As a mother to three sons of Indian descent, I think my response to her would have been less classy than his. After the podcast, he posted on social media, “I disagree with her but respect she had the guts to speak her mind.”

Despite my anger toward Coulter and others who project racist views, I deeply respect Ramaswamy’s commitment to free speech. During one of his rallies in July 2023, for example, he let a woman who interrupted his rally to advocate abortion finish her point. He posted the video on social media and wrote in the caption, “I am a free speech absolutist. Especially for those who disagree with me.”

Like many sanctimonious racists, Coulter is not known for withholding comments and masking her racist thoughts. Following the Republican primary debate in August 2023, she posted, “Nikki and Vivek are involved in some Hindu business, it seems. Not our fight.”

With the phrase “Not our fight,” Coulter suggested these two patriotic Americans are somehow outsiders to the country. But Americans know that people such as Coulter do not dictate what it means to be American.

Coulter is not alone in the racist fringes on the Right and Left. Race peddlers, such as Ibram X. Kendi and Nikole Hannah-Jones, profit off the notion that the answer to past discrimination is present discrimination. They constantly push critical race theory — the harmful belief that people are either oppressors or the oppressed based on their race. 

These race-baiters should not be dictating education policy for our children any more than Coulter should. But sadly, they are.

In fact, Fairfax County Public Schools paid Kendi $20,000 for a one-hour Zoom meeting with the district’s leaders to pontificate his racist ideas. Meanwhile, Fairfax County’s local government paid Hannah-Jones $35,000 to share her racism during a one-hour public event held at the McLean Community Center. These are examples of local governments institutionalizing racism.

Coulter, Kendi, and Hannah-Jones are joined in their racism by pro-Hamas agitators on college campuses, some of whom are calling for the extermination of Jews. Last week, one of them called Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL) a “race traitor” and “Uncle Tom.”

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This is not an exhaustive list of obviously racist people. I would add others, such as the Fairfax County School Board members who were upset with Asian American children for performing too well academically. 

But these racists do not represent the vast majority of people. They are an invasive cancer exacerbating an already politically polarized nation. And it’s well past time for those of us who value true equality and justice — principles on which this country was built — to banish them back to the fringes and out of the mainstream.

Stephanie Lundquist-Arora is a contributor for the Washington Examiner, a mother in Fairfax County, Virginia, an author, and the Fairfax chapter leader of the Independent Women’s Network.

Yes, NPR is biased, but Congress should defund it for a more basic reason: Taxpayers should not have to pay for a government radio network, even if it were the most neutral outlet on the market. Running a radio network is simply not the government’s job.

NPR was founded in 1970 by a group of public radio stations that successfully lobbied for federal funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a nonprofit organization funded entirely by our tax dollars. Many of these stations produce worthwhile content, as former NPR chairman Paul Haaga argued in this weekend’s Washington Post. Haaga and other defenders, however, ignore that federal funding gives NPR an unfair advantage over its competitors and that NPR is not transparent with the public about how much federal funding it receives.

NPR likes to remind the public that only about 1% of its funding comes from taxpayers. At first glance, this appears to be true: 51% of its funding comes from corporate sponsorships and private donations and 31% from licensing fees, meaning the majority of its money comes from voluntary contributions and payments like any other media outlet.

But if this is true, why does it need any taxpayer funding at all? NPR should sustain itself on corporate sponsorships, licensing fees, and private donations like its competitors without an unfair, if minimal, advantage from federal funding.

Sadly, the claim that only 1% of its revenue comes from the forced donations of taxpayers isn’t true. On the same webpage where NPR claims this minimal taxpayer investment, it also says federal funding is “essential” to its mission. Well, which is it?

The answer lies in the 31% of its budget that comes from licensing fees. This significant chunk of its revenue, which was as high as 37% as recently as 2010, comes from member stations paying to license NPR-produced content such as All Things Considered and Morning Edition. These stations receive $128 million in federal grants annually to pay in fees back to NPR. The most recent audit of NPR from 2022 reveals that it receives $93 million in revenue from these stations, which would account for 73% of the CPB grants to affiliates.

