Tag: political correctness

DEI’s defenders are massive First Amendment hypocrites

The Trump administration’s efforts to rein in diversity, equity, and inclusion policies plaguing public schools suffered a setback last month when judges in three states ruled in favor of advocacy groups defending the status quo. In one complaint, the American Federation of Teachers claimed the Trump administration policy change “will chill speech and expression.”

As a recently retired teacher who was a member of the union for decades, color me skeptical of the union’s commitment to the First Amendment. When I spoke against a union-approved DEI program and came under fire from school officials for my opinion, the union hung me out to dry.

Nineteen states, including my home state of Connecticut, followed the teachers’ union’s lead by suing the Department of Education over its plan to condition federal school funding on an end to DEI. The state coalition similarly claims that Trump’s policy change “threaten[s] to chill … speech[.]” But in my case, Connecticut school officials made it clear they can and will silence any speech they don’t like.

Such rank hypocrisy may not affect outcomes in court, but it should alert voters and teachers that when it comes to DEI, those cloaking themselves in the mantle of free speech view it as a one-way street.

This past fall, I ended a 35-year career teaching and training students in Hartford Public Schools. In that time, I successfully worked with kids from nearly every ethnic background.

But then I was told minority students couldn’t learn from me because I didn’t share their skin color, and that as a male I could not effectively teach female students. My privilege and implicit biases, according to DEI indoctrination, made me inadequate for the job — and possibly even a threat to the success of the children I thought I was helping.

What had changed? Not me. In 2017, new school administrators brought with them a race-focused agenda and sought to implement it through classroom teachers. They enlisted the Hartford Federation of Teachers, a local affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers, to support their new direction.

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UCLA med school allegedly discriminates against white, Asian applicants: Lawsuit

A class action lawsuit from Do No Harm and Students for Fair Admissions alleges that the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA is illegally discriminating against white and Asian applicants by holding some applicants to a much lower admissions standard.

“(Jennifer) Lucero and the Admissions Committee routinely admit black applicants with below-average GPA and MCAT scores — even significantly below-average scores — while requiring whites and Asians to have near-perfect scores to even be seriously considered,” wrote the plaintiffs in their class action complaint.

Jennifer Lucero was appointed associate dean of admissions of David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA in 2020. She also serves as vice chair for inclusive excellence — formerly called diversity, equity and inclusion — for the Geffen Department of Anesthesiology and Perioperative Medicine.

In 2020, UCLA was ranked by U.S. News and World Report as the sixth-best medical school for research.

But UCLA fell to 18th by the time U.S. News and World Report stopped ordinal ranking of medical schools and eliminated reputational ranking of departments within medical schools after numerous former top medical schools boycotted submitting data to USNWR over “equity” concerns.

The number of students failing exams has increased tenfold since 2020 for some subjects, according to reporting from the Free Beacon.

Under Proposition 209, passed by California voters in 1996, it is illegal for state entities to consider race in hiring, contracting and education. In 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard that race-based affirmative action policies for college admissions violate the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.

The complaint details several notable incidents in which Lucero engaged in unusual behavior during admissions committee meetings.

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Two State Capitals Adopt LGBT Flags as Official City Flags in Bid to Circumvent Law

“Cutting off your nose to spite your face” is a metaphorical expression.

I’m not letting most of you, our infinitely wise readership, at home in on this self-evident fact. Instead, this is more of a public service announcement to the family, friends, and co-workers of those employed or elected by the cities of Boise, Idaho, and Salt Lake City, Utah: Keep sharp objects away from these people for the next few weeks or anytime you hear someone saying something about their visage. Thank me later.

I mention this because, within hours of each other, lawmakers in both state capitals, 330 miles away, passed laws that made the LGBT rainbow “pride” flag and other flags official city flags in order to sidestep state laws that would have barred the display of such flags.

According to KSL-TV in Salt Lake City, “[t]he new flags would add the sego lily logo from Salt Lake City’s city flag to the Juneteenth, Progress Pride and transgender flags” in order to make them official city flags, essentially a move to sidestep a bill that would ban flying most flags that were not the official national, state, city, or school flags.

BoiseDev reported a similar reasoning behind the move “retroactively designating the Pride flag and the Donate Life flag, commemorating April as Donate Life Month, honoring the benefits of organ donation, as official flags of the City of Boise. This puts these two flags alongside the traditional blue City of Boise flag featuring the Idaho State Capitol as official flags of the city’s government.”

