DEI 4

ESTB 1 25

MERRI OK

see pjt 2025 doge coup cut usaid b/c gay opera? DOES NOT ALIGN WITH PRIORITES = XO? VOUGHT OMB SEE PUBLIC HEALTH

fcc CARR JIHAD IN THE NAME OF CIVIL RIGHTS

SEE TRUMP BASE WHITE GREIVANCE REVERSE DISCRIM

see crt rufo reboot censor 3

SEE ACADEMIC SUPPRESSION FLORIDA

SEE WWW MEMORY HOLE HEGSETH SMITHSON BURGUM

SEE KIRK

see APARTHEID

AFT UNION SUES TRUMP

aha // commie just all purpose devil term? // woke? not definable? no evidence needed?

asxz?

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MMA

New report highlights systemic failures behind DC plane crash that right-wing media blamed on DEI

The incident illustrated how right-wing media rush to establish a political narrative before facts emerge in the wake of tragedy

Written by Courtney Hagle

:{Published 02/18/26

In January 2025, newly inaugurated President Donald Trump kicked off his presidency by attributing a deadly midair collision in Washington, D.C., to diversity policies. Right-wing media quickly followed suit, offering an early glimpse of how the administration and its allies would confront tragedies on their watch: by pushing politically charged narratives ahead of verified information. Now, a new report highlights how “multiple failures across different parts of the government” were responsible for the crash, citing eight main factors none of which included DEI initiatives.

The day after the crash between an American Airlines jet and an Army Black Hawk helicopter that killed 67 people, Trump and his administration pointed to DEI policies as part of the cause, claiming that a group within the FAA had “determined that the [FAA] workforce was too white” and signing an executive order ”aimed at undoing all of that damage" from “Biden administration's DEI and woke policies.” Trump further claimed, “We want the most competent people. We don't care what race they are,” even as he admitted that “we don’t know” what caused the crash but that “common sense” helped him reach his conclusion.

Right-wing media fell in line with the Trump administration’s effort to essentially blame the crash on the hiring of women, nonwhite, and disabled people through diversity policies. Fox News host Sean Hannity claimed that the crash “is why DEI can be dangerous.” Fox News host Will Cain claimed, “DEI is a policy that exacerbates human error.” Fox News host Jesse Watters used the tragedy to say people should be “suspicious” that DEI plays a role in disasters. He continued, “When DEI is in place, which it was at the FAA, standards get lowered, staffing's affected.”

Scapegoating DEI was not a new tactic for right-wing media, which had previously blamed DEI for the 2024 Baltimore bridge collapse, the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires, and ongoing issues with Boeing planes.

Now, a new report highlights how “multiple failures across different parts of the government” were responsible for the crash, citing eight main factors, none of which included DEI.

The attempts to cynically exploit the crash were just a preview for how MAGA would handle tragedies in Trump’s second term. In the past year, conservative media lied about the ideological profile of a man who killed Democratic Minnesota state Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband; covered for the Department of Homeland Security’s repeated immigration abuses that included the killing of two Minnesotans; and baselessly targeted an innocent Palestinian student after a shooting at Brown University.

In each of these incidents, the Trump administration and its media allies moved quickly to establish a political narrative before facts were established, which often takes time and investigation. The result was a cycle in which speculation hardened into talking points, shaping public perception before a full and careful accounting of the truth could take place. By the time the actual facts came to light, the narrative was set and right-wing media had already moved on to the next outrage cycle.

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MMA

TPUSA spokesperson links diversity efforts to the Potomac River sewage leak: “White men created Western civilization”

02/18/26

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AN 2 26

PsyPost reports that a new study published in the journal Advances in Psychology suggests that White people who personally perceive themselves as ranking at the bottom of the racial economic hierarchy or “tied” with Black Americans were the most likely to support President Donald Trump.

Previous research identified a phenomenon known as “last place aversion,” where people fear being at the very bottom of a social hierarchy — and Trump voters apparently feel the sting of smallness more acutely than others, whether or not they are actually at the bottom rung of the ladder.

Surprisingly, researchers found that these attitudes were not driven by actual poverty. The researchers controlled for objective indicators of socioeconomic status, such as income and education levels. They found that belonging to the “last place” profile predicted Trump support and anti-DEI attitudes regardless of how much money or education the participant actually had.

“We … [expected] a subset of non-Hispanic, white Americans who feel ‘last place.’ That said, we expected this profile to be more likely among working class individuals,” Cooley told PsyPost.“However, perceiving oneself to be ‘last place’ was not associated with the lowest objective income nor the lowest objective education among the White Americans in our samples.”

The United States currently exhibits a significant racial wealth gap with economic statistics consistently showing that the average white family holds considerably more wealth than the average Black or Hispanic family. But despite this reality, surveys indicate that many white Americans feel they are “personally falling behind” in terms of status without realistically weighing the resources at their disposal.

“This line of research was motivated by recent political trends among some white Americans, including support for DEI bans, alignment with alt-right ideology, and endorsement of political violence in pursuit of political goals (e.g., January 6th),” said study authors Erin Cooley and Jazmin Brown-Iannuzzi, associate professors of psychology at Colgate University and the University of Virginia, respectively. “Many of these attitudes are not only extreme but also anti-democratic, raising questions about how such views can coexist with identities centered on being ‘most American’ (e.g., white nationalist belief systems).”

The tool researchers used to assess personal status was a box measure called the “Perceived Self-Group Hierarchy.” Participants viewed a diagram representing a status ladder based on money, education, and job prestige, and they were asked to place markers representing themselves, white people, Black people, Asian people, and Hispanic people onto this ladder.

Researchers found a consistent link between this “last place” profile and specific political views.

“White Americans who fit this profile reported the highest levels of support for Donald Trump throughout the campaign season. They also expressed the strongest intention to vote for him. When surveyed the day after the election, this group was the most likely to report having cast their ballot for Trump,” PsyPost reports.

This same group of insecure white people also showed “the strongest opposition to DEI programs, favoring policies that would ban such initiatives in universities.” Additionally, they showed higher alignment with alt-right ideologies, agreeing more frequently with statements such as “White people are generally under attack in the U.S.” and “The government threatens my personal rights.”

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AN 2 26

Teacher sues after GOP policy labels 'everyone is welcome' sign as anti-Trump resistance

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Newsmax host complains about Lupita Nyong'o playing Helen of Troy: “Forced diversity has made its way into the film”

02/03/26

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an 12 25

Donald Trump's Department of Justice is getting in on the push to force diversity programs out of American businesses with a "novel" interpretation of an 1863 fraud law, but an analysis from MS NOW found that this new "bullying" tactic amounts to "a complete waste of resources."

According to a recent report from the Wall Street Journal, the DOJ is now attempting to use the 1863 False Claims Act to go after companies that receive government money through federal contracts to make sure they do not have "diversity, equity and inclusion" programs in place. The report specifically singled out Verizon and Google's parent company, Alphabet, as some of the initial targets.

Trump issued an executive order in March calling for the end of all DEI initiatives in the federal government. His administration has also been aggressive in targeting such programs at private businesses with any means available to it, and major companies like Amazon, Target and Paramount opted to roll them back in response.

Examining the new legal tactic at the heart of this push, MS NOW's Hayes Brown explained that the False Claims Act was first introduced to take on defense contractors attempting to bilk the Union government for more money during the Civil War. Recently, it's mostly been used to go after healthcare companies suspected of overcharging the federal government.

This new intended use of the law by the Trump administration, holding companies liable and potentially leveling fines against them for having DEI programs in place while taking government money, would be a "novel" interpretation, Brown wrote, and one that "hasn’t been tested in court and could easily fall flat." Still, he argued, "the mere fact that DOJ is pursuing this route is chilling in and of itself."

Brown also noted that, by utilizing this novel approach to the False Claims Act, the Trump administration is shifting responsibility for its anti-DEI crusadeonto the DOJ from the department's civil rights division to its fraud division, which has been ordered to "aggressively" pursue the matter. Aside from being "clear politicization of the legal system," Brown also argued that it represents "a major waste of resources" for the DOJ, which has recently "been struggling with its workload" under Attorney General Pam Bondi's remaking of the department.

"Even if the cases go nowhere, or don’t result in charges, businesses with less money than Google may step up efforts to roll back their diversity programs," Brown concluded. "MAGA pours a lot of resources into achieving its goals, but it prefers that its targets for bullying comply in advance."

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an 12 25}:

Visitors to an American military cemetery in the Netherlands are pushing back following the removal of plaques honoring Black veterans of World War II, according to an NBC News report, seemingly done as part of Donald Trump's anti-diversity crusade.

Per the report, "visitors have filled the guestbook with objections" since the plaques came down earlier this year at the visitor center for the American Cemetery in Margraten, Netherlands. The two displays honored Black soldiers who took part in the war effort and helped liberate Europe from Nazi control. Operated by the American Battle Monuments Commission, the cemetery is the final resting place for around 8,300 American soldiers.

As NBC noted, the cemetery's graves themselves were dug by an all-Black contingent of soldiers.

"One display told the story of 23-year-old George H. Pruitt, a Black soldier buried at the cemetery, who died attempting to rescue a comrade from drowning in 1945," the report explained. The other described the U.S. policy of racial segregation in place during World War II. Some 1 million Black soldiers enlisted in the U.S. military during the war, serving in separate units, mostly doing menial tasks but also fighting in some combat missions. An all-Black unit dug the thousands of graves in Margraten during the brutal 1944-45 season of famine in the German-occupied Netherlands known as the Hunger Winter."

Emails obtained by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) and Dutch News confirmed that the decision to remove the plaques was in direct response to Trump's executive order targeting "diversity, equity and inclusion" programs, an order which has since impacted a wide array of displays, memorials and programs honoring African-American history.

US Ambassador to the Netherlands Joe Popolo -- one of the many wealthy businesspeople and GOP megadonors named to European diplomatic roles by Trump -- spoke out in support of the removal, arguing that the "signs at Margraten are not intended to promote an agenda that criticizes America."

The displays were reportedly removed without any public notice, prompting anger from visiting Americans, as well as local officials and residents. One local who spoke out against the removal to NBC News was 79-year-old Cor Linssen, the son of a Black US soldier and a Dutch mother. Linssen, along with a group of other children of Black US soldiers, visited the cemetery to view the plaques together back in February.

“It’s an important part of history,” Linssen said. “They should put the panels back.”

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MMA

Fox News contributor blames DEI for shooting deaths at Brown University

Nicole Parker: “I believe that Brown University's prioritization was not on the safety and security of their students. They were more focused on things like DEI efforts, and that has been catastrophic and led to the death of two students.”

Written by Media Matters Staff

:{:{Published 12/17/25}:

Video

Citation

From the December 17, 2025, edition of Fox News' The Faulkner Focus

JULIE BANDERAS (ANCHOR): What does this video say to you, and how shocked are you, first of all, that this video has produced nothing? I mean, nobody has come in, as of this video being released, for questioning.

NICOLE PARKER (FOX NEWS CONTRIBUTOR): I'm actually not shocked at all because I know that Brown University is now trying to defend their posture on their security statements that they have made. But it's been an epic fail, the fact that there is no security footage from the campus and that the justification was it was an older building. Both the attorney general and the police chief of Providence police department have said we have no video surveillance. That is inexcusable. I believe that Brown University's prioritization was not on the safety and security of their students. They were more focused on things like DEI efforts, and that has been catastrophic and led to the death of two students.

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an 12 25

Washington Monthly writer Anne Kim reports the president and former star of “The Apprentice” vowed to “reach and surpass 1 million new active apprentices,” before surrendering his commitment to funding cuts, grant cancellations, and layoffs.

Trump directed the Department of Labor to deliver his commitment to surpass 1 million new active apprentices within 120 days in an April executive order, but Kim reports that deadline has passed, “with no evidence of progress or even a plan to reach the one-million apprenticeship milestone.”

“Instead, drastic layoffs, funding cuts, and a purge of ‘DEI’-related initiatives have sabotaged the emerging apprenticeship movement. Growth in apprenticeships is at its slowest in years, far more sluggish than during Joe Biden’s administration or even [Trump’s] first term,” said Kim.

“I don’t see them getting to 1 million apprentices till 2032,” Former Department of Labor senior staffer Nick Beadle told Kim.

The number of new apprentices has grown by only about 3 percent so far, according to Zach Boren, Senior Vice President of Apprenticeships for America and the former chief of registered apprenticeship and policy for the Department of Labor.

“We’ve got a White House that has really good talking points on apprenticeship, but no road map,” Boren said.

“One major problem: the gutting of the DOL’s Office of Apprenticeships, first by Elon Musk’s DOGE initiative, and then by the exodus of key staff,” said Kim. “There’s literally no one available to write a plan, let alone implement it.”

The office lost its national director and several division chiefs, and staffing levels are down by as much as 30 percent, according to Boren. The website for the national office lists just three people, all of them designated as working in an “acting” capacity.

“The Department of Labor, and especially the Office of Apprenticeship, are running on fumes,” said Boren.

The Trump administration has also paused or canceled grants for apprenticeship programs and apprenticeship research, which means fewer resources for recruiting and preparing candidates, helping employers and community colleges launch programs, or evaluating their effectiveness.

In fact, at least $30 million in funding appropriated by Congress last year was never spent and has expired, said Beadle.

Meanwhile, Trump’s executive order “Ending Radical and Wasteful DEI Programs,” has purged websites, data, and programs perceived to promote diversity. And the administration canceled dozens of grants under the Women in Apprenticeship and Nontraditional Occupations (WANTO) program established in 1992 by President George H.W. Bush.

“Much as he did on his show, Trump seems to favor a particular kind of apprentice,” said Kim, pointing to a recent Department of Labor social media campaign featuring what’s “presumably Trump’s ideal: a blond, broad-shouldered, AI-generated Aryan avatar ripped straight from the manosphere, with a chiseled jaw and a cleft chin.”

Historians say the style of the DOL posts evoke “historical government propaganda, including posters from New Deal-era America and fascist Europe,” but Kim said propaganda is probably the most Trump’s commitment to apprenticeships will amount to.

“Like so many of his promises to his working-class base, ‘one million apprenticeships’ will likely prove hollow,” Kim said.

Read the Washington Monthly report at this link

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no lnx

The true risk behind Trump's purges

Thom Hartmann November 14, 2025

The American media refuses to call them out, so I guess the job falls to me: you can cut the racism with a knife, it’s so thick. With the Trump administration, the Confederacy is actively rising again, using the Lost Cause mythology/lie as its basis.

Trump this past week, apparently just in time for Veterans Day, erased tributes to Black U.S. soldiers who died fighting fascism — removing displays and plaques honoring African American liberators in Europe and removing similar memorial content at home — not merely to rewrite history but to say that only white men’s stories matter.

First, he claimed that brown-skinned people from south of the border were “murderers and rapists,” openly promoting racist tropes and activating enthusiastic bigots all across America to his side.

He whipped up a white mob who attacked the Capitol building and beat Black Capitol Police officers, while he watched on TV with apparent glee. He then pardoned all of them.

He reinstalled the statue of notorious Klan member, traitor, and Confederate general Albert Pike, while removing references to the horrors of slavery or early American presidents’ slaveholding from national parks and other federal monuments.

Trump’s white supremacists removed references to Black and female soldiers’ sacrifices from the Arlington Memorial Cemetery website.

Meanwhile, “Whiskey” Pete Hegseth is sweeping out senior‐level military leaders — women and people of color disproportionately — for daring to exist in leadership, and has ended military recognition of Black and women’s history events.

Trump’s henchman Russell Vought is finishing DOGE’s purge of Civil Service protections and DEI programs, with Black men and women especially hit hard.

This isn’t mere bureaucratic housekeeping: it’s the return of a white-male-supremacist architecture taking root in the GOP and the administration with echoes of the old Confederacy and the masked Klan in modern uniforms and executive orders.

But the even larger issue here is not only the racism: it’s the systematic assault on democracy and diversity itself. This is not just about statues or plaques or websites. It’s about the rewriting of our national identity, the redefinition of who counts as American, and the hasty, one-presidential-term reconstruction of a two-tier democracy: one for white men and one for everyone else.

Democracy depends on memory. When we lose sight of who fought, bled, and sacrificed to make this country more just, we lose our understanding of what democracy is supposed to mean. By erasing Black liberators, women leaders, and the long, painful march toward equality, this administration is saying: Only one story matters: the white, male, Confederate one.

That’s not just historical revisionism; it’s political weaponry. It’s a way of teaching future generations that the only people who truly belong in the story of America are white men with power.

This is how authoritarianism takes root, not just through violence, but through erasure. When diversity and equality are scrubbed from public memory, when entire groups of Americans are made invisible, it becomes easier to justify their exclusion in the present.

And once exclusion is normalized, democracy itself begins to die.

This Confederate revival we’re witnessing is not nostalgia: it’s a blueprint. The Lost Cause myth was always about rewriting defeat as heroism, slavery as benevolence, and white dominance as divine order.

That same logic is now being reinstalled at the highest levels of government. It’s an ideology that says equality is a threat and diversity is an invasion. It recasts white resentment as patriotism and paints those demanding fairness as enemies of the state. It’s why Hegseth condemned DEI in front of his generals and admirals and Trump and Fox “News” constantly rail against it.

But democracy, real democracy, cannot coexist with white supremacy. The two are fundamentally opposed.

Democracy requires inclusion, the recognition that every person’s voice and dignity matter. Diversity is not a “side issue” or a “political correctness” distraction; it is — as Ronald Reagan pointed out (ironically) — the very mechanism that keeps democracy alive. Reagan famously said (and Trump now repudiates):

“This, I believe, is one of the most important sources of America’s greatness. We lead the world because, unique among nations, we draw our people — our strength — from every country and every corner of the world. And by doing so we continuously renew and enrich our nation.

“While other countries cling to the stale past, here in America we breathe life into dreams. We create the future, and the world follows us into tomorrow.

“Thanks to each wave of new arrivals to this land of opportunity, we’re a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas, and always on the cutting edge, always leading the world to the next frontier.

“This quality is vital to our future as a nation. If we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost.”

A government that silences or excludes women, Black people, immigrants, and other marginalized voices is no longer democratic and no longer looking or striving toward the future. It is frozen, stale, hierarchical, authoritarian, and fragile.

When the Trump administration erases diversity from its institutions — by firing people of color, ending DEI programs, banning the celebration of women’s history or Black soldiers’ sacrifices — it is not just discriminating. It is redefining the nation’s soul.

It is saying: only white male Americans count. Only they deserve to be remembered. Only they deserve to hold power, control wealth, and lead.

That is a true danger.

It’s an attempt to create a pseudo-democracy that exists in name only, one that maintains the trappings of elections and laws but has hollowed out the moral core of equality beneath them that upholds and sustains our republican system.

If this continues unchecked, we won’t simply be facing a rollback of rights; we’ll be watching the slow, deliberate dismantling of this noble 249-year democratic experiment itself.

And so, we must fight, not just for memory, but for meaning. We must insist that our national story remain whole and honest. We must demand that the sacrifices of every American — Black, brown, white, female, queer, immigrant — are honored, taught, and celebrated.

Because democracy without diversity is tyranny in disguise.

All Americans of conscience and goodwill must demand an end to these purges of women and minorities in memorials, jobs, the military, and civil service.

We must demand that our politicians stand up to Trump and his white supremacist lickspittle’s while insisting on a return to our foundational promise: equality, equal opportunity, and recognition for every person who serves and sacrifices.

Because if we don’t stop them now, the erasures become the new normal and our children will wake up in a country that no longer remembers it ever stood for freedom at all.

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GGL 11 25

AI Overview

Russell Vought, as OMB director under the Trump administration, prioritized ending DEI initiatives in the federal government through executive orders

. Key priorities included terminating DEI programs and positions, eliminating DEI-related requirements for federal contractors, and shifting federal employment back to a focus on merit-based practices rather than DEI preferences. This was part of a broader effort to end what the administration termed "radical and wasteful" government DEI programs.

Federal government priorities

Terminate DEI programs: The administration directed the termination of all federal DEI programs, offices, and positions.
Coordinate termination: The Director of OMB was tasked with coordinating the termination of discriminatory programs.
End equity-related grants: The administration moved to end all "equity-related" grants or contracts.
Promote merit-based practices: Federal employment practices were to be refocused on individual initiative, skills, and performance, rather than preferences based on race or sex.

Federal contractor priorities

Eliminate internal DEI: Federal contractors were required to certify compliance with federal anti-discrimination laws and to eliminate internal DEI efforts.
Cancel affirmative action: Affirmative action requirements for federal contractors were canceled.
Encourage private sector: The Attorney General was tasked with recommending measures to encourage the private sector to end illegal DEI discrimination and preferences.

Broader context and other related priorities

Limit federal power: Vought has been associated with plans to reduce the size and scope of the federal government and has expressed support for curtailing federal authority, notes the Union of Concerned Scientists.
Challenge equity: Some of the initiatives were framed as part of a broader effort to challenge the principles and practices of DEI.
Enforce biological sex: The administration also sought to establish a federal policy of two genders only, influencing policies related to gender identity and sex in healthcare and employment.

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OMFG PUBLIC HEALTH WOMEN SHELTER

an 11 25

When President Donald Trump posted a satirical music video on social media in early October depicting his budget director, Russell Vought, as the Grim Reaper lording over Democrats in Congress, public health workers recognized a kernel of truth.

Vought has exerted extraordinary control over government spending this year, usurping congressional decisions on how the nation’s money is used. His push for more layoffs during the government shutdown is only the latest blow, following months of firings, canceled grants, and withheld funds.

By cutting and freezing public health funds, in particular, the Trump administration has already begun to undercut efforts to provide medical care, outbreak response, housing assistance, and research across the U.S., according to health officials, nonprofit directors, and federal agency staffers interviewed by KFF Health News.

Since most federal funds for public health flow to states, Vought is rivaling the Department of Health and Human Services secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., in his ability to upend government-led efforts to keep Americans healthy. In Texas, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention funds to stem a measles outbreak weren’t available until after the crisis had subsided and two children had died. A project to protect Alabamans from raw sewage and hookworm was abandoned. People with HIV have had to delay medical care as clinics scale back hours. Time-dependent surveys on HIV and maternal mortality were halted. Food banks have canceled events. Tobacco prevention programs lapsed. Initiatives to protect older adults at risk of falling have been harried.

No matter what budget Congress ultimately passes for next year, the Trump administration may continue to thwart financial support for such programs in ways that will harm people’s health. “The White House has shown that they are willing to unilaterally exert control over funding,” said Gillian Metzger, a constitutional law professor at Columbia University.

“This is a huge deal,” she added, “because the power of the purse is central to Congress’ ability to shape and direct policy.”

Before he was appointed to lead the White House’s Office of Management and Budget this year, Vought outlined budgetary strategies the executive branch could deploy to wrest power from Congress and federal agencies in Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s conservative blueprint.

Vought’s tactics unfolded this year, often below the radar. They include abrupt grant cancellations, extraordinary constraints on how funds can be spent, and excessive layers of review, agency officials say, at every step in the grantmaking process. Getting money out the door has been further complicated by layoffs that have gutted offices overseeing grants on chronic disease prevention, HIV, maternal mortality, and more.

Government employees have described these tactics to members of Congress, said Abigail Tighe, executive director of the National Public Health Coalition, a group that includes current and former staffers at the CDC and HHS. “We want Congress to act, because this is preventing states and communities from doing critical public health work to keep our country safe,” she said. “If they don’t have capacity, we all collectively suffer.”