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As it turns out, a shell game is afoot. Your tax dollars are given to the CPB, which passes a few million on to NPR so it can claim the taxpayer contribution is negligible while the rest is laundered through local affiliates who kick the federal subsidy back up to NPR. This public radio financing system is so opaque that no one is actually certain how much federal funding NPR receives. Affiliates are required to keep track of how much of their federal grants end up back with NPR, but a 2011 Government Accountability Office audit of 29 stations found that the majority did not maintain these required records. Saul Goodman couldn’t design a better laundering operation.

Congress should take this opportunity to rein in NPR’s shady accounting and make it compete on a level playing field with the rest of the radio market. Whether you like NPR’s content or not, you and I shouldn’t be forced to pay for it.

James Erwin is the federal affairs manager for telecommunications at Americans for Tax Reform and executive director of Digital Liberty.

In response, Donalds highlighted that some of the protesters were not college students. He incisively observed that the agitator, clearly middle-aged, is “really old to be in college.”

In fact, the leftist agitator spewing hate at Donalds likely was one of the many “outside agitators” who stirred up the student protests in the first place. For example, New York City Mayor Eric Adams and Police Commissioner Edward Caban said that of the 282 protesters arrested on campuses in New York City, 134 of them had no affiliation with the university.

Regardless, the anti-Israel, racist agitator joins many other non-black leftists, including President Joe Biden, who try to define black people in the mold of their own interests. In 2020, for example, Biden told black voters, “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.”

I wonder if the president of the United States will tell the black Chicago voters who are infuriated by the city’s illegal immigrant crisis, which was caused by his own porous southern border policies and exacerbated by the city’s Democratic leadership, that they “ain’t black.” Or even worse, when black Chicagoans cast their votes for former President Donald Trump in November, will the hordes of leftists monopolizing the Democratic Party refer to them as “race traitors” or “Uncle Toms”?

But this time around, Democrats’ race-baiting is likely to fall on deaf ears.  

In the last year and a half, 35,000 migrants have arrived in Chicago and its surrounding suburbs. Chicago’s residents are fed up with their resources being taken by illegal migrants.

In June 2023, for example, Chicago’s black residents fervently objected to the city council’s decision to allocate $51 million to house illegal migrants. Among them, a woman argued that the city needed to use its resources to care for its own citizens. She said, “We need to allocate some of this money for our black children, for the black community. We have not gotten anything for our community, and we are sick and tired of being sick and tired. Enough is enough.” 

Chicago’s leadership appears to be ignoring its voters and has continued pouring the city’s resources into its illegal migrant crisis. 

Meanwhile, likely as a direct result of its migrant surge, the Chicago Police Department reported a 16% increase in crime and a 14% rise in homelessness in 2023. And many frustrated black residents now are vowing to “turn Chicago red.”

Earlier this year, after a resident criticized Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson for not listening to citizens regarding the city’s sanctuary status, she argued that Chicago needs political change. She said, “If the Democratic Party is not going to listen to us, if the Democratic Party is not going to stand up for the people that have supported this party, then it’s time for us to make a change.” 

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It is time for a change indeed. At a Chicago City Council meeting earlier this year, one of the speakers summarized the situation well during public comment when he said, “All this asylum-seeking lie, all this about refugees — no, no, no. What’s happening is they’re emptying out the dregs of their jails into the United States and to our communities. They’re junking up our country. And yeah, we feel some kind of way about it because it’s our country.” 

It is our country — where all citizens should have a right to hold and project their own political opinions. Our nation’s black members of Congress shouldn’t need to worry about agitators publicly spewing racist hate at them because of their political positions. And black voters shouldn’t need to be concerned about Biden telling them they “ain’t black” when they cast their votes to improve their cities and country.

Stephanie Lundquist-Arora is a contributor for the Washington Examiner, a mother in Fairfax County, Virginia, an author, and the Fairfax chapter leader of the Independent Women’s Network.

For decades, U.S. universities, especially selective ones, have favored applicants who struck the right “social justice” notes, and hired faculty that reinforced those views. Then they cemented this zeitgeist with the jargon of identity and the “oppressed-oppressor” paradigm.

