3.1-1-Scatamburlo-D’Annibale.pdf

In the early 1990s, the general public could hardly escape the deluge of articles and editorials warning that an apparent scourge was threatening university and college campuses across the United States.  Even casual attention to the mainstream media was enough to discover that “political correctness”(P.C.) was the latest affliction gripping the nation.  Major newspapers ran headline stories, columns, and editorials about the return of the “storm troopers,” “fascist control” of academic institutions, and the rise of the “new fundamentalists.”  Newsweek emblazoned its December 24, 1990 cover with the phrase “thought police” and asked whether “political correctness” was the “new McCarthyism.”  Television talk shows were awash with tales about unruly “leftist” cabals that had taken over campuses and turned them into hotbeds of radicalism.  In story after story, it was alleged that the “left” – a catch-all phrase encompassing feminists, multiculturalists, deconstructionists, Marxists, gays, and “special interest” groups – was behaving like a coterie of group-think dragoons intent on silencing free expression and imposing the edicts of political correctness on unassuming faculty colleagues and vulnerable students (Adler, 1990; Henry, 1991; Houston, 1990; Prescott, 1990; Taylor, 1991; Wall Street Journal, 1991; Will, 1991[a], 1991[b], 1991[c], 1991[d]).   

Most of the furor over P.C. came at the apex of what had been dubbed the “culture wars” – a presumably titanic struggle between the defenders of “Western civilization,” academic standards, and freedom of speech (among other things) and those left-wing tenured radicals who were allegedly attempting to politicize the academy, police language and thought, indoctrinate students, and promote anti-American and anti-Western sentiment.  At the height of the culture wars controversy, most of the mainstream media reports tended to treat the anti-P.C. insurrection as though it had suddenly sprung up in response to leftist overtures in college and university classrooms.  Such a characterization, however, was quite misleading. The crusade against P.C. was anything but reactive.  Rather, it was part of a much broader right-wing offensive to challenge what conservatives perceived to be the last bastions of radicalism in the United States – college and university campuses.  The architects of the right, propped up by corporate funded think tanks, began mapping out their plans to “reclaim the academy” in the late 1970s and early 1980s – long before P.C. became a household term (Scatamburlo, 1998).  They merely began to publicly promulgate their agenda in the late 1980s and early 1990s.   

Arguably, the political context engendered by the first Gulf War made the early 1990s a most opportune time to propel P.C. into national consciousness (Stabile, 1995).  Riding high on a renewed sense of patriotism, the right seized the moment to create a new “enemy within.”  While media attention to P.C. preceded the Gulf War (c.f. Bernstein, 1988), the war “victory” initiated a more intense round of P.C. bashing – especially after George H.W. Bush’s infamous commencement address at the University of Michigan in 1991.  Exploiting his increased (but short-lived) popularity after “kicking butt” in the Persian Gulf, then-president Bush, hardly a paragon of civil liberties and free speech, took up the battle cry and joined the chorus condemning the leftists who were purportedly creating mini-ministries of truth and choking out the flowers of free expression on campus.  Bush’s pronouncements about the campus enemies of the American way opened the floodgates for even more vitriolic attacks.  Members of the so-called “politically correct” quickly replaced Saddam Hussein’s troops as the enemy and Operation Desert Storm gave way to Operation Campus Storm.  These new enemies were, in the paranoid minds of some rightist pundits, more insidious than the alleged threat posed by Hussein himself.  Indeed, George Will implied that Lynne Cheney, then the Chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities, had a more difficult job than her husband Dick, then Secretary of Defense for the elder Bush.  Will even referred to Mrs. Cheney as the “secretary of domestic defense” and further suggested that the “foreign adversaries” were “less dangerous, in the long run, than domestic forces” (Will, 1992, p. 25).  

Of course, the brouhaha over P.C. eventually subsided, the headlines waned, and assaults on the “liberal/leftist” academy were, for a time, consigned to occasional opinion columns penned by rightists like Will and Thomas Sowell as conservatives set their sights more intensely on Bill Clinton and various “gates,” Monica Lewinsky, cigars, and a blue dress among other things.  As a result, academe itself was temporarily spared from the conservative offensive.  Then came “9/11.” 

As has been noted in the pages of this journal, the aftermath of 9/11 and the “war on terror” have provided renewed opportunities for the right’s malevolent assault on academics (Gabbard and Anijar, 2006).  Just as the neoconservatives occupying the star chambers of American foreign policy shamelessly used the 9/11 tragedy as a springboard to launch an aggressive political and military agenda which had been years in the making (Scatamburlo, 2005, 2006), on the intellectual front, a similar and equally disturbing form of opportunism reared its ugly head as the broader right pounced on the occasion to breathe new life into its crusade against the academy, critical thought, and progressive intellectuals. 

The editors of The Nation have claimed that

“[t]he suppression of . . . dissent, a disconcerting feature of political life since the Bush administration took power, has been most sharply felt on college campuses . . . Not since the McCarthy era have American campuses felt such a cold breeze – make that an idiot wind.  And the new campus McCarthyism is made of much the same ingredients:  thuggish intimidation, the circulation of specious rumors and . . . that least venerable of American traditions, anti-intellectualism.” (April 2005, pp. 3-4)

Examples of the “cold breeze” are plentiful across the country – from legislation that would dictate faculty hiring practices and the content of courses offered at universities to initiatives targeting professors critical of American foreign (and especially Middle East) policy to calls for the outright dismissal of faculty members who have failed to provide mindless boosterism for Bush’s “war on terror.”  What these and other examples unmistakably reveal is that the “idiot wind” has spawned a new form of P.C. – patriotic correctness. 

I am using the phrase “patriotic correctness” to refer to a political agenda being pushed by a highly ideological coalition of free-market fundamentalists, militant neoconservatives, and right-wing religious zealots.  In many ways, 9/11 fortified a variety of conservative forces already in place in American society and provided a new dynamism for this coalition to pursue, even more assertively, a wide-ranging agenda that includes American unilateralism and imperialism abroad as well as domestic shock and awe at home.  The former – the drive toward global American empire – does not necessarily constitute a classic imperial mission for control of another territory but it does reflect the use and projection of political and military power on behalf of a radical, pro-corporate, antigovernment ideology that mainly benefits the economic activities of the global capitalist elite while cloaked in the rhetorical garb of “freedom” and “democracy.”  The latter—a domestic version of shock and awe – is represented by a campaign which, in addition to tax cuts for the wealthy, favors capital freed from government restraints, deregulation, privatization and cuts in public services, a systematic dismantling of labor rights and environmental protections, a frontal assault on civil liberties, the blurring of church and state lines, and the demonization of dissent. 

As a form of public pedagogy, patriotic correctness conveys a very particularized and ideologically-laden worldview which suggests, among other things, that unfettered capitalism is the best economic system in world history and that countries around the world should all fall in line with the “Washington consensus.”  After all, freer markets and freer trade, as Bush told the UN in September 2005, can help to strike a blow against “terrorists.”   Its commitment to free market economic fundamentalism privileges the pursuit of profit regardless of the human cost while it concomitantly enshrines a form of radical individualism that undervalues any notion of collective responsibility and the public good.  Patriotically correct pedagogy propagates the tale of America’s “good exceptionalism,” a conviction that the United States is a benevolent entity in world affairs and that it is motivated not by avarice and power but by the greater global good.  It insists that American military force is always inspired by noble purposes and directed towards laudable goals and that American foreign policy has been, and continues to be, a “civilizing” force for the benefit of the dispossessed and disenfranchised people throughout the world.  In fact, it promotes the idea that American foreign policy is ordained by the Almighty himself as inherently just and that it must be embraced with unquestioning obedience.  It also suggests that unthinking patriotism and uncritical acquiescence to governmental authority are synonymous with loving “freedom” and that dissent lends support to the minions of terrorism.  Allegiance to the homeland is demanded at all costs – regardless of the facts.

