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 stat...
Mar 18, 2021•12 min
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 t...
Mar 12, 2021•30 min
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. Subscribe to the podcast on your platform of choice at: https://influencewatch.fireside.fm/ • Facebook: https://w...
Mar 05, 2021•27 min
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 bac...
Feb 26, 2021•35 min
In this week’s episode: We switch gears slightly and invite Capital Research Center’s Jake Klein, head of our in-house Dangerous Documentaries video production brand, to discuss its latest project: The Politically Incorrect Guides, an animated web-series featuring notable podcasters and authors Tom Woods and Michael Malice based on Regnery Publishing’s book series of the same name that educates viewers beyond the politically correct rhetoric increasingly infecting American universities and socie...
Feb 19, 2021•19 min
In this episode: We discuss an issue that is well known to those involved in politics and to donors, but perhaps not as well known to the average voter. So we’re hoping to shed some light on it. The issue is donor disclosure, and we have as a special guest Jennifer Braceras, director of Independent Women’s Law Center, project of independent women’s forum, and a former member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, who wrote a very sharp op-ed on the subject recently, "Freedom Of Association Is U...
Feb 12, 2021•23 min
In this episode: Continuing what has become something of a series on how American big business, big labor, and other “bigs” have gotten aggressively more aligned with progressive liberalism, today we turn to Big Business—Wall Street, Big Tech, and so forth. Groups like the Chamber of Commerce were once stalwarts of the Republican Party, but in the 2020 election they were far less aligned with their historical allies Joining me to discuss the realignment of Big Business support is my Capital Rese...
Feb 06, 2021•13 min
In this episode: We welcome special guest Dan Judy, vice president at North Star Opinion Research in DC. He’s a Georgia native and a fellow UGA alumnus (Go Dawgs!) We discuss privacy rights and donor disclosure. For more reading go to: http://www.northstaropinion.com/about/our-team Subscribe to the podcast on your platform of choice at: https://influencewatch.fireside.fm/ • Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/capitalresearchcenter • Twitter: https://twitter.com/capitalresearch • Instagram: https:...
Jan 29, 2021•14 min
In this episode: It’s a new week, and there’s a new Presidential administration in town. And if his modern-era unprecedented early firing of the general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board and his immediate re-entry to the Paris Climate Accord are any indication, the administration of President Joe Biden is going to be a series of favors for the left-wing special interest groups that helped get him elected. Joining us to discuss the new Biden administration and the role those special i...
Jan 23, 2021•19 min
In this episode: In recent years, American big business, big labor, and other “bigs” have gotten aggressively more aligned with progressive liberalism—even those bigs, like Big Philanthropy, that are technically required by law not to intervene in elections. While Big Philanthropy might always have been liberal-leaning ideologically, it has gotten so openly Democratic that as conservative philanthropic scholar Bill Schambra noted, “it’s no longer suspect, or even noteworthy, to treat nonprofits ...
Jan 15, 2021•19 min
In this episode: We’re doing something different this week, because we're recording this on Thursday January 7, 2021. Yesterday, a riotous mob stormed the U.S. Capitol and attempted to prevent the certification of the votes of the Electoral College that make Democrat Joe Biden President-elect of the United States. There is no excuse for demonstrators, whatever their beliefs and goals, to overrun police barricades and attempt to prevent the people’s elected representatives from carrying out their...
Jan 08, 2021•15 min
In this episode: A strange thing happened on the road to the Emerging Democratic Majority. Even as Joe Biden won a roughly four-and-a-half percentage point national lead in total ballots cast, the “Rising American Electorate” demographics that were supposed to deliver “blue Texas” actually kept the Lone Star State and Florida in the Republican column while swinging to the right—even in deep-blue areas—as the country tilted to the left relative to 2016. The swings were most notable in two areas: ...
Dec 31, 2020•18 min
In this episode: The federal government closed a substantial part of the book on its investigation into the largest labor union corruption scandal since the mob control over the Teamsters Union was broken. Federal prosecutors in Michigan announced that they had reached a settlement with the United Auto Workers to establish an oversight regime and adopt reforms to increase members’ ability to hold union leadership accountable. Joining us to recap how we got here and breakdown the settlement is Se...
Dec 19, 2020•16 min
As states finalize their results or find the ballots they misplaced or lost the sticky notes for—looking at you, New York Twenty Two—the debate over election procedures shifts from the concluded 2020 elections to protecting election integrity for the future. And while much heat and light—arguably too much of the former—has focused on voting machine manufacturers, less light has shone on the influencers that exploited the COVID pandemic to fundamentally alter how elections were conducted, often w...
Dec 11, 2020•20 min
In this episode: Last week, free-market economics lost one of its greatest evangelists: George Mason University professor, occasional Rush Limbaugh Program substitute host, book author, syndicated columnist, and Capital Research Center Advisory Board member Dr. Walter Williams. Joining us to reflect on Williams’s life and legacy is one of his colleagues, Mercatus Center scholar and columnist Veronique de Rugy. For additional reading: Thomas Sowell: Walter E. Williams 1936-2020 Free to Choose Net...
Dec 05, 2020•17 min
In this episode: As all eyes are turned toward Georgia’s two Senate runoff races, we discuss proposed legislation that both the Democratic challengers in Georgia support, and that has serious implications for right-to-work laws nationally if the Senate flips from red to blue. The legislation is called the Pro Act, and it’s an expanded federal version of the controversial AB5 legislation in California that has upended independent contracting in that state. Subscribe to the podcast on your platfor...
