“A political hit job”: The Boston Globe’s Shirley Leung Interviews Nancy MacLean on Claudine Gay Case

I cannot recommend strongly enough that you read this Shirley Leung piece interviewing historian Nancy MacLean about the malign forces attacking higher education, including the Claudine Gay case. Then listen to the entirety of Ms. Leung’s interview with Professor MacLean at the Globe’s  Say More.

These are the same folks attacking K-12 over CRT and LGBTQ persons. As Professor MacLean made clear, to understand the saboteurs like Chris Rufo you need to understand where the money behind them comes from. So, let’s look at some of Chris Rufo’s patrons using Center for Media and Democracy’s invaluable Sourcewatch.

Rufo is currently a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. No surprise, Manhattan has received funding from entities controlled by Charles Koch and his late brother David. Here are some donors from the extremist right oligarchy:

Charles Koch Institute $66,720 (2014-2018)

Charles Koch Foundation ($788,093 (2013-2019).

Bradley Foundation ($3,000,000+ 2001-2010)

Bradley Impact Fund ($181,500 (2014-2019)

Paul E Singer Foundation: $3,500,000 (2013-2018)

InfluenceWatch has some more recent donors: “Thomas W. Smith Foundation ($1.27 million in 2019), ¹¹ the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation ($625,000 in 2019), ¹² and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation ($599,631 in 2017).

The major funder of school privatization fronts in Massachusetts is the Walton Family Foundation. WFF gives to Manhattan Institute too, $600,000 in 2021-2022, and more since 2000.

Rufo has also been a fellow at the Pacific Research Institute. From Sourcewatch, here are some of its moneymen and women:

Charles Koch Foundation: $150,000 (2013-2016)

Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation (Koch controlled): $150,000 (2011-2012)

David H. Koch Foundation: $150,000 (2017)

Sarah Scaife Foundation: $3,872,000 (1985-2012)

Searle Freedom Trust: $1,410,000 (2003-2012)

Donors Capital Fund (frequent conduit of Koch network dark money) : $1,210,001 (2007-2012)

Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation: $1,136,000 (1987-2012)

Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation: $905,000 (1992-2012)

Jaquelin Hume Foundation: $773,750 (1999-2012)

William E. Simon Foundation: $759,250 (2002-2012)

John M. Olin Foundation: $735,000 (1986-2002)

Lovett and Ruth Peters Foundation (founders of Boston’s Pioneer Institute): $625,000 (2002-2012)

Rufo was also a fellow at the Heritage Foundation. Heritage is the most influential right wing think tank in Washington. Sourcewatch notes “Its initial funding was provided by Joseph Coors, of the Coors beer empire, and Richard Mellon Scaife, heir of the Mellon industrial and banking fortune.” It has deep ties to the Koch network and right-wing umbrella group Council for National Policy (CNP). Funders include:

Charles Koch Foundation: $631,554 (2014-2020)

Charles Koch Institute: $624,000 (2018-2020)

Donors Capital Fund: $264,000 (2010-2019)

DonorsTrust: $2,611,654 (2010-2021)

Ed Uihlein Family Foundation: $230,000 (2014-2020)

Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation: $1,707,440 (2013-2021)

Mercer Family Foundation: $2,000,000 (2013-2016)

Searle Freedom Trust: $1,875,000 (2011-2020)

Walton Family Foundation: $200,000 (2018)

Heritage’s Form 990 tax return for 2022 shows it took in over $95,000,0000. What does it do with that money? Here is its recent 900+ page plan to the hoped for 2025 Trump administration: how to dismantle American government, including public education. Heritage is a crucial member of the CNP, which in 2017 urged Trump to move toward abolishing public schools to be replaced with “free-market private schools, church schools, and home schools as the normative American practice.”

The Koch network and CNP have been working on this for years. See Anne Nelson, Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right;  and Ralph Wilson and Isaac Kamola, Free Speech and Koch Money: Manufacturing a Campus Culture War.

After you’ve read and listened to Nancy MacLean’s interview with Shirley Leung, read Prof. MacLean’s book, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America.

Then take action. Support institutions like our glorious public and private universities and our wonderful public schools—they are crucial to democracy. As Timothy Snyder argues in On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, tyrants attack institutions that support democracy in order to upend them and replace them with authoritarian fronts. We need to defend our free and fair elections, our courts, our media, and our k-12 public schools and institutions of higher learning.

Rufo and his ilk are well-organized and lavishly funded. But I’ve learned something chasing dark money: it has to stay dark because the public hates what its check writers are selling. Democracy beats these authoritarians. But only if we act to protect our democratic form of government and the institutions that serve it so well.

“Why wait for popular opinion to catch up when you could portray as ‘reform’ what was really slow-motion demolition through privatization?” – Professor Nancy MacLean, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Plan for America.

[Full disclosure: as a (now retired) educator in the UMass system, I am a union member. I write about dark money, democracy, and oligarchy. My book, Dark Money and the Politics of School Privatization, is in print.]