Patriotically correct pedagogy, in the post-9/11 era, also implies that the mantra “there is no alternative” (TINA) should now be read as “there is no alternative to American empire.”  Indeed, the empires builders of the Bush regime and their media and intellectual toadies would have the world believe that their only choice is between their version of empire and the axes of “evildoers.”  And since the United States has apparently been called upon to defend the ‘hopes of all mankind,’ the saving grace of all humanity is presumably to be found in the religion of neoliberalism and a commitment to American global hegemony.  In short, the only alternative is to embrace the manic logic of American-led capitalism ceremoniously dipped in the patina of “democratic” platitudes.

In many ways, this pedagogical vision embodies the declaration made by George W. Bush on May 1, 2003 – the same day of his “Mission Accomplished” propaganda spectacle that was jarringly reminiscent of Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will.  Earlier that day, before Bush donned his Top Gun duds and swaggered across the flight deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln after a choreographed tail hook landing, he issued a decree in honor of Loyalty Day, a legal American holiday that was established in 1958 in an effort to draw attention away from the communist and socialist inspired celebration workers’ rights associated with MayDay (McClellen, 2006).1   His proclamation included the following remarks:

“Our citizens are bound by ideals that represent the hope of all mankind . . . Today, America’s men and women in uniform are protecting our Nation, defending the peace of the world, and advancing the cause of liberty. The world has seen again the fine character of our Nation through our military as they fought to protect the innocent and liberate the oppressed . . . [t]heir service and sacrifice . . . are a testament to their love for America . . . [and] reaffirms our Nation’s most deeply held beliefs:  that every life counts, and that all humans have an indelible right to live as free people.  These values must be imparted to each new generation.  Our children need to know that our Nation is a force for good in the world, extending hope and freedom to others.  By learning about America’s history, achievements, ideas, and heroes, our young citizens will come to understand even more why freedom is worth protecting” (Bush, 2003)

This particular statement was one among many that captured the pedagogical vision favored by the right – one that would convey the message of American exceptionalism, a sanitized version of history, and a worldview that lends succor to the neoliberal, neoconservative project that still dominates mainstream American consciousness.  Of course, such a vision obfuscates the “value system disorder” that lies at the heart of American empire including “US logistical and financial support of death-squads, terrorist networks and so-called ‘wars of liberation’” (McMurtry, 2002, pp.xii-xiii) that have systematically fomented chaos around the globe, long before hijacked planes struck the Twin Towers and the Pentagon on that fateful September day.   In this regard, it evokes an “amnesiac claim of political innocence, a guise of national blamelessness” that philosopher Cornel West refers to as American’s “Peter Pan complex” (West, cited in James, 2003, p. 74).  And, it reinforces the “they hate us because we’re free” mantra that became the principal narrative in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11.

Perhaps most insidious is that those pedaling patriotic correctness prefer image and spin to reality.  Their aim is to discourage people from thinking, from asking too many questions, and from looking beyond the surface of manufactured spectacles that shape the public mind.  They deal in powerful tools of fiction.  Theirs is a world of dramatic visual effects, appearances are preferred over reality and “truth” is that which sells—that is, if people can be made to “buy” their version of reality, it is right and true.  In such a context, the “big lie” circulates all the more freely, often with little contestation.  As McMurtry argues “in the old totalitarian culture of the Big Lie,” the truth was often hidden.  In the “new totalitarianism, there is no line between the truth and falsehood to embarrass the lies.  The truth is what people can be conditioned to believe.” McMurtry goes on to argue that Ronald Reagan was the cultural icon of this form of “fin de siecle politics” whose eight years of “media triumphs” set the stage for a new culture characterized by “no line between truth and falsehood” (2002, p. 88-89).  Arguably, the Bush administration has taken stagecraft and image politics to a level unimaginable to even the most savvy of Reagan’s spin doctors.  Indeed, one of Bush’s presidential aides once spoke sarcastically of the “reality-based community” to author Ron Suskind.  The aide, in typical Rovean fashion, added that a “judicious study of discernible reality” is “not the way the world works anymore” and explained that “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality” (Rich, 2006, p. 3).           

The campaign for patriotic correctness is currently being aggressively pursued by a number of organizations intent upon imposing an intellectual culture and pedagogical infrastructure of unthinking submission  and compulsory patriotism—one where critical faculties are lulled into slumber and anti-intellectualism and mind-numbing conformity reign supreme.  The campaign is undoubtedly being waged on several fronts but the nation’s universities have become the main theaters of engagement.  Redirecting the wrath once reserved for communists and pinko compatriots, a coalition of conservatives has concocted a new adversary comprised of liberal and leftist professors who are, according to ideological mullahs like David Horowitz and Ann Coulter anti-capitalist, anti-American, terrorist collaborators.  Indeed, Horowitz brought down the proverbial house at a gathering of College Republicans in 2005 when he claimed that “universities are a base of the left. Universities are a base for terrorism” (Horowitz, cited in Blumenthal, 2005, p. 2).  And Coulter, in a rant about John Walker Lindh, the American who was captured during the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan while fighting for the Taliban, once proclaimed that

“when contemplating college liberals, you really regret that John Walker is not getting the death penalty.  We need to execute people like John Walker in order to physically intimidate liberals, by making them realize that they can be killed, too. Otherwise, they will turn out to be outright traitors” (Coulter, cited in Willis, 2004, p. 21).

Most conservatives have not called for the slaughter or outright threatening of leftists and liberal scholars as the dyspeptic Coulter has.  And, of course, her venomous vituperations come as no shock to anyone familiar with her – after all, some have even suggested that if she “had been around for the Third Reich Ice-Cream Social, Eva Braun wouldn’t have stood a chance” (BuffaloBeast.com cited in Willis, 2004, p. 39).  Nonetheless, far too many rightists have been quick to dub liberals (let alone leftists) as terrorist sympathizers and unpatriotic scoundrels intent on endangering the very foundations of “civilization.”  Moreover, while they may not advocate the physical annihilation of their liberal and left opponents, many on the right-wing of the political spectrum have lobbied for their symbolic eradication and the silencing of their dissident voices.  And, their efforts have been lavishly funded by many of the same conservative foundations that sponsored the anti-political correctness crusade of the early 1990s.  It is to them that I now turn.

The Right-Wing’s Sugar Daddies:

For decades, conservative philanthropy has undoubtedly played an influential role in moving many public policy discourses to the right on a wide array of social issues and it has aggressively pushed the larger economic agenda of neoliberalism.  Behan (2003) contends that the sea change in our public life and the dismantling of democratic gains is primarily the result of the efforts of twelve “arch-conservative philanthropic foundations” (which he calls the diligent dozen) that set out to advance neoliberalism/free market theology forty years ago.  In what follows, I do not claim to cover the entire spectrum of conservative philanthropy and the full extent to which a “cadre of ultraconservative and self-mythologizing millionaires” undertook a program to rescue the country “from the hideous grasp of Satanic liberalism” (Lapham, 2004, p. 3).  Nor do I present a comprehensive portrait of the right’s financial base and political strategies.  Rather, the focus is on the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) which has been instrumental in coordinating and facilitating a conservative movement on college and university campuses that has been largely financed by right-wing foundations that have been especially active in the culture wars, the right-wing attack on higher education and the so-called “liberal” academy.  

