Intersectionality theory, what I’ve described as the “mother’s milk” of Critical Race Theory and Diversity Equity and Inclusion has become a big focus of the Legal Insurrection Foundation. Our Report, prepared jointly with the Defense of Freedom Institute (DFI), focused on the destructive symptoms, Intersectionality – The Rise of a Dangerous Anti-American Ideology and How to Stop it.I was pleased to talk about the report and some of the actions we are seeking, on DFI’s podcast, Freedom to Learn, hosted by Ginny Gentles. I really liked her style of interviewing, allowing me to explain in detail without wandering.The segment was titled Closing the Intersectionality Loophole and here is the DFI summary write up:
Intersectionality has quietly become the unseen driver behind today’s divisive education policies, anti-American sentiments, and campus radicalization, according to a new report issued by the Defense of Freedom Institute and the Legal Insurrection Foundation (LIF). William A. Jacobson, Cornell Law School professor and LIF founder, joined the Freedom to Learn podcast to sound the alarm on this dangerous ideological “mother’s milk” that feeds critical race theory, DEI, and even some acts of domestic extremism. Bill describes how teachers unions and colleges of education pushed intersectionality into K-12 classrooms. And he provides concrete actions policymakers should take to confront intersectionality directly, including executive orders and guidance, federal funding oversight, and congressional hearings.
Watch below. Transcript and content links provided by DFI.
0:00 Introduction
1:31 Understanding Intersectionality and Its Origins
5:32 The Impact of Intersectionality on Education
12:53 The Role of Teachers and Unions in K-12 Education
15:25 Intersectionality and the Rise of Antisemitism and Institutional Capture
19:20 Addressing the Intersectionality Loophole
21:23 How Congress Can End Intersectionality
23:47 Dismantling the DEI Industrial Complex on Campus
28:37 LIF’s Legal Actions Against Discriminatory Practices
34:59 Addressing the Myth that We are a Systemically Racist Society
Also available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube.
Transcript provided by DFI
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.Our organizations released a report, “Intersectionality, the Rise of a Dangerous Anti-American Ideology and How to Stop It,” that traces the development and application of intersectionality. What is intersectionality?William A. Jacobson: Intersectionality is a word that’s been thrown around for a while, but most people don’t understand it. It is, in many ways, the mother’s milk of critical race theory (CRT) and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). Intersectionality was actually developed as a fairly benign employment law doctrine in the late 1980s by the same woman who coined the phrase critical race theory. It originally developed in employment law, focusing on black women, who have two intersecting identities, female and racial, that could have multiple forms of discrimination. As an employment doctrine, it made sense, but it has morphed into a group identity doctrine, where everybody is viewed and everybody is judged based on their group identity.Intersectionality gave rise to critical race theory, which gave rise to diversity, equity, and inclusion. I teach on a campus where intersectionality is the dominant ideology. People don’t frequently use the term critical race theory, although it’s used. They do use diversity, equity, and inclusion, although they’ve run away from it. But intersectionality is the dominant doctrine on college campuses. I see that firsthand. And it is untouched by a lot of the pushback against critical race theory and DEI that we see because people don’t understand what the origin of those doctrines and those practices are.The report describes intersectionality as dividing people into marginalized or privileged categories and saying that they’re entitled to different treatment. That sounds a lot like CRT. And is that because, like you said, it’s the “mother’s milk?” It fed this CRT system?William A. Jacobson: Yes, group identity is the campus focus, and it manifests itself in critical race theory, which is a toxic term now they never like to use, but most practically in diversity, equity, and inclusion, where everybody is assigned a group identity. Those group identities are then used to build coalitions. That’s where we get into the anti-Americanism, the anti-Westernism, and the antisemitism that we see on the campuses because they view everything as people of color versus white oppressor. That’s why they consider the United States illegitimate because it is a “white oppressor society” of “coalitions of color,” as they refer to it. We need to fight back against that.
It is the poison running through the veins of the higher ed system and increasingly K-12, in which everybody identifies not the way our constitution says you should identify, as an individual, endowed by your creator with certain inalienable rights. No, you’re a member of a group. It’s essentially the balkanization of our society and the forming of coalitions along group identity, and that’s why it’s so dangerous and has given rise to these other practices.
