Religion is a Mental Illness

Thread by @JohnDSailer on Thread Reader App

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

threadreaderapp.com

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.

realityslaststand.com

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 Wikipedia’s Pro-Hamas Editors Hijacked the Israel-Palestine Narrative

a powerful group of editors is hijacking Wikipedia, pushing pro-Palestinian propaganda, erasing key facts about Hamas,

piratewires.com

a powerful group of editors is hijacking wikipedia, pushing pro-palestinian propaganda, erasing key facts about hamas, and reshaping the narrative around israel with alarming influence

• A coordinated campaign led by around 40 Wikipedia editors has worked to delegitimize Israel, present radical Islamist groups in a favorable light, and position fringe academic views on the Israel-Palestine conflict as mainstream over past years, intensifying after the October 7 attack
• Six weeks after October 7, one of these editors successfully removed mention of Hamas’ 1988 charter, which calls for the killing of Jews and the destruction of Israel, from the article on Hamas
• The group also appeared to attempt to promote the interests of the Iranian government across a number of articles, including deleting “huge amounts of documented human rights crimes by [Islamic Republic Party] officials”
• A group called Tech For Palestine launched a separate but complementary campaign after October 7, which violated Wikipedia policies by coordinating to edit Israel-Palestine articles on the group 8,000 member Discord
• Tech For Palestine abandoned its efforts and its members went into a panic after a blog discovered what they were doing; the group deleted all its Wiki Talk pages and Sandboxes they had been using to coordinate their editing efforts, and the main editor deleted all her chats from the group’s Discord channel

On everything from American politics to corporate brands, Wikipedia plays host to a smoldering battle of ideas and values that occasionally erupts into white-hot, internecine edit wars. But no fire burns hotter than the Israel-Palestine topic area. The topic is such a flashpoint that the Palestine-Israel Articles (PIA) designation is used synonymously with its own dispute resolution abbreviation — Requests for arbitration/Palestine-Israel Articles, known as ARBPIA in Wiki-speak.

While always contentious, over roughly the past four years, and intensifying since October 7, PIA has been subject to a highly coordinated, sustained and remarkably effective campaign to radically alter public perception of the conflict. Led by around 40 mostly veteran editors, the campaign has worked to delegitimize Israel, present radical Islamist groups in a favorable light, and position fringe academic views on the Israel-Palestine conflict as mainstream.

A separate but complementary campaign, launched after October 7 and staged from an 8,000 member-strong Discord group called Tech For Palestine (TFP), employed common tech modalities — ticket creation, strategy planning sessions, group audio “office hour” chats — to alter over 100 articles. Operating from February 6 to September 3 of this year, TFP became a well-oiled operation, going so far as to attempt to use Wikipedia as a means of pressuring British members of parliament into changing their positions on Israel and the Gaza War.

These efforts are remarkably successful. Type “Zionism” into Wikipedia’s search box and, aside from the main article on Zionism (and a disambiguation page), the auto-fill returns: “Zionism as settler colonialism,” “Zionism in the Age of the Dictators” (a book by a pro-Palestinian Trotskyite), “Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims,” and “Racism in Israel.”

The aggregate effect of these efforts is a wholesale shift to the landscape of the Palestine-Israel topic online. As I reported in a previous Pirate Wires investigation, this is largely thanks to Google, which grants Wikipedia a “most favored nation” status with articles automatically given the first spot on any topic-related search result. If you Google “Zionism and settler colonialism,” for example, what you get is a Wikipedia article automatically anchored to the very top of the Google search results, with its own knowledge panel to the right. A fringe concept that would have only shown a smattering of unfocused articles just two years ago — before the article was created — now has its own primetime Internet stage.

“The recent issue with the ‘Zionism’ Wikipedia page is fundamentally a Google problem,” says someone familiar with the matter. “Wikipedia articles act as an unprotected back door to top Google search results, with the article's introduction often populating the knowledge panel, giving the impression Google has vetted this content — when it hasn’t. Malicious editors exploit this vulnerability, platforming fringe views and giving them priority over more reliable sources.”

The kind of coordination carried out by these groups violates many of Wikipedia’s most fundamental policies, including one of its core content policies, Neutral Point of View (NPOV), which states that, “Wikipedia aims to describe disputes, but not engage in them.” The practice also violates the Gaming the System guideline, which prohibits editors from “engineering ‘victory’ in a content dispute.” It runs afoul of the broader Wikipedia ethos discouraging Tag teaming, when “editors coordinate their actions to circumvent the normal process of consensus.” Most flagrantly, it violates a guideline called Canvassing, which prohibits secret coordination with the “intention of influencing the outcome of a discussion in a particular way.”

To skirt this, the pro-Palestine group leverages deep Wikipedia know-how to coordinate efforts without raising red flags. They work in small clusters, with only two or three active in the same article at any given time. On their own, many of these edits appear minor, even trivial. But together, their scope is staggering, with two million edits made to more than 10,000 articles, a majority of which are PIA or topically associated. In dozens of cases, the group’s edits account for upwards of 90% of the content on an article, giving them complete control of the topics.

One of the most prominent members of the pro-Palestine group is the user Iskandar323, a prolific editor whose nuanced approach to historical and even esoteric articles is representative of the larger effort. In the article on “Jews,” for example, he removed the “Land of Israel” from a key sentence on the origin of Jewish people. He changed the article’s short description (a condensed summary that appears on Wikipedia’s mobile version and on site search results) from “Ethnoreligious group and nation from the Levant” to “Ethnoreligious group and cultural community.” Though subtle, the implication is significant: unlike nations, “cultural communities” don’t require, or warrant, their own states.

Iskandar also worked to sanitize articles on Hamas, in one case removing mention of Hamas’ 1988 charter, which calls for the killing of Jews and the destruction of Israel, from the article “Hamas.” (The edit remains intact today.) He removed mention of Hamas’ 1988 charter in at least three other articles.

To expand his reach, Iskandar also goes on editing rampages, or “speedruns.” Last August, he removed 22,000 characters from the article on Amnesty International that were critical of the organization, in one case wholesale deleting a 1,000-word long passage related to criticism of its stance on Israel. On the “History of Israel” article, Iskandar deleted a paragraph critical of the Iranian government; removed an account of 16th century Jewish immigration to Israel; excised a mention of the Palestinian Mufti of Jerusalem's alliance with Hitler; and made dozens of similar edits — all in a matter of minutes.

Far from a lone wolf, however, Iskandar is part of a group of editors that uses coordinated “swarm” tactics that, taken together, invert Wikipedia’s founding vision, turning the site's perceived neutrality and authority into an attack vector that can be hijacked to advance ideological aims at a mass scale.

In August, an analysis of the intensity of editing in PIA between January 2022 and September 2024 found that the top contributor to PIA by number of edits, a user called Selfstudier, made over 15,000 edits in the space in that period. Iskandar323 contributed over 12,000 edits to PIA articles in the same period. Other members of the pro-Palestine group are equally prolific, with top contributors including CarmenEsparzaAmoux (8,353), Makeandtoss (8,074), Nableezy (6,414), Nishidani (5,879), Onceinawhile (4,760) and an admin called Zero0000 (2,561).

