More than $3 million of your tax dollars have been spent on funding a project to study microaggressions against “black women living with HIV.”
“Monitoring Microaggressions and Adversities to Generate Interventions for Change (MMAGIC) for Black Women Living with HIV,” purports to “shed light on how microaggressions and other adversities (i.e. re-occuring trauma and violence) impact HIV viral suppression among [Black women living with HIV] as mediated by mental health symptoms/diagnosis.”
The National Institutes of Health has given the project $3,405,724 since 2019, according to The College Fix’s analysis of public data.
A researcher at the Heritage Foundation says the project is a waste of taxpayer money. David Ditch, a senior policy analyst there, says that “not one penny of NIH funding should go towards studies that are so brazenly based on ideology rather than genuine scientific inquiry.”
He adds that the $3 million budget “is high for a project that involves sociological rather than medical research.”
Ditch is a former congressional budget analyst.
Ditch laments that the project will be of no use to Americans in general “because this is studying niche leftist ideological concerns (microaggressions and intersectionality) and doing so for a very small population group (less than 0.1% of Americans are black women with HIV).”
The project’s researchers wrote:
Originating from a Black feminist critique of the consequences of treating race and gender as mutually exclusive categories, intersectionality is a theoretical framework that examines how intersecting and mutually interdependent forms of power and oppression (e.g., racism, classism, cisgenderism, ableism) drive health inequities.
Ditch says this is an example of how federal health agencies routinely waste money on “ideological” studies: “Unfortunately, this grant is just one of countless examples of ideological capture in federal science agencies, who receive tens of billions in funding every year. The public and most of Congress are unaware of how much damage that these agencies do to real science, using tax dollars that the country can’t afford when the debt has risen to $34.5 trillion. The National Science Foundation regularly gives out grants promoting ‘indigenous knowledge’ and ‘other ways of knowing’ due to radical activists claiming the modern scientific method is rooted in ‘colonial’ thinking.’ The NIH approved a grant based on there being a gap in ‘gender affirmation’ for minority children, which implies that the NIH thinks more adults should be encouraging minority children to become transgender. The CDC approved a grant for ‘eradicating racism’ in HIV treatment in Oakland, CA. This was not based on evidence of bigotry (Oakland’s population is 2/3rds minority), but instead based on cross-racial differences in outcomes. The federal government is waging ideological crusade from all federal agencies rooted in the idea that unequal outcomes are caused by racism.”
The Biden administration has hosted “indigenous knowledge” seminars that warned scientists against “disrespecting” spirits.
In December 2022, the Biden administration released guidance designed to promote the use of indigenous knowledge and beliefs in federal agencies’ decisions, but also to give tribes more control over the public release of their indigenous knowledge. After the administration illegally withheld records about its policies on “indigenous knowledge,” it was sued in court. The lawsuit triggered the release of records that reveal a desire by some insiders to restrict the free flow of information.
