Tag: political correctness

Report says there’s too many ‘dirty jokes’ in the Canadian Armed Forces

A Department of National Defence report has found that the Canadian military still tolerates too many off-colour jokes and microaggressions, despite a decade-long culture change campaign. Tamara Ugolini and Lise Merle covered the Blacklock’s Reporter story on Tuesday’s Rebel Roundup.

“The military tolerates too many off-colour jokes despite a decade-long campaign of culture change,” Ugolini read from the report. “Sexualized jokes and microaggressions are often overlooked.” The report found that “subtle forms of inappropriate behavior, microaggressions, exclusionary comments, and informal grey-zone behavior continue to undermine psychological safety,” and concluded that “inclusion is not yet embedded” and that diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts “are often seen as performative.”

Both hosts were incredulous.

“This is the state of the Canadian military, ladies and gentlemen,” Ugolini said. She traced the term “microaggression” back to around 2011, when it first entered public discourse. “Now here we are where this is the biggest concern of our military — the same military that can’t recruit or retain anybody.” Merle added, before bluntly stating it’s “What happens when you put weak people at the head of the military. This is what happens to a military inside of 11 years after a whole bunch of lily-livered, hand-wringing, weak-wristed liberal aristocrats take over.”

The broader context makes the report’s priorities look even more disconnected from reality. Recruitment and retention are at all-time lows. The military has opened its ranks to foreign nationals because it cannot attract enough Canadians. And in the name of expanding access, the military has also broadened eligibility to include recruits with anxiety disorders and other conditions. 

“You want to talk about psychological safety?” Ugolini said. “You’ve just expanded recruitment to include people who are inherently psychologically unsafe because they suffer from anxiety. I don’t want someone who is going to be cowering in the corner at the slightest threat to be at the front lines.”

Merle summed it up: “We could be invaded and they could take us over by lunchtime.”

Ugolini also raised the question of cost — how much public money has been spent over the course of a decade on DEI reports, evaluations, culture change campaigns, and the bureaucratic machinery behind them, while the fundamental metrics of military readiness have gotten worse. “The priorities here are just so absolutely absurd.”

The department’s culture change campaign, the report notes, began in 2015 with efforts to weed out what it called “problematic behavior.” Eleven years and apparently no shortage of reports later, the main finding is that soldiers are still telling jokes the DEI office doesn’t like.

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Trump Adds $174 Million to Black Colleges, ‘Engines’

The Trump administration is directing more than $174 million in additional funding to historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs).

Education Secretary Linda McMahon announced on Tuesday the one-time investment at the HBCU Summit at the White House, which brought together administration leaders, university presidents, and others.

“For nearly 200 years, HBCUs have been engines of opportunity in communities, advancing critical innovations and uplifting local industries across the nation,” McMahon said.

“This new investment will help ensure these vital institutions have the resources they need to continue delivering world-class education and to prepare students for success in a rapidly evolving economy.”

The award follows a one-time investment last year, bringing the combined total to more than $612 million in new funding to the schools in fiscal years 2025 and 2026.

Under Secretary of Education Nicholas Kent said the institutions remain central to higher education in the United States.

“HBCUs have helped shape the story of American education, and they will undoubtedly shape the future,” Kent said.

“These institutions of higher education remain central to our nation’s higher education ecosystem, fueling workforce development, driving economic growth in their communities, and cultivating leaders across sectors including STEM, education, public service, and business,” Kent said.

The department did not release a national breakdown of individual awards.

Sen. Katie Britt, R-Ala., released figures for her state, which she said received $21,259,618, the largest share.

Alabama is home to more historically Black colleges and universities, and historically Black community colleges, than any other state.

Among the Alabama schools, Alabama State University received $2,873,624, Alabama A&M University $2,831,147, Lawson State Community College $2,120,333, Tuskegee University $1,767,981, and Talladega College $1,516,171, according to Britt’s office.

“Alabama is home to some of the finest HBCUs and HBCCs in the nation, and the standard of excellence they produce makes these investments well-deserved,” Britt said.

The administration will also make a one-time award of more than $61 million in additional funding to Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs).

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Nikole Hannah-Jones’ Racism Is Why Her Daughter Can’t Do Math

Nikole Hannah-Jones has curated herself an extremely lucrative, notoriety-winning career by blaming white people for black people’s problems. In her latest article for The New York Times Magazine, she does it again. It’s titled, “In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own?”