Democrats on the House and Senate appropriations committees have pushed for transparency, but the extent to which money Congress appropriated for public health in 2024 and 2025 has gone unspent because of the administration’s disruptions is not yet known. “This is a sophisticated strategy to cause money to lapse and then say, ‘If they can’t spend it, they don’t need it,’” said Robert Gordon, a public policy specialist at Georgetown University and a former assistant finance secretary at HHS.

“No one thought this was possible or legal, but that is what’s happening,” he said.

Details on how the administration has subverted health spending have received little attention because many changes have been made quietly — and people who rely on federal funds fear retribution. The Trump administration has defunded and threatened federal offices that hold the government accountable and fired whistleblowers. It has abruptly revoked funds for local governments and organizations.

Vought and spokespeople at the White House and the OMB did not respond to queries from KFF Health News. However, Vought described his intentions in VID] a. He said that federal agencies and Congress had gained more power over spending since the 1970s and that their control became “woke and weaponized” under Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

“Thankfully, President Trump won,” he said. “And we have now been embarked on deconstructing this administrative state.”

Many Parts, Many Malfunctions

Like a car, the federal budget process has many components that can break down. Through the OMB and its partner, Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, the administration has intervened at various junctures. “There are so many ways in which money is not operating in the way it is supposed to operate,” said Bobby Kogan, the senior director of federal budget policy at the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank, and a former OMB adviser.

Typically, Congress passes a budget that appropriates money for the next fiscal year to federal agencies. For many public health programs, ranging from housing assistance to cancer screening, agencies then post open calls online for states, local governments, and organizations to apply for funding. Agency experts select winners and send notices of awards — or notices of ongoing funding to groups that previously won multiyear awards.

Next, the OMB, which administers the federal budget, activates money for agencies, like a bank activates a credit card, so that grantees can spend and get reimbursed rapidly. Auditors keep an eye on spending, but the government has in the past limited interruptions so that programs run smoothly.

Early on, the Trump administration canceled billions of dollars in awards granted in 2024 and early 2025 for research and global health. In March, it clawed back $11.4 billion in covid-era funds that Congress had earmarked for health departments that were using the money for disease surveillance, vaccinations, and more.

Although some funds have been restored because of lawsuits, the Supreme Court has allowed other cuts by the administration to stand while the cases move through the courts.

Beyond these “shotgun” cancellations, the administration has taken a quieter, “in-the-weeds, slowing, cutting, conditioning” approach that’s frozen funds for public health, said Matthew Lawrence, a law professor specializing in health policy at Emory University.

By August, the CDC’s center for HIV and tuberculosis prevention had doled out $167 million less than the historical average, according to an analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a think tank focused on reducing inequality. The CDC’s funding for chronic disease prevention lagged by $259 million, the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program had underspent by $105 million, and funds for mental health at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration were more than $860 million behind what was expected.

An unknown amount of Congress’ 2025 funding for research and public health has yet to be awarded and will probably lapse this year, said Joe Carlile, an author of the center’s analysis and an associate OMB director during the Biden administration. The obstructions appear to be concentrated in areas where the White House proposed cutting the federal budget next year. “The administration may be executing their 2026 budget request through administrative controls,” Carlile said.

“This is boring but crazy-high stakes,” he added. “A one-branch veto of spending neuters the power of the purse in the Constitution that Madison said was the fundamental check on the executive branch.”

Incremental Chaos

A key tactic Vought described in Project 2025 occurs when the OMB activates funds for agencies in installments, called apportionments. Vought wrote that “apportioned funding” could “ensure consistency with the President’s agenda.”

Under Vought, the OMB shrank the size of apportionments, HHS and CDC staffers said. It’s illegal for agencies to let grantees withdraw money before the total amount is in the metaphorical bank, so that delayed agencies’ ability to greenlight spending.

The OMB and DOGE also placed conditions on apportionments through memos, footnotes, and spoken directives telling agencies to ensure that spending “aligns with Administration priorities,” according to reports and HHS employees who said that notices of funding opportunities and awards required excessive layers of sign-off. The CDC and other agencies circulated lists of priorities that reflect White House stances, including those targeting diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts; immigration; and transgender rights. Public health efforts have been especially caught up in red tape, since many focus on populations bearing an unequal burden of death, disease, and injury.

Groups that rely on federal funds have largely been unaware of the reasons grants were held up, but they’ve fielded what they viewed as unsettling queries. For example, Kathy Garner, the head of a Mississippi nonprofit, said officials asked her to defend the exclusion of men from a program to shelter women who experienced domestic violence.

Delays were made worse by uncertainty. Grantees said they’ve been unable to reach program officers because tens of thousands of federal workers have been laid off. Agency officials said firings slow funding further.

“Everyone’s inbox is full of letters from grant recipients asking, ‘How do we proceed?’” one high-ranking CDC official told KFF Health News, which granted agency officials anonymity because of their fears of retaliation. “We just say, ‘Please wait.’”

Time was critical as a measles outbreak surged in West Texas early this year. The state asked for federal funding for the response in March, but it didn’t arrive until May, after the outbreak had largely faded in Texas, according to an investigation by KFF Health News. Apportionment control was a key reason, CDC staffers said.

In July, 81 HIV organizations sent a letter to Kennedy. “With every day of delayed FY2025 funding release, the delivery of essential HIV services is compromised,” said the letter, which was reviewed by KFF Health News. Because of delays and uncertainty, it said, HIV clinics had laid off case managers and reduced clinician hours, closed sites, and pared down hotlines that patients call with urgent questions. The funds arrived about a month later, but HIV providers remain shaken.

Lauren Richey, medical director at University Medical Center’s HIV clinic in New Orleans, backed out of hiring a sorely needed dentist she had recruited. “I was afraid to tell someone to move across the country for a job when I wasn’t sure if or when we’d get the funding for their salary,” she said. “The wait is now three to four months for dental services, when it was usually a couple of weeks at most.”

Tamachia Davenport, program director at the St. John AIDS outreach ministry in New Orleans, said that “a lot of us are having to rob Peter to pay Paul.”

When the group didn’t get CDC funds it expected this summer, Davenport had to decide between cutting staff or supplies. Concerned her top employees would take jobs elsewhere, she stopped buying the condoms they distribute throughout the city to prevent the spread of sexually transmitted infections.

Louisiana already has one of the highest rates of HIV, chlamydia, and gonorrhea in the country. Condoms cost far less than treating these diseases. For a person infected by HIV at age 35, such costs exceed $326,000.

Groups focused on cancer, diabetes, and heart disease also report lasting repercussions from delays, as well as ongoing fears that they will happen again. Louisiana State University’s Healthy Aging Research Center canceled some of its workshops to train health workers on caring for people with dementia. “There may be fewer people who have this very specific expertise next year in Louisiana and Mississippi,” said Scott Wilks, the director of the center. “That’s on top of the big shortage we have already.”

Nationwide surveys tallying maternal and infant mortality froze for about five months because of funding delays, causing an irrecoverable gap in data that had been collected continuously since 1987, CDC officials say.

“We are seeing the administration get their way with or without an approved budget,” one said. “It’s such a terrible shame to play with people’s health this way.”

DOGE also inserted itself into grant reimbursements this year, stalling the rapid turnaround that public health groups typically expect to cover salaries, rent, and other monthly costs outlined in budgets that have already been approved. In what’s now labeled Departmental Efficiency Review, itemized expenses must be regularly justified by multiple government officials, according to documents reviewed by KFF Health News.

DOGE posted on its website expense reports covering about a month’s span from April to May. Nearly 230 of the individual expenses filed to federal agencies during that period are for $1 or less. Other entries break down monthly salaries for individual employees and petty costs for postage or monthly subscriptions.

“Public funds deserve scrutiny, but this is different from audit practices I’ve been a part of,” Carlile said.

DOGE also stalled calls for applications for 2025 funding — and some calls never appeared as the fiscal year came to a close on Sept. 30. Among them are programs for groups that provide housing assistance. People will be evicted when these organizations run out of money left over from 2024, said Steve Berg, chief policy officer at the National Alliance to End Homelessness.

Other solicitations came out months behind schedule, leaving groups with a few weeks to put together complicated applications for multimillion-dollar awards, including for Alzheimer’s care, addiction recovery, senior support, and chronic disease management.

“They’ve set projects up to fail,” one HHS official said.

*KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.

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AN 11 25

HARPERS FERRY, W.Va. — Despite concerns about attempted historical erasure at Harpers Ferry National Historical Park due to new Trump administration policies being unfounded, some historians worry other attempts across the country may have a detrimental impact on historical preservation in the U.S.

ABC 7 News first reported that Harpers Ferry was forced to remove items located in its slavery exhibit due to the Trump Administration’s March 27 executive order, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” According to the report, the order would force “the National Park Service [to] remove or cover up signs or displays that have been determined by the Trump administration to disproportionally emphasize negative aspects of American history or historical figures.”

However, Alan Spears, the senior director for cultural resources at the National Parks Conservation Association, said a citizen watchdog group created to protect and enhance America’s national parks found the story to be false. As a historian, Spears’ work in the association is focused on protecting and promoting historic and cultural resources tied to the federal parks department.

According to him and other historians, concern is still being raised about how this order is affecting national parks and important historical exhibits across the country.

According to the order, it intends to “restore Federal sites dedicated to history, including parks and museums, to solemn and uplifting public monuments that remind Americans of our extraordinary heritage, consistent progress toward becoming a more perfect Union, and unmatched record of advancing liberty, prosperity and human flourishing.”

Two months after the initial order was released, on May 20, the Secretary of the Interior released an additional order, SO 3431, which essentially “operationalized” the order for the United States Parks Service, according to Spears.

The order did three things. First, it set up QR codes that allowed parkgoers to enter comments about the location. Spears said he believes that the administration was looking for people to “tattle on the National Park service to say, ‘We don’t really like this interpretation. It’s too liberal, it’s too woke, it’s too DEI, it’s too anti-American.’”

However, what the Secretary of the Interior found instead was that many parkgoers had either positive things to say about the historical interpretation of these sites or that these sites actually needed more work when defining issues like slavery, women’s rights, labor rights, and Native and Indigenous history.

Next, the parks were ordered to submit lists of any interpretive materials that might fall into what SO 3431 is trying to remove. Finally, the Secretary of the Interior sorted through these lists and sent out letters of noncompliance.

According to Spears, not all parks submitted lists for review, and not all parks were sent letters from the Interior. Ultimately, Harpers Ferry was not included in either set.

There are some images that could trigger a letter of noncompliance, according to Spears, such as photographs from their “Protests in America” display of a man being arrested at an AIDS protest, a group protesting the Vietnam War and the National Women’s Party that protested for women’s suffrage, for example. However, the park has not received orders to remove them, and Spears said that as far as he is aware, they do not plan to.

However, he said he does believe that the administration is not running an entirely transparent process. Despite Harpers Ferry not being on the list, several other facilities in the country were told to scrub their historical sites and landmarks.

Signs about climate change at Acadia National Park in Maine have been taken down, an LGBTQ display at a Rosie the Riveter site in Oakland, California, was taken down and then put back after concern was raised, and references to transgender activism at the Stonewall Inn in New York City have been removed.

“The truth of the matter is that nobody really is talking publicly about what’s been on the target list,” Spears said.

The language of the order itself has also caused concern, with the focus framed on “the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people or, with respect to natural features, the beauty, abundance, and grandeur of the American landscape,” instead of outright saying it will enforce bans on historical knowledge focused on marginalized groups.

Another historian and graduate student, Peter D’Arpa, said he believes the wording is built to give it plausible deniability.

“[The administration] can’t, right now, just do stuff. They have to keep people happy, where we’re at right now.”

He compared this language to fascist states like Nazi Germany, in which Nazis would “build consensus amongst your population of who belongs and who doesn’t,” “get them angry at certain groups,” and only then, once they were used to ostracize members of the group, could they move on to their removal or inflict violence on them.

Spears said what’s happening now is an issue of “whether or not this country wants to come to grips with the lingering effects” of difficult parts of American history, including slavery.

In his perspective, some do and some don’t — and that is one of the crises at the heart of the historical erasure, he said.

“I think it’s important that efforts to soften, sanitize, erase this history is critically important,” Spears said. “If you don’t want to learn about slavery and its lingering impacts on this country, that’s your choice. I think it’s a bad choice, but it’s your choice.”

In the end, he said he does not want that choice to be taken away from those who actively want to seek out these stories and learn from them.

“I do believe that if we… want to bring people together, that we have to see each other and understand a little bit more about where we’ve come from. That means our history — that shared national narrative of ours — has to include the ugly parts as well as the beautiful parts,” Spears said.

D’Arpa has also raised concerns about the order and how it points to division within the country. According to him, the division and historical erasure happening now are a result of citizens being angry and scared that they are being forgotten by those in power.

“They hear that the Democrats say they want to take care of a specific group of people, but they don’t hear the Democrats say they want to take care of all Americans, and that scares people that are in rural America that might like American policies,” he said. “They don’t want to be forgotten, they don’t want to feel like they’re being forced to accept a certain ideology that they don’t agree with.”

Politically, D’Arpa said he believes the order to be anti-American. He said that it points to the president taking power away from the people and the states, using the power of the federal government to force the people and the states “to basically think the way the government wants them to think.”

The historical preservation and documentation that took place during this time also inspired the Citizen Historians for the Smithsonian, an organization in which volunteers photograph and film different exhibits in the Smithsonian, should anything be removed or changed. The Smithsonian museums located in D.C. have been sent letters of noncompliance, but as of right now, nothing has changed.

Historically, similar censorship has happened in Communist China, according to historian and professor at Georgetown University and co-founder of the citizen historians group Citizens Historians for the Smithsonian James Millward.

After the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, the Chinese Communist Party worked very hard over decades to ensure people didn’t know the full story of what happened.

“They created their own version of what it was, and made it impossible to write about or talk about,” Millward said.

Lizzie Watts, who worked in the National Parks Service for 49 years, said she feels the order makes it harder to tell a complete story. She said she believes people work hard to preserve historical sites like Harpers Ferry because they tell an inclusive story of our history.

“All stories are not happy, all stories don’t end on a good note, but they’re history,” she said. “If we ever want to get back to a moderate world where everyone gets along and understands each other and works for the betterment of the United States, then we have to be inclusive. You can’t leave people out, you can’t avoid the sad things to just “try to save the positive parts of history.”

Ultimately, all these historians say that the order is unique to the United States in this moment, and although it is not clear what the future of it will look like, they worry about the preservation of the nation’s history for future generations.

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AN 9 25

Citing state policy on tenure, elimination of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, and the cost of living, Florida faculty laid out their frustrations in a recent survey.

In a Faculty in the South survey conducted by various conferences of the American Association of University Professors, 31% of Florida respondents said they have applied for a job outside of Florida since 2023. That number was 25% among all survey respondents in the South.

The same, 31% of Florida respondents, said they plan to seek employment in another state during the next hiring cycle.

“The governor of Florida threatens at every turn to take funding away so administration at colleges don’t stand up to him or board of education. I no longer have any motivation or creativity to make courses better,” a tenured professor at a public community college wrote.

The survey focused on policy affecting employment, including whether faculty would recommend working in their state to up-and-coming academics, and trends in applications for faculty positions. It included nearly 200 responses from Florida faculty among its nearly 4,000 responses across Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia.

IFrame Content

The survey concluded with an open-ended question asking faculty to provide examples of how “attacks on higher education are directly impacting your work.” It did not report respondents’ identities beyond basic demographics like gender, race, tenure status, years of experience, and type of institution they teach at.

‘Walking on egg shells’

“Students report any classroom discussion they don’t like directly to the Governor’s office. Everyone is afraid all the time,” one woman teaching at a public four-year school wrote. “I have stopped teaching books that might be in any way controversial. I don’t open up general discussion in class but ask only direct questions that will elicit non-controversial answers. I need health insurance so I can’t just quit.”

The state scanning course materials for disfavored viewpoints was a widespread stressor for many faculty.

Florida DOGE to ‘deep dive’ into state universities, ‘prune’ ‘ideological study stuff’

IFrame Content

“Most of the courses I’ve taught for decades now violate state and university mandates,” a man teaching at a Florida tier-one research university said.

As of earlier this year, Florida institutions’ general education courses no longer contained “indoctrinating concepts,” State University System Chancellor Ray Rodrigues proclaimed in January.

Florida universities have conducted a review, required by a 2022 law, of general education courses to ensure that they do not “distort significant historical events or include a curriculum that teaches identity politics.”

“I’m continually worried that the content of my clases [sic] will be flagged as “DEI” because I am a historian of the Caribbean, a region mostly populated by non-white people,” one professor said.

One women’s studies professor described the effect as “Constant anxiety, walking on egg shells trying to anticipate what would be used against me/us.”

More than a third, 34%, of Florida respondents said administrators have questioned syllabi or curricula choices for their courses. Among all states surveyed, half as many, 17%, indicated administrators questioned their curricula.

One professor said that since the state and federal government have made illegal “a wide range of Constitutionally protected components of speech and expression,” “I must break the law in order to tell the truth. Because I’m hired to tell the truth, and because I’m much more committed to the truth than to the law, I break the law. This means I am expecting to be arrested in front of a classroom any day, for actions that are illegal only as a result of the right-wing fad of the most recent decade.”

Nearly three in four, 71%, of faculty in Florida who were surveyed said they would not encourage a graduate student to seek employment in Florida.

“I am going to take early retirement despite a great job and salary. The threats are real and I am exhausted, between fighting this and fighting AI and poorly prepared, lazy, unethical students,” a tenured professor at a four-year public university wrote.

Higher education funding cuts have been the subject of nationwide political debate, including Florida State University reporting that it lost $100 million in federal grants, although $83 million of that has since been reinstated, the school’s president said last week.

About one-in-10, 11%, said they have had a federal contract ended by the Trump administration.

“The loss of vital federal grants has removed opportunities from me and my colleagues,” one professor wrote. “Attacks on LGBTQ students, immigrants, and diversity have also made it difficult to recruit promising graduate students or to guarantee their health and safety. Florida colleges being forced to remove diversity languages has destroyed years of valuable work, overturned an incredible general education curriculum, taken power and governance away from faculty, and wasted a lot of valuable time.”

Tenure troubles

Since 2023, professors in Florida with tenure have been subject to post-tenure review, graded on standards crafted by university trustees relating to research performance, teaching, service, and compliance with state laws and university policies.

Of the nearly-one-third who recently applied for an out-of-state job, tenure and DEI issues, academic freedom, the political climate, and cost of living were among the most common concerns.

Respondents said the number of applications for coworkers’ positions, as well as the quality of applicants, have decreased.

“Our department is trying to improve, but we have had several failed searches in recent years because candidates don’t want to move to Florida because of the broad political climate and the fact that tenure protections functionally no longer exist here,” a tenured public university professor said.

Some faculty said they have not experienced problems with “attacks on higher education,” one stating, “I haven’t felt any — Florida is great!.” Another said, “They’re not, and freedom in the classroom still persists, and I am at a public university in… wait for it… FLORIDA…”

“I find that I’m having to spend more time explaining to students why they need to use evidence to support their views and why clear arguments are important,” a professor at a private institution wrote.

One professor complained that “our board of trustees stacked with heritage foundation members, our president was forced out and replaced by a republican politician.” Course materials face heightened scrutiny, this professor added.

“The climate of persecution, retaliation, and ideological imposition makes it impossible to teach my discipline accurately or well without opening oneself to disciplinary measures,” that professor said. “While New College got a lot of headlines, similar invasions of public universities are happening with no national press, leaving those of us who work here isolated and vulnerable to attack.”

‘Academic freedom is on life support,’ say professors surveyed on tenure, censorship

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Gov. Ron DeSantis orchestrated a shake-up of the University of West Florida Board of Trustees in a more conservative light earlier this year and that institution is now led by a former GOP lawmaker.

Results for the survey were collected throughout August and more than 60% of respondents said they are tenured. Last year’s iteration of the survey featured responses from about 350 Florida professors.

“There is a lower threshold of critical thinking because everyone is fearful about what is ‘allowed’ vs. ‘banned’ by law. The fear and the self-censorship is widespread. Our administration, now saddled with a governor-imposed, unqualified hire as a President, is understandably more cautious rather than vocal about protecting academic freedom,” one professor wrote.

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the conv an 8 25

When people use the term “Orwellian,” it’s not a good sign.

It usually characterizes an action, an individual or a society that is suppressing freedom, particularly the freedom of expression. It can also describe something perverted by tyrannical power.

It’s a term used primarily to describe the present, but whose implications inevitably connect to both the future and the past.

In his second term, President Donald Trump has revealed his ambitions to rewrite America’s official history to, in the words of the Organization of American Historians, “reflect a glorified narrative … while suppressing the voices of historically excluded groups.”

This ambition was manifested in efforts by the Department of Education to eradicate a “DEI agenda” from school curricula. It also included a high-profile assault on what detractors saw as “woke” universities, which culminated in Columbia University’s agreement to submit to a review of the faculty and curriculum of its Middle Eastern Studies department, with the aim of eradicating alleged pro-Palestinian bias.

Now, the administration has shifted its sights from formal educational institutions to one of the key sites of public history-making: the Smithsonian, a collection of 21 museums, the National Zoo and associated research centers, principally centered on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.

On Aug. 12, 2025, the Smithsonian’s director, Lonnie Bunch III, received a letter from the White House announcing its intent to carry out a systematic review of the institution’s holdings and exhibitions in the advance of the nation’s 250th anniversary in 2026.

The review’s stated aim is to ensure that museum content adequately reflects “Americanism” through a commitment to “celebrate American exceptionalism, [and] remove divisive or partisan narratives.”

On Aug. 19, 2025, Trump escalated his attack on the Smithsonian. “The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was…” he wrote in a Truth Social post. “Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future. We are not going to allow this to happen.”

Such ambitions may sound benign, but they are deeply Orwellian. Here’s how.

Winners write the history

Author George Orwell believed in objective, historical truth. Writing in 1946, he attributed his youthful desire to become an author in part to a “historical impulse,” or “the desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.”

But while Orwell believed in the existence of an objective truth about history, he did not necessarily believe that truth would prevail.

Truth, Orwell recognized, was best served by free speech and dialogue. Yet absolute power, Orwell appreciated, allowed those who possessed it to silence or censor opposing narratives, quashing the possibility of productive dialogue about history that could ultimately allow truth to come out.

As Orwell wrote in “1984,” his final, dystopian novel, “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

Historian Malgorzata Rymsza-Pawlowska has written about America’s bicentennial celebrations that took place in 1976. Then, she says, “Americans across the nation helped contribute to a pluralistic and inclusive commemoration … using it as a moment to question who had been left out of the legacies of the American Revolution, to tell more inclusive stories about the history of the United States.”

This was an example of the kind of productive dialogue encouraged in a free society. “By contrast,” writes Rymsza-Pawlowska, “the 250th is shaping up to be a top-down affair that advances a relatively narrow and celebratory idea of Americanism.” The newly announced Smithsonian review aims to purge counternarratives that challenge that celebratory idea.

The Ministry of Truth

The desire to eradicate counternarratives drives Winston Smith’s job at the ironically named Ministry of Truth in “1984.”

The novel is set in Oceania, a geographical entity covering North America and the British Isles and which governs much of the Global South.

Oceania is an absolute tyranny governed by Big Brother, the leader of a political party whose only goal is the perpetuation of its own power. In this society, truth is what Big Brother and the party say it is.

