It’s pretty big news when the largest retailer in America abandons wokeness.
Anti-woke crusader Robby Starbuck has been on a mission to shift the corporate landscape in America from insanity and rainbows to what he considers “sanity and neutrality.” He has successfully pressured companies such as Tractor Supply, John Deere, Harley-Davidson, Polaris, Indian Motorcycle, Lowe’s, Ford, Coors, Stanley Black & Decker, Jack Daniel’s, DeWalt Tools, Craftsman, Caterpillar, Boeing, and Toyota to move away from toxic Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) practices.
Now, Starbuck is at it again. He wrote on X that America’s largest employer, Walmart, has decided to end its woke policies after he “had productive conversations to find solutions” with management.
He stated that the changes Walmart committed to “will send shockwaves throughout corporate America,” adding that their executives deserve “major credit” for wanting to end corporate wokeness.
“This is the biggest win yet for our movement to end wokeness in corporate America,” Starbuck said.
Here are the changes Walmart committed to:
Surveys: Walmart will no longer participate in the HRC’s woke Corporate Equality Index.
Products: Monitor the Walmart marketplace to identify and remove inappropriate sexual and / or transgender products marketed to children.
Funding of Grants: Review all funding of Pride, and other events, to avoid funding inappropriate sexualized content targeting kids.
Equity: We will not extend the Racial Equity Center which was established in 2020 as a special five-year initiative.
Supplier Diversity: We will evaluate supplier diversity programs and ensure they do not provide preferential treatment and benefits to suppliers based on diversity. We don’t have quotas and won’t going forward. Financing eligibility will no longer be predicated on providing certain demographic data.
LatinX: Walmart will no longer use the term in official communications.
Trainings: Walmart will discontinue racial equity training through the Racial Equity Institute.
DEI: Walmart will discontinue the use of DEI as a term while ensuring a respectful and supportive environment. Our focus is on Belonging for ALL associates and customers.
Starbuck continued:
Remember, Walmart is the #1 employer in America with over 1.6 Million Employees and they have a market cap of nearly $800B. This won’t just have a massive effect for their employees who will have a neutral workplace without feeling that divisive issues are being injected but it will also extend to their many suppliers.
We’ve now changed policy at companies worth over $2 Trillion dollars, with many millions of employees who have better workplace environments as a result. I’m happy to have secured these changes before Christmas when shoppers have very few large retail brands they can spend money with who aren’t pushing woke policies. Companies like Amazon and Target should be very nervous that their top competitor dropped woke policies first. I think Target specifically will suffer serious sales problems as a result and Walmart will benefit.
Our campaigns are now so effective that we’re getting the biggest companies on earth to change their policies without me even posting a story outlining their woke policies. Companies can clearly see that America wants normalcy back. The era of wokeness is dying right in front of our eyes. The landscape of corporate America is quickly shifting to sanity and neutrality. We are now the trend, not the anomaly.
We are winning and one by one we WILL bring sanity back to corporate America.
Kevin O’Leary on Fox Business had some choice things to say:
“Target is a great example. When they got into the gender identity stuff, they got slaughtered.”
“You’ve got to start punishing stupidity at the management level.”
They now teach Bud Light in schools as a cautionary example of what not to do.
Indeed, O’Leary called the Bud Light debacle “a complete combination of idiot management and the inability to read the room.”
This particular turn of phrase stuck out to me, because I remember, very clearly, that the phrase “read the room” was used like a club to justify whatever woke idiocy was coming down the pike at the time: Football players kneeling, defunding the police, treating #BlackLivesMatter riots as justification to break Flu Manchu quarantine, etc. It was a lie based on systemic preference falsification then, but more than true now, as America as a whole is done with wokeness.
Walmart is a big, big domino, and expect most of American companies looking to toss all their woke idiocy on the dunghill of history, no matter how much their HR department might object.
The Babylon Bee just dropped a video on Democrats “rethinking” their approach.
“The election did not go as we planned it.” “Only because the voters are racist, misogynist garbage.”
“I don’t understand. We all said that if Trump won, it’d be the end of democracy, and that there would never be another election.”
“So one group that we have to get better with is Latinx men. Okay. They don’t like us and they don’t like being called Latinx men.” “Stupid idiots.”
“We cannot just start calling them Latino and Latina. That would be buying into the patriarchal gender binary.”
“So is there another letter that we can tack on to Latin?”
“Latine. But we but we actually pronounce it Latiné. Like, with one of those Mexican line thingies on the top. Yeah, it’s not as cumbersome as Latinx, but it’s still forced and pretentious enough to make it clear that we’re better than anyone else that doesn’t say it this way.”
“A lot of people are frustrated with the performative announcement of pronouns, the drag queen story hours, the chopping off of children’s body parts.” “Stupid idiots.”
“You know, when people don’t agree with us we usually just yell at them. ‘You’re transphobic!’ Well, what if instead of that, we yell it even louder!”
“I’d rather lose being right, comforted by the knowledgethat everyone else is garbage, than win being wrong. I’d rather get the approval of Rachel Maddow, the ladies of The View, and those kids out there calling for the murder of the Jews than pander to a bunch of lousy racists for a couple of votes.”
