PrairiePundit

 Federalist Wire: ... Pete Buttigieg’s time as Transportation Secretary under President Joe Biden sparked debate over his focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives at the expense of modernizing the nation’s outdated air traffic control systems. Federal spending records reveal that the Department of Transportation (DOT) allocated over $80 billion to DEI grants over four years—roughly half its typical annual budget—while air traffic infrastructure, unchanged since the Carter era, continued to cause flight delays and cancellations, according to airline industry insiders. In a candid moment, Buttigieg, rumored to be eyeing a 2028 presidential run, reportedly told airline executives that upgrading air traffic systems would only allow them to fly more planes, “and so why would that be in his interest?” sources said according to the New York Post. This remark fueled perceptions that he showed “little to no interest” and took “definitely zero action” toward modernizing av...

  DC Daily Journal: ... The Supreme Court on Friday greenlit a temporary freeze on millions of dollars in grants aimed at tackling teacher shortages. This marks the first major triumph at the high court since Trump reclaimed the White House in January, signaling a powerful shift in how federal funds are managed under his watch. The 5-4 decision saw Chief Justice John Roberts siding with the court’s three liberal justices in dissent, but the majority ruled in favor of the administration’s push to halt the cash flow. At the heart of the move is Trump’s fierce stance against what he sees as wasteful spending tied to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives—pet peeves of his administration that he’s vowed to root out. ... I am surprised the decision was this close and that Roberts sided with the DEI racism.  Trump is right in opposing DEI, which advances people based on their race or other characteristics rather than their merit. 

 Wall Street Journal: The Minority Voters Who Love Trump’s Dismantling of DEI The president has found support from nonwhite voters who feel the nation has become too woke Some of President Trump’s Black and Latino supporters say they are pleased with his immediate efforts to dismantle federal diversity, equity and inclusion programs, according to interviews conducted by The Wall Street Journal, though they were uneasy about the way he talked about race and some worried he might spark a rise in discrimination. Ending so-called DEI programs—which include efforts to foster a more diverse workforce—was a frequent promise by Trump during the campaign, during which he broadly picked up a higher share of support from nonwhite voters than in his 2020 and 2016 bids. Since taking office, Trump has made slashing DEI programs a priority, signing executive orders to eliminate programs within the federal government and ordering up lists of federal employees involved in those efforts. He also re...

  Washington Examiner : President Donald Trump kept a major campaign promise this week when he terminated all diversity, equity, and inclusion mandates. With the stroke of a pen , he freed the government from checking imaginary boxes on race, gender, and sexuality and returned to a focus on merit. ... Merit should prevail.  Can you imagine any sports team trying to compete with a diversity, equity, and inclusion lineup?   They would be at a disadvantage against a lineup where players were selected on merit. See also: So Trump Nixed Your Bullshit DEI Job

 Newsmax: President Donald Trump, in his first executive order on Monday, revoked the Biden-era action that allowed those who identify as transgender to serve in the military, The Hill reported. During the signing ceremony at the Capital One Arena in Washington, D.C., Trump revoked Executive Order 14004 , signed by former President Joe Biden in January 2021. The order, also known as Enabling All Qualified Americans To Serve Their Country in Uniform, revoked a 2018 order under Trump that barred those identifying as transgender from serving in the military. Trump's executive order came as his White House called out diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts that have "corrupted them by replacing hard work, merit, and equality with a divisive and dangerous preferential hierarchy." ... Trump believes that service should be based on merit and not indemnity politics. That was certainly the case during my time as an officer in the Marine Corps.  DEI is a corrosive mistake. ...

  DC Daily Journal: ... Donald Trump’s stance on upholding the authority of the U.S. Supreme Court and scrutinizing universities that defy its rulings is not without merit, especially when considering the actions of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) following the Supreme Court’s landmark 2023 decision to ban race-based affirmative action in college admissions. UCLA’s recent efforts to circumvent the ruling by increasing diversity through questionable methods put it squarely under the spotlight for potential legal challenges. After the Supreme Court’s decision, many universities, including those in the Ivy League, saw shifts in their student demographics, with Asian enrollment rising and black and Latino enrollment falling. However, UCLA experienced an unprecedented surge in its diversity statistics, raising concerns about whether the university was intentionally defying both the letter and spirit of the ruling. According to Richard Sander, a UCLA law professor, “ther...

 Headline USA: Pentagon Gets Rid of DEI Evidence Before Trump Takes Office 'They’re being archived as we speak. They are full-bore focused on cleaning up anything DEI-related...' DEI is a failed ideology that substitutes identity for merit.  The goal should always be hiring the best and bightest.

 Fox News: 'Merit-based hiring' might be 'unfair': American Psychological Association A study claimed that inequality and merit-based decisions are 'intertwined' I think merit-based hiring leads to a stronger organization.  Can you imagine an NFL or NBA draft where a team tries to win with diversity instead of talent?

 NY Times: In late 2022, a group of conservative activists and academics set out to abolish the diversity, equity and inclusion programs at Texas’ public universities. They linked up with a former aide to the state’s powerful lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, who made banning DEI initiatives one of his top priorities. Setting their sights on well-known schools like Texas A&M, they researched which offices and employees should be expunged. A well-connected alumnus conveyed their findings to the A&M chancellor; the former Patrick aide cited them before a state Senate committee. The campaign quickly yielded results: In May, Texas approved legislation banishing all such programs from public institutions of higher learning. Long before Claudine Gay resigned from Harvard University’s presidency this month under intense criticism of her academic record, her congressional testimony about campus antisemitism and her efforts to promote racial justice, conservative academics and polit...