Nov 20, 2020•20 min
In this episode: While the provisional results of the 2020 presidential election are disappointing to many conservatives, American voters threw roadblocks and cautions to an aggressive progressive agenda in even some of the bluest states. Illinois voters rejected a “progressive”—read, higher—income tax; California voters defeated the union-backed plan to override the commercial property tax limitations in Proposition 15 that we discussed a few weeks ago and rejected a measure to overturn the sta...
Nov 13, 2020•27 min
In this episode: “Keep Portland Weird”—that is a common slogan for Oregon’s largest city. But the rest of the country would rather at least one particular weirdness stay in Portland: Antifa, the radical-left extremist faction that has spent most of the summer and fall rioting there. But what is Antifa? Is it an idea, an ideology, or a conventionally understood group? Joining us to explore this question is writer Mark Hemingway, a third-generation Oregonian who conducted an in-depth analysis of A...
Nov 06, 2020•19 min
In this episode: Since the enactment of the National Labor Relations act of 1935, American collective bargaining law in the private sector has relied on exclusive monopoly representation at the enterprise level. In layman’s terms, a single labor union forcing all employees in a designated portion of an employers’ work force to accept a single union negotiated contract. The unions and their allies have eyed a different approach, that of the social democracies of continental Europe, which practice...
Oct 31, 2020•22 min
In this episode: For over forty years, residential and commercial property taxes in the State of California have been limited by a law known as “Proposition 13,” passed by voters in response to skyrocketing tax bills from steadily increasing property-value assessments. But while California—which hasn’t had a Republican “trifecta” control of its government since Ronald Reagan was governor—was never the blood-red state of partisan Republican memory, changes in its dominant industries (less gritty ...
Oct 23, 2020•22 min
In this episode: We talk about the Capital Research Center’s new report on Arabella Advisors, The Shadow Over America, which details a little-known $635 million “dark money” network and is a follow-on to our report from last year, Big Money in Dark Shadows, that initially charted the massive Arabella empire. Joining us today is the report’s author, CRC’s Hayden Ludwig, and another expert on Arabella and the activist Left in general, Joe Schoffstall, a writer for the Washington Free Beacon. Subsc...
Oct 16, 2020•15 min
In this episode: For two years former FBI Director Robert Mueller, acting as a Justice Department special prosecutor, conducted an investigation to determine if “individuals related to the Trump campaign are witting of or coordinating activities with the government of Russia related to the 2016 presidential election.” Despite breathless media speculation about the inevitable forthcoming proof of “Russian collusion,” none arrived. Joining us today is CRC’s Ken Braun, to discuss his work collectin...
Oct 09, 2020•27 min
In this episode: We are joined by John Hinderaker, Minnesotan and President of the Center of the American Experiment, a free market think tank holding the line against the state’s historic populist tendencies. We’ll discuss the Project Veritas allegations of illegal ballot harvesting Minnesota, ruminate on how true defunding the police has never been tried, and talk a little bit about Big Labor in the state. Subscribe to the podcast on your platform of choice at: https://influencewatch.fireside....
Oct 05, 2020•19 min
In this episode: We sit down to hash out some of the issues of the day as they relate to the research and work CRC is currently engaged in.
Sep 25, 2020•30 min
In this episode: Hayden Ludwig, an investigative researcher at the Capital Research Center fills in for Mike Watson. With us today is Kevin Mooney, a reporter for the Daily Signal and the Commonwealth Foundation in Pennsylvania. We’ll be discussing CRC’s new report, The Shadow Over America: Arabella Advisors’ $635 Million Empire, pulling back the curtain on a vast web of liberal “dark money” influencing the 2020 election—right here in Washington, DC. Subscribe to the podcast on your platform of ...
Sep 18, 2020•14 min
In this episode: In recent weeks we have covered the actions of Big Philanthropy, and for most of the modern history of philanthropy there has been no bigger force than the Ford Foundation. Today, we are joined by Sloan Rachmuth, Executive Director of Pen and Shield Media, to discuss the foundation’s recent activities supporting the rise of the radical Left, the history of the Ford Foundation, and what ought to be done about Big Philanthropy. Subscribe to the podcast on your platform of choice a...
Sep 11, 2020•21 min
In this episode: Since the initial demonstrations following the police-custody death of George Floyd, foundations have pledged over one billion dollars to support efforts to combat alleged “systemic racism.” In practice, that means more foundations have followed the path of the Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, and Pew Charitable Trusts and abandoned the business-friendly pro-capitalist outlooks of their founding donors and adopted the socialist and woke-progressive outlooks of their Curr...
Sep 04, 2020•19 min
In this episode: They say that in warfare, amateurs talk strategy while professionals talk logistics. With that in mind, I’m joined by Mike Hartmann, Capital Research Center Senior Fellow and Director of CRC’s Center for Strategic Giving to talk advocacy logistics, specifically the multi-billion-dollar world of private foundations that sustains much of the Professional Left, the position of the Right in advocacy resources and the effects of the falls of Steve Bannon and Jerry Falwell on those re...
Aug 27, 2020•27 min
This week I’m joined by my colleague Sarah Lee to discuss how recent developments in the investigation of the Trump-Russia investigators illustrates the problems with the administrative state, ask how American political parties might work to improve the quality of their nominees and what they stand to gain from doing so, and investigate the Lincoln Project, a Democratic Super PAC with pretentions of being more than that. • Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/capitalresearchcenter • Twitter: https...
Aug 21, 2020•27 min
In this episode: In this episode: Ninety years ago this week, George Soros was born; in the last year for which data are available, he spent $708 million through his two principal Open Society Foundations, mostly on left-progressive activism. Today, I’m joined by my Capital Research Center colleague Shane Devine, who joined us earlier this year in Episode 115 to discuss the left-progressive billionaire’s philosophical and political testament, In Defense of Open Society, as we look on Soros’s lif...
Aug 14, 2020•9 min
