Author: Washington Free Beacon

A Chinese-American academic who was wrongly imprisoned in Iran for more than three years said the Biden administration’s likely nominee to serve as the next Iran envoy “played no positive role” in securing his release.

Xiyue Wang, who spent more than three years in an Iranian prison before being freed by the Trump administration in 2019, raised numerous concerns about reports that President Joe Biden is set to tap Robert Malley as his new envoy to Iran. Malley, a veteran foreign policy hand, was fired from former president Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign after it was revealed he held unauthorized talks

Welcome back to Campus Insanity, a weekly roundup of the craziest developments at our nation’s 4,000-plus institutions of higher education.

6. Mellon Foundation Donates Millions to Universities to Study ‘Nation’s Racist Past’ | Inside Higher Ed

Brown University, Columbia University, and the University of California, Berkeley are among a handful of the country’s top schools that will receive a total of $72 million from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s “Just Futures” grant program, which aims to create “solutions-based work that contributes to public understanding of the nation’s racist past and can lead to the creation of socially just futures.”

5.

A Virginia teachers’ union says students should not return to the classroom until they all receive a COVID-19 vaccine—a threshold that may be impossible to reach given the FDA’s current age restrictions for available vaccines.

During a Fairfax County Public Schools board meeting, the president of the district teachers’ union said students should receive the COVID-19 vaccination before full-time, in-person instruction resumes. Many of the school district’s students, however, are unable to receive the vaccine—Pfizer’s vaccine is only authorized for individuals over the age of 16, and Moderna’s is only available to those over 18.

“The timeline and return to

An executive order on LGBT rights signed by President Joe Biden on Wednesday signals the start of a bitter cultural clash that will loom large over his presidency.

Biden’s directive broaches almost every aspect of domestic policy, from housing to refugee resettlement to transgender student athletes. The order requires every federal agency to make clear that civil rights laws banning sex discrimination also ban discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity, citing the Supreme Court’s landmark gay rights ruling in June 2020.

Since the start of COVID-19 in 2020, journalists and other Democrats have taken it upon themselves to snitch on anyone (meaning Republicans) who didn’t wear a mask and promptly accuse them of recklessly endangering the lives of others.

WATCH: You Can Run But You Can’t Hide From the Media Mask Police

Now that Joe Biden is president, it appears that snitching is no

Colorado senator John Hickenlooper (D.), who fought off attacks regarding his close ties to lobbyists during his campaign for U.S. Senate, has hired a top financial lobbyist as his chief of staff.

Kirtan Mehta, Hickenlooper’s new chief of staff, comes to the job from his perch as a lobbyist for the stock trading app Robinhood. Prior to his work for Robinhood, Mehta worked as senior vice president for congressional relations for the American Bankers Association lobbying Senate Democrats. He entered the lobbying field after several years working for Sen. Joe Manchin (D., W.Va.), where he was an

Planned Parenthood stands to recover tens of millions of dollars in federal funding as the Biden administration moves to reverse Trump policies that cut off its access to taxpayer dollars.

The organization lost $60 million in 2019 alone after withdrawing from the Title X Family Planning Program, which uses taxpayer funds for contraceptive services to low-income individuals. When the Trump administration changed the policy to exclude any organization that participates in abortion, Planned Parenthood withdrew from the program.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) is demanding the Biden administration’s Department of Homeland Security explain its decision to end the deportation of illegal immigrants, which could include those convicted of violent crimes, rape, sexual assault, and other felonies.

Rubio calls for immediate clarification on a directive issued this week mandating “an immediate pause on removals of any noncitizen with a final order of removal,” in a letter sent Friday to David Pekoske, acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. Rather than deporting illegal immigrants, DHS said on Wednesday it will focus on processing immigrants along the Southern border and

A total of 124 members of the Democratic caucus in Congress voted to grant a waiver allowing former Army general Lloyd Austin to serve as President Biden’s defense secretary, after voting against granting the same waiver to former Secretary of Defense James Mattis when he was nominated four years ago.

A 1947 law prohibits former service members who have fewer than seven years of experience after military retirement from leading the Pentagon without a waiver. Due to Austin’s recent service in the military—the former CENTCOM commander has only been retired for five years—he required a special waiver from Congress to

Reporters at a Norfolk, Va., newspaper warned Thursday of their white “privileges” and “blind spots” in a newly launched series on the city’s “racial divisions.”

In a tweet announcing its “Dividing Lines” project, the Virginian-Pilot stated, “For full disclosure, the people behind this reporting are white and benefit from numerous privileges that the disadvantaged populations highlighted in this project do not, ‘So we have blind spots.'”