At one point, in the minds of its writers and supporters, perhaps The Bulwark really was about providing a “bulwark” for “conserving conservatism” in opposition to the right-populism of once and future President Donald Trump. But as our colleague Ken Braun recounts in his series on the evolution of the publication, The Bulwark has become little more than just another outlet regurgitating Democratic Party talking points. Ken joins us to discuss the past, present, and future of The Bulwark.

The Bulwark: Birth of The Bulwark

In an era when fewer than six percent of private-sector workers are union members, it’s easy to forget how forceful Big Labor’s activists can be when they’re out rooting for dues and political power. Joining us to discuss how Unite Here has exercised its coercive power over working Americans is Patrick Semmens, vice president of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation.

Influence Watch profile for “Unite Here”

It’s 2025 in America, but news reports of antitrust lawsuits which, if successful, could potentially lead to at least a partial breakup of some of the biggest tech companies in the world, hearken back to the early 1900s when Standard Oil was fundamentally restructured and the Federal Trade Commission was created. Names like Meta, Google, Amazon, and Apple – they’re all being examined for potential anticompetitive behavior, with Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg recently taking the stand and Google entering a remedy phase to ameliorate what a Court decided was behavior violating antitrust law. The political giving associated with these companies suggests that the outcomes of these suits could affect not just individual platform users but also possibly the broader American political landscape. Joining the podcast today to discuss these developments is Daniel Cochrane, Senior Research Associate in the Center for Technology and the Human Person at The Heritage Foundation.

Mark Zuckerberg Wants Us to Forgive, Forget Facebook’s Sins

Hello, I’m Michael Watson joined by Robert Stilson and this is the InfluenceWatch Podcast. There’s an odd thing about the loud demonstrators protesting Israel in the year and a half since the Hamas attacks on the country in October 2023: They don’t like America much either. And now, there’s documentary proof to go along with the suppositions derived from protest literature, marchers’ signs, and ideological manifestos. Our colleague Ryan Mauro, an expert on political extremism and Middle East policy, has detailed the increase in anti-American and anti-law-enforcement sloganeering by pro-Palestinian groups since the October 7, 2023 attacks on Israel.

How “Pro-Palestinian” Protest Groups Promote Anti-Americanism
Organizational Examples
Prevalence of Charities Among Radical Groups

While we at Capital Research Center may not have a favorite Internal Revenue Service regulation, we do find one to be particularly relevant to our work on nonprofits in the public policy process: “Restriction of political campaign intervention by Section 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organizations.” Long story short, if you’re a public charity, you’re free to be ideological, but you cannot endorse or support candidates for office. And New Georgia Project, the charitable-nonprofit voter outreach group of serial Georgia candidate Stacey Abrams, is on the hot seat for allegedly breaking that regulation, with the group paying a state fine for campaign finance violations, the Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee asking the IRS to revoke the group’s tax exemption, and the state Senate investigating the Abrams-New Georgia relationship. Campaign finance expert Hans Von Spakovsky joins us to discuss what’s going on down in Georgia.

New Georgia Project Leader Resigns After Ethics Fine
Stacey Abrams-founded nonprofit faces crackdown threat from House GOP’s top tax writer
Georgia Senate targets Stacey Abrams voting organization in new investigation

Sixty billion dollars—that is the estimate of foreign funding of American universities that Americans for Public Trust released earlier this week. Of that $60 billion, $20 billion went to just ten prestigious schools including Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, MIT, Yale, and Columbia, among others. Joining us to discuss the findings and the implications of the foreign funding of these major universities is Caitlin Sutherland, executive director of APT.

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We here at CRC try not to wade into the more salacious soap opera stories that quite frankly infest the DC political world. But when a story intersects with work we already do, well, we’re not above getting down into the dirt a little. Such is the case with the report that dropped a few days ago that Connecticut liberal Senator and Biden mouthpiece Chris Murphy has recently left his wife and taken up with leftist activist Tara McGowan, late of the Obama administration and Courier Newsroom, a local news propaganda peddler that pushes political advertisements under the guise of local journalism. Watson has covered Courier fairly extensively so we decided to invite another Courier watcher Mark Hemingway of Real Clear Politics on to discuss what a union between Murphy and McGowan might mean beyond just a lot of really flattering, AI-generated pieces in quote “local news outlets.”

Addiction breaks lives, breaks families, and on a mass scale can break societies, but breaking an addiction is quite difficult. There are two main schools of thought for how to help addicted people: Abstinence, or the cessation of drug (or alcohol, or other addictive vice) use, or “harm reduction”—the practice defined by the National Institutes of Health as “interventions aimed to help people avoid negative effects of drug use.” But is “harm reduction” a good policy and a good use of federal government money? Joining us to discuss his report on harm reduction spending by federal agencies is our colleague Robert Stilson.

