According to a number of reports, President-elect Donald Trump will be creating a commission to review leaders in the military with the assumption that many of the top brass will be fired.

Trump will be using a “warrior board” of retired officers, The Hill reported, to review our current crop of three- and four-star officers and will weed out the ones the commission disapproves of.

That’s not all.

Trump’s pick for secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth—an Army veteran who has been awarded two Bronze Stars, and who served in Iraq and Afghanistan—said in past interviews that it’s necessary to remove “woke” senior military officials who have left the U.S. armed forces in a sorry state.

“First of all, you’ve got to fire [the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff] and obviously you’ve got to bring in a new secretary of defense, but any general that was involved—general, admiral, whatever—that was involved in any of the DEI woke s—, has got to go,” Hegseth said in an early November interview on “The Shawn Ryan Show” podcast. DEI is shorthand for diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Pete Hegseth is ready for day one as Defense Secretary.

'All the woke Generals must be fired immediately.'pic.twitter.com/ai9cqoImj4

— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) November 13, 2024

Trump and Hegseth—the author of “The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free” and “Modern Warriors: Real Stories from Real Heroes”—clearly intend to shake up the military at the top.

The Left, however, isn’t taking it well.

Legacy media is reporting on that development as if it’s some kind of ominous sign that Trump will “politicize” the military. They are even calling it a “purge.”

One left-wing podcaster, Fred Wellman, who includes “democracy advocate” in his X bio, even posted that removing generals is “truly fascist.”

This is truly fascist. The idea is they'll review and fire generals is chilling beyond measure and will damage our military for a generation. You don't make generals overnight. It takes decades. The good ones will leave early instead of waiting to be destroyed. (gift)…

— Fred Wellman (@FPWellman) November 12, 2024

Ah, yes, civilian control of the military, so fascist.

For a quick history lesson, a president’s removal of generals and other high-ranking military leaders—especially after years of relative “peace”—has often been a significant boon, not a hindrance, to the military.

Peacetime militaries—and I only use that phrase loosely to refer to our own era of near-constant, low-level asymmetrical conflicts—frequently calcify. Leaders who successfully navigate the bureaucratic treadmill to make it to the top ranks in those times are frequently not the best wartime leaders.

Militaries need to be shaken up from time to time.

In the War of 1812, many American military officers were holdovers from the American Revolution. Many had grown old and ineffective. The crucible of war allowed junior commanders like Winfield Scott to emerge as a brilliant young general who would prove instrumental in that war and future conflicts.

In the Civil War, there was a tremendous shake-up of the senior ranks on both sides.

Marginal officers like Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, who was almost entirely overlooked at the Virginia Military Institute, proved himself to be one of the most astoundingly gifted military commanders once he had a chance to prove himself in battle.

Abraham Lincoln suffered through far too many mediocrities at the top before finding war winners like Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman. Almost none of the top commanders at the beginning of the war ended up in the same place by the war’s end.

Right now, the United States clearly needs a shake-up at the Pentagon in the worst way.

The world is in turmoil, thanks in no small part to the Biden administration, and we are closer to seeing an actual peer-to-peer conflict than perhaps at any point since World War II.

Yet, many on the Left are hyperventilating about the move. Why? It’s a pretty good sign that they know they’ve made serious inroads into military institutions that are historically traditional and conservative. They don’t want to lose their grip on the military, just as they fear losing control of any other institution they dominate.

The primary issue, beyond typical military calcification, is that our current military leadership appears to be filled with those who have floated to the top amid the general woke-ification of American society and government.

It’s not Trump who will be “politicizing” the military; it’s the military itself that has been politicized. DEI, critical race theory, and other radical ideologies have been force-fed into military institutions, and the Biden administration was only too happy to accelerate that transformation.

They justified DEI by saying that it would create a better, more cohesive military and deepen the pool of recruits. That was the same unproven, bogus argument corporate America made when it went whole hog on “diversity” to the point of climbing aboard the discrimination bandwagon.

But much like the corporate DEI push—which proved a financial liability, rather than a boon—the military DEI advocacy has failed to “succeed” by even the most basic measures.

Nearly every branch of the military now faces a historic recruitment crisis, not to mention a surge in worrisome incidents that suggest a decline in competence and warfighting capability.

To make matters worse—and this is why Trump’s shake-up is almost certainly necessary—the military has failed to hold anyone at the top accountable for notable failures on the international stage.

Those failures have significantly weakened this country’s prestige and credibility abroad.

Most notably was the shambolic withdrawal from Afghanistan. After that failure, nobody at the top got fired. The Biden administration and the military moved on, as if nothing had happened.

If we can’t handle our business against the Taliban, isn’t it worth questioning our ability to counter far greater potential adversaries, such as China?

To underscore the notion that the military has lost all accountability at the top, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin disappeared for nearly a week early this year to take care of a health issue before notifying the president.

If these are the sorts of “invaluable” leaders we may lose if Trump gets his way, it’s hard not to see the president-to-be’s “warrior board” as a net positive. This country should expect a lot better of its military.

This seems like an important moment for a “democratic” correction to a military that has seen a sharp decline in public trust.

Under Biden, the buck stopped nowhere. With Trump, maybe more capable leaders will have a chance to rise to the top and get our military back to focusing on preparedness and defending the American people.

A recent survey by Scott Rasmussen called “Elite 1%,” which was a project of the polling firm Napolitan Institute, reveals that there’s a stark divide between the viewpoints of ruling elites and the rest of the American people on a wide range of questions.

The report, released Friday, not only found wide differences in opinion between the American people and the elites, it also concluded that the gap in ideology and power between the groups may be leading to America’s fraught political situation.

The research categorized Americans into several groups, but focused on the gap between a small subset of elites and the rest of the country, which it defined as “Main Street Americans” who represent “70-75% of the U.S. population” and have none of the attributes of those categorized into the “elite” groups.

“They do NOT have postgraduate degrees, do NOT live in densely populated urban areas, and earn LESS than $150,000 annually” is how the survey defined so-called Main Street Americans.

The findings on the differences between the elites and the rest of America clearly represent an unmistakable political split between institutional insiders versus outsiders.

According to the report, “members of the Elite 1% have very favorable opinions of university professors, lawyers, union leaders, journalists, and members of Congress.”

While the elites leaned strongly toward the Democratic Party, those who were Republicans tended to be much more similar to their partisan counterparts rather than to Main Street Americans.

The elite insiders are typically more socially liberal, less likely to trust citizens to govern themselves, and—perhaps unsurprisingly—tend to be far more trusting in institutions to make the right decisions for the country (without much or any input from people outside their class).

They are also far more comfortable with censorship and regulating the lives of ordinary people.

On social issues, the poll found that there’s an enormous gap between most Americans and the elite on the issue of transgenderism and whether biological males should be allowed to participate in female sports.

“If a biological male identifies as a woman, just 17% of Main Street voters believe that person should be allowed to compete in women’s sports,” the research found. “Among the Elite 1%, 29% believe such athletes should be allowed to compete in women’s sports.”

It’s not just women’s sports on which there’s such a wide gap in opinion on the transgender issue.

“Only 9% of voters favor a regulation being developed by the Biden administration that would make misgendering a co-worker a fireable offense,” the study found. “Seventy-five percent (75%) of voters are opposed.”

The elites are also far more likely to announce their pronouns when introducing themselves.

“Only 10% of voters have introduced themselves by expressing their preferred pronouns,” the polling found. “Among the Elite 1%, more than 4 out of 10 have done so. Among the Politically Active Elites, 61% have introduced themselves by expressing their preferred pronouns.”

The elites are suspicious of the Second Amendment and even the First Amendment. Those amendments to the Bill of Rights protect the right to bear arms and the freedom of speech and assembly, respectively.

The polling divide between elites and average Americans on speech is stark:

Voters, by a 59% to 34% margin, believe that letting the government decide what counts as misinformation is more dangerous than the disinformation itself. Among the Elite 1%, the numbers are reversed: by a 57% to 39% margin, they see letting the government decide as the lesser problem.

