Alyssa Bowen is managing editor and senior researcher for the progressive watchdog group True North Research where she tracks and writes about dark money in U.S. politics. She received her Ph.D. in history from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in 2021 and has bylines in The Nation, Rewire News Group, Ms. Magazine, and Truthout.
Maria Bustillos is a journalist, critic, and founding editor of Popula and The Brick House.
Michael Edison Hayden is a Senior Investigative Reporter and Spokesperson for Southern Poverty Law Center. In addition to breaking many stories on the extremism beat, he wrote the guide to OSINT reporting for Columbia University’s Tow Center.
Evan Vorpahl is a senior researcher for True North Research. He directs True North’s research with a focus on tracking dark money groups distorting public policy, elections, and our judiciary. Before True North Research, Evan was a Fellow at the Center for Media and Democracy, where he worked on in-depth investigations on right-wing networks tied to the Kochs, SPN, ALEC and the Bradley Foundation. Evan graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2015 with degrees in Economics, Spanish and Latin American Studies.
Alex is a former investigative reporter with the Center for Media and Democracy. A campaign finance expert, Alex helped launch money-in-politics website Sludge, and his work has been published by more than two dozen media outlets including The American Prospect, The Nation, and Vice.com. As of fall 2022, he was executive director of the OptOut Media Foundation, a nonprofit charity he co-founded that maintains a news aggregation app for independent news and offer other services to assist financially independent media outlets.