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Former SecAF Kendall Unwittingly Exposes The Base Problem Of The DEI Agenda

The Biden Administration’s Secretary of the Air Force, Frank Kendall (a West Point graduate whom a classmate said is “left of Marx”), displayed remarkable tone deafness quoted in a recent article, Pete Hegseth’s blocks on promotions rankle former military leaders, where those interviewed erroneously think SecWar Hegseth is blocking promotions because the person is black or a woman.

That is the complete opposite of what Hegseth is trying to do in eliminating DEI–throwing out selections based on skin color or sex. (Now if the person was an enthusiastic advocate for the divisive Marxist-based CRT/DEI/Woke ideology and pushed that agenda, that’s another thing).

Kendall was quoted in this article as saying,

“There seems to be an assumption that if you were a minority or a woman and you were promoted, that it was because of your identity and not because you’re good at what you do.”

Well, yeah, because you created that assumption by pushing the DEI agenda so much where people WERE promoted based on their DEI identity and not their qualifications. (See sample articles below).

Servicemembers watched this happen over and over again causing more qualified, experienced people to give up and leave or not recommend military service.

This is the whole base problem of constantly pushing the divisive DEI agenda on the military: it created an atmosphere where minorities and women (and their coworkers observing) didn’t know if they were selected because they were good at what they do or because of their skin color or gender, thus creating doubts in everyone–a horrible situation. Said one senior military officer,

“If we can’t get rid of this DEI BS, none of us of color are ever going to know if we really earned the position we are promoted into.”

Hegseth is removing DEI and its advocates and once DEI is really in the wastebin and no longer pushed and thought about, everyone can assume people are selected based on their qualifications, period. In other words, Merit.

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RFK Jr. Announces Obesity Rates in America Are Down for the First Time in Half a Century

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced Tuesday that the obesity rate in the United States dropped last year for the first time in half a century.

Speaking at an event hosted by America First Policy Institute in Charlotte, Michigan, Kennedy said, “Since President [Donald] Trump came into office, obesity rates in this country have dropped by 2.5 percent. That’s the first drop in 50 years. And that drop alone will have significant impacts on health care costs in this country, because obesity drives about 80 percent of chronic disease.”

Health care costs account for approximately 35 percent of federal expenditures, according to the most recent data from the Treasury Department.

In fiscal year 2024, the federal government spent $1.9 trillion on health care programs, making it the largest category of federal spending.

“Thirty-five percent of American adults are obese,” RFK Jr. said. “When my uncle [John F. Kennedy] was president [in the early 1960s], 3 percent of children were obese. Now, it’s 20 percent.”

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How Many Ways Can You Avoid Reporting That Cops Killed a Baby?

“One-Year-Old Boy Killed After Officer Fires at Vehicle in Mississippi,” said the New York Times headline (6/16/26). So, a “one-year-old boy”—what most people would call a baby—was “killed after” a police officer fired at a vehicle, but there’s no verb you could use to connect those two things?

The Times subhed continued that pacifying work:

It is not entirely clear what led up to the shooting, but the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation said that police officers were responding to a shoplifting call.

“Ohh, shoplifting…!” we’re evidently supposed to say, before turning the page; that might make the baby murder make sense. I don’t need to say that baby was Black.

There will be more coverage of this heartbreaking, infuriating news about cops in Senatobia, Mississippi, called to the five-alarm crisis of someone purportedly shoplifting diapers, opening fire into a car whose driver “allegedly drove toward them.”

But in the meantime, please think hard about reporting that tells you to calm down, that suggests that, just maybe, nothing wrong happened at all. As ABC News (6/18/26) put it in a piece on how the “officer involved in shooting outside Walmart that killed 1-year-old boy” has been placed on leave: “One-year-old Kohen Wiley was killed, according to the family’s attorney.”

So maybe he’s not dead? Or he died from something other than the gun of the “involved officer”? Caution in reporting is valuable, but when it’s mainly deployed to protect the inflicters of state violence (FAIR.org, 7/11/16), you have to ask if it’s really a principle at all.

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FTC sues transgender health group for ‘misleading’ parents about necessity of transitioning kids

The Federal Trade Commission followed through on its nearly year-old pledge to crack down on allegedly false and misleading statements about so-called gender affirming care, suing the World Professional Association for Transgender Health in a Texas federal court known for friendliness to Republican attorneys general.

Texas, Iowa, Alaska and Nebraska joined the FTC in Wednesday’s lawsuit, alleging state-specific harms caused by WPATH, which was notably not cited by Democrats or their witnesses in a recent Senate hearing on pediatric gender medicine.

