Tag Archive for: wokeism

The War on Corporate Activism: Win, Lose, or Draw?

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Pride Month came and went this year, a wilted version of the weeks-long rager activists are so used to enjoying. But as dejected as the Left must be over the cultural and corporate retreat from their cause, you can’t blame them for hoping that this tsunami of grassroots change is temporary. Or did everyday Americans, who went from feeling powerless to bringing the biggest brands to their knees, actually accomplish the impossible — reverse-engineering the woke for good? The answer, experts say, is somewhere in the middle.

One reason for that, they’ll tell you, is how we got here. Look, Jerry Bowyer, CEO of Bowyer Research and the Head of Corporate Engagement for ProsprAligned, is quick to remind people, “The other side showed up for 30 years, and conservatives basically were a cheap, cheap date for management.” We assumed, he told the audience at a recent Heritage Foundation event, that businesses were automatically on our side. “And we didn’t show up, and then things got out of whack.”

None of this happened overnight, Bowyer insisted. The Left is savvy. They’re “extremely good at using the administrative state and hacking the rules in secret in sort of technical ways in order to accomplish social change … these kind of extremist, political agenda items.” For three decades, they flew under the radar in their long march through the institutions. It was genius, the Manhattan Institute’s James Copeland chimed in. Invading America’s companies and education system was one way they could “get things without going through our bicameral Congress and having to convince the president and get a broad national consensus…” Instead, he explained, “You’ve got these small teams of engagement managers and asset management companies leaning in on corporate America. And for a while there, from about 2017 to 2022, they were leaning in in bad ways.”

But Americans woke up spectacularly in 2023, thanks to six cans of beer. Their frustration with these ultra-radical agendas had been boiling under the surface since the first Trump administration and on into 2020, when businesses started wading into the Georgia election law debate. Ultimately, though, it was Anheuser-Busch that broke the dam with their spectacularly stupid partnership with Dylan Mulvaney, a trans-identifying “influencer” who only ended up influencing Bud Light’s bottom line by billions of dollars — kick-starting a nationwide backlash that hasn’t stopped to this day.

Now, dozens of corporate concessions, stock losses, and apologies later from the likes of Target, Disney, Rip Curl, Doritos, John Deere, Tractor Supply Co., Ford, Coors Light, Jack Daniels, Harley Davidson, Walmart, and others, the script has flipped in a way that most executive boardrooms never saw coming. So is ESG, DEI, and general LGBT activism on the run or just evolving and rebranding?

Some, like Copeland, believe it’s in retreat — but “hibernating. It’s going to return. A lot of [the current success is] due to [the Trump] administration,” he believes. “A lot of it is due to the Left overplaying its hand. A lot of that is due to the efforts of people like [Jerry Bowyer who] are actively pushing in the other direction…”

Bowyer himself was quick to say that no matter what happens, the Left will never have the luxury of taking advantage of America again. “I don’t think we’re ever going back, because we’re awake now,” he underscored. “We just slept through the takeover of corporate America by shareholder activists who basically harassed and cajoled them to take one side in a culture war based on the idea that the future inevitability will be wokeism. And they found out that there’s a snapback,” he said. “We didn’t know what was going on. Now we know [and] we’re never going to forget. We know the rules. We’ve got our own institutions [to push back] now. [Conservatives] are not going to forget and say, ‘We’re not going to fight this anymore.’ The red states are awake. They’re not going to say, ‘Oh, it’s okay now. We passed a couple of laws.’ They’re going to keep on top of it. Careers are being built on fighting ESG. You’re seeing state auditors become state treasurers [and then] become members of Congress. So [now], that’s a guarded space. We’re not going to go back.”

In his mind, the woke wars are going to be like the rest of American politics, “going back and forth.” But, Bowyer reiterated, “We have one huge advantage: our ideas are sane.” So, like Capitol Hill and statehouses all over the nation, this will be “just another contested space in American life. … And I’m content with that,” he shrugged. “… If one side goes too far, then the people kind of go in the other direction.”

And yet, one area where conservatives have an enormous opportunity is local legislation. “The blue states have been voting in accordance with their ideology — [and] the red states have [also been] voting in accordance with the blue states’ ideology.” But Bowyer sees red states “every day waking up.” Even so, of the 26 red or purple states, he estimates there are “maybe five or six that are on top of this. So the possibility [for gains] is huge. This is really early innings for us. So when we get to that 50/50 over the next five years, there [are] a lot of wins on the way.”

In other words, now isn’t the time to let up on the gas pedal, Stefan Padfield urged on The Washington Stand’s “Outstanding” podcast. In a lot of these cases, decisions about Bud Light cans or trans benefits for children or Pride sponsorships weren’t necessarily made with the CEOs’ blessing or even knowledge. “Higher up the food chain in terms of the executive offices and so on, I think a lot of them don’t know. They basically just hand [their policies] off to the insurance provider [or HR director]. Now somewhere, someone is making an express decision to include this [wokeness], and I think it’s going to take a little more work to figure out exactly where to pinpoint the pressure and where this is happening. But I do think it is in many cases, [this was not] not front of mind with the board of directors, with the CEO.” Now, in one of the most significant wins for Americans, it is.

Obviously, Padfield notes, there will always be “the true believers” behind brands, the activists “who actually don’t care if they burn down the business, as long as they can go home at night and look in the mirror and say, ‘I’ve been advancing the cause.’ The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution,” he said. “But then you also have the opportunists, you have the useful idiots, you have the cowards, right? And all of those basically have played a role.”

Bowyer is asked all the time how companies can resist the Left, and his message is simple: “grow a spine, and we’ll have your back. That’s it.” He talked about watching BlackRock’s Larry Fink on Fox this summer, who conceded that “the pendulum” had swung too far to the Left. “I was glad to see him acknowledge that,” Bowyer said. “[But] … the problem is that we’re thinking of it as a pendulum. Fiduciary obligation,” or stewardship, “is a sacred obligation enshrined in thousands of years of law. It’s in the Constitution. It’s in the Declaration of Independence. It’s in the Torah. It’s in the New Testament. It is not negotiable. It comes from the biblical tradition. It is not just a moral. It’s, in my opinion, a theological obligation, basically. Board members, you’ve got one job. That’s it.”

And Americans — conservatives specifically — who have businesses’ backs when they roll back some of this lunacy will start experiencing even more success. “What I find is when we show up [is] they are often willing to stand up … because they really [got into] business to do business. And this stuff is a distraction. And we help them [by saying], ‘Okay, let’s get the distraction out of the way and go.’”

In the meantime, the question we should be asking isn’t whether we’re winning or losing. It’s: are we engaged? Are we using our voices and platforms and dollars to make a difference? There’s always this temptation, Stefan admits, to “oversell how much success we’ve had. ‘Oh, Trump got elected. DEI is over. ESG is over.’ Well, that’s not the case. On the other hand, we can get black-pilled, where we wake up and every day it just seems like these companies [are] … just lying low until the next opportunity. And so, I think both of those things we want to avoid. We want to look for the hope, right?” And one of the biggest takeaways of the last three years is how strong and impactful our movement can be. “[T]hese companies have to take us seriously, [because] if they go too far, we can literally destroy shareholder value. … All of this,” he stresses, “we can view through the lens of hopefulness. We have this power, and we can be effective.”

AUTHOR

Suzanne Bowdey

Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2026 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Truist Bank Makes an Important Withdrawal from LGBT Activism

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There haven’t been a lot of industries untouched by the anti-woke revolution in the last three years. But there is one pocket of the economy that’s been slightly less eager to roll back the radical agendas that have been swallowing companies whole these last two decades: banks. But, in a sign that no corporate entity can escape the consumer muscle flexing across America, that may be about to change.

In what everyone hopes is a genuine pivot, Truist Bank has agreed to stop submitting to the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index — a dramatic change considering the company’s string of 100% scores leading up to 2026. The move, prompted by a Heritage Foundation shareholder proposal, is the first big domino to fall in a financial sector that’s escaped largely unscathed from the grassroots movement.

As most people know, HRC’s index, produced by the largest and loudest LGBT activist group in America, ranks businesses on how well they implement extreme policies like covering the cost of gender-transition procedures for staff and their families, publicly lobbying for pro-LGBTQ legislation, forcing employees to undergo multiple ideological trainings, opening restrooms to both sexes, introducing a pronoun sharing guide, recruiting employees based on sexual orientation and gender identity (not merit and experience), and more. A perfect score from HRC essentially means the wokest of the woke.

But, in a seismic shift, CEOs have fled the index this year, refusing to carry the leftist political baggage that could paint a target on their backs and sink their profits. Just this year, the 2026 index lost a whopping 65% of its Fortune 500 participants, dropping from 377 companies in 2025 to just 131.

Jerry Bowyer, a former columnist for Forbes who now serves as president and CEO of Bowyer Research, can’t underscore just how significant this concession is, especially for a major bank. “We’ve seen that from a lot of the regional banks … even from tech companies and consumer companies.” But this, he told “Washington Watch” guest host Jody Hice, “is really astonishing.”

Stephen Soukup, visiting fellow in the Heritage Foundation’s Free Enterprise Initiative, agreed. “I think it’s pretty clear that the Human Rights Campaign is losing what remains of its relevance in the effort to influence American corporate behavior. Truist Bank is the latest example of a major corporation to admit that its public and private positions on the HRC and its Corporate Equality Index were at odds with one another,” he told The Washington Stand.

It’s worth noting, he continued, “that this concession came in what was an otherwise combative engagement with Bowyer Research on behalf of its client, the Heritage Foundation. As a shareholder of Truist, Heritage filed a proxy proposal asking the bank to evaluate the business risks it creates when its values are misaligned with those of its shareholders. The bank refused to budge on many important questions, but not on its participation with the HRC” — a telling sign of the organization’s cratering influence.

Of course, as Bowyer pointed out, the index didn’t used to be a list of wildly controversial demands on transgenderism. Back in the day, it was essentially an agreement that businesses wouldn’t discriminate against people who identify as LGBT. “But little by little, [HRC] moved the goalposts until finally it was bathroom wars, Bud Light branding, and puberty blockers for the children of employees.” Getting a 100% may have seemed like an A+ in corporate board rooms, Bowyer underscored, but to most Americans, “it’s an F-minus.”

Gradually, thanks to Robby Starbuck’s crusade and other long-suffering soldiers of the movement like Soukup, businesses that were growing uncomfortable with the over-the-top concessions they had to make to HRC started to peel off. Groups like Bowyer’s, who represent the interests of shareholders against companies “who’ve been,” as he describes it, “led around by the nose by activist groups,” started asking CEOs, “Why don’t you just stop participating altogether? You don’t have to have these outside groups who are determining your policies, who are pressuring you. Just focus on being a bank. … Focus on being a credit card company. And a lot of them are saying, ‘Okay, that’s what we’re going to do.’ Because frankly, I’m not sure they all realize what they were signing up for. … It was sold to them as a way to decrease controversy,” he pointed out. But in the last few years, what it became was “a huge magnet for controversy.”

Equally significant, at least where Truist is concerned, is their willingness to fix the debanking problem that’s been plaguing Christians and conservatives for years. Thanks to Joe Biden’s weaponization of the federal government, major financial institutions were encouraged after January 6 to “comb through the private transactions of their customers” to look for “suspicious charges” (without warrants) of legal activities involving political and religious expression.

Observers warned that it would lead to a flood of cancellations where conservatives were concerned. They were right. What was already a growing problem of viewpoint discrimination at the nation’s banks became an epidemic. More institutions started freezing assets and locking conservatives out of accounts, citing “reputation risk” to justify their bias.

Faith groups and leaders have been a common target. In just the past few years, Bank of America suddenly closed the accounts of reputable ministries like Indigenous Advance Ministries and Timothy Two Project International, claiming that the groups “exceeded the ‘bank’s risk tolerance.’” JP Morgan Chase piled on, canceling the account of the National Committee for Religious Freedom (NCRF), headed by former U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom Sam Brownback. “In order for their account to be reinstated,” The Washington Stand’s Dan Hart reported, “JPMorgan demanded that NCRF turn over a list of high-level donors, ‘a list of candidates it intended to support, and its criteria for political support.’”

President Trump, outraged by the injustice — and a victim of this coordinated attack himself — issued an executive order last year to crack down on debanking. “It is the policy of the United States that no American should be denied access to financial services because of their constitutionally or statutorily protected beliefs, affiliations, or political views, and to ensure that politicized or unlawful debanking is not used as a tool to inhibit such beliefs, affiliations, or political views. Banking decisions must instead be made on the basis of individualized, objective, and risk-based analyses.”

After several months of conversations, Truist agreed, offering Bowyer a link to its updated service agreement that addressed concerns about politicized debanking. “This is an issue,” he said in an organization statement, “that we’ve been engaging the company on for more than two years — and it’s a true blessing to see a prohibition on debanking based on ‘political opinions’ come as fruit of that engagement.” The message, he hopes, is “back to neutral.”

But now isn’t the time to let up on the gas pedal. “Christians need to get in the game,” especially on the investment side, Bowyer urged. When companies started becoming left-wing operatives, “The problem wasn’t the Biden administration,” he argued, or any Democratic administration before it. “The problem is you weren’t showing up. …We complain about a process of woke capitalism that we helped create with our absence and neglect.”

Asked if he thinks the change is sustainable in a post-Trump world, Bowyer was frank. The “vibe shift,” he argues, “started before the election of Trump. I don’t think Trump cause[d] it.” He believes the two were basically parallel tracks that combined to create this powerful climate of pushback. But, he acknowledged, “Starbucks is still going to be Starbucks. Disney is going to be Disney. I mean, they didn’t really want to talk, and they didn’t change anything. But that’s maybe three or four out of 100 companies we’ve engaged with, most of which have been extremely productive engagements,” he underscored. In his opinion, this is “the biggest reverse march through the institutions I’ve ever seen in my life. The ESG and DEI bubble is just collapsing before our eyes.”

As Soukup stressed, the momentum for change is only snowballing. “It’s worth noting that this concession came in what was an otherwise spirited engagement with Bowyer Research on behalf of its client, the Heritage Foundation.” The fact that “Truist is willing to resist some efforts by its shareholders to rein in its political activity, even as it willingly defies the Human Rights Campaign” is significant. “The spell is broken. Corporate fear of the HRC is dead. Bowyer Research and the Heritage Foundation scored an important victory for shareholders, even as they keep the pressure on Truist to do better.”

The successes keep coming — beyond most consumer activists’ wildest dreams. But “to quote Churchill,” Bowyer said, “It’s not the end. It’s not the beginning of the end. But,” he smiled, “it just might be the end of the beginning.”

AUTHOR

Suzanne Bowdey

Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2026 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Military Recruitment Is Surging: A Multifaceted Turnaround

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“Just two years ago,” read a statement from the Department of War, “the outlook for military recruitment was bleak.” For the last several years, nearly every branch of the military fell short of its recruitment goals. The COVID-19 pandemic — including vaccine mandates that alienated many within the military as well as potential recruits — played a significant role. The Biden administration’s push for woke policy gender ideology within the military also drove many away.

The Washington Stand previously reported: “[I]n 2023, the Air Force fell roughly 2,700 airmen short, the Army was 15,000 soldiers short, the Navy missed their goal by over 7,450 sailors, and the Coast Guard by about 4,800. The military as a whole missed its recruitment target by 41,000 recruits.” Some believed the U.S. military was beginning to reach levels of crisis.

