It seems that trying to Bud Light their brand was just the beginning of Jaguar’s brand suicide. For a couple of weeks, images have been floating around online showing some hideous pink monstrosity that was dismissed as merely concept art. Alas, it seems to be all too real.
It like a giant pink dildo had sex with the Batmobile from Batman: The Animated Series. It’s so gay that Elton John would tell them to tone it down. There’s no rear window or side mirrors (which will likely make the car illegal in most states).
This vehicular Pink Panther is falling flat on its face.
Jaguar’s alleged attempts to woo Generation Z with a Barbie-pink electric vehicle backfired spectacularly after Zoomers dubbed the luxury UK automaker’s creation “cheap” and compared it to a “pink Batmobile.”
Pictures of new Jaguar Type 00 concept, dubbed the Design Vision Concept, had leaked online ahead of its official release at Miami Art Week this week, the Telegraph reported.
Per the photos, the $126,519.50 vehicle featured a giant bonnet, slatted rectangular grills and no rear window while the leaping Jaguar logo has vanished from both ends, taking a back seat to a divisive, new round logo, the Daily Mail reported.
Jaguar had a great logo, and now they’re throwing it away in this idiotic woke rebrand.
However, the hot-omobile’s most noticeable feature was its “Miami pink” exterior, which evoked a boxier version of the Corvette from the “Barbie” movie. It also comes in metallic blue.
Gerry McGovern, the chief creative officer of Jaguar Land Rover, deemed the flamboyant concept car a “taste of things to come” at the Miami convention.
And that taste seems to be “coal covered in pink aluminum foil.”
Jaguar Managing Director Rawdon Glover notably dubbed the company’s new direction a “complete reset” meant to “inspire a new generation.”
Ironically, many of their so-called intended younger customers were quick to put the Type 00 model in the rhetorical car compactor.
“If you thought the Jaguar rebrand was peak cringe, you gotta look at their new car,” scoffed one detractor on X.
Snip.
“What on Earth is Jaguar thinking?” exclaimed gearhead Luke Malpas in one TikTok clip. “They’ve gone from being a staple of British engineering, creating some of the best cars we’ve seen on the road, to this”
“Go woke, you know the rest,” wrote podcaster Jay Anderson on X, while journalist Jordan Schachtel wrote, “Go DEI go absolutely broke. This is a mockery of the Jaguar brand.”
Some critics found the “Copy Nothing” slogan ironic, given that the new EV vehicle seemed to rip off many storied vehicle brands.
“Copy nothing except Rolls Royce, Bentley, and then put a Studabaker radiator on the back of the car,” snarked Canopy Capital Group CEO Eric Golden on X.
“Copy nothing? It’s a pink Batmobile,” scoffed another naysayer while decrying the vehicle’s departure from the brand’s iconic macho mobiles of old.
Some accused Jaguar of risking alienating their consumer base by attempting to appeal to people who will never buy their product.
“Someone on the Jaguar marketing team has greatly overestimated the size of the ‘vegan barista who wants to roll up to the drum circle in a luxury sports car’ market, I fear,” mused Lulu Cheng Meservey, a board member at tech company Shopify, on X.
“I have a feeling @Jaguar may be about to find out that there are fewer well-off, non-binary, woke lesbians of color than their echo chamber assured them there were,” sniped right-wing British Reclaim Party founder and “political correctness” foe Laurence Fox.
This is simply the latest evidence that Jaguar is doubling down on wokeness. “Santino Pietrosanti, UK Brand Director at Jaguar Land Rover, teased the upcoming rebrand for the company as part of its own ‘transformative journey.’ ‘We’re on a transformative journey of our own. Driven by a belief in diversity, inclusion, creativity, policy and, most importantly, action. We’ve established over 15 DEI groups such as Pride, which are here tonight, and Women in Engineering and Neurodiversity Matters,’ Pietrosanti said.” Absent from that rebrand checklist is respect for its existing (overwhelmingly male) customer base, who I seriously doubt are inclined to plop down six figure sums for ugly pink electric cars. And there aren’t enough wealthy Mary Kay saleswomen in the world to make up that deficit.
