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Pete Hegseth's Hateful War Against Harvey Milk
The Trump administration’s, and Hegseth’s, recent efforts to paper over and rewrite history suggests they don’t want the current and future generations to know about that movement, its accomplishments, and the persistent battle for LGBTQ equality.
Jun 08, 2025
Despite all the military threats facing the United States, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth decided to go to war with the gay community. During the first week of Pride Month, he ordered the Navy to rename the USNS Harvey Milk, which honors the late gay rights leader and Navy veteran.
“Secretary Hegseth is committed to ensuring that the names attached to all DOD installations and assets are reflective of the Commander-in-Chief’s priorities, our nation’s history, and the warrior ethos,” said a Pentagon spokesman.
On Thursday, Senate Republicans blocked an effort by Democrats to oppose Hegseth’s order.
It is notable that Hegseth, an outspoken Christian nationalist, targeted Milk, who was not only gay but also Jewish. Hegseth is aligned with a wing of the evangelical church that believes in establishing a theocratic Christian government in which Jews would be, at best, second-class citizens, and LGBTQ individuals would lose nearly all of the rights they have won in recent decades. Earlier this month, Hegseth promoted staffer Kingsley Wilson as the Pentagon’s chief press secretary, despite her history of disseminating antisemitic conspiracy theories and neo-Nazi rhetoric on social media.
Milk, a gay rights activist, was elected to San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors (its city council) in 1977, making him, at that time, the most high-profile LBGTQ figure in the country. He was assassinated the following year.
In 2016, then-U.S. Navy Secretary Ray Mabus, a former Mississippi governor, observed that “Even after death, his voice still spoke, his struggles continued and his cause taken up by countless others.” Milk, he said, “offered hope for millions of Americans who were being ostracized and prosecuted just for who they loved.”
When the ship was finally built and christened in 2021, then-Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro spoke at the event, “not just to amend the wrongs of the past, but to give inspiration to all of our LGBTQ community leaders who served in the Navy, in uniform today and in the civilian workforce as well, too, and to tell them that we’re committed to them in the future.”
To Hegseth, Milk is an obvious target in the Trump administration’s homophobic crusade. It is part of a broader effort to reverse decades of progress toward equality and human rights. Trump and his MAGA followers want to eliminate recognition of people and movements who fought discrimination against women, people of color, and LGBTQ Americans, including those who served in the military.
In March, the Pentagon removed from its website a story about Jackie Robinson’s military service, explaining that “DEI is dead at the Defense Department.” Toward that goal, the Pentagon also removed a page about Ira Hayes, a Native American who was one of the marines pictured raising the American flag at Iwo Jima during World War II, as well as articles about Native American code talkers. The DOD also deleted an article about a Tonawanda Seneca officer who drafted the terms of the Confederacy’s surrender at Appomattox. A DOD webpage about a Black Medal of Honor recipient, Maj. Gen. Charles Calvin Rogers, was also briefly taken down but later restored. A DOD page about an all-Japanese-American unit that fought in WWII was also removed and then restored.
The backlash against scrubbing mention of Robinson, the trailblazing baseball hero and activist, was so widespread that the Pentagon restored the story a day later, but Hegseth has pursued his crusade nevertheless.
According to a memo from Navy Secretary John Phelan, the names of other civil rights pioneers are also on the list to potentially be removed from Navy vessels, including Supreme Court justices Thurgood Marshall and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, abolitionist leader Harriet Tubman, suffrage and anti-slavery activist Lucy Stone, NAACP leader Medgar Evers (who was assassinated by a Ku Klux Klan member), and farmworker organizer Cesar Chavez, who was also a Navy veteran.
Soon after taking office, Hegseth fired prominent Black and female officers, including Air Force Gen. CQ Brown, the second African American to serve as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Adm. Lisa Franchetti, the first woman selected as the Navy’s top officer, suggesting that they may have been promoted to those positions due to their race or gender rather than merit.
Hegseth has also pushed to eliminate courses at West Point and the Naval Academy that deal with gender, racial, and LGBTQ issues and remove books from their libraries that focus on these subject. He ordered the military academies to end consideration of gender, race, or ethnicity as part of their admissions standards. “Selecting anyone but the best erodes lethality, our warfighting readiness, and undercuts the culture of excellence in our armed forces,” said Hegseth.
Hegseth seems unaware that Harvey Milk was also a warrior. He demonstrated courage, leadership, and resilience in challenging the status quo. In his day, as an activist and public official, Milk did battle with conservative and religious right forces.
Milk is hardly an obscure figure. He was the subject of an acclaimed 1982 biography by Randy Shilts calledThe Mayor of Castro Street. The Times of Harvey Milk won the 1984 Academy Award for Best Documentary. In 2009, the film Milk garnered eight Academy Award nominations (including best picture). Sean Penn, who played Milk, won the Oscar for Best Actor, while Dustin Black earned the award for Best Original screenplay. That year, the California legislature established Milk’s birthday, May 22, as Harvey Milk Day throughout the state and President Barack Obama posthumously awarded Milk the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his contribution to the gay rights movement. Obama explained, “He fought discrimination with visionary courage and conviction.”
Milk is to the gay rights movement what Jackie Robinson was to baseball, what Martin Luther King Jr. was to civil rights, what Betty Friedan was to the women’s movement, and what Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta were to the farmworkers movement.
When Milk was elected to San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors in 1977, most gay women and men were still in the closet. Many states had laws against hiring gay people as schoolteachers and other occupations. This was just a few years after the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders. It was before the AIDS epidemic, before Rock Hudson became the first movie star to acknowledge that he was gay. It was before Congress passed and President Bill Clinton signed “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell,” a policy that allowed gay and lesbian people to serve in the military. It was before Ellen DeGeneres, star of the TV comedy series “Ellen,” publicly came out as a lesbian during an interview on the Oprah Winfrey show and became the first openly gay character on a major TV show. It was before colleges offered courses in gay literature, history, and politics. It was before the Supreme Court ruled, in the 2003 decision Lawrence v. Texas, that state laws criminalizing gay or lesbian sex were unconstitutional, and ruled again in 2015, in Obergefell v. Hodges, that states could not prohibit same-sex couples from legally marrying.
Milk was not the first openly gay person to win public office. Voters in Massachusetts, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Michigan had already elected gay and lesbian candidates. But Milk’s victory, winning a powerful high-profile position in the nation’s gay capital, made him instantly a national figure.
Today, at least 1,336 openly LGBTQ persons are serving in public office, according to the LBGTQ Victory Institute, including three governors, 13 members of Congress, and 68 mayors.
Milk grew up in a middle-class Jewish family on Long Island outside New York City. In high school he played football and developed a passion for opera. He graduated from college in 1951 with a degree in math. Although he knew he was homosexual while he was still a teenager, he kept it secret. A college friend recalled, “He was never thought of as a possible queer — that’s what you called them then — he was a man’s man.”
After college Milk joined the navy for four years, serving as a diving officer aboard a submarine rescue ship during the Korean War. He was discharged in 1955 with the rank of lieutenant, junior grade.
For the next fifteen years, Milk drifted, taking a series of jobs for which he had little enthusiasm. He taught high school, then worked as a statistician for an insurance company and as an analyst for a Wall Street brokerage firm. During that period he had a number of relationships with men.
In 1972, Milk and his partner Scott Smith joined the exodus of hippies and gays migrating to San Francisco. The city had long been a haven for nonconformists and bohemians. The 1950s beatnik scene, with its overlapping circles of radicals and folk music devotees, morphed into the hippie culture of the 1960s, centered in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. After World War II, San Francisco had also become a mecca for gay men. By the 1960s, it had more gay people per capita than any other American city and a thriving gay scene of bars, businesses, and bathhouses. The Castro District became the city’s gay ghetto, but the official culture still reflected mainstream antipathy toward gays. For example, landlords could legally evict tenants whom they discovered to be homosexual.
As their numbers grew, gays became a political force in the city. Two organizations — the Society for Individual Rights and the Daughters of Bilitis — began challenging the police department’s arbitrary and sometimes brutal persecution of gay bars and entrapment of gays having sex in public parks. In 1971, 2,800 gay men were arrested for having sex in public restrooms and parks. That year Richard Hongisto, a straight ex-cop who had fought the police department’s bias against gays and minorities, ran successfully for county sheriff with the support of the gay community. Other liberal politicians began to court gay and lesbian support. Key gay leaders, including the publisher of the gay newspaper the Advocate, started the Alice B. Toklas Democratic Club in 1971 to mobilize gay voters.
Milk lived as an openly gay man. He and Smith had opened Castro Camera. The store’s back room became a gathering place for Milk’s widening circle of friends. He frequently complained about taxes on small businesses, underfunded schools (which he learned about when a teacher asked to borrow a projector because her school’s equipment did not work), and ongoing discrimination against gays by employers, landlords, and cops. In 1973 Milk decided to run for supervisor. “I finally reached the point where I knew I had to become involved or shut up,” he recalled.