In it, the creator of the scholarly abomination known as the 1619 Project admits that her warped educational ideas have harmed her daughter’s future and their relationship. When her daughter finally convinced her parents to let her attend a more challenging high school, she went from getting straight As in math to “barely keeping up”: “After an assessment, the center’s director called me in and told me that Najya knew very little algebra and had huge gaps in many of the building blocks of math that she should have learned in elementary school, like mastery of long division and fractions.”

This was after Najya had gotten As in a previous algebra class and been on her middle school’s honor roll. For elementary, Hannah-Jones and her husband had deliberately enrolled their daughter in one of New York City’s worst public schools, which Hannah-Jones calls “a poor Black one.” In 2016, Hannah-Jones’ daughter was literally on the cover of NYT Magazine to flaunt her mother’s decision.

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DISTURBING: Woke Stanford University Caught Using AI to Race-Swap Male Student with Black Female in Ad — Student Left Feeling ‘Silenced and Erased’

Stanford University, an institution that receives hundreds of millions in taxpayer funding, was caught red-handed using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to digitally erase a student and replace him with an AI-generated Black woman in university promotional materials.

The conservative campus paper The Stanford Review reported Monday that Stanford Residential & Dining Enterprises took a photograph shot by a university photographer, ran it through AI, and published the doctored result as advertising.

Sophomore Billy Ramirez recognized the original shot. In the banner that went out, he was gone. In his place: an AI-generated Black woman. Two students to his right were also digitally slimmed down and had their faces altered.

“I was driving to school from my hometown when my friend sent me the images comparing the banner to the original photos, and I was immediately baffled,” Ramirez told The Stanford Review.

“At first, I found it hilarious that they had used AI to completely change our appearances, including my race and gender. But after looking at the comparison, I was also upset because I don’t agree with Stanford making those choices about how we were represented. Seeing my identity changed and being left out of the picture made me feel, in a way, silenced and erased from a representation that was supposed to include me.”

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BBC MEMORY HOLES Comedy Sketches That SATIRISED Racism

The BBC has completely cut multiple sketches from 2006 comedy skit show That Mitchell and Webb Look after dumping the Bafta-winning series back onto its streaming service for its twentieth anniversary.

The official line is that some of the old material no longer “works today.” What no longer works, it turns out, is comedy that satirised and mocked the very mindset of racism.

A BBC spokesman said: “This is a 20-year-old sketch show; in consultation with the programme makers, we have included the ones that still work today and not the ones that don’t.” David Mitchell and Robert Webb have not publicly replied at time of writing.

The sketches were not random gags that aged badly. They were built as self-aware send-ups of the people doing the offending. Yet in 2026, not even this is acceptable.

Eleven sketches have been stripped out, including a skit named ‘How Not What To Look Like / Behind the Scenes: Burqa’, a makeover-show parody in which Mitchell plays a contestant in a burqa.

The scene then cuts to Mitchell and Webb as themselves. Webb asks whether they are “just taking the piss out of people’s sincerely held beliefs.” Mitchell replies: “I think you can worry too much about this kind of thing. I mean, what’s offensive to one person is just good, clean fun to another.” He then pulls off the burqa and is in blackface.

The entire foundation of the joke is predicated on the fact that putting blackface on a TV show is NOT acceptable. But any clever or nuanced factors just don’t matter anymore, because LOOK BLACKFACE IS BAD.

It’s the exact point the joke is making. Yet it still got cut because thinking and considering why something is funny isn’t permitted in 2026.

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Woke NYT, 1619 Project writer deliberately sent daughter to troubled schools as a ‘sacrifice’ — and it backfired spectacularly

The writer behind the New York Times’ controversial 1619 Project deliberately sent her daughter to poor Big Apple schools as a “sacrifice” to try to boost the education system — and no one is angrier than the kid.

The teen is now “boiling” mad — badly behind her peers after finally being allowed to enroll in a more rigorous high school, her mother revealed in a bombshell bizarre essay.

Nikole Hannah-Jones, 50, enrolled her only child in two struggling Brooklyn public schools beginning in 2015 — as part of a battle to change what she characterized as systemic racism, despite having the “connections and time and status” to get the girl into the city’s best schools, she wrote in the Times Magazine on Sunday.

That “status” included top-notch education of her own and financial security — she and her husband bought a $1.5 million Bed-Stuy brownstone in 2018.

But she said she still decided to offer up her daughter’s education for the cause of bettering the experience of black students in city schools.

