A recent report alleges that the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation aims to censor and control society for the purpose of advancing progressive ideals.
According to the report, which has been published at The Capital Research Center, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation advocates for the censorship of politically incorrect and anti-feminist views on social media. In addition, the foundation has partnered with Microsoft in an effort to replace standardized testing with an educational video game system that would likely bring a progressive message to millions of American students.
The free speech-averse John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation aspires to leverage social media and educational testing in order to strengthen elite control of all aspects of society and culture. The philanthropy promotes politically correct censorship on popular websites like Twitter and Facebook, but for more insight into the organization, focus on the left-wing MacArthur board chairman who has long been a heavy-hitter in textbook publishing.
John MacArthur died in 1978, and by 1981, the leftists had taken power at his foundation and ousted the conservatives. With just under $6.5 billion in assets at the end of 2014, it is now the seventeenth-largest private foundation in the country and the largest in Illinois, according to FoundationSearch. The philanthropy has been a major force on the American media landscape for years, with total annual spending of approximately $225 million. In 2013, the foundation spent $79.1 million on U.S. grants, with the lion’s share going to “digital media and learning.”
While its oft-mentioned donations in support of liberal media outlets like NPR and PBS have made the MacArthur brand familiar to many, few Americans know of its larger designs: a stealth campaign to help the Left control the U.S. educational system via digital media assessments and efforts by the foundation’s chairman to foster censorship on social media. The unifying theme of many MacArthur projects is manipulation of America’s “Overton windows” (a term describing the range of acceptable political discourse on a particular topic), either through increasingly antiquated communication channels like radio and television, or through forward-looking technology and education grants.
MacArthur has been interested in global online censorship since 2007, when it teamed up with Harvard’s Berkman Center to track governmental Internet censorship worldwide. Ironically, MacArthur now advocates for censorship of anti-feminist views and other opinions it automatically deems “hate speech.”
Read the article at The Capital Research Center.
Tom Ciccotta writes about Free Speech and Intellectual Diversity for Breitbart. You can follow him on Twitter @tciccotta or on Facebook. You can email him at tciccotta@breitbart.com