Milk, who still looked like an aging hippie, ran a spirited but low-budget and chaotic campaign, drawing on patrons of gay bars angry about police harassment. His fiery speeches and flare attracted media attention, and he garnered 16,900 votes — winning the Castro District and other liberal neighborhoods, finishing tenth out of thirty-two candidates. It was not enough to win the citywide campaign, but it made Milk a visible presence.
Milk and other gay business owners founded the Castro Village Association, which chose Milk as its president. He also organized the Castro Street Fair to attract more customers to the area. By then, Milk had started referring to himself as the “mayor of Castro Street.”
Milk ran a better campaign for supervisor in 1975. He cut his hair and wore suits. His community organizing paid off. He had more money and more volunteers. Thanks to his activism, he earned the support of key unions. This time he came in seventh, one spot away from winning a supervisor’s seat.
Milk remained involved in grassroots gay activism, which was facing a backlash by the religious right across the country. The growing antigay climate had real consequences. Random attacks on gays in the Castro increased. Upset by the lack of police protection, groups of gays began patrolling the neighborhood themselves. On June 21, 1977 conservative thugs attacked Robert Hillsborough, a gay man, yelling “Faggot!” while stabbing him fifteen times, killing him. A few weeks later, 250,000 people attended the Gay Freedom Day Parade, fueled by anger as well as by gay pride.
Milk’s leadership in these mobilizations, plus his previous campaigns, gave him an advantage when he ran again for supervisor in 1977.
Equally important, voters had just approved a city charter change to elect supervisors by geographic districts instead of citywide. The new District 5, centered in the Castro area, was Milk’s home base. That November, Milk was finally elected to the Board of Supervisors, beating sixteen other candidates, half of them gay. This time he had an effective campaign manager, a large cadre of volunteers, and the endorsement of the San Francisco Chronicle.
Milk’s victory made national news. He became a close ally of Mayor George Moscone, a progressive who had been elected two years earlier. Together, they challenged the power of the big corporations and real estate developers that were gentrifying the city and changing its skyline. They supported rent control, unions, small businesses, neighborhood organizations, and a tax on suburban commuters. Milk made sure that he responded to constituency concerns, such as fixing potholes and installing stop signs at dangerous intersections.
In fact, soon after taking office, he sponsored two bills. The first outlawed discrimination based on sexual orientation. Milk was responding to his core constituency, San Francisco’s gay community, which had endured years of bigotry from employers, landlords, and other institutions. The second bill dealt with an issue that, according to polls, voters considered the number-one problem in the city: dog feces. Milk’s ordinance, called the “pooper scooper” law, required dog owners to scoop up their pets’ excrement. After it passed, Milk invited the press to a local park, where, with cameras rolling, he intentionally stepped in the smelly substance. The stunt attracted national media attention as well as extensive local press coverage, as Milk had anticipated. He later explained why he pulled off the photo op: “All over the country, they’re reading about me, and the story doesn’t center on me being gay. It’s just about a gay person who is doing his job.”
Milk was a big personality, but he was also a serious and brilliant politician. After his election, he was the most visible gay public figure in America. At a time when homophobia was still deeply entrenched in American culture, Milk encouraged gays and lesbians to come out of the closet. He received thousands of letters from gays around the country, thanking him for being a role model. “I thank God,” wrote a sixty-eight-year-old lesbian, “I have lived long enough to see my kind emerge from the shadows and join the human race.”
Milk knew that to win elections and pass legislation, he had to build bridges with other constituencies and with his straight colleagues on the Board of Supervisors. He cultivated support from tenants’ groups, the elderly, small businesses, environmentalists, and labor unions.
Milk forged an unlikely alliance with the Teamsters union, which represented truck drivers. The Teamsters wanted to pressure beer distributors to sign a contract with the union to improve pay and working conditions for its members. They were particularly angry at Coors, which of all the beer companies was the most hostile toward unions. A Teamsters organizer approached Milk for help in reaching out to gay bars, a big portion of Coors’s customer base. Within days, Milk had canvassed the gay bars in and around the heavily gay Castro District, encouraging them to stopping selling Coors beer. With help from Arab and Chinese grocers, the gay boycott of Coors was successful. Milk had earned a political ally among the Teamsters. At Milk’s urging, the union also began to recruit more gay truck drivers.
Much of Milk’s eleven months in office — before he and Moscone were assassinated — was spent organizing opposition to a statewide referendum sponsored by State Senator John Briggs to ban gays from teaching in public schools. Milk went up and down California speaking out against the initiative. He debated Briggs on television. He crashed Briggs’s events, generating media stories. When Briggs claimed that gay teachers abused their students, Milk countered with statistics documenting that most pedophiles were straight, not gay.
Opposition to the Briggs initiative mobilized gays and their liberal allies. They knocked on doors, wrote letters to the editor, and paid for TV and radio ads. More than a quarter of a million people attended that summer’s Gay Freedom Day Parade in San Francisco. (Similar events in other cities attracted record numbers). Milk rode in an open car and later gave an inspiring speech that, according to the San Francisco Examiner, “ignited the crowd.” He said:
On this anniversary of Stonewall, I ask my gay sisters and brothers to make the commitment to fight. For themselves, for their freedom, for their country. We will not win our rights by staying quietly in our closets. We are coming out to fight the lies, the myths, the distortions. We are coming out to tell the truths about gays! I’m tired of the silence. So I’m going to talk about it. And I want you to talk about it. You must come out. Come out to your parents, your relatives. Come out to your friends.
On November 7, 1978, Briggs’s initiative lost by more than a million votes, with 58 percent of voters — and 75 percent in San Francisco — opposing it. It was a stunning victory for the gay community, and Milk was its most visible leader.
Twenty days later, Milk and Moscone were dead. On November 27, former supervisor Dan White, carrying a gun, climbed into city hall through a basement window and shot both public officials. White had represented one of the city’s more conservative neighborhoods and was the only supervisor to oppose Milk’s antidiscrimination ordinance. Frustrated by his marginalization on the board, he abruptly resigned on November 10, only ten months after being sworn in. He quickly changed his mind and asked Moscone to reappoint him to his old position. Moscone refused to do so, in part because of Milk’s lobbying against White.
White was charged with first-degree murder, making him eligible for the death penalty. A conviction seemed a slam dunk. But White’s lawyer claimed that he was not responsible for his actions because of his mental state, which the lawyer termed “diminished capacity.” On May 21, 1979, a jury acquitted White of the first-degree murder charge but found him guilty of voluntary manslaughter. He was sentenced to seven years in prison. The verdict triggered riots outside city hall as gays and their allies unleashed their fury.
Milk had anticipated his murder. He had received many hate letters and death threats. He recorded his thoughts on tape, indicating who he wanted to succeed him if he were killed, saying, “If a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door.” He added, “I would like to see every gay lawyer, every gay architect come out, stand up and let the world know. That would do more to end prejudice overnight than anybody could imagine. I urge them to do that, urge them to come out. Only that way will we start to achieve our rights.”
Milk’s charisma and political savvy helped unleash the power of gay voters and advance the issue of gay rights, including the growing number of gay and lesbian elected officials and widening acceptance of same-sex marriage.
The Trump administration’s, and Hegseth’s, recent efforts to paper over and rewrite history suggests they don’t want the current and future generations to know about that movement, its accomplishments, and the persistent battle for LGBTQ equality.
Responding on his Facebook page to news of the effort to rename the USNS Harvey Milk, gay playwright Harvey Fierstein described the move as a “crime against the gay community” and wrote that Trump is a “vile, petty, stupid, destructive, jealous, illiterate, hateful, ego-maniacal and dangerous shmuck.”
California State Senator Scott Wiener, who is also gay, told the Los Angeles Times that Hegseth’s move against Milk is part of a “systematic campaign to eliminate LGBTQ people from public life.”
“They want us to go away, to go back in the closet, not to be part of public life,” added Wiener. “And we’re not going anywhere.”
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'Unabashed Fascism': Trump Executive Order Targets 'Improper Ideology' at Smithsonian
"First Trump removes any reference of diversity from the present—now he's trying to remove it from our history," wrote one Democratic lawmaker. "You cannot erase our past and you cannot stop us from fulfilling our future."
Mar 28, 2025
U.S. President Donald Trump has elicited a fresh wave of anger after he signed an executive order on Thursday targeting exhibits or programs critical of the United States at the Smithsonian Institution, a sprawling network of largely free museums and Washington, D.C.'s National Zoo.
The order aims to prevent federal money from going to displays that "divide Americans based on race" or "promote programs or ideologies inconsistent with federal law and policy," as well as remove "improper ideology" from Smithsonian's museums, education centers, and research centers.
"This is unabashed fascism," wrote the journalist Lauren Wolfe on X on Thursday. Amy Rutenberg, a history professor at Iowa State University, wrote: "Last week, while visiting several Smithsonian museums, I kept wondering how long it would take for this administration to direct exhibits to be pulled. Not long, it turns out."
