Rich kid radicals: Several of the Columbia and Barnard students charged in the Butler Library takeover come from elite private schools and multimillion-dollar homes, reports our Jessica Schwalb, Jon Levine, and Jessica Costescu. Meet Emma Biswas, a former robotics team leader at the $65,000-a-year Harker School in California who grew up in a $5.8-million mansion—and whose father is a senior executive at a tech firm with ties to Israel, the very country the rioters were targeting.
Joining Biswas at the May 7 library raid was Luna Firefly Deerfield Cuming Shaw, granddaughter of JFK’s self-described "unofficial photographer"; Marisol Rojas-Cheatham, a Columbia pre-law student raised in a $1.8-million Berkeley home; and Ava Ambrose Tomasula y Garcia, a Yale graduate who previously attended Interlochen Center for the Arts, a private Michigan boarding school with tuition topping $78,000. Others include students from prep schools like Horace Mann, the Putney School, and MacDuffie—all places where tuition can exceed $60,000.
One student, Sophie Elizabeth Jones, even won an "International Friendship" medal before joining the riot that injured two campus security guards.
All in all, a Washington Free Beacon review found no less than eight students charged with trespassing had attended swanky private schools.
Government funds, activist causes: Millions in taxpayer dollars are still flowing to professional associations promoting DEI, radical gender ideology, and anti-Israel activism—despite executive orders from the Trump administration meant to shut off the spigot. The fiscal watchdog Open the Books is sounding the alarm on a number of these groups, reports our Alana Goodman.
One such group, the Society of Health and Physical Educators (SHAPE) America, has raked in more than $2.5 million from the CDC and the Department of Defense’s education arm for children of American service members. SHAPE America helped draft national sex education standards that instruct teachers to introduce second graders to the "range of ways people express their gender" and, by the end of fifth grade, to teach students about hormone blockers and how to distinguish "between cisgender, transgender, gender nonbinary, gender expansive, and gender identity."
Other associations flagged by OTB include the American Psychological Association, whose member listserv featured pro-Hamas rhetoric and calls for intifada, and the National Council for History Education, which hosted a speaker who called for tearing down a statue of Christopher Columbus as part of an effort to dismantle white supremacy.
While Americans have a First Amendment right to free assembly, that doesn’t mean professional associations are "entitled to tax dollars to grow their ranks," OTB CEO John Hart told the Free Beacon. His group is urging the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to investigate.
Away from the Beacon: