Kurtz, S 2

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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">overwrite at bottom, capt and text other node</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">no lnx</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" /><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/critical-race-theory-2659941137/">
</a></font></div><div><a href="https://www.alternet.org/critical-race-theory-2659941137/">https://www.alternet.org/critical-race-theory-2659941137/</a></div><div>
</div><div>twenty or 30 years ago, most consumers of right-wing media didn't know what critical race theory (CRT) was. Many liberals and progressives, for that matter, were unfamiliar with CRT — a college-level African-American studies discipline that, in essence, argues that racism of the past affects present-day institutions.</div><div>
</div><div>But in recent years, CRT has become a major boogieman in right-wing media and among MAGA Republicans. MAGA pundits and politicians, according to their liberal critics, have weaponized the term CRT and used it to attack any book or article that makes them uncomfortable — be it "The Autobiography of Malcolm X" or Alice Walker's "The Color Purple."</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">
</span></div><div><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">Scholar Stanley Kurtz is among the right-wing figures who has been railing against CRT, but his efforts go beyond trying to keep books out of public schools.</b></div><div>
</div><div>READ MORE: Why Texas Republicans’ crusade against 'woke civics' does students a huge disservice: report</div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Reporter Asher Lehrer-Small, in an article published by The 74 on May 2, emphasizes that Kurtz has "spearheaded a quiet but influential campaign to cleanse classrooms of what he calls 'woke civics.'" According to Lehrer-Small, Kurtz's "advocacy in&nbsp;<b>Texas led to the 2021 passage of an unprecedented state law banning assignments that involve 'direct communication' between students and their federal, state or local lawmakers."</b></span></div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The reporter notes, "At the core of Kurtz's activism is a central idea: that hands-on civics lessons, such as students writing to their legislators, will lead to 'school-sponsored indoctrination and political action in support of progressive policy positions'…. Accurate or not, Kurtz's depiction of 'woke civics' is now being felt in America's classrooms."</span></div><div>
</div><div>Lehrer-Small adds, "<b>When the scholar penned his model legislation in 2021, which said students should be banned from receiving class credit for 'lobbying' or 'advocacy' at the federal, state or local level, lawmakers and advocates across the country pounced."</b></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The reporter notes some specific examples of Kurtz's influence. In 2022, for instance, Democratic Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware and GOP Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, according to Lehrer-Smalls, proposed a bipartisan bill that called for increasing grants for civics education. But the bill was "stopped in tracks" when Kurtz labeled it CRT. And<b>&nbsp;Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis "mimicked" Kurtz's messaging by claiming that the bill would "award grants to indoctrinate students with ideologies like critical race theory.</b></span><b>"</b></div><div>
</div><div>READ MORE: 'Censorial filters are unconstitutional': DeSantis' aim to control FL colleges' academic freedom worsens</div><div>Read Asher Lehrer-Small's full report for The 74 at this link.&nbsp;<a href="https://www.the74million.org/article/the-conservative-scholar-who-convinced-gop-lawmakers-civics-conceals-crt/">&nbsp;https://www.the74million.org/article/the-conservative-scholar-who-convinced-gop-lawmakers-civics-conceals-crt/</a></div><div>
</div><div>FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES</div><div>
</div><div>'My heart is broken': Florida teachers ordered to remove, block class libraries or face felony prosecution ›</div><div>'Bless your heart': Twitter scorches Marsha Blackburn for untrue anti-critical race theory 'klansplaining' ›</div><div>Is the white working class ready to trade in some of their whiteness? ›</div><div>RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB</div><div>Ron DeSantis's Attack on Black Studies Is Textbook Proto-Fascism ... ›</div><div>DeSantis defends rejection of African American studies class | The Hill ›</div><div>What Is Critical Race Theory? A Brief History Explained - The New ... ›</div></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">=</font></div></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/tracing-the-roots-of-city-boy-trumps-racist-suburban-dream-nonsense-all-the-way-to-rush-limbaugh"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/tracing-the-roots-of-city-boy-trumps-racist-suburban-dream-nonsense-all-the-way-to-rush-limbaugh</font></a></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">no lnx twt many</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It’s no surprise that the current occupant of the White House is running for reelection on racism. Given his track record, it would be a surprise if he weren’t. Donald Trump’s racist rhetoric has always centered on fearmongering around crime, going back not just to the start of his presidential campaign in 2015, but back to the 1980s. Now he’s at it again, this time with a focus on the suburbs and, in anachronistic language that evokes June Cleaver or Carol Brady, ”suburban housewives.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Based on his rambling, Trump seems to think the suburbs are still filled with white women in aprons making their kids PB&J on Wonder BreadTM with the crusts cut off, dutifully fixing after-work martinis for their husbands. Trump thinks he can scare those white-lady aprons right off with tales of Black and brown criminals descending upon their neighborhoods, and present himself as the white (orange?) savior who will keep their neighborhoods safe by keeping them white. This particular dog whistle is not one Trump invented, of course. Among others, Rush Limbaugh has been blowing it for years.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Let’s start with Trump’s current campaign. On June 30, President Shitgibbon tweeted that he was “studying the AFFH housing regulation that is having a devastating impact” on the suburbs. He also claimed that his opponent, former vice president Joe Biden, wants to make things “much worse”—correction: “MUCH WORSE.” Trump added that he “may END!” the AFFH.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The AFFH refers to the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule, enacted in 2015, under the Obama-Biden administration. Barack Obama’s AFFH rule updated a previous regulation governing discrimination in housing and real estate, which wasn’t doing what it was supposed to do as required by the Fair Housing Act of 1968.</font></div><div>
</div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>What Obama did was mandate that local governments that received federal money to build housing must “identify and address patterns of racial segregation outlawed under the Fair Housing Act of 1968 by creating detailed corrective plans.</b>”<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">&nbsp;In other words, he simply wanted to make sure that cities and towns followed existing law. Radical, I know. To clarify, the AFFH would not destroy, abolish, or even fundamentally alter the nature of housing in the suburbs. It’s just a boogeyman Trump’s using because he thinks it will scare the white ladies of Westchester County and beyond into voting for him.</span></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A few weeks after the initial tweet, on July 23, this appeared on Herr Twitler’s feed.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Less than a week later, on July 29, the White House announced that it was revoking the AFFH</b>.<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">&nbsp;This formal revocation came on top of action Trump took in January 2018, which de facto blocked the rule from taking effect by pushing back its effective start date to at least November 1, 2020. The Trump administration has taken numerous other steps to hamstring the federal government’s efforts to enforce fair housing and desegregate neighborhoods.</span></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The same day the rule’s revocation was made public, Trump followed up with a tweet that, as many have noted, said the quiet part out loud.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">That same day, Trump echoed his tweet in remarks to an audience in Midland, Texas. “There will be no more low-income housing forced into the suburbs,” he declared, adding that “it’s been going on for years. I’ve seen conflict for years. It’s been hell for suburbia.</span>”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Whereas Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Ben Carson and his minions have portrayed the gutting of Obama’s fair housing rules as merely making things simpler by reducing unnecessary paperwork, President Charlottesville just came right out and revealed the real motivation for these changes. He’s vowing to make sure the people he considers undesirable from “low-income housing” projects can’t move in next door—and assuming it’s an effective strategy.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Apparently, Trump convinced himself that his previous tweets were too subtle. He decided that it would help if he named someone who would supposedly help Joe Biden take aim at the suburbs if he was elected. Since President Barack Obama is no longer on the ticket, the Orange Julius Caesar must have figured he needed a substitute of a similar hue.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">When pressed on what he meant by that tweet, Trump, as The New York Times put it, “told on himself.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">“They’re going to, in my opinion, destroy suburbia, And just so you understand, 30 percent-plus of the people living in suburbia are minorities,” Trump rambled. “African-American, Asian-American, Hispanic American—they’re minorities. Thirty percent. The number is even higher, it’s—they say 35, but I like to cut it a little bit lower. You know why? That way I can never get myself in too much trouble with the fake news.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Women of all races have been calling Trump out on this hate-filled nonsense. “I think people may make assumptions,” one white Kentucky stay-at-home mother of three told the Daily Beast. “And I think that’s something the president has done, unfortunately, is make assumptions that all white women are going to support him. And we’re not.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Writer Ally Henny, on the other hand, was explicit in her explanation of why Trump is choosing his words so carefully.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Most recently, perhaps having decided that race-baiting the suburbs from Trump’s own mouth and tweets needed some fleshing out as a campaign strategy, the impeached president and his HUD secretary “wrote” an op-ed piece, placed behind The Wall Street Journal paywall. It’s a bit more subtle, and makes passing mention of Americans of color also living in the suburbs, but this slick product can’t unsay what the racist-in-chief already put out there.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><b style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">As Media Matters laid out, Trump’s racist suburban shtick strongly echoes the work of right-wing author and commentator </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">Stanley Kurtz. In 2012, Kurtz published a book called Spreading the Wealth: How Obama is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities.</span></b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">&nbsp;If you’re wondering whether Kurtz has spent a lifetime studying housing policy, don’t bother. His previous book was 2010’s Radical-in-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism. There is something that is definitely not “expertise in housing policy” running through both tomes.</span></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">Back to 2020. On the morning of June 30, Kurtz published a National Review piece claiming that if Biden won the presidency, he would go beyond the AFFH and adopt a policy advocated by Cory (not “Corey”) Booker; he further asserted that Biden’s true intention is to “abolish the suburbs.</font><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">” Trump’s tweet saying the same went live about 12 hours later. Media Matters’ Bobby Lewis pointed out the connection between Kurtz’s article and the Trump tweet.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Stanley Kurtz leads us to the other right-wing blowhard mentioned at the beginning of this post, namely the man with whom Trump defiled the Medal of Freedom:<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);"> Rush Limbaugh</span></b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">.</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">&nbsp;In doing research for my recent book, I analyzed multiple examples of Limbaugh slamming Obama over his policies regarding the suburbs—most of the time citing Kurtz. A week before Kurtz’s book came out in 2012, Limbaugh started talking about it, quoting from it, and using it to paint President Obama as anti-suburban and, in so many words, anti-white. This went on for the remainder of Obama’s time in office.</span></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">On July 26, 2012, Limbaugh offered lengthy quotations from the Kurtz book, which regaled its readers with lies about Obama’s “lifelong hostility to the suburbs.” The 44th president apparently had it in for suburb dwellers, whom he supposedly believed “were just greedy racists who didn’t want to share their tax money with the urban poor.” We know exactly which group of people Limbaugh means when he talks about “the suburbs,” and who he means when he talks about “the urban poor.” This is the very same dog whistle Trump is blowing now, eight years later, when he’s fighting to keep the presidency.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Limbaugh did this over and over again. The next day he claimed that suburbanites were Obama’s “real enemies,” and six days after that, Limbaugh predicted that the first Black president would “abolish” the suburbs</b>. In September 2013, the racist host said that President Obama would “destroy the suburbs,” and in July 2014, Limbaugh spouted off about “Obama’s war on the suburbs”—during a segment where he specifically went after the AFFH rule Trump so desperately hates, which was then under consideration. In a July 2015 master class on race-baiting, the host tied his suburbia-based attacks on Obama to “forced busing,” as well as to “attacks on the South” and “attacks on the Confederate flag.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">This went on and on. In addition to the examples above, Limbaugh threw out similar suburban dog whistles during the Obama presidency here, here, here, here, here, and here—each “here” represents a different day’s broadcast. And of course, Limbaugh is still at it in 2020. He even blew his dog whistle during his reaction to Rep. John Lewis’s funeral.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Thanks to reporting from New York Magazine’s Gabriel Sherman, we know that Trump got many of the specific topics for his race-baiting rhetoric from talk radio. In the run-up to the 2016 campaign, onetime top Trump aide Sam Nunberg did a “deep dive into talk radio</b>”—listening for “thousands of hours” and then giving “reports” to Trump on what was really motivating the right-wing base. Limbaugh has the largest audience in talk radio, and has for as long as such ratings have been measured. Trump’s recent dog whistles on the suburbs and Biden are wholly unoriginal: They’re virtually a carbon copy of Limbaugh’s language on the suburbs and Obama—language which itself was cribbed from Stanley Kurtz.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">When it comes to the suburbs, and other policies that relate to race and economics more broadly, Limbaugh and Trump have sought to win over middle- and working-class white Americans by falsely claiming that former President Obama and future President Biden want nothing more than to take away what they have earned—whether it’s money or safe neighborhoods—and give it to Black and Latino Americans who supposedly don’t deserve it.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Playing to racial anxieties and ginning up fear and hatred are the only ways the Limbaugh-Trump Republican Party can get the support of those voters, given that GOP policies actively work against their economic interests while favoring those of the real elites—the top 1%.</b>&nbsp;To defeat Trump and the Republican Party made in his image, Democrats must help these voters recognize that Republicans are spewing hate in order to keep white Americans and Americans of color from coming together on the basis of shared interests.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">One way to do so is to point out what the Trump party actually does when it gains power. The Trump presidency’s singular legislative accomplishment is a multibillion dollar tax giveaway to millionaires and billionaires, that does little to nothing for the average American of any race. The other major legislative effort undertaken by Trump & Co. was repealing the Affordable Care Act, which expanded coverage to tens of millions of Americans. Thankfully, that effort failed, but it too would have mostly helped the wealthy by giving them a tax cut, and harmed the folks—again, Americans of every race—earning around or just below the national median income who had gained coverage.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Republicans can’t sell their economic policies to middle- and working-class white voters, so all they have left to peddle is hate. That’s why Trump is now trying to scare white suburbanites with tall tales about poor people moving in from cities, or, as he did just a few days ago, revisiting some of his worst rhetoric from the 2016 campaign about immigrants and crime.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">When thinking about where Trump comes from, most people associate him with the city. Trump Tower, his erstwhile home, sits in midtown Manhattan. He claims to have “built” skyscrapers, but mostly he just got paid to place his name on other people’s buildings.&nbsp;<b>However, he grew up in 1950s Jamaica Estates, a neighborhood that, although it was located in Queens, New York City, much more resembled a wealthy suburban enclave. It was, according to a New York Times article, “an exclusive and nearly all-white place, resistant to outsiders and largely impenetrable to minorities.” Trump himself described it as “safe” and “an oasis” when compared to other parts of Queens, which he viewed as “rough.”</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This mindset—the idea of a suburban environment as a place where white people with enough money to escape the inner city’s poor neighborhoods of color, as well as enough power to keep non-whites from moving in—is at the core of Trump’s race-baiting on the suburbs. Trump understands, and hopes to exploit in this year’s election the very racist fears that once motivated the white flight from American cities in the 1950s and ‘60s. So does Rush Limbaugh, whose racist rhetoric throughout the Obama presidency laid out the blueprint that Trump is now using to attack Joe Biden.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Two months before Election Day, it appears that the white suburban women who elected Trump in 2016 (and to whom Trump thinks this hate-filled nonsense will appeal) are not responding to his dog whistle, at least not in large enough numbers to reelect him. Perhaps they’ve evolved in terms of their fears and prejudices. Or perhaps they’ve simply come to realize that The Man Who Lost The Popular Vote poses a far greater danger because of his manifest unfitness to lead our country.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Making sure they remember that and come out to vote for the Biden-Harris ticket is one thing we can all help to make happen.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ian Reifowitz is the author of The Tribalization of Politics: How Rush Limbaugh’s Race-Baiting Rhetoric on the Obama Presidency Paved the Way for Trump (Foreword by Markos Moulitsas)</font></div></div><div><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">=</font></p></div></div><div><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;=</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><a href="http://www.alternet.org/education/right-wing-billionaires-are-funding-cynical-plot-destroy-dissent-and-protest-colleges" style="text-decoration: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">http://www.alternet.org/education/right-wing-billionaires-are-funding-cynical-plot-destroy-dissent-and-protest-colleges</a></font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As&nbsp;s far-right speakers face loud student opposition at their university speaking gigs,&nbsp;<b>conservative lawmakers in several states are introducing legislation that cracks down on protesters. As</b><b>&nbsp;<a href="http://www.unkochmycampus.org/mar-1-2017-protest-ban-sold-as-free-speech/" style="text-decoration: none; outline: none;">uncovered</a>&nbsp;by UnKoch My Campus’ Ralph Wilson, numerous states have borrowed their so-called “campus free speech” bills from the rightwing Goldwater Institute, which is funded by conservative plutocrats including Charles Koch and the Mercer family.</b></font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The intent of these bills isn’t to protect student speech; it’s actually to suppress it in favor of guest speakers who, at times, support white nationalism, LGBTQ discrimination and other hateful worldviews. By funding the Phoenix-based Goldwater Institute, wealthy conservatives are enabling the promotion of hate speech while stifling student dissent. Whether or not Koch, for example, agrees with the hate speech he indirectly sponsors, he certainly benefits from a more friendly academic environment for far-right ideologues who often deny climate change and praise his extreme brand of tax- and regulation-free capitalism.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The Goldwater Institute’s model bill allegedly ensures “the fullest degree of…free expression,” but it explicitly&nbsp;<a href="https://goldwater-media.s3.amazonaws.com/cms_page_media/2017/1/30/Campus%20Free%20Speech%20Paper.pdf#page=20" style="text-decoration: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">states</a>&nbsp;that “protests and demonstrations that infringe upon the rights of others to engage in or listen to expressive activity shall not be permitted and shall be subject to sanction.”</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>It goes on to say, “Any student who has twice been found responsible for infringing the expressive rights of others will be suspended for a minimum of one year, or expelled.”</b></font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Under this code, imagine that a student protests a climate change denier and gets a brief suspension. Then the College Republicans group brings in a full-on white nationalist. Will this student do what she thinks is right and protest a racist who’s given a platform at a respected university, or stay home because she's risking expulsion? This campus "free speech” legislation is essentially an attack on student speech and an elevation of ultra-conservative ideas that many people in university communities think have no place in American society.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“These laws would create a chilling effect on students who reject the idea that white supremacists or climate deniers are simply representing an ‘opposing viewpoint’ that should be tolerated, and who are rightfully relying on their first amendment freedoms to stop the rise of fascism and prevent global climate catastrophe,” Wilson, UnKoch’s senior researcher, told AlterNet. The group has been conducting research into Charles Koch’s considerable&nbsp;<a href="http://www.alternet.org/investigations/inside-charles-kochs-plot-hijack-universities-across-america" style="text-decoration: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">ideological donations</a>&nbsp;to higher education, most of which goes toward free-market programs.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; font-size: small; line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Charles Koch Foundation representatives say that conservative views are underrepresented in higher education, and the foundation’s massive university donations—which fund free-market academic centers, professorships, grad students and lecture series—are necessary for academic freedom. This view is shared by other conservative billionaires and higher ed donors including </span><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Education Secretary Betsy DeVos,</b> <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">who recently&nbsp;<a href="https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/02/24/education-secretary-criticizes-professors-telling-students-what-think" style="text-decoration: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">said</a>&nbsp;to the crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference, “The education establishment [tells you] what to think…the real threat is silencing the First Amendment rights of people with whom you disagree.”</span></font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">What the Kochs and their allies really want, by amplifying the voices of far-right professors and guest speakers, is to steer society towards a tax- and regulation-free plutocracy. Charles and David Koch, who together are worth nearly $97 billion, have been working toward this goal for over 40 years.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">In 2014, Virginia passed the nation’s first&nbsp;<a href="http://lis.virginia.gov/cgi-bin/legp604.exe?141+ful+HB258" style="text-decoration: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">law</a>&nbsp;banning so-called “free speech zones,” which restrict protected speech to designated areas often far away from events that students want to protest. The following year, Missouri enacted a&nbsp;<a href="http://www.senate.mo.gov/15info/BTS_Web/Bill.aspx?SessionType=R&BillID=165" style="text-decoration: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">Campus Free Expression Act</a>&nbsp;forbidding “free speech zones” without imposing punitive measures.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>But while more recent legislation bans free speech zones as well, it also restricts student free speech in scenarios where, lawmakers claim, free speech is protected.</b></font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The protest crackdown</font></strong></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Legislators in some states including Illinois and Tennessee have introduced bills in 2017 that explicitly mention sanctions on student protesters.&nbsp;<a href="http://www.ilga.gov/legislation/fulltext.asp?DocName=&SessionId=91&GA=100&DocTypeId=HB&DocNum=2939&GAID=14&LegID=104448&SpecSess=&Session=" style="text-decoration: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">Illinois’ bill</a>, proposed by two Republicans, lifts this language, and additional passages, nearly verbatim from the Goldwater model. Also sponsored by Republicans, the&nbsp;<a href="http://www.capitol.tn.gov/Bills/110/Bill/HB0739.pdf" style="text-decoration: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">bill</a>&nbsp;in Tennessee—nicknamed the <b>“Milo Bill” </b>after an event at the University of California at Berkeley featuring the racist “alt-right” icon Milo Yiannopolous was canceled due to protests—directs universities to enact free speech policies that include “sanctions for anyone under the jurisdiction of the institution who interferes with the free expression of others,” and it <b>gives faculty “the right to regulate class speech.”</b></font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">In North Carolina, Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Forest intends to work with legislators on a&nbsp;<a href="http://ltgov.nc.gov/lt-governor-dan-forest-push-campus-free-speech" style="text-decoration: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">Restore Campus Free Speech Act</a>, which would create <b>“a discipline policy that would punish students who shout down visiting speakers or deprive others of their right to free expression, a tactic commonly known as the ‘hecklers’ veto.'"</b></font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Last year, Forest floated&nbsp;<a href="http://www.alternet.org/activism/how-campus-free-expression-act-north-carolina-actually-aims-suppress-student-speech" style="text-decoration: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">a measure</a>&nbsp;calling on the University of North Carolina’s board of governors to create a system-wide policy that would<b> impose harsh penalties, including expulsion, on students, staff and faculty members who disrupt classes, public meetings or events. </b>The Koch-funded Generation Opportunity&nbsp;<a href="https://generationopportunity.org/press-release/new-legislation-protecting-free-speech-on-unc-campuses-to-be-introduced-this-month/" style="text-decoration: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">lauded</a>&nbsp;the effort at the time. Forest has said that yelling at a guest speaker “has never been free speech,” and he’s called<b>&nbsp;campus protest methods “terrorist tactics.” No one introduced a free speech bill that year.</b></font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; font-size: small; line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Other proposed laws, like&nbsp;<a href="http://www.legis.nd.gov/assembly/65-2017/documents/17-0328-03000.pdf" style="text-decoration: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">North Dakota’s</a>, which was introduced by six Republicans, omit sanctions provisions but state that a university may restrict student speech if it blocks entrances to buildings, obstructs traffic or interferes with events. </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Much of the North Dakota bill comes directly from the text of the Goldwater model legislation. A large group of most Republican legislators in Virginia has a&nbsp;</span><a href="http://lis.virginia.gov/cgi-bin/legp604.exe?171+ful+HR431+hil" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); text-decoration: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">new bill</a><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">&nbsp;in play that includes much of the Goldwater language but stays away from restrictions on students.</span></font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; font-size: small; line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Additional campus free speech bills have been introduced this year in&nbsp;<a href="http://leg.colorado.gov/sites/default/files/documents/2017A/bills/2017A_062_ren.pdf" style="text-decoration: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">Colorado</a>&nbsp;(sponsored by two Republicans and one Democrat) and&nbsp;<a href="http://le.utah.gov/_{2017/bills/static/HB0054.html}" style="text-decoration: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">Utah</a>&nbsp;(sponsored by 14 Republican state representatives).&nbsp;<a href="http://floridapolitics.com/archives/232665-florida-legislate-free-speech-college-campuses" style="text-decoration: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">Florida</a>&nbsp;could be next</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">.&nbsp;</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b>Gov. Scott Walker</b> of Wisconsin has a "free speech" provision in his proposed&nbsp;<a href="http://host.madison.com/wsj/news/local/education/university/scott-walker-s-budget-would-turn-university-of-wisconsin-free/article_f8a221ef-5bd0-558f-b3c2-fc83ab7568fe.html" style="text-decoration: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">budget</a>.</span></font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Big money driving campus 'free speech’ efforts</font></strong></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">One of the model bill’s authors,&nbsp;<b>Stanley Kurtz, is a longtime fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based Ethics and Public Policy Center</b>, which applies “the <b>Judeo-Christian moral tradition </b>to critical issues of public policy,” according to its website. The center has received millions of dollars in donations from the foundations of the conservative Bradley, Scaife, Olin and Earhart families, as well as hundreds of thousands from two vehicles for wealthy right-wing donors, Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch</b> are responsible for more than $9 million in contributions to the two groups from 2006 to 2015, according to the website Conservative Transparency and additional research by this author. Much of the $6.3 million that went to Donors Trust came in 2015. A now-defunct Koch nonprofit, the Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation, donated $190,000 to the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and the Charles Koch Foundation has given over $9,000.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The Goldwater Institute’s James Manley, senior attorney, and Jonathan Butcher,</b>&nbsp;education director, also co-authored the “campus free speech” model legislation. The institute took in nearly $2.5 million from Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund from 2002-2015, according Conservative Transparency and additional research. The Charles Koch Foundation has pitched in $75,000. Manley formerly worked at the Mountain States Legal Foundation, which has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the two Donors funds. Butcher was a research assistant at the heavily Koch-funded Heritage Foundation from 2002 to 2006.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; font-size: small; line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Says Wilson, “These bills take Koch's academic presence to the next level, creating protected space to reveal the white supremacist roots of Koch's free market crusade, like&nbsp;<b style="">Koch's close friend and white nationalist Charles Murray who has taken to campuses to espouse the genetic superiority of white males.”</b></font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Another Koch-funded think tank, the American Enterprise Institute, reportedly has student groups at nearly 80 colleges and universities. These groups bring in AEI fellows like the<b>&nbsp;eugenicist Murray&nbsp;</b>to speak on their campuses. Recently, Murray attempted to give a lecture at Middlebury College in Vermont but was stymied by vociferous protests. He had to end his speech early, and he and a liberal professor were attacked on their way out.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Students at UC Berkeley and area residents protested Yiannopoulos, whom the College Republicans had invited to speak. The protests led to fires, vandalism, and reportedly, fights. Until recently, Yiannopoulos was an editor at Breitbart News, known as the online “platform of the alt-right,” which happens to be funded by Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah, the far-right mega-donors who are major Donald Trump backers and whose family foundation has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Goldwater Institute. The younger Mercer was even a member of Trump’s transition team. Violence against a speaker, a professor or an onlooker is certainly unacceptable. So is inviting a white supremacist to speak at an institution of higher learning, and so is preventing students and faculty from protesting such a speaker.&nbsp;</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Plenty of right-wing billionaires likely don’t agree with white nationalist ideas, and by funding these so-called campus free speech bills they’re trying to advance free-market principles. But regardless of motivation, this campus "free speech" movement is spreading the hate of white nationalism, the racist “alt-right,” Islamophobia and homophobia—not to mention climate change denial and economic policies that benefit only the very wealthy—on campuses filled with young students. Conservative, corporate millionaires and billionaires are at fault.</font></p></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>howard </b>kurtz?