INTERVIEW: Anti-DEI activist Kenny Xu running for 13th Congressional District
Anti-DEI activist Kenny Xu has announced his candidacy in the 13th Congressional District of North Carolina. Although the district has a Democratic incumbent, Wiley Nickel, the new district maps ratified by the NC General Assembly this year have shifted more Republicans resulting in a R+9 "Likely Republican" rating according to analysis by the John Locke Foundation.
Xu (pronounced "shoe") has published two books, An Inconvenient Minority: The Harvard Admissions Case and the Attack on Asian American Excellence and School of Woke: How Critical Race Theory Infiltrated American Schools and Why We Must Reclaim Them and served on the board of Students for Fair Admissions, the advocacy group whose brought lawsuits against Harvard and UNC resulted in a SCOTUS decision earlier this year striking down race based admissions policies. Xu is also the President of Color Us United, an organization we have previously highlighted in it’s efforts to combat and expose "divisive" Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) policies.
The Fight Against "Divisive Ideologies" at Major Universities in the Triangle
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity
THIS WEEK IN THE TRIANGLE (TWITT): To start with the basics, why are you running for office?
KENNY XU: Because I'm ready to take on the DEI and CRT in the federal government and stand for the ordinary American.
TWITT: Tell us a little about your history with activism and what you've been working on.
XU: I led the fight to defeat Harvard and UNC's race-based admissions policies, where they were valuing surface-level identity above merit. Most Americans, especially the hard-working Americans in North Carolina, want to be valued based on their hard work and their talent, not based on their skin color.
I'm the author of two successful books: An Inconvenient Minority) and School of Woke, where I really talk about the decline of our education system in the United States and how it can be fixed. There are state, local, and federal-level solutions: I'm going to be leading the federal level charge in education and in DEI as well.
I helped this state in taking out DEI at UNC Medical School - getting them to renounce the framework for DEI at their medical school, and changing their race-based admissions policies, and I plan on standing for that in federal office.
TWITT: Did you see Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard as going far enough in terms of banning race-based admission preference?
XU: I think that's why you need a Congressperson in office that has the experience taking on the big giants. There is so much double speak and among the big liberal institutions, like Harvard. When they're saying, "oh, we're just doing this for diversity," no, we're doing this for certain diverse people and not for other diverse people.
What I will do with Congress regarding that decision is require universities to provide an anonymized data set of the average grades, SAT scores, races of their applicants so people can really see if the standards are being lowered and raised for universities, as the Harvard case showed. And that, by the way, links into the things that I'm going to do to lower the federal bureaucracy in all sorts of areas, not just education.
I'm going to require every department level agency to do a zero dollar audit of themselves, where consumers and taxpayers get to know where they're spending their money on from dollar zero. Keeping accountability in our federal government to the American citizen is one of the essential things of what I'm going to do.
TWITT: On a scale of 1 to 10, how serious is the US debt crisis?
XU: It's a 10. The more we spend, it's going to have to paid back somehow, and it's going to be paid back by us: me, my generation - Generation X, Y, and Z. I get the spending, and where it goes, but if we want to cut the federal budget, which we have to do, if we want to solve the debt crisis, we're going to have to identify where to cut. That's why I'm going to propose this audit to start off with.
One of our big places that we spend money on is Medicare. We spend 25% on health care, and I want to make sure that we lower the costs of health care in our hospital systems as well by lowering the cost of drug prices that are being forced upon ordinary Americans.
TWITT: There's a tendency for politicians to tell people what they want to hear, but how much pain is going to be required to dig us out of that hole? Are people going to have to accept a reduction in the entitlements or the programs that they care about in order to get us back on a solid financial footing?
XU: One thing I'm not going to pledge to is, I'm not going to pledge to lower taxes. We might have to raise income taxes in order to be able to lower the cost of debt.
One of the big things I want to cut is the government spending that is financing people that are not young people; for example, 25% of Medicare spending goes to people in their last year of life. You want to ensure that it goes out gently and everything like that, but we cannot spend so much money to help somebody that's not going to be helped by more medicine and more drugs. They're going to be helped by the company of their families. That would be a sacrificial cut that would give some pain on some people, but it's necessary for us to be able to resolve our national debt.
TWITT: Whenever you have large amounts of money that are being spent, the recipients of that money have a lot to spend on lobbying to ensure that that money keeps coming to them. Do you have any plans or strategies in terms of how to effectively cut spending while you're fighting these major interests who want the spending to continue?