Another observer, journalist and founding editor of the outlet SpyTalk Jeff Stein, remarked that "Trump goes full-on Soviet with intent to scrub Smithsonian museums etc. of 'improper ideology.'"
The move highlights Trump's desire to reshape not only American politics, but cultural institutions too.
The order, which included an accompanying fact sheet, also directs U.S. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to reinstate monuments, memorials, statues, and other properties that have been taken down or altered since the beginning of 2020 to "perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history, inappropriately minimize the value of certain historical events or figures, or include any other improper partisan ideology."
The order also specifies that U.S. Vice President JD Vance—a member of the Smithsonian Board of Regents—will be tasked with identifying and appointing Smithsonian board members "who are committed to advancing the celebration of America's extraordinary heritage and progress."
The executive order singles out specific museums, like the African American History and Culture, and a "forthcoming" American Women's History Museum plan to celebrate what the White House described as "the exploits of male athletes participating in women's sports."
"Once widely respected as a symbol of American excellence and a global icon of cultural achievement, the Smithsonian Institution has, in recent years, come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology," according to the executive order.
Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) connected Trump's targeting of Smithsonian to his administration's attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.
"First Trump removes any reference of diversity from the present—now he's trying to remove it from our history. Let me be PERFECTLY clear—you cannot erase our past and you cannot stop us from fulfilling our future," she wrote on X on Thursday.
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Why DEI Was Doomed to Fail
DEI’s fundamental contradiction was this: It argued that race is a social invention—a system created to control people by reducing complexity—yet it never suggested replacing it with a more holistic vision of justice.
Mar 09, 2025
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, or DEI, is collapsing—not just as a corporate initiative, but as an ideological framework.
In what seemed like a flash, it became a dominant force in American institutional life, embedded in HR departments, university policies, and media discourse. And now, just as quickly, it finds itself in retreat, with entire DEI offices being gutted across corporate and academic America.
President Donald Trump’s administration has aggressively targeted DEI, issuing executive orders to dismantle these programs across federal agencies. This federal rollback has emboldened Republican-led states to eliminate DEI efforts within public institutions. Meanwhile, MSNBC’s recent firing of Joy Reid, a vocal defender of DEI who embodied many of its most aggressive tendencies, signals a broader cultural shift.
If we want to build a politics that actually addresses racial injustice, we need an approach that is dynamic rather than static—one that acknowledges history without being trapped by it.
The right celebrates this as a victory over “woke ideology.” The left frames it as yet another example of backlash and white fragility. But these explanations fail to account for why DEI has unraveled so quickly.
The reality is that DEI was doomed to fail—not because the principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion are unworthy, but because the framework built around them was structurally flawed.
DEI’s fundamental contradiction was this: It argued that race is a social invention—a system created to control people by reducing complexity—yet it never suggested replacing it.
Instead, it doubled down on racial categorization, reinforcing the very thing it claimed to challenge. This reification of race, rather than dismantling structures of oppression, helped sustain them, making DEI brittle and politically untenable.
For the left, the lesson here is crucial. If we don’t break out of the rigid, black-and-white thinking that DEI promoted, we will continue ceding ground to the right. The need to discuss race and identity remains vital, but it must be done in a way that opens space for complexity rather than reinforcing the very constructs that uphold division.
DEI’s fatal flaw is that it traps itself in a closed loop. It rightly argues that race is a historical construct—a tool of power designed to enforce hierarchy. Yet instead of pushing beyond this construct, it reinforces race as fixed and immutable. The result is an ideological contradiction: Race is framed as an arbitrary invention, yet treated as an unchanging, permanent reality.
James Baldwin exposed the hollowness of racial constructs decades ago. In “On Being ‘White’… and Other Lies,” he wrote: “The crisis of leadership in the white community is remarkable—and terrifying—because there is, in fact, no white community.”
Baldwin understood that whiteness, like all racial identities, was not a biological or cultural fact but a political invention—a shifting construct designed to serve power. Yet DEI never seriously engaged with this idea. It simply replaced one rigid racial hierarchy with another, treating whiteness as an unchanging position of privilege while treating other racial identities as fixed sites of oppression.
This rigidity meant that DEI operated as a closed system, reasserting racial categories rather than interrogating them. It failed to engage with race as a lived, historically contingent process—one shaped by history, class, and material conditions.
By doing this, DEI alienated people across the political spectrum. Many white people, even those who consider themselves progressive, felt that DEI erased any meaningful discussion of economic struggle or historical complexity within whiteness.
Meanwhile, many people of color found DEI’s racial framework superficial—offering corporate-friendly language about inclusion while doing little to address material inequalities. The framework functioned as a kind of racial accounting system, but it lacked a clear political vision for building solidarity.
Sheena Mason, a scholar of racial theory, has articulated the deeper flaw in this approach: “To undo racism, we have to undo our belief in race.”
This insight is crucial. If race itself is a construct designed to justify social stratification, then maintaining race as a primary framework for addressing inequality only reinforces the divisions we claim to want to overcome. Yet DEI never suggested dismantling the concept of race—it only sought to redistribute power within its existing framework.
This was a fatal mistake. Modern genetic science has definitively debunked the biological basis of race. There is more genetic diversity within so-called racial groups than between them. The racial categories that shape our politics and institutions are historical inventions, not natural facts.
Yet DEI, instead of leveraging this knowledge to transcend racial essentialism, entrenches race as the defining lens for justice. This approach not only deepens social division but also makes the left vulnerable to the right’s attacks.
By insisting on the permanence of racial categories, DEI created an ideological framework that could be easily caricatured as divisive and exclusionary—giving conservatives an easy target while failing to deliver meaningful change.
Racial discourse often eclipses broader discussions of material conditions, making it harder to address economic inequality in a meaningful way.
Patricia Hill Collins, a foundational thinker in intersectional theory, has observed that, “Race operates as such an overriding feature of African-American experience in the United States that it not only overshadows economic class relations for Blacks but obscures the significance of economic class within the United States in general.”
DEI’s fixation on race, detached from material conditions, contributed to this very problem. By prioritizing racial categorization over economic struggle, it often obscured the broader systems of inequality that shape American life.
This not only made class politics more difficult to articulate but also allowed racial identity to become a stand-in for structural critique—reinforcing an identity-based framework that often benefited elites more than the working class.
With DEI collapsing, the question becomes: What comes next? The right hopes this marks the end of racial discourse altogether. That cannot happen. Structural racism, economic exclusion, and historical injustice are still deeply embedded in American life. Ignoring the function of racism and racial categories plays into the hands of those who want to maintain both racial and economic inequality.
But we cannot simply replace DEI with another rigid, prepackaged framework that reproduces the same mistakes. If we want to build a politics that actually addresses racial injustice, we need an approach that is dynamic rather than static—one that acknowledges history without being trapped by it.
This means recognizing that racial categories are not timeless truths but historical constructions that have been shaped by economic, political, and social forces. It means rejecting the idea that people are permanently locked into racial identities that define their entire experience. And it means moving beyond an approach that focuses primarily on representation and inclusion toward one that addresses material conditions to redistribute power.
DEI’s failure provides an opportunity for the left to rethink how it engages with race and identity. We need to stop seeing race as an unchanging structure and start understanding it as something that can be transformed. Morgan Freeman put it bluntly in an interview, stating, “I don’t want a Black History Month. Black history is American history.”
This is the kind of shift we need—one that integrates historical understanding rather than segregates it, one that moves past “race”—which we know doesn't exist—as a fixed identity category toward a broader, more holistic vision of justice.
The goal should not be to replace DEI with another top-down, bureaucratic approach, but to build a new paradigm that is open, flexible, and capable of fostering real solidarity.
If the left fails to do this, it will keep losing to the right. And if that happens, the backlash against DEI will not just be the end of a flawed initiative—it will be a major setback for the broader struggle for justice and equality.
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Fueled by Anger at Trump and Corporate Greed, Economic Blackout Underway
"We have the power," said one supporter of the boycott. "We don't have to accept corporate monopolies. We don't have to live with corporate money corrupting our politics."
Feb 28, 2025
After hundreds of thousands of social media users in recent days shared posts calling for an economic blackout at major retail corporations on February 28, the boycott was underway Friday, with proponents saying the aim was to deliver a message about widespread anger over corporate greed "to corporate America directly."
"We have the power. We don't have to accept corporate monopolies. We don't have to live with corporate money corrupting our politics," said former Labor Secretary Robert Reich. "We don't have to accept more tax cuts for billionaires. We don't have to pay more of our hard-earned cash to Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg or the other billionaire oligarchs."
The idea of the blackout originated with a self-described "mindfulness and meditation facilitator," John Schwartz, who urged consumers to join the push for "systemic change," emphasizing that the boycott was not targeting President Donald Trump, his billionaire adviser and benefactor Elon Musk, or a political party, as both Democratic and Republican leaders "have manipulated the economy and profited off the working class."
