The MacArthur Idiot Grant

A Pox on the MacArthur Genius Fellowship

Genius Grants are for Morons

I’ve spent the last month or so on a book tour, where I am often asked about how to win the culture war we find ourselves in. But winning the culture war waged against biological men and women and their children is just one of our great projects.

The other, of course, involves culture of a different kind: the arts and letters. Here, the battle is not yet joined. Instead, the right has surrendered and kept on surrendering.

Small rebellions have started to break out, of course. Not every movie is filled with men dressed like women. Not every painting is commissioned by a Podesta for their BDSM dungeons. Here and there, the spirit of beauty and truth still burns. Acorns for rhe culture war lie fallow, just waiting to be watered.

So how did the Left come to dominate the arts, and how can we compete?

Answer: Find a rich dead billionaire, seduce his widow, and plunder his fortune.

This is what happened to the storied MacArthur family’s foundation. It is worth $7.6 billion and hands out $260 million a year to some of the worst artists and leftwing art institutions on Earth.

And there is no more lusted-after prize among lefty academics than the MacArthur Fellowship, colloquially known as the Genius Grant.

The Genius Grant is a no-strings attached prize of $800,000, paid in quarterly installments over five years. 

The Grant is funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. 

You’ve probably heard their name and their famous mission statement read at the end of many PBS specials and documentaries.

The MacArthurs

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, private, independent foundation established in 1970 by philanthropists John and Catherine MacArthur. The MacArthur Foundation’s mission is to “support creative people and effective institutions committed to building a more just, verdant, and peaceful world.”

Here are the 2022 winners:

Officia Geniuses

The MacArthur Foundation didn’t start out as a slush fund for woke progressives. The history is a fascinating reminder of Conquest’s Second Law:

“When the MacArthur Foundation was created in 1970, it had six board members: William Kirby, two executives from Bankers Life and Casualty, radio commentator Paul Harvey, MacArthur’s wife Catherine, and MacArthur’s son Roderick. “I made the money,” MacArthur told the board, “you guys will have to figure out what to do with it.” In a 1976 interview with the Chicago Tribune, MacArthur said, “I’ve seen too many people, including Henry Ford, try to administer their estates from the grave. You have changing times. Besides, you lay down rules and people don’t follow them. So, I’ll trust in the Almighty that my trustees will do more good for the country than I would.”

John D. MacArthur was a self-made billionaire and a conservative. New York Daily News reporter Kiki Levathes described MacArthur as an “arch conservative” who complained, “The liberals have destroyed what makes this country great.”

When he died in 1978, MacArthur’s leftwing son Roderick took over administering the trust, which was worth $6 billion.

You can imagine how things went from there. 

One of Roderick’s earliest initiatives was the MacArthur Fellows Program, nicknamed “Genius Grants” by the media.

Conservative critics pointed out that many of the grantees were well-known for their liberal and left-wing political activism: the ACLU’s Morton Halperin, Population Bomb author Paul Ehrlich, global population control advocate John Holdren, leader of the unilateral nuclear freeze movement Randall Forsberg, and founders of the socialist periodical Dissent Irving Howe and Meyer Schapiro. Additional fellows included advocates for a variety of left-of-center causes including homelessness, environmentalism, abolishing the death penalty, prisoners’ rights, and the peace movement. Writing in U.S. News & World Report, John Leo described MacArthur fellows as “gender ideologues” and “low-luster laborers in the traditional vineyards of the left.” Sam Worley, Deputy Editor of the leftist “alternative” weekly Chicago Reader, exclaimed, “There could hardly be a more liberal grant than the MacArthur Fellowship.”

Another initiative spearheaded by Roderick in 1980 was the foundation’s $19 million bailout of failing Harper’s Magazine. A few years later, the foundation turned the magazine over to a new Harper’s Magazine Foundation, and Roderick’s son Rick was named publisher. With Rick MacArthur at the helm, Harper’s Magazine took a sharp turn leftward.

(From https://www.influencewatch.org/non-profit/john-d-and-catherine-t-macarthur-foundation/)

Thanks to Roderick MacArthur, the entire $6 billion fortune his father made was devoted to far-left causes. Predictably, this meant hundreds of millions to leftwing artists, climate organizations,  criminal justice (i.e., releasing all felons), “American Democracy,” and voter registration causes. 

Poor John MacArthur has become, in death, the American George Soros. 

Bad Art

But it is the Genius Grant for creatives that represents all that is wrong with our current culture. “Cecilia Conrad, managing director of the program, said the goal of the awards is to recognize “exceptional creativity,” as well as future potential, across the arts, sciences, humanities, advocacy and other fields.

“We want to have a share in people who are at a pivotal moment, when the fellowship could accelerate what their future could look like,” she said.

So says the woman who would rather see you in a gulag than give you a Genius Grant.

So who gets a Grant? Certain factors may help:

“While there are few restrictions on who may receive a fellowship, trends have emerged over time. Nearly all recipients are liberal, for example, and they tend to live on the East or West Coast, namely Manhattan and San Francisco. Working in academia or the arts is a definite plus, too. Lots of fellows are professors.”

Anyone who has seen the list of recent recipients getting Genius Grants could be forgiven for rending their garment in rage. 

In 2015, Ta-Nehisi Coates won and used the money to make homoerotic Black Panther comic books. 

"What's the good of getting a MacArthur genius grant if you can't go and write a comic book for Marvel?" Coates tells NPR's Audie Cornish. "I don't know. There are things that people consider to be genius, and then there are things that deep in my heart I've always believed to be genius."