The 15,000 edits by Selfstudier and the 12,000 by Iskandar323 put those two users in the top 99.975% of editors by number of edits — solely for their PIA edits made in under three years. The other pro-Palestine group members’ PIA edits from this period place them among the top 99.9% of Wikipedia editors. All together, the top 20 editors of this group made over 850,000 edits to more than 10,500 articles, the majority of them in the Palestine-Israel topic area, or topically connected historical articles.

It’s not just the raw number of edits that matters. The same analysis shows that fully 90% of total edits by Selfstudier in that period were made to Palestine-Israel articles. Other members of the group clock in at 90% (sean.hoyland), 86% (CarmenEsparzaAmoux), 82% (Makeandross), 64% (Nishidani), and 43% (Onceinawhile). After October 7 the intensity increased, with Selfstudier peaking at 99% in October 2023, while others got to 97%, 98% and even 100% of their total monthly edits dedicated to PIA.

To evade detection, the group works in pairs or trios, an approach that veils them from detection. They also appear to rotate their groupings for the same reason. Likewise, one or more of the group’s editors can come to the aid of another in the case of pushback. In many instances, editing by the group is made to articles focused on historical issues, where a single editor might be patrolling for this kind of abuse, making it easy for two dedicated users to overwhelm or exhaust the lone editor.

A separate analysis shows the number of instances in which two members of the group edited the same article to be extraordinarily high. As of time of publication, Nableezy and Onceinawhile have co-edited 1,418 articles. Nableezy and Iskandar323 1,429 co-edited articles. Onceinawhile and Zero0000 have co-edited 2,119 articles. Zero000 and Nableezy have co-edited 1,754 articles. Onceinawhile and Iskandar323 have 1,594 co-edited. Huldra and Onceinawhile have co-edited articles 2,493 times. Nableezy and Huldra have co-edited 1,764 times.

One of the articles targeted most intensively by the group is the one for Amin Al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem from the 1920s to the 1950s, a pivotal figure in Palestinian history. While Iskandar323 worked to remove negative content from the Al-Husseini article, it was two other members of the group — Zero0000 and Nishidani — who would have the greatest impact, together making over 1,000 edits to the article, often in an attempt to erase or downplay Al-Husseini’s well-documented collaboration with Hitler.

In one instance in April 2021, Zero0000 and Nishidani worked together to keep a photo of Al-Husseini touring a Nazi concentration camp out of the article. While a single editor, Shane (a newbie), advocated for its inclusion, a trio of veterans including Zero0000, Nishidani and Selfstudier fought back. After Selfstudier accused Shane of being a troll for arguing for the photo’s inclusion, Zero0000, days later, “objected” to its inclusion, citing issues of provenance. Nishidani stepped in to back up Zero0000, prompting a response by Shane. The following day, Zero0000 pushed back against Shane, who responded. The day after, Nishidani returned with his own pushback. The tag-team effort proved too much for Shane, who simply gave up, and the effort succeeded: the photo remains absent. To date, Nishidani’s contributions to the article on Al-Husseini comprise 56.4% of its content.

In another case, Nishidani worked with a member of the pro-Palestine group editors, Onceinawhile to produce an article called “Zionism, race and genetics.” (The article’s title was later changed to “Racial conceptions of Jewish identity in Zionism”.) The article attempts to tie Zionism’s roots to 19th century views on “race science” embraced by the Nazis, thereby drawing an implicit — and, in at least one instance in the article, explicit — parallel between Zionism and Nazism. Pro-Palestine group member Onceinawhile created the article in July of last year, accompanied by a note arguing, “Early Zionists were the primary supporters of the idea that Jews are a race, as it offered scientific ‘proof’ of the ethno-nationalist myth of common descent.”Together, Onceinawhile and Nishidani’s contributions account for nearly 90% of the article’s content. Onceinawhile would continue to push this view in numerous other articles, including the article on “Zionism.”

In March, a Wikipedia user submitted a case to Wikipedia’s Arbitration Committee (Arbcom) alleging “a systematic removal of instances documenting human rights crimes by Iranian officials on Wikipedia, accompanied by the addition of misleading information favoring the IRP (Islamic Republic Party) on the platform.” The case shows that a member of the pro-Palestine group called Mhhossein edited the article on the Mahsa Amini protests — the months-long anti-regime demonstrations that rocked Iran when a young woman died in custody after being arrested for improperly wearing her head scarf — to change key wording to falsely depict widespread support for the Iranian regime and whitewash violent calls from pro-government counter-demonstrators.

According to the allegations, Iskandar323 (who has co-edited with Mhhossein nearly 400 times) worked with a separate editor to delete “huge amounts of documented human rights crimes by [Iranian] officials.” This included a claim about Iran’s post-revolution death commissions that executed thousands political prisoners; details showing executions were carried out by “high-ranking members of Iran’s current government”; mention of the Iranian government’s “unprecedented reign of terror” in the early 1980s; the sentencing of an Iranian official to life in prison in Sweden for his role in the executions; the targeting of an Iranian dissident group with “psychological warfare,” and dozens of others.

The charges are serious, and the evidence backing them up abundant. Nevertheless, seven months later the Arbcom case is still pending. The reason is systemic: in a lengthy request for arbitration on a separate PIA case, one of Wikipedia’s arbitrators noted that the final decision-making panel is staffed by 12 volunteers, only 10 of whom are active. “It is clear that AE [arbitration enforcement] has run out of steam to handle the morass of editor conduct issues in PIA,” the arbitrator wrote. “PIA is a Gordian knot; and AE has run short of knot detanglers.”

Electing more Arbcom members would require a massive overhaul of the site’s governing regulations, a task akin to the US government amending its constitution. And though Wikimedia Foundation, which owns the site, has around $500 million in assets, because of the air-gap between Wikipedia and WMF and the volunteer ethos of Wikipedia’s mission not a penny can be used to hire people to oversee contentious topics.

So the group’s pro-Iran efforts go unchecked. One of its most prominent members, Nableezy (over 6,000 PIA edits since 2022), has put considerable effort into sanding the hard edges off of Iran’s most powerful proxy, Hezbollah. Nableezy — who took the extraordinary step of including a userbox on his Talk page that links to a text that reads “This user supports Hezbollah.” — has worked to rebuff claims that Hezbollah is a terror organization. In one instance, Nableezy pushed back against another user characterizing a Hezbollah attack on Israeli population centers as a terror attack, arguing “An attack on military targets is not terrorism.” Last year, Nableezy, who appears to be an American, argued in the Talk page for the “Hezbollah” article that, “The US military is designated as a terror group by Iran, should we include that as an endnote everywhere the US army is mentioned?”

But Nableezy’s main area of focus is Israel. To this end, Nableezy’s editing has included subtle, ideologically consistent moves like removing a picture of the Dead Sea Scrolls from the “Israel” article (the image remains absent at time of publishing), pushing for the removal of the ancient history of Israel from the article, and altering a sentence on Zionism that described it as a call by its leaders for the “restoration of the Jews to their homeland” to a call for “the colonization of Palestine by European Jews.”

