True, we need, or at any rate must suffer, the plague of foundations—for fear of an unhealthy political monoculture in which our own miscues and misdeeds go unchallenged. That does not mean these foundations’ current powers and privileges should go unscrutinized. The Ford Foundation was set up in 1936 and now controls about $17 billion in assets, and long since passed out of the effective control of the Ford family. The Rockefeller Foundation controls a mere $6 billion but is so alienated from its roots in Standard Oil money that it is divesting from fossil fuels.

These foundations, and the endowed nonprofit sector more broadly, have been captured by a set of woke officers largely unsupervised by equally woke boards of trustees. They are globalist and frequently antihuman, but they benefit from tax privileges at the expense of the American people. The Ford Foundation has given hundreds of millions to Black Lives Matter and similar causes, and nothing to those whose homes and businesses were destroyed by BLM rioters. The Rockefeller Brothers Foundation pays anti-Semitic protestors on Ivy League campuses while claiming to be balanced because it funds the no less murderously intentioned astroturf organization, the Orwellian-monikered Jewish Voices for Peace.

We can’t and we shouldn’t make every rich man in America either blow his stash on drawing to inside straights and launching fast rockets or donate it to more humane causes. But we can require that all nontaxable foundations come to subserve the views of current donors, by requiring every entity in the nonprofit sector to spend down its endowment in a short period of time. At the moment, private foundations are required to spend 5% of their endowment a year. Given market performance, especially in inflationary times, that is far from sufficient to ensure that these foundations do not outlive the intentions of their donors and eat American civilization.