Literally what "decolonize STEM" means.
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Literally what "decolonize STEM" means.
“Why would we have any trust in our government or the educational institutions and legacy news organizations who today act as propagandists for campaigns of hatred directed at Americans who do not want to be forced to abandon their faith, patriotism, and freedom? The leadership of our nation has perhaps never been more egregiously distant and disconnected—yet simultaneously demanding and damaging—during the entire course of our 250-year history.”
Explore the decline of trust in America and the impact of government overreach on society in this insightful analysis of our current cultura
One of the most famous–and controversial– psychology studies ever conducted is a fraud, a scientist claims in a new report. Not only was the Stanford Prison Experiment a sham, but it’s …
One of the most famous–and controversial– psychology studies ever conducted is a fraud, a scientist claims in a new report.
Not only was the Stanford Prison Experiment a sham, but it’s mastermind, Stanford psychology professor Philip Zimbardo, pushed participants towards the results he wanted, Dr. Ben Blum claims in a report published on Medium last week.
...
The study was supposed to last two weeks but guards were reportedly so cruel, it had to be stopped after six days.
...
One of the men who acted as an inmate told Blum he enjoyed the experiment because he knew the guards couldn’t actually hurt him.
“There were no repercussions. We knew [the guards] couldn’t hurt us, they couldn’t hit us. They were white college kids just like us, so it was a very safe situation,” said Douglas Korpi, who was 22-years-old when he acted as an inmate in the study.
In a recorded clip of the experiment, Korpi was seen locked in a dark closet, naked under a thin white smock, screaming “I’m burning up inside!” and kicking furiously at the door.
But the Berkeley grad now admits the whole thing was fake.
I can’t say I’m too surprised. We had to watch a film on this in a psychology course I took as an elective in college. It was pretty scary to say the least, so it’s a relief that it was acting and not real.
But this reveal only adds to my skepticism regarding sociology and psychology. There is a good reason why most scientists do not consider social sciences to be legit.
Watch now | Publication should mark the beginning of academic scrutiny, not the end of it.
By: Colin Wright
Published: May 29, 2026
We’re often told that science is “self-correcting.”
But that’s not really true.
Science doesn’t correct itself like a thermostat adjusting the temperature in your house. Science is a human institution run by human beings. And human beings are vulnerable to career incentives, groupthink, moral fads, political pressure, and fear.
And when those forces capture academic journals, peer review stops being a filter for bad ideas and starts becoming more of a credentialing system for fashionable nonsense.
This isn’t exactly new.
In 1996, the physicist Alan Sokal managed to publish a totally gibberish article in the journal Social Text full of trendy postmodern jargon. His point was simple: if you flatter the ideological commitments of certain academic editors, nonsense can pass as real scholarship.
Two decades later, James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian pulled off the “grievance studies” hoax, placing over a half dozen absurd papers in peer-reviewed journals. One paper used dog parks to analyze rape culture and “queer performativity.” Another rewrote parts of Mein Kampf in the language of feminist theory.
The problem wasn’t just that fake papers got published. It was that they were completely indistinguishable from the real thing.
And today, the problem is even worse.
We now have serious science journals publishing papers about feminist lesbians marrying brine shrimp. We have disturbing papers that aim to “queer” and sexualize infants. We have scholarship on “lesbian-queer-trans-canine relationalities” and “trans-dog intimacies.”
But while Clown World papers are concerning because it makes a complete mockery of academia, the same broken, ideologically captured system is also publishing research in legitimate science and medical journals that pushes sex and gender pseudoscience, relies on deeply flawed data, and influences policies on the medical transition of children and young adults.
That’s not funny. That affects real people. It affects medicine. It affects law. It affects children.
And when critics try to respond, they often discover there’s no serious mechanism for correction. Submitted Letters to the Editor often go completely ignored. Contrary evidence is rejected without comment. As a result, the best critiques are often relegated to personal blog posts, social media threads, or newspaper op-eds, while the original paper remains in the literature wearing the armor of “peer review.”
That is untenable.
So Kevin McCaffree, editor-in-chief of Theory and Society, and I decided to do something about it.
Today, in the Wall Street Journal, we announced a first-of-its-kind article type called “Peer Review.”
The idea is simple: publication should be the beginning of academic scrutiny, not the end of it.
A Peer Review article can critique a paper from any scholarly journal. It can address problems with methods, evidence, logic, definitions, theory, or interpretation. But it has to focus on the claims and arguments, not personal attacks.
Submissions are capped at 2,500 words and go through a straightforward merit review instead of endless gatekeeping and ideological screening. We ask just one basic question: Is this critique coherent, serious, reasonable, or even popular enough to deserve scholarly attention?