This exchange embodies the rhetorical approach taken by the group: the shifting of language, the torturing of settled definitions, and positioning fringe academic theory as mainstream — an approach developed by the radical left, in concert with global Islamist movements, in the wake of 9/11, when the attacks put Islamism on the moral back foot. In response, the leftist-Islamist alliance launched two decades of ideological assault on the US, and the West more generally. The same post-9/11 dynamic took place after October 7, when the savagery of the Hamas attack opened a vulnerability as the broader public would recognize it as a barbaric attack on civilians.

In response, the ideological push-back on Wikipedia ramped up. In February, an explicitly coordinated effort was launched when leaders on a group called Tech For Palestine (TFP) — launched in January by Paul Biggar, the Irish co-founder of software development platform CircleCI — opened a channel on their 8,000-strong Discord channel called “tfp-wikipedia-collaboration.” In the channel, two group leaders, Samira and Samer, coordinated with other members to mass edit a number of PIA articles. The effort included recruiting volunteers, processing them through formal orientation, troubleshooting issues, and holding remote office hours to problem solve and ideate. The channel’s welcome message posed a revealing question: “Why Wikipedia? It is a widely accessed resource, and its content influences public perception.”

At the heart of TFP Wikipedia Collaboration was a veteran editor called Ïvana, who was tapped as the resident expert on the site, and whose Discord username featured the red triangle affiliated with Hamas’ targeting.

With Ïvana’s guidance, as well as her hands-on editing of articles, the TFP Wikipedia Collaboration group coordinated both on Discord and Wikipedia, where they created editing staging grounds on Talk pages that included elements like “Work in Progress Table,” “Investigate and Decide,” and a volunteer job board with detailed responsibilities. Off-wiki, the group created planning documentation with agendas, meeting notes, goal setting, role allocation, skills and breakdowns. Their activities ranged from editing celebrity articles by adding pro-Palestine statements they made to creating new articles out of whole cloth, like a proposed article called “Palestine: The Solution.” The group focused extensively on the article for German discount supermarket Lidl, adding a section in the “Criticism” section about products from Israel being incorrectly labeled as Moroccan. They also put special emphasis on articles concerning sexual violence perpetrated by Hamas on October 7, with Ïvana questioning the veracity of reports of rape from that day, while adding to other articles claims that Israeli soldiers raped Palestinians. (In March, a senior UN official who investigated sexual violence on October 7 concluded that, “There are reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence — including rape and gang-rape — occurred across multiple locations of Israel and the Gaza periphery during the attacks on 7 October 2023.” The official wrote her investigation produced a “‘catalogue of the most extreme and inhumane forms of killing, torture and other horrors,’ including sexual violence.”)

In its most audacious case, TFP members developed a project to use Wikipedia as a means of pressuring British Members of Parliament to change their stance on the Israel-Palestine conflict in advance of UK elections in July. The plan called for scraping data on visits by MPs to Israel and Israel-related donor information, to create a dedicated Wikipedia article using the data to (as the originator of the project put it) inform “voters to put pressure ahead of the next [parliamentary] elections.”

Within the TFP channel, there was always a background awareness that what they were doing was not in keeping with Wikipedia norms. Early in the channel’s existence, a user and veteran Wikipedia editor called shushugah wrote, “I’m a little confused what the goal is here. I’m an active Wikipedia editor, and for any Israel/Palestine topics you need a solid grasp of Wikipedia policy/culture, and have 500 edits/30 days of activity…no shortcuts.” Within minutes, another user, Heba, wrote “Let’s chat [hand wave emoji].” One of the channel’s power users, zei_squirrel, who runs an X account with 270,000 followers, noted “it’s important to keep this as decentralized and organic as possible to avoid it being used against us, but again this should all be familiar to those who know how wiki works.”

The anxiety was not unwarranted. In September, a researcher discovered the TFP Wikipedia Collaboration channel and published a number of posts on a blog called Wikipediaflood. (A magazine called Jewish Insider also stumbled across the group, but mostly failed to appreciate its full significance.) These events sent the group into a panic, with Ïvana erasing all her chats in the channel, and deleting the Talk pages and Sandboxes staging pages she’d created. The group locked down the TFP Wikipedia Collaboration channel in September. At minimum, the group made revisions to at least 112 articles on celebrities, American cities, pro-Palestine organizations, and figures and events related to the Gaza war.

There is little doubt that the kind of careful, intelligent Wikipedia coordination detailed above will continue. Wikipedia is simply too powerful a tool — and one too easy to manipulate — for actors like the pro-Palestine group and TFP activists to stay away from. But Wikipedia is coming to a crossroads. The ask-and-answer modality of generative AI will eat away at the value of the site’s privileged position within the Google information ecosystem. Groups less savvy than pro-Palestine will also learn to exploit the site, to much more public effect. As with so many of our once-cherished institutions, trust will be lost, and credibility will soon follow.

One of the hallmarks of an institution in crisis is that, far from preparing for the future, it is barely capable of managing the present. With Arbcom grinding to a halt and edit wars erupting in all corners — all while Wikimedia Foundation, fiddling to the baroque tunes of DEI, has turned its attention to funding progressive activism — it seems Wikipedia is facing exactly this challenge. In most cases, calling a crisis existential is overblown. While Wikipedia may not be there just yet, it’s clear that moment is not far off.

“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.” -- George Orwell, "Nineteen Eighty-Four"

Woke doc refused to publish $10 million trans kids study that showed puberty blockers didn’t help mental health

Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy said she believes the study would be “weaponized” by critics of transgender care for kids, and that the research c

New York Post

A prominent doctor and trans rights advocate admitted she deliberately withheld publication of a $10 million taxpayer-funded study on the effect of puberty blockers on American children — after finding no evidence that they improve patients’ mental health.

Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy told the New York Times that she believes the study would be “weaponized” by critics of transgender care for kids, and that the research could one day be used in court to argue “we shouldn’t use blockers.”

Critics — including one of Olson-Kennedy’s fellow researchers on the study — said the decision flies in the face of research standards and deprives the public of “really important” science in a field where Americans remain firmly divided.

For the National Institutes of Health-funded study, researchers chose 95 kids — who had an average age of 11 — and gave them puberty-blocking drugs starting in 2015. The treatments are meant to delay the onset of bodily changes like the development of breasts or the deepening of the voice.

After following up with the youths for two years, the treatments did not improve the state of their mental health, which Olson-Kennedy chalked up to the kids being “in really good shape” both when they started and concluded the two-year treatment.

However, the Times points out that her rosy assessment contradicts earlier data recorded by the researchers which found around one-quarter of study participants “were depressed or suicidal” before receiving treatment.

The result also does not support the findings of a 2011 Dutch study, which is the primary scientific research cited by proponents of giving kids puberty blockers. That study of 70 kids found that children treated with puberty blockers reported better mental health and fewer behavioral and emotional problems.

Olson-Kennedy, the outlet points out, is one of the country’s leading advocates for providing gender-affirming care to adolescents, and regularly provides expert testimony in legal challenges to state bans on such procedures, which have taken root in more than 20 states.

When asked by the Times why the results have not been made public after nine years, she said, “I do not want our work to be weaponized,” adding, “It has to be exactly on point, clear and concise. And that takes time.”

She then flat-out admitted she was afraid the lack of mental health improvements borne out by the study could one day be used in court to argue “we shouldn’t use blockers.”

