Today’s higher education is not your grandfather’s higher education. Indeed, it’s not even the higher education of my first run through it in the 90s, before the pervasive embrace of DEI and critical race theory, before the extreme ideological disparities that led to a decrease in the study of traditional humanities and an increase in the study of social justice issues, and before the pernicious threats to independent thought and free speech that led to a recent wave of rampant antisemitism at some of the America’s most prestigious institutions. The threats facing higher education and, more broadly, civil society have arisen relatively quickly, and the question now is: can anything be done to fix what ails higher education in the same rapid timeframe? As universities grow richer and more administratively bloated and students become less educated and more ideologically indoctrinated, are there answers from inside the institutions, or is it going to take choices made by outside influences like governments, donors, and parents to get higher ed back to its mission of educating America’s young people to be productive American citizens? A new book of essays from The Heritage Foundation, written by preeminent education scholars, titled “Higher Education in America: It’s Worse Than You Think,” seeks to answer some of these questions. One of those scholars, Jonathan Butcher, Acting Director for Heritage’s Center for Education Policy, joins us today.

Since the Hamas attacks on Israel in October 2023, the Everything Leftist Omnicause has turned its Eye of Sauron toward aggressive support for Palestinian nationalism—support for Palestinian nationalism that all too frequently crosses the line from a political position to antipathy towards American Jews. Nowhere has the latter been more visible than on the most elite college campuses, where administrations that have been perfectly happy to suppress speech they didn’t like about mainstream political issues have allowed Palestinian nationalist demonstrators to impose their wills on campus. Today’s guest used her position to ask the presidents of three of America’s most prestigious universities how that came to be; the resulting incoherent responses started a firestorm that culminated in her new book, Poisoned Ivies: The Inside Account of the Academic and Moral Rot at America's Elite Universities. Joining us today to discuss higher education and the rot within it is U.S. Representative Elise Stefanik of New York.

Poisoned Ivies: The Inside Account of the Academic and Moral Rot at America's Elite Universities


Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) Questions University Presidents on Antisemitism

The Universities That Don’t Understand Academic Freedom

Elise Stefanik’s new book ‘Poisoned Ivies’ highlights the dangerous extremism in higher education

Without energy, we have nothing: The economy relies on it; our entertainments rely on it; our schools rely on it; our comfort and lives rely on it. But the energy on which we all rely has enemies, and our colleague Ken Braun has traced them in his new report Enemies of Energy. Ken joins us today to discuss his report.

Enemies of Energy report
What’s Behind American Energy NGOs Doing China’s Dirty Work

Americans who know Cuba best—those who fled the Communist-ruled island and their descendants—loathe the country’s Communist regime, in power since Fidel Castro overthrew an American-backed strongman in 1959. Thanks to Cold War geopolitics and the political influence of those Cuban-American communities (especially those around Miami, home city of Secretary of State Marco Rubio), the United States has maintained strict restrictions on trade and travel to the island, largely on a bipartisan basis. But left-of-center activists often operate as if laws they don’t like don’t apply to them, and that any infractions will be dismissed with a wink and a nod by their “moderate” allies. And with an aggressive right-of-center government in power, that is increasingly a bad bet, as a number of radical-left activists including podcaster Hasan Piker and CodePink leader Medea Benjamin have reportedly been subpoenaed for information about their participation in the “Nuestra America Convoy” supporting the Communist regime. How much trouble are these leftist agitators potentially in? What are they doing, and who’s funding it? Stu Smith of the Manhattan Institute joins us to discuss.

Feds subpoena Hasan Piker, Medea Benjamin over Cuba trips

Hasan Piker

Code Pink (CODEPINK)

Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)

The Cuban regime’s American sympathizers

Stu Smith

Today we’ve got a very important and exciting topic to cover: The nonprofit tax return (Form 990)! Now please don’t turn your podcast dial—this actually matters way more than you think, even if you aren’t a nonprofit accountant, because 990 disclosures are so very important to discovering “Who Funds That” in nonprofit advocacy. The Trump administration has proposed major changes to the “990” that “are intended to detect misconduct and hold wrongdoers accountable.” We’ve invited our colleague Robert Stilson, who has written extensively on fixing the nonprofit tax return, to offer his ideas on what the Trump administration should do. 

Treasury Announces Form 990 Transparency Initiative to Expose Hidden Funding and Strengthen Oversight

Some Suggestions for Improving the Form 990

Thinking About Fiscal Sponsorship: The Form 990 Black Hole

Thinking About Fiscal Sponsorship: Potential Reforms

Tides Center

Seven buildings with 288 companies. Empty offices with unopened government notices in the mail slots. Convicted fraudsters vaguely warning that they know who journalists’ families are. It’s all real, and it’s all been uncovered in Columbus, Ohio, where millions of taxpayer dollars are disappearing into questionable home healthcare businesses and the state government and the businesses have few answers to many, many questions. Joining us to discuss their Ohio Medicaid investigation are Luke Rosiak, an investigative reporter for the Daily Wire, and Capital Research Center’s investigative researcher Parker Thayer.