WPATH developed its Standards of Care 8 “without regard for scientific protocols,” “knows that its recommendations are not supported by scientific evidence or a medical consensus” and yet “misrepresents the risks and benefits of pediatric medical transition” by falsely claiming gender transitions for kids are “lifesaving,” the suit says. 

The Biden administration was caught after the fact successfully pressuring WPATH to remove age minimums in SOC-8, as the suit documents.

The group has an economic interest in pediatric gender transitions, as it advocates expanding insurance coverage to pay for them, “promotes the purchase of its members’ pediatric medical transition services” and financially benefits “by leveraging its position as the de facto authority on transition medicine in the United States,” the suit says.

“WPATH has provided to clinicians the means by which they deceive children and their parents into purchasing pediatric medical transition services,” it says.

The group also hid side effects from gender-affirming treatments, including “mood disturbances,” vaginal and erectile pain and “inability to orgasm” from cross-sex hormones, according to the FTC.

“For decades, the FTC has taken action against entities that make deceptive and unsubstantiated health-related claims,” Chairman Andrew Ferguson said. “The complaint filed today reflects that same long-standing mandate: when an entity makes a claim about a medical treatment, the claim must be truthful, evidence-based and not misleading.”

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UK City Council Launches Court Bid to Ban Union Jacks That ‘Intimidate Diverse Communities’

Brits are cheering on their team in the 2026 FIFA World Cup and showing their support by flying their country’s flag. And that’s problematic for Bristol City Council, which has voted to ban the flying of the St. George’s Cross.

Residents say Torrington Avenue in the Knowle West area of the city has become an iconic symbol of patriotism over the years – with photographs of flags draped across the street often pictured during big footballing moments.

But Bristol City Council’s Green leader Tony Dyer has released a statement forbidding people from flying flags “on lampposts or railings or any public property”.

Mr Dyer told residents: “please do not attach anything to lampposts – it causes health and safety issues”.

The council leader went on to say: “we are currently taking down flags in sensitive locations as a priority and will be reviewing our strategy for removing other flags on our property”.

LBC reports that Torrington Avenue is known as the U.K.’s most patriotic street because of its flag displays.

That’s aside from the headline to this piece, though. We’ve covered the “Raise the Colors” movement in the U.K., in which patriots hang flags from flagpoles and lightposts, only to have them taken down by authorities. Oxfordshire County Council is reported to have supercharged its legal battle to ban raising British flags on lampposts.

The council has applied for an injunction to block the Raise the Colours group from hanging the flag in a bid to “protect” its residents and “values,” reports GB News.

A council spokesman said on Wednesday: “Residents across Oxfordshire, from Adderbury to Wallingford, have complained to the council about safety risks, intimidation and distress linked to this activity.

“The ongoing scale and persistence of the behaviour by Raise the Colours has created safety risks, caused distress within communities, and led to abuse and intimidation directed at council teams and residents.”

Former England boss Harry Redknapp decried the anti-flag action in a major intervention last night.

“We are proud to be British – that is what we are. Fly your flags, be proud of your country. Don’t be ashamed to be British,” he said.

The county has so far spent £15,000 to remove more than 300 Union and St George’s Cross flags from lampposts.

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Case of Air Force Officer Highlights Disturbing Mental Health Diagnosis Manipulation in the U.S. Military

Could this case expose a troubling trend within military mental health care, where diagnoses can be manipulated to justify punitive measures rather than provide needed support?

This potentially unsettling reality is illustrated by the experience of Dacia “Thunder” Sexton, a decorated Air Force Lieutenant Colonel and sexual assault survivor. Sexton’s story was first shared on The Star Chamber Podcast of Walk the Talk Foundation (WtTF) on April 29.

In the episode, it was said that her case “exposes what happens when excellence threatens insecure leaders, frauds get unmasked, and retaliation becomes the response.”

For one year, Sexton received treatment for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), only to have the command-directed processes reshape her diagnosis into a personality disorder, raising serious concerns about the integrity of mental health evaluations in the military.

The Gateway Pundit spoke to Jeremiah “Jay” Bybee, Sexton’s WtTF advisor, about this abhorrent turn of events. The retired Air Force Master Sergeant said, “Her case isn’t just about retaliation; it’s about diagnostic transformation under command pressure.”