A Washington Post-KFF Trans in America survey found that 68% of US adults are against providing puberty blockers to trans-identifying youth ages 10 to 14, and 58% oppose hormone treatments for those ages 15 to 17.

Boston College clinical and research psychologist Amy Tishelman, who was one of the original researchers on the study, pointed out the obvious contradiction in withholding scientific evidence on the grounds that it doesn’t match an expected conclusion.

“I understand the fear about it being weaponized, but it’s really important to get the science out there,” she told the outlet.

“No change isn’t necessarily a negative finding — there could be a preventative aspect to it,” she said hopefully.

“We just don’t know without more investigation.”

Erica Anderson, a clinical psychologist and a transgender youth expert, told The Post she was “shocked” and “disturbed” about the decision to withhold publication of such vital research.

“We’re craving information about these medical treatments for gender-questioning youth. Dr. Olson-Kennedy has the largest grant that’s ever been awarded in the US on the subject and is sitting on data that would be helpful to know,” she said.

“It’s not her prerogative to decide based on the results that she will or won’t publish them.”

She also wasn’t buying Olson-Kennedy’s rationale for holding back the study’s findings based on fear of backlash.

“It’s contrary to the scientific method. You do research, and then you disclose what the results are,” she said. 

“You don’t change them, you don’t distort them, and you don’t reveal or not reveal them based on the reactions of others. You report as scientists what you’ve learned.”

In a 2020 progress report submitted to the NIH, Olson-Kennedy hypothesized that study participants would show “decreased symptoms of depression, anxiety, trauma symptoms, self-injury, and suicidality, and increased body esteem and quality of life over time.”

Olson-Kennedy appeared to attempt to muddy the waters in her interview with the Times when explaining how her hypothesis didn’t pan out, claiming participants had “good mental health on average.”

She made this assertion “several times” despite saying previously that 25% of the study’s young patients were suffering with various mental illness symptoms before treatments began.

When pressed by the outlet for an explanation for the seemingly contradictory findings, Olson-Kennedy attributed it to “data averages,” and said she was “still analyzing the full data set.”

In April, England’s National Health Service disallowed puberty blockers for children following a four-year review conducted by independent researcher Dr. Hilary Cass, who wrote in her report that “for most young people, a medical pathway will not be the best way to manage their gender-related distress.”

Last year, Dr. Riittakerttu Kaltiala, a leading Finnish expert on pediatric gender medicine, said in a newspaper interview that “four out of five” gender-questioning children will eventually grow out of it and accept their bodies even without medical intervention.

Olson-Kennedy did not respond to The Post’s request for comment.

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.

Oh CAPTAIN, My CAPTAIN

Southern Poverty Law Centre's legal hopes rest on an international smear campaign

voidifremoved.co.uk

I think we need a more detailed defense that we can use that can respond to academic critics and that can be used in the many court cases that will be coming up. […] we know that some of the studies we have cited in support of our recommendations will be torn about by organizations such as the Society for Evidence Based Gender Medicine.

Most recently, members of the newly designated hate group, Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine, helped advise the Cass Review in the United Kingdom,

Notably, SEGM’s funding streams include the same groups that fund the Heritage Foundation, the Alliance Defending Freedom, and the Family Research Council, far-right organizations capitalizing on Christian nationalism.

a large part of SEGM’s funding in 2020 came through a $100,000 donation from the Edward Charles Foundation … Analyses of additional financial records from 2021 reveal that SEGM’s total revenue nearly quadrupled from the previous year to nearly $800,000, and that funding appears to have come primarily from donor advised funds. The largest contribution, which came from Fidelity Investments Charitable Gift Fund, totals over $350,000. Notably, Fidelity and Vanguard Charitable Endowment Program (which also donated to SEGM in 2021) have a history of directing money to anti-LGBTQ+ groups, such as the Alliance Defending Freedom and the Family Research Council. … [In 2020] In addition to Heritage Foundation, that year, the Charles Koch Institute contributed […] $1.3 million to the Edward Charles Foundation (which funded SEGM that year).

The donor, a 68-year-old woman from California who asked to remain anonymous because she feared harassment, described herself as a non-religious feminist who had supported Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

• In 2020/21 the Fidelity Investments Charitable Gift Fund gave SEGM $363,500, while also giving SPLC $4,065,459. 
• In 2020/21 Vanguard gave SEGM $22,000 and SPLC 45 times more: $1,084,650
• In 2020/21, The American Online Giving Foundation gave SEGM just $15,201 and SPLC over 130 times more: $1,995,272

The culture war is about to get a lot worse

The Tories deserved to lose, but the Labour landslide will keep the “woke” movement on life-support for another few years.

andrewdoyle.substack.com

“The intent of psychological intervention is not to change the person’s perception of who they are but to work with them to explore their concerns and experiences and help alleviate their distress, regardless of whether they pursue a medical pathway or not. It is harmful to equate this approach to conversion therapy as it may prevent young people from getting the emotional support they deserve.”

Research into trans medicine has been manipulated

Court documents offer a window into how this happens

The Economist

In April Hilary Cass, a British paediatrician, published her review of gender-identity services for children and young people, commissioned by NHS England. It cast doubt on the evidence base for youth gender medicine. This prompted the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), the leading professional organisation for the doctors and practitioners who provide services to trans people, to release a blistering rejoinder. WPATH said that its own guidelines were sturdier, in part because they were “based on far more systematic reviews”.

Systematic reviews should evaluate the evidence for a given medical question in a careful, rigorous manner. Such efforts are particularly important at the moment, given the feverish state of the American debate on youth gender medicine, which is soon to culminate in a Supreme Court case challenging a ban in Tennessee. The case turns, in part, on questions of evidence and expert authority.

Court documents recently released as part of the discovery process in a case involving youth gender medicine in Alabama reveal that WPATH's claim was built on shaky foundations. The documents show that the organisation’s leaders interfered with the production of systematic reviews that it had commissioned from the Johns Hopkins University Evidence-Based Practice Centre (EPC) in 2018.

From early on in the contract negotiations, WPATH expressed a desire to control the results of the Hopkins team’s work. In December 2017, for example, Donna Kelly, an executive director at PATH, told Karen Robinson, the EPC's director, that the WPATH board felt the EPC researchers “cannot publish their findings independently”. A couple of weeks later, Ms Kelly emphasised that, “the [WPATH] board wants it to be clear that the data cannot be used without WPATH approval”.

Ms Robinson saw this as an attempt to exert undue influence over what was supposed to be an independent process. John Ioannidis of Stanford University, who co-authored guidelines for systematic reviews, says that if sponsors interfere or are allowed to veto results, this can lead to either biased summaries or suppression of unfavourable evidence. Ms Robinson sought to avoid such an outcome. “In general, my understanding is that the university will not sign off on a contract that allows a sponsor to stop an academic publication,” she wrote to Ms Kelly.

Months later, with the issue still apparently unresolved, Ms Robinson adopted a sterner tone. She noted in an email in March 2018 that, “Hopkins as an academic institution, and I as a faculty member therein, will not sign something that limits academic freedom in this manner,” nor “language that goes against current standards in systematic reviews and in guideline development”.