Fast forward to now, however, and there’s been a significant shift. Rather than dropping standards to meet recruitment goals, enrollment is reportedly surging. According to National Review, “In fiscal year 2025, which ended on September 30, the Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, and Space Force all reached their recruiting goals. Incredibly, in June, the Army announced that it surpassed its goal of 61,000 new soldiers four months before the deadline.”

So, what caused the spike?

NRO noted that the shift is a result of “fresh thinking, an influx of financial resources, and untold amounts of work and effort on the part of the nation’s military recruiters — the noncommissioned officers tasked with a very difficult and often thankless task.” Additionally, the outlet added, “Donald Trump, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, and other administration officials say that their efforts to create a post-woke spirit in the military since Trump’s victory in 2024 is the reason behind the recruiting surge.”

Reportedly, there were also other motivations, such as the 2025 National Defense Authorization Act, signed by former President Joe Biden, which “raised the base pay of junior enlisted personnel by 14.5 percent, making the early years of a career in the military more financially competitive with big box stores and other entry-level jobs.” Other bonuses and financial incentives have since been offered as well. As for the men and women who did not meet physical standards, which was another facet of the years-long recruitment drought, the Army’s “Future Soldier Preparatory Course” at Fort Jackson, S.C. — otherwise known as “Army Fat Camp” — was implemented, offering potential recruits the chance to get into shape prior to actual boot camp.

“From my perspective,” Lt. Colonel (Ret.) Bob Maginnis told The Washington Stand, “today’s recruiting surge is the direct result of a sharp course correction in leadership and culture. Under President Biden, nearly every branch missed its goals — Pentagon officials acknowledged a combined shortfall of roughly 41,000 recruits in FY 2023. Critics pointed to the administration’s DEI and CRT initiatives, which even Congress moved to restrict in 2024. These policies alienated many traditional recruiting communities, while COVID restrictions, falling eligibility, and declining trust in institutions further suppressed enlistment.” And yet, he added, this all “changed dramatically with the return of President Trump.”

As Maginnis explained, “His administration immediately dismantled federal DEI programs, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth pledged to remove ideologically driven policies from the ranks” and this alone “restored confidence among the very families who historically supply the bulk of America’s recruits. The results followed quickly: the Army hit its FY 2025 goal of 61,000 recruits four months early, and the Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, and Space Force all met their goals by the end of the fiscal year.” So, “whether this surge lasts will depend on keeping these fundamentals in place.” And what does that look like? According to Maginnis, it looks like “sustained pro-defense leadership, competitive military pay, and serious investment in quality-of-life issues are essential.”

However, he emphasized, “if these gains are reversed — if ideological agendas return, if pay stagnates, or if the eligibility crisis goes unaddressed — the nation could quickly slip back into the ‘crisis levels’ seen just a few years ago. Shrinking formations, recruiting gaps, and reduced readiness would follow, inviting miscalculation from adversaries already probing U.S. resolve.”

As Maginnis concluded, “The current surge shows what happens when leadership, mission clarity, and common-sense policy align. The risk is that if those conditions disappear, the surge will too.”

AUTHOR

Sarah Holliday

Sarah Holliday is a reporter at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

‘Ready to Win’: Hegseth Announces New Policies to Restore Department of War’s ‘Warrior Ethos’

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Progressive policies are out and wartime fitness standards are in at the newly-renamed Department of War, according to Secretary Pete Hegseth. At a high-profile meeting with the U.S. military’s top generals in Quantico on Tuesday morning, Hegseth and President Donald Trump unveiled new plans and policies to restore the military’s “warrior ethos” after years of left-wing dilution.

“Good morning, and welcome to the War Department, because the era of the Department of Defense is over,” Hegseth announced. “The motto of my first platoon was, ‘Those who long for peace must prepare for war,’” he shared. “This is, of course, not a new idea. This crowd knows that the origin dates to fourth century Rome, and has been repeated ever since, including by our first commander in chief, George Washington, the first leader of the War Department. It captures a simple yet profound truth. To ensure peace, we must prepare for war.”

“From this moment forward, the only mission of the newly restored Department of War is this war-fighting, preparing for war and preparing to win, unrelenting and uncompromising in that pursuit,” Hegseth, himself a decorated military veteran who served in the Iraq War and the Afghanistan War, announced. “Not because we want war — no one here wants war — but it’s because we love peace. We love peace for our fellow citizens. They deserve peace, and they rightfully expect us to deliver it,” the secretary of War continued. “Our number one job, of course, is to be strong so that we can prevent war in the first place. The president talks about it all the time. It’s called peace through strength. And as history teaches us, the only people who actually deserve peace are those who are willing to wage war to defend it.”

“We are the strength part of peace through strength, and either we’re ready to win or we are not,” Hegseth told the senior officers gathered. “This speech today is about people, and it’s about culture. The topic today is about the nature of ourselves. Because no plan, no program, no reform, no formation will ultimately succeed unless we have the right people and the right culture at the War Department,” he continued. “The best way to take care of troops is to give them good leaders committed to the war-fighting culture of the Department. Not perfect leaders — good leaders, competent, qualified, professional, agile, aggressive, innovative, risk-taking, apolitical, faithful to their oath and to the Constitution.”

“For too long, we have simply not done that. The military has been forced by foolish and reckless politicians to focus on the wrong things. In many ways, this speech is about fixing decades of decay,” the secretary explained. “You might say we’re ending the war on warriors,” he quipped. “For too long, we’ve promoted too many uniformed leaders for the wrong reasons based on their race, based on gender quotas, based on historic so-called firsts. We’ve pretended that combat arms and non-combat arms are the same thing. We’ve weeded out so-called toxic leaders under the guise of double-blind psychology assessments promoting risk-averse, ‘go along to get along’ conformists instead,” Hegseth recounted. “You name it, the department did it. Foolish and reckless. Political leaders set the wrong compass heading, and we lost our way. We became the woke department. But not anymore.”

“This administration has done a great deal from day one to remove the social justice, politically-correct, and toxic ideological garbage that had infected our department, to rip out the politics. No more identity months, DEI offices, dudes in dresses, no more climate change worship, no more division, distraction, or gender delusions. No more debris,” Hegseth declared. “As I’ve said before and will say again, we are done with that s***. I’ve made it my mission to uproot the obvious distractions that made us less capable and less lethal. That said, the War Department requires the next step.”

“The litmus test for these changes is pretty simple. Would I want my eldest son, who is 15 years old, eventually joining the types of formations that we are currently wielding?” Hegseth asked. “My son is no more important than any other American citizen who dons the cloth of our nation. He is no more important than your son. All precious souls made in the image and likeness of God,” he continued. “Every parent deserves to know that their son or their daughter that joins our ranks is entering exactly the kind of unit that the secretary of War would want his son to join,” Hegseth emphasized. “Jesus said, ‘Do unto others what you would have done unto yourself.’ It’s the ultimate simplifying test of truth. The new War Department golden rule is this: ‘Do unto your unit as you would have done unto your own child’s unit.”

“Would you want him serving with fat or unfit or under-trained troops, or alongside people who can’t meet basic standards, or in a unit where standards were lowered so certain types of troops could make it in, in a unit where leaders were promoted for reasons other than merit performance and war-fighting? The answer is not just no, it’s hell no,” the secretary proclaimed. “This means that the War Department, first and foremost, we must restore a ruthless, dispassionate, and common-sense application of standards,” he explained. “I don’t want my son serving alongside troops who are out of shape or in combat, in a unit with females who can’t meet the same combat arms physical standards as men, or troops who are not fully proficient on their assigned weapons platform or task, or under a leader who was the first but not the best,” Hegseth shared. “Standards must be uniform, gender neutral, and high. If not, they’re not standards. They’re just suggestions, suggestions that get our sons and daughters killed.”

“The era of politically correct, overly-sensitive, ‘don’t hurt anyone’s feelings’ leadership ends right now at every level. Either you can meet the standard, either you can do the job, either you are disciplined, fit, and trained, or you are out,” Hegseth stated. Some of the policies he shared that the Department of War is introducing to increase the U.S. military’s lethality and warrior ethos include:

  1. The Department is restoring the highest male standards for combat roles, ensuring that all personnel in combat Military Occupational Specialties (MOS) and designated combat arms positions meet the highest male physical fitness and performance standards, regardless of their sex. “If women can make it, excellent. If not, it is what it is,” Hegseth said. “It will also mean that weak men won’t qualify, because we’re not playing games. This is combat. This is life or death.”
  1. All servicemembers, including high-ranking officers such as generals and admirals, will have to pass rigorous physical fitness and weight tests twice a year. “Frankly, it’s tiring to look out at combat formations — or really any formation — and see fat troops. Likewise, it’s completely unacceptable to see fat generals and admirals in the halls of the Pentagon and leading commands around the country and the world,” Hegseth said. “It’s a bad look. It is bad, and it’s not who we are. So whether you’re an Airborne Ranger or a Ranger, a brand new private or a four-star general, you need to meet the height and weight standards and pass your P.T. test.”
  1. Grooming and appearance standards are also being reset in an effort to promote uniformity and discipline. Bans on beards and long hair, for example, will be strictly enforced now, with exceptions made for Special Forces personnel. “No more beards, long hair, superficial individual expression. We’re going to cut our hair, shave our beards, and adhere to standards,” the clean-shaven Hegseth announced. “We don’t have a military full of Nordic pagans, but unfortunately, we have had leaders who either refuse to call B.S. and enforce standards, or leaders who felt like they were not allowed to enforce standards. Both are unacceptable.”
  1. The War Department will also be reducing unnecessary training related to issues such as climate, sensitivity, gender ideology, and DEI. “An entire generation of generals and admirals were told that they must parrot the insane fallacy that ‘our diversity is our strength.’ … They had to put out dizzying DEI and LGBTQ+ statements. They were told females and males are the same thing, or that males who think they’re females are totally normal. They were told that we need a green fleet and electric tanks. They were told to kick out Americans who refuse an emergency vaccine,” Hegseth recounted. “Now we’re giving you back real time: less PowerPoint briefings and fewer online courses, more time in the motor pool and more time on the range.”
  1. The online actions of troops will also be more strictly observed and disciplined. Anonymous posting and particularly criticizing or complaining about military leaders will not be tolerated. “Anonymous online or keyboard complaining is not worthy of a warrior. It’s cowardice masquerading as conscience. Anonymous unit-level social media pages that trash commanders, demoralize troops, and undermine unit cohesion must not be tolerated again,” Hegseth clarified. Additionally, officers will not be excessively penalized for “honest mistakes” or for taking risks. “A risk-averse culture means officers execute not to lose, instead of to win,” Hegseth explained. “Commanders and NCOs don’t take necessary risks or make tough adjustments for fear of rocking the boat or making mistakes. A blemish-free record is what peacetime leaders covet the most, which is the worst of all incentives.”
  1. Diversity, equity, and inclusion standards, such as race-based hiring or promotion, and gender ideology, as Hegseth noted at the beginning of his speech, are over at the Department of War. Instead, the military will focus on merit-based hiring and promotion to ensure that it is advancing the best, brightest, and bravest that the nation has to offer.

In comments to The Washington Stand, retired Lt. Col. (Ret.) Robert Maginnis, senior fellow for National Security at Family Research Council, observed, “Secretary Hegseth sent a very clear message at Quantico: the Pentagon is back to being the War Department. His focus is on warfighting, not bureaucracy. That means ending politically-correct distractions — he said flat out, ‘the era of overly-sensitive, don’t hurt anyone’s feelings’ leadership ends right now.’” Maginnis added, “What this means moving forward is simple: a leaner, tougher, more lethal military. If it’s done right, it restores the warrior ethos that wins wars. But it will also test whether these reforms are about readiness or politics. The stakes couldn’t be higher.”

Lt. Gen. (Ret.) Jerry Boykin, executive vice president at Family Research Council, told TWS, “In my 36-and-a-half years in the U.S. Army, I never saw an event like this, where virtually all senior leadership of all the military services gathered to hear the secretary of Defense tell his people what he expects of them and the people they lead.” Boykin shared, “I think it is another indication that our American military is being restored from the abysmal shape that it was in when the last administration left office. I sincerely hope that this will be at least an annual event for him and these leaders.”

The president also spoke at the Quantico summit, joking that Hegseth’s speech was so strong that he would rather “fire” the secretary than have to follow him onstage. “There could be no higher honor than to serve as your commander in chief. It is a great honor. … To each and every one of you, I thank you for your unwavering devotion to the armed forces and to the country that we’ve all sworn a sacred oath to defend,” Trump began.

Addressing the change of name from Department of Defense to Department of War, the president commented, “We won the First World War. We won the Second World War. We won everything in between and everything before that. We only won. And then we went in a way that was probably the first sign of wokeness. And we changed it to Defense instead of War.” He observed, “It’s really a historic reassertion of our purpose and our identity and our pride. That’s when we go with the word war.” The president continued, “We want war, because we want to have no wars. But you have to be there, sometimes you have to do it. I have settled so many wars since we’re here. We’re here almost nine months, and I’ve settled seven. And yesterday we might have settled the biggest of them all.”

Trump observed that the only conflict he hasn’t “settled” yet is the one between Ukraine and Russia. He faulted his predecessor, Joe Biden, and his inept leadership of the military for emboldening Russian President Vladimir Putin to engage in the conflict. “I mean, if we were weak, they wouldn’t even take my phone call. But we have extreme strength. We had the horror show in Afghanistan, which is really the reason I think that Putin went in. He saw that horror show by Biden and his team of incompetent people, and that showed, I think it gave him a path in,” the president posited. “And now we’re back, and that’s it. We’re not going to have any of that crap happen, I can tell you. That was terrible. So terrible.”

“Together, we’re reawakening the warrior spirit. And this is a spirit that won and built this nation. And from the cavalry that tamed the Great Plains to the ferocious, unyielding power of Patton, Bradley, and the great General Douglas MacArthur, these are all great men in this effort. We’re a team,” the president told the gathered military leaders. “I am with you, I support you, and as president, I have your backs 100%. You’ll never see me even waver a little bit. That’s the way it is.”

“As leaders, our commitment to every patriot who put on the uniform is to ensure that the American military remains the most lethal and dominant on the planet, not merely for a few years, but for decades,” Trump declared. “To be so strong that no nation will dare challenge us, so powerful that no enemy will dare threaten us, and so capable that no adversary can even think about beating us,” he added. “History has shown that military supremacy has never been simply a matter of money or manpower. At the end of the day, it is the culture, the spirit of our military, that truly sets us apart from any other nation,” the president stated. “Our ultimate strength will always come from the fierce people, those brilliant people with such pride and the unbending will and the traditions of excellence that have made us the most unstoppable force ever to walk the face of the earth. And that’s what we are.”

“The men and women in this room inherit the legacy built and won by Washington and Jackson. Grant and Pershing, Eisenhower and Patton, Nimitz and LeMay. We carry forward the majestic military heritage passed down from father to son, soldier to soldier, and one generation of warriors to the next,” Trump soliloquized. “From Concord Bridge to Fort McHenry, from Gettysburg to Manila Bay, from Normandy to Sicily, and from the jungles of Vietnam to the dusty streets of Baghdad, America’s military has charged into hellfire, climbed up jagged mountains, crossed roaring oceans, and thundered across open deserts to defend our flag, our freedom, and our homeland.”

“Now we are discovering American muscle, reasserting American might, and beginning the next storied chapter in American military legends and lore. … When it comes to defending our way of life, nothing will slow us. No enemy will stop us. They cannot stop us. And no adversary will stand in our way. They won’t stand in our way,” the president asserted. “We will vanquish every danger and crush every threat to our freedom in every generation to come. Because we will fight, fight, fight, and we will win, win, win. I want to just thank you once again, and God bless the United States military and God bless America. God bless you all.”

