The United States is facing a crossroads. For decades, the insidious creep of political correctness, wrapped in acronyms like CRT (Critical Race Theory), DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion), and ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance), has infiltrated every corner of society. The result? A culture war that pits ideology against reality, innovation against conformity, and freedom against restriction.
President-elect Donald Trump has proposed a bold strategy to dismantle these ideologies, promising to upend DEI policies in the military, academia, and government. His administration plans to restore meritocracy and remove the divisive frameworks implemented during the Obama and Biden years. Trump’s position is clear: the United States must reclaim its role as a beacon of excellence, free from the shackles of political correctness.
The American Dream, Diluted by Leftism
America is unique—a melting pot where diverse backgrounds converge under the promise of freedom and opportunity. This is the “American Dream,” a cultural export envied worldwide. Yet, Leftists, much like “meth-addled” experimenters, have torn apart this cohesive vision, reconstructing it with glaring omissions.
Under Leftist policies, DEI initiatives have been weaponized, replacing opportunity with entitlement and merit with mediocrity. Critical Race Theory divides rather than unites. ESG metrics prioritize performative virtue over profitability. These policies undermine the very foundation that made America the world’s most innovative and resilient nation.
Trump’s Proposals: A Return to Meritocracy
President-elect Trump’s plan targets these issues head-on. His proposals include:
Eliminating DEI Mandates in Federal Agencies: Trump intends to rescind DEI-related hiring and training programs in federal agencies, which he sees as fostering division rather than unity.
Restoring Merit-Based Systems in the Military: Under Trump’s leadership, the military will abandon woke training programs and refocus on operational excellence and readiness.
Even Hollywood is grappling with the fallout of these policies. Actor Sean Penn, known for his outspoken political views, recently criticized political correctness. Referring to a 2028 Monk Debate where Stephen Fry lambasted political correctness for stifling diversity of thought, Penn said:
“I would just encourage everybody to be as politically incorrect as their heart desires and to engage diversity and keep telling those stories.”
Penn’s words, though not directly supportive of Trump’s policies, underscore a growing recognition that DEI culture suppresses the very diversity it claims to champion. Political correctness, Penn argues, has become a dogma, stripping society of diverse perspectives and creative freedom.
Bill Maher’s Take: A Leftist Critiques the Left
Sean Penn joins the likes of another Leftist who seems to find sanity at times, namely Bill Maher. This Leftist tool has also criticized the Left’s obsession with political correctness and DEI initiatives, as well. On his show Real Time with Bill Maher, he frequently calls out the hypocrisy and excesses of woke culture. Maher has argued that these policies alienate Americans, particularly working-class voters, by prioritizing symbolic victories over substantive progress.
In a 2023 segment, Maher commented:
“You’re not winning hearts and minds when you’re making people walk on eggshells about every word they say. This country was built on free speech and open debate, not on purity tests.”
Maher’s critique aligns with Trump’s proposals: Americans are tired of being lectured by elites disconnected from the realities of everyday life.
Americans Demand Change
Voters overwhelmingly chose Trump because they are tired of these policies. Sanctuary cities overrun by illegal immigration, schools teaching divisive ideologies, and corporations kowtowing to woke activists have pushed Americans to demand a reset. They see DEI, CRT, and ESG for what they are: distractions from the real issues facing the nation.
Even a Leftist radical like Sean Penn sees these policies for what they are. And Penn didn’t just come to these conclusions post-election. As with all the other signs pointing to the Trump thrashing of Kamala Harris, Penn has been espousing these opinions over the past few years. He finally was saying what many in his ilk have believed for at least two decades: the Left pushed way too far. Moreover, they disallowed any contrarian thoughts to their own distorted beliefs. That incestuous thinking is one of the main reasons why Trump won such a decisive victory.
The Path Forward
As Trump prepares to take office, the nation stands ready for a cultural reset. His proposals to end DEI nonsense, coupled with voices like Sean Penn and Bill Maher highlighting the absurdities of political correctness, mark a turning point. The goal is clear: restore the American Dream, celebrate genuine diversity, and reject the ideological fads that divide us.
American will soon experience a Renaissance. We stand on the cusp of reclaiming America’s true greatness.
When Indiana University implemented DEI standards in its law school curriculum, Professor John Lawrence Hill warned the state legislature about attempts by “extreme idealogues to indoctrinate students” that “fly in the face” of America’s legal foundations.
“This class is guaranteed to further polarize and politicize the law school environment and represents yet another attempt by the academic Left to provide a platform for extreme idealogues to indoctrinate students who are essentially academic hostages,”Hill wrote in his letter. “DEI is now ‘in’ at the McKinney school….”
In an interview with The Federalist, Hill, a professor at Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law (IU McKinney) says that issues with the ABA’s DEI requirements are long-standing.
A New ABA Requirement
In February 2022, the ABA introduced a new standard for legal education. Standard 303(c) reads, “A law school shall provide education to law students on bias, cross-cultural competency, and racism: (1) at the start of the program of legal education, and (2) at least once again before graduation.”
This marks the first time the ABA has mandated non-legal coursework in law school curriculum.
Hill learned of the new ABA requirement when he was serving on the law school’s academic affairs committee, which was tasked with implementing curricular reform. At the time, Hill chalked it up to an “unnecessary” addition to students’ legal education.
Once Hill departed from the committee, however, the university faculty capitalized on the new ABA instructions. Although standard 303(c) can be satisfied through orientation sessions, lectures, or “other educational experiences,” the faculty at IU McKinney opted to create a mandatory DEI course.
“[As] things developed, and I saw the way it was going … it wasn’t just unnecessary. It’s been baleful,” Hill says. “I mean, it’s really been … used as a predicate to make other changes.”
DEI at the Expense of Constitutional Law
In order to introduce new DEI coursework, the committee gave three proposals to the faculty. Two of them involved moving constitutional law to the second year, a major departure from traditional law school curriculum. Hill says this provoked a “huge faculty fight.”
“Every single one of us took constitutional law in the first year. Every single law student has taken Con Law in the first year for a century,” Hill recalls telling the faculty. “Why is it that all of a sudden our students can’t do this?”
In a memo, Hill urged the faculty to reject the abandonment of constitutional education for first-year students. Hill says he suggested a number of alternatives, including reducing the hours of one of his own classes, civil procedure.
“People freaked out at the memo,” Hill remembers. “There was a lot of anger.”
As a professor of constitutional law himself, Hill viewed the proposals to move constitutional law as particularly egregious.
“I believe that the real reason for throwing Constitutional Law out of the first year is plainly ideological,” Hill wrote in his letter to state senators. “Our Constitution enshrines and projects the values of liberty, individuality, and equality under the law. These values, which have served our nation for over 235 years, fly in the face of the DEI paradigm.”
In April, the faculty agreed to keep constitutional law in the first-year curriculum while still incorporating the “responsible lawyering” course. The new curriculum will take effect this fall.
“The law school has not considered or approved a 1-hour Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) course,” a spokeswoman for IU McKinney said in a statement to The Federalist. “A new 1L course, Responsible Lawyering, will include professional identity formation, consistent with ABA Standard 303, among other professionalism topics.”
However, “responsible lawyering” was added in direct response to the ABA’s DEI agenda. According to the ABA, this type of coursework will “reinforce the skill of cultural competency and their obligation as future lawyers to work to eliminate racism in the legal profession.” Hill describes this curriculum as a sign of more leftist change down the road.
“In law, sometimes a case is called a signal. It may be more modest in terms of what it actually rules, but it signals a change … a new way of doing things. The ABA requirement was cover, and it was a signal that … law schools can make changes, including pretty dramatic changes,” Hill says. “Many people in our faculty said this is a cover. The ABA has given us cover. That term was used specifically by other faculty members.”
According to Hill, these changes run deeper than some may think.
“What ties all this together is that there is an ideological agenda. Some people understand that consciously. They embrace it. They pursue it. A lot of other people just sort of go along, understanding the current. You know, people can sense when political currents are changing or where they’re moving, and so they sort of move with it, without really sharing the goal as such. But I think that this was something that came down from on high [that is] ideological, deeply ideological.”
In an interview with The Federalist, Raatz confirmed he is investigating the matter personally.
“We can all be sensitive to one another, but to mandate diversity, equity, inclusion … what does that really mean?” Raatz, a recipient of Hill’s letter, told The Federalist. “To just be frank about it, I’m not a proponent of DEI, honestly, and I’m going to determine just what their parameters are, and we’ll go from there.”
Fighting a DEI Agenda
Hill sent his letter to Raatz and Crane on Saturday afternoon. The senators are members of the Indiana Senate Education and Career Development Committee, and Hill hopes making them aware of the situation could lead to action.
“I have taught at McKinney for 21 years. I love this school and I love our students,” Hill wrote. “I hope that there might be something that you and your colleagues in the Indiana House and Senate might be able to do to respond to these developments.”
In the meantime, his concern is primarily for the quality of education at IU McKinney.
“When I started teaching, I was middle of the road. I wasn’t, you know, a wild-eyed progressive, but I wasn’t a libertarian or a conservative, either. I tried to kind of find the middle way, but I started to see the extent to which our textbooks, the way people teach classes, who gets tenure, who’s elevated — I mean, there’s so much of politics in it.”
Today, Hill says he still has hope for the law school — and for Americans.
“The most important thing is that you get everything accurate,” Hill told The Federalist. “I think once people know, it makes it harder for the powers that be to continue to advance these causes. I mean, everyone is aware of what’s going on. People are smart. Americans are smart. Once they’re aware of what’s going on, how it’s going on, it removes the cover for people who are trying to essentially push these values, these courses.”
Monroe Harless is a summer intern at The Federalist. She is a recent graduate of the University of Georgia with degrees in journalism and political science.
The mob’s stranglehold of speech on college campuses may be beginning to loosen thanks to legal challenges aimed at strengthening the free-speech rights of college professors and students. Just look at Western Michigan University. In 2021, WMU fired adjunct music professor Daniel Mattson solely for writing about his religious views off-campus on his own time. After a remarkably short seven months of litigation, Mattson was vindicated this year on Oct. 31.
Mattson, a professional symphony trombonist, had worked for WMU’s School of Music since 1999. He performed in the university’s Western Brass Quintet, comprised of School of Music faculty members. As part of his duties, Mattson also performed with the Western Winds, a student-faculty ensemble.
In 2009, Mattson returned to Catholicism and left behind his prior homosexual lifestyle. For several years, he wrote articles and spoke at public events explaining how the church should engage with people who experience same-sex attraction. All the while, Mattson strictly compartmentalized his religious activity from his work at WMU. He never initiated a discussion about his religious beliefs or views concerning sexuality with students.
Punished for Christian Ideas
In 2017, Mattson’s writing culminated in Why I Don’t Call Myself Gay: How I Reclaimed My Sexual Reality and Found Peace — an autobiographical account of his experience with same-sex attraction. He advocated that the church should sympathetically engage people who experience same-sex attraction while offering Catholicism as a better way.
In October 2021, Mattson agreed to perform as a guest artist at the School of Music. A recently appointed faculty member and LGBT activist discovered Mattson’s writings on his experiences with homosexuality and his recommitment to the Catholic faith. She launched a campaign to cancel Mattson’s planned events. As she posted to Twitter: “I won’t be going to any recitals by ex-gay activists, thanks.” She engaged students, faculty members, and DEI administrators in this effort. In the weeks leading up to the recital, there was extensive discussion over email and on social media among faculty and students, many of whom expressed support for the idea that Mattson’s presence on campus was “harmful” to students who identify as LGBT.
The administration’s response to the outcry over Mattson’s religious speech was swift and harsh. Matson was first stripped of his core duties, hindered in important school activities, and finally, WMU refused to renew his teaching contract.
Mattson refused to allow activists to cancel him without a fight. He challenged WMU’s forcing him to choose between earning a livelihood as a world-class artist and mentor for aspiring musicians on campus and his life as a religious believer and witness for conflicted Catholics off-campus.
Violations of Free Speech and Religion
In March 2023, Mattson, represented by the Center for Individual Rights, a nonprofit public interest law firm, filed a federal lawsuit on Mattson’s behalf challenging his firing as a violation of his rights to free exercise of religion and freedom of speech under the First and 14th Amendments.
WMU’s efforts to cancel Mattson ran afoul of both recent and longstanding Supreme Court precedent guaranteeing the right to religious free speech. Just last year, in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, the Supreme Court reaffirmed a longstanding rule that government action that burdens a sincere religious practice in a manner that is not “neutral” must be justified by a compelling government interest and must be narrowly tailored to that interest.
In the 2018 decision Masterpiece Cake Shop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, the court found that a plaintiff may also prove a free exercise violation by showing evidence of government hostility to religion. Here, the school administration had made its views clear in an email sent to the entire school community. “Mr. Mattson is also a high-visibility advocate for the position that homosexuality is a chosen lifestyle that is to be avoided. He has stated his position strongly and widely. While he is free to express his beliefs, we cannot ignore the fact that they are harmful to members of our LGBTQ community, particularly our students.”
Another body of law going back to the 1960s prohibits retaliation by a public employer against an employee on the basis of protected speech by the employee, where that speech was directed to an issue of public concern and was not made as part of the employee’s official duties.
Confronted with the controlling legal authority in Mattson’s suit and his refusal to let WMU cancel him so cavalierly, WMU was again swift to respond. Rather than attempting to defend its sectarian or viewpoint-based punishment in a court of law, less than seven months after Mattson filed suit, WMU settled the case and agreed to pay Mattson substantial damages and attorney’s fees.
These are the workings of the leftist cancel mob. Instead of a wholly government-controlled censorship regime, militant activist mobs have informally coordinated with DEI bureaucrats. Together, they have cowed administrators to censor, punish, expel, and fire students and professors who contradicted leftist orthodoxies about skin color and sex. These radicals have met the slightest deviations from DEI orthodoxy with draconian punishments, and sincere religious believers have suddenly been at risk of losing their livelihoods.
