Over the past three decades, conservatives have painstakingly cultivated the public persona of an aggrieved outsider class, bereft of the money and media influence they claim liberals enjoy. Their well-rehearsed routine consists of the repetition of a series of catchphrases designed to snare votes by using wedge social issues to create class divisions, while their own campaigns are funded by a class of wealthy, corporate donors who keep their think tanks flush with lucre. But this bait and switch is hardly a secret, and the donor class continues to throw hundreds of millions of dollars at conservative think tanks in order to shore up the right wing's advantage in both organization and message discipline. Since the early 1970s, countless conservative foundations have sprung up to quietly influence American public policy by identifying, training, and churning out conservative journalists, thinkers, and pundits -- many of whom now hold positions of power in the media. Earlier this year, the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP) issued a detailed report by Jeff Krehely, Meaghan House and Emily Kernan entitled, "Axis of Ideology: Conservative Foundations and Public Policy," in which they sought to gauge the degree of the right's investment in its ideas infrastructure. Universally ignored by the mainstream media, the report's authors identified more than $254 million worth of public policy grants made between 1999 and 2001, with just five institutions (many of which share board members and directors) laying out the lion's share of the money. [more
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