By her own account, Hannah-Jones’ daughter Najya knows she was cheated by her parents.

“So you had money to send me to one of the best schools, and you chose not to?” the girl yelled in one fight, according to the essay. “Because other kids are disadvantaged, you didn’t want to put me in a great school?”

Hannah-Jones wrote of her decision, “We thought by sending Najya to a mostly low-income and Black school, we could help improve it for all the children there.

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Christian teachers fired in Canada over beliefs now face losing their licences

Two Ontario teachers who say they were fired after refusing to compromise on their Christian beliefs are facing another professional battle, this time, one that could cost them their teaching certificates altogether.

I first interviewed Matthew Alexander in 2023, after he and his wife, Nicole, were suspended from their teaching positions in different schools. Matthew had spent 24 years in education without disciplinary issues and had held leadership positions in schools. Nicole, who also had an unblemished record, was teaching kindergarten.

According to Matthew, after their son, Josh Alexander, made headlines for taking a stand against biological males accessing female washrooms at his high school, he and his wife appeared to become targets despite neither of them teaching at their son’s school.

Matthew says the board raised concerns about his association with Josh, the Christian youth organization Save Canada and even Christian pastors he had been photographed with. Nicole, meanwhile, was suspended after quietly removing a Pride flag someone had placed on her kindergarten classroom door.

The couple says they were ultimately given an ultimatum: agree to comply with the board’s requirement that they “celebrate and affirm LGBTQ issues in the classroom” or lose their jobs.

The Renfrew County District School Board later terminated the couple on October 26, 2023. “We had never discriminated against anybody, always had warm, welcoming classrooms,” Matthew told me. “But somehow if we won’t celebrate, we’re not allowed, not allowed to teach.”

Now, the Alexanders are facing an investigation by the Ontario College of Teachers, the regulatory body responsible for their professional teaching certificates.

Matthew said the implications could extend far beyond simply losing the ability to return to the classroom.

“The ramifications are broad, wide and very serious,” he said, warning that an adverse professional ruling could carry significant financial consequences and affect future licensing opportunities.

The couple has joined forces with the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms, which is assisting with their legal defence through crowdfunding efforts as they continue their fight.

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Alberta woman forced into human rights hearing over anti-Pride flyer

An Alberta woman will face an eight-day human rights hearing over a flyer she distributed opposing a rainbow crosswalk and raising concerns about transgender ideology.

The Alberta Human Rights Tribunal hearing against Westlock resident Benita Pedersen begins Monday.

Pedersen distributed the two-sided flyer in June 2023 after learning that the Town of Westlock planned to paint a rainbow crosswalk incorporating colours from the transgender pride flag.

The front urged residents to “Say NO to the rainbow crosswalk in Westlock” and provided instructions for contacting municipal officials and attending a council meeting.

The reverse side contained stronger language about transgender ideology, children and medical transitions. It described certain treatments as “chemical castration and genital mutilation” and claimed that children could be left “infertile and unable to reproduce.”

The flyer alleged that “the transgender agenda is part of the de-population agenda, which is part of Agenda 2030.”

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The Compliance Layer: DEI, Readiness, And The Military’s Personnel Problem

The latest Pentagon outrage is aimed at the smallest part of the story. In late August 2026, The Washington Post reported that conservative military veterans with large online followings had received civilian roles the department would not clearly describe, near Anthony Tata’s Personnel and Readiness shop. The names included retired Col. Rob Maness, retired Col. Kurt Schlichter, and retired Col. Thomas Anderson, known online as “Cynical Publius.” They say the work involved reviewing senior service colleges — curriculum, interviews with commandants and faculty — not running a messaging shop.

The Pentagon still has not published the documents that would settle it.

Fine. Ask those questions. But do not pretend this is when politics first entered the building. The better question is whether the military had already been politicized before a few outside veterans received government email accounts.

The issue is not whether influencers now orbit the Pentagon; it is why influence only becomes scandalous when it challenges the last decade’s abysmal record, personnel doctrine, and culture-war assumptions.

The real power is not who gets a Pentagon email address. It is who writes the rules governing who may serve, what counts as fit, what officers are taught, what commanders may question, and who gets retained or removed.

They are not under fire for the policy argument. They are under fire for the name. The charge attaches to the name so no one has to answer the policy. It is still not the same as using government machinery to rewrite accessions, medical rules, fitness scoring, or careers.