If yes, it gets published.
And the authors of the original paper get a built-in right of reply, so readers can see the critique and the response in a legitimate academic venue.
That’s how science is supposed to work.
Science becomes self-correcting only when real people build the mechanisms that allow correction to happen.
That’s what we’ve done.
Now it’s time for academics to use it.
A deeply flawed meta-analysis on transgender fitness reveals a troubling breakdown in the British Journal of Sports Medicine’s peer-review p
By: James L. Nuzzo
Published: May 11, 2026
Earlier this year, a meta-analysis on physical fitness in transgender individuals was published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, one of the most historically important journals in sports medicine and exercise science. The paper’s eight authors, led by Sofia Mendes Sieczkowska, concluded that “transgender women do not exhibit significant differences in upper-body strength, lower-body strength, or maximal oxygen consumption relative to cisgender women after 1–3 years of [gender-affirming hormone therapy].” Based on this conclusion, the authors expressed support for “nuanced, sport-specific policies rather than blanket bans” regarding the inclusion of transgender individuals in sports.
The paper caused an initial stir online—and rightly so. Below, I show how the authors misled the public by concluding that their meta-analysis provided evidence of no difference in muscle strength between women and transgender women (i.e., biological males) after “1–3 years” of cross-sex hormones. More specifically, the authors did not even follow their own inclusion criteria. In some cases, they included data that should have been excluded; in others, they excluded data that should have been included. Underlying all of this is the fact that the muscle-strength meta-analysis was underpowered from the start, with only a few studies contributing to the analysis.
Let us now take a closer look at the data and the claims.
Figure 2 in the paper, shown below, presents the data comparing muscle strength in cisgender and transgender women. Panel A is the forest plot for the meta-analysis of upper-body strength, while Panel B is the forest plot for the meta-analysis of lower-body strength.
On the left side of each plot are the labels for the individual studies included in the meta-analysis. These labels contain the surnames of the researchers who conducted the original studies, the year of publication, and the studies’ reference numbers in the paper’s reference list.
In total, six studies are shown in Panels A and B. The first is the Alvares 2025 study, which appears in both panels because it included data on both upper-body and lower-body strength. The others are Ceolin 2024, Hamilton 2024, Andrade 2022, Jenkins 2020, and Saitong 2025. Saitong 2025 appears twice in Panel B for reasons I will explain later.
In the plots, each study has a blue square associated with it. The blue square represents that study’s effect size, which reflects the magnitude of the difference in muscle strength between cisgender and transgender women. The upper-body strength analysis included four effect sizes from four studies, while the lower-body strength analysis included only four effect sizes from three studies.
The thin black lines extending to the left and right of each blue square are the 95% confidence intervals (CIs). The narrower the CI around the blue square, the more confident we can be that the blue square accurately reflects the true difference in muscle strength between cisgender and transgender women. The wider the CI, the less confident we can be.
The solid black vertical line in the middle of the plot aligns with zero on the x-axis and indicates no difference in muscle strength between cisgender and transgender women. The farther a blue square appears to the left of this zero line, the stronger the cisgender women were relative to the transgender women. The farther it appears to the right, the stronger the transgender women were relative to the cisgender women.
A large, light-blue diamond is displayed at the bottom of each plot. This diamond represents the overall effect size when all the studies in that plot are pooled together. Researchers use this pooled estimate to determine whether there is a statistically significant difference in a given fitness outcome between two groups. If the diamond crosses the vertical zero line, researchers generally conclude that there is no statistically significant difference between the groups. If the diamond does not cross the zero line, they conclude that a statistically significant difference does exist.
As seen in both Panels A and B, the diamonds cross the vertical zero line. This is why the authors concluded that there was no difference in upper-body or lower-body muscle strength between cisgender and transgender women.
Story over, right?
Too Few Studies
The overall effect size—the diamond—is only as meaningful as the inputs that comprise it. If researchers include studies that are irrelevant to the question, or exclude studies that are relevant to it, then the diamond, and the conclusions drawn from it, become meaningless.
More fundamentally, the number of individual studies that make up the overall effect size is critical. A meaningful meta-analysis typically includes a dozen or several dozen effect sizes. Meta-analyses based on only three or four effect sizes are inherently fragile. They can be easily distorted by a single outlier study, and that is precisely what happened in Figure 2.
Sieczkowska and her co-authors are not at fault for the limited number of available effect sizes. But they are responsible for choosing to conduct a meta-analysis on a topic for which so little data were available. Reaching such a bold conclusion from such sparse evidence was a further scientific failure. Put bluntly, Sieczkowska and her co-authors should never have conducted the muscle-strength meta-analyses shown in Figure 2.