AUTHOR

S.A. McCarthy

S.A. McCarthy serves as a news writer at The Washington Stand.

RELATED VIDEO: Secreatary of War Pete Hegseth’s full speech

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

U.S. Army Discharges Woke Promotion Screening Program

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The U.S. Army has formally discontinued its Command Assessment Program (CAP), only months after its formal adoption by the Biden administration in its final week. The program injected subjective criteria into the military’s promotion assessment and sought to correct for “conscious or unconscious” bias. “Good riddance,” tweeted Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in response to the news. “Promotions across @DeptofDefense will ONLY be based on merit & performance.”

The CAP expanded upon a pilot program for lower-level promotions, the Battalion Commander Assessment Program (BCAP), begun in 2019 during the first Trump administration. The goal was to create an in-depth, comprehensive replacement for the Army’s Vietnam-era Centralized Selection Board/Lists (CSL), in use since 1969, which identifies non-commissioned officers for promotion. In addition to performance metrics, the new program also gave weight to interviews, personality assessments, and feedback from peers and subordinates.

It’s not entirely clear when the program went awry, but the program had shifted significantly after four years under the Biden administration. “A panel conducts double-blind interviews of the candidates behind a screen to limit unconscious bias related to race and ethnicity,” described a 2022 paper in the U.S. Army War College Quarterly. “Panel members participate in antibias training just before the initial interview process and receive a shorter refresher each day they serve on the panel.”

The theory behind the antibias training was that the military officer corps was too straight, too white, and too male, and that overt sensitivity training could correct this perceived problem. Or, to put it more diplomatically, “the CAP process puts a priority on screening out individuals who have counterproductive leadership behaviors,” stated Biden’s Army Secretary Christine Wormuth. “You can be confident that the folks coming out of CAP who are going into command … are a lot less likely to have counterproductive leadership tendencies.”

One effect of this heavy screening was a marked decline in the number of officers applying for promotion. From 2019 to 2024, the percentage of officers choosing not to participate in the promotion program jumped from an average of 40% to a record of 54%. To state it differently, this means that the Army saw a 25% decline (from 60% to 46%) in the number of officers seeking promotion, in the space of five years.

What could cause such a rapid shift? Perhaps the unspoken message was clear: officers with certain demographic features (or political beliefs) need not apply.

For some, however, the military promotion structure was still not woke enough. In late 2024, four-star General Charles Hamilton was fired after he attempted to improperly influence the CAP promotion system, to push through a black officer he favored, who had already failed twice. Hamilton blamed the officer’s failure on unconscious, pervasive racism throughout the Army.

The Biden administration, however, was satisfied with the leftward progress they had made in the military in four short years, and they determined to cash out. On January 16, 2025, four days before President Trump’s second inauguration, departing Army Secretary Wormuth published a directive establishing CAP as an enduring Army program.

Months later, the Trump administration’s Army Secretary, Dan Driscoll, downgraded the program, placed it under review, and suspended it pending changes. At one point, administration officials proposed to eliminate the program’s more “touchy-feely” aspect by renaming it “the Army Warrior Leader Certification.”

As of early September, the CAP has been scuttled irretrievably. The Army will return to the CSL model, where a board evaluates officers’ past assignments, performance, and “demonstrated potential,” said Army spokesman Major Travis Shaw. “Previous CAP results will not factor into the process.” Shaw gave no reason for shelving the CAP except that the decision was “in line with” a June 20 memo, “Evaluating Military Officer Promotion and Selection Procedures.”

That memo came from Jules Hurst III, then serving as the acting Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness. Hurst previously worked as a legislative director and defense advisor for House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), and he now serves as acting comptroller and chief financial officer for the Department of Defense (unprecedented obstruction by Senate Democrats means that, nearly eight months into the Trump administration, the U.S. military still lacks a Senate-confirmed CFO).

“The Secretary of Defense is committed to fair, transparent, colorblind, and merit-based processes to select and promote the best officers to lead our men and women in defense of our nation,” Hurst stated in the memo. “As such, the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness will assess current programs and policy … to ensure we select superior military leaders.”

“Objective standards and measures should be at the forefront of the promotion and selection process,” he continued. “This holistic review of military office promotion and selection processes … will incorporate an examination of current policies” including “command selection boards.”

The U.S. Army will likely respond to this change like a balloon held underwater springs to the surface when released. After years of flagging recruitment, the Army already met its 2025 recruiting goal four months ahead of schedule; the number of officers applying for promotion will likely see a similar resurgence. After four years of stifling wokeness under President Biden, military morale can once again count on a commander in chief who will once again back them up, let them win, and not penalize them for personal beliefs. The Army may need to replace the 50-year-old CSL eventually, but at least it has preferred the old system to a new format captured by wokeness.

AUTHOR

Joshua Arnold

Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

DNC Doubles Down on DEI

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The Democratic National Committee’s (DNC) Resolutions Committee on Tuesday unanimously approved a resolution affirming what it called the “American Values” of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) at the party’s annual summer meeting. The Democratic Party has struggled to regain its footing after a stunning loss in the 2024 election, but party leaders have so far ignored advice to avoid the cultural leftism that pushed many 2024 voters towards President Donald Trump.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion “are American values. This is what America was built on,” declared delegate Bill Owen (D) of Tennessee. “And to my Republican friends and fellow citizens … who profess to be active Christians, I remind them that DEI is the very foundation of the Christian church. I get a little emotional on this, but: ‘Jesus loves little children, all the children of the world, red and yellow, black and white.’”

Let Owen’s hot take stand as a warning against founding a worldview on a children’s song or treating the lyrics as an irrefutable mic drop. On issues that matter, it’s far safer to consult the original source itself — which, given the multitude of accurate English Bible translations available at reasonable prices, is not terribly difficult to do.

According to the Bible, the kingdom of heaven will have diversity, in the form of “a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages” (Revelation 7:9). But the equity (or justice) of this kingdom actually results in exclusion of the unregenerate. “And the dead were judged by what was written in the books, according to what they had done. … And if anyone’s name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire” (Revelation 20:12, 15). Of course, the diversity of God’s kingdom is not an end in itself; it exists to showcase God’s wisdom and glory (Ephesians 3:10).

All of this is quite irrelevant to any discussion of political DEI, since God’s people constitute a spiritual entity, not a political one. A key attribute of the kingdom of God is that it is “not of this world” (John 18:36) and operates according to different principles.

(Finally, the fundamental problem most Americans have with DEI in a political context is not the ideals themselves, but the left-wing practices that masquerade under the banner of DEI, but which actually subvert the ideals.)

Nevertheless, it was this controversial expression of political DEI that the DNC Resolutions Committee saw fit to approve unanimously.

This unanimous approval is significant in comparison to other issues on which Democrats could not agree. Far more ink has been spilled over the Democratic drama on Israel, where the Resolutions Committee considered two dueling resolutions and advanced neither. The more radical resolution called for an arms embargo against Israel amid their war in Gaza, while the other endorsed a two-state solution and an immediate ceasefire. “Neither of these resolutions ended up passing,” observed FRC Action Director Matt Carpenter on “Washington Watch.” “They ended up saying, basically, ‘Let’s talk about this some more.’”

While an arms embargo on Israel may have gone beyond the pale for the old-school Democrats, the DEI resolution showed that “they continue to find points of unity that … the American people reject,” summarized FRC Senior Fellow Jody Hice.

“The 2024 election was absolutely a referendum on that agenda,” Carpenter concurred. “The Biden administration took every opportunity they could to push that DEI agenda in every nook and cranny they could of the federal government into American society. And it was rejected at the ballot box.” In the final weeks of the 2024 presidential campaign, Republicans spent millions of dollars on an ad roasting Trump’s opponent, “Kamala is for they/them, Donald Trump is for you.”

“It’s frankly astonishing that the party would double down on that,” continued Carpenter. “Once you’ve been rebuked at the ballot box, it’s time to go back to the drawing board.”

Remarkably, unanimous approval for the DEI resolution came even after a “center-Left” group (or at least a group that passes for moderate in the current Democratic Party) issued a memo last Friday to “All Who Wish to Stop Donald Trump and MAGA” that begged Democrats, for the sake of their own political fortunes, to stop using language that alienates normal people.

What followed was a list of 45 terms, including the most offensive, alienating, or off-putting recently coined (or repurposed) by the Left:

  • “Privilege …
  • “Othering
  • “Triggering
  • “Microaggression …
  • “Safe space
  • “Body shaming …
  • “Subverting norms
  • “Systems of oppression …
  • “The unhoused
  • “Food insecurity
  • “Housing insecurity
  • “Person who immigrated …
  • “Birthing person/inseminated person
  • “Pregnant people
  • “Chest feeding
  • “Cisgender
  • “Deadnaming
  • “Heteronormative
  • “Patriarchy
  • “LGBTQIA+ …
  • “Latinx
  • “BIPOC
  • “Allyship
  • “Intersectionality …
  • “Incarcerated people
  • “Involuntary confinement”

“For a party that spends billions of dollars trying to find the perfect language to connect to voters, Democrats and their allies use an awful lot of words and phrases no ordinary person would ever dream of saying,” the report pleaded. “The intent of this language is to include, broaden, empathize, accept, and embrace. The effect of this language is to sound like the extreme, divisive, elitist, and obfuscatory, enforcers of wokeness.”

Not every term on the list deserves to be there (e.g., “dialoguing … postmodernism … heuristic”). Some terms even someone with a professional duty to understand and interpret the latest progressive propaganda, like yours truly, has likely never heard (e.g. “progressive stack … minoritized communities … carceration”).

But, as a whole, let us give credit where credit is due: the creators of this list at least had the self-awareness and listening skills to interpret how these terms sound to ordinary people. They classified the terms into six categories, based on how normal people interpret them. “These words say ‘I’m more empathetic than you, and you are callous to hurting other’s feelings,’” they described one category. “These say ‘your views on traditional genders and gender roles are at best quaint.,” said another.

“It’s good advice, but a bit like closing the stable door after the horse has already galloped off to the glue factory,” scoffed National Review’s Jeffrey Blehar. “Kamala Harris used nearly every single one of these terms during a misbegotten political career that climaxed in a failed presidential campaign that bonded her party to this particular variety of noxious progressivism.”

As far as actual policies go, it’s hard to distinguish a “Third Way”-style politician from a standard progressive, especially on policies like abortion. Their rejection of left-wing verbal clutter simply reveals a desire not to sound quite as radical, based solely on political expediency. They object not to the Democrat Party’s leftward drift, but to rocking the boat in a way that startles longtime partisans into jumping ship.

The fundamental problem with this approach is that it is difficult to lull passengers back to sleep once they have been startled awake by the raging storm around them. The left-wing policies gaining purchase in the Democratic Party only make sense to those who have imbibed the left-wing worldview that created them.

“The Democrats can drop this sort of language from their messaging as much as they wish, but until they drop the spirit of this rhetoric from their political objectives, they will remain just as culturally alienated from the mainstream as they are now,” Blehar concluded. “Or, to quote an online friend: Normal people don’t need to be told to act normal.”

“The Democratic Party is certainly in a tough spot,” agreed Carpenter. “Recent polling showed they’re at just 24% approval rating among registered voters, with a 56% disapproval rating.” Additionally, he noted, the Democratic Party has ousted leaders only months after electing them, stockpiled $14 million in cash to Republicans’ $84 million, and lost 2.1 million voters, while Republicans have gained 2.4 million.

Democrats know their party is in trouble, but they seem divided over the best course to chart. DNC Chairman Ken Martin articulated one alternative on Tuesday, when he complained that he was “sick and tired of this Democratic Party bringing a pencil to a knife fight. We cannot be the only party that plays by the rules anymore.”

This complaint suffers from the conceit that Democrats play by the rules, a questionable proposition after their last administration arrested peaceful pro-life protestors; planted informants in churches; defied the Supreme Court; colluded with medical organizations, school boards, and social media platforms; and waged the most extensive lawfare campaign ever conducted against a former president. (In fact, perhaps such recent, toxic misbehavior accounts for part of the Democratic Party’s current misfortunes.)

While Democrats struggle to find consensus on the path forward, they know where they stand now: solidly behind the toxic identity politics encapsulated in the label “DEI.” As far as these values are considered, Democratic leadership has convinced itself to ignore the warning signs and power full steam ahead.

AUTHOR

Joshua Arnold

Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

‘Woke,’ ‘Weak,’ and ‘Out of Touch’: The Crisis of the Democratic Brand

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The summer hasn’t done much to break the heat that Democrats are feeling from voters. The party of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris is about as popular as a rush-hour traffic jam, according to the latest surveys. Unfortunately for Minority Leaders Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) and Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), time hasn’t helped the dismal approval ratings — nor, most Americans would point out, has the party’s supposed “self-reflection.”

In the eight months since Election night, Democrats have spent countless hours and dollars on meetings, strategy sessions, focus groups, and autopsy reports only to turn around and ignore the lessons they teach. “Woke,” “weak,” and “out of touch” was how one survey described the party that paid for the poll. With the GOP eating into the once-impressive margins that Democrats enjoyed with Hispanics, the working class, and white men, Schumer and company are looking at a pretty dismal approval rating — just 35% across those key demographics.

Equally as frustrating, there’s little to no hope in the base that things will change. Asked how optimistic they are about the future of the party, dejected Democrats have all but resigned to their fate in the political wilderness. Only 35% think things will turn around in the future — an almost 20-point drop from the 57% last July. Much to Jeffries’s and Schumer’s displeasure, congressional Democrats are taking a severe beating in the polls. A late June YouGov/Economist survey found a sharp drop in Americans’ approval of their House and Senate members: a -32 favorability rating, compared to -15 when Donald Trump took office in January.

And while insiders are quick to call these results “striking,” they’re just as quick to dismiss them. “Americans have a pretty sour view of everyone in Washington right now,” Democrat pollster Matt McDermott rationalized. But, he rightly pointed out, “It’s important to note that the favorability of the opposition party has never been a reliable barometer for midterm results. Voters don’t need to like the ‘out’ party to vote for change — they just need to be fed up with the incumbents,” he observed. “I see parallels in the current climate. Trump’s presidency (or second presidency, in this case) has mobilized a lot of anger and opposition.”

Republicans might be tempted to cheer the opposition’s fall from grace or draw premature conclusions about how this could impact the 2026 elections — but they shouldn’t. The reality is, Donald Trump will always be more unpopular in the Democratic base than Democrats themselves — and he, not Jeffries or Schumer — is what will motivate them to turn out in the midterms. To think that the base’s exasperation with the Left will keep them home is to underestimate their general hatred for the president. Once Trump is gone, the party will have a real crisis on its hands. Without the president to drive the protest vote, Americans will be forced to evaluate Democrats on what they actually stand for. And that’s where the party’s tenuous hold unravels.

“Part of the problem for Democrats is that there is little consensus about what exactly the party stands for in concrete policy terms,” David Walsh vents in the Boston Review. Or maybe the problem is that people do know what the Democrats stand for — radical gender ideology, open borders, DEI, abortion until birth, the “global intifada,” and general lawlessness — and reject it on its face. That, more than anything, is what’s given rise to a quiet countermovement in the Democratic Party, a growing determination to give voice to the marginalized — but more broadly appealing — centrists in the base.