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Today a Senate Committee voted to advance former Oregon Representative Lori Chavez-DeRemer, Trump’s controversial pick for Labor Secretary, to a full floor vote, so Americans would do well to begin preparing for an impending onslaught of labor-related news, especially since, as my colleague Mike Watson will likely make clear in this episode, the new courtship of Big Labor coming from the right made the unlikely pick of Chavez-DeRemer a possibility. Adding to the drama was the no vote from Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, who, not coincidentally, earlier in February introduced the National Right to Work Act, a conservative-backed bill that among other things, makes paying union dues voluntary. Joining us to discuss that development, and his organization’s work on the act itself, is Jace White, Director of Federal Affairs at the National Right to Work Committee.

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How much did the U.S. government spend on illegal migrants and dubious asylum claimants over the past four years? That is the question that many people are asking after Elon Musk, who is the frontman for the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency teams, claimed that FEMA had spent $59 million on “luxury hotels” to house migrants. Unfortunately for taxpayers, as our guest Simon Hankinson of the Heritage Foundation has noted, that expenditure is only the tip of the iceberg of taxpayer support for the migration surge under the Biden administration.

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The new Trump administration has set its Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) at the institutional bureaucracy with a mandate to streamline government operations and target wasteful spending or spending contrary to administration policy. Here at Capital Research Center, our “DOGE Files” are highlighting federal grantmaking to nonprofit organizations that DOGE, the rest of the administration, and Congress may find wasteful or contrary to sound policy. Joining us to discuss their investigations are our colleagues Parker Thayer and Robert Stilson.

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Big Philanthropy and the so-called “good government” groups that it funds have a “solution” (I’m making air-quotes) to partisan gerrymandering: The “independent redistricting commission.” With funding from left-of-center groups like the Sixteen Thirty Fund, the National Redistricting Action Fund, the SEIU, the NEA, and the Quadrivium Foundation, a supposed political neophyte named Katie Fahey (whom media reports placed at Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Election Night event) campaigned to establish one in Michigan during the 2018 election. Fahey won, and then 13 citizens went about drawing Michigan’s congressional and state legislative districts after the 2020 Census. Joining my Michigan-based colleague Ken Braun and I to discuss her experiences inside Michigan’s redistricting commission is Rebecca Szetela, who served as the Commission Chair from September 2021 through March 2022.

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The Trump administration is dismantling DEI within the federal workforce and ESG is slowly morphing into one of the most irritating terms in corporate governance. But conservatives, sensing there may be more work yet to do, might wonder if there is anything they can do individually to help end these discriminatory and counter-productive policies once and for all. Turns out, there is. A new effort called Coign (spelled C.O.I.G.N) offers what is essentially a conservative Visa card that donates a portion of every transaction to support Conservative charities. It’s the brainchild of CEO Rob Collins, a proud conservative with some heavy-hitting bona fides such as serving as Former Executive Director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, Former Chief of Staff to Representative Eric Cantor, and Former Press Secretary for Senator John Thune’s Senate Campaign. Rob joins the show today to tell us all about COIGN.

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Almost everyone can look at the education landscape in America today and see that something has gone very, very wrong. Spending per student has increased, and there is no evidence that this increased spending has improved student performance outcomes. But what if there are factors eating up the budget and keeping the student performance outcomes stagnant? Factors such as the rise of teachers’ unions in non-right-to-work states, for example? Joining us today is Corey DeAngelis, a school choice evangelist who is a senior fellow at the American Culture Project, to discuss a recently released report he helped author that looks at just that, the administrative bloat in the public school system and how it correlates to increased teacher union influence. Also joining is CRC colleague Mike Watson, our regular host and resident labor union expert.

Corey A. DeAngelis is a senior fellow at the American Culture Project. He has been labeled the “school choice evangelist” and called “the most effective school choice advocate since Milton Friedman.” He is a regular on Fox News and frequently appears in The Wall Street Journal. DeAngelis is also the executive director at Educational Freedom Institute, a senior fellow at Reason Foundation, an adjunct scholar at Cato Institute, a board member at Liberty Justice Center, and a senior advisor at Accuracy in Media. He holds a Ph.D. in education policy from the University of Arkansas. He is the national bestselling author of The Parent Revolution: Rescuing Your Kids from the Radicals Ruining Our Schools (Center Street, 2024).