Conservatives have won elections for decades, so why do so many red states still govern like California? On this episode of The Jenny Beth Show, Jenny Beth Martin sits down with Noah Wall, founder of the State Leadership Initiative, to expose the “shadow government” — a network of unelected, Washington-based associations that quietly set policy for every state agency, from Medicaid to libraries to the DMV.
Noah Wall, a veteran of the State Financial Officers Foundation, walks through his organization's findings: 25 associations analyzed, not one of them remotely centrist, all pushing progressive “best practices” your governor never approved. The conversation lands on a real-world bombshell — a Georgia Medicaid contract that penalized health-care providers for following the state's own parental-notification law.
In this conversation:
- What the shadow government is and how it operates behind the scenes
- The Georgia Medicaid contract that punished following state law
- Why red states often carry bigger bureaucracies than blue states
- How state membership dues quietly fund the whole system
- A three-part agenda: economic dynamism, financial strength, digital sovereignty
- A simple game any citizen can play to expose it in their own town
Jenny Beth Martin is co-founder of the Tea Party movement and Chairman of Tea Party Patriots Action, representing three million grassroots activists.
Make your voice heard — reach your representatives through the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121.
Read the reports at stateleadership.org. Learn more at jennybethshow.com and teapartypatriots.org.
00:00 — Welcome to The Jenny Beth Show
00:32 — Washington vs. the states: meet Noah Wall
01:12 — Why Noah launched the State Leadership Initiative
02:08 — The 20% tax gap and the NGO networks no one tackles
04:05 — Libraries, the DMV, and how agencies get standardized
07:08 — Defining the shadow government
11:33 — Inside the report: the Georgia Medicaid bombshell
15:44 — The National School Boards Association playbook
22:05 — Follow the money: how state dues fund it all
28:41 — Louisiana, abortion lobbying, and “health equity”
34:28 — The State Leadership Index and red-state bureaucracy
44:48 — The three-part agenda and how you can fight back
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