E216 - Tracking Think Tanks w/ Ben Freeman and Nick Cleveland-Stout

American Prestige

Daniel Bessner & Derek Davison

History, Politics, News

4.8 • 705 Ratings

🗓️ 24 June 2025

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Subscribe now to skip the ads and get more content. Ben Freeman and Nick Cleveland-Stout from the Quincy Institute join the program to talk about their Think Tank Funding Tracker, a repository that tracks funding from foreign governments, the U.S. government, and Pentagon contractors to the top 50 think tanks in the United States over the past five years. The group discusses think tanks’ role in the “military-intellectual” complex, what specific foreign funders like the UAE and UK might be looking to influence, why certain governments like Ukraine and China gave little to no money, the lack of transparency among individuals working in sectors like journalism and government who also work with think tanks, the utilization (and under-utilization) of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, how to restructure the order so that expertise isn’t limited to these kinds of institutions, and how to make think tanks more democratically accountable in the meantime. Read the Quincy Institute's brief on their project, “Big Ideas and Big Money: Think Tank Funding in America.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:40.3	Decentcies apply. Hello, American Hello, American Prestige listeners, it's Derek.
1:05.0	I'm joined, as always, by my friend and comrade, Danny Bessner, and we are very pleased
1:08.8	to welcome to the program, two distinguished guests from the Quincy Institute.
1:13.2	We've got Ben Freeman, director of the democratizing foreign policy program at Quincy, and Nick Cleveland Stout, who I'm told, has just been promoted.
1:22.0	This is breaking news here on American prestige.
1:24.5	Mazel to research associate, right, research associate
1:28.3	in also the same
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