The regime imposes near total censorship so that not only dissident speech but subversive private reflection, or “thought crime,” is viciously prosecuted. In this way, it controls the present.

But it also controls the past. As the party’s protean policy evolves, Smith and his colleagues are tasked with systematically destroying any historical records that conflict with the current version of history. Smith literally disposes of artifacts of inexpedient history by throwing them down “memory holes,” where they are “wiped … out of existence and out of memory.”

At a key point in the novel, Smith recalls briefly holding on to a newspaper clipping that proved that an enemy of the regime had not actually committed the crime he had been accused of. Smith recognizes the power over the regime that this clipping gives him, but he simultaneously fears that power will make him a target. In the end, fear of retaliation leads him to drop the slip of newsprint down a memory hole.

The contemporary U.S. is a far cry from Orwell’s Oceania. Yet the Trump administration is doing its best to exert control over the present and the past.

Down the memory hole

Even before the Trump administration announced its review of the Smithsonian, officials in departments across government had taken unprecedented steps to rewrite the nation’s official history, attempting to purge parts of the historical narrative down Orwellian memory holes.

Comically, those efforts included the temporary removal from government websites of information about the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the atomic bomb over Hiroshima. The plane was unwittingly caught up in a mass purge of references to “gay” and LGBTQ+ content on government websites.

Other erasures have included the deletion of content on government sites related to the life ofHarriet Tubman, the Maryland woman who escaped slavery and then played a pioneering role as a conductor of the Underground Railroad, helping enslaved people escape to freedom.

Public outcry led to the restoration of most of the deleted content.

Over at the Smithsonian, which earlier in the year had been criticized by Trump for its “divisive, race-centered ideology,” staff removed a temporary placard with references to President Trump’s two impeachment trials from a display case on impeachment that formed part of the National Museum of American History exhibition on the American presidency. The references to Trump’s two impeachments were modified, with some details removed, in a newly installed placard in the updated display.

Responding to questions, the Smithsonian stated that the placard’s removal was not in response to political pressure: “The placard, which was meant to be a temporary addition to a 25-year-old exhibition, did not meet the museum’s standards in appearance, location, timeline, and overall presentation.”

Repressing thought

Orwell’s “1984” ends with an appendix on the history of “Newspeak,” Oceania’s official language, which, while it had not yet superseded “Oldspeak” or standard English, was rapidly gaining ground as both a written and spoken dialect.

According to the appendix, “The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the worldview and mental habits proper to the devotees of [the Party], but to make all other modes of thought impossible.”

Orwell, as so often in his writing, makes the abstract theory concrete: “The word free still existed in Newspeak, but it could only be used in such statements as ‘This dog is free from lice’ or ‘This field is free from weeds.’ … political and intellectual freedom no longer existed even as concepts.”

The goal of this language streamlining was total control over past, present and future.

If it is illegal to even speak of systemic racism, for example, let alone discuss its causes and possible remedies, it constrains the potential for, even prohibits, social change.

It has become a cliché that those who do not understand history are bound to repeat it.

As George Orwell appreciated, the correlate is that social and historical progress require an awareness of, and receptivity to, both historical fact and competing historical narratives.

*This story is an updated version of an article originally published on June 9, 2025.

*The Smithsonian is a member of The Conversation U.S.

Laura Beers, Professor of History, American University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Robby Starbuck, a right wing influencer who has led manufactured online outrage campaigns to get companies to roll back their DEI policies, has officially been hired by Meta as an advisor to root out “ideological and political bias” in their AI product...

8 25 GMAIL

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an 8 25

It’s been about six months since the U.S. Department of Education sent a “Dear Colleague” letter to all schools that receive federal funding, warning them that they could risk losing this money if they promote what the department calls “pervasive and repugnant” racial preferences.

The letter, among other things, reversed previous presidents’ positions on how diversity, equity and inclusion influences schools’ disciplinary measures. It advised schools to, within two weeks, begin to eliminate all discipline protocols rooted in DEI, on the grounds that this work is discriminatory against white students.

Trump also issued an executive order, “Reinstating Commonsense School Discipline Policy,” in April 2025, doubling down on the letter.

Trump’s letter and executive order exert an unusual level of influence over how schools can decide the best way to teach and, when necessary, discipline students. It also cuts against recognized research that Black, Latino and Native American students are disciplined more frequently and harshly than white and Asian students.

I am an educational scholar who has spent the past 13 years analyzing school discipline policy. While previous administrations have issued “Dear Colleague” letters to schools, Trump’s is the first that frames itself as though it were law – setting a potential new precedent for the executive branch to issue educational mandates without the approval of the judicial or congressional branches of government.

While all but two states have responded to Trump’s letter, about half of them have said they are not going to comply with its terms – despite the administration’s threat of cutting funding if they do not follow the guidance.

Understanding DEI in education

Equity-oriented education, or diversity, equity and inclusion, refers to an ideology and programming that intend to ameliorate patterns of racial inequality. In the context of discipline in schools, DEI strategies could include teachers having conversations with children about their behavior, rather than immediately suspending them.

Research shows that these techniques can help reduce racial discipline gaps in academic achievement and disciplinary outcomes.

The Obama administration in 2014 recognized this research in its own “Dear Colleague” letter to schools. The administration advised schools to either reform their discipline practices toward nonpunitive alternatives to suspension or risk being investigated for discrimination.

The first Trump administration rescinded this letter in 2018.

Then, in 2023, the Biden administration released a document along the same lines as Obama’s letter.

Trump’s February 2025 letter grouped all of these recommendations under the banner of “DEI” and argued that such practices are discriminatory, privileging students of color over white and Asian students.

In his April executive order, Trump reiterated that if schools did not eliminate DEI, they would be out of compliance with Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. This act prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color or national origin,

Public school districts regularly have to issue a certificate of compliance to the government showing that their work is in line with Title VI.

While the Trump administration characterizes DEI as “smuggling racial stereotypes and explicit race-consciousness into everyday training, programming, and discipline,” it does not define exactly what constitutes DEI programming.

This puts school districts at risk of losing funding if they maintain any initiatives related to racial equality.

Legal concerns with Trump’s directives

The executive office and members of Congress typically issue “Dear Colleague” letters, which are not legally binding, to advise schools and others on policy.

Yet Trump’s letter was written like a mandate and reinforced by an executive order, which is legally binding.

Some scholars are calling the letter an “overreach” of legal authority.

In the spring of 2025, I analyzed states’ responses to Trump’s letter and executive order.

Two states, Iowa and Tennessee, had not yet provided public responses.

Twenty-three states complied with the administration’s directive by signing the letter as of May 30. Some, like Oklahoma, not only certified the letter but also passed state laws banning DEI policies and programs.

The remaining 25 states refused to certify the letter, asserting that they already complied with Title VI and that their policies are not discriminatory.

In addition, 19 of those 25 states sued the Trump administration over the letter in April, culminating in a court injunction later that month that temporarily released states from having to comply with its demands.

I noticed that many states that refuted Trump’s letter used the same exact words in their responses, signaling a concerted effort to resist Trump’s directives. States that did not sign on to the letter but objected to its intent generally resisted on legal grounds, ethics or both.

A legal argument

Most states that rejected it grounded their refusal to sign Trump’s letter in federal law. They cited the Civil Rights Act and the Paperwork Reduction Act, which protects states from having to file redundant paperwork. Because these states already certified compliance with Title VI, this argument goes, they should not have to do so again under Trump’s directive.

Education commissioners from a few states, including Illinois and Minnesota, also cited specific language used by Betsy VID]

DeVos,, who supported DEI policies.

Charlene Russell-Tucker, the education commissioner for Connecticut, also pointed out that in order for the federal government to cancel DEI programming, it would have to first legally change the definition of Title VI.

States resisting on other grounds

Some education officials also argued that their DEI work is ideologically necessary for providing supportive learning environments for all students.

Patrick Tutwiler, Massachusetts’ interim education commissioner, wrote in an April 16 letter, for example, that “Massachusetts will continue to promote diversity in our schools because we know it improves outcomes for all of our kids.”

Other officials displayed more subtle resistance. Randy Watson, Kansas’ education commissioner, for example, affirmed the state’s “commitment to comply with all Federal statutes,” including Title VI – but did not explicitly address Trump’s “Dear Colleague” letter.

Similarly, Kentucky informed the Department of Education of its compliance with federal law, while simultaneously encouraging local districts to continue diversity, equity and inclusion work.

Mississippi’s state department of education pointed out that school districts operate independently, so the state cannot force policies on them. However, Mississippi signaled compliance by citing a new state law banning DEI and confirmed that each of its individual school districts have already certified compliance with federal laws.

More legal pushback

It is not yet clear what might follow the April court injunction, which largely prevented the Department of Education from cutting federal funding to schools that continued their DEI-related programs and policies.

While the Trump administration has made major cuts to the Department of Education, it has not announced that states refusing to certify the letter will lose funding.

This is the first time an administration is issuing such a direct threat to withhold K-12 funding, placing schools in an unknown place, without a clear blueprint of how to move forward.

Hilary Lustick, Associate Professor of Education, UMass Lowell

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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note not xo?

an 8 25

Trump will sign a memorandum ordering colleges and universities to submit information on their admissions to ensure they are complying with a 2023 U.S. Supreme Court order banning affirmative action and gutting race-conscious admissions. The order would expand the current admissions data the government collects.

“Admissions data has increasingly become a focus of the Trump administration as part of its effort to change the ideological balance of the higher education system, which the president views as hostile to conservatives,” The New York Times reported.

Several Ivy League schools have agreed to hand over to the Trump administration certain admissions data, including “standardized test scores and grade point averages of all applicants, as well as information about their race, a measure that could profoundly alter the competitive college admissions process,” according to the Times.

The 2023 6-3 Supreme Court ruling banned public and private colleges and universities from considering race as a factor in its admissions decisions. Schools had said they needed to do so to protect the constitutional guarantee of equal protection, as Justice Sonia Sotomayor said in her dissenting opinion.

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Bloomberg News called Thursday’s order “a new and expansive front” in the Trump administration’s “pressure campaign against colleges.”

Angel Perez, CEO of the National Association for College Admission Counseling, Bloomberg added, “said the data transparency mandate could drive institutions away from the kinds of holistic admissions practices that have helped them increase diversity on campuses.”

“The bottom line,” Perez said, “is that colleges that don’t admit enough White students will be punished.”

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AN 7 25

Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey may have a bad track record in court, but he’s winning anyway. This is especially true of his crusade to make the workforce and higher education less diverse.

He’s had success using losing lawsuits, investigations that do nothing but burn Missouri taxpayer dollars and threatening letters that misstate the law.

On the day that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled traditional affirmative action programs in higher education unconstitutional, Bailey sent threatening letters to Missouri universities and municipalities in which he overstated what the ruling did and implied that all efforts at fostering diversity and inclusion in Missouri must be halted.

In April, Bailey excoriated the Business Roundtable for having “racist DEI initiatives.” He wrote he would fight “woke political trends and blatant racial discrimination.” In an impressive act of government “jawboning” that Bailey has claimed to oppose in other contexts, he threatened that such policies “risk exposing your organizations to substantial liability.”

Bailey is suing IBM, alleging the company did too much to recruit non-white and female hires.

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Diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts (the “DEI” much maligned by the far-right) help companies hire and retain qualified people who they wouldn’t easily find through traditional white male networks. Many studies and companies have explained that diversity is good for profits and innovation, and that you don’t get a diverse workforce without making an effort to recruit one.

Bailey’s court filings come shockingly close to outright stating his contrary premise: women and non-white people are inherently inferior so any increase in their representation is bad.

IBM argued that Bailey hasn’t pleaded that any Missouri employee or job applicant was discriminated against. Indeed, this looks like Bailey preening for the national anti-diversity warriors rather than addressing a Missouri problem.

Though you wouldn’t know it from listening to Bailey, diversity is still a permissible goal under Supreme Court precedent. And it is typical for companies to reward executives for advancing corporate goals.

But the IBM lawsuit looks like another one where Bailey could win with a loser of a case. IBM has long been known for being a model for inclusive policies and a great place to work. IBM’s diversity council began in the ‘90s. It has touted hiring a disabled employee in 1914. But this year it ended most of its diversity efforts. We’ll see whether IBM continues to fight back against Bailey.

Whatever happens, say goodbye to IBM and similarly situated companies employing more people here. Bailey has made it clear that employers should expect legal harassment for exercising their rights to association and free speech in Missouri.

Bailey has also sued Starbucks. His brief argues that the Starbucks workforce has become “more female and less white” — and that this is unacceptable.

Starbucks appears to be defending the values that the company professes. The company is also likely aware that if it were to abandon its reasonable efforts to have a workforce more representative of its customer base, it could lead to a boycott and a massive stock hit like Target experienced.

Shareholders have realized that reversing inclusive policies is bad for business. Shareholders voted down anti-diversity proposals overwhelmingly this proxy season.

The market has spoken. So Bailey’s latest ploy is to punish free speech in the market.

Bailey filed lawsuits against two firms that give shareholders advice on how to vote. He claims that they have engaged in “deceptive practices” by recommending inclusive policies. This is one of his many attempts to weaponize the Missouri Merchandising Practices Act, which was meant to protect Missourians from actual fraud.

But frivolous lawsuits against out-of-state corporations are not the only way to light taxpayer dollars on fire.

Bailey can burn up twice the Missouri tax dollars by having Missouri wage legal warfare against itself. See for example, Bailey’s investigation of the Hazelwood School District over an off-campus fight between students of different races, the three year lawsuit against the Springfield School District over demands to search thousands of documents for a list of possibly DEI-related terms that the District estimated would cost $170,000, or his new investigation of the City of Columbia over whether it might be trying to advance diversity and equity.

How does a successful, powerful white man come to have such resentment towards women and people of color for the modest gains we have made that he treats it as Missouri’s biggest problem? How does someone once known as a “reasonable and smart attorney” become a “warrior in the culture wars”? What could compel him to regularly use dehumanizing language about diversity proponents who merely want more people to have opportunities?

Did he get radicalized online? Bailey has filed a surprising number of lawsuits based on tweeted statements or videos.

His IBM lawsuit cites a video circulated online. He sued Media Matters in response to an Elon Musk tweet (that lawsuit was thrown out as I predicted, but Media Matters had to cut staff due to the costs of Bailey and Musk lawsuits, so that’s another extra-legal win for Bailey). Bailey sued Planned Parenthood over a Project Veritas video, without bothering to get the unedited tape.

Another possibility is that this is how Republicans feel they need to make a name and impress Trump and MAGA. Still, I just can’t muster the cynicism to make it make sense.

Sometimes I wonder what Bailey’s mom thinks.

I learned that Dr. Jessica Bailey was the first female dean of the University of Mississippi Medical Center’s School of Health Related Professions and a revered and beloved leader there — and a champion of diversity efforts.

A 2022 article about her retirement describes Dr. Bailey’s mentorship and recruitment of the school’s then chief diversity and inclusion officer. In an earlier article, Dr. Bailey extolls that colleague for being “committed to providing opportunities for students who might otherwise not imagine themselves in a health care profession,” and having “the vision to recognize opportunities to make our health care work force be more representative of our Mississippi population.”

These are goals that her son claims are unconstitutional and racist.

During Dr. Bailey’s tenure as dean, she oversaw the development of a Diversity and Inclusion Champion Professional Development and Certificate Program. She supervised PhD theses concerning the need to diversify the health work force and bone marrow donors. She was lauded for her personal involvement in a program that recruited young Black men into medical professions.

I asked Bailey’s office whether the attorney general thinks his mother was engaged in illegal “woke political trends and blatant racial discrimination” in general, or specifically with the mentorship program for Black men.

His office responded:

“Attorney General Bailey has no knowledge of these programs administered in another state, years ago, when he was not in office. What he does know is this: DEI programs that condition opportunity on skin color violate the Missouri Constitution and the foundational American promise of equality under the law. Whether it’s in corporate boardrooms, public universities, or government contracting, he will continue to fight race-based discrimination in any form. He has led on this issue since taking office.”

That’s a clearer “yes, my mother did illegal, racist things” than I was expecting.

Bailey is not just disavowing the work of his highly accomplished mother, who has referenced the barriers she overcame as a woman in a male dominated field and who worked to help others up the ladder. He is twisting the law to claim all such efforts are illegal.

Missouri Independent is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Missouri Independent maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jason Hancock for questions: info@missouriindependent.com.

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an 7 25

The Guardian reports even dedicated CIA critic Tim Weiner is sounding the alarm on the damage President Donald Trump is doing the agency.

Weiner — who wrote the CIA political take-down ‘Legacy of Ashes’ about decades of CIA mistakes and bad behavior — compares Trump’s second administration to watching the U.S. stand with Russia, Iran and North Korea by voting against a UN resolution condemning the invasion of Ukraine.

“You come to the realization, if you hadn’t already: ‘My God, the president of the United States has gone over to the other side. He has joined the authoritarian axis,’” Weiner said.

A chapter of Weiner’s new book "The Mission" addresses how the CIA was blindsided by Russia’s influence operation on behalf of Trump’s 2016 campaign. This was when Russian intelligence began releasing hacked Democratic National Committee emails, dealing a devastating blow to Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

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“The Russians stole our f—————— election. How do we make sure this never happens again?” Weiner recalls CIA head Tom Rakusan demanding of his staff.

Following two impeachments, an insurrection and a second election, Trump is back in the White House and bent on revenge against the CIA. He’s also hired, according to Weiner, “a coterie of dangerously incompetent and servile acolytes to the highest positions of national security”.

“What keeps me up at night,” he told The Guardian, “is the fact that Trump has put the instruments of American national security in the hands of crackpots and fools, and that their incompetence and ideological blinkers will blind them to a coming attack. If the United States gets hit again under Trump, he will destroy what is left of our democracy.”

Weiner describes new CIA director, John Ratcliffe — a former personal injury attorney — as “a spineless person who will do whatever Trump tells him to do.”

Ratcliffe immediately fired hundreds of recently hired staffers and then sent their names to Elon Musk in an unclassified email that Weiner said was probably intercepted by the Russians and Chinese, who are now presumably working to recruit them as spies.

“All they need to do is to find people who are either deeply resentful or who might have a financial or a drug problem to be exploited,” Weiner said.

Trump’s anti-diversity crusade was another foolish mistake because “if you want to spy in a nation like Somalia or Pakistan or China, it might be wise to have a workforce that is not made up exclusively of white guys, and who speak languages other than English,” Weiner said. “Diversity was one of the CIA’s few superpowers, and the mindless abolition of the effort to diversify the CIA’s officers and analysts was one of the most stupid self-inflicted wounds that Radcliffe could have delivered.”

Sadly, Weiner says no “Robert Mueller” or “Barack Obama” is going to save the nation. What that takes is a massive upheaval from Americans.

“[T]he other day, several million Americans marched in the street to protest the Mad King. And just as only we can defeat ourselves, I think only we can save ourselves,” Weiner said.

Read the full Guardian report at this link.

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Media Matters: Charlie Kirk on Texas flooding: “What you are not being told by the media anywhere is that the death toll likely would not have been as high if it wasn't for DEI”

"It's not just incompetence. This is DEI working to undermine meritocratic institutions, and more people likely died than otherwise would have because of DEI."

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Charlie Kirk on Texas flooding: “What you are not being told by the media anywhere is that the death toll likely would not have been as high if it wasn't for DEI”

07/09/25 MMA

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an 6 25

The Supreme Court recent unanimous ruling in Ames v. Ohio Department of Youth Services hasn’t got nearly the attention it deserves.

On the surface, the ruling seems innocent enough. The Court merely decided that white and straight employees who allege they’ve been discriminated against don't need to meet a higher standard of proof than do Black or LGBTQ+ employees who sue for discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.

(Prior to this ruling, some courts had required that white or straight employees demonstrate not only that they were discriminated against but they also worked in a discriminatory environment.)

The Court’s decision in Ames appears a logical extension of the 2023 ruling by its six conservative justices ending race-conscious admission programs at colleges and universities across the country.

But seen against Trump’s bigoted agenda and the widening discrepancies between the political power of Black or LGBTQ+ people relative to the power of white straight people, the Ames case should trouble everyone.

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Trump and his lackeys have argued that discrimination against white and straight Americans occurs under the coverof diversity, equity and inclusion. And Trump has gone to great lengths to undo what it calls “illegal D.E.I.” — ousting diversity officials from federal agencies and removing D.E.I. references from government websites.

The Ames ruling could be the death knell for D.E.I. because it makes it easier for white and straight people to argue that a D.E.I. policy at the workplace caused an employer to discriminate against them.

The Supreme Court I got to know in the 1970s when I worked in the Solicitor General’s office understood its responsibility to balance the scales of justice in favor of the powerless — including Black people, women, and gay people.

That Court understood that as majoritarian institutions, Congress and the executive branch could not always be counted on to reflect the needs of people with far less political power than straight white men.

Hence, they assumed that one of the Court’s essential roles in our system of self government — indeed, the core of its moral authority — was to give extra weight to the challenges or aspirations of such minorities.

Even Nixon’s appointees—Harry Blackmun, Lewis Powell, and Warren Burger—seemed to understand this important counter-balancing role. Blackmun wrote the Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade, and Powell and Burger joined him (as did four Democratic appointees to the Court—William O. Douglas, Thurgood Marshall, William Brennan, and Potter Stewart).

Douglas, Marshall, and Blackmun were the intellectual leaders of that Supreme Court. Their opinions gave the Court its moral heft. They drew not only from the Constitution as written but also from their understanding of how the nation had evolved, and of the distribution of power.

Like an earlier Supreme Court that unanimously decided in Brown vs. Board of Education of Topekathat separate schooling for Black and white children was inherently unequal and therefore unconstitutional, the Supreme Court I argued before understood that America must rely on the Court to protect the rights of the voiceless and the powerless.

Today’s Supreme Court majority doesn’t have a clue about the court’s moral authority or its essential role in counter-balancing a distribution of power disadvantaging Black or LGBTQ+ people.

The Republican appointees to today’s Supreme Court are political hacks intent on entrenching the power of the already powerful.

Five were nominated by presidents who lost the popular vote; three were nominated by a president who instigated a coup against the United States and were confirmed because a rogue Republican Party mounted scorched-earth campaigns to put them on the Court.

The current Supreme Court has no interest in counter-balancing the majoritarian tendencies of Congress and the President. To the contrary, as demonstrated by theAmesdecision, today’s Court is at best the third majoritarian branch of government.

On Juneteenth — the day we commemorate the end of slavery in the United States — it is well to ponder that there is no longer any branch of government dedicated to protecting the life chances of those with less political power due to their race, ethnicity, gender, sexual preference, or sexual orientation.

This is deeply unfortunate.

NOW READ:Trump now faces the same terrible choice

*Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.

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5 25 email

the AFT, along with AFT-Maryland, the American Sociological Association and Eugene (Ore.) School District 4J, has won a temporary pause on the Trump administration’s threat to take funding away from universities and school districts that teach lessons referencing race and racism, or provide support to students through diversity, equity and inclusion programming. The preliminary injunction addresses a “Dear Colleague” letter from the Department of Education that required institutions to demonstrate compliance or lose funding. Read more here.

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AN 5 25

South Africans are wearily attuned to governments’ Orwellian misuse of language. After all, South Africa is a country where a one-time government passed a law (the Natives Abolition of Passes and Coordination of Documents Act of 1952) which extended rather than abolishing the notorious pass system. This made it compulsory for black South Africans over the age of 16 to carry a passbook. And the same government passed the Extension of University Education Act of 1959 which made it more, not less, difficult for black students to register at “open” (or white) universities.

So perhaps they should not be unduly surprised that the government of the US has imported 49 Afrikaners and labelled them as “refugees”. The claim is that they are escaping from the persecution of Afrikaners – and white people more broadly – in South Africa today.

The Trump administration knows perfectly well this claim is a complete fabrication. As President Cyril Ramaphosa and his government have pointed out, there is no evidence whatsoever that Afrikaners or white people more generally are subject to genocide.

True, South Africa has one of the highest murder rates in the world. But it is poor black South Africans – not whites – who are principal victims of such deadly violence. Nor are Afrikaners/whites subject to persecution. Along with all other South Africans, their human rights are protected by a constitution. This is no mere piece of paper. Its provisions are (albeit imperfectly, and unlike in the US these days) largely enforced by the courts.

Furthermore, genocide implies the deliberate elimination of a people on racial, ethnic, or religious grounds. Therefore, if a genocide of whites and Afrikaners was taking place, we might assume that their numbers would be falling. In fact the reverse is true. The white population has continued to grow (albeit slowly) in absolute numbers since 1994.

Worse, the characterisation of Afrikaners as refugees at a moment in time when the people of Gaza are daily subject to a regime of death, terror, and murder inflicted on them by the Israeli government is not merely an absurdity but a downright insult to those genuinely subject to genocide.

So, what is really going on?

The drivers

Extensive commentary has correctly highlighted the motivations of the Trump administration.

First, the administration has launched an attack on what it terms the “tyranny” of “diversity, equity and inclusion” policies across the entire spectrum of public and private institutions in America. Critics argue this is driven by an appeal to Trump’s white Christian nationalist political base. Because post-apartheid South Africa, rightly or wrongly, has become the poster-country of diversity, equity and inclusion policies internationally, because of its constitutional commitment to non-racialism and diversity, it has been singled out for attack.

Secondly, labelling Afrikaners as refugees plays to the insecurities of Trump’s political base. This finds the idea of a white minority being ruled by a black majority government difficult to swallow.

Third, characterising Afrikaners as subject to genocide is a very deliberate response to South Africa’s charging of Israel as guilty of genocide against the Palestinian people before the International Court of Justice. But this is unacceptable to the US Christian nationalist right. For them the existence of Israel represents the realisation of Biblical truth – the return of Jews to the Holy Land.

Trump is saying that the US can and will play the same game, using it to clobber South Africa regardless of the groundlessness of the charge. But, being Trump, he will balance pandering to his support base against what economic benefits he can extract from South Africa.

The landscape

But what of the 49 Afrikaners themselves? Why have they chosen to accept the opportunity offered to them by the US government? After all, extensive attention in the South African media has been given to Afrikaners who have defiantly stated that. VID]

The reasons they give are that it’s their home. And they fully accept that, at least formally, South Africa has become a non-racial democracy.

Likewise, as I have detailed in my book on Whites and Democracy in South Africa, Afrikaners and whites have not only survived in democratic South Africa but, generally, have prospered economically. Furthermore, whites as a “population group” (to use outdated apartheid-era terminology) have participated fully in South African democracy. They are more highly disposed to voting in elections than other racial groupings, and de facto, they are well represented in parliament and local government by the Democratic Alliance, which is a vigorous defender of their interests.

But (there is always a but), if we want to guess the motivations of Trump’s 49 “refugees”, we need to bear in mind the following.

First, until we know more about the personal circumstances of the individuals involved, we cannot really know what has driven them to take the drastic step of leaving families and their personal history behind by moving to America.

Second, most whites have responded to the arrival of democracy pragmatically. They have their numerous complaints, notably about equity employment (affirmative action policies in favour of blacks) which they view as discriminatory against whites. But they have continued to enjoy high rates of employment. Indeed they continue to occupy the higher ranks of employment in the private sector in disproportionate numbers.

However, although many whites continue to live in a de facto overwhelmingly white world, both at work and at their homes in suburbia, there remains a minority which has remained wholly unreconciled to the changes which have taken place politically and economically since 1994. The armed opposers linked to the far-right have long been defeated. But we may presume the 49 belong to a broader category of passive resisters who have withdrawn into a white world as much as possible.

Third, although most whites continue to do well economically, the changes which have taken place since 1994 have led to the re-appearance of a small class of largely uneducated poor whites who feel excluded from employment by equity employment legislation. And who generally feel the loss of their racial status under democracy.

Opportunists, not refugees

Having said all that, some interesting questions remain.

Presumably the Afrikaner 49 belonged to that category of whites which, for one reason or another, is disposed to leave South Africa. However, emigrating requires jumping through numerous hoops; meeting educational and professional qualifications, getting a job offer, having sufficient financial resources to take with them to support themselves and their families before they can qualify for recipient countries’ social security systems, and so on. Apart from the emotional costs involved, emigration is not always the easiest of options, even for those who wish to “escape”.

The evidence suggests that the heads of household among the Afrikaner 49 are drawn not only from that minority of Afrikaners who are totally unreconciled to democracy, but who – quite simply – are opportunists who have availed themselves of a short cut to emigrate.

Roger Southall, Professor of Sociology, *University of the Witwatersrand

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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aha // commie just all purpose devil term?

an 5 25

new York Times bestselling author George Saunders knows President Donald Trump can probably fire the librarian of Congress, but says the move gave him "a visceral feeling for just how diseased this administration really is."

Librarian Dr. Carla Hayden, the first Black woman to hold the position, is energetic, engaged and “utterly dedicated to the work of the library,” Saunders wrote in the Times.

But the White House tossed out “nonsense from its meager box of repetitive right-wing auto-defenses” when it claimed Hayden had, “in the pursuit of D.E.I.,” done “quite concerning things.”

“Did it name those things? It did not. It couldn’t have,” Saunders argues. “Putting aside the basic idiocy of being against that position (“What, you value diversity? You think things should be equitable? And that all should be included?”), members of the administration now use ‘D.E.I.’ as a sort of omni-pejorative, deliberately (strategically) leaving its exact meaning vague.”

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“What it seems to mean, to them, is: The accused is a person who is aware that certain groups have had a different experience of American life and who feels that it is part of our intellectual responsibility (and joy) to engage with that history, so as to improve our democracy,” Saunders said.

The White House also claimed with “sickening” inaccuracy that Hayden put “inappropriate books in the library for children,” when the librarian of Congress “doesn’t put books” into the library at all.

“When a ship is sinking,” writes Saunders, “there’s value in knowing how fast, and calling it out. When a country is self-sabotaging, ditto. So let me just say it: Shame on the White House. Shame on those who should be stopping this slide into autocracy and aren’t. (I’m looking at you, John Thune, Mike Johnson and Marco Rubio.) Shame on all of us if we let these ignorant purveyors of cruelty reduce this beautiful thing we’ve built over these hundreds of years to a hollow, braying, anti-version of itself.”

Read the full New York Times essay here.

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an 5 25

Librarian Dr. Carla Hayden, the first Black woman to hold the position, is energetic, engaged and “utterly dedicated to the work of the library,” Saunders wrote in the Times.

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Read the full New York Times essay here.

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Responding to a reporter's question about President Donald Trump firing Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt accused her of "putting inappropriate books in the library for children."

"She was doing concerning things in the pursuit of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI)," Leavitt said during a White House briefing on Friday, defending Hayden's termination.

The Librarian of Congress is the chief officer of the Library of Congress, selected by the president with the approval of the Senate, and serves a ten-year term. Hayden's term was set to expire next year.

Political commentators reacted to the press secretary's remarks and noted that the Library of Congress is not frequented by minors. According to the library's website, anyone aged 16 or older can become a member.

Author Jack Pitneywrote on X: "Inappropriate books for children? Ms. Leavitt does not know that you have to be at least 16 to use the Library of Congress. And you can't wander the shelves or check books out."

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Journalist Lydia Polgreen mockingly said: "At least she admits some members of Congress are children."

Writer Joe Flood wrote: "Kids can’t check books out of the LOC. No one can! It’s a research library. There’s not much for kids unless they want to read the Federal Register."

Podcaster Hemant Mehta said: "They have no idea what her job was, do they."

User @GreekMediaHub wrote: "This is how fascism works. Slow to start, and then the walls start tumbling, one by one. Education. Books. Speech. Press. That sound is your rights crumbling away."

Hayden was the first woman and the first African American to be librarian of Congress. She was confirmed in 2016.

On Thursday, the White House informed Hayden that she had been dismissed from her role,CNN reported, citing a spokesperson for the Library of Congress.

The exact cause of Hayden’s dismissal was not immediately known. Congressional Democrats quickly condemned the president's decision, saying he was aiming to censor books.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) said Hayden's removal was “a disgrace and the latest in his ongoing effort to ban books, whitewash American history and turn back the clock.”

"There will be accountability for this unprecedented assault on the American way of life sooner rather than later," he said in a statement posted to the social platform X Thursday.

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mma 5 25 long vid too

VIDEO: How billionaires created the DEI panic | Media Matters for America

Since the first days of his second term, President Donald Trump has systematically attacked diversity, equity, and inclusion programs — terminating DEI offices, eliminating equity-related grants, and attacking universities accused of promoting diversity. Meanwhile, right-wing media have spent the past two years fearmongering about DEI, blaming it for everything from plane crashes and bridge collapses to wildfires and shootings.

It’s no secret that DEI has become an extremely effective boogeyman for the American right as they push policies that attack racial and sexual diversity. We find ourselves in a political moment when the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights is investigating universities for partnering with a nonprofit that supports Black, Latino, and Native American students seeking a doctorate degree. But how did we come to this age of doublespeak? And what lessons can the media find from their past mistakes in covering this type of racist disinformation?

1990s: How to manufacture a moral panic over “political correctness”

In his book The Myth of Political Correctness, author John Wilson described the process of “mythmaking through anecdote” and detailed the spread of one such example “which first appeared in a Wall Street Journal column by Alan Charles Kors in 1989.”

Kors had described a “courageous female undergraduate” member of a committee examining diversity at the University of Pennsylvania who wrote a memo in which she declared, “The desire of the committee to continually consider the collective before the individual is misconceived. At Penn we should be concerned with the intellect and experience of INDIVIDUALS before we are concerned with the group .... The desire of this subcommittee to dictate what to think regarding groups or individuals does not constitute education; it is merely a process of thought homogenization.” A university administrator on the committee responded by circling the word “INDIVIDUALS,” and commenting: “This is a ‘RED FLAG’ phrase today, which is considered by many to be RACIST. Arguments that champion the individual over the group ultimately privileges [sic] the ‘individuals’ belonging to the largest or dominant group.”

The administrator did not take any actions to punish the student for their statement — they only wrote a comment. However, as Wilson reported, “Probably no other note scribbled on a memo has ever attracted this much attention.” Writing in 1995, he observed that the incident “has reappeared in at least thirty-five articles and books about political correctness.”

The PC panic exploded onto the American media landscape in the first half of the 1990s. Wilson reported that the Nexis media database showed 65 articles that mentioned political correctness in 1990. The next year, there were over 1,500. By 1994, there were nearly 7,000.

Speaking to NPR in 2021, Wilson said:

“A myth is not a falsehood: It doesn’t mean it’s a lie. It doesn't mean everything is fabricated,” he says. “It means that it's a story. And so what happened in the '90s is, people, with political correctness, they took certain — sometimes true — anecdotes and they created a web, a story out of them, a myth that there was this vast repression of conservative voices on college campuses.”

So, how did the right manufacture a myth about the “vast repression of conservative voices on college campuses” that persists to this day?

Throughout the 1980s, marginalized groups had gained power in American culture. Black Americans were being elected into powerful offices, winning Miss America, and going to space. Second wave feminism brought increased attention to systemic sexism baked into American society. The AIDS crisis brought gay rights into the national focus. And on college campuses, an ongoing push for ethnic and feminist studies programs was elevating the perspectives of marginalized voices in academia.

But where there is social progress, there is also backlash — and sometimes that backlash is fueled by right-wing dark money.

Beginning in the late 1980s, the conservative John M. Olin Foundation started pouring money into propaganda about political correctness and liberalism on college campuses. The Olin Foundation supplied right-wing academic Allan Bloom with a grant to write an article for National Review that became the basis for his 1987 national bestseller, The Closing of the American Mind, which blamed “cultural relativism” for “destroying the West's universal or intellectually imperialistic claims, leaving it to be just another culture.”

The Olin Foundation gave Dinesh D’Souza a $30,000 grant to write his 1991 book, Illiberal Education, and another $20,000 to help promote it. D’Souza argued that “an academic and cultural revolution is under way at American universities,” adding, “It is changing what students learn in the classroom, and how they are taught. It is aimed at what University of Wisconsin chancellor Donna Shalala calls ‘a basic transformation of American higher education in the name of multiculturalism and diversity.’”

The Olin Foundation also funded critic and commentator Roger Kimball to write essays in the conservative journal New Criterion, which would go on to become the basis for his book Tenured Radicals. Kimball wrote:

We have all become familiar with the kinds of foolishness that the demand for multiculturalism and political correctness has brought to our schools and college campuses. The denunciation of Western civilization as inextricably racist, sexist, elitist, and patriarchal; the efforts by college administrations to enforce speech codes on college campuses; the blatant rewriting of history text books to soothe wounded ethnic feelings: all are transforming the nature of American society.

And it wasn’t just books. The Olin Foundation also spent $15 million a year funding conservative magazines like the American Spectator, National Review, and Crisis, which would publish horror stories about “political correctness” going too far.

In 1991, right-wing think tank The Heritage Foundation published a speech by conservative scholar Harvey Mansfield titled “Political Correctness and the Suicide of the Intellect.” Mansfield claimed there was a growing epidemic of “politicization and PC” that was “manifest in three aspects of the universities: first, in the admission of students and recruitment of faculty, and the related question of affirmative action; second, in campus life and the demand for sensitivity; and third, in the curriculum and the criticism of the traditional canon.” His speech railed against the use of “he or she” rather than male pronouns as a default, calling the practice “ridiculous” and “an attempt to create an atmosphere of self-censorship,” and defended the right of a Harvard student to hang a Confederate flag from her dormitory window. Mansfield concluded by calling for conservatives to “raise a little hell” over political correctness on campuses.

Right-wing money also funded lawsuits. By 1995, the Center for Individual Rights had received nearly $2 million in support of its work bringing suits by students and professors claiming to be victims of campus incidents of “political correctness.”

Through publicizing anti-PC anecdotes and filing lawsuits, right-wing groups successfully manufactured the illusion of a crisis. Suddenly, the term was on the cover of major magazines, with Time describing political correctness as “the fraying of America,” Newsweek publishing an anti-PC cover story titled “Thought Police” and warning of “the New McCarthyism,” and New York magazine asking: “Are you politically correct? Am I guilty of racism, sexism, classism? Am I guilty of ageism, ableism, lookism?”

In 1994, The Open Mind, an educational program on PBS, brought on anti-PC activists to fearmonger about “intolerance and witch-hunting in the name of political correctness and multiculturalism.” Universities also granted the panic legitimacy with public debates like one held at the in 1993 as part of William F. Buckley’s Firing Line, which declared political correctness to be a “menace.”

2000s: Mainstreaming the PC panic

Throughout the first two decades of the 21st century, the right’s conception of political correctness evolved from a panic about speech on college campuses into a catch-all term used to mock anything concerned with social justice. Fox News started blaming the “PC Police” for miniscule social changes like removing a racist caricature from a baseball team’s logo, adding female characters to a children's TV show, or relabeling “family restrooms” as “all-gender restrooms.”

The PC panic permeated popular media beyond Fox News, with political correctness becoming a punchline on shows like The Simpsons, South Park, and Modern Family. Mainstream news outlets also deployed the term to criticize progressive perspectives on a variety of issues, like a movie about Israeli-Palestinian relations and university students' protest of a commencement speech by former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

While mainstream media were making jokes about political correctness going too far, something far more sinister was taking place on the far right — the term was evolving from a punchline about liberal sensitivity into an outright defense of bigotry. “This might not be politically correct” became the qualifier ahead of blatantly hateful, frequently Islamophobic statements, as though being self-aware made the bigotry itself permissible. Americans watching Fox News would hear statements like, “It’s not politically correct but I am sick of hearing that Islam is a religion of peace,” or, “It may not be politically correct but I’ll say it — many Americans link all Muslims to terrorism.”

On the right, political correctness was also depicted as an actual threat to Americans. After the 2009 mass shooting at Fort Hood, Texas, carried out by a Muslim service member, right-wing media were quick to find the real culprit, declaring: “The problem is political correctness, that’s what we’re talking about. And this is not the first time political correctness when it comes to Islam and Muslims has gotten people killed.” On Fox, Michelle Malkin called political correctness “the handmaiden of terror” and claimed that U.S. military officials “worship the false god of diversity over putting national security and the safety of their own officers first.” According to Fox & Friends, “Because of this political correctness climate, the military [and] the FBI sort of perhaps looked the other way.”

Americans watching right-wing media were told that political correctness was a threat that, by limiting their speech, was making them unsafe from people they perceived as dangerous (e.g. Muslims, Black Americans, women accusing men of sexual assault). By the late 2010s, Americans seem to have categorized political correctness as harmful. A 2017 Cato Institute poll found that 71% of Americans said that political correctness had silenced necessary social discussions, and a 2018 poll from More in Common found that 80% of Americans disliked “political correctness.”

This landscape made for an ideal cesspool for anti-PC crusader Donald Trump, who launched his first presidential campaign in 2015 by railing against immigrants and political correctness.

Trump took the subtext of the panic over political correctness and made it explicit — the problem was never overly sensitive students. It was that you couldn’t be openly bigoted anymore. And after consuming decades worth of anti-PC propaganda, conservative Americans viewed Trump’s unleashed bigotry as freedom from the controlling PC mob.

Right-wing media celebrated Trump’s disdain for political correctness.

“The politically correct crowd often fires vile accusations toward those they don't like,” Bill O’Reilly said. “Folks who oppose gay marriage, for example, are homophobic. People who want a responsible welfare system are anti-poor. Americans who believe that the enormous out-of-wedlock African American birth rate is hurting the country are anti-Black. That's vile stuff, and clear-thinking people, Americans know it. Thus, when a guy like Trump actually attacks politically correct madness, he gains devoted followers.”

Fox contributor and future Trump official Monica Crowley said, “The American people understand the nature of the enemy, all this political correctness about Islam and the threat and so on — Trump just barrels right through it and gets to the core.”

Fox guest Hadley Heath Manning: “We can’t allow political correctness to come ahead of our national security and that’s part of the reason Trump was elected — because he ran against political correctness.”

“The effort to control our minds by controlling our language has been growing more and more powerful each year — until Trump,” said then-Fox Business host Lou Dobbs. “Trump is almost singlehandedly burying political correctness and tearing up the playbook.”

Former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke also praised Trump’s anti-PC campaign, saying that the candidate “deserves a close look by those who believe the era of political correctness needs to come to an end.”

2020s: Cancel culture, DEI, and more become the new PC boogeymen

When he first proposed the “Muslim ban,” Trump said, “You’re going to have more World Trade Centers. It’s going to get worse and worse, folks. You can be politically correct or stupid.”

When he attempted to enact the policy upon taking office, Fox White House correspondent Kristin Fisher reported, “President Trump really pushed political correctness aside by saying this: ‘People, the lawyers and the courts can call it whatever they want but I am calling it what we need and what it is, a TRAVEL BAN.’”

Trump’s first presidency really was an end to the age of political correctness. He called African nations “shithole countries.” He called COVID-19 a “Chinese virus” and the “kung flu.” Through his presidency, right-wing media could celebrate his politically incorrect language and unapologetic bigotry.

At the same time, Americans were experiencing another reckoning over racism. The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the consequences of racial inequality in the U.S. After the police murder of George Floyd, protests erupted around the country. There was a wave of states removing Confederate symbols and monuments.

Much like in the early 1990s, Americans were experiencing a shift in cultural awareness about race and inequality in their country — a shift that conservatives already had a tried-and-true strategy to fight back against. They could weaponize the same PC panic to stir up racial anxiety in their white base, except “political correctness” was a bit worn out and overplayed. They needed a scary new term to paint social progress as a threat to Americans’ safety.

Cancel culture

Beginning in 2020, conservatives had a new catch-all fearmongering term: “cancel culture.” The term spiked into the national consciousness that June, while America was in the heat of protests against racist policing.

Right-wing media now fearmongered that Americans would be “canceled” by society for saying something bigoted. While the name had changed, the structure of the new narrative was virtually identical to that of the PC panic: Minority groups have taken control, they’re silencing conservatives, and you’re not allowed to say the truth anymore.

Much like the earlier campaign against political correctness, the panic over cancel culture was fueled by a hodgepodge of the most trivial anecdotes that right-wing media could scrape together. Fox & Friends Weekend ran down a list of “some of the recent victims of cancel culture,” including Paw Patrol, Aunt Jemima, and The Muppets. Fox & Friends First warned: “Cancel culture extending its reach this time to — deep breath — Snow White.”

Anxiety about cancel culture quickly spread from right-wing media ecosystems into the broader American media space. It was covered on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, it was on the cover of New York magazine, it got a segment on. Members of Congress took to the floor to call cancel culture “anti-American” and “fascist,” comparing it to “a medieval mob coming to burn witches.”

Much like with political correctness, the definition of cancel culture evolved. While it initially spoke to the experience of public backlash in response to offensive behavior, its meaning morphed to describe any attempt to hold powerful people or institutions accountable for their actions. Cancel culture was when a politician was investigated for sexual harassment, or when the police were criticized for murdering Black people, or when people chose not to promote the work of a transphobic author. Before long, white supremacists like Nick Fuentes were using the term to defend themselves from criticism.

Conservatives had correctly identified “cancel culture” as an effective term for stoking fear and outrage in their base. At the 2020 Republican National Convention, at least 11 GOP speakers used the platform to speak about the threat of cancel culture.

Wokeism

Reinventing the PC panic with cancel culture worked so well, why not do it again? A few months later, a new moral panic emerged on the right around “wokeism.”

The formula was exactly the same: Minorities have taken control, they’re silencing conservatives, you can’t tell the truth anymore. And just like with political correctness and cancel culture, the wokeism panic was fueled by minor anecdotes amplified by right-wing media. A Fox News host announced that “Lego is going woke,” for instance, after the company unveiled a range of characters with disabilities.

The term went mainstream with big spikes of attention in 2021 and then again in 2022, permeating mainstream media with segments like CNN asking, “Is ‘wokeness’ a problem for the Democratic Party?”

While political correctness and cancel culture both evolved into more vague, all-encompassing terms that referred to any backlash to bigotry, “wokeism” achieved new levels of ambiguity. Wokeism was when white people were forced to think about. Wokeism was when kids were exposed to the existence of trans people. Wokeism was when people welcomed immigrants into their communities.

As Philip Bump wrote in The Washington Post:

Woke is the perfect pejorative. At times, it refers to misguided overreactions to concerns about the presentation of identity. In common usage, though, it often means little more than “raising issues that I would prefer not be raised.” It is a distillation of “politically correct” to the hot-button, triggering issues of race, gender and sexuality.

Much like its predecessors, wokeism worked to rile up the conservative base, with GOP voters soon identifying it as an election issue. A 2023 Wall Street Journal poll found that a majority of Republican primary voters agreed that “fighting woke ideology in our schools and businesses” was more important than preventing cuts to Medicare and Social Security.

