CRC News: CRC gives congress the lowdown on the nonprofit sector

Wall Street Journal—Good Manners Returning to the Capitol? House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries is urging colleagues to behave.

In Other News

Remind Us Again Why These Outfits Get Tax Exemptions

Scott Walter of the Capital Research Center testified this week before the House Ways and Means Committee:

The state of the nonprofit sector is not pretty. Traditionally a glorious part of American exceptionalism, featuring ordinary citizens helping each other in grassroots groups devoted to real charity, the nonprofit world, and especially its so-called charitable branch, is too often crudely politicized. As one knowledgeable observer put it, the law that says tax-deductible gifts to 501(c)(3) charities “can’t be used for electoral work … is a joke.” Actually, “Philanthropy can help win elections, pass legislation, enact policy, decide court cases, shape press coverage, catalyze protests, smear your enemies, boost your allies, and even help set the overall cultural direction of American life,” the same observer admits.

This author, David Callahan, leads InsidePhilanthropy.com and BlueTent.us and is no conservative conspiracy theorist. He’s a left-wing activist passionately fighting to “flip the House” of Representatives to the Democrats and help the party win every other federal and state election, and he admits that the trend is toward ever-more politics in the charitable sector:

Over the past three decades, wealthy people and institutional funders alike have gotten far more savvy at using philanthropy to sway politics, deploying ever larger sums across more issues and arenas. In addition, they’ve become more sophisticated at integrating their philanthropic giving with campaign donations, lobbying, media strategies, and business operations.

Callahan acknowledges “The public does not support a system that offers so many different ways to convert wealth into political influence and get a nice deduction in return,” and he admits, “philanthropy is largely run by highly educated professionals with little connection to the working class or material hardship.”

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New York Post—Woke Virginia prosecutor who let alleged migrant killer walk took big Soros bucks

“Sometimes Soros will come in with just, you know, one or $200,000 for a DA, for Descano, the money truck really back got backed up for him,” Capital Research Center Investigative Researcher Parker Thayer told The Post.

The Hungarian-born left-wing financier has spent millions on political races supporting far-left candidates via his vast array of philanthropic organizations and political action committees.

Soros has donated at least $35 million to district attorney races across the country since 2016, according to Thayer.

“What Soros realized was that you could dump enormous sums of money into district attorney races, especially in the Democratic primaries in deep blue cities and he could essentially pick the DA because the Democratic candidate is almost always going to win,” Thayer said.

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Washington Examiner—Scandal-plagued Labor Department sends millions to liberal, race-based organizations 

Mike Watson, director of research at the Capital Research Center, said there “certainly is an institutional bureaucracy” at DOL that seeks to push liberal policies.

“When the cat’s away, the mice will play,” Watson said, alluding to DeRemer’s alleged absentee leadership at the department. “The bureaucrats will do what the bureaucrats have been doing for as long as these agencies have existed, which is trying to use big government to advance the progressive agenda.”

“Bureaucrats who aren’t being supervised, who aren’t being closely watched, they’ll do what they want to do, they’ll do what they have been doing, they’ll do what they got into government to do, which is to make government bigger, which is to make government more intrusive, and which is to make government carry out the progressive agenda,” Watson added.

[. . .]

Watson, an expert on organized labor, conceded that reining in these union-related expenditures could be beyond the abilities of even a competent labor secretary, given the desire of northeastern Republican congressmen to keep unions placated.

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Daily Wire—Mosque Near Pentagon Labels Iran’s Khamenei As Its ‘Martyred Leader’: Virginia mosque, aligned with leftist groups, funded by alleged front for Iranian regime.

After the October 2023 Hamas terrorist attack against Israel, the Manassas Mosque issued a newsletter that said, “We stand firmly with the Palestinian Resistance (Hamas),” according to InfluenceWatch.

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NewsBusters (Media Research Center)—DePaul University Launches New ‘Racial Justice,’ Anti-ICE Media Institute with Lori Lightfoot

DePaul is also partnering on this effort with the liberal media nonprofit Public Narrative, which has been funded by massive left-wing money networks like the MacArthur Foundation, and eBay co-founder Pierre Omidyar. MacArthur — which has doled out millions to causes such as “environmentalist policy, population control,” “racial justice” and “abortion access” per Influence Watch — has nominally funneled $2,030,300 (unadjusted for inflation) between Public Narrative’s founding in 1989 to 2024.

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Racket News (Matt Taibbi)— Introducing: Who’s That Source? Racket’s new feature chronicles the money behind oft-quoted sources

The new Racket feature goes a step beyond sites like Influence Watch, OpenSecrets, Nonprofit Explorer, MapLight, and others. Not only will we tell you whose money is behind a source quoted in the New York Times or Fox, we’ll check the track records of people called “experts,” highlight mispredictions, and compute a source’s “shill factor” — the percentage chance that the “expert opinion” is a politically predetermined conclusion. Has this Republican-funded organization ever criticized a Republican? Is this “follow the science” environmental group really a Democratic Party campaign committee?

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Washington Examiner—White-collar workers, blue donors: The professional class turns on the cash spigot for Democrats

“Your average Republican, including certainly President Trump himself, at least wants to present himself as business-friendly,” Capital Research Center research director Michael Watson told the Washington Examiner. “If you think about the sort of regulations and deregulations that, you know, the EPA, the Interior Department, and even Labor are moving, they are pretty conventional Republican deregulations for the most part. You get populist things like President Trump’s tariff policy that make business ownership squeamish, but compare that to what you would have gotten from the Harris administration, which would have been, you know, totally intertwined with organized labor, totally intertwined with environmentalist groups, totally intertwined with big philanthropy and its goals of gutting and destroying the market enterprise system. You can see why the more entrepreneurial white-collar professionals would still prefer the Right.”

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/crc-news-crc-gives-congress-the-lowdown-on-the-nonprofit-sector/