Tag: political correctness

GEN (RET) LLOYD AUSTIN’S TROUBLING LEGACY OF DEI, COVID, LOSING WARS, AND WAR PROFITEERING

GEN (Retired) Lloyd Austin will be replaced as SECDEF once the new administration’s pick is confirmed. He will finish nearly 50 years of service to our country. He achieved many firsts – first Black theater commander during war and the first Black SECDEF among other firsts. He does however, leave a troubling legacy as both an Army general and SECDEF.

DEI

Austin accelerated the spread of DEI within the US military as SECDEF. As a Black SECDEF warning about extremism and lack of opportunity for minorities, he is to be both commended for his path from West Point and chided as a supreme hypocrite.

The Army is like most other branches of the military where officers typically need to branch into a combat specialty and move up the ranks commanding combat units to reach general officer and high commands. Austin graduated from West Point in 1975 and chose the correct branch – infantry. He commanded at all levels from company grade to field grade to general officer. Examining nothing else in his career, it would seem that he chose the correct path to be a general…and he indeed attained the rank of four-star general.

In the DEI debate, proponents point out the lack of equity in race of general officers. The percentage of Black generals is lower than the percent of Blacks in West Point’s classes. The data for each class is difficult to obtain, but the author is familiar with the demographics of his own 1996 West Point year group. A mere 3 Black males in the West Point Class joined the 180 or so cadets that branched Infantry. Two left before 10 years’ service and the last left as a LTC. Minorities have to be willing to branch the correct branches AND remain in the military if they wish to compete for general officer rank later on in their career. So, in this sense, Austin chose the harder combat arms branch and was later rewarded for it.

In his last speech as SECDEF at West Point in December 2024 he talked about the difficulties facing minorities in today’s military.

“So look, if I get a little fired up about this, it’s just because this isn’t 1950. It isn’t 1948. It is 2024. And we need each and every qualified citizen who steps up to wear the cloth of our nation. And any military that turns away tough, talented patriots—women or men—is just making itself weaker and smaller. So enough already.”1

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From Woke to Law: Realigning the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division to Correct Decades of Judicial Overreach

The Justice Department under the next Trump administration has a duty to remove protected classes for groups that have exploited civil rights laws to garner extra privileges and rights, over and above the rights of American citizens. Of note include illegal aliens and LGBT persons. Neither of these groups should have ever enjoyed the privileges of heightened scrutiny analysis within the purview of Title VII or Civil Rights law generally. These laws were never intended for such persons, however, over years they have been misapplied and misinterpreted, resulting in very real harms to society. In fact, heightened scrutiny analysis has no basis whatsoever in the text of the Constitution itself and can be rightly deemed anathema with the letter and spirit of the Constitution, though that is a separate topic worthy of its own discussion.

For decades, America’s civil rights jurisprudence has clouded and distorted the Constitutions’ original meaning and purpose. Activist judges, under the pretext of “judicial review,” have perverted the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment and other laws and constitutional provisions in service to a liberal ideology, now recognizably termed as “woke.” New standards of review were manifested into existence, such as “intermediate scrutiny,” which is used to adjudicate cases of alleged sex or gender-based discrimination. None of these developments have a relationship, directly or indirectly, to the text or original intent of the Constitution itself.

Instead, they have been weaponized in many cases against businesses, schools, and legacy American citizens, creating hostile work environments that actively prioritize non-Americans while at the same time discriminating against men and native-born people in many cases. The result has been to establish and legitimize a new form of institutionalized racism, directed primarily at whites – who themselves increasingly are a numerical minority in many states. All of this has been made in service to an ideology born out of the civil rights movement that is oriented around a fundamentally Marxist view of history. This ideology perceives all historically disenfranchised and “wronged” minorities as needing legal recourse, in the form of extra-constitutional remedies that ultimately seek to establish absolute equality – now commonly described as “equity” – in real world outcomes.

This is in sharp contrast with the far more limited goal of legal equality enumerated under the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Whereas the former is ordered towards achieving equal outcomes, the latter establishes a baseline of generally applicable standards like fairness and justice for all parties regardless of background that courts must adhere to.

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Woke Wikipedia Spends a Fortune on DEI Policies – Elon Musk Urges People to Stop Giving Them Money

Wikipedia’s left-wing bias is well known. Conservatives have been pointing it out for years.

Now it has been revealed that as a company, Wikipedia spends a massive amount of cash on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) policies, which is no surprise at all.