Critical race theory

Woke may have been the “perfect pejorative” but it was also a little too nebulous to create policy around. Conservatives needed a new villain, one that they could run against to win general elections. And that brings us to “critical race theory,” an academic framework for understanding the impacts of systemic racism that quickly became the right’s new villain.

The CRT panic had the same bones as those before it: Minorities have taken control, they’re silencing conservatives, you can’t tell the truth anymore. Once again, the panic was fueled by trivial anecdotes boosted by right-wing media.

Much like with cancel culture and wokeism, CRT’s meaning was amorphous and vague. CRT was when people acknowledged the existence of racism in American society. CRT was when Black people were appointed to the Supreme Court. CRT was when “white people feel guilty.”

This panic, however, created political changes at hyperlocal levels. Anti-CRT groups disrupted school board meetings, ousted liberal board members, and harassed parents who supported teaching children about racial equity.

Christopher Rufo, the right-wing activist who invented the campaign against CRT (funded by some of the same groups that created the PC panic), described the success of the CRT panic to The New Yorker.

“We’ve needed new language for these issues,” Rufo told me, when I first wrote to him, late in May. “‘Political correctness’ is a dated term and, more importantly, doesn’t apply anymore. It’s not that elites are enforcing a set of manners and cultural limits, they’re seeking to reengineer the foundation of human psychology and social institutions through the new politics of race, It’s much more invasive than mere ‘correctness,’ which is a mechanism of social control, but not the heart of what’s happening. The other frames are wrong, too: ‘cancel culture’ is a vacuous term and doesn’t translate into a political program; ‘woke’ is a good epithet, but it’s too broad, too terminal, too easily brushed aside. ‘Critical race theory’ is the perfect villain,” Rufo wrote.

The CRT panic took the right’s anxiety about “political correctness” and turned it into a real political project. Throughout 2021 and 2022, local, state, and federal officials across the U.S. introduced a total of 563 anti-CRT measures, 241 of which were enacted or adopted as of April 2023. In Texas, the state passed a law designed to keep CRT out of Texas public schools by banning courses that make any individual feel “discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race or sex.”

DEI

The political success of the CRT panic gave conservatives a blueprint for attacking racial equity policies — they just needed a new term to expand the scope of their campaign beyond education. DEI was exactly the same villain as CRT but it had the added benefit of existing in schools, workplaces, and government agencies alike. Anti-DEI policies allowed for the expansion of attacks on diversity efforts across most sectors of American life.

Of course, the DEI panic contained the same structure as each panic before it: Minorities are in control, they’re silencing conservatives, you can’t say the truth anymore.

By March 2024, more than 30 states had introduced bills banning or limiting DEI efforts. When Trump took office for his second term in January, many of his first actions involved attacks on DEI.

If the Obama-era cries of political correctness run amok were racist dog whistles, the panic over DEI is a megaphone, emboldening right-wing media to loudly proclaim their racist, sexist, and anti-LGBTQ beliefs. What started out as complaints about corporate diversity trainings rapidly devolved into proclamations about how Americans can’t trust nonwhite doctors.

“Now speaking of DEI, we’re ushering in an era of deadly medicine as well,” claimed Laura Ingraham. “It could lead to actual human suffering.”

A Fox guest warned, “DEI is a poison to objective standards of excellence. This is going to ruin medicine. You will now go into a doctor and not know by which merits they became a doctor.”

Where that leaves us

The right wants to manufacture the belief that we're facing some radical new culture war but the reality is that we’ve been having the same argument for over 30 years now. Just compare how then-House Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik spoke to Fox Business about DEI last year versus how a former head of the KKK used to speak about affirmative action:

Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY): We are a nation that’s based upon merit, that’s based upon excellence, based upon the American dream. And the DEI radical far left agenda is crushing the American dream.

David Duke: You should be judged on your abilities and your merit, not on your race. … When we stop judging people by their abilities and start judging people by their racial backgrounds, we back away from freedom and true equality in America.

It would appear that we are stuck in a time loop. The right knows that arguing against social progress isn’t great optics — it’s challenging to look like the good guys and defend racist policies. To hijack conversations around social progress, conservatives need to keep reframing the same old racist narratives around new boogeymen like political correctness, cancel culture, wokeism, CRT, and DEI.

It’s like picking a scab. Left alone, Americans might eventually accept racial equity policies that build a stronger society for everyone or curricula that acknowledge our country’s deeply racist past. These racial-anxiety boogeymen are how the right-wing convinces Americans to keep caring about maintaining our racial hierarchy — to keep picking at the scab. And if you are picking at a scab, it doesn’t heal. It gets infected.

Part of the reason this propaganda strategy works is that liberals keep falling for it too. After Kamala Harris lost the 2024 election, liberal commentators immediately began blaming Democrats for being too concerned with identity politics, too woke, too politically correct, too nice to trans people. Remarkably, Democrats similarly blamed John Kerry’s loss in 2004 on the party’s perceived acceptance of gay marriage. Two decades later, Democrats are still asking themselves if they should sacrifice queer people to win elections.

Folks, we are playing a rigged game. The right creates a panic, hijacks the news cycles, then forces their opponents to play defense — always arguing that the left is too woke or too politically correct — as if this entire conversation wasn’t invented by right-wing think tanks.

And it’s going to happen again. Eventually, conservatives will have exhausted all of their anti-DEI policy options and will need to rebrand the same racial panic yet again. And as long as the media keep taking the bait, accepting the premise that we can be too oriented toward equality, we’ll stay stuck in this loop, playing their game, turning on each other while the right rolls back the most basic attempts at social progress.

As it turns out, the only winning move is not to play.

an 4 25

'Lying again': Hegseth ripped for ending 'woke Biden initiative' Trump signed into law

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LTR CARR FCC

:{:{:{:{Dear Mr. Roberts,}:

I am writing to inform you that I have asked the FCC’s Enforcement Bureau to open an investigation into Comcast and NBCUniversal. In particular, I want to ensure that your companies are not promoting invidious forms of discrimination in violation of FCC regulations and civil rights laws.

As you know, the Communications Act and Commission rules prohibit regulated entities—like Comcast and NBCUniversal—from discriminating on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, age, or gender.1 Indeed, the FCC’s longstanding Equal Employment Opportunity or EEO rules set forth specific requirements that both Comcast and NBCUniversal must adhere to. Nonetheless, I am concerned that Comcast and NBCUniversal may be promoting invidious forms of DEI in a manner that does not comply with FCC regulations.

For instance, Comcast states on its website that promoting DEI is “a core value of our business” and public reports state that Comcast has an entire “DEI infrastructure” that includes annual “DEI day[s],” “DEI training for company leaders,” and similar initiatives. NBCUniversal has similar DEI initiatives, including executives specifically dedicated to promoting DEI across the TV and programming side of the business. But promoting invidious forms of discrimination cannot be squared with any reasonable interpretation of federal law.

It can only deprive Americans of their rights to fair and equal treatment under the law. Despite the emergence of DEI initiatives in recent years, these forms of discrimination have long been condemned by America’s civil rights laws. Indeed, the Supreme Court has stated that “‘[d]istinctions between citizens solely because of their ancestry are by their very nature odious to a free people whose institutions are founded upon the doctrine of equality.’”2 Likewise, the Supreme Court has written that racial classifications “threaten to stigmatize individuals by reason of their membership in a racial group and to incite racial hostility.”3 For this reason, the Supreme Court has stated that, in the government context, “action based on race—a group classification long recognized as in most circumstances irrelevant and therefore prohibited— should be subjected to detailed judicial inquiry to ensure that the personal right to equal protection of the laws has not been infringed.”4

President Trump took quick and decisive action to root out the scourge of DEI. In his first week in office, President Trump issued an Executive Order that will end the radical and wasteful DEI programs that have spread across the federal government.5 Likewise, President Trump issued an Executive Order to end illegal discrimination and restore merit-based opportunity across the private sector. 6 In that latter Executive Order, President Trump wrote that illegal DEI policies “undermine our national unity, as they deny, discredit, and undermine the traditional American values of hard work, excellence, and individual achievement in favor of an unlawful, corrosive, and pernicious identity-based spoils system.” President Trump’s Executive Order also tasked federal agencies with combatting illegal private-sector DEI preferences, mandates, policies, programs, and activities.

At my direction, the FCC has already taken action to end its own promotion of DEI.7 As a next step, the FCC will be taking fresh action to ensure that every entity the FCC regulates complies with the civil rights protections enshrined in the Communications Act and the agency’s EEO rules, including by shutting down any programs that promote invidious forms of DEI discrimination. I am starting this broader effort with Comcast and NBCUniversal for two reasons. First, as noted above, there is substantial evidence that your companies are still engaging in the promotion of DEI.

Second, your companies cover a range of sectors regulated by the FCC—from cable to high-speed Internet and from broadcast TV stations to MVNO wireless offerings. Therefore, I expect that this investigation into Comcast and its NBCUniversal operations will aid the Commission’s broader efforts to root out invidious forms of DEI discrimination across all of the sectors the FCC regulates.}:

... NO FOOT

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// 4 25 cut pgm cops ~ AA blm

Earlier this month, the Vera Institute of Justice, a national criminal justice reform nonprofit, was notified that all five of its federal grants had been abruptly canceled by the Department of Justice. The lost funding, totaling approximately $5 million, had supported ongoing programs to improve prison conditions and mental health crisis response, as well as training law enforcement to better serve deaf survivors of domestic violence—all of which, the nonprofit says, have bolstered public safety across the country.

“It is just an opening salvo,” Insha Rahman, Vera’s vice president for advocacy and partnerships, told me. “Vera might be the first organization to lose its federal funding, but I am certain we will not be the last in the criminal justice field.”

Since taking office in February, Attorney General Pam Bondi has made sweeping moves to align the Department of Justice with President Donald Trump’s policy priorities. The day she was sworn in, Bondi directed the department’s Civil Rights Division to investigate what she described as “illegal DEI and DEIA discrimination and preferences.” Under her leadership, the department has dropped criminal cases against the president’s allies and removed top career officials from their posts. On,[vid] Bondi promised to “root out” DOJ and FBI employees who “despise” Trump.

Coupled with the Department of Government Efficiency‘s cost-cutting rampage, it may have been inevitable that officials would take a closer look at the DOJ’s largest grantmaking entity, the Office of Justice Programs. That office distributes more than $4 billion in funding for law enforcement training, violence prevention, victim services, and criminal justice research. Some of the grants are awarded to city and county governments, while others go to local and national nonprofits. Before leaving office earlier this year, two Biden-era officials said the office had expanded access to grants for communities most affected by violence, writing that “those partnerships significantly contributed to the recent downward trajectory of violence in a majority of our cities and communities throughout our country.”

The Vera Institute, established in 1961, is among the oldest, largest, and most prominent criminal justice nonprofits in the country. In the 2023 fiscal year, its total revenue was $263 million, according to its public tax filings. The organization’s president, Nick Turner, said the affected programs would continue operating while it formally appeals the funding termination.

Given the Trump administration’s unprecedented cuts to federal spending, Rahman said she wasn’t surprised when the Vera Institute received the termination letter April 4. In it, the DOJ wrote that the Vera Institute’s work “no longer effectuate[s] the program goals or agency priorities.” What was unusual, Rahman said, was that Vera was alone in having its funding cut.

“It leads us to believe that the only reason our funding was cut is that we have been singularly vocal in our opposition to this administration’s actions.”

“It leads us to believe that the only reason our funding was cut is that we have been singularly vocal in our opposition to this administration’s actions,” Rahman said. The Vera Institute has condemned the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda and detention of pro-Palestine student protesters.

The Department of Justice did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Other criminal justice reform and direct service organizations are far more reliant on federal funding and so far have been able to continue operating. But Rahman said what happened to the Vera Institute will make it far more difficult for those groups to speak out, given widespread fear that it will draw unwanted attention from the Trump administration.

“So we think it’s important to stand up and call this out publicly,” Rahman said. “We are doing so because we have to look back at this moment in history and know that we have done the right and principled thing.”

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rww 4 25

Malcolm Ferguson @ The New Republic: Trump’s Anti-DEI Purge Hits Harriet Tubman and Underground Railroad

Harriet Tubman is now DEI, apparently.

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AN 3 25

Army erases WWII vet Medgar Evers from Arlington National Cemetery website

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an pp tt

In 2019, the Keller Independent School District in North Texas looked a lot like its counterpart just 30 miles to the east in the Dallas suburb of Richardson. Each served about 35,000 children and had experienced sharp increases in the racial diversity of students in recent decades. Each was run by a school board that was almost entirely white.

In the five years since, the districts have followed strikingly divergent paths as culture war battles over how to teach race and gender exploded across the state.

In Keller, candidates backed by groups seeking to limit the teaching of race and gender took control of the school board and immediately passed sweeping policies that gave outsized power to any individual who wanted to prevent the purchase of books they believed to be unsuitable for children.

Though more than half of Keller’s students are from racially diverse backgrounds, the district in 2023 nixed a plan to buy copies of a biography of Black poet Amanda Gorman after a teacher at a religious private school who had no children in the district complained about this passage: “Amanda realized that all the books she had read before were written by white men. Discovering a book written by people who look like her helped Amanda find her own voice.” The passage, the woman wrote, “makes it sound like it’s okay to judge a book by the authors skin color rather than the content of the book.”

Board members at the Richardson school district went in the opposite direction, even as they contended with similar pressure from groups aiming to rid the district of any materials that they claimed pushed critical race theory, an advanced academic concept that discusses systemic racism. The school board did not ban library books but instead allowed parents to limit their own children’s access to them, keeping them available for other students.

One major difference contributed to the districts’ divergence: the makeup of their school boards.

The way communities elect school board members plays a key, if often overlooked, role in whether racially diverse districts like Keller and Richardson experience takeovers by ideologically driven conservatives seeking to exert greater influence over what children learn in public schools, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune found. Since the pandemic, such groups have successfully leveraged the state’s long-standing and predominantly at-large method of electing candidates to flip school boards in their direction.

Most of Texas’ 1,000 school districts use an at-large method, where voters can cast ballots for all candidates. Supporters say that allows for broader representation for students, but voting rights advocates argue that such systems dilute the power of voters of color. If board members are elected districtwide, there tends to be less diversity, according to research, which also shows that if they are elected by smaller geographic zones, candidates of color often have more success.

“What you’re seeing happening in Texas is how at-large districts make it easy for somebody to come in, usually from the outside, and hijack the process and essentially buy a board,” said Michael Li, senior counsel for the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonprofit public policy institute that champions small-donor campaign financing. “Because of this conflux of factors — at-large elections and large amounts of outside money — it just sort of defeats the idea of representative democracy.”

ProPublica and the Tribune examined 14 rapidly diversifying suburban school districts where children from diverse backgrounds now make up more than half of the student population. In the six districts that used at-large voting systems, well-funded and culture-war-driven movements successfully helped elect school board members who have moved aggressively to ban or remove educational materials that teach children about diversity, even in districts where a majority of children are not white. Nearly 70% of board members in such districts live in areas that are whiter than their district’s population.

Eight nearby school systems with similar demographics employ single-member voting systems to elect school board candidates. Under the single-member system, voters within certain boundaries elect a board member who specifically represents their area. Candidates in those districts received less campaign support from ideologically driven political action committees, and none of the districts experienced school board takeovers fueled by culture war issues.

About 150 Texas school districts have transitioned to a single-member system since the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which is intended to prevent voter discrimination and has brought greater racial representation to local governments. Richardson joined that list in 2019 after a former Black board member sued the district.

Such legal challenges, however, could soon become more difficult. In one of his first acts in office, President Donald Trump froze civil rights litigation against school districts accused of discriminating against minority groups, and many legal experts believe that under his administration, federal prosecutors will refuse to bring challenges against at-large systems. DOJ officials did not respond to questions from the news organizations.

Trump, a staunch critic of diversity and inclusion programs, has threatened to cut federal funding to schools that he says are pushing “inappropriate racial, sexual or political content onto the shoulders of our children.”

Districts whose boards oppose sweeping efforts to restrict curriculum and books related to race and racism face even more headwinds in Texas. In January, Gov. Greg Abbott vowed to ban diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in public schools, a move that would expand the state’s existing ban on college campuses. And Texas lawmakers continue to target the books students can access. One bill, authored by North Texas state Sen. Angela Paxton, the wife of Attorney General Ken Paxton, would require every district in the state to follow a version of Keller’s library book purchase policy.

The president of the Keller board, Charles Randklev, did not respond to multiple requests for comment, and the district did not answer written questions. District officials have previously said that the board represents all students, not just those in a specific neighborhood or area.

But Laney Hawes, the parent of four students in the district and an outspoken critic of the school board, said the policy on library purchases spawned a backdoor channel to banning materials about race. That, she said, has deprived her children of reading books about Americans like Gorman that provide points of view they might not find otherwise.

“They have created a system that allows anyone in the community to complain about any book for any reason, and now that book is not on library shelves,” said Hawes, who is white. She added that the book does not contain any sexually explicit material and was strictly targeted because it dealt with race.

“They just hate the racial undertones.”

“Up Against a Machine”

School districts across Texas have drawn considerable attention for removing books from their shelves, but board members in Keller went further when they passed a policy in August 2022 that, in practice, allowed community members to block proposed purchases.

Students spoke out against the district’s removal policies during a board meeting months later, pleading for access to books about race. One biracial student, who has since graduated, told the board that books about characters from different racial backgrounds helped her feel more accepted.

“All kids deserve to see themselves in literature,” the student said. “Racial minorities being written into a story does not instantly equate the book to being propaganda. Having books that mirror the experience of race is not pushing an agenda. It's simply documenting the hardships that consistently happen to most students of color that they’re able to relate to. Concealing ideas just because they tell an uncomfortable truth is not protecting your children.”

The students’ pleas didn’t sway the board, and by July 2023, challenges to such books began pouring in.

One person opposed the purchase of “Jim Crow: Segregation and the Legacy of Slavery.” The person, who did not provide their name, pointed to a photo of a young girl participating in a Black Lives Matter protest with the caption: “Just as in the past, people continue fighting for change.” They also took issue with this quote: “You can’t ‘get over’ something that is still happening. Which is why black Americans can’t ‘get over’ slavery or Jim Crow.”

The photo and the quotes, the book challenger said, were “potentially CRT,” showed the Black Lives Matter Movement in “a positive light” and claimed “oppression is still happening.”

Another person challenged the planned purchase of “Our Skin: A First Conversation About Race,” saying that the book started “beautifully,” but that “unfortunately tenets of CRT, social justice, and anti-white activism are portrayed.” The person, who used a pseudonym, did not offer specifics.

Administrators removed those books, the Gorman biography and 26 others from the purchase list after receiving the complaints, according to district officials. Librarians can reinstate books on future lists, but 75% of those flagged for further review never made it to the shelves, an online search of district libraries shows. That includes the three books about race.

Hawes, who heads two PTA groups at her children’s schools, said book challenges and complaints have come from allies of school board members. In 2022, Patriot Mobile Action, a North Texas Christian nationalist PAC funded by a cellphone company, spent more than $115,000 supporting three ideologically driven conservatives running for control of the school board.

Leigh Wambsganss, Patriot Mobile’s spokesperson and executive director of the PAC, declined to comment but said in a 2022 podcast that the PAC chose candidates based on their Christian conservative views and sought out those who “absolutely would stand against critical race theory.” Patriot Mobile supported eight candidates in three other North Texas districts that used at-large voting during the same election cycle. All of them won their races.

“We weren’t prepared for what was coming,” Hawes said. “We were literally up against a machine.”

Another PAC, KISD Family Alliance, spent $50,000 to help elect the same Keller school board candidates. Its donors included conservative activist Monty Bennett, who previously told the Tribune that he believes schools have been taken over by ideologues “pushing their outlandish agendas.” Neither Bennett nor the PAC’s treasurer responded to requests for comment.

The slate of Keller candidates, whose combined campaign war chests dwarfed that of their opponents’ by a more than 4 to 1 margin, focused their agendas squarely on culture war issues related to library books and curriculum.

“While I have many priorities I want to focus on, if concerns over child safety, and sexualization and politicization of children make me a one-issue candidate, so be it. I will be a one-issue candidate all day long,” Joni Shaw Smith wrote on her campaign website. Smith, who is now a board member, declined to comment.

Her election contributed to what would become a sweep of the seven seats on the board. Five of those seats are held by board members who live in the city of Keller, where three-quarters of residents are white and the median household income of more than $160,000 is among the highest in the state.

Most of the Keller district’s 42 schools, however, are located in the more diverse neighborhoods of Fort Worth.

A Different Approach

Thirty miles away, the makeup of Richardson’s school board changed dramatically after the district settled a lawsuit filed in 2018 by David Tyson Jr. He argued that the continued use of at-large voting to select candidates was a “relic of the district’s segregated past.”

Tyson became the district’s first Black board member when he was elected in 2004. After he retired in 2010, he watched with growing consternation as no candidates from diverse backgrounds followed in his footsteps, even though students of color accounted for nearly 70% of the district’s population.

Frustrated, Tyson sued Richardson, challenging its system for electing candidates under the Voting Rights Act of 1965. He and Richardson officials settled the lawsuit in 2019, and the district converted primarily to a system in which candidates needed to live within specific boundaries and receive a majority of votes from residents who also lived within those boundaries to be elected.

As ideologically driven candidates swept Keller school board elections, similar efforts played out differently in Richardson. In 2022, two candidates supported by groups seeking to limit instruction and library books that deal with race and gender ran against two candidates of color with differing views. A local PAC that accused the district of teaching “CRT nonsense” in a mailer hired the same Republican campaign consulting firm that was working in support of the Keller candidates.

Despite being outspent 2-to-1, the candidates of color won their elections. Their wins gave Richardson four board members of diverse backgrounds, a remarkable evolution from an all-white board just three years earlier. And, as nearby districts began mass removals of library books dealing with race and gender, the Richardson school board embraced an “opt-out” process to give concerned parents control over their children’s reading “without impacting the choices of other families who may have different values, wishes or expectations.” Opponents say opt-out systems do not go far enough in protecting students from materials they deem objectionable.

“Single-member districts benefited us in making sure our school board maintains the diversity, and diversity of thought, we have, and not just fall into those culture wars,” said Vanessa Pacheco, one of the board members who won.

Pacheco said not being consumed by such fights allowed the board to focus on “real stuff” like dual-language classes for elementary students, expanding pre-K opportunities and scheduling school events for parents in the evenings and on weekends to account for working families.

So striking was the district’s atmosphere following the 2022 election that a Dallas Morning News commentary dubbed Richardson a “no-drama district” in a sea of school boards consumed by fights over race and gender.

Tyson, whose lawsuit set the stage for the Richardson school board’s dramatic transformation, said that the shift in voting methods has accomplished what he had hoped for.

“The goal was to get representation,” he said. “We’re a majority-minority school district, and so we need to have a majority-minority representation on the school board.”

“Now or Never”

Hawes watched as voters down the road in Richardson rejected candidates seeking to limit what the district’s diverse student body could read and learn. She watched as the board itself grew increasingly diverse. And she watched with a touch of envy as the district embraced the idea that parents and community members who opposed certain books should not make decisions for every child in the district.

With Richardson as their north star, Hawes and a growing number of concerned parents began discussing ways to force the Keller school district to adopt what they believed was a more representative voting system. It wasn’t just a question of race for Hawes. It was also about geographic diversity. Board members who live in the city of Keller hold a majority, even though less than a third of students in the district attend schools there.

