News Roundup: CRC & IW covered by Fox, Zero Hedge and more

Over the last couple of weeks, both InfluenceWatch and the Capital Research Center have continued to receive extensive media coverage. Samples of the reports and excerpts from same are listed below.

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Washington Examiner – DOJ probe into Black Lives Matter finances deepens as group cuts ties with top board member

Parker Thayer, an investigative researcher at the Capital Research Center, told the Washington Examiner that Bowers’s ouster should be viewed as a warning sign.

“It’s a massive red flag,” he said. “It’s something we haven’t seen at any nonprofit in America in recent history. That’s like a five-alarm fire.”

Thayer added that the Justice Department has been increasingly aggressive in policing nonprofit abuses and said BLMGNF’s issues are so extensive that “there aren’t too many things that a nonprofit could do wrong that BLM hasn’t already done.” He said the group’s repeated controversies around financial disclosures and leadership self-dealing create “a strong likelihood that an investigation will find something that actually goes the distance.”

Thayer also pointed to BLMGNF founder Cullors’s previous admission that she found preparing IRS filings “triggering,” and argued that her reaction betrayed an awareness of deeper problems. “You don’t get scared by paperwork unless it reflects reality,” he said. “I think there is a good chance that something more than clerical errors is found.”

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Fox News – House GOP probe targets Soros-linked groups over alleged Antifa funding ties: The letter demands that Open Society Foundations and Alliance for Global Justice to preserve and turn over records

In the letter to Open Society Foundations, the committee wrote, “According to a recent report from the Capital Research Center, since 2016, OSF has donated more than $80 million to extremist organizations that support or engage in terrorism or other extremist violence.”

“Of particular concern, OSF has donated ‘at least $2 million’ to the Sunrise Movement, a group closely connected to Antifa. According to the Capital Research Center report, the Sunrise Movement ‘endorsed and solicited financial support for the Antifa-associated anarchist terrorists of the Stop Cop City / Defend the Atlanta Forest coalition’ which, in 2023, violently attacked law enforcement officers and utility workers constructing a training facility near Atlanta, Georgia for police officers and firefighters. During the siege, Antifa terrorists threw Molotov cocktails, bricks, and rocks at law enforcement officers, attempted to blind officers by shining lasers in their eyes, and set construction equipment and a police car on fire, among numerous other violent acts. Prosecutors later charged more than individuals with domestic terrorism due to the attacks.”

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Zero Hedge – “Panic Unfolds”: Nonprofit Sector Battered By 419% Surge In Job Losses And Grantmaking Freeze

There have been numerous reports from the Capital Research Center and investigative researchers Peter Schweizer and Seamus Bruner of the Government Accountability Institute that show an abundance of evidence via 990 filings that Soros foundations and other leftist billionaire-funded groups funneled money into “pro-terror groups.”

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American Leviathan: The Homeless Leviathan: How the Ruling Class Monetized Misery

The crisis sustains the bureaucracy that claims to fight it. The administrative state has simply built a new limb of itself—what the Capital Research Center rightly calls the “Homeless Industrial Complex.” In truth, it’s a Homeless Leviathan: a vast, unelected empire of nonprofits, bureaucrats, and activists, united not by compassion but by ideology and the pursuit of power.

According to the new report Infiltrated: The Ideological Capture of Homelessness Advocacy, this network includes 759 organizations with more than $9 billion in combined revenue, one-third of which comes directly from taxpayers. These are the same groups that urged the Supreme Court in Grants Pass v. Johnson (2024) to declare local anti-camping laws unconstitutional.

The Court refused. But the case revealed something deeper: that much of America’s homelessness “advocacy” has become a political insurgency against order itself.

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The Federalist – Dems Try To Sabotage Push For Proof Of Citizenship To Vote

Formerly known as the National Council of La Raza, the group was a vehement supporter of Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and Deferred Action for Parents of Americans (DAPA) executive maneuvers to grant legal status to illegal immigrants, according to charity tracker InfluenceWatch.