Medicaid Millionaires

He Was Convicted For Defrauding The Government. Now Medicaid Pays His Wife Millions.

Ohio Restores Medicaid Anti-Fraud Measures After Daily Wire Investigation

Inside Ohio’s Home Health Empire: 7 Buildings, 288 Medicaid Companies, $250 Million

No One Is Safe: Homecare Fraud Schemes Are Ripping Off Americans In Every State

As working-class Americans demonstrate increasing willingness to support conservative political candidates, some ostensible conservatives—some perhaps in service to their think tank’s funders in left-wing Big Philanthropy and others perhaps in the delusion that Big Labor will lead them to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue—have argued that the path to working-class support is through union bosses’ marble and stone palaces in Washington, D.C. and other big blue cities. Today’s guest brings warnings that that way lies madness—or at least self-inflicted defeat, because those palaces still serve the Left as they have for (at least) almost a century. Today Tom Jones of the American Accountability Foundation brings the receipts, with documentation on how private-sector unions that have Republican members have been using their (often forced) dues to fund the Institutional Left.see less

Scathing report claims nation's oldest labor union 'betrayed' MAGA members through 'shocking' spending

DUKE: A Shaky Ceasefire And A Union Betrayal
Making the AFL-CIO great again: labor policy in 2026

Some local Teamsters groups announce Harris endorsements after national union declines to do so

Does Big Labor truly represent the American worker?

Big Labor sees pensions as a “weapon”

When conservatives wax poetic about their favorite Supreme Court justices from what one might call the “Federalist Society era” of Republican appointments, Clarence Thomas and the late Antonin Scalia take precedence. The oldest may prefer the late William Rehnquist, for a time the lone “originalist” on the court; the youngest may prefer Neil Gorsuch, the libertarian radical appointed by President Donald Trump in 2017. But today’s guest argues for Samuel Alito, appointed as George W. Bush’s second choice for the vacancy created by the retirement of Sandra Day O’Connor in 2005, as perhaps the most consequential of them all. Mollie Hemingway, editor-in-chief of The Federalist, joins us to discuss her latest book: Alito: The Justice Who Reshaped the Supreme Court and Restored the Constitution.

Alito: The Justice Who Reshaped the Supreme Court and Restored the Constitution

Alito: The fulcrum of the conservative Court

Demand Justice

ProPublica

Brett Kavanaugh’s Would-Be Assassin Gets Time Off for Trans Behavior

Maryland, for my sins my home state, is almost completely controlled by the teachers unions—this was proven during COVID-19, when the state had among the longest school closures in the nation. But the end of the pandemic did nothing to curb Maryland teachers unions’ ambitions, which are now focused against private education, which the unions and their allies in state government hope to ideologically compel to follow the party line. Today’s guest, Corey DeAngelis of the Heritage Foundation among other places, focuses on an effort by the union-backed state legislature to require private schools in the state to acquiesce to gender transitions—even schools that have sincere religious objections to gender transitions likely protected by the First Amendment. He joins us today to discuss what this effort by blue-state teachers-union-controlled legislatures can tell us about parental rights campaigns across the country.

Maryland’s assault on private education

Teachers Unions Extort States Unwilling to Resist

InfluenceWatch Podcast #397: Teachers Unions Target Target

BREAKING: Chicago Teachers Union just sent out curriculum for public school teachers and it indoctrinates kids by calling Trump fascist.

Hello, I’m Michael Watson joined by Sarah Lee and this is our first episode of Capital Research Center’s “Who Funds That?” podcast. I am fond of reminding anyone who will hear me that organized labor is an institutional pillar of “Everything Leftism,” the omnibus ideology of progressive-liberal-socialist politics that relies on every single issue—yes, including that one—has one right answer and every issue relies on all issues following the party line. Today’s guest, Rhyen Staley of Defending Education, found documents from the Sunrise Movement, the radical left mobilization group that has shifted focus from the Green New Deal and environmentalism toward the full Everything Leftist agenda, that further prove these ties. He joins us today to discuss his research on Sunrise Movement’s guide to planned school disruptions and the role of the teachers’ unions in supporting them.

A Sunrise Movement training guidebook calls for students to ‘take action monthly’ to ‘disrupt business as usual’ to bring about a ‘political revolution’

Newly obtained slides from a Sunrise Movement membership meeting calls for a ‘political revolution’ that includes the ‘need to structurally change the foundations of this country’ to achieve ‘Eco-socialism, [a] multi-racial democracy, and Green New Deal legislation’

A May Day 2026 Host Toolkit includes training information for a “coordinated day of action” and promotes tactics such as a school ‘walk-in’; NEA provided $1.7M in funding to organization involved with training.

K-12 Student Walkout and Protest Tracker