Robby Starbuck, Tennessee political commentator and documentary filmmaker, said he expected a “David vs. Goliath fight” when exposing Walmart Inc. for its “woke” corporate policies, however, ended up in discussions with Walmart executives that resulted in an agreement about the company’s woke policies moving forward.
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Robby Starbuck, Tennessee political commentator and documentary filmmaker, said the goal behind his work exposing companies that push DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) initiatives in the workplace is to have those companies get back to embracing “corporate neutrality.”
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A Republican state senate candidate is at odds with former President Donald Trump, who is running for reelection, on several key points.
Chris Spencer is running for state senate in District 18, encompassing Sumner and Trousdale Counties. He is challenging Speaker Pro Tempore Senator Ferrell Haile (R-Gallatin).
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Wokeness is impossible to escape. Everywhere you turn, you see rainbow flags, Black Lives Matter signs, or calls for “diversity and inclusion.” Companies force DEI trainings on staff. FBI agents march in Pride parades. Teachers tell kids in school that they are oppressors or oppressed based on their skin color. Target stores sell transgender swimsuits and Bud Light teams up with a grown man who acts like a little girl. Even Buzz Lightyear and “Star Wars” have gone woke.
Meanwhile, the Biden administration is falling all over itself to push transgender pronouns, to promote drag queens, and to celebrate Pride—even on Easter Sunday!
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Most conservatives are aware Big Tech is an insidious force in American life. Tech giants censor free speech, promote wokeness, and fund far-left groups. A number of Republicans at the federal level want to curtail the massive power Big Tech wields in our country.
However, at the state level, many Republicans are lining up to serve the interests of the tech giants. Big Tech knows that there’s little appetite at the federal level to do its bidding. So corporations like Microsoft are now lobbying state legislators to enact the AI regulations they want. It’s a campaign few Americans know about, but it could dramatically impact their lives.
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Wokeness was envisioned as a new reboot of the coalition of the oppressed.
Those purportedly victimized by traditional America would find “intersectional” solidarity in their victimhood owing to the supposed sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, and other alleged American sins, past and present.
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On February 12, the president of the Harvard Graduate School of Education urged higher education bureaucrats to blacklist Florida’s public universities for refusing to establish offices of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (DEIA). The institutions “have no right to be accredited,” wrote Professor Brian Rosenberg.
If you think this argument is all bark and no bite, think again. Wokeness has penetrated virtually every institution in America. School accrediting agencies are no exception. Increasingly, they are demanding that schools incorporate DEIA into their policies and curricula—or else. If current trends continue, it won’t be long until non-woke colleges lose their accreditation, jeopardizing their reputation and very existence.
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America is in a state of decline, if not chaos, following disappointing results in three straight elections and too many years of organized turmoil in our streets, schools, government institutions, and elsewhere. Reversing this requires fundamental changes in conservatives’ political and philanthropic strategies.
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Tensions are rising between those who profess to want to redefine the “soul” of America and those who have traditionally provided them the votes to win elections.
A new report from the Manhattan Institute warns that increasing tensions inside the Democratic Party between woke White elites and working class voters threaten to tear the party apart.
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Monday morning on The Tennessee Star Report, host Leahy welcomed all-star panelist, Nashville singer-songwriter Gary Chapman in studio to comment upon the death of Lisa Marie Presley and country star John Rich’s legal victory against wokeness.
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U.S. Representative Mike Gallagher (R-WI-8) this week responded scathingly to news that the Marine Corps is considering a report recommending the branch ditch gendered identifiers for drill instructors.
The Corps commissioned a study per a $2 million contract with the University of Pittsburgh. The report broadly recommends “direct, sustained training from drill instructors of both genders” to emphasize that “men and women are equally respected and authoritative leaders of their Service.” A section of the study addresses allegedly discriminatory language and suggests that the Corp may want to consider instructing personnel to call their superior officers by their ranks and last names rather than “Sir” or “Ma’am.”
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Monday morning on The Tennessee Star Report, host Leahy welcomed the original all-star panelist Crom Carmichael to the studio for another edition of Crom’s Crommentary.
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Wednesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report, host Leahy welcomed the Tennessee state director for Citizens for Renewing America, Aundrea Gomez in studio to talk about her personal experiences in public schools that led to her new position.
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As computer giant Apple considers bringing employees back to work in person while the COVID-19 pandemic winds down, some of those employees are worried that returning to work in person will make the company less diverse.
“Apple will likely always find people willing to work here, but our current policies requiring everyone to relocate to the office their team happens to be based in, and being in the office at least 3 fixed days of the week, will change the makeup of our workforce,” said an open letter written by employees. “It will make Apple younger, whiter, more male-dominated, more neuro-normative, more able-bodied, in short, it will lead to privileges deciding who can work for Apple, not who’d be the best fit.”
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It is not often that two contrasting mainstream media events reveal so completely the nature of the deep dysfunction of modern culture. Yet that is precisely what happened last month.
Those two events are as follows: First, contrarian Substack writer and known anti-woke crusader Andrew Sullivan appeared on Jon Stewart’s new show, “The Problem With Jon Stewart.” I do not think I am being uncharitable when I call the appearance a disaster. Which, to be fair, is not entirely Sullivan’s fault, seeing as he was thrust into what was effectively a three-on-one fight (more like a dozens-on-one fight, if you include the studio audience). He was the lone dissenter against a pack of braying fanatics, egged on by a motley trio consisting of a grifter and two useful idiots, one of whom is the most famed enforcer of liberal dogma from decades past.
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According to emails obtained by The Georgia Star News, far-left Gwinnett County School Board (GCSB) Chairwoman Dr. Tarese Johnson pushed for the Gwinnett County Chamber of Commerce (GCCC) to adopt social justice initiatives.
In a chain of internal GCSB emails from August, Johnson complains that the GCCC put on a skit regarding the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA), the public transit system in the city, that “perpetuated deeply rooted stereotypes.”
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Rev. Dr. Gregory P Schulz, a philosophy professor and Lutheran pastor, was suspended from Concordia University in Wisconsin following the publishing of his Feb. 14 article “Woke Dysphoria at Concordia.”
“Wokeness appears to be developing into a pathology at my ‘institution of Lutheran higher education’” Schulz wrote in Christian News article, criticizing the direction of Concordia University.
Five days later, Schulz discovered that he was suspended from the university. He apparently did not know why, even after getting locked out of his university email account and banned from all campus properties.
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In modern times, as in ancient Rome, several nations have suffered a “systems collapse.” The term describes the sudden inability of once prosperous populations to continue with what had ensured the good life as they knew it.
Abruptly, the population cannot buy, or even find, once plentiful necessities. They feel their streets are unsafe. Laws go unenforced or are enforced inequitably. Everyday things stop working. The government turns from reliable to capricious if not hostile.
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An outpouring of grants to activist groups promoting race-based ideology is causing problems for some Democrats by highlighting the most unpopular beliefs of party members, according to an op-ed published in The New York Times.
Charitable support for “racial equity” projects skyrocketed after the death of George Floyd in June 2020. These projects received $3.3 billion from 2011 to 2019, then $12.7 billion and $11.6 billion in 2020 and 2021, respectively, according to the NYT op-ed.
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The online class on gender, feminism, and the law was underway when Lisa Keogh, a 29-year-old student and mother of two, introduced a note of unwoke contention into the discussion.
“We were talking about equal rights for women, and I said I don’t believe a trans woman is really a woman,” said Keogh, then attending Abertay University Law School here. “I said that my definition of a woman is someone with a vagina.” Keogh, disagreeing with another point of view expressed in the same meeting, also voiced the apparently retrograde opinion that not all men are rapists.
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by Paul Gottfried In a widely noted analysis of wokeness at The American Conservative, Scott McConnell indicates that there’s good news ahead. Woke culture may soon be a spent force. It may be following the paths of other attempted revolutions like communism and Jacobinism, which reached a high point in power and popularity and then precipitously declined. According to McConnell, these periodic eruptions “seem to have a natural lifespan,” of about five years, only to peter out. If we show enough “will power” and presumably patience, that will happen in this case. An End to Wokeness A reaction is supposedly already setting in with the woke ideas of American educational and media elites. It seems these zealots have pushed their weird notions of white systemic racism, gender fluidity, and anti-Westernism beyond the point of public endurance. Pushback has supposedly begun; and most of McConnell’s detailed commentary is an attempt to flesh out how this perhaps inevitable reaction to wokeness is unfolding. Asian and Hispanic voters are breaking from the woke-intoxicated Democratic Party; and in the Virginia gubernatorial race in November, a Republican candidate who ran against critical race theory shocked the cultural Left by winning. Moreover, Glenn Youngkin’s Democratic opponent, rather…
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In regions like suburban Philadelphia, the Salvation Army’s red kettles at retail entrances are a timeless reminder of ordinary Americans’ philanthropic commitment to the less fortunate. Unfortunately, Salvation Army leaders have now dared to accuse these same Americans of participating in a “racist” society where “racial groups are placed into a hierarchy, with White or lighter-skinned people at the top.”
The organization’s “Let’s Talk About Racism” curriculum for its officers and soldiers has sparked national outrage for its admonition that white people “repent” for “racism” and for its belief that America “work[s] to keep White Americans in power.” Yet rather than admit that these woke ideas are not shared or supported by its donors or staff, the leadership of the Salvation Army has hidden its new effort from the public.
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Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) announced at a press conference yesterday the unveiling of new anti-woke legislation referred to as the Stop the Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees (WOKE) Act. After DeSantis banned Critical Race Theory (CRT) from Florida’s schools he said this is the next step in legislation to fight back against “woke indoctrination.”
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In a Wednesday press conference held via Zoom, the nonprofit Color Us United further exposed the Salvation Army’s wokeness after the latter group came under fire for telling white people to apologize for their racism during this holiday season.
Kenny Xu, President of Color Us United, pushed back against the Salvation Army, after the international charitable organization claimed that Xu’s group was sensationalizing claims of Critical Race Theory (CRT) within its ranks.
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Rather than admit their woke policies are not supported by donors or staff, the leadership of The Salvation Army hides these policies from the public. Salvation Army captains tell me, however, that mandatory “diversity” training and calls to repent for racism are still very much integral to TSA internal policies.
I am president of Color Us United, an organization created to stand up for the individual dignity of ordinary Americans against abusive woke policies. Several months ago Color Us United learned that the Salvation Army had gone woke by imposing a curriculum that asks members to “repent for racism.“ We have called them out publicly on this and even met with their National Commander. Instead of addressing the policies that the majority of their members and donors do not support, however, the Salvation Army has hidden its woke materials.
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Millions of citizens long ago concluded that professional sports, academia, and entertainment were no longer disinterested institutions, but far Left and deliberately hostile to Middle America.
Yet American conservatives still adamantly supported the nation’s traditional investigatory, intelligence, and military agencies—especially when they came under budgetary or cultural attacks.
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Joe Biden is systematically eliminating the religious freedom protections that Donald Trump established. The latest example of Biden’s secularist program comes from his Labor Department, which is planning to undo Trump’s policy of defending the religious freedom of federal contractors.
Trump’s Labor Department protected federal contractors who “hold themselves out to the public as carrying out a religious purpose.”
“Religious organizations should not have to fear that acceptance of a federal contract or subcontract will require them to abandon their religious character or identity,” said Trump’s Secretary of Labor Eugene Scalia.
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Microsoft was ridiculed on social media Thursday for including land acknowledgments, pronoun statements and references to hairstyles in its corporate introductions.
While giving presentations during the Microsoft Ignite 2021 conference on Tuesday, Microsoft employees recognized that the land they were currently standing on previously belonged to Native American tribes.
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There is no faster – or more amusing – way to make a campus radical lose his composure than to fuss about the importance of cultural literacy.
The term “cultural literacy,” made popular by the controversial scholar E.D. Hirsch, describes a person’s capacity to comprehend cultural references and use that knowledge in conversation with others.
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It’s no secret that the far left has infiltrated higher education with its radical ideas. But now, woke ideology has come for K-12 classrooms across the country.
“As parents, we send our kids to school to learn to think critically, to figure out how to solve problems, and to respectfully discuss and resolve differences of opinion,” Ashley Jacobs, executive director of Parents Unite, said Friday during the new organization’s first conference.
“But,” Jacobs said, “our educational systems are not enabling these skills, and in some cases, [they are] stifling them.”
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As they reel from revenue losses connected to the pandemic, many colleges and universities are racking up other costs not likely to turn up in their glossy brochures or as line items on staggering tuition bills: untold millions of dollars in legal fees and settlements for allegedly violating the rights of students, professors, and applicants on free speech, admissions and other matters as the schools pursue social justice causes.
Harvard University’s legal costs fighting a continuing 2017 challenge to its racial admissions practices have surpassed $25 million, the cap of its primary insurer, and it is now suing a secondary legal insurer, the Zurich American Insurance Company, over its refusal to pick up the tab going forward.
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The fall of Kabul is not the end, as Joe Biden seems to think, of the Afghanistan nightmare.
It is the beginning of a never-ending bad dream. Biden and the Pentagon have managed to birth a new terrorist haven, destroy much of U.S. strategic deterrence, and alienate our allies and much of the country.
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Joe Biden’s scripted or no-questions press conferences, and the clean-up afterward by Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, and Jen Psaki, have been some of the most misleading episodes in modern presidential history—mostly in what was not said rather than was exaggerated, warped, and misrepresented.
The more Joe Biden mutters “The buck stops here” or “I take full responsibility,” the more we know he will not—and not just because of his now reduced mental state, but because 1) he repeats the same opportunist messaging that he has for the last 50 years of his political career, and 2) the only true thing he could say was “I ordered a withdrawal in the most reckless manner in U.S. military history.”
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For nearly two years, Americans have engaged in a great woke experiment of cannibalizing themselves. American civilization has invested massive labor, capital, and time in an effort constantly to flagellate itself for not being perfect.
Yet neither America’s resilience nor its resources are infinite. We are now beginning to see the consequences of what happens when premodern tribalism absorbs Americans.
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It might seem that there is little to be added to what the whole world has witnessed viewing the unutterable shambles of the U.S. departure from Afghanistan. But that would be an illusion. The story of the perilous departure from Afghanistan of NATO forces and civilians and their Afghan collaborators who are now in mortal danger is obviously a matter of great suspense. The United States could certainly tell the Taliban government of Afghanistan that if all those whom the Western powers wished to evacuate were not allowed to leave it would be an act of war. If there were the will to act on that ultimatum, it would be successful.
But under the circumstances, the credibility of such a threat would probably have to be proved by acting on it. As some commentators have mentioned, this would be morally justified and is morally required and the administration would simply have to accept that it has bungled the withdrawal, and must execute an immediate but brief return. The Biden Administration, after seven months, has shown no competence whatever in foreign or national security policy.
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“Stakeholder capitalism” is the idea that companies should serve not only their shareholders but also other interests and society at large. This ideology, championed by America’s business and political leaders, promises a better, more diverse, and environmentally friendly world. Social justice is the purported goal.
In reality, this insidious force is an invitation for politics to infect business, creating a marriage between big business and big government that has the two working in concert. The result is a hybrid behemoth of immense power, capable of controlling our money, our voice, even our identity.
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Americans are growing angrier by the day in a way different from prior sagebrush revolts such as the 1960s Silent Majority or Tea Party furor of over a decade ago.
The rage at the current status quo this time is not just fueled by conservatives. For the first time in their lives, all Americans of all classes and races are starting to fear a self-created apocalypse that threatens their families’ safety and the American way of life.
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Tuesday morning on the Tennessee Star Report, host Michael Patrick Leahy welcomed the host of Pensive Politics Christian Watson to the newsmakers line to talk about Color Us United, critical race theory, and the woke ideologies of Blackness
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Wokeness might do to the American military what no foreign enemy ever could: Fracture the world’s greatest armed forces from within, through divisive political indoctrination and controls.
Wokeness—extreme ideological intolerance of opposing views and the imposition of life-destroying punishments for the insufficiently woke—is organized fratricide.
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by Debra Heine Over 1,000 former members of the military have signed a scathing public letter warning that the increased priority placed on “wokeness” in the military is a threat to the Constitution and the nation’s military readiness. The letter comes after Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley defended the teaching of critical race theory in the military during a House Armed Services Committee hearing on Wednesday. Former President Donald Trump blasted Milley as “pathetic” for defending the toxic ideology during an interview Friday morning on Newsmax. “General Milley – I watched his statements and it was pathetic. I watched the statements of some others – your head of the Navy. It was pathetic,” Trump said. “They didn’t talk that way when I was around, I can tell you. They didn’t talk that way or I would have gotten rid of them in two minutes. In particular Navy and Milley, just sad, pathetic statements,” the former president added. Two military groups – Flag Officers 4 America and the Committee to Support and Defend – have joined forces to warn that the military’s embrace of the woke ideology is a major national security issue. LTC Allen West is a member of…
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As conflict over Pentagon wokeness intensifies between uniformed and civilian adversaries, dissenters within the military have taken to social media aiming to win hearts and minds for the anti-woke faction.
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You wouldn’t think any possible controversy could append itself to that day, except that we are living in preternaturally contentious times. Two days ago, Rep. Cori Bush, a freshman Democrat from St. Louis, was testifying about racial disparities in health care, focusing specifically on childbirth. While describing her own medical experiences, Bush used the unwieldy phrase “birthing people” instead of “mothers.” Apparently, this was an awkward attempt to use inclusive language.
Predictably, this rhetorical gambit earned her a fair amount of ridicule on social media. I’m sure Rep. Bush has many virtues, but neither self-awareness nor self-deprecating humor are at the top of that list. Just as predictably, Bush lashed out at those who mocked her wording for their “racism and transphobia.” She also accused her critics of trivializing an important subject, which was a more substantive rejoinder. Bush was discussing racial disparities in America’s medical system, which is no laughing matter, and invoking her own harrowing experiences in hospital delivery rooms to do it.
Yet breezily trying to replace the word “mothers” as a sign of wokeness a few days before Mother’s Day wasn’t likely to go down well. It was Cori Bush’s own peculiar choice of words that distracted listeners from her story.
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What ultimately ended the nihilist Soviet system?
Was it not that Russians finally tired of the Kremlin’s lies and hypocrisies that permeated every facet of their falsified lives?
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Tuesday morning on the Tennessee Star Report, host Michael Patrick Leahy welcomed Misrule of Law blogger and California refugee Mark Pulliam to the studio to discern between Republican state leadership and the implementation of conservative legislation.
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During the 2019 shareholder season, Justin Danhof, general counsel for the National Center for Public Policy Research, tabled a shareholder proposal at Amazon’s annual meeting. “Diversity in board composition is best achieved though highly qualified candidates with a wide range of skills, experience, beliefs, and board independence from management,” it read. Uncontroversial, one might think, but Danhof was booed and heckled throughout his presentation. Afterward, a representative for Arjuna Capital (which “works with high net-worth individuals,” its website says) told Danhof that he was simply trying “to protect white males.” A representative of the Nathan Cummings Foundation (with $424 million of cash and investments, on its most recent balance sheet) made clear that Danhof was unwelcome and should hasten, lest he be late for his next Klan meeting or book burning.
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George Orwell published Animal Farm in August 1945, in the closing weeks of the Pacific War. Even then, most naïve supporters of the wartime Soviet-British-American alliance were no longer in denial about the contours of Moscow’s impending postwar communist aggression.
The short, allegorical novel’s human-like farm animals replay the transition of supposedly 1917 revolutionary Bolsheviks into cynical 1930s Stalinists. Thereby, they remind us that leftist totalitarianism inevitably becomes far worse than the supposed parasitical capitalists they once toppled.
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Monday morning on the Tennessee Star Report, host Michael Patrick Leahy welcomed former NYU professor and author Dr. Michael Rectenwald to the newsmakers line to discuss his new thriller Thought Criminal and social justice in academia.
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Activist members of the student government at Cornell University are waging an ideological war against fellow Cornell Student Assembly members who recently voted against disarming campus police.
From launching recall petitions and rallying against their fellow representatives in November, to earlier this month ousting some of them from subcommittees or the entire assembly, these activist student government members say they are motivated to set right what a “white-cis-het” group of their peers did in voting down the disarmament resolution.
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There was once a tradition of Democratic liberalism. But that wing of the Democratic Party no longer exists and died sometime in the 1990s. Old-style liberalism has been absorbed by Progressivism at best and unapologetic socialism at worst—in a journey on the supposedly predetermined arc of history that bends toward 1984.
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by Victor Davis Hanson In February, New York was the world’s most dynamic metropolis. By August, the city was more like the ruins of Ephesus. It is not all that hard to blow up a culture. You can do it in a summer if you haven’t much worry about others. When you loot and burn a Target in an hour, it takes months to realize there are no more neighborhood Target-stocked groceries, toilet paper, and Advil to buy this winter. You can in a night assault the police, spit at them, hope to infect them with the coronavirus, and even burn them alive. But when you call 911 in a few weeks after your car is vandalized, your wallet is stolen, and your spouse is violent, and no one comes, only then do you sense that you earlier were voting for a pre-civilized wilderness. You can burn down a Burger King in half an hour. But it will take years to find anyone at Burger King, Inc., who would ever be dumb enough to rebuild atop the charred ruins – to prepare for the next round of arson in 2021 or 2023. Today’s looter carrying off sneakers and smartphones in 10 years will be tomorrow’s…
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