Inside Israel's Big-Budget Campaign of Direct Foreign Influence w/ Nick Cleveland-Stout

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On this edition of Parallax Views, the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft's Nick Cleveland-Stout returns to discuss his latest research into Israel's unprecedented influence campaign in the United States and how it is reshaping the landscape of foreign lobbying, political messaging, and artificial intelligence.

Drawing on extensive Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) filings, Nick explains how Israel has become the projected largest foreign spender under FARA, committing more than $100 million since 2023 to a sprawling public influence effort aimed not at Washington elites, but at ordinary Americans. We examine why Israeli officials concluded that declining public support was a communications problem rather than a policy problem, and how that assumption has driven an expansive strategy spanning mass text messaging, influencer partnerships, digital advertising, conservative media, AI optimization, and religious outreach.

Nick details the roles played by Brad Parscale's Clock Tower X, Havas Media Group, Targeted Communications (part of Stagwell, led by Mark Penn), Show Faith by Works, and Eagle's Wings, unpacking how these firms and organizations have participated in campaigns ranging from Breitbart and Daily Caller advertising to YouTube initiatives, evangelical outreach, and controversial proposals to geofence churches in order to deliver pro-Israel messaging directly to worshippers' mobile devices.

We also discuss one of the investigation's most striking revelations: efforts to influence the outputs of large language models by creating hundreds of Wikipedia-style websites intended for AI training datasets. Nick explains how these sites entered datasets used by companies including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Microsoft, what happened when various AI chatbots were tested against this content, and what the episode reveals about the future of information warfare in the age of generative AI.

Finally, we examine transparency and accountability under FARA, the use of front organizations in mass messaging campaigns, why many paid influencers appear not to have registered despite potential legal obligations, and whether Israel's massive investment in strategic communications is actually succeeding. While the campaign has generated enormous digital reach and sophisticated online infrastructure, polling continues to show declining public support for Israel in the United States, raising important questions about the limits of influence operations in an increasingly skeptical media environment.

Read More: The Eighth Front: Inside Israel’s $1 Billion Influence Campaign - Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft