A professor hailing from China with a World Economic Forum (WEF) background is behind critical race and gender theory research on children at two of Arizona’s taxpayer-funded universities.
Sonya Xinyue Xiao teaches psychological science and performs developmental research on moral and gender development at Northern Arizona University (NAU). Xiao was a postdoctoral scholar at the Arizona State University (ASU) T. Denny Sanford School of Social and Family Dynamics (SSFD) from 2020 to 2022, where she taught until last year. NAU has Xiao on a tenure track.
Presently, Xiao is also an affiliated research fellow for the Cultural Resilience and Learning Center (CRLC) in California and a member of the Diversity Scholars Network in the National Center for Institutional Diversity at the University of Michigan (UM). Xiao’s UM profile declares her social priority on children, youth, and families, with her specific focus pertaining to that priority on gender, sexuality, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, social class, and socioeconomic status.
“[Xiao] is investigating how early adolescents’ multiple intersecting identities in gender and race/ethnicity are related to their prosocial behavior toward diverse others over time, with youth from diverse ethnic racial backgrounds,” stated her UM profile.
Additionally, Xiao has served as the programming committee member for the Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and Expression (SOGIE) Caucus of the Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD) since 2021. The SRCD has repeatedly opposed efforts to restrict or ban gender transitions for minors.
Xiao’s published research papers have declared the need for parents to raise their children to embrace gender theory in themselves and their peers, under the claim that rejection results in poor social and emotional outcomes later in life, as well as to engage their children in diverse friendships, under the claim that those as young as preschoolers can be racist.
Characteristics aligning with progressive critical race and gender theories are what Xiao defines as “prosocial behaviors” throughout her research.
Finally, the last paper I started in grad school class on #gender is out in time for #PrideMonth! I was auditing carol's gender class, and that was the semester when covid hit….The paper has been in submission for 14months! Nonpaywalled version here: https://t.co/VEHUH7WEtN
— Sonya Xinyue Xiao, Ph.D. (@SonyaXinyueXiao) May 30, 2023
Last year, Xiao contributed to a chapter entry in a book, “Gender and Sexuality Development.” The chapter expanded the understanding of gender to many gender identities.
Check out this new meta-analysis on understanding predictors of prejudice toward trans individuals 👏 The authors tested 15 predictors, all but one are important (e.g.,political orientation, social dominance orientation, religiosity, gender essentialism) https://t.co/Q16biGeq2m
Xiao’s work includes “gender integration,” which studies the differences between genders with the ultimate goal of total integration. Xiao’s team with the T. Denny Sanford School of Social and Family Dynamics (SSSFD) holds the belief that gender is fluid and not binary; they receive federal funding through the Institute of Education Sciences (IES).
Xiao’s research has also relied on participants’ self-reported gender identities. Elsewhere, her current research team’s most recent release of preliminary findings asked children “how much they think they look like girls and how much they think they look like boys,” and reported that 10 percent thought they looked like both genders, and nearly one percent believing they didn’t look like either gender.
we are doing school-based research in AZ now and ask an open-ended question "what's your gender?” and the reader/experimenter says "for example, I am a girl."
In May, Xiao’s work on gender integration was featured in an IES blog series focusing on “research conducted through an equity lens.” SSSFD professor Carol Martin said that their work aims to achieve diversity, equity, and inclusion in education. Martin further insisted that teachers need to break up naturally-occuring gender segregation in their students to encourage diversity.
“We study the importance of having diverse classrooms (mixed-gender in our case) and breaking down barriers that separate people from each other but stress that this diversity matters only when it is perceived as inclusive and fosters a sense of belonging,” said Martin. “For some students, additional supports might be needed to feel included, and we hope to identify which students may need these additional supports and what types of support they need to promote equity in classrooms around issues of social belongingness.”