This just confirms what conservatives have been saying about the online encyclopedia all along.

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Activists Tried Cancel a Record Number of Campus Events in 2024

This past year, a record 164 speakers and events were targeted by campaigns to be disrupted or canceled, according to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), a First Amendment group. This is slightly higher than 2023’s 154 deplatforming attempts. More than half of 2024’s attempted cancelations were related to the Israel-Palestine conflict, up from about a third of 2023’s platforming attempts.

In all, 2023 and 2024 saw a significant increase in attempted deplatformings of campus speeches and events from the years prior (though it’s worth noting that FIRE records attempted cancellations of events with multiple speakers as separate attempts). Meanwhile, 2022 and 2021 had just 81 and 56 attempts, respectively. Around half of 2024’s attempts resulted in the event being canceled, the speaker’s invitation being revoked, or the event being substantially disrupted. 

In January, Indiana University canceled an exhibition from a Palestinian-American artist over her pro-Palestentian social media posts. In April, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D–Md.) was shouted down during a physics department lecture at the University of Maryland. In the spring, speakers ranging from United Nations Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield to CNN’s Michael Smerconish had their invitations to deliver commencement speeches revoked following student or community outrage. In November, a symposium on the Israel-Palestine conflict including Judith Butler was forced off the campus of the University of Florida after administrators objected to the event.

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Texas AG Ken Paxton Reveals Multiple Instances of Debanking Amid Political and Legal Challenges

Texas Attorney-General Ken Paxton has spoken at a Turning Point USA event to detail a series of unjust obstacles he has been facing since taking office, one of those being debanking.

According to Paxton, as many as four different banks denied him their services, which was followed by a US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) lawsuit, attempts to revoke his law license, and an FBI investigation.

This was happening during the last four years of the Biden-Harris Democrat administration, suggesting that the reasons were political, but it went all the way to “a Republican split”: while the state House tried to impeach Paxton – the Senate later acquitted him in the impeachment trial.

The takeaway here is that democratic norms and the principle of due process are at this point considerably compromised and highly vulnerable to political influence.

And Paxton is by no means the only high-profile individual to become the target of debanking. When the new administration took over after President Trump’s first term in office, his wife Melania, and son Barron were denied banking services.

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New Jersey Mom Targeted by Military and Homeland Security for Questioning LGBTQ+ Poster at Elementary School

Within the spectrum of overreactions, few can rival what unfolded in New Jersey when Angela Reading, a mother and former school board member, dared to question a poster at her daughter’s elementary school.

The poster, innocuously crafted during a “Week of Respect” event, celebrated “LGBTQ+” themes, including the term “polysexuality.”

That’s a term describing an attraction to multiple genders — though the seven-year-olds likely gleaned little understanding of this.

What they did glean, however, was enough for Reading’s daughter to come home curious, which set off a chain reaction of Facebook posts, military involvement, and, yes, counter-terrorism reports.

Angela Reading’s ordeal is a cautionary tale of how questioning the wisdom of mixing elementary school art projects with complex identity politics can snowball into government surveillance, a federal lawsuit, and a First Amendment debate that feels like it was pulled from the pages of Orwell.

The Poster That Launched a Thousand Emails

It all started with a simple question. During the North Hanover Township school’s celebration of acceptance and respect, students created posters featuring LGBTQ+ flags and terms, one of which included the word “polysexual.” When Reading’s daughter innocently asked what it meant, Reading did what many parents might: she turned to Facebook to vent her frustrations.

Describing the content as “inappropriate for young children,” Reading argued that elementary school wasn’t the place for discussions about sexuality. Her post, written as a private citizen, quickly gained traction. And like clockwork, the backlash began.

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Mandatory Inclusion in Video Games: A Threat to the Essence of Entertainment?

In the last decade, video games have gone from being simple entertainment tools to becoming a powerful cultural platform capable of influencing millions of people around the world. However, this evolution has also turned the industry into an ideological battlefield, where the focus on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) generates debates about its impact on the quality and essence of games.

Is inclusion a tool for cultural enrichment or an imposition that compromises the player experience?

The rise of DEI ideology in video games is no coincidence. According to a report by the Entertainment Software Association, more than 71% of Americans play video games, and half spend more than eight hours a week on this activity. With such a wide audience, video games have become an ideal medium for spreading political and social ideas.

