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@JohnDSailer: In 2022, a paper drawing from “critical whiteness studies" analyzed how "whiteness" shows up in Physics 101—concluding that, a

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In 2022, a paper drawing from “critical whiteness studies" analyzed how "whiteness" shows up in Physics 101—concluding that, among other things, the use of whiteboards perpetuate whiteness in physics.

Here's what's crazy: this "research" was funded by the federal government.

But first: what's Critical Whiteness Studies?

Per the article, it's a research framework that starts with the assumption that omnipresent, invisible whiteness pervades our ordinary interactions and institutions to ensure "white dominance."

t's a bold starting point—with more than a hint of racial animosity. Applied to physics, it gets weird.

The article finds that the values of "abstractness" and "disembodiment" in physics ("physics values") reify whiteness and reflect human domination and entitlement.

It goes on to declare that, yes, even whiteboards "play a role in reconstituting whiteness as social organization."

They do this by "collaborat[ing] with white organizational culture" where ideas gain value "when written down."

Again, this is funded by, well, you...

Look at the National Science Foundation's recent budget requests: The federal agency has spent a quarter-billion-dollars annually on it's "Division of Equity for Excellence in STEM."

That doesn't account for projects on race and equity funded by other division.

Thus, "Observing whiteness in introductory physics" was funded by the National Science Foundation.

It was a part of a half million-dollar project unpacking which "strategies, tools, and materials" contribute to marginalization.

This sort of research is the most noticeable consequence of the NSF's now-well-documented push to fund social justice projects.

But, in my latest, I argue that it's not by any means the most consequential, and it's why I'm not at all convinced that "wokeness" has peaked.

Is Academic ‘Wokeness’ in Remission? - American Compass

New developments on campus may seem promising for academic freedom, but the more meaningful problems are deeper

American Compass

It’s undeniable that identity politics plays a different role in American life than it did four years ago. Far-fetched tales of omnipresent racism, once received with deference, are now out of vogue. For some, in light of this substantial cultural change, it seems that “wokeness” is in remission.

Viewed from a certain angle, even developments in higher education, despite the tumult of the last year, might serve as an example of how we’re past “peak woke.” In May, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology suddenly banned the practice of requiring faculty job applicants to write “diversity statements,” becoming the first elite private university to ditch the policy. It turned out to be a watershed moment: Left-of-center academics applauded MIT. Bill Maher praised the decision on his late-night show. Even the Washington Post’s editorial board came out against the policy. Soon after, Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences followed suit.

No doubt, MIT and Harvard’s decisions marked a real victory for academic freedom. The practice of requiring prospective faculty to demonstrate their commitment to a progressive social cause is so obviously contrary to the spirit of intellectual freedom that even many staunch progressives have voiced their opposition to it.

But this sort of policy—much like the decision by Vanderbilt, Stanford, Penn, and many others to adopt the principle of institutional neutrality on political issues—demonstrate far less serious reform than one might expect. This is because the policies most emblematic of “wokeness” didn’t simply leap onto campus out of nowhere in the summer of 2020. They are the result of structural incentives, and those incentives have yet to change. The worst offender might be the National Science Foundation.

A recent and widely circulated report by the Republican members of the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science & Transportation hints at a serious problem for higher education reformers: structural impediments to change, built up in recent years, will be more difficult to undo than changing a few policies. The report reviewed the number of NSF grants related to diversity, equity, and inclusion—finding that it spent $2.05 billion funding DEI projects over the last four years.

It’s worth noting that even by the NSF’s own accounting, the spending on social-justice-related grants is immense. In the NSF’s annual budget, the spending by the “Division of Equity for Excellence in STEM” has gradually increased, from $214 million in spending in 2021 to $267 million in the NSF’s 2025 budget request.

The report highlights how these grants span the full gamut of DEI-related projects, including one grant to a Georgia Tech professor for a project on deconstructing “racialized privilege in the STEM classroom” by acknowledging “Whiteness and White Supremacy.” The report’s takeaway clearly frames the problem: “these kinds of projects mask Marxist social ideology as rigorous and thoughtful investigation. Many of these awards—based on subjective, qualitative research incapable of repetition—failed to follow basic tenets of the Scientific Method.”

Of course, pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into universities to advance a social agenda will inevitably produce a string of consequences. It’s therefore worth expounding on the ranking member’s conclusion.     

First, and most basically, it is worth acknowledging that the National Science Foundation—and by extension, the federal government—is responsible for a substantial amount of research that typifies the absurdity of 2010s and 2020s academia. Such entries include “Observing whiteness in introductory physics: A case study,” by Seattle Pacific University professor Amy Robertson—a study that “synthesize[s] literature from Critical Whiteness Studies and Critical Race Theory” to “identify and analyze whiteness as it shows up in an introductory physics classroom interaction.”

Robertson goes so far as to assert that whiteboards have perpetuated racism in the physics classroom: “Whiteboards display written information for public consumption; they draw attention to themselves and in this case support the centering of an abstract representation and the person standing next to it, presenting. They collaborate with white organizational culture, where ideas and experiences gain value (become more central) when written down.”

“Observing whiteness in introductory physics” could be mistaken for Sokal-style parody, but for Robertson, it serves as evidence of career success. As the article notes, the research was funded by the NSF, specifically as a part of a half-million-dollar project on “Centrality and Marginalization in Undergraduate Physics Teaching.”

When grantmakers flood academia with research dollars pointed at certain conclusions, they eventually create the illusion of consensus, irrespective of evidence. A 2020 paper purported to find that black newborn mortality is higher when the infants are cared for by white doctors. The paper has now been widely debunked, yet the conclusion still made its way into Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dissent in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. Even a single paper can shape a politically useful narrative; a steady flow of tendentious research can have a much greater effect.

Second, taking one step back, this type of funding shapes a wide array of downstream incentives at universities. For many in the sciences, the NSF is a career-maker that just can’t be ignored. As I’ve argued before, when a key source of cash and prestige declares a priority, everyone down the funding food chain—from graduate students to scientists to administrators—will inevitably adapt.

To give just one example of how this plays out: by NSF’s own account, the CAREER award is the agency’s most prestigious source of funding for early career scientists. As a further honor, the NSF nominated the “most meritorious” CAREER recipients or the “Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers” (PECASE). But, remarkably, one of the three criteria for selecting PECASE awardees is a “commitment to STEM equity, diversity, accessibility, and/or inclusion.”

The effect of this sort of mechanism goes far beyond politicized or low-quality research. It creates an incentive to act and speak a certain way. For young scientists, the value of “getting with the program”—that is, at the very least, getting behind race conscious policies—is too high to ignore. And of course, since the NSF openly funds this priority to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, it’s not just early career scientists who inevitably find themselves weighing the costs and benefits of a certain brand of social justice language.

Third, and most relevant to the pedantic “peak woke” debate: the funding ensures that universities will maintain the NSF’s race-conscious priorities in ways that are hard to roll back.

Last month, the New York Times ran an expose of the sprawling inclusion bureaucracy at the University of Michigan. The article notes how the university evaluates its job candidate diversity statements for their “commitment to allyhood through learning about structural inequities.” As it turns out, the University of Michigan’s hiring protocols—which encourage search committees to heavily weigh diversity statements—have been adopted across the country. This is thanks in no small part to the NSF.

The University of Michigan was one of the first recipients of the NSF ADVANCE award, which funds university offices focused on recruiting women and minorities in STEM. Michigan’s ADVANCE office—which has remained even after its funding expired—produced a hiring framework, “Strategies and Tactics for Recruiting to Improve Diversity and Excellence,” or “STRIDE,” that heavily emphasizes DEI. The University of Louisville, Northeastern University, and Rutgers are among those that have adopted the STRIDE framework, through the work of their own NSF funded ADVANCE offices. At Rutgers, the diversity statement rubric rewards faculty who display their “commitment to allyhood through learning about structural inequities,” a rubric developed with the University of Michigan STRIDE committee.

Low-quality research propped up by excessive cash will end when the funding dries up. But institutional policies, once adopted, can endure. This is the real lesson of the NSF’s decades-long foray into social justice funding.

In fact, mandatory diversity statements, a policy increasingly unpopular amongst even several prominent staunch progressive, emerged as a “best practice” through programs directly funded by the NSF.

In 2013, faculty throughout the University of California System convened to discuss how to require and evaluate contributions to diversity, equity, and inclusion in faculty selection—a convening funded by the NSF ADVANCE program. The result of the discussion was a rubric that evaluated such contributions in three key areas: their awareness of “inequities,” their track records of “removing barriers,” and their future plans for promoting diversity and inclusion initiatives.

This is the prototype for the now notorious rubric used at UC Berkeley, which calls for penalizing faculty who say they prefer to “treat everyone the same.” Versions of this rubric—brought to you in part by, well, you, the American taxpayer—have ended up in the hands of faculty search committees from South Carolina to Texas to Ohio.

These cases make two takeaways inescapable.

First, in assessing the power of identity politics, race-conscious policies, or illiberal progressivism—however you want to define “wokeness”—policymakers should be careful not to mistake changes in weather for changes in climate. In advancing the peak woke thesis, one of the most astute theorists of wokeness, Musa al-Gharbi, points to the demonstrated decline in whiteboards-are-racist style papers. But if the underlying structure remains—if our sense-making institutions still require fealty to race-consciousness—this decline might turn out to be an epiphenomenon, a surface level change.