Even more rewarding than the financial compensation for Mattson is the vindication in standing up for the rights of all individuals to religious expression regardless of what others think. As more victories like this pile up, we may hope that we’re reaching a turning point in the battle against cancel culture.
J. Robert Renner is the Deputy General Counsel of the Center for Individual Rights and counsel of record for Mr. Mattson.
The board of Harvard unanimously voted to retain the university’s president Claudine Gay despite her public refusal to say that calls for genocide of Jewish students would contradict Harvard’s code of conduct — and subsequent allegations of past plagiarism.
“Our extensive deliberations affirm our confidence that President Gay is the right leader to help our community heal and to address the very serious societal issues we are facing,” the Harvard Corporation announced in a statement on Tuesday.
Gay kept her position despite both credible allegations of plagiarism and an abysmal performance alongside other university presidents before the House Education and the Workforce Committee. On Capitol Hill last week, Gay along with the presidents of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania refused to testify that calls for Jewish genocide violate student codes of conduct — despite their schools’ histories of punishing students for conservative speech.
“We embrace a commitment to free expression even of views that are objectionable, offensive, hateful,” Gay said. “It’s when that speech crosses into conduct that violates our policies against bullying, harassment, intimidation.”
Gay’s peers offered lawmakers similar answers when it came to confronting students who called for the genocide of Jews at their respective schools. University of Pennsylvania President M. Elizabeth Magill resigned from her role on Saturday after donors responded to her disastrous testimony by pulling contributions. Ross Stevens, a hedge fund manager who graduated from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton Business School, threatened to withdraw a $100 million donation from his alma mater — and he was only one donor to threaten to pull funding.
Investor and Harvard alumnus Bill Ackman claimed that Gay’s poor performance had cost Harvard more than a billion dollars. But somehow Gay survived both poor reactions from donors and allegations of plagiarism, a chief sin in academia — and it was likely not a coincidence.
Gay is the first black woman to run the university that is one of the nation’s oldest and most prestigious institutions in higher education.
“She assumed leadership with high expectations, but her tenure, which began this summer, has been mired in scandal,” Chris Rufo reported Monday in City Journal. “As dean and then as president, Gay has been accused of bullying colleagues, suppressing free speech, overseeing a racist admissions program, and, following the Hamas terror campaign against Israel, failing to stand up to rampant anti-Semitism on campus.” She landed the top job at Harvard despite having only authored 11 peer-reviewed articles, four of which have now come under allegations of plagiarism.
Gay, however, is among one of the most protected classes according to the left’s hierarchy of victimhood. Firing not just a woman but a black woman would be blasphemous against the religion of identity politics.
“A white male would probably already be gone,” observed Carol Swain, a retired professor from Vanderbilt and Princeton whose work was apparently plagiarized by Gay.
Swain, who is black, told Fox News that “obviously” Harvard “did not have the courage to fire its first black president.”
The New York Post reported Monday night that Harvard University even threatened the paper months ago over the Post’s own probe into Gay’s allegations of plagiarism. Yet, as dean, Gay reportedly forced “dozens” of students to leave campus over violations of academic integrity codes.
So-called diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives such as the programs endorsed by Gay, however, have begun to replace merit-based standards in academia, government, and business, with physical characteristics becoming a factor in employment eligibility. The vice president and a Supreme Court justice were both explicitly chosen based on their sex and skin color.
In the Soviet Union, residents needed a party card to guarantee their employment and other benefits unavailable to the rest of the country. In America today, special perks are now afforded to those who meet the criteria of preferred classes, from race to sexual orientation.
DEI is welfare for idiots who are unemployable in the absence of identity politics. In the Soviet Union, the party card was a guarantee of employment and perks unavailable to the unwashed masses. In America in 2023, identity politics serves the same purpose. With the right skin…
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist and the author of Social Justice Redux, a conservative newsletter on culture, health, and wellness. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com. Sign up for Tristan’s email newsletter here.
The Left has created a hostile environment on college campuses for those of any color, race, or creed who dissent from its Orwellian groupthink. Pictured: A Jewish student watches a protest in support of Palestine and for free speech at Columbia University campus on Nov. 14. (Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
Sara Garstka, a member of the Young Leaders Program at The Heritage Foundation in 2023, received a bachelor’s degree in English in 2022 from Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia.
During a hearing this week on the rise in antisemitism on college campuses, Rep. Glenn Grothman, R-Wis., said a lack of ideological diversity contributed to the hateful educational environment endured by Jewish students since the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks in Israel by Hamas.
He’s right.
A recent poll found that 73% of Jewish college students and about 44% of non-Jewish students have experienced or witnessed some form of antisemitism since the beginning of the 2023-24 school year.
“Since Oct. 7, students who have felt comfortable with others knowing they’re Jewish decreased significantly,” according to the poll results released jointly by the Anti-Defamation League and the Jewish outreach organization Hillel International.
The poll found that, before Oct. 7, 63.7% of Jewish students surveyed said they “felt ‘very’ or ‘extremely’ comfortable, but now only 38.6% feel the same.”
Among those testifying Tuesday before the House Education and Workforce Committee was University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill, who finds herself under increasing fire from critics. Penn is one of the Ivy League schools at the center of controversy over free speech on college campuses amid the troubling increase in antisemitism, especially since Hamas’ terrorist attacks in Israel.
Previously, the existence of DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) initiatives at Penn and on other college campuses made it look like universities actively promote safe environments for minority groups such as Jews.
Magill’s DEI statement on the University of Pennsylvania’s website, for example, reads: “Penn is a place with deep-seated values that reflect respect for all and a sincere commitment to service, to diversity in all its forms, and to creating conditions where all can thrive so we can as a Penn community have our greatest impact on the world.”
‘Context-Dependent’
But antisemitic speech isn’t respectful of “diversity in all its forms,” nor does speech advocating genocide promote a safe environment for Jewish students.
Rep. Elise M. Stefanik, R-N.Y., pressed Magill at the hearing on whether “calling for the genocide of Jews violates Penn’s code of conduct when it comes to bullying and harassment.”
“If the speech becomes conduct, it can be harassment,” Magill said, adding later: “It is a context-dependent decision, Congresswoman.”
Stefanik told Magill that it was the easiest yes-or-no question to answer. But Magill didn’t say “yes.”
University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill listens during her testimony Tuesday before the House Education and Workforce Committee. (Photo: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
Following backlash for her testimony, on Thursday morning Magill posted a video statement on X stating her intention to clarify and evaluate campus policies on free speech. She didn’t apologize.
Penn donor Ross Stevens, founder and CEO of Stone Ridge Asset Management, later withdrew a $100 million donation to protest the university’s stance on antisemitism on campus and Magill’s congressional testimony, Fox Business reported.
“In what world is a call for violence against Jews protected speech, but a belief that sex is biological and binary isn’t?” Rep. Tim Walberg, R-Mich., asked Harvard President Claudine Gay during the hearing.
At Penn, a clear double standard exists for protecting free speech, alumnus Arjunan Gnanendran told The Daily Signal. Gnanendran said he spoke on behalf of a law professor, Amy Wax, during her examination by Penn’s Faculty Senate for allegedly creating a hostile classroom environment by the way she talked about affirmative action in her course, “Conservative Political & Legal Thought.”
“They’re defending the right of the pro-Palestine students to say things like ‘From the river to the sea’ and call for the genocide of Israelis,” Gnanendran said of university administrators.
“That’s free speech, [but] it’s not, you know, creating a hostile environment for Jewish students?” he argued.
“But then at the same time, they’re saying when Professor Wax talks about racial preferences in affirmative action, that creates a hostile environment for students of color and she should be stripped of tenure,” Gnanendran said. “So, there’s no free speech for Professor Wax, but there’s free speech for the pro-Palestine people who are harassing Jewish students.”
Like others interviewed for this article, Gnanendran is a fellow member of The Heritage Foundation’s internship program, called the Young Leaders Program. Their stories illustrate the existence of the ideological echo chambers at today’s colleges and universities. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)
Antisemitism on campus is another form of cancel culture from the ideological echo chambers entrenched at today’s colleges and universities, something Grothman alluded to during the House hearing.
For many young conservatives on-campus intimidation for their beliefs can come from all angles: peers, professors, and administrators. It’s no wonder that a new unifying issue for the Left, the war between Israel and Hamas terrorists, could result in hateful speech and behavior toward Jewish students. It already was happening to conservatives.
When some speech is protected and other speech is not, colleges become echo chambers for left-leaning ideology, where “there are things that you are prohibited from speaking about,” Austin Gae said in an interview about the culture on his campus.
Cancel culture “is anything that represses free speech and open debate” and often is characterized by disrespect, said Gae, a senior at The George Washington University in the nation’s capital.
Indeed, cyberbullying, classroom censure, false narratives, administrative neglect, and social blacklists are all methods used on campus to discourage ideological diversity.
Peer-Pressured Into Silence
Gae said he became the target of cyberbullying in a class group chat after saying that then-President Donald Trump didn’t incite an “insurrection” by asking supporters at a rally near the White House to “peacefully and patriotically make their voices heard” at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
People who had never met him labeled him a racist homophobe during his freshman year at GWU for something that had nothing to do with race or sexuality, Gae said. The experience prompted him to go silent on his political beliefs for the remainder of his education.
“After that, I decided to not really talk to anyone on campus,” Gae said.
Unless a person can first get to know someone else, and share that he is “a kind, real person with manners and stuff like that,” he said, it’s hard to feel comfortable talking about politics on any level.
For Erin Leone, a junior at GWU, not even a history course on President Ronald Reagan was a safe space for conservative thought. Reagan’s famous 1964 speech, “A Time for Choosing,” was the subject of study for one lecture in which the professor filtered his analysis through a lens that saw the future president’s speech was “divisive and racist,” Leone told me in an interview for The Daily Signal. When she asked the professor for specific examples of racially divisive language in the speech, instead of answering the question, the professor called on three outspoken, left-leaning classmates to explain how Reagan’s words made others “afraid of black people,” Leone said.
“Does that answer your question?” the professor asked Leone after her three peers finished yelling at her, she recalled.
False Narratives
In another one of Leone’s history classes, she said, a professor claimed that Catholic missionaries in Mexico “made up the Our Lady of Guadalupe apparitions to trick the Mexicans into converting to Catholicism.”
Afterward, Leone approached the professor with concerns that the remarks were racist toward Mexican culture and openly anti-Catholic. The professor, she said, later denied making the remarks.
“If a professor said that about Islam or Judaism, they should be fired,” Leone contended.
In another situation at Penn, the student newspaper The Daily Pennsylvanian neglected to follow journalism ethics and reported allegations as fact to push a narrative that fraternities are places that harbor racism and should be removed from campus. The student newspaper claimed that a person of color was assaulted by a Penn student, Nicholas Hamilton, at a fraternity party. Hamilton had to go to court over the allegations and was found not guilty of assault in Philadelphia Municipal Court, the newspaper reported.
Administrative Neglect
At Nicholls State University in Louisiana, the Student Organizations and Activities Office neglected to process paperwork establishing a College Republicans chapter, former student Cooper Moore told The Daily Signal. This occurred despite the university’s having a chapter of College Democrats as well as a Democratic Socialist Club, Moore said. Moore served as vice president of College Republicans for the brief period the club was permitted to host activities on campus at Nicholls State. That ended, he said, when College Republicans’ “chalking campaign” during the 2020 presidential campaign resulted in a riot in which leftists called for his death and the banning of the club from campus.
On the campus quad, College Republicans chalked slogans such as “MAGA,” “Vote Trump,” and “Vote #1,” this last a reference to a pro-life amendment on the state ballot at that time, Moore said.
“None of it was bigoted,” he said. “None of it was derogatory toward the Democrats or Joe Biden or to liberal students.”
Yet the College Republicans’ chalk was washed away with mops and buckets by some of his peers, and the university hosted a town hall to discuss free speech on campus. In that forum, Nicholls State President Jay Clune neglected to take a clear stance on free speech, Moore said. Nicholls State implemented a policy prohibiting “political chalk” on campus, he said, although Democrat-affiliated clubs had been doing so with no push-back from administrators. The next day, Moore said, he had to be escorted from class by campus security because participants in a Black Lives Matter rally were yelling his name.
The university didn’t follow up to ask about his safety or mental health, Moore said. The only thing the school reached out about, he said, was to say that the College Republicans club was barred from campus because the necessary paperwork hadn’t been filed. But the club did file the paperwork and the school’s Activities Office was at fault for it not being processed, Moore said.
Free Speech at Stake
While she was at GWU, Leone said, two members of a Greek organization were shunned by their sorority sisters after someone found Instagram photos of them taken at a College Republicans event. “Nobody would be friends with them anymore,” Leone said of the two students, as if they were socially blacklisted for being conservative. It’s the same in other student organizations, she said.
“The rhetoric in the groups is that, if someone were to not agree with [liberal ideas], they’d be a horrible person,” Leone said.
The Left has created a hostile environment on campus for those of any color, race, or creed who dissent from its Orwellian groupthink. Since college and university administrators continue to discourage ideological diversity on campus, speech encouraging acts of genocide should come as no surprise. Unless free speech, including dissent from the Left’s doctrines, is encouraged on campuses, our educational institutions will continue to embolden hostility that endangers those with a different view who speak out.
When regimes capture power, it’s often not in the dramatic fashion of the storming of the Bastille. Instead, it’s a bureaucratic takeover, hidden in jargon and filled with clichés, for the greater good. The Federal Communications Commission is poised to vote today on a sweeping set of new rules called the “Preventing Digital Discrimination Order.”
The 200-page report recommends implementing an exhaustive array of new restrictions that will alter the internet forever. It springs from section 60506 of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act 2021. This legislation was meant to infuse some federal dollars into America’s sagging internet infrastructure. Unfortunately, this vote will grant the FCC the power to control nearly every aspect of internet infrastructure in the name of our secular gods of diversity, equity, and inclusion.
