It was John Wayne's political club. Now it's spending millions on online influence

[RandySF]

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.



https://calmatters.org/economy/technology/2026/03/old-political-club-is-big-social-influencer/

[BlueWaveNeverEnd]

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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.