Second, once again, we should be ever mindful of the extreme power of federal grantmaking, especially in the sciences. MIT banned mandatory diversity statements. States like North Carolina and Texas have pushed a comprehensive reform agenda. Yet, even in these states, NSF funding continues to roll out ambitious personnel-building projects with the explicit goal of “cultural transformation.”

For reformers, this should be cause for sobriety—but also hope. Funders like the NSF shaped the American university we have today, a system inclined to sacrifice its basic mission for the cause of social activism. The same tools can be used to steer higher education back toward true intellectual freedom.

Voting Against ‘Wokeness’ Is Not Single-Issue Voting—It’s Every-Issue Voting

Wokeness is a totalizing worldview—a lens through which nearly every policy area is viewed and scrutinized.

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As the election approaches, American voters are compelled to introspect and decide who will earn their vote. Naturally, this decision-making process involves identifying which issues they hold most near and dear. For some voters, a single issue—such as immigration, abortion, or free speech—determines their choice. Increasingly, however, many Americans are also considering their stance on “wokeness”—a term often used to describe the perceived excesses of Critical Social Justice ideology, which encompasses Critical Race Theory, Queer Theory, and Postcolonialism—as a potential deciding factor.

In 2021, at a rally in Cullman, Alabama, Donald Tru.mp famously quipped that “everything woke turns to shit,” and that it’s “a shortcut to losing everything you have.” Similarly, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has expressed vehement opposition to wokeness—“Woke needs to die”—and has even signed the Stop WOKE Act, which prohibited the teaching of certain activist concepts surrounding race and gender in schools and businesses. Vivek Ramaswamy, a 2024 presidential candidate, centered much of his campaign on opposing wokeness, even authoring a book in 2021 titled Woke, Inc. Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam.

Critics often dismiss voters primarily motivated by a disdain for wokeness as narrow-minded or overly engaged in the culture wars. For instance, earlier this week, neuroscientist and noted Tru.mp critic Sam Harris, during a debate with conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, labeled these people as “low information voters.” He argued, “[T]here are many people for whom wokeness and far-left identity politics has become a single issue around which they’re going to react.” But is Harris’ characterization of these people as “single issue” voters accurate?

The answer is no, because the reality is that wokeness is multifaceted, and voting to oppose it does not equate to a “single issue” stance like voting based solely on abortion access or climate change policy. The adverse impacts of wokeness are neither peripheral nor trivial. Contrary to portrayals by some on the left, wokeness extends beyond mere debates over bathroom access or children’s library books. It poses a profound threat to a wide range of fundamental values cherished by many Americans. This is because wokeness is a totalizing worldview—a lens through which nearly every policy area, from science and medicine to education and social issues, is viewed and scrutinized. Consequently, a voter primarily driven by opposition to wokeness is closer to an “every-issue” voter than a “single-issue” voter.

Woke concepts like diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) are used to reshape policies at every level. This worldview challenges some of our most fundamental and valued beliefs, such as equality under the law and valuing individual merit over group identity. Instead of honoring individual achievement, “equity” demands that all disparities—whether in the workplace, the classroom, or the justice system—be eliminated to produce equal outcomes. This is routinely accomplished through preferential treatment based on race, sex, and other identities that comprise the intersectional stack. This represents a perfect reversal of Martin Luther King Jr.’s timeless ethical guidance to judge people “not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” Elevating group identity over the individual not only fuels racial tensions but also undermines both King’s Dream and the American Dream.

The negative impact of policies rooted in the woke concept of “equity” is profound and not always immediately obvious. Consider the Minnesota African American Family Preservation and Child Welfare Disproportionality Act, signed into law by Governor Tim Walz, Vice President Harris’ running mate, in response to activists’ complaints about racial disparities in the child-welfare system. How is this statistically equal racial outcome achieved, you ask? By making it more challenging to remove black children from abusive and unsafe environments. Such actions have resulted in a rise in the proportion of black child maltreatment deaths. To echo the thoughts of Thomas Sowell, woke equity appears more focused on sounding good than on being effective.

The First Amendment—our fundamental right to free speech—is a primary target of woke ideology. Just weeks ago at the 2024 Forbes Sustainability Leaders Summit, former secretary of state John Kerry described the First Amendment as “a major block to be able to just, you know, hammer [disinformation] out of existence.” Tim Walz also demonstrated a misunderstanding of free speech by stating on multiple occasions that there is “no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech,” despite the Supreme Court’s repeated affirmation that there is no “hate speech” exception to the First Amendment. Woke DEI policies have become synonymous with censorship, restricting ideas and individuals that don’t align with a narrow view of what constitutes “inclusion.” Therefore, voting against wokeness is not about opposing diversity but about defending open debate and merit-based achievement.

The catastrophic impact of Queer Theory on science and medicine cannot be overstated. Queer Theory contends that reality is merely a construct devised by the powerful to sustain their dominance, positioning itself in stark opposition to scientific principles. It insists that all natural categories, even fundamental biological distinctions such as male and female, must be “queered” out of existence to achieve liberation. This ideology has transformed reality into a farcical Monty Python sketch, where men claim to be women and demand to be treated as such in every conceivable context, including sports, prisons, and sex-segregated public spaces. The influence of Queer Theory on medicine has led to the widespread acceptance of pseudoscientific concepts like the “sex spectrum” and an innate “gender identity” or “brain sex” that purportedly can be misaligned with one’s physical body. These views are used to justify interventions like halting the puberty of confused and troubled children, followed by administering sterilizing cross-sex hormones and conducting extreme and irreversible “gender-affirming” surgeries.

As a scientist committed to the truth, addressing the spread of this harmful pseudoscience and protecting children from permanent bodily harm is a major concern.

Wokeness extends its reach further through Postcolonialism, which reduces all geopolitical events to a binary of oppressor versus oppressed, typically based on perceived colonial status. Nowhere is this more glaring than in the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas, especially following Hamas’ October 7th massacre of over 1200 men, women, and children in Israel. The woke “decoloniality” framework labels all Israeli residents as “colonizers,” thereby casting innocent civilians as legitimate targets. Considering the pervasive history of human colonization over past millennia, it suggests that no group could claim legitimate ownership of any land without the possibility of being forcibly expelled or slaughtered. Because of this, I’ve previously described the ideology of decolonization as a woke parallel to jihad.

The examples of the detrimental effects of woke ideology on our society and globally are extensive, and I’m sure readers can identify many more. Importantly, woke ideology is not a marginal belief; its impacts are profound and widespread, representing a degradation at the core of numerous values that Americans hold dear.

Let’s be clear: Tru.mp is the anti-woke candidate. While I’m not in the business of telling people how to vote, it stand to reason that if you agree with my premise that the problem with wokeness is not a single issue but closer an every-issue, then the choice becomes more clear. A vote for Tru.mp is a gamble to purge our institutions of wokeness and its pervasive influence. A vote for Harris would guarantee its further entrenchment. Can they recover?

You may object—didn’t wokeness dramatically intensify during Tru.mp’s first term? Indeed, it did. Even Sam Harris, during his aforementioned debate with Ben Shapiro, expressed concerns, stating, “it will be all woke all the time under Tru.mp.” But wokeness gets more rabid during a Tru.mp presidency for the same reason the possessed girl’s head in The Exorcist started spinning and spewing vomit when the priests began the exorcism process. The woke ideologues possessing our institutions will not relinquish their power voluntarily, and will go absolutely bonkers in the process of losing it. Nevertheless, this should not deter us from initiating the exorcism process.

Ultimately, opposing wokeness means upholding fundamental principles cherished by many Americans: equality of opportunity, freedom of speech, scientific integrity, and women’s sex-based rights. To dismiss opposition to wokeness as a “single issue” trivializes the magnitude of the ideological shift at stake and its destructive nature on everything it touches. Voting against wokeness is not single-issue voting—it’s voting to protect nearly every issue that matters.

The choice is yours. And we can still be friends if we disagree.

Dr. Colin Wright is the CEO/Editor-in-Chief of Reality’s Last Stand, an evolutionary biology PhD, and Manhattan Institute Fellow. His writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Times, the New York Post, Newsweek, City Journal, Quillette, Queer Majority, and other major news outlets and peer-reviewed journals.

How DEI Corrupted the NIH

The medical agency has poisoned itself in the name of “diversity.”

City Journal

The National Institutes of Health, which provides funding for breakthroughs in medical science, has long enjoyed a trustworthy reputation. But, in keeping with the Biden administration’s “whole-of-government equity agenda,” the NIH has shifted its priorities away from science and toward “the science of scientific workforce diversity,” subordinating medicine to the latest ideological fad: diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI.

With the help of Open the Books, a nonprofit research organization, we have obtained documents detailing the NIH’s descent into left-wing racialism. The agency, which is supposed to prioritize hard science, has made DEI a top priority, shelling out millions on “diversity” initiatives that do nothing to advance medical research.

At the beginning of his term, President Biden signed an executive order implementing DEI throughout the federal bureaucracy and Congress directed the NIH to develop “a strategic plan with long-term and short-term goals to address the racial, ethnic, and gender disparities at NIH.” In short: less focus on curing cancer, and more attention to making sure no one cures cancer without acknowledging his “responsibility to correct systemic racism and inequities.”

The NIH immediately got to work implementing the executive order across the mammoth agency. The plan, which applied to fiscal years 2023 through 2027, required “the participation of all 27 Institutes and Centers (ICs); Offices within the Office of the Director (OD); and working groups, staff committees, advisory groups, and employee groups across NIH.” Altogether, the agency reported, it had “identified a community of almost 100 offices, committees, and groups working within the NIH-wide DEIA ecosystem.”

