An old California political club is a big social influence pioneer
By Colin Lecher, CalMatters
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A conservative organization with decades of influence in California has quietly turned attention, and millions of dollars, to a national initiative of right-leaning news operations, records show.
The Lincoln Club was established in the early 1960s by a group of California business leaders. Since then, it’s been a quiet but formidable force in state and local politics, pushing right-leaning causes and candidates.
But in the past few years, an affiliated organization, the Lincoln Media Foundation, has massively increased its incoming revenue as it pushes online content with a conservative slant under the guise of local news in markets around the country.
According to Internal Revenue Service disclosures, the foundation had a little more than $400,000 in net revenue for the fiscal year ending in 2021, all of it from contributions.
By the fiscal year ending in 2024, the most recent disclosure available, that revenue had ballooned almost 10 times, to nearly $4 million.
In the same period, the Lincoln Club itself grew more modestly, not quite doubling its revenue to just over $3 million, according to records.
According to independent research and promotional material produced by the club’s media foundation, its money has gone toward creating a network of websites across the country, with the hopes of influencing the public and swaying voters in key states.
Many of the sites, first flagged by the researcher Max Read of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, say they are locally organized, with names like The Angeleno and The Keystone Courier. CalMatters and The Markup recently explored another site linked to the organization, called the California Courier, using the same name as an unrelated Armenian newspaper. The Courier produces a steady stream of often unattributed articles about political controversies throughout the state and pays Facebook to promote those posts and videos on similar topics.
Critics say the group is attempting to influence the public with the veneer of local news that fails to offer clear disclosures about the messenger.
Kevin DeLuca, an assistant professor of political science at Yale University who has studied similar news sites, sometimes called “pink slime” news, told The Markup and CalMatters earlier this year that such sites may not be outright lying. Still, the sites often fall short of traditional journalistic standards, failing to properly attribute stories and funding, or heavily pulling and slanting press releases.
Jim Miller, a labor activist and co-author of a progressive history of San Diego, called the tactic “a menacing example of the use of stealth.”
“If you don’t think you can win an argument in a transparent debate publicly,” he said, “you try to disguise the messenger as much as you can.”
Neither the club nor the foundation responded to requests for comment or interviews with executives about its work.
The Lincoln Club
The Lincoln Club of Orange County was established in the 1960s by wealthy local businessmen eager to spread pro-business Republican ideas locally and nationally. Those businessmen donated handsomely to sympathetic candidates and causes.
The club became a power player in Southern California politics when Republicans had more leverage in the Golden State. The group still boasts online of having counted among its ranks famous California political figures like Richard Nixon and John Wayne.
A 1972 article in The New York Times described it as a group “made up largely of millionaires” who “boast that, without their efforts and generosity, [Nixon] would not be occupying the White House today.” The Times article described the group as an organization with “many secrets” that shunned publicity but successfully influenced the political scene.
“I think they were very influential back in the ‘60s and ‘70s,” said Steve Earie, professor emeritus of political science at the University of California, San Diego.
By 1996, as the Los Angeles Times reported at the time, the group’s financial power had waned in the face of internal battles, but the club continued to wield influence.
The group, according to legal documents, partly funded the 2008 anti-Hillary Clinton documentary that became the subject of the landmark Citizens United Supreme Court decision that opened the door to unlimited spending by corporations and unions on elections.
In 2012, the group was described as the key architect of Proposition 32, a ballot measure that would have severely curtailed the power of unions in the state by limiting their ability to collect and spend funds for political purposes. The ballot measure ultimately failed.
Although its light may have dimmed from 50 years ago, the Lincoln Club still exerts influence in California politics.
“If you look on their website, they don't start it talking about helping businesses, the quality of life,” Earie pointed out. “They talk about ‘preserving the American way of life.’ And that's as much cultural as it is economic.”
A new strategy
Despite its old Republican roots, the group appears to have moved into a 21st-century online influence strategy with the Lincoln Media Foundation.
According to a promotional video, the foundation uses targeted web ads to broadcast its message where it can reach key voters in battleground states.
In one recent LinkedIn post accompanying a video explanation of its work, the group says it acts as a corrective to “material omissions, alternative sets of facts, and outright lies” by the media.
“Our country can’t stay free if we’re not informed with the truth,” the video reads, describing the group as a “megaphone” for “unbiased truth.” The video says it delivers that information through 27 publications in seven states, reaching millions through online advertising.
In reality, even the video is far from unbiased — a stream of germ-like images of “DEI” and “Russiagate” float by in front of the voiceover.
The launch of the foundation, and the disclosures showing it’s well-funded, suggest a new turn for the decades-old group, from one trying to influence politics through candidates to one willing to broadcast its message directly through online influence.
“Unfortunately, it’s a pretty good strategy,” Miller said.
Recently, headlines published by websites linked to the group have slammed everyone from Democratic school board officials in Orange County to Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, while approving of President Trump’s foreign policy.
The accompanying stories are then pushed on social media platforms to what the video describes as the most influential two percent of voters in the country and as a key part of the group’s strategy.
Meta, Facebook’s parent company, has rules against “inauthentic activity” on its platforms, although a spokesperson for the company told The Markup and CalMatters that sites linked to the organization weren’t breaking those rules.
Lincoln Media Foundation isn’t alone in using the strategy to spread its views. Most famously, a right-leaning group called Metric Media has produced sites across the country pushing a right-wing message. As sites with murky attribution and sourcing practices proliferate, experts worry that artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT could supercharge their tactics.
“It’s going to make these pink slime sites even harder for people to know that what they’re reading is not from a human source and not really local investigative journalism,” DeLuca says.
Even with its rapid growth, the Lincoln Media Foundation is only a slice of the hundreds of millions of dollars spent yearly on similar causes, according to a tally by some observers. Not all of those groups use the language of local news to spread their message.
The strategy works, the foundation’s video promises.
“It’s ad-delivered truth, inoculating lies, and preserving freedom from the inside out,” the video says.
This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.
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