Eventually WPATH relented, and in May 2018 Ms Robinson signed a contract granting WPATH power to review and offer feedback on her team’s work, but not to meddle in any substantive way. After WPATH leaders saw two manuscripts submitted for review in July 2020, however, the parties’ disagreements flared up again. In August the WPATH executive committee wrote to Ms Robinson that WPATH had “many concerns” about these papers, and that it was implementing a new policy in which WPATH would have authority to influence the EPC team’s output—including the power to nip papers in the bud on the basis of their conclusions.

Ms Robinson protested that the new policy did not reflect the contract she had signed and violated basic principles of unfettered scientific inquiry she had emphasised repeatedly in her dealings with WPATH. The Hopkins team published only one paper after WPATH implemented its new policy: a 2021 meta-analysis on the effects of hormone therapy on transgender people. Among the recently released court documents is a WPATH checklist confirming that an individual from WPATH was involved “in the design, drafting of the article and final approval of [that] article”. (The article itself explicitly claims the opposite.) Now, more than six years after signing the agreement, the EPC team does not appear to have published anything else, despite having provided WPATH with the material for six systematic reviews, according to the documents.

No one at WPATH or Johns Hopkins has responded to multiple inquiries, so there are still gaps in this timeline. But an email in October 2020 from WPATH figures, including its incoming president at the time, Walter Bouman, to the working group on guidelines, made clear what sort of science WPATH did (and did not) want published. Research must be “thoroughly scrutinised and reviewed to ensure that publication does not negatively affect the provision of transgender health care in the broadest sense,” it stated. Mr Bouman and one other coauthor of that email have been named to a World Health Organisation advisory board tasked with developing best practices for transgender medicine.

Another document recently unsealed shows that Rachel Levine, a transwoman who is assistant secretary for health, succeeded in pressing WPATH to remove minimum ages for the treatment of children from its 2022 standards of care. Dr Levine’s office has not commented. Questions remain unanswered, but none of this helps WPATH’s claim to be an organisation that bases its recommendations on science. 

Thread by @benryanwriter on Thread Reader App

@benryanwriter: NEWS: Alabama Attorney General submits motion for summary judgment in District Court case over ban on pediatric gender-trans

threadreaderapp.com

NEWS: Alabama Attorney General submits motion for summary judgment in District Court case over ban on pediatric gender-transition treatment.

The document offers a scathing @WPATH's credibility, based on subpoenaed documents, dismissing it as an "activist interest group." 🧵

This summarizes the Alabama Attorney General's assessment of @WPATH, based on a trove of subpoenaed internal communications that have been unsealed this week, plus more yet to be unsealed: "In short, neither the Court nor Alabama need treat WPATH as anything other than the activist interest group it has shown itself to be. The Constitution allows States to reject WPATH’s model of “care” and protect vulnerable minors from life-altering transitioning “treatments.” The Court should grant Defendants summary judgment."

The AL AG's motion for summary judgment borrows liberally from the UK Cass Review to portray the scientific literature on gender-transition treatment as weak and unreliable. It also relies on the words of @WPATH's president, Dr. Marci Bowers: "Asked whether 'reasonable people could conclude that there is not enough evidence to support the safety or clinical effectiveness of puberty blockers,' Bowers replied: 'There’s not enough high level evidence. Yes, you can – you can – you can say that.'”

The AL AG also points to Dr. Eli Coleman, the chair of @WPATH's Standards of Care 8 trans-care guidelines, when arguing that a 12-year-old cannot assent to gender-transition treatment that may make them infertile: “at their age – they would not know what they want."

The Alabama AG posits what has become a highly contested argument that most gender dysphoric young children will desist and stop identifying as transgender during adolescence.

The Alabama Attorney General argues in its motion for summary judgment in District Court regarding suit over the state's pediatric gender-transition ban: “Minors, and often their parents, are unable to comprehend and fully appreciate the risk and life implications, including permanent sterility, that result from the use of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgical procedures." Thus, “the decision to pursue a course of hormonal and surgical interventions to address a discordance between the individual’s sex and sense of identity should not be presented to or determined for minors who are incapable of comprehending the negative implications and life-course difficulties attending to these interventions.”

The plaintiffs suing Alabama over its ban of pediatric gender-transition treatment rely on guidelines by @WPATH and the Endocrine Society. The AL Attorney General points to the Cass Review to characterize them as "unreliable and methodologically unrigorous."

The Alabama AG again refers to the Cass Review when characterizing what Cass called "circularity" in the WPATH and Endocrine Society's pediatric gender-transition treatment guidelines, but which the AG refers to as laundering.

The Alabama AG argues that the major medical associations that back the gender-affirming care model for children do not, in fact, explicitly endorse @WPATH or the Endocrine Society's treatment guidelines per se. 

When @WPATH's Dr. Eli Coleman couldn't get the @AmerMedicalAssn to back WPATH's Standards of Care 8 guidelines for trans care, he emailed his colleagues in a fury and said the AMA is run by “white cisgender heterosexual hillbillies from nowhere."

The Alabama AG criticizes @WPATH for not seeking to prevent intellectual conflicts of interest from biasing its Standards of Care 8, meaning the guidelines were made by those "professionally engaged in performing, researching, or advocating for the practices under review."

Activists have made much of the fact that Hilary Cass was appointed by the NHS to conduct a review of pediatric care for gender dysphoric children despite no experience with such patients. But that is why she was chosen, because she lacked that intellectual conflict of interest. 

WPATH, the AL AG asserts, leaned into intellectual conflicts of interest when crafting the SoC8. Its president, Dr Marci Bowers, says she made more than $1 million from such surgeries last year and said it was "absolutely...important for someone to be an advocate" for gender-transition treatment to sit on the guideline committee.

Despite the fact that the head of WPATH's Standards of Care 8 trans treatment guidelines, Dr. Eli Coleman, said that most of those who contributed to them had financial and/or nonfinancial conflicts of interest, WPATH denied this in public.

Despite asserting that they were creating the Standards of Care 8 according to evidence-based medicine principles, WPATH did not do so. Dr. Eli Coleman, who headed the effort, said, "we were not able to be as systematic as we could have been (e.g. we did not use GRADE explicitly)

WPATH admitted using the term "recommend," which per the principles of evidence-based medicine is reserved for treatments backed by strong evidence with few downsides and a high degree of acceptance among providers and patients, to describe treatments with low-quality evidence.

The systematic literature reviews that @WPATH commissioned from Johns Hopkins and that it subsequently largely buried found "little to no evidence about children and adolescents" with respect to gender-transition treatment. HHS acknowledged this in Sept 2020.

WPATH denied Johns Hopkins the requisite independence for conducting and publishing the systematic literature reviews on trans care that the organization commissioned.

Social justice lawyers told @WPATH that evidence-based reviews of the science behind gender transition treatment for children would put the organization "in an untenable position in terms of affecting policy or winning lawsuits."

WPATH, the Alabama AG alleges, were "explicit in their desire to tailor SOC-8 to ensure cover-age for practically any 'embodiment goal' a patient has by labelling it 'medically necessary.' That label was given to a staggeringly broad list of treatments, seemingly without regard to the evidence base."

Biden Admin health official Rachel Levine put political pressure on WPATH to remove the age restrictions for gender-transition treatments in the Standards of Care 8.

After the @AmerAcadPeds threatened to withhold support for the SoC8 and to come out against it if @WPATH didn't remove the age limits on gender-transition treatment, WPATH relented and then fabricated a story for the public about why they did so.

WPATH's Dr. Eli Coleman said trans health care is "not only under attack by politicians, but by:” (1) “academics and scientists who are naturally skeptical,” (2) “parents of youth who are caught in the middle of this controversy,” (3) “increasing number of regret cases” who “blame clinicians for allowing them[] to transition,” and (4) “continuing pres-sure in health care to provide evidence-based care.”

Erica Anderson, former USPATH head, told me how she locked horns with her WPATH colleagues after telling @AbigailShrier that some care of gender dysphoric kids was "sloppy." Anderson wanted more openness with journalists, USPATH wanted a moratorium on talking to the press. Anderson lost that battle.

One author of the SoC8 adolescent chapter said: "My fear is that if WPATH continues to muzzle clinicians and relay the message to the public that they have no right to know about the debate, WPATH will become the bad guy and not the trusted source."

In public, WPATH denies that social contagion may contribute to gender dysphoria in minors and that rapid-onset gender dysphoria may be a real phenomenon, but in private they are more circumspect, the Alabama Attorney General asserts.

DIE-ing Schools

And Glimmers of Hope

restorationbulletin.com

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.

Decolonizing the Drugstore

“This feels like indoctrination.”

https://www.thefp.com/

Mandatory ideological training has now come to the drugstore. In California, pharmacists and pharmacy technicians, in order to keep their license, must study the latest in gender identity, colonialism, and white privilege. Such “cultural competency” courses are required by a state law that went into effect this year.

When the bill was introduced, Democratic Assemblyman Christopher Ward, the lead sponsor, said that the continuing education class would help “ensure pharmacists are looking out for the well-being of LGBTQ+ individuals.” 

Like many licensed professionals, pharmacists are required to take continuing education courses, usually with titles like “Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disorder (COPD)” and “Trimming Trends: Unveiling the Latest in Weight Management Guidelines.” Though this new training requires only an hour of the pharmacist’s time every two years, it’s another demonstration of compelling people to passively accept dubious assertions and assumptions, or risk losing their livelihoods.

One such course, titled Caring for All: The Pharmacy Professional’s Role in LGBTQ+ Health and Equity comes from the California Pharmacists Association (CPhA). The outline, obtained by The Free Press, features many charts that are hard to square with the duties of a pharmacist. There is a chart illustrating many “systems of oppression.” These include “sexism,” “cis-sexism,” “heterosexism,” and “adultism.” 

Another chart describes “effects of colonialism and colonization on pre-colonial ways of being.” It states: “Racism creates race: otherness and whiteness.” Some of the pre-colonial ways of being pharmacists are taught include “two-spirit,” the term used by Native Americans to describe someone who has “both a masculine and feminine spirit.” 

The training also suggests that pharmacists introduce a question about a customer’s gender at their first interaction. The course gives this prompt: “Hello, my name is Jay. I use they/them and he/him pronouns. How would you like me to address you?”

Click here to see a slide show of the training.

What does any of this have to do with being a pharmacist? Not much, said several pharmacists The Free Press spoke to.

Lisa Marino, 54, a hospital pharmacist in Los Angeles County, says the new cultural competency course provides nothing that relates to her job. “Our role is to aid in providing safe and appropriate use of medication for all people, regardless of culture, and with a respect for everyone’s privacy and dignity,” said Marino. “This feels like indoctrination.”

Joe, 50, who asked The Free Press not to use his last name, worked as a pharmacist for 25 years and owns an independent pharmacy in Los Angeles County. He says that respecting all customers, no matter their race or sexual orientation, is a given.

“To be a competent pharmacist, you need to know about medications, professional ethics, and the law,” said Joe. “That’s it.” 

Dr. Carrie Mendoza is an emergency medicine physician and the recently appointed director of Genspect USA, an organization that seeks evidence-based treatments for people with gender distress. She says people are taught to be so hyper-sensitive to avoid offending people, especially to those in a designated “marginalized” group, that pharmacists may be afraid to bring up legitimate concerns. “A pharmacist might not raise medication safety concerns such as adverse effects [or] inappropriate dosing. . . out of fear they will be called discriminatory,” said Mendoza. “Political trainings like this undermine safety for all patients and should be immediately removed from our healthcare system.”

But one of the three CPhA cultural competency course authors, Dr. Tam Phan, an assistant professor of clinical pharmacy at the University of Southern California—and the clinical pharmacy program coordinator at the Los Angeles LGBT Center—told The Free Press in an email that a pharmacist’s role has expanded beyond quick interactions at the prescription counter. 

“Pharmacist prescriptive authority in California has expanded to immunizations, hormonal contraceptives, travel medicine, nicotine replacement products, and HIV. . . treatments,” he wrote. “For pharmacists who are not interacting with patients directly, LGBTQ+ cultural sensitivity is still important since pharmacists should be knowledgeable of potential drug interactions between hormones being used in gender affirmation with the patient’s other medications.”

A Doctor Told the Truth. The Feds Showed Up at His Door.

A young surgeon revealed how his hospital was secretly transitioning gender-distressed children. He is now facing federal charges.

https://www.thefp.com/

Eithan Haim, 34, is at the beginning of his career as a surgeon. He and his wife are expecting their first child in the fall. And now he is facing a four-count federal felony indictment for blowing the whistle on Texas Children’s Hospital, where he worked while a resident. 

At TCH, he discovered the hospital was secretly continuing gender transition treatments on minors—including hormonal intervention on patients as young as 11 years old—after publicly declaring, in March of 2022, it would no longer provide such services.

The hospital unwillingly backed away from the treatments under pressure from the Texas governor and attorney general. But Haim found not only were the treatments continuing—the program appeared to be expanding. He recorded several online presentations by medical staff encouraging the transition of children—one social worker described how she deliberately did not make note of such treatment in the medical charts of patients to avoid leaving a paper trail. Haim told me, “They were talking publicly about how they were concealing what they were doing. You can’t take care of your patient without trust. For me as a doctor, to not do something about this was unconscionable.”

Haim, like a growing number of medical professionals around the world, had grave doubts about the safety and efficacy of the explosively growing business of youth gender transition medicine. When he looked into it, he found that children distressed about their biological sex often had multiple mental health challenges—conditions that were being ignored in the rush to put vulnerable young people on hormones, and even to perform surgical interventions. These treatments are profoundly life-altering, with a high risk of rendering a young person sterile. In the last few years, a growing number of countries have investigated these treatments for young people, found the evidence wanting, and have effectively banned interventions such as puberty blockers—drugs that prevent children from entering puberty.

Haim felt he had to act, but he knew the career risks of speaking out could be enormous. He contacted conservative journalist Christopher Rufo, who published an exposé without naming Haim. Before giving Rufo evidence that puberty blockers were still being surgically implanted in young patients, Haim made sure the patient’s names and other identifying information were redacted. This was both to protect patient privacy, and himself from violating the law known as HIPAA, which protects individual patient identities while also allowing various uses of medical information. The story Haim gave to Rufo was published May 16, 2023. The next day, the Texas legislature voted to ban the medical gender transition of minors.