I want to dig into two things that you said there. One, what’s happening in K-12 specifically? And then why is it so dangerous?
William A. Jacobson: I’ll give you a perfect example. [There was] a teacher we brought forward on my website multiple years ago, a white teacher in an almost entirely non-white school district in Providence, Rhode Island. She got along with the students great for 20 years. Then they switched the curriculum and brought in the CRT/DEI curriculum. They literally threw out the classic books on the shelves. They came through the classrooms and pulled them out and threw them into dumpsters and substituted propaganda pamphlets along CRT lines, white oppressor versus non-white oppressed. And she described how, in just the course of a year or two, the students turned against her, and most importantly, the students turned against their country.
In Rhode Island, they’re required to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. Now, any student doesn’t have to. Do they have a constitutional right not to? Yes. But the class needs to do it. They stopped standing for the Pledge of Allegiance and stopped reciting it. And they started to refer to her as “America.” “You’re America because you’re white. We’re not America because we’re not white.” And that’s the danger. And that’s why we’re trying to call attention to this. That’s why we’re sounding the alarm. People don’t understand that the practices that turn students against their country emanate from an ideological view that you’re a member of a racial or ethnic group. You’re not a member of the United States. What they do is, they turn students against each other. They turn students against their teachers, and they turn students against our country. You see it on the streets almost every day now, and in the news, how that has happened. And that’s why we view this as a particularly dangerous ideology, because it’s attacking our system.
Another example I’ll give you, which is mostly in higher ed, is land acknowledgments. At Cornell, every official event needs to start off with a fairly lengthy land acknowledgement. And I can sum up the land acknowledgement very quickly, although they don’t say it bluntly: “We’re an illegitimate country. We’re on stolen land. We have no right to be a country.”
This all started on the campuses, but it has moved into K-12 because we’ve graduated one, maybe two generations of students who are steeped in this ideology.
Particularly, the teachers unions are a problem. We do a lot of work both in K-12 and higher ed, although mostly my organizations are focused on higher ed. But every place we go in K-12, we bump up against the teachers unions. They push this ideology. They use their political power to make sure it sticks. They are the driving force. In K-12, we’re increasingly seeing this ideology.
Now, the good news is also the bad news. The good news is, there is substantial and meaningful pushback in red states because K-12 education is still mostly directed at the state and local level. But in the blue states, it’s actually getting worse. In Rhode Island, in New York state, it’s actually getting worse.
It’s very troubling, like the example I gave you, and we’ve documented it. And [the teacher from Rhode Island] has spoken publicly about her experiences in the system. It is really poisoning students against their country. And that’s why you see the rise of groups like Antifa. You see the rise of groups that may not speak in racial terms, but are taught to hate our country. One of the examples in the report is the Turtle Island Liberation Front. Have you ever heard of Turtle Island?
I’ve heard of it recently, both because that organization started getting some attention and a recent DFI report on graduate student unions revealed that they like to use the term Turtle Island.
William A. Jacobson: Well, congratulations, you’re one of the few people off a campus who’s actually heard of it. Anybody who’s on a campus knows exactly what Turtle Island is. It’s connected to the land acknowledgments. Turtle Island is a Native American term, and there’s some dispute about how much it was used, but the activists have seized on it. Turtle Island is what they call the land mass we call the United States and North America.
They do not recognize the United States as a legitimate entity. It is Turtle Island. It is getting back to the mythical Native American, indigenous conception of this land mass. So, Turtle Island Liberation Front is in many ways the classic intersectional group. And Turtle Island Liberation Front is in the news because they were recently, or many of them were recently arrested by the federal government for plotting various crimes and carrying out various violent crimes. Not thought crimes, actual crimes, planning to blow things up, things like that.
