CRC News: How do you use our research?

CRC News is a semi-weekly feature that recaps how the media and other policy influencers have used the work of InfluenceWatch and the researchers from the Capital Research Center. While we’re delighted with that attention, it’s extra special when our readers and supporters steal our stuff and tell the media about it for us. So, the top item on this edition of CRC News is a quote from a recent letter to the editor of the High County Press in Boone, NC. The letter was submitted by Cary and Bridget Davenport.

If you have used CRC or InfluenceWatch  in a published letter to the editor, please share it with us!

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High County Press (Boone, NC)—LETTER: Confronting the Democrats Who Are Blaming Watauga County Commissioners For The Lawsuit

From Influence Watch website, I quote “Tides has received millions of dollars from George Soros’s Open Society Foundations and was labeled by the National Legal and Policy Center as “George Soros’ Favorite Money Handler”. Tides Foundation reported on their 2024 IRS form 990 a “grant” to this Watauga County Voting Rights Task Force of $50,000. Pretty healthy donation and again, the deep pockets of Soros reaching into our county to fund this lawsuit against us. Don’t know yet what 2025 “grants” are pushing this law fare along. And just as an aside, we couldn’t find a 2024 filing by Watauga County Voting Rights Task Force reporting this $50,000.

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Fox News— Soros-linked dark money network fuels Virginia redistricting push backed by national Democrats: A primary backer of Virginia’s redistricting effort raised more than $64M via dark money groups and support from national Dems like Nancy Pelosi

Another one of the top donors to the left’s Virginians for Fair Elections is American Opportunity Action, described as “a pure pass-through entity” by Parker Thayer, a dark money expert from the conservative Capital Research Center.

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Washington Examiner—A look into the controversies surrounding the now-former secretary of labor

Staffers reportedly described DeRemer as an “absentee secretary” who left employees “deeply demoralized.”

“When the cat’s away, the mice will play,” Capital Research Center research director Mike Watson previously told the Washington Examiner. “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.”

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The Center Square—Analyst: Southern Poverty Law Center indictment will increase scrutiny of group

Senior research analyst at American think tank Capital Research Center Robert Stilson told The Center Square that “at a minimum,” the Southern Poverty Law Center’s indictment will “further increase public scrutiny of a group whose operations were already deeply controversial.”

“Americans might rightly question whether what the SPLC does is aligned with their own understanding of what charities should be doing with their tax-exempt dollars – and this was true before any of the alleged actions in the indictment came to light,” Stilson said.

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Although this information was “unbeknownst to donors” previously, the DOJ said, Stilson has noted in the past the bias embedded throughout the SPLC, stating that “its activities are highly controversial and divisive.”

Stilson added: “For context, it is important to recall just how incredibly wealthy the SPLC is.”

“Its most recent financials disclosed net assets of over $786 million, with annual revenues that exceed some of the best-known charities in the country,” Stilson said.

“Despite this, it continues to strenuously solicit money from small-dollar donors on its website,” Stilson said. “Those ordinary donors in particular are the ones who should be taking a hard look at the true nature of the group they are supporting.”

Stilson has written in the past on the “extraordinary” wealth of the SPLC.

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The Daily Signal and Victor Davis Hanson (YouTube interview)—From Charlottesville to Corporate Cash: The Left’s Playbook REVEALED

“Capital Research Center is a great resource for investigating these left-wing nonprofits…” – Jack Fowler interviewing Victor Davis Hanson (at 33:20 mark)

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American Thinker—NGOs Cosplaying as Overlords and Power Brokers

As the SPLC’s left-wing advocacy grew, so did its financial holdings, prompting criticism from former employees like Bob Moser, who described the group in 2019 as a “highly profitable scam” that was “ripping off donors.”

“Its balance sheet long ago revealed the SPLC had ceased to be a charity and become a venture capital firm,” Scott Walter, the president of the Capital Research Center, a conservative watchdog group, told the Washington Free Beacon. “The indictment reinforces that fact by revealing the SPLC operates like a centimillionaire who simultaneously invests in a drug to treat diabetes and a firm producing high fructose corn syrup.”

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National Legal and Policy Center—We’ve Seen It Before: The Protection Racket That Corporate America Built

The story begins with Al Sharpton. For more than two decades, NLPC has tracked how Sharpton’s National Action Network solicited and received corporate donations following public pressure campaigns by threatening boycotts, protests, and the application of the racism label to companies that failed to cooperate. InfluenceWatch documents the pattern in detail, including NLPC’s own characterization: Peter Flaherty, president of NLPC, has called Sharpton’s operation “quite clearly a shakedown operation.” NLPC’s late chairman Ken Boehm put it more directly to the New York Post: “Al Sharpton has enriched himself and NAN for years by threatening companies with bad publicity if they didn’t come to terms with him. Put simply, Sharpton specializes in shakedowns.”

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InsideNOVA (Northern Virginia news source)— ‘Pink slime’ arrives in Virginia

There we find that the publication is coming from The American Independent Foundation, another misnomer. According to Influence Watch, the organization, based in Washington, is “part of a network of left-of-center media outlets managed by liberal activist David Brock” that “supports liberal investigative journalism to foster ‘increased public awareness of progressive issues.’”

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Natalie Winters (Substack)— The Media Is Hiding Cole Allen’s Ties To A Far-Left Group That Advised Biden. Now The Evidence Is Vanishing From Their Website. The official narrative is dead wrong.

InfluenceWatch notes that Sunrise “played a significant role in the early days of Joe Biden’s presidency” and reports that, according to The Hill, Sunrise had been in “regular contact” with Biden administration officials as Biden moved on environmental priorities, including halting Keystone XL construction and restricting fossil fuel activity on federal lands.

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InfluenceWatch also lists 2019 grants to Sunrise Movement including $175,000 from Tides Advocacy and $28,750 from the Tides Foundation, placing Sunrise within the broader mainstream progressive donor infrastructure.

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/crc-news-how-do-you-use-our-research/