</font></div><div><p class="first-text" style="box-sizing: inherit; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; margin: 0px auto 1.25rem; word-break: break-word; padding: 0px; font-size: 17px; line-height: 32px; max-width: 636px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman">... In 2004, I was a reporter for the&nbsp;<em style="box-sizing: inherit; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; line-height: inherit;">Chicago Tribune</em>, covering television. In January of that year, I began looking into a story about <b>political donations made by reporters, editors, anchors, executives and other employees at media companies.</b></font></p><p style="box-sizing: inherit; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; margin: 0px auto 1.25rem; word-break: break-word; padding: 0px; font-size: 17px; line-height: 32px; max-width: 636px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman">This is, of course, an evergreen story. All the information you need is available online at databases of Federal Election Commission records. Just plug "Fox News," or "NBC," or "Tribune Company" into the Employer field, and you get a list of names of employees of those firms who've donated to various candidates or political committees. Scan the list for names of editorial employees—as opposed to, say, an advertising sales staffer—and you have yourself a story about reporters crossing lines into political advocacy. Any reporter with an internet connection can do it at any time.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: inherit; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; margin: 0px auto 1.25rem; word-break: break-word; padding: 0px; font-size: 17px; line-height: 32px; max-width: 636px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman">So I was doing it. And I came up with a few names, including someone called <b>Bert Solivan, who described himself on FEC records as a vice president for news information at Fox News Channel</b> and general manager of Foxnews.com. Solivan had made two $240 donations to the National Republican Senatorial Committee. (Fox News' Neil Cavuto and Griff Jenkins, who was Oliver North's producer at the time, had also donated to Republicans. There were names from a bunch of other outlets, as well.)</font></p><div class="js_ad-mobile-dynamic js_ad-dynamic" style="box-sizing: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); font-size: 17px; line-height: 32px; box-sizing: inherit; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; margin: 0px auto 1.25rem; word-break: break-word; padding: 0px; max-width: 636px;"><font face="Times New Roman">I called Bert Solivan to ask him why, as someone who appeared to exercise editorial control over the "news information" that Fox News purveyed, he felt it was appropriate to throw in with the Republican Party in the run-up to a presidential election campaign. The call was returned by Irena Briganti, a Fox News flack&nbsp;<a href="http://gawker.com/fox-news-flack-irena-briganti-tried-to-scrub-her-bad-on-514395959" x-inset="1" style="box-sizing: inherit; text-decoration: none; line-height: inherit;">who can be exceedingly unpleasant when she wants to</a>. She often wants to.</font></p><aside class="referenced-wide referenced-fullwidth js_inset tmpl_referencedGroupFullWidth clearfix core-decorated-inset" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; box-sizing: inherit; clear: both; float: none; margin: 0px auto 0.45rem; padding: 0px; max-width: 636px;"><div class="container" style="box-sizing: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border-top: 0px solid rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.298039); border-bottom: 0px solid rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.298039); position: relative;"><div class="referenced-item " data-inset-id="1557065018" style="box-sizing: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; padding: 0px;"><a href="http://gawker.com/fox-news-flack-irena-briganti-tried-to-scrub-her-bad-on-514395959" target="blank" style="box-sizing: inherit; text-decoration: none; line-height: inherit;"><font color="#000000" face="Times New Roman"><source class="ls-small-media-source" data-srcset="https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--Z-g-fP_h--/18rc3odbo8n1rjpg.jpg" media="(max-width: 599px)" sizes="141px" srcset="https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--Z-g-fP_h--/18rc3odbo8n1rjpg.jpg" style="box-sizing: inherit;"><source data-srcset="https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--Z-g-fP_h--/18rc3odbo8n1rjpg.jpg" media="(max-width: 1487px)" sizes="141px" srcset="https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--Z-g-fP_h--/18rc3odbo8n1rjpg.jpg" style="box-sizing: inherit;"><source data-srcset="https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--Z-g-fP_h--/18rc3odbo8n1rjpg.jpg" sizes="141px" srcset="https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--Z-g-fP_h--/18rc3odbo8n1rjpg.jpg" style="box-sizing: inherit;"><img src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACH5BAEKAAEALAAAAAABAAEAAAICTAEAOw" class="ls-lazy-image-tag lazyautosizes lazyloaded" data-sizes="auto" data-mp4-src="https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--Z-g-fP_h--/18rc3odbo8n1rjpg.jpg" data-webm-src="https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--Z-g-fP_h--/18rc3odbo8n1rjpg.jpg" data-poster-src="https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--Z-g-fP_h--/18rc3odbo8n1rjpg.jpg" data-chomp-id="18rc3odbo8n1rjpg" data-format="JPG" sizes="141px" style="box-sizing: inherit; max-width: 100%; height: auto; display: inline-block; vertical-align: middle; border: none; overflow: hidden; position: absolute; top: 0px; bottom: 0px; left: 0px; right: 0px; width: 141.094px; background: none;" /></source></source></source></font></a><h6 class="headline" style="box-sizing: inherit; margin: -3px 0px 3px; font-size: 20px; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; word-break: break-word; max-width: 636px;"><span class="full-headline" style="box-sizing: inherit; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility;"><a href="http://gawker.com/fox-news-flack-irena-briganti-tried-to-scrub-her-bad-on-514395959" target="blank" style="box-sizing: inherit; text-decoration: none; line-height: inherit; margin-top: 0px;"><font face="Times New Roman">Fox News Flack Irena Briganti Tried to Scrub Her Bad Online Reputation</font></a></span></h6><p class="text small-offset-4 medium-offset-3 " style="box-sizing: inherit; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; margin: 0px auto 3px; word-break: break-word; padding: 0px; font-size: 15px; line-height: 25px; max-width: 636px;"><span class="referenced-item-excerpt hide-for-small" style="box-sizing: inherit; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; display: inherit !important;"><font face="Times New Roman">In New York magazine this week, Graeme Wood explores the world of paid online "reputation…</font></span><a href="http://gawker.com/fox-news-flack-irena-briganti-tried-to-scrub-her-bad-on-514395959" class="js_readmore readmore-referenced" target="blank" style="box-sizing: inherit; text-decoration: none; line-height: inherit; display: block; margin-top: 2px;"><font color="#000000" face="Times New Roman">Read more</font></a></p></div></div></aside><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); font-size: 17px; line-height: 32px; box-sizing: inherit; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; margin: 0px auto 1.25rem; word-break: break-word; padding: 0px; max-width: 636px;"><font face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Briganti insisted to me, emphatically, that Solivan was not an editorial employee. His job, she said, was entirely technical in nature. He ran information systems.</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> He had zero impact on Fox News' newsgathering. He was free to donate as he pleased, she said, and it would be unfair to criticize him, or Fox News, for his political affiliations. In the course of our conversation, in order to rebut Briganti's accusation that I was singling out Fox News for criticism, I told her about the various other editorial employees at other news outlets that I had identified as donors.</span></font></p><div class="ad-promotions-container js_ad-promotion row ad-wide ad-top js_ad-promotion-mobile" data-mobile="true" style="box-sizing: inherit; margin: 0px auto; padding: 0px; width: 800px; max-width: 63rem; position: relative; z-index: 97;"><div class="ad-unit js_ad-unit ad-mobile ad-promotion js_ad-promotion" style="background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; box-sizing: inherit; margin: 0px -18px; padding: 0px; text-align: center;"><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); font-size: 17px; line-height: 32px; text-align: left; box-sizing: inherit; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; margin: 0px auto 1.25rem; word-break: break-word; padding: 0px; max-width: 636px;"><font face="Times New Roman">I argued with Briganti for quite a while about Solivan. My position, as I recall it, was that irrespective of her claims about his actual duties, the fact that someone with the title of "vice president for news information" at a cable news outlet was donating to political campaigns was a story—or part of a larger one about donations from news staffers—and that I intended to write it. As for Jenkins and Cavuto, I didn't really care. They were obviously partisan Republicans on the air and off.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); font-size: 17px; line-height: 32px; text-align: left; box-sizing: inherit; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; margin: 0px auto 1.25rem; word-break: break-word; padding: 0px; max-width: 636px;"><font face="Times New Roman">So I continued to reach out to people at the other news outlets I had turned up. A few days later—in my recollection it was two days after my conversation with Briganti, but this is a while ago—I saw this headline on a story by the&nbsp;<em style="box-sizing: inherit; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; line-height: inherit;">Washington Post</em>'s <b>Howard Kurtz:</b> "<a href="http://politicalwire.com/archives/2004/01/18/some_journalists_give_to_campaigns.html" rel="noopener" target="blank" style="box-sizing: inherit; text-decoration: none; line-height: inherit;">Journalists Not Loath to Donate To Politicians; Media Companies' Policies Vary Widely</a>".</font></p><blockquote style="background-color: rgb(245, 245, 245); font-size: 17px; line-height: 32px; box-sizing: inherit; margin: 0px auto 1.25rem; border-top: 0px; border-right: 0px; border-bottom: 0px; border-left: none; padding: 1.12rem; max-width: 636px; clear: both; overflow: visible; border-radius: 3px;"><p style="text-align: left; box-sizing: inherit; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; margin: 0px auto; word-break: break-word; padding: 0px; max-width: 636px;"><font face="Times New Roman">More than 100 journalists and executives at major media companies, from NBC's top executive to a Fox News anchor to reporters or editors for the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, USA Today, CBS and ABC, have made political contributions in recent years.</font></p></blockquote><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); font-size: 17px; line-height: 32px; text-align: left; box-sizing: inherit; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; margin: 0px auto 1.25rem; word-break: break-word; padding: 0px; max-width: 636px;"><font face="Times New Roman">Like I said, the story was available to any reporter with an internet connection. There was no particular time peg for it. Maybe Kurtz just had the same idea at precisely the same time that I did. Or maybe someone gave him the idea. I don't know.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); font-size: 17px; line-height: 32px; text-align: left; box-sizing: inherit; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; margin: 0px auto 1.25rem; word-break: break-word; padding: 0px; max-width: 636px;"><font face="Times New Roman">There was one curious thing about<b> Kurtz</b>'s story, though: The name Bert Solivan didn't appear in it. Cavuto did, as did Jenkins. The last sentence of the story—<a href="http://www.caclean.org/problem/wapost_2004-01-18.php" rel="noopener" target="blank" style="box-sizing: inherit; text-decoration: none; line-height: inherit;">which is preserved online here</a>—read, "Many of the other media employees in the FEC records worked in business or technical jobs or are no longer employed by those outlets." Kurtz must have concluded that Solivan's was, as Briganti surely told him, a "technical job."</font></p><div class="js_ad-mobile-dynamic js_ad-dynamic" style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; box-sizing: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); text-align: left; box-sizing: inherit; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; margin: 0px auto 1.25rem; word-break: break-word; padding: 0px; font-size: 17px; line-height: 32px; max-width: 636px;"><font face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">I dropped my story. I didn't see much of a point in replicating Kurtz's piece with the addition of one employee that Fox claimed worked in a technical capacity. About a year-and-a-half later, Bert Solivan got a promotion at Fox News. The press release announcing it&nbsp;<a href="http://www.mediabistro.com/tvnewser/foxnews-com-gm-bert-solivan-named-evp-of-fox-interactive-media_b5895" rel="noopener" target="blank" style="box-sizing: inherit; text-decoration: none; line-height: inherit;">said this about his previous duties as vice president for news information</a>: </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">"Solivan’s other responsibilities included overseeing FOX News’ 24-hour news research department and its on-air fact writing operations</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">." That was, of course, directly at odds with Briganti's claims to me. "On-air fact writing" included, I was later told, the news ticker or "crawl" at the bottom of the screen, as well as information presented in graphics and captions. (I&nbsp;</span><a href="http://www.referencetone.com/2005/07/truth-sometimes-outs-not-that-it.html" rel="noopener" target="blank" style="box-sizing: inherit; text-decoration: none; line-height: inherit; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">wrote about it at the time</a><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">&nbsp;on my blog.)</span></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); text-align: left; box-sizing: inherit; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; margin: 0px auto 1.25rem; word-break: break-word; padding: 0px; font-size: 17px; line-height: 32px; max-width: 636px;"><font face="Times New Roman">So as it turns out, I had been preparing a story indicating that the man responsible for the factual information in all of Fox News' graphics and news ticker was a GOP donor. I had called Briganti about it, and in doing so relayed to her the names of several other reporters who had made similar donations. Briganti had demonstrated a strong desire to keep Solivan's name out of my story. Roughly two days later, the&nbsp;<em style="box-sizing: inherit; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; line-height: inherit;">Washington Post</em>&nbsp;published a story by Howard Kurtz featuring all of the names I had relayed to Briganti—but no Bert Solivan.</font></p><p style="text-align: left; box-sizing: inherit; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; margin: 0px auto 1.25rem; word-break: break-word; padding: 0px; font-size: 17px; line-height: 32px; max-width: 636px;"><font face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">A few months after his story about political donations, Kurtz wrote a&nbsp;<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A41604-2004Jul10.html" rel="noopener" target="blank" style="box-sizing: inherit; text-decoration: none; line-height: inherit;">negative review</a>&nbsp;of Robert Greenwald's anti-Roger Ailes film&nbsp;<em style="box-sizing: inherit; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; line-height: inherit;">Outfoxed.</em></span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">&nbsp;He also wrote a related item, quoting Briganti,&nbsp;</span><a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A41582-2004Jul10.html" rel="noopener" target="blank" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: inherit; text-decoration: none; line-height: inherit;">accusing the&nbsp;<em style="box-sizing: inherit; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; line-height: inherit;">New York Times Magazine</em></a><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">&nbsp;of "ambushing" Fox News in a feature about the movie. More recently, Ailes turned to Kurtz for an&nbsp;</span><a href="http://gawker.com/5809062/roger-ailes-wants-you-to-throw-a-rock-through-his-window" x-inset="1" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: inherit; text-decoration: none; line-height: inherit;">exclusive interview in June 2011</a><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">&nbsp;after two damaging stories in&nbsp;</span><a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/how-roger-ailes-built-the-fox-news-fear-factory-20110525" rel="noopener" target="blank" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: inherit; text-decoration: none; line-height: inherit;"><em style="box-sizing: inherit; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; line-height: inherit;">Rolling Stone</em></a><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">&nbsp;and&nbsp;</span><a href="http://nymag.com/news/media/roger-ailes-fox-news-2011-5/" rel="noopener" target="blank" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: inherit; text-decoration: none; line-height: inherit;"><em style="box-sizing: inherit; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; line-height: inherit;">New York</em>&nbsp;magazine</a><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">&nbsp;portrayed him as a paranoid lunatic. A few months after that, Kurtz wrote an&nbsp;</span><a href="http://gawker.com/5843864/meet-the-new-moderate-fox-news-channel" x-inset="1" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: inherit; text-decoration: none; line-height: inherit;">influential story</a><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">&nbsp;claiming that Fox News had become more "moderate" under Ailes' strategic guidance. Several months after that, a "senior Fox News executive"&nbsp;</span><a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/05/22/ailes-regrets-scum-attack-on-nyt.html" rel="noopener" target="blank" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: inherit; text-decoration: none; line-height: inherit;">turned to Kurtz to express "regret"</a><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">&nbsp;after (the now moderate!) Ailes called the&nbsp;</span><em style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: inherit; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; line-height: inherit;">New York Times</em><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">&nbsp;"lying scum." Kurtz transmitted the apology, as well as Ailes' "respect" for&nbsp;</span><em style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: inherit; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; line-height: inherit;">Times</em><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">&nbsp;editor Jill Abramson, but did not note that Ailes had called her "lying scum"&nbsp;</span><a href="http://gawker.com/5913933/in-calling-new-york-times-lying-scum-roger-ailes-tells-absolute-100-total-bald+faced-lie" x-inset="1" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: inherit; text-decoration: none; line-height: inherit;">in the course of telling a bald-faced lie himself</a><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">.