Week in Review: DEI Goes Down in Yet Another State

First Florida. Then Texas. Then Arizona. And now Iowa, too.

The discriminatory “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) regime that infested the ivory tower of higher education is crumbling as state after state follows the Goldwater Institute’s blueprint for freeing our colleges from DEI’s stranglehold.

Taking a page out of the Goldwater Institute’s playbook, the Iowa Board of Regents has delivered a major victory for university students and faculty against the political radicalism of DEI—an ideology that cultivates a campus-wide culture of fear by ordering students and faculty alike to treat others differently based on their race. The Iowa regents voted recently to eliminate DEI positions and programming throughout the state-run university system and to abolish the use of mandatory “DEI statements,” which force faculty job applicants to pledge fealty to progressivism.

In doing so, the Hawkeye State follows in the footsteps of Texas, Florida, and Arizona, where the Goldwater Institute has enacted laws and spearheaded public pressure campaigns to eliminate taxpayer subsidies of this racially divisive ideology in higher education.

Thanks to the Goldwater Institute’s work, DEI’s reign of terror will soon be relegated to the ash heap of history.

Read more here. 

Goldwater Strikes Blow Against Government Theft

A victim of child sexual abuse was supposed to receive a small measure of relief when a North Carolina judge ordered her abuser to pay her $69,000 in restitution—that is, until the federal government stepped in and claimed the money for itself.

Civil asset forfeiture lets the government confiscate her money and untold billions more from countless other victims if officials think that property might somehow be connected to a crime. But this week, the Goldwater Institute struck a major blow against this type of predatory practice when the Fourth Circuit federal appeals court reaffirmed basic due process rights.

While trial courts frequently defer to the government in forfeiture proceedings and make it extremely difficult for a citizen to challenge a forfeiture action, the Fourth Circuit’s decision makes clear that the government bears the burden of proving seized property is subject to forfeiture, rather than the property owner having to prove it isn’t.

Goldwater is fighting civil asset forfeiture around the nation and defending innocent Americans’ rights—from state courts all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court and Congress. We’ll keep standing up to government theft all around America—and this week’s Fourth Circuit decision is a valuable precedent that will help us do it.

Read more here. 

If They Can Do It with Eggs…

“It’s an incredibly slippery slope,” says Tucson restaurateur Grant Krueger, who’s challenging—with Goldwater’s help—unelected officials’ decision to mandate that all eggs sold in Arizona be cage-free. “When does the next appointed government agency get to make laws outside the legislative branch?” he adds to Arizona’s Family KTVK.

And therein lies the problem: while the Arizona Constitution delegates lawmaking to elected lawmakers, Arizona’s “egg bureaucrats” unilaterally—and illegally—imposed a new policy that affects millions of people across the entire state. And if they can do it with a food staple in nearly everyone’s home, what’s next?

That’s why Goldwater is suing the egg bureaucrats. It’s part of our nation-leading work to fight the Administrative State, whose unelected regulators write rules with the force of law and prosecute alleged violations—all while combining legislative, executive, and judicial authority with zero checks and balances.

As Grant explains to Reason magazine: “Ultimately, laws that are put upon us should be done by the legislative branch of the government, that more accurately reflect the people who have chosen those electors to make those decisions for them. It’s the core of representative democracy.”

Read more at Reason.

New Video: Is Freedom Bad for the Environment?

Why are some of the dirtiest places on the planet the places where government has the most power? In the eighth installment of the Foundations of Freedom video series, Goldwater Vice President for Legal Affairs Timothy Sandefur explores concepts like “the tragedy of the commons” and “externalities” to explain that what we want is a clean enough environment: one that balances cleanliness with other human values.

Watch Episode 8 here.