The Turtle Island Liberation Front was one of the things that motivated us to bring forth this report, because we don’t think the policy holders understand it. They understand CRT, they understand DEI, but they don’t understand intersectionality. And intersectionality is driving the anti-Americanism in the streets we see, the anti-Americanism in the colleges, and increasingly K-12. It’s the ideology that supports domestic terrorist groups. That’s why we issued the report, and we’re very happy DFI was able to cooperate with us on that. I feel it was a good cooperation, and we’re moving forward, and we’re calling on specific actions to be taken.
One more thing on the Turtle Island Liberation Front: a number of their leaders identify as transgender. In Washington, we tend to do things as bureaucrats, as policy wonks, in silos. So, the folks who might be thinking we’re doing the right thing on gender ideology might have no idea that with intersectionality, it all blends together and becomes this very powerful force. We can’t do the typical Washington thing and tick off boxes of actions that we’ve taken on these separate topics, on DEI, on CRT, on gender ideology, when there’s something that’s weaving it together in such a pernicious way.
With things leaving the campus and showing up in society, or leaving the campus and showing up in K-12, it doesn’t just happen. It’s not just that students happened to walk by a protest and caught the ‘feels” of intersectionality. I wonder if you have any thoughts on what colleges of education are doing to train up these teachers and to unionize the teachers so that they then go and preach this when they show up on elementary and secondary campuses.
William A. Jacobson: The colleges and the programs that train people to become teachers are notoriously the most left-wing, the most “woke” programs there are. So they’re training teachers to push these ideologies. And when the teachers get on the job, that’s exactly what they do. And so the teachers colleges, for want of a better word, are really a fundamental problem. The people who go into K-12 education as teachers, a significant portion of them have been specifically trained in these ideologies, and they’re backed by the teachers unions. And so that’s the problem in K-12. This is very heavily teacher-focused.
Many of the foundations that fund the K-12 curriculum push K-12 to racialize everything. They’re all supporting this. It is absolutely astounding how much money they seem to have. It seems to be a bottomless pit of money, despite what the media says about all the right-wing groups that are getting all this dark money. In fact, it’s just the opposite. We’re constantly astounded, and we’ve been covering education at various levels for almost 20 years now, at how well-financed even groups you’ve never heard of, groups that popped up yesterday, are. They seem to have limitless funds from major foundations, major foundations that would shock people. The Rockefeller Brothers Fund funds a lot of the anti-Israel movement in the U.S. and on campuses. You could run down a list of name-brand, large foundations that have been captured and fund all this stuff. It really is a problem. At the state level, they can make a difference. I think at the federal level, they can too, and they’re trying, but people need to understand how deeply entrenched this is.
Antisemitism is another topic that we should cover and that the report covers. You give specific examples of union-driven curriculum and materials that are getting pushed out into the schools by the Massachusetts Teachers Association, for example. It seems like a lot of these unions have Educators for Palestine, or anti-Jewish, anti-Israel, anti-Zionist factions that are very powerful. Could you speak a little to that?
William A. Jacobson: This is something else that started on campus, a push through the so-called boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement for 20 years to purge anyone who was pro-Israel from academia. That works out in various ways now in the K-12 teachers unions; Massachusetts is perhaps the most notorious. What we see constantly is institutional capture.
One thing I’ve noticed, not just on these issues, but other issues, people on the left are extraordinarily motivated. They make this their life. Their entire life becomes about being an activist. People right of center say, “I’ve got other things to do. I can’t devote myself 100% of the time to fighting these people,” but the people who are pushing this are absolutely motivated.They eventually take over institutions.
One of the first that I covered was the American Studies Association, the first major faculty organization to endorse the boycott of Israel in 2013. And they did it in classic ways. First, their members took over subcommittees. Then, they took over committees. And then the committees proposed a referendum. And then they packed the membership. They got people to join so that when it finally came to a vote, the people who joined with the existing activists were able to pass resolutions, and they were the only ones who voted. Approximately 20% of the membership voted to boycott Israel because nobody else cared. And now the institutions are completely captured.
Is this the long march through the institutions?
We’ve seen that, the long march through institutions. Absolutely. Very strategic. You take over the subcommittee, you take over the committee, you, you know, you, stock the membership with people who agree with you. And all of a sudden, you’ve captured an entire organization by 20% of the vote because most people don’t bother to vote. Now, it’s a completely captured institution.