</span></font></p><aside class="referenced-wide referenced-fullwidth js_inset tmpl_referencedGroupFullWidth clearfix core-decorated-inset" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: inherit; clear: both; float: none; margin: 0px auto 0.45rem; padding: 0px; max-width: 636px; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px;"><div class="container" style="box-sizing: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border-top: 0px solid rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.298039); border-bottom: 0px solid rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.298039); position: relative;"><div class="referenced-item " data-inset-id="1558201729" style="box-sizing: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; padding: 0px;"><a href="http://gawker.com/5809062/roger-ailes-wants-you-to-throw-a-rock-through-his-window" target="blank" style="box-sizing: inherit; text-decoration: none; line-height: inherit;"><font color="#000000" face="Times New Roman"><source class="ls-small-media-source" data-srcset="https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--9dNPXPlL--/18k1ucjser9hgjpg.jpg" media="(max-width: 599px)" sizes="141px" srcset="https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--9dNPXPlL--/18k1ucjser9hgjpg.jpg" style="box-sizing: inherit;"><source data-srcset="https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--9dNPXPlL--/18k1ucjser9hgjpg.jpg" media="(max-width: 1487px)" sizes="141px" srcset="https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--9dNPXPlL--/18k1ucjser9hgjpg.jpg" style="box-sizing: inherit;"><source data-srcset="https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--9dNPXPlL--/18k1ucjser9hgjpg.jpg" sizes="141px" srcset="https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--9dNPXPlL--/18k1ucjser9hgjpg.jpg" style="box-sizing: inherit;"><img src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACH5BAEKAAEALAAAAAABAAEAAAICTAEAOw" class="ls-lazy-image-tag lazyautosizes lazyloaded" data-sizes="auto" data-mp4-src="https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--9dNPXPlL--/18k1ucjser9hgjpg.jpg" data-webm-src="https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--9dNPXPlL--/18k1ucjser9hgjpg.jpg" data-poster-src="https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--9dNPXPlL--/18k1ucjser9hgjpg.jpg" data-chomp-id="18k1ucjser9hgjpg" data-format="JPG" sizes="141px" style="text-align: left; box-sizing: inherit; max-width: 100%; height: auto; display: inline-block; vertical-align: middle; border: none; overflow: hidden; position: absolute; top: 0px; bottom: 0px; left: 0px; right: 0px; width: 141.094px; background: none;" /></source></source></source></font></a><h6 class="headline" style="text-align: left; box-sizing: inherit; margin: -3px 0px 3px; font-size: 20px; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; word-break: break-word; max-width: 636px;"><span class="full-headline" style="box-sizing: inherit; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility;"><a href="http://gawker.com/5809062/roger-ailes-wants-you-to-throw-a-rock-through-his-window" target="blank" style="box-sizing: inherit; text-decoration: none; line-height: inherit; margin-top: 0px;"><font face="Times New Roman">Roger Ailes Wants You to Throw a Rock Through His Window</font></a></span></h6><p class="text small-offset-4 medium-offset-3 " style="box-sizing: inherit; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; margin: 0px auto 3px; word-break: break-word; padding: 0px; font-size: 15px; line-height: 25px; max-width: 636px;"><span class="referenced-item-excerpt hide-for-small" style="text-align: left; box-sizing: inherit; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; display: inherit !important;"><font face="Times New Roman">Roger Ailes, the totally paranoid chairman of Fox News, called up Newsweek/The Daily Beast's…</font></span><a href="http://gawker.com/5809062/roger-ailes-wants-you-to-throw-a-rock-through-his-window" class="js_readmore readmore-referenced" target="blank" style="text-align: left; box-sizing: inherit; text-decoration: none; line-height: inherit; display: block; margin-top: 2px;"><font color="#000000" face="Times New Roman">Read more</font></a></p></div></div></aside><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); text-align: left; box-sizing: inherit; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; margin: 0px auto 1.25rem; word-break: break-word; padding: 0px; font-size: 17px; line-height: 32px; max-width: 636px;"><font face="Times New Roman">Anyway,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2013/06/20/media-reporter-kurtz-to-leave-cnn-for-fox-news/" rel="noopener" target="blank" style="box-sizing: inherit; text-decoration: none; line-height: inherit;">Fox News just hired Howard Kurtz</a>&nbsp;to host a Sunday morning show about the media.</font></p></div><div style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 16px; line-height: 0; text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 0;"><div style=""><div id="content-header" style="line-height: 18.0161px;"><h1 class="title" style="text-align: left; line-height: 1.15em; margin-top: 10px; margin-bottom: 2px; font-weight: normal;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">National Association of Scholars</font></h1><h1 class="title" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 1.15em; margin-top: 10px; margin-bottom: 2px; font-weight: normal;"><div id="content-header" style="font-size: medium; line-height: 18.0161px;"><div id="content-area" style="font-size: medium; line-height: 18.0161px;"><div id="node-18893" class="node sticky node-type-right-wing-group-profile"><div class="node-inner"><div class="content" style="border-top-width: 1px; border-top-style: solid; border-top-color: rgb(152, 152, 152);"><p style="margin: 1em 0px;" /><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" line-height="line-height" px="px"><font face="Times New Roman">221 Witherspoon Street, Second Floor</font></span></div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" /><div style="text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="line-height: 18.0161px;">Princeton, New Jersey 08542-3215&nbsp;</span></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></div><div style="text-align: left; text-decoration: none;"><a href="http://www.nas.org/" target="blank" style="text-decoration: none;" /><a href="http://www.nas.org/" target="blank" style="line-height: 18.0161px; text-decoration: none;">www.nas.org</a></div><p style="margin: 1em 0px;" /><div style="text-align: left;"><strong style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" line-height="line-height" px="px">Founded</strong><span style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" line-height="line-height" px="px">: 1985</span></div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" /><div style="text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong style="line-height: 18.0161px;">President</strong><span style="line-height: 18.0161px;">:&nbsp;</span><b style="line-height: 18.0161px;">Stephen H. Balch</b></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></div><strong /><div style="text-align: left;"><strong><strong><strong><strong><strong><strong><strong><strong><strong><strong><strong><strong><strong><strong><strong><strong><strong><strong><strong><strong><strong><strong><strong style="line-height: 18.0161px;">Publications</strong><span style="line-height: 18.0161px; font-weight: normal;">:&nbsp;</span><em style="line-height: 18.0161px; font-weight: normal;">NAS Update</em><span style="line-height: 18.0161px; font-weight: normal;">&nbsp;quarterly newsletter,&nbsp;</span><em style="line-height: 18.0161px; font-weight: normal;">Academic Questions</em><span style="line-height: 18.0161px; font-weight: normal;">&nbsp;quarterly journal, and&nbsp;</span><em style="line-height: 18.0161px; font-weight: normal;">Science Insights</em><span style="line-height: 18.0161px; font-weight: normal;">; and occasional reports&nbsp;</span></strong></strong></strong></strong></strong></strong></strong></strong></strong></strong></strong></strong></strong></strong></strong></strong></strong></strong></strong></strong></strong></strong></div><strong /><div style="text-align: left;"><strong><strong><strong><strong><strong><strong><strong><strong><strong><strong><strong><strong><strong><strong><strong><strong><strong><strong><strong><strong><strong><strong><strong style="line-height: 18.0161px;">Finances</strong><span style="line-height: 18.0161px; font-weight: normal;">: Has an income of less than $25,000 per year.</span></strong></strong></strong></strong></strong></strong></strong></strong></strong></strong></strong></strong></strong></strong></strong></strong></strong></strong></strong></strong></strong></strong></div></div></div></div></div></div></h1><h3 style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); text-align: left; line-height: 1.3em; margin-top: 0.769em; margin-bottom: 0.769em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">NAS Principle Issues:</font></h3><h1 class="title" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 1.15em; margin-top: 10px; margin-bottom: 2px; font-weight: normal;"><div style="font-size: medium; line-height: 18.0161px;"><div class="node sticky node-type-right-wing-group-profile"><div class="node-inner"><div class="content" style="border-top-width: 1px; border-top-style: solid; border-top-color: rgb(152, 152, 152);"><ul style="margin: 1em 0px; padding-left: 2em; list-style-image: url(" sites="sites" all="all" themes="themes" rightwingwatch="rightwingwatch" images="images" bullet.png="bullet.png"><li style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">NAS was founded to bring together conservatives in academia to fight the "liberal bias" on college and university campuses and to target multiculturalism and affirmative-action policies.</font></li><li style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">NAS organizes professors, graduate students, college administrators and trustees, and scholars who believe that there is a "[d]ogmatic hostility to Western civilization, and turning the study of non-Western cultures into an instrument for denouncing American society" on college campuses.</font></li><li style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Fights against the "[d]ecline in civility on college and university campuses."</font></li></ul></div></div></div></div></h1><h3 style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); text-align: left; line-height: 1.3em; margin-top: 0.769em; margin-bottom: 0.769em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">NAS Principle Activities:</font></h3><h1 class="title" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 1.15em; margin-top: 10px; margin-bottom: 2px; font-weight: normal;"><div style="font-size: medium; line-height: 18.0161px;"><div class="node sticky node-type-right-wing-group-profile"><div class="node-inner"><div class="content" style="border-top-width: 1px; border-top-style: solid; border-top-color: rgb(152, 152, 152);"><ul style="margin: 1em 0px; padding-left: 2em; list-style-image: url(" sites="sites" all="all" themes="themes" rightwingwatch="rightwingwatch" images="images" bullet.png="bullet.png"><li style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">NAS builds scholar networks, organizes panels, conferences, and lectures and creates NAS campus communities. NAS organizes outreach programs to recruit new members.</font></li></ul></div></div></div></div></h1><h3 style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); text-align: left; line-height: 1.3em; margin-top: 0.769em; margin-bottom: 0.769em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Major Right Wing Donors:</font></h3><h1 class="title" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 1.15em; margin-top: 10px; margin-bottom: 2px; font-weight: normal;"><div style="font-size: medium; line-height: 18.0161px;"><div class="node sticky node-type-right-wing-group-profile"><div class="node-inner"><div class="content" style="border-top-width: 1px; border-top-style: solid; border-top-color: rgb(152, 152, 152);"><ul style="margin: 1em 0px; padding-left: 2em; list-style-image: url(" sites="sites" all="all" themes="themes" rightwingwatch="rightwingwatch" images="images" bullet.png="bullet.png"><li style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Sarah Scaife Foundation</font></li><li style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Inc</font></li><li style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Castle Rock Foundation</font></li><li style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">John M. Olin Foundation</font></li></ul></div></div></div></div></h1><h3 style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); text-align: left; line-height: 1.3em; margin-top: 0.769em; margin-bottom: 0.769em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">NAS's Board of Advisors:</font></h3><h1 class="title" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 1.15em; margin-top: 10px; margin-bottom: 2px; font-weight: normal;"><div style="font-size: medium; line-height: 18.0161px;"><div class="node sticky node-type-right-wing-group-profile"><div class="node-inner"><div class="content" style="border-top-width: 1px; border-top-style: solid; border-top-color: rgb(152, 152, 152);"><ul style="margin: 1em 0px; padding-left: 2em; list-style-image: url(" sites="sites" all="all" themes="themes" rightwingwatch="rightwingwatch" images="images" bullet.png="bullet.png"><li style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">John H. Bunzel,&nbsp;<b>Hoover Institution</b></font></li><li style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Edwin J. Delattre, American Enterprise Institute</font></li><li style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Chester E. Finn, Fordham Foundation</font></li><li style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Gertrude Himmelfarb,&nbsp;<b>Independent Women's Forum</b></font></li><li style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Paul Hollander, National Review,<b>&nbsp;Front Page Magazine</b></font></li><li style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Harry V. Jaffa, Claremont Institute</font></li><li style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><b><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Donald Kagan, Project for the New American Century</font></b></li><li style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><b><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, UN Ambassador under President Reagan, American Enterprise Institute</font></b></li><li style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><b><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Irving Kristol, American Enterprise Institute</font></b></li><li style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Richard D. Lamm, American Reform Party</font></li><li style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Leslie Lenkowsky, National Review</font></li><li style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Seymour Martin Lipset, Hoover Institution</font></li><li style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><b><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Christina Hoff Sommers, Independent Women's Forum</font></b></li><li style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><b><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Shelby Steele, Hoover Institution, Manhattan Institute</font></b></li><li style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Stephan Thernstrom, Manhattan Institute</font></li><li style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">James Q. Wilson, Manhattan Institute</font></li></ul><p style="margin: 1em 0px;" /><div style="text-align: left;"><em style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" line-height="line-height" px="px"><font face="Times New Roman">Updated July 2004</font></em></div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" /><div style="text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="line-height: 18.0161px;">&nbsp;</span></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></div></div></div></div></div></h1></div></div><div style="background-color: transparent; text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div></div><div style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 16px; line-height: 0; text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div style="background-color: transparent; line-height: 0;"><p style="font-size: 16px; text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">In addition, a recent article in&nbsp;<a href="http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2515" target="blank" style="text-decoration: none;">Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting</a>&nbsp;is highly critical of <b>Lichter’</b>s research methodology. Another example of such conflicted interests is provided by&nbsp;</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Professor Thomas Reeves</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. When Reeves writes in strong support of Horowitz’s proposals on the&nbsp;<a href="http://hnn.us/articles/1731.html" target="blank" style="text-decoration: none;">History News Network,</a>he fails to note that he is a spokesman for the California Association of Scholars, a branch of the</span>&nbsp;<b style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">National Association of Scholars</b>&nbsp;<font style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">(see funding sources above) and that he is director of the&nbsp;</font><a href="http://www.mediatransparency.org/recipientgrants.php?recipientID=368" target="blank" style="text-decoration: none; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Wisconsin Policy Research Institute,</a><font style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">&nbsp;which was, again, brought into being by the Olin and Bradley Foundations.</font></font></p><p style="font-size: 16px; text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">This manufactured drumbeat against “academic bias” is amplified by</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">&nbsp;<a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/kurtz/kurtz200310140905.asp" target="blank" style="text-decoration: none;">Stanley Kurtz</a>&nbsp;of the Hoover Institution&nbsp;</span></b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">(see funding sources above),&nbsp;</span><a href="http://www.city-journal.org/html/15_3_college_follies.html" target="blank" style="text-decoration: none; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Heather MacDonald,</a><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">&nbsp;a John M. Olin fellow at the Manhattan Institute (see funding sources above), and&nbsp;</span><a href="http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110006149" target="blank" style="text-decoration: none; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Brian C. Anderson,</a><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">&nbsp;editor of the Manhattan Institute’s&nbsp;</span><i style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">City Journal</i><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">&nbsp;and a former research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (see funding sources above).</span></font></p><p style="font-size: 16px; text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</span></font></p><p style="font-size: 16px; text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">=</span></font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="font-size: 16px;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">text:&nbsp;</span></font><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">=</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">oops 2x see also stanley</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
