Without the rigorous peer-reviewed standards required by prestigious academic publications, the Olin Foundation was able to inject into the mainstream a number of works whose scholarship was debatable at best.

Ford was, for instance, pouring money into the environmental movement, funding the Environmental Defense Fund and the Natural Resources Defense Council. By supporting public interest litigation, it showed conservatives how philanthropy could achieve large-scale change through the courts while bypassing the democratic electoral process, just as the

Hayek’s point was emphatic: to conquer politics, one must first conquer the intellectuals. O’Connell recalled, “It was like a home-study course.”

accelerate plans to establish an independent black studies program at Cornell, as well as to investigate the burning of a cross outside a building in which several black female students lived.

Cornell’s administrators had quickly capitulated to the demands of the black militants, rather than risk a bloody confrontation.

eighty black students marched in formation out of the student union, which they had seized, with their clenched fists held high in black power salutes.

Cornell University on April 20, 1969.

“I was lucky. Higher education did not push me left, and I’ve never regretted it,” he wrote in his memoir. “I’d say the main reason that rich people feel guilty is that the schools teach them they should.”

Between 1981 and 1986, the top income tax rate was cut from 70 percent to 28 percent. Meanwhile, taxes on the bottom four-fifths of earners rose. Economic inequality, which had flatlined, began to climb.