Meet Another Batch of Big Philanthropy–Funded Leftist Loons: The “Health Policy Research Scholars”

Key Points

• The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is a multi-billion-dollar private foundation that funds ideological “public health” activism.
• Its program to support postgraduate students interested in Everything Leftist activism is Health Policy Research Scholars, which awards recipients from “historically marginalized backgrounds” $30,000 annual stipends to support their research.
• Scholars have published work on “transfeminist pregnancy,” “the role of race and capitalism in Southern labor politics and labor organizing,” and a “teach-out” that explores “how settler colonialism manifests across sectors such as health, education, law, food systems, and media while envisioning anti-colonial futures,” among other left-wing concepts.

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Among the projects of large tax-exempt philanthropic organizations that constitute a pillar of the institutional Left in the United States is naming and funding the next generation of academics and “thought leaders.” The most famous (and, given the award amount of $800,000, probably the most lucrative) of these awards is the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s “genius grants,” which counts among its alumni such leftist luminaries as 1619 Project creator Nikole Hannah-Jones, Biden administration acting Labor Secretary Julie Su, labor activist Ai-jen Poo, and radical-left racial theorist Ibram X. Kendi. The Marguerite Casey Foundation names “Freedom Scholars” who receive $250,000 lump-sums to research such leftist causes célèbres as “feminist prison abolition, global urbanism, alternatives to movement capture, Indigenous erasure and militarized policing.”

Proving that no leftist trend in Big Philanthropy doesn’t metastasize, there is another program that funds scholars who purvey leftist ideological cant in academia. The quietly radical Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), which funds left-of-center health care policy development, has a Health Policy Research Scholars program that provides doctoral students interested in health policy with annual grants up to $30,000 over the length of their doctoral studies (or four years, whichever is shorter). Behind that anodyne descriptor is uncut Everything Leftism.

Who the Scholars Are

So, who are the RWJF’s Health Policy Research Scholars? Let the program describe them:

Health Policy Research Scholars is a leadership development program for full-time doctoral students from historically marginalized backgrounds who can connect how their background, identity, or lived experiences have positioned them to contribute to the goals of the program, including bringing unique and diverse perspectives to their research.

The emphasis on “marginalized backgrounds” is an immediate car-dealership-American-flag-sized red flag that the program is about funding Everything Leftism. (Given the Trump administration’s reinterpretations of civil rights law, it might also be a signal for investigation, too.) But RWJF can throw up more red flags. The program states:

With a vision for achieving health equity in America through policy and systems change, HPRS views leadership as a dynamic, transformative, relational process of change aimed at repairing damage from historical and structural injustices and oppression. This process is facilitated by active, ongoing collaboration rooted in shared power to design and implement equitable policies.

The Scholars’ Projects

So how does that Everything Leftist word salad that affirms so many of the principles of unclear political writing condemned by George Orwell in “Politics and the English Language” translate into work product? Exactly as a student of the radical fringe of Big Philanthropy would expect. Colin Wright, a Manhattan Institute fellow and evolutionary biologist, highlighted one such work product on the website formerly known as Twitter, characterizing it as “the most [bat emoji] [poop emoji] paper I’ve ever read.”

Carlo Sariego, a Yale University gender studies postgraduate, authored a paper for the journal Feminist Theory titled “Transfeminist pregnancy: reproductive speculation, genre, and desire.” Sariego asserts, “I argue that pregnancy is not to be defined by biological phenomena but instead as a genre of political, aesthetic, and affective experience and expectation. As a multidimensional genre of experience, rather than merely a biological datum, pregnancy can potentially establish a shared ground between trans and cis women”—whatever that means.

Such “scholarship” on what RWJF described as “the cultural, social, and historical processes of reproductive control in the United States, paying special attention to the overlap between reproductive health and gender affirming care in order to expand the potentialities for queer family making beyond ‘what we need’ and towards ‘what we want’” earned Sariego a Health Policy Research Scholarship.

I like to joke that “there is always a labor angle,” and sure enough, the Health Policy Research Scholars contains (at least) one. Resha Swanson-Varner, a postgraduate student in social work and social policy at the University of Chicago, obtained a scholarship to study how preemption laws that fix employment regulations like minimum wages and paid-leave mandates at the state rather than local level “[harm] the health and socioeconomic well-being of black, Latinx, and immigrant families, who make up a disproportionate share of low-wage workers in the South.” In practice, this effort seeks to connect the Big Labor legislative program to “health” and the many government powers “health” can unlock.

And lest I be accused of “nutpicking” (the practice of highlighting particularly insane examples to make an entire group look insane), consider one of the scholars whom RWJF itself highlighted. RWJF’s “Scholars in Action” blog highlighted the work of Melissa Horner, a University of Missouri postgraduate whose “research interests cohere around examining the social structures of everyday, ongoing settler colonialism in the U.S. while also exploring Indigenous knowledge systems that persist in Native Nations and Indigenous communities.” The blog noted that Horner created a “Teach-Out,” defined as “a free online course that engages learners on a particular topic and supports them to take action to advance the topic in their community” on “Ongoing U.S. Settler Colonialism & Native Peoples.”

Public Health’s Ideology

All Americans experienced the very sharp end of the ideological crusade that defines “public health” as practiced from 2020 through 2022 during the height of COVID-19 and the ensuing lockdown regime. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation supported the most radical wing of that crusade, making a six-figure grant to the “People’s CDC” of pro-lockdown holdouts housed at a Marxist organizing school in New Jersey. RWJF made a seven-figure grant to Alliance for Housing Justice as part of a broader left-wing campaign for a government takeover of housing.

RWJF, like the public health industry it funds, is quietly radical and seeks to make all issues into “health” issues—and perhaps, in the fullness of time, “public health emergencies” opening the floodgates of emergency powers like those abused during the COVID lockdowns. The radical scholars it has funded through nine cohorts of induction are just part of a broader effort.

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/meet-another-batch-of-big-philanthropy-funded-leftist-loons-the-health-policy-research-scholars/