Haim says there was no immediate aftermath: “Everything went quiet. I was anonymous and went on with my life.” Then June 23 of last year, the day Haim was to graduate from his residency, two federal agents from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services showed up at his house to have a little chat. Haim’s wife, an assistant U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Texas, a different division of the U.S. Attorney’s office than the one that has indicted her husband, advised him not to talk. 

As Haim later wrote in City Journal, “Before leaving, they handed me a letter revealing that I was a ‘potential target’ of an investigation involving alleged violation of federal criminal law related to medical records.” Haim then went public about the threat facing him in an interview with Rufo. (The U.S Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Texas did not respond to a request for comment.)

Haim was indicted last week, but, as of this writing, he and his attorneys do not yet know the precise nature of the charges. One of his lawyers, Mark Lytle, told me it’s very unusual to bring felony charges for an alleged HIPAA violation unless there is a significant underlying crime, such as a hospital clerk selling a celebrity’s medical records. He said the indictment of Haim seems politically motivated. “The government is entering into the town square on the culture wars and didn’t like what Eithan had to say,” said Lytle. “I think they are looking to make an example of him.” Haim is raising money for his legal fees through this GiveSendGo account.

Haim told me despite the peril he is now facing he has no regrets about blowing the whistle and is committed to fighting the federal charges. He said, “If we don’t fight back, what world are we delivering our children into?”

So, I was in a sense lucky, or I was unlucky. I was in Portland teaching at Portland State which was truly an inconceivable ideological sinkhole. There was just no escape from the people who were caught in that madness.

So, I started to realize that there was a problem. Where are these-- where are my colleagues getting their ideas? These ideas are totally unhinged from reality, they're completely deranged there's no questioning the ideas. So I started to dig a little bit into the literature, what we term grievance studies literature. Those subjects that deal with race, gender, identity basically, trans issues in particular, that's extra crazy.

In 2017, we published a paper that people lost their minds about. The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct. I don't know if you've read it but I think it's extremely funny. it basically argues, among other things, that penises are responsible for climate change. It was a Sokal-style hoax paper and the goal of the paper was to show that there was a problem in Gender Studies. And so, we wanted to see if we can get an in completely broken, truly crazy paper published. And we did and it was in the style of Alan Sokal, who is who's now a friend of mine, who's a physicist and mathematician at NYU who published a fake paper in the most famous postmodern journal social text.

So, we copied that style for the Conceptual Penis in 2017. And of course, the usual suspects lost their minds and said this paper doesn't prove what you think it does, you know, this is a low-level journal, you only did one, you got to do multiple papers.

So, I call up Jim, James Lindsay, and I'm like, all right this is awesome, they gave us a road map, let's do it. Let's just do exactly what they've told us to do. They've told us exactly what we need to do to make the point. Let's see if we can do it.

So, we delved into the literature, really, I think I lost quite a few brain cells in that process, but we delved into the literature, figured out what the claims were, what the assumptions were, and then we wrote 20 intentionally broken, completely crazy, often vile, reprehensible papers and then we just started getting them-- we started landing those all over the place.

In exactly the kind of journals that they told us. Journals that specialize in gender studies. We got one, for example, in the best gender studies journal in the world which is Hypatia. We got-- that's a funny one, we never talk about that because it's too complicated for most people to understand. People like the simple ones like the dog park, like everybody-- you can meme that out, everybody gets it. But the other papers were more complicated.

We got busted by The Wall Street Journal after we had seven published. I'm quite confident we would-- because we got better at writing them as we went along and 10 months, my guess is by the end of the year if we didn't get busted, we probably would have had 12 or 13.

Federal judge blocks Biden's Title IX transgender protections

A Texas judge on Tuesday halted President Joe Biden’s Title IX changes, which aimed to protect transgender students.

KEYE

Joe Biden’s unlawful effort to weaponize Title IX for his extremist agenda has been stopped in its tracks,” Paxton said in the release. “Threatening to withhold education funding by forcing states to accept ‘transgender’ policies that put women in danger was plainly illegal. Texas has prevailed on behalf of the entire Nation.”

Casting Evidence Aside

The Biden administration’s new Title IX guidance disregards the research on pediatric gender distress.

City Journal

In its recent Title IX guidance, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights redefines the 1972 law to ban discrimination on the basis of “gender identity” in federally funded education programs. In doing so, it showed willful disregard for scientific research on pediatric gender transition and for the findings of the Cass Review, a 388-page report and the most comprehensive to date on youth gender medicine.

OCR also ignored legal precedent. It said that its Title IX rule was a response to Bostock v. Clayton County, a 2020 Supreme Court decision that involved employment discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. OCR thus acted without regard for the vast differences between employment (which involves adults) and education (which involves primarily children). And it disregarded entirely the Bostock Court’s explicit statement that it was “proceed[ing] on the assumption that ‘sex’ . . . refer[s] only to biological distinctions between male and female” and consequently that its ruling does “not purport to address bathrooms, locker rooms, or anything else of the kind.”

The Republican response has been swift. Several red states have publicly condemned the update, and more than 20 have filed lawsuits. Much of the criticism has rightly focused on how creating “gender identity” rules will undermine women’s safety and opportunities by eliminating single-sex spaces and forcing the integration of male athletes into female sports.

The new rule effectively forces schools to facilitate so-called social transitions—recognizing trans-identifying students by their chosen “gender”—regardless of students’ age, familial circumstances, or medical and mental-health background. Schools won’t need to get parental consent; in fact, the rule effectively compels them to secure students’ consent before disclosing information about their social transition to their parents. It does so by recognizing students’ right to privacy from not just their school, but their own parents.

These new changes bring the Department of Education into conflict with the findings and recommendations of the recently published Cass Review. Immediately following the Review’s publication, Kamran Abbasi, editor-in-chief of the British Medical Journal, acknowledged that the evidence base for gender medicine—“from social transition to hormone treatment”—is “threadbare.” He called the report “an opportunity to pause, recalibrate, and place evidence informed care at the heart of gender medicine.”

The Biden administration has declined that opportunity. Its new Title IX rules implicitly reject the report’s findings and further illustrate Democrats’ indifference to the rising chorus of international skepticism about pediatric gender medicine and early social transition.

Advocates of social transition make two arguments for the practice. First, they insist that social transition improves mental health in “trans kids” and that failing to “affirm” a child’s “gender identity” can be psychologically damaging. Second, and somewhat in tension with the first claim, proponents argue that using students’ preferred names and pronouns, and granting them access to their preferred sex-specific facilities and activities, is no big deal. It’s not a psychological intervention at all, they claim, but merely a show of “respect” and “inclusion.”

Like physical medicine, psychological interventions can be beneficial or harmful. Iatrogenesis—treatment-induced illness—exists in physical and mental-health care alike. For this reason, any intervention requires careful diagnosis, weighing of costs and benefits, consideration of alternatives, and informed consent, which, in the case of minors, comes from those legally responsible for their wellbeing.

In her report, Cass writes that social transition “in an NHS setting” is “an active intervention because it may have significant effects on the child or young person in terms of their psychological functioning and longer-term outcomes.” Cass and her team recommend that, for children, mental-health professionals advise parents “on the risks and benefits of social transition as a planned intervention, referencing best available evidence.” (Keep in mind that Cass’s recommendation assumes mental-health professionals will not automatically “affirm” a child’s feelings about gender.)

