Me
Neeraja Deshpande is a writer and editor based in Washington, D.C., working full-time as a policy analyst for Independent Women, a center-right women’s organization where she primarily focuses on education and gender. She is also a senior contributor to IWFeatures.com, Independent Women’s grassroots journalism initiative. Her work on a wide range of topics, from K12 schools to culture to technology, has appeared in print and online in outlets including City Journal, Pirate Wires, The American Spectator, and The Free Press (where she previously worked as a staff researcher), among others.
She is originally from Massachusetts and graduated magna cum laude from all-women’s Wellesley College with a Bachelor of Arts in Russian, having also completed a minor in classical music and 7/8 of an economics major (long story).
That’s my actual professional bio, but I think it’s also worthwhile sharing what motivates my work: I started writing publicly in college, at the height of the COVID response fallout, and have made a career out of communications because I’m convinced that this country is at something of a make-it-or-break-it point, and has been for a decade at least, if not longer. Most of what I write (and think about) is motivated by that sense of urgency—that something has gone terribly wrong, and that serious people across the political aisle should be dedicating themselves to doing everything they can to help course correct, lest we find out too late that it’s, well, too late.
Primarily, I think “course correction” will involve investing in institutions and rebuilding public trust bit by bit—without condescension—in order to advance a future that’s both economically dynamic and socially cohesive, no matter how many on both right and left these days claim that these two things are at odds with each other. As I see it, the pie (so to speak) can always get bigger.
I like the Abundance Movement for this reason, and I hope it catches on with the general public as opposed to staying mostly confined to wonks and writers like me. I’m also a fan of things like Waymos and data centers and, while I share concerns about things like screen time for kids and people outsourcing their brains to The Borg, I think AI is ultimately going to make our lives and the economy better, not worse.
That’s why I’m so frustrated that certain Silicon Valley types have poisoned the well against tech by frothing at the mouth about how everyone but them is going to be in the so-called “permanent underclass” in the AI age. It’s not true, but ordinary people—the types who have mortgages and spouses and kids and don’t have the sort of wealth that allows them not to have to worry whether or not they can put food on the table—are horrified at what they are hearing and vote in what they perceive to be their interests. Goodbye data centers, goodbye Waymos. If the tech community cares about being able to continue to achieve greater heights of human progress, I believe it will be incumbent on them to invest in rebuilding trust and actually communicating with the public rather than talking down to people at best, mocking their struggles at worst.
I’ll also note that while I’ve been working on the right in some capacity or the other since 2021, and would call myself pretty solidly conservative, another firm conviction of mine is that our pluralistic, classically liberal society is one that’s worth preserving and people across the political spectrum are needed to work toward that goal.
So: these are the issues and topics generally occupying my mind these days. If you want to read more from me that isn’t already included on this website, the place where I publish most of my thoughts is, for better or worse, Twitter, which I still refuse to call X (my handle is @neerajadeshp). If you want to get to know me beyond that, feel free to contact me via the “Get in Touch” page on this website.