What did Columbia, Harvard, New York, Yale, MIT, Princeton, and the many other universities now being rocked by pro-Palestinian protests expect? That there would not be consequences?

These will be felt most deeply, and most unfortunately, by the students. The 2024 class, which didn’t have high school graduations because of the COVID mess, may now see their college ones canceled, or at least severely disrupted, because some of their classmates have been taught to oppose Israel’s right to exist or simply believe this is the right social pose to adopt.

Most affected by this mess are the Jewish students, who, in the year of our Lord 2024, and in America, no less, now have legitimate fears about being on campus. We have reached the point when, at Columbia, Rabbi Elie Buechler advised Jewish students to return home and stay there because “Columbia University’s Public Safety and the NYPD cannot guarantee Jewish students’ safety.”

That American Jews have gotten caught up in the maelstrom should also not surprise anyone. Israelis are described by the Left as the “oppressor” in the Middle East narrative.

It apparently does not matter that on Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terrorists invaded the Jewish state and massacred 1,200 people, mostly civilians, many women and children — the worst atrocity committed against Jews since the Holocaust. A narrative that boils everything down to an epic struggle between the oppressor and those he oppresses gives simple minds license to justify any cruelty.

Most of the version of Marxism that provides the beliefs now rife on U.S. campuses has evolved from the economically determinist ideology first set down by Karl Marx and his co-writer Friedrich Engels in the 1848 Communist Manifesto.

Katharine Cornell Gorka and I have titled our new book NextGen Marxism because the original economic orthodoxy has gone first through a cultural distillation in Europe, and then yet another here in America, with other features, such as race, sex, and climate, being added.

But the “oppressor-oppressed” paradigm is undistilled Marxism. Among the opening words of the Manifesto, Marx and Engels write:

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another…” (emphasis added).

Marxists of all stripes, economic ones, cultural ones, and NextGen ones, have dressed up this struggle in the language of “social justice.” This struggle is supposedly carried out to help the downtrodden against those who keep them down, and seeks, as the Manifesto puts it, “a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large.”

But “social justice” must be put inside scare quotes, as I do in this article, because what the revolutionaries want most is this “reconstitution” of society, not an improvement in social conditions. Many Marxists end up recognizing that capitalism improves the lives of all.

For example, Max Horkheimer, the German architect of the culturally Marxist “critical theory” approach, averred in 1969 that Marx had erred in believing that “capitalist society would necessarily be overcome by the solidarity of the workers due to their increasing impoverishment. This idea is false. The society in which we live doesn’t impoverish workers but helps them toward a better life.”

In the United States, NextGen Marxists have, for this reason, foregone the worker as the revolutionary figure and have transferred that task to members of racial and sexual “marginalized” groups, which they insist are the oppressed, and thus have a reason to seek the “revolutionary reconstitution of society at large.”

The various Black Lives Matter organizations are Exhibit A of this phenomenon. They are deeply steeped in the American descendant of critical theory, known as critical race theory, and portray themselves as a social movement working to help racial and sexual minorities against the oppressor’s ideology of “white supremacy.”

But all the architects of BLM are self-described Marxists who openly say they seek societal reconstitution. Melina Abdullah, the head of the group BLM Grassroots, is perhaps the most powerful BLM leader at the moment. Her 2003 dissertation at the University of Southern California draws heavily from the top CRT thinkers.

She is also a sworn enemy of the capitalist system that, as Horkheimer recognized, actually improves the lives of the poor.

“When we feed capitalism, we feed racism,” Abdullah said in a 2020 interview on the podcast People’s Party With Talib Kweli. Abdullah has also said that “white capitalism feeds itself through the exploitation of Africa and black people.”

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Abdullah is a tenured professor at California State University because these are the types of “academics” that universities hire, just as Stanford University admitted a student who, for his admissions essay, wrote the words #BlackLivesMatter over and over again.

It is no surprise that BLM is deeply committed to the Palestinian cause and sees Israel as an oppressor. Universities have invited in this poison, and in 2024, we are seeing the awful consequences. Maybe let’s cut off the taxpayer spigot until they cleanse themselves.

Mike Gonzalez is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and the author of NextGen Marxism: What It Is and How to Combat It.