“This move comes after weeks of tension over [the mayor’s] decision to continue flying the Progress Pride flag in front of city hall in defiance of HB 96 brought by Rep. Heather Scott, R-Blanchard.

“That bill, passed in the 2025 legislative session, restricted the flags local governments in Idaho can fly to a specific list of flags, including the United States flag, the State of Idaho flag, official city flags, the POW/MIA flag, branches of the U.S. military, Indian tribal flags, flags for colleges, universities or public schools and the flags of other nations for special occasions.”

Now, it’s worth mentioning that, when conservatives protested against the universal protection for killing babies in the womb and for same-sex marriage, the Supreme Court miraculously discovered in the Constitution — we were reminded that we were one nation and should respect the law of that nation — “penumbras” and “emanations” conveniently located in a vaguely written amendment, which originally dealt with the aftermath of the Civil War but is now used as a cudgel for every left-wing cause that cannot pass muster at the ballot box.

Now, two states have passed perfectly legal and clear laws about what flags may be displayed, a clear shot across the bow of liberal locales that put rainbow or transgender flags atop poles across the city for “pride” month, often overshadowing or ignoring the flag of the nation or state and alienating the electorate.

Very well, Boise and Salt Lake City are saying after the massive backlash: We’re going to make symbols of enforced acceptance of sexual deviance official city flags because nyahhhh!

“The feedback we have gotten since we ventured into this space has been overwhelming from local Boiseans in support of this because we know that’s not just a flag. We know it says who we are, and we know that this bill was about just one flag,” Boise Mayor Lauren McLean said.

“We now have three official flags in this city in response to this bill, but most importantly, that action demonstrates who we are, the values we hold, our commitment to those seen and unseen to show you are welcome and wanted here.”

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Biden admin prioritized ‘social engineering’ over air traffic safety, key aviation Republican says

The chairman of the House’s Aviation Safety Caucus is accusing the former Biden administration of helping fuel the current air traffic control (ATC) crisis, by its choice to fund progressive diversity initiatives instead of modernizing the aging system.

Rep. Nick Langworthy, R-N.Y., told Fox News Digital that the former administration’s marquee bill, the bipartisan infrastructure bill, was among several “missed opportunities” to fund a revamp of the ATC system.

“That was before I came to Congress, but, you know, you had just mistaken priorities in that, all this DEI policy, DEI staffing, that all got baked into the cake,” Langworthy said. “They could have taken that money and spent it on real modernization of what is critical infrastructure in this country.”

“We had the longest period of incident-free aviation in this country’s history, where we didn’t have a commercial air crash from the time the crash happened in Buffalo, in my district, back in 2009, to just this year, and what happened at [Ronald Reagan Airport]. And it was avoidable,” he said.

It comes after a blackout at Newark Liberty International Airport reportedly caused a roughly 90-second outage to its air traffic control screens.

And earlier this year, a military helicopter collided with a passenger plane coming from Wichita, Kansas, in a deadly incident just off the shores of the nation’s capital.

Langworthy clarified that he does not believe DEI policies “necessarily” directly hit ATC.

“It’s what they spent the money [on]. I mean, you know, there’s infrastructure projects, ones in my backyard, where they want to bury and tunnel over our main artery in the town because it’s going to reunite a community somehow,” he said.

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When did charities turn into insufferable activist groups?

When did charities become so political? From Oxfam to the British Heart Foundation, many British charities are going well beyond their core missions of saving lives and helping the needy and have branched out into political lobbying, whether it’s for sugar taxes or so-called climate justice. The third sector has relegated old-fashioned charity work to second place, behind lobbying the government for ‘progressive’ policies.

This trend should not be allowed to pass unnoticed, especially when there is such a clear revolving door between charities and politics. According to research from Transparency International in 2023, almost one in three ex-Conservative ministers ended up in jobs that overlapped with their government brief – many in charities. After last year’s General Election delivered a landslide of new Labour MPs, more than 35 per cent of parliamentarians now have a ‘background’ in the charity sector, including eight members of the cabinet.

Labour figures have proved most adept at floating seamlessly between NGOs and government. Gordon Brown’s foreign secretary, David Miliband, now specialises in ‘refugee resettlement and assistance’ at the International Rescue Committee. Others, like UNICEF and Save the Children’s Justin Forsyth, have gone back and forth between charity and government. In 2023, Oxfam appointed Halima Begum as its chief executive, who tried to become Labour MP in 2019.

