N. S. Lyons joins Brian C. Anderson to discuss the deep-pocketed Ford Foundation’s long history of funding radical social movements.
Audio Transcript
Brian Anderson: Welcome back to the 10 Blocks podcast. This is Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal. Joining me on the show today is the essayist N.S. Lyons. He's the author of a terrific Substack newsletter called The Upheaval, which explores our era of revolutionary cultural, technological, and political change.
He's written for City Journal a number of times. He's also written for First Things, Palladium, and other top publications. He was previously a geopolitical analyst based in Washington, DC. He joins me today to discuss his provocative story in our spring issue “Foundation of American Folly,” which details the long history of radicalism and bad ideas supported by the Ford Foundation. So, N.S., thanks very much for joining us.
N.S. Lyons: Hi, Brian. Great to be here.
Brian Anderson: So as this essay you've written for us shows the Ford Foundation's influence on politics and society has been and continues to be profound for decades, largely, you argue, and I would agree, to destructive effect.
So let's start with the current situation where the foundation, as you indicate, has funded a number of far left wing and even what you could describe as revolutionary causes and groups in America. So I wonder if you could just say what it's been up to in recent years? And how much money does the foundation spend and have on hand to spend?
N.S. Lyons: Well, the Ford Foundation alone is sitting on an endowment of around $16 billion, at least in 2021, which is the last data that I saw. So it's really a tremendous amount of money. That would put it in approximately the Fortune 500 if it was a private firm, but it's not. So that's untaxed money.
And what they've been funding in the last, let's say the last decade since 2013, '14, is essentially the whole Black Lives Matter, left wing, progressive machine that we've sort of seen disrupt American life over the last 10 years. So the most recent thing that they've poured at least a fair amount of money into is the sort of pro-Palestine protests we've seen in the last year or so since the October 7th attacks in Israel. A lot of the protests that we've seen in cities like New York is funded by foundations, not just Ford, but they have certainly played a role in that.
Brian Anderson: And they're doing this through various groups that they're giving grants to and the groups are setting up these encampments. Is that basically it?
N.S. Lyons: Absolutely. So essentially it would be a mistake to think that, say these student protestors, and this is really just one example of many examples that we've seen over the last ten years, these and beyond, is these groups when the students organize on campus, this is not the students themselves spontaneously doing all this organization and fundraising for themselves and so on.
These movements are not only funded, but organized at the grassroots or the ground level, the AstroTurf level, by various NGOs, left-wing NGOs and nonprofits that basically do this professionally all the time. And these nonprofits are funded by sort of a whole network of foundations, which are quite tangled. But many of these nonprofits eventually end up being funded by the largest foundation such as the Ford Foundation, the Open Society Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and so on.
Brian Anderson: I wonder if you could provide a brief overview of the Ford Foundation's history. Its initial mission was very different from what it has become. So how did the foundation shift from its original goals and become what it is today, an entity supporting very left-wing, indeed revolutionary causes in some cases?
N.S. Lyons: Yeah, I mean, the foundation is completely different from what it was envisioned as originally. I mean, actually the foundation was founded essentially as a tax dodge in 1936 by Henry Ford. FDR's various New Deal tax laws had come into effect. And the Ford Motor Company was essentially threatened with the family, the Ford family, losing their controlling position in the Ford Motor Company.
And so they set up this foundation essentially in order to grant it 90% of their stock. So that they would essentially remain, so that they would not have to sell stock in order to raise cash and therefore lose control of the company. So originally this was essentially just a tax move. It soon became more than that.
Eventually it began to, I mean, it had become the largest private foundation essentially overnight in the world. So it had a tremendous amount of money, they had to figure out what to do with it. And they started funding things that we would sort of normally think of as charity work. Sort of like the old Andrew Carnegie model.
But that soon changed in the 1960s when essentially the Ford Foundation pioneered a shift to social justice, social work as its sort of primary model. And that was sort of led by the transition of the foundation into what we might call the hands of the technocratic class. Who decided that they knew a better way to fix society and that they were going to pioneer this through the Ford Foundation's money.
