July 17, 2026

Photo credit: NurPhoto / Contributor / NurPhoto via Getty Images

The Democratizing Racial Justice project operated at the University of Texas at San Antonio from 2021 to late 2024. Funded by a $5 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the project promised to push “antiracist and decolonial pedagogies.” And did it ever.

One of its main activities was its “Ethnic Studies Educators’ Academy,” which gathered higher education faculty each year to “engage with our racialized past and present, and envision racially just futures.” The academy’s teaching guide argues that white supremacy and racism lie “at the foundation of U.S. society.” For one assignment, nearly half the grade that students earned depended on whether they “show awareness that they are building on Black/Chicanx feminist thought.”

The Democratizing Racial Justice project reveals “how such grantmaking can become a political weapon,” John D. Sailer writes, “empowering a scholar-activism that spreads beyond the academy, including by using the university as a pass-through to fund on-the-ground organizing.”

Read more.

This fall, socialist candidates seem poised to take control of the Portland City Council, and potentially even the Los Angeles mayor’s race. They’ve already done so in Seattle, and they recently nabbed a congressional victory in Denver.

What’s driving this lurch to the far Left in the West?

A decline in opportunity, Joel Kotkin argues.

For one thing, companies have been shedding jobs there, with some leaving the West Coast altogether for lower-tax areas. Since 2023, for instance, Amazon and Microsoft have laid off more than 46,000 employees in Seattle. Between 2022 and 2024, the entertainment industry in Los Angeles lost 42,000 jobs. Unemployment in Portland, L.A., and Seattle now exceeds the national average, while California alone has a worker surplus of about 500,000.

Meantime, the West Coast is home to an increasing number of well-educated, young, often childless voters. “The ‘yuppie dream’ of yesterday has faded as young urbanites embrace New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s ‘warmth of collectivism,’” Kotkin writes. “The ‘economic anxiety’ they feel is not imaginary; according to the New York Fed, 42 percent of recent college graduates are underemployed. These young people, disappointed by reality, are driving the rise of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).”

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New York’s primary election last month was undoubtedly a huge success for the Democratic Socialists of America. Two of the group’s candidates for Congress in New York City districts unseated two incumbent Democrats.

But the DSA isn’t the only institution pushing New York Democrats further leftward. The Working Families Party (WFP) has been at it a long time, Joseph Burns points out.

Unlike the DSA, the WFP is its own political party. But its “real political strength,” Burns argues, “comes from its ability to mobilize on behalf of candidates in Democratic primaries.” Indeed, the WFP’s door-knocking and mailers helped its candidates win in state legislative primaries, which may “do far more for its movement than scoring upset wins in congressional races,” Burns writes.

Read more about the WFP’s influence.

No-contact orders were initially intended to address stalking and sexual assault on college campuses by prohibiting physical and digital interactions. But over the past few years, they’ve been increasingly used against Jewish and pro-Israel students.

For instance, when Alexandra Orbuch Horowitz was a student at Princeton University in 2023, she tried to record footage of a pro-Palestinian protest on campus. But an organizer tried to block her camera and then followed her as she tried to cover the event. He later requested a no-contact order against her.

“The order covered not just communication but physical presence: we both had to vacate any closely shared space, and I was banned from his departmental building entirely,” she writes.

Read about some of the challenges others have faced, and how the orders have been increasingly wielded against Jewish students.