I’d previously said that Rawdon Glover needs to be fired to save the brand, but that clearly isn’t sufficient. Not only does Pietrosanti need to go, but everyone in the executive suite, everyone in branding and everyone in marketing who refused to push back against this insane, brand-destroying path.
And, of course, the entire DEI department. But that goes without saying for every company…
Another day, another Ken Paxton lawsuit, this one against BlackRock over coal.
Texas and 10 other states have sued three of the world’s largest financial companies, alleging the trio violated antitrust laws to push coal power plants out of commission.
Attorney General Ken Paxton announced he and 10 other attorneys general sued BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street in federal district court in Tyler, Texas.
“Each Defendant has individually acquired substantial stockholdings in every significant publicly held coal producer in the United States,” the filing asserts.
“Each has thereby acquired the power to influence the policies of these competing companies and bring about a substantial lessening of competition in the markets for coal. And each has used its power to affect a substantial reduction in competition in coal markets.”
The suit then points to the Climate Action 100+ agreement onto which all three firms signed, a 2021 pact that laid out decarbonization commitments; BlackRock and State Street announced their withdrawal from the pact earlier this year.
The lawsuit continues, “Rather than individually wield their shareholdings to reduce coal output, therefore, Defendants effectively formed a syndicate and agreed to use their collective holdings of publicly traded coal companies to induce industry-wide output reductions.”
Paxton’s position seems to be: Pressuring coal companies by yourself is fine, but get together to pressure them collectively is forming an illegal, anti-competitive cartel.
The plaintiffs are asking the court for forced divestiture of each company’s coal plant holdings and to fine the defendants $10,000 per violation under the Texas Business & Commerce code, along with miscellaneous other requests.
In total, seven counts across the various states were brought against the financial titans.
“Texas will not tolerate the illegal weaponization of the financial industry in service of a destructive, politicized ‘environmental’ agenda. BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street formed a cartel to rig the coal market, artificially reduce the energy supply, and raise prices,” Paxton said.
“Their conspiracy has harmed American energy production and hurt consumers. This is a stunning violation of State and federal law.”
BlackRock responding that they’re as pure as the driven snow snipped.
Like many other places across the country, Texas’ main power grid — the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) region — has seen a reduction in its coal power fleet as aged plants retire and nothing new is built.
Coal has fallen out of fashion both politically and within the industry. Environmentalists push for wind and solar to replace it in the power portfolio, while the cheaper natural gas prices around the world have steadily forced coal generators out of commission.
ERCOT currently has 14,321 megawatts (MW) of installed coal and lignite capacity, though about half of that is usually operating at any given time; that’s down from around 20,000 MW of coal capacity in 2015.
This lawsuit is an extension of the fight over the Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) movement in the world of capital — a generally politically progressive phenomenon that tries to push policies like decarbonization and pro-choice views in boardrooms.
Paxton might have difficulty prevailing should the issue come to trial, as there’s no shortage of U.S. agency declarations of “decarbonization” as an official government goal that BlackRock can point to. But I’m pretty sure neither side wants this in court. Especially BlackRock, who is on the wrong side of anti-woke culture shift with Trump II incoming and most of the rest of the corporate world backtracking on social justice and ecomadness.
Expect them and their co-defendents settle to avoid long, nasty bouts of discovery making its way into the news.
“Lazy Thanksgiving Weekend Video Blogging” continues here at BattleSwarm, with a random Ryan Long comedy bit on activists.
“I feel like vegans are the most hated activist group vegans get so much shit. People will be like ‘FUck you. You’re like that pedophile. They’re like ‘behind him there’s a vegan!'”
Happy Thanksgiving! A hope all of you have a great day eating too much food with your family and love ones!
For those left-wing sorts, the Babylon Bee provides a handy guide (in their usual helpful way) for “How to Talk to Your Racist MAGA Uncle This Thanksgiving.”
“I’m a good, tolerant person and they’re all terrible, intolerant people. And how can I find common ground with these rednecks who are literally Hitler?”
“First, try slowly and articulately explaining to him how he is a racist, a bigot, a Nazi, and just an overall garbage person.”
“Sometimes your family might disagree with you and attempt to use far right tactics such as facts and logic.” So obviously you should run away and hide in your safe space…
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…
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.
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.