This year, TJ is ranked 14th, down from 5th in 2023, and 1st for three years before that. Its premier ranking occurred when Fairfax County’s only magnet school’s admissions were based on merit, not on “equity.” With the last merit-based class graduating in June, we can expect to see the flagship institution wither away and disappear as it succumbs to its diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, cancer.

TJ’s tragic downfall has become clear to the public in recent months. Earlier this year, for example, McLean High School’s quiz bowl team defeated the long-favored TJ team in the 2024 Virginia High School League Scholastic Bowl State Championship. This marks the first time in nine years that TJ has not won a title. With the change in TJ’s admissions and its continued rejection of merit, it is likely the school will be losing its competitive edge in scholastic competitions such as quiz bowl, robotics, and debate.

The STEM school also has had to begin offering its admitted freshmen remedial math. In fact, the school’s principal, Ann Bonitatibus, was so enthusiastic in her expectations that all of TJ’s freshmen would be proficient in Algebra 1 by the end of this academic year that she sent parents an email on March 1, 2024, to brag about it. Her message took many Fairfax County residents by surprise because students entering TJ under the previous, merit-based system had usually finished Algebra 1 by the end of seventh grade.

But that was before institutionalized racism against Asians and other “privileged” students became socially acceptable among the Left. 

When Fairfax County School Board members and administrators, such as Bonitatibus, decided that Asians were doing too well academically, they changed the admissions standards to reduce their numbers to benefit other races in TJ’s admissions. It worked — along with the school’s decline in its national ranking, there are also significantly fewer students of Asian descent than there were before.

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Before the admissions changes at TJ, I believed that the magnet school might be a good fit for my three sons. I began to question that when my eldest was rejected last year in favor of students who, apparently, are not yet proficient in Algebra 1. But as I witness the institutionalized racism against high-performing students, coupled with what is likely to be the school’s future continued nosedive in the national ranking, I think our designated neighborhood high school actually might be the better choice.

Looking at TJ’s decline, I am skeptical that Fairfax County School Board members were dumb enough to believe they could replace merit with equity in the admissions process without academic consequence. It makes me wonder if their intent all along was to destroy an institution designated for gifted education as a sacrifice to their DEI religion. If that was their goal, they seem to be achieving it.

Stephanie Lundquist-Arora is a contributor for the Washington Examiner, a mother in Fairfax County, Virginia, an author, and the Fairfax chapter leader of the Independent Women’s Network.

The result has been an understandable lament on the Right that our universities have no moral core and that they transmit no common cultural inheritance or shared intellectual framework.

But that’s no longer true, as a recent report by Speech First, titled “No Graduation without Indoctrination,” documents. The Western-minded framework that higher education once relied on has simply been replaced by a different, noxious values system.

If you went to college, you’re familiar with course requirements. Even if you’re a math major, you might need to take two courses in the humanities. Even if you’re an English major, you might need to take two courses in quantitative reasoning. Some universities require a few courses in a foreign language. And now, two-thirds of universities require you to take coursework in neo-Marxist ideology.

They don’t advertise it as such, of course. Rather, they advertise it as part of their diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, or some similar Orwellian moniker. But in reviewing the course requirements, Speech First didn’t code for course descriptions that said, “It’s good to respect minorities and appreciate other cultures.” Rather, they coded for requirements that coerced students into taking course credits infected and inflected by neo-Marxist ideology.

What they found were courses such as Pomona College’s “Queering Childhood,” which “examines the figure of the Child and how this figuration is used by politics, law, and medicine to justify continued cultural investment in reproductive heteronormativity and productive able-bodiedness.” Or courses such as the University of Minnesota’s “Queer Kinship: Undoing the American Family,” which insists that “the American family only exists within U.S. mythology built on imperialism and settler colonialism.” Or, your more run-of-the-mill courses such as “Social & Racial Justice: Advocacy and Action,” which trains students to be social justice warriors who “work in teams to create a podcast about a social or racial justice issue.”