Fed up with the off-putting narrative driving the Democrats’ messaging, the party’s “middle” is hosting events like WelcomeFest to bridge the gap that voters see between Jeffries’s Squad and the average American. “In the wake of their 2024 loss,” Jeremiah Johnson writes in The Dispatch, “a significant portion of Democratic leadership seems to believe that what the party really needs is to change the messaging. They need more aggressive PR, better catchphrases, more viral stunts. They need to go on more podcasts!” Sure, he agrees, a better messaging strategy might help. “But the core thing that held Democrats back in 2024 wasn’t PR strategy. It was the party’s beliefs and policies. If Democrats want to win the kind of large and durable majorities that will allow them to really govern, they’re going to have to rethink those policies.”

He’s referring, of course, to the party’s insistence on clinging to fringe views that reject everything from the sanctity of girls’ sports to parental rights in education, legal immigration, and empowering law enforcement. “Democrats,” Johnson agrees, “continue to deviate from public opinion — afraid to denounce the 20 end of an 80/20 issue in the polls for fear of offending an interest group.” And, he continues, “Democrats do themselves no favors by not loudly condemning the excesses of wokeness, which are real.”

There’s a way to thread that needle, Johnson argues. “They can get visibly tougher on illegal immigration while still advocating for more legal pathways and the fair treatment of immigrants. They can focus on the LGBT rights that matter like non-discrimination in the workplace, non-discrimination in housing, and access to health care — rather than dying on dubious and unpopular niche issues like trans athletes in women’s sports. They can loudly denounce the excesses of DEI (such as mandatory diversity statements for technical STEM research) while preserving diversity and inclusion ideas that still make sense (such as honoring civil rights heroes like Jackie Robinson),” he reiterates. “They can advocate for intelligent police reforms while still taking a hard stance against public disorder, crime, and anti-social behavior.”

And yet, every time a Democrat attempts to moderate their stance, they’re later rolled, repentant, or ostracized. California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) and Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) tested the waters on girls’ sports, suggesting it wasn’t fair for America’s daughters to lose titles and positions to men, only to retreat once the party’s woke overlords and fundraisers get their hooks in.

Or take Senator John Fetterman (D-Pa.), the hoodie-wearing castoff who’s staked out a rational position on Israel, Iran, ICE, and immigration, and who’s become, in CNN’s words, “isolated” for agreeing with most voters. While he’s tried to embrace a practical view on some of the Democrats’ biggest messaging liabilities, his effort rarely goes unpunished. Even now, the party’s growing frustration with his independent thinking is helping to fuel a bitter primary race in Pennsylvania, where Fetterman’s overall approval is still a +4 positive at 41%.  Ironically, Republicans, who’ve grown to appreciate his ability to break with the Left, give him even higher marks: 45% approval. “My values haven’t changed,” the senator wanted people to know recently. “But I think in some cases, I think our party’s values have changed.” Instead of seeing Fetterman as a senator who can help Democrats reach voters, he’s become a pariah.

Even Fetterman’s suggestion that the party at least sound more civil while pushing these outlandish agendas was ignored. “I think their primary currency was shaming and scolding and talking down to people and telling them ‘Hey, I know better than you, or you’re dopes, or you’re a bro, or you’re ignorant or, how can you be this dumb? I can’t imagine it. And then, by the way, they’re fascists. How can you vote for that?’” Fetterman asked.

“I know and I love people that voted for Trump, and they’re not fascist. They don’t support insurrection and those things. And if you go to an extreme, and you become a boutique kind of proposition, then you’re going to lose the argument. And we have done that,” he lamented about Democrats.

FRC Action Director Matt Carpenter could only shake his head at the party’s refusal to adapt to the cultural and political winds. “The problem is much deeper than a facelift on their advertising and an update to their talking points,” he told The Washington Stand. “The Democratic Party’s base wants their leaders in Congress to double down on opposing President Trump and the Republican Congress wherever they can. This places the Democratic Party in a desperate position,” he warned. “They can try to stanch the bleeding among key demographics by moderating in some places and risk their base turning on them — or they can lean into the anger of their base and watch their numbers continue to decline among men and working-class voters.”

At the end of the day, it’s their choice. “To win votes, you can’t have wildly different views from the public,” Johnson underscored. “That’s a lesson Democrats seem to have forgotten.”

AUTHOR

Suzanne Bowdey

Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Explainer: How Trump ’s Proposed 2026 Budget Impacts Transgenderism, Abortion, Education, Immigration, and More

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President Donald Trump won the 2024 election with a promise to end divisive, taxpayer-funded programs, and his proposed budget for the next fiscal year proves he is willing to save your money where his mouth is. The president’s budget specifically asks Congress to cut billions of dollars from government programs promoting “radical transgender ideology,” “LGBTQIA+” programs, and government “targeting [of] peaceful pro-life protesters” while transferring power back to the states and increasing federal funding for national defense, border security, and public safety.

President Trump detailed his proposed FY 2026 budget in a 46-page overview of major discretionary funding changes, revealing a fiscal and ideological break with his Democratic predecessors. In all, Trump would spend $1.69 trillion, including requesting more than $1 trillion in defense spending for the first time in U.S. history to assist in “repelling the invasion of our border” and “to clean up the mess President Trump inherited from the prior administration.”

Yet the White House refers to the spending guidelines as the “skinny budget,” since it offsets significant spending hikes with $136 billion in reductions that slash 22.6% from non-defense discretionary spending. “Savings come from eliminating radical diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and critical race theory programs, Green New Scam funding, large swaths of the Federal Government weaponized against the American people, and moving programs that are better suited for States and localities to provide,” according to a White House fact sheet that accompanied the budget release.

If the Biden-Harris administration’s proposed FY 2025 budget sought to insert equity into every program through a whole-of-government approach, the second Trump administration has set out to uproot every vestige of compulsory taxpayer funding of the radical Left. “Over the last four years, Government spending aggressively turned against the American people and trillions of our dollars were used to fund cultural Marxism … and even our own invasion” by illegal immigrants, said Russ Vought, director of the Office and Management and Budget (OMB). “No agency was spared in the Left’s taxpayer-funded cultural revolution.” The administration cited $315 million the Biden administration spent on grant programs “to push ‘intersectionality,’ ‘racial equity,’ and LGBTQIA+ programming for preschoolers,” adding that the FY 2026 budget “ends all of that.”

The budget also promises to advance “the Administration’s goal of restoring federalism,” tying the well-being of families to the U.S. government’s respect for states’ rights and constitutional order. “Just as the Federal Government has intruded on matters best left to American families, it has intruded on matters best left to the levels of government closest to the people,” writes Vought in a letter transmitting the budget.

Here are the specific cuts and dollar amounts removed from the federal budget.

Abortion and the Right-to-Life Movement

President Trump’s proposed FY 2026 budget slashes or eliminates abortion funding while protecting pro-life advocates’ constitutional rights. Specifically, the budget would cut $6.2 billion from Global Health Programs and Family Planning initiatives. “The United States is the largest global contributor to programs that provide so-called family planning services through liberal NGOs, and have funded abortions. This stands in direct conflict with the President’s action reinstating the ‘Mexico City Policy.’ The Budget protects life and prevents a pro-abortion agenda from being promoted abroad with taxpayer dollars.” The president reinstated his 2017 Protecting Life in Global Health Assistance (PLGHA) policy, which bars any group that receives taxpayer funding from carrying out or advocating for abortion overseas. But the budget maintains funding for the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) for current recipients.

The proposed budget also safeguards pro-life advocates’ rights by eliminating $545 million from Biden-Harris administration policies that charged the FBI with “targeting peaceful pro-life protesters, concerned parents at school board meetings, and citizens opposed to radical transgender ideology,” as well as erasing “DEI programs.” The budget also reestablishes fairness by cutting $193 million from General Legal Activities at the Justice Department, prioritizing criminal prosecutions but reducing the budget of the Civil Rights Division, “which the previous administration weaponized against States implementing election integrity measures, local police departments, and pro-life Americans.”

Slashing LGBTQ Radicalism and DEI Programs

President Trump made eliminating DEI, critical race theory, and government-sponsored racism and sexism a focus of his successful 2024 campaign, cementing the approach through a series of executive actions that prosecute race-based discrimination. Similarly, the Republican Party spent $65 million on ads highlighting the Democratic Party’s extremism on transgender ideology, making it the top reason swing voters decided not to vote for Kamala Harris, according to the Democratic polling firm Blueprint. The proposed FY 2026 budget cuts tens of billions of dollars in DEI and LGBTQIA+ funding, as well as climate change ideology.

The proposed budget cuts $18 billion from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to restore “accountability, public trust, and transparency at the NIH. NIH has broken the trust of the American people with wasteful spending, misleading information, risky research, and the promotion of dangerous ideologies that undermine public health” by denying the likely lab leak origin of COVID-19 and promoting gain-of-function research, which the president recently banned by executive order. Yet “NIH has also promoted radical gender ideology to the detriment of America’s youth. For example, the NIH funded a study titled ‘Psychosocial Functioning in Transgender Youth after 2 Years of Hormones,’ in which two participants tragically committed suicide,” the budget notes. The president also cuts $3.6 billion from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in a blueprint that “eliminates duplicative, DEI, or simply unnecessary programs.”

The president would cut $8.3 billion from Economic Support Fund, Development Assistance for Europe, Eurasia, and Central Asia, as part of a broader foreign policy to place American interests first and save Europe from itself, but also because “U.S. economic and development aid has been funneled to radical, leftist priorities, including climate change, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), and LGBTQ activities around the world.”

The budget cuts $3.5 billion from the National Science Foundation’s grants and research on “climate; clean energy; woke social, behavioral, and economic sciences.” That comes in addition to another $1.1 billion cut to NSF’s Broadening Participation activities, which have underwritten such programs as “Reimagining Educator Learning Pathways Through Storywork for Racial Equity in STEM”; “addressing White Supremacy in the STEM profession”; and preparing “the next generation of DEI leaders to promote long-term, sustainable racial equity initiatives.”

The president moved dramatically against the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) after taking office: exposing their radical grants before firing most of their staff and placing the agency under the authority of Secretary of State Marco Rubio. The FY 2026 budget cuts $2.5 billion from USAID and “eliminates non-essential staff that were hired based on DEI and preferencing practices” while implementing executive orders 14169 to realign foreign aid and 14151 to eliminate DEI programs.

The budget cuts more than $1 billion in grants nestled under the Department of Justice, such as “$1 million to the National Opinion Research Center to ‘investigate the social ecological context of anti-LGBTQ+ hate crime reporting.’ Further, the Budget realigns Violence Against Women Act funding with its original core mission to combat violence against women and directly serve victims — eliminating extraneous programs that divert resources from these core functions. For example, grant funding from the Office on Violence Against Women (OVW) had been offered for biological men. In addition, OVW’s Rural Program grants were sent to train community-based Fa’afafine advocates — an organization of biological men that describes themselves as a ‘third-gender.’”

Pro-family experts singled out the VAWA proposal as a welcome gesture. “VAWA programs are intended to help women who are the victims of abuse and in recent years it has been invaded by gender ideology. Currently, women who escape abuse in a VAWA funded shelter could be forced to share private spaces with a man,” Mary Beth Waddell, director of Federal Affairs for Family and Religious Liberty at Family Research Council, told The Washington Stand. “We are grateful that the president is calling out this injustice.”

The budget cuts $4.5 billion from the Department of Education while maintaining full federal funding for K-12 schools, consolidating 18 programs into one formula grant that allows the DOE to do as much work with fewer employees. “The new approach allows States and districts to focus on the core subjects — math, reading, science, and history — without the distractions of DEI and weaponization from the previous administration,” notes the budget. It also saves $127 million in administrative costs.

At the college level, the budget cuts $195 million from the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Ed (FIPSE), noting that Congress has “abused FIPSE by using it to fund initiatives unrelated to students or institutional reforms, including earmarking $1.2 million for San Diego Community College’s LGBTQIA+ PRIDE Center staffing.” It also cuts $1.6 billion from TRIO and GEAR UP, two programs that incentivized colleges to engage low-income students. The administration argues that economic incentives have eliminated the need for the federal government to continue underwriting colleges and universities’ outreach. “A renewed focus on academics and scholastic accomplishment by [Institutions of Higher Education], rather than engaging in woke ideology with Federal taxpayer subsidies, would be a welcome change for students and the future of the Nation.” The budget also removes $691 million in cultural exchanges for foreign exchange students that prevent American students from acquiring high-demand skills, which the foreign students then take back to their home countries.

The budget cuts $1.6 billion by consolidating the Labor Department’s Make America Skilled Again (MASA) grants, defunding nonprofits promoting DEI, and “the hiring of illegal aliens and migrants; sometimes providing them subsidized housing in addition to a job.”

It cuts $1.3 billion from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), scrutinizing NOAA grants for “George Mason University’s ‘Policy Experience in Equity Climate and Health’ fellowship, a workshop for ‘transgender women, and those who identify as nonbinary.’”

Trump’s budget cuts $646 million from Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)’s non-disaster grant programs, seeking to curtail such FEMA activities as “webinars promoting the distribution of disaster aid based on ‘intersectional’ factors like sexual orientation and prioritizing ‘investment in diversity and inclusion efforts … and multicultural training’ over disaster prevention and response.” Under the Trump administration, “FEMA will no longer ‘instill equity as a foundation of emergency management.’” The document rightly notes that “FEMA discriminated against Americans who voted for the President in the wake of recent hurricanes, skipping over their homes when providing aid. This activity will no longer be tolerated.”

The budget cuts $624 million from the Economic Development Administration (EDA) and Minority Business Development Agency (MBDA), specifically citing an EDA grant “constructing a ‘Pride Plaza’ in Portland, Oregon.”

It cuts $602 million from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA), effectively eliminating “wasteful, woke programming in NIFA, such as activities related to climate change, renewable energy, and promoting DEI in education that were prioritized under the Biden Administration.”

The Trump administration aims to gut federally funded woke programs aimed at Americans at both ends of life. The proposed FY 2026 budget eliminates $405 million from the Labor Department’s Senior Community Service Employment Program (SCSEP), which is supposed to subsidize jobs and employment for poor senior citizens but “is effectively an earmark to leftist, DEI-promoting entities like the National Urban League, the Center for Workforce Inclusion, and Easter Seals.” At the same time, it cuts $315 million from Preschool Development Grants (PDG), which was “weaponized by the Biden-Harris Administration to extend the Federal reach and push DEI policies on to toddlers.” For instance, the “guiding principles” implemented by the Minnesota Department of Education for its PDG program include “intersectionality” and “racial equity.”

The budget cuts roughly $19 billion from programs promoting what the White House calls the “Green New Scam.”

The government’s proposed budget generally reins in government grants flowing to radical causes:

  • It cuts $167 million by consolidating the Small Business Administration’s Entrepreneurial Development Programs (EDP), deleting such programs as SCORE, “which in 2023 posted ‘Six Ways to Support LGBTQIA-Owned Businesses.’”
  • It cuts $129 million from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), which “pushed radical gender ideology onto children, funding a project at the Seattle Children’s Hospital titled, ‘Using Telehealth to Improve Access to Gender-Affirming Care for BIPOC and Rural Gender-Diverse Youth.’”
  • It cuts $112 million from programs aimed at “Strengthening Institutions,” noting, “It is not the responsibility of Federal taxpayers to support a new ‘Guided Pathways Village, expanding the current Learning Communities and creating a new Ethnic and Pride Inclusion Center for historically underserved students, including LGBTQ+ students.’”
  • It cuts $100 million in “divisive racial discrimination and environmental justice grants that were destined to go to organizations that advance radical ideologies.”
  • It cuts $70 million from Teacher Quality Partnerships, which field grants indoctrinating teachers to begin “acknowledging and responding to systemic forms of oppression and inequity, including racism, ableism, ‘gender-based’ discrimination, homophobia, and ageism.”
  • It cuts $55 million from Complex Crisis Fund, “a catch-all slush fund for nation-building projects and political interference” which “has been weaponized to mandate DEI and LGBTQ policies be implemented in recipient countries as a condition of aid to small businesses.”
  • It cuts $49 million from the DOE’s Office of Civil Rights, a 35% strategic reduction to “refocus away from DEI and Title IX transgender cases … while removing their ability to push DEI programs and promote radical transgender ideology.”

