Another week, another reminder that Capital Research Center is not a serious research organization. It’s a partisan hit operation, and their output last week proved it again. As always, they wrote partisan conclusions first, and then went looking for facts to back them up later. Same shop, same tricks, same disinformation dressed up as scholarship.
The Enemies of Energy profile of the Freedom Together Foundation lists GRID Alternatives among the “major anti-energy NGOs” the foundation funds. GRID Alternatives is the nation’s largest nonprofit solar installer, and it describes its own work as building community-powered solutions to advance economic and environmental justice through renewable energy — deploying energy, not opposing it. The piece then calls the foundation’s new president “a professional activist with the perfect resume for left-wing philanthropy” and leans on that résumé — past employers, board seats, a co-authored book — to establish that the money itself is radical. None of that biography describes what a single 2024 grant actually funded.
A “Who Funds That?” episode on the Democratic Socialists of America builds its central thesis, that DSA candidates now win “overwhelmingly” on the support of “downwardly mobile professional whites” rather than union members or minority voters, on a single race, the June 2026 Democratic primary in New York’s 13th District. The precinct returns don’t match the account: in a majority-Hispanic district where white residents make up only a small share of the population, the incumbent’s margin was about seventeen points among Hispanic voters, and the DSA challenger narrowly won majority-Black areas — far from the uniform racial bloc the episode describes. The episode never tests the generalization against any other 2026 DSA-aligned win before extending it to the movement’s national coalition.
The week’s most sweeping piece, on “the nonprofits that ate the California Dream,” argues that an “NGOcracy governs California,” its legislature stocked with activists rather than businesspeople. The evidence is seven named legislators out of a 120-member body — no count, and no survey of where the other members come from. The same piece calls the state’s homelessness spending an exercise in “spending absurd quantities of public money toward no apparent purpose,” but the California State Auditor report it quotes for its own $24 billion figure found that two of the five programs it assessed, Homekey and the CalWORKs Housing Support Program, were “likely cost-effective,” and largely criticizes the State for failing to collect adequate data on the other three programs — a distinction the article’s blanket framing erases.
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