XU: To shine the light on them: that goes back into my activism experience, right? What did I do? I exposed college and corporate malfeasance. I exposed the way that schools are tied in with educational lobbyists and businesses. If lobbyists try to meddle within our congressional framework, I'm going to expose that. I come from a background of investigative journalism, and I've exposed people who haven't wanted to be exposed before, and I will do it, and I'm certain of that.
TWITT: In this race for that 13th district and the GOP primary, there's already four or five candidates who have announced. What are you bringing to the table that none of these other candidates are?
XU: I would say, a proven record. Anybody can say that they are conservative, but few people have actually done what I've done on a national scale to fight for conservative values.
I helped to beat the SFFA v. Harvard case. With my nonprofit Color Us United, I successfully got the Salvation Army, a $3.6 billion national organization, to back down from it's CRT framework which accused it's employees of being racist. And, I've written two bestselling books about the state of our schools and our country.
So, I actually have put my knees to grind stone and I've done the hard work, you have to earn it. You can't just say you're conservative, you have to earn it. I bring a proven record and I think voters are going to see that.
I bring energy and exuberance. I'm going to go out on tour in district 13, promoting my candidacy and I can do that in a way that older candidates cannot. And then really, I mean, I bring some fundraising heft.
I raised the second most amount of money, outside money, among all Triangle candidates. And that is without me dumping any of my money in, because I don't come from a trust fund background.
TWITT: I see you have a Bible verse in your Twitter bio, Romans 12:2. What church do you attend and what role will your faith play in how you would represent this district?
XU: Romans 12:2 - Do not conform to the pattern of this world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.
I attend Chapel Hill Bible Church, it's historically where I have attended. It's not in district 13, but it's my favorite church and I'm going to stay committed to it.
For me, that's the extension of why I'm doing all of this. Running for office is a task you really have to believe in. For me, my belief in God is what what lights up my life. It's the reason that I move with confidence because I know that he's blessed my life in this country and that he's called me to public service. That's what I did with Color Us United and that's what I'm going to do with my run for Congress.
TWITT: Is there any congressman, either past or present, that you see as a role model for how you would conduct your first term in Congress?
XU: I think Dan Bishop is awesome, he is a true committed conservative. He's running for attorney general now, but he's been a really awesome, faithful person.
The chief justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court Paul Newby is somebody I personally look up to. I've gotten to know him a little bit: he's a man of integrity, a man of kindness.
Sometimes people associate conservatism with a sort of brashness, and neither of those two men are. I'm going to bring that kindness to the House Floor as well.
TWITT: I've saved one of the most controversial questions for last: in terms of the recent Israeli-Palestinian conflict and some of the demonstrations that we've seen at UNC, or in Moore Square in Raleigh. What are your thoughts on both the US foreign policy in the Middle East?
XU: Practically speaking, Israel-Palestine is about a lot more than Israel-Palestine. Iran has interests in Hamas, lots of countries do. So if Israel just goes full bore and just completely destroys the Palestinian state that's going to anger and destabilize a lot of things in the Middle Eastern region. I do want Israel to win because that attack against Israel civilians, 1600 people, is totally unjustified. But, if we're to be the beacons of liberal democracy and freedom, Israel needs to conduct itself in a way that does not inspire their immediate neighbors to hate them even more than they already do.
So I support Israel, but I it's qualified support of Israel.
In terms of what the terms of the broader Middle Eastern region: look at the difference between Obama and Biden administration policy in the Middle East, which was endless wars and endless spending in that region, compared to the Donald Trump policy. Basically he said, OK, we have specific goals take out Al-Qaeda, take out the Taliban and that's exactly what he did.
He did one round of bombardment and he took out Soleimani and a lot of those leaders and frightened the Taliban into never attacking. As soon as he left office and we withdrew from Afghanistan, they immediately came back and took over Afghanistan.
You cannot mess around with these people, you cannot project weakness, and unfortunately that's what the Biden administration has been doing with it's dilly-dallying
TWITT: Any thoughts on the demonstrations in favor of Palestine at UNC or some of the other universities, where there seems to be an overlap with some of the leftist ideologies you have experience with fighting in your activism?
XU: These left-wingers and UNC and Harvard and other campuses have a right to free speech, they can say whatever they want. We're not going to prevent them from saying the things that they say, but one thing that free speech does is that it exposes people to how people actually see them.
When you have Harvard students say the Israeli regime is solely responsible for the violence in the region, which is what 30 student organizations said, it really makes them look silly. And it really shows how are we paying so much money to give these kids an "elite education" and they come out spewing things like this.
So, I think that it should lead to serious questions about how our higher education system really is indoctrinating and not teaching, at the very least, both sides of the controversy. They are clearly not doing that.