The TL;DR of the obtuse rules is the ability to censor, control, and regulate internet service providers based on vague laws around equity. Most disturbing is that it doesn’t have to be “discrimination” as it’s generally understood but rather “disparate outcomes,” meaning all internet infrastructure must produce perfect equity or face the wrath of the United States government.
The agency’s unelected officials will convene to deliberate on regulations to integrate the latest progressive ideals regarding race and identity into the internet landscape. It’s expected to pass 3-2. It will stifle innovation and impede internet access opportunities, all in pursuit of achieving equity.
If approved, this would mark the first time the FCC would gain the authority to oversee various aspects of every ISP’s service termination policies, including customer credit usage, account history, credit checks, and account termination, among other related matters.
Experts have been sounding the alarm about what this could mean for internet freedom.
The @FCC is claiming the power to control every aspect of broadband infrastructure and the industry itself.
To call it "extreme" or "radical" doesn't do this proposal justice.
It includes price controls, forced buildout of broadband regardless of ROI, and more. https://t.co/b7HMYW1sDD
Even FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr has blasted the power-grab, calling it a free pass giving the “administrative state effective control of all internet services and infrastructure.”
“President Biden has called on the FCC to adopt new rules of breathtaking scope,” Carr noted on X, formerly Twitter. “Those rules would give the federal government a roving mandate to micromanage nearly every aspect of how the Internet functions — from how ISPs allocate capital and where they build, to the services that consumers can purchase; from the profits that ISPs can realize and how they market and advertise services to the discounts and promotions that consumers can receive.”
“The FCC reserves the right under this plan to regulate both ‘actions and omissions, whether recurring or a single instance.’ In other words, if you take any action, you may be liable, and if you do nothing, you may be liable. There is no path to complying with this standardless regime. It reads like a planning document drawn up in the faculty lounge of a university’s Soviet Studies Department.”
Next week, the FCC will vote on President Biden’s plan to give the Administrative State effective control of all Internet services and infrastructure.
These regulators have established a framework that could penalize any organization seeking to enhance internet accessibility or provide internet services if the agency determines that it did so in a manner that facilitates discrimination. Whatever the regulators decide that means.
Congressional pushback
Ranking Member Ted Cruz (R-Texas) of the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee, along with 27 fellow senators, is urging the Federal Communications Commission to withdraw its preliminary proposal regarding “Digital Discrimination.” This proposal would grant the federal government significant influence over virtually every facet of the internet, potentially subjecting broadband providers to extensive, vague, and detrimental liability under a “disparate impact” standard.
In a letter to FCC Chairwoman Rosenworcel, the senators wrote:
“Your Draft Order, which largely follows a Biden administration diktat, will create crippling uncertainty for the U.S. broadband industry, chill broadband investment, and undermine Congress’s objective of promoting broadband access for all Americans. We urge you to adhere to the will of Congress and conform to the plain meaning of [the bipartisan infrastructure bill] to avoid causing serious damage to the competitive and innovative U.S. broadband industry.”
Net neutrality back door
This power-grab is also a de facto attempt to bring back net neutrality. Net neutrality, with its burdensome and intrusive regulations, hinders the internet’s natural evolution. The internet has thrived remarkably well without the heavy hand of net neutrality oversight. Moreover, these regulations prevent internet service providers from rightfully charging substantial fees to content giants like video streaming platforms, which are voraciously consuming bandwidth. By prohibiting these fees, net neutrality shifts the responsibility of expanding network capacity entirely onto individuals and away from giant tech platforms.
This, in turn, is expected to result in higher costs for consumers, as they will be forced to bear the burden of more expensive internet packages, even if they don’t use these data-intensive streaming services. As it stands, net neutrality stifles innovation, undermines market forces, and ultimately harms consumers and the internet ecosystem. The idea that they would resurrect these onerous rules through the back door is no less worrying just because it isn’t surprising.
The one silver lining to this is that the disparate impact rules they cite to justify the power-grab have been struck down by the Supreme Court. There will no doubt be immediate lawsuits to try to fight these rules. Across varying industries and government entities, a concerted effort exists to curtail your freedom. From COVID lockdowns to tech censorship, expansive regulations, gun laws, and the jailing of political dissidents, the underlying result is curtailing your freedoms. The regime knows a free internet is one of the last tools the American people have left, which is why it tries to control it at every turn.
Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s defense of racial discrimination is falling apart. It’s now well known that Jackson repeated an embarrassing falsehood while defending affirmative action in college admissions. In her Students for Fair Admissions dissent, she asserted that matching Black physicians with Black patients doubles survival rates for newborns, a claim that’s equally unbelievable and factually unsupported.
But this is not the only mistake Jackson made. Her second error shows the diversity-industrial complex’s deep corruption of medicine – and its threat to Americans’ health.
Jackson wrote, “research shows that Black physicians are more likely to accurately assess Black patients’ pain tolerance and treat them accordingly,” for instance, “prescribing them appropriate amounts of pain medication.” A footnote refers to an amicus brief from the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), the same source that led to Jackson’s first mistake.
Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who was unable to define the word “woman” when asked at her confirmation hearing last year, made a telling error during her affirmation action decision. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
The AAMC brief refers to four studies in support of this claim. Yet none of them examine whether Black doctors are better at treating the pain of Black patients. All four document Black patients’ problems with pain management, but crucially, not one examines the efficacy of doctors of different races. The AAMC either failed to read the research or deliberately created this claim out of whole cloth.
It’s unfortunate that Jackson and her elite-trained clerks were led astray by yet another falsehood. But it’s unconscionable that the Association of American Medical Colleges got the facts so wrong in such a high-stakes case. Most concerning of all, it’s unsurprising for this once prestigious yet still powerful organization. The AAMC, which represents every accredited medical school in the U.S. and Canada, has elevated diversity to an absurd level. It holds, as an article of faith, that medical schools must recruit more Black students, even if that means discriminating against students of other races and lowering standards for admission.
Not only does the AAMC brook no arguments to the contrary, but it also misreads research and perhaps manufactures evidence to support its position. These are the actions of a radicalized organization – one that puts political demands above its stated goal of improving medical education. The AAMC’s faulty justification of race-based admissions, seen in its amicus brief, is bad enough. Yet the association’s extremist turn doesn’t end there.
The AAMC has quietly graded its member schools’ commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion. Through freedom of information reports, we have found reports from 34 medical schools, detailing their implementation of 89 AAMC-approved DEI initiatives. The list includes hiring and promoting professors based on DEI metrics, creating a permanent DEI bureaucracy, lobbying for DEI policies at every level of government and making DEI a “key learning outcome.” The average medical school has complied with 85% of the AAMC’s wishes.
It’s unfortunate that Jackson and her elite-trained clerks were led astray by yet another falsehood. But it’s unconscionable that the Association of American Medical Colleges got the facts so wrong in such a high-stakes case. Most concerning of all, it’s unsurprising for this once prestigious yet still powerful organization.
The corruption of curriculum is especially concerning. Last summer, the AAMC released new “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Competencies,” which effectively dictate what medical schools teach. Future physicians must now master “intersectionality,” describing “how each identity may result in varied and multiple forms of oppression or privilege related to clinical decisions and practice.” Other mandatory topics include “colonization, white supremacy, acculturation, [and] assimilation.” The AAMC sponsors medical schools’ accrediting body, so institutions that don’t teach these medical divisive concepts risk losing their ability to issue degrees.
The AAMC’s actions are lowering, not raising, the quality of medical education, which in turn lowers the quality of future medical care. By repeating the organization’s false claims about racial preferences in college admissions, Justice Jackson has shined a light on the deeper danger that DEI poses to Americans’ health and well-being.
Since its CEO hailed DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) initiatives and a backlash for targeting kids with LGBTQ Pride messaging, Target’s stock price hit its lowest level since the 2020 pandemic lockdowns.
Shares hit a low of $133.42 on Wednesday in early trading and has dropped for eight consecutive sessions, its longest losing streak since November 2018, the New York Post reported.
Its market capitalization has seen about a $12.7 billion drop to $61.6 billion Wednesday since CEO Brian Cornell hailed DEI as having been a boon to business.
“When we think about purpose at Target, it’s really about helping all the families, and that ‘all’ word is really important,” Cornell told Fortune’s “Leadership Next” podcast this month. “Most of America shops at Target, so we want to do the right thing to support families across the country.’
“I think those are just good business decisions, and it’s the right thing for society, and it’s the great thing for our brand.”
Cornell hailed DEI initiatives has being a moneymaker.
“The things we’ve done from a DE&I standpoint, it’s adding value,” he said. “It’s helping us drive sales, it’s building greater engagement with both our teams and our guests, and those are just the right things for our business today.”
But now it has led to backlash, boiling before June’s Pride Month for the LGBTQIA+ community. Calls for Target boycotts on Twitter have been going on since mid-March, condemning pride messaging and LGBTQ clothing for children, and even babies, TheStreet reported.
Target closed at $160.96 on March 17 (topping at $162.43 at 11 a.m. ET that day) since Cornell’s remarks and has only closed lower since, including $133.80 on Tuesday.
Notably, Target’s Twitter account activity has been virtually nonexistent since October, just days after CEO Elon Musk took over — a sign it might be engaging in its own political boycott. The Target boycott has also rejected “tuck-friendly” clothing and merchandise from a vendor who sells items with satanic messaging, The Washington Post reported.
Also, new song called “Boycott Target” by Forgiato Blow and Jimmy Levy surged Monday to the No. 1 spot in the iTunes hip hop chart, increasing the surge against Target in a campaign similar to the one waged against Bud Light.
“Attention all shoppers, there’s a clean up on every aisle,” Blow raps in the opening line. “Target is targeting your kids.”
Bud Light infamously used Dylan Mulvaney, a pro-President Joe Biden transgender social media influencer, to help sell its beer in April, leading to a backlash that has seen a campaign rise against the brewer. Anheuser-Busch’s share price has fallen around $13.63 since it closed at $66.57 on March 31, just a day before Mulvaney appeared on Twitter to brag about the personalized Bud Light cans and partnership. The share price dipped to $52.94 on Wednesday, or more than 20% loss of market capitalization to $91.7 billion.
U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy recently released an advisory titled “Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation.” It warns that social isolation is a major public health problem. The 81-page document presents six government-directed “pillars” of action to address the health hazards of social isolation.
On the surface, these six directives may look innocuous, but they present a clear and present danger to the autonomy of our private lives and relationships. The project is potentially so massive in scope that it’s not an overstatement to say it threatens to regulate our freedom of association in ways we never could have imagined.
Let’s look in greater depth at those pillars and the risks they pose.
‘Building a Social Infrastructure’
The first stated goal is to “strengthen social infrastructure in local communities.” It defines “social infrastructure” as the regular events and institutions that make up community life, and says the federal government should both fund local organizations and direct how they’re structured, including their locations. This can only mean that all local communities must answer to the federal bureaucracy in the quest to strengthen social connections among people.
Social infrastructure, the report says, includes physical parts of a community, such as housing, libraries, parks and recreation spaces, transport systems, and so forth. The report expresses concern that some people have better access to such locations than other people, and recommends federal interventions.
Those are likely to be used to promote densified housing along the lines of the “15-minute city” (more accurately termed 15-minute ghettoes), as well as the eventual dismantling of single-family housing. The goal of replacing private vehicles with public transportation fits easily into this scheme too.
I don’t presume that this plan will, by itself, drive wholesale changes in our physical infrastructure. But it would certainly provide authority and justification for changes supported by radical environmentalists, all of which diminish our freedoms.
The advisory warns that participation is mandatory if the plan is to work: “It will take all of us — individuals, families, schools, and workplaces, health care and public health systems, technology companies, governments, faith organizations, and communities — working together…”
The report’s proposed infrastructure to solve the problem of social isolation seems designed to lock everybody into compliance with and dependence upon federal mandates. Local control is then lost.
We end up with a massive federal infrastructure that can monitor the levels of social connection and disconnection in every nook and cranny of society. As described in the report, this would mean every institution, every governmental department, every volunteer association, every locality, every church, every faith community, every organization, every club, every service club, every sports league, and so on, would likely be assessed and “strengthened” to promote social connection.
‘Enact Pro-Connection Public Policies Everywhere’
According to the second pillar, “Government has a responsibility to use its authority to monitor and mitigate the public health harm caused by policies, products, and services that drive social disconnection.” How will these be tracked and mitigated? It “requires establishing cross-departmental leadership to develop and oversee an overarching social connection strategy. Diversity, equity, inclusion, [DEI] and accessibility are critical components of any such strategy.”
In other words, some people are more socially connected than others, and that’s not fair. They enjoy benefits — as in “unearned privileges” — that put others at a disadvantage. So, the government needs to intervene for the sake of equity to “spread the wealth” of social connections.
DEI is a creature of identity politics, which serves to erase human individuality and replace it with demographic identity markers that label people as either oppressors or victims, thus cultivating more resentments and hostilities in society. By injecting the codes of DEI into all social relationships, we’re bound to become even more divided, alienated, and lonely. And the federal government is bound to become even more authoritarian and meddlesome in our personal relationships and social interactions.
‘Mobilize the Health Sector’
Another threat to the private sphere of life comes under the directive to “mobilize the health sector” by expanding “public health surveillance and interventions.” This sounds very much like tracking your social connections and intervening when the bureaucracy deems it necessary. Big Brother sitting in on your doctor visits and therapy sessions?
The report indicates that health care workers will be trained to track cases of what the government views as social connection and disconnection. As they obediently report to the federal bureaucracy, most individual and local control will be lost. Medicine is bound to become more federalized and less private than ever when answering to these mandates.
Consider also that mental health practitioners are already suggesting that signs of racial or cultural bias should be classified as a mental illness.