— Sonya Xinyue Xiao, Ph.D. (@SonyaXinyueXiao) May 6, 2023
According to her LinkedIn, Xiao attended Tianjin University of Science and Technology before beginning her career as a teacher at Zhenguang Primary School in Shanghai, China. While at Tianjin, Xiao had two notable back-to-back volunteering stints in 2010: first, a two-month gig at the Shanghai World EXPO 2010, then a month-long gig at the World Economic Forum (WEF) Summer Davos. For the latter gig with the WEF, Xiao reported providing document and verbal translation at the Lishunde Hotel, as well as assistance to conference attendees.
China’s practice of its cultural subversion tactics on U.S. soil, especially involving children, have been widely reported over the years, most recently concerning TikTok. While the Beijing-based company behind the app pushes content ranging from the mind-numbing to dangerous to foreigners, it restricts Chinese youth to a domestic version, Douyin, which contains only educational and inspirational content. In its short existence, TikTok has become a major influence in American children’s development.
Papers published while at ASU or NAU where Xiao was the principal author are listed below:
Xiao has also contributed in over a dozen other research papers uplifting critical race and gender theories, as well as promoting “nurturant parenting,” described as inductive discipline and punishment avoidance, versus the disciplinary model of “restrictive parenting,” described as punitiveness, corporal punishment, and strictness. That paper on nurturant versus restrictive parenting further advised that white parents should avoid restrictive parenting to ensure their children behaved better toward non-white peers.
Other papers to which Xiao contributed argued that white parents who claimed to be color-blind or were displaying evidence of “implicit racial bias” caused their children to have less empathy toward Black children.
Bill Gates, the billionaire Microsoft founder who has served as a prominent advocate for prevailing narratives that fuel the climate alarm movement, set the climate debate on fire this week with a long essay signaling a major shift in direction.
Rather than continuing efforts to use atmospheric content of carbon dioxide as a global thermostat, Gates now advocates a refocusing on efforts to mitigate for the impacts of climate change and dedicate more funding to “the most effective things we should be doing to improve life in a warming world.”
Gates’s belated endorsement of an alternative approach long advocated by many critics of climate alarmism is laudable. But one must wonder what took him so long.
One argument Gates puts forth to justify his shift in narrative is, as he puts it, “surprisingly, excessive cold is far deadlier, killing nearly 10 times more.” But that only comes as a surprise to those who haven’t been paying attention to data that has long been in the public domain. Australian analyst Bjorn Lomborg, himself a believer in man-cause warming theory, has regularly made the same point for years now.
Gates also veers away from climate alarmist dogma with the recognition that “using more energy is a good thing,” because it means economic growth, slamming efforts by alarmists to deny companies the ability to produce more fossil fuels. Noting that such “keep-it-in-the-ground pressure” “has had almost no impact on global emissions,” Gates writes, “but it has made it harder for low-income countries to get low-interest loans for power plants that would bring reliable electricity to their homes, schools, and health clinics.”
More than any other aspect of Mr. Gates’s change in narrative, this statement reveals a divergence from the central goal of the climate alarm global religion. It has long been obvious that the goal has been to intentionally and massively raise the cost of all forms of energy to force the world’s masses to consume less of it, not more.
Some of the most prominent climate alarm advocates, like Bill McKibben, have long railed against affordable energy and continuing economic growth as inherent evils that must be ended to save the planet. So, this is a real bit of heresy by Gates, and it will be interesting to observe how this part of his message is received at the upcoming COP 30 climate conference and the annual World Economic Forum conference in Davos, Switzerland next January.
Gates also diverges from a prevailing alarmist talking point when he writes, “Although climate change will hurt poor people more than anyone else, for the vast majority of them it will not be the only or even the biggest threat,” he writes. “The biggest problems are poverty and disease, just as they always have been.” Again, true, but we must wonder why Gates remained silent about this reality when Joe Biden spent four years repeatedly claiming that climate change was our most existential threat?
In an interview with Bloomberg on Thursday, Energy Secretary Chris Wright noted Gates’s change of narrative, saying he has had “multiple great dialogs with Bill Gates over the last year multiple times and at some length,” adding that Gates has “done fabulous stuff in public health around the world, and I’m thrilled to see him talk in a more candid way about this issue.”
Wright added his own view that, “climate change is a real thing. It’s a real challenge. It is just not remotely close to the world’s top challenge.”
Former World Bank Group President David Malpass told me in an interview he also views Gates’s shift favorably. “I was very happy to see (Bill Gates’ new view), of course,” Malpass said. “Wouldn’t itbe good if we saw Antonio Gutierrez, the head of the United Nations, John Kerry or Al Gore understand the logic that Bill Gates is laying out? Whatever people think about the warming of the planet, what was so harmful in the climate fanaticism was they didn’t care at all about the cost or about the opportunity cost.”
It’s hard to know what motivated Mr. Gates’s sudden narrative shift on this crucial topic. Regardless, his reconsideration can only help efforts to adopt a more serious, reality-based approach to addressing the problem.
David Blackmon is a contributor to The Daily Caller News Foundation, an energy writer, and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
Arizona State University (ASU) received over $3.4 million in funds from the nonprofit founded by leading Democratic dark money donor George Soros.
The online data guru Jennica Pounds, known by her username @DataRepublican, named ASU as a recurring recipient of Soros funds as part of nearly a decade of grants from the Open Society Foundations (OSF).
🚨 Download Soros Grant Spreadsheet 💵
Ever wonder where George Soros is sending his money? 👀 I've extracted and published the public Open Society Foundations grant database in spreadsheet format. This is your chance to dig through the receipts. 📂🧾
🇺🇸 Want to follow the…
— DataRepublican (small r) (@DataRepublican) May 12, 2025
Pounds — who boasts a background as a software engineer for leading American tech companies including Amazon, eBay, Snap, and Upstart — gained recognition among Republican voters and the Trump administration for building AI tools to assist with the ongoing Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) effort to identify and eliminate wasteful or fraudulent spending.
Pounds’ latest project focused on cataloguing Soros’ philanthropic arm.
From 2018 to 2022, the ASU Foundation received $169,000 for the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College; $200,000 for the Connected Learning in Crisis Consortium; $1.2 million for the McCain Institute for International Leadership; $200,000 for improving learning amid crises and conflict; $22,000 to bring together global educational leaders, and $24,000 for the New American University.
One of OSF’s largest donations to ASU was over $1.5 million for English Second Language (ESL) at the Open Society University Network (OSUN).
Soros established OSUN in January 2020 at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, just weeks before the COVID-19 pandemic swept the world. OSUN serves as a global collaboration of universities. ASU was among the first to be included in OSUN. Of note, ASU’s page for OSUN omits any mention of Soros as the establisher of the network.
Other American universities to later join OSUN were the Bard Early Colleges of Baltimore, Cleveland, Manhattan, New Orleans, Newark, Queens, and Washington, D.C.; the Bard Prison Initiative; Picker Center for Executive Education at Columbia University; Bard College at Simon’s Rock; University of Connecticut Human Rights Institute; Talloires Network of Engaged Universities; Princeton Global History Lab; Tuskegee University; University of California’s Berkeley Human Rights Center; and the University of Pittsburgh’s Afghanistan Project at the Center for Governance and Markets.
Other Arizona-based entities to receive Soros money were:
Arizona Wins ($3.875 million);
Living United For Change in Arizona ($3.3 million);
One Arizona ($1.8 million);
Our Voice, Our Vote Arizona ($1 million);
League of Conservation Voters ($750,000);
Inter Tribal Council of Arizona ($500,000);
Community Foundation for Southern Arizona ($500,000);
Arizona Community Foundation ($400,000);
ADRC Action ($300,000);
PODER ($100,000);
Poder in Action ($75,000);
YWCA of Southern Arizona ($60,000)
Arizona Center for Empowerment ($37,000, and another $325,000 through the Center for Popular Democracy, a partner organization)
Arizona Coalition to End Sexual and Domestic Violence ($25,000);
Sonoran Prevention Works ($15,000)
Other entities were paid by OSF throughout the years to engage in advocacy in Arizona and, ultimately, influence state policies and laws. Among those who received payment for advocacy were: Invest in Education, $700,000; re:power Fund, $200,000; State Engagement Fund, $170,000; PAFCO Education Fund, $150,000; Alliance for Youth Organizing, $50,000; and Vote.org, $20,000.
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The McCain Institute played host to several “disinformation experts” in Phoenix last week, where they discussed how best to control free speech online.
These experts, Bret Schafer and Rachael Dean Wilson, hail from Alliance for Securing Democracy at the German Marshall Fund.
Schafer created and manages Hamilton 2.0, an online open-source dashboard tracking the outputs of Russia, Chinese, and Iranian state media outlets, diplomats, and government officials. Wilson was the communications director and advisor to the late John McCain.
Schafer’s Hamilton 2.0 is a continuation of his original project within Alliance For Securing Democracy, Hamilton 68, which culled data from major social media companies to identify content similarities between foreign adversaries and Americans — X when it was “Twitter” prior to Elon Musk’s buyout, Facebook, and Instagram — shortly after Donald Trump assumed the presidency in 2017. Musk paywalled X’s application programming interface, stymieing Schafer’s data stream.
Schafer was part of investigations into practices by social media companies that were weaponizing the government against right-wing citizens.
During last Thursday’s panel, Schafer said that an individual from Meta (Facebook) told him that they began to implement more “guardrails” following the Christchurch shooting, since the shooter used the company’s live-stream function, “Facebook Live,” to film and publish the attack. Schafer said that artificial intelligence (AI) was the “reverse” of efforts to implement guardrails, and expressed concern that there should be greater limitations on “problematic” online speech.
“I think the concern is this pollution in the information space, so if somebody has a narrative that’s particularly problematic it now seems as if it’s coming from 50, 100, 200,000 different sources and it can kind of drown out competing voices who are not using manipulated information to get their message out,” said Schafer.
Schafer advocated for social media companies to reduce the spread of content not originating from certain officials or media outlets. He recalled how those technology companies did some of this during the 2020 election. Schafer lamented that public perception of social media companies controlling content reach and visibility became “politicized” and controversial.
“The only way to make sure the people who genuinely want to actually access accurate information […] is for [social media companies] to make some decisions about what is and is not quality information,” said Schafer. “That has become politicized in ways that I think are really problematic so I think we do need to pressure the companies to the various mechanisms we can: advertisers, everything else to ensure at least around elections that they are taking an active role in making decisions about what should be prioritized because if it’s just left up to the algorithms we’re not going to see the good information surface at the top.”
Wilson agreed. She added that officials could rely on online influencers to spread their information. Combined with Schafer’s proposal of increasing and prioritizing reach for certain information from certain officials and experts, that may mean influencers would be incentivized to spread certain information in order to increase their visibility, engagement, and monetization.
“I think getting the influencers to encourage referencing experts is really important,” said Wilson.
Secretary of State Adrian Fontes also participated in the panel discussions.
Like the Hamilton initiative, the Alliance for Securing Democracy was founded after Trump took the White House. The organization is led by Laura Thornton, whom the McCain Institute hired in August to serve as senior director of global democracy programs.
Among its team members are David Salvo, former Obama administration foreign service officer within the State Department, and Shanthi Kalathil, former deputy assistant to the president and coordinator for democracy and human rights at the National Security Council under President Joe Biden.
Alliance for Securing Democracy used to publicize its list of advisory members until some time late last year or earlier this year.
Mike Cherthoff, formerly the W. Bush administration Homeland Security Secretary;
Toomas Ilves, formerly the Estonia president and a World Economic Forum co-chair;
David Kramer, formerly a McCain Institute senior director and W. Bush administration State Department official;
Bill Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard and former staffer for the Reagan and H.W. Bush administrations;
Rick Ledgett, formerly the Obama administration NSA deputy director;
Mike McFaul, formerly the Obama administration ambassador to Russia;
Michael Morelll, formerly the Obama administration CIA acting director;
Ana Palacio, lawyer and formerly European Parliament member;
John Podesta, formerly Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair and an official for both the Clinton and Obama administrations.