Overseeing this bureaucracy is the NIH’s Office of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion, which has more than 50 employees. The office’s mission: to “identify and eliminate discrimination from the agency’s personnel policies, practices, and working conditions.” As part of its efforts, it has created digital information hubs on “Understanding Systemic Racism” and “Racism in Health,” and planned an “Anti-Bullying Training” session for employees—all methods to advance racialist ideology, rather than the department’s scientific mission.

The leader of NIH’s DEI apparatus is Marie Bernard, the agency’s chief officer for scientific workforce diversity. Bernard, to whom ten NIH employees report, has been thoroughly involved in the organization’s diversity efforts, co-leading the development of its DEI plan and co-chairing multiple diversity projects. One of these projects, NIH UNITE, which was established in 2021, “acts as a think tank to promote equity” and “identifies and addresses any structural racism that may exist within the NIH and throughout the biomedical and behavioral workforce.” In other words, the agency has 11 full-time employees focused on combatting “structural racism.” By their own account, they’re making progress.

In addition to ramping up internal DEI measures, the NIH has overhauled its external funding efforts. One major priority is “Health Equity,” a trendy new academic discipline that, in theory, studies health disparities between groups—for example, African-Americans’ disproportionately high rates of Alzheimer’s—and tries to identify causes and find solutions. In practice, however, Health Equity is critical race theory’s window into medical science, yielding trifling grievance reports focused not on medical outcomes but on the demographics of the medical-research workforce itself.

The programs vary in complexity. Some are simple: the NIH, through UNITE’s DEIA Prize Competition, launched at the beginning of President Biden’s term, cumulatively has sent $1 million to ten universities that have “implement[ed] innovative strategies to enhance DEIA in research environments.” Others are more sophisticated: the Diversity Program Consortium, a cross-institutional initiative first established by President Obama, is designed to train students and develop faculty “from groups underrepresented in biomedical research.” These initiatives are supposedly intended to help the underprivileged, but they are, in practice, highly ideological, promoting, for example, “liberatory race-conscious mentorship” done “through the framework of critical race theory.”

The permanent bureaucracy within the NIH was already fertile ground for this kind of thinking. Even under President Tru.mp, who ostensibly opposed this ideology, the agency was a significant funder of left-wing racial science—a practice that the Biden administration continued.

Consider several of NIH’s funded projects, which began under Tru.mp and endured under Biden. The agency allotted $3 million to Columbia University, for example, to use Twitter “to enhance the social support for Hispanic and Black dementia caregivers” and to study the “ethical use of minority detection algorithms.” Remarkably, this award funded the creation of a “Black Tweet detection algorithm” to help curate posts “tailored to Black and Hispanic dementia caregivers.”

The NIH also bankrolled several bizarre initiatives focused on LGBT issues. It granted Yale University $3 million to study HIV risk by tracking gay men with GPS monitors; the project’s ultimate goal was to develop “a real-time phone app” partially on the tracking data. The agency also awarded Stanford $3.7 million to study “[s]ex hormone effects on neurodevelopment” in “transgender adolescents,” which researchers hope will “advanc[e] the empirical basis of clinical care for this vulnerable population of youth.”

These examples point to a key nexus: that between NIH, which controls billions in taxpayer funds, and major universities, which receive them in the name of DEI. The agency has spent an astonishing amount of taxpayer money under the current administration on DEI-inflected projects in research, undergraduate recruitment and retention, and faculty hiring—all to entrench the ideology in academia.

The most important of these initiatives is the NIH Common Fund’s Faculty Institutional Recruitment for Sustainable Transformation (FIRST) program, which was created in 2021 and “aims to enhance and maintain cultures of inclusive excellence in the biomedical research community” by funding the “recruitment of a diverse group of faculty” at research universities. NIH FIRST has subsidized such programs at 16 universities, including Cornell, USCD, Northwestern, and Drexel. The agency says that its efforts to make faculty more “diverse” will help to “ensure[] that the most creative minds have the opportunity to contribute to realizing our national research and health goals.”

The program has been used explicitly to justify increasing minority hiring. Cornell, which received $5,141,750 in FIRST funding, admitted to using the program “to increase the number of minoritized faculty in the biological, biomedical, and health sciences . . . . across six colleges and 20 departments. Remarkably, the university says it “is in an excellent position to test the hypothesis” —note the uncertainty—“that FIRST Cohort faculty will be successful.”

Some of these faculty members aren’t even focused on medical research. One new hire is an assistant professor of interpersonal communication who studies “how undocumented immigrants draw on communication identity management and advocacy strategies to challenge [structural] barriers.” Another is a behavioralist who “applies social theories to public health, focusing on the intersections between individual, interpersonal, and structural factors contributing to health inequities.”

Taken together, these initiatives raise a troubling point: taxpayers have agreed to fund the NIH on the understanding that their money will be used by talented scientists to expand our knowledge of the natural world and to cure illness and disease. But the federal government, blinded by a corrosive left-wing ideology, is using that money to fiddle with the demographics of elite institutions, design an HIV tracking app, and build AI that can tweet like a black person—whatever that means.

The deeper lesson is this: racialism erodes competence and quality. It has already done great damage to American universities. We should not be surprised that an approach guided by critical race theory, which denies the very existence of objective truth, is incapable of producing real science.

The only way to clean up our medical research institutions, and, by extension, our federal grantmaking agencies, is put the science back in medical science—and leave the ideology at the door.

Report: DEI Is Transforming the National Science Foundation

Government-funded grants favor research exploring ‘white supremacy’ and ‘non-normative forms of gender and sexuality' according to new analy

https://www.thefp.com/

Government-funded grants favor research exploring ‘white supremacy’ and ‘non-normative forms of gender and sexuality' according to new analysis.

If you thought the august National Science Foundation focused only on string theory or the origins of life, you haven’t spent much time in a university lab lately. Thanks to a major shift endorsed by the Biden administration, recent grants have gone to researchers seeking to identify “hegemonic narratives” and their effect on “non-normative forms of gender and sexuality,” plus “systematic racism” in the education of math teachers and “sex/gender narratives in undergraduate biology and their impacts on transgender, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming students.” 

A new report from Republican members of the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science & Transportation made available to The Free Press says that DEI considerations now profoundly shape NSF grant decisions.

“In recent years, we have seen a sharp increase in actual scientists—that is, people with degrees in the hard sciences from major universities who regularly receive money to conduct actual scientific research—using their credentials to parrot the talking points of the woke neo-Marxist left,” Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas), the ranking minority member of the Senate committee, said in the report.

The report, titled “DEI: Division. Extremism. Ideology,” analyzed all National Science Foundation grants from 2021 through April 2024. More than 10 percent of those grants, totaling over $2 billion, prioritized attributes of the grant proposals other than their scientific quality, according to the report. 

What’s more, that’s a feature—not a bug—of the new grant-making process. Biden’s 2021 Scientific Integrity Task Force released a report in January 2022, stating that “activities counter to [DEIA] values are disruptive to the conduct of science.” 

“DEIA” expands the concept of diversity, equity, and inclusion to include “accessibility.”

“Many policy decisions are ‘science-informed,’ meaning that factors in addition to science shape decision-making,” the Biden task force wrote. “These factors may include financial, budget, institutional, cultural, legal, or equity considerations that may outweigh scientific factors alone.” Going forward, the task force said, such “considerations” should play an important role in NSF grant decisions. 

An NSF spokesperson did not specifically address the committee’s report when I reached out. But they said the “NSF’s merit review process has two criteria—intellectual merit and broader impacts—and is the global gold standard for evaluating scientific proposals.” Their statement continued, “NSF will continue to emphasize the importance of the broader impacts criterion in the merit review process.”

The GOP members’ report said it searched for grant applications that used a variety of terms associated with social justice, gender, race, environmental justice, and individuals belonging to underrepresented groups. Some of the grant applications that received funding showed up in more than one category. 

The overall 10 percent figure identified by the GOP report masks how quickly the number of such grants have increased. In 2021, before the Biden task force report came out, they were less than 1 percent of the total number of grants. By 2022, that number had risen to more than 16 percent, and was at 27 percent between January and April 2024.

The Republicans’ report highlighted several specific grants that illustrate how DEI is changing the nature of NSF-funded research: 

• Shirin Vossoughi, an associate professor of learning sciences at Northwestern University, is co-principal investigator for a $1,034,751 2023 NSF grant for a project entitled “Reimagining Educator Learning Pathways Through Storywork for Racial Equity in STEM.” The project’s abstract says that current teaching practices reproduce “inequitable” structures in the teaching of STEM subjects and “perpetuate racial inequalities” within STEM contexts. Her public writing, such as in a co-authored 2020 op-ed, argues that all American institutions, including STEM education, are “permeated” by the “ideology of white supremacy.” Vossoughi could not immediately be reached for comment.
• Marwa Elshakry, an associate professor of history at Columbia University, together with Jamil Sbitan, a PhD student in history, received more than $15,000 in 2023 to identify how “hegemonic narratives have sought to obfuscate not only the contemporary existence of non-normative sexual experiences in certain national contexts, but also aimed to bury any historical traces of non-normative forms of gender and sexuality.” Vossoughi, Elshakry, and Sbitan were among several grant recipients that the report called out for their support of campus protests against Israel and its conduct of the war against Hamas. “The relationship between DEI NSF funding and the chaos on college campuses is not merely a matter of correlation,” the report notes. “. . . several NSF grant recipients awarded funding for a DEI grant either supported these encampments or joined anti semitic demonstrations.” Elshakry is on leave this semester and could not immediately be reached for comment. Sbitan also could not be reached for comment. 
• A 2023 NSF grant for $323,684 to Stephen Secules, assistant professor in the College of Education & Computing at Florida International University, intends to “transform engineering classrooms towards racial equity.” Secules has also been critical of the fact that “engineering professors are not engaging as active change agents for racial equity.” Secules could not be reached for comment.
• The NSF provided a total of $569,851 split among Florida International University, Colorado State University, and University of Minnesota for a project to examine “sex/gender narratives in undergraduate biology and their impacts on transgender, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming students.”
• And the University of Georgia received $644,642 to “identify systemic racism in mathematics teacher education.”