In 2021, race warmonger Ibram X. Kendi won a Grant. 

In 2022, architect Amanda Williams won a Grant. Her work “investigates color, race, and space while blurring the conventional line between art and architecture,” including painting abandoned houses in the ghetto purple.

Williams also won a grant in 2014 from 3arts, a Chicago-based grant organization that “supports Chicago’s women artists, artists of color, and Deaf and disabled artists who work in the performing, teaching, and visual arts.” 

3Arts bestows $30,000 awards a year to ten artists.

Remember this sculpture that was unveiled this year in New York City? The succubus-octopus Ruth Bader Ginsberg abortion demon?

The genius with another of her sculptures, “Witness” (2023).

The Pakistani-American artist, Shahzia Sikander, received her own MacArthur Genius grant in 2006.

A painter named Titus Kaphar won the Grant in 2018. His work “reconfigures and regenerates art history to include the African-American subject.” 

Here are some examples of him “reconfiguring” classical art that featured white subjects:

If you are a starving artist and thinking of applying for your own Genius Grant, make sure you meet their stringent ideological requirements, which means having the correct politics. Whatever you do, try not to be white!

Total World Domination

The MacArthur Fund doesn’t just support a handpicked list of the wokest humans in the world. Bad news: they also fund lots of other people and institutions.

 “The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation supports creative people, effective institutions, and influential networks building a more just, verdant, and peaceful world. MacArthur is placing a few big bets that truly significant progress is possible on some of the world's most pressing social challenges, including over-incarceration, global climate change, nuclear risk, and significantly increasing financial capital for the social sector. In addition to the MacArthur Fellows Program, the Foundation continues its historic commitments to the role of journalism in a responsible and responsive democracy, as well as the strength and vitality of our headquarters city, Chicago.”

 They’ve given over $23 million to the Brooklyn-based nonprofit American Documentary. This is a company that churns out PBS documentaries that help reinforce the values of the parent fund.

Your children may have even seen their NAMBLA-friendly animated kids’ short on PBS called “To the Future, With Love.” Here is the description: “Meet 19-year-old Hunter “Pixel” Jimenez, a nonbinary trans boy caught between the expectations of his Guatemalan immigrant family and his dreams of living happily ever after.”

I watched it so you don’t have to. Hunter narrates this South Park style cut-out animated memoir. “Right now I identify as a nonbinary trans man,” he intones. I finally figured out that Hunter was actually a girl, only because her mean Catholic parents keep asking her if she is sure she is a boy. 

Hunter tells us about her “boyfriend” Damien, a white “transboy” in Arkansas. “He is my galaxy prince.” 

They’re not sending their best, folks.

Unfortunately, the MacArthur Foundation is in no danger of running out of money to fund its pet causes. They’ve got billions to spend. In 2021, their fund made over 20% in returns.

Which means we’re going to get a lot more terrible woke art.

I’m looking forward to the upcoming artistic output of TransLash, “a nonprofit media organization dedicated to producing digital, video, audio, and interactive reporting and nonfiction storytelling by and about transgender people in the United States, in particular, trans people of color.” Ooh, I can’t wait!

THE ANTIDOTE

Is there a way to combat this absolute trash tsunami swamping the culture?

Yes. We need our own MacArthur Fellowship. A new Genius Grant for /ourside/.

A GENESIUS GRANT 

Enter Saint Genesius. I chose him because he is the patron saint of actors and screenwriters, and it sounds like “genius.” Cute, right?

For you philistines:

Genesius of Rome is a legendary Christian saint, once a comedian and actor who had performed in plays that mocked Christianity. According to legend, while performing in a play that made fun of baptism, he had an experience on stage that converted him. He proclaimed his new belief, and he steadfastly refused to renounce it, even when the emperor Diocletian ordered him to do so.

A Genesius Grant could be our equivalent to the MacArthur Fellowship for artists and writers. Creative men and women on our side, for bloody once! You would like to read a good novel? Script? Watch a dramatic stage play that is not a pornographic queer exploration of some 21 year-old illiterate grad student’s sexual awakening? Me too!

Here is the mission statement for the Genesius Grant:

The Genesius Fellows Program is intended to encourage people of outstanding talent to pursue their own creative, intellectual, and professional inclinations. In keeping with this purpose, the Foundation awards fellowships directly to individuals rather than through institutions. Recipients may be writers, scientists, artists, entrepreneurs, or those in other fields, with or without institutional affiliations. They may use their fellowship to advance their expertise, engage in bold new work, or, if they wish, to change fields or alter the direction of their careers.

Although nominees are reviewed for their achievements, the fellowship is not a lifetime achievement award, but rather an investment in a person's originality, insight, and potential. Indeed, the purpose of the Genesius Fellows Program is to enable recipients to exercise their own creative instincts for the benefit of human society.

Just kidding—that’s the mission statement of the MacArthur Grant. I just changed the names. Jealous now?

And yet, the old problem stubbornly remains. Folks, we neglected to take over some 18th century copper baron’s ill-gotten fortune and claim it for our own cause! We have exactly zero little old ladies who are the heirs to great-grandfather
Abernathy’s shipping business billions.

I have heard from many people that right-wing donors “will not give away their money,” “they don’t understand culture,” “they only give money to politicians.” Is this true? 

Maybe. 

Regardless, we have to try. Or this will be the fate of all art soon:

Thanks for reading this one!

—Peachy

P.S. If you enjoyed this, you’ll enjoy my new book, Domestic Extremist: A Practical Guide to Winning the Culture War.

Thank you—I hope you keep reading!

Learn more at: peachykeenanwrites.com.