacy groups that otherwise influence American public policy, and that brings us to Swiss billionaire Hansjoerg Wyss, the major environmentalist donor who just dropped a bid to buy the Chicago Tribune and turn the paper into a clone of the Washington Post, another national-level liberal propaganda outlet. But a funny thing happened on the way to a Midwestern #Resistance media outlet: the New York Times exposed Wyss’s agenda and he dropped his bid for the Tribune. Joining us to discuss Wyss, the brouhaha, and Wyss’s other projects is my colleague Hayden Ludwig.

Episode 165: Is the PTA a Teachers Union Stooge?

April 16th, 2021  |  24 mins 38 secs

closures, conservative, covid, covid-19, left, liberal, libertarian, nea, pandemic, parents, progressive, pta, public school, right, school, teachers, unions

In this episode: We have covered extensively the prolonged and unprecedented closures of schools ostensibly caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, which continue to see teachers unions insist, even when their members receive vaccination priority or when school districts conduct extensively disruptive “pandemic theater” like closing for deep cleaning that even the teachers-union, er, “stakeholder” compromised CDC has concluded is unnecessary, that in-person schooling is “unsafe,” without evidence. Parents seeking to raise pressure with school officials to reopen schools might have considered turning to the “Parent-Teacher Associations”—PTAs—the largest organizations supposedly representative of parents’ interests, but as our guest Luke Rosiak of the Daily Wire has documented, the PTAs are in fact deeply intertwined with the teachers unions and often function as little more than appendages for the far-left advocacy of Big Labor.

Episode 164: Baseball, Philanthropy, and Politics

April 9th, 2021  |  18 mins 46 secs

In this episode: Last week, Major League Baseball announced it would move the All-Star Game from Atlanta to Denver in protest of Georgia election-administration legislation that would make the state’s voter access more liberal than the pre-COVID status quo; in the eyes of Democratic activist and former gubernatorial candidate Stacy Abrams—who, presaging the actions of another prominent Georgia election-loser of a different political party, never formally conceded the legitimacy of her defeat to Gov. Brian Kemp—this amounted to “Jim Crow Two,” so the game had to go. (For the record, Abrams denies encouraging a boycott.) Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred—previously best known as the architect of such crimes against the National Pastime as the universal designated hitter and starting extra innings with a runner on second base—is only the latest corporate figure to push a left-progressive social agenda from his perch as a 21st-century captain of industry; Big Philanthropy has long been a leftist bastion and Big Business has increasingly deferred to left-wing activists through Environmental, Social, and Governance—E S G—investing. Joining us to discuss the rise of “woke capitalism,” the centralization of “Big Philanthropy,” and what can be done about them, is Howard Husock, senior executive fellow of the Philanthropy Roundtable.

Episode 163: Responding to Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse

April 5th, 2021  |  20 mins 18 secs

conservative, constitution, culture, donor, hr 1, left, liberal, libertarian, media, politics, privacy, progressive, right, rights, senate, whitehouse

In this episode: We’ve discussed H.R. 1 before, see episode 161 with Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshal, and it is important enough to discuss it again. Joining us today is Capital Research Center president Scott Walter to discuss donor disclosure and his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee Subcommittee on Federal Courts, Oversight, Agency Action, and Federal Rights.

Episode 162: Dragging Hollywood Even Further Left

March 26th, 2021  |  19 mins 54 secs

billionaire, communism, conservative, culture, hollywood, ken braun, left, liberal, participant media, politics, propaganda, right, socialism

In this episode: It’s a tale so old it’s a cliché: The left-wing liberal Hollywood glitterati. But even the “normal” levels of bat-guano leftism from the hills above Los Angeles isn’t enough for some people, so at least one liberal billionaire built his own movie studio to make Hollywood even more of a left-wing propaganda outlet. Joining us to tell the story of Participant Media, that billionaire, and the push to make Hollywood even more of a den of left-wing champagne socialist hypocrites is Capital Research Center's colleague Ken Braun.

Episode 161: What Would H.R. 1 Mean? (with guest Steve Marshall)

March 18th, 2021  |  12 mins 13 secs

alabama, american, attorney general, california, congress, conservative, culture, democrat, labor, left, legislation, liberal, libertarian, politics, progressive, republican, right, society, steve marshall, stimulus, unions

In this episode: H.R. 1: It might be the most consequential piece of legislation before the Congress this year—and that’s saying something in year when Congressional Democrats have already spent $1.9 trillion and advanced a fundamental restructuring of American labor relations. But what does this partisan-Democratic proposal to turn all American elections into copies of California’s often-criticized system mean? Joining us is Steve Marshall, the Attorney General of Alabama and one of twenty state attorneys general who signed a letter to Congressional leaders (that we will include in today’s show notes) opposing large sections of H.R. 1.

Episode 160: The Worst Bill in Congress: The PRO Act (with guest Edwin Egee)

March 12th, 2021  |  30 mins 11 secs

biden administration, big labor, congress, conservative, culture, democrat, ed egee, filibuster, house of representatives, left, legislation, liberal, libertarian, national retail federation, pro act, progressive, republican, right, senate, society, unions, workers

In this episode: This week, the U.S. House of Representatives again advanced the odious catalog of Big Labor favors known as the “PRO Act” on a nearly party-line vote. While the legislation will likely stall in the Senate as long as the legislative filibuster remains in effect, the proposal remains a priority of the Biden administration, leaving Big Labor’s Sword of Damocles hanging over American workers and American businesses for at least the remainder of this Congress. Joining us to discuss the threat posed by the legislation is Ed Egee, vice president for workforce development at the National Retail Federation.

Episode 159: Standing Up to Woke Capital (with guest Stephen Soukup)

March 5th, 2021  |  26 mins 48 secs

book, business, conservative, culture, democrat, dictatorship, esg, investing, left, liberal, libertarian, money, political correctness, politics, progressive, republican, right, society, stephen soukup, wall street, woke

In this episode: We welcome Stephen Soukup, author of The Dictatorship of Woke Capital: How Political Correctness Captured Big Business to discuss…well, woke capital and how political correctness captured big business. (Isn’t it helpful when a book does exactly what it says on the cover?) Soukup is publisher and vice president of the Political Forum, an independent research provider.

Episode 158: Power and Influence of Teachers Unions (with guest Lisa Turkeltaub)

February 25th, 2021  |  34 mins 35 secs

children, conservative, democrat, distance learning, education, fairfax, fea, leadership, left, liberal, libertarian, lisa turkeltaub, parents, progressive, public schools, reopening, republican, right, school boards, schools, special interests, teachers, unions

In this episode: Across the country, bold political leadership from both parties has eased or overridden special interest groups’ resistance to reopening public schools, but linguini-spined leaders of both parties have permitted teachers unions to force children to endure nearly a full year of isolation and virtual learning. Fighting the battle at Ground Zero in the DC suburbs have been the parents of Fairfax County Public Schools, who stand opposed by the Fairfax Education Association—which back last summer set a medically impossible standard to return to work. Excuse me, to classrooms, the union has insisted to me that the schools are open for virtual learning. I regret the error.

Joining us is one of those parents, Lisa Turkeltaub, to discuss the efforts and organizing of OpenFCPS, a campaign group pushing to reopen the schools for real.