   

These foundations, Scaife, Bradley, Olin, and Smith Richardson (all part of Behan’s diligent dozen and often referred to as the “four sisters”), have lavishly funded a number of right-wing research factories, think tanks, social advocacy groups, media outlets and pressure groups of various kinds which, taken together, constitute perhaps the most potent “institutionalized apparatus ever assembled in a democracy to promote one belief system” (Stein, cited in Lapham, 2004, p.3).  This apparatus includes, but is not limited to, the aforementioned Intercollegiate Studies Institute and its Collegiate Network, the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, the now defunct Madison Center for Educational Affairs, David Horowitz’s Freedom Center (formerly named the Center for the Study of Popular Culture), Lynne Cheney’s ACTA, the National Association of Scholars (NAS), the Leadership Institute, Young America’s Foundation and others.  Some of these organizations played an integral role in the anti-political correctness campaign of the early 1990s and have, more recently, been at the forefront of the patriotically correct movement on campuses.  Before exploring the ISI, it is necessary to briefly review three of its major sponsors—the Scaife Foundations, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, and the J.M. Olin Foundation.

The Scaife Foundations

Richard Mellon Scaife has been alternatively described by friends and foes as a press-shy introvert, a conspiracy theory buff with a mean, vindictive streak, the arch-conservative godfather of the right, a gutter drunk, a fine public-spirited individual, and even a hero (Brock, 2003; Kaiser, 1991; Kaiser and Chinoy, 1999; Rothmyer, 1981, 1998).  Although a generally aloof man known to shun the media spotlight, Scaife who Time magazine once dubbed “the ultimate patron” of the Clinton-haters (Lacayo, 1998), nonetheless became the focus of several news reports in the mid-to-late 1990s for the financial largesse he bestowed upon numerous anti-Clinton activities.  Among them was the notorious Arkansas Project in which $2.4 million of his money was funneled through the American Spectator magazine to dig up dirt on the former president (Broder and Conason, 1998). 

More recently Scaife’s name has been linked to a controversial and factually-challenged docudrama (some have dubbed it a crocudrama) that attempted to lay blame for the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon squarely at the doorstep of Bill Clinton.  The Path to 9/11, which aired on ABC in fall 2006 to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the attacks, was directed by David Cunningham who has long been associated with a “secretive evangelical religious right” group committed to battling the liberal bias that presumably permeates the Hollywood establishment.  This group, in turn, has ties to David Horowitz whose Freedom Center has benefited quite handsomely from Scaife funding over the years (Blumenthal, 2006).  While Scaife gained a certain degree of unwanted publicity for his bankrolling of the Arkansas Project and, to a lesser extent, in terms of his indirect funding of the aforementioned crocudrama, his real influence lies in helping to establish the modern conservative movement in the United States more than forty years ago.  Indeed, he has been deemed the most generous donor to conservative causes in American history (Kaiser, 1999).             

The billionaire conservative was born July 3, 1932 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to Alan Scaife, a descendant of one of Pittsburgh’s upper-crust families, and Sarah Mellon, the wealthy heir of the Mellon empire (Rothmyer, 1981).  From the time he was a teenager attending Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts, Richard Mellon Scaife earned the reputation of a bully and a hard drinker.  In his freshmen year at Yale he was expelled after he rolled a keg of beer down a flight of stairs and broke the legs of a classmate in an alcohol-induced haze.  At the age of 22 he caused a serious, near-fatal car accident which injured five members of a family. As a result, the family won a large settlement (Kaiser, 1999).  Scaife eventually attended the University of Pittsburgh, where his father was chairman of the board of trustees, and earned a bachelor’s degree in English in 1957.

Unlike his mother, a well-known philanthropist who had established various trusts and foundations dedicated to causes including family planning and the environment, Scaife was much more interested in bankrolling conservative initiatives.  Beginning in 1962, he provided monetary assistance to groups with “educational missions on conservative themes” including “education against communism” (Kaiser and Chinoy, 1999).  In 1963 he began funding the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) formerly known as the American Enterprise Association (AEA) and became an enthusiastic supporter and financial backer of Barry Goldwater in 1964.  After his mother died in 1965 Scaife and his sister Cordelia assumed control of the family’s considerable trusts.  Judis (2001) reports that from 1965 to 1973, the two siblings battled over the direction of the family’s philanthropic efforts.  While Cordelia wanted to spend the foundations’ money on causes that had been dear to her mother’s heart, including the arts, family planning and population control, her brother had other visions. 

When Scaife became chairman of the Sarah Mellon Scaife Foundation in 1973, he had a freer hand in controlling the family funds which he in turn used to back new right causes, organizations and publications.  Not surprisingly, Scaife helped to launch the right-wing Heritage Foundation with beer magnate Joseph Coors.  Although Coors was commonly credited as Heritage’s chief financial patron, Scaife was, in essence, a silent partner in that enterprise.  In fact, Scaife contributed $900,000 to Coors’ $250,000, for the establishment of the foundation.  At Heritage the joke was, “Coors gives six-packs; Scaife gives cases” (cited in Kaiser and Chinoy, 1999).  Today, the Heritage Foundation, founded by right-wing activist Paul Weyrich, continues to be a main recipient of Scaife’s largesse.

Scaife’s philanthropic empire is comprised of three foundations—the Sarah Scaife Foundation, the Carthage Foundation, and the Allegheny Foundation.  Over the years, they have contributed hundreds of millions of dollars to the development of an immense and interconnected institutional apparatus dedicated to recruiting, nurturing, and funding a cadre of conservative journalists, economists, and academics to preach what some have called the right-wing gospel (Alterman, 2004).  Between 2003 and 2005, the Scaife Foundations’ collectively paid out $65,177,800 in grants with more than $40 million coming from the Sarah Scaife Foundation alone.2  Among the major beneficiaries was the ISI which received $1,325,000.

Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation

The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation is currently the wealthiest and most influential right-wing organization in the United States.  From 1986 to 2005, it provided $1,597,100 to the ISI alone according to the website MediaTransparency.org.  Like the Scaife and the J.M Olin foundations, it supports free market ideology, limited government, “traditional” values and a belief system modeled on Judeo-Christian principles.  It is also apparently dedicated to American imperialism having given almost $2 million to help fund the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), the prominent neoconservative group that had advocated an invasion of Iraq since it was founded in 1997.  Additionally, it provided financing for Samuel P. Huntington’s The Class of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order, a tome that arguably brought the domestic culture wars to the global stage (Muwakkil, 2003).3 

The late Lynde and Harry Bradley brothers were members of one of Milwaukee’s most well-known families.  Their maternal grandfather, William Pitt Lynde, was one of Wisconsin’s first two congressmen.    In 1903, Lynde and Harry established a business in Milwaukee that grew to become the Allen-Bradley company—a major manufacturer of radio and electronic components.  By 1942, the brothers had created the Allen-Bradley Foundation which while granting funds to rightist groups, was essentially dedicated to local philanthropic efforts. 