 Sean Davis: DEI is welfare for idiots who are unemployable in the absence of identity politics. In the Soviet Union, the party card was a guarantee of employment and perks unavailable to the unwashed masses. In America in 2023, identity politics serves the same purpose. With the right skin color and sexual habits, you can go anywhere with your DEI card. But this creates a HUGE problem for the regime when obvious DEI hires crap the bed. They can’t throw the fake Gay lady at Harvard overboard without also admitting the entire DEI program is a sham that exists entirely to credential and elevate morons based on their skin color/sexual habits and their willingness to ruthlessly enforce DEI orthodoxy on everyone else. America won the Cold War against the Soviet Union, but it clearly lost the ideological war against Marxism. DEI is just Marxism with skin color and sexual habits instead of class. And it’s been installed as the operating system in every single major institution in this ...

 Jay P. Greene: Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson's defense of racial discrimination is falling apart. It’s now well known that Jackson repeated an embarrassing falsehood while defending affirmative action in college admissions. In her Students for Fair Admissions dissent, she asserted that matching Black physicians with Black patients doubles survival rates for newborns, a claim that’s equally unbelievable and factually unsupported. But this is not the only mistake Jackson made. Her second error shows the diversity-industrial complex’s deep corruption of medicine – and its threat to Americans’ health. RESEARCHERS HORRIFIED, DECRY RISE OF 'FASCISM' AS STUDENTS SEND MOCKING RESPONSES TO WOKE SURVEY Jackson wrote, "research shows that Black physicians are more likely to accurately assess Black patients’ pain tolerance and treat them accordingly," for instance, "prescribing them appropriate amounts of pain medication." A footnote refers to ...

 The Blaze: CNN host Abby Phillip ended a segment with a fair admissions advocate on Thursday when he used facts to demonstrate the downside of affirmative action. Kenny Xu — a board member for Students for Fair Admissions, the plaintiff in the Supreme Court case — told Phillip that academic excellence, not race, "should be prioritized" in college admissions. "I think that admissions should be only based on merit," he said. "Why are we asking a university to calculate somebody's level of diversity? I think that sets a very bad precedent for anybody trying to get into college. We should be treated on the basis of our merits. We should be treated on the basis of how hard we work, or study, our SAT scores, our grades." But Phillip pushed back. She asked why admissions boards should not consider "other factors" that students "bring to the table" like socio-economic background. Xu argued you cannot do that fairly because, inevitably, adm...

 Texas Tribune: The Texas House gave final approval Monday to one of Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick ’s legislative priorities that would ban diversity, equity and inclusion offices in public colleges and universities. The legislation now heads back to the upper chamber where the Senate could accept the changes or elect to meet in a conference committee of lawmakers to hash out the differences. If the legislation becomes law, Texas would be the second state in the nation with such a ban, following Florida. The bill received preliminary approval Friday after hours of debate and multiple attempts to kill the legislation from Democrats. In an attempt to stop a deluge of amendments opposing Senate Bill 17 , lawmakers approved an amendment offered by the bill’s sponsor, Seguin Republican John Kuempel , that requires the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board to conduct an annual study into the impact of banning DEI offices, allows universities to make “reasonable efforts” to re-assign employee...

 Ruy Teixeira: ... In typical  polling from Pew in 2022 , just 7 percent of the public thought high school grades should not be a factor in college admissions and a mere 14 percent thought standardized test scores should not be a factor. But an overwhelming 74 percent thought that  race or ethnicity should not be a factor in college admissions . ... The Supreme Court is hearing a case on college admissions and it would not be surprising if the court ruled against "affirmative action" admissions.  I think such a ruling would also impact the current "Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion race-based admissions and hiring.  That would reinstate merit as the basis for job and entry.  The left's war on merit deserves to lose.

 Breitbart: On Friday’s broadcast of HBO’s “Real Time,” Twitter CEO Elon Musk stated that the anti-meritocratic and anti-free speech aspects of “the woke mind virus” are dangerous to society and that the “woke mind virus” is due to “the amount of indoctrination that’s happening in schools and universities” that is “far beyond what parents realize.” Host Bill Maher asked, “You have talked about this woke mind virus in really apocalyptic terms. I don’t — you should explain why you don’t think it’s hyperbole to say things like it’s pushing civilization towards suicide. First of all, what is the woke mind virus? And if we don’t deal with this, nothing else can get done. Tell me why you think that.” Musk answered, “I think we need to be very cautious about anything that is anti-meritocratic and anything that results in the suppression of free speech. So, those are two of the aspects of the woke mind virus that I think are very dangerous, is that it’s often very anti-meritocratic, and yo...

 Fox News: Merit was never a dirty word for Blacks. Competing on merit empowered us to destroy racist stereotypes about our capabilities, shatter color barriers, and pioneer inventions that improved all Americans' quality of life. For example, do you know someone whose cataracts were removed by laser eye surgery? Thank Dr. Patricia Bath. This ophthalmologist pioneered laser eye surgery and advocated for preventive blindness, earning her the "ultimate reward" of restoring sight to the blind. Bath enjoyed many firsts, including being the first woman to chair an ophthalmology residency program in the United States. In 1986, she discovered a new device and less painful method to remove cataracts. Despite a colleague’s sexist denials of her breakthrough, Bath became the first Black female doctor to receive a medical patent for her treatment. A merit-based program set Bath on a career path. In high school, she won a competitive research opportunity from the National Science Fo...