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</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">http://www.alternet.org/education/right-wing-billionaires-are-funding-cynical-plot-destroy-dissent-and-protest-colleges</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
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</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">As s far-right speakers face loud student opposition at their university speaking gigs, conservative lawmakers in several states are introducing legislation that cracks down on protesters. As uncovered by UnKoch My Campus’ Ralph Wilson, numerous states have borrowed their so-called “campus free speech” bills from the rightwing Goldwater Institute, which is funded by conservative plutocrats including Charles Koch and the Mercer family.</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The intent of these bills isn’t to protect student speech; it’s actually to suppress it in favor of guest speakers who, at times, support white nationalism, LGBTQ discrimination and other hateful worldviews. By funding the Phoenix-based Goldwater Institute, wealthy conservatives are enabling the promotion of hate speech while stifling student dissent. Whether or not Koch, for example, agrees with the hate speech he indirectly sponsors, he certainly benefits from a more friendly academic environment for far-right ideologues who often deny climate change and praise his extreme brand of tax- and regulation-free capitalism.</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The Goldwater Institute’s model bill allegedly ensures “the fullest degree of…free expression,” but it explicitly states that “protests and demonstrations that infringe upon the rights of others to engage in or listen to expressive activity shall not be permitted and shall be subject to sanction.”</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">It goes on to say, “Any student who has twice been found responsible for infringing the expressive rights of others will be suspended for a minimum of one year, or expelled.”</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Under this code, imagine that a student protests a climate change denier and gets a brief suspension. Then the College Republicans group brings in a full-on white nationalist. Will this student do what she thinks is right and protest a racist who’s given a platform at a respected university, or stay home because she's risking expulsion? This campus "free speech” legislation is essentially an attack on student speech and an elevation of ultra-conservative ideas that many people in university communities think have no place in American society.</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">“These laws would create a chilling effect on students who reject the idea that white supremacists or climate deniers are simply representing an ‘opposing viewpoint’ that should be tolerated, and who are rightfully relying on their first amendment freedoms to stop the rise of fascism and prevent global climate catastrophe,” Wilson, UnKoch’s senior researcher, told AlterNet. The group has been conducting research into Charles Koch’s considerable ideological donations to higher education, most of which goes toward free-market programs.</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Charles Koch Foundation representatives say that conservative views are underrepresented in higher education, and the foundation’s massive university donations—which fund free-market academic centers, professorships, grad students and lecture series—are necessary for academic freedom. This view is shared by other conservative billionaires and higher ed donors including Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, who recently said to the crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference, “The education establishment [tells you] what to think…the real threat is silencing the First Amendment rights of people with whom you disagree.”</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">What the Kochs and their allies really want, by amplifying the voices of far-right professors and guest speakers, is to steer society towards a tax- and regulation-free plutocracy. Charles and David Koch, who together are worth nearly $97 billion, have been working toward this goal for over 40 years.</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">In 2014, Virginia passed the nation’s first law banning so-called “free speech zones,” which restrict protected speech to designated areas often far away from events that students want to protest. The following year, Missouri enacted a Campus Free Expression Act forbidding “free speech zones” without imposing punitive measures.</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">But while more recent legislation bans free speech zones as well, it also restricts student free speech in scenarios where, lawmakers claim, free speech is protected.</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The protest crackdown</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Legislators in some states including Illinois and Tennessee have introduced bills in 2017 that explicitly mention sanctions on student protesters. Illinois’ bill, proposed by two Republicans, lifts this language, and additional passages, nearly verbatim from the Goldwater model. Also sponsored by Republicans, the bill in Tennessee—nicknamed the “Milo Bill” after an event at the University of California at Berkeley featuring the racist “alt-right” icon Milo Yiannopolous was canceled due to protests—directs universities to enact free speech policies that include “sanctions for anyone under the jurisdiction of the institution who interferes with the free expression of others,” and it gives faculty “the right to regulate class speech.”</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">In North Carolina, Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Forest intends to work with legislators on a Restore Campus Free Speech Act, which would create “a discipline policy that would punish students who shout down visiting speakers or deprive others of their right to free expression, a tactic commonly known as the ‘hecklers’ veto.'"</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Last year, Forest floated a measure calling on the University of North Carolina’s board of governors to create a system-wide policy that would impose harsh penalties, including expulsion, on students, staff and faculty members who disrupt classes, public meetings or events. The Koch-funded Generation Opportunity lauded the effort at the time. Forest has said that yelling at a guest speaker “has never been free speech,” and he’s called campus protest methods “terrorist tactics.” No one introduced a free speech bill that year.</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Other proposed laws, like North Dakota’s, which was introduced by six Republicans, omit sanctions provisions but state that a university may restrict student speech if it blocks entrances to buildings, obstructs traffic or interferes with events. Much of the North Dakota bill comes directly from the text of the Goldwater model legislation. A large group of most Republican legislators in Virginia has a new bill in play that includes much of the Goldwater language but stays away from restrictions on students.</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Additional campus free speech bills have been introduced this year in Colorado (sponsored by two Republicans and one Democrat) and Utah (sponsored by 14 Republican state representatives). Florida could be next. Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin has a "free speech" provision in his proposed budget.</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Big money driving campus 'free speech’ efforts</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">One of the model bill’s authors, Stanley Kurtz, is a longtime fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based Ethics and Public Policy Center, which applies “the Judeo-Christian moral tradition to critical issues of public policy,” according to its website. The center has received millions of dollars in donations from the foundations of the conservative Bradley, Scaife, Olin and Earhart families, as well as hundreds of thousands from two vehicles for wealthy right-wing donors, Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund.</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch are responsible for more than $9 million in contributions to the two groups from 2006 to 2015, according to the website Conservative Transparency and additional research by this author. Much of the $6.3 million that went to Donors Trust came in 2015. A now-defunct Koch nonprofit, the Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation, donated $190,000 to the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and the Charles Koch Foundation has given over $9,000.</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The Goldwater Institute’s James Manley, senior attorney, and Jonathan Butcher, education director, also co-authored the “campus free speech” model legislation. The institute took in nearly $2.5 million from Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund from 2002-2015, according Conservative Transparency and additional research. The Charles Koch Foundation has pitched in $75,000. Manley formerly worked at the Mountain States Legal Foundation, which has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the two Donors funds. Butcher was a research assistant at the heavily Koch-funded Heritage Foundation from 2002 to 2006.</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Says Wilson, “These bills take Koch's academic presence to the next level, creating protected space to reveal the white supremacist roots of Koch's free market crusade, like Koch's close friend and white nationalist Charles Murray who has taken to campuses to espouse the genetic superiority of white males.”</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Another Koch-funded think tank, the American Enterprise Institute, reportedly has student groups at nearly 80 colleges and universities. These groups bring in AEI fellows like the eugenicist Murray to speak on their campuses. Recently, Murray attempted to give a lecture at Middlebury College in Vermont but was stymied by vociferous protests. He had to end his speech early, and he and a liberal professor were attacked on their way out.</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Students at UC Berkeley and area residents protested Yiannopoulos, whom the College Republicans had invited to speak. The protests led to fires, vandalism, and reportedly, fights. Until recently, Yiannopoulos was an editor at Breitbart News, known as the online “platform of the alt-right,” which happens to be funded by Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah, the far-right mega-donors who are major Donald Trump backers and whose family foundation has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Goldwater Institute. The younger Mercer was even a member of Trump’s transition team. Violence against a speaker, a professor or an onlooker is certainly unacceptable. So is inviting a white supremacist to speak at an institution of higher learning, and so is preventing students and faculty from protesting such a speaker.&nbsp;</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Plenty of right-wing billionaires likely don’t agree with white nationalist ideas, and by funding these so-called campus free speech bills they’re trying to advance free-market principles. But regardless of motivation, this campus "free speech" movement is spreading the hate of white nationalism, the racist “alt-right,” Islamophobia and homophobia—not to mention climate change denial and economic policies that benefit only the very wealthy—on campuses filled with young students. Conservative, corporate millionaires and billionaires are at fault.</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"></font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">=</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">National Association of Scholars</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">221 Witherspoon Street, Second Floor</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Princeton, New Jersey 08542-3215&nbsp;</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">www.nas.org</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Founded: 1985</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">President: Stephen H. Balch</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Publications: NAS Update quarterly newsletter, Academic Questions quarterly journal, and Science Insights; and occasional reports&nbsp;</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Finances: Has an income of less than $25,000 per year.</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">NAS Principle Issues:</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">NAS was founded to bring together conservatives in academia to fight the "liberal bias" on college and university campuses and to target multiculturalism and affirmative-action policies.</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">NAS organizes professors, graduate students, college administrators and trustees, and scholars who believe that there is a "[d]ogmatic hostility to Western civilization, and turning the study of non-Western cultures into an instrument for denouncing American society" on college campuses.</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Fights against the "[d]ecline in civility on college and university campuses."</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">NAS Principle Activities:</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">NAS builds scholar networks, organizes panels, conferences, and lectures and creates NAS campus communities. NAS organizes outreach programs to recruit new members.</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Major Right Wing Donors:</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Sarah Scaife Foundation</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Inc</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Castle Rock Foundation</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">John M. Olin Foundation</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">NAS's Board of Advisors:</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">John H. Bunzel, Hoover Institution</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Edwin J. Delattre, American Enterprise Institute</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Chester E. Finn, Fordham Foundation</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Gertrude Himmelfarb, Independent Women's Forum</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Paul Hollander, National Review, Front Page Magazine</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Harry V. Jaffa, Claremont Institute</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Donald Kagan, Project for the New American Century</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, UN Ambassador under President Reagan, American Enterprise Institute</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Irving Kristol, American Enterprise Institute</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Richard D. Lamm, American Reform Party</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Leslie Lenkowsky, National Review</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Seymour Martin Lipset, Hoover Institution</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Christina Hoff Sommers, Independent Women's Forum</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Shelby Steele, Hoover Institution, Manhattan Institute</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Stephan Thernstrom, Manhattan Institute</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">James Q. Wilson, Manhattan Institute</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Updated July 2004</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">&nbsp;</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"></font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"></font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">In addition, a recent article in Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting is highly critical of Lichter’s research methodology. Another example of such conflicted interests is provided by Professor Thomas Reeves. When Reeves writes in strong support of Horowitz’s proposals on the History News Network,he fails to note that he is a spokesman for the California Association of Scholars, a branch of the National Association of Scholars (see funding sources above) and that he is director of the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, which was, again, brought into being by the Olin and Bradley Foundations.