And low statistical power is not the only problem with the muscle-strength meta-analyses in Figure 2. Incompetence and misleading statements were also on display.
Andrade 2022 Study: The Wrong Sex!
Let us start with the most shocking error in Figure 2: the inclusion of Andrade 2022. This study should not have been included in the muscle-strength meta-analysis at all.
According to Sieczkowska and her co-authors, Figure 2 presents results from studies comparing muscle strength between cisgender women and transgender women. But Andrade 2022 did not compare muscle strength between cisgender women and transgender women. It compared muscle strength between cisgender men and transgender men!
This is stated plainly in the title of the paper itself: “Bone mineral density, trabecular bone score and muscle strength in transgender men receiving testosterone therapy versus cisgender men” [italics added].
Ceolin 2024 and the Duration of Gender-Affirming Hormone Therapy
Removing Andrade 2022 reduces the number of relevant muscle-strength studies in Figure 2 to five, and the number in Panel A, on upper-body strength, to three. One of these three remaining studies is Ceolin 2024.
Sieczkowska and her co-authors stated that, to be eligible for their meta-analysis, a study needed to include a group of transgender individuals who had undergone gender-affirming hormone therapy, apparently for any duration. With that inclusion criterion in mind, the next most shocking error in Figure 2 is the inclusion of Ceolin 2024.
Ceolin 2024 did not include transgender women who had undergone gender-affirming hormone therapy. In fact, this is stated explicitly in the paper’s title: “Bone health and body composition in transgender adults before gender-affirming hormonal therapy: data from the COMET study” [italics added].
Ceolin 2024 reported baseline data on upper-body strength in transgender women before they underwent gender-affirming hormone therapy. For this reason, the study should not have been included in the meta-analysis of upper-body strength shown in Panel A of Figure 2. Removing it reduces the number of eligible studies to four overall, and to only two for upper-body strength.
But the problems concerning the duration of gender-affirming hormone therapy do not end there.
In their conclusion, Sieczkowska and her co-authors stated that the transgender women in the meta-analysis had undergone “1–3 years” of gender-affirming hormone therapy. A closer look at the four remaining studies suggests otherwise.
The Alvares 2025 study did not state explicitly the average duration of the participants’ gender-affirming hormone therapy. So, how could Sieczkowska and co-authors possibly know that all the transgender women in the Alvares 2025 study had undergone 1-3 years of gender-affirming hormone therapy? If anything, one can assume that the average therapy duration was longer than 3 years based on the average age of the transgender women in the study (30.3 years old) and the average age at which the transgender women in the study started their gender-affirming hormone therapy (23.0 years old).
The Saitong 2025 study reported that the transgender women had “been undergoing feminizing gender-affirming therapy for 8-10 years.” Thus, the Saitong 2025 study clearly falls outside of the 1-3 years range mentioned in Sieczkowska and co-authors’ concluding remarks.
The Hamilton 2024 study reported that the transgender women had undergone one year or more years of gender-affirming hormone therapy, with an average therapy duration of four years. Thus, several of the participants in the Hamilton 2024 study would have been undergoing gender-affirming hormone therapy for more than 3 years.
The Jenkins 2020 study reported that the transgender women had undergone a minimum of 2 years of gender-affirming hormone therapy, but no group average or range was provided. Thus, some participants in the Jenkins 2020 study would have also likely been undergoing gender-affirming hormone therapy for more than 3 years.
To their credit, Sieczkowska and co-authors did mention elsewhere in their paper that “[t]herapy duration varied widely, ranging from 3 months to 14 years, with most studies reporting the following participants for 1–3 years of therapy.” Their statement confirms large heterogeneity in therapy duration, and this heterogeneity amplifies the existing problems in the already underpowered meta-analysis. Their statement also reveals that the “1-3 years” remark, which was used in their concluding statements, was a rough range based on all 52 studies in their paper—not just the studies that compared muscle strength in cisgender and transgender women.
So, Sieczkowska and co-authors misled readers when they said there was no difference in muscle strength between cisgender women and transgender women who had undergone “1-3 years of gender-affirming hormone therapy.” In fact, one could argue that none of the studies that were included in panels A and B in Figure 2 are represented by that remark.
Remarkably, the errors do not end there.
Alvares 2025 Study: The Small Men
The Alvares 2025 study, published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, examined body composition and physical fitness in cisgender women, transgender women, and cisgender men who had “engaged in regular volleyball training for at least 1 year.”
Alvares 2025 is a clear outlier in Panels A and B. It “pulls” the diamonds in both panels to the left and is the main reason the diamond in Panel A crosses the zero line. It also contributed substantially to the diamond in Panel B crossing the zero line.
