Best of CRC Media Hits in August 2020

The world has gone a bit mad, and people are rightly curious about who’s funding some of the civil unrest plaguing Seattle, Portland, New York, Rochester, and even Washington, DC—Capital Research Center’s home base

As a result, the researchers and analysts at CRC have been quite busy—while still slowly making our way back into the office with appropriate pandemic considerations—continuing the work of tracking and communicating philanthropic funding moves, ebbs, and flows. This funding plays a largely unreported role in policymaking that affects the entire country. Below is a smattering of media hits from August 2020 in which we attempt to communicate what we’re learning to the wider world.

“Who Is Financing the War on Police?”
RealClearPolicy, Hayden Ludwig, 8/3/2020

We recently broke the story that the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation—the leading group in the radical, Marxist-led movement that has inspired waves of riots and demands that cities “defund the police”—transferred ownership from its fiscal sponsor Thousand Currents to the Tides Center, effectively confirming that this “spontaneous” movement is controlled by professional left-wing activists.

This also makes the leading group of Black Lives Matter (BLM) just one more face in the $636 million “dark money” web known as the Tides Nexus, already infamous for sponsoring the creation of new activist groups in a process called “incubation.”

“Gig Worker Attacks a Big Labor Ploy”
InsideSources, Mike Watson (Op-Ed), 8/13/2020

Part of that economy are companies like Uber, Postmates, DoorDash, and GrubHub (to name only a few) that rely on independent contractors to deliver food from restaurants and items from stores to customers; these workers set their own schedules, contribute their own capital, and direct their own work, unlike most conventional employees.

Big Labor sees this as a problem and are engaging in a campaign to undermine the thriving gig economy before it gets any larger.

“Six Ways Conservatives Should—And Shouldn’t—Give To Higher Ed”
American Conservative, Mike Hartmann (Op-Ed), 8/27/2020

For decades, conservative philanthropy has supported many different institutions, organizations, and projects within America’s vaunted higher-education system. This giving has usually been meant to maintain or improve the quality of—and sometimes reform—higher ed. For many conservative givers, the underlying motivation has been to make higher ed less alienating not only for individual conservative faculty members and students, but for conservatism in general.

Now, it seems as if all of America has taken on the characteristics of campus culture. If conservative philanthropy intended to neutralize well-credentialed academic progressives before the effects of their thinking reached the rest of the country, it didn’t. Looking back, given those high stakes, it might be time for a serious audit of conservative giving to higher education.

“Center for Tech and Civic Life: Democratic Election Operatives Masquerading as Concerned Voters’ Group, Critic Says”
Legal Newsline, W.J. Kennedy, 8/24/2020

The Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) promotes itself as a non-profit, non-partisan bunch of concerned citizens with the pleasant-sounding mission of helping local and state election officials “implement safe, inclusive and secure elections in November.”

What they really are, according to the Washington-based Capital Research Center (CRC), are a bunch of Democratic operatives using donations from left-of-center groups to maximize the use of mail-in ballots – subject to rampant fraud – to steer the election Joe Biden’s way.

Already this year, CTCL has spent over $6 million in the battleground state of Wisconsin, and Scott Walter, president of CRC, says the group’s focus is on those urban areas where Trump defeated Clinton in 2016 by narrow margins.

“Biden and Harris Have Received $155 Million from Financial Sector”
Washington Free Beacon, Collin Anderson, 8/17/2020

Campaign finance watchdogs agreed that the selection of Harris sends mixed messages if a candidate is attempting to woo Sanders supporters.

“The Biden campaign, by picking Kamala, is essentially proving Trump’s simplest narrative, which is that these ‘elitists’ are out for themselves and not for you,” Scott Walter, president of the money-in-politics watchdog Capital Research Center, told the Free Beacon.

As a senator, Biden received more than $8.5 million in direct contributions from the financial industry from 1989 to 2008. He went on to receive more than $710,000 from the industry during his failed presidential bid in 2008, and the Obama-Biden ticket took more than $10.1 million in financial sector cash four years later. A trio of groups aligned with the ticket, including the DNC, Priorities USA, and Obama Victory Fund, took a combined $71.4 million.

“Behind Colorado Wolf Initiative—California Cash”
Colorado Politics, Hayden Ludwig, 8/19/2020

The Rocky Mountain Wolf Project is the main advocacy group pushing the wolf reintroduction measure. It’s also a front for the San Francisco–based Tides Center, part of a $636 million nexus of groups that helps professional activists push left-wing policies, ranging from selling the benefits of Obamacare to halting the construction of oil pipelines to painting Republican states blue.

A look at the Rocky Mountain Wolf Project’s donate page reveals its status as a “project of Tides Center,” meaning all donations to the Rocky Mountain Wolf Project end up in Tides coffers, which administers the group’s finances internally.

As a Tides project, the group doesn’t file regular Form 990 reports with the IRS, so almost nothing about its finances is publicly available and its donors cannot be identified.

“CancelCon Takes on ‘Greatest Threat to Free Speech in American History’”
Newsweek, Paul Bond, 8/17/2020

Some folks who have butted heads with social-media giants like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube over politically incorrect things they have said or written, and who have battled college administrators for their right to say uncomfortable things on a college campus, are banding together for something dubbed CancelCon.

Organizers are billing their digital convention as “The biggest free speech event of the year.” Speakers include Ben Shapiro, Dave Rubin, Dennis Prager and Adam Carolla, all of whom appear in a movie about the so-called “cancel culture” at universities called No Safe Spaces, a co-sponsor of the event.

Many of the participants have been outspoken on the topic of free speech, including some who have testified at congressional hearings.

“‘Absolutely Unprecedented’: Leftist PAC Infiltrates Local Republican Primaries to Flip Them Blue”
TownHall, Madeline Peltzer, 8/4/2020

Although Democrats tout campaign finance reform on the trail, liberals have found success by flooding local elections with national dollars to advance their agenda, according to Scott Walter, president of Capital Research Center, a non-profit that tracks election donations.

“Liberals are the loudest ‘dark money’ hawks in Congress and in the media complaining about money influencing elections, but they rarely seem to notice the scads of ‘dark money’ helping Democrats,” Walter said in a statement to Townhall. Walter noted that companies often funnel millions of dollars into phony nonprofits based in states with key elections and receive “virtually no criticism from the money-in-politics crowd.”

“The Rise and Fail of Vote by Mail”
PJ Media, J. Christian Adams, 8/5/2020

New data shows that vote-by-mail also failed in Nevada. Clark County, home to Las Vegas, voted to go all-mail, just like the advocates wanted—over the objections of local election officials who knew better. Clark County mailed 1,325,934 ballots to registered voters, including voters who never asked for a mail ballot.

Roughly 310,000 mail ballots came back. Of those, about 7,000 were outright rejected by election officials. But here is the staggering statistic: 223,469 ballots bounced back as undeliverable. Forty-two percent of those bounced back from active registrant addresses, compared to inactive. That’s 93,585 ballots that bounced back as undeliverable to the address election officials show is a real, live location of a valid active voter.

In the District of Columbia and Maryland, election officials decided to conduct a mail election, except the mail didn’t arrive. Thousands of people never got ballots, then showed up in person to try to vote. Election officials, unfortunately, thought their mail-voting panacea made polling places obsolete, so many were closed. Chaos and long lines followed—in places where the voters could even find a polling place.

You are starting to see the benefits of a system where someone votes a real ballot in person at a government-run precinct, where the public can observe the process.