Brian Anderson: As you argue, the foundation played a significant role in fostering what we today are calling identity politics. And indeed, this did start in the '60s with various initiatives to promote black separatism and community control of schools. So maybe describe that a little bit. There were very involved with that whole initiative in New York and elsewhere.
N.S. Lyons: Yeah, they absolutely were. In fact, I argue that looking at the evidence, the Ford Foundation seems to have essentially invented identity politics in the United States. That may be an exaggeration, but it's at least close.
So in the '60s, the foundation had gained a new president McGeorge Bundy, the former national security official. And they were very close with first the Kennedys and second with Lyndon B. Johnson. And what was decided essentially in the '60s by Bundy, was that the foundation would make the black struggle, well, black struggle, essentially the leading pillar of the foundation's work.
And this was, they followed through on this. They went into the cities. This was a program that was sort of invented by Paul Ylvisaker, a Harvard social scientist who was at the Ford Foundation. And what they essentially decided was that they would pioneer these efforts in the inner cities to essentially apply social science to these cities and with a tremendous amount of money.
And so for example, the so-called Gray Areas Project was set up in New York City as a test ground. To essentially they started a foundation, funded essentially the takeover of the school boards, the school districts in New York, at least some of them, and then handed them over to cadres of activists that the foundation had selected.
And they deliberately selected the most radical. Internal documents say they sought for the most radical and disruptive black activists they could find. The idea of being to create a new, so-called leadership class among the African-American elite, which they're trying to set up. And in practice that meant to them that these would be the most radical separatists they could find.
And it worked. These separatists took over these schools and created a huge amount of disruption. So much so that there was essentially a city-wide strike and a mass pushback by the population. That's the only way that these experiments, as they called them, ended. But for several years in the '60s, there was a tremendous amount of disruption, and that was sort of just the start for the Ford Foundation who went on to essentially fund much of the left-wing activism, especially of what we call the new left in the United States.
Brian Anderson: As you document, and I guess I didn't know this history, the foundation's work really could even be said to have created a kind of Hispanic identity in the United States. In the sense of bringing together different groups of people who didn't recognize themselves specifically as Hispanics. I wonder if you could talk a bit about that.
N.S. Lyons: Yeah, well, it's actually quite fascinating. It was shocking to me to essentially find this out in my research. Because before the 1960s or the early '70s, really “Hispanic” was not a thing in the United States. No one called themselves that. That was a category that was in fact created by the Ford Foundation in the early, or the late 1960s.
So in 1964, the Ford Foundation funds this program at UCLA. A study that was called, if I can recall it, it was the... Okay, so in 1964, the Ford Foundation begins to fund this study that comes out in 1966. It's called “The Mexican American People, the Nation's Second-Largest Minority.” So these UCLA researchers essentially go around and talk to all the Mexicans, but also other Latino populations they can find. And essentially try to convince them that they quote, "Share with the Negroes the disadvantages of poverty, economic insecurity, and discrimination."
And what they find is that these people do not see themselves that way. They don't see themselves as oppressed. Often they see themselves as white. And so this is a huge disappointment to them because what they're looking to do is essentially attach the Mexican-American populations and others to LBJ's Great Society program in the war on poverty. So they want to be able to use these people as a means of sucking money out of the federal government.
And so what the Ford Foundation sets out to do, Paul Ylvisaker, this expert, the same guy who later funds the Black Power Initiatives, is he sets up to create a new ethnic identity in the United States. He funds various NGOs, including the Mexican-American Legal Defense Fund, MALDEF, that's still operating today. But mainly he funds La Raza, which is literally The Race, and the purpose, which is also still active today, although under a different name.
And the whole purpose of this advocacy organization, The Race is to create a new race of people in the United States under one umbrella, which becomes Hispanics. And so they do this by essentially pressuring the US Census Bureau into creating this category and creating new laws. Pressuring the Congress to create new laws that essentially categorizes all these people under one umbrella so that they can sort of push this identity forward.
And this works fantastically. I mean, today we think of Hispanics as sort of one group, although they're not. But the Hispanics has sort of become a power base for the Democratic Party, which was the point. Because Ylvisaker says in this follow-up essay years later that his entire aim was to create a new solidarity for the left under this identity. So this is literally identity politics at sort of its most raw level.