Given that Alvares 2025 was an obvious outlier that strongly influenced the conclusions of the meta-analysis, one might have expected Sieczkowska and her co-authors to explain why this study was an outlier. Yet no such explanation was provided.
Here are some key details about Alvares 2025. First, the transgender women in the study were, on average, 5 cm shorter than the cisgender women and 13 cm shorter than the cisgender men. Second, the transgender women had an average body mass 7.8 kg lower than the cisgender women and 17.8 kg lower than the cisgender men. Third, the transgender women practiced volleyball 10 hours per week less than both the cisgender women and the cisgender men.
So what explains these bizarre results?
The cisgender women in Alvares 2025 were not ordinary recreational volleyball players or weekend warriors. They played in “second division national level championships.”
Importantly, Alvares and colleagues themselves addressed this issue in a section of their paper titled “Confounding factors.” There, they explicitly identified training experience, body height, and body mass as confounding factors that help explain why the average grip strength of the cisgender women in their study was greater than that of the transgender women.
Yet Sieczkowska and her co-authors did not inform readers about these confounding factors, which help explain why Alvares 2025 is an outlier in Figure 2. Moreover, because the cisgender and transgender women in Alvares 2025 were so oddly mismatched, the results of that study, and any meta-analysis that relies heavily on it, are of little scientific or practical value.
Jenkins 2020: Missing Data
One of the other problems with the muscle-strength meta-analysis in Figure 2 is that it omitted data that were eligible for inclusion under the authors’ own stated criteria.
The first example is Jenkins 2020, which examined body composition and physical fitness in cisgender women, transgender women, and cisgender men. One of the fitness tests Jenkins conducted was the vertical jump. Results from this test appear to be what Sieczkowska and her co-authors displayed in Panel B.
However, Jenkins and colleagues also reported grip-strength data for cisgender and transgender women. Yet Sieczkowska and her co-authors did not include these data in their meta-analysis of upper-body strength in Panel A.
This omission matters because the grip-strength data run counter to Sieczkowska and her co-authors’ conclusion. The average grip strength of the transgender women was 93.0 kg, compared with 63.9 kg for the cisgender women and 112.7 kg for the cisgender men. The 29.1 kg difference between transgender women and cisgender women was statistically significant, whereas the 19.7 kg difference between transgender women and cisgender men was not.
Saitong 2025: Missing Data
Sieczkowska and her co-authors categorized the vertical jump test as a measure of lower-body “strength.” But today, the vertical jump is more commonly, though still somewhat debatably, described as a test of “power.” In fact, this is how Alvares, Jenkins, and Saitong referred to it. Strength and power are correlated, and strength does correlate with vertical jump height. However, velocity and power are stronger correlates of vertical jump height than strength.
I highlight this issue of nomenclature for two reasons. First, inconsistent use of terminology can confuse readers about which fitness attributes are, and are not, affected by sex and gender-affirming hormone therapy. Second, in this meta-analysis, the inclusion of only the vertical jump as a lower-body strength test is odd, especially because at least one of the included studies—Saitong 2025—reported results from a more direct test of lower-body muscle strength: isokinetic peak torque of the knee extensor and knee flexor muscles.
Saitong 2025 examined these attributes in cisgender women, cisgender men, transgender women with orchiectomy (the surgical removal of the testes), and transgender women without orchiectomy. The group comparisons for the vertical jump and isokinetic peak torque tests were similar, with cisgender women tending to score lowest among all groups, though not necessarily at statistically significant levels. Nevertheless, Sieczkowska and her co-authors’ decision to include the vertical jump results, but not the isokinetic peak torque results, is odd.
Even stranger, Saitong 2025 also included two tests of upper-body strength that Sieczkowska and her co-authors did not include in their meta-analysis in Panel A: isokinetic peak torque of the elbow extensor muscles and isokinetic peak torque of the elbow flexor muscles. The results from these two tests are presented below. They show that cisgender women had the lowest average strength values, although their averages were not statistically different from those of transgender women who had undergone approximately 8–10 years of gender-affirming hormone therapy.