This shift in emphasis of NSF grants is happening at the same time the American public says its faith in the scientific community is declining.

Pew Research Center data from 2023, for instance, found that 27 percent of Americans say that they have “not too much” or “no” confidence in scientists to act in the public interest, as compared to only 12 percent in April 2020 at the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. 

The Republicans’ report argues that it’s not just the public’s trust that is at issue—it’s also the quality of the science that NSF grants produce. 

“These [DEI] grants both crowd out other kinds of research that could advance understanding of the physical world and advance a deeply divisive philosophy antithetical to the tenets of empirical scientific research,” the report said.

At the end of last week, the American economist and writer Professor Glenn Loury spoke on a panel as part of a conference held at King’s College, Cambridge. The event, ‘Towards the Common Good: Rethinking Race in the 21st Century’, was organised by The Equiano Project and aimed to promote liberal and universalist approaches to tackling racial conflict and inequality.

An edited version of his speech is printed below.

Fellow combatants in the culture wars, we are fighting for our lives here. We are fighting for the preservation of Western civilisation and the hour is late. I only mildly exaggerate.

I am an economist by training and that is a bust of the great John Maynard Keynes, here at King’s College, Cambridge. It resonates.

I agree with my friend and colleague Shelby Steele that, for black Americans, when we talk about disparities in race the problem is not oppression: the problem is freedom. The problem used to be exclusion and discrimination; the problem today is freedom. We’re well into the 21st century and African Americans have equal citizenship before the law in the United States, as a matter of fact.

Don’t bother me with anecdotes. I’m talking about the basic structure of citizenship. It’s a level playing field; it’s an open field. The ball is in our court. The issue is, what shall we do with our freedom?

I’ll quote another great economist, Thomas Sowell, who has taught us that disparities are one thing and discrimination is another. This is now my second point. The first point is, for black Americans the problem is the problem of freedom, not unfreedom. My second point is that disparities are one thing, discrimination is another. Disparities are not, ipso facto, evidence of unfreedom. Disparities are to be expected.

There’s a deep irony here when the identitarians become group egalitarians. The identitarians are the ones who are constantly telling us, “This is my identity; this is who I am; this is my group; this is my culture; these are my people. Don’t tread on us; don’t culturally appropriate us. We are an integral, distinct, identifiable type.”

Okay. So you have your blacks, you have your browns, you have your yellows, you have your gays, you have your whatever. How, then — since you are so insular, distinct, identity-based and different — should we expect that you would represent yourselves in equal numbers in every dimension of human activity? That there would be the same number of doctors, the same number of engineers, the same number of financiers, the same number of school teachers, the same number of criminals, the same number of shopkeepers per capita across all these different identity categories — if, indeed, identity is a real thing. The position is incoherent.

We should not expect group equality across every aspect of humanity and we don’t see it, and this was Thomas Sowell’s empirical point in book after book after book. Everywhere you look in the world you see disparities because everywhere you look in the world you see cultural differences which reflect themselves in human behaviour, which then lead to different representations in various areas of human activity. So disparities are not ipso facto a problem.

Finally, I want to say that equity is not equality. I could name them but I won’t: the writers in the US who are so prominent now — Ibram X. Kendi comes to mind — in promoting a certain ideology assert, “I see a disparity. I want equity.” And by equity they mean an equal representation. This is not equality.

If you use a different standard of assessment in order to achieve equity, you have just patronised me. You have just communicated tacitly that you don’t think I’m capable of performing according to the objective criteria of assessment as well as anybody else. I am now your client. I am now a ward. I go or come by your leave.

This argument that “We blacks must be made equal and you have to open up the doors and let us in! Never mind that our test scores are not as great” is pathetic. It’s a surrender of dignity. You will not be equal at the end of that argument even if you get what you ask for. There’s no substitute for earning the respect of your peers: if they grant it to you out of guilt or pity they have just reduced you, not elevated you.

How Psychological Manipulation Spread DEI Across America

The ideology behind DiAngelo’s ‘White Fragility’ has roots in the controversial re-education methods of 1970s Racism Awareness Training.

realityslaststand.com

The following essay is an exclusive excerpt from Joseph (Jake) Klein’s newly released book, Redefining Racism: How Racism Became “Power + Prejudice.” This excerpt is breaking news, shedding light on the National Training Laboratories (NTL) and its deep ties to modern anti-racism education—a revelation that has not yet been noticed by anyone outside a few individuals with pre-release copies. In this section, Klein uncovers how the infamous ideas of Robin DiAngelo, author of White Fragility, trace back to NTL’s controversial training methods, exposing a key third vector that has shaped modern DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) programs across America.

A few weeks ago, America’s most famous Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion educator and author of the infamous book White Fragility (which spent over 150 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and argued that “only whites can be racist” and white people like herself must strive to be “less white,”)—Robin DiAngelo—was revealed to be a plagiarist.

However, DiAngelo’s history of plagiarism is far worse than the recent reporting reveals. I’d know. Today/Earlier this week, I published my book Redefining Racism, an investigation into the origins of DiAngelo’s ideas. While most Reality’s Last Stand readers will know by now the origins of “wokeness” in critical theory and post-modernism, I discovered a key third vector from which DiAngelo’s strain of so-called “anti-racism” stems.

DiAngelo’s ideas are identical to those taught by a group of white-on-white “Racism Awareness Training” educators during the 1970s, most prominently Robert W. Terry, Patricia Bidol, and Judith H. Katz. DiAngelo, without citing them in White Fragility, recycled their ideas that “Racism = Power + Prejudice”—meaning that it’s impossible to be racist against white people within Western society—and that the best a white person can be is an “anti-racist racist,” as all white people are inherently racist by definition.

But to understand who originated these egregiously bad ideas is to know only half the story. The other half requires understanding how such transparent absurdities could successfully skyrocket DiAngelo’s public profile and come to dominate educational institutions and corporations across America. The death of George Floyd in 2020 may have provided the opportunity, but the means were developed decades prior at an organization Terry, Bidol, and Katz were all closely tied to: the National Training Laboratories (today called the NTL Institute).

The origins of the techniques used in modern DEI training can be traced back to the 1940s, with the work of psychologist Kurt Lewin. Lewin, who headed the “psychological warfare center for the Far East” at the Office of Strategic Services (a predecessor to the Central Intelligence Agency) during WWII, is perhaps best known for his research on “group dynamics.”

Lewin studied how people change and come to accept new values via “re-education.” He believed that new belief systems and values are generally accepted when people feel a sense of belonging after joining a new social group, upon which “previously rejected facts will become accepted as they become ‘facts’ of ‘his group.’” His re-educative change process involved “unfreezing” people’s previously held psychological patterns, moving them to “a new level” of thoughts, feelings, and/or behavior, and then “refreezing” that change. Lewin believed that this sort of re-education could lead to “cultural reconstruction.”

While Lewin did not live to see the first operations of NTL in the summer of 1947, his ideas formed its underlying philosophy and he gave “enthusiastic support” to its creation. NTL was conceived of as “an educational or re-educational or resocialization program directed first toward adult leaders with the goal of helping them become better group leaders and members, sensitive to the dynamic forces in groups and in themselves, and more competent agents of change in their roles and organizations.”

NTL gained prominence due to its development of the “T-Group,” short for “training group” and also known as “encounter groups,” “sensitivity training,” and “human relations training.” T-Groups are a type of “experience-based learning” in which “participants work together in a small group over an extended period, learning through analysis of their own experiences, including feelings, reactions, perceptions, and behavior.”

NTL used T-Groups to run experiments in what they called “action research,” meaning “the scientific study of controlled social change.” NTL understood that in order to create change, “detecting and correcting fallacies in group thinking” was necessary and that “member ideologies” must be integrated into “common group traditions, ideology, and goals.” They knew that creating change in individuals would require getting them to overcome their natural rejection of those labeled as “outside agitators” or “Communists.” The techniques they developed to do so included “making changes aware of the need for change” through “shock” and “guilt,” helping group participants “experience acceptance, support, trust, and confidence in their relations with one another,” and encouraging them to “anticipate their Utopia in the days to come.” These techniques worked, and NTL staff understood their power; one staff member told NTL co-founder Leland Bradford, “you're now in a position where you can form ideology for other people.”

Despite their often radical views, NTL was not a fringe organization. Staff came to NTL’s programs each year from major universities including Harvard, Yale, and UC Berkeley. NTL received a grant from IBM and conducted trainings for Bell Telephone, General Electric, the American Red Cross, the State Department, and the National Security Agency, among other corporations, non-profits, and government agencies. A scholar of NTL’s history wrote that by the late 1960s, “NTL assumed an almost mythical status as an agent of the new order.” By 1974, Bradford estimated “it would be a conservative figure to say that at least twenty to thirty million persons have been touched by group experiences that had some relationship, usually unknown to them, to NTL.”