The American Association of University Professors, which was once the gold standard for academic freedom, has been completely captured by anti-Israel activists. The president, a professor at Rutgers who’s openly anti-Zionist and an activist, now leads the organization supposedly devoted to academic freedom, and has caused the organization to scale back its opposition to systematic academic boycotts. For decades, they were opposed to that. All of a sudden, they get captured, and now they withdraw the opposition. This is a real problem, and we need to understand that we are dealing with a system where the major institutions have been captured. The question is, how do you take them back?
You’re arguing that it’s necessary to deal with intersectionality as a distinct ideology. Maybe we’ve been playing whack-a-mole as we’ve been trying to take the institutions back. Again, with dealing with things in silos, dealing with the products of intersectionality rather than the ideology itself. I think that folks in Washington, maybe in state capitals, would say, “Well, we’re already targeting the kind of discrimination that you’re talking about. We’re already targeting this kind of ideology.” How would you push back on that perspective?
William A. Jacobson: One of the things we’re calling for is to close what amounts to a loophole. The executive orders have been impactful; we can’t change the embedded system in a year, but they’ve been very impactful. DEI and CRT at the college level and to some extent K-12 as distinct ideologies are in retreat. Schools are rebranding. They’re staying away from the language. I’m not sure they’ve really changed their attitudes, but they are.
But intersectionality has been untouched, and it’s the same ideology. So what we’re calling on is for the administration to close that loophole. Closing that loophole isn’t a cure-all; it’s not going to fix everything, but it will fix a lot of the problem. It will fix the practices that we’ve documented that are going on, which are very similar to the racial and ethnic discrimination that takes place under DEI, but it’s under a different name, and it is really the source of it.
We think it would be a major step forward for the administration to close the intersectionality loophole to make the existing executive orders more effective and impactful because it will get to the underlying ideology, which still flourishes openly on campuses.
How do you see that loophole showing up in the executive orders? There’ve been these anti-DEI, anti-gender theory measures, the executive orders. What exactly is the loophole? Do you need the word intersectionality in an executive order, or is it something beyond that?
William A. Jacobson: I think it would be helpful to have that. That’s one of the things that we’re calling for: a new executive order that makes clear that intersectionality, in its various forms, is included under the definition of DEI in the prior executive orders. We’re not seeking to redo six or 12 executive orders. Just to make clear that intersectionality falls under the prior executive orders addressing diversity, equity, and inclusion. I think that would have a tremendous impact, just like those executive orders, particularly as to grant funding, federal funding, and federal contracting, all of those things have been very impactful. But to make it more complete, more inclusive, we need to include intersectionality.
We think it will have a tremendous impact, and we’re not overselling it. None of these executive orders, no matter what you put in there, can solve everything. But they do have a huge impact because what we’re ultimately seeking to do is not just to stop the discriminatory practices that take place under the rubric of these ideologies, but to change the campus culture.
We’ve been focusing on executive orders. You’re asking for administrative guidance, and Dear Colleague letters to address this, too.
William A. Jacobson: Exactly. Once there’s this executive order, Department of Education, Department of Justice, HHS, all of these different entities, we’re hoping will then offer guidance to the people who get their money, that intersectionality is included under the prior guidance when it comes to DEI discrimination. I think that will have a tremendous prophylactic impact and that people will get the message that we need to be careful here and that we need to include the vast intersectional programming that takes place on campuses and in K-12.
Who are the people you want to get the message? Because the unions aren’t going to get the message. They’re going to continue with the talking point of “CRT, intersectionality, those are legal theories that were constructed in the 80s, and they’re not taught in classrooms.” They’ll just continue with that talking point. Who are these executive orders for? Who is the guidance targeted to? And who do you think will and can take action on this?