Back before I was suspended on Twitter (I’m still suspended, since the Twitter/X appeals process is broken), I followed ShoeOnHead, who frequently had sane things to say about the lunacy of the left. I think she blocked me because I noted she was wrong about transexism, but this nice rant showed up in my feed recently.
“New York was closer to flipping red than Florida was to flipping blue.”
Where she’s coming from: “I voted for Bernie in the primaries in 2016 and I watched as the Democratic party did everything in their power to destroy this man. Twice. So it is safe to say I am a little biased when it comes to the Democratic Party.”
“You idiots! You morons. You imbeciles! Kamala Harris? Really? That’s who you threw up there? The one who dropped out before Iowa? The one who got blown the out by Tulsi Gabbard. Why didn’t you hold a primary? Aren’t you the saviors of democracy?
“Oh, big congratulations to Tim Walz on being the first white male DEI hire. It didn’t work. The DNC completely neutered that guy, reduced him to this weird token white man. “Hello, fellow men. I do play football.”
A nice slam on the Liz Cheney/#NeverTrumper idiocy.
A discussion of how young came out in force to vote for Trump…and of feminists openly wishing for them all to die.
“‘We need a liberal Joe Rogan!’ You had a liberal Joe Rogan! His name was Joe Rogan!” Dave Rubin and Jordan Peterson (among others) have made this point as well.
“Democrats can’t have a Joe Rogan, because everything that makes Joe Rogan Joe Rogan is not allowed on the left.”
Plus a discussion of populism.
I’d advise watching the whole thing. You probably won’t agree with everything, but you might with a good 80-85% of it…
Flu Manchu lockdowns bankrupted numerous American businesses (restaurants were particularly hard hit), but the firehose of taxpayer money the feds turned on also made a whole lot of people rich, including several fraud artists.
A Louisiana-based rap artist pleaded guilty Monday to his role in a large-scale prescription drug fraud ring that operated out of his multimillion-dollar home in Utah.
Rapper NBA YoungBoy, whose real name is Kentrell Gaulden, walked into a courtroom in Logan, Utah, with his head hung low as he entered the plea for his part in the alleged scheme, KTVX-TV reported.
The 25-year-old rapper was originally charged in the Logan District Court with 46 charges related to the alleged crime. On Monday, he pleaded guilty to two counts of third-degree felony identity fraud, two counts of third-degree felony forgery and six counts of misdemeanor unlawful pharmacy conduct. Gaulden entered a “no contest” plea to the remaining charges.
As part of a plea deal, Gaulden will not serve prison time in Utah. Instead, his four felony charges were reduced to Class A Misdemeanors and he was ordered to pay a $25,000 fine, the television station reported.
District Judge Spencer Walsh agreed to suspend a prison sentence as Gaulden is expected to serve a “substantial” 27 months in federal prison for related charges in a case stemming out of Weber County, Utah. Following his release, Gaulden will then be placed on five years of federal supervised probation.
Closer to home, another Harris County official was indicted for fraud that involved a coronavirus testing program.
Former Harris County Public Health Executive Director Barbie Robinson has been charged with felony misuse of official information in what may have been yet another bid-rigging scheme coordinated with county contractors.
Fired from her post last September, Robinson allegedly used her private email to coordinate with International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) officials regarding a $31 million contract to craft a social services program called Accessing Coordinated Care and Empowering Self Sufficiency (ACCESS) that the company would later bid to provide.
Last week Robinson was charged with misuse of official information, a third-degree felony which carries a possible sentence of two to 10 years in jail and fines of up to $10,000.
Before working for Harris County, Robinson had previously served as the director of the Sonoma County Department of Health Services where she also worked with IBM to create a nearly identical ACCESS program to coordinate county services for low-income residents.
According to emails obtained by the Texas Rangers, Robinson appears to have exchanged emails with IBM officials shortly after she was hired by Harris County in the spring of 2021. Communications included discussion of “sole-source” contracts that might be exempted from competitive bids.
In July 2021, the county paid IBM $45,000 to put on a workshop to discuss creation of an ACCESS-style program, and in early November 2021 Robinson continued to use her personal email to coordinate with IBM to craft a scope of work document in the weeks and days before the county issued a public request for proposals.
Robinson came under fire earlier this year for communications surrounding a $6 million contract awarded to DEMA, a California-based company, to run Harris County’s Holistic Assistance Response Teams (HART).
According to scoring documents obtained by the Houston Chronicle, DEMA won the contract for HART services by a fraction of a point over The Harris Center for Mental Health and Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities, a state-funded agency with experience in responding to 911 calls. DEMA’s overall score was 72.88, while the Harris Center earned 72.5. Robinson awarded DEMA 70.5 out of 100 points compared to 66.5 for the Harris Center, and she and other evaluators awarded points to DEMA for a list of references.
DEMA was awarded more than $26 million in no-bid contracts in Sonoma County but lost the contracts after a 2023 investigation by The Press Democrat found billing of at least $800,000 for non-existent positions.