Perhaps one of the earliest indications of the Bradley Foundation’s eventual political leanings was Harry’s early embrace of, and financial support for, the John Birch Society, one of the country’s most notorious far-right organizations based in Appleton, Wisconsin.  The idea of the John Birch Society was first introduced by Robert Welsh, a candy manufacturer, at a meeting of twelve “patriotic and public-spirited” men convened in Indianapolis on December 9, 1958 (www.publiceye.org/tooclose/jbs.html).  The first chapter of the society was founded just a few months later in February 1959 and was militantly anti-communist.  Welsh was a frequent speaker at Allen-Bradley sales meetings and Harry Bradley regularly circulated Birchite literature at the company.  Like Welsh, the burrs in Harry’s britches at the time were “World Communism and the U.S. federal government, not necessarily in that order” (www.mediatransparency.org). 

Generally prone to conspiracy theories, the John Birch Society maintained that “internationalist ‘insiders’ with a collectivist agenda” were out to undermine “national sovereignty and individualism.”  Liberals, they contended, “consciously encourage the graduate process of collectivism” and as such are “secret traitors whose ultimate goal is to replace the nations of Western civilization with a one-world socialist government.”  Despite its self-proclaimed, and seemingly benign, commitment to “less government, more responsibility, and—with God’s help—a better world,” the Birch Society essentially promotes a “culturally defined White Christian ethnocentrism as the true expression of America” (Berlet and Lyons, 2000, p. 176, 178).  Goldberg has argued that today’s rampant Christian nationalism and many of its fixations can be traced to the obsessions of the John Birch Society, particularly a “fearful loathing of secular liberals.”  Indeed, Tim LaHaye, co-author (with Jerry B. Jenkins) of the apocalyptic Christian fundamentalist Left Behind book series (which predicts the end-times and which casts Baghdad as Satan’s headquarters), was a member of the group and even ran training seminars on behalf of the society in the 1960s and 1970s.  LaHaye’s indebtedness to Birchite teachings were most readily apparent in he and David Noebel’s 2000 paranoid polemic entitled Mind Siege in which they argued that the United States was being ruled by a small but influential cabal of committed humanists who were determined to “turn America into an amoral, humanist country ripe for merger into a one-world socialist state” (cited in Goldberg, 2006, p. 161). 

Given Harry Bradley’s long-time affiliation with the Birch society, one could have certainly predicted that the foundation’s current pattern of funding (especially of Christianist and culturally conservative programs) would reflect the right-wing legacy of its founder.  But, it is also important to note that like other founding families of the conservative movement, the Bradley’s were particularly disturbed by New Deal liberalism and the constraints it presumably imposed on big business.  As Phillips (2006, p. 22) has aptly noted, when it comes to matters of business, economics, and wealth, the tendency of the Christian right is “to oppose regulation and justify wealth and relative laissez-faire” and to tip its hat to corporations and those in upper-income brackets.

While the Allen-Bradley Foundation quietly provided financing for a variety of rightist causes throughout the 1960s and 1970s, its profile was raised quite dramatically in 1985 when the company was sold to Rockwell International, a leading defense and aerospace conglomerate, for $1.651 billion.  After the company’s sale, the foundation saw its assets skyrocket virtually overnight from less than $14 million to more than $290 million.  At around the same time, in an effort to publicly separate the foundation from the company, the Allen-Bradley Foundation was renamed the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation.4 

With the influx of money derived from the sale of the company, the foundations’ trustees quickly acknowledged the need to hire a high profile administrator in order to expand the foundation’s philanthropic efforts beyond the local and state levels.  For that they turned to Michael Joyce.  Joyce, who died in 2006, was named as “one of the three people most responsible for the triumph of the conservative political movement” by Atlantic Monthly magazine and was hailed by neoconservative guru Irving Kristol as the godfather of modern philanthropy (Berkowitz, 2006).  Prior to joining the Bradley Foundation in 1985, Joyce served on Ronald Reagan’s presidential transition team in 1980 as well as a host of other Reagan-Bush advisory boards and task forces in subsequent years.  He also toiled at the Institute for Educational Affairs (a neoconservative outfit started by Irving Kristol and William Simon) and the John M. Olin Foundation (see below).5 

While working at the Olin Foundation, Joyce was instrumental in launching the Federalist Society (also a recipient of Scaife munificence), the rather secretive conservative legal association devoted to “restricting privacy rights and reproductive freedoms, rolling back civil rights gains, and thwarting the authority of government to regulate industry in the public interest” (Brock, 2003, p.49).  With Joyce’s ongoing support the society fostered the development of ultra-conservative legal scholars and politicians.  Among its current and former members are ex-Attorney General, statuary clothier, and Crisco aficionado John Ashcroft (also a darling of the John Birch society),6 the torture-loving former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, Clinton-hunter Kenneth Starr, Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito.  Chief Justice John Roberts, a Federalist favorite, denied any affiliation with the group during his confirmation process despite the fact that he was once listed in its leadership directory.   Joyce was also largely responsible for providing a more focused and sophisticated approach to the Bradley Foundation’s philanthropy making it one of the premiere right-wing establishments in the United States. 

The Bradley Foundation’s grant-giving apparatus reflects its commitment to “limited government, free enterprise, a strong national defense and international democratic capitalism” (Krehely, House, and Kernan, 2004, p. 61).  Its’ critics, however, describe the foundation’s agenda much more harshly.  As Wilayto (2001) contends:

Bradley envisions the return to a pre-1935 form of laissez-faire capitalism, free from the concessions forced from the property-owning class by the labor movement of the 1930s and the social movements of the 1960s.  The means to this goal are the privatization of government services, deregulation of business, and the entrenched social stratification of society by class, race, and gender.  

Given the Bradley’s family and corporate history, it is rather difficult to deny Wiyalto’s assertions.  For decades, women working at Allen-Bradley were not paid the same as men for operating the same machinery.  That changed when a group of women sued the company in 1966 and a federal judge ruled in their favor.  Its record on labor is equally unsettling.  Although employees of Allen-Bradley had been unionized since 1937, the company was adamantly opposed to a closed or union shop.  After a 76 day strike in 1970, management reluctantly agreed to allow payroll deductions for union dues. The company was also one of Milwaukee’s last bastions of a racial segregation – in 1968, of its more than 7,000 member work force, only 46 employees were either Black or Latino.  The Bradley clan, long-recognized opponents of civil rights, finally capitulated to public and legal pressure in 1968 after the federal government expressed its support of a discrimination suit that had been filed (www.mediatransparency.org). 

The Bradley’s hostility to civil rights however, lives on.  In recent years, beneficiaries of Bradley’s generosity include Charles Murray and the late Richard Herrnstein who penned the controversial The Bell Curve, Dinesh D’Souza (see below), and a variety of groups and organizations that have actively lobbied for anti-affirmative action legislation including the National Association of Scholars and Ward Connerly’s deceptively named American Civil Rights Institute.  The foundation has also used Wisconsin—and particularly Milwaukee’s black community—as a “kind of social laboratory for its right-wing experiments” in everything from welfare restructuring to school “reform” (i.e. privatization and vouchers) initiatives and faith-based programs designed to bolster the “influence of conservative religious groups in communities of color as a means of social control”(Wilayto, 2001). 