But Schwartz noted on his website for The People's Union USA, "a grassroots movement dedicated to economic resistance, government accountability, and corporate reform," that the group stands "firmly for equality and freedom for ALL people, regardless of race, gender, background, or identity. The idea that companies and institutions should abandon diversity and inclusivity is regressive and unacceptable."
The statement was an apparent reference to Trump's executive order threatening to open investigations into companies that do not dismantle initiatives aimed at promoting "diversity, equity, and inclusion" (DEI). The order—and the decision by some companies including Target, Walmart, Amazon to roll back DEI programs—has been named by some participants in Friday's economic blackout as a reason to withhold their spending from the corporations.
"We don't have to reward corporations that have abandoned their DEI policies to align themselves with Trump's racist, homophobic, misogynistic agenda," said Reich. "We have choices."
"It is promising that people are responding to the current moment by showing their distrust of these corporations."
Schwartz's posts about the blackout on social media went viral in recent weeks, with 700,000 people sharing his Instagram post and the content generating 8.5 million total views.
The boycott has gained the attention of celebrities with wide followings including actor Mark Ruffalo and author Stephen King.
While one marketing expert, Anna Tuchman of Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, told The Associated Press that the boycott was unlikely to lead to "long-run sustained decreases in economic activity" that would impact the financial bottom line of Amazon, Target, Walmart, and other affected companies, she noted that the blackout could make an impact on daily sales.
"I think this is an opportunity for consumers to show that they have a voice on a single day," said Tuchman.
Based on information from a data company called Placer.ai, the one-day blackout is likely not the only action many shoppers have been taking.
During the week of February 10, according to the company, which uses phone location date to track visits to stores, foot traffic dropped at Target stores by 7.9% and at Walmart by 4.8%, while it increased by 4.8% at Costco locations; Costco has defended its DEI policies under the Trump administration.
Joseph Feldman of financial research firm Telsey Advisory Group told clients that recent data "shows a clear drop in traffic in late January into mid-February following [one] company's step back from DEI."
According to Schwartz's website, more economic blackouts—both wide-scale and those targeting specific corporations—are being planned for the coming weeks.
The People's Union USA called for an Amazon blackout, including Whole Foods, during the week of March 7; a boycott of Nestlé to protest water exploitation and child labor during the week of March 21; and 24-hour economic blackouts on March 28 and April 18.
In a separate push, labor unions led by the United Auto Workers have already begun preparing for a general strike on May 1, 2028—International Solidarity Day.
Friday's blackout comes on the heels of news that consumer confidence plummeted in February, likely leading some corporations to already have felt the impact of fewer shoppers. Analysts linked the drop in consumer spending to anxiety stemming from Trump's mass firing of federal workers and his threatened tariffs on imports from the European Union, Canada, and Mexico.
The video posted by Schwartz on Instagram recently rallied consumers by telling them that "corporations profit off of our labor while keeping wages low, banks steal billions through inflation and predatory policies, politicians accept bribes disguised as donations while ignoring the people."
"They have taken everything from us while convincing us we should be grateful of the scraps," said Schwartz. "And that ends now."
With enthusiasm and media coverage of the blackout spreading in recent days, Aaron Vansintjan, co-author of The Future Is Degrowth: A Guide to a World Beyond Capitalism, told The Intercept that "people are getting a sense that they're ripped off, that they're being taken advantage of and exploited as consumers."
"It is promising that people are responding to the current moment by showing their distrust of these corporations," said Vansintjan, whose book calls for reducing consumption and production of fossil fuels, factory-farmed meat products, and other goods that harm the planet.
Vansintjan noted that consumers have power that is more limited than that of unionized workers and tenants, who can organize for fair wages, working conditions, and rent prices.
"It's hard to have an impact where you shop, because most of us don't actually have much of a choice in that," Vansintjan said.
Schwartz told The Washington Post: "We are the economy. We are the workforce."
Corporate retailers, he said, "benefit only because we get up every day and do what we do. If we stop, they have nothing, and it's time for them to accept that truth."
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Resisting Trump and Musk’s Cultural Revolution
Team MAGA wants a “second American Revolution” that roots out all vestiges of progressivism, liberalism, and secularism and that “will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”
Feb 22, 2025
The aging leader wanted to shake up his country, so he launched a second revolution with the help of a cadre of young people. Drunk with power, the leader targeted his enemies, remade his political party, and turned his own government into a self-destructing circus. Anyone with real expertise was sent far away from the political center. Intellectuals of all kinds came under suspicion. And the young people who rose up in support of the aging leader ran roughshod through society.
They might not seem to have a lot in common, Mao Zedong and Donald Trump. The Communist leader, having come to power through a revolutionary war, harbored a visceral hatred for capitalism. The American businessman shirked military service, won the presidency (twice) through democratic elections, and harbors a visceral hatred for communism.
And yet, Trump is currently involved in a cultural revolution as thoroughgoing in its ambitions and potential destructiveness as what Mao unleashed in China in the mid-1960s.
You Say You Want a Revolution?
At one level, what Donald Trump and his minions are doing is regime change, as Anne Applebaum has argued. They aren’t reforming U.S. government. They are transforming its operating system, courtesy of Elon Musk and his inaptly named Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Regime change is certainly part of the Trump game plan. He has borrowed this strategy from Viktor Orban, who turned Hungary’s political system based on liberal principles into a patronage system run along illiberal lines. The Orban transformation relied on a compliant legislature that allowed him to concentrate power in the executive. Once a leading liberal, the Hungarian leader knew how to deconstruct the Hungarian political system from the inside by stacking the courts, suppressing civil society, and controlling a right-wing media.
You’d think that regime change would be enough for Trump. He is a man of unpredictable utterances but rather constrained ambitions. He wants to punish his enemies, reward his friends, stay out of jail, and secure his financial and political legacy. Those around Trump, however, are pushing for something more extreme. They have cast him in the role of the Great Helmsman—Mao’s favorite moniker—who steers American society into turbulent, uncharted waters.
Mao, of course, wanted to pull China into a modern future. Trump and company promise something more high-tech, but they are really more interested in dragging the United States back to an imagined past.
Team MAGA wants a “second American Revolution” that roots out all vestiges of progressivism, liberalism, and secularism and that “will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be,” according to Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation. By “left,” Roberts means anyone who follows the Constitution, acknowledges the importance of international law, and has a moral conscience.
This more revolutionary program owes much to Chairman Mao who, in 1966, decided that Chinese society was so infected with various strains of reformism (capitalism, liberalism, traditionalism) that it, too, needed another revolution. On top of that, Mao unleashed the power of populism—the “masses” in the vernacular of that time and place—to eliminate his political enemies. “It was a power struggle waged… behind the smokescreen of a fictitious mass movement,” writes Belgian scholar Pierre Ryckmans.
In the 1950s, after the country’s first revolution, Chinese society remained fundamentally conservative. The economy was primarily agrarian and Confucianism was still strong, particularly in the countryside. China was also elitist, with a Communist leader like Zhou Enlai born into the mandarin class and Mao himself coming from wealthy landowning stock. The Communists didn’t just aspire to change China’s governance. They wanted to turn Chinese society into something considerably more urban, industrial, secular, literate, and egalitarian. The change would be violent, if necessary, because Mao believed that “revolution was not a dinner party” (one wonders if Kevin Roberts has a copy of the Little Red Book on his bedside table).
At first, Mao relied on the party and its repressive institutions to effect change. By the mid-1950s, he launched an effort at reform, the Thousand Flowers Campaign, that spiraled out of the party’s control, which generated the backlash of the Anti-Rightist Campaign. That was, in turn, followed by the disastrous economic experiments of the Great Leap Forward. These whiplash changes in policy created considerable anxiety among the Chinese leadership that the party, and the revolution more generally, was losing its hold over the population, which understandably didn’t know where to turn. Mao ultimately decided that only another revolution could break the country’s ties with its past.
The agents of Mao’s Cultural Revolution were the Red Guards, teenagers who heeded Mao’s call for transformation by taking the law into their own hands. They attacked capitalist-roaders, “bourgeois” teachers, and ultimately each other. Chinese society descended into such chaos that some people even fled over the border into North Korea, which was seen as a place of relative sanity. That’s how violent, unpredictable, and apocalyptic China was during the Cultural Revolution, which lasted nearly a decade until Mao’s death in 1976.
Trumpists have their counterpart to Mao’s desire for revolutionary transformation: a plan to destroy everything in the federal government except the royal presidency and the Pentagon, and privatize everything in the country that has a tinge of the public to it.
The Trumpian equivalents of the Red Guards are a motley crew. There’s “Big Balls,” 19-year-old Edward Coristine, a DOGE-employed hacker who, among other questionable ventures, administers “an AI-powered Discord bot operating in Russia.” Then there’s 25-year-old Marco Elez, a DOGE staffer who resigned after the revelation of his racist tweets (but whom Musk has promised to rehire). The parallel with China is not precise, since there are plenty of non-teenagers who are involved in this insurrection, including the middle-aged January 6 rioter Peter Marocco, who is slated to head up USAID. Whatever their age, however, these Trumpists are true believers, enthusiastically feeding democracy into the woodchipper.
Mao, of course, wanted to pull China into a modern future. Trump and company promise something more high-tech, but they are really more interested in dragging the United States back to an imagined past.
Why Trumpians Take Culture Seriously
The Trump administration’s attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) are not just a response to some recent fad. They are, as in China, an effort to radically revamp the very culture.
Since the 1960s, the United States has become a more inclusive country, which has necessarily meant that white men have lost some part of their privileged positions in education, employment, and entertainment. By the 2000s, the United States still had a long way to go, but in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, anti-racism books were on the best-seller list, major corporations were examining their hiring and promoting policies, and educational institutions were finally beginning to address structural racism.
Perhaps if we can hold the line here, in these opening months of the Trump-Musk cultural revolution, we can avoid all the mayhem and destruction that China experienced in the 1960s.
Cultural transformations always move two steps forward and one step backward. In this case, the backlash has been much more intense, with Trump and company eager to rewind the clock to before the various civil rights movements, back even before the 14th Amendment that added birthright citizenship to the Constitution in 1868. The Trump administration has tried to impose gender categories that define the trans community out of existence. It is restricting abortion access at home and abroad, fulfilling the candidate’s promise to help women “whether they like it or not.”
In the same way that Mao tried to make everything in China public—business, meals, child-rearing—Trump wants to privatize everything from schools to the post office. He is opening up government to conservative Christians, and religious institutions are poised to claw back as much public power as they can get.
Mao thought that he was pushing with history’s tide. China’s current capitalist trajectory suggests otherwise, even though the regime change implemented by the Communist Party has remained more or less intact. The party remains in charge, but the culture shows few enduring influences of the Cultural Revolution.
With far-right politicians on the rise around the world, Trump and Musk similarly believe that they are on the cutting edge of change. But mass deportations and boosted birthrates among “tradwives” won’t prevent America from losing its white-majority status in about 20 years. DEI is no fad. It is an accurate reflection of demographics. And short of imposing totalitarian control and setting up concentration camps, the MAGA crowd won’t be able to alter this trajectory.
Welcome Back to 2025
This is not the first time I’ve written about the parallels between Trump and Mao’s Cultural Revolution. In 2022, safely ensconced in the Biden era but plagued by nightmares of the future, I wrote an article entitled “The Terrifying World of 2025” for TomDispatch. It was and is a world of mass deportations, where “Social Security checks and Medicare benefits have been delayed because the federal bureaucracy has shrunk to near invisibility.” Here was my look into the future, which is now our present:
On his first day in office, the president signaled his new policy by authorizing a memorial on the Capitol grounds to the “patriots” of January 6 and commissioning a statue of the QAnon shaman for the Rotunda. He then appointed people to his cabinet who not only lacked the expertise to manage their departments but were singularly devoted to destroying the bureaucracies beneath them, not to speak of the country itself. He put militia leaders in key Defense Department roles and similarly filled the courts with extremists more suited to playing reality-show judges than real life ones. In all of this, the president has been aided by a new crop of his very own legislators, men and women who know nothing about Congress and actively flouted its rules and traditions even as they made the MAGA caucus the dominant voting bloc.
My piece focused on one part of this nightmare scenario—the dispatch of all newly unemployed federal employees, academics, and journalists to take the jobs vacated by deported immigrants. That has yet to take place, but Musk’s acquisition of all federal data could serve as the basis for a MAGA Corps of workers that fill the gaps in the private sector.
The Trump team is currently stress-testing U.S. democracy to see where and how it breaks. Perhaps if we can hold the line here, in these opening months of the Trump-Musk cultural revolution, we can avoid all the mayhem and destruction that China experienced in the 1960s.
Back in 2022, I was not optimistic in my crystal-ball-gazing:
I know this nightmare won’t end overnight. China’s Cultural Revolution stretched on for nearly a decade and resulted in as many as 2 million dead. Our now-captive media doesn’t report on the growing violence in this country, but we’ve heard rumors about mobs attacking a courageous podcaster in Georgia and vigilantes targeting a lone abortion provider in Texas. Things might get a lot worse before they get better.
Things could indeed get a lot worse. The mass deportations haven’t begun in earnest. The courts have hit pause on a number of Trump’s more egregious moves. The worst of the new Cabinet members—Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Hegseth, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—have yet to make their marks.
But I’d like to believe that Trump and Musk, for all the power they currently deploy, are basically spitting into the wind. But it’s up to us, with every breath we take, to make sure that all that ugly spittle ends up back on the face of MAGA.
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As Trump Blames DEI for Plane Crash, Report Shows Understaffed Air Traffic Control
One controller was doing the work of two people at the long-understaffed tower in the Washington, D.C. area.
Jan 30, 2025
A preliminary report on Wednesday night's crash involving a American Airlines commercial flight and a military helicopter revealed that the air traffic control tower in the vicinity of the accident was not staffed at "normal" levels, with just one controller handling a task that two employees ordinarily would have done in the high-stress job.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) report on Thursday said the staffing at the time of the crash was "not normal for the time of day and volume of traffic."
One controller was instructing helicopters near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport while also directing planes landing at and departing from the airport.
As The New York Times reported, controllers use different radio frequencies to communicate with helicopter pilots and those flying planes.
"While the controller is communicating with pilots of the helicopter and the jet, the two sets of pilots may not be able to hear each other," according to the Times.
Air traffic controllers have been forced to work longer hours and workweeks in recent years, amid budget constraints and high turnover. In 2023, the tower near Washington, D.C. had 19 fully certified air traffic controllers. The FAA and the controllers' union say the optimal number is 30.
The FAA report was released shortly after President Donald Trump presented his own theory, without evidence, of why the crash that killed 67 people happened.
Trump suggested at a press briefing that under the Biden administration, the FAA had overseen a "diversity push" with a "focus on hiring people with severe intellectual and psychiatric disabilities."
A reporter at the briefing asked whether Trump was saying the crash "was somehow caused and the result of diversity hiring" and called on him to offer evidence to support the claim.
"It just could have been," Trump said, adding that his administration has "a much higher standard than anybody else" for hiring federal employees.
Government Executive noted that the FAA began diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) hiring programs as early as 2013, which continued under the first Trump administration.
No identifying information has been reported about the air traffic controller who was handling the flight paths in question on Wednesday. American Airlines has also not released any personal information about who was piloting its aircraft; Army officials said the helicopter was piloted by one man and one woman, and a male staff sergeant was also on board.
Trump told reporters that he was confident that DEI hiring practices played a role in the crash because he has "common sense."
But critics including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) noted that Trump has taken several steps since taking office less than two weeks ago that could make air travel more dangerous for Americans in the long term.
"Trump gutted the aviation safety committee last week," said the congresswoman, referring to the Aviation Security Advisory Committee. "Air traffic controllers—already understaffed—got Trump's 'buyout' this week with a one-week ultimatum to decide. It's not DEI—it's him."
Rep. Rick Larsen (D-Wash.) also warned last week that Trump's federal hiring freeze could worsen understaffing among air traffic controllers.
"Hiring air traffic controllers is the number one safety issue according to the entire aviation industry," said Larsen at the time. "Instead of working to improve aviation safety and lower costs for hardworking American families, the administration is choosing to spread bogus DEI claims to justify this decision. I'm not surprised by the president's dangerous and divisive actions, but the administration must reverse course."
On Thursday, Larsen offered condolences for the families of the victims in the crash, and cautioned against speculating "on the causes of aviation accidents before we have the facts and the details."
"However, I know it's not DEI because it never is," said Larsen. "The National Transportation Safety Board will look at the causes and contributing factors of this accident. It is important to let the NTSB complete its work before we consider any potential policy response."
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Running in Circles on Racial Justice
Hard-fought victories in terms of racial justice in the U.S. are always met with a vicious backlash that makes progress a circular motion where we end up, it seems, where we began.
Jan 20, 2025
We keep running in circles when it comes to addressing racial justice in the U.S. This means that with every advance we almost come back to the same place and must fight the battles all over again. It doesn't mean that progress has not been made, but the progress retrogresses due to the immediate backlash that charges any advance to rectify past racial injustices as an affront to white people. At best there is an ebb and flow when it comes to rectifying the racial harms and damages of the past.
Race history and the many initiatives to rectify past wrongs is more of a circle than a linear line. It may be an expanding circle considering advances, but for every victory won there is a vicious throw back. It is almost like the 1993 movie Groundhog Day where morning after morning we awaken to history repeating itself, and where victories of racial justice are swept away by the courts or a change in the body politic. The struggle continues, and in many cases, we must begin again.
Every racial justice victory in the United States came about because of the Civil War and the various modes of resistance employed by victims of racial injustices. Mass protests and resistance has generally forced those in power to seek easy answers to placate the anger of the victims of racial injustice. But every attempt to satisfy and pacify the various protests is met with vociferous protests that erase hard fought victories. Just a few examples over four centuries in U.S. history serve as evidence. At each juncture of political protest those in power have historically responded with various initiatives designed to calm the uprisings and unrest. However, any advance is quickly eradicated under the guise of reverse discrimination.