“In addition, they supported the ‘DREAM Act’ that would provide legal status to certain migrants,” InfluenceWatch reports. “UnidosUS also supported other left-of-center immigration policy proposals at the federal, state, and local levels that offer legal presence and protection to illegal immigrants, especially those from Mexico and Central America.”

The group’s leadership was tied at the hip to Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign, former Vice President Al Gore’s 2000 campaign operation, and Obama’s administration.

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Powerline – On Climate, Follow the Money

InfluenceWatch reference from energy journalist Robert Bryce was quoted in the Powerline blog:

[Bill] McKibben’s new NGO, Third Act, is aimed at organizing people over the age of 60 “for progressive change.” What does that mean? As Influence Watch notes, the group “advocates for a total transition towards weather-based energy sources.” Furthermore, Third Act is a dark money group. It doesn’t reveal its funding, its funders, or the payments to its leaders. McKibben gets away with this because Third Act is a sponsored project of the Sustainable Markets Foundation, a New York City-based NGO that reported $49 million in revenue in 2023. McKibben’s patron doesn’t disclose the names of any of its donors.

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The Dallas Express – Dallas Area Transit Alliance Attempts To Stop Cities From Dumping DART

The Action Network first emerged during the 2011 Occupy Wall Street protests, according to InfluenceWatch. It helped organize the anti-Keystone XL oil pipeline protests, the March for Our Lives, and the left-wing Women’s March. According to The Federalist, the Action Network helped coordinate anti-Tesla protests this spring, as well as protests for the socialist holiday May Day.

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The Dallas Express – Latino Voter Group Sues AG Ken Paxton For ‘Retaliatory’ Attack On Election Work

Jolt is a leftist get-out-the-vote group that targets Latinos in Texas, according to InfluenceWatch. It launched in 2016 to boost voter participation, which it calls “non-partisan.”

[. . .]

Ramirez co-founded the Workers Defense Project – a left-wing group that represents immigrants in the workforce and collaborates with powerful unions – in 2003, according to InfluenceWatch.

She ran as a Democrat to represent Texas in the U.S. Senate in 2020, but lost in the primary, according to Ballotpedia.

[. . .]

Jolt reported $2.6 million in revenue in 2022, and $2 million in total expenses, according to InfluenceWatch.

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Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs – ‘Open primaries’ backers supported Marxist candidate for president

According to Influence Watch, Open Primaries President John Opdycke “has worked for independent and radical-left political candidates and organizations throughout his career. In the late 1980s, he worked as a researcher for the lobbying arm of the Rainbow Coalition, a left-of-center political alliance organized by Jesse Jackson. In 1992, he worked on the presidential campaign of Lenora Fulani, an avowed Marxist of the New Alliance Party. Opdycke then worked for Fulani again two years later when she unsuccessfully opposed Gov. Mario Cuomo (D-NY) in the New York Democratic gubernatorial primary.”

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Mondoweiss – Trump’s widening war on the left started with Palestine: The Trump administration’s recent efforts to target left-wing groups started with attacks on the Palestine movement, following the strategy established by pro-Israel organizations that worked for decades to pave the way for such repression.

Gibbons also cited Capital Research Center (CRC), a conservative watchdog that tracks the finances of left organizations, as an administration influence. He points out that the FBI has historically used such right-wing, McCarthyite sources to pick targets for investigations.

In September, the Justice Department referred to a report by CRC while calling for federal prosecutors to investigate the liberal billionaire George Soros.

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Fox News – The new Mafia: Trump, civil RICO and the global intifada

Ryan Mauro, an investigative researcher at the Capital Research Center and a member of the Clarity Coalition, a group challenging this extremist network, recently released a report examining billionaire George Soros’s funding networks. He told me, “This antisemitic, anti-American, seditious movement is more than a loose group of agitators. It is a well-funded ecosystem of hate. Many self-styled enemies of capitalism are, in truth, the very capitalists they denounce.”