Elbow extensor isokinetic peak torque:
Cisgender women: 25.9 ± 4.9 Nm
Transgender women with orchiectomy and ~8–10 years of gender-affirming therapy: 27.2 ± 5.4 Nm
Transgender women without orchiectomy and ~8–10 years of gender-affirming therapy: 29.1 ± 5.2 Nm
Cisgender men: 47.3 ± 14.7 Nm
Elbow flexor isokinetic peak torque:
Cisgender women: 19.2 ± 5.1 Nm
Transgender women with orchiectomy and ~8–10 years of gender-affirming therapy: 21.5 ± 5.7 Nm
Transgender women without orchiectomy and ~8–10 years of gender-affirming therapy: 21.3 ± 5.0 Nm
Cisgender men: 36.3 ± 9.0 Nm
Another important point about Saitong 2025 is that the results from both transgender women with orchiectomy and transgender women without orchiectomy were compared against the same reference group of cisgender women. From the standpoint of study feasibility, this is understandable: it avoids the need to recruit a second reference group of cisgender women. But from a statistical standpoint, the double inclusion of the same reference group in a low-powered meta-analysis is problematic. If that reference group of cisgender women is unusual compared with the broader population of cisgender women, then its uniqueness will disproportionately influence an already flawed analysis.
The Non-Included Alvares Study: More Missing Data
Another bizarre aspect of the meta-analysis in Figure 2 is that at least one other study referenced elsewhere in the paper appears to qualify for inclusion in the figure but is absent from it. This was a second study by Alvares, listed as reference #38 in the paper and included in Figures 1 and 3.
This second Alvares study was published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine in 2022. It compared cisgender men, cisgender women, and transgender women who had undergone gender-affirming hormone therapy for 14 years, on average. One of the outcomes was grip strength. Grip strength was about 19 percent higher in transgender women than in cisgender women, 35.3 kg versus 29.7 kg, though this difference was not statistically significant. The grip strength of the cisgender men was 48.4 kg.
Including the grip-strength data from the transgender and cisgender women in Panel A would have “pulled” the diamond to the right, away from Sieczkowska and her co-authors’ conclusion.
Conclusion
On March 26, 2026, about a month and a half after Sieczkowska and her co-authors’ meta-analysis was published, the International Olympic Committee announced its new policy restricting eligibility for the female category at the Olympic Games and other IOC events to biological females. Thankfully, the IOC does not appear to have been influenced at the last minute by Sieczkowska’s paper. That said, findings published in papers like this can still influence sports policies developed by organizations other than the IOC, and they can still impact law.
As I have detailed, the meta-analysis of muscle-strength data in Figure 2 contains many flaws. It included multiple studies that do not meet the authors’ own stated eligibility criteria, while excluding multiple studies that do. Moreover, the meta-analysis was unsound from the start, because too few studies were available to support meaningful conclusions.
Sieczkowska and her co-authors should either issue a correction to their work or retract it altogether, particularly if similar problems exist elsewhere in the paper. Their conclusion that transgender women do not exhibit significant differences in upper-body or lower-body strength compared with cisgender women after 1–3 years of gender-affirming hormone therapy is inappropriate in light of the flaws highlighted above.
At this point, the more appropriate format for synthesizing this literature would be a narrative review, which would allow researchers to take a deeper look at the few available studies in this emerging area. Unfortunately, exercise scientists are often overly eager to publish meta-analyses because they are easier to complete than laboratory experiments, frequently cited by other researchers, and carry a patina of prestige because they are quantitative and require researchers to check a long list of procedural boxes that supposedly improve research quality.
Yet, as we have seen, these supposedly gold-standard procedures are no cure for good old-fashioned human incompetence.
This meta-analysis had eight authors, presumably two to four peer reviewers, and at least one editor. Yet apparently none of them identified one or more of the problems I have highlighted here. That is terrifying!
Finally, it is important to note that three of the papers discussed above were published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine. This meta-analysis makes four. Two of those papers—the Hamilton 2024 study and the second Alvares study—required formal corrections. If Sieczkowska and her co-authors’ meta-analysis is corrected, it would become the third paper on this topic in the journal to require correction. That is a remarkably high proportion, and it reflects the British Journal of Sports Medicine’s failing peer review process.
Over the past few years, the British Journal of Sports Medicine has become increasingly political. It has placed itself at the center of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in sports medicine and exercise science publishing. One of the boxes Sieczkowska and her co-authors were required to check before publishing in the journal was the author DEI statement. These statements take up one or two paragraphs of valuable space in papers already limited to 5,000 words. Sieczkowska and her co-authors’ DEI statement took up 80 words.
Think about that for a minute.
Consider the one or two important points of scientific clarification that could have been made with those 80 words. For example, they could have been used to explain why Alvares 2025 was such an outlier and to caution readers against overinterpreting the results of the muscle-strength meta-analysis. Instead, readers learned about the authors’ sexes, gender identities, sexual orientations, career stages, geographic locations, and marginalization statuses—none of which help policymakers understand whether there are meaningful differences in muscle strength between cisgender and transgender women.
This is how DEI undermines science.
David Blackman, a native of Plano, Texas, was thrilled to be starting law school at Penn State in the fall of 2025. A former 911 call operat
By: Aaron Sibarium
Published: May 14, 2026
David Blackman, a native of Plano, Texas, was thrilled to be starting law school at Penn State in the fall of 2025.