</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">This manufactured drumbeat against “academic bias” is amplified by Stanley Kurtz of the Hoover Institution (see funding sources above), Heather MacDonald, a John M. Olin fellow at the Manhattan Institute (see funding sources above), and Brian C. Anderson, editor of the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal and a former research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (see funding sources above).</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">=</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/312807/burn-down-suburbs-stanley-kurtz</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">=</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">It is a telling marker of the ideological cohesiveness and extremism of this core group of philanthropies that three of the five founding members, Joseph Coors, David Koch and Harry Bradley, were members and financial supporters [14] of the John Birch Society. The Scaife foundations, headed by Richard Mellon Scaife, are also involved, [15] albeit in less direct ways.</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">In the past 20 years this core group of funders has, by many reports, built and strategically linked an impressive array of almost 500 think tanks, centers, institutes and "concerned citizens groups" both within and outside of the academy. It is particularly telling to observe the funding sources of these organizations during the first 10-15 years of their existence, when their ideological identities were being established. A small sampling of these entities include the Cato Institute, [16] the Heritage Foundation, [17] the American Enterprise Institute, [18] the Manhattan Institute, [19] the Hoover Institution,[20] the Claremont Institute, [21] the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, [22] Middle East Forum, [23]Accuracy in Media, [24] and the National Association of Scholars, [25] as well as Horowitz's Center of the Study of Popular Culture. [26]</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The absence of formal organizational linkages between the entities within these networks creates an illusion of independent analytical voices reaching similar conclusions about strategic policy issues, a technique known in the public relations industry as “astroturfing.” This network has developed an enormous capacity to generate “data” consistent with the targeted political agenda and world views of its core group of funders to quickly and redundantly represent these issues in the mainstream press by what appear to be the voices of independent analysts and to translate these viewpoints into public policy that serves the focused ideological agenda of this core group of funders. The Bradley Foundation under Michael Joyce's leadership has even established a publishing house, Encounter Books, [27] to ensure that grantees like Horowitz have a quasi-academic outlet for their viewpoints.</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The degree of interconnectedness within this network of organizations is considerable but almost invisible to the casual observer. For example, when ACTA’s president, Anne Neal, introduced herself to the Select Committee on Academic Freedom in Higher Education in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, she presented ACTA as “a bipartisan network of college and university trustees and alumni across the country dedicated to academic freedom.”</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Full disclosure should have required some mention of the fact that ACTA (see funding sources above), which changed its name from the National Alumni Forum [28] in 1998, was established by theIntercollegiate Studies Institute [29] in 1994. The Intercollegiate Studies Institute in turn evolved from William Bennett’s Madison Center for Educational Affairs [30] and the Institute for Educational Affairs founded by Irving Kristol, Michael Joyce’s mentor, and William Simon, the first president of the John M. Olin Foundation. Bennett and Kristol also sit on ACTA’s Board of Directors. The remarkably consistent record of funding across all of the incarnations of this organization and the high degree of redundancy with Horowitz’s own, highly partisan Center for the Study of Popular Culture is not consistent with Neal’s definition of ACTA as an independent, non-partisan organization.</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Another example illustrative of the quietly incestuous nature of this network is presented by an article by the Boston Globe columnist Cathy Young. The article is entitled “Liberal bias in the ivory tower” [31]and by all appearances is an independent opinion piece written by a regular Globe columnist. At the end of the article Young identifies herself as “a contributing editor at Reason Magazine.” What is undisclosed in the article is that Reason Magazine is the publication of the Reason Foundation, whose funding sources [32] are virtually the same as those funding Horowitz’s "Academic Bill of Rights" project and Neal’s ACTA.</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Young’s premise for the article is stated in her opening sentence: “Yet another study has come out documenting what most conservatives consider to be blindingly obvious: the leftwing tilt of the American professoriate.” The study that she references [33] was conducted by Stanley Rothman, now emeritus professor at Smith College; S. Robert Lichter, emeritus professor at George Mason University; and Neil Nevitte of the University of Toronto, and was published in the online journal Forum. This study was also cited by Neal in her testimony in Pennsylvania. Young does not inform her readers that Rothman is director of the Center for the Study of Social and Political Change, [34] a center with funding sources that are remarkably redundant with Horowitz’s Center for the Study of Popular Culture. Lichter is also president of the Center for Media and Public Affairs, [35] which again has funding sources that are redundant with those referenced earlier.</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">In addition, a recent article in Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting [36] is highly critical of Lichter’s research methodology. Another example of such conflicted interests is provided by Professor Thomas Reeves. When Reeves writes in strong support of Horowitz’s proposals on the History News Network,[37] he fails to note that he is a spokesman for the California Association of Scholars, a branch of the National Association of Scholars (see funding sources above) and that he is director of the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, [38] which was, again, brought into being by the Olin and Bradley Foundations.</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">This manufactured drumbeat against “academic bias” is amplified by Stanley Kurtz [39] of the Hoover Institution (see funding sources above), Heather MacDonald, [40] a John M. Olin fellow at the Manhattan Institute (see funding sources above), and Brian C. Anderson, [41] editor of the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal and a former research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (see funding sources above).</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The relentlessness with which columnists and experts with direct funding relationships with Olin, Scaife, Bradley, Koch and Coors level charges of academic bias and assert the need for legislative reform of higher education is remarkable. The goal of this narrowly focused and ideologically driven public relations campaign can only be understood in terms of its fostering of a political climate in which federal regulatory “reform” of what is universally recognized as the finest system of higher education in the world, will be tolerated.</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Indeed, as has been discussed, such regulatory oversight may already be in the offing. The academy stands today as one of the last spaces in America where the democratic ideas that shape the social, economic and political fabric of the nation can be openly and independently debated on the basis of their merits and without coercion or distortion from vested economic and political interests. It is certainly in the national interest that it remain such.</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Author/s:&nbsp;</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Alan Jones</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Author's email:&nbsp;</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">info@insidehighered.com</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Alan Jones is dean of the faculty and professor of psychology and neuroscience at Pitzer College.</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Source URL: https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2006/06/16/jones?width=775&height=500&iframe=true</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">=</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">newsbusters</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Writing in today’s Wall Street Journal and National Review Online, Ethics and Public Policy Center senior fellow Stanley Kurtz traces Barack Obama’s partnership with former domestic terrorist William Ayers when the two collaborated at the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a charity established to help Chicago’s public schools that was commandeered by Ayers to promote his radical agenda.</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The association between Obama and Ayers has received virtually no attention from the three broadcast networks, with the conspicuous exception of a primary-season debate sponsored by ABC when George Stephanopoulos asked Obama about his relationship with Ayers. Out of 1,365 broadcast evening news stories about Obama prior to the end of the primaries, only two mentioned Ayers — one a brief mention of the debate question on the April 17 Nightly News, and the other a World News Sunday story about McCain raising the Ayers issue on This Week.&nbsp;</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">With just 42 days left until Election Day, the broadcast networks have not presented a single in-depth report on Obama’s relationship with Ayers. But Kurtz’s review of the documents at the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC) shows the two “worked as a team to advance the CAC agenda,” which “flowed from Mr. Ayers’s educational philosophy, which called for infusing students and their parents with a radical political commitment, and which downplayed achievement tests in favor of activism.”&nbsp;</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">For a flavor of Ayers’ continuing radicalism, the New York Times profiled the 1960s radical back on September 11, 2001, the same day as the al-Qaeda attack that killed thousands of New Yorkers at the World Trade Center. The piece by Dinitia Smith began: “‘I don’t regret setting bombs,’ Bill Ayers said. ‘I feel we didn’t do enough.’”</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">A short excerpt from that piece:</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Mr. Ayers, who in 1970 was said to have summed up the Weatherman philosophy as: ''Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that's where it's really at,'' is today distinguished professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. And he says he doesn't actually remember suggesting that rich people be killed or that people kill their parents, but ''it's been quoted so many times I'm beginning to think I did,'' he said. ''It was a joke about the distribution of wealth.''</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">He went underground in 1970, after his girlfriend, Diana Oughton, and two other people were killed when bombs they were making exploded in a Greenwich Village town house. With him in the Weather Underground was Bernardine Dohrn, who was put on the F.B.I.'s 10 Most Wanted List. J. Edgar Hoover called her ''the most dangerous woman in America'' and ''la Pasionara of the Lunatic Left.'' Mr. Ayers and Ms. Dohrn later married. ...</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">In 1969, after the Manson family murders in Beverly Hills, Ms. Dohrn told an S.D.S. audience: ''Dig it! Manson killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then they shoved a fork into a victim's stomach.''</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">A month earlier, a profile of Ayers in Chicago Magazine included a picture of Ayers stomping on the American flag. Marcia Froelke Coburn wrote the accompanying article: “Talk to him for any length of time and some rhetoric of the past slips into the conversation. ‘I think there will be another mass political movement,’ he predicts, ‘because I believe that the kind of injustice that is built into our world will not go quietly into the night.’”</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">In the mid-1990s, Obama was hired to be the chairman of Ayers’ “brainchild,” the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. Here are the key excerpts from Kurtz's op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal; the entire must-read article can be found here.</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Despite having authored two autobiographies, Barack Obama has never written about his most important executive experience. From 1995 to 1999, he led an education foundation called the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC), and remained on the board until 2001. The group poured more than $100 million into the hands of community organizers and radical education activists.</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The CAC was the brainchild of Bill Ayers, a founder of the Weather Underground in the 1960s. Among other feats, Mr. Ayers and his cohorts bombed the Pentagon, and he has never expressed regret for his actions. Barack Obama's first run for the Illinois State Senate was launched at a 1995 gathering at Mr. Ayers's home.</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The Obama campaign has struggled to downplay that association. Last April, Sen. Obama dismissed Mr. Ayers as just "a guy who lives in my neighborhood," and "not somebody who I exchange ideas with on a regular basis." Yet documents in the CAC archives make clear that Mr. Ayers and Mr. Obama were partners in the CAC. Those archives are housed in the Richard J. Daley Library at the University of Illinois at Chicago and I've recently spent days looking through them....</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The CAC's agenda flowed from Mr. Ayers's educational philosophy, which called for infusing students and their parents with a radical political commitment, and which downplayed achievement tests in favor of activism. In the mid-1960s, Mr. Ayers taught at a radical alternative school, and served as a community organizer in Cleveland's ghetto....</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">CAC translated Mr. Ayers's radicalism into practice. Instead of funding schools directly, it required schools to affiliate with "external partners," which actually got the money. Proposals from groups focused on math/science achievement were turned down. Instead CAC disbursed money through various far-left community organizers, such as the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (or Acorn).</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Mr. Obama once conducted "leadership training" seminars with Acorn, and Acorn members also served as volunteers in Mr. Obama's early campaigns. External partners like the South Shore African Village Collaborative and the Dual Language Exchange focused more on political consciousness, Afrocentricity and bilingualism than traditional education. CAC's in-house evaluators comprehensively studied the effects of its grants on the test scores of Chicago public-school students. They found no evidence of educational improvement....</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Mr. Ayers's defenders claim that he has redeemed himself with public-spirited education work. That claim is hard to swallow if you understand that he views his education work as an effort to stoke resistance to an oppressive American system. He likes to stress that he learned of his first teaching job while in jail for a draft-board sit-in. For Mr. Ayers, teaching and his 1960s radicalism are two sides of the same coin....</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The Obama campaign has cried foul when Bill Ayers comes up, claiming "guilt by association." Yet the issue here isn't guilt by association; it's guilt by participation. As CAC chairman, Mr. Obama was lending moral and financial support to Mr. Ayers and his radical circle. That is a story even if Mr. Ayers had never planted a single bomb 40 years ago.</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">In his National Review Online piece, Kurtz adds a valuable point about how the radical left dominated the CAC despite the fact that the funding originated with Republican powerhouse Walter Annenberg:</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The Obama camp denies CAC’s radicalism by pointing to the fact that this foundation was funded by Nixon Ambassador and Reagan friend, Walter Annenberg. Moderates and Republicans often support Annenberg activities, it’s true. Yet the story of modern philanthropy is largely the story of moderate and conservative donors finding their funds “captured” by far more liberal, often radical, beneficiaries. CAC’s story is a classic of the genre. Ayers and Obama guided CAC money to community organizers, like ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) and the Developing Communities Project (Part of the Gamaliel Foundation network), groups self-consciously working in the radical tradition of Saul Alinsky. Walter Annenberg’s personal politics don’t change that one iota.</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The fact that Ayers and other tenured radicals hold power at our universities is in no way negated by the presence of Republican appointees on university boards of trustees. Ayers’s radicalism is undeniable. He remains unapologetic for his bombings of the 1960s. Even now, he refuses to rule out violence as a resort. His education writings are deeply politicized and filled with exhortations to “resist” America’s racist and oppressive social system. In 2006 — along with his wife and fellow former-terrorist, Bernardine Dohrn, and Jeff Jones — Ayers released, Sing A Battle Song, a collection of intensely radical writings from the Weather Underground. Ayers makes it clear in that book that, while he is embarrassed by some of the Weather Underground’s rhetoric, he still adheres to the same ideas. Beyond its strictly historical interest, Ayers and his co-editors make a point of hoping that their old writings would be “of use to new generations of militant activists and organizers.” By directing CAC funds to groups like ACORN and the Developing Communities Project of the Gamaliel Foundation, Ayers was supporting just such militant activists and organizers....</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The Chicago Annenberg Challenge stands as Barack Obama’s most important executive experience to date. By its own account, CAC was a largely a failure. And a series of critical evaluations point to reasons for that failure, including a poor strategy, to which the foundation over-committed in 1995, and over-reliance on community organizers with insufficient education expertise. The failure of CAC thus raises entirely legitimate questions, both about Obama’s competence, his alliances with radical community organizers, and about Ayers’s continuing influence over CAC and its board, headed by Obama. Above all, by continuing to fund Ayers’s personal projects, and those of his political-educational allies, Obama was lending moral and material support to Ayers’s profoundly radical efforts. Ayers’s terrorist history aside, that makes the Ayers-Obama relationship a perfectly legitimate issue in this campaign.</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Kurtz has painstakingly documented the connections between Barack Obama and the radical left. The only question is, will the so-called mainstream media find any of this worth reporting between now and Election Day?</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">About the Author</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="text-align: left; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 21px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Rich Noyes is Research Director at the Media Research Center. Click here to follow Rich Noyes on Twitter.</font></p><div style="font-size: 16px; text-align: left;">