In fact, sponsoring “faith-based” organizations and programs designed to foster the privatization and deregulation of social programs and erase any remaining vestiges of the New Deal, has been one of Bradley’s pet causes. It is therefore no surprise that Michael Joyce, who ended his sixteen-year tenure as the foundation’s president in 2001, eventually went to work for the Bush administration in an attempt to bolster the president’s then-floundering faith-based initiative.  The current president of the Foundation, Michael Grebe, who replaced Joyce, describes the fundamental principles animating Bradley-supported faith-based programs as follows:  “Individual citizens should be viewed as persons who are capable of running their own affairs and who are personally responsible for their actions.  These programs were developed in response to our uncertainty that government assistance programs as they were then constituted were truly effective in helping citizens.”  Grebe, a long-time Republican Party operative, also added that he was confident that the social programs of faith-based organizations were often more effective than those of their non-faith-based counterparts (Grebe, cited in Krehely, House and Kernan, 2004, p. 61).  Of course, one may be inclined to question Grebe’s certitude about the efficacy of faith-based programs given that there has been little if any oversight of such programs and that they have generally helped President Bush’s base rather than the poor (Goldberg, 2006)

In addition to attacks on public education and concomitant support of privatization and school vouchers, the Bradley Foundation has provided abundant financial backing to the same institutes, groups and associations (ISI, David Horowitz Freedom Center, ACTA, etc.) dedicated to countering the perceived “liberal bias” on college campuses and promoting patriotic correctness.7  The foundation has also taken its philanthropy a step further by rewarding Bradley prizes of $250,000 to individual scholars who sanction and advance ideas (read: pro-free market, unfettered capitalism and unabashed support of all things conservative and “American”) congruent with the foundation’s mission.  As well, the foundation bankrolls conservative programs and a Bradley Graduate and Postgraduate Fellowship Program at several esteemed academic institutions including Harvard and the University of Chicago. It has also provided substantial funding to Encounter for Culture and Education ($1,175,000 in 2005 alone) which publishes books by far-right extremists including Ann Coulter (Krehely, House, and Kernan, p. 64).  Of course, it was Coulter speaking at the February 2005 Conservative Political Action Conference (an annual right-wing jamboree), Coulter who recommended that right-wingers take a page “from McCarthy’s handbook and persecute left-leaners the way the good senator sniffed out commie pinkos (Maguire, 2006, p. 111). In a speech deemed “part right-wing stand-up routine” and part “bloodcurdling agitprop by Time, Coulter called for nothing less than a “new McCarthyism” on campuses (Ibid). 

John M. Olin Foundation

John Merrill Olin, who once graced the cover of Sports Illustrated dressed in a three-piece suit and brandishing a gun, was born in 1892 in Alton, Illinois to a family of emerging capitalists.  In that same year, his father, Franklin W. Olin, a Cornell-educated engineer founded the Equitable Powder Company in East Alton, Illinois.  A predecessor of Olin Industries, Equitable Powder provided blasting materials to Midwestern coal fields and eventually began making bullets.  Thus was born the Western Cartridge Company in 1898 where John started his career in 1913 as a chemical engineer after having received a B.Sc. degree in chemistry from Cornell.  The father and son worked together to build a manufacturing behemoth that sold 15 billion rounds of ammunition during World War II and subsequently expanded its business to make cellophane, metals, rocket fuel, and pharmaceuticals.  John eventually became president of the Olin Industries chemical and munitions empire and the fortune amassed in the family business enabled him to launch his foundation in 1953.

A stalwart institution of the conservative movement, the J.M. Olin Foundation officially shuttered its doors on November 29, 2005 after decades of bankrolling the right’s “counterintelligentsia” to the tune of almost $400 million.  The foundation was established after Olin determined that it was necessary to vigorously promote American capitalism and ward off what he perceived to be an encroaching socialist threat.  In a 1977 interview, Olin claimed that he created his foundation in an effort to “see free enterprise re-established” in America and contended that business and the public had to be reawakened to “the creeping stranglehold that socialism” had gained in the U.S. since World War II.8  It should also be noted, however, that Olin had other motivations as well.  In a fawning tribute A Gift of Freedom: How the John M. Olin Foundation Changed America, John J. Miller (2005), a conservative writer for National Review stated quite unapologetically that events of the 1960s were also of grave concern to Olin. In particular, he was troubled by the influx of minority students into the nation’s prestigious universities which he viewed as a recipe for trouble.

The foundation made its first donation of $18,000 to Cornell University in 1954 but it was relatively dormant until 1969 when a building takeover by student protesters at his alma mater incited Olin to action.9  He began allocating large sums of money as well as his own time to the organization.   Like its conservative siblings, Olin provided financing for Washington institutes devoted to lowering taxes and minimizing government regulation (i.e. the Heritage Foundation, AEI) but once the late William E. Simon (a former Secretary of the Treasury under presidents Nixon and Ford) became its president in 1977, the foundation swiftly set its sights on so-called intellectual elites (DeParle, 2005). 

In his 1978 publication, A Time for Truth, Simon declared that the country was going to hell in a hand basket because of an “assault on America’s culture and its historic identity” that was emanating mainly from the incorrigibly left-leaning intelligentsia.  He called for

nothing less than a massive and unprecedented mobilization of the moral, intellectual and financial resources which reside in those . . . who are concerned that our traditional free enterprise system . . . is in dire and perhaps ultimate peril . . . [and] those who see a successful United States as the real “last best hope of mankind” (Simon, 1978, pp. 229-230).

To remedy the deplorable state of affairs, Simon offered the following three-point plan:

1. 1)Funds generated by business . . . must rush by multimillions to the aid of liberty . . . [and] funnel desperately needed funds to scholars, social scientists, writers and journalists who . . . [would] dissent from a dominant socialist-statist-collectivist orthodoxy which prevails in much of the media, in most of our large universities, among many of our politicians and, tragically, among not a few of our top business executives;
   

2. 
   

2. 2)Business must cease the mindless subsidizing of colleges and universities whose departments of economics, government, politics and history are hostile to capitalism;
   

3. 
   

3. 3)Finally, business money must flow away from the media which serve as megaphones for anticapitalist opinion and to media which are . . . at least professionally capable of a fair and accurate treatment of procapitalist ideas, values and arguments (Ibid, pp. 230-232).
   

For Simon then, nothing less than the creation of a “counterintelligentsia” would suffice to further the rightist agenda—the key for Simon was to redirect the grant making apparatus of the foundation in order to achieve explicit partisan political results.10 

According to the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy’s 2004 report, Axis of Ideology, the Olin Foundation ranks third (behind Sarah Scaife and Lynde and Harry Bradley) in providing public policy grants to conservative organizations (Krehely, House, and Kernan, 2004).  It has also funneled hundreds of millions of dollars to some of the nation’s top universities (particularly to law and economics programs) including Harvard, the University of Chicago, Yale, Columbia, Stanford, Cornell and UCLA. Olin has also filled the financial trough for a whole host of conservative scholars including the late Allan Bloom who received more than $3 million in grants and donations, mainly from the Olin Foundation, to write The Closing of the American Mind (published in 1987) which many agree was the opening salvo in a concerted campaign to sabotage the public’s faith in higher education and which established the tone for many subsequent attacks on the academy and the bogeyman of political correctness in the early 1990s.  In fact, Bloom’s right-wing cultural manifesto in which he condemned the Sixties and critical philosophy for the decline of nothing less than Western civilization, arguably started the trend towards the corporate funded “intellectual” diatribes that have become popular within the mainstream.

Olin’s philanthropy has undoubtedly facilitated a variety of projects (including the aforementioned Federalist Society)11 but perhaps the foundation’s most noteworthy legacy was in helping to establish the very edifice of a conservative “counter-culture” on college campuses through its sponsorship of notoriously right-wing student publications like the Dartmouth Review which have served as breeding grounds for the conservative talking heads industry.  Greene (2005, p. 2) notes that funding “conservative student publications not only served to increase the voice of conservatives on campus, it provided students with the skills and connections to continue in punditry and activism upon graduation.”  Indeed, some of the most notorious right-wing mouthpieces including David Horowitz, Ann Coulter, and Laura Ingraham, have “all been associated with Olin-funded organizations or publications.”12  Before it closed its doors in 2005, Olin gave the ISI $3,502,600 in funding over a twenty-year period for its various activities including $200,000 in 1997 to fund a lecture series on “The Culture War on Campus.”