Maybe because most college students realize they have better things to do, colleges are putting their thumbs on the scales by effectively forcing students to imbibe this ideological dreck. It’s kind of a marvel how we got here. Egghead liberal academics have little intellectual or moral conviction outside of feeling that schools should teach that racism is bad. Neo-Marxist academics came along and said, “OK, we’ll label our anti-white race hatred as anti-racist so you have to teach it.” Academics, more afraid than anyone of being called racist, agreed. And, for the most part, until very recently, politicians didn’t really notice.

Fortunately, that’s changing. The red state pushback against DEI on campus has swung into full gear. Texas and Florida are leading the way, and it seems likely that within the next few years, DEI administrators will be a thing of the past in many public red state universities. 

Yet, as the Speech First report shows, targeting DEI administrators does not go far enough. These administrators have helped reshape the required academic core of universities so that students can’t get out of there without taking DEI courses. And, of course, you can’t do well in a DEI course without expressing your support for DEI. Therefore, two-thirds of colleges require students to express support for DEI to graduate.

Speech First and the Goldwater Institute have teamed up to create model legislation to address this issue. Their “Freedom from Indoctrination Act” would require college trustees to root out direct and indirect DEI graduation requirements. 

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And, while they’re at it, it would require them to reinsert at least a little bit of Western civilization, or at least a little bit about America. There’s no reason whatsoever why a bachelor’s degree should require training in intersectionality. But there’s every reason why we should expect our college graduates to have studied the Constitution.

Most colleges are totally enthralled to DEI ideology. And blue state leaders are likely quite comfortable running colleges as ideological training camps. But in red states, leaders must not merely push back against DEI administrators, but against every way that DEI has infected and corrupted the college experience. A great first step would be to eliminate all DEI course requirements — to allow for graduation without indoctrination once again.

Max Eden is a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and serves on the board of Speech First.

This campus political climate, when added on top of the usual stresses of managing course loads, a social life away from home, and the omnipresent social media world, can make life difficult and stressful for students. Is it any wonder college students are in the midst of a mental health crisis? 

This is especially true for young women. Research has broadly shown that women report worse rates of mental health compared to their male counterparts. This gender gap has become even more apparent among Gen Zers.

Recent data from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, for example, show that young women deal with appreciably higher levels of stress and anxiety than their male counterparts. When college students were asked about how often they feel stressed, frustrated, or overwhelmed, more than three-quarters (77%) of all students reported feeling these feelings more than half of the time. A closer look found that 84% of women, compared to 66% of men, reported regularly feeling stressed and overwhelmed. This 18-percentage-point difference points to something larger going on with collegiate women.

The gender gap continues across a host of additional mental health questions. While more than two-thirds of students (68%) reported feeling anxious more than half of the time, 77% of women, compared to 56% of men, reported feeling anxious this frequently. About 51% of female students said they feel lonely regularly, compared to 43% of male students. And 45% of female students feel depressed regularly, compared to one-third (33%) of male students.

While all of these levels of worry and stress are too high for both men and women, why is there such a large gender gap? Writers such as Jonathan Haidt argue that the contagion effects of social media are creating a “tidal wave” of anxiety, depression, and self-harm, mostly affecting young girls. 

Certainly, social media and digital connection play a role in affecting college students’ mental health. However, there’s another, though largely overlooked, cause driving the significant mental health gender gap on campus: politics and ideology.

In the past decade, Gen Z collegiate men have become more conservative, while Gen Z collegiate women have become more liberal. Young women are also more likely to vote, care about political issues, and participate in social movements and protests than young men. Presently, almost 55% of female students identify as liberal, while only 13% identify as moderate and 15% as conservative. Almost 40% of men, however, identify as liberal, 16% as moderate, and 25% as conservative.

Women on campus are now overwhelming left of center compared to men, and they are certainly being targeted and influenced by DEI offices, which are “far-reaching on most campuses” with the intention of turning tomorrow’s leaders “into advocates for a far-left version of social justice.” DEI offices have long seen women as victims and engage with liberal women quite differently from the more centrist men. These differences are now playing a major role in shaping campus culture.