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</font></div><div style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 0;"><div class="print-content"><div id="node-20227" class="node node-views-entry view-mode-print clearfix" about="/views/2006/06/16/jones" typeof="sioc:Item foaf:Document"><div class="content"><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p style="text-align: left;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">It is a telling marker of the ideological cohesiveness and extremism of this core group of philanthropies that three of the five founding members, Joseph Coors, David Koch and Harry Bradley, were&nbsp;<a href="http://www.commonwealinstitute.org/reports/tort/Section1.html" target="blank" style="">members and financial supporters</a>&nbsp;<span class="print-footnote">[14]</span>&nbsp;of the John Birch Society. The Scaife foundations, headed by Richard Mellon Scaife,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.mediatransparency.org/recipientgrants.php?recipientID=1385" target="blank" style="">are also involved,</a>&nbsp;<span class="print-footnote">[15]</span>&nbsp;albeit in less direct ways.</font></p><p style="text-align: left;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">In the past 20 years this core group of funders has, by many reports, built and strategically linked an impressive array of almost 500 think tanks, centers, institutes and "concerned citizens groups" both within and outside of the academy. It is particularly telling to observe the funding sources of these organizations during the first 10-15 years of their existence, when their ideological identities were being established. A small sampling of these entities include&nbsp;<a href="http://www.mediatransparency.org/recipientgrants.php?recipientID=51" target="blank" style="">the Cato Institute,</a>&nbsp;<span class="print-footnote">[16]</span>&nbsp;the&nbsp;<a href="http://www.mediatransparency.org/recipientgrants.php?recipientID=153" target="blank" style="">Heritage Foundation,</a>&nbsp;<span class="print-footnote">[17]</span>&nbsp;the&nbsp;<a href="http://www.mediatransparency.org/recipientgrants.php?recipientID=19" target="blank" style="">American Enterprise Institute,</a>&nbsp;<span class="print-footnote">[18]</span>&nbsp;the&nbsp;<a href="http://www.mediatransparency.org/recipientgrants.php?recipientID=198" target="blank" style="">Manhattan Institute,</a>&nbsp;<span class="print-footnote">[19]</span>&nbsp;the&nbsp;<a href="http://www.mediatransparency.org/recipientgrants.php?recipientID=311" target="blank" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Hoover Institution,</a><span class="print-footnote"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">[</span>20]</span>&nbsp;the&nbsp;<a href="http://www.mediatransparency.org/recipientgrants.php?recipientID=72" target="blank" style="">Claremont Institute,</a>&nbsp;<span class="print-footnote">[21]</span>&nbsp;the&nbsp;<a href="http://www.mediatransparency.org/recipientgrants.php?recipientID=16" target="blank"><b>American Council of Trustees and Alumni,</b></a><a href="http://www.mediatransparency.org/recipientgrants.php?recipientID=16" target="blank" style="">&nbsp;</a><span class="print-footnote">[22]</span>&nbsp;<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><a href="http://www.mediatransparency.org/recipientgrants.php?recipientID=207" target="blank" style="">Middle East Forum,&nbsp;</a><span class="print-footnote">[23]</span><a href="http://www.mediatransparency.org/recipientgrants.php?recipientID=1374" target="blank" style="">Accuracy in Media,</a>&nbsp;<span class="print-footnote">[24]</span>&nbsp;and the<b>&nbsp;<a href="http://www.mediatransparency.org/recipientgrants.php?recipientID=242" target="blank" style="">National Association of Scholars,</a></b>&nbsp;</span><span class="print-footnote"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">[</span>25]</span>&nbsp;as well as Horowitz's&nbsp;<a href="http://www.mediatransparency.org/recipientgrants.php?recipientID=63" target="blank" style="">Center of the Study of Popular Culture.</a>&nbsp;<span class="print-footnote">[26]</span></font></p><p style="text-align: left;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The absence of formal organizational linkages between the entities within these networks creates an illusion of independent analytical voices reaching similar conclusions about strategic policy issues, a technique known in the public relations industry as “astroturfing.” This network has developed an enormous capacity to generate “data” consistent with the targeted political agenda and world views of its core group of funders to quickly and redundantly represent these issues in the mainstream press by what appear to be the voices of independent analysts and to translate these viewpoints into public policy that serves the focused ideological agenda of this core group of funders. <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The Bradley Foundation under Michael Joyce's leadership has even established a publishing house,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.mediatransparency.org/recipientgrants.php?recipientID=98" target="blank" style="">Encounter Books,</a></span>&nbsp;<span class="print-footnote">[27]</span>&nbsp;to ensure that grantees like Horowitz have a quasi-academic outlet for their viewpoints.</font></p><p style="text-align: left;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The degree of interconnectedness within this network of organizations is considerable but almost invisible to the casual observer. For example, when ACTA’s president, Anne Neal, introduced herself to the Select Committee on Academic Freedom in Higher Education in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, she presented ACTA as “a bipartisan network of college and university trustees and alumni across the country dedicated to academic freedom.”</font></p><p style="text-align: left;"><font face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);" size="4"><b>Full disclosure should have required some mention of the fact that ACTA (see funding sources above), which changed its name from the&nbsp;<a href="http://www.mediatransparency.org/recipientgrants.php?recipientID=434" target="blank" style="">National Alumni Forum</a>&nbsp;<span class="print-footnote">[28]</span>&nbsp;in 1998, was established by the<a href="http://www.mediatransparency.org/recipientgrants.php?recipientID=177" target="blank" style="">Intercollegiate Studies Institute</a>&nbsp;<span class="print-footnote">[29]</span>&nbsp;in 1994</b>. The Intercollegiate Studies Institute in turn evolved from William Bennett’s&nbsp;<a href="http://www.mediatransparency.org/recipientgrants.php?recipientID=525" target="blank" style="">Madison Center for Educational Affairs</a>&nbsp;<span class="print-footnote">[30]</span>&nbsp;and the Institute for Educational Affairs founded by Irving Kristol, Michael Joyce’s mentor, and William Simon, the first president of the John M. Olin Foundation. Bennett and Kristol also sit on ACTA’s Board of Directors. The remarkably consistent record of funding across all of the incarnations of this organization and the high degree of redundancy with Horowitz’s own, highly partisan Center for the Study of Popular Culture is not consistent with Neal’s definition of ACTA as an independent, non-partisan organization.</font></p><p style="text-align: left;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Another example illustrative of the quietly incestuous nature of this network is presented by an article by the&nbsp;<i>Boston Globe</i>&nbsp;columnist Cathy Young. The article is entitled&nbsp;<a href="http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/04/11/liberal_bias_in_the_ivory_tower?mode=PF" target="blank" style="">“Liberal bias in the ivory tower”</a>&nbsp;<span class="print-footnote">[31]</span>and by all appearances is an independent opinion piece written by a regular&nbsp;<i>Globe</i>&nbsp;columnist.<b>&nbsp;At the end of the article Young identifies herself as “a contributing editor at&nbsp;<i>Reason Magazine.</i>” What is undisclosed in the article is that&nbsp;<i>Reason Magazine</i>&nbsp;is the publication of the Reason Foundation, whose&nbsp;<a href="http://www.mediatransparency.org/recipientgrants.php?recipientID=286" target="blank" style="">funding sources</a>&nbsp;<span class="print-footnote">[32]</span>&nbsp;are virtually the same as those funding Horowitz’s "Academic Bill of Rights" project and Neal’s ACTA.</b></font></p><p style="text-align: left;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Young’s premise for the article is stated in her opening sentence: “Yet another study has come out documenting what most conservatives consider to be blindingly obvious: the leftwing tilt of the American professoriate.”&nbsp;<a href="http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2005/03/30/politics" target="blank" style="">The study that she references</a>&nbsp;<span class="print-footnote">[33]</span>&nbsp;was conducted by Stanley Rothman, now emeritus professor at Smith College;<b>&nbsp;S. Robert Lichter, emeritus professor at George Mason University;&nbsp;</b>and Neil Nevitte of the University of Toronto, and was published in the online journal Forum. This study was also cited by Neal in her testimony in Pennsylvania. Young does not inform her readers that Rothman is director of the&nbsp;<a href="http://www.mediatransparency.org/recipientgrants.php?recipientID=1012" target="blank" style="">Center for the Study of Social and Political Change,</a>&nbsp;<span class="print-footnote">[34]</span>&nbsp;a center with funding sources that are remarkably redundant with Horowitz’s Center for the Study of Popular Culture.<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">&nbsp;Lichter is also president of the&nbsp;<a href="http://www.mediatransparency.org/recipientgrants.php?recipientID=573" target="blank" style="">Center for Media and Public Affairs,</a></span>&nbsp;<span class="print-footnote">[35]</span>&nbsp;which again has funding sources that are redundant with those referenced earlier.</font></p><p style="text-align: left;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">In addition, a recent article in&nbsp;<a href="http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2515" target="blank" style="">Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting</a>&nbsp;<span class="print-footnote">[36]</span>&nbsp;is highly critical of Lichter’s research methodology. Another example of such conflicted interests is provided by Professor Thomas Reeves. When Reeves writes in strong support of Horowitz’s proposals on the&nbsp;<a href="http://hnn.us/articles/1731.html" target="blank" style="">History News Network,</a><span class="print-footnote">[37]</span>&nbsp;he fails to note that he is a spokesman for the California Association of Scholars, a branch of the<b>&nbsp;National Association of Scholars</b>&nbsp;(see funding sources above) and that he is director of the&nbsp;<a href="http://www.mediatransparency.org/recipientgrants.php?recipientID=368" target="blank" style="">Wisconsin Policy Research Institute,</a>&nbsp;<span class="print-footnote">[38]</span>&nbsp;which was, again, brought into being by the Olin and Bradley Foundations.</font></p><p style="text-align: left;"><font face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);" size="4"><b>This manufactured drumbeat against “academic bias” is amplified by&nbsp;<a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/kurtz/kurtz200310140905.asp" target="blank" style="">Stanley Kurtz</a>&nbsp;<span class="print-footnote">[39]</span>&nbsp;of the Hoover Institution</b> (see funding sources above),&nbsp;<a href="http://www.city-journal.org/html/15_3_college_follies.html" target="blank" style="">Heather MacDonald,</a>&nbsp;<span class="print-footnote">[40]</span>&nbsp;a John M. Olin fellow at the Manhattan Institute (see funding sources above), and&nbsp;<a href="http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110006149" target="blank" style="">Brian C. Anderson,</a>&nbsp;<span class="print-footnote">[41]</span>&nbsp;editor of the Manhattan Institute’s&nbsp;<i>City Journal</i>&nbsp;and a former research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (see funding sources above).</font></p><p style="text-align: left;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The relentlessness with which columnists and experts with direct funding relationships with Olin, Scaife, Bradley, Koch and Coors level charges of academic bias and assert the need for legislative reform of higher education is remarkable. The goal of this narrowly focused and ideologically driven public relations campaign can only be understood in terms of its fostering of a political climate in which federal regulatory “reform” of what is universally recognized as the finest system of higher education in the world, will be tolerated.</font></p><p style="text-align: left;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Indeed, as has been discussed, such regulatory oversight may already be in the offing. The academy stands today as one of the last spaces in America where the democratic ideas that shape the social, economic and political fabric of the nation can be openly and independently debated on the basis of their merits and without coercion or distortion from vested economic and political interests. It is certainly in the national interest that it remain such.</font></p></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-authors field-type-text field-label-above"><div class="field-label" style="text-align: left; font-weight: bold;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Author/s:&nbsp;</font></div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" style="text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Alan Jones</font></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-email field-type-text field-label-above"><div class="field-label" style="text-align: left; font-weight: bold;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Author's email:&nbsp;</font></div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" style="text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">info@insidehighered.com</font></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-bio field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p style="text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Alan Jones is dean of the faculty and professor of psychology and neuroscience at Pitzer College.</font></p></div></div></div></div></div></div><div class="print-footer" style="text-align: center;"><hr class="print-hr" style="text-align: left; border: 0px; height: 1px; width: 726px; background-color: rgb(158, 158, 158);" /><div class="print-source_url" style="text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong>Source URL:</strong>&nbsp;<a href="https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2006/06/16/jones?width=775&height=500&iframe=true" style="">https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2006/06/16/jones?width=775&height=500&iframe=true</a></font></div></div></div><div style=""><div style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 0; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" line-height="line-height" background-color="background-color" transparent="transparent">===</span></div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="" /><div style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 0; text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="line-height: 0; background-color: transparent;">newsbusters</span></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="line-height: 0px;">
</span></div><span style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 0; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="line-height: 0;">Writing in today’s <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122212856075765367.html" target="blank">Wall Street Journal</a> and <a href="http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MTViMGRmMmYxZTgwZTFjYmFjODU5YzM4Y2MwM2ViMjY=" target="blank">National Review Online</a>,

