Last month, the Associated Press broke two "ground-breaking" stories in rapid-fire succession. One headline all but screamed out the stunning revelation that "Scientists Say Men, Women Not Alike." Before Americans could begin to absorb the implications of this epochal discovery, they were bombarded by another AP shocker: "Study: Parents Can Affect Teen Sex."

Now I am pleasantly surprised whenever well-paid researchers draw the proper conclusions from their social "data," and journalists, in turn, communicate this information to the public without contaminating it with the usual liberal bias. But still, after reading these incredibly banal headlines, I wondered: just how stupid have American intellectuals become, that they need to spend millions of dollars on research to confirm what most of us know anyway? To tell us basic truths about relations between the sexes which any good parent should have instilled in us as a matter of course?

Well, the answer to this question is fairly simple. American intellectuals as a class, judging by what we read and hear daily in the mainstream media organs they control, have become very, very stupid. If you regularly read the kind of social science revelations the highbrow New York Times has been publishing since the 1960s, you begin to see why an uneducated simpleton like Forrest Gump struck so many Americans as a fount of wisdom. These days it often seems like the more schooling people receive, the dumber they get.

Still, if American intellectuals are imbeciles when it comes to the basic facts of life, just how, exactly, did they get that way? To me, this is the real mystery. And while countless books published in the last decade or so, from Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind to Philipp Howard’s The Death of Common Sense, have copiously illustrated the depths to which American intellectual and popular culture has sunk, they have been conspicuously less successful in explaining why this has happened.

Enter Heather Mac Donald, an investigative journalist from the New York-based City Journal whose new essay collection, The Burden of Bad Ideas, draws on years of first-hand observation on the front lines of American cultural depravity. After reading this brilliant book, I have come to think of Mac Donald as a kind of Forrest Gump of the culture wars, whose self-effacing intellectual modesty, combined with curiosity, hard work and a good eye for detail, allows her to generate both genuine shock at the stupidity around her and a plausible account of how things came to be as they are today.

One of the charms of this book is the lack of methodological pretense Mac Donald brings to her work. Though a fearless reporter, she never went to journalism school; although historically astute, she never (unlike me) wasted time and money getting a Ph.D. in the subject; and although possessing both English and law degrees, she uses neither professionally. Instead, she just talks to ordinary people about their problems, listens to what they have to say, and writes the truth about them.

To explore the sexual pathology wrought by our welfare system, for example, Mac Donald asks a single mother on food stamps what she would do without them. "I’d get a husband," the woman replies without a second thought, providing Mac Donald with "a tantalizing bit of evidence of welfare’s corrosive effect on the inner-city family." Naturally, the liberal editor of the newspaper she worked for then cut the quote from her article (on the grounds that citing the poor woman’s truthful remarks would "stigmatize the poor").

Peeling back from this anecdote, Mac Donald describes a world in which millions of highly educated Americans, like her editor, choose to willfully ignore patently obvious truths about social behavior in order to preserve their pretensions of liberal virtue. But she does more than this: she explains who taught them to do this — well-endowed foundations and universities pushing a destructive social agenda — and how and why these influential organizations, which were once run by reasonable men and women of strong moral character, turned into such bastions of unreason in the 20th century.

Mac Donald’s story begins, surprisingly enough, with the famously God-fearing entrepreneurial "robber barons" who endowed America’s greatest research institutions. The real hero here was Andrew Carnegie, who used his steel fortune to create our wonderful system of free public libraries, along with universities, museums and scientific research institutes — whose administrators, importantly, were required by statute to run their institutions in accordance with their founder’s strict moral values. This meant that no "handouts" were allowed; anyone who received grants or support had to prove his or her worthiness first.

Unfortunately for America, Carnegie’s greatest contemporary peer in wealth accumulation, oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller, abandoned a crucial element in the Carnegie model of philanthropy in order to outdo his rival. While the Rockefeller Foundation contributed, in the early years of the 20th century, to astounding scientific discoveries in fields as diverse as genetics, biochemistry and X-rays, Rockefeller himself ultimately abdicated personal control over his foundation’s priorities on the say-so of his advisor, a visionary of "scientific philanthropy" named Frederick Gates. Gates convinced Rockefeller that endowed charities would only have true social value if they were put in the hands of educated "experts," who presumably knew more than rich old laissez-faire capitalists about public morality.

Rockefeller himself had his doubts about this — he wrote in a private letter in 1919 that he feared turning over his money to academics, who, he had noticed, were already conspicuous in their sympathy for "Bolshevism" in the early years after the Russian Revolution — but he gave in to Gates’ pressure, and unaccountable "experts," armed with higher degrees, were put permanently in charge of all of Rockefeller’s endowments.

It is impossible to exaggerate the impact of Rockefeller’s unfortunate decision and the precedent it set for successor endowments, of which the most important (and richest) is the Ford Foundation. Nearly all of the medical and social-science research which now sets the nation’s social agenda traces ultimately to the great private foundations, which over time came to preach a socialistic gospel that would have been anathema to the men who made the fortunes which underwrite them. (It is true that conservative foundations, like Olin, have sprung up in recent years to counter Rockefeller and Ford, but according to Mac Donald they are still outspent four to one by the "liberal Leviathans.")

Today the robber barons would scarcely recognize the perverse agenda now being promoted with their money, from single-mother welfare advocacy groups, to condom-distribution programs for teenagers, to the whole mind-boggling array of largely revisionist minority, ethnic, gay and lesbian studies programs that now impoverish intellectual life in our universities.