If the United States is ever going to create a society of real growth and opportunity, it needs to stop chasing its tail.
After the Civil War, one man, one vote was militarily imposed resulting in the elections of Black men to numerous political offices in the South. With those advances came the passage of the 13th Amendment in 1865 abolishing slavery. The Civil Rights Act of 1866 granted citizenship to people born in the U.S. This served as a response to the 1857 Supreme Court Dred Scott decision that ruled Blacks were not citizens. The 14th Amendment passed in 1868 addressed and attempted to rectify state laws that abridged the rights of Black people. In 1870 the 15th Amendment was adopted that attempted to grant the right to vote to Black men (It should be noted that it wasn't until 1920 that women had the right to vote). In 1871 another Civil Rights Act was passed, also known as the Klu Klux Klan Act, which was a response to the growing terrorism used by whites against Blacks and advances in civil rights. These acts of terror were designed to take away the vote, enforce racial codes, and re-impose restrictions on Black people that had been granted post-Civil War. The backlash turned back the clock on the numerous advances that sought to correct the racial injustices of the past.
In 1865 Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, and Andrew Johnson became President. Andrew Johnson was a Southerner who worked to turn back the numerous advances made in racial justice. Under his administration amnesty was granted to Confederates. Confiscated lands (plantations) were returned to those who rebelled against the Union. The last remaining Union troops were withdrawn from the South in the Compromise of 1877 resulting in the reestablishment of pre-Civil War policies that completed the circle of restoring white Southern rule, reinstating the Black Codes, and allowing states to make policies that re-created de facto enslavement. The circle turned 360 degrees from voting rights, citizenship, anti-terrorism, social rectification, and attempts at inclusion to making it virtually impossible for Blacks to vote, live and work, or engage in the routines of life without fear and intimidation. Reconstruction, a response to racial injustices and calls to the nation to be inclusive and equitable, was short lived—from 1865-1877—and in that short time it ushered in amendments and civil rights acts. However, it was attacked from the beginning, sabotaged, and died because of white backlash. Most of the steps forward were spurned within 12 short years, and all the advances undone. The circle of racial justice took Blacks from winning to having to fight all over again.
In response to the racial justice organizing in the 20th century and the social unrest through demonstrations, sit-ins, and mass marches, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed. This act prohibited discrimination in labor and attempted to end segregation in public facilities, public schools, and federally funded programs (keep in mind that 10 years prior, in 1954, the Supreme Court had already ruled segregation in public schools unconstitutional and ordered schools to desegregate). In 1965 the Voting Rights Act was passed to challenge the many schemes employed by states to abridge the ability of Blacks to vote. It also required Southern states to seek permission to substantively change voting practices. However in 2013, the Supreme Court in Shelby County v. Holder gutted these protections arguing that they were "based on 40-year-old facts having no logical relationship to the present day." Hence voting protections enacted in 1965 were gutted effectively rendering the act a relic of the past. This is an example of the ebb, or the circular motion, of the nature of racial rectification in the U.S.
In the 21st century white resistance to the freedoms of Blacks to move and live within the society coupled with continued fears of whites towards Black people resulted in "Stand Your Ground" laws. These were boilerplate legislation written by the American Legislative Exchange Council and offered to state legislators which produced glaring and frightening consequences for Black people. Black people were shot for ringing the wrong door bell, or for being in the wrong neighborhood. But all of this played into a larger scheme to erode equal rights and turn back the clock on racial rectification.
The reaction to racial justice is relentless and comes whenever strides are made to make the nation more inclusive. The Black Lives Matter movement emerged, trying to hold people and society accountable. The movement was spurred on by the killings of Trayvon Martin and Ahmaud Arbery by vigilantes. George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Sandra Bland, and Philando Castile were examples of police killings. In the streets voices chanted, "Defund the police," and bodies blocked expressways and intersections. Political leaders and bodies across the country entertained discussions on the matter. Corporate America responded along with other entities employing "Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion" (DEI) measures. DEI became part of the discussion in the economic, political, and educational arena. The corporate world responded to the various outcries of disadvantaged groups that included racial and the LGBTQIA community and sought ways to demonstrate their desire to include and sell to these groups. Among those employing DEI initiatives were Amazon, Meta (FaceBook), McDonald's, Walmart, Ford, Lowe's, John Deere, American Airlines, Boeing, Jack Daniel's (Brown-Forman), Caterpillar, Harley-Davidson, Molson Coors, Nissan, Polaris, Toyota, and Anheuser-Busch.
The criticisms however grew louder as the "Turn Back the Clock" and Make America Great Again activists homed in on "wokeness" and began to attack those corporations for their support of racial justice and gay rights. The 2023 Supreme Court decision on college admissions, which struck down affirmative action programs declaring that race cannot be a factor in college admissions, was used to advance charges of reverse discrimination and of lowering standards. Then with the election of President Donald Trump the attacks on DEI found greater energy and corporations demonstrated lesser courage. Each of the corporations mentioned have since rolled back or eliminated their Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs. This is another example of a 360-degree turn in the struggle for racial justice and inclusion within the society, culture, and workplace.
Blacks have been historically wronged and remain disadvantaged. We continue to lag behind our white counterparts in terms of education, economics, and wealth. If progress is linear then we could surmise that at some point Blacks would catch up to whites. Instead, in most categories, the gaps and disparities have grown wider. The only way to explain this phenomenon is that we are engaged in a circle of gaining and then losing. The circle may grow larger signifying the progress being made, but the hard-fought victories in terms of racial justice are always met with a vicious backlash that makes progress a circular motion where we end up, it seems, where we began.
If the United States is ever going to create a society of real growth and opportunity, it needs to stop chasing its tail. It needs to change its belief that correcting past wrongs is somehow to penalize someone else. The irony is that those who complain about reverse discrimination are the ones who have been the beneficiaries of a system of discrimination. A strong society must come to terms with its history; tell the stories of the good, the bad, and the ugly; and muster the courage to create and maintain policies, programs, and systems that correct the sins of the past.
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Zuckerberg Extols 'Masculine Energy' in Corporate America as Meta Kills DEI Programs
"Remember, Zuckerberg built Facebook not for social connection but to rate the hotness of his female college mates," noted one critic.
Jan 11, 2025
As numerous U.S. corporations bend to the right with the political winds swirling around Republican President-elect Donald Trump's imminent return to power, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is following up on his company's termination of its fact-checking program by ending its diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and praising "masculine energy" in corporate America.
"I think a lot of the corporate world is, like, pretty culturally neutered," Zuckerberg said during an interview with the eponymous host of "The Joe Rogan Experience" podcast on Friday. Meta is the parent company of social platforms including Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.
Explaining that he has "three sisters, no brothers" and "three daughters, no sons," Zuckerberg continued: "So I'm, like, surrounded by girls and women, like, my whole life. And it's like...I don't know, there's something, the kind of masculine energy, I think, is good."
"And obviously, you know, society has plenty of that, but I think corporate culture was really like trying to get away from it," he said. "And I do think that... all these forms of energy are good. And I think having a culture that, like, celebrates the aggression a bit more has its own merits that are really positive."
The tech industry is built on 'masculine energy', a bro--no girls allowed--culture. Remember Zuckerberg built Facebook not for social connection but to rate the hotness of his female college mates. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...
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— Amy Diehl, Ph.D. (@amydiehl.bsky.social) January 11, 2025 at 8:09 AM
Zuckerberg elaborated:
I do think that if you're a a woman going into a company, it probably feels like it's too masculine. Right? And it's like there isn't enough of the kind of the energy that you may naturally have. And it probably feels like there are all these things that are set up that are biased against you. And that's not good either, 'cause you want women to be able to succeed.
But I think these things can... go a little far. And I think it's one thing to say we want to be kind of, like, welcoming and make a good environment for everyone. And I think it's another to basically say that masculinity is bad. And I, I just think we kind of swung culturally to that part of the... spectrum where, you know, it's all like, okay, masculinity is toxic. We have to, like, get rid of it completely.
No... Both of these things are good, right? It's like, you want, like, feminine energy, you want masculine energy... I think that that's all good. But I do think the corporate culture sort of had swung towards being this somewhat more neutered thing. And I didn't really feel that until I got involved in martial arts, which I think is still a more, much more masculine culture.
While some social media observers attributed Zuckerberg's shift to factors like "the power of gym bro masculinity," others noted the rightward shift in corporate America accompanying Trump's White House return and Republicans' control of both houses of Congress.
"Zuck is a Cuck": Meta's Billionaire Bends The Knee to MAGA Mark Zuckerberg joins a rogue's gallery of billionaires capitulating to Donald Trump's threats and promoting MAGA's agenda against truth, democracy, and diversity for the sake of self-preservation. thelefthook.substack.com/p/zuck-is-a-...