The Intercollegiate Studies Institute and Collegiate Network:      

The Intercollegiate Studies Institute (formerly named the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists) was established in 1953 by Frank Chodorov and conservative icon William F. Buckley served as its first president.  Ironically, Chodorov modeled his organization on the Intercollegiate Society of Socialists (the brainchild of Upton Sinclair) which had been established in September 1905 to advance socialist thought on campuses.13  The ISI, the oldest national college conservative organization in the United States, is currently housed at a 23-acre mansion in Delaware and from 1985 to 2005 it has received grants totaling more than $20 million.14  It has often been characterized as having paleoconservative (as opposed to neoconservative) tendencies but many of its core principles, including beliefs in limited government, personal responsibility, and the freemarket economy are quite similar to those of neoconservatives.15  Moreover, many of the authors and lecturers that it supports are easily identified as neoconservatives.

The ISI’s main purpose is to promote cultural conservatism and it has long dedicated itself to countering the alleged leftist presence on campus.  In a 1990 essay, ISI president T. Kenneth Cribb (a former advisor to Ronald Reagan) summarized the institute’s intent quite succinctly:

We must . . . provide resources and guidance to an elite which can take up anew the task of enculturation.  Through its journals, lectures, seminars, books, and fellowships, this is what ISI has done successfully for thirty-six years . . . But we should add a major new component to our strategy:  the conservative movement is now mature enough to sustain a counteroffensive on that last Leftist redoubt, the college campus . . . We are now strong enough to establish a contemporary presence for conservatism on campus, and contest the Left on its own turf.  We plan to do this by greatly expanding the ISI field effort, its network of campus-based programming.16 

And expand they did.  Today, the ISI boasts volunteer representatives at over 900 colleges and has more than 50,000 student and faculty members on virtually every campus in the United States.  In addition, the ISI conducts more than 300 educational programs on campuses each year – everything from large public lectures to small-group seminars, sponsors various events and speeches, and has dozens of lecturers (including Dinesh D’Souza and anti-feminist Christina Hoff-Sommers) available for hire listed on its website.  It also offers a number of graduate fellowships to students pursuing academic careers including a unique award worth $20,000 for graduate work related to Western civilization studies.  It produces three journals, The Intercollegiate Review, Modern Age, and The Political Science Reviewer, distributes an additional five conservative publications and operates ISI books—and imprint of the ISI which claims to publish volumes that “strike at the heart of the prevailing orthodoxies of contemporary scholarship.”17

The Intercollegiate Review regularly publishes scholarly harangues denouncing multiculturalism, feminism, and other sixties-inspired critical discourses that play to cultural animosities against women, gays, and minorities.18  In recent years, targeting traitorous intellectuals has become de rigueur.  In the first issue after 9/11, the journal included an essay by Yale historian Donald Kagan titled “Terrorism and the Intellectuals” in which the author chastised academics and intellectuals who apparently suggested that the “responsibility for September 11” rested with “the United States.”  He complained about alleged “leftist intellectual orthodoxy” on campuses, and the “fashionable assaults on patriotism” made by privileged yet irresponsible academics whose despicable behavior should be condemned by those who are devoted to the nation’s special virtues (Kagan, 2002, pp. 3-7).  Kagan echoed the dominant narrative that hatred of the United States stemmed from its commitment to “free, open, democratic,” and “tolerant” forms of governance. In so doing, Kagan epitomized the posturing of patriotic correctness, particularly in terms of the notion of America’s exceptionalism. 

In Kagan’s world, it was unfathomable that reasonable minds could assert that the history of U.S. international policy and actions might have had something to do with the horrors of 9/11.  Presumably, rational individuals had no business arguing that more nuanced understandings of the complexities of international relations, American complicity in arming tyrannical regimes, its flouting of international law, and its dominance of the world economy were needed to fully comprehend acts of terrorism.  Kagan’s attempt, rife with the stench of neo-McCarthyism, to link critical intellectuals with terrorists is not at all surprising given his neoconservative pedigree.  He was a signatory to PNAC’s 1997 founding statement of principles—an organization that was co-founded by his son Robert.  And, his other son Frederick was instrumental in promoting the “surge” strategy currently being pursued by the Bush administration in Iraq.          

Another interesting figure associated with the ISI is Marvin Olasky whom the institute lists as one of its “speakers” available for lectures on topics including “Is Compassionate Conservatism an Oxymoron?” and “God, Sex, and Statemanship.”  Olasky, a professor of journalism at the University of Texas at Austin and the editor of World, a national weekly news magazine written from a biblical perspective, coined the phrase “compassionate conservatism” and has been one of George W. Bush’s most influential intellectual advisers. Like Bush, Olasky is a fundamentalist born-again Christian and their history dates back to 1993, just before Bush was elected governor of Texas.  In fact, Olasky’s book Compassionate Conservatism includes a sycophantic introduction written by Bush. 

Christian nationalists like Olasky (who was also one of the main theorists behind Bush’s faith-based initiative), have long dreamt of “replacing welfare with private, church-based charity that would be dispensed at the discretion of the godly” (Goldberg, 2006, p. 109).  They believe that poverty is not the result of financial lack but, rather, a reflection of poor peoples’ moral turpitude.  Goldberg argues that Olasky’s ideas

have helped to shape  an ascendant movement that is challenging not just church/state separation, but the whole notion of secular civil society and social services based on empirical research rather than supernatural intervention . . . Olasky and other supporters of faith-based funding [are] driven by the conviction that the poor and addicted are sinners who need to be redeemed by Jesus Christ . . . Olasky’s work thus serves as a valuable guide to the kind of society that Bush and his Christian nationalist backers are striving to create.  His vision is a deeply radical one, heavily influenced by Christian Reconstructionism.  He yearns for the days before the New Deal, when sinners could be denied aid until they repented . . . Olasky identifies two primary enemies as responsible for the country’s fall—religious liberalism and ‘political socialism,’ which he blames for jettisoning a one-on-one, salvation-minded approach to the poor (p. 109-112).                   

Christian Reconstructionism is a doctrine formulated mainly by Rousas John Rushdoony and his 1973 book The Institutes of Biblical Law is the most “important for the dominionist movement” (Hedges, 2006, p. 12).  In that text, Rushdoony draws extensively from the repressive theocratic creed articulated by Calvin in Institutes of the Christian Religion, first published in 1536.  Echoing Calvin, Rushdoony calls for a Christian society that is “harsh, unforgiving and violent” and one that emphasizes the inerrant authority of the Bible and the irreconcilability between believers and non-believers.  Christian Reconstructionism is deeply antagonistic toward the federal government – in fact, Rushdoony believes that the government should concern itself almost exclusively with national defense while matters pertaining to education and social welfare should be ceded to churches (Hedges, p. 13).  Not surprisingly, he has called for the dismantling of federal democracy so that it can be replaced with a “network of small sovereign communities run by fundamentalist Christians” (Hedges, p. 158).  Fundamentalists view secular institutions and humanist philosophies as inherently problematic and they believe that the separation of church and state is based on a misinterpretation of the Constitution.  They are also quite prominent in seeking to introduce the teaching of “intelligent design” in public institutions at all levels – including colleges and universities in the name of “intellectual diversity.”  Predictably, Olasky has used his bully pulpit at World Magazine to chide “ideologically identical professors” while concomitantly heaping praise on conservative organizations like the ISI and student gestapos committed to battling the scourge of radicalism on college campuses.  Apparently, Olasky doesn’t think his religious extremism is radical.            