Early in 2021, Robinson had been instrumental in bringing DEMA to operate COVID-19 testing sites in Harris County. In a September 2021 email, DEMA CEO Michelle Patino offered her a contract for legal consulting, even though Robinson is not a practicing attorney.
Last June a Harris County auditor’s report found that nine invoices had position titles and rates that were not supported by the contract, that DEMA was not registered to conduct business in Texas when the contract was executed, and that the company did not have required insurance coverage.
In response to a Texas Public Information Act request from The Texan for scoring documents related to the IBM contract for ACCESS Harris County, the county attorney’s office appealed to the Texas Office of the Attorney General for an exemption.
Earlier this year, The Texan learned that in January 2024, Robinson also contracted with Yuba County, California to provide services for a three-year period. Robinson’s work for Yuba County’s public health department provided her with nearly $200,000 in compensation for hundreds of hours of work, all while managing Harris County’s public health department.
In response to the indictment, Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo accused District Attorney Kim Ogg of “weaponizing” the district attorney’s office and claimed that Ogg simply did not like the successful program created by Robinson.
It seems like Democratic activists view every government program as a potential source of graft to line their pockets with, and Flu Manchu funds were passed so quickly and with such little oversight that they provided especially tempting targets for the usual suspects to stick in their snouts.
Hopefully unsupervised barrels of money like this are going to be on DOGE’s chopping block in the incoming Trump Administration.
Not only is it woke gender bending nonsense, its sins are compounded by the meaningless platitudinous nature of the generically rebellious message, a sad technicolor echo of Apple’s “Think Different” campaign more than a quarter-century after the original.
I wasn’t going to comment on this, because I didn’t think I had a new angle on it. Then I realized I did!
Ever see the 1990 Dudley Moore movie Crazy People? There’s no reason you should, as it’s not particularly good. In it, an ad executive snaps and starts producing ads that tell the truth. Including this gem:
“Jaguar: For men who like handjobs from beautiful women they hardly know.”
The thing is, if they had actually run that ad rather than the Colorform Gender Bending Extravaganza, they would have done less damage to their brand. Feminists would scream at it, but it wouldn’t offend its core male car-buying target demographic, who would just laugh at it.
Because I’m a problem solver, I’m going to tell Jaguar (or, more accurately, Tata Jaguar Land Rover, as they’re now part of an Indian automotive conglomerate) how to fix their problem overnight with a new ad.
Step One: Fire Jaguar Managing Director Rawdon Glover, the man who just tried to Bud Light your brand.
Step Two: Pay Richard Hammond $1 million. You want Hammond because he’s a famous, well-liked car personality who happens to own a superb classic Jag:
Step Three: Have Hammond cut a one minute ad. At the beginning he says “I love old Jags” and then natters on for 25 seconds about what he loves about his restored Jaguar XK150. Then he says “I love new Jags,” and natters on for 25 seconds about the latest F-Type or whatever sports car you’ve given him along with the $1 million. Then at the end he says “I love Jags. There’s nothing wrong with loving something that’s beautiful.”
That’s it. That’s the message. Do that and people will stop talking about your idiot social justice stunt and you can get back to selling sports cars to slightly cadish, slightly affluent men who can’t afford a Ferrari or Lamborghini.
The Trump witchunt trial is suspended, PA Democrats give up the steal, the ruble collapses, a real estate developer is busted for bribery, thrash metal TDS, and an unexpected voice of sanity and reason from…Cenk Uygur?
Judge Juan Merchan indefinitely postponed the sentencing hearing in President-elect Donald Trump’s New York criminal case, which had been planned for next week, in light of Trump’s election.
Merchan is giving Trump’s legal team more than a week to file its motion asking for a dismissal under the argument that his return to office provides him a new host of immunity-related defenses.
Trump’s lawyers will be required to file by December 2, after which Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg will have until December 9 to respond.
Snip.
While Trump could face up to four years in prison, the more likely sentence in the case — should it move forward — would be probation, which could include some combination of a fine or community service, as the former and future president is a first-time offender.
“Just as a sitting President is completely immune from any criminal process, so too is President Trump as President-elect,” Trump’s lawyers wrote in a letter filed Tuesday.
Trump’s team had requested a December 20 deadline to file.
Bragg, for his part, has argued in favor of freezing the case for the entirety of Trump’s term in office, and then revisiting the sentencing at the end of Trump’s tenure.
But Trump attorneys Todd Blanche and Emil Bove have argued dismissal of the case “is necessary under the Constitution and federal law to facilitate the orderly transition of Executive power — and in the interests of justice — following President Trump’s victory in the Electoral College and the popular vote in the 2024 Presidential election.”
To paraphrase Instapundit, we’ve entered some sort of hellworld where Cenk Uygur is a voice of moderation and reason, calling out far left pollster Allan Lichtman for blowing his election call, whereupon Lichtman shrieks that Uygur is committing “blasphemy” against him. Everyone and their dog has posted this, but I’m linking to the Asmongold clip because his seems to be the shortest.