So last year, Hawes and other concerned parents met with law firms and the NAACP and began planning a petition drive that would require the board to hold an election to do away with at-large voting. Members planned to meet in January to finalize a strategy.

Then, in mid-January, the Keller school board shocked many in the community by proposing to split the district in two, separating the whiter, more affluent city of Keller to the east from the neighborhoods of northern Fort Worth, which are home to the majority of the district’s students, including many who are low income. Like many districts in the state, Keller faces a massive budget shortfall.

Randklev, the board president, defended the split as financially beneficial for both districts in a Facebook post last month. He also wrote that “neighboring school districts have been forced into single-member districts, and that’s a no-win situation regardless of where you live.” He did not explain his position but said the proposed split “could provide programming opportunities that best reflect local community goals and values and foster greater parent and community involvement.”

But many parents, including Dixie Davis, who previously ran unsuccessfully for the board, said the proposed change would leave the vast majority of the district’s low-income student population, and most of its students of color, with uncertain access to facilities like an advanced learning center and the district’s swimming complex.

On Friday, board members abandoned plans to divide the school district in two, citing the cost of restructuring the district’s debt. But their push to split the district has further energized efforts by some parents to do away with at-large voting. Brewer Storefront, the same law firm that fought to change the voting system in Richardson, has filed a similar legal challenge in federal court against Keller and concerned parents have launched a petition drive to force the district to vote on its at-large system. The district has not yet filed a response to the lawsuit and did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

“With the momentum and uproar around this proposed district split, it's now or never to get this done,” Davis said. “It'll be a huge uphill battle, but this is our best shot.”

Lexi Churchill, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, and Jessica Priest, The Texas Tribune, contributed research.

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jackie robinson put back?

trms pix of enola gay hegseth ~ DEI

an 3 25

Many MAGA Republicans vehemently criticize liberals and progressives for language policing, often mocking "woke" terms like "Latinx" and "pregnant people." And some Americans who vote Democratic are critical of "woke" language as well: "Real Time" host Bill Maher and veteran Democratic strategist James Carville argue that it's ridiculous for Democrats to say "Latinx" when the vast majority of Latinos don't use that word.

But language policing exists in the MAGA movement as well.

In an article published on March 7, New York Times journalists Karen Yourish, Annie Daniel, Saurabh Datar, Isaac White and Lazaro Gamio list some of the many words and terms that the Trump Administration is urging government workers to limit or avoid in their communications.

The list includes a lot of terms that are often mocked on the right as stereotypically "woke," including "Latinx," "pregnant people," "non-binary" and "pregnant persons." But many of the terms listed aren't necessarily thought of as "woke" — for example, "Black," "stereotype," "prostitute," "mental health," "activists," "sexuality," "inequality," "disparity," "trauma" and "discriminatory."

Also on the list: "hate speech," "gender-affirming care" and "intersectional."

"All presidential administrations change the language used in official communications to reflect their own policies," the Times reporters explain. "It is within their prerogative, as are amendments to or the removal of web pages, which The Times has found has already happened thousands of times in this administration."

The journalists add, "Still, the words and phrases listed here represent a marked — and remarkable — shift in the corpus of language being used both in the federal government's corridors of power and among its rank and file. They are an unmistakable reflection of this administration's priorities."

*Read the full New York Times article at this link (subscription required).

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an 4 25

Through what Sen. Joey Garcia, D-Marion, called “dirty tricks” in the last 30 minutes of the 2025 regular session, Republican lawmakers in the Senate passed a bill Saturday to ban nearly all diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in the state of West Virginia.

The bill passed the House at 10:41 p.m. after nearly three hours of debate.

When the bill advanced to the Senate, 13 amendments from Garcia appeared to be pending on the legislation.

Then, confusion reigned.

Sen. Eric Tarr, R-Putnam, made a motion to suspend legislative Joint Rule 3 — a rule that governs how amendments to amendments and disagreements are handled between the two legislative chambers. That motion was adopted and the Senate then concurred with and passed the House’s version of the bill 31-2 without any consideration of Garcia’s amendments.

IFrame Content

After a short break — and as several attorneys and the chamber’s parliamentarian gathered at Senate President Randy Smith’s podium — Tarr withdrew his initial motion to suspend legislative Joint Rule 3 due to a technical error. The vote would need to be done again.

Another member then moved the previous question to consider the Joint Rule 3 motion again and concur with and pass the House’s version of Senate Bill 474. Again, the Senate voted 31-2 approving the bill.

As motion after confusing motion was considered, the microphones for both Garcia and Sen. Mike Woelfel, D-Cabell — the lone no votes on the bill — were muted while they attempted to call points of order on Tarr’s motions as well as Smith’s rulings.

In an interview after the chaos, Smith, R-Preston, said he also didn’t quite understand the legislative procedures that led to the passage of SB 474. His job, he said, is to preside over the body and the process, but other people tell him what is within the rules and not.

“This was a procedure I’ve never seen in my 13 years in the House or the Senate,” Smith said “… We have a parliamentarian who knows the rules very well, probably better than anybody in the Senate. Sen. Tarr knows the procedure very well … As far as I’m concerned, as the procedure and rules, everything was in order.”

If it wasn’t, Smith said, someone will need to challenge the law’s legitimacy in court. But for now, it heads to Gov. Patrick Morrisey’s desk for approval.

Garcia, in an interview after the Senate adjourned Sine Die for the session, said he believed there is a “legal deficiency” in the legislation.

“I have questions whether this bill actually did pass,” Garcia said. “… [Republicans in the Senate] will take short cuts, break rules, whatever it takes to get their agenda passed.”

Senate Bill 474 bans the offering of specific services or opportunities to people based on their race, color, ethnicity, country of origin and, in some instances, sex.

The bill only applies to DEI policies and initiatives in state and local governments and schools, including institutions of higher education.

Garcia’s attempt to hold up the bill came after his colleagues in the House — mostly Democrats — employed similar tactics. There, 27 amendments were filed by lawmakers. Just three of those were adopted.

Those voted down included moves to include the Crown Act — a policy banning discrimination based on hairstyles and textures — in the bill, as well as adding nondiscrimination measures based on political beliefs and exempting parts of the bill from applying to veterans, among other measures.

Democrats in the body gave fiery speeches against the overall bill, namely Del. Anitra Hamilton, D-Monongalia, who is one of just three Black lawmakers in the state Legislature.

Hamilton told her colleagues that DEI measures are not about giving people of color or other classes special treatment; they’re about ensuring everyone has equal ability to apply for and access the same opportunities.

She shared her experiences dealing with system racism in West Virginia and, specifically, at the Legislature. Her points were echoed by her colleagues, Minority Leader Sean Hornbuckle, D-Cabell, and Del. Hollis Lewis, D-Kanawha, who are also Black.

Not recognizing the existence of racism or sexism, Hamilton said, will only hold West Virginia back.

“Diversity, equity and inclusion matters,” Hamilton said. “If we don’t embrace these principles, we don’t have a bone in the race of this Backyard Brawl. We’ll continue to lose every year … I just pray that we can not only abolish this legislation, we can abolish the mentality and ideology that goes along with it, and the energy.”

YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE. SUPPORT

West Virginia Watch is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. West Virginia Watch maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Leann Ray for questions: info@westvirginiawatch.com.

===

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fired for jan 6 bs, anticipated DEI attack by doge:

bs

Foreign-Aid Group Faces Reckoning over Support for DEI Ideology

Jun 19, 2024

Media

Foreign-Aid Group Faces Reckoning over Support for DEI Ideology

National Review

Jimmy Quinn | June 19, 2024

After using divisive rhetoric about ‘whiteness,’ a powerful NGO faces a possible funding ban from Congress.

A House committee voted last week to block all U.S. government funding for a prominent foreign-aid organization that pushed diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) ideology and other left-wing talking points on race.

Long a fixture of the foreign-aid scene, the group, InterAction, convenes other powerhouses in the industry and argues on their behalf before government offices. Among its members are well-known aid groups, such as Save the Children, OxFam, and Habitat for Humanity.

Now its efforts to push a DEI-centered approach to race into foreign-aid work is posing a liability amid growing complaints that it is politicizing U.S. foreign-assistance programs. An amendment to the State Department and foreign-operations budget passed on June 12 by the House appropriations committee explicitly prohibits any of those funds from being diverted to InterAction, which has long received contracts from the U.S. Agency for International Development.

“American taxpayer dollars should not fund advocacy groups that politicize humanitarian aid. InterAction has demonstrated a clear pattern of using its influence to prioritize its own agenda over the needs of those it claims to help,” Representative Michael Cloud told National Review. Cloud was the author of the provision, which was also supported by the Republican Study Committee, the largest caucus of House Republicans.

“This organization operates within an ‘aid industrial complex’ that encourages a pay-to-play system, diverting much-needed resources from the needy to instead serve as a vehicle for implementing their radical social policies or propping up oppressive regimes.”

In an interview Tuesday, InterAction president Tom Hart suggested that the NGO is pivoting away from that DEI focus and trying to rebuild bridges with Republicans alarmed with the DEI push.

“Obviously, we were surprised and disappointed about the amendment,” he told National Review, emphasizing that he joined InterAction six months ago and is relatively new. “This organization is going through a new strategic planning exercise where we want to focus and we want to be more bipartisan.” He added that he spent 25 years at Bono’s ONE Campaign public-health initiative, “building bridges between right and left — successfully, I might add.”

InterAction also receives about $2.5 million in U.S. government contracts to carry out foreign-aid work and educational programs every year, Hart said.

InterAction’s work on infusing DEI principles into foreign-aid work drew attention from conservatives last year, after a Heritage Foundation report, by Tim Meisburger, a former USAID official in the Trump administration, highlighted its support of DEI ideology in foreign-aid work.

Meisberger cited a 2022 InterAction memo, “The DEI Compact: INGO Commitments Toward Greater Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion,” as a reason for concern. The Heritage report accused InterAction of using “typical Marxist language,” citing its invocation of concepts such as oppression, privilege, and “power structures of society.” “The DEI Compact” has since been taken down from InterAction’s website.

The Heritage report flagged another InterAction memo titled “Anti-Blackness & Racism,” which urges workers in the foreign-aid industry to confront racism. The report uses language common in left-wing activist circles, accusing aid workers of approaching their work with a “problematic white gaze.”

“Through this lens, the sector often places people of color, especially Black, Brown, and Indigenous people, against a model of whiteness — specifically, a whiteness rooted in the Global North — as the default or highest standard to strive toward,” it reads.

“Anti-Blackness & Racism” remains accessible on InterAction’s website, but Hart distanced himself from it, saying that the task force that produced it operated under prior administrations and is currently defunct. The program that published the paper on “whiteness” had ended before he arrived at InterAction, he added, but he was not sure whether it ended before or after Heritage issued its report.

“They’re trying to steer American taxpayer dollars to promote DEI, a woke climate agenda, and radical left wing foreign policy views,” Representative Kevin Hern, the chairman of the RSC, said in a statement. “Humanitarian aid should not be politicized, but that’s exactly what this organization is doing. We should not fund InterAction.”

In addition to InterAction’s advocacy for DEI, Republican congressional offices were troubled that the group lobbied against legislation that would block the U.S. from normalizing diplomatic ties with the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria and that would place sanctions on the Wagner Group. Hart said that he was not familiar with those efforts, which took place before he started at InterAction, and that it was his predecessor who had signed the letter protesting the Assad bill.

Hart said that he wants to rebuild his organization’s ties to conservatives. “There are a lot of disagreements between or among some conservatives and what InterAction has done in the past. . . . This is a moment for us to find common ground to move forward together to tackle the challenges that the world is presenting some of the most vulnerable people,” he said, adding that U.S. leadership on foreign assistance could boost America’s ability to compete with China.

It’s unlikely that Representative Cloud’s provision will survive through passage on the House floor, then consideration in the Senate, under the control of a Democratic majority.

Still, it may be a sign of where the winds are blowing for an industry that has unapologetically embraced left-wing talking points. InterAction’s embrace of DEI rhetoric reflects long-running trends in the foreign-aid realm, said Max Primorac, a former USAID official in the Trump administration and now a senior research fellow at Heritage.

“It is the first time that this industry — and, effectively, this is the foreign-aid-industrial-complex industry — is held accountable for its wacky and extremist social agenda that’s pushing through DEI.” Primorac said. He added that those efforts and the industry’s focus on abortion and “other things that have no place in foreign aid” don’t represent mainstream America and are “resented by those communities that we’re trying to help.”

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Tim M

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AN 2 25

A federal judge sharply criticized an attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice over Pentagon policy asserting that the U.S. Armed Forces could somehow be compromised simply by requiring service members to use a colleague’s preferred pronoun.

U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes, a Biden appointee, appeared skeptical of both the President’s and the Department of Justice’s stance on transgender service members during Tuesday’s hearing.

Reyes “asserted flatly that the idea that the greatest fighting force in the history of the world would be adversely effected by the need to use specific pronouns for a few thousand members of the military is, ‘Ridiculous,'” Fox News producer Jake Gibson reported.

According to Politico’s Kyle Cheney, this is how the exchange went:

“REYES: Can we agree that the greatest fighting force… is not going to be impacted in any way by less than 1 percent of the soldiers using a different pronoun than others might want to call them?

DOJ ATTORNEY: I can’t agree with that here.

REYES: Would you agree with me that if our military is negatively impacted in any kind of way that matters… We all have a lot bigger problems than pronoun use. We have a military that is incompetent. Any common sense rational human being knows that it doesn’t. It is pretext. It is frankly ridiculous. If you want to get me an officer of the U.S. military who is willing to get on the stand and say that because of pronoun usage the U.S. military is less prepared because of pronoun usage. I will be the first to give you a box of cigars.”

An estimated 15,000 service members are transgender.

In another striking exchange, Judge Reyes also called Trump’s executive order on transgender service members “unadulterated animus.”

IFrame Content

Currently, the Pentagon has ordered service branches to stop accepting new transgender recruits into the military, and to pause any gender-affirming medical care for transgender troops.

“One of the plaintiffs,” in the case, WUSA9‘s Jordan Fischer reports, “Koda Nature, a 23-year-old transgender man from Texas, said he had been working with a recruiter to join the U.S. Marine Corps when he was informed last month he would no longer be able to enlist. Nature said joining the military had been his dream since he was 5 years old – a dream to follow in the footsteps of 17 generations of his family.”

President Donald Trump has signed at least four executive orders restricting the civil rights of transgender people in the United States, including one that could be used to ban open service by transgender troops, under the guise of prioritizing military excellence, readiness, and “unit cohesion” — tropes that for decades were also used to try to prevent lesbian, gay, and bisexual troops from serving openly in America’s armed forces.

“Consistent with the military mission and longstanding DoD policy, expressing a false ‘gender identity’ divergent from an individual’s sex cannot satisfy the rigorous standards necessary for military service,” Trump’s January 27 executive order reads. Trump also alleged that “adoption of a gender identity inconsistent with an individual’s sex conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle, even in one’s personal life. A man’s assertion that he is a woman, and his requirement that others honor this falsehood, is not consistent with the humility and selflessness required of a service member.”

That order specifically targeted the use of preferred pronouns, which he called, “invented and identification-based pronoun usage.”

“It is the policy of the United States Government to establish high standards for troop readiness, lethality, cohesion, honesty, humility, uniformity, and integrity. This policy is inconsistent with the medical, surgical, and mental health constraints on individuals with gender dysphoria. This policy is also inconsistent with shifting pronoun usage or use of pronouns that inaccurately reflect an individual’s sex.”

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judd

2 10

today, the National Security Agency (NSA) is planning a "Big Delete" of websites and internal network content that contain any of 27 banned words, including "privilege," "bias," and "inclusion." The "Big Delete," according to an NSA source and internal correspondence reviewed by Popular Information, is creating unintended consequences. Although the websites and other content are purportedly being deleted to comply with President Trump's executive orders targeting diversity, equity, and inclusion, or "DEI," the dragnet is taking down "mission-related" work. According to the NSA source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak to the media, the process is "very chaotic," but is plowing ahead anyway.

A memo distributed by NSA leadership to its staff says that on February 10, all NSA websites and internal network pages that contain banned words will be deleted. This is the list of 27 banned words distributed to NSA staff:

Anti-Racism

Racism

Allyship

Bias

DEI

Diversity

Diverse

Confirmation Bias

Equity

Equitableness

Feminism

Gender

Gender Identity

Inclusion

Inclusive

All-Inclusive

Inclusivity

Injustice

Intersectionality

Prejudice

Privilege

Racial Identity

Sexuality

Stereotypes

Pronouns

Transgender

Equality

The memo acknowledges that the list includes many terms that are used by the NSA in contexts that have nothing to do with DEI. For example, the term "privilege" is used by the NSA in the context of "privilege escalation." In the intelligence world, privilege escalation refers to "techniques that adversaries use to gain higher-level permissions on a system or network."

The purge extends beyond public-facing websites to pages on the NSA's internal network, including project management software like Jira and Confluence.

The NSA is trying to identify mission-related sites before the "Big Delete" is executed but appears to lack the personnel to do so. The NSA's internal network has existed since the 1990s, and a manual review of the content is impractical. Instead, the NSA is working with "Data Science Development Program interns" to "understand the false-positive use cases" and "help generate query options that can better minimize false-positives." Nevertheless, the NSA is anticipating "unintended downtime" of "mission-related" websites.

While Trump's executive order claims to target "illegal and immoral discrimination programs," the NSA's banned-word list demonstrates that the implementation is far broader. The Trump administration is attempting to prohibit any acknowledgment that racism, stereotypes, and bias exist. The ban is so sweeping that "confirmation bias" — the tendency of people "to accept or notice information if it appears to support what they already believe or expect" — is included, even though it has nothing to do with race or gender.

The government memory hole

Since Trump took office, thousands of web pages across various federal agencies have been altered or removed entirely. Federal agencies have taken down or edited resources about HIV, contraceptives, LGBTQ+ health, abortion, and climate change. Some web pages have later come back online “without clarity on what had been changed or removed.”

An analysis by the Washington Post of 8,000 federal web pages “found 662 examples of deletions and additions” since Trump took office. The analysis found that words like diversity, equity, and inclusion were removed at least 231 times from the websites of federal agencies, including the Department of Labor, the Department of Education, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Department of Transportation.

One example included a job listing page for the Department of Homeland Security that removed language about maintaining an “inclusive environment.” The Post also found examples of words being removed that had nothing to do with DEI, such as a page on the Department of the Interior’s website that boasted of its museums' “diverse collections,” removing the word “diverse.”

Following Trump’s executive orders targeting transgender individuals, multiple federal websites have removed transgender and intersex people from the acronym “LGBTQI,” NBC News reported. On the State Department website, a web page that used to provide resources for “LGBTQI Travelers” now addresses “LGB Travelers.” The Social Security Administration has made similar changes, with a page heading now reading “Social Security for LGBQ People.” Some agencies, including the Department of Education, have removed web pages with LGBTQ resources altogether.

On X, Elon Musk's United States DOGE Service is celebrating the deletions:

Federal agencies have also been scrubbing websites for mentions of climate change, which Trump has called a “hoax.” The Department of Agriculture’s Office of Communications issued a directive to “archive or unpublish any landing pages focused on climate change,” the Guardian reported. Resources on the Forest Service website, including the Climate Change Resource Center and the Climate Action Tracker, appear to still be unavailable. The Department of Transportation website replaced the phrase “climate change” with “climate resilience.”

Among the agencies with the most deleted web pages is the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which took down over “3,000 pages,” according to the New York Times. In one example, data from the CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey, which tracks important health metrics, was temporarily unavailable, only to come back online later with “at least one of the gender columns missing and its data documentation removed.” A banner on the top of the CDC website states it is “being modified to comply with President Trump’s Executive Orders.”

Last week, the Trump administration was sued by Doctors for America, a physicians' group, for removing health resources and data from government websites, arguing that it "deprived clinicians and researchers of tools necessary to treat patients.”

---

ggl 2 25

[### The NSA's "Big Delete"

Popular Information | Judd Legum

https://popular.info › the-nsas-big-delete](https://popular.info/p/the-nsas-big-delete)

Feb 10, 2025 — The analysis found that words like diversity, equity, and inclusion were removed at least 231 times from the websites of federal agencies, ...

[### Federal list of forbidden words may jeopardize research at ...

KPBS

https://www.kpbs.org › news › economy › 2025/02/07](https://www.kpbs.org/news/economy/2025/02/07/federal-list-of-forbidden-words-may-jeopardize-research-at-ucsd)

Feb 7, 2025 — The banned words include: women, disability, bias, status, trauma, Black, Hispanic communities, as well as socioeconomic, ethnicity and ...

[### UT Austin flagging DEI-related words in 'routine scans' of ...

KXAN Austin

https://www.kxan.com › news › ut-austin-flagging-dei-r...](https://www.kxan.com/news/ut-austin-flagging-dei-related-words-in-routine-scans-of-its-website/)

Nov 19, 2024 — Some of those words included: Diversity; DEI; Diverse; DEAI; Equity; Equitable; Inclusive; Inclusion; Safe space; BIPOC; Implicit bias ...

Missing: resilience ‎| Show results with: resilience

[### The List of Trump's Forbidden Words That Will Get Your ...

Gizmodo

https://gizmodo.com › the-list-of-trumps-forbidden-wor...](https://gizmodo.com/the-list-of-trumps-forbidden-words-that-will-get-your-paper-flagged-at-nsf-2000559661)

Feb 5, 2025 — Trump and his fellow fascists use terms like DEI to describe anything they don't like, which means that the word “women” is on the forbidden ...

[### University Of Texas At Austin And Other Public ...

AfroTech

https://afrotech.com › public-universities-taking-down-...](https://afrotech.com/public-universities-taking-down-dei-terms-webpages)

Additional words listed include: Diversity; DEI; Diverse; DEAI; Equity; Equitable; Inclusive; Inclusion; Safe space; Implicit bias; Anti-racist; Oppression ...

[### Trump banned words: NIH, VA flagging research grants | STAT

statnews.com

https://www.statnews.com › 2025/02/13 › trump-dei-ba...](https://www.statnews.com/2025/02/13/trump-dei-ban-banned-words-list-scrambles-research-nih-veterans-affairs/)

5 days ago — Scientists scour grants for words flagged by Trump administration. Keyword list criticized as an overly broad threat to legitimate research.

Missing: doge ‎resilience

[### UT Austin flagging DEI-related words in 'routine scans' of ...

Yahoo

https://www.yahoo.com › news › ut-austin-flagging-dei...](https://www.yahoo.com/news/ut-austin-flagging-dei-related-230018420.html)

Nov 19, 2024 — Routine audits of the University of Texas at Austin's website are flagging words related to diversity, equity and inclusion, also known as DEI.

Missing: resilience ‎| Show results with: resilience

[### A Brief Guide To Major Companies No Longer Supporting ...

AfroTech

https://afrotech.com › list-of-companies-that-dont-supp...](https://afrotech.com/list-of-companies-that-dont-support-dei)

Feb 8, 2025 — Amazon's DEI Changes. As we covered in the list above, Amazon is discontinuing any and all previous bids for diversity, equity and inclusion.

[### A Sweeping Ban on D.E.I. Language Roils the Sciences

The New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com › science › trump-dei-science](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/09/science/trump-dei-science.html)

Feb 9, 2025 — President Trump's executive order is altering scientific exploration across a broad swath of fields, even beyond government agencies, researchers say.