Brian Anderson: Well, it's an extraordinary impact when you think of the trajectory of our history in the subsequent decades. The foundation here does seem to be supporting, or at least verbally supporting the idea of community and community control, but it's often been criticized as a kind of top-down, you used the word earlier technocratic organization.
So I wonder how does it operate? How does its decision-making work? And how much visibility do we even have into the foundation's inner workings?
N.S. Lyons: I mean, we have some visibility in the sense that the foundation itself advertises much of what it does. I mean, they're quite proud of their social justice work. So if you go to their website, you'll find plenty about that. They maintain a whole database of their grants, and they're required to do that as a nonprofit.
And so you can go digging through their grants database and you'll be surprised at what you find. Like I did in some cases. I mean, they're funding, for example, Chinese government organizations, think tanks, for example. They don't advertise that so much, at least here. So there is some visibility in the sense that it's open. What hasn't happened is people really haven't dug into these foundations, I think as much as they should.
And I'd emphasize again that it's not just Ford. All of these foundations, the big foundations do this. They're essentially all left-wing and they're all united. And that's part of what makes them so powerful. So they work together as well.
So to some degree, there's some visibility. But what I think is not well understood is how they channel their money essentially through a whole network of institutions and NGOs and nonprofits. And sometimes this is called sort of charitable money laundering because they can use essentially strings of NGOs to disguise where the money originally came from.
So if Ford might fund one umbrella NGO, that then funds others, that then eventually ends up funding Antifa activists on the street. So it's Ford money funding these people, but it's not quite obvious. We also see that these foundations fund a lot of the organizations that you might think would cover them, investigate them critically. I mean, Ford for example, funds The New York Times, not well known, for millions of dollars.
It funds the Public Broadcast Corporation, and NPR. So these media institutions, including local media, small local media, are often funded by these foundations as well. And then this network goes beyond funding the activists and the propaganda, let's say, but also the sort of whole legal system that surrounds them.
So when Ford-funded activists were arrested in Charlottesville and elsewhere for violence, essentially, these people were bailed out and supported in court by lawyers who were also funded by the Ford Foundation. So they sort of have accomplished this whole network of supporting institutions that are all supported by the same foundations to do what they want to do.
Brian Anderson: It's really a remarkable system of power. And when you compare not just Ford, but these other left-of-center foundations with what exists on the right, it dwarfs the conservative foundation world in terms of money, right?
N.S. Lyons: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think there's simply no comparison. I mean, we're talking collectively about hundreds of billions of dollars that these foundations are sitting on top of, the left-wing, big left-wing foundations. And that's not even taking into account what we call the oligarchic money from some of America's largest billionaires. Much of which flows through these foundations, but not all of it.
Because these foundations also work with the so-called “dark money" sort of organizations, often use LLCs or other structures in order to hide where their money is coming from. But these all are sort of in the same ecosystem, and so there's simply no comparison for money on the right. And I think in part that's sort of a difference in philosophy.
Conservatives tend to, let's be honest, not be very good at organizing these sort of vast bureaucratic systems, much of which is just sort of grift. So people on the right, at least in my view, tend to try to accomplish specific aims. Whereas these foundations have essentially, they exist to perpetuate themselves as well as to exert influence. And so they have sort of no final goal or point at which they would stop their activities and say, "All right, we're done." That simply doesn't happen on the left.
Brian Anderson: Well, that's a very useful overview, N.S., and thank you for the conversation and for the superb article. It's called “Foundation of American Folly.” You can find it on the City Journal website and some of N.S.'s other work there as well. We'll link to his author page in the description.
You can find City Journal on X, @CityJournal, and on Instagram @CityJournal_MI. And N.S. Lyons' Substack, I encourage you to check it out. It's called The Upheaval. It's filled with interesting content. As always, if you like what you've heard on today's podcast, please give us a five-star rating on iTunes. N.S., thanks very much for coming on.
N.S. Lyons: Thank you, Brian.
Photo by Bill Tompkins/Getty Images