The elites don’t just want to censor speech, they want to disarm Americans, according to the polling data.

“Seventy-two percent (72%) of the Elite 1% would prefer to live in communities where guns are outlawed,” the report found. “Most voters (51%) take the opposite view and would prefer to live in communities where guns are allowed.”

The research found that 77% of the elites polled want to ban the private ownership of firearms.

On the concept of self-government, elites were far more likely to not only make arbitrary decisions for society, but also to be OK with rigging the system to ensure they stay in power.

“If their campaign team thought they could get away with cheating to win, 7% of voters would want their team to cheat,” the polling found. “Among the Elite 1%, the support for cheating rose to 35%. And, among the Politically Active Elites, 69% would want their team to cheat, rather than accept voters’ decisions.”

Perhaps most surprisingly, the polls found that most elites had no idea that their ideas were so different from those of the mainstream.

The report found that “two-thirds (65%) of the Elite 1%—and 82% of Politically Active Elites—think most voters agree with them on important issues. As has been documented throughout this report, that is far from an accurate assessment.”

The creators of the project noted that while there is nothing wrong with there being large gaps in opinions on serious questions in a society, the Elite 1% “hold tremendous institutional and media power that amplifies their voices at the expense of the American people.”

This power is enhanced, they wrote, by the alliance between the elites “and the unelected managers of the federal government.”

They concluded that the views and overwhelming influence of out-of-touch elites “may be the root cause of the political toxicity in our nation today” and that their “underlying attitudes reflect an implicit rejection of the founding ideal that governments derive their only just authority from the consent of the governed.”

Frankly, it was an embarrassment for American corporate media and gives the lie to the idea that the Harris campaign is all about defending “democracy.”

The interview was exactly what one would expect if you’d followed the Harris campaign at all. It was a series of mostly softball questions, delivered in the friendliest of confines on left-wing MSNBC, conducted by an admiring and sycophantic host, Stephanie Ruhle.

That setup was practically telegraphed ahead of time.

Five days before the interview, Ruhle went on HBO’s “Real Time With Bill Maher” and claimed that Harris didn’t have to answer any substantive questions from the media.

“Kamala Harris isn’t running for perfect,” Ruhle heatedly told the New York Times’ Bret Stephens, another guest on the program. “She’s running against [former President Donald Trump]. We have two choices. And so there are some things you might not know her answer to. And in 2024, unlike 2016, for a lot of the American people, we know exactly what Trump will do, who he is, and the kind of threat he is to democracy.”

Ruhle said it was utopian—“nirvana”—to think we the people might get substantive answers from Harris on how she’d govern if elected president.

Really, what a crazy idea that some of us may have that we should live in a free society, where leaders are expected to account for themselves, and the people are the boss.

Basically, Harris isn’t Trump, so anything at all is good enough, right?

How interesting it is that after those comments, the Harris campaign almost immediately announced that they would allow Queen Kamala to come down from on high and grant Ruhle a humble request for an audience.

It was a “coincidence” that didn’t go unnoticed by commentators on X.

hahahaha

Stephanie Ruhle slobbered over Kamala a few days ago, saying she doesn’t have to do interviews because democracy is at stake, and the Harris campaign immediately called her up and says, “You’re our kind of interviewer.”

Incredible. https://t.co/ziPPQEtYzo

— Bonchie (@bonchieredstate) September 25, 2024

Stephanie Ruhle goes on Bill Mahar and lick spittles Kamala Harris saying it doesn't matter that she doesn't answer questions or what she believes. Peter Baker calls her "the great" for landing a pretaped interview because of it. https://t.co/LCqF3ioY1w

— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) September 25, 2024

It is really bad form for MSNBC to have someone argue that Kamala Harris doesn't need to take questions at all and then have that same person conducting the interview with her. Like if they care about journalistic ethics at all, they should assign a different interviewer. https://t.co/YdPcJXOuvK

— Zaid Jilani (@ZaidJilani) September 25, 2024

As for the interview, Harris was asked a few gentle questions about her proposed policies, to which she responded with mostly shallow, bumbling non-answers.

