InfluenceWatch Friday

InfluenceWatch, a project of Capital Research Center, is a comprehensive and ever-evolving compilation of our research into the numerous advocacy groups, foundations, and donors working to influence the public policy process. The website offers transparency into these influencers’ funding, motives, and connections while providing insight often neglected by other watchdog groups.

The information compiled in InfluenceWatch gives news outlets and other interested parties research to use in reporting on significant topics that are often overlooked by the American public.

CRC is pleased to present some of the most significant additions to InfluenceWatch in the past week:

• The Brooklyn Museum, known officially as the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, is an art museum located in New York City, and one of the oldest such museums in the United States. The museum was the site of an anti-Israel rally in May 2024, where over 1,000 protesters occupied the museum grounds. This coincided with a rally that had been planned by the radical pro-Palestine group Within Our Lifetime. In June 2024, protesters defaced and painted antisemitic images on the homes of several Jewish members of the museum’s leadership, including placing a banner outside the home of museum director Anne Pasternak reading “Anne Pasternak Brooklyn Museum White-Supremacist Zionist.”
• The League of Young Communists USA is a radical political activist group that recruits youth to support Marxism-Leninism and engage in radical-left political activism. The group opposes the European Union (EU), the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and any Western policy or group it considers to be rooted in “imperialism.” The League of Young Communists USA was one of many groups that endorsed the pro-Palestine 2024 “March on Washington for Gaza” in Washington D.C. Others included American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Muslim Legal Fund of America, and the Palestinian Youth Movement.
• The Campaign Workers Guild is a labor union formed by the campaign staff of Democratic Party candidates and Democratic-aligned organizations. Since its founding in 2017, the Guild has negotiated collective bargaining agreements with numerous Democratic organizations including NextGen America, ActBlue, the Democratic Party of Oregon, and the campaigns of U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and U.S. Senator Mark Kelly (D-AZ). In June 2024, the Guild announced it had successfully negotiated a unionization agreement with the re-election campaign of President Joe Biden.
• The Movement Voter PAC is a political action committee (PAC) affiliated with the Movement Voter Project, a clearinghouse for Democratic donors, and the Movement Voter Fund, which is affiliated with major left-of-center grantmaking organization the Tides Foundation. During the 2024 election cycle, as of July 2024, Movement Voter PAC and its employees had contributed to other aligned groups including the Working Families Party, Workers Vote, the Black Voters Matter Action PAC, and the Michigan Liberation Action Fund. The PAC’s executive director William Wimsatt previously worked for left-of-center groups including the Solidaire Network, Rock the Vote and Green For All.
• The Palestinian Christian Alliance for Peace (PCAP) is a left-of-center organization co-founded by Philip Farah, a founding member of the Washington Interfaith Alliance for Middle East Peace. The PCAP advocates for Palestinian Christians to push the United Methodist Church to divest from “corporations that profit from the Israeli occupation,” consistent with the anti-Israel boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement. In 2021, group co-chair Alex Awad published a letter claiming that calling Hamas a terrorist group hides a “complicated truth” and that the organization is “a reflection and result of the untenable and unjust status quo in the land.”