Missing: doge ‎| Show results with: doge

[### Drugmakers Step Back From Diversity Pledges in Bow to ...

MSN

https://www.msn.com › money › savingandinvesting › b...](https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/savingandinvesting/bristol-removes-dei-pledges-from-its-latest-annual-report/ar-AA1yW8YA)

2 days ago — Biogen Inc. removed the phrase “diversity, equity and inclusion” from its annual report filed Wednesday, instead describing the company as ...

---

an 2 25

The National Security Agency (NSA), a largely clandestine global intelligence-gathering and counterintelligence organization that “prevents and eradicates threats to U.S. national security systems,” is reportedly undergoing a massive “purge” on its public and private websites and internal network, eliminating any site that contains any of a list of 27 words — despite possibly including mission-related work. The operation is an effort to comply with President Donald Trump’s order to eliminate any so-called “DEI” programs or language.

Trump has called DEI — diversity, equity, and inclusion — “illegal,” and in his January 21 executive order alleged that DEI “policies not only violate the text and spirit of our longstanding Federal civil-rights laws, they also undermine our national unity, as they deny, discredit, and undermine the traditional American values of hard work, excellence, and individual achievement in favor of an unlawful, corrosive, and pernicious identity-based spoils system. Hardworking Americans who deserve a shot at the American Dream should not be stigmatized, demeaned, or shut out of opportunities because of their race or sex.”

According to Popular Information, on Monday the NSA, which is under the U.S. Department of Defense, “is planning a ‘Big Delete’ of websites and internal network content that contain any of 27 banned words, including ‘privilege,’ ‘bias,’ and ‘inclusion.’ The ‘Big Delete,’ according to an NSA source and internal correspondence reviewed by Popular Information, is creating unintended consequences.

Popular Information’s Judd Legum and Rebecca Crosby report that “the dragnet is taking down ‘mission-related’ work. According to the NSA source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak to the media, the process is ‘very chaotic,’ but is plowing ahead anyway.”

A memo announcing the 27 banned words “acknowledges that the list includes many terms that are used by the NSA in contexts that have nothing to do with DEI. For example, the term ‘privilege is used by the NSA in the context of ‘privilege escalation.’ In the intelligence world, privilege escalation refers to ‘techniques that adversaries use to gain higher-level permissions on a system or network.'”

Efforts to comply with Trump’s anti-DEI orders are not limited to the NSA.

“Since Trump took office, thousands of web pages across various federal agencies have been altered or removed entirely. Federal agencies have taken down or edited resources about HIV, contraceptives, LGBTQ+ health, abortion, and climate change. Some web pages have later come back online ‘without clarity on what had been changed or removed.” Popular Information also reported.

“An analysis by the Washington Post of 8,000 federal web pages ‘found 662 examples of deletions and additions’ since Trump took office. The analysis found that words like diversity, equity, and inclusion were removed at least 231 times from the websites of federal agencies, including the Department of Labor, the Department of Education, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Department of Transportation.”

A quick search of the NSA’s public website for the word “transgender” came up with only one hit, a page titled, “50 Years of Pride: Celebrating NSA’s Committment {sic] to Promoting Respect, Individuality, Diversity, and Equality.” That link led to an error page that stated: “The page you are looking for might have been moved, renamed, or may be temporarily unavailable.”

But a search for pages with the words “Diversity,” “Privilege,” and “Pronouns” resulted in numerous positive hits.

Legum posted the list of 27 banned words to social media. They include, Anti-Racism, Racism, Allyship, Bias, DEI, Diversity, Confirmation Bias, Equity, Feminism, Gender, Gender Identity Inclusion, Inclusive, and All-Inclusive, among others.

===

mma

Project 2025 laid the foundation for Trump using DEI to target USAID staff and level a broader attack on workers

The sprawling presidential transition plan uses anti-DEI language as a tool to attack workers across the public and private sectors

Written by John Knefel

Published 02/07/25 11:47 AM EST

Project 2025 — a conservative transition plan to support the Trump administration, led by The Heritage Foundation and more than 100 partner organizations — repeatedly criticized diversity initiatives to justify mass firings across government offices and to lay the groundwork for a broader assault on workers’ rights.

Now, President Donald Trump is using that template to decimate the federal workforce.

### Following Project 2025’s recommendations, Trump’s first executive orders target DEI efforts

In the first days of his second term, Trump took several executive actions reflecting years of right-wing attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, issuing an executive order that removed DEI programs from the federal government and another to “combat illegal private-sector DEI preferences, mandates, policies, programs, and activities.” A third order prohibited hiring federal employees with the aim of increasing diversity in the workforce, and Trump further ordered that all federal employees who worked in DEI offices be placed on administrative leave.

Days after that initial barrage of activity, the Office of Management and Budget issued a memo purporting to freeze all federal funding — amounting to tens of billions of dollars — partially based on one of Trump’s anti-DEI orders. The memo, which aligned with the recommendations in Project 2025’s policy book, Mandate for Leadership, was later rescinded following a broad backlash and court challenges.

It’s already clear that in Trump’s first weeks in office he has moved to enact many of the proposals in Mandate, in some cases pushing even more extreme policies than those put forward by Project 2025. His attacks on DEI are no exception.

* ### Project 2025 takes aim at USAID workers by attacking DEI programs

The Mandate for Leadership chapter on the U.S. Agency for International Development criticizes DEI programs and initiatives 14 times, including calls for all DEI-related activity to be shuttered and employees working in those areas to be fired.

“The next conservative Administration should dismantle USAID’s DEI apparatus by eliminating the Chief Diversity Officer position along with the DEI advisers and committees; cancel the DEI scorecard and dashboard; remove DEI requirements from contract and grant tenders and awards; issue a directive to cease promotion of the DEI agenda, including the bullying LGBTQ+ agenda,” the chapter reads. “It should eliminate funding for partners that promote discriminatory DEI practices and consider debarment in egregious cases.”

Trump has gone even further, not only dismantling USAID’s DEI apparatus but promising to “wind down” the entire agency and potentially bringing it under the purview of the State Department. The New York Times reported that the Trump administration planned to “reduce the number of workers” at the agency “from more than 10,000 to about 290 positions.” CNN previously reported that USAID had placed “dozens of senior officials” on leave and “thousands of contractors [had been] laid off."

In offering an explanation for why USAID should be effectively shuttered, the Trump administration leaned heavily on anti-DEI justification. In a February 3 statement, the White House criticized supposed agency programs that “advance diversity equity and inclusion in Serbia’s workplaces and business communities;” allocate money to fund a “‘DEI musical’ in Ireland;” support a “‘transgender opera’ in Colombia” and a “‘transgender comic book’ in Peru;” and fund “sex changes and ‘LGBT activism’ in Guatemala.” (USAID did not fund the musical in Ireland, the opera in Colombia, or the comic book in Peru.)

This anti-diversity rhetoric seeded by Project 2025 and embraced by Trump helped to provide a partial pretext for mass layoffs at USAID that ultimately extend far beyond any DEI-specific programs.

### Project 2025’s anti-worker policies are largely built on an anti-DEI foundation

Like the chapter on USAID, Mandate’s chapter on the Labor Department and related agencies leans heavily on anti-DEI, anti-“woke” rhetoric. The first entry in the “Needed Reforms” section reads: “Reverse the DEI Revolution in Labor Policy.” It calls on the next Republican administration to “eliminate every one of these wrongful and burdensome ideological projects,” without specifying exactly what that would entail.

The entire chapter is an attack on the working class, largely under the guise of combatting DEI. “The DEI revolution in labor affected not only the administrative state, but it has also targeted much of the private sector,” the chapter reads, adding that “much of American labor and employment policy has become institutionally oriented toward ‘woke’ goals. Retracting regulations that support this revolution is a good first step, but more is needed.”

From this foundational opposition to DEI, Project 2025 pushes extreme, anti-worker policies. It calls for a drastic roll back of overtime protections. It seeks to misclassify employees as independent contractors by reverting to a rule from Trump’s first term, thus denying them benefits and protections otherwise required by law. Project 2025 also looks to weaken child labor laws and create “employee involvement organizations” as employer-friendly alternatives to unions.

Mandate for Leadership takes specific aim at the National Labor Relations Board, which helped unions secure significant gains during the Biden administration, by demanding that the next Republican president immediately fire then-NLRB general counsel Jen Abruzzo, one of the most aggressive advocates for the working class in the federal government. Trump followed through and not only removed Abruzzo but also fired Gwynne Wilcox, the first Black woman member of the NLRB, who called her dismissal a “blatant violation” of the law. In a report headlined “Trump Ousts Top Labor Board Leaders Who Backed Broader Worker Rights,” Bloomberg noted that “a White House official described those fired as far-left appointees with radical records who don’t belong in a Trump administration.”

Project 2025 also calls for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which investigates violations of civil rights law in the workplace, to “prohibit racial classifications and quotas, including human-resources classifications and DEI trainings that promote critical race theory.”

Trump took the issue to heart. His choice to lead the EEOC, Andrea Lucas, describes her priorities as “rooting out unlawful DEI-motivated race and sex discrimination,” according to The Washington Post. The Post wrote that Lucas, “a vocal critic of corporate DEI initiatives, will lead an agency that holds sway over policy for a vast swath of U.S. employers.”

### Project 2025’s attack on the Department of Education targets teachers unions

Conservatives have attempted to dismantle public education for decades, and Project 2025 continues those efforts in its recommendations for the second Trump administration. The Department of Education chapter in Mandate for Leadership opens with the following sentence: “Federal education policy should be limited and, ultimately, the federal Department of Education should be eliminated."

One inescapable throughline in Project 2025’s attacks on the Education Department is criticism of DEI and the related right-wing boogeymen of “critical race theory” and what conservatives call “gender ideology." Mandate recommends, for example, that the president issue an executive order requiring an “accounting of how federal programs/grants spread DEI/CRT/gender ideology.” Elsewhere, Project 2025 recommends the next administration prohibit the federal agencies from requiring higher education institutions “to adopt diversity, equity, and inclusion policies."

The chapter is simultaneously a broadside against DEI and the two largest teachers unions — the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers — which are also two of the largest unions in the country. Project 2025 claims that the teachers union “promotes radical racial and gender ideologies in schools” and calls on Congress to “rescind the National Education Association’s congressional charter,” referring to it as a “radical special interest group."

On February 4, NBC News reported that Trump is considering issuing an executive order to “eliminate the Education Department,” thus fulfilling one of Project 2025’s central goals. Already, the Trump administration is using its opposition to DEI as a pretext to target workers. “Dozens of employees who attended a diversity training course that former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos encouraged during President Donald Trump’s first administration have been placed on paid leave as part of Trump’s targeting of DEI programs," according to another NBC News report.

The move echoes a recommendation Project 2025 makes in the chapter on the Treasury Department to “treat the participation in any critical race theory or DEI initiative, without objecting on constitutional or moral grounds, as per se grounds for termination of employment."

### A cascading crisis

The Trump administration is attempting to lay waste to nearly every aspect of the federal civil service, and with it the government’s capacity to function. According to The Wall Street Journal, at least 40,000 federal workers took a buyout offered by the administration. Legal experts say the offer is likely illegal, and unions have sued to stop what they refer to as an “ultimatum to a sweeping number of federal employees: resign now or face the possibility of job loss without compensation in the near future."

Some federal workers are reportedly facing intimidation from outside groups as well. NBC News reported that a website called “DEI watchlist” posted the personal information of “mostly Black employees who work in agencies primarily within the Department of Health and Human Services” and referred to them as “targets.” The website is reportedly a “project of the American Accountability Foundation,” a conservative organization on the advisory board of Project 2025 known for its McCarthyite tactics. (Last June, The Associated Press reported that AAF was creating and planning to publicize a list of “100 names of government workers to a website this summer to show a potential new administration who might be standing in the way of a second-term Trump agenda — and ripe for scrutiny, reclassifications, reassignments or firings.”)

Trump’s attack on workers is already extending beyond federal civil servants. The National Science Foundation stopped issuing grant money to be in compliance with Trump’s federal funding freeze on DEI programs, sending some recipients into financial turmoil. Even after the funding was unfrozen, the NSF continued to review grants related to “discriminatory programs, including illegal DEI” initiatives.

Newly confirmed Attorney General Pam Bondi reportedly issued a memo to Department of Justice staff instructing them to “target private-sector diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility initiatives for potential ‘criminal investigation,'" according to Slate.

The memo appears to echo a nearly identical suggestion from Mandate for Leadership. DOJ’s “Civil Rights Division should spend its first year under the next Administration using the full force of federal prosecutorial resources to investigate and prosecute all state and local governments, institutions of higher education, corporations, and any other private employers who are engaged in discrimination in violation of constitutional and legal requirements,” the policy book recommends.

Now, the Trump administration is going beyond Project 2025’s policy proposals and using its attacks on DEI programs to bolster a broader assault on the entire working class.

---

judd 2 25

Since taking office on January 20, President Donald Trump has targeted so-called "diversity, equity, and inclusion" programs, also known as DEI. According to a January 21 executive order, "critical and influential institutions of American society, including the Federal Government, major corporations, financial institutions, the medical industry, large commercial airlines, law enforcement agencies, and institutions of higher education have adopted and actively use dangerous, demeaning, and immoral race- and sex-based preferences" under the guise of DEI. These programs, according to Trump and his administration, "undermine our national unity, as they deny, discredit, and undermine the traditional American values of hard work, excellence, and individual achievement in favor of an unlawful, corrosive, and pernicious identity-based spoils system."

The executive order suggests there is pervasive discrimination against hard-working white men, who are being replaced by less-qualified women and minorities. This point was made explicitly last October by Darren Beattie, who was just hired for a senior State Department role by the Trump administration. "Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work," Beattie wrote in a post on X. "Unfortunately, our entire national ideology is predicated on coddling the feelings of women and minorities, and demoralizing competent white men."

Beattie was fired from his job at Duke University in 2018 for attending a white nationalist convention.

The executive order claims that corporate DEI programs constitute "illegal discrimination." The executive order mandates that each federal agency "shall identify up to nine potential civil compliance investigations" into large corporations or non-profit groups for implementing DEI programs.

This legal analysis is flawed. In Students for Fair Admissions, the Supreme Court ruled that race-based affirmative action programs in college admissions are illegal. But Students for Fair Admissions does not have any impact on corporations because affirmative action in employment situations, in almost all circumstances, is already illegal. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 banned the consideration of race in hiring. Corporate DEI programs involve "expanding outreach for new hires, creating employee resource groups for underrepresented workers, and reducing bias in hiring through such practices as 'blind' applications."

The push to eliminate DEI is effectively affirmative action for white men, eliminating programs that help corporations attract and retain qualified minorities and women.

Beyond the flawed legal analysis, however, is an empirical question: Is corporate America biased against white people? Are white people being shut out of desirable jobs to accommodate an influx of racial minorities? According to the latest data, the answer to these questions is an emphatic "no."

Women and minorities are severely underrepresented in corporate America

The reality is, even with diversity efforts, women and minorities remain badly underrepresented in corporate America.

According to a 2024 report by McKinsey, women have made modest gains in the workplace over the last 10 years. But at the current rate of progress, McKinsey projected that it will take 22 years for white women and 48 years for women of color to attain the same level of representation in senior leadership roles as they have in the general population.

The number of women in executive positions has jumped from 17% in 2015 to 29% in 2024. While this is a significant gain, the report found that much of it was due to companies eliminating positions historically held by men and hiring women for new support roles in legal, HR, and IT departments. Companies cannot continue adding such positions indefinitely, so the gains women made are not sustainable. Additionally, the study found that women are less likely to get hired to entry-level positions than men and less likely to get their first promotion.

The representation of Black people in the workforce has seen little to no improvement since DEI initiatives gained traction in 2020, based on a Bloomberg analysis of data that 84 top U.S. companies provided to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 2023.

The proportion of Black employees at these 84 companies reached a peak in 2021 at 17%, but has been on the decline since. Twenty-six percent of all jobs cut by these companies in 2023 were held by Black employees. Among the 84 companies, which are more diverse than the US workforce as a whole, the share of Black people in senior leadership roles decreased at more than half since 2020.

Popular Information is an independent newsletter dedicated to accountability journalism since 2018. It is made possible by readers who upgrade to a paid subscription.

Subscribed

While white men saw their representation in executive positions and the workforce overall decrease, they are still overrepresented in higher paying positions, making up 46% of executive roles and 37% of managers, but less than a third of the workforce of the companies analyzed by Bloomberg.

While corporate boards have made some progress in increasing representation of women and minorities in recent years, the upward trend is slowing, according to a 2024 report by the Conference Board. Gender and racial diversity “reached record levels in 2024,” but “the proportion of new directors who are women or from non-White backgrounds has declined since a high in 2022.”

While women now make up 34% of directors in the S&P 500 and 29% in the Russell 3000, they are still vastly underrepresented, as women make up “47% of all U.S. employees” and 50.5% of the population. In 2024, women only made up 11% of board chairs in the S&P 500 and 8% in the Russell 3000.

In 2024, there were slightly more minority directors and board chairs compared to 2020. But the number of newly hired Black, LGBTQ, and non-white women directors fell since 2022. The number of new white directors significantly increased, reaching 69% in both indexes. The report notes that the decreasing trends may “signal some waning of momentum in corporate diversity initiatives amid heightened political and social scrutiny.”

---

miller defend budget freeze BS called DEI “wicked” and ---?

---

mma sorta random

### Charlie Kirk says that if Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) “wants to be a senator ever in his future, I certainly hope for his own sake he votes for Bobby Kennedy”

01/31/25 1:57 PM EST

### Ben Shapiro: “I support Bobby Kennedy for HHS”

01/31/25 1:49 PM EST

### Fox correspondent: Tariffs on Canadian crude oil “could lead to an immediate jump in U.S. gas prices by as much as 30-70 cents per gallon,” while tariffs on auto parts “could also raise the price of a car by maybe $3,000”

01/31/25 1:12 PM EST

### Fox News contributor: “I personally don't care” whether the migrants sent to Gitmo have criminal histories or not

01/31/25 12:04 PM EST

### Media Matters weekly newsletter, January 31

01/31/25 10:55 AM EST

### Fox host: Trump knows a lot about aviation because he buys planes and has pilots for friends

01/31/25 8:38 AM EST

### Sean Hannity links Washington, DC, plane crash to “insane DEI directives”

01/30/25 9:47 PM EST

### Jesse Watters says people should be “suspicious” that DEI plays a role in disasters

01/30/25 8:41 PM EST

### Laura Ingraham connects Washington, DC, plane crash to DEI

01/30/25 7:50 PM EST

### Jesse Watters: Air traffic control was “unable to meet their own DEI quotas, and that’s what is leading to staffing shortages”

01/30/25

===

### “Consoler-in-chief”: Fox News panel gushes over press conference during which Trump linked diversity to deadly aircraft collision

01/30/25 12:48 PM EST

### Fox News praises Trump's presser where he used plane crash to rant about DEI: “Think about how quickly we received tangible answers”

01/30/25 12:44 PM EST

### CNN aviation correspondent on Trump's plane crash presser: “It is just unhinged that he could even say with any sort of certainty that diversity, equity, and inclusion policies had any part to play”

01/30/25

===

SOME BAK

{see affirmative ACTION}:

see vp harris attacks

see racism

SEE CRM eg LA wildfires

see kirk clarence

see white grievance

// woke corps, pretty much any fail eg Sil V bank, boeing door blamed

merri ok

see blum students for fair admission

---

“Consoler-in-chief”: Fox News panel gushes over press conference during which Trump linked diversity to deadly aircraft collision

01/30/25 12:48 PM EST

### Fox News praises Trump's presser where he used plane crash to rant about DEI: “Think about how quickly we received tangible answers”

01/30/25 12:44 PM EST

### CNN aviation correspondent on Trump's plane crash presser: “It is just unhinged that he could even say with any sort of certainty that diversity, equity, and inclusion policies had any part to play”

01/30/25 MMA

---

DEI BS basis for budget freeze?

===

an 1 25

A group of Republican attorneys general — including Kentucky’s Russell Coleman — is pressuring Costco “to end all unlawful discrimination imposed” by the retailer’s diversity, equity and inclusion policies.

The 19 attorneys general sent a letter to Costco CEO Ron Vachris this week citing Republican President Donald Trump’s executive order that encouraged “all agencies to enforce our longstanding civil-rights laws and to combat illegal private-sector DEI preferences, mandates, policies, programs, and activities.”

Writing that Costco “should treat every person equally and based on their merit, rather than based on divisive and discriminatory DEI practices,” the attorneys general asked Vachris to either repeal Costco’s DEI policies or explain why the company is keeping them in place within 30 days.

Costco shareholders recently rejected a proposal from a conservative think tank to examine risks posed by its DEI policies. Nearly 98% ofshareholders voted against the measure. Costco’s board had recommended rejection of the proposal.

At the Jan. 24 shareholders meeting, Costco board chair Tony E Curtis said the company’s commitment to inclusion “does not and has never included quotas or systematic preferences, nor does it mean compromising merit. The demands of our business and our steadfast commitment to serve our members mean that we cannot afford to do anything but hire and promote the most qualified individuals.”

Costco has not publicly responded to the letter. A spokesperson for the company did not immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday.

Kentucky AG Coleman said in a statement, “Costco has a motto to ‘Do the right thing,’ but their DEI business practices are all wrong. By pushing a DEI agenda, Costco is out-of-step with the Kentuckians who just want affordable prices.”

Costco hasfour storesin Kentucky, according to its website.

Nationwide, some companies are rethinking their commitment to DEI, while others are standing by their diversity practices. Brands like Walmart and Meta have rolled back DEI policies while tech giants Microsoft and Apple reaffirmed their policies within the last week. Last year, Kentucky-based whiskey makerBrown-Forman suspended its DEI policies.

DEI policies are often aimed at removing bias and promoting fairness in areas like employment and education.

Former Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron crusaded with other Republican attorneys general to curb DEI in the private sector, including issuing a letter to Fortune 100 CEOs calling on them to use “race-neutral principles in your employment and contracting practices” following the U.S. Supreme Court’s reversal of affirmative action in higher education.

After losing a race for Kentucky governor in 2023, Cameron became CEO of the 1792 Exchange, a group that aims to “steer public companies back to neutral on divisive, ideological issues.”

Kentucky Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear in an appearance at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, recently defended private sector decisions to maintain DEI policies. If companies think encouraging a diverse workforce helps them, Beshear said, “the state that you’re working with should support you.”

Read the letter below

FINAL Costco Lettet (1)

Kentucky Lantern is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kentucky Lantern maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jamie Lucke for questions: info@kentuckylantern.com.

---

SEE MERITOCRACY BS from trust fund nepo babies

AN 1 25

Trump issued an abundance of executive orders after returning to the White House, some of which aggressively attack DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) programs in the federal government. This marks a major reversal from the Biden Administration, which ended when Trump was inaugurated on Monday, January 20.

Two days later, according to NBC News' Megan Lebowitz, federal government employees received an e-mail "warning that they could face repercussions if they do not report on co-workers who work in diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility positions that might have gone unnoticed by government supervisors."

A January 22 e-mail, Lebowitz reports, read, "We are aware of efforts by some in government to disguise these programs by using coded or imprecise language."

Government employees were also warned, "There will be no adverse consequences for timely reporting this information. However, failure to report this information within 10 days may result in adverse consequences."