The result of this echo chamber is clear in charities’ output. Last year, Oxfam, which was founded to help famine relief efforts in the developing world, called for a 60 per cent tax in the UK on income, stocks, shares, rent and other revenue ‘that the rich disproportionately rely on’. The British Heart Foundation pledges to reach Net Zero by 2045 and pushes for nanny-state policies like sugar and salt taxes. Christian Aid was set up to provide life-saving support when wars blighted some of the world’s poorest communities. Now it also campaigns for ‘climate justice’, whatever that means.

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“Male Supremacism Studies Conference” Advocates Aggressive Deplatforming to Suppress Dissent, Criticized for Promoting Censorship Over Dialogue

At the Male Supremacism Studies Conference, held by the Institute for Research on Male Supremacism (IRMS), some of the most extreme calls for censorship yet emerged from figures who see open digital discourse as a problem to be solved, not a value to protect.

Virginia Commonwealth University professor Dr. Kay Coghill and Patrick Hermansson, a senior researcher for the UK-based group Hope Not Hate, openly pushed for aggressive deplatforming as a means of silencing dissenting viewpoints, particularly those labeled as conservative or “supremacist.”

Dr. Karlyn Borysenko, an independent journalist and commentator, attended the conference to document what she describes as a deliberate effort to suppress opposing political views under the banner of “combating extremism.” What she observed was not a nuanced discussion about violence or threats, but rather an open endorsement of censorship as a political weapon.

Coghill, speaking candidly at the event, declared, “I think a solution that will really disrupt capitalism, honestly, is de-platforming people and making specific websites, forums, whatever, illegal and actually having consequences, material consequences.”

She went on to emphasize the need to cut access to digital platforms entirely: “making sure people do not have access to these social media websites and forums that allow them to perpetuate and push this information in digital spaces, because that’s where the youth is getting this information from.”

Coghill also criticized Elon Musk’s decision to reinstate previously banned figures on X, such as President Donald Trump and Milo Yiannopoulos, suggesting that once individuals are removed, they should stay removed, permanently.

Patrick Hermansson, representing Hope Not Hate, a group that openly champions deplatforming, conceded that while this tactic remains central to their mission, its effectiveness is waning. “I spent my whole career doing deplatforming. It’s like the core strategy we do,” he stated.

But as platforms multiply and decentralize, he acknowledged, “they have their own platforms and … it’s very hard to control them.” He lamented the lack of pressure on major social media companies to continue aggressive bans and noted the growing financial and technical independence of those targeted by such efforts.

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Transportation Secretary Cancels $54 Million in University Grants Tied to DEI, Climate Agenda

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy on Friday announced the termination of seven federally funded university research grants totaling $54 million, saying the programs are wasteful and ideologically divisive projects that fall outside the scope of the Department of Transportation’s core mission.

“The previous administration turned the Department of Transportation into the Department of Woke,” Duffy said in a May 2 statement. “I’ve focused the Department on what matters; safety, making travel great again, and building big, beautiful infrastructure projects.”

The grants supported research projects that Duffy said were used to advance a “radical DEI and green agenda” that wasted taxpayer resources and were not aligned with the transportation priorities of Americans.

The seven canceled grants had been awarded to research centers at the University of California–Davis, City College of New York, University of Southern California, New York University, San Jose State University, University of New Orleans, and Johns Hopkins University.

He cited specific examples of what he called ideological misuse of funds, including a $12 million grant to UC Davis for research on “accelerating equitable decarbonization,” a $9 million grant to the City College of New York for studying “equitable transportation for the disadvantaged workforce,” and a $6 million grant to San Jose State University that examined infrastructure and safety issues facing women and gender non-conforming individuals.

“We’re taking out all the racist DEI and green new scam and injecting a dose of reality back into our higher education system,” Duffy said in a video statement.

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President Trump Announces He’s Stripping Harvard’s Tax-Exempt Status After Woke College Defied Five Key Demands From Trump and Sued Instead

One of the nation’s premier colleges is about to learn that defying President Trump is a grave mistake.

This morning, Trump posted on Truth Social that he will be taking away far-left Harvard University’s tax-exempt status after the school refused to comply with five key demands from his administration and sued instead.

“We are going to be taking away Harvard’s Tax Exempt Status,” Trump wrote. “It’s what they deserve!”