US President-elect Donald Trump’s administration is preparing to reinstate its “maximum pressure” strategy against Iran, targeting Tehran’s economic stability and its ability to support militant proxies and nuclear development, The Financial Times reported on Saturday, citing sources close to the transition team.
The sources revealed that the administration plans to impose stricter sanctions, particularly on Iran’s oil exports, which serve as a critical revenue source.
The anticipated sanctions could drastically reduce Iranian oil exports, which currently exceed 1.5 million barrels per day, up from a low of 400,000 barrels per day in 2020. Experts suggest that these measures would severely impact Iran’s economy. Bob McNally, an energy consultant and former US presidential adviser, indicated that reducing exports to a fraction of current levels would leave Iran in a far worse economic position than during Trump’s first term.
In a followup to yesterday’s story, Texas Governor Greg Abbott has ordered state entities to divest from investments in Communist China. “One investment group specifically highlighted in Abbott’s letter is the University of Texas/Texas A&M Investment Management Company (UTIMCO), which manages billions of dollars in assets for both university systems. UTIMCO has come under scrutiny after a Texas Scorecard investigation revealed its investments in more than 50 Chinese companies.”
El Salvador’s gang prison doesn’t play around. A whole lot of this would (rightfully) be considered cruel and unusual punishment, but we should veer more in this direction rather than putting illegal alien rapists up in hotels…
Sherman Roberts, who led the City Wide Community Development Corporation, was indicted four years ago for a bribery scheme involving former Mayor Pro Tem Dwaine Caraway and former City Council Member Carolyn Davis for their support of loans and low-income housing tax credits for his apartment projects.
He now faces up to five years in prison and is expected to be sentenced in March.
Roberts paid Davis several thousand dollars in cash, and promised future payments after her council tenure ended, in return for Davis’ support of his projects — Serenity Place, Runyon Springs, and Patriot’s Crossing — according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Texas.
Roberts was a Democratic Party donor, but in fairly piddling amounts for a real estate developer…
The DOJ wants Google to sell off Chrome. Well, that would be a start in addressing their monopoly position in Internet searches, but would hardly be sufficient. They should also have to spin off YouTube. And because consumers were directly harmed by their monopoly, they should be required to add 2GB of storage a year for every Gmail user for 20 years, he said self-interestedly. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
The time of the turning: “Sold-out NYC crowd ERUPTS, chants USA as President Trump attends UFC 309 with Elon Musk, RFK Jr, Speaker Johnson.”
Shocking news from the world of science: Weed isn’t good for you. “According to their findings, exposure to cannabis was associated with a range of cancers – breast, pancreatic, liver, thyroid, testicular and lymphoma – that also develop quickly and are more aggressive.”
Sweden’s Gender Equality Minister Paulina Brandberg is deeply afraid of…bananas.
Communist China has plenty to worry about with a second Trump Administration coming in, but now a second Republican politician is taking concrete steps to thwart their plans: Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who has issued a number of executive orders to curtail Chinese influence in the state.
Gov. Greg Abbott announced a new executive order on Monday aimed at countering what he describes as harassment campaigns by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) against Texans.
The order focuses on China’s “Operation Fox Hunt,” which Abbott says is part of a broader CCP effort to forcibly repatriate Chinese dissidents living abroad to the People’s Republic of China (PRC).
“The PRC forces targeted dissidents to return in several ways, including threatening dissidents’ families still residing in China, using PRC assets to target dissidents abroad in their host countries, and kidnapping and smuggling dissidents back into the PRC,” the order states.
According to Safeguard Defenders, a human rights nonprofit, as of 2022, the PRC has established at least 102 illicit overseas “police service stations” worldwide, including some in the United States. These stations reportedly engage in unlawful campaigns of threats, harassment, and harm against U.S. citizens and lawful residents of Chinese origin or descent.
At least six of these so-called “police service stations” are believed to still exist in the United States, including one in Houston.
The order tasks the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) with a series of actions to address the issue, including:
Identifying and prosecuting offenders: DPS will identify and charge individuals suspected of exploiting dissidents on behalf of foreign governments.
Collaborating with law enforcement: DPS will partner with local and federal law enforcement through the Texas Fusion Center to assess incidents in which foreign governments attempt to intimidate Texans.
Documenting and reporting threats: DPS will discover and document individuals planning or carrying out acts of repression, and by January 15, 2025, will provide policy recommendations and training programs to counter these threats.
Improving reporting systems: Texans will be able to report suspected acts of oppression or coercion through a new hotline and updates to the iWatch Texas Community Reporting System.
Abbott says that Texas will not tolerate such harassment, particularly against the state’s Chinese-American community.
Gov. Greg Abbott issued an executive order aimed at strengthening Texas’ defenses against hostile powers.
Abbott identified the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as the primary threat. He also included North Korea, Iran, Cuba, Russia, and Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro in his order.
The executive order directs state agencies, public institutions of higher education, and other key sectors to bolster security measures, safeguard critical infrastructure, protect intellectual property, and secure personal data against threats from these hostile powers.