“Consider also that mental health practitioners are already suggesting that signs of racial or cultural bias should be classified as a mental illness. “
Of course, to the promoters of DEI, all white people are inherently racially biased, simply because of their skin color. This brings to mind the disturbing practice in the Soviet Union of consigning political dissenters to psychiatric treatment. The official line was that you must be mentally ill if you disagree with communism.
‘Reform Digital Environments’
The advisory recognizes that overuse of the internet and social media can drive people deeper into social isolation. But it also promotes centralized government control over technology development, especially in human interactions: “We must learn more by requiring data transparency from technology companies,” it says. So, government would decide how to design and use such technologies. It would very likely compel technology companies to provide data to the government on Americans’ social connections.
The advisory also backs the “development of pro-connection technologies” with the goal of creating “safe” environments and “safeguarding the well-being of users.” Such phrasing has been used in recent years to justify censorship under the guise of protecting certain demographics.
In light of the importance of DEI to the overall strategy, this sounds ominously like a call for further “protection,” i.e., government control of the private sphere. Again, the primary director of all these remedies is the federal bureaucracy, not a trusted family member, friend, pastor, or neighbor.
‘Deepening Our Knowledge’
The fifth pillar of the advisory pushes a “research agenda” that enlists all “stakeholders” — that means every level of government, every organization, every corporation, every school, every family, every individual — to deepen their knowledge about social connection and disconnection. Of course, the advisory has already predetermined the outcome of much of this research, and we can be reasonably confident this research will reflect the outlook offered by the advisory. After all, that’s how researchers get grants and research contracts.
I imagine institutions will publicize their “studies” through a media monopoly that promotes the preferred narrative on what kinds of relationships we should have, what we can and can’t talk about. Essentially, we’ll get a flood of government propaganda about their preferences for human relationships.
In the context of today’s censorship regime, this means promoting a single narrative that will drown any competing views offered by critics and the public with the favored views of government and corporate interests, parroted endlessly by Big Media.
‘Cultivate a Culture of Social Connection’
Finally, the advisory advocates for cultivating “a culture of connection,” one based on “kindness, respect, service, and commitment to one another.” This sounds lovely, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, our government’s relentless push for woke policies tells us that we cannot expect to understand those terms as traditional virtues.
Rather, such terms will likely be used in woke Orwellian fashion, to direct our social interactions and behaviors. For example, not dating a transgender person is now labeled unkind and “transphobic.” “Gender affirming care” — i.e., castration and mutilation of children — is the only “respectful” way of treating gender dysphoria. Your “responsibility” is to comply without question.
The advisory also calls for the media and the arts to promote stories that encourage “connection,” most likely in the Orwellian sense that wokeness demands. Further, the report cautions that certain kinds of social connection are harmful for individuals and society. It warns that too much like-mindedness can lead to extremism and violence.
The Historical Pattern of Big Government Is Atomization, Not Social Connection
Ironies abound in this advisory. The pretext for government injecting itself into our personal lives is to rescue us from the misery of our loneliness epidemic. Never mind that government policies are largely to blame for family breakdown, welfare dependency, urban blight, attacks on free speech, attacks on privacy, and countless other developments that result in an acute sense of isolation and polarization.
Never mind that the proven prescription for loneliness is the opposite: a private sphere of life where intact families raise their children with a sense of virtue; where institutions of faith give people a sense of order and purpose in life; and where friends can confide in one another without meddlers eavesdropping on their conversations. This sphere of life — the private sphere — is the fount of freedom, love, and trust that nurtures social connections. It can only thrive in privacy.
But this private sphere seems to be in the crosshairs of Murthy’s massive government project to “fix” the social connections of all Americans. The government will doubtless enlist a media monopoly and Big Tech for support in monitoring those connections.
Given the current direction of this administration’s policies, it will also deploy heavy-handed political censorship — of which Murthy already proved a huge fan during Covid — to enforce compliance and punish dissent. Such censorship heightens the fear of speaking openly, which only builds more walls between people. Ironically, we would end up more atomized than ever.
The Tentacles of Bureaucracy
This may sound over the top to a general reader who may find the advisory benign and even welcoming, and perhaps just a narrowly focused plan to address a recognized health issue.
I am very skeptical about that for two reasons. The first is the natural inclinations of bureaucracies populated by “experts.” Bureaucracies never shrink. They continuously bloat. That’s the nature of the beast. Their protectors keep pushing their relevance on some issue or problem. Their experts — who will always “know better” than anyone else — will present solutions to be deployed by the bureaucracy. Compliance will then be demanded. And the bureaucracy will continue to bloat until its tentacles strangle every area of life.
The second reason for skepticism is history, which is filled with examples of governments invading the private sphere of life, specifically the institutions of family, faith, and community. That private sphere is still the most decentralized area of life, the one in which individuals are most able to think and speak freely, unless the government invades. Communist China, the Soviet Union, and Nazi Germany are prime examples in the 20th century of government invading the private sphere.
Eminent sociologist Robert Nisbet wrote about the deep-seated tendency of governments to hijack the functions of the mediating institutions of family, faith, and community. When the government takes over those functions, we lose those institutions as buffer zones between the isolated individual and the all-powerful state. We become powerless in the resulting isolation.
Nisbet posed this rhetorical question: “What remains then, but to rescue the masses from their loneliness, their hopelessness, and despair, by leading them into the promised land of the absolute, redemptive State?”
I believe the surgeon general’s advisory vindicates Nisbet’s point. Indeed, the state creates the malady and then offers its authority as the only cure as it rushes into the vacuum. The strategy for doing so seems evident in the report’s “six pillars.”
Where Does It All End?
No one can say for sure where this “Ministry of Loneliness” proposal will end up. History — particularly recent history — has warned us about such projects. The goals of this advisory may seem unobjectionable, but the concern is about who decides how we connect socially.
When the “who” is the federal government, we should remember that the pattern of the mass state is always to induce loyalty to the mass state. That pattern always comes with a push to surrender our loyalty to one another as individual human beings capable of real kindness and real love. That amounts to something I call the weaponization of loneliness.
We must insist on making our own decisions to live as free individuals. That means pushing back in any way possible against potential intrusions in the private sphere of life. It means rejecting the pseudo-intimacy and pseudo-connection that our federal government seems intent on foisting upon us in exchange for control of our private lives and relationships. Otherwise, we end up in much worse isolation that renders us powerless and unfree.
Stella Morabito is a senior contributor at The Federalist. She is author of “The Weaponization of Loneliness: How Tyrants Stoke Our Fear of Isolation to Silence, Divide, and Conquer.” Her essays have appeared in various publications, including the Washington Examiner, American Greatness, Townhall, Public Discourse, and The Human Life Review. In her previous work as an intelligence analyst, Morabito focused on various aspects of Russian and Soviet politics, including communist media and propaganda. Follow Stella on Twitter.
By describing woke ideologies and their fruits at face value, conservatives felled the left’s self-conferred monopoly on how, when, and where the term could be used.
The Associated Press Stylebook, a once-respected linguistic guide for journalists, conceded the definition of the word “woke” to conservatives on Thursday, in an update instructing writers to “use quotes around the slang term.”
“Woke” was originally popularized by left-wing proponents of identity politics to flatteringly refer to their own “enlightenment or awakening about issues of racial and other forms of social justice,” as the AP explains. Conservatives have used it to describe those same people and their ideas.
Those ideas more often than not, demand revolutionary social changes that prejudge people based on their secondary physical characteristics. If, like the vast majority of America until about five seconds ago, you think such identarian prejudices are a bad thing, you might use the word “woke” in a less than fawning manner. Apparently, the AP’s staff can’t handle that.
AP’s concession of the word is hilariously thin-skinned, but it’s also a rare win for conservatives in the war of words. Just by describing woke behavior as such, we’ve held a bit of ground against the unhinged language police who are mad that the right is using their terminology against them. Unintentionally, it seems we’ve ended up with command of the word altogether, if left-wing outlets like the AP are henceforth refusing to use it.
While there are times individual ideologies require a more specific description — queer theory, or socialism, for example — “woke” is a completely fair and often helpful term to use when speaking generally about the coalition of people on the left who want to see meritocracy replaced by identity politics. As my colleague Samuel Mangold-Lenett noted recently in these pages, “what other slogany-sounding word really works as a catch-all for what leftism has become?”
“They lost complete control of the English language,” he added, “and the word they used to indicate their radicalism to one another is being used to expose that radicalism to the rest of the world.”
The apparatus of left-wing media outlets, cultural celebrities, and tech platforms that drives our modern discourse has a majority share in defining the language we use. From headlines to search engines to literal dictionaries, activists manipulate the tools of debate. In any debate, the first step is defining your terms — if your definitions are off, you’ve already lost.
That’s why it’s incumbent upon conservatives to be intentional, honest, and straightforward with the words we use. That includes defending the legitimacy of disfavored-but-accurate terms (like “woke,” or “woman”) and refusing to use inaccurate language.
Take the nonsense phrase “gender-affirming care,” for example. The diction dictators have effectively standardized the term, to the point where even people who disapprove of such procedures will glibly repeat it. But nothing about the phrase is tethered to reality.
The whole idea that people have “genders” beyond their natural sex is pseudo-science crafted to further an ideology. Procedures that attempt to inhibit or reverse the physical realities of a person’s sex are not “affirming” that sex, but actively rejecting it. And deformative surgeries that involve amputating healthy body parts and creating Frankenstein-esque “penises” and “vaginas” with scraps of carved-up skin are certainly not “care.”
To use the phrase “gender-affirming care” is to give up the entire argument before it’s even begun. Or, as George Orwell put it, such nonsense terms “construct your thoughts for you,” and “perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself.”
The same goes for using improper pronouns to describe sexually confused people: calling a man “she” or a woman “he.” Doing so indulges a delusion. Having physical reality on your side does little good if you concede it away by the very words you use.
Concurrent with the effort to mainstream invented euphemisms such as “gender-affirming care” is an effort to cannibalize established English vocabulary. Other victims of the AP Stylebook’s recent crusades include “riot,” “mistress,” “crazy,” and “pro-life.” Proper grammar is also a victim, with the redefinition of the plural pronoun “they” to refer to individuals who are in denial of their natural sex.
Tech monopolies such as Google instruct their employees to avoid terms like “man hours” and “blacklist.” The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has nixed “criminal” and “foreigner.” From journalism to medicine, terms such as “mother” and “woman” are replaced by dehumanizing lingo like “birthing parent” and “person who menstruates.” Merriam-Webster has redefined “anti-vaxxer,” “sexual preference,” and “assault rifle” to further the editors’ ideological ends.
By describing woke ideologies and their fruits at face value, conservatives felled the left’s self-conferred monopoly on how, when, and where the term could be used. But the same people policing the word “woke” are appointing themselves the arbiters of the rest of the English language, too.
For those of us who prefer our words to reflect reality, there is nothing to be gained by good-naturedly going along with linguistic charades. On the other hand, there is the entire discourse to be lost.
“The worst thing one can do with words is to surrender them,” George Orwell wrote in his 1946 essay, “Politics and the English Language.” Orwell protested not just sloppy use of language, but intentional misuse of language for political purposes.
“Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable,” he said. “Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.”
Politicians and dishonest media propagandists today use inaccurate language to frame narratives and foster a leftist perspective. Inadvertently, even well-meaning audiences sometimes internalize this language and end up propagating the very ideas and framing they fundamentally reject. Don’t let that be you.
In every debate, it’s vital to start by defining your terms. If conservatives want to counter the radical left’s agenda, we have to begin by using words that accurately reflect what we mean — not words that actively mean the opposite. Here are just 10.
1. ‘Mainstream Media’
The public communication cartel headed by The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, CBS, and MSNBC does not represent mainstream Americans. Earlier this year, Axios (another culprit of heavy-handed political spin) reported that 56 percent of Americans believe “Journalists and reporters are purposely trying to mislead people by saying things they know are false or gross exaggerations.”
Big Media has engaged in deception through false and misleading “reporting” on Georgia’s election laws, the trespass and unrest at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, and more. Embracing “Russiagate” and the allegations of the Steele dossier against President Trump was one indicator of crumbling credibility. The cover-up of the Hunter Biden laptop story just before the 2020 presidential election was another.
Even more recently, CBS’s “60 Minutes” invented a scandal about Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, while giving minuscule coverage to New York Democrat Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s cover-up of COVID-19 nursing home deaths his policies caused.
Leftist propaganda outlets who are running cover for Democrats and spreading inaccurate opposition research on conservatives don’t deserve to be called mainstream. Instead, use “Big Media,” “corporate media,” or — as DeSantis says — “smear merchants.”
2. ‘Gender,’ When You Mean ‘Sex’
Words have gender; people are one sex or another. For Latin and in many of the languages that have grown out of it, gender is a linguistic term indicating which word endings a term should possess. Gender is either feminine, masculine, or neuter. The phrase “la boulangerie,” for example, is French for “the bakery,” and its gender is feminine.
Male and female, on the other hand, refer to sex. Sex is a biological category that reflects a person’s physical characteristics and reproductive systems, and also manifests in certain broad behavioral differences that distinguish men and women.
3. ‘Sex-Reassignment Surgery’
Further, sex is not assigned, at birth or ever. If it is not “assigned,” it cannot be reassigned. Surgical procedures that remove or conceal the outward appearance of a woman or man’s reproductive organs, are most accurately described as genital mutilation or amputation.
4. ‘Democracy,’ When You Mean ‘Republic’
A democracy is direct rule by the supreme will of the people: the highest law is that of the loudest mob. Derived from the Greek “demos” (people) and “kratia” (power), democracy involves no higher law than popular consensus, and subjects the majority will to no checks and balances but itself.
In Book VIII of “The Republic,” Plato lists democracy as the social structure directly followed by tyranny. Democracy, Plato theorized, “comes into being when the poor, winning the victory, put to death some of the other party, drive out others, and grant the rest of the citizens an equal share in both citizenship and offices.” He continued, “that is the constitution of democracy alike whether it is established by force of arms or by terrorism.”