The ISI also administers the Collegiate Network—an association of approximately 100 right-wing student publications from Dartmouth to UCLA that provides its members with annual operating grants, mentoring sessions, training conferences, and paid year-long and summer internships at cooperating national media outlets including USA Today, the Wall Street Journal and the notoriously right-wing Weekly Standard.  The campus publications, most of which are disseminated gratis at scores of colleges and universities, have a combined annual distribution of more than 2 million copies. 

The history of the network dates back to 1979 when two University of Chicago students (both students of Allan Bloom) approached the Institute for Educational Affairs (IEA), which had been established by Irving Kristol and William E. Simon with funding from the usual suspects, for financial assistance to counter the “one-sided reporting” that presumably dominated the main student publication on their campus.  The students convinced IEA that control of campus publications was firmly entrenched in the hands of radicals who systematically excluded conservative points of view and the IEA eventually provided funding for Counterpoint.  The student founders of Counterpoint were Tod Lindberg, now a contributing editor to the Weekly Standard and a current research fellow at the conservative Hoover Foundation where he also serves as editor of Policy Review and John Podhoretz. 

John Podhoretz is the son of neoconservative royalty and rabid propagandist for all things antiliberal Norman Podhertz (one of the pioneering figures of neoconservatism, a signatory to PNAC, and a long-time editor of Commentary) and Midge Decter, another founding member of PNAC who was also a co-chair, with Donald Rumsfeld of the now defunct Committee for a Free World (CFW), a pro-free market organization—generously funded by both the Scaife and Olin foundations—that was essentially devoted to American hegemony on the world stage (One of Decter’s recent books, Rumsfeld: A Personal Portrait, is a fawning paean to the former Secretary of Defense).   John, a former speechwriter for both Reagan and Bush the elder, is a Fox News Channel contributor, a twice weekly columnist for Rupert Murdoch’s tabloid the New York Post, a weekly columnist for National Review Online, and a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard which he helped to launch with Murdoch’s backing.  Known for writings that are “jokey” recitations of “hoary hand-me-downs from babyhood” (Wolcott, 2004, p. 51), Podhertz has, nonetheless, been a dependable ally of the Bush administration.  From his various media perches, he has reliably provided panglossian support for George W. Bush’s military misadventures.  And, in 2004 he authored a syrupy ode to the Bush presidency, Bush Country: How Dubya Became a Great President While Driving Liberals Insane.

The IEA eventually expanded its grant program and in 1980 the Collegiate Network (CN) was formally established by William Simon and Irving Kristol.  In 1990, the Madison Center (which was founded by Allan Bloom and William Bennett in 1988) merged with the IEA to form the (now defunct) Madison Center for Educational Affairs (MCEA) in order to maintain funding for what was then a consolidated system of 57 conservative student publications.  In 1995, the CN moved from Washington, D.C. to Wilmington, Delaware and ISI took over the operations of the network. From 1995 to 2005, the CN has been munificently funded to the tune of $5, 675,000.19  According to its website, the CN’s stated mission is “to focus public awareness on the politicization of American college and university classrooms, curricula, student life, and the resulting decline of educational standards” but its real function is to feed and water Ann Coulter wannabes who will then take up their rightful place in what David Brock (2004, p. 68) has called “the Republican noise machine.”  Indeed, Brock maintains that many young conservatives “choose to train at highly ideological media programs” like those offered by the CN because “they are more interested in politics than in journalism.”  And it shows.  For the most part, the member newspapers of the CN are staffed by fiery rightists who demonstrate minimal, if any, regard, for the tenets of traditional journalism—including fairness and accuracy.  They are, at best, apparatchiks posing as student journalists and they relish in broadsiding “liberalism.”  An October 2004 edition of the Princeton Tory typifies this.  That particular issue featured a cover photograph—of a young hunter in full camouflage regalia, brandishing a shotgun—accompanied with a declaration that “the state of New Jersey” had declared “open season on the hunting and trapping of all liberal species.”20

CN’s “journalists” are also very enthusiastic about preaching the right-wing gospel on a range of issues—from feminism and multiculturalism to the morality of war and capitalism.  Yet, with respect to the latter they fail to see the fundamental contradictions at the heart of their enterprises.  While these free market champions and advocates of “personal responsibility” and “self-reliance” cast themselves as beleaguered minorities barely surviving on liberal-dominated campuses, the financial muscle behind their publications belies not only such dramatically presented imagery but also their core ideology.  In fact, the right’s campus warriors who extol the virtues of free market capitalism write for publications which depend on a form of right-wing welfare provided by foundations and institutes in the form of subsidies.  There really is no comparative counterpart on the liberal left to the CN.  Progressive campus papers often struggle with funding issues, lack support from wealthy foundations and alumni groups, and usually depend upon a mix of university funding and advertising dollars for their survival.  Since the administrations of universities are often targets of criticism, progressive papers often find themselves in adversarial situations and subject to funding decreases.  By contrast, most right-wing campus publications aren’t competing for advertising revenue to sustain their operations; rather the unwavering defenders of Adam Smith’s free market magic are held up by the concealed but very real hands of their sugar daddies.

What is more disturbing is that so many of the network’s newspapers, editors, and writers rely on fanning the flames of nativism, racism, social intolerance and gay-baiting to register their complaints against multiculturalism, affirmative action, various diversity initiatives on campuses and anti-war proponents.  The political catechism of the CN network is spiked with rage and bigotry and it is propped up by a stubborn conviction that unsupported opinions presented in a mean-spirited fashion are preferable to complex analysis.  Case in point is the former paramour of Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham (both of whom toiled at CN newspapers), Dinesh D’Souza, whose history warrants a brief detour here. 

D’Souza pioneered the noxious “journalism” which has become the hallmark of the CN.  His Letters to a Young Conservative is chock-full of advice on how to use newspapers and/or magazines as tools to provoke progressives on campuses while concomitantly promoting the conservative agenda.21  He founded the Dartmouth Review, the first member of the official CN, in 1980 and also served as the publication’s editor in the early 1980s.  While under his directorship, the paper ran a particularly incendiary piece entitled “Dis Sho’ Ain’t No Jive, Bro,” a parody of African-American students at Dartmouth which featured an “interview” with a member of the Ku Klux Klan, a graphic image of a lynched black man, and some selected words of wisdom from Adolph Hitler himself.22  The newspaper also commemorated Hitler’s birthday and emblazoned the front page with a picture of the Nazi leader.  And in yet another piece, written for the Heritage Foundation’s Policy Review, D’Souza, commenting on gender issues, claimed that:  “The question is not whether women should be educated at Dartmouth.  The question is whether women should be educated at all” (cited in Henson, 1991, p. 6).