“Our No. 1 priority is to protect Texans, including from espionage threats posed by the Chinese Communist Party and its proxies,” Abbott said. “The Federal Bureau of Investigation reported that the Chinese government has actively targeted local and state officials as part of their strategy to undermine the national security of the United States. Hardening our state government is critical to protect Texans from hostile foreign actors who may attempt to undermine the safety and security of Texas and the nation.”
The executive order is designed to prevent Chinese influence and espionage operations within Texas’ state government.
Among the key provisions of the order:
Increased Scrutiny for Contractors: Any company bidding for state contracts must certify that it does not have ownership or control by a foreign adversary government or its subsidiaries.
Enhanced Background Checks: Stronger background check procedures will be introduced for state employees and contractors who have access to critical infrastructure.
Gift and Travel Restrictions: State employees will be prohibited from accepting gifts from representatives of foreign adversary countries, and any state-sponsored travel to those countries will be banned.
Restrictions on Foreign Government Contracting: Texas state agencies will no longer be allowed to contract with companies owned or controlled by foreign adversary governments, ensuring that Texas is not inadvertently empowering foreign entities with national security concerns.
Protection for Higher Education: Faculty and employees will be prohibited from participating in foreign recruitment programs sponsored by foreign adversary nations, which often serve as channels for espionage or intellectual property theft.
“With this Executive Order, Texas will safeguard our critical infrastructure and information from threats posed by the Chinese Communist Party,” Abbott added.
In the past Communist China has infiltrated or partnered with University of Texas system entities, including “The University of Texas Medical Board (UTMB)-run Galveston National Laboratory (GNL) [signing] a formal Memorandum of Understanding with the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in 2017.”
Gov. Greg Abbott announced his third executive order in as many days targeting the influence and potential security threats posed by the Chinese Communist Party in Texas.
Abbott’s latest executive order directs two key agencies—the Texas Division of Emergency Management and the Public Utility Commission of Texas—to take immediate action to prepare for and counteract any potential cyberattacks or other disruptive actions aimed at Texas’ critical infrastructure. This includes sectors crucial to public safety and economic stability such as communications, energy, water, and transportation.
In his statement, Abbott emphasized the urgent need for these protective measures. “China has made it clear that they can—and will—target and attack America’s critical infrastructure,” he wrote, adding:
Just this past year, a hostile Chinese government actor targeted America’s communications, energy, transportation, water, and wastewater systems, threatening our national security. Today, I directed Texas state agencies to identify potential vulnerabilities to prevent cyberattacks on local, state, and other critical infrastructure. Texas will continue to protect our critical infrastructure to ensure the safety of Texans from potential threats by the Chinese Communist Party or any hostile foreign government.
The executive order outlines a multi-faceted approach to reinforce the security of Texas infrastructure. Among the key provisions, TDEM and PUC will:
Establish a taskforce to identify vulnerabilities in Texas’ infrastructure, focusing on state and local government systems. This taskforce will also offer actionable recommendations to address and mitigate these vulnerabilities.
Simulate responses to cyberattacks across key Texas industry sectors, including energy, water, transportation, and telecommunications, to ensure preparedness for potential disruptions. These simulations will guide the development of policies and best practices to prevent or minimize the impact of cyberattacks.
Convene a state agency committee to simulate the restoration of Texas’ electric grid in the event of a foreign attack, ensuring that state and utility authorities are prepared to respond swiftly to protect the state’s energy supply.
Additionally, the Electricity Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) has been directed to create a dedicated, secure communications system for electric and telecommunications companies to use during critical grid incidents. Abbott has set a deadline of June 30, 2025 for the creation of this system.
That secure communications system sounds like it would have come in handy during the last two ice storms.
Taken together, these actions may seem somewhat scattershot, and are no substitute for effective, coordinated federal action, but they reflect China’s multifaceted threat. At lot of these may have no impact (I see no signs China is particularly active in the U.S. contract employee space, though India certainly is), but others may at least have some bureaucrats go “Eh, I supposed we should look into this,” which might end up turning up something.
And anything that discourages private companies and government agencies from working with a genocidal communist dictatorship is a good thing.
With Trump’s victory and the belated realization that wokeness has pushed the normies Too Far, there’s talk that the poison of social justice will finally die a well deserved death in the name of improving Democratic Party election chances.
I remain skeptical.
With the woke retreating to Bluesky in order to further isolate themselves from #WrongThink and all those hateful, hateful facts, it seems like the woke will be clinging more bitterly to their anti-rational, low calorie religion substitute than ever before.
Still, there are some signs of progress here and there, so let’s cover a few instances of pushback against wokeness.
Trump II will have a chance to purge wokeness from the federal bureaucracy, but it’s going to be a long, hard struggle.
As president elect, Donald Trump has already begun discussing his plans to weed out “Marxist diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucrats” from the nation’s universities and to take aim at schools that continue to discriminate by race “under the guise of equity.”
But dismantling the federal government’s massive DEI bureaucracy, which has ballooned under the direction of President Joe Biden, and rooting out illiberal and unconstitutional racial preferences the Left has deeply embedded into the government and into law will be a yearslong effort, conservative civil-rights lawyers and activists told National Review.