The American system was established as a constitutional republic. The highest law of the land is the U.S. Constitution, to which all public servants are (or should be) accountable. Additional laws are made by elected representatives of the people. Further, the American system is a federal republic, meaning power is divided between federal, state, and local governments, all of whom serve as the guarantors of the people’s sovereignty and rights.
5. ‘Abortion Doctors’ and ‘Abortion Clinics’
Doctors protect life; they don’t willfully take it. The Hippocratic Oath, written by the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates and long respected as a noble description of a doctor’s vocation, includes a commitment to “not give to a woman an abortive remedy.” Doctors are also obligated to, as far as it is in their power, “do no harm.” (This phrase is commonly attributed to the Hippocratic Oath, but actually comes from another work of Hippocrates, his book, “Of the Epidemics.”)
Similarly, clinics are medical facilities where people receive help and care. We do not call the room in which a prisoner on death row is executed a “clinic,” and neither should we use the term to describe the place where preborn babies are killed and dismembered. Call abortionists and abortion facilities what they are.
6. ‘Antidiscrimination’
Often, “antidiscrimination” policies actually refer to legal preferences based on sex, race, socioeconomic status, or some other category. The Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, for example, released an “Antiracist Agenda For Medicine” earlier this month that would provide “preferential care based on race” for black and Latino patients.
In another example of discrimination under the name of its opposite, Yale University unlawfully discriminated against white and Asian students, according to a two-year Department of Justice investigation. Instead of using the leftist buzzword “antidiscrimination” to describe these policies, call them legalized preferences, or simply the discrimination they are.
7. ‘Undocumented Immigrant’
“Undocumented” is the term used by people who don’t want to call breaking immigration laws “illegal.” However, most illegal immigrants have identification documents from their home governments. Further, 16 states — California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Utah, Vermont, Virginia and Washington — as well as Washington, D.C., issue drivers licenses to illegal aliens, giving them U.S. documents as well.
8. ‘Equity’ Or ‘Equality,’ When You Mean The Other
Equity and equality sound similar, but have widely different implications today. Noah Webster’s 1828 dictionary defines “equality” as “The same degree of dignity or claims; as the equality of men in the scale of being … an equality of rights.” The Declaration of Independence’s assertion that “all men are created equal” recognizes this equal value and dignity in personhood of each human being.
Equity has traditionally been a common legal term, referring to civil remedies; it can also mean the “impartial distribution of justice.” But in the jargon of identity politics, equity describes a policy that “recognizes that each person has different circumstances and allocates the exact resources and opportunities needed to reach an equal outcome.” See the above entry for “antidiscrimination” for an example of how equity-driven policies usually work.
9. ‘Cisgender’
Cisgender is an unnecessary word and assumes that sex is a result of human choice. A cisgender man is a man; a cisgender woman is a woman. Only added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2015, “cisgender” was invented to represent the opposite of “transgender” in the 1990s.
10. ‘Pro-Choice’
“Pro-choice” is a euphemism to get around having to call yourself pro-abortion. But just as we don’t use “pro-choice” to describe supporting a person’s decision to murder another, we shouldn’t use it here. Abortion denies giving the unborn baby the choice to live; in that sense, it is violently anti-choice.
“This invasion of one’s mind by ready-made phrases,” Orwell continued, “can only be prevented if one is constantly on guard against them.” Sloppy, inaccurate phrases will “construct your thoughts for you,” he says, and “perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself.”
Don’t let corrupt media and politicians design your words and supplant your meaning. To win the culture debate, you better first define your terms.
Elle Purnell is an assistant editor at The Federalist, and received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. Follow her work on Twitter @_etreynolds.
It is clear that state-sponsored SEL violates the U.S. Constitution in its attempt to infuse the religious science of ‘right human relations’ into education while cloaking it in secular language.
Social-emotional learning will soon become spiritual-ethical learning, and the public school systems will decide whose spiritual and ethical beliefs to teach.
For families that care about raising their children with the moral and religious values of their own faith tradition, questions about which spiritual and ethical teachings should be taught prompt even more speculation about whether so-called social-emotional learning (SEL) should be taught in public education at all.
As the theory adopts spiritual and ethical dimensions, it will amount to state-sanctioned religion.
What Is SEL, and How Has It Changed?
Social-emotional learning (SEL) is a mental-health framework that has woven itself into the very fabric of our education system. Standards, assessments, curricula, and even college and career readiness standards have been altered to teach, measure, and track students’ adoption of SEL’s five core competencies — put forth by its standard-bearer, the Collaborative for Academic Social Emotional Learning (CASEL).
Since its birth in 1994 at the Fetzer Institute and up until 2020, CASEL’s definition of social-emotional learning and its competencies have relatively stayed the same. It described SEL as “the process through which children acquire the skills to recognize and manage emotions, develop caring and concern for others, make responsible decisions, establish positive relationships, and handle challenging situations effectively.”
In 2020, amid the chaos of the global pandemic and racial riots, CASEL quietly updated that definition and its five core competencies. Its new definition of Transformative SEL and adjusted competencies reflect the view that so-called social and emotional learning needs to be taught through a racial and “equity” lens.
SEL lessons and the subjects addressed through them act as both a springboard and smokescreen for activist teachers to have discussions about race, sex, and class that aim to create a critical consciousness in children. Once they are led to believe the systems of society have been set up to oppress specific groups of people, students can be coached to become social-justice activists who show their empathy and compassion by tearing down the systems of society in order to build ones that are more “equitable.”
In this vision, “equitable” means equal outcomes through the redistribution of resources, not equal opportunity under the law. The whole purpose of social-emotional learning has therefore been changed to explicitly “address issues such as power, privilege, prejudice, discrimination, social justice, empowerment, and self-determination” with the goal of developing “justice-oriented, global citizens.”
Spirituality Through SEL
As if this departure from its original purpose were not destructive enough, social-emotional learning is undergoing another revision — one that will seek to address the spiritual needs of students as a part of the Whole School, Whole Community, Whole Child (WSCC) model. Created by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD), WSCC claims to create a comprehensive school health approach by fostering collaboration among the public health and education sectors through the integration and alignment of their services, far beyond hearing and vision screenings.
These public-private partnerships will take other medical and mental health services that are generally rendered out of school and facilitated by parents and caregivers and instead allow them to be offered as aid provided by the school so the needs of the “whole child” can be met. Spirituality will soon be seen as one of those needs.
🧵The CDC expands into education via the WSCC model of Community/Healthy Schools. They want children accessing psycho-social-emotional, medical, sexual, reproductive, dental, and eye services at school. They are collecting data, expanding Medicaid, and removing parental consent. pic.twitter.com/mDaXv5Nd4U
Recently, there has been an influx of SEL programs in the market that incorporate spirituality into their lessons. The Fetzer Institute, along with Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors and Dr. Lisa Miller from Columbia’s Teachers College, launched the Collaborative for Spirituality in Education. Fetzer’s support of research on the spiritual aspects of childhood development led to the social-emotional learning program, “What Makes Me: Core Capacities for Living and Learning.”
Released in collaboration with UNICEF and the Learning for Well-being Foundation — a “Whole Child Partner” committed to advancing the WSCC model worldwide — it addresses nine core capacities that are believed to protect and improve the lives of children based on the U.N.’s Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC).
Both children’s ‘evolving capacities’ and ‘children’s spiritual well-being’ are key parts of achieving multiple children’s rights, as outlined in the UNCRC. The evolving capacities of the child are mentioned in both Article 5 and Article 14.1 in regard to children being able to exercise their own rights (Article 5), and their freedom of thought, conscience and religion (Article 14.1). Moreover, Articles 17, 23.3, 27 and 32 … recognize spiritual well-being as a goal of these rights alongside physical, mental and moral well-being, among others.
“What Makes Me” seeks to teach spirituality through SEL as “a more active and engaged process in which some persons choose to shape and create a way of knowing and living that may or may not draw on religion” and as something that involves the conscious choice to explore life’s “big questions.”
The UNCRC also states that children have sexual rights from birth and should be able to learn about sexual behaviors as young as age 5 through Comprehensive Sexuality Education, including the idea that sex is not binary or immutable. One must wonder if the “spirituality” they intend to impart to children as a fundamental “right” is a wide acceptance of sexual variance and the offering of an alternative belief system that differs from their familial, cultural, and religious beliefs.
“What Makes Me” is not the only SEL program incorporating spirituality that Fetzer invests in. It recently pledged $1 million to the QUESTion Project, started by mentalist and owner of The Open Future Institute, Gerard Senehi. It asks students questions such as: “Who am I?” “What is my purpose?” “What does a good life look like?” If administered in a public school using taxpayer money, these questions violate the separation of church and state and cross the line into the government using education to institute an unconstitutional state-sanctioned religion. SEL programs such as these meet the federal government’s definition of a religion, which is a “comprehensive belief system that addresses the fundamental questions of human existence, such as the meaning of life and death, man’s role in the universe, and the nature of good and evil, and that gives rise to duties of conscience.”
The First Amendment commands that the government can “make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
Considering the esoteric and mystical religious roots of social-emotional learning and CASEL through the Fetzer Institute, and its broadening into explicitly teaching “spirituality,” it is clear that state-sponsored SEL violates the U.S. Constitution in its attempt to infuse the religious science of “right human relations” into education while cloaking it in secular language.
The role and responsibility of molding and shaping a child’s moral character does not belong in public classrooms backed by organizations with political or societal agendas.
It should remain in the loving arms of the family, where it has been since the dawn of time.
Lisa Logan is the host of the YouTube Channel Parents of Patriots and author of the Substack Education Manifesto. As a wife, mother and patriot, she has made it her mission to expose the sinister agenda behind social-emotional learning programs to save our children and the future of our country.
The Black Lives Matter (BLM) riots of 2020 were the largest and most successful shakedown in American history. These “mostly peaceful protests” — which burned more than 200 American cities and wreaked more than $2 billion in damages — achieved more than anyone could have predicted: changes in laws, private sector policies, and perhaps most importantly, a historic transfer of wealth to racial and leftwing causes. As a result, American corporations gave or pledged more than $83 billion to either BLM or BLM-related causes.
We created a database tracking contributions and pledges made to the BLM movement and related causes, which we define as organizations and initiatives that advance one or more aspects of BLM’s agenda, and which were made in the wake of the BLM riots of 2020. To date, our data spans more than 400 companies and $83 billion in pledges and contributions.
The famed consulting firm McKinsey and Company thinks the number is far larger. They calculated that from May 2020 to October 2022 companies pledged about $340 billion “to racial equity, specifically for Black Americans after the murder of George Floyd in May 2020.” Our number is conservative by comparison. But unlike McKinsey, we provide details about the pledges and contributions of specific companies.
We are surprised at some of the incredulity in our calculations. So too is BLM, which suggests that objections to wealth transfers of this scale are rooted in “white supremacy,” and “a pathology that Black organizations don’t deserve to be funded.”
BLM called for reparations. In a sense, they succeeded, as these reparations were paid out to BLM itself (approximately $122 million) and to its vast NGO archipelago and other racialized causes and schemes under various names.
While the money was given or pledged in different ways, it was unmistakable for so-called “racial justice.” Sometimes this meant cash transfers to partners of BLM, like the Color of Change, the NAACP, the Equal Justice Initiative, and the ACLU.
Sometimes it meant cash or pledges to other “reparative” initiatives including race-based, discriminatory hiring programs; race-based, sub-prime lending; race-based scholarships; and partisan voter initiatives. Sometimes it meant Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives, which are the polite versions of BLM calibrated to middle-class, middle-management tastes. The DEI ideology disagrees with BLM in few ways, if any.
DEI and BLM share one mission: to punish white America, through different means. The latter through riots and pressure campaigns, the former through preferential hiring and promotion of members of protected groups. Both aim to redistribute honor, privileges, and money to black Americans. Both are extorting special privileges and money by using white guilt.
Moreover, both are attempting to do so by cultural revolution, and both stand openly against meritocracy, the rule of law, freedom of speech, and individual rights. Correctly understood, DEI is an expression of BLM’s broader agenda.
We already know the exorbitant amount of money given or pledged by large banks like JPMorgan ($30 billion), Bank of America ($18 billion), and Silicon Valley Bank ($70 million) in the wake of the 2020 BLM riots to subsidized and sub-prime race-based lending, race-based investment targeting, supply chain diversity initiatives, and nonprofits advancing racial justice.
But BLM was so effective that even seemingly middle-America companies shelled out big. For example, Cargill, the Minnesota-based food producer, launched its “Black Farmer Equity Initiative,” a redistributive program that attributes declining numbers of black farmers to “the legacy of systemic racism” and seeks to “dismantle Anti-Black racism” and “operationalize equity across the food and agriculture system.” Cargill pledged $11 billion to the initiative through 2030.
Kroger, a ubiquitous neighborhood grocery chain, spent at least $13 million to advance racial division, including $5 million toward its “Framework for Action: Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” initiative and a $500,000 contribution to LISC’s Black Economic Development Fund, a discriminatory investment fund that promotes BLM. Kroger also partnered with the discriminatory, race-based hiring platform OneTen, which aims to “hire, promote, and advance one million Black individuals who do not have a four-year degree into family-sustaining careers over the next ten years.”
Caterpillar, the producer of heavy equipment, donated $500,000 each to the NAACP and the Equal Justice Initiative. It too partnered with OneTen. John Deere donated $1 million to the NAACP, again, an official partner of BLM.
Defense contractors, traditionally neutral and dedicated to keeping America safe, also submitted to BLM’s demands. Northrop Grumman donated $1 million to the NAACP and an additional $1 million to organizations promoting social justice as part of an employee charitable gift matching program. It also partnered with OneTen.