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— Wajahat Ali (@wajali.bsky.social) January 10, 2025 at 6:47 PM
Nowhere is this more pronounced than in the wave of companies ending or dialing back diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs. The growing list includes McDonald's, Walmart, Boeing, Molson Coors, Ford, Harley-Davidson, John Deere, Amazon, and—as of Friday—Meta.
According to an internal memo from Meta vice president of human resources Janelle Gale viewed by several media outlets, Meta is immediately ending DEI programs in hiring, training, and supplier selection because the "legal and policy landscape surrounding diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in the United States is changing."
"The term 'DEI' has also become charged, in part because it is understood by some as a practice that suggests preferential treatment of some groups over others," Gale explained.
Meta's move follows Tuesday's announcement that the company is ending its third-party fact-checking program because it is "too politically biased" and replacing it with community notes à la X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter and owned by Elon Musk, who will co-chair the Trump administration's Department of Government Efficiency.
The announcement also said Meta "will be moving the trust and safety teams that write our content policies and review content out of California to Texas and other U.S. locations."
As part of its broad new "free expression" policy, Meta will also permit certain speech widely considered hateful by human rights defenders.
According to training materials
viewed by The Intercept and other media outlets, Meta users will be able to say things like "immigrants are grubby, filthy pieces of shit," "Black people are more violent than whites," "Italians are dickheads," women are "household objects" or "property," and transgender people are mentally ill. Calling trans people "trannies" or "it" is now also acceptable on Meta sites.
I got a warning for posting "you are an evil man" to Zuck but not for posting "you are a degenerate tranny." Real nice system they have at Meta.
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— Alejandra Caraballo (@esqueer.net) January 10, 2025 at 7:50 PM
The New York Times reported Friday that Meta has ordered its offices in Silicon Valley, New York, and Texas to remove the tampons which had been offered to transgender and nonbinary employees who use men's restrooms. The report also said that Meta has removed trans and nonbinary themes from its Messenger chat app.
Zuckerberg has also appointed UFC CEO Dana White, a friend and supporter of Trump, to Meta's board of directors,
explaining, "I've admired him as an entrepreneur and his ability to build such a beloved brand."
These moves followed a November meeting between Trump and Zuckerberg at the former's Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, after which Meta reportedly also gave $1 million to the president-elect's inauguration fund.
Zuckerberg's alignment with key elements of Trumpism represents a stark departure from just a few months ago, when, in a new book, Trump accused him of inimical "plotting" during the 2020 election and said he threatened to imprison the tech billionaire for life if he did so again in 2024.
Now, Zuckerberg's blasting outgoing Democratic President Joe Biden. He told Rogan Friday that during the coronavirus pandemic, Biden administration officials would "call up and, like, scream... and curse" at Meta leaders over Covid-19 misinformation.
Some internet users poked fun at Meta's new policies, with one popular meme satirically claiming that Zuckerberg "died of coronavirus and complications from syphilis."
Who needs dumb old facts anyways?
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— JonZoidberg ( @jonzoidberg.bsky.social) January 7, 2025 at 8:42 PM
But others took a more serious view of Zuckerberg's about-face, with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) asserting this week that "these changes reveal that Meta seems less interested in freedom of expression as a principle and more focused on appeasing the incoming U.S. administration."
"Meta has long been criticized by the global digital rights community, as well as by artists, sex worker advocacy groups, LGBTQ+ advocates, Palestine advocates, and political groups, among others," EFF added. "A corporation with a history of biased and harmful moderation like Meta [needs] a careful, well-thought-out, and sincere fix that will not undermine broader freedom of expression goals."
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Critics Say Trump Got 'Nothing Right' About Causes of LA Wildfires
One observer blasted MAGA's "conflagration of lies and disinformation."
Jan 09, 2025
Progressive critics were left shaking their heads this week as Republican U.S. President-elect Donald Trump and his MAGA allies absurdly blamed the Los Angeles County wildfires on everything from an ichthyophile governor to diversity policies—while ignoring what experts say is the true cause of the deadly infernos.
On Wednesday, Trump took to his Truth social media platform to falsely accuse Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom—whom he repeatedly called "Newscum"—of refusing "to sign the water restoration declaration put before him that would have allowed millions of gallons of water... to flow daily into many parts of California, including the areas that are currently burning in a virtually apocalyptic way."
Newsom's office responded to Trump's accusation by correctly noting that "there is no such document as the water restoration declaration."
Trump also accused Newsom of wanting "to protect an essentially worthless fish called a smelt, by giving it less water," a red herring and false statement given that the state's plan to protect the endangered delta smelt actually involved increasing the amount of fresh water flowing into its habitat.
Jeffrey Mount, a water policy expert at the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California, told MSNBC newsletter editor Ryan Teague Beckwith on Thursday that Trump got "nothing right" in his post.
Summarizing his interview with Mount, Teague Beckwith wrote:
Without getting into too much detail, here's what did happen... During Trump's first term, his administration sought to divert some of the water coming into a river delta near San Francisco to farmers in the San Joaquin Valley, among others. They came up with a plan for the water, which Newsom challenged in court. The Biden administration later negotiated a new plan with California on how to divvy up the water.
This is basic stuff, so the fact that Trump describes this as Newsom refusing to sign some kind of document that never existed should give you a sense of how disengaged he is with his own policy.
Meanwhile, MAGA acolyte and soon-to-be Department of Government Efficiency co-leader Elon Musk used his X social media network—formerly Twitter—to amplify racist posts disparaging Democratic Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, an antisemitic diatribe by defamatory conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, implicitly sexist and homophobic attacks on Los Angeles' fire chief, and his own frequent aspersions of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies.
Slate web editor Nitish Pahwa condemned MAGA's "conflagration of lies and disinformation."
"Just one day after Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook and Instagram would no longer be fact-checking informational posts, and mere months after nonstop online hoaxes obstructed federal efforts to assist North Carolinians in the recovery from Hurricane Helene, we're getting an early-year preview of how the United States is going to experience and respond to these rampaging climate disasters throughout the near future," Pahwa said.
"In the vacuum left by mainstream TV networks that did not at all mention climate change in their fire coverage, bad-faith digital actors swooped in with their own takes," Pahwa added. "Climate change doesn't just boost record weather events—it boosts the snake-oil salesmen, too."
Climate experts and defenders weighed in with science-based explanations for the increase in extreme weather events like the Los Angeles County wildfires.
As Common Dreams reported earlier Thursday, Aaron Regunberg, Public Citizen's Climate Program senior policy counsel, noted that "a recent study found that nearly all of the observed increase in wildfire-burned area in California over the past half-century is attributable to anthropogenic climate change."
"This devastation is the direct result of Big Oil's conduct," Regunberg asserted.
As Fossil Free Media director Jamie Henn said, "This is exactly the sort of disaster that Exxon's own scientists predicted more than 50 years ago, but they spent billions to keep us hooked on fossil fuels."
According to the U.S. National Park Service, the area burned annually by California wildfires has increased fivefold since the 1970s.
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What Is Trump Really Offering Rural Voters? More Hell on Earth and Harder Times Ahead
In a world where the weather’s only growing worse, if my community is a good example — and I suspect it’s as good as any — rural Americans need to think hard when they go to the ballot box next week.
Oct 28, 2024
Images of homes that collapsed under mudslides or falling trees, waterlogged farms, and debris-filled roads drove home (yes, home!) to me recently the impact of Hurricane Helene on rural areas in the southeastern United States. That hurricane and the no-less-devastating Hurricane Milton that followed it only exacerbated already existing underlying problems for rural America. Those would include federal insurance programs that prioritize rising sea levels over flooding from heavy rainfall, deepening poverty, and unequal access to private home insurance — issues, in other words, faced by poor inland farming communities. And for millions of rural Americans impacted by Helene, don’t forget limited access to healthcare services, widespread electricity outages, and of course, difficulty getting to the ballot box. Case in point: some 80% of North Carolinians under major disaster declarations live in rural areas.
Given that Helene’s human impact was plain for all to see, what struck me was that significant numbers of headlines about that storm’s devastation centered not on those people hardest hit, but on the bizarre conspiracy theories of extremist observers: that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is funneling tens of millions in funds and supplies meant for hurricane survivors to migrants, that the Biden administration has been in cahoots with meteorologists to control the weather, or that Biden and crew actually planned the storm! One of my personal favorites came from a neighbor I encountered at the post office in our rural Maryland town: we don’t have enough money for FEMA rescue operations, she told me, because we’re funding Israeli healthcare and housing — a reference, undoubtedly, to the tens of billions of dollars of bombs and other aid this country has sent Israel’s military in its war in Gaza and beyond.
Of course, some conspiracy theories have a grain of truth at their core: if only we had focused long ago on issues of human welfare here instead of funding decades of foreign wars, it’s possible we might not be living in such an inequitable, infrastructurally weak country, or one increasingly devastated by climate-change-affected weather. But why did it take the deranged rantings of figures like former President Donald Trump and multibillionaire Elon Musk on social media to begin a discussion about how we choose to spend limited federal dollars? If only more government relief money was indeed spent on basic human necessities like housing and healthcare, anywhere at all, and not on war!