From the beginning, NTL was aware that its programs “created various degrees of stress for some individuals and we needed either a psychiatrist or clinical psychologist present.” Psychiatric staff brought into NTL, while very friendly to the organization, reported that “some casualties are probably inevitable.” Those “casualties” ranged between participants leaving T-Groups with “emotional disturbances,” participants with previous psychiatric histories undergoing “psychotic episodes and become[ing] seriously ill,” and at least one suicide. A study by the American Psychiatric Association found that 9.4%—a “conservative estimate”—of 170 subjects who completed NTL’s programs could be counted as casualties, meaning they “became more psychologically distressed” for an enduring period of at least eight months after their group experience.

While the casualties from NTL’s T-Groups were bad enough, the casualties from other groups who adopted and further developed their methods tended to be much worse. For example, Synanon, an organization that was originally founded as a rehabilitation program for drug addicts but developed into a particularly brutal cult. Synanon members were forced to shave their heads, and some members were forced to have vasectomies, abortions, and divorces. Despite Synanon owning hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of weapons and participating in multiple attempted murders, Synanon successfully maintained ties with major corporations such as IBM and Heinz until the 1980s when the cult was finally shut down by the IRS for tax evasion.

The problems with T-Groups and “sensitivity training” didn’t go unnoticed; they became a focus of political controversy. In congressional testimony, the T-Groups were compared to Communist struggle sessions and accused of “trying to homogenize… members” by making “approval… more important to [members] than truth.” Due to this public notoriety, the terms “T-Groups” and “sensitivity training” have become less common over time, but their methods have continued nonetheless.

The links between DiAngelo and NTL’s techniques are not marginal. Judith Katz, whose work DiAngelo’s White Fragility most heavily copies from, was a member of NTL’s board of directors. Patricia Bidol, who Katz took her ideas from, was the “dean and facilitator for NTL’s Human Interaction Labs.” Robert Terry, who Bidol based her work on, underwent a series of NTL group sessions and ran his own trainings in partnership with an NTL staffer.

While “Racism Awareness Training” as developed by Terry, Bidol, and Katz—and currently taught by DiAngelo and her ilk under the name of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion—may not have gone quite as far off the rails as Synanon, they’re both sibling children of NTL’s methods. Like Synanon, which claimed to be one thing but indoctrinated its participants into something much worse, DiAngelo’s style of DEI claims to be “anti-racist” but has indoctrinated its participants into something entirely different.

For more on the National Training Laboratories and the history of Racism Awareness Training, read Joseph (Jake) Klein’s book Redefining Racism: How Racism Became “Power + Prejudice,” available now.

America may soon be subjected to the country’s first DEI president: Kamala Harris

There is a raging debate in corporate America on the future of DEI, aka Diversity ­Equity and Inclusion, because it is literally destroying

New York Post

There is a raging debate in corporate America on the future of DEI, aka Diversity ­Equity and Inclusion, because it is literally destroying businesses that go there.

And yet the American public may soon be subjected to DEI writ large in the next president of the United States, if Kamala Harris finds her way to the top of the Democratic ticket while Joe Biden wilts away as the party’s presidential nominee after his horrific ­debate performance. 

Yes, maybe the most irrepressibly fatuous politician in America may become the leader of the free world because the Democratic Party is unable to break its DEI stranglehold. 

Harris is already being hailed as the president-in-waiting as her boss Sleepy Joe — despite his defiant TV vow to George Stephanopoulos Friday night to stay in the race — increasingly faces reality that his chances of besting Trump are slim.

Calls that he should step down are mounting, paving the way for his VP to land at the top of the ticket.

Even if does stay and achieves the near impossible by pulling out a victory, you can bet he won’t survive four years.

Harris becomes the nation’s first DEI president by default. 

For the American people it would be such an unfair and odd coronation.

Remember, she’s part of an administration that gave us inflation, world chaos and an open border that literally invites terrorists to enter the country and kill people.

She has spent nearly four years as Biden’s No. 2 flubbing every assignment given to her, including the border mess. 

That’s on top of her manifest ­unlikability; her word salad whenever she tries to sound smart; her cackle when she laughs; her vaulting ambition.

She once suggested during a 2020 primary debate that her current boss was a racist for being against federally mandated busing.

But Biden’s busing stench wasn’t nasty enough to stop her from jumping at the chance to serve as his VP when DEI came calling. 

Following the 2020 death of ­George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police, the pressure on Biden to pick a woman of color as his running mate was intense.

(And he boxed himself in by publicly saying his running mate would be a woman.)

Harris checked all the boxes: Her father, an academic with a Ph.D., is from Jamaica; her late mother, a biologist, was Indian.

VP Harris was a California state attorney general and a US senator. 

Yet if you delved, you would see a weak record of accomplishment, and weird personal tics (that aforementioned laugh), and an intense desire for power.

First Lady Jill Biden is said to have hated her but as one Dem operative told me before Joe Biden made her his VP: “She’s black and that is all that matters.” 

DEI, of course, is a construct first embraced by academia, the lefty political class and then business that posits the world needs to be observed in terms of those historically oppressed (people of color and of diverse gender classifications) at the expense of the oppressor (namely white people and particularly white men).

Jobs, image making, TV programming must be seen through this warped view of reality. 

It’s a topic I cover in my upcoming book “Go Woke, Go Broke,” ­illustrating how DEI had been ­ingrained in the corporate culture before the American people began to revolt.

Examples are endless.

Among them, Disney’s DEI mandates pushed so-called “queerness” into cartoons; trans women found their way into beer commercials; and there was a white-male hiring freeze at many corporations until relatively recently. 

It’s fair to say the high-water mark of DEI was after Floyd’s death and continued for three years.

Now, corporate America is backtracking feverishly because while Americans respect the desire for diversity, they hate DEI’s purely idiotic demands where the offspring of rich South Americans get jobs over a white coal miner’s daughter.

It’s also patently illegal; the SCOTUS ruling outlawing affirmative action for college admissions is a precedent that lots of businesses want to avoid. 

And they are, or at least starting to.

Consider the giant retailer Target.

In 2023, CEO Brian Cornell said, “The things we’ve done from a DE and I standpoint, it’s adding value, it’s helping us drive sales, it’s building greater engagement with both our teams and our guests.”

That was his rationalization for a massive Pride Month merchandising display in his stores — complete with mannequins wearing so-called tuck-friendly bathing suits, books about trans children being sold next to rainbow-colored onesies. 

Then came the customer backlash from those who didn’t appreciate being indoctrinated when they shop.

In 2024, Cornell reduced Target’s Pride displays enough that no one really noticed.

So much for DEI adding value. 

Some Dems I speak to caution me it’s not all DEI giving Harris the edge to replace Biden.

She is, after all, the VP. If she’s on a new ticket, it gets to keep money raised already, not start from scratch. 

OK, but I can’t imagine money will be an issue.

One possible nominee, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, is a billionaire.

The Dem money machine on Wall Street and Silicon Valley is formidable. 

Yet the country might just be stuck with Harris as president if Sleepy Joe wins and stumbles his way to resignation while in his second term, or if Biden drops out in the coming days and she ­becomes the nominee. 

All because DEI is the Democratic Party’s touchstone, no matter how much evidence amasses that it’s a failed ideology. 

DIE-ing Schools

And Glimmers of Hope

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The hysteria in the Ivy League does not start there. Those students shrieking Hamas slogans in the squares of New York were not radicalized overnight. It is in schools that civilization is built or destroyed. Schooling determines the calibre of a nation’s governing class, if not its ideology. This is well understood by the Left, which has transformed Western pedagogy since the 1968 publication of the third most-cited work of social science of all time, Pedagogy of the Oppressed by the Brazilian Marxist Paolo Freire. Freire’s book took the USA by storm in the 1970s, helping to decimate such tyrannical norms as the authority of the teacher over the pupil, the memorization of knowledge, and even the idea that knowledge is good for its own sake (he claimed that the sole value in teaching is to reveal the “oppressive nature of reality” to children). So, while the unholy trinity of Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity (D.I.E.) has enjoyed a growth spurt in the last decade, we can trace its roots back to good old-fashioned 20th century Marxism. Soviet-funded subversive ideology surviving its mother’s demise, yet again.

D.I.E. is, in turn, the mother of poor standards: dumbing down logically proceeds from the ideology of “emancipatory education,” which attacks “logocentric” (or, more recently, “Eurocentric”) knowledge for being the fruit of Dead White Male labor. This explains the lack of classroom rigor and teaching authority that underpins the appalling standards in American public schools. US literacy and numeracy scores have now dropped to their lowest level in decades. (Though there is some evidence suggesting this has partly to do with demographic changes.) This decline preceded 2020 but was undoubtedly worsened by the closure of schools during the pandemic.

But poor test scores are only part of the problem: the ideological equivalent of paranoid schizophrenia, poorly concealed by woke buzzwords like “inclusion,” now has a stranglehold on the schools. Children are being fed ideas which are not just nakedly ideological, but bewildering: there are as many genders as there are numbers and racial color-blindness is oppressive. This allegedly pastoral education eats into the time that children might otherwise spend learning a language. 

Top institutions are not invulnerable to the ideological madness and philistinism of D.I.E. In some cases, they lead the charge: flagship independent schools like Eton and its American parallel, Philipps Exeter (attended by now-disgraced Harvard President Claudine Gay), have officially DIEd a demeaning death. 

At Eton, English master Will Knowland was fired in 2020 for refusing to retract his statements in a lecture entitled “The Patriarchy Paradox,” in which he challenged the idea that masculinity is by nature toxic. In defending masculinity, Knowland sought to emancipate a classroom full of boys from the idea that their sex is irrevocably stained with the sin of “patriarchy.” Knowland’s goal – and crime – was to encourage boys to have confidence. This was too much for the school: Knowland was fired at the hands of Head Master Simon Henderson, who, in the wake of George Floyd’s death, pledged to teach a school of English boys the fanatical dogma of the American left: that society is plagued with “systemic racism” and (in a nation which abolished slavery throughout much of Africa) must be “decolonized.” 

The events in May 2020 likewise prompted a period of insanity at Phillips Exeter. “Intersectional” studies of science and race abound, as do “queer readings” of Shakespeare; most alarmingly, children are subject to cynical “anti-racist training,” based on the idea that white children are inherently racist – an idea which is sure to shatter the self-confidence of those children. 

It may sound elitist to mourn top institutions like Eton and Exeter rather than focussing on the abject conditions of state-funded schools in the Anglosphere. To that I say: yes! The health of the body politic depends on the health and caliber of its political elite. It is in any nation’s best interest to be governed by men and women who know right from wrong, are well-versed in the languages and literatures of their global allies, and conduct themselves with responsibility rather than racially motivated neurosis or self-victimization. At the very least, can’t politicians possess the basic knowledge required to do their jobs? It seems not: last month, it was revealed that the chief secretary to the Treasury in the UK, educated at top grammar school Oxted and Pembroke College, Oxford, doesn’t know how to interpret statistical data. 

But education isn’t just instrumental. Knowledge may be power, but it is also true “emancipation.” The perversion of D.I.E is that it removes the real freedom which excellence and emotional robustness gives children, shackling them with poor-quality learning and a host of neuroses. This particularly betrays children from unstable backgrounds, whom D.I.E. claims to help. The distress which anti-colorblind dogma brings children is palpable: parents have reported that their children leave classrooms in tears because they are white, therefore monstrous oppressors. Chaya Raichik, known for her Twitter account “LibsofTikTok,” has drawn attention to dozens of cases of overt anti-white propaganda in American schools, many of which are elementary schools; typical occurrences include schools hosting playdates which exclude white children. Despite her primary tactic being to simply repost content which teachers and schools willingly publish themselves, Raichik has come under fire for “inciting hatred” (as a glance over her outrageously partisan Wikipedia page reveals). Since her platform has such a wide reach, her critics claim she is irresponsibly drawing attention to humble elementary school teachers; it doesn’t occur to them that these teachers should probably restrain themselves from posting about their ideological schemes on TikTok, the most popular mobile app in the USA.

Perhaps even more pressing is the explosion of transgenderism in schools. As a recently censored study shows, “rapid onset gender dysphoria” is a real and growing phenomenon. The contagious nature of trans identities contradicts the claim that these identities are innate; evidence of exploding numbers of insecure, pubescent children identifying as transgender in social clusters shows otherwise. 

The social contagion effect in schools is compounded by ideologically driven teachers who work to alienate parents from their children by concealing and abetting their young pupils’ new identities. In April 2022, Chaya Raichik exposed footage of an 8th grade English teacher in Owasso, Oklahoma, who stated in a video "If your parents don't accept you for who you are, f*ck them. I'm your parents now. I'm proud of you. Drink some water. I love you." Tyler Wrynn, the teacher in question, is far from alone in his stated mission to “emancipate” children from parents who are concerned that their children might seek out and access cross-sex hormonal therapy, which risks sterilization and myriad permanent ailments. In this way, D.I.E. in schools poses a threat to fundamental unit of society which overwhelmingly determines outcomes for children: the nuclear family.

Parents are waking up. Demand is growing for classical schools where great books will be devoured rather than dismissed as relics of a world of Dead White Men. Schools which champion the principles of authority, stability, order, and emotional fortitude are already boasting unusual academic success and good discipline: Michaela Community School in London, run by the effervescent Katherine Birbalsingh, is a testament to how strict authority can transform the prospects of children who come from deprived, largely nonwhite backgrounds. Birbalsingh discourages the victimhood mentality which is typical of Generation Z, eschewing appeals to “mitigated circumstances” if homework is late.

Often described by the British press as the “strictest school in Britain,” Michaela attained among the best GCSE results (the rough British equivalent of the Iowa tests) in the country in its very first student cohort. In 2022 and 2023 the school boasted the highest “value-added” (or progress) score in the country, all while autocratically banning mobile phones and making it compulsory to sing the National Anthem. In Alberta, Canada, Caylan Ford (who has written incisively about the pernicious philosophy underpinning Freire’s Pedagogy) has been overwhelmed by the demand for her newly-founded classical charter school, Calgary Classical Academy. The Great Hearts School network, exploding across the American southwest, is another heartwarming example.

Stuffy, strict, concerned parents: take stock. You are not alone.

Is this the end for DEI?

“Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” hiring policies are unprofitable, patronising and regressive. Some companies are finding a better way.

andrewdoyle.substack.com

“There is a mistaken belief that meritocracy somehow conflicts with diversity. I strongly disagree. No group has a monopoly on excellence. A hiring process based on merit will naturally yield a variety of backgrounds, perspectives, and ideas. Achieving this requires casting a wide net for talent and then objectively selecting the best, without bias in any direction. We will not pick winners and losers based on someone being the ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ race, gender, and so on. It should be needless to say, and yet it needs saying: doing so would be racist and sexist, not to mention illegal. Upholding meritocracy is good for business and is the right thing to do.”

“You’re ‘disrupting’ current hard-fought standards you don’t like, by reverting to a system rooted in bias and inequality that asks less of you as a hiring manager and as a leader” – Dan Couch (He/Him)

“Curious to see how hiring processes can effectively (and objectively) measure one’s ‘merit’, ‘excellence’, and ‘intelligence’, all of which are very subjective terms” – Cole Gawin (He/Him)

“What is merit and how do we measure it?” – Rio Cruz Morales (They/Them)

“This sounds a lot like excuse making for casting off DEI principles” – R.C. Rondero De Mosier (He/Him)

1. We will never discipline or fire members of staff on the basis of pressure from online activists.
2. We have no interest in our employees’ political opinions, and how they choose to express themselves outside the workplace is no business of ours.
3. We will not probe into our employees’ thoughts with “unconscious bias training”, or force them to undertake workshops that presuppose the existence of “systemic injustice”.
4. We will never make statements of fealty to any given cause, political or ideological, or claim to promote certain “values”. Our aim is to make a profit, not preach to our customers.
5. We will not tolerate the public shaming of employees if they cause offence, either through a joke or poor phrasing, and will instead seek to resolve internally any disputes that naturally occur when human beings work together.
6. We reject the current predominance of identity politics and will simply treat everyone equally (staff and customers alike) irrespective of their race, gender, sexuality, or any other immutable characteristic.

DEI: the great misunderstanding

On the collectivist nature of diversity, equality, and inclusion ideology.

socialimpurity.substack.com

The occupation of university campuses by terrorist supporters celebrating the October 7th massacre of Israeli citizens and visitors to the country by Hamas and calling for more Jewish blood makes abundantly clear the extent to which our academic institutions have been damaged by the ideology of diversity, equality, and inclusion (DEI, sometimes also called EDI). Yet, against the backdrop of positive news (MIT dropping DEI statements, UNC System votes to repeal its DEI policy, UT Austin laying off multiple DEI employees, multiple universities re-instating standardized testing for admissions), there are continued calls to reform, rather than eliminate, DEI, claims that diversity, equality, and inclusion are “important values”, as well as paradoxical remarks that with proper definitions of the three terms, the ideology can be salvaged, returned to its original “good intentions”.

In my view, the problem here is that many Westerners misunderstand what DEI is, how it works, and why it is so destructive. They misunderstand it because they were born, grew up, and lived in democratic, capitalist societies that valued individual freedoms and responsibilities, while DEI at its core is a collectivist ideology. Therefore, its comprehension comes easier to those of us who experienced collectivist notions first-hand.

A good example of this misunderstanding is the term “DEI hire” that is being applied to individuals, most recently the disgraced former president of Harvard University Claudine Gay and the democratically elected Mayor of Baltimore Brandon M. Scott. The problem is that DEI does not operate at the level of individuals, but on the scale of the entire society, by modifying the selection criteria for admissions, hiring, and promotion. The term, therefore, is an oxymoron; everyone hired in academia in the past decade or so has been a DEI hire, and that is precisely why the ideology is so destructive. DEI works by replacing selection criteria that have previously been based on merit with those based on an allegiance to the ideology, propagating its destruction in the space of multitude of institutions, and in time—through generations of faculty and students. Whereas in the past, hiring and admission decisions were based on one’s ability to do the job, thirst for knowledge, and aptitude to pursue it, now they are based on one’s ability to perpetuate the ideology and its growing bureaucracies. The result is a communist dream, where those who were nothing, are becoming everything—with the associated destructive consequences.

A detour is needed here to address one of the most pervasive myths behind the need for DEI: that academia was never a meritocracy. This nonsense is being repeated ad nauseum in the hopes that repeating it will somehow make it true. One argument is that it could not possibly have been a meritocracy because the applicant pool was limited: e.g., women were not admitted to educational institutions, quotas were instituted limiting the admission of Jewish candidates, etc. Yes, imposing such limits on the applicant pool is a bad thing. Progressive societies have been doing away with these practices (unlike regressive societies, cue the Taliban). Yet, the principles that were used to select candidates from the limited pool – those principles were based on ability and aptitude and were, at their core, meritocratic, much like sex-segregated athletics or chess remain meritocratic in each sex category.

