OPINION:
The New York Times — perhaps best known these days for publishing Nikole Hannah Jones’ falsified history of the American Revolution and abetting the Soviet Union’s cover-up of the forced starvation of millions of Ukrainians — is once again batting cleanup for the intellectual and moral (and now good old-fashioned financial) bankruptcy of the left.
This time, the paper’s heavy hitters are trying to piece back together the latest wreckage of diversity, equity and inclusion programming that’s sapping our nation’s educational institutions of their academic rigor.
As student journalists at Boston University’s Daily Free Press and reporters at The Boston Globe helped uncover recently, DEI guru Ibram X. Kendi has recently come under scrutiny for the apparent meltdown of his Center for Antiracist Research, which has soaked donors for up to $50 million in contributions over the past three years while failing, it seems, to do much beyond enrich Mr. Kendi, defraud benefactors, and terrorize lower-level staff workers before firing them en masse.
According to the Free Press, university administrators were tipped off about “multiple high-level employees leaving [the center] suddenly and allegations of a workplace culture that included fear of retaliation and discrimination,” combined with a “pattern of amassing grants without any commitment to producing the research obligated to them.”
As the Free Press quotes one center staffer saying: “It’s pretty hard for me to imagine they blew through $30 million in two years. … There’s been a lack of transparency about how much money comes in and how it’s spent.”
Enter New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg.
While Ms. Goldberg at least acknowledges the generally dismal state of things at Mr. Kendi’s anti-racism center — noting that “there are considerable questions about what’s been accomplished with all that money” — she then gives a master class in damage control, deflection and victimhood to mitigate the fallout for the DEI movement at large:
“It’s almost hard to blame right-wingers for their delight; Kendi’s mistakes played right into their hands. But for the rest of us, it’s important to understand that the center’s seeming breakdown is more the result of a failed funding model than a failed ideology. It exemplifies the lamentable tendency among left-leaning donors to chase fads and celebrities rather than build sustainable institutions.”
That’s right: The failure of the premier anti-racism center in the United States, which raked in tens of millions of dollars — including from major figures like the founder of Twitter — was due to funding challenges.
Perhaps even more absurdly, in Ms. Goldberg’s telling, the center is merely the victim of its own success — a story of the little man on the left trying desperately to counter the towering influence of right-wing bogeymen but handicapped by the inexperience of its enthusiastic backers.
As Ms. Goldberg writes: “For years, people on the left have dreamed of imitating the success of the Koch network, a plutocratic donor consortium that provides long-term investments in the right’s intellectual infrastructure. … Left-wing giving, by contrast, tends to be driven more by passion than hope of future gain, and often follows a boom-bust cycle.”
In other words, despite dominating virtually every institution of higher education — and even actively seeking to suppress any political dissent — the left and its entire DEI apparatus are really just the scrappy little guy in this modern David and Goliath story.
The Times, to its credit, did also run a longer news piece in which it acknowledged questions as to whether Mr. Kendi “was providing the leadership the newly created institute needed.”
But here, too, the newspaper makes sure the takeaway is actually the villainy of the right, declaring that Mr. Kendi’s work “has ignited criticism from conservatives, ranging from some Black intellectuals to Republican-led state governments, which have banned his books from their classrooms and libraries.”
In other words, the Times has no problem parroting the left’s fake “book ban” narrative to paint Mr. Kendi as the victim of right-wing censorship, yet conveniently neglects to mention that the reason his book runs afoul of certain state laws regarding classroom content is its explicit promotion of racial discrimination in direct repudiation of the 14th Amendment of the Constitution and the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Like the nearly $40 million siphoned away to mansions, private jets, and other personal enrichment by the founders of the Black Lives Matter organization, this latest episode of DEI-driven financial malfeasance is not the result of noble social reformers simply getting in over their heads, but rather the inevitable result of a fraudulent ideology built upon racial resentment and the exploitation of others.
Lawmakers have the opportunity — and the responsibility — to shield their own state institutions from similar financial and ideological rot. They must follow in the footsteps of states such as Florida and Texas, which have adopted model policies from the Goldwater Institute and our partners to defund the bloated DEI bureaucracies, prohibit mandatory “diversity statements,” and protect students and faculty from forced instruction in the tenets of DEI.
The Times will no coubt continue its spin, but at least state-sponsored programs in racial resentment will have gone the way of Mr. Kendi’s center — down the drain.
• Matt Beienburg is director of education policy at the Goldwater Institute. He also serves as director of the institute’s Van Sittert Center for Constitutional Advocacy.
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