We tried to warn them.

For decades, whenever liberals proposed expanding federal involvement to new domains of American life, we conservatives explained that new government powers could easily be redeployed for ends they would not like.

They ignored us, and now they are starting to pay the price.

Democratic administrations used the lever of federal funding for K-12 schools to force changes to disciplinary policies they thought were unfair to minority students. Now President Donald Trump’s administration is using that same funding to coerce schools to stop teaching what it calls “radical, anti-American ideologies.”

In the recent past, federal bureaucrats used federal money to prod universities to reduce procedural protections for students accused of sexual misconduct. Now they’re using that money to make the universities end their diversity, equity and inclusion programs. (Yes, the very kind of programs that federal........

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