According to this article by Jane Mayer in The New Yorker, a businessman named Art Pope spent $2.2 million bucks in 2010 and bought 18 seats in the North Carolina General Assembly, flipping it to Republican control for the first time since 1870.

That’s not all Pope has done; he’s attempting to dictate the content of economics courses taught at state universities, at least the ones that he can’t succeed in defunding altogether.

Pope’s network has campaigned to slash education budgets, which is a controversial move. George Leef, the director of research at the [Pope-funded] Center for Higher Education Policy, has described the funding of higher education as “a boondoggle” that robs taxpayers, and Shaw has demanded that the legislature “starve the beast.” Last spring, the Republican majority voted to cut four hundred and fourteen million dollars from the state-university budget—a sixteen-per-cent reduction. Funds were also severely cut for public schools and preschool programs. Even though public opinion overwhelmingly supported leaving a penny sales tax in place, in order to sustain education funding, Republican legislators instituted the cut anyway, overriding a veto by Perdue, the Democratic governor. (Many of the Republicans had signed a no-tax pledge promoted by Americans for Prosperity.) At the university level, the cuts are expected to result in layoffs, tuition hikes, and fewer scholarships, even though the state’s constitution specifically requires that higher education be made as free “as practicable” to all residents.

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At the same time that Pope’s network has been fighting to get university budgets cut, Pope has offered to fund academic programs in subjects that he deems worthwhile, like Western civilization and free-market economics.

Thank you, Justices Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, Kennedy and Alito. Your partisan decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission has given a state to the Republican party. It’s not quite as big a prize as your predecessors achieved in Bush v. Gore, but it’s still pretty impressive.