Unsurprisingly, Harris has few ideas about how to cover the $1.7 trillion in spending she’s proposed other than to raise corporate taxes on “billionaires.” Harris additionally had no answer for how she would get this corporate tax hike through with the Republican Party controlling the Senate, if they win back control in November.

So, we just have to assume more borrowing and more inflation. Great stuff.

Here is Harris addressing increasing housing and other costs in society, but her grand idea is just to say, over and over, that our problems must be addressed “holistically.”

NEW: Vice President Kamala Harris says "holistic" three times in a 15-second period.

The VP proudly showed off the word during an interview with MSNBC host Stephanie Ruhle.

"Looking holistically at the connection between that and housing and looking holistically at the… pic.twitter.com/Z9DMdR97Qj

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) September 25, 2024

Using “holistically” in this way is akin to using other meaningless corporate-speak buzzwords like “creating synergy” that are intended to sound profound, but mean nothing. I suppose it’s slightly better than saying that the plan for lowering costs is lowering costs.

NEW: Kamala Harris is asked about her plan to lower the cost of living, says she will do that by lowering the cost of necessities.

Remarkable.

Question: What will you do to lower costs?

Answer: Yeah. I first of all, thank you both for being here and yours is a, a story I hear… pic.twitter.com/UQUNCnvesO

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) September 20, 2024

There was hardly any real substance to the interview at all. Aside from a handful of policy questions, Ruhle and Harris joshed about accusations that Harris never worked at a McDonald’s in her youth as she claimed.

Harris said she made fries, not burgers. But besides laughing and taking potshots at Trump, she didn’t really get into specifics or dispel the notion that the story about her working at a fast-food chain might be made up.

There’s really nothing more to say about these tepid, jovial back-and-forths, but it is notable how similar this was to Harris’ previous CNN interview with host Dana Bash. A handful of “tough” questions received only the lightest of follow-up questions and a large portion of the interview was fluff, wasting the time of viewers.

That would be fine if Harris was generally out on the campaign trail talking to the press and conducting interview after interview like a typical presidential candidate in the age of “democracy.”

It’s wholly unacceptable when one considers that the vice president was dropped into this race in a last-second swap, in which she never even answered to Democratic primary voters. We really are supposed to just accept that the reason to vote for Harris is that she’s not Trump, just as Ruhle said.

When the MSNBC host was later asked about Harris’ vague policy answers, particularly on why the Biden administration ended up keeping many of Trump’s tariffs in place, Ruhle made the excuse that the issue is “complicated.”

It’s totally fine that Harris didn’t give clear and direct answers, because “we are not talking about clear or direct issues,” she said.

Ah, yes, as Sun Tzu doubtlessly once said, the ways of the great leader must be mysterious and opaque to those who must follow.

Since when are members of the press expected to run PR for the politicians they interview?

What we should take from this MSNBC interview is that America’s media don’t want to ask her tough questions in an election. They want to conduct and plan her coronation. They are hardly even interested in getting answers about the way she will promote left-wing policies.

Just being in power is apparently good enough.

In some sense, Harris’ gilded tower campaign is even more disturbing than the Biden basement campaign. Any pretense of illuminating the policy positions of the candidates before the people is gone.

Hard questions won’t be asked. “Joy” and “vibes” will suffice.

The hearing stemmed from a debate sparked by an online essay a month ago in The Free Press by longtime NPR editor Uri Berliner, who alleged that the network was both extremely biased and had abandoned its commitment to quality journalism.

Berliner, who considers himself a liberal, wrote in his essay that NPR had become deeply biased and that its news coverage had alienated all but a narrow, left-wing audience. He said the network needed to change or it would erode not only its own credibility, but the credibility of media in general.

Berliner resigned about a week after the controversy erupted.

NPR’s CEO, Katherine Maher, was asked to appear before the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce on Wednesday. However, the day before, she said she couldn’t make it because she didn’t have enough time to prepare. Maher also said that she had an NPR board meeting to attend.

“NPR respects the Committee and its request, and has offered to testify on a date in the near future that works for the Committee and Maher,” an NPR spokesperson said, according to Fox News.

