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OpEdNews Op Eds 4/7/2025 at 11:38 PM EDT H1'ed 4/7/25

Research On Right and Left Wing Policy Development and Promotion Infrastructure

By Rob Kall (Page 4 of 16 pages) Become a premium member to see this article and all articles as one long page. 5 comments, In Series: Progressive Policy Engine Think Tanks

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- **Funding**: ~$10 million annually. Historically funded by Koch and Mercer family donors.

### **Turning Point USA (TPUSA)**

- **Function**: Youth-focused conservative activism, campus organizing, and social media influence.

- **Funding**: ~$50 million annually. Major donors include Foster Friess, Diane Hendricks, and GOP-aligned PACs.

### **Federalist Society**

- **Function**: Shapes judicial philosophy by vetting and promoting conservative judges (e.g., Supreme Court nominations).

- **Funding**: ~$20 million annually. Funded by Koch network, Leonard Leo's CRC Advisors, and legal industry donors.

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## **3. Legal & Judicial Influence**

These groups work to shift the legal landscape in a conservative direction.

### **Judicial Crisis Network (JCN)**

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Rob Kall is an award winning journalist, inventor, software architect, connector and visionary. His work and his writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, the HuffingtonPost, Success, Discover and other media.

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He is the author of The Bottom-up Revolution; Mastering the Emerging World of Connectivity

He's given talks and workshops to Fortune 500 execs and national medical and psychological organizations, and pioneered first-of-their-kind conferences in Positive Psychology, Brain Science and Story. He hosts some of the world's smartest, most interesting and powerful people on his Bottom Up Radio Show, and founded and publishes one of the top Google- ranked progressive news and opinion sites, OpEdNews.com

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Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness (more...)

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Series: "Progressive Policy Engine Think Tanks"

Dems Can't Save Us From Trump/Musk Assault on The Constitution (Article) ((View How Many People Read This))	02/22/2025
View All 8 Articles in "Progressive Policy Engine Think Tanks"

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3 people are discussing this page, with 5 comments

Scott Baker

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(Member since Oct 25, 2008), 78 fans, 365 articles, 1481 quicklinks, 3963 comments, 41 diaries (How many times has this commenter been recommended?)

Both the Left and the Right rely on higly organized, self-sustaining networks of donors, NGOs (mostly Left), think tanks, SuperPACs (Mostly Right), and - despite protests on the Right to the contrary - government funding directly or indirectly.

Yesterday morning Elon Musk posted on X where he personally has >210 million followers (Twitter leaned Left before Musk bought it & turned it mostly Right rebranded as the X platform): "For fake NGOs, I think there needs to be a number of arrests in that regard as well, because these are fake charities where mostly Democrats...

...I want to be clear, there's sometimes a little bit of Republican in there, because they sometimes throw the Republicans a bone to say, hey, be quiet about this. So that's where you start getting the uniparty thing going on. But it is overwhelmingly to Democrats, and they give these billions of dollars to NGOs run by Democrats that then go through a whole network of additional NGOs. It's a giant money laundering scheme. Really, at this point, I think the word NGO and money laundering are almost synonymous."

To which I responded (including to my ~600 followers):

"Both NGOs & Billionaires launder money by returning it to politicians who support them. Democrats mostly do it through the NGO recycling. Republicans mostly do it through billionaires & centimillionaires returning money through superpacs & donations, like @elonmusk has done.

Which is better:

A. Supporting an NGO that supplements food & shelter for 100,000 poor people?

B. Subsidizing a single centimillionaire who wants to start an innovative EV car company?"

Musk was not a billionaire before he started Tesla. Government subsidies which he chooses to forget, were instrumental in making him so. As the most powerful advisor to a president in history, unvetted, Musk continues to enjoy unfettered - if not entirely profitable lately - access to the most legally unbound, power-seizing president in history. The level of graft and grifting in the Trump administration, mostly involving Trump himself under the new, novel theory from the supreme court that the president has "absolute immunity" and is essentially above the law, is also unprecedented.

On the Left, Bernie Sanders and AOC are part of a handful of mostly marginalized politicians who don't seem to have effective tools to counterweight the Rightward trifecta control of federal government branches. Congress, at least is likely to return control to the Left, in one or both Houses in the midterms, but there's a huge asterisk, highlighted mostly by journalist/statistician Greg Palast and sometimes the ACLU in court, about how we don't have a fully functioning democracy anymore. No amount of money, NGOs, think tanks, etc. can completely overcomes: gerrymandering, voter purging, voter intimidation, legislative interference (most state legislatures lean Right, partly as a result of rural bias in American geopolitics, and partly due to the aforementioned anti-democracy issues, plus a biased supreme court that leans far Right).