William A. Jacobson: Well, it’s essentially university administrators, university presidents, the ones who set the agenda, the ones who approve the programming, the ones who approve the academic offerings. They need to get the message that just like they’ve been on notice about critical race theory and diversity, equity, and inclusion, discriminatory practices, they also need to keep their focus on intersectionality. Ultimately, this is going to dismantle the DEI industrial complex on campuses. I was shocked at how much of this was funded by the federal government, state funding, and private philanthropy. The administrators at the universities need to understand that they are in a unique position to change the campus culture through the programming and that if they want to continue to see the flow of federal dollars, they have to address the intersectionality problem.
As a board of visitors member of a small university in Virginia, I want to put board members on that list. I think we kind of float in this other world of not really realizing the level of control these kinds of ideologies have or their impact on the campus. Trustees need to wake up.
When you talk about the level of federal funding, that’s actually one of the recommendations in the report: “directing federal funding only towards projects and programs that produce meritorious research and education in the national interest.” In the fiscal year 2026 and 2027 presidential budget requests, the administration proposes to stop funding this stuff.
Who needs to really wake up on this? I would say Congress needs to. The administration knows what’s going on, but Congress likes to just shell out funds without thinking this through.
William A. Jacobson: Republicans in Congress need to make sure that there aren’t specific provisions funding these things. Court fights occur when the administration refuses to spend money that has been specifically targeted by Congress. So Congress doesn’t need to do anything negative. They don’t need to say, “don’t fund something.” I mean, that would be great if it happened, but it’s probably not going to happen.
Yes, earmarks and whatnot.
William A. Jacobson: They need to scrutinize these bills that come through and make sure that there’s no targeted money for these intersectional, CRT, or DEI racialized programs. The administration still has discretion on how things are handed out and what they are. And that’s why I think the departmental level would become very important because they’re much closer to the issue than the White House is, but a push from the White House to identify intersectionality as part of the problem would go a long way towards encouraging the departments to issue their own guidance.
And you’re right. I think one of the wrongly ignored components of this are boards of trustees, boards of visitors. They are ultimately responsible for the university. And they get very little attention in this whole equation. And maybe I’m guilty of that too. I focus on the presidents, and I focus on the deans and things like that.
But if they’re captured, that’s harder.
William A. Jacobson: But actually getting the boards of trustees more involved, I know it’s difficult, but I think that’s important because they ultimately are responsible for the university.
I suggest that your team swing by the annual gathering of the organization that trains the board members, because it’s very much a resist mentality there. They want to continue on with the kind of things that you’re saying are deeply unhealthy. If the board members are getting trained and encouraged to embrace intersectionality, we’ve got a problem.
Lawsuits are another tool, and one that you recommend as a way of dealing with this — lawsuits against discriminatory practices arising from these policies premised on intersectionality. What can lawsuits do? And do you have some examples of success to point to on that front?
William A. Jacobson: My organization, Legal Insurrection Foundation, has a project called the Equal Protection Project, equalprotect.org. And we’ve worked mostly through administrative remedies, because we’re talking about practices here that violate the Civil Rights Act. And that’s what we’re always clear about. We’ve never challenged a program merely because it was DEI. But most of these practices, and it’s the practices that the administration has addressed, most of these practices are, in fact, unlawful discrimination in violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 for public universities, the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, the Equal Protection Clause, and it almost always violates state law. And in every single case we’ve brought, it also violates the school’s own non-discrimination policies. So holding them to their own set of rules is extremely important.
We’ve had very good success. We’ve challenged 300 universities and colleges regarding over 800 programs. And in several hundred of them, we’ve seen the programs reworked. Now, are they doing it behind closed doors, what they’re not doing openly? That’s something that needs to be considered. I mean, and that’s a huge issue with the Supreme Court’s affirmative action decision. So that’s always a problem.
The administrative remedy is extremely important. And we had great success even under the Biden administration at the Department of Education because we challenged practices that are on their face discriminatory. The Trump administration opened an investigation into practices at the Ithaca City School District, where they had events where white students were excluded. And they literally had on the website an explanation as to why white students could not attend.
We challenged a teacher hiring program in the Providence Public School District, first with the EEOC. And now the Department of Justice has filed the lawsuit. And we’ve brought many actions. We challenged practices in the Cal State system at eight of their campuses, where there were certain practices only open to black males. They’ve since revised those.