“This is not a short-term project,” said Dan Morenoff, executive director of the American Civil Rights Project, which specializes in fighting identity-based discrimination.
Undoing the Biden administration’s “Equity Agenda” will take not only executive orders from Trump, but also congressional action, efforts by Trump-appointed agency heads, notice-and-comment rulemaking, and likely continued lawsuits from civil-rights groups.
“The president has some real power to get this ball rolling and to dictate where the ball is going, but there are things that are going to take some additional steps,” Morenoff said.
Taking office in the wake of George Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis and the racial-justice riots that engulfed many American cities, Biden — who owed his presidency to support from the black community — made so-called equity an immediate priority.
On his first day in office, Biden signed Executive Order 13985, or Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government, in part to combat the “systemic racism” he claimed still plagues the nation’s institutions. But even as his administration lost repeatedly in the courts and voters soured on the concept, Biden doubled down with additional orders and a whole-of-government approach to DEI, preferences for select minority groups, and identity politics.
Biden commanded the heads of federal departments and agencies to establish Equity Teams, which were directed to submit annual Equity Action plans to the White House.
A report last month from Do No Harm, a medical watchdog, identified over 500 active or planned DEI actions by federal agencies. A new report from Open the Books, a government transparency group, found that the Department of Health and Human Services alone has about 300 staffers dedicated to diversity at an annual cost of $38.7 million.
Under Biden, aid to small businesses and farmers, contracts, scholarships for students, homeless services, and community-development funds for local governments were all provided with an eye on benefiting certain, often arbitrarily defined, minority groups.
The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL), a conservative law firm that has successfully fought the Biden administration’s discriminatory programs in court, has counted more than 60 programs written into the U.S. Code that continue to provide grants, rebates, set-asides, preferences, waivers, price caps, and discounts based on racial preferences.
Dan Lennington, a WILL lawyer, said Biden’s plan was to “re-orient the entire federal bureaucracy towards eliminating all racial disparities. And what that meant was that in every area — assistance to farmers, to small businesses, in health care, all facets of American life — Biden directed the federal bureaucracy to treat racial groups differently, to give a benefit to some and not a benefit to others.”
In addition to signing executive orders, Biden was “tremendously successful” at signing racial preferences into law through the American Rescue Plan Act, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill, and the Inflation Reduction Act, Lennington said. Some of those set-asides have been blocked by the courts, including a loan-forgiveness program for black farmers, but many others remain.
All Biden’s social justice executive orders need to be cancelled and replaced by Trump, and all statutory instances need to be repealed.
With President-elect Donald Trump’s victory, radical and discriminatory Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs could be — finally — on the way out.
DEI has captured almost every level of education and government.
Our CriticalRace.org project has documented how deeply DEI permeates higher education, medical schools and even elite private boarding schools.
The Biden-Harris team itself was birthed by DEI, after then-candidate Joe Biden came under intense pressure to pick a “woman of color” as his running mate.
His choice, Kamala Harris, fully embraced DEI in her 2024 campaign, even creating Zoom calls for different racial, ethnic and sex-based interest groups: “White Women for Harris,” “white dudes,” “black women” and so on.
Turns out, voters didn’t buy Harris or the DEI she was selling
Trump’s win, driven by a broad multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-religious coalition, puts DEI on life support.
It’s time to pull the plug and let DEI die.
In a July 2023 video posted as part of his Agenda 47 policy series, Trump focused heavily on his promise “to fire the radical Left accreditors that have allowed our colleges to become dominated by Marxist Maniacs and lunatics.”
Elon Musk, Trump’s new government-efficiency adviser, re-circulated the video this week, indicating its importance in the president-elect’s agenda.
Focusing on accreditors will make a real difference long-term.
The US Department of Education has oversight authority over higher education accreditation agencies — and groups like the American Bar Association, for example, use legislative-appointed near-monopoly status as a means of driving DEI into universities and graduate schools.
Trump has also promised that his Department of Justice will “pursue federal civil rights cases against schools that continue to engage in racial discrimination,” defying the Supreme Court’s landmark 2023 decision outlawing affirmative action in admissions
We are all for that, but to ramp up the pressure Trump should also empower private parties to pursue those actions.
Our Equal Protection Project has filed more than 40 civil rights complaints with the Department of Education, leading half of the schools involved to change or drop discriminatory criteria after adverse publicity and public shaming.
But don’t leave it to slow-acting government agencies alone to do this work: Trump can also work with Congress to empower groups like ours, giving us standing to sue in court in our own name under civil rights laws and agency regulations.
Individual victims of DEI often fear retribution and will not sue in their own name, so their grievances go unanswered.
If advocacy groups have standing in court, we can pursue their cases while protecting victims’ safety.
All of the above are systemic changes that will have a lasting impact.
But the quickest fix should be Trump’s highest priority: Cutting off the supply of money that feeds the DEI industrial complex on campuses and elsewhere.