A former 911 call operator and a veteran of the Texas State Guard, Blackman, 26, loved the university's football team and its location in the Appalachian Mountains.
"I’ve been a fan of Penn State since I was a teenager," Blackman told the Washington Free Beacon. He arrived on campus in August 2025, a 50 percent merit scholarship in hand, excited for game nights in Beaver Stadium and a three-year reprieve from the Texas heat.
Then he sat through his first anti-racism class.
On the first day of "Race and the Equal Protection of the Laws," a required course for all first-year law students, Blackman listened as a transgender faculty member, Emily Spottswood, explained why the course was mandatory.
"It’s not optional," Spottswood said, because "being a lawyer is about recognizing and combating injustice."
In audio of the session obtained by the Free Beacon, Spottswood said that this "institutional message" was "baked into" the law school's "DNA," adding that, as a "trans woman," the course's focus on "combatting oppression … is meaningful to me."
Spottswood's remarks followed a presentation by Jeffrey Dodge, the law school's associate dean, and Shaakirrah Sanders, who was introduced as "the first associate Dean of anti-racism and critical pedagogy in the country." The presentation made clear that Blackman wasn't in Texas anymore; he and his classmates were now conscripts in a political "coalition" that, as Dodge put it in his talk, was dedicated to "building a more anti-racist" future.
"We are taking action to disrupt and dismantle systems that racialize, subordinate, and oppress," Dodge said. "We … want to acknowledge the reality of systemic racism … as a foundation for this course."
Thus began a series of struggle sessions in which professors demanded students affirm activist talking points and ultimately drove Blackman, whose first-choice law school had been Penn State, to withdraw from the school after just one semester. (The Free Beacon reviewed Blackman's transcript.) Over the course of three 150-minute lectures, speakers described all white people as "privileged," called to "eradicate patriarchy," and asserted that the justice system is "about keeping black people in their place." One assignment said students should "consider" framing their essays around "the reality of systemic racism," implying that doing otherwise could affect a student's grade.
"Consider drawing on the instruction we provided on design thinking as a way to frame your assignment," the essay prompt read. Linked below were slides from the first session of the class, which defined "institutional anti-racism" as "acknowledg[ing] the reality of systemic racism, subordination, and oppression."
Launched in 2020 at the height of the George Floyd protests, the class is now raising questions about whether a public law school violated the First Amendment and the Civil Rights Act. Blackman withdrew from the law school after a committee convened by law school dean Danielle Conway refused to grant him an exemption from the course, which he said amounted to compelled speech. In an interview with the Free Beacon, he also noted that the course vilified white people and law enforcement and that professors assigned texts by critical race theorists without presenting an alternative perspective.
"My law degree is not worth sitting through a mandatory DEI class that spits on my entire background," said Blackman, who helped the Texas Guard deliver emergency supplies during Hurricane Beryl. "You have a lot of people who say DEI is bad, but I gave up a law career because of it."
Penn State is a land-grant university with significant ties to Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro (D.), who controls 9 of the 36 voting spots on the board of trustees. Along with the law school's strategic plan, which pledges to expand "employment opportunities for candidates who are underrepresented in the University," the course is a stark example of how DEI remains entrenched in many Democratic institutions even as the legal threats to such programs continue to grow.
The America First Policy Institute told the law school in April that the class creates "a racially hostile educational environment in violation of Title VI." And the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) said Penn State may have violated the First Amendment by pressuring students to "acknowledge" contested claims about white supremacy.
"That would in many cases be compelled speech," said Zach Greenberg, an attorney at FIRE, adding that the analysis would turn on whether students could question those claims without being marked down. "Even if there is not a legal case to be made, we hope that universities are open to a wide array of viewpoints when they’re teaching students."
For his part, Blackman felt pressured to toe the line. Asked to submit an essay on "systemic racism in the law," he wrote about Texas's strict drug laws—which he believed should be reformed—but framed the issue as a matter of racial justice rather than colorblind fairness.
"I added a lot of color that doesn't really stand up with my beliefs to get a passing grade," Blackman said. Penn State did not respond to a request for comment.
Blackman had been willing to put up with the readings from Paul Butler, a Georgetown University Law Center professor who argues that police are "looking for a reason to arrest" black men, and with Penn State's propensity for progressive neologisms, such as "intersectional liberal democracy." The straw that broke the camel's back was a statement from Conway, the law school's dean, condemning Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
"This weekend's blanket of snow with its clean, white veneer starkly contrasts with the conflagration enveloping the rule of law," Conway wrote in a school-wide message on Jan. 26, 2026, referencing the deaths of two anti-ICE protesters in Minnesota earlier that month. "Our power lies in activating critical pedagogy to teach and learn about the importance of our nation’s constitutional order in real time and to voice the need for accountability and transparency to our representatives."