Numerous studies have shown that those on the Left have embraced the logic of oppression and harm. Those on the Left also tend to be more politically radical, insular, vocal, and politically active than their moderate or conservative counterparts. And, unsurprisingly, almost all of the reactionary chaos on campus (from protests and sit-ins to the extreme and harsh rhetoric toward certain groups and the allegations of harm and threats of violence) is coming from the Left. 

From Vanderbilt to Harvard, we regularly now see women leading political actions on campus as part of a larger trend of female political activism and mobility. Their world, thanks to their liberal ideology and DEI offices, is one where they see unending harm and narratives of victimization.

If women are embedded in communities where everything around them and their own ideology states that they are constantly confronting dangers such as harm, violence, and oppression and where they are led to believe that identity politics is how we should engage with difference, it should surprise no one that there is a significant mental health gender gap. 

This is all more proof of why DEI must be dismantled and destroyed — for it poses a real danger to both the civic sphere and the health of so many women.

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Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Four years removed from the near total adoption of DEI principles across every major cultural institution in the United States, from the news media to corporate America to academia and beyond, Charlamagne’s stinging critique felt like a watershed moment.

“The truth about DEI, however well intentioned, is that it’s mostly garbage,” he said. “And you know I’m right because every one of you sat through one of those diversity training sessions and thought, ‘This is some bulls***.’”

It’s incredible it took so long for someone, anyone, to state the obvious to a large liberal audience: that DEI, typified by the deluge of corporate “diversity” commercials that flooded the airwaves in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death and the expansion of DEI departments across academia, was only ever meant to help white liberals cling to their cultural power.

And DEI consulting firms were more than happy to oblige. Like the corrupt, medieval Catholic Church that exchanged a shorter stay in Purgatory for monetary payments, DEI firms sold their seal of moral approval to the highest bidders, resulting in a multibillion-dollar expansion of the industry. As a result, not a single white executive or academic administrator had to relinquish their position so that a minority might take their place, and DEI consulting firms, staffed by diversity studies majors unqualified to do anything else in the professional sphere, swam in cash.

According to Charlamagne, this arrangement didn’t improve the workplace conditions of minorities. Indeed, it probably did the opposite.

“Over 900 studies have shown that DEI programs don’t make the workplace better for minorities,” he said. “In fact, it can actually make things worse because of the backlash effect. Remember D.A.R.E. from school? DEI training was like D.A.R.E. for racism. And you all know how effective that was. I was sitting there going, ‘Oh s***! There’s a ton of fun drugs I should try!’”

This is, of course, exactly what conservative critics of DEI have been saying the whole time. The progressive insistence on “seeing race” and adjusting accordingly was only ever going to fuel racial disharmony. This neoracist approach, popularized by corporate consultant Robin DiAngelo and academic lightweight Ibram X. Kendi, fostered an atmosphere of paranoia, bafflement, and hostility in which black people were infantilized by white liberals and no tangible progress was made. 

Meanwhile, the imperfect approach of treating people equally regardless of race, otherwise known as the “colorblindness approach,” appears to have been the best option all along. While it is crucial to acknowledge America’s dark racial history, radical social engineering based on skin color is both unworkable and morally dubious. And yet, conservatives have been reflexively blasted as “white supremacists” for daring to suggest this since the summer of 2020. 

Charlamagne’s admission should encourage conservatives to make a strong, affirmative case that their approach to race relations is the most effective and morally justifiable. Indeed, the dramatic swing in voter preferences among minorities away from Democrats and toward Republicans in numerous recent polls suggests an opening for conservatives on this issue unseen in decades. Scholar Coleman Hughes’s calm dismantling of The View’s Sunny Hostin on the topic last week offers a strong model to emulate going forward. 

Conservatives shouldn’t be afraid to say “I told you so” on the DEI disaster. The public has soured on the Kendian, neoracist approach to race relations. It’s time that proponents of the failed cultural phenomenon suffer political consequences. It’s time for conservatives to boldly make their case on race.

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Peter Laffin is a contributor at the Washington Examiner. His work has also appeared in RealClearPolitics, the Catholic Thing, and the National Catholic Register.