The proposed FY 2026 budget also cuts a total of $19.2 billion from Energy Department initiatives it describes as part of the “Green New Scam.”

Getting the Government Out of the ‘Disinformation’ Business

The proposed FY 2026 budget cuts $491 million from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) as part of its efforts to eliminate “weaponization and waste.” The budget “eliminates programs focused on so-called misinformation and propaganda as well as external engagement offices such as international affairs. These programs and offices were used as a hub in the Censorship Industrial Complex to violate the First Amendment.”

It also cuts $315 million for the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which supported Ukrainian government efforts to brand critics as exponents of Russian disinformation and “funded the now-infamous Disinformation Index Foundation that targeted and blacklisted conservative media outlets like Federalist, Newsmax, TAC, the Blaze,” and others.

Restoring National Sovereignty

President Trump has identified himself with the words “America First,” and his budget stakes out similar priorities. It cuts $1.7 billion from the United Nations, UNESCO, and World Health Organization dues, implementing executive order 14199. However, the president may fund these organizations out of a separate funding source “to preserve maximum negotiating leverage.” It also eliminates $1.6 billion from United Nations “peacekeeping” missions that wage war under the U.N.’s blue-helmeted auspices. And it cuts $1.5 billion from Food for Peace, recognizing the waste and abuse of foreign aid transfers from U.S. taxpayers to foreign oligarchs.

The budget also acknowledges that the free market and local business development create sustainable prosperity, not foreign aid. “The program also distorts and undermines local and regional markets where the aid often could be purchased for less and with less waste,” says the budget. Similarly, it cuts $75 million from Transition Initiatives, a program that leads to “further destabilization” around the world and “funds a wasteful tangle of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and partisan cutouts pushing a leftist agenda around the world.”

Borders, Patriotism, National Unity

The budget increases funding for the Department of Homeland Security — which oversees many border enforcement and deportation efforts — by a whopping 65%, or $43.8 billion in additional funds. It cuts nearly $2 billion from programs for refugees and Unaccompanied Alien Children (UACs), funds which “were weaponized by the Biden-Harris Administration to give cash handouts, medical services, and job training to illegal immigrants” and to release children in the custody of “insufficiently vetted sponsors,” effectively making the government complicit in child trafficking.

It cuts $650 million from the Shelter and Services Program earmarked for “non-citizen migrants,” tax payments which “funded radical leftist NGOs, who spent funding to facilitate mass illegal migration into the interior of the Nation … weakening the United States from within, taking resources away from American citizens, and promoting crime and decay in America’s cities.” And it cuts $247 million from the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), which the Biden administration used “to facilitate mass illegal migration by allowing illegal migrants to fly into the interior without proper documentation.”

Yet the budget radically increases funding for the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) to hire more air traffic controllers; for Rail Safety and Infrastructure grants to prevent tragedies such as the train derailment and intentional detonation of a train in East Palestine, Ohio; for the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) to intercept fentanyl; and for stronger trade enforcement against technological and competitiveness threats from the People’s Republic of China.

“Linking proposed decreases in funding to areas of egregious mismanagement of taxpayer dollars and reorienting these dollars to their intended purpose, as opposed to ideological ones, sends a strong message that taxpayers deserve respect, and the use of their hard-earned money should be stewarded well,” Waddell told TWS.

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Trump’s Military Beefs Up Physical Standards to Build Back Elite Fighting Force

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Under Joe Biden, nothing was a greater threat to our military than the administration in charge of it. With a brief respite during Donald Trump’s first term, America’s fighting force has spent the better part of the last 15 years as a minefield of social experimentation — with little to show for it but low morale, retention and recruitment woes, and a global reputation of weakness and wokeness. In the name of “equity,” the Biden and Obama administrations made a mockery of the military’s high standards. According to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, that ends now.

Say what you will about Hegseth’s personal life, his choice of tattoos, or his inadvisable group chats, but when it comes to making our men and women in uniform respectable, this veteran is on a one-man mission to turn our troops back into an elite warrior class. After years of relaxing standards, the Pentagon announced it was returning the military to the high physical benchmarks that made our men and women the most lethal fighting force in the world.

“For far too long,” Hegseth insisted on X, “we have allowed standards to slip. We’ve had different standards for men/women serving in combat arms [military occupational specialty’s] and jobs. … That’s not acceptable, and it changes right now!” The time has come to ditch the Left’s DEI approach to national security. “We need to have the same standards — male or female — in our combat roles to ensure our men and women who are under our leaders and in those formations have the best possible leaders and the highest possible standards that are not based at all on your sex.”

As part of a memo released Monday, the DOD secretary directed the secretaries of America’s military departments to “develop comprehensive plans to distinguish combat arms occupations from non-combat arms occupations. This effort will ensure that our standards are clear, mission-focused, and reflective of the unique physical demands placed on our Service members in various roles.” For certain combat roles, Hegseth continued, “it is essential to identify which positions require heightened entry-level and sustained physical fitness. These roles, which are critical to our military’s mission success, demand exceptional physical capabilities, and the standards for them must reflect that rigor.”

From now on, the secretary declared, “All entry-level and sustained physical fitness requirements within combat arms positions must be sex-neutral, based solely on the operational demands of the occupation and the readiness needed to confront any adversary.” Those standards, he directed, must be implemented by October.

As Hegseth himself explained, this isn’t meant to denigrate or shame female recruits. But the reality is, men and women are physiologically different, and females should never be allowed in combat units if they aren’t physically up to the task. And according to a study by the left-leaning RAND in 2022, the Army’s women were not — failing even the easier fitness tests at significantly higher rates than men. That was the same year the Biden administration decided to loosen certain requirements for women against the advice of experts, who warned that it would only create a more dangerous environment for everyone.

Hegseth took a lot of flak in the days leading up to his confirmation hearing for suggesting that women shouldn’t be in combat roles at all — a position that he’s modified with this caveat: “If we have the right standard and women meet that standard, roger, let’s go.”

When the last two Democratic presidents decided to dilute fitness tests for females, Family Research Council’s Lt. General (Ret.) Jerry Boykin was adamantly opposed — not just to their DEI approach to our national defense but to mixing the genders to begin with. Boykin, who’s commanded Special Forces in battle, was clear about the consequences of this kind of social experimentation. “Some units, like infantry, Special Forces, SEALs, and others, are not suitable for combining men and women. It has nothing to do with the courage or even capabilities of women. It is all about two things: the burden on small unit leaders and the lack of privacy in these units,” he explained.

“Leaders of these units must be focused like a laser on keeping their soldiers alive and defeating the enemy,” Boykin knows. “It is unreasonable to encumber them with the additional burden of worrying about how they provide privacy for the few women under their command during stressful and very dangerous operations. It is not the same as being a combat pilot who returns to an operating base or an aircraft carrier after the fight, where separate facilities are available.” It’s the absolute wrong policy for America, Boykin went on, because it “ignores fundamental biological differences between the sexes and the natural implications of those differences.”

And it’s not just men who feel this way, but brave women in uniform too. The New York Times pointed to an op-ed written by Kristen Griest, one of the first two females to graduate from the Army’s elite Ranger School, objecting to this woke approach to war-fighting. “With equal opportunity comes equal responsibility,” Griest insisted. “Lowering fitness standards to accommodate women will hurt the Army — and women.”

She argued that separate scoring based on gender would “drastically reduce the performance and effectiveness of combat arms units. … [T]he requirements to join the nation’s combat forces could soon be as low as performing ten push-ups in two minutes, running two miles in twenty-one minutes, deadlifting 140 pounds three times, and performing only one repetition of a leg tuck or, failing that, two minutes of a plank exercise,” she pointed out.

“While these low standards may have seemed adequate in a controlled study,” Griest insisted, “I know from experience that they will not suffice in reality. Indeed, the presence of just a handful of individuals who cannot run two miles faster than twenty-one minutes has the potential to derail a training exercise,” she warned, “not to mention an actual combat patrol. … Missions will be delayed and other soldiers will be overburdened with the weight of their unfit teammates’ equipment. This scenario is inconvenient and bad for morale during a training exercise; in combat it could be deadly.”

Griest stressed that “while it may be difficult for a 120-pound woman to lift or drag 250 pounds, the Army cannot artificially absolve women of that responsibility; it may still exist on the battlefield.” And frankly, “The entire purpose of creating a gender-neutral test was to acknowledge the reality that each job has objective physical standards to which all soldiers should be held, regardless of gender. The intent was not to ensure that women and men will have an equal likelihood of meeting those standards. Rather,” she argued, “it is incumbent upon women who volunteer for the combat arms profession to ensure they are fully capable and qualified for it. To not require women to meet equal standards in combat arms will not only undermine their credibility, but also place those women, their teammates, and the mission at risk.”

What Hegseth has done is recognize that men and women are different, Lt. Colonel (Ret.) Bob Maginnis told The Washington Stand. “Yet, across recent and mostly Democrat administrations, those differences were blurred to the point of insanity. As a result, the military departments watered down their standards for many combat positions to access women. However, as most combatants understand, that reduction in standards negatively impacted readiness. That’s the target of Hegseth’s directive — improve readiness.”

Maginnis, who wrote an entire book called “Deadly Consequences: How Cowards Are Pushing Women into Combat,” blames Obama for starting this social experiment, which, he noted, coincided with that administration’s announcement to assign women to ground combat units. “That decision to violate a virtually universal principle of military practice represented our craven military leadership’s surrender to the political forces of radical feminism. The implications for U.S. national security were — and remain — sobering.”

Now, years later, Maginnis points out, “We know that a) very few military women are interested in combat duty; b) the Pentagon’s assurances that military readiness will not be compromised are seriously flawed; and 3) until Trump, our top uniformed leadership surrendered to feminist ideologues without a fight.”

As far as he’s concerned, this change “was a long time coming.” And it should be welcomed by every “common-sense American interested in maintaining a ready military.”

AUTHOR

Suzanne Bowdey

Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

The Party That Woke Broke

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Democrats have been wallowing in the despair of last November’s elections for months, unable — or maybe unwilling — to crawl out of the pit of public opinion they find themselves in. “It’s hard to win if you don’t know why you lost,” Axios’s Alex Thompson observed. But it’s even harder, some would say, if you know and do nothing about it.

To most people, the solution to the party’s problems is simple. After a year of losing ground with virtually every demographic — men, Black Americans, Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans, young people, Independents, suburban moms — the polling all points to Democrats being completely out of step with everyday voters. So why not just abandon the extremism Americans rejected? For the party of Barack Obama and Joe Biden, the answer is much more complicated.

The crisis facing Democrats isn’t about their identity; they have one. The crisis is that they can’t moderate their ideology — or embrace it — without severe consequences. As National Review’s Rich Lowry put it, “The reason Joe Biden won in 2020 is he didn’t seem like a progressive, and one reason that his party lost in 2024 is that he governed like one.” For Democrats, ideological extremism is their kryptonite and their lifeblood. It’s what excites the base and repels the populace. In other words, it’s a recipe for long-term political disaster.

And yet, in several instances, the Democrats who’ve tried to soften their positions or build a temporary bridge to sanity have been beaten back into conformity. After the election, Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) dared to say he didn’t want his daughters to play sports against biological boys — like 80% of his country — only to turn around and vote against his girls three months later. “I was just speaking authentically as a dad about one of many issues where I think we’re just out of touch with the majority of voters,” he explained to the angry mob in November. “… I stand by my position.” Or at least he stood by it until the time came to act on it, Americans learned.

But lately, even the barest hints of compromise are punished. Look at the hysteria over Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), who needs increased security simply for voting with Republicans to stop a government shutdown — something his own party argued would be a disaster for hard-working families a month earlier. For sticking to that position, there’ve been furious calls for his ouster and a leadership mutiny in party ranks.

Then, there’s California Governor Gavin Newsom (D), who tested the waters earlier this month with his whiplash comments on Title IX. Sitting down with Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk on his podcast, the governor was asked about the issue of trans-identifying athletes in girls’ sports. To most people’s surprise, the progressive replied, “I think it’s an issue of fairness. I completely agree with you on that.” He emphasized his point by adding, “It’s deeply unfair.”

Newsom, who, by his own admission, has been a “leader” in the “LGBTQ” movement, encouraged his party to admit that a lopsided playing field is cause for concern. He said, “We’ve got to own that. We’ve got to acknowledge it.” His sudden openness to a broader discussion was met with horror on the Left and deep skepticism on the Right — a perfect illustration of the conundrum facing Democrats.

As California Family Council President Jonathan Keller pointed out on a recent episode of the “Outstanding” podcast, “He’s trying to set it up in such a way that … he’s going to look like he’s a moderate.” But frankly, Keller said, “I’m not positive that’s actually going to be an effective strategy from him. I think what it may be effective in doing is getting him destroyed in the primaries,” he said, referring to the root problem for Democrats, which is that what wins primaries is the same thing that loses general elections.

In Newsom’s case, even an insincere shift to the middle is next-to-impossible to pull off, thanks to years of activist baggage. As Kirk wrote after the interview, “I’m under no illusions about why I was invited: Gavin Newsom wants to run for president in three years, and he thinks that talking [to] conservative figures like me increase his recognition, help him present as a centrist, and cast him as a champion of the Left in a time when the [L]eft has no real leaders. … We shouldn’t fall for this… ” he warned. “[A]nd fortunately, swerving to the center won’t be that simple for Gavin. … He knows his current record can’t win him the White House, and so he’s trying to rewrite what that record is.”

Polling proved the governor’s flirtation with rationality didn’t help his case. Of 1,000 California voters, only 24% said the podcast helped them see Newsom as more moderate, while 17% insisted it made them less likely to see him as a moderate. A majority, 59%, said it made no difference. Americans are not so easily fooled. A few soundbites does not a record make.

“Like the national Democrat[ic] Party and the legacy media,” John Nolte stressed, “Newsom has painted himself into a corner where the only way to survive is through the fealty to the 20 percent of hard leftists that make up the left’s base of activist and financial support. … With all their lies and lunacy in support of things like open borders and this transsexual nonsense, Newsom, Democrats, and the corporate media have alienated all the Normal People, probably forever. So that 20 percent is all they’ve got.”

The foot soldiers of the Democratic Party grasp the paradox. They’ve tried, unsuccessfully, for the last nine years to turn the heads of leadership to mainstream positions on things like gender, immigration, education, and energy. “I don’t want to be the freak show party like they have branded us,” one DNC member from Florida complained after the election when it was obvious the Left’s social radicalism had cost them every lever of power in Washington. “When you’re a mom with three kids,” she pointed out, “and you live in middle America, and you’re just not really into politics, and you see these ads that scare the bejesus out of you, you’re like, ‘I know Trump’s weird or whatever, but I would rather his weirdness that doesn’t affect my kids.’”

Others echoed her alarm. “The progressive wing of the party has to recognize — we all have to recognize — the country’s not progressive, and not to the far left or the far right. They’re in the middle,” said Joseph Paolino, a DNC committeeman for Rhode Island.