We challenged 51 scholarships at the University of Rhode Island, which have now been taken down and are under reconsideration because they had discriminatory terms. So we’ve done this in a lot of places. We’ve done it in red states, even red states that have banned DEI. We have found some programs and challenged them. University of Tennessee, we found a program. And so this is all over the place. It’s an all-hands-on-deck situation.
We are challenging in court a New York state-funded program, STEP (Science Technology Entry Program), where the state provides funds to 56 colleges and universities to provide STEM programming for high school and middle schoolers. So far, great. The problem is the eligibility requirements were discriminatory. If you were black, Hispanic, or Native American, as a student, you were automatically eligible. But if you weren’t, i.e. white or Asian, you had to show family economic hardship. That’s now in court. We’ve survived a motion to dismiss. I believe we will win. Nothing’s ever 100%. But we should win. It’s a pretty open and shut case. But this is what we’re seeing.
We’re focusing increasingly more on state-funded programs, since the federal government is not still funding this sort of discrimination. Although we did find three openly discriminatory programs at HHS, we filed a complaint with HHS over that. It’s like trying to get soap out of a sponge; getting this racism out of the system is hard. So yeah, legal actions, whether they’re administrative or they’re court. And we focused on administrative because we found it to be a very efficient remedy. Court cases are very expensive, can go on for years. Whereas if you have an administration that’s doing its job, they can resolve these things quickly. And like I said, we even had success under the Biden administration, and we’re hoping to have even more success under the Trump administration. We have a window of opportunity, which has about two and a half years left in it. While a like-minded administration is running these agencies, the agencies need to get more aggressive on this, and they need to act on the complaints from us and DFI and other groups expeditiously, because we’re all seeking the same goal, which is a non-discriminatory educational environment. The things we say we are for, the things every single school we’ve challenged says they are for, but they’re just not doing it. And so I think lawsuits, administrative claims, all of the above.
And congressional hearings. We don’t want to totally let Congress off the hook here.
William A. Jacobson: I hope we can get a congressional hearing or subcommittee hearing on the intersectionality issue, because that’s part of the education process, the national education process. Look at what the hearings regarding campus antisemitism did. Really changed in many ways the trajectory of the education system in the nation.
We want it all. We want executive orders, guidance from departments, funding more clearly targeted to things that are civic minded as opposed to race minded, and of course congressional hearings to shine a huge spotlight on the issue. So this report, I encourage people to read it, this report lays out many choices and it’s not one or the other, it’s all of the above because the problem is so deeply embedded.
As we conclude, I love to have my guests tackle the myth that bothers them the most. So is there a myth about intersectionality that you’d want to tackle today?
William A. Jacobson: I think the biggest myth is that we are a systemically racist society. Maybe you could make that argument a hundred years ago. Maybe you could make it 70 years ago. You cannot make it in 2026. In fact, what we see everywhere is over the top, sometimes unlawful efforts to make sure we are not discriminatory. There is no embedded discriminatory agenda in our country.
Unfortunately, the fight against discrimination has led to a form of discrimination. And so that is the biggest myth I see, that we are systemically racist. But in terms of countries that have diverse populations, we are probably the least racist in the world. It is not systemic.
To the extent there is systemic racism in the education system, it’s the DEI, the CRT, and the intersectionality that are pushing it. SPLC may be the best example. It was so hard for them to find actual racism, the government alleges they created it and they funded it. And so that’s the biggest myth is that we’re a systemically racist society. It’s an insult to our society, and it’s an insult to students because it sends the message that because of the color of your skin, you might as well just give up. And that’s a really damaging sort of message. So that’s my message: we are not a systemically racist country. We’re just the opposite. We go to enormous lengths to prevent racism in this country. And that should be recognized and celebrated.
How can people follow the Legal Insurrection Foundation’s work?
William A. Jacobson: We have multiple websites. legalinsurrectionfoundation.org is the foundation’s website. We’re better known from our blog, legalinsurrection.com, which has been around since 2008, and the Equal Protection Project, which is equalprotect.org.
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