People are entitled to their viewpoints, but they are not entitled to federal money to promote discriminatory conduct.
The federal government must eliminate funding for any program, anywhere in the federal government, that includes race- or ethnicity-based eligibility or preferences — including the use of DEI statements for admission, hiring or promotion.
Indeed, it’s also time to cut federal funding completely for any institution, public or private, educational or otherwise, that uses such discriminatory DEI criteria.
This is all good advice, but it’s easier said than done. If you’re going to get that legislation passed, it has to be part of Trump’s first budget where it cane be passed through reconciliation, because wokeness is still the Democratic Party’s religion, and they will filibuster any attempt to purge the bureaucracy. You’ll probably need to at least amend the Pendleton Act as part of the budget process to specify that Administration’s power to lay off employees, and the senate needs to have the starch to let Trump kill off vast swathes of government agencies. No phase outs, no “oh, look at the out-year savings” shenanigans. Hundreds of departments and agencies need to be eliminated, not pruned. Zeros don’t grow back.
As we recently reported, President-elect Trump pledged to set up a Task Force to look at the infiltration of DEI into the U.S. military…You remember Matt Lohmeier. He is the former Space Force Lieutenant Colonel squadron commander who was fired, forced to resign without a pension just before his retirement date and subjected to an Inspector General investigation within the Pentagon after publishing his bestselling book, Irresistible Revolution: Marxism’s Goal of Conquest & the Unmaking of the American Military, which tore the lid off the military’s obsession with racist and radical “woke” ideologies.
Matt participated in a seminar Legal Insurrection held in 2022 about DEI seeping its way into the curriculum at the service academies, Saving the Military Service Academies from Wokeness, and I attended an event Matt spoke at in Arizona in the summer of 2023: Matthew Lohmeier – a Tour de Force Supporting our Military Members. Matthew Lohmeier during his presentation:
And, as we reported, President-elect Trump has pledged to appoint Matt to the Task Force charged with dismantling DEI in the U.S. military. [And] on Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal reported that President-elect Trump is indeed considering cleaning house at the Pentagon:
Trump Draft Executive Order Would Create Board to Purge Generals:
The Trump transition team is considering a draft executive order that establishes a “warrior board” of retired senior military personnel with the power to review three- and four-star officers and to recommend removals of any deemed unfit for leadership.
If Donald Trump approves the order, it could fast-track the removal of generals and admirals found to be “lacking in requisite leadership qualities,” according to a draft of the order reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. But it could also create a chilling effect on top military officers, given the president-elect’s past vow to fire “woke generals,” referring to officers seen as promoting diversity in the ranks at the expense of military readiness.
Note how the writer tries to cast this as a negative through the use of the phrase “chilling effect,” but what the writer fails to emphasize is that the current leadership in the Pentagon is all about wokeness and identity politics over merit, to the detriment of the national defense, as we have repeatedly reported:
New Documents Detail Air Force’s Plan to Cut Number of White Male Officers
Space Force Personnel Chief Walks Back General’s LGBTQ+ Personnel Assignment Policy
Air Force Colonel, Selected for Promotion to Brigadier General, Pushes DEI, CRT, and Racist Dogma
Next Space Force Commander Grilled Over Firing of Space Force Lieutenant Colonel Matthew Lohmeier
Joint Chiefs Chairman Nominee Soft Pedals His Prior Racist Policies in Confirmation Hearing
Joint Chiefs Chairman Milley’s Replacement Even More Woke, If That is Possible
The writer also fails to mention that when Barack Obama took over, he purged 197 Generals and Admirals from the ranks, no doubt to re-make the U.S. military in his image: Obama’s Military Coup Purges 197 Officers In Five Years.
In any case, given the current crop of senior military officers and their dedication to all things DEI, cleaning house is definitely in order to make sure the U.S. military returns to a focus on engaging with and killing the enemy, not being a laboratory for the latest left-wing social experiments.
Our military needs real warriors, not social justice warriors.
Closer to home, the Texas A&M has approved removal of 52 programs, including an LGBTQ studies minor.
The Texas A&M University (TAMU) System’s Board of Regents unanimously voted to remove 52 “low-producing” academic programs on November 7, including its controversial “LGBTQ Studies” undergraduate minor, after failing to pass certain threshold requirements recently established by the provost.
The board proposed a resolution on October 29 to eliminate 14 minors and 38 certificate programs found to be “low-producing” after they “reviewed minors and certificate programs to ensure adequate student interest and demand and to eliminate inefficient and low-producing programs,” according to new course thresholds designed by the Office of the Provost.
Per the new requirements proposed by Texas A&M University Provost Alan Sams, in order to maintain an active status as an A&M minor, the program must have graduated “a minimum of 10 students” within the past two school years as well as have at least five students plus five graduates enrolled in the current school year — thresholds the LGBTQ Studies and 13 other A&M minors allegedly fail to meet.
The board directed university President Mark Welsh III to “take actions necessary” for the elimination of such programs, including minors such as LGBTQ Studies, Global Art Design, and Asian Studies, and certificates including Regulatory Science in Food Systems, Cultural Competency, and Landscape Management.
