CRC News: CRC’s busy month of May

Every few weeks we produce a blog post summarizing the media and other attention paid to CRC and InfluenceWatch, our comprehensive research tool that provides fact-based descriptions of the influencers of public policy and politics in America.

That reporting model fell apart in May, due to a happy deluge of coverage that forced us to divide the “CRC News” reports into four separate updates. Previous reports included the following:

CRC News: A month in the busy life of InfluenceWatch

CRC News: Daily Wireinvestigation of suspicious Ohio NGO began at the Capital Research Center

CRC News: SPLC coverage

 This is the last of the four reports, recounting CRC media coverage from the month that was not directly related to the two big stories noted above.

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Philanthropy Daily—Civil Thoughts: Laughing Matters

At Capital Research Center’s InfluenceWatch, Robert Stilson explains the American-based support for Cuba’s communist regime. From the history:

The primary activity of the Venceremos Brigade involves organizing trips to Cuba for Americans, known as brigadistas, who wish to demonstrate their solidarity with the communist country and their opposition to United States government policy toward the island. Approximately 10,000 brigadistas from the United States have traveled to Cuba since the first Venceremos Brigade contingent in 1969. A large proportion of brigadistas have traditionally come from California and New York, as well as from other parts of the Northeastern and Southwestern United States.

In addition to touring and learning about the country, brigadistas perform work while in Cuba. In the past, this has included agricultural labor, construction and building maintenance, small-scale manufacturing, and gardening. Recent trips have tended to place higher emphasis on tourism and education relative to labor. Brigadistas visit local facilities and meet with representatives from institutions such as the Union of Communist Youth and Cuba’s one-party legislature, the National Assembly of People’s Power. They also attend cultural events and performances. In a video documentary produced for the group’s 46th anniversary in 2015, brigadistas are shown traveling around Cuba, dancing, singing, swimming, and visiting tourist sites, in addition to performing some work.

The Venceremos Brigade cautions prospective brigadistas that in Cuba they “will experience living conditions familiar to the majority of people in the world, but unfamiliar to most in the United States,” including rudimentary group accommodations and possible shortages of water and other supplies. The group attributes these conditions to American “economic warfare” against Cuba.

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NPR—Survey warns that some nonprofits are in danger of closing due to funding cuts

• Interview with CRC president Scott Walter. Here’s a sample of the Q&A:

LUDDEN: But Scott Walter says U.S. charities and the foundations that support them need more scrutiny. He heads the Capital Research Center, a free-market think tank that studies how such groups spend their money, and he thinks most Americans would agree it should not be for things like DEI and LGBTQ rights.

SCOTT WALTER: We have not always lived up to this, obviously, but constitutionally, we’re not supposed to be segregating and treating differently people by race or sex or religion.

LUDDEN: Walter hopes the administration’s actions lead some groups to rethink their mission.

WALTER: I’d love to see foundations take a serious look at what they’re funding and say, you know, maybe we have to make people’s lives better instead of advocating for a variety of basically political causes.

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Daily Wire—What’s Behind American Energy NGOs Doing China’s Dirty Work—Energy nonprofits are impeding America’s energy production while collecting cash to promote pro-China policies.

• Essay by CRC managing editor Ken Braun teasing his new research report: Enemies of Energy: The Myths, the Movement, and the Money: A lively report profiling what are currently the fifteen most influential opponents of nearly 90 percent of the fuels that built modern America and sustain our prosperity, their known donors, and the myths used to support the movement.

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Zero Hedge—Political Warfare? Advocacy Group With Ties To Lefty Unions Targets SpaceX IPO

The union-affiliated pension fund adviser, linked to the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) – a labor union that has supported the left-wing, billionaire-funded “No Kings” protest against President Trump [. . .] has asked regulators to review the accuracy and reliability of SpaceX’s financials, ensure auditor independence, and examine accounting around transactions with other Elon Musk-linked companies, including xAI and Tesla.

The InfluenceWatch database via Capital Research Center shows SOC’s ties with lefty unions…

To note, SOC is weirdly obsessed with unhinged globalist ESG investment activism that damaged the U.S. economy during the Biden-Harris regime years.

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Legal Insurrection—Treasury is Rightly Focused on Nonprofit Transparency: Could certain changes reap a world of change?

• Opinion essay written by CRC senior research analyst Robert Stilson.

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Just the News—One Nation Under Fraud: Trump administration uncovers massive welfare, citizenship abuses: The cost to taxpayers identified by Vice President JD Vance’s task for targeting government benefit programs is mounting, and no plausible explanations are forthcoming.

Recent public reports indicate that federally-funded state government programs beyond just Minnesota are ripe for exploitation and fraud. In a sweeping investigation, the Daily Wire and a researcher from the Capital Research Center found that Ohio spent billions of federal dollars on “personal services” payments to home healthcare companies with dubious credentials.

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The National News Desk—Balancing the budget by eliminating fraud: WH official makes strong claim at roundtable

The Government Accountability Office estimates the total amount of improper government payments across all programs is closer to $186 billion. But President of the Capital Research Center, Scott Walter, told The National News Desk on Wednesday, Miller is onto something with his remarks. Especially since no one knows the full scope of the fraud happening in both federal and state governments.

“We know at the barest minimum, it’s tens of billions and quite possibly hundreds of billions of dollars and therefore would make a dramatic effect on the budget deficit that we currently run,” Walter said.

Walter added, it’s difficult to track the different types of fraud all over the budget. Like covid loan fraud. Medicaid home healthcare fraud, along with hospice and autism fraud.

“Not only is this a tragedy for taxpayers, but as the Vice President said, it’s also a tragedy for the legitimate people in America who are suffering and who rely on these programs,” said Walter.

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Daily Signal—Is the Left’s Censorship Industrial Complex Pulling the Strings Behind AI?

GPAHE frames opposition to mass immigration and transgender ideology as rooted in “hate,” “white supremacy,” or “Christian nationalism.”

GPAHE openly admits that it “does not cover far-left extremism.” It claims far-left groups do not “attack individuals for their identity traits,” that they do not “advance rights-restricting agendas,” and that “far-left extremist movements have not in recent years engaged in mass violence in the manner that the far-right has.”

“It’s inexcusable Anthropic has partnered with such biased outfits as GPAHE, which was launched by leaders from the disgraced Southern Poverty Law Center, and admits it ignores extremism among its left-wing allies,” Scott Walter, president of the Capital Research Center, told The Daily Signal.

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Daily Signal—AI Claims Political Neutrality—but ‘Election Safeguards’ Partners Are Flush With Left-Leaning Cash

The Foundation for American Innovation website notes it has been funded by a combination of grant makers on both the right and the left [. . .] Notably, conservative-leaning donors such as the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation and the Sarah Scaife Foundation each made contributions of more than $300,000 per year in 2024 and 2023, according to the Capital Research Center, which monitors nonprofits.

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Newsbusters (Media Research Center)— STUDY: Billionaire George Soros Gave ‘May Day Strong’ Lefties Protesting Billionaires $115M

Another unironic Soros-funded signatory to the coalition was another radical climate change group called the Sunrise Movement, which was already named in a groundbreaking Capital Research Center investigation as one of a collective of pro-terrorism groups that received at least $80 million from the Soros empire. CRC noted that Sunrise “endorsed the Antifa-linked Stop Cop City campaign, in which activists currently face over 40 domestic terrorism charges and 60 racketeering indictments.” That coalition, noted then-CRC Investigative Researcher Ryan Mauro, “engaged in arson, property damage and violence against law enforcement personnel and utility workers to try to stop construction of this local police training center.”