Meanwhile, reporting from Washington Post journalists Julian Mark, Taylor Telford and Susan Svrluga details the extent the Trump Administration is going to in its anti-DEI, anti-affirmative action efforts.

"The flurry of executive orders was meant to put a hard stop to diversity, equity and inclusion programs (DEI) throughout the federal government," the Post reporters explain in an article published on January 23. "The (Trump) Administration ordered U.S.-run diversity offices to close and scores of their workers to be put on administrative leave by Wednesday. It also suspended dozens of contracting programs aimed at minorities and women, some of which have been operating for decades."

Mark, Telford and Svrluga continue, "But the orders go far beyond the federal government. Trump also directed agencies to draw up lists of public companies to investigate over their DEI policies — a move that legal experts said could send chills through the private sector."

The Post journalists note that that Trump even revoked a 60-year-old executive order from the late President Lyndon B. Johnson.

In 1965, LBJ directed federal contractors to take "affirmative action" to end discrimination in their firms.

Noah Feldman, who teaches constitutional law professor at Harvard Law School in Massachusetts, told the Post, "The Trump Administration is trying to give the death blow to diversity in legal and in political cultural terms."

---

aha DEI is useful BS reductionistic explanation for a various more comlpex and various and inconvenient ideologically problems? go to BS for blue state problem

mma 1 25 deflection?

Fox News' Jeanine Pirro responds to New Orleans attack by calling the police chief “a DEI hire”

01/03/25

---

===

TRUMP INAUG // AM CARNAGE, MERITOCRACY

an 1 25

The World Economic Forum begins its 54th annual confab of CEOs and billionaires this week in Davos, Switzerland. Among its attendees are some who attended Trump’s inauguration yesterday to kiss his derriere, and then promptly private-jetted to the Swiss Alps.

Since its inception, the Davos confab has justified itself — and thereby sought to justify global corporate capitalism — by embracing “corporate social responsibility.”

The basic idea is that big global corporations can — and should — be good for everyone. Sure, they may make a few CEOs and big shareholders fabulously wealthy. But they can and should also protect the planet and spread their financial gains.

Hence, Davos attendees’ annual commitments, in myriad sessions and presentations, to “ESG” (environmental, social, and governance — that is, sustainability), “DEI” (diversity, equity, and inclusion), and global and social responsibility in general.

In recent years, Davos has become a choice venue for splashy corporate announcements of such commitments.

In 2020, Marc Benioff of Salesforce issued a goal to plant a trillion trees. The same year, Larry Fink of BlackRock (which manages more than $10 trillion in investments) announced a series of initiatives to invest in ways that better protect the environment. The CEOs of JPMorganChase and Goldman Sachs trumpeted their Net-Zero Banking Alliance.

Other corporate poobahs have used the venue to make grand promises to share profits with their workers, their communities, and the less fortunate around the world. Jamie Dimon, then head of the Business Roundtable, touted his and the Roundtable’s pledges to their workers, their neighborhoods, and the nation as a whole.

But wait. These are exactly the goals Trump and MAGA have railed against, calling them “woke” capitalism.

Now that CEOs of the largest corporations in the world are demonstrating cringe-worthy cowardice when it comes to all things Trump, what’s to become of corporate social responsibility?

Presto! Davos has gone through an ideological cleansing. This time, few if any sessions will be devoted to ESG or DEI. The perennial theme of “corporate social responsibility” has almost vanished.

The CEOs who used to trumpet their corporate social responsibility won’t be doing so this year. (BlackRock’s Fink has already expressed regret over becoming the face of ESG). JPMorganChase and Goldman Sachs have departed their Net-Zero Banking Alliance.

Instead, after years of calling for “responsible” global corporate capitalism, the CEOs gathering in Davos are now openly focusing on their bottom lines.

In other words, the jig is up. The pretense is over. The blather about corporate social responsibility is revealed for what it really is and always has been — PR designed to make the public believe that big global corporations care about anything other than making as much money as possible, as soon as possible.

I, for one, think this is a good thing.

All the artifice about corporate responsibility, echoed year after year at Davos and by the Business Roundtable and in business schools, gave lawmakers who wanted one an excuse to sit on their hands, because, they’d say, big global corporations can be trusted to do what’s right.

The truth is, they can’t. They never could. They won’t sacrifice shareholder returns to tackling climate change or social injustice.

Anyway, these are jobs for governments responsible to the people, not for corporations responsible to shareholders.

The Trump regime won’t do a damned thing about these problems, of course. If anything, it will take us and much of the world backward. (Trump is expected to appear at Davos via videoconference, and god knows what he’ll say.)

But at least we will know where the blame lies. And we will have the chance in future years — I fervently hope — to elect governments that tackle them head-on.

---

rww 1 25

jack Hibbs Says The Founding Fathers Would Hang LA Mayor Karen Bass Christian nationalist pastor Jack Hibbs says that the Founding Fathers would hang Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass for dereliction of duty over the wildfires.

---==

omg // maui fire BS? MMA

Greg Gutfeld calls DEI “a death sentence”

01/13/25 6:23 PM EST

### Fox News' Jeanine Pirro questions whether or not California deserves federal disaster relief money

01/13/25 5:57 PM EST

### Angelo Carusone tells MSNBC's Ayman Mohyeldin the right-wing playbook for LA wildfires and other crises

01/12/25 1:01 PM EST

01/12/25 12:08 PM EST

### Jesse Watters: “Martial law might have to be declared” in California

01/10/25 9:10 PM EST

### Greg Gutfeld justifies smearing qualified minorities as a “DEI hire”

01/10/25

### Jesse Watters says “there’s a good chance the homeless started” the California fires

01/09/25 6:21 PM EST

### On CNN, Rep. Jasmine Crockett pushes back on baseless right-wing media claims that DEI has hindered the LAFD wildfire response

01/09/25 1:46 PM EST

### Charlie Kirk says Donald Trump should threaten to withhold federal assistance to California

01/09/25 1:10 PM EST

### Charlie Kirk says California Democrats are “living in the tragedy of your own making”

01/09/25 1:06 PM EST

### Charlie Kirk: “I sure hope that Pam Bondi and President Trump open a **robust criminal investigation into Gavin Newsom and Mayor Bass”

01/09/25 12:36 PM EST

### Right-wing media figures baselessly claim LA wildfires are burning out of control because the fire chief is an LGBTQ woman who supports DEI

01/09/25

---

GREG KELLY SILVER LINING

MMA

January 8, 2025, edition of Newsmax'sGreg Kelly Reports

There are a couple of silver linings here. I hate to say it, but what this fire means is Gavin Newsom, for sure, is finished in politics. The scheming, the conniving, the obsession with image. We can all see it. And it's — America is never buying this guy.

And Mayor Bass. I don't think she can hold on to the job for much longer. You know, when you're the mayor of a big city, why would you ever leave that city? Why would you ever go anywhere else? I mean, if you want to go, you're in California. I don't know, go to Catalina Island or something if you really want to get away from it all. But she went to Africa. She went to Ghana. And when this fire broke out, that's where she was. What in the world would you be doing over there? I think she regrets it now. Looks like a reporter caught up with her shortly after she returned, and she had very little to say about the situation.

...

KELLY: Yikes. She actually seems like she might be genuinely ashamed. She's not talking about pro-choice values or the community thing, and the Latinos and the Black. Just, all that gibberish that got her elected, it's useless now. That fire is still raging. Still not contained.

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an 12 24

Milwaukee State Rep. Ryan Clancy readily admits he was the odd one out last week at a Washington, D.C., meeting of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

ALEC, a nonprofit that brings together state lawmakers and corporations and drafts model legislation, describes its point of view as “dedicated to the principles of limited government, free markets and federalism.” It has produced state policies embraced almost solely by Republicans — drafted with input from corporate members of the organization.

Clancy is neither a Republican politician nor a corporate official. “To the best of my knowledge, I would be the only Democrat — and almost certainly the only socialist” at the States & Nation Policy Summit ALEC held Tuesday through Thursday, Clancy said in an interview. But as a state legislator, he was technically welcome at the event.

On the last day, however, Clancy was summarily kicked out and told his registration would be withdrawn and the fee refunded. While declining to explain how, an ALEC spokesman said Clancy was being “disruptive” — something Clancy categorically denies.

Attending an ALEC event was important to him, said Clancy, who is just wrapping up his first term in the Assembly after being elected in 2022. He wanted to see the process by which ALEC drafts model legislation and distributes bill proposals through its member lawmakers to statehouses around the country.

Clancy said that in his first term in Madison he has seen a lot of legislation circulate that originated in ALEC proposals. Those included more than a dozen bills putting restrictions on trans and nonbinary people, such as preventing gender affirming medical care for people under 18, he said.

“My oldest child is trans,” Clancy said in an interview. “It was just horrific to have to bring together the community to push back on those. But it was also good to know about them in advance.”

Clancy said the anti-trans legislation points to priorities that he believes ALEC has beyond the talking points it makes about individual liberty, free markets and limited government.

“Even more economic-seeming policy discussions were often peppered with anti-trans and anti-DEI comments behind the scenes,” Clancy said.

While his attendance was cut short, he said, his time at the session offered a preview of ALEC-inspired legislation that he expects to see in the coming session of the state Legislature, and an opportunity for his fellow Democratic lawmakers to “figure out how we can push back on that.”

Democratic tradition...

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MMA

Dozens of right-wing media personalities suggested Kamala Harris’ political success is due to DEI

07/31/24

Since Vice President Kamala Harris became the likely Democratic presidential nominee, many right-wing media figures have tried to make her the face of diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. At least 40 right-wing personalities have claimed that she is a “DEI candidate” or insinuated she owes her success to her race, ethnicity, and/or gender.

Right-wing media have a long record of attacking race-conscious policies and studies such as critical race theory and DEI efforts, including suggesting DEI stands for “Didn’t Earn It.”

Now, rather than focusing on Harris’ years of experience and advocacy on a number of key Democratic issues, many in right-wing media have chalked up her likely nomination to “racial idolatry issues,” claimed that she took a “DEI-based path” to the vice presidency, suggested that she will “be the first DEI president” if elected, and said she “literally ‘Didn’t Earn It.’”

## Right-wing media have attacked CRT and DEI and used them to undermine Black achievement

- After years of using “critical race theory” as a vessel for coded racist attacks, right-wing media shifted their focus to diversity, equity, and inclusion.The focus on DEI used many of the same targets as the attacks on CRT, but broadened the scope from just the education system to corporate and government realms. Media Matters, [6/23/21, The New York Times, 1/20/24]

- Right-wing media have blamed or attacked DEI initiatives over a variety of events that DEI had nothing to do with, suggesting the initiatives cause companies to hire unqualified people.Conservative personalities attacked or blamed DEI after a Boeing mechanical malfunction, a Baltimore bridge collapse, the Trump assassination attempt, and Hamas’ attack on Israel on October 7. Media Matters, [1/25/24, 3/30/24; The Washington Post, 7/16/24; Fox News, Fox News @ Night, 6/18/24]

- Right-wing media personalities have used DEI to belittle the achievements of Black people in positions of authority by suggesting the acronym stands for “Didn’t Earn It.”Fox News’ Jesse Watters even labeled Vice President Kamala Harris the “DEI vice president” back in January. Media Matters, [4/5/24; Fox News,Jesse Watters Primetime, 1/24/24]

## Here are 40 right-wing commentators who have used DEI to attack Harris, or claimed she was chosen for her race or sex, since Biden dropped out of the presidential race

1. Fox News host Greg Gutfeld claimed Harris’ selection mimicked DEI hiring practices.Gutfeld said on The Five: “The New York Times had profound concerns about her electability. They said that the process of public scrutiny was ignored. What does that sound like to you? It’s DEI.” Fox News, *The Five*, [7/22/24]

1. Fox News host Laura Ingraham dismissed concerns about calling Harris a “DEI candidate.”Ingraham: “People have called Kamala the DEI candidate, but Democrats, they don't like that.” After playing one criticism of the attack she asked, “That's it?” Fox News, *The Ingraham Angle*, [7/23/24]

1. Fox News host Jesse Watters claimed “the only reason” Harris is vice president is because of “the DEI deal Biden cut with [Sen.] Bernie [Sanders] to seal the nomination.” He also said “many people believe Kamala Harris is being promoted because of what she looks like and nothing else.” Fox News, *Jesse Watters Primetime*, [7/23/24]

1. OutKick’s Clay Travis called Harris “DEI personified.”Travis: “Kamala Harris, not that bright, not that accomplished, doesn't have a family of her own, never had kids, got her scarred start in politics as the side chick of a Democrat San Francisco mayor. She is DEI personified.” OutKick, *OutKick the Show*, [7/21/24]

1. Fox News contributor Leo Terrell posted on X (formerly Twitter) that “Kamala is the choice of the DEI Party.” He also described the Democrats as the “Race Card Party,” “Affirmative Action Party,” and the “Critical Race Party.” Twitter/X, [7/21/24]

1. Fox News contributor Ben Domenich said Harris took the “DEI-based path” to the vice presidency.Fox News, *Life, Liberty, & Levin*, [7/21/24]

1. Newsmax host Sebastian Gorka called Harris “literally a DEI hire” and said she will be the nominee because her “skin color is the correct DEI color.” Gorka later added, “So this choice, this trap they [Democrats] have created for themselves of Kamala, the DEI hire, it's not going to be very popular with the average American. So keep up, keep it up, keep on going, Kamala.” Newsmax, Newsmax broadcast, [7/21/24]

1. Later in that segment, Newsmax anchor Bob Brooks agreed with Gorka, saying, “She very well might be the first DEI president.” Newsmax, Newsmax broadcast, [7/21/24]

1. In a social media rant, Newsmax host Chris Plante said Harris is “a woman of color” and “that’s why she was chosen in the first place.” Twitter/X, [7/23/24]

1. On Jesse Watters Primetime, podcast host Jason Calacanis discussed Harris as the nominee, telling Watters, “I think what they are going to learn is that the DEI candidate concept is just not going to work.”Fox News, *Jesse Watters Primetime*, [7/21/24]

1. Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk repeatedly mispronounced Harris' name while calling her “deeply scary” and “a DEI candidate.” Kirk told his audience, “He chose her based on the same criteria of DEI that got Trump shot, that has been destroying this country. The very same DEI ideology that has been sweeping the nation is now the standard bearer of the Democrat Party, and I think that is perfect.” Real America’s Voice, *The Charlie Kirk Show*, [7/22/24]

1. Daily Wire host Matt Walsh called Harris “the DEI vice president.”He added, “It's quite fitting that the first Black — well, sort of Black — female presidential nominee was handed the job and didn't earn it.” The Daily Wire, *The Matt Walsh Show*, [7/22/24]

1. Daily Wire co-founder Ben Shapiro claimed “the only reason” Harris is vice president is “because of her sex and her race.” “If she were a white man,” Shapiro continued, “she never would have even been a senator from California let alone vice president of the United States. Everyone including Democrats knows this.” The Daily Wire, *The Ben Shapiro Show*, [7/23/24]

1. Former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly said “there’s no doubt” that “Harris is a DEI hire” on Sean Hannity’s radio show.O’Reilly was responding to Hannity’s comment that “I don’t like the DEI argument. … I think that is ridiculous.” O’Reilly claimed, “I don’t think it’s a ridiculous argument, but I don’t think it advances the cause of the election. Kamala Harris is a DEI hire; there’s no doubt about it. Now, if you want to state this as a fact, I don’t have a problem, because it is a fact. But that’s not going to get voters mobilized.” Premiere Radio Networks,*The Sean Hannity Show*, [7/24/24]

27. BlazeTV’s Glenn Beck claimed that Democrats “took [Harris] on for DEI purposes.” Beck: “You [Democrats] took her on -- you know you took her on because of DEI. You took her on for DEI purposes and now you're not going to let her go because you say she's not qualified?” BlazeTV,*The Glenn Beck Program*, [7/23/24]

1. The Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles said Biden picked Harris as his running mate “because she's a Black woman.” Knowles said, “She was picked for VP, it would seem, based on the way that she ran in 2020. Now, of course that’s not true. As Joe Biden told us, she was picked for VP because she's a Black woman. … The way it was all pitched, after the fact, was that Kamala was picked based on her campaign, based on her ability to be president should anything happen to Joe Biden.” The Daily Wire, *The Michael Knowles Show*, [7/24/24]

1. Right-wing host Steve Deace claimed that Democrats are coalescing behind Harris because of “racial idolatry issues.”BlazeTV, *The Steve Deace Show*, [7/22/24]

1. TimCast IRL’s Ian Crossland said Harris was made vice president because of her skin color. Crossland: “I don't see leadership material in the woman, but they put her in as the vice president because she was Black. She's not even Black — I hate that term — but like because of her dark skin.” *TimCast IRL*, [7/24/24]

1. Right-wing host Jesse Kelly said, “She's a DEI hire. She's a disgrace. Every part of her career has been an embarrassment.” The First, *I’m Right w/Jesse Kelly*, [7/24/24]

1. Dinesh D’Souza called Harris a “walking ad for like DEI” on his podcast. His guest, Turning Point USA’s Caitlin Sinclair, called Harris “100% a DEI hire.” Salem Podcast Network, *The Dinesh D’Souza Podcast*, [7/22/24]

1. Rudy Giuliani called Harris the “first DEI pick for president” on his podcast.He claimed Harris was unqualified and her rise is based on “gender and race.” YouTube, *America’s Mayor Live*, [7/23/24]

1. On her podcast, Republican National Committee co-chair Lara Trump said that the Democrats are stuck with Harris as a “DEI hire.” Trump added, “That’s exactly who she’s always been.” *The Right View with Lara Trump*, [7/24/24]

1. Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson said on his latest show: “They have to go with Kamala because she’s sorta Black, sorta Indian, and a woman – for DEI reasons.”He added, “She’s a moron, in a job she doesn’t deserve. That’s the whole point of DEI is to elevate people who don’t deserve their jobs to positions of power.” Tucker Carlson Network, *The Tucker Carlson Show*, [7/22/24]

1. On Carlson’s show, far-right personality Jack Posobiec agreed with Carlson’s attribution of Harris’ success to DEI, saying “it’s tough” for Democrats to “pass her over” because of DEI.Tucker Carlson Network,*The Tucker Carlson Show*, [7/22/24]

1. Right-wing podcaster Dave Rubin called Harris a “diversity hire who nobody likes.” Twitter/X, [7/21/24]

1. Right-wing podcaster Benny Johnson said that if Harris picked Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg as her running mate it would be the “full DEI presidential ticket.”He continued, “There you go. You have … the full victimhood, class presidential ticket.” *The Benny Show*, [7/21/24]

1. Daily Wire host Jordan Peterson called Harris “DEI Barbie'' on social media.He posted, “My new grandson and me giving the thumbs up to the news that @thedemocrats most qualified candidate is DEI Barbie.” Twitter/X, [7/22/24]

1. On Fox News, Project 2025 contributor Monica Crowley said former first lady Michelle Obama will run for president because she “squares the Kamala Harris circle: being a minority and a DEI hire.”Fox News, *Jesse Watters Primetime*, [7/21/24]

1. The Manhattan Institute’s Chris Rufo posted a screenshot of a CNN article about Biden considering selecting a Black woman for his running mate in 2020, calling it the “definition of DEI.”He wrote on X: “Selecting on ancestry and anatomy, rather than talent and virtue, is the definition of DEI.” Twitter/X, [7/24/24]

1. Townhall columnist Kurt Schlichter called Harris a “cackling DEI hire.” He called her “incompetent” and added, “She is the personification of every idiot promoted over more worthy people that you have ever encountered in you daily life.” Twitter/X, [7/24/24]

1. Conservative podcaster Bill Mitchell claimed Biden had better options to pick for his running mate in 2020, adding, “Does anyone doubt he chose Kamala because she's a black woman?”Twitter/X, [7/24/24]

1. Right-wing personality Rob Smith, who has been a Turning Point USA contributor, called Harris the “DEI soon-to-be nominee for President.”Twitter/X, [7/22/24; Fox News, accessed 7/22/24]

1. Newsweek senior editor-at-large Josh Hammer cited DEI as the reason Kamala Harris “gets leapfrogged from a dud of a candidacy in 2020 to now being the nominee.”Real America’s Voice, *War Room*, [7/25/24]

1. Washington Examiner’s Zachary Faria wrote an editorial titled “Democratic challenges to Harris are DEI’d on arrival.”Washington Examiner, [7/22/24]

1. Senior editor at the Federalist David Harsanyi wrote on X, “Kamala Harris was definitely a DEI hire.” Twitter/X, [7/25/24]

1. Daily Caller contributor Carly Atchinson Bird claimed Harris was picked as Biden’s VP “because of her identity as a black and South Asian American woman.”Her op-ed o misleadingly stated, “The Democrat machine successfully circumvented millions of primary voters in what has become, essentially, a coronation of Harris just over 100 days before November.” The Daily Caller, [7/23/24; PBS, 7/24/24]

1. Right-wing figure James Lindsay responded “Definitely DEI all along” toformer Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL)pointing out Harris’ credentials on social media.Twitter/X, [7/25/24]

1. Manhattan Institute’s Ilya Shapiro: “She really is running a DEI campaign.”He posted in response to a fundraiser called “White dudes for Harris.” Twitter/X, [7/26/24]

1. Right-wing comedian Terrence K. Williams wrote, “Kamala Harris is DEI!” adding that “She literally ‘Didn’t Earn It.’”Twitter/X, [7/26/24]

1. Right-wing social media account Amuse wrote, “Sadly Kamala is a DEI hire plain and simple.” Twitter/X, [7/28/24]

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an 7 24

Since the Saturday, July 13 rally shooting that left former President Donald Trump injured, one attendee and the suspected shooter dead, several Republican leaders have placed blame on President Joe Biden and the Democrats.

According to NBC News, US Rep. Mike Collins (R-GA) wrote on social media that Butler County's GOP attorney general should "file charges against Joseph R. Biden for inciting an assassination," while US Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) "wrote that 'Democrats and liberals in the media have called Trump a fascist. They’ve compared him to Hitler.'"

However, according to a Monday report published by WIRED, other MAGA supporters are blaming the shooting on something else: women and DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) practices.

Per the report, "Hundreds of posts on X" written by right-wing pundits and influencers strongly criticize "a number of female Secret Service agents who were part of Trump’s close protection detail on Saturday," and call for Secret Service director Kimberly Cheatle to be fired.

"Dozens" of the posts "have more than 1 million views, according to a review conducted by WIRED and researchers at Advance Democracy, a nonprofit organization that conducts public interest research," the report notes.

WIRED also notes that several social media posts include a video clip from a CBS interview earlier this year with Cheatle, "where she discussed increasing the number of female agents in the service to 30 percent as part of a diversity initiative."

Chaya Raichik, founder of the far-right and anti-LGBT Libs of TikTok account X account, wrote, "This female agent couldn’t even holster her gun today during the attempted assassination of Trump. DEI hire?"

The conservative Washington Times reported that some photos from the incident "seemed to show the female agents were too short to properly shield the Republican front-runner once he stood up. Mr. Trump stands 6 feet, 3 inches tall."

The right-wing newspaper added, "As Mr. Trump was loaded into his getaway vehicle, one of the female agents was seen struggling to holster her pistol."

*Wired's full report is available at this link.

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“DEI got someone killed”: Right-wing media blame diversity initiatives for Trump rally shooting}:

07/15/24

DEI got someone killed”: Right-wing media blame diversity initiatives for Trump rally shooting...

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