While Cass claims that social transition “is within the agency of an adolescent to do for themselves,” this needs to be clarified. A student may request new pronouns, wear clothing typical of the opposite sex, or want to use the other sex’s bathrooms, but a trans-identifying child has not socially transitioned unless adults in positions of authority treat the child as though he were what he claims to be. For very young children who don’t understand what pronouns are or how gender-related behaviors like dress and haircuts relate to one’s status as boy or girl, the “request” for social transition is inferred by adults from the child’s behavioral cues. In other words, by definition, social transition is something done to kids—not something they do to themselves.

If, as established, social transition is an active psychological intervention, the next question is: Does it help? The Biden DOE, which in 2021 encouraged schools to “use the name a student goes by, which may be different from their legal name, and pronouns that reflect a student’s gender identity,” thinks so. The department’s position mirrors that of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, which, in its Standards of Care for the Health of Transgender and Gender Diverse People, Version 8, says, “Research indicates social transition and congruent gender expression have a significant beneficial effect on the mental health of [trans-identifying] people.”

This isn’t true, according to the Cass report. Cass and her team commissioned seven systematic reviews of evidence and medical guideline quality from experts at the University of York, one of which dealt specifically with the question of social transition. The findings of that review, Cass writes, support “none of the WPATH [SOC] 8 statements in favour of social transition in childhood.”

Cass also notes that “social transition in childhood may change the trajectory of gender identity development for children with early gender incongruence.” In other words, if all adults in positions of authority in a boy’s life consistently treat him as if he is a girl, he will be more likely to believe that he really is a girl. While data on the relationship between social transition and gender-identity outcomes is limited, the possibility that social transition solidifies a cross-sex identity is supported by desistance literature. A 2018 paper by University of Toronto psychologist Kenneth J. Zucker suggests that 67 percent of children who meet the diagnostic threshold of gender dysphoria outgrow those feelings by adulthood, typically during puberty. Of those below the diagnostic threshold, 93 percent desisted.

Crucially, the kids in those studies had not been socially transitioned in the way gender transition advocates now recommend. Compare these high rates of desistence to those from a 2022 study of a group of socially transitioned children, which found that 97.5 percent had not come to terms with their sex at the end of a five-year follow-up period. Though this study did not follow the kids all the way through adolescence, it suggests that social transition can lock in a child’s cross-gender beliefs and feelings that otherwise are likely to remit. Most of the children in this study were receiving medical interventions, including puberty blockers, by its end.

Cass and her team thus recommend caution. They instruct parents to socially transition a young child, if at all, only after consulting a clinician, and they counsel clinicians to prefer partial social transition (e.g., letting the child wear cross-sex clothes while maintaining his name and pronouns) to full social transition. For adolescents, they argue that “exploration” of identity “is a normal process” and “rigid binary gender stereotypes can be unhelpful.” (Of course, trans identities often rely on such stereotypes.)

While gender ideology critics may find it disappointing that Cass allows for social transition in some cases, it’s important to remember that her approach is pragmatic. She acknowledges the reality that parents, teachers, and clinicians only have so much control over a teen’s life. Whatever parents do, they should never make it harder for their kids to “return” to their sex (i.e., desist) after having declared themselves trans. The important thing is “keeping options open.”

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Cass emphasizes that there is no way of knowing which gender non-conforming or trans-identified kids, if any, will experience a lifetime of suffering if they are denied social or medical interventions. By contrast, getting it wrong means severe and potentially permanent iatrogenic harm. Clinicians have no diagnostic tool that can distinguish a child or adolescent who is destined to endure a lifetime of agony from one going through a phase. Normal distress over puberty, inability to accept oneself as gay, ongoing mental health challenges, and (in young children) simple confusion can all manifest symptoms consistent with the current definition of “gender dysphoria.” For this reason, Cass has warned of “diagnostic overshadowing.”

But even if a diagnostic test for “true trans” existed, there is no good evidence that the long-term benefits of early intervention outweigh the risks. And even if they did, it is doubtful that a young teen could understand the tradeoffs and give informed consent.

It is a mark of arrogance that the Office of Civil Rights took none of these facts—many well-known prior to the publication of Cass’s final report—into account when formulating its new Title IX rules. The agency couches its rules in absolutist “rights talk” and imposes highly inflexible requirements on schools.

The new regulations will force schools to accommodate a student who requests social transition, regardless of the student’s age, level of cognitive and emotional maturity, family circumstances, or mental-health challenges, and with or without a mental-health professional’s diagnosis or input from parents. Notably, the rules favorably cite two policy documents—an advisory from the California DOE and an administrative regulation from Nevada’s Washoe County School District—that endorse blanket social transition policies at school without requiring parental notification.

As one of us (Sapir) has pointed out in the past, legal rules like the new Title IX regulation generate considerable legal uncertainty for school districts. In their desire to avoid expensive and embarrassing civil rights lawsuits and OCR investigations, and on the advice of their risk-averse lawyers, school officials and boards find it in their interest to defer to the very advocacy organizations that, either on their own or through allies in their network, can initiate legal proceedings against the school. A self-interested administrator will thus adopt, say, GLSEN’s model policy on transgender accommodation, in the expectation that doing so will send a signal of compliance to the powerful ACLU. Unlike the Biden administration, neither GLSEN nor the ACLU are accountable to voters. Both can adopt radical policies far afield from what even an ideologically driven Department of Education can hope to achieve. This is essentially a racket underwritten by the federal government.

Following OCR’s logic to its conclusion, a school with a parental-notification policy could be guilty of “hostile environment harassment,” as defined in the new Title IX regulations. After all, some would argue, such a policy could be “subjectively and objectively offensive and . . . so severe or pervasive that it limits or denies a person’s ability to participate in or benefit from the recipient’s education program or activity.” Indeed, though the regulatory update goes into effect in August, the Office for Civil Rights has already cited this rationale to launch an investigation against a school district for its parental-notification policy.

The Biden administration, in its Title IX guidance and elsewhere, has stretched the term “abuse” beyond its obvious connotation to include failing to “affirm” a child’s gender identity. Proponents of the administration’s position claim that trans-identified students are at high risk of rejection and could face abuse at home if they are “outed” to their families, but we’ve noted serious problems with this argument. In effect, so has England’s National Health Service, which recommended last September that fit parents should always be involved in the decision-making process regarding social transition in school.

Indeed, mental-health outcomes for gender-distressed youth are better when they have supportive relationships with their family. “Outcomes for children and adolescents are best,” Cass writes, “if they are in a supportive relationship with their family. For this reason parents should be actively involved in decision making unless there are strong grounds to believe that this may put the child or young person at risk.” Secret social-transition policies—which Parents Defending Education estimates are in effect in 18,878 schools in the United States, affecting close to 11 million students—establish an adversarial dynamic between parents and children.

The Cass Review contrasts an “evidence-based” approach to managing gender-related confusion and distress with a “social justice model,” in which considerations of evidence are secondary to political goals. The Biden administration’s Title IX rules, which subordinate the interests of vulnerable children to those of powerful interest groups in the Democratic coalition, clearly belong in the second category. 

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."