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Alberta woman hauled before human rights tribunal for opposing rainbow crosswalk

George Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four nearly 80 years ago as a warning about totalitarianism. The novel’s true horror isn’t censorship — it’s compelled speech. In the book’s climax, the rebellious Winston Smith is sent to the Ministry of Love, where torture is used to force him to agree that an obvious falsehood is the truth. Asked how many fingers his tormentor is holding up, the correct answer isn’t four or five — it’s whatever the party says it is.

Nineteen Eighty-Four was fiction. But in 2026, examples of compelled speech in Canada are not hard to find.

Take the claim that a mass grave of Indigenous children sits at a former residential school in Kamloops, B.C. — a claim unsupported by any forensic evidence to date. Simply asking questions about it, or declining to wear an orange shirt on September 30, is enough to be branded a denier and an enemy of reconciliation. Merely questioning the official Kamloops narrative could one day be treated as a criminal matter.

Then there’s gender identity, where a person born with a penis is a man and a person born with a vagina is a woman — a statement now considered controversial enough to invite official sanction. A U.S. Supreme Court justice, asked to define the word “woman,” could not do it. And in Canadian institutions, a man who says he identifies as a woman is now entitled to compete against women in sports, shower in women’s changerooms, and be housed in women’s prisons. Object, and expect to be labelled a hater, a bigot, and a transphobe.

Canada has no Ministry of Love, and no torture chambers. But there is more than one way to enforce conformity, and a case headed to the Alberta Human Rights Tribunal on September 14 shows how it’s done.

Westlock, Alberta, resident Benita Pedersen — a DJ, children’s entertainer, and event coordinator — is facing a human rights complaint over a flyer she handed out three years ago opposing a proposed rainbow crosswalk incorporating the colours of the transgender pride flag. According to the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedom, Pedersen’s flyer stated facts, including the potential for infertility following gender transition, and encouraged residents to contact their elected representatives if they shared her concerns.

On June 19, 2023, local resident Laurie Hodge filed a complaint against Pedersen under the Alberta Human Rights Act, alleging the flyer constituted discrimination based on gender, gender expression, and gender identity. Hodge was not on Westlock town council at the time. Both women ran in a January 2024 by-election; Pedersen finished second, Hodge third — though Hodge was later elected to council in a subsequent vote. Whether the complaint was ever really about a crosswalk, or about eliminating a political rival, is a fair question.

The Director of the Alberta Human Rights Commission has since taken carriage of the complaint on Hodge’s behalf and referred it to the Tribunal under Section 3 of the Act, which bars publications likely to expose people to hatred based on protected characteristics. The Director is expected to call an expert witness to testify that failing to paint the crosswalk could cause physical and mental harm to transgender and marginalized youth. Pedersen, in turn, must rely on evidence from an endocrinologist and a psychiatrist specializing in gender dysphoria simply to defend a flyer about a paint scheme. In May, the Director moved to exclude most of Pedersen’s witnesses as irrelevant; the Tribunal denied that motion in July.

“Albertans should be free to express their opinions on controversial topics without being accused of hatred and discrimination,” said constitutional lawyer Allison Pejovic of the Justice Centre.

Pedersen’s case is not isolated. The Supreme Court of British Columbia has granted four organizations intervenor status in nurse Amy Hamm’s appeal of a March 2025 disciplinary ruling by the British Columbia College of Nurses and Midwives, which found her guilty of unprofessional conduct over online statements she made about sex, gender, and sex-based rights between 2018 and 2021. In a decision released September 8, Justice J. Hughes granted standing to the College of Physicians and Surgeons of B.C., West Coast LEAF, Egale Canada, and the Association for Reformed Political Action Canada (ARPA), while dismissing an application from the Vancouver Lesbian Collective. ARPA is expected to argue that criticizing gender identity theory does not amount to discrimination or hatred. Hamm’s appeal is scheduled to be heard in Vancouver this November.

The reach of compelled speech isn’t limited to tribunals and regulators. In 2024, David was covering a story on Ash Davis, a biological male competing on the Fergus Highlanders women’s rugby team, when Ontario Provincial Police officers threatened him with arrest simply for asking questions on a public sports field. Later that same day, while conducting consensual interviews with spectators in the stands — not on the field, not interfering with play — police made good on the threat and arrested him. 

All of this unfolds while southern Ontario endures a record crime wave, raising the obvious question of what, exactly, police resources are being prioritized for.

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