There’s much useful research to be done and free-flowing debate that’s needed. Unfortunately, AERA is more interested in progressive jeremiads than in doing such work. This year’s conference is titled “Dismantling Racial Injustice and Constructing Educational Possibilities: A Call to Action,” and AERA isn’t even trying to elide the politics of the affair. The “Call to Action” title is fitting: It’s very clear that the point of the gathering is to proselytize rather than to ponder.

The program asserts that “the disruption of truth, attacks on race theories, banning of books, and erasure of histories have become commonplace” and asks how attendees can “take an intersectional approach” to “eradicating racism” and “all other forms of oppression.” Now, despite AERA asserting that this “call for a global conversation on race, racism, and its redress is long overdue,” wily observers may note that it doesn’t actually seem all that different from such recent AERA conferences as ”Cultivating Equitable Education Systems for the 21st Century” or “Leveraging Education Research in a ‘Post-Truth’ Era.”

The sprawling conference, with more than 2,500 sessions and 14,000 attendees, boasts four “featured” speakers. Kimberlé W. Crenshaw, billed as a “pioneering scholar and writer on civil rights, critical race theory, [and] Black feminist legal theory,” will speak about “defending the freedom to learn in the war against woke.” AERA president Tyrone Howard will offer thoughts on “recognition and redress of racial injustice in education.” Gloria Ladson-Billings, an early proponent of critical race theory, will address “’Not Yet at Plessy’: 70 Years Post-Brown.” And Dolores Delgado Bernal, professor at Loyola Marymount University, will draw on her work offering “a critical race feminist praxis” and “pedagogical, methodological, and activist approaches to social justice.”

While AERA’s formal mission is to “advance knowledge about education, to encourage scholarly inquiry related to education, and to promote the use of research to improve education and serve the public good,” it exhibits remarkably little interest in knowledge, inquiry, or healthy discourse. Indeed, AERA operates more as a bastion of far-left, identitarian groupthink than a scholarly organization.

In 2020, for example, AERA coauthored a “Statement in Support of Anti-Racist Education,” which made clear that AERA members “must stand against the notion that systemic racism does not exist.” That same year, the president of AERA denounced “white supremacist tests” for “traumatiz[ing] students of color” by telling them “they are not smart or good or qualified.” So much for measured discussion of assessment.

In 2021, AERA members unanimously passed a resolution to no longer hold conferences or public events in states with “anti-trans laws.” While the resolution itself was rather vague, it quickly became clear that state laws requiring that parents be informed of how their child’s gender is identified at school, restricting access to puberty blockers, or mandating that biological males not participate on girls’ sports teams would be deemed as hateful “anti-trans” measures.

In 2022, AERA submitted an amicus brief to the Supreme Court in support of race-based admissions practices. In 2023, when the court found such practices to be unconstitutional, AERA issued a statement denouncing the ruling as a “low point” likely to visit all sorts of ills upon higher education.

AERA isn’t just failing to promote responsible research, it’s actively undermining it. After all, it impedes the ability of researchers to fearlessly ask hard questions when their professional association holds that only certain views are defensible or legitimate. When AERA’s leaders adopt a party line on hotly contested questions that promises to stifle useful inquiry or quell informed debate, the distinction between a research association and an advocacy organization has been lost.  

All of this serves to raise two very practical questions: Why should taxpayers be subsidizing this outfit, and why should public officials accord it any weight?

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If AERA were strictly a private entity, this would all be troubling enough. But AERA is not a strictly private entity. It partners with the National Science Foundation to award research grants. It is funded in significant part by membership fees, subscriptions to its journals, and faculty travel budgets. For academics at public institutions, many of these dollars are supplied by taxpayers. Even at private institutions, many of these funds flow from taxpayer-financed grants awarded by federal research agencies.

Federal entities should stop partnering with AERA, and Congress should insist that no more research funding flow to the organization. The legislators who fund public colleges and the trustees who oversee colleges and universities should find better uses for the funds that currently make their way to AERA’s politicized coffers. There’s no reason for taxpayers to be subsidizing “research organizations” that eschew research for ideological advocacy.

Rick Hess is a senior fellow and the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he works on K–12 and higher education issues.