A spokesperson for the committee responded to Maher’s absence.

“It speaks volumes that Ms. Maher has chosen not to appear [Wednesday] to answer for how her taxpayer-funded news outlet discriminates against the viewpoints of millions of Americans,” the committee spokesperson said, according to Fox News.

Rep. Morgan Griffith, R-Va., who was to chair the hearing, said in his opening statement that the committee was investigating whether allegations of ideological bias and censorship of conservative and moderate voices were true.

Griffith said that the subcommittee had invited Maher and that he hoped she would appear before the committee in the near future.

“The only reason not to appear in front of this committee at some point in the near future is if the allegations are both true and NPR doesn’t care,” the Virginia lawmaker said.

Democrats on the committee were dismissive of the hearing, and said that allegations of NPR’s bias are baseless.

Rep. Kathy Castor, D-Fla., said that NPR isn’t biased at all, that its reporting is valuable and objective, and that Republicans listen to too much conservative media.

“Despite the clear benefits of public radio, Republicans have brought us here to discuss an alleged bias at NPR,” she said. “Republicans say that NPR is biased against conservatives, but what they point to are examples of objective journalism. Disagreeing with reporting does not mean that the information is biased.”

Democrat Rep. Kathy Castor seriously believes NPR is unbiased journalism.

"Republicans say NPR is biased against conservatives, but what they point to are examples of objective journalism." pic.twitter.com/ENUsE6UjIf

— Media Research Center (@theMRC) May 8, 2024

The Florida Democrat suggested that the committee should instead focus on covering the gun deaths of children, preparing for the next pandemic, what she said were the successes of the Biden administration-backed Inflation Reduction Act, or climate change.

“Members may want to step out of the right-wing echo chambers, which have routinely peddled lies and conspiracy theories,” Castor said.

Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash., said that it was crucial to conduct oversight of NPR, which receives taxpayer dollars, and that there is no free-speech right to get taxpayers’ money to fund a media organization.

“It is a fundamental principle under the First Amendment for news agencies to report on stories however they see fit,” she said. “It is not, however, a fundamental principle for news organizations to receive public funding to express their viewpoint.”

McMorris Rodgers said that the hearing was to be about discussing accusations from within NPR that the news network is “actively censoring viewpoints” while taking taxpayer money.

“Note for the record that we invited NPR CEO Ms. Maher to participate in today’s hearing,” McMorris Rodgers said. “She declined to do so, stating that she needed more time to prepare and that she had a conflict with an NPR board meeting.”

The Washington congresswoman said that it was “especially troubling” that an organization funded with taxpayer money has “mocked, ridiculed, and attacked the people who fund their organization.”

McMorris Rodgers pointed to the Berliner essay and said that it was telling that NPR declined to report stories that could help President Donald Trump in the 2020 election, no matter “how true and important to the public conversation they were.”

She cited how Berliner wrote that an editor at NPR thought the news network shouldn’t report on the Hunter Biden laptop story in the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election because it could help Trump.

It was also revealing, she said, that Berliner said he found 87 editors registered as Democrats, but no Republicans.

“Today’s NPR has strayed from their core mission,” McMorris Rodgers said. “When an entity that was created by Congress and receives taxpayer funding strays from their core mission, there needs to be accountability and oversight.”

Rep. Frank Pallone, D-N.J., said that the hearing was a waste of time. He said that it was unfair for Republicans on the committee to call in the NPR CEO to testify, given that she only had a week to prepare and that she had a board meeting scheduled at the same time.

The New Jersey Democrat also said that, given that Maher had only been the CEO for six weeks, she shouldn’t have to answer for a “former, disgruntled employee,” referring to Berliner.

Pallone said that NPR plays a “vital role in democracy” in providing information. He said that public funding for the network goes to support mostly local programming that provides the last line of defense in “news deserts.”

He said that instead of investigating the publicly funded NPR, Congress should investigate “the vast landscape of right-wing media” that he said promotes “misinformation.”

Pallone said that investigating NPR hearkens back to the days of “McCