Free Republic

President Trump just made one of the biggest moves yet to destroy the left’s most powerful weapon—and hardly anyone is talking about it. It didn’t even make a blip on the media’s radar. With one blistering executive order, Trump took a sledgehammer to the very foundation of the DEI movement. That’s right—47 just gutted the so-called “legal theory” that’s been used for decades to punish businesses, control hiring, and force unfair racial quotas under the phony guise of “civil rights.” This was the left’s top-secret weapon—and it was called “disparate impact”—and until now, it’s been holding America back from greatness....

President Trump gets a thing or two done. In his first term in office, President Trump apparently thought he could operate as if the federal government were a corporation he headed as Chief Executive and Commander in Chief of the armed forces. He assumed those beneath him would give him honest counsel, would perform their assigned duties, and follow his directives. He learned otherwise. All the steps he took the first week after beginning his astonishing second term are those a wise CEO and commander in chief must take to do the job he promised and was elected to do....

Trump just revoked EO 11246, signed by President LBJ in 1965 which established gov affirmative action

Donald Trump’s re-election has been hailed by some as the nail in the coffin for ‘wokeness’, a movement now rejected by both the left and the right. But how did it fall so far out of favour? When Donald Trump launched his 2024 presidential campaign, he centred his platform on a promise to end “wokeness”. In his campaign video, “Agenda47: President Trump’s Ten Principles for Great Schools Leading to Great Jobs”, the now president-elect declared schools a key battleground to be reclaimed from the left, pledging to ban lessons on gender identity and structural racism in classrooms. Before his election...

Vivek Ramaswamy broke the first rule of public relations. He said something that will probably alienate the public in what we can call his blood, sweat, and tears tweet. The billionaire entrepreneur had one simple message on X: We can't get ahead by taking it easy, no matter what Hollywood says.The reason top tech companies often hire foreign-born & first-generation engineers over “native” Americans isn’t because of an innate American IQ deficit (a lazy & wrong explanation). A key part of it comes down to the c-word: culture. Tough questions demand tough answers & if we’re really serious about fixing...

Joe Biden’s last-minute pardons have been positively scandalous — and the one for his son Hunter hasn’t even been the worst of them. Biden’s pardons are terrible in and of themselves, but taken together they illustrate a more important point. Pardons are for resolving individual cases one at a time; pardons aren’t for policymaking. First: Holy smokes, some of these pardons are bonkers, including Biden’s grant of clemency for the corrupt judge at the center of the “Kids for Cash” case, in which former Pennsylvania Judge Michael Conahan took bribes in exchange for wrongly sentencing children to time in for-profit...

By hiring weak leaders with failed track records and prioritizing equity over merit, Michelle Reid destroyed Fairfax County schools.Last month, Ann Bonitatibus announced that she was resigning from her position as principal of Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (TJ), a magnet school located in Fairfax County, Virginia, the state’s largest school district.Before her leadership, TJ was the top-ranked high school in the nation for about a decade. Bonitatibus aided in the overhaul of TJ’s selection process in 2020 from merit to equity, thereby compromising the once highly prestigious school’s rigor, and sinking its ranking from first to...

As America’s largest companies and their CEOs increasingly embrace a new leadership role in advancing racial equity, they face a confounding question: What really works? Despite decades of research and a growing corporate focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) over the past few years, many executives are unsure what actions are most effective at increasing diverse representation, improving feelings of inclusion, or making progress on other DEI goals

The University of Kentucky is the latest school to close its Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) offices, joining public colleges in Texas, Florida, and Alabama in eliminating programs that encourage discrimination based on race and sex. The university has decided to close its DEI office after the state legislature questioned whether the identity-focused programs have hindered discourse on campus, University of Kentucky President Eli Capilouto said on Tuesday. Watch Below:

Churchill Archives Centre, Churchill Press Photographs, CHPH 1A/F2/8 A black and white photograph of Winston Church in 1924, wearing a three piece suit and bow tie, smoking a cigar, sitting on garden steps, looking at his young daughter Mary, Chartwell, KentChurchill Archives Centre, Churchill Press Photographs, CHPH 1A/F2/8 A little-known speech made by Winston Churchill in the run up to the Paris Olympics in 1924 has been uncovered in an archive. The statesman was supporting a 1923 fundraising campaign to enable British athletes to take part in the Games based on merit, not just on whether they could afford it....

Some aviation experts argue the FAA’s focus on ‘diversity’ instead of ’merit' in hiring pilots and controllers is leading to serious safety concerns... As the U.S. Justice Department decides whether to pursue a criminal case against Boeing, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is investigating dozens of airplane incidents since January, including one in which a Swiss Air jet almost collided with four other planes on the runway at JFK International Airport in New York City. The FAA has more than 100 aviation accidents and incidents since the beginning of 2024. These include airplane and helicopter crashes, equipment and mechanical malfunctions,...

Peter Robinson, Uncommon Knowledge: After growing up in Harlem, Thomas Sowell served in the United States Marine Corps during the Korean War, then received an undergraduate degree from Harvard, a master’s degree from Columbia, and a doctorate from the University of Chicago. After teaching at universities that included Cornell, Brandeis, and UCLA, Dr. Sowell became a fellow at the Hoover Institution in 1977. Thomas Sowell is the author of some forty books, including his newest volume, Social Justice Fallacies. And this past spring, he turned ninety-three. Tom, welcome back. Thomas Sowell: Oh, good being here. Robinson: Dr. Martin Luther King...

On June 29, 2023, a Twitter account called “Erica Marsh” tweeted the following:“Today’s Supreme Court decision is a direct attack on Black people. No Black person will be able to succeed in a merit-based system which is exactly why affirmative-action based programs were needed. Today’s decision is a TRAVESTY!!!”Link to original: https://twitter.com/ericareport/status/1674453321078415362Link to archived version: https://web.archive.org/web/20230629201916/https://twitter.com/ericareport/status/1674453321078415362Here’s screenshot:I can’t tell if this is a real liberal, or a conservative troll trying to make fun of liberals.Of course, regular readers of my blog know that I disagree with the comment. I have always been in favor of high academic standards, and encouraged...

NY Times columnist Pamela Paul writes today about disturbing evidence that science won’t be spared from the long march of identity politics through our institutions. A group of 29 scientists including two Nobel laureates collaborated on a paper titled “In Defense of Merit in Science,” but major science journals rejected it.A paper published last week, “In Defense of Merit in Science,” documents the disquieting ways in which research is increasingly informed by a politicized agenda, one that often characterizes science as fundamentally racist and in need of “decolonizing.” The authors argue that science should instead be independent, evidence-based and focused...

Before its collapse Friday, wokesterism surrounded Silicon Valley Bank like a miasma.The wokesterly attentiveness didn't per se destroy that mid-sized bank, given that most banks play these games and the big ones are very loud about it.As I noted earlier, Johns Hopkins University professor of economics, Steve Hanke, put his finger on the problem more precisely in an email:[T]he real SVB issue was terrible banking and risk management that resulted in a massive duration mismatch between SVB's liabilities (read: deposits) and its assets (read: long-dated bonds). The mismatch was stupidly not hedged. SVB was a poorly run bank, a disaster...

Our government is playing with our lives as it prefers diversity, equity, and inclusion over ensuring the best qualified employees are hired. A recent epidemic of airline near misses deserves both attention and reflection. In mid-December, a San Francisco-bound United Airlines Boeing 777-200 airliner, just a little over a minute after taking off from Maui, Hawaii, suddenly dived. It lost more than half its altitude and came within 800 feet of crashing into the Pacific Ocean before pulling up. About a month later, an American Airlines jet crossed the runway at New York City’s John F. Kennedy International Airport just...

On Tuesday night, Fox News host Tucker Carlson drew attention to the dark side of the left’s prioritization of equity over merit in corporate hiring decisions. And nowhere is this growing trend more frightening — and potentially deadly — than in the airline industry. In the video below, he pointed out that airlines are “dramatically lowering hiring standards for pilots and for air traffic controllers” and warned that “at some point, many people are going to die” as a result. Carlson described several “near disasters” that have occurred in just the past few months that should have all Americans concerned...

For years, two administrators at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (TJ) have been withholding notifications of National Merit awards from the school’s families, most of them Asian, thus denying students the right to use those awards to boost their college-admission prospects and earn scholarships. This episode has emerged amid the school district’s new strategy of “equal outcomes for every student, without exception.” School administrators, for instance, have implemented an “equitable grading” policy that eliminates zeros, gives students a grade of 50 percent just for showing up, and assigns a cryptic code of “NTI” for assignments not turned...

The American Bar Association is under fire after taking steps to abandon LSAT entrance exam scores as a law school admissions requirement after a study showed that minority applicants score lower. The Council of the ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar approved the proposed standards revision earlier this month.The proposed change now goes to the association's policy-making body, the House of Delegates, for review in February. "But final approval to change ABA Standards and Rules of Procedure for Approval of Law Schools rests with the council, which serves as an independent arm of the ABA for...

Professors from the University of Arizona and the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs are arguing that "success and merit" are "barriers" to the equity agenda.“Admitting that the normative definitions of success and merit are in and of themselves barriers to achieving the goals of justice, diversity, equity and inclusion is necessary but not sufficient to create change,” professors Beth Mitchneck and Jessi L. Smith recently wrote for Inside Higher Education.Mitchneck and Smith attributed those definitions to a "narrow definition of merit limited to a neoliberal view of the university." Specifically, they express concern that universities receive funding and recognition based...