Raytheon pledged $25 million over five years to “advance racial justice, empowerment, and career readiness in underserved communities.” The commitment includes donations to the NAACP, Equal Justice Initiative, and National Urban League; community outreach; public policy lobbying; and a supplier diversity initiative.
Boeing pledged a minimum of $25 million by 2023 toward racial “equity” and “social justice.” In 2020, it contributed $15.6 million to organizations addressing “racial inequity,” including $1 million to the Equal Justice Initiative.
The list goes on, and should be further explored by journalists in order to understand the full extent of the shakedown. By caving to BLM, American companies not only became the tools of radicals but also laid the groundwork for future violence and extortion.
The Center for the American Way of Life is a branch of The Claremont Institute. The mission of The Claremont Institute is to restore the principles of the American Founding to their rightful, preeminent authority in our national life.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
In a newly signed executive order designed to use federal agencies to forcibly guarantee equality of outcome instead of equality of opportunity for Americans, President Joe Biden tacitly admitted his administration is collaborating with a prominent leftist group to advance neo-Marxism throughout the U.S. government.
A prime example of “equity” in action can be seen in Virginia, where several high schools in Fairfax and Loudoun Counties admitted to withholding National Merit awards from deserving students in order to avoid hurting the feelings of those not awarded. As The Federalist reported, “Asian American students are highly represented among the recipients, and some believe withholding the awards to be an act of racially motivated biases against Asian students.”
Under Biden’s new executive order, federal departments are instructed to embrace such ideology to construct a so-called “fair” and “inclusive” economy, which would include investing in areas where the administration claims federal policies have “historically impeded equal opportunity … in ways that mitigate economic displacement.”
Buried within the order, however, is a directive for federal agencies to implement what’s called the “Justice40 Initiative.” While the document doesn’t specify what the mission of Justice40 is, a quick trip to the group’s website reveals it to be nothing more than an effort by left-wing activists to advance neo-Marxist policies under the guise of “environmental justice.”
“The Justice40 promise seeks to create an equitable recovery for Americans facing challenges created by aging infrastructure, a frayed social safety net, natural disasters, and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic,” the organization’s website reads. “Justice40 must address inequities that hinder a sustainable, just society, and that disproportionately harm low-income and communities of color across America.”
What are they really?
They’re another neo-Marxist organization directing policy in the Biden Administration.
Plenty of clenched fists on their website to go around, but their leaders are more blatant in their commie sensibilities. 2 of them have a telling social media history. pic.twitter.com/BjvHKAQ1Ih
Back in July 2021, Biden officially adopted Justice40’s stated goal of providing at least 40 percent of federal investments “in climate and clean energy” to these so-called “disadvantaged communities.” In other words, the administration is distributing taxpayer money to certain jurisdictions based on racial demographics.
The policy is eerily similar to Covid-related guidance the administration released in December 2021, in which health-care providers were advised to prioritize racial and ethnic minorities in the dissemination of Covid treatments such as monoclonal antibodies.
But it’s not just Justice40’s mission that’s tied to neo-Marixst ideology. Several of the group’s listed “movement leaders” have pushed policies and ideas embraced by radical leftist organizations such as Black Lives Matter. On her Twitter profile, Justice40 leader Cassia Herron proclaims she is a “lover” of “revolutions,” and has several posts calling to defund the police.
“We want to defund the police and distribution of wealth,” a July 7, 2020 tweet reads.
Also listed as a Justice40 “movement leader” is Jacqueline Patterson, who during Trump’s presidency in December 2020 seemingly compared the Covid jab rollout to the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, in which the U.S. government secretly conducted experiments on black American men for decades without informing them of viable treatment options. Over a year later, when Biden was in office, Patterson tweeted she was fully vaccinated “from the black batch” and boosted, adding that the risk of Covid “seemed worse with not getting vaccinated.”
The collaboration between the administration and Justice40 represents the latest nail in the coffin of legacy media’s narrative that Biden is some sort of unifying moderate who advances centrist policies. Shortly after his inauguration, for instance, Biden signed an executive order reversing the “Mexico City Policy,” which prevented nongovernmental entities receiving U.S. taxpayer money from using such funds to promote or perform abortions.
Moreover, America’s commander-in-chief has consistently issued racially divisive statements, such as comparing Republicans opposed to his party’s proposed takeover of U.S. elections to segregationists.
“So I ask every elected official in America, how do you want to be remembered? Do you want to be on the side of Dr. King or George Wallace?” Biden asked during a January 2022 speech. “Do you want to be on the side of John Lewis or Bull Connor? Do you want to be on the side of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis?”
Shawn Fleetwood is a Staff Writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He also serves as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood
Little more than a decade ago, DEI was just another arcane acronym, a clustering of three ideas, each to be weighed and evaluated against other societal values. The terms diversity, equity, and inclusion weren’t yet being used in the singular, as one all-inclusive, non-negotiable moral imperative. Nor had they coalesced into a bureaucratic juggernaut running roughshod over every aspect of national life.
They are now.
Seemingly in unison, and with almost no debate, nearly every major American institution — including federal, state, and local governments, universities and public schools, hospitals, insurance, media and technology companies, and major retail brands — has agreed that the DEI infrastructure is essential to the nation’s proper functioning.
From Amazon to Walmart, most major corporations have created and staffed DEI offices within their human resources bureaucracy. So have sanitation departments, police departments, physics departments, and the departments of agriculture, commerce, defense, education, and energy. Organizations that once argued against DEI now feel compelled to institute DEI training and hire DEI officers. So have organizations that are already richly diverse, such as the National Basketball Association and the National Football League.
Many of these offices in turn work with a sprawling network of DEI consulting firms, training outfits, trade organizations, and accrediting associations that support their efforts.
“Five years ago, if you said ‘DEI,’ people would’ve thought you were talking about the Digital Education Initiative,” Robert Sellers, University of Michigan’s first chief diversity officer, said in 2020. “Five years ago, if you said DEI was a core value of this institution, you would have an argument.”
Diversity, equity, and inclusion is an intentionally vague term used to describe sanctioned favoritism in the name of social justice. Its Wikipedia entry indicates a lack of agreement on the definition, while Merriam-Webster.com and the Associated Press online style guide have no entry (the AP offers guidance on related terms). Yet however defined, it’s clear DEI is now much more than an academic craze or corporate affectation.
“It’s an industry in every sense of the word,” says Peter Schuck, professor emeritus of law at Yale. “My suspicion is that many of the offices don’t do what they say. But they’re hiring people, giving them titles and pretty good money. I don’t think they do nothing.”
It’s difficult to know how large the DEI Industrial Complex has become. The Bureau of Labor Statistics hasn’t assessed its size. Two decades ago, MIT professor Thomas Kochan estimated that diversity was already an $8 billion-a-year industry. Yet along with the addition of equity, inclusion, and like terms, the industry has surely grown an order of magnitude larger. Six years ago, McKinsey and Company estimated that American companies were spending $8 billion a year on diversity training alone. DEI hiring and training have only accelerated in the years since.
“In the scope and rapidity of institutional embrace,” writes Marti Gurri, a former CIA analyst who studies media and politics, “nothing like it has transpired since the conversion of Constantine.”
Yet in our time, no Roman Emperor has demanded a complete cultural transformation. No law was passed mandating DEI enactment. No federal court ruling has required its implementation. There was no clarion call on the order of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s “military industrial complex” warning. No genuine public crisis matched the scale of the response.
The sources of this transformation are both deep and fairly recent. On one level, they can be traced back to the egalitarian movements that have long shaped American history — from the nation’s founding, through the Civil War and Reconstruction to the battles for women’s suffrage, the civil rights movement, and same-sex marriage. In other ways, the rapid transformation can seem no more explicable than an eccentric fashion trend, like men of the late 18th century wearing periwigs. However, a few pivot points of recent history bent its arc in DEI’s direction.
The push for affirmative action is the most obvious influence, a program first conceived during the Reconstruction era but then abandoned for nearly a century. Although triumphs for social justice, the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights acts of the late 1950s and 1960s didn’t stop discrimination; the country would need to take more affirmative steps toward assisting minority groups and achieving more equitable outcomes, proponents argued. A controversial policy from the start (with the Supreme Court expected to curb its use in college admissions this term), affirmative action was further complicated by immigration reforms that allowed for more non-European immigrants, setting off a seismic demographic shift that continues to reverberate.
The diversity movement of the early 1990s was in part an attempt to capitalize on the new multicultural reality. Stressing individual and institutional benefits rather than moral failings, early corporate diversity training programs hewed to traditional values of equality and meritocracy. Creating a diverse workplace, R. Roosevelt Thomas wrote in the Harvard Business Review, in 1990, “should always be a question of pure competence and character unmuddied by birth.”
But in other ways, the recent explosion of DEI initiatives reflects shortcomings of earlier efforts, as suggested by the headline of a 2016 article in the Harvard Business Review, “Why Diversity Fails.” Even as high-achieving first- and second-generation immigrants have thrived in certain industries, particularly STEM fields, people of color remain scarce in senior institutional positions. There is also the deeper issue of what many in the post-George Floyd era have taken to calling systemic or structural racism, citing major disparities for black Americans in education, health care, homeownership, arrests, incarceration, and household wealth.
More recently, a spate of widely publicized police killings of unarmed African Americans has galvanized a growing belief, especially among progressives and especially since Donald Trump’s election, that America is an irredeemably racist nation. In 2020, in the wake of the Floyd murder and in advance of a fraught election, a moral panic set in. Having increased their ranks, social justice entrepreneurs and bureaucrats were poised to implement an ideological agenda and compound their institutional power.
Although no hard numbers exist on the exact size of the industry, the “DEIfication” of America is clear. From Rochester, New York, to San Diego, California, cash-strapped municipalities have found the funds to staff DEI offices. Startups and small companies that once relied on their own employees to promote an inclusive culture now feel compelled to hire diversity consultants and sensitivity trainers to set them straight.
At Ohio State University, for example, the average DEI staff salary is $78,000, according to public information gathered by economist Mark J. Perry of the American Enterprise Institute — about $103,000 with fringe benefits. Not to be outdone by its Big Ten conference rival, the University of Michigan pays its diversity officers $94,000 on average — about $124,000 with benefits. Until he retired from the position last summer, Michigan’s chief diversity officer, Robert Sellers, was paid over $431,000 a year. His wife, Tabbye Chavous, now has the job, at the vice provost rank and a salary of $380,000.
For smaller organizations that cannot afford a full-time equity officer, there are other options for shoring up social justice bona fides — namely, working with any of the hundreds of DEI consulting agencies that have risen like mushrooms after a night’s rain, most of them led by “BIPOC” millennials. With some firms, the social justice goals are unmistakable. The Racial Equity Institute is “committed to the work of anti-racist transformation” and challenging “patterns of power” on behalf of big-name clients like the Harvard Business School, Ben & Jerry’s, and the American Civil Liberties Union. With others, the appeal has less to do with social change than exploring marketing opportunities and creating a “with-it” company culture, where progressive politics complement the office foosball tables and kombucha on tap.
“Diversity wins!” declares the management consultancy McKinsey & Company. Certainly diversity officers have been winning, although opposition is building in Florida and elsewhere, where the wider woke agenda that includes DEI has advanced. Even minimally trained practitioners are in high demand, and signs of their influence abound.
Major tech companies like Google publicly chart the “Black+ and Latinx+” people they’ve hired and assure the public that Artificial Intelligence will prioritize the DEI political agenda. ChapGPT, an AI model that can generate remarkably cogent writing, has been designed with a liberal bias, summarily rejecting requests that don’t conform to the algorithm’s notions of “positivity, equality and inclusivity.”
In education, college students are required to take DEI-prescribed courses. Community college employees in California are evaluated on their DEI competencies. Loyalty oaths to the DEI dogma are demanded of professors. Applicants to tenure-track positions, including those in math and physics, are rejected out of hand if their mandatory DEI statements are found wanting. Increasingly, DEI administrators are involved in hiring, promotion, and course content decisions.
“Academic departments are always thinking, ‘We need to run this by Diversity,’” says Glenn Ricketts, public affairs officer for the National Association of Scholars.
The industry’s reach can also be seen in the many Orwellian examples of exclusion in the name of inclusion, of reprisals in the name of tolerance. Invariably, they feature an agitated clutch of activists browbeating administrators and executives into apologizing for an alleged trespass against an ostensibly vulnerable constituency. When that has been deemed insufficient or when senior executives have sensed a threat to their own legitimacy, they’ve offered up scapegoats on false or flimsy pretexts. That might be a decades-long New York Times reporter, a head curator at a major art museum, an adjunct art history professor, a second-year law student, or a janitor at a pricey New England college. (The list is long.)
Often enough, the inquisitions have turned into public relations debacles for major institutions. But despite the intense criticism and public chagrin, the movement marches on.
The expansion “happened gradually at first, and people didn’t recognize the tremendous growth,” Perry says. “But after George Floyd, it really accelerated. It became supercharged. And nobody wanted to criticize it because they would been seen as racists.”
Not playing along with the DEI protocols can end an academic career. For example, when Gordon Klein, a UCLA accounting lecturer, dismissed a request to grade black students more leniently in 2020, the school’s Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion office intervened to have him put on leave and banned from campus. A counter-protest soon reversed that. However, when Klein also declined to write a DEI statement explaining how his work helped “underrepresented and underserved populations,” he was denied a standard merit raise, despite excellent teaching evaluations. (He is suing for defamation and other alleged harms.)
Scores of professors and students have also been subject to capricious, secretive, and career-destroying investigations by Title IX officers, who work hand-in-glove with DEI administrators, focusing on gender discrimination and sexual harassment. As writer and former Northwestern University film professor Laura Kipnis recounts in “Unwanted Advances,” individuals can be brought up on charges without any semblance of due process, as she was, simply for “wrongthink” — that is, for having expressed thoughts that someone found objectionable.