A more poignant criticism is not that academia wasn’t meritocratic, but that meritocracy itself is imperfect; that the failure of nominally meritocratic procedures resulted in the selection of the proverbial “wrong man for the job”. This, of course, is true: anyone who’s ever set foot on a university campus has no doubt encountered people of very questionable qualifications. Coupled with limited applicant pools, such failures of meritocratic selection evoke a deep sense of unfairness: why should someone incompetent be selected over someone who had no chance to compete in the first place? They shouldn’t, of course.

Meritocracy is imperfect. That is a fact. Arguing with facts is counterproductive. Admission, hiring, and promotion procedures must continuously be improved. Yet, it is imperfect in the same sense as democracy or capitalism are imperfect: there simply is no viable alternative—as long as we want things to work, that is; for the human race to continue to survive, peacefully prosper, and progress. After all, we know very well what happens to societies that exchange the imperfection of democracy and capitalism for the perfection of communism, socialism, or national socialism. Indeed, DEI has already led to some spectacularly unqualified individuals infiltrating academia—Claudine Gay is merely one example—and the storm of violent, antisemitic, pro-Hamas protests.

DEI grew out of authoritarian ideologies and is repeating their tried and tired destructive paradigms. It is based on the fallacy that a fair selection must reflect the composition of the population, on fighting “overrepresentation”—the same notions were used by the Nazis to justify their antisemitic policies in German and Austrian universities, and beyond, in 1930s; It is based on the notion that everyone must first and foremost be an activist, guarding ideological purity and promoting contemporary notions of morality and social justice—the notion adopted in the USSR, where every act and statement were imbued with political significance, one that was either in accordance the party line, or against it.

This brings me to my final point. According to Theodosius Dobzhansky, a Russian-American geneticist and evolutionary biologist who was fortunate to have escaped Lysenko’s purges by defecting to the West, “nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.” Neo-Marxists occupying Western universities, following in the anti-Darwinist footsteps of their forebears, criticize the “survival of the fittest” approach to admissions, hiring, and promotion. But a living system subject to a selection pressure will always evolve; the only question is, what will it be evolving towards? In other words, “survival of the fittest” is a universal law. What changes with the nature of the selection pressure is not whether the fittest survive—they always do—but what they are fit for. Those, who survive the selection based on DEI ideology, are fit for activism, cowardice of mobs, bigotry, antisemitism and other forms of racism, violence and destruction. This is exactly what we see in today’s campus protests, and this has always been the point: to produce generations of activists who not only lack knowledge, but who were robbed of the skills needed to develop it, of the curiosity to seek answers to their questions beyond the “party line”. There never were any good intentions.

Love Wins

Love has always won; there’s no reason for it to stop now.

news.fairforall.org

So, I have a confession: I am a Kenny Chesney fan. His song "Get Along" has always been a favorite of mine, but it didn’t achieve great significance in my mind until I started this job. As many of you know, I am the Director of Legal Advocacy for FAIR, and a big part of my job is fielding complaints from people who have faced discrimination at work or their children’s schools. Some have been outright barred from participating in events and activities based solely on their skin color. Others have been compelled to participate in discriminatory practices against their wishes for the same reason. Suffice it to say, the stories I hear are often quite grim and don't showcase the best of humanity. Instead, they frequently highlight discriminatory “DEI” efforts—present discrimination as a means of correcting past discrimination. These tactics are inherently flawed and bound to fail.

When the so-called “great awokening” began to sweep the country in 2020, my primary feeling was confusion. We were told that America is a systemically racist country and that the opportunity to succeed depended entirely on one's skin color. That racism was not in fact discrimination against an individual based on their race, but that racism = prejudice + power. The proposed solution was to decolonize America—a revolution.

I was confused by these proclamations because, as far as I could tell, they were not entirely accurate; many were themselves fundamentally racist. Has America and its leaders made horrid, unthinkable mistakes throughout history? Definitely. Do racist people still exist in America today? Of course. It’s the sweeping generalizations of the new orthodoxy that are suspect. Quite frankly, based on what I can see with my own eyes, it’s nonsense. However much actual racism there is in the world today, it is amplified 10X the moment you open social media. I have found that if we let it, sometimes the real world might just pleasantly surprise us. 

Every member of a group categorized based on shared skin color does not think or act the same as the others. Nor does one’s likelihood of success in life depend on which group they are assigned to. Race-essentialist and reductive notions like these aren’t just crude, they’re wildly improbable. They’re also dangerous. What could go wrong in resurrecting the pernicious principle that the law might rightly treat people differently based on their immutable traits, so long as it fits the popular narrative of the day? The current dogma of “intersectionality” and “oppressors versus oppressed” is ultimately a losing proposition. It will logically fail on its own, and I believe that failure will be accelerated by love.

Fifty-seven years ago today, the Supreme Court handed down its opinion in Loving v. Virginia, the case that challenged anti-miscegenation statutes in several states. The plaintiffs, Mildred Jeter, a black woman, and Richard Loving, a white man, were married in the District of Columbia and then returned to Virginia to establish their marital home. Soon after, a grand jury indicted the Lovings for violating Virginia’s ban on interracial marriage. The Lovings appealed, and once their case reached the Supreme Court, justice was finally served. The Court ruled that our Constitution does not allow a state to prevent you from marrying someone simply because you don’t share the same skin color. For me, this history gives the slogan “Virginia is for lovers” a special meaning.

We’ve all probably felt the power of indeterminable forces trying to divide us based on immutable characteristics. After searching widely to find the exact source of this power, I still couldn’t tell you what it is. But I grow more and more convinced that it’s mostly imagined, fueled primarily by our willingness to give it oxygen. Thankfully, these misguided forces are weak; they only survive when we choose to breathe life into them. At the end of the day, they are built upon one critical, fatal flaw—they ignore that our common humanity transcends immutable traits. Love overlooks those differences, and now, so too does the law.

On this Loving Day 2024, we’d do well to remember that fact. Instead of allowing the ideological forces to divide us, we should take Kenny Chesney’s advice: “Always give love the upper hand. Paint a wall, learn to dance. Call your mom, buy a boat. Drink a beer, sing a song. Make a friend.” Do these basic human things and live by love—the rest will work itself out.

Republicans Introduce Bill To Ban DEI in Government, Federal Contracting

Congressional Republicans introduced a bill on Wednesday that would eliminate all diversity, equity, and inclusion positions in the federal

Washington Free Beacon

Congressional Republicans introduced a bill on Wednesday that would eliminate all diversity, equity, and inclusion positions in the federal government and bar federal contractors from requiring DEI statements and training sessions.

The Dismantle DEI Act, introduced by Sen. J.D. Vance (R., Ohio) and Rep. Michael Cloud (R., Texas), would also bar federal grants from going to diversity initiatives, cutting off a key source of support for DEI programs in science and medicine. Other provisions would prevent accreditation agencies from requiring DEI in schools and bar national securities associations, like NASDAQ and the New York Stock Exchange, from instituting diversity requirements for corporate boards.

"The DEI agenda is a destructive ideology that breeds hatred and racial division," Vance told the Washington Free Beacon. "It has no place in our federal government or anywhere else in our society."

The bill is the most comprehensive legislative effort yet to excise DEI initiatives from the federal government and regulated entities. It offers a preview of how a Republican-controlled government, led by former president Donald Trump, could crack down on the controversial diversity programs that have exploded since 2020, fueled in part by President Joe Biden’s executive orders mandating a "whole-of-government" approach to  "racial equity."

From NASA and the National Science Foundation to the Internal Revenue Service and the U.S Army, all federal agencies require some form of diversity training. Mandatory workshops have drilled tax collectors on "cultural inclusion," military commanders on male pregnancy, and nuclear engineers on the "roots of white male culture," which—according to a training for Sandia National Laboratories, the Energy Department offshoot that designs America’s nuclear arsenal—include a "can-do attitude" and "hard work."

The Sandia training, conducted in 2019 by a group called "White Men As Full Diversity Partners," instructed nuclear weapons engineers to write "a short message" to "white women" and "people of color" about what they’d learned, according to screenshots of the training obtained by the Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo.

The bill would ban these trainings and close the government DEI offices that conduct them. It would also prevent personnel laid off by those closures from being transferred or reassigned—a move meant to stop diversity initiatives from continuing under another name.

The prohibitions, which cover outside DEI consultants as well as government officials, would be enforced via a private right of action and could save the government billions of dollars. In 2023, the Biden administration spent over $16 million on diversity training for government employees alone. It requested an additional $83 million that year for DEI programs at the State Department and $9.2 million for the Office of Personnel Management’s Office of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility—one of the many bureaucracies the bill would eliminate.

A large chunk of savings would come from axing DEI grants made through the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which has a near monopoly on science funding in the United States. The agency hosts an entire webpage for "diversity related" grant opportunities—including several that prioritize applicants from "diverse backgrounds"—and has set aside billions of dollars for "minority institutions" and researchers with a "commitment to promoting diversity." All of those programs would be on the chopping block should Vance and Cloud’s bill pass.

Cosponsored by Marsha Blackburn (R., Tenn.), Rick Scott (R., Fla.), Kevin Cramer (R., N.D.), Bill Cassidy (R., La.), and Eric Schmitt (R., Mo.) in the Senate, the Dismantle DEI Act has drawn support from prominent conservative advocacy groups, including Heritage Action and the Claremont Institute. At a time of ideological fracture on the right—debates about foreign aid and the proper role of government bitterly divided Trump’s primary challengers, for example, both in 2016 and 2024—Wednesday’s bill aims to provide a rallying cry most Republicans can get behind: DEI needs to die.

