InfluenceWatch Podcast

Updated: 28 Mar 2025 • 358 episodes
ricochet.com/series/influencewatch

The podcast where we go beneath the surface to reveal the web of connected influence, money, and motivation driving the news, sourced primarily from our website InfluenceWatch.org, the Capital Research Center's online encyclopedia of the donors, non-profits, and influencers driving politics. You can watch the video version of the podcast at: http://bit.ly/2rnQygY Listen to all episodes of InfluenceWatch Podcast at Ricochet.com.

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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

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To quote our colleague and guest for the week, Parker Thayer, the nonprofit voter registration industry “might not sound like a particularly exciting or important topic, and in an ideal world it wouldn’t be either, but unfortunately, it’s both.” Earlier this week, Parker testified to the Michigan House Election Integri

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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 libera

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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

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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

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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 “lu

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