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Rikki Schlott was 14 years old when she and other students were herded into racial affinity groups to celebrate Martin Luther King Day. “That was my first moment of kind of doubting the environment around me,” she recalled.

By the time she got to NYU, she was hiding books by Thomas Sowell, Jordan Peterson, and other authors. “It's been so ideologically oppressive for as long as I can really remember being even vaguely a mature thinker that it's just sort of all I knew. And it wasn't until I started reading for myself, like classical liberal texts and John Stuart Mill, that I realized that there's an alternative … that I could fight for,” Schlott explained.