As reported in the Daily Wire, the department spent a whopping $77 million on DEIA programs last year for its staffing shop, the Bureau of Global Talent Management. Just this past month, the State Department offered a training session on “Unveiling the Hidden Wounds: Exploring Racial Trauma and Minority Stress.” It promised a “space for empathy” where “voices are heard, wounds are acknowledged, and action is taken towards justice and equity.”

Then there was also “A Conversation on Racial Equity and Social Justice” with Bryan Stevenson, who pulled in $55,000 in donations per minute for a single TED talk.  

Employees could also take the half-day course “Intersectional Gender Analysis Training,” which “explores how gender and systems of power shape an individual’s lived experience.” Alternatively, they could attend the “Embrace Equity and Inspire Change” seminar or a series of female empowerment sessions such as “Elevating Women in Technology and Beyond.” 

Anticipating resistance, the State Department offered the course “Understanding Backlash to DEIA and How to Address It,” in which Dr. Kimberly Rios claimed to “highlight evidence demonstrating that DEIA initiatives can challenge the power, values, status, belonging, and cultural identity of dominant group members, particularly White Americans whose racial identity is important to their sense of self.” Rios will do this, the announcement said with unwitting irony, “to promote intergroup harmony.” 

Government employees are required to take a variety of training courses to advance in their careers. Even five years ago, most of these were about doing your job better — courses on leadership, management, and other skills. But in the “woke” era, employees are also subjected to ideological sessions such as those mentioned above. 

Given what all these courses and speakers cost taxpayers to provide, is there any evidence that they are based on sound information or that they improve the workforce? 

Let’s examine one offering more closely. 

The State Department runs a DEIA Distinguished Scholar Speaker Series that “highlights cutting-edge scientific research,” under which they recently brought Yale professor John Dovidio to give a talk titled “Racism Among the Well-Intentioned — Challenges and Solutions.”  

In a 2013 speech, Dovidio said, “About 80% of white Americans will say they are not sexist or they’re not racist … but work with the IAT will show that 60% to 75% of the population are both racist and sexist at an implicit level.” 

So, what is this “IAT” that Dovidio cites? 

Harvard’s Implicit Association Test is a favorite tool of social scientists who want to prove that people are inherently racist and sexist. This is a necessary premise for critical race theory, which posits that nebulous concepts such as “structural bias” and “systems of oppression” can explain all variances in performance between racial groups rather than individual factors such as education, industry, and behavior. IAT offers the evidence the Left needs to support this theory.

But the IAT is not an accepted measure of bias. One of the IAT’s own inventors said, “I and my colleagues and collaborators do not call the IAT results a measure of implicit prejudice [or] implicit racism.” And in a 2015 review, Dr. Hart Blanton of Texas A&M wrote that “all of the meta-analyses converge on the conclusion that … IAT scores are not good predictors of ethnic or racial discrimination and explain, at most, small fractions of the variance in discriminatory behavior in controlled laboratory setting.” In a 2021 academic paper, Ulrich Schimmack came to the same conclusion, writing that “IATs are widely used without psychometric evidence of construct or predictive validity.” 

As far back as 2008, in an article for the American Psychological Association, Beth Azar wrote that people’s IAT scores “often change from one test to another.” German Lopez, writing for Vox, took the test two days apart and found that in the first, he “had a slight automatic preference for white people,” and in the second, “a slight automatic preference … in favor of black people.” Summing it up, Greg Mitchell of the University of Virginia said, “The IAT is not yet ready for prime time.”

That’s hardly a firm foundation for using taxpayer money to train federal staff in a worldview that will affect their careers and lives. And of course, all of the hours employees spend auto-flagellating with critical race theory is paid time they are not working on matters of national interest. 

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One can’t put too much blame on race merchants such as Dovidio, Ibram X. Kendi, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Nikole Hannah-Jones for simply trying to sell their product. But the question is: Why is the government buying it with our money?  

Taxpayer-funded institutions should not pay for courses and speakers whose premises are contentious and whose efforts won’t measurably improve the workforce. Federal employees are free to explore social theory on their own time. On our dime, they should get on with their real job. 

Simon Hankinson is a senior research fellow in the Border Security and Immigration Center at the Heritage Foundation.