Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

by Kurt Andersen

In his speech, Powell said that because “the media and intellectual communities of our society [have] built up these extremists into national figures of prominence, power and even adulation,” made them “lionized on the campus, in the theater and arts, in the national magazines and on television,” more and more young Americans, “often from our finest homes, [are] vulnerable to radical ‘mind-blowing’ ” and now believed “the destructive criticism…that our free enterprise system is ‘rotten’ and that somehow we have become a wholly selfish, materialistic, racist and repressive society.” And concerning “this incongruous support of revolution,” he quoted none other than Milton Friedman and his warnings about the media and intellectual establishments exposing “the foundations of our free society” to “wide-ranging and powerful attack…by misguided individuals parroting one another and unwittingly serving ends they would never intentionally promote.”