It felt like, at least from those comments, that the party was finally going to pivot. “This is basically a rebuild job from the bottom up,” former DNC Chair Donna Brazile emphasized.

But what happened when push came to shove? Against the pleas of their non-elite base, the far-left won even greater control of the party — electing woke, anti-gun, pro-trans, defund-the-police, ICE-abolishing, climate change-pimping DNC leaders in Chairman Ken Martin and Vice Chair David Hogg. To the everyday Democrats, who’d been “begging the party to ditch the radical Left,” it was an astonishing betrayal.

“The weaknesses of Democrats among non-white voters, particularly Hispanic and Black working-class voters, is pretty significant,” authors of a new book, “Where Have All the Democrats Gone?” insist. “They’re sort of realizing this is a problem. On the other hand, they’re so invested in this whole vector of cultural issues. They’re worried about the blowback on social media and from the college-educated ‘liberalish’ voters who are increasingly a loyal base of the Democratic Party. Trump understood that and he played upon it. He continues to play upon it. He continues to get votes upon it. And the Democrats are oblivious to it.”

Not all Democrats, it seems. A growing chorus of disillusioned officials are starting to speak up about the continued reckoning that awaits the party in future elections. During snippets of his interview with NPR Monday, Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-N.Y.) sounded outright logical in his assessment. “We can’t just resist. It can’t just be why we’re against Trump and what’s wrong with Trump. … The Democratic brand has been damaged. “

“When you ask people … ‘What do the Republicans stand for?’ They say, ‘Well, Make America Great Again. They want to cut the size of government, they want to give tax cuts, stuff like [that].’” Then, Suozzi said, when you ask, “‘What do the Democrats stand for?’ And I think the people are kind of scratching their head a little bit, they believe in, like, [abortion] and LGBT rights — which I believe in those things too — but I don’t know that you can build a whole party around that.” He talked about running on the border issue in 2024, and his consultants protested, arguing, “‘Well, Tom, that’s a Republican issue. I don’t know if you should be talking [about that].’ I said, ‘No, this is what the people of my district are talking about. We can’t ignore what the people are talking about.’”

Even longtime fixtures of the party are starting to reconsider the wisdom of pandering to a sliver of the country. Trusted Obama advisor Rahm Emanuel took on the misguided messaging of the current party earlier this month, urging local Democrats to beat the drum on “safe streets, strong schools, stable finances. Focus on those three things, and your city’s going to be fine,” he said on “Real Time with Bill Maher.” “Less about the bathrooms, more about the classrooms.”

The party’s fringe had a fit, forcing the ex-mayor to clarify, “I wasn’t looking to have a fight on woke culture. I was looking to have a debate on the failure of eighth graders to read. I don’t think culturally that being not just into the generic woke debate is wrong politically. It’s also [that] the data is pretty clear that people think that’s all we care about.” And in the end, he admitted, “We sunk our party. We’re responsible for that. And we’re also therefore responsible for rebuilding it.”

So far, the Democrats’ only idea for rebuilding has been parading Rep. Alexandria-Ocasio Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) around the country as the movement’s future standard-bearers. And, yes, CNN polling of the party’s voters did suggest that Sanders and the Squad leader “best represented the Democrats’ core values” — without asking if the majority of Democrats even supported those values in the first place. What they did question is if Democratic leaders are taking the party in the wrong direction, and a majority said “yes.” Either way, Lowry quipped, “If AOC is the Democratic future, the party is even worse off than we think.”

Most of us, FRC Action’s Matt Carpenter observed, “are used to seeing the Democrats operate as a tightly-knit team. For years, they moved in lockstep at the direction of their leaders toward the party’s goals,” he told The Washington Stand. “So it’s a curious thing to see them now rudderless, searching for leadership, searching for an issue to rally around, searching for support from voters and donors, and coming up short. The ground they gained over the years under the leadership of figures like Obama, Pelosi, and even Biden turns out to have left them stranded in the political wilderness.”

Making matters worse, Carpenter pointed out, “They just had their worst performance among minority voters maybe of all time. They are seen as the party of inflation, war, and obsessed with abortion and turning girls into boys and boys into girls. But that’s not even the worst of it for them,” he shook his head. “The worst part of it for the Democratic Party is that they’ve inculcated these ideas into their base. So they cannot retreat from their unpopular positions without watching their base become demoralized, or worse, angry.”

The reality is a painful one for a party in disarray, but Democrats are boxed in without a viable way out — at least for now. They’ve hitched their wagon to a radical, self-aggrandizing Left without looking behind them to see if anyone followed. Now that the wheels have come off, the sobering truth is this: they have no one to blame but themselves.

AUTHOR

Suzanne Bowdey

Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Trump Ends Democrats’ DEI War on Police, Firemen, and Public Safety

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The Trump administration has dismissed a series of DEI lawsuits brought by the Biden administration which claimed physical fitness tests had no bearing on someone’s ability to be a policeman or fireman. The Biden Justice Department insisted that written or physical tests were not “job related,” and even claimed that testing applicants is racist and sexist — because not enough women or minorities could pass them. One of Biden’s lawsuits branded the policies of then-Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s police force as discrimination.

The genius of the second Trump administration has been its ability to enact commonsense reforms exposing left-wing policies that are unhinged and unpopular, improve the core functions of government, restore power to the American people, and make liberals react in a way that makes them and their policies even more unhinged and unpopular.

Perhaps no case illustrates this trend than the disposing of four Biden-Harris lawsuits, which the White House said “lowered standards and endangered public safety” to promote left-wing ideology. “American communities deserve firefighters and police officers to be chosen for their skill and dedication to public safety — not to meet DEI quotas,” said Attorney General Pam Bondi as she dismissed the lawsuits last Wednesday. The Trump administration is “dedicated to ending illegal discrimination and restoring merit-based opportunity nationwide,” especially for “front-line public-safety workers who protect our nation,” because “[p]rioritizing DEI over merit when selecting firefighters and police officers jeopardizes public safety.”

Interestingly, one of the Biden-Harris administration’s lawsuits targeted policies overseen by a member of its own Cabinet.

Suing Pete Buttigieg’s South Bend

The Biden Justice Department filed a legal complaint that the South Bend police force required applicants to pass physical fitness and written aptitude tests since at least 2016. The mayor of South Bend from 2012 to 2020 was none other than Pete Buttigieg, the failed 2020 presidential hopeful and Transportation secretary who now presents himself as a born-again DEI opponent as he eyes a run for higher office in Michigan. “From 2016 through August 2019, approximately 87.6 percent of male test-takers passed the PFT, while approximately 45.5 percent of female test-takers passed,” stated the DOJ lawsuit. Around August 2019, the department “lowered the passing standards,” and something curious happened. “Since August 2019, approximately 83.8 percent of male test-takers passed the PFT, while approximately 47.4 percent of female test-takers passed.”

That is, the number of women who passed the less rigorous physical test rose by 2.9%. But is it plausible that fewer men could pass the test’s weaker criteria?

The new test outcomes prove that, if Mayor Pete’s police force engaged in job discrimination, it certainly did not disadvantage women. Yet the change did not satisfy the Biden administration, which sued to foist its views on South Bend once Buttigieg moved away and no longer had to face the electoral consequences.

Biden’s DOJ aimed a similar lawsuit at the Maryland Department of State Police, because the MDSP required applicants to pass a Functional Fitness Assessment Test (which has the unfortunate acronym “FFAT”). Applicants had to do 18 push-ups in one minute, 27 sit-ups in one minute, have the flexibility to sit down and stretch their fingers 1.5 inches past their toes, and run 1.5 miles in 15 minutes, 20 seconds. The majority of applicants passed: 81% of men and 51% of women. MDSP applicants also had to get at least a 70% on the written test, the Police Officer Selection Test (POST), in its three categories of reading, writing, and grammar. The DOJ reported that an even larger majority of applicants cleared this hurdle: 91% of whites and 71% of blacks passed the POST. Yet shortly after Republican Governor Larry Hogan left office, the Biden-Harris administration began negotiating a settlement with up-and-coming Democratic Governor Wes Moore (who happens to be black).

Employing White Firemen ‘Undermines Public Safety’: Biden Admin

The lawsuits were filed by the leader of Biden’s DOJ civil rights division, then-Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke, who holds an idiosyncratic view of public safety. “The under-representation of [b]lack people in the fire department workforce in Durham, and across the country, undermines public safety efforts,” said Clarke without proof.

Her words echoed the views of Los Angeles Fire Department Deputy Fire Chief Kristine Larson, who asserted (again, without proof) that a rescue worker who “looks like you” gives victims “a little bit more ease, knowing that somebody might understand their situation better.” The deputy chieftess dismissed concerns that she or others lack the sorts of qualifications South Bend and Maryland hoped to test. People frequently asked, “‘Is she strong enough to do this?’” Larson revealed. Some said, “‘You couldn’t carry my husband out of a fire.’ [To] which my response is, ‘He got himself in the wrong place if I have to carry him out of a fire.’”

Indeed. That would be implicit in his being surrounded by flames. But if a woman lacks the muscle to fulfill her taxpayer-funded job duties to save human lives, she has gotten herself in the wrong place.

Clarke claimed any policy that disproportionately harms a minority group may ipso facto be considered racist. For instance, she sued the Durham (North Carolina) Fire Department, because the DFD’s written test “disqualified Black applicants from employment at significantly disproportionate rates.” Her DOJ claimed Title VII of the Civil Rights Act “prohibits not only intentional discrimination but also employment practices that result in a disparate impact on a protected group, unless such practices are job related and consistent with business necessity.” However, the Supreme Court largely invented the doctrine of “disparate impact” in its 1971 ruling in Griggs v. Duke Power Company. In the end, the term’s definition came from neither the legislative nor the judicial branch but from the unelected bureaucracy. “Agencies, not courts, first developed disparate impact under the Civil Rights Act of 1964,” noted Olatunde C.A. Johnson of Columbia Law School in a 2014 paper on the legal doctrine’s pedigree. He argued in favor of “the continuing role that federal administrative agencies play in shaping the meaning of disparate impact today.”

These are perfect lawsuits for social engineers whose radical commitment to imposing left-wing ideology exceeds everything, including human life. Clarke — for whom the Article III Project made a criminal referral after she allegedly committed perjury by misleading Congress about her history of domestic violence — also sued the state of Utah for refusing to house male inmates who identify as transgender in female prisons. Once again, Clarke justified the radical doctrine in identity politics wrapped in the guise of civil rights: Clarke called housing males in female prisons a “basic right [which] extends to those with gender dysphoria.”

The Biden administration’s Justice Department sued the state of Tennessee over its aggravated prostitution law (§ 39-13-516), which punishes with a Class C felony anyone who knowingly sells sex for money after testing positive for HIV/AIDS, on the grounds that state lawmakers “unlawfully discriminate against individuals with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), a disability.” Only a radical left-wing ideologue could treat a law designed to restrict the spread of the world’s deadliest virus as conservatives’ hard-hearted attempt to pick on cripples.

Of course, the Biden-Harris administration began promoting DEI radicalism in its first day in office via Executive Order 13985, “Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government.” That became the first of 78 Biden-era executive orders President Donald Trump repealed on day one.

The president’s disapproval has only caused the Left to double down on DEI. Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison (D) insisted anyone trying “to eradicate DEI is saying, ‘We’re going to eradicate black and brown people and women and gay people and people with disabilities.’” (That may not be the most logical construction of the underlying sentence.) Another Minnesota Democrat, State Rep. Alicia “Liish” Kozlowski of Duluth (who identifies as non-binary) recently called a bill to prevent men from competing in women’s sports “another example of state-sanctioned bullying and genocide.” But while the Left insists ending DEI programs ranks a human rights atrocity somewhere between the Armenian Genocide and the Holodomor, Democrats censor anyone who complains about the impact of state-sponsored racism and sexism. “I am tired of the white tears,” said Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas). “The only people that are crying are the mediocre white boys that have been beaten out.”

The Left will soon have more to lament. “Today’s dismissal is an early step toward eradicating illegal DEI preferences across the government and in the private sector,” said Bondi. But Christians should rejoice.

Replacing Liberal Extremism with Constitutional Order and Biblical Morality

The Trump administration’s legal reversal restores one of the core functions of government. “God hath certainly appointed government to restrain the partiality and violence of men,” wrote John Locke in his Second Treatise on Government. The chief end of the law is “to protect and redress the innocent, by an unbiassed application of it, to all who are under it; wherever that is not bona fide done, war is made upon the sufferers, who having no appeal on earth to right them, they are left to the only remedy in such cases, an appeal to heaven,” added Locke, the philosopher most quoted by the Founding Fathers. “To avoid this state of war … is one great reason of men’s putting themselves into society.”

More importantly for Christians, halting lawsuits that put racial discrimination over public safety conforms to biblical morality. “Of a truth I perceive that God is no respecter of persons: But in every nation he that feareth Him, and worketh righteousness, is accepted with Him,” said the Apostle Peter (Acts 10:34). The principle comes from the Old Testament, which repeatedly emphasizes that diverse measures — such as disparate physical fitness standards — constitute a form of fraud (Proverbs 20:10). “One law and one manner shall be for you, and for the stranger that sojourneth with you,” wrote Moses (Numbers 15:16 and 29; see also Leviticus 24:22, among other verses).

For generations, Christians have prayed, “We beseech thee also, so to direct and dispose the hearts of all Christian rulers, that they may truly and impartially administer justice, to the punishment of wickedness and vice, and to the maintenance of Thy true religion, and virtue.” President Trump’s banishment of state-sponsored racism brought their prayers one step closer to reality.

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

The Death of Hollywood

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The name “Hollywood” was once an emblem of creativity, ingenuity, and originality. The film industry was, for decades, the home of the daring and devoted, those who were willing to risk their reputations and fortunes for the sake of their craft, for the sake of telling a good story in a way no one had ever told a story before. In the pioneering days of the film industry, motion pictures were still a novelty, allowing for much experimenting: filmmakers explored new ways to construct narratives, new techniques to make the impossible seem possible, new methods of framing and ordering images to elicit certain emotional responses — but all of this was done in the name of telling a good story.

However, after watching Sunday night’s Academy Awards ceremony, one has to ask if Hollywood has simply run out of good stories. Top contenders for the once-prestigious Oscar statuette included “Anora,” a nearly-two-and-a-half hour-long tale of strippers, Russian crime lords, and sexual assault; the French crime musical “Emilia Pérez,” centered on a South American cartel captain who decides he’s transgender; and “Conclave,” which depicts the leaders of the Catholic Church as scheming, Machiavellian arch-politicians and imagines that the next pope might be transgender. Eventually, the coveted “Best Picture” title went to “Anora,” the heartwarming one about a stripper marrying a Russian gangster and trying to avoid being raped. A tale as old as time, they say.

Hollywood used to tell good stories. Recent years have seen only a handful of good stories told well — the World War I epics “All Quiet on the Western Front” and “1917,” the World War II dramas “Dunkirk” and “Hacksaw Ridge,” the exciting “Ford v. Ferrari,” and the oddly-charming “Green Book” stand out to this writer as examples acknowledged by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences over the past decade — but the film industry was, once upon a time, a behemoth of creativity, ingenuity, and originality, inspiring the imaginations of generations of boys and girls.