As The New York Post notes, Harvard’s tax exemptions have played a key role in helping the school amass the largest university endowment in the entire country. It currently stands at roughly $53 billion, with $2.4 billion ‘earned’ in the 2024 fiscal year.

As ABC notes, Trump had previously demanded Harvard lose its tax-exempt status after the university refused to comply with the administration’s commonsense demands, including actions on antisemitism and the use of DEI on campus.

The Gateway Pundit previously reported that the Department of Health and Human Services on April 11, along with other federal agencies, issued Harvard a letter demanding five key reforms if it wished to continue receiving federal research funding.

The demands were:

  • Shuttering of all diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs;
  • A university-wide “viewpoint audit” to eliminate leftist ideological monocultures;
  • Forced hiring and admissions practices to ensure conservative representation;
  • Defunding and disbanding of radical pro-Hamas student groups;
  • And complete transparency on foreign funding sources.

After Harvard refused, the Trump administration on April 15 froze $2.2 billion</> in federal grants to Harvard due to its coddling of antisemitism and bigotry on campus.

Harvard sued the Trump Administration a week later to restore the funding.

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British Royal Marine Held Under “Terrorism Act” For Questioning DEI Policies

In 2015 the US Marines carried out a study to discern if women could fulfill combat duty roles within mixed gender units.  The study followed an aggressive push by the Pentagon and the Obama Administration to expand female participation on the front line.  This included the much hyped inclusion of women in Army Rangers training – The program was later exposed for giving special treatment to the female trainees and lowering their fitness standards.  In essence, it was the beginning of DEI within elite units in the military.

However, the Marines study relied on merit based standards and was not skewed to make the Pentagon brass happy.  It told the truth:  Women and mixed gender units offer dismal performance in the field under pressure.

Data collected during a months-long experiment showed Marine teams with female members performed at lower overall levels, completed tasks more slowly and fired weapons with less accuracy than their all-male counterparts. In addition, female Marines sustained significantly higher injury rates and demonstrated lower levels of physical performance capacity overall, officials said.  Any unit with women was dragged down.

DEI is a disaster for most endeavors, but it is especially deadly in the military where performance and merit determine life and death.  It also causes divisions and distrust; if a soldier cannot be counted on to perform tasks to a certain level of expertise then they can put the entire unit at risk.

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Trump Admin Investigates Chicago Public Schools For Racial Discrimination

The U.S. Department of Education has launched an investigation into Chicago Public Schools (CPS) for alleged racial discrimination in its “Black Student Success Plan,” which reportedly only focuses on the academic achievement of black students.

The Title VI investigation comes after education advocacy organization Defending Education filed a complaint with the department’s Office for Civil Rights in February. The Education Department’s press release states that the “Black Student Success Plan” deals with “remedial measures only for black students, despite acknowledging that Chicago students of all races struggle academically.”

“Chicago Public Schools have a record of academic failure, leaving students from all backgrounds and races struggling and ill-prepared to meet the challenges and enjoy the rewards of contemporary American life,” Craig Trainor, acting assistant secretary for civil rights, said. “Rather than address its record honestly, CPS seeks to allocate additional resources to favored students on the basis of race. The Trump-McMahon Department of Education will not allow federal funds, provided for the benefit of all students, to be used in this pernicious and unlawful manner.”

“To CPS, I say this: Every American student deserves access to a quality education, and the Trump Administration will fight tirelessly to uphold that ideal and ensure all students are treated equally under law,” he added.

Also in February, the department sent a notice to state education officials that they will no longer be allowed to have programs that exclude people based on race or make race-based hiring decisions, as had become the norm for diversity, equity, and inclusion-crazed school districts. Some states, schools, and left-wing interest groups have attempted to fight the directive.

Chicago is no different, and its Democrat mayor, Brandon Johnson, threatened to sue the Trump administration if it cut its $1.3 billion (about 16 percent of CPS’s annual budget) in federal funding due to the city’s DEI obsession.

The state got involved as well, with the Illinois State Board of Education sending a letter to the Education Department claiming it was in compliance with Title VI and that it really has no idea what the Trump administration means by DEI — the common refrain from left-wing protectors of the ideology, despite the fact that what is meant by “DEI” is well documented.

The state board also has an entire page dedicated to its commitment to the ideology, and CPS has an “Office of Equity” complete with a DEI resource guide.

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