Before the 2012 presidential election, anonymous billboards sprung up in battleground states warning voters that voter fraud was a felony. These billboards were placed in areas where minorities live in Ohio and Wisconsin. It has been widely assumed that the intent was to frighten minority voters and to suppress their vote, which would likely be heavily Democratic. More recently it was learned that these billboards were funded by the Bradley Foundation (http://www.jsonline.com/blogs/news/176675811.html), whose president, Michael Grebe, was the campaign manager for Scott Walker, the controversial right-wing Republican governor of Wisconsin (http://www.prwatch.org/news/2012/11/11834/bradley-foundation-bankrolls-controversial-billboards-treading-controversial-new-).
What many people may not be aware of is the Bradley Foundation’s role in supporting the writing of the influential scholarly work, The Bell Curve, which claimed that IQ is a genetically inheritable trait, directly related to socioeconomic success. Charles Murray, one of the authors, was given $800,000 over a period of 10 years by the Bradley Foundation to support his work on this book (The Critical Assessment of Research, 35). Many reviewers of The Bell Curve, both in the mass media and scholarly periodicals, lauded the book. It was called “a landmark study,” “meticulous,” and “honest,” with findings that “cannot be easily dismissed” (The Critical Assessment of Research, 29-31). However, given its advocacy of hard right wing positions (see http://www.jsonline.com/news/milwaukee/from-local-roots-bradley-foundation-builds-conservative-empire-k7337pb-134187368.html and http://www.jsonline.com/news/134079498.html), is it likely that the Bradley Foundation was funding research whose findings were anything but a foregone conclusion from its very inception?
Focus On Research (FOR) 