In the early days of Hollywood, studio heads and producers like Samuel Goldwyn, Louis B. Mayer, and the Warner Brothers would partner with directors like Alfred Hitchcock, Fritz Lang, and Jean Renoir to both perfect the technical art of filmmaking and tell riveting, intriguing, immersive stories. As the era of silent film faded, the Golden Age of Hollywood began. The half-century-long Golden Age produced numerous stars, of course — from Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, and Clark Gable to Jimmy Stewart, Kirk Douglas, and Gregory Peck to Cary Grant, Audrey Hepburn, and Marlon Brando — but was, more crucially, a time when screenwriters, cinematographers, and directors honed their art, establishing the rules which would govern filmmaking for decades.

For example, the style and format of a western differed from the style and format of a romantic drama, which itself differed in tone and technique from a romantic comedy. These rules, far from stifling creativity, were instead a means of guiding and even enhancing creativity and originality. Studio executives, of course, wanted a sizable return on the money they invested in a film, but were wise enough in those days to realize that a certain degree of novelty, daring, and even risk was necessary to make a film that would become a success. Hiring competent directors who knew when to adhere to general filmmaking guidelines and when to innovate, and casting stars with enough prestige and popularity to pack a theater allowed producers to spend a bit of their filmmaking capital splurging on original stories.

The Golden Age of Hollywood was a treasure trove of good stories: from taut thrillers like “Rear Window” and “North by Northwest” to sweeping romances like “Casablanca” and “Gone with the Wind” to moving dramas like “It’s A Wonderful Life” and “To Kill A Mockingbird” to grandiose epics like “Spartacus” and “Citizen Kane” to lighthearted musicals like “Singin’ in the Rain” and “High Society.” Over the course of decades, thousands of stories were told, captivating the hearts and minds of generations.

In the 1960s, a new cadre of filmmakers arose, shaped by the classical moviemaking of the Golden Age but eager to take new risks and further develop the technical and narrative aspects of their chosen craft. The New Hollywood movement, spearheaded by the likes of George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola, and Martin Scorsese, took the tried-and-true rules established by their predecessors and applied them in novel ways, benefitting from and in many cases pioneering technological advances, which were coupled with ever-more-original approaches to storytelling.

The era produced numerous hits and spawned the phenomenon of the blockbuster. While some films, like 1967’s “Bonnie and Clyde,” pushed the envelope in regard to onscreen depictions of violence and discussions of sexuality, others, such as “Jaws,” the first “Star Wars” trilogy, the “Indiana Jones” movies, “The Godfather,” “Apocalypse Now,” “2001: A Space Odyssey,” “Chinatown,” and others dazzled audiences with immersive, realistic, and relatable storytelling techniques, breathtaking special effects, and a novel application of the filmmaking style developed in the previous decades.

Action films exploded onto the scene in the 1980s, with movies like “Rambo: First Blood” and “Die Hard” depicting heroes who fight hard to do the right thing. Films like “E.T. the Extra Terrestrial” and “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” used innovative special effects to tell heartwarming, family-oriented stories. “Risky Business,” “The Breakfast Club,” and others immortalized the style of teenage comedy unique to the 1980s. “Blade Runner” and “The Terminator” joined the “Star Wars” films as science-fiction classics. Many of the stars and filmmakers of the 1980s went on to continued success in the 1990s, with action stars like Mel Gibson proving themselves skilled and adept directors and household names like Spielberg yielding instant classics like “Jurassic Park” and hard-hitting epics like “Saving Private Ryan.”

Even the modern era of filmmaking has yielded some good stories, passionately and skillfully told by masters of the art of filmmaking. But those good stories have become fewer and farther between since the dawn of the 21st century. Why? There are two chief causes: corporate greed and woke ideology.

Film studios and producers have long been fixated on making money, but, as noted above, many recognized in the past that audiences enjoy and appreciate at least a modicum of creativity, ingenuity, and originality, whether in the story itself or in how it’s told. But the advent of the blockbuster in the 1970s showed studios that they could not only make some money on successful films but profit immensely from blockbusters. Thus, studios began pouring more and more money into films, in the hopes of creating that rare beast: the blockbuster. If a film needed $10 million more for its budget to afford star power, popular tunes, more engaging special effects, it could be a worthwhile investment, netting hundreds of millions of dollars for the studios and producers responsible.

Of course, studios learned that disaster could also ensue. Sinking money into a film wouldn’t necessarily make it good, even if that money was spent on stars, script rewrites, and stunning special effects. A prime example is 1995’s “Cutthroat Island,” a $98 million attempt at a swashbuckling pirate adventure. After the film lost the studio over $100 million, pirate movies were barred from production for nearly a decade, until Walt Disney Pictures and producer Jerry Bruckheimer took a risk on “Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl.” Major studio losses on films over the past two decades have gone as high as $200 million (wasted on the science-fiction-meets-mythology film “John Carter”) and even $237 million (lost on 2023’s “The Marvels”).

The combined desire to generate a sure-fire blockbuster and the dread of losing and never recouping hundreds of millions of dollars has led to the asphyxiation of creativity, ingenuity, and originality in the film industry. A handful of directors — almost all of whom made a name as a New Hollywood director in the 70s, an action auteur in the 80s, or a breakout genius of independent cinema in the late 90s and early 2000s — have enough cachet behind their own names to be handed almost unbridled creative control over cinematic endeavors, but the majority of big-budget, studio-funded films tend to be either reboots or franchises. A movie will be made, on a budget of hundreds of millions of dollars, so long as that movie has a built-in, pre-existing fan base and, thus, a better-than-average chance of making money.

The endless stream of “Star Wars” sequels, prequels, and television shows; the ever-increasing adaptations of the “Harry Potter” books; the nonstop production of “Fast and Furious” flicks; and the almost-incestuous, incessantly-expanding Marvel superhero “multiverse” are all symptomatic of the corporate cancer that is eating the film industry away from the inside. The simple fact is that studios and producers simply are not willing to take risks on new, daring, and original ideas — with one exception.

Hollywood has become a hotbed of woke ideology over the last 15 years for certain, but the malady has arguably been around far longer. The only “risks” that studios and producers are willing to take are in pushing and promoting the LGBT agenda, demonizing white men, and mocking or belittling Christianity. Woke ideology is anathema to good storytelling; it is predicated on the concept that victimhood is a virtue. “Anora” and “Emilia Pérez” are ideal fare for the Academy Awards: a stripper who is not appreciated by her Russian mobster husband and a drug lord who wants to transition genders are perfect victims and, thus, perfectly virtuous according to the tenets of woke ideology.

Good storytelling, however, is predicated on the cultivation of virtue and its triumph over vice. This principle has been the bedrock of literature for centuries, one to which practically every great story has adhered. Victimhood is deserving, in some cases, of pity, but it is not the equivalent, in good storytelling, of either virtue or heroism. William Wallace is not the hero of “Braveheart” because he is a victim; he is the hero because he fights against tyranny, devotes his life not to revenge but to the good of his country, and finally gives his life for the sake of his country’s liberty. Dr. Alan Grant is not the hero of “Jurassic Park” because he gets attacked by dinosaurs, but because he risks life and limb to save two children and learns by the story’s end to like children.

Corporate greed has choked the creativity, ingenuity, and originality out of filmmaking — and what little there is left has been inverted and neutered by woke ideology. It has been years since the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has been relevant, but Sunday’s awards ceremony was nothing more than a soulless pageant, rewarding the woke with little statuettes, since the unoriginal franchise reboots have already been rewarded with millions of dollars.

AUTHOR

S.A. McCarthy

S.A. McCarthy serves as a news writer at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is repbulished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Americans Rush to Enlist in Trump’s Military Recruitment Boom

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The Trump team may be slashing and burning lots of government jobs, but there’s one agency that’s been hanging a “We’re hiring” shingle for four years: the U.S. military. In yet another sign that the long and embarrassing chapter of the Biden administration is over, young men and women apparently can’t enlist fast enough, spiking recruitment numbers that had been at their lowest levels since World War II. Apparently, voters aren’t the only ones eager to exchange a commander in woke for a commander in chief.

The boom of sign-ups was celebrated by new Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who tweeted on Tuesday, “BREAKING: In December 2024, the @USArmy had its best recruiting number in 12 years. In January 2025, the Army hit its best recruiting number in 15 YEARS. BOTTOM LINE: America’s youth want to serve under the bold & strong ‘America First’ leadership of @realDonaldTrump.”

Since the election, a steady stream of recruits have been pouring into local offices. The Army, which has been hemorrhaging soldiers over the last several years, reported that it was enlisting almost 350 soldiers a day in December. For a Pentagon that missed its goals by 41,000 in 2023, the burst of potential reinforcements was welcome news. “Our Recruiters have one of the toughest jobs — inspiring the next generation of #Soldiers to serve. Congratulations and keep up the great work! #BAYCB,” Army officials wrote on X.

The surge couldn’t come at a better time, as Daniel Driscoll, President Trump’s nominee for Army secretary, made quite clear. “We have the fewest number of active soldiers that we’ve had since World War II, even as conflict is erupting around the world. We need to fix that,” he said at his confirmation hearing earlier this month. And while the Biden administration’s solution was lowering standards and sweetening the pot with benefits and signing bonuses, Driscoll doesn’t think that approach attracts the people America needs. “I actually don’t think the answer is throwing more money at the problem. I think it’s nice to get things like GI Bill benefits. But I didn’t join for that. I enlisted to serve the country.”

That jives with what some of Biden’s critics have been saying for years. To them, it wasn’t just that Americans couldn’t be bought, but that this generation didn’t believe in the only battle the last president insisted on fighting: the culture war. Instead of raising up a warrior class, the previous commander in chief seemed preoccupied with drag shows on military bases, critical race theory, preferred pronouns, underwriting gender transition surgeries, and projecting weakness on the world stage.

“It is no surprise to me that the recruiting figures have taken a turn for the better,” Lt. General (Ret.) William Boykin told The Washington Stand. “I think we will see this trend continue as young men and women step up to be part of our military now that DEI is no longer a part of it, and commanders are not bullying their people to take vaccinations that they don’t want. Now that Donald Trump is the commander in chief, the young men and women around the country see strength and resolve,” he pointed out. “They want to be part of something great, and our military will be great again when Donald Trump leaves office at the end of his term. Our enemies need to know that American military power is on the rise.”

Interestingly enough, this all comes on the heels of the annual Military Family Lifestyle Survey — which painted an unflattering picture of the state of service in the last year of the Biden administration. Conducted from March to May last year, more than 5,000 people chimed in about their experiences — from active-duty, National Guard, Reserve, veterans, and their families.

Among the more interesting findings, 69% agreed that military service has “added value to their family’s life,” but only 32% would recommend military service to a young family member. Equally as disheartening, there’s a national perception that the military is appreciated by the public at large when only 19% of active-duty families believe Americans are truly grateful for their sacrifice.

One area where the military does agree with civilians is that a major conflict is on the horizon. Eighty-three percent of active-duty families think America is on the cusp of global war within the next three to five years, as do 67% of everyday people. Clearly, the authors concluded, more needs to be done to bolster the troops and their families before those crisis times arrive.

Freshman Rep. Pat Harrigan (R-N.C.), a former Green Beret, emphatically agrees. He’s watched with disgust the decisions of the Biden administration — decisions, he says, that prompted him to run for Congress. “I [saw] Afghanistan fall,” he told Family Research Council President Tony Perkins on Thursday’s “Washington Watch.” “And I knew at that point that we had just condemned the next generation of Americans to conflict.”

Widely viewed as one of the most catastrophic decisions of Joe Biden’s term (and there were many), Harrigan believes more than anything that the Afghan withdrawal emboldened our enemies. “We had never been weaker than that one moment in our nation’s history. And so, we need real change in this country,” the veteran insisted. “We need real leadership. Thankfully, we have it. And as you were talking about with the record-breaking January recruitment cycle that the Army had, I think that there is a resounding consensus that that leadership is back. And this is a military that our young men and women want to join again.”

Perkins, who served in the Marine Corps, nodded. “I know there [are] a lot of young men and women who are willing to serve this country, but they don’t want to serve for no reason,” he reiterated. “They want to serve, and they’re willing to make sacrifices if it’s for a purpose. And I think, as you pointed out, what happened in Afghanistan was disastrous. And it just, I think, it turned many, many young men and women away, thinking, ‘What’s the point?’”

And Harrigan was quick to make a spiritual connection to that mentality. “I think a lot of us — and a lot of your viewers — [who] have a biblical worldview would identify with this. I think there [was] a genuine question prior to President Trump getting elected: ‘What are we fighting for? Are we fighting for those time-tested concepts of freedom, democracy, free market economies, and the things that our fathers and forefathers have fought and died for in order to make this country the greatest country on the face of the earth? Or are we fighting for some sort of social agenda that we are actually trying to project across the globe?’”

Frankly, he pointed out, “I think that was a question in many folks’ minds prior to November 5th. And so it’s just great to see that America is back — that strong, principled America that traditionally leads the world is back. And it’s here to stay moving forward.”

AUTHOR

Suzanne Bowdey

Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council,

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Fame Fatale: How the Elite Celeb Culture Doomed Dems

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If there’s anything more gratifying than watching conservatives win, it’s watching celebrities lose. The pampered, out-of-touch A-listers who shilled for Kamala Harris have not coped well since Tuesday’s results (if threats of death-by-Drano are any indication). But in every meltdown, one thing is clear: their despair isn’t just that the vice president failed, but that the country is too stupid to understand that famous people know better. It’s the same campaign of condescension that led to the demise of woke corporations. And with a little luck, celebrity endorsements will meet the same fate.

Of course, as plenty of news outlets are pointing out, using star power in politics isn’t new. More than 100 years ago, “Al Jolson led a march of fellow actors through the streets of Ohio in support of Republican Warren G Harding’s bid,” The Guardian explains. “Endorsements from Babe Ruth, Frank Sinatra and Barbra Streisand have all been coveted by the candidates of their day.” But that was before the vast majority of Hollywood and pro athletes became an arm of the socialist Left and lost all touch with the average American.

“Even though Harris’ slogan was, ‘We are not going back,’ the campaign was firmly in reverse,” the New York Post’s Kirsten Fleming insists, “taking the DeLorean to 2008 … [b]ack when Hollywood A-listers meant something. … Before the Democratic Party completely abandoned the working class. Talked down to them. Told them they were racist or bigoted for not putting their pronouns in their bio.”

They put down their caviar and step off their private jets fully expecting their celebrity cache to supersede a person’s opinions, values, or lived experience. Ricky Gervais mocked this idea over the summer before Harris introduced her cast of star surrogates. “As a celebrity, I know all about stuff like science and politics, so trust me when I tell you who you should vote for,” Gervais mimicked. “If you don’t vote the right way, it’s like a hate crime and that makes me sad and angry, and I’ll leave the country — and you don’t want that!”

A bandwagon of actors and NBA players may have worked in the glamour days of the Obamas, who seemed like celebrities themselves but always managed to resonate with the normal family. The difference now is that the Democratic Party is so far outside the mainstream ideologically (try Jupiter) that the stars who endorse them seem even more unrelatable. Not only are they rich and beautiful with massive platforms and industry accolades, but they’re embracing an agenda of extremism that never made sense to begin with.

Oprah, Christina Aguilera, Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, Harrison Ford, Taylor Swift, Cardi B, LeBron James, Jennifer Aniston, Beyoncé, Anne Hathaway, Sally Field, Bruce Springsteen, Jennifer Lawrence, Julia Roberts, Martha Stewart, Steph Curry, George Clooney, Spike Lee, Ariana Grande, Eminem, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Robert De Niro, and all of Ben Affleck’s former wives and girlfriends have the luxury of caring about the fringe issues because they’re not living on a budget, scared by crime, or losing jobs and housing to migrants. They’re too divorced from reality to understand what America wants or needs. And despite their capacity for great acting, they never bother to put themselves in the role of the average person.