Ethics and Public Policy Center senior fellow Stanley Kurtz traces

Barack Obama’s partnership with former domestic terrorist William Ayers</span><font style="font-size: large; background-color: transparent;"><span style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 0;">

when the two collaborated at the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a charity

established to help Chicago’s public schools that was commandeered by

Ayers to promote his radical agenda.</span></font></div></span><div style="text-align: left;">
</div><font style="" /><div style="text-align: left;"><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><span style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 0; background-color: transparent;">The association between

Obama and Ayers has received virtually no attention from the three

broadcast networks, with the conspicuous exception of a primary-season

debate sponsored by ABC when George Stephanopoulos asked Obama about his

relationship with Ayers. Out of 1,365 broadcast evening news stories

about Obama prior to the end of the primaries, only two mentioned Ayers —

one a brief mention of the debate question on the April 17 Nightly

News, and the other a World News Sunday story about McCain raising the

Ayers issue on This Week.&nbsp;</span></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></div><div style="text-align: left;">
</div><font style="" /><div style="text-align: left;"><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><span style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 0; background-color: transparent;">With just 42 days left until Election

Day, the broadcast networks have not presented a single in-depth report

on Obama’s relationship with Ayers. But Kurtz’s review of the documents

at the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC) shows the two “worked as a team

to advance the CAC agenda,” which “flowed from Mr. Ayers’s educational

philosophy, which called for infusing students and their parents with a

radical political commitment, and which downplayed achievement tests in

favor of activism.”&nbsp;</span></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></div><div style="text-align: left;">
</div><font style="" /><div style="text-align: left;"><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style="background-color: transparent;"><span style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 0;">For a flavor of Ayers’ continuing radicalism, the </span></font><a href="http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F02E1DE1438F932A2575AC0A9679C8B63&scp=1&sq=weathermen" target="_blank" style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 0; background-color: transparent;">New York Times profiled</a><font style="background-color: transparent;"><span style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 0;">

the 1960s radical back on September 11, 2001, the same day as the

al-Qaeda attack that killed thousands of New Yorkers at the World Trade

Center. The piece by Dinitia Smith began: “‘I don’t regret setting

bombs,’ Bill Ayers said. ‘I feel we didn’t do enough.’”</span></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></div><div style="text-align: left;">
</div><font style="" /><div style="text-align: left;"><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><span style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 0; background-color: transparent;">A short excerpt from that piece:</span></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></div><blockquote style=""><div style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 0; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" line-height="line-height" background-color="background-color" transparent="transparent">Mr.

Ayers, who in 1970 was said to have summed up the Weatherman philosophy

as: ''Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments.

Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that's where it's really

at,'' is today distinguished professor of education at the University of

Illinois at Chicago. And he says he doesn't actually remember

suggesting that rich people be killed or that people kill their parents,

but ''it's been quoted so many times I'm beginning to think I did,'' he

said. ''It was a joke about the distribution of wealth.''</span></div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" /><div style="text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="line-height: 0px;">
</span></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 0; background-color: transparent;">He

went underground in 1970, after his girlfriend, Diana Oughton, and two

other people were killed when bombs they were making exploded in a

Greenwich Village town house. With him in the Weather Underground was

Bernardine Dohrn, who was put on the F.B.I.'s 10 Most Wanted List. J.

Edgar Hoover called her ''the most dangerous woman in America'' and ''la

Pasionara of the Lunatic Left.'' Mr. Ayers and Ms. Dohrn later married.

...</span></div><div style="text-align: left;">
</div><div style="text-align: left;"><font style="background-color: transparent;"><span style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 0;">In 1969, after the </span></font><font style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 0; background-color: transparent;">Manson family murders</font><font style="background-color: transparent;"><span style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 0;"> in Beverly Hills,

Ms. Dohrn told an S.D.S. audience: ''Dig it! Manson killed those pigs,

then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then they shoved a fork

into a victim's stomach.''</span></font></div></blockquote><font style="" /><div style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 0; text-align: left;"><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font><font><font><font><font><font><span style="line-height: 0; background-color: transparent;">A

month earlier, a profile of Ayers in Chicago Magazine included a

picture of Ayers stomping on the American flag. Marcia Froelke Coburn

wrote</span><a href="http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/August-2001/No-Regrets/" target="_blank" style="line-height: 0; background-color: transparent;"> the accompanying article</a><span style="line-height: 0; background-color: transparent;">:

“Talk to him for any length of time and some rhetoric of the past slips

into the conversation. ‘I think there will be another mass political

movement,’ he predicts, ‘because I believe that the kind of injustice

that is built into our world will not go quietly into the night.’”</span></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="line-height: 0px;">
</span></div><font style="" /><div style="text-align: left;"><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style="background-color: transparent;"><span style="line-height: 0;">In

the mid-1990s, Obama was hired to be the chairman of Ayers’

“brainchild,” the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. Here are the key excerpts

from Kurtz's op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal; the entire must-read

article can be found </span></font><a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122212856075765367.html" target="_blank" style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 0; background-color: transparent;">here</a><font style="background-color: transparent;"><span style="line-height: 0;">.</span></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></div><blockquote style=""><div style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 0; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" line-height="line-height" background-color="background-color" transparent="transparent">Despite

having authored two autobiographies, Barack Obama has never written

about his most important executive experience. From 1995 to 1999, he led

an education foundation called the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC),

and remained on the board until 2001. The group poured more than $100

million into the hands of community organizers and radical education

activists.</span></div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" /><div style="text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="line-height: 0px;">
</span></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 0; background-color: transparent;">The CAC was the brainchild of Bill Ayers, a founder of

the Weather Underground in the 1960s. Among other feats, Mr. Ayers and

his cohorts bombed the Pentagon, and he has never expressed regret for

his actions. Barack Obama's first run for the Illinois State Senate was

launched at a 1995 gathering at Mr. Ayers's home.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;">
</div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 0; background-color: transparent;">The Obama

campaign has struggled to downplay that association. Last April, Sen.

Obama dismissed Mr. Ayers as just "a guy who lives in my neighborhood,"

and "not somebody who I exchange ideas with on a regular basis." Yet

documents in the CAC archives make clear that Mr. Ayers and Mr. Obama

were partners in the CAC. Those archives are housed in the Richard J.

Daley Library at the University of Illinois at Chicago and I've recently

spent days looking through them....</span></div><div style="text-align: left;">
</div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 0; background-color: transparent;">The CAC's agenda flowed from

Mr. Ayers's educational philosophy, which called for infusing students

and their parents with a radical political commitment, and which

downplayed achievement tests in favor of activism. In the mid-1960s, Mr.

Ayers taught at a radical alternative school, and served as a community

organizer in Cleveland's ghetto....</span></div><div style="text-align: left;">
</div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 0; background-color: transparent;">CAC translated Mr. Ayers's

radicalism into practice. Instead of funding schools directly, it

required schools to affiliate with "external partners," which actually

got the money. Proposals from groups focused on math/science achievement

were turned down. Instead CAC disbursed money through various far-left

community organizers, such as the Association of Community Organizations

for Reform Now (or Acorn).</span></div><div style="text-align: left;">
</div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 0; background-color: transparent;">Mr. Obama once conducted "leadership

training" seminars with Acorn, and Acorn members also served as

volunteers in Mr. Obama's early campaigns. External partners like the

South Shore African Village Collaborative and the Dual Language Exchange

focused more on political consciousness, Afrocentricity and

bilingualism than traditional education. CAC's in-house evaluators

comprehensively studied the effects of its grants on the test scores of

Chicago public-school students. They found no evidence of educational

improvement....</span></div><div style="text-align: left;">
</div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 0; background-color: transparent;">Mr. Ayers's defenders claim that he has redeemed

himself with public-spirited education work. That claim is hard to

swallow if you understand that he views his education work as an effort

to stoke resistance to an oppressive American system. He likes to stress

that he learned of his first teaching job while in jail for a

draft-board sit-in. For Mr. Ayers, teaching and his 1960s radicalism are

two sides of the same coin....</span></div><div style="text-align: left;">
</div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 0; background-color: transparent;">The Obama campaign has cried foul

when Bill Ayers comes up, claiming "guilt by association." Yet the

issue here isn't guilt by association; it's guilt by participation. As

CAC chairman, Mr. Obama was lending moral and financial support to Mr.

Ayers and his radical circle. That is a story even if Mr. Ayers had

never planted a single bomb 40 years ago.</span></div></blockquote><font style="" /><div style="text-align: left;"><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font><font><font><font><font><font><span style="line-height: 0px;">
</span></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></div><font style="" /><div style="text-align: left;"><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style=""><font style="background-color: transparent;"><span style="line-height: 0;">In his </span></font><a href="http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MTViMGRmMmYxZTgwZTFjYmFjODU5YzM4Y2MwM2ViMjY=" target="_blank" style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 0; background-color: transparent;">National Review Online piece</a><font style="background-color: transparent;"><span style="line-height: 0;">,

Kurtz adds a valuable point about how the radical left dominated the

CAC despite the fact that the funding originated with Republican

powerhouse Walter Annenberg:</span></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></div><blockquote style=""><div style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 0; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" line-height="line-height" background-color="background-color" transparent="transparent">The Obama camp denies CAC’s

radicalism by pointing to the fact that this foundation was funded by

Nixon Ambassador and Reagan friend, Walter Annenberg. Moderates and

Republicans often support Annenberg activities, it’s true. Yet the story

of modern philanthropy is largely the story of moderate and

conservative donors finding their funds “captured” by far more liberal,

often radical, beneficiaries. CAC’s story is a classic of the genre.

Ayers and Obama guided CAC money to community organizers, like ACORN

(the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) and the

Developing Communities Project (Part of the Gamaliel Foundation

network), groups self-consciously working in the radical tradition of

Saul Alinsky. Walter Annenberg’s personal politics don’t change that one

iota.</span></div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" /><div style="text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="line-height: 0px;">
</span></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 0; background-color: transparent;">The fact that Ayers and other tenured radicals hold power

at our universities is in no way negated by the presence of Republican

appointees on university boards of trustees. Ayers’s radicalism is

undeniable. He remains unapologetic for his bombings of the 1960s. Even

now, he refuses to rule out violence as a resort. His education writings

are deeply politicized and filled with exhortations to “resist”

America’s racist and oppressive social system. In 2006 — along with his

wife and fellow former-terrorist, Bernardine Dohrn, and Jeff Jones —

Ayers released, Sing A Battle Song, a collection of intensely radical

writings from the Weather Underground. Ayers makes it clear in that book

that, while he is embarrassed by some of the Weather Underground’s

rhetoric, he still adheres to the same ideas. Beyond its strictly

historical interest, Ayers and his co-editors make a point of hoping

that their old writings would be “of use to new generations of militant

activists and organizers.” By directing CAC funds to groups like ACORN

and the Developing Communities Project of the Gamaliel Foundation, Ayers

was supporting just such militant activists and organizers....</span></div><div style="text-align: left;">
</div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 0; background-color: transparent;">The

Chicago Annenberg Challenge stands as Barack Obama’s most important

executive experience to date. By its own account, CAC was a largely a

failure. And a series of critical evaluations point to reasons for that

failure, including a poor strategy, to which the foundation

over-committed in 1995, and over-reliance on community organizers with

insufficient education expertise. The failure of CAC thus raises

entirely legitimate questions, both about Obama’s competence, his

alliances with radical community organizers, and about Ayers’s

continuing influence over CAC and its board, headed by Obama. Above all,

by continuing to fund Ayers’s personal projects, and those of his

political-educational allies, Obama was lending moral and material

support to Ayers’s profoundly radical efforts. Ayers’s terrorist history

aside, that makes the Ayers-Obama relationship a perfectly legitimate

issue in this campaign.</span></div></blockquote><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 0;" /><div style="text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 0;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 0;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 0;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 0;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 0;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 0;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 0;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 0;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 0;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 0;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 0;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 0;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 0;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 0;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 0;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 0;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 0;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 0;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 0;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 0;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 0;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 0;"><span style="line-height: 0; background-color: transparent;">Kurtz has painstakingly

documented the connections between Barack Obama and the radical left.

The only question is, will the so-called mainstream media find any of

this worth reporting between now and Election Day?</span></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></div><div role="complementary" id="block--" class="block block-" style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 0;">

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                <font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><span class="field-content"><h2 style="text-align: left;">About the Author</h2><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="line-height: 0; background-color: transparent;">Rich Noyes is Research Director at the Media Research Center. </span><a href="http://twitter.com/#%21/RichNoyes" style="line-height: 0; background-color: transparent;">Click here</a><span style="line-height: 0; background-color: transparent;"> to follow Rich Noyes on Twitter.</span></div></span></font></div>

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