InfluenceWatch Friday
The information compiled in InfluenceWatch gives news outlets and other interested parties to use this research in future reporting on significant topics that are often overlooked by the American public.
Barack Obama
Big Philanthropy to the Rescue? Think Again.
As the media and elites across America take up a fight to “save democracy,” Big Philanthropy is casting itself in the role of superhero. Since 2011, the University of Pennsylvania’s…
The Gates Foundation’s Common Core Disaster
The Gates Foundation played a crucial role in making the vision of Common Core a reality. Yet after an entire decade of implementation, “no convincing evidence exists that the standards…
Teachers Unions Push Restorative Justice Without Evidence
Hardly a week goes by nowadays without some video of a student violently assaulting or verbally attacking their teacher going viral online. Fellow students record the incident and react with…
Donors’ Distance in Decades of Decadence
“[T]he gulf between the Republican party’s donors and voters has never been greater, and ultimately (and thankfully), the voters hold the power,” according to U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida…
The Thesis That Drove American Politics Crazy: The Emerging Democratic Majority
In 2002, liberal scholars John Judis and Ruy Teixeira published a provocative thesis: A new Democratic majority would “emerge” by the end of the decade. Traditional middle-class and working-class Democrats…
The Thesis That Drove American Politics Crazy: A Prescription or a Prophecy?
The Emerging Democratic Majority is a book of two halves; a description of electoral trends that Judis and Teixeira argue favor the Democrats and a prescription for Democrats to adopt…
The Thesis That Drove American Politics Crazy: From McConnell to Trump
Sean Trende speculated that a Republican Party advancing the alternate approach “would have to be more ‘America first’ on trade, immigration and foreign policy; less pro–Wall Street and big business…
The Thesis That Drove American Politics Crazy: Teixeira Exiled
The Democratic response to the Trump administration accelerated the burial of progressive centrism. The professional class hardened in its Democratic alignment as “wokeness”—the mix of Robin DiAngelo- and Ibram X.
The Thesis That Drove American Politics Crazy: Conclusion
"The Emerging Democratic Majority," while not prophetic, was informative in projecting who would constitute Barack Obama’s presidential majorities. But its prescription, a “progressive centrism” focused on left-populist economic and welfare…