Woke Has Infiltrated Our Once-Most Prestigious Honors, Part 1
The so-called "Genius" Grant has become anything but.
One very strange thing I discovered while doing research was how little so many celebrated doctors know about medical science. Interviews with Dr. Scott Atlas are rife with stories of how little Drs. Birx and Fauci knew about the subject matter about which they were advising the President.
Then there was the case of Dr. Atul Gawande. He said in a radio interview that the immunity you get from the covid vaccine is superior to that you get from getting and recovering from the disease. I think everyone who is reading this including laymen who have never taken a high school biology class knows why natural immunity confers much better protection than that horrible single component vaccine.
But Dr. Gawande clearly does not.
Gawande is a very celebrated author and surgeon and MacArthur Grant winner.. That’s the grant that is frequently called the “Genius” grant. How could a genius grant winner not know something a D student in medical school would most certainly know.
At the time, Biden was considering him for the role of Director of USAID and he had a COVID Vaccine start-up and a COVID therapeutic company going and there was a lot of federal grant money (another taxpayer-funded grant!) being given out. But if he said the wrong thing on purpose when people’s lives were at stake, and they were, that’s much worse than not knowing immunology. So we’ll assume he just didn’t know the basics of immunology.
It seems far more important to be part of the woke virtue-signalling world these days to get awarded a MacArthur Grant than it does to be a genius.
The MacArthur Fellows will receive an $800,000 grant, which is a "no-strings-attached award to extraordinarily talented and creative individuals as an investment in their potential," according to the MacArthur Foundation.
Here is a partial list of the winners of this year’s grants, and what they are doing that motivated the selection committee to give them $800,000:
Martha Gonzalez, a musician and artist from Claremont, California, has used art to build community and promote social justice.
Jennifer Carlson is a sociologist from Tucson, Arizona, who has been investigating gun culture in the United States.
Paul Chan is an artist from New York who has depicted political and social topics
P. Gabrielle Foreman is a historian and digital humanist from University Park, Penn., who has researched early African American activism.
Sky Hopinka is a filmmaker from Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, whose films elevate Indigenous perspectives.
Kiese Laymon is a Houston, Texas, writer who examines Black people's experience with violence.
Reuben Jonathan Miller is a sociologist from Chicago who has researched the aftermath of incarceration, primarily among communities of color.
Loretta J. Ross, a human rights advocate from Northampton, Mass., has worked to link social justice and human rights with reproductive justice.
Amanda Williams is an artist from Chicago whose work "uses ideas around color and architecture to explore the intersection of race and the built environment," per the foundation's website.
TK: Highlighting the lack of representation of people of color in the canon of Western art
and on and on and on.
Even the MacArthur Foundation admits that it is a far Left organization. John D. MacArthur would not be pleased to hear the money he earned in his lifetime is going to fund social justice warriers and far left causes.
This is written on the MacArthur Foundation wensite:
“Many left-of-center grantees have received more than $5 million in MacArthur grants since 1987, among them Planned Parenthood, the Population Council, the Carter Center, ProPublica, Union of Concerned Scientists, Environmental Defense Fund, ClimateWorks, and International Crisis Group.[3]
Since 2015, the foundation has focused its grantmaking on what it calls “Big Bets” — program areas that include climate change, criminal justice reform, and nuclear nonproliferation.[4]
The MacArthur Foundation also funds a Fellows Program, popularly known as “Genius Grants.” Fellowships are five-year, unrestricted “stipends” to individuals “who show exceptional merit and promise of continued creative work.” In 2017, the stipend was $625,000.[5][6] Most fellows are not noticeably political, but a sizeable minority, however, are recognized because of their left-wing political activism. Grantees have included a number of environmentalists and community organizers,[7][8]as well as at least one drag performer.[9] The left-wing weekly Chicago Reader wrote in 2015 “There could hardly be a more liberal grant than the MacArthur Fellowship.”[10]
While the MacArthur Foundation leans strongly to the left, the man whose vast wealth launched the foundation was a rags-to-riches capitalist and is typically described as conservative. John D. MacArthur, a banker and insurance salesman who was one of two billionaires alive at the time of his death, created the MacArthur Foundation and staffed its board with a number of conservatives and Republicans, including two Bankers executives, radio commentator Paul Harvey, and former Nixon administration Treasury Secretary William Simon. MacArthur’s son J. Roderick MacArthur, however, was a proud liberal and appointed more liberals to the board. By 1981, the conservatives on the board had all resigned except for Paul Harvey. The Foundation has been solidly liberal ever since.”
Here’s a video of the 2022 winners:
Did you notice that? Of the 25 winners in 2022, only two are white males. Clearly, they are biased against the demographic shared by the person who earned the money. This is extreme affirmative action as applied to awarding grants. You have to wonder whether the two white males they did select, have some other characteristic that allowed them to pass the litmus test.
I’m not putting the winners down. I’m just correctly pointing out the fact that the far left has infiltrated this once, open-to-all fellowship to the point that white male members members of society are excluded.
This is the same thing Biden did when he limited the Supreme court nominee to only 6% of the population and we got someone who couldn’t come up with even one defining characteristic of a woman.
The same thing with the Nobel Peace Prize Committee. (It has been infiltrated by the far left also.)Recall that President Obama got a Nobel Peace prize without doing anything.
Stay tuned for MacArthur Case Study #1 The paintings of Joan Snyder tomorrow and Woke Has Infiltrated Our Once Most Prestigious Honors Part 2 The Rhodes Scholarship
"Recall that President Obama got a Nobel Peace prize without doing anything."
Well, he did announce the sending of an additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan before picking up his prize.
I think they should be funding projects that improve lives. Science and biology explorations without profit motive. Too many liberal arts majors with an agenda in the list. Whiners.