Evidently, D’Souza’s depraved deeds and debauchery endeared him to conservatives and he subsequently served as a domestic policy analyst in the Reagan administration.  While his first book, a bromidic biography of the recently deceased bible-thumper Jerry Falwell remains largely unknown and unread, he was catapulted from virtual anonymity to media stardom seven years later after Illiberal Education – his jeremiad (funded by rightist foundations and organizations including Olin) against political correctness and affirmative action—was published in 1991.  Since then D’Souza, aided and abetted by conservative think tanks, has written (among other tracts) The End of Racism and What’s So Great about America.  The former is a 736-page revisionist account of the history of slavery and racism in America, which provides a culturalist rather than a biological, “explanation” for Black “inferiority.”  In the book, which garnered considerable criticism for its asinine assumptions and preposterous pronouncements, D’Souza attributes the economic disadvantages endured by African-Americans to the “pathology of black culture.”  The “real” obstacles facing the black community stem from its collective unwillingness to acknowledge its own “cultural deficiencies.”  According to D’Souza, these defects include an excessive reliance on government funding; the normalization of illegitimacy; paranoia about racism; and a resistance to academic achievement which is supposedly perceived among African-Americans as tantamount to “acting White.”  In addition to arguing that slavery (which he suggests brought blacks into the orbit of modern civilization) and segregation weren’t as racist as experts and the media have made them out to be, D’Souza makes the outrageous claim that the belief in the persistence of racism is a disturbing and self-serving myth concocted by the black civil rights establishment.23   The latter, What’s So Great about America, a miasma of right-wing claptrap, is essentially a post-9/11 exercise in patriotic cheerleading, a defense of American exceptionalism replete with incredulous rationalizations for U.S. unilateralism and the use of naked and brutal force in the service of “Planet America.”    

With his latest offering, The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and its Responsibility for 9/11, D’Souza has arguably become the Ann Coulter of “research” institutes for his venomous vituperations clearly rival those which the demagogic diva has routinely hurled at liberals and leftists.  The treatise, which one reviewer aptly labeled “the worst nonfiction book about terrorism published by a major house since 9/11,” seeks to blame the American “cultural left” for the terrorist attacks.  According to D’Souza’s contorted logic, bin Laden and al-Qaeda were driven to deadly destruction by the hedonistic, licentious, and secular culture that the U.S. exports to “traditional societies.”  For D’Souza, it is the cultural left and its cronies in government, the media, Hollywood, the non-profit sector, and the universities that are responsible for the “volcano of anger toward America that is erupting” in the Islamic world.  Obsessed with lambasting liberalism and naming domestic enemies – among them Hillary Clinton, Michael Moore, Howard Dean, Rosie O’Donnell, Planned Parenthood, the ACLU, and Human Rights Watch – D’Souza encourages “American conservatives” to make common cause with Muslims and others “in condemning the global moral degeneracy that is produced by liberal values” (cited in Pollitt, 2007, p. 9). 

The fact that D’Souza has parlayed the tiresome “blame the left” mantra into a lucrative career likely serves as an inspiration to all those that still toil at right-wing campus rags across the country.  A simple survey of the CN’s most prominent publications renders obvious the primary objective of the network’s operations – to breed the next generation of what James Wolcott (2004, p. 17) calls “attack poodles,” those “alpha males” and “Malibu Barbies” of punditry and “other occult arts” conditioned to pounce at any foe of the radical conservative agenda.  The CN enables these lapdogs in training to hone various skills including the juvenile name-calling tactics that are the trademark of Fox News Network personalities Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity as well as other right-wing media gasbags who push the boundaries of civility and thrive on calumny and bombast.  Consider the remarks of Bernadette Malone who cut her “journalistic” (I The fact that D’Souza has parlayed the tiresome “blame the left” mantra into a lucrative career likely serves as an inspiration to all those that still toil at right-wing campus rags across the country.  A simple survey of the CN’s most prominent publications renders obvious the primary objective of the network’s operations – to breed the next generation of what James Wolcott (2004, p. 17) calls “attack poodles,” those “alpha males” and “Malibu Barbies” of punditry and “other occult arts” conditioned to pounce at any foe of the radical conservative agenda.  The CN enables these lapdogs in training to hone various skills including the juvenile name-calling tactics that are the trademark of Fox News Network personalities Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity as well as other right-wing media gasbags who push the boundaries of civility and thrive on calumny and bombast.  Consider the remarks of Bernadette Malone who cut her “journalistic” (I use the term loosely) teeth at the CN’s Binghamton Review (and who has also been known to equate anti-Bush demonstrators to Islamic militants):24  

I am delighted to report that on college campuses on both coasts . . . [that] there are student-run independent newspapers that are battling the America-hating political scientists, Marxist economics professors, deconstructionist English departments, feminazis, pot-smoking philosophers, Birkenstocked war protesters, and the whole migraine that is the Campus Left.  These conservative newspapers . . . helped to get Bush reelected (cited in Berkowitz, 2004).

She adds, apparently with a straight face, that “Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, and other fair and balanced news institutions employ former student editors of conservative newspapers” (Ibid.)  In this instance, and contrary to the stated lofty goals of raising public awareness about so-called declining educational standards, Malone exposes the genuine aspirations of the CN network—to advance the cause of radical conservatism; provide a forum that turns outrageous (and mainly unsubstantiated) claims about liberal/left shenanigans on campuses into conventional wisdom for large swathes of the public; fuel the knee-jerk anti-intellectualism of the right; and serve as an auxiliary to the Republican Party. 

Conclusion

One could reasonably argue that right-wing student scribes who run roughshod over any notion of civility and even the most rudimentary of journalistic principles and who seem to want to immunize themselves to ideas that might challenge or “offend” them are hardly in a position to evaluate the standards of higher education.  If anything, these reactionary junior poodles, like their counterparts in the national media, contribute to the wholesale underpinning of journalism for political purposes and to a coarsening of public discourse that undermines the very precepts of rationality.  Just as the myth of the liberal media has essentially served to weaken journalism’s watchdog function and to move media discourse to the right, conservative campus publications that exist, ostensibly, to report on the “dangers” of the liberal/left campus seek to narrow the political spectrum and weaken the very practice of critique and critical thinking.  Far from desiring higher standards in education, their purpose is to provide ideological cover for powerful interests and give ballast to the logic of U.S. militarism and rightist ideology.  In advancing what Gerry Spence (2006) has fittingly termed the “conservative hate culture,” they seek to inoculate the institutions and power arrangements they venerate – corporate America, the military, right-wing Christianity, capitalism, etc., – from any type of serious scrutiny.   

The ISI and its network of newspapers peddle patriotic correctness by repeating many of the same themes and hackneyed charges (i.e. left-wing hegemony on campuses, anti-Americanism, etc.) that were bandied about more than a decade ago amidst the culture wars of the early 1990s.  In many ways, they have simply been repackaged for post-9/11 American in an attempt to stifle any criticism of the Bush administration, U.S. foreign policy, the “war on terror,” and the nobility of American “values. 

More importantly, however, the ISI, like other organizations that have revealed their affinity with the McCarthyite legacy that continues to cast a dark and menacing shadow over American political life, is dedicated to promoting free-market ideology on behalf of the corporate masters that fund it.  Far from being concerned with the moral fabric of the United States, democratic communication and education, the foundations that support conservative campus activism are preoccupied with the profits that accrue from American global dominance.  Writing in 1991, Alexander Cockburn made an interesting observation about the “culture wars” and the controversy over “political correctness.” He noted that although the attacks on the academy were presumably being waged in the name of defending Western civilization, traditional values, and upholding “standards,” their real ideological intent was motivated by the need to fashion minds “sufficiently deadened to reason and history to allow the capitalist project to reproduce itself from generation to generation” (1991, p. 691).  His comments are even more apposite today for they sum up the true impetus for the ISI and CN’s initiatives and activities—shaping minds and the academy in the service of America empire.      

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