"It’s absurd to fund these divisive policies, especially using Americans' tax dollars," Cloud told the Free Beacon. "And it’s time for Congress to put an end to them once and for all."

The bill has the potential to free millions of Americans—both in government and the private sector—from the sort of divisive diversity trainings that have become an anti-woke bête noire. Its most consequential provisions might be those governing federal contractors, which employ up to a fifth of the American workforce and include companies like Pfizer, Microsoft, Lockheed Martin, and Verizon.

Each firm runs a suite of DEI programs, from race-based fellowships and "resource groups" to mandatory workshops, that have drawn public outcry and in some cases sparked legal challenges. By targeting these contractors, the bill could purge DEI from large swaths of the U.S. economy without directly outlawing the practice in private institutions.

Targeting accreditors, meanwhile, could remove a key driver of DEI programs in professional schools. The American Bar Association and the Liaison Committee on Medical Education, which accredit all law and medical schools in the United States and derive much of their power from the U.S. Department of Education, have both made DEI material—including course content on "anti-racism"—a requirement for accreditation, over the objections of some of their members.

Those mandates have spurred a handful of law schools to require entire classes on critical race theory. The transformation has been even more acute at medical schools, which, per accreditation guidelines released in 2022, should teach students to identify "systems of power, privilege, and oppression."

Yale Medical School now requires residents to take a mandatory course on "advocacy" and "health justice," for example. And at the University of California, Los Angeles, David Geffen School of Medicine, students must complete a "health equity" course that promotes police abolition, describes weight loss as a "hopeless endeavor," and states that "biomedical knowledge" is "just one way" of understanding "health and the world."

While the bill wouldn’t outlaw these lessons directly, it would prevent accreditors recognized by the Education Department from mandating them. Such agencies, whose seal of approval is a prerequisite for federal funds, would need to certify that their accreditation standards do not "require, encourage, or coerce any institution of higher education to engage in prohibited" DEI practices, according to the text of the bill. They would also need to certify that they do not "assess the commitment of an institution of higher education to any ideology, belief, or viewpoint" as part of the accreditation process.

Other, more technical provisions would eliminate diversity quotas at federal agencies and end a racially targeted grant program in the Department of Health and Human Services.

Unlike past GOP efforts to limit DEI, which have focused on the content of diversity trainings and the use of explicit racial preferences, the bill introduced Wednesday would also ax requirements related to data collection. It repeals a law that forces the armed services to keep tabs on the racial breakdown of officers, for example, as well as a law that requires intelligence officials to collect data on the "diversity and inclusion efforts" of their agencies.

Though officials could still collect the data if they so choose, the bill would mark a small step toward colorblindness in a country where racial record-keeping—required by many federal agencies—has long been the norm.

"DEI destroys competence while making Americans into enemies," said Arthur Milikh, the director of the Claremont Institute Center for the American Way of Life, one of the conservative groups supporting the bill. "This ideology must be fought, and its offices removed."

White House 'Equity' Requirements Holding Back EV Charging Station Construction, Internal Docs Show

In 2021, the Biden administration pledged it would build 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations by 2030. So far, it’s built seven. Last

Washington Free Beacon

In 2021, the Biden administration pledged it would build 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations by 2030. So far, it’s built seven.

Last month, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg—who administers the funds apportioned for EV charger construction in the $1.2 trillion Bipartisan Infrastructure Act—said Americans should not be surprised at the time it takes to stand up "a new category of federal investment."

"It’s more than just plunking a small device into the ground," Buttigieg said in an interview with CBS’s Face the Nation.

But internal memos from the Department of Transportation obtained by the Washington Free Beacon, as well as interviews with those who are responsible for overseeing the implementation of the electric vehicle charging station project, say the delay is in large part a result of the White House’s diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.

"These requirements are screwing everything up," said one senior Department of Transportation staffer who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "It’s all a mess."

President Joe Biden has reportedly expressed frustration with the pace at which his much-touted infrastructure projects are getting built. A "close ally" of the White House told CNN last December that Biden "wants this stuff now," and a White House spokesman added that the president "constantly pushes his team to ensure we are moving as quickly as possible."

But Biden may only have himself to blame.

Shortly after taking office, the president signed an executive order mandating that the beneficiaries of 40 percent of all federal climate and environmental programs should come from "underserved communities." The order also established the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council, which monitors agencies such as the Department of Transportation to ensure the "voices, perspectives, and lived realities of communities with environmental justice concerns are heard in the White House and reflected in federal policies, investments, and decisions."

In order to qualify for a grant, applicants must "demonstrate how meaningful public involvement, inclusive of disadvantaged communities, will occur throughout a project’s life cycle." What "public involvement" means is unclear. But the Department of Transportation notes it should involve "intentional outreach to underserved communities."

That outreach, the Department of Transportation states, can take the form of "games and contests," "visual preference surveys," or "neighborhood block parties" so long as the grant recipient provides "multilingual staff or interpreters to interact with community members who use languages other than English."

"This all just slows down construction," says Jim Meigs, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute who focuses on federal regulation.

"These ‘public involvement’ requirements are impossible to quantify and even open builders up to lawsuits by members of the community where an electric vehicle charging station is set to be constructed."

How these equity requirements are relevant to the construction of a single electric vehicle charging station is unclear, Meigs said. But all applicants for federal funding must in many cases submit reports that can total hundreds of pages about how they will pursue "equity" every step along the way.

This leads to delays and increases costs throughout the construction process, one senior Department of Transportation official told the Free Beacon. "Highly Qualified" applications, internal memos state, must "promote local inclusive economic development and entrepreneurship such as the use of minority-owned businesses."

That can take the form of funding "support services to help train, place, and retain people in good-paying jobs or registered apprenticeships, with a focus on women, people of color, and others that are underrepresented in infrastructure jobs." A firm’s "workplace culture" should "promote the entry and retention of underrepresented populations."

"These onerous diversity, equity, and inclusion requirements handcuff professionals from making proper evaluations and prevent the government/public from funding the most deserving projects, instead funneling money towards less qualified applicants," the senior Department of Transportation official said.

Those regulations are visible throughout more than 500 federal initiatives across 19 agencies, according to the White House’s chief environmental justice officer Jalonne White-Newsome, who spoke during a White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council meeting on Wednesday. The Free Beacon accessed that meeting, which took place over Zoom and included more than 15 speakers from various federal agencies.

"Since the President took office, the number of publicly available charging ports has grown by over 90 percent, with more than 184,000 publicly-available EV charging ports operational today and 1,000 more coming online each week," a Department of Transportation spokesperson said. "There are currently projects underway in partnership with states and local grantees for 14,000 federally-funded EV charging ports across the country under the NEVI and CFI programs that will build on the 184,000 chargers operational today."

The first electric vehicle charging station funded by the bipartisan infrastructure bill opened last December in a small Ohio town, and no one used the station within the first hours of its opening. Ohio has some of the lowest electric vehicle adoption in the country, with just 0.33 percent of all vehicles in the state operating on battery power, according to Nasdaq.

But the propensity for a local population to actually use an electric vehicle charging station appears to be an afterthought for the Biden administration, Meigs said. Instead the various regulations seem to serve more as a way to pay off Democratic constituencies—in the form of minority-focused contracting and hiring—at the expense of completing any projects in a timely or cost-effective manner.

"At a certain point you have to ask, is the point of these programs to reduce emissions or is the point to spread taxpayer money around and support groups that vote for the Democratic Party?"

White men have least chance of getting on BBC trainee scheme

Applicants coming from black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds were two and a half times more likely to be accepted for the training

The Telegraph

Non-white applicants to the BBC’s flagship journalism training scheme were almost two and a half times more likely to get in than their white counterparts.

Since 2022, an average of 22.5 per cent of applicants were classed as coming from black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds (BAME).

However over that same two-year period, BAME individuals made up 41 per cent of participants on the scheme.

In contrast, whites made up an average of 77.5 per cent of applicants but only 59 per cent of participants, since 2022.

This means that non-white applicants were 2.4 times more likely to be given a place on the highly coveted scheme than their white counterparts.

The two-year scheme, referred to as the Journalism Advanced Apprenticeship, provides participants with training and a potentially permanent role at the Corporation.

The findings were released via the Freedom of Information Act. Female applicants also had a stronger chance of getting in than men, but by a lesser degree.

Since 2022, an average of 60.25 per cent of applicants were women. But in that same period, women made up 71 per cent of participants.

In contrast, men made up an average of 39.75 per cent of applicants but 29 per cent of participants, meaning that womens’ chances of getting onto the scheme were 1.6 times higher than their male counterparts.

Neil O’Brien, who until the election was the Conservative MP for Harborough, said: “Unlike previous BBC schemes which have stated they are BAME-only, this scheme markets itself as open to anyone. But in practice there is discrimination.

“These practices will go into overdrive if Sir Keir Starmer becomes prime minister.

“People are not being treated fairly. We need to get back to hiring the best person for the job rather than basing it on the colour of your skin.”

In April, the Telegraph revealed that one in three participants on the scheme identified as white British.

A BBC spokesman said: “Similarly to The Telegraph’s Newsroom apprenticeship scheme, our apprenticeship courses enable people from a range of backgrounds to enter the media industry. We always offer places based on merit.

“We’re committed to our recruitment processes being fair to everyone, and attracting applicants that represent all parts of the UK, and like the Telegraph Media Group we’re committed to creating a diverse and inclusive culture at the BBC.

“The BBC runs many apprenticeship schemes, so it’s unclear what analysis can be determined from applications made to one course.”