Blackman drafted a reply to the email, thanking Conway for her "effort to create space for reflection" but politely pushing back on her "one-sided view of deeply contested events," which he said could "undermine confidence in the school's neutrality."
"Leadership communications, as the public-facing voice of the law school, carry special weight," he wrote to a school-wide listserv. "It is not in the best interest of the law school, or our educational mission, to appear to prematurely assign blame before … an investigation is concluded and all facts are fully established."
But when Blackman attempted to send the email, he was notified that a moderator for the listserv had blocked the message.
"Your message was rejected by a moderator for these recipients," read the note from Kalene Faircloth, the law school's senior associate director of academic and student services, who did not provide a rationale for the decision.
Fed up with the blatant act of censorship, Blackman filed a petition with the provost's office demanding a "University-level audit of the Race and the Equal Protection of the Law … course and the concurrent administrative suppression of student speech."
"Evidence demonstrates that Penn State Dickinson Law has established a 'Closed Loop' of state-enforced orthodoxy," the seven-exhibit complaint read. "The Dean broadcasts the ideology (Exhibit D), the Curriculum compels students to advocate for it (Exhibit C), and Administrators censor legal dissent (Exhibit F)."
But rather than launch its own audit, Penn State punted the petition to Conway—the very dean who was the subject of the complaint. Conway, the executive director of Penn State's Antiracist Development Institute, was also the driving force behind the creation of the anti-racism class, which she credits with exposing students to "the structure that supports the nation's constitutional democracy."
"REPL allows us to teach that through the lens of enslavement and racism," she said in a press release about the course. "We use critical pedagogy to analyze how a governing system founded on a pledge of democratic ideals produces systemic inequity when legal, social, economic and civil obstacles limit liberty for those othered in society."
The 2024 press release also noted that Conway attends every session of the class.
"It was an obvious conflict of interest," Blackman said. He quoted a Latin saying, "nemo iudex in causa sua," which means "no one should be a judge in their own case."
On Feb. 26, the law school informed Blackman that he would not be excused from the class.
"We conclude that none of the remedial actions you seek to have the university take are required," law professor Jud Mathews said, writing on behalf of a committee Conway had convened. "To graduate from the law school, you will need to complete all required courses, including REPL."
That was the last straw. Blackman withdrew from the law school rather than complete the course, returning to Texas for a master's degree in business administration.
Before he left, he gave Conway one final piece of his mind.
"As a former member of law enforcement in the Great State of Texas, I abhor everything this class teaches and will no longer be even a passive participant in such a farce," Blackman wrote in an email on Feb. 27. "I am 'free to think, and speak as I wish, not as the government or law school demands.'"
The full audio recordings of two class sessions are included below.
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This is "Emily" Spottswood, the man speaking in the beginning of the first audio recording.
You don't get to pretende to be "oppressed" when you can coerce others into mimicking your opinions with the threat of an undeserved failing grade.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/specious
1 : having a false look of truth or genuineness : sophistic specious reasoning 2 : having deceptive attraction or allure 3 obsolete : showy
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Noam Chomsky: If you look at what's happening, I think it's pretty easy to figure out what's going on. I mean, suppose you are a literary scholar at some elite university. Or, you know, anthropologist or whatever. I mean, if you do your work seriously, that’s fine, you know. But you don’t get any big prizes for it.
On the other hand, you take a look over in the rest of the university and you’ve got these guys in the physics department and the math department and they have all kinds of complicated theories, which of course we can’t understand, but they seem to understand them. And they have, you know, principles and they deduce complicated things from the principles and they do experiments and they find either they work or they don’t work. And that’s really, you know, impressive stuff.
So I want to be like that too. I want to have a theory. In the humanities, you know, literary criticism, anthropology and so on, there’s a field called theory. We’re just like the physicists. They talk incomprehensibly, we can talk incomprehensibly. They have big words, we’ll have big words. They draw, you know, far-reaching conclusions, we’ll draw far-reaching conclusions. We’re just as prestigious as they are.
Now if they say, well look, we’re doing real science and you guys aren’t, that’s white male, sexist, you know, bourgeois or whatever the answer is. How are we any different from them?
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I worry that when I describe this idiocy as "fraud," people think I'm exaggerating, being hyperbolic or otherwise overstating it.
I'm not. If anything, I'm understating it.