All of this ambient chatter has had an impact as real as the 140 mile-per-hour-plus winds and severe flooding that razed communities in six states across the Southeast in the last month and killed hundreds of Americans, with more still missing. In a region where death remains so omnipresent that observers can smell human bodies as they drive through mountain passes, conspiracy theories have led to real threats that forced FEMA crews to relocate from hard-hit Rutherford County, North Carolina, after reports of armed militia members who said they were “hunting FEMA.”
Given the truly destructive nature of all that chatter, I wasn’t surprised to hear New York Times “The Daily” host Michael Barbaro open one of his podcasts about Hurricane Milton with a question to fellow political journalist Maggie Haberman that would have seemed odd in any other context: “How quickly do we expect this storm to become political?”
How quickly do we expect this storm to become political? How about: How long before the next storm hits category 4 or even 5 status and makes landfall? It seems as if the world we’re living in isn’t Helene’s or Milton’s but the alternative-factual world of former Trump staffer Kellyanne Conway and forecasting what nonsense will pop up next about the weather (or almost anything else) has become more real than the weather itself.
The Complex Identity of Rural America
At the start of the Covid pandemic, I moved to a fairly progressive rural community in Maryland after my family purchased a small farm there where we have an orchard, a large produce garden, and a flock of egg-laying chickens (all of which are, I suppose, our versions of hobbies). I remain confounded by the fact that so many Americans — especially rural ones — vote for the party whose leaders divert aid and attention from solving problems that affect their communities, including the hurricane season and other kinds of extreme weather, not to speak of the rescue work that follows such natural disasters, and the need to provide services and protection for migrants who work on such farms and in rural businesses. Case in point: Republican members of the House and Senate voted against stopgap funding for FEMA a few weeks before Helene hit, doing their part to jeopardize aid to so many of their supporters, even though such efforts may ultimately prove unsuccessful.
It’s well known that many rural Americans provide a bulwark of support for Republican candidates and far-right causes. During the 2016 presidential elections, Donald Trump gained more backing from that group than any other president had in modern American history. The impact of rural America on his coalition of voters in the 2020 presidential elections was comparable to that of labor unions for Democrats.
Some rural voters also have spoken up loudly when it comes to far-right causes and identity politics. Typically, Tractor Supply Company, which bills itself as the “largest rural lifestyle retailer” and sells gardening tools, feed, small livestock, clothing, and guns, among other things, succumbed last summer to a pressure campaign from its customers to stop anti-discrimination and awareness-raising diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) hiring programs that had previously earned it national recognition. Its management also pledged to stop participating in LGBTQ+ pride events and eliminate its previous goals to cut carbon emissions in its operations. The campaign kicked off after a right-wing influencer in Tennessee, who ran unsuccessfully for a congressional seat in 2022, posted on X that the company was funding sex changes, among other baseless accusations.
Rural America and Climate Change
I had to balk at such a campaign. Anywhere you look in my town, you can find evidence of how initiatives like Tractor Supply Company’s serve to benefit our community.
To consider (at least to my mind) the most pressing case in point, it’s increasingly difficult for people to farm in today’s climate because governments are not curbing greenhouse gas emissions fast enough. The Biden administration has significantly chipped away at the problem by investing in clean energy, reining in the worst corporate polluters, and curbing emissions and coal usage. Unfortunately, this country still produces record amounts of oil and natural gas, and the ravages of extreme weather in my mid-Atlantic agricultural community are plain to see, as is also true nationally.
Let me share a few small-scale, personal examples. A few years ago, I found that there was enough water locally and nighttime temperatures dipped sufficiently low to grow vegetables, meaning my family wouldn’t have to purchase much produce during the summer months. The past two summers, however, heat, wildfire smoke, and more recently, drought, have made small-scale farming prohibitively difficult, at least for my less experienced hands. My tomatoes haven’t cooled enough at night to ripen sufficiently. More than half of the new fruit trees I purchased to add to our orchard died for lack of sufficient water, and I found myself having to stay up in our barn with one of my best laying hens that I found collapsed from heat stroke one summer day. Dipping her little feet in cool water and forcing electrolytes down her beak ultimately revived her, but the near death of that tiny animal that the local Tractor Supply branch had sold me and advertised as “heat hardy” shook me.
Worse yet, earlier this spring, wildfires swept through my back woods and neighborhood, burning down one of my neighbor’s sheds, threatening numerous homes, including mine, and forcing a neighboring farm to evacuate their livestock. And even worse than that, there wasn’t enough water in my once robust creek for the local fire department to extinguish the flames quickly before the fire impacted several properties.
Our family is lucky. We each have a full-time job to sustain us and so don’t have to rely on farming to do anything but enrich our lives. Unfortunately, other families who have bravely sought to feed more people for a living can’t always say the same. Hurricane Helene is a case in point. According to the American Farm Bureau, that storm (and Milton on its heels) had a unique impact on rural communities and agriculture, with billions of dollars in fruit, nuts, and poultry lost. Food supply in rural communities across the Southeast has already been impacted and grocery price increases throughout the country will be likely.
In the U.S., where more than half of all land is used for agricultural purposes, the number of farms has been decreasing since the 1930s. And while climate change has made growing seasons longer, it’s also made the weather far less predictable. Despite farmers scaling up production and adapting their methods, doing everything from bringing horticulture indoors to using recycled human food waste as feed, yield has fallen and it’s growing ever more difficult to stay in the black. The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the crucial global research body tracking that phenomenon, recently found that the largest casualty of our overheating planet is the struggle of agriculture to produce enough food for people to live, leading to growing food insecurity in regions around the world.
Worse yet, government efforts to help farmers survive sometimes create more problems than they solve. For example, financial and tax incentives for farmers who can demonstrate that they are using their crops to capture carbon require large amounts of paperwork, while climate regulations that may help farms in the long run entail red tape and restrictions that make paying the bills far harder in the short term. Yet some of the more vulnerable farmers like those in communities of color have welcomed recent government interventions as reparations for decades of discrimination in federal loan programs, as have indigenous communities who benefit from grants to develop more sustainable farming practices.
Nonetheless, if voting patterns and consumer pressure campaigns are any harbinger of the future, too many rural voters and consumers don’t seem to be thinking about how to create just such sustainable farming practices in a climate-changing world. Instead, the loudest voices in rural America seem focused on fear-based identity politics and anger rather than what elected officials have — and have not — said and done to aid their everyday lives in increasingly difficult times.
By some indicators, rural lives have only grown far more precarious in our moment and maybe that helps explain why so many farm families are frustrated with the powers that be. Farmers in this country are more than three times as likely to die by suicide as people in the general population. Factors like high rates of gun ownership and social isolation have an impact, but so do unpredictable weather, supply chain interruptions born of the Covid-19 pandemic, and our government’s slow and haphazard response to so much in the Trump years.
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
I find it perplexing that the rural customers of Tractor Supply rejected diversity, equity, and inclusion campaigns from that rural retailer, since people of color, women, and LGBTQ+ folks make up a significant part of rural communities, just not the well-paid or well supported ones. Most farmworkers who tend crops and livestock and engage in other forms of manual labor like processing or transporting our food are, in fact, foreign born and work for only the little more than half of the year that encompasses the growing season. Those workers or others in their families need to get second jobs just to make ends meet. They are more at risk of climate- and access-related health issues because of air pollution and heat-stroke. Such risks were compounded by Trump-era policies that cut federal funding for rural health centers and curbed insurance regulations in struggling rural clinics and hospitals.
In an America where discrimination as well as pay gaps based on race, gender, and sexual orientation remain rampant, making equity a priority can only help those who actually sustain this country’s farming communities. In my county, where equity and inclusiveness are central to social policy, about a third of the children at our small rural school receive free lunches and other services. That portion of the school population consists significantly of kids whose parents are willing to do low-wage work on local farms and that’s not generally white, American-born families.
What’s clear is that Donald Trump’s politics of grievance appeals to voters who see their lives and those of their children worsening, not getting better, as time goes by. Social science research has identified emotions like anger, fear, and nostalgia as key to his appeal to rural Americans and other groups whose health indicators, isolation, and economic well-being are only worsening. If his recent seemingly unhinged “dance party” in Pennsylvania is anything to go by, I suspect he’s hearkening back to a time in American history when communities were smaller, life was simpler, and racism was rampant and — yes! — unhinged. (Note, by the way, his inclusion of “Dixie,” the unofficial Confederate anthem, on that playlist he danced to for 39 straight minutes.) While rural America certainly struggles in more ways than I can describe, it’s precisely the things that Democratic candidates are trying to do now that would bring them back to a healthier, more sustainable way of life.
In a world where the weather’s only growing worse, if my community is a good example — and I suspect it’s as good as any — rural Americans need to think hard when they go to the ballot box (or the cash register) and consider the universe of hard scientific facts rather than just listening to the latest conspiracy monger on X or Instagram. Their lives and their livelihoods may just depend on it.
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