That’s what makes the grassroots popularity of Donald Trump, a billionaire who owns 16 golf courses and lives in gold-gilded homes, such a paradox. But then, the 45th president never implied that Americans couldn’t think for themselves or prioritize what’s important. He didn’t reduce them to their education status, skin color, or reproductive organs. He made it his business to listen to the country — not preach. And unlike the Left’s elites who reek of moral superiority and disdain for hard-working families, he embraced them.

Of course, the former president had his own famous friends. And like the enigma they threw their support behind, these endorsements were different — and quite possibly, more effective. In our vicious media culture, standing with Trump took guts, and Americans know it. Unlike Harris’s backers, who were treated like heroes for accepting a zero-risk offer to step into the political limelight, Trump’s public allies — people like Mel Gibson, Danica Patrick, Brett Favre, Joe Rogan, Buzz Aldrin, Dr. Phil, Roseanne Barr, Paula Deen, Elon Musk, Harrison Butker, Brittany Mahomes, Kelsey Grammar, and Kid Rock — understood that they would not only face extreme ridicule and backlash, but, quite possibly, career consequences. In a battle between the fearless and the smug, it’s not hard to see who would earn more respect.

At the end of the day, the country objects to Hollywood’s moralizing for the same reason they objected to corporate America’s: it’s snobbish and patronizing, yes, but it’s also not their lane. If you throw a football, throw a football. If you sing, sing. But stop telling us that rooting out “white privilege” or banning plastic straws is more important than global stability, decent schools, or feeding our families.

And practically speaking, at least where politicians are concerned, this glitzy echo chamber does nothing to move the needle. Arizona State University professor Margaretha Bentley, whose classes have studied the “social importance” of Taylor Swift says, “In the academic literature, research has shown that, while celebrity endorsements can increase civic engagement and voter registrations, it has not proven to have a direct impact on how people make their voting decisions.”

Or if it does, it moves them in the wrong direction. When the biggest pop star on the planet endorsed the vice president, a poll from YouGov found that “only 8% of voters would be ‘somewhat’ or ‘much more’ likely to vote for Harris — with a surprising 20% saying [Swift’s support] actually made them less likely to vote for her.” In other words, it backfired. Harris was not only worse off for it, but Swift lost a good chunk of her fans’ goodwill.

So will Cardi B, who, like most of these personalities, aren’t exactly graceful losers. “I hate y’all bad,” the rapper complained after Election Day. She responded to someone asking if she’d appear at Trump’s inauguration by saying: “I’m sick of you! Burn your f****** hats, motherf*****. I’m really sad. I swear to God I’m really sad.” Singer Christiana Aguilera ordered fans to “unfollow me if you voted against female rights. … Unfollow me because what you did is unreal. Don’t want followers like this. So yeah. Done. Also after today I will be shutting down this fan account that I have had for so many years because this is sick.”

All of this adds to the country’s growing revulsion for the insulated and detached celeb scene. The reality is, Family Research Council’s Joseph Backholm told The Washington Stand, “It’s normal for people to respect and admire another person, but if we don’t know them personally, our respect for them is generally limited to the thing we know them for. I can respect a musician or an athlete for their elite talents, but I need a lot more information about them before I start taking parenting advice from them,” he said. “The Left seems to assume that because we like someone’s music or movies we’re going to defer to their judgment about what’s good for us. Most people may believe Taylor Swift is better at writing songs than they are, but that doesn’t mean they believe she’s better at deciding what’s best for their family.”

Some on the Left are waking up to this reality for the party in general. Democrat Chris Cuomo outright blamed wokeism for Harris’s loss. “You are forcing new social norms on people in this country. ‘No, I’m not,’ [they insist]. ‘We’re just doing what’s fair. Trans people have rights too.’ Yes, but if it’s communicated as if you must be forced to accept and be indoctrinated with ideas that you do not share — is that fair? ‘That’s not what we were doing.’ That’s how they felt you were treating them about it,” Cuomo argued. “That’s the women in sports thing. It’s not that it happens a lot. … [But] it’s that the fact that it happens at all, to them, is a gross violation of norms and unacceptable. And you find it okay, and they believe that is wokeism run amok.”

What you’re seeing, Rasmussen head pollster Mark Mitchell told FRC President Tony Perkins on “Washington Watch,” is that these people “fleeing the Democrat Party and the Republicans, the Donald Trump movement, are really starting to become the core culture of the counterculture. … The mainstream media has jumped the shark, has lost its credibility, is losing its sway. And look at all the actors and actresses and authority figures that [threw] endorsements to Kamala Harris, and none of them moved the needle because people just don’t care anymore. So I think that trend is going to continue.”

And for Americans sick of being lectured by woke politicians, companies, actresses, and athletes, maybe that’s one of the biggest Election Day victories of all.

AUTHOR

Suzanne Bowdey

Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Montessori and Drag Queen Story Hour

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Globalism is a replacement ideology that seeks to reorder the world into one singular, planetary Unistate, ruled by the globalist elite. The globalist war on nation-states cannot succeed without collapsing the United States of America. The long-term strategic attack plan moves America incrementally from constitutional republic to socialism to globalism to feudalism. The tactical attack plan uses asymmetric psychological and informational warfare to destabilize Americans and drive society out of objective reality into the madness of subjective reality. America’s children are the primary target of the globalist predators.

For readers who may be under the impression that private schools are exempt from the humanitarian hoax of whole child education and its sociopolitical intent, I have included an informative article written by retired Montessori educator Charlotte Cushman, published online in American Thinker[i]and on her website, Authentic Montessori Education,[ii] on January 21, 2023.

Charlotte Cushman taught the Montessori Method for over 40 years, and co-owned and operated two Montessori schools. She is appalled by today’s woke (Marxist) trend in Montessori, and advocates a return to authentic Montessori and its founder’s principles:

Not in the service of any political or social creed should the teacher work, but in the service of the complete human being, able to exercise in freedom, a self-disciplined will and judgement, unperverted by prejudice and undistorted by fear. —Maria Montessori

The Real Purpose of Drag Queen Story Hour

By Charlotte Cushman

Those who have voiced concerns about the dangers that drag events, such as Drag Queen Story Hour (DQSH), pose for children (namely, sexualization and grooming) have been told that those concerns are baseless, that the events are harmless, that it is all just entertainment and fun, and that attending drag events is a way to understand the gay culture.

On January 25, 2021 an academic paper entitled “Drag pedagogy: the playful practice of queer imagination in early childhood” was published online in Curriculum Inquiry, an educational journal. The paper, recently called out by James Lindsay here and here and also by Christopher F. Rufo here, was written by Harper Keenen and Lil Miss Hot Mess (a founder of DQSH), who describe themselves as “a genderqueer drag performer/scholar and a trans scholar.” (p. 443)

Right off the bat, the abstract tells us the purpose of DQSH:

Ultimately, the authors propose that “drag pedagogy” provides a performative approach to queer pedagogy that is not simply about LGBT lives, but living queerly. (p. 440)

Then the authors state,

Through this programme, drag artists…[are] positioning queer and trans cultural forms as valuable components of early childhood education. We are guided by the following question: what might Drag Queen Story Hour offer educators as a way of bringing queer ways of knowing and being into the education of young children?

The purpose of DQSH is not entertainment, nor to understand gay culture. The purpose is to turn children “queer” through an educational process.

What is queer, you might ask? Queer in this context comes from Queer Theory, the idea that asserts that sexual norms are oppressive, that actually anything normal is a problem. Ronald Pisaturo, author of Masculine Power, Feminine Beauty, a book that condemns the LGBT movement, defines a queer as “an activist dedicated to overthrowing capitalism, the system alleged to enforce oppressive sexual norms such as masculinity, femininity, and heterosexuality.”

Turning children into Marxist activists is the goal. Because capitalism has not produced a populace motivated to revolt, Herbert Marcuse, the father of the New Left, advocated creating discontented groups, one of which is sexual “queers.” This goal is supported by LGBT ideology. Pisaturo explains (p. 113) that, according to LGBT theory,

Infants are “polymorphously perverse,” to use Freud’s term. That is, an infant will be sexually excited by anyone and anything anywhere. Freud considered this infantile state an early stage of development. Marcuse and many LGBT activists, in contrast, consider this state the ideal end state for adults. According to Marcuse, people leave this ideal state only because they become repressed, limiting the kinds of sexual responses available to them. The repressed energy of such people becomes channeled into economic production…. That is, productive work is the repressed alternative to blissful, indiscriminate sex. Capitalism, of course the system of greatest economic production, is hence also the system of greatest sexual repression.

Therefore, capitalism must be destroyed.

The “Drag Pedagogy” paper tells us,

It may be that DQSH is “family friendly,” in the sense that it is accessible and inviting to families with children, but it is less a sanitizing force than it is a preparatory introduction to alternate modes of kinship. Here, DQSH is “family friendly” in the sense of “family” as an old-school queer code to identify and connect with other queers on the street. (p. 455)

Pisaturo explains, “The phrase ‘preparatory introduction to alternate modes of kinship’ means sexual and Marxist grooming. The authors want to eradicate the traditional family by grooming children to join the ‘family’ of queers.”

In her 1984 essay, “Thinking Sex,” leading queer theorist Gayle Rubin blamed capitalism for suppressing sexual deviancies and defended child pornography, pedophilia, promiscuity, sadomasochism, and other sexual perversions. One can see these perverse elements when the drag queen struts around like a slut, grooming children by exposing them to explicit sexual acts and/or private body parts. And when the queen invites the child to participate, that is sexual assault of a minor.

Attempting to turn children into queers is bad enough, but there are other alarming elements to DQSH. Drag queens teach the children that reality is fluid:

Drag similarly breaks boundaries between reality and fantasy in allowing performers to take on new identities and social relationships in material form, just by playing the part. (p. 449)

At many DQSH events, children ask genuine questions like “are you a boy or a girl?” … In many cases, drag queens may not respond with answers, but with questions meant to complicate perceptions of gender and society: “Why does it matter if I’m a boy or a girl?” (p. 452)

That response reveals an astonishing ignorance about child development. The answer matters a great deal to the child who is just beginning to learn about reality and form concepts. The first judgment anyone perceives about another person is whether the person is a girl or a boy. Man or woman? To destroy that demarcation and bring in the arbitrary to a child, that a man can be a woman, is to undermine the important, fundamental concept of reality, that reality is stable and cannot be wished away. Serious cognitive damage is done by blurring the child’s grasp of reality. For the child, an unstable reality confuses him, frightens him, and sabotages his ability to navigate the world.

Children are also taught to be defiant—not for a valid reason, but for the sake of defiance:

While drag has some conventions, it ultimately has no rules—its defining quality is often to break as many rules as possible! (p. 448)

An implicit objective of DQSH is acknowledged:

There is a premium on standing out, on artfully desecrating the sacred. (p. 451)

They do not want to broaden or enrich the sacred (sexuality) through some kind of deeper understanding. They want to desecrate, to vandalize, to destroy.

And this is disturbing:

She is less interested in focus, discipline, achievement, or objectives than playful self-expression. Her pedagogy is rooted in pleasure and creativity borne, in part, from letting go of control. (p. 451)

The authors are not teaching children how to use their minds. Instead, they are teaching children to be abnormal, to be queer, to be pawns in the movement to tear down the normal.

Do people really think it is harmless to bring children to see sexuality portrayed not as a sacred expression of love for one special individual, but as frivolous “desecrating” for the benefit of any and all strangers? To see sexuality divorced from thought and romance? To see sexuality portrayed as ugly caricature? To see sexuality, which is intensely personal, selective, and meaningful, made voyeuristic, indiscriminate, and meaningless?

The young child learns from observation; he learns from absorbing his environment. Everything that he sees and experiences makes an impression upon his mind before he has the ability to evaluate it. The “desecrating” of sexuality will make a child’s mind abnormal regarding sex and all cognition, and that is exactly the goal of the drag queens. The concerns about DQSH aren’t baseless, and DQSH isn’t harmless. It is precisely child abuse.

If the purpose of DQSH is to turn children “queer” through an educational process, the next questions to ask are: What is the social purpose of turning children queer and destroying their innocence? Why would governments participate in this process of destruction?

The catastrophic psychological damage done to children by destroying childhood innocence is a political goal, and normalizing sexual perversion exploits the perversion for political gain. Woke “culture warriors” are validating their own sexual perversions, and the enemies of freedom are using them as useful idiots to help collapse society from within.

Canadian cultural anthropologist Geoffrey Clarfield offers an interesting perspective on the impact of self-interest in changing social norms. His fascinating article “Nurture not Nature,”[iii] published June 19, 2023, in the National Association of Scholars publication Minding the Campus, presents a compelling argument that the findings of early American cultural anthropologists were self-serving. The article is subtitled “Wokeism and the Anthropological Origins of Gender Bending.”

American cultural anthropology has a lot to answer for.

Its icons—people like Franz Boas, Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Edward Sapir—were the indispensable precursors of the woke ideology now so deeply entrenched in our schools and universities, courts, politics, and business.

This is not to say that cultural anthropology is the sole source of wokeism, but that its contribution was seminal. Its mid-twentieth-century practitioners took what began as a simple field method, cultural relativism, and by insensible degrees transformed it into a philosophical movement. What started out as the common-sense proposition that you could only understand a culture from the inside was soon transformed into the rather different notion that every culture was just as good as every other culture, and that there was no ground on which to prefer one over the other….

But what if these early practitioners of cultural anthropology, driven by a desire to “normalize” their own behavior at home, committed the cardinal scientific sin of reading into cultures what they needed to find there, rather than describing those cultures as they found them? If so, subsequent anthropological investigations of those same cultures would not reproduce the pioneers’ original findings, and cultural anthropology’s contribution to the intellectual foundations of wokeism would be revealed as a sham and a travesty. This article presents the prosecution’s case against cultural anthropology’s American founders….

Mead and her colleagues succeeded in challenging the darker side of Western civilization (eugenics), but they threw out the baby with the bathwater. Alongside cultural anthropologists, radical feminists, Marxists, and haters of the West have given us a generation of Tenured Radicals, mostly baby boomers, who have indoctrinated Generation Z. They have created a generation that now sees Western civilization as the problem, not the solution, to the question of how one should live life….

When the president of the United States [Joe Biden] endorses the transhumanist agenda and encourages children to change their sex surgically without their parents’ permission, one may start to long for the good ol’ days of patriarchy. Margaret Mead and her followers clearly have won the culture war.

Early American cultural anthropology’s great legacy is the widespread adoption of the idea that nurture trumps nature. According to most of today’s mainstream cultural anthropologists, the very concept of an objective nature outside humanity’s control is just a propaganda tool of a power structure imposed by morally corrupt oppressors. If you publicly oppose that worldview, expect to be persecuted and prosecuted.

Geoffrey Clarfield’s article exposes the very personal underbelly of today’s woke ideology and its academic origins in the homosexuality of the American cultural anthropology icons whose self-serving findings provided its foundation. The real purpose of Drag Queen Story Hour is societal destruction––to build back better.

©2024. Linda Goudsmit. All right

Please visit Linda’s Pundicity page: goudsmit.pundicity.com  and here website: lindagoudsmit.com

[i] American Thinker; https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/01/the_real_purpose_of_drag_queen_story_hour.html

[ii] Authentic Montessori Education; https://www.authenticmontessorieducation.com/

[iii] Nurture not Nature; https://www.mindingthecampus.org/2023/06/19/nurture-not-nature/