Recent titles such as God of War: Ragnarök have reimagined characters based on Norse mythologies, such as Angrboda, depicting her as a black woman.

While proponents argue that these changes promote inclusivity, detractors criticize the lack of respect for the cultural traditions that inspired the game. In a similar case, Spider-Man 2 received praise for “its relentless promotion of queerness,” which created polarization among gamers.

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Biden’s Education Dept Spent Over $1 Billion On DEI Grants; Report

A new report claims that the Biden Administration’s Department of Education has spent over $1 billion on grants that force the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) agenda in hiring practices, programming, and mental health training in public schools.

According to Fox News, the report from the watchdog group Parents Defending Education (PDE) claims that this DEI spending has been ongoing since 2021. PDE researchers found a total of 229 such grants across 42 states, plus Washington D.C., during the roughly four-year time period.

With the spending broken down along specific criteria, nearly $490 million was spent for grants that demanded more racial bias in hiring practices, while $343 million was spent on general DEI programs, and another $170 million was spent on mandating DEI-based mental health training. This amounts to just over $1 billion, at approximately $1,002,522,304.

This spending “incorporates both awarded (committed) and disbursed dollars, as most of the grant money is distributed [a] period of several years,” the report reads.

One of the researchers who worked on the report, Rhyen Staley, said it was likely that the report does not even account for every single grant that may be considered pro-DEI, as the report narrowed down their search to a handful of criteria. This led to the researchers ignoring many other grants that they determined to be simply using “buzzwords” rather than actively promoting DEI.

“The only people or groups to benefit from the enormous amount of grant funding are the universities, administrators, and DEI consultants, at the expense of children’s education,” said Staley.

“This needs to change by placing children’s learning at the forefront of education, instead of prioritizing race-based policies and DEI.”

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Senior Democrat: the Party Should Double Down on Identity Politics

A senior Democrat has told the party it must reaffirm its commitment to identity politics, even if the face of Kamala Harris’s crushing electoral defeat to Donald Trump.

On Thursday, Democrat National Committee Chairman Jaime Harrison, an African American, blasted critics who believe the party’s reliance on identity politics was the reason for Kamala Harris’s loss. Harrison was speaking at a meeting of Democrat chairs in Arizona.

“When I wake up in the morning, when I look in the mirror, when I step out the door, I can’t rub this off,” Harrison said, gesturing towards his face and his skin colour.

“This is who I am. This is how the world perceives me.”

“That is my identity,” he continued.

“And it is not politics. It is my life. And the people that I need in the party, that I need to stand up for me, have to recognize that. You cannot run away from that.”

Harrison’s tenure as Chairman will end in early 2025. During his speech he suggested that he has further grievances to air and that when his replacement is elected “the muzzle comes off.”

The Democrats are currently locked in an acrimonious blame game over Kamala Harris’s defeat to Donald Trump, with some blaming an excessive focus on identity politics and others saying that Americans are simply more bigoted than was previously thought.

There is significant anger about the extent of Harris’s spending. Senior strategist James Carville said the Vice President has done “unfathomable damage” to the Democrat cause by spending well over a billion dollars.

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Twilight Of The Race Hustle

Were you thinking of Daniel Penny this weekend? A year and a half ago, the US marine veteran, age 26, subdued one Jordan Neely, 30, a homeless schizophrenic with a record of 42 arrests who was menacing riders on a New York City subway car. Neely was, at the time, a fugitive on an arrest warrant for felony assault on a sixty-seven-year-old woman. Penny applied a choke hold after Neely declared he was of a mind to kill somebody on the train. Neely was still alive when the cops came, but they declined to give him CPR because he was filthy and an apparent drug-user, and they feared getting AIDS or hepatitis from giving him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. . . so Neely died there in the subway.

Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg indicted Penny for manslaughter in the second degree and secondarily for criminally negligent homicide. His trial has been going on all month. On Friday, the jury reported its inability to reach a verdict on the manslaughter charge. Instead of declaring a mistrial, Judge Maxwell T. Wiley dismissed the primary charge and directed the jury to continue deliberations this week on the secondary negligent homicide charge, a procedurally dubious action.

Everybody knows that the trial is an absurd injustice, but that has been the temper of our society for many years now in the age of the Woke Jacobins. Unlike the original Jacobins of 1794 in Paris, who were ultra-extreme idealists, our Woke Jacobins are extreme cynics, imagining only the worst about the project of civilization. Hence, their alt-project to de-civilize the rest of us.

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