All of this postmodern crap we're dealing with is completely fake. All this ridiculous intersectional jargon is a big grift. All of these domains producing this ridiculous nonsense are bogus and corrupt. All the scholarship they produce is fraudulent. It's fake from top to bottom.
All of it.
These people are cloaking asinine retardation in fancy words to cover up how asinine and retarded this asinine retardation is.
The people producing it are shallow and stupid. Not to mention, envious and spiteful about the status and authority of science. They just use absurd jargon to hide that fact and trick you into thinking it's too deep and profound for you to understand. But when it's decoded into simple English, à la the Tweet summaries above, the retarded, moronic nature becomes obvious.
The response to this kind of ridiculous shit needs to be laughter and derision, not tenure or a tertiary qualification.
We have to get rid of it because it's destroying our societies.
Woke academia strikes again.
Today's entry comes from the University of Victoria, where someone earned a PhD in the School of Indigenous Governance, which I had never heard of but appears to be where ordinary academic standards go to be ceremonially sacrificed.
The dissertation is titled, "Mnidoo-mkwendamwin: Beading and Restitching with Ancestral Threads of Memory." And before the dissertation even begins, we of course get a mandatory land acknowledgment.
The abstract opens with a typo. It says, quote, "This work was created to go beyond the study cultural mnemonic devices." It appears to be missing the word 'of' there, but maybe proofreading is an oppressive colonial construct as well.
But it gets better, or worse, however you look at it. The author says the dissertation documents how to make, quote, "ancestral knowledge encodements" through "indigenous beadwork, textile, other fiber arts." It seems to be missing the word 'and' there as well. So that's two typos, and we haven't even moved beyond the first sentence yet
It then explains that beading is, quote, "indigenous resurgence" explored through the author's intersecting lenses of being a, quote, "chronically ill neurodivergent two-spirit Mississauga Nishabi Lucanan artist and scholar."
The abstract also says that, quote, "the body, mind, spirit, land, and material expressions of culture" are only viewed as separate entities "due to colonization."
This dissertation is based on so-called "indigenous knowledges." But while cultural traditions, stories, and art can be personally meaningful, when universities start treating them as co-equal with scientific knowledge and dismiss skepticism as a form of colonial oppression, we've left the realm of serious scholarship entirely and dove headfirst into mystical woo-woo.
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This work was created to go beyond the study cultural mnemonic devices and into the realm of documenting how to make ancestral knowledge enc
Abstract
This work was created to go beyond the study cultural mnemonic devices and into the realm of documenting how to make ancestral knowledge encodements that synthesize research through Indigenous beadwork, textile, other fibre arts. Beading is Indigenous resurgence that connects me to my ancestors, and this research delves into what that means in a grounded wholistic way through my intersecting lenses of being a chronically ill neurodivergent Two-Spirit Mississauga Nishnaabe Lucbanin artist and scholar. Conceptualizations around the body, mind, spirit, land, and material expressions of culture are often thought of as separate entities due to colonization, so a foundational part of this work examines approaches to Indigenous ideas of wholeness in community and identifies what forms of decolonization and resurgence can facilitate reconnection with the spiritual. Beads come together and interplay with one another in similar ways that gained wisdoms do within the research process. While the overall design that is created through knowledge is powerful and important, so is every stitch that makes that design come into being. Each relative who collaborated on this dissertation brought a prismatic array of experiences and played a powerful role in shaping the trajectory of the ancestral knowledge encodement of this work in the Ngwaagan Regalia (2025). Throughout the dissertation are ancestral knowledge encodements—created through historical inspiration, depictions of relatives, tea-visits with kin, and narratives shared by family and community members. The encodements created and embedded into this written dissertation take the forms of photographs, historical images, digitally stitched collages, digital mixed media illustrations, paintings, and diagrams. I have chosen to honour this tradition of weaving in the threads of previous generations and connecting it to those in the future through integrating ancestral mkwendamwinan (memories) in the same way that I am including contemporary conversational dbaajmownan (stories).
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Art is not science. Any form of "knowledge" which is inaccessible to all but an anointed, special few is not "knowledge."
“Fact” is not anybody’s experience; it states the experience of no one in particular. … By definition, then, if we take the empirical rule (no personal authority) seriously, revelation cannot be the basis for fact, because it is not publicly available. Similarly, attempts to claim a special kind of experience or checking for any particular person or kind of person—male or female, black or white, tall or short—are strictly illicit. … if you make different rules for black and white checkers, you are not doing science. … if the way you are checking works only for people with a sympathetic attitude, or if your results are not replicable by others in a reasonably regular fashion, you are not doing science. … If the way you are seeing and explaining works only for the religious, you are breaking the rules. – Jonathan Rauch, "Kindly Inquisitors"
They really are just writing about themselves.