In short: American political views lean center-left, though right on some culture war issues that are enough to swing elections. But most of the money power leans Right and money is now at least as influential as voting populations, and probably more. Short of an economic crash - which may have already begun - and a reset, which could go either way, or to something new entirely, it's hard to see how this power imbalance will change and it may even become more pronounced.

Submitted on Tuesday, Apr 8, 2025 at 2:11:26 AM

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Scott Baker

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(Member since Oct 25, 2008), 78 fans, 365 articles, 1481 quicklinks, 3963 comments, 41 diaries (How many times has this commenter been recommended?)

Reply to Scott Baker:

Frankly, when I see things like this - just 6 blocks from my building in NYC - it makes me very hesitant to support the misguided, possibly foreign terrorist group funded, Left:

Terror supporters have violently taken over Grand Central Station in NYC, completely halting all trains.
(Image by X) Details DMCA

Link: Click Here - if you have an X account.

The so-called Left supports a lot of ultra-conservative farthest Right oppressive regimes these days, beyond anything existing in the West. This helps explain why they are losing elections too.

Submitted on Tuesday, Apr 8, 2025 at 2:32:24 AM

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Rob Kall

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(Member since Jun 5, 2005), 292 fans, 2765 articles, 5372 quicklinks, 7104 comments, 527 diaries (How many times has this commenter been recommended?)

Reply to Scott Baker:

Scott, take a closer look. The left has more money in these organizations. But between them all they're losing. And that's why you and so many of us are scared. We're close to a strongman, Fascist, authoritarian takeover. But we still need to do this. We need to build the policy development and promotion infrastructure like the right has, but better. We can't just do what we've been doing, digging a deeper hole, just responding to the bad stuff that the Republicans do. And just talking nice and being positive, like Kamala did, clearly didn't and doesn't work. Work. We have to be nice and compassionate but also be tough and play hardball just like the Republicans. And by the way, Elon Musk didn't start Tesla. He took it over. From what I understand, that's what he does.

Submitted on Tuesday, Apr 8, 2025 at 8:40:55 AM

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Scott Baker

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(Member since Oct 25, 2008), 78 fans, 365 articles, 1481 quicklinks, 3963 comments, 41 diaries (How many times has this commenter been recommended?)

Reply to Rob Kall:

Leaving aside the corruption of the election system for the moment - though this is at least as important a factor in the Left losing as any ideological issues - there are 4 issues that have to be addressed for the Left to overcome the Right.

1. The migrant crisis. Right or wrong, Biden DID let in a lot more migrants than Trump did. The Border patrol has a graph that shows a 3X spike almost immediately when Biden came into office, that didn't go down until the last summer of his term, when it became clear he was never going to get a comprehensive agreement with the Republicans, once Trump meddled in that. Working class people - and their advocates, including Bernie Sanders - have been decrying the export of jobs for decades, but the import of low wage workers competing for low end jobs has been largely ignored by the Left, while MAGA has been told wages will rise to make those jobs more attractive if only "illegals" didn't take them for low wages. Then too, there are real criminal gangs from SOME migrants and the Left is letting them go free too often through its "progressive" DAs, like Alvin Bragg in my city, New York City. I'm not sure when shoplifting became acceptable to the Left, but the loss of small business support stems largely from policies like that.

2. Trans people. Europe has reversed itself on this issue due to recent studies that show no psychological benefit on average for young people who have medical intervention to conform to their perceived gender identity and some American states are following suit. Parents intuitively know this, but new laws in CA etc. sometimes force them to accept their children's gender identity or lose custody. Women, as a class of people, are being wiped out by transwomen competing in women's sports, which, according to one U.N. study, have been responsible for 900 wins that would have gone to cis-women ('cis' is a hated term even among classic liberals and independents too).

3. War, war, war. The Democrats have become the party of war, which is incredible considering how they used to be the party of peace. Trump is perceived by both sides as the anti-war president & candidate. Democrats have no coherent plan to end the two major wars (sadly, no one in America much cares about the other wars raging forever in Africa and elsewhere). However...

4. Support for Palestinians, but really, Hamas. The sick, sometimes paid support, for Hamas, as shown in my previous comment has got to end. Outside some liberal campuses like Columbia, there is zero support for this in middle America or even large cities; I speak from ground zero, living near the U.N. The rise of antisemitism is unprecedented in American history, and also has attracted the opposition of independents and the right, a strange change that doesn't carry over to their own behavior, but does erode support for the Left. Musk is hated by both Right and Left. Trump by the Left. But if these issues aren't addressed the Left will keep losing.

Submitted on Tuesday, Apr 8, 2025 at 11:19:41 AM

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Lance Moore

(Member since Jan 2, 2014), 7 fans, 9 articles, 97 comments (How many times has this commenter been recommended?)

Rob is right. No doubt about it, Progressives need to reclaim a "voice" and avail ourselves of all media venues--especially the "non-mainstream" ones.

Submitted on Tuesday, Apr 8, 2025 at 7:43:24 AM

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