Mike Rogers, CNN commentator and formerly a GOP congressman, army officer, FBI special agent;
Marietje Schaake, formerly a European Parliament member;
Kori Schake, American Enterprise Institute director and formerly employed by the State Department, Defense Department, and White House National Security Council; and,
Nicole Wong, formerly the Obama administration deputy chief technology officer, Google vice president and deputy general counsel, and Twitter legal director for products.
This week, the McCain Institute announced it had been accepted to be featured in the competitive annual event, South by Southwest.
Last week’s full panel is available here:
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An Arizona Republican legislator is looking to present voters with an upcoming opportunity to help protect their state’s sovereignty.
Earlier this week, freshman State Representative Austin Smith announced that he had introduced HCR 2040, which is a concurrent resolution to enact and order “the submission to the people of a measure relating to public monies.”
🚨IMPORTANT BILL DROP 🚨
Should this state or political subdivisions be able to use public monies for becoming a member of an association or organization that, promotes, advocates, or plans for:
– REDUCING THE CONSUMPTION OR PRODUCTION OF MEAT OR DAIRY PRODUCTS OR REPLACING… pic.twitter.com/C3znoBLJZg
In a comment to AZ Free News, Smith said, “The public policy of this state, political subdivisions, and universities should be – public monies are not spent to join organizations that promote anti-freedom agendas listed in HCR2040. This HCR aims at the heart of what the World Economic Forum and the UN Climate Council are working to implement globally. HCR2040 is about protecting freedom. Period.”
The definition of the prohibited expenditures of public monies was laid out in the bill, as follows:
1. REDUCING THE CONSUMPTION OR PRODUCTION OF MEAT OR DAIRY PRODUCTS OR REPLACING ANIMAL-BASED PROTEIN WITH INSECT OR SYNTHETIC PROTEIN.
2. REDUCING OR REPLACING MOTOR VEHICLE TRAVEL WITH WALKING, BIKING, OR PUBLIC TRANSIT.
3. REDUCING OR LIMITING TRAVEL BY AIRPLANE.
4. LIMITING THE NUMBER OF ARTICLES OF CLOTHING AN INDIVIDUAL MAY PURCHASE OR OWN.
5. REUSING WATER THAT HAS TOUCHED HUMAN FECES AS A SOURCE OF MUNICIPAL DRINKING WATER.
6. REDUCING GREENHOUSE GAS EMISSIONS OR TRACKING AND COLLECTING OF ANY INFORMATION OR DATA FOR DETERMINING CONSUMPTION-BASED EMISSIONS.
7. LIMITING THE INCREASE OF THE AVERAGE GLOBAL TEMPERATURE OR PRODUCING OR ADOPTING A CLIMATE ACTION PLAN.
8. REPLACING PRIVATE OWNERSHIP WITH SHARED OR RENTED GOODS AND SERVICES TO PROMOTE A CIRCULAR ECONOMY.
9. FURTHERING MARXIST IDEOLOGIES, INCLUDING STAKEHOLDER CAPITALISM.
10. IMPLEMENTING MASS SURVEILLANCE SYSTEMS TO MONITOR MOTOR VEHICLE TRAVEL.
The resolution was cosponsored by Representatives Biasiucci, Carbone, Carter, Chaplik, Diaz, Dunn, Gillette, Griffin, Heap, Hendrix, Jones, Marshall, Martinez, McGarr, Montenegro, Parker, Parker, and Payne; as well as by Senators Hoffman and Wadsack.
If the resolution were to pass the Arizona House and Senate, it would be transmitted to the Secretary of State to be offered to the voters in the November General Election.
Daniel Stefanski is a reporter for AZ Free News. You can send him news tips using this link.