Whereas Carnegie wanted his money used to help "those who help themselves" (thus the free public library) instead of going to the "slothful, the drunken, [and] the unworthy," the fortunes of most of his counterparts now typically end up in the hands of designated victim groups, pregnant teenagers, welfare cheats and intravenous drug users. Endowed medical research (what Mac Donald calls "public health quackery") now often denies the possibility of individual responsibility for sexually transmitted diseases such as AIDS, focusing instead on bugaboos such as "sexism" and "racism."

When modern researchers do spend foundation or government money to focus on individual behavior, meanwhile, they often encourage exactly the kind of moral slothfulness Carnegie decried, as in the now-infamous Centers for Disease Control sponsored STD-prevention "project" which featured "condom demonstrations on dildos in a church in Nashville and condom ads on buses and billboards." The clean-living entrepreneurs who accumulated the wealth now being squandered in this way must be rolling over in their graves.

Nowhere did the liberal foundations have a more corrosive influence on our culture than in the so-called "War on Poverty" begun in the 1960s. Almost single-handedly, the Ford Foundation invented, in the recollection of retired Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, "a new level of American government: the inner-city community action agency." Through such agencies, Ford money (and that of the federal government, which often follows Ford’s lead) has subsidized gangs, ethnic pride groups and even "teen pregnacy initiatives" which promote frank discussions about premarital sex in traditional Latino and Asian ethnic communities where it is frowned upon.

This last instance of social engineering Mac Donald labels "moral imperialism," a term which could aptly be applied to the welfare system as a whole. In a particularly effective chapter called "Compassion Gone Mad," she details the snowballing effect of social service subsidies which, by rewarding dysfunctional behavior, have exacerbated all of the problems they were supposed to solve.

To illustrate this circular, self-reinforcing process, Mac Donald takes on a tour of the welfare system, as an irresponsible young woman might go through it. "Pregnant with illegitimate child," our future single mother will begin receiving Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) benefits by the sixth month of pregnancy. If she lives in liberal big city like New York, she will also have access to free or low-cost targeted medical care, along with other strangely named "preventive" services such as "Healthy Start," which are meant to lubricate her future family with cash to face the problems she, as a single mother, is expected to have.

Once our subject has given birth, things get really bizarre. The worse a mother she turns out to be (say, if she trades in her food stamps for drugs, or beats her child) the more case workers will be assigned to her — each paid by various government and semi-governmental agencies — and the more special subsidies she will have access to. Juvenile justice, child welfare, youth services and mental health action groups will pitch in cash for counseling, "parental guidance" classes, "anger management" therapy, even maid service and help with household chores, until our single mother will be a veritable government program unto herself, a giant money pit of social failure. Meanwhile, Mac Donald points out reprovingly, "the neighbors next door, a poor working couple struggling to provide a decent home for their child, are left to scrub their own floors."

The perverse logic that sees more and more public and private capital go to reward social pathology is perfectly encapsulated in the new phenomenon of high school day-care centers, provided by city governments to ease the lives of teen mothers. New York City’s public school system, for example, operates no less than 35 of these, costing urban taxpayers nearly $8 million annually, at about $12,666 per teen mother. Remarkably, these centers do not even require that the mothers visit their children during lunch hour — on the logic that doing so would harm the already "vulnerable" young woman further. If she nursed her child even this once during the school day, you see, our young mother wouldn’t get to hang out with her friends in the all-important cafeteria social hour. By thus "normalizing" selfish, destructive behavior instead of stigmatizing it, Mac Donald argues, our government sends the "pernicious message that society not only tolerates but expects teens to have babies."

After reading Mac Donald’s book, I feel safe in concluding that our public welfare system has been a moral disaster, taking even something as basic to human life as parenting and screwing it up almost irreversibly. What is even more shocking is how much we have paid to destroy our culture. Since the 1960s, Mac Donald estimates, the foundations and federal programs designed on the basis of foundation research have sunk tens of billions of dollars into promoting an anti-family agenda.

It didn’t have to be this way. Perhaps the greatest virtue of Mac Donald’s book is the way it shows us how the well-intentioned decisions of powerful and wealthy individuals — most significantly Rockefeller — enabled our country’s vast wealth to be squandered on this swath of social destruction known as the welfare state. It takes a very rich country to turn single motherhood into a professional vocation, to spawn entire generations of socially destructive parasites out of the best of liberal intentions. Had Rockefeller and Ford laid down conditions on how their money was spent, had our private universities held on to the moral values of the men who endowed them, we might have spawned generations of hard-working inventors, scientists and scholars instead.

It will take years to undo the damage already done to our culture by the liberal foundations and the government agencies they inspired, but if those accumulating the wealth of today listen to Mac Donald’s advice and earmark their charitable donations to organizations which "restore the distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor," then perhaps there is hope. We should all pay closer attention to what becomes of our tax and tuition and donation dollars, and make sure it is not wasted any longer on programs that work against our fundamental values.

Who knows? If the Associated Press can admit that men and women are different, and that parents —no kidding! — can affect their children’s behavior, then someone must be sponsoring research that is doing some good. It is sad to have to prove the obvious, but if that’s what it takes to reverse the dumbing down of America by professional intellectuals, then I say we should all be contributing to those few research institutions out there which actually serve the public welfare, instead of the public welfare state. Or better yet, go to work for them. We owe it to Mac Donald, who has so brilliantly shown us the path of misdirected charity that led us into the social abyss, to make an effort to climb back out again, one dollar at a time.