The Goldwater Institute continues to blaze trails for liberty in courtrooms, classrooms, and statehouses, fighting for freedom and against government overreach nationwide.
That’s why we welcomed hundreds of our liberty-loving supporters to Phoenix on Friday for the Goldwater Institute’s annual Freedom Gala—headlined by Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin—to celebrate our many successes over the last year.
“I want to thank the Goldwater Institute for passing laws across the nation and fighting in courtrooms across the country. Your reach is far and your reach is impactful,” said Governor Youngkin.
Trailblazers for liberty are often driven by a mission to clear away unnecessary—sometimes harmful—government roadblocks. That is certainly true of Elijah Stacy, a leading supporter of the Goldwater Institute’s groundbreaking Right to Try 2.0 legislation, who was honored at the gala with this year’s Freedom Award.
The 23-year-old, who was diagnosed at age 6 with Duchenne muscular dystrophy—a fatal and incurable disease—is a tireless advocate for allowing patients to access individualized treatments designed just for them, even if the treatments haven’t yet made it through the federal government’s slow and outdated regulatory process. Elijah’s work is both inspiring and critically important, and we’re grateful for all he does in support of health freedom.
Of course, threats to liberty are never ending—but as we’ve shown time and again, the Goldwater Institute and its allies will never stop defending freedom from coast to coast.
Read more about our Freedom Gala here.
Many of America’s most prestigious universities have essentially turned into credential mills where expensive degrees are no longer signs of acquired wisdom but are instead little more “bragging rights at cocktail parties.” That’s the blistering critique of Manhattan Institute fellow Heather Mac Donald in the latest episode of the Goldwater Institute’s new Dismantling DEI podcast. Listen here.
College and university students, she says, are increasingly coddled by DEI bureaucracies who insist they are fragile victims and that exposure to disfavored arguments is unsafe. And when DEI bureaucrats admit underprepared students who fall behind and fail, the problem is attributed to “systemic racism”—DEI cannot fail; it can only be failed.
Mac Donald warns that this is all part of a broader assault on Western civilization, which treats its own legacy—including its historic embrace of equality, tolerance, human rights, and science—as poison. “We would rather be mediocre and racially diverse than excellent and compete with China,” she says. “And China is watching all this and saying, ‘Bring it on.’”
Watch Dismantling DEI in its entirety here, or listen on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Car allowances of up to $1,250 a month, vacation banks that can be “cashed out” for tens of thousands of dollars, multiple pensions—those are just some of the hidden, taxpayer-funded extras that school superintendents typically receive in Arizona, the Goldwater Institute’s Christopher Thomas writes in a new op-ed in the Arizona Daily Star.
Thomas, the Institute’s Director of Litigation for Education Policy and the author of the report The Hidden Ways Arizona Superintendents are Paid, writes that contracts are often drafted to scatter superintendent compensation across as many as ten categories.
“This is not an accident of bookkeeping. It is a system meant to conceal how tax dollars get spent,” he adds. “To make matters worse, when watchdogs request the full contracts, districts often drag their feet, charge illegal fees, or ignore the law outright.”
While taxpayers are often left in the dark, the Goldwater Institute is there to shine a light on the government’s secretive spending.
Read the op-ed here.