Phases of “Thunder’s” Story

Bybee outlined four distinct “phases” of her narrative. The first phase involved a diagnosis of PTSD related to Military Sexual Trauma (MST) in 2022. The second phase saw Sexton’s symptoms continuing and worsening, leading to increased cognitive difficulties, memory loss, hypervigilance, time blindness, and cognitive exhaustion saturation. The third phase included a command-directed assessment that identified Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) in 2024. Shortly thereafter, in the fourth phase, all her earlier symptoms were reinterpreted.

“The same symptoms—newly identified Traumatic Brain Injuries (TBIs)—were reframed as maladaptive behavior, uncooperative conduct, and accountability failures,” he explained.

For Sexton, this triggered disciplinary action, career damage, and significant financial harm. For Bybee, “The case raises serious questions about whether medical diagnoses were altered—intentionally or negligently—to justify administrative punishment.”

“One thing is certain: when the diagnosis changed, so did the way Dacia was treated,” he argued. “Medical symptoms became disciplinary evidence, requests for care became noncompliance, and trauma responses became credibility issues.”

The consequences included the dismantling of her career, reputation, and re-traumatization through administrative and disciplinary actions to include:

  • A Letter of Reprimand (LOR)
  • Command surveillance of daily movements
  • Non-Judicial Punishment (NJP)
  • Loss of a $100K+ career bonus
  • Total financial harm exceeding $170K

“Recent medical findings identify multiple previously undiagnosed TBIs,” Bybee pointed out. These include physical TBI linked to a vehicle accident that resulted in loss of consciousness, likely chemical and/or neurological injury tied to assault conditions, and chronic neurocognitive deficits to include memory loss and executive dysfunction. “These directly map to the behaviors used to justify punishment,” he argued.

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Why Meta Suddenly Loves the Kids Online Safety Act

For years, Meta cast itself as the reluctant holdout against the Kids Online Safety Act, the one company that just could not bring itself to endorse a bill that was, at least on the face of it, written to protect children, but has an ulterior motive.

That resistance lasted right up until the Senate sweetened the pot. Once lawmakers bundled KOSA with a federal block on state AI laws and a national digital ID push, two measures Meta has spent millions lobbying to win, the company located its conscience and decided the bill was tolerable after all.

POLITICO reported that the conversion arrived the moment the Senate paired KOSA with the App Store Accountability Act, a digital ID bill aimed squarely at app stores. Meta now sits beside Microsoft, Apple, X, Snap, and Pinterest, all of them cheering for the legislation. It makes for an awkward look; a law sold to the public as a leash on the biggest platforms, when most of the biggest platforms turn out to be holding the leash.

As we’ve said many times before, and it seems we’re having to now say on a daily basis, verifying how old you are means proving who you are. The systems that estimate your age want a government ID, a face scan, or enough surveillance of your behavior to make an educated guess. None of them confirm your age and nothing else; they confirm your identity and keep a copy, so the platform that once let you be a username now wants your legal name on file.

So why would a company that lives off your data fight to make you surrender more of it? The App Store Accountability Act would order Apple and Google to verify ages at the store, which would load the cost and the legal risk onto the two companies that run the stores. Its own apps pick up no new obligation at all. Meta collects the identity-checked internet it has wanted for years and gets to look like a bystander while Apple and Google play the heavy.

The deeper payoff is older than this bill. Meta has dreamed of a real-name internet since Facebook’s early days, back when it enforced an authentic-identity rule until the public revolt made the policy too expensive to keep.

“Age verification” revives that dream by statute and applies it to everyone, with the invoice mailed to somebody else. A network of confirmed, identity-linked humans is also a network where the bots that annoy advertisers thin out, and ad space attached to real people fetches a premium. Protecting children is the version for the cameras; the version that moves the company sits on the balance sheet.

The less advertised half of the package lives in the preemption language. A handful of states have started writing their own AI rules, some governing how companies grab biometric data and let algorithms make decisions about residents. A federal block would bulldoze those efforts and erase one of the few places ordinary people can still object to how these systems treat their information.

Meta strolls away with a single, gentler national standard while residents lose the local protections they had started to build and the whole trade gets filed under everyone wins, as long as “everyone” means Meta.

The bundle also tucks in the NO FAKES Act and this is where the child-safety wrapping paper comes off completely. The bill would let anyone sue over an “unauthorized digital replica” and would hit platforms with heavy penalties for failing to obey its demands, among them fast removal of flagged content and policies to cut off repeat offenders.

A company staring down those fines for guessing wrong on a hard case will pull lawful speech first and worry about the details later. What the bill builds is a takedown machine, with the lever handed to whoever complains the loudest.

The actors’ union SAG-AFTRA has been pushing the bill hard from the other side, gathering more than 16,000 signatures on an open letter that frames it as a shield against deepfakes used in scams, fake endorsements, and the replacement of human performers. “Unchecked AI can ruin lives,” union president Sean Astin said and on that narrow point, he has a fair case. The trouble is what the rest of the bill does and how it curbs satire and parody.

The latest version came back last month from a bipartisan group that includes Senators Marsha Blackburn, Chris Coons, Thom Tillis, and Amy Klobuchar, with OpenAI, YouTube, and IBM applauding from the wings. The Senate Judiciary Committee takes it up Thursday.

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Google Removes the Final Workaround for Full Ad Blocking in Chrome

Google is removing the last technical workaround that kept effective ad blockers alive in Chrome.

When Chrome 150 ships on June 30, the browser will delete a hidden setting called the ExtensionManifestV2Disabled flag, a switch that power users had been toggling to keep old-style extensions running after Google officially discontinued them.

Without it, uBlock Origin and every other extension built on the old Manifest V2 framework, the set of rules that governed how browser extensions worked for years, will stop functioning permanently. Chrome 151, expected in July, will strip the remaining MV2 flags entirely. No policy override and no hidden setting will bring them back.

The company that sells more advertising than any other on Earth now controls whether you can block those ads. And it just decided you can’t, at least not effectively.

What Google took away and why it took it

The technical change is the replacement of Chrome’s webRequest API with the declarativeNetRequest API.

Under the old system, extensions like uBlock Origin could watch your browser’s traffic as it happened, see an ad or tracker trying to load, and block it on the spot before it ever reached your screen.

Under the new system, extensions have to hand Google a pre-written list of things to block and Chrome decides whether to follow those instructions. The lists are capped at a fixed number of rules, and the extension can’t react to anything that isn’t already on the list.

uBlock Origin’s developer, Raymond Hill, has been clear that a Manifest V3 version cannot replicate the original’s full capabilities. A stripped-down version called uBlock Origin Lite exists for MV3, but it handles only a fraction of the filter lists, the community-maintained databases of known ads and trackers, that the original supported.

It also can’t perform cosmetic filtering, the process of hiding ad containers and promotional elements that remain on a page even after the ad itself is blocked. Without it, you get blank boxes where ads used to be, or sponsored content that looks native to the page. For more than 40 million Chrome users who relied on the original, the replacement is a downgrade by design.

Google engineer Devlin Cronin confirmed the timeline in a Chromium code review commit, a logged change to Chrome’s underlying source code that other developers can inspect, writing that “MV2 extensions are no longer allowed in any supported version of Chrome, and we are removing support for them and the associated functionality. We won’t be able to provide / maintain this functionality indefinitely due to the complexity and tech debt, as well as the security risks it entails (we’ve actually found a number of bugs that are specific to MV2 lately). Of course, other browsers can continue supporting these if they so desire.”

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Google’s New AI-Fueled Search Bar Threatens to Further Upend Journalism Industry

Google made an announcement last month that could turn the journalism world upside down, accelerating the internet’s shift toward an overwhelmingly AI-driven landscape and serving the Trump agenda of media suppression.

At its developer conference in May, the company announced the most disruptive changes to Google Search in over 25 years. Google Search will further demote its index of the web — a list of links that information-seekers can explore as they choose. Instead of prominently displaying links, it will increasingly become a destination that answers questions directly through AI, linking only to the sources it decides to reference in its overview. On the majority of our tests, the AI overview was followed by a heavy block of sponsored results and a combination of videos, short clips, trending posts, and discussions. Index links — for example, to articles on news sites and research studies — were given only a small fraction of real estate. Additionally, Google is aggressively pushing readers to use AI Mode, which completely removes the index links.

In practical terms, this means users of the world’s largest search engine will see, in response to their queries, a summary generated by an AI bot developed by a corporate behemoth with close ties to the Trump White House.

This seismic move builds upon the launches of AI Overview in 2024 and AI Mode in 2025, shifting toward nearly eliminating the user’s ability to search autonomously, and toward an overwhelmingly AI-driven experience of the internet (and therefore, for many people, of life).

We must take into account the political context in which this shift transpires. Alphabet (Google’s parent company), along with Facebook’s parent company (Meta), as well as Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Nvidia, were among major tech companies that donated to President Donald Trump’s inauguration. They have also consistently capitulated to Trump’s recent manipulations.

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