With activist administrators assuming the role of grand inquisitors, “the traditional ideal of the university — as a refuge for complexity, a setting for free exchange of ideas — is getting buried under an avalanche of platitudes and fear,” she writes. And it would appear that students and professors would have it no other way. By and large, they want more bureaucratic intervention and regulations, not less.
As more institutions create DEI offices and hire ever more managers to run them, the enterprise inevitably becomes self-justifying. According to Parkinson’s Law, bureaucracy needs to create more work, however unnecessary or unproductive, to keep growing. Growth itself becomes the overriding imperative. The DEI movement needs the pretext of inequities, real or contrived, to maintain and expand its bureaucratic presence. As Malcolm Kyeyume, a Swedish commentator and self-described Marxist, writes: “Managerialism requires intermediation and intermediation requires a justifying ideology.”
Ten years ago, Johns Hopkins University political scientist Benjamin Ginsberg found that the ratio of administrators to students had doubled since 1975. With the expansion of DEI, there are more administrators than ever, most of whom have no academic background. On average, according to a Heritage Foundation study, major universities across the country currently employ 45 “diversicrats,” as Perry calls them. With few exceptions, they outnumber the faculty in history departments, often two or three to one.
At Michigan, Perry wasn’t able to find anyone with the words “diversity,” “equity,” or “inclusion” in his job title until 2004; and for the next decade, such positions generally remained centralized at the provost level, working for the university as a whole. But in 2016, Michigan president Mark Schlissel announced that the university would invest $85 million in DEI programs. Soon after, equity offices began to “metastasize like a cancer,” Perry says, across every college, department, and division, from the college of pharmacy to the school’s botanical garden and arboretum, where a full-time DEI manager is now “institutionalizing co-liberatory futures.” All the while, black enrollment at Michigan has dropped by nearly 50 percent since 1996.
Despite the titles and the handsome salaries, most DEI administrative positions are support staff jobs, not teaching or research positions. In contrast with the provisions of Title IX, DEI is not mandated by law; it is entirely optional. DEI officers nevertheless exert enormous influence, in part because so few people oppose them. The thinking seems to be that if you’re against the expanding and intrusive diversity, equity, and inclusion agenda, you must be for the opposite — discrimination, inequality, and exclusion.
“By telling themselves that they’re making the world a better place, they get to throw their weight around,” says Ricketts. “They have a lot of money, a lot of leverage, and a lot of people who just don’t want to butt heads with them — people who just want to go along to get along. People who are thinking, ‘If we embrace DEI, nobody can accuse us of being racist or whatever.’ They’re trying to cover their backsides.”
Some organizations, it seems, are merely trying to keep up with cultural trends.
Consider Tucson, Arizona, where diversity is not a buzzy talking point but an everyday reality. With a population that is 44 percent Hispanic, 43 percent white, and only 4.6 percent black, the city has had no major racial incidents in decades. Yet like hundreds of others communities, Tucson suddenly decided in direct response to the Floyd murder 1,600 miles away that it needed an office of equity.
To many observers, it seemed that the city was just “getting jiggy with it,” pretending to solve a problem that didn’t exist. After a two-year search, it hired Laurice Walker, the youngest chief equity officer in the country, at age 28, with a salary of $145,000 — nearly three and a half times what Tucson’s mayor, Regina Romero, earns.
Not that the mayor is complaining. “I think this position is about putting an equity lens into all that we do,” Romero said in May, by which she means — well, nobody is quite sure what “equity” means, particularly with respect to federal legislation clearly prohibiting positive and negative discrimination alike.
But trying to get out in front of the DEI train can also result in getting run over by it.
When the city council of Asheville, North Carolina, hired Kimberlee Archie as its first equity and inclusion manager, its members probably didn’t anticipate being accused of having a “white supremacy culture.” After all, city manager Debra Campbell is black, as are three of the seven women making up the city council. The council had cut police funding and unanimously approved a reparations resolution.
Archie nevertheless complained that her colleagues still weren’t doing enough to advance racial equity. “What I describe it as is kind of like the bobblehead effect,” she said in 2020. “We’d be in meetings … and people’s heads are nodding as if they are in agreement. However, their actions didn’t back that up.”
The drama in western North Carolina illustrates a dilemma that organizations face going forward. They can pursue an aggressive political agenda in which white supremacy is considered the country’s defining ethos (per The New York Times’ “1619 Project“) and present discrimination as the only remedy to past discrimination (see Ibram X. Kendi). Or they take the path of least resistance, paying rhetorical tribute to DEI enforcers as the “bobbleheads” that Archie disparages but doing little more than that. After all, they still have universities, businesses, and sanitation departments to run, alumni and investors to satisfy, students to teach, research to pursue, roads to be paved, sewage to be treated, costs to be minimized, and profits to be maximized.
Perhaps, too, senior administrators and executives are beginning to realize that, despite the moral panic of 2020, the most culturally diverse country in the world might not be irredeemably racist, even if it’s no longer acceptable to say so. The United States twice elected an African American man named Barack Hussein Obama as president. His first attorney general was a black man, who would be replaced by a black woman. His vice president would pick a woman of mixed race as his running mate. The mayors of 12 of the 20 largest U.S. cities are black, including the four largest cities.
Likewise, many of the people whom Americans most admire — artists, athletes, musicians, scientists, writers — are black. Lately, most winners of MacArthur Foundation “genius” grants are people of color. Gay marriage is legal, and enjoys wide public support, even among conservatives. The disabled, neurodivergent, and gender-divergent are applauded for their courage and resilience. And nonwhite groups, particularly Asians, Latinos, and African immigrants, have been remarkably upwardly mobile (often without official favoritism).
Clearly, troubling disparities persist for African Americans. What’s much less clear is that racism, systemic or not, remains the principal cause of these disparities or that a caste of equity commissars will reverse them. And now, it would seem that narrowing these disparities runs counter to their self-interest.
“I don’t want to deny that there’s genuine goodwill on the part of some of these programs,” says Prof. Schuck, stressing that he hasn’t examined their inner workings. “But some of these conflicts are not capable of being solved by these gestures. They have to justify their own jobs, their own budgets, however. And that creates the potential for a lot of mischief. They end up trafficking in controversy and righteousness, which produces the deformities we’ve been seeing in policies and conduct.”
Still, to hear DEI officers, it’s they who are beleaguered and overwhelmed. Yes, they have important-sounding jobs and rather vague responsibilities. They are accountable to nobody, really. Rather than fighting “the man,” they now are the man, or at least the gender-neutral term for man in this context. But this also means that they are starting to catch flak, particularly as the evidence mounts that the institutions they advise and admonish aren’t actually becoming more fair, open, and welcoming. They’re not even becoming more ethnically diverse.
Like other DEI advocates, the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education has declined to answer questions for this article. Its officers are too busy traveling to conferences to do so, a spokeswoman said.
But at a recent association meeting, Anneliese Singh of Tulane University invoked Rosa Parks’ refusal to take a back seat to discrimination. Although Parks was a housekeeper and diversicrats have comfortable university sinecures, their struggles are analogously distressing, Singh suggested. The latter, too, are on the “front lines” in a harrowing war. However, she said, her colleagues needed to remember what mattered most: Looking out for themselves.
“It is not self-indulgence,” she said, now quoting the feminist and civil rights activist Audre Lord. “It is self-preservation. And that is an act of political warfare.”
For the moment, it’s a war Singh and her DEI colleagues are clearly winning.
This article was originally published by RealClearInvestigations.
The Pentagon’s investigation into the U.S. military in 2021 found about 100 individuals engaged in extremist activities out of a force of 2 million. It appears investigators were looking in the wrong place. The search for extremists might have yielded better results had they examined the Department of Defense Education Activity (DODEA), the government agency that administers K-12 education to the children of military personnel.
The Claremont Institute’s recently released report“Grooming Future Revolutionaries” describes shocking indoctrination taking place at overseas schools. It is a must-read, especially for military parents of the nearly 70,000 children in these schools.
I am a military spouse and the mother of a former DODEA student. The particular teacher training that was the focus of Claremont’s report is the reason, in part, why I lost all trust in the system.
In May 2021, I saw that DODEA would be holding an “Equity and Access Summit” for teachers and administrators. Knowing that “equity” means different things to different people, I wanted to get a sense of what it meant at DODEA. When I managed to gain access to the recordings, I was absolutely floored by what I saw and heard.
As the Claremont report shows, the summit featured hours of teacher training steeped in critical race and gender identity theories.
Claremont released a video of summit clips in which a principal talks about a student who felt like he’d done something wrong because he’s a “young, white male.” The teacher said she didn’t know what to tell him — but she seemed pleased with the breakthrough. Perhaps she was just following the lead of DODEA’s diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) chief Kelisa Wing, who is currently under investigation by DOD for a history of disparaging comments toward white people.
Video Evidence of Teachers Pushing CRT
The report also highlights literature teacher Gregory DeJardin’s presentation called “Combating 1- Sided Narratives (Decolonize the Curriculum).” DeJardin insists teachers become social activists and interviewed several students in his class at Vicenza High School in Italy about their difficulties with “majority culture.” It was painfully apparent in their answers that they were parroting his dogma, as one student said: “[School] is getting better about being more diverse and not taking a very normative perspective but there are definitely issues and I feel like it is still incredibly skewed to the white, male, heterosexual and Protestant gaze.”
Betty Roberts, an educator at Robinson Barracks Elementary School in Germany, talked about critical literacy. She wants her students to look deeply into textbook versions of events to find hidden biases. She asks her students questions like: “Is the American Revolution still being fought today?” She presses further and asks if the American Revolution was just a “transition from one group of rich white men to another group of rich white men.” Roberts goes on to express her gratefulness to the teachers’ union for its training on white fragility because she recognized her need for cultural humility.
Normalizing Transgenderism
Aside from the relentless instruction on anti-racism and white privilege, a clear effort was underway to normalize transgender identities and the notion of a gender spectrum. Genevieve Chavez and Lindsey Bagnaschi, presenters of “Ally 101 — Creating an Inclusive Classroom for LGBTQ+ Students,” talked about gender transitions they have facilitated for students at their schools in Spain and Germany, respectively — sometimes without parental knowledge or consent.
And many LGBT educators apparently belong to a system-wide resource-sharing group on Schoology curated by a DODEA educator. Chavez recommends resources from the group such as “Teaching with Mx. T” and “Teaching Outside the Binary.” But there is another similar group that’s passcode protected — and it’s for students. Teachers can add students to their own LGBT chat rooms in Schoology, and parents are not invited.
If teachers run out of content from people like “Mx. T,” they can use Discovery Education, which many recommended during the summit. One of the programs is “Speak Truth to Power.” This program offers lesson plans that are “flexible, standards-aligned digital resources, designed to educate, engage and inspire the next generation of human rights defenders.” Sounds good, doesn’t it — until you see that transgender activist Jazz Jennings is one of those human rights defenders. But Discovery Education is password-protected, with one portal for students and another for teachers, so we really have no idea what’s being promoted to our children via third-party content creators who can update information in real-time.
Congress Needs to Do More
Our children deserve to learn in an environment free from divisive ideologies, and thankfully, DODEA’s activism has not gone unnoticed by Congress. Rep. Vicky Hartzler, R-Mo., wrote a letter to DOD asking why teachers are being trained to secretly “transition” children at overseas schools. After a year, she still had not received an answer. She also introduced H.R. 4764, the No CRT for our Military Kids Act.
In the Senate, Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., offered an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) of 2023 to prevent DODEA schools from hiding important medical information from parents — but it was voted down.
Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., introduced a Servicemember Parents Bill of Rights amendment to the NDAA to provide for more transparency and accountability in DODEA schools. It was adopted in committee with bipartisan support by a vote of 39-19 and is in the House-passed NDAA.
But Congress needs to do much more to ensure the safety of our military children and also that of any DODEA educator who is being intimidated into conformity. It will likely take years to sort out the mess at DODEA, so in the meantime, Congress could consider extending the military’s Non-DOD Schools Program to all students instead of only to those who are not in close proximity to a DODEA school.
Whatever the case, it looks like an extremist stand down is in order for DODEA, and it just might net more than the .005 percent found among our uniformed force.
Amy Haywood is a former senior legislative assistant for a U.S. House representative and an educator with years of experience working in a research-based program to help third culture kids adjust to life overseas. She holds a master’s degree in national security and strategic studies from the U.S. Naval War College.
In the latest example of doubling down on bad policies, the Biden administration is currently seeking to restore Obama-era federal guidance that had severe consequences for student safety. According to recent reports, the policies under consideration would investigate schools based on their rates of discipline of students with disabilities and those from racial minority backgrounds. In the past, these investigations have led to the threats of federal lawsuits against school districts and mandated a focus on reducing the rates of suspension for disabled and minority students.
All of these policies are based on the woke narrative surrounding “disparate impacts.” Under this theory, even a policy that, on its face, is entirely race-neutral, is adjudged to be racist if it affects individuals from different races or backgrounds at different rates. This narrative has come to the forefront not only in education, but also in policing with countless headlines noting that minorities are arrested and incarcerated at higher rates for a wide variety of crimes.
What is not allowed to be discussed is whether this is a result of true racism, or of differences in behavior that are correlated along race lines. Even though it is politically incorrect, most of the evidence points to the latter. The reality is that on objective measures where there is little or no possibility of racial bias, racial disparities still exist in the rates of anti-social behavior.
For instance, research has found that African Americans are far more likely than their white peers to report having been in a fight at school, and more likely to face mandatory discipline where there is little room for discretion on the part of teachers and principals. There are many explanations for why this could be the case. The most likely is differences in poverty among white and minority students, which correlates very well with student discipline disparities. Indeed, extensive research has found that poverty rates are predictive of misbehavior regardless of student race. But whatever the reason, ignoring misbehavior is likely to lead to greater harm to the students it is designed to protect.
My research on the implementation of similar policies in Wisconsin has found that students report feeling less safe in schools as rates of suspension for minority students decline.
