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Glenn Beck answered a sharp question at his recent TPUSA speech about why AIPAC does not register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, and he did what every good journalist should do — he went and did his homework instead of settling for a catchy conspiracy line. What he found is not a smoking gun of foreign control but a tangle of American law and exemptions that reward clever lawyers and political insiders more than they protect the American people.
The law at the center of the debate, FARA, is a disclosure statute written in a different era that requires agents of foreign principals to register and disclose their activities, but it contains a raft of exemptions and regulatory gray areas that have been carved out over decades. One of the biggest is the Lobbying Disclosure Act exemption, which allows entities that properly register as lobbyists to avoid a separate FARA filing so long as they are not literally acting for a foreign government or foreign political party. Those technicalities matter, and they are precisely where the outrage machine tends to get tripped up.
AIPAC, like many advocacy groups, is structured as an American organization and reports under domestic lobbying rules — a legal posture that its defenders point to as justification and that critics find deeply unsatisfying. The reality is that multiple diaspora organizations and foreign-linked commercial entities exploit the same legal lines, which means this is not a Jewish or Israeli issue so much as an American legal problem that lets outside influence hide behind U.S. addresses. That legal design choice is what Beck rightly flagged as the real story.
Worse, the landscape has been muddied by inconsistent DOJ guidance, advisory opinions, and even rulings that have narrowed or expanded exemptions at different times, leaving compliant businesses and lawmakers guessing. Recent high-profile examples — from advisory opinions favoring corporate exemptions to cases where Saudi-owned interests were allowed to use LDA filings instead of FARA disclosures — show how loopholes can be exploited and information withheld from the public. At the same time, the Department of Justice under new leadership shifted enforcement priorities in 2025, altering the risk calculus without fixing the underlying statutory weaknesses.
It is no virtue for Washington to fall into selective outrage where one interest group is pilloried while another quietly benefits from the same legal wrinkles. The DOJ has pursued prosecutions in some foreign-influence cases, and Congress has reacted — lawmakers from both parties have proposed bills to close gaps and restore transparency, which proves that the problem is recognized even among those who disagree about its remedies. If Americans want a clean, accountable system, they should demand laws that apply equally to every lobbyist and every foreign-linked actor, not selective enforcement based on who shouts loudest.
Conservatives should be the first to defend transparency and the rule of law: if foreign money or foreign governments are shaping American policy, the American people deserve to know whose interests are being served. That means fixing the statute, clarifying exemptions, and giving the Justice Department the tools and political independence to enforce the law uniformly — not weaponizing it as a partisan cudgel. Glenn Beck is right to point the finger at broken laws and bad incentives rather than traffick in ugly, anti-American conspiracies.
The solution is straightforward and patriotic: Congress must act to modernize FARA, tighten the commercial and LDA exemptions, and demand public disclosures that make foreign influence visible to voters, not hidden in regulatory loopholes. Americans of every political stripe should insist on equal application of the law so our Republic can withstand influence from wherever it originates, and so our elected officials answer to citizens rather than shadowy outside interests. That is the kind of reform-minded conservatism that defends liberty and national sovereignty, and it is a fight worth having.