Now all we need is follow-through, making sure those previously working to implement woke policies are handed their walking papers.
Putin evidently expected his “special military operation” (i.e., his illegal war of territorial aggression against Ukraine) to be over in three days. In a grim milestone and testament to wide-ranging Russian incompetence and the superiority of NATO weapons and Ukrainian ingenuity, that conflict just hit the 1,000 day mark.
Ukraine marked 1,000 days of war with Russia on Tuesday since Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his “special military operation” on Feb. 22, 2022, and initiated the largest conflict Europe has seen since World War II.
It isn’t only the scale of the fight that has resembled the infamous war that ended more than 75 years prior to Putin’s invasion. Parents loaded their children onto trains in the early days of the war, veins of trenches have scarred eastern Ukraine, and cities and towns have been completely decimated by air, land and sea-based bombardments.
But the war has done more than remind Western leaders of the global repercussions that come when major nations enter into mass conflict. A new type of warfare emerged out of the fight in Ukraine and the reliance on cheaply made drones to target cities, troop locations and military equipment that cost millions, cemented a new era in combat strategy.
The war has been a war crime for Russia, a bloody tragedy for Ukraine, and a resounding success for NATO, as Russia has used up the majority of the weapons and equipment it inherited from the Soviet Union. Russia has been grinding away for the last two of those years for what have essentially been infinitesimal gains at high cost.
Some think Trump is going to bail out Putin, but Trump sees everything from a negotiating/persuasion/bargaining perspective (along with tit-for-tat game theory), and Trump’s strategy is to threaten what his opposite number holds most dear before dangling a carrot.
I predict that any Trump-led negotiations will be…interesting.
A group of states is suing the Security Exchanges Commission (SEC), claiming the commission is overstepping its authority in regulating digital assets like cryptocurrencies — arguing that the SEC’s actions stifle state-level innovation and impose federal control without congressional approval.
Eighteen state attorneys general have joined the lawsuit, one of which is Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, in addition to DeFi Education Fund, a nonpartisan research and advocacy group.
Along with naming the SEC directly in the complaint, it also lists SEC Chair Gary Gensler, among other officials.
The states want the court to stop the SEC from enforcing regulations and allow them to manage digital assets with their own laws.
“The SEC’s sweeping assertion of regulatory jurisdiction is untenable,” the suit states. “The digital assets implicated here are just that — assets, not investment contracts covered by federal securities laws.”
“They do not entail any traditional investment relationship, in which the investor invests capital and the promoter assumes an ongoing obligation to use that capital in a common enterprise to generate returns that the investor will share.”
The lawsuit goes on to explain that the laws defining what counts as an “investment contract” were written in a clear way, and past U.S. Supreme Court decisions support this definition. Because of this, the complaint asserts, the SEC does not have broad authority to regulate all digital asset transactions as if they were securities. The argument is that the SEC is overreaching beyond what these laws and past rulings allow.
The complaint, filed in Kentucky district court, is asking the court to declare that digital asset transactions are not considered securities if they don’t involve a promise to manage assets for profit. They also want the court to stop the SEC from forcing digital asset platforms to register as securities-related businesses if they don’t meet those conditions. Additionally, the states claim the SEC broke rules by not following proper procedures.
Snip.
While on the campaign trail, President-elect Donald Trump vowed to protect the blockchain industry, making a bevy of promises to crypto enthusiasts.
Trump took the stage at the Libertarian National Convention back in May, where he promised to stop “Joe Biden’s crusade to crush crypto.” In July he said he would “fire Gary Gensler” on day one of his new administration.
“No longer will your government sit by and watch as Bitcoin jobs and businesses flee to other countries, because America’s laws are too unclear and too tough and too angry and too stiff,” Trump said while delivering the keynote address at a Bitcoin conference. “We will keep each and every Bitcoin job in the United States of America, that’s what we’re going to be doing.”
Texas has become a major center of the crypto and Bitcoin industry in America. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) is a vocal advocate for the emerging finance sector, and Gov. Greg Abbott signaled he will continue to be friendly to the crypto community, describing himself as a “crypto law proposal supporter.”
There’s a long-running debate about just what the hell cryptocurrencies are under federal law. Unlike other securities (say, a stock or bond), a unit of cryptocurrency is not a token that represents a tangible legal entity in the real world. It’s not a currency as traditionally understood, as it is not backed by specie or the power and authority of a government. It’s not a commodity, because what commodity can be moved across the world at the speed of light?
If it doesn’t actually fit the profile of anything that legislation has specified that the government regulates, then maybe, as Paxton et al assert, then the federal government shouldn’t regulate it. That would seem to be the proper constitutional interpretation under the Tenth Amendment.
While I’m still skeptical of the long-term usefulness of cryptocurrency (though with Bitcoin hovering around $90,000, I sure wish I had mined some back when it was easier to do), the Trump Administration is filled with very smart people who believe in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. History teaches us that it’s best to let new technologies shake out without government interference, so let’s hope Paxton and company’s lawsuit succeeds.