Across the country, teachers complain that students who have engaged in behaviors that warrant a suspension are being given more lenient punishment in the name of keeping numbers down. Some have even attributed the mass shooting at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School to a school system that turned a blind eye to the eventual killer’s behavior one too many times.
This lack of support for teachers is causing some of them to leave the classroom entirely. Given that majority-minority districts are some of the most in need of effective educators, this is especially problematic. Indeed, because America has many majority-minority schools, the students who bear the brunt of this policy failure are other minority students who are focusing on their schooling and want to succeed.
In the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic and school shutdowns, the achievement gap between white and minority students has only expanded. Parents who lacked the resources to supplement their children’s educations during the era of at-home “learning” are desperate for schools to help their kids make up for lost time. This makes fighting back against this discipline guidance from the Biden administration all the more critical. Students who want to learn deserve the chance to be in safe, non-disruptive classrooms where they can gain knowledge. The alternative where chaos reigns in the name of political correctness is unconscionable.
Dr. Will Flanders is research director for the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty.
Forcing children to sleep and undress next to kids of the opposite sex effectively puts up a ‘Christian kids need not apply’ sign on public recreation activities.
This spring I got an email from 4-H, a club I participated in as a child, effectively communicating that my Christian family need not apply to summer camps and other activities sponsored by the quasi-public organization. (County governments often sponsor 4-H activities.) This email was signed by a 4-H staffer who put pronouns in his signature and told me, “Youth are assigned cabins based on gender indicated on the 4-H camp application and registration,”suggesting children were roomed by gender identity rather than sex.
Naturally, I was concerned that my tween daughter and son might be roomed overnight with an emotionally disturbed camper or counselor if I enrolled them in this camp. Based on numerous reported stories, I know that if this did happen, the camp likely would not even tell me, so I’d only hear about it after the fact from my kids. When I emailed again to confirm I was understanding this correctly, the staffer refused to answer definitively whether campers could be placed in private facilities such as bedrooms and bathrooms with transgender individuals. That’s an unacceptable risk to children’s well-being, as well as a lawsuit waiting to happen.
Given how socially contagious LGBT identification is, it’s not just about transgender issue but also exposing children to sexual information and pressures far earlier than they are ready. Hand in hand with grouping children by gender identity is forcing conversations about what that means, which pushes children earlier and earlier to declare and investigate sexual behaviors. This is destabilizing to their identity, not “affirming” it.
Given 4-H national’s commitment to the toxic “diversity, equity, inclusion” ideology, the fact that my Christian kids now cannot equally access lots of their programming due to 4-H’s choice to sexualize their activities was no surprise. But I still wanted to see in writing that my red county in my red state was indeed giving tax breaks and other government privileges to an organization that might room children overnight with troubled people of the opposite sex against their parents’ will. The answer is yes. (Thanks, Republicans!)
Everywhere We Go, Someone Wants to Talk Dirty to My Kids on the Public Dime
It’s not just places kids get naked. It’s everywhere. I cannot take my children to the public library anymore, either, because the shelves are so full of pornographic and hostile books that it’s not a safe place for them. There, too, self-righteous LGBT activism has resulted in effectively banning my children from yet another public place and weaponizing my own tax dollars against my children’s safety. The shelves and displays in our library are full of books telling my children lies such as that “men can become women” and “some boys have girl brains” and “gender is a social construct.” I’m happy to have these conversations with my children when they are ready, but I know my six-year-old, and he is not ready. My eight-year-old is not ready, and neither are my 10- and 11-year-old, frankly. It’s grotesque and evil to put books at their eye level that deliberately aim to confuse them about something so deep and important. To do this is to usurp not only my parental wisdom and authority over my own children but to usurp my children’s right to an innocent, emotionally secure childhood.
It Won’t Happen, And When It Does, You Bigots Will Deserve It
These all prove that rapidly rewriting American laws to ignore sexual differences has effectively banned Christian families from equal participation in public facilities and activities. It’s not just Christian families, it’s any family that thinks it imprudent to lodge their sometimes-undressed daughters with an emotionally traumatized male at summer camp or to obtain swimming lessons at a public pool. This all descends from the massive bait and switch inherent to the LGBT policy agenda. We were told it was only about extending government sanction to what consenting adults do behind closed doors. We were told it was about allowing people to visit loved ones in hospice and inherit without legal difficulties. It wasn’t going to affect our families, remember?
Anyone who raised concerns about how calling sexual activities that cannot create a family “marriage” would affect children, faith, and families was smeared as a know-nothing bigot. Anyone who wanted to logically think through how legally equating men to women in the social keystone of marriage would have a domino effect on many other laws and social arrangements was also smeared as a hateful bigot, all the way up to highly intelligent and reasoned Supreme Court dissents. It’s the same toxic play we’ve seen work ever since: Anyone with a contrary opinion or even unanswered questions is not engaged, but simply smeared.
Men and Women Are Different, And That Matters
The fact is that equating homosexual relationships to marriage very often requires explaining adult sexual behaviors to tiny children. Erasing the differences between the sexes in marriage also leads irrevocably to erasing the differences between the sexes everywhere else, from bathrooms to pools to summer camps. Breaking down all sexual differences also results in discrimination against religious expressions that acknowledge men and women are different, and these differences are divinely ordered.
Thus upending the natural sexual order has resulted, not in the falsely promised “equality,” but in simply flipping which social system will rule. For what we were prevented from discussing or even seeing was the fact that these two regimes — treating the sexes as different and complementary versus seeing them as neutered and interchangeable — are mutually exclusive.
You cannot have both transgender swimmers and single-sex sports competition. You cannot have both the sexual profligacy pushed by the dominant LGBT activist class and protect children from sexualized childhoods and predatory social situations. You must have one or the other.
In the absence of clarity about this reality combined with effective use of power on reality’s behalf, abrasive, antisocial activists have fully taken over every public space. Any further sorties are merely tinkering around the edges of their all-encompassing kingdom.
Children Are No Longer a Protected Class, They’re Targets for Groomers
So instead of achieving equality, what we have really achieved is the subversion of children’s developmental needs to adult desires. Instead of equality, we have replaced legal preferences for the only sexual arrangement that produces the most stable future citizens — lifelong married biological parents — with legal preferences for sexual arrangements that harm children and send religious folk to the back of the public bus.
Therefore, all who believe in protecting children from marinating in sexual imagery and ideas everywhere they go are the new underclass in our political regime, and in many cases no Republican officials will even recognize our legitimate concerns, let alone fight for our daughters. That’s certainly the case here in Indiana, where Republican Gov. Eric Holcomb won’t sign bare-minimum legislation protecting girls’ sports and nobody is even talking about making our libraries, camps, and pools safe for families (even though that’s one of the few value-added policies a state like Indiana can offer its citizens).
Many of our major public and private institutions are making the public square completely hostile to a happy childhood and faith. Their “solution” to alleged bigotry was institutionalizing actual bigotry. “Our kind” aren’t wanted in “their” territory, you see. Maybe we would be allowed to have separate pools and summer camps funded by our own money, as long as the ACLU doesn’t sue them out of existence like they do Christian hospitals and foster care agencies.
What we weren’t told was that letting homosexuals out of the closet would require stuffing all the children and Christians inside.
Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Sign up here to get early access to her next ebook, “101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation.” Her bestselling ebook is “Classic Books for Young Children.” Mrs. Pullmann identifies as native American and gender natural. She is also the author of “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books. In 2013-14 she won a Robert Novak journalism fellowship for in-depth reporting on Common Core national education mandates. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs.
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NEW YORK, NY – JUNE 26: A boy carries a flag during the New York City Pride March, June 26, 2016 in New York City. This year was the 46th Pride march in New York City (Photo by Eric Thayer/Getty Images)
Democrats in the State House are pushing House Bill 2184, a measure that would mandate “comprehensive sexual health education” by the year 2022.
Informed Parents of Washington, a group that describes itself as “a coalition of parents dedicated to fighting Comprehensive Sexxx [sic] Education in our schools and legislation that imposes upon parental rights,” is warning parents about the dangers of the legislation.
The Democrat narrative behind the legislation is that such a bill would establish “equity,” i.e., equal access to sexual health information, especially with regard to the topics of “affirmative consent” and the needs of LGBTQ students.
A work group composed of 16 women that reviewed K–12 sex ed provisions in the state concluded in its final report that “members agree all students would benefit from K–12 comprehensive sexual health education.”
The conclusion, however, was reached after the Washington Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI) conducted a survey about the issue and received more than 10,000 responses, nearly three-fourths of which came from females. Ironically, the work group found 58 percent of survey respondents said comprehensive sexual health education (CSHE) should not be required in grades K–12, and 42 percent said that it should be required.
Nevertheless, the work group stated:
The Sexual Health Education Workgroup agreed that all students in Washington’s public schools should have access to comprehensive sexual health education (CSHE) in grades K–12. Mandating CSHE is an issue of equity and would help to ensure all students across the state receive quality, evidence-informed instruction, regardless of who they are or where they live. The Workgroup found that several groups are often excluded from relevant, inclusive instruction, including students in out of home care, students with disabilities, students who identify as LGBTQ+, and English learners, among others.
The website of Washington Rep. Michelle Caldier (R) provides a radio report with John Sattgast in Olympia about the bill.
“When I looked at the curriculum, I’d be happy to read some of this stuff, but I will tell you I know that the chair would gavel me because it is completely inappropriate for me to say here,” Caldier said about the proposed mandated sex ed curriculum. “And I think that if it is inappropriate for me to say on the dais, I don’t think that’s something that I would want to teach a kindergartner.”
Sattgast observed that 97 people signed up to testify, yet only 16 were permitted to do so within the time limit.
Though the bill to mandate comprehensive sex ed died in the last legislative session, the current bill is equally as controversial, stated Washington conservative radio host Jason Rantz of The Jason Rantz Show on AM 770 KTTH.
“And it’s fueled less about meeting the sexual needs of young kids (these needs don’t exist), than it is about pushing a very specific social justice agenda on gender identity for all classrooms,” he stated.
According to the Democrats’ proposal, called “Rights, Respect, Responsibility: A K-12 Curriculum” (3Rs), kindergartners would learn about the proper names for body parts, but only after a “note on language” clarifies that biology is subservient to gender identity.
“You will notice that this lesson refers to ‘girls’ and ‘boys’ and ‘male’ and ‘female’ when identifying body parts,” states the note to teachers. “Lessons in higher grades use more precise language and begin to introduce a broader concept of gender.”
With the aid of a PowerPoint presentation, teachers are instructed to tell the young children:
Most girls have a vulva, which is the name for the area between the legs. The vulva describes the whole area including the small hole where urine or pee comes out called the opening to the urethra, the hole below that, which is a little bigger and is called the vagina that is used when a female has a baby, and the hole below that where a bowel movement, or poop, comes out called the anus. So a person with a vulva has three holes between their legs and a very sensitive little area at the top called the clitoris.
…
Most boys have a penis between their legs which they use to urinate or ‘pee.’ Some boys have a foreskin, which is a piece of skin that covers the end of the penis and some boys do not. A boy also has a hole where a bowel movement, or poop, leaves the body called an anus, just like a girl.
In the proposal, first graders would begin to learn about gender roles. Teachers are instructed to read My Princess Boyprior to the lesson and then ask the children:
“Does the job a person has, or what they wear mean the person is a man or woman?” (No) “Do the activities someone likes to do for fun or what they wear mean they are a boy or a girl?” (No)
…
Close the lesson by asking “How could you support others in trying new things and participating in activities that some people may sometimes say are only for boys or only for girls?” Ask for volunteers to offer strategies. (Some responses might include: tell them that you think it’s great; tell them that they shouldn’t listen to what other people think; tell them that you will do it with them; tell them that there is no such thing as girl activities and boy activities, etc.)
In the Democrats’ proposal, sixth graders would learn “language … that seems less familiar – using the pronoun ‘they’ instead of ‘her’ or him,’ using gender neutral names in scenarios and role-plays and referring to ‘someone with a vulva’ vs. a girl or woman.”
“This is intended to make the curriculum inclusive of all genders and gender identities,” states the proposal.
Informed Parents of Washington noted as well what the “3Rs” curriculum will teach 15-year-olds about “sexting”: “Sexting is here to stay folks. The real issue is consent. If you think about it like that, then sexting is just another aspect of normal sexual behavior.”
“That’s what The 3Rs curriculum wants to tell your 15-year-old, using a video the IT will have to unblock so it can be shown,” the parents’ coalition posted to Facebook.
“Then they’ll discuss scenarios that make sexting seem like the norm,” the parents add. “For homework kids go out and share their newfound knowledge with at least four friends. Though they do tell students that naked photos of kids under 18 is illegal, if they were serious about discouraging kids from sexting they would take a different, more serious approach.”
Well, this shoots a great, big gaping hole into the ‘white privilege’claim, doesn’t it? Proponents of so-called ‘white privilege’maintain that there is systemic oppression of non-white people, and that’s why they need ‘equity‘ rather than ‘equality‘. Equity, though it sounds like equality, isn’t the same thing. It’s not treating all as equal but instead giving a ‘leg-up’ to those that need that extra help to achieve the same results.
If you look up ‘Equity vs. Equality’ online, you’re bound to come across this set of images:
The social justice proponents would say that treating everyone as equals means that some will get things that they don’t need, some will get just enough, and others will still be left short. (Pun not intended.)
Government is not the one to distribute rights to individuals or groups, rather, according to the Founders, it is the role of government to protect man’s natural rights that were given to him ‘by nature and by nature’s God’.
But what happens when the progressive social justice people are proven wrong? What if it turns out that all of the Affirmative Action and these ‘leg up’ programs haven’t made us all able to get what we need as in the above illustration, but have actually given distinct advantages to particular groups and crippling disadvantages others?
Perhaps if we had some real journalists that report facts we could stop with all the race-based ‘privilege’ nonsense and deal with the real problems that our fellow Americans face.
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