The actions of Big Tech companies—most prominently Twitter and Facebook’s decision to ban then-President Donald Trump from their platforms—have led conservatives to consider invoking anti-trust powers of which they have long been skeptical to crack down on these companies’ power. Joining me today is a skeptic of that approach, Paul Steidler of the Lexington Institute, to discuss the case against an antitrust crackdown on tech companies. Episode Links: https://insidesources.com/time-for-conservat...
Jun 03, 2022•17 min
Last year, we had author Stephen Soukup on the podcast to discuss his book The Dictatorship of Woke Capital: How Political Correctness Captured Big Business. In recent months, “woke capital” has taken a few major hits: heterodox billionaire Elon Musk has bid to purchase Twitter with a promise to expand free speech on the platform, Florida’s state government responded to an intervention in social policy by Disney by stripping it of a special local governance privilege, and Netflix all but told “w...
May 27, 2022•22 min
By fighting to keep schools closed—excuse me, open for virtual learning—for a full year in the jurisdictions in which they hold the most power, teachers unions sought to expand their power. Now public-school enrollments are tumbling and evidence is piling up that the school closures harmed students’ mental health and expanded the racial achievement gaps the unions claim to seek to close. Joining me to discuss the teachers unions’ attempts to spin their school closures and her organization’s effo...
May 20, 2022•21 min
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 joins us to discuss asset forfeiture, how he tried to reform it, and the obstacles to protecting due...
May 13, 2022•23 min
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 justices have largely wondered how it could have happened given the Court’s need for institutional c...
May 06, 2022•36 min
“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 existence. Links: Fox Article: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/secretive-soros-funded-group-works-behind...
Apr 29, 2022•16 min
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 national liberal institution has expanded almost as far as one can go while remaining in a U.S. state: A...
Apr 22, 2022•20 min
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 merchants to post notices or include on receipts statements that certain taxes have been suspended. ...
Apr 15, 2022•20 min
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/capitalresearch
Apr 08, 2022•28 min
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 relations reform: The Employee Rights Act, recently re-introduced with an expanded vision of the mo...
Apr 01, 2022•22 min
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/capitalresearch Special Guest: Hayden Ludwig.
Mar 25, 2022•24 min
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 schools—and as a result, parents got a view into the education their tax dollars paid for their childre...
Mar 18, 2022•29 min
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 as 226 forgivable loans made under PPP totaling over $36 million that went to labor unions and relate...
Mar 11, 2022•30 min
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 management firm. Consumer's Research, led by Will Hild, has been attempting to expose Fink's affinit...
Mar 04, 2022•25 min
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/capitalresearch
Feb 25, 2022•22 min
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/capitalresearch
Feb 18, 2022•13 min
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 for federally mandated disclosures from the group, he couldn’t find them. Now he has only more ques...
Feb 11, 2022•27 min
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 continue in places like Flint, Michigan, and forced-masking orders. But rather than enable children...
Feb 04, 2022•26 min
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 testified on one such bill before the Virginia State Senate; he joins us to discuss the “Zuckbucks” and le...
Jan 28, 2022•24 min
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, former Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe, having said in a debate “I don’t think parents should be...
Jan 21, 2022•20 min
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 Business and Big Philanthropy. Joining me to discuss one such group, The Education Trust, and the br...
Jan 14, 2022•27 min
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 entrenched adversary rages in Chicago, where the Chicago Teachers Union is conducting an industrial acti...
Jan 07, 2022•24 min
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 • Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/capitalresearchcenter • YouTube: https://bit.ly/CRCYouTube • Ru...
Dec 17, 2021•16 min
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 vaccination passport regime this side of the Atlantic. No one over the age of five will be permitted t...
Dec 10, 2021•26 min
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 environmental benefits of nuclear energy through his group Environmental Progress and just released ...
Dec 03, 2021•39 min
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 favorable voting rules, with no small help from a Philadelphia union boss and political fixer who was just ...
Nov 19, 2021•22 min
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. Joining me to discuss how special interest groups take advantage of municipal election structure is Max E...
Nov 12, 2021•25 min
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 its own directive to convene FBI meetings on the matter; parents, political activists, school official...
Nov 05, 2021•13 min
CRC's Research Director Mike Watson talks to CRC's Research Associate Parker Thayer about the events of Climate Chaos Week. It happened last week when a network of radical environmentalist activists staged five days of demonstrations around Washington, DC, to pressure the Biden administration to impose more fossil fuel restrictions and shut down pipelines, despite already skyrocketing gas prices and a looming energy crisis this winter. The demonstrations received relatively little media coverage...
Oct 29, 2021•21 min
An interesting shift in the debate over electoral politics happened following the 2020 election: Americans began to wonder if the results they were seeing at the polls were reflective of the collective will of the people. Discussions about election integrity followed, and the focus quickly shifted to local elections as a potential source of at least some of the disconnect. CRC's Research Director Mike Watson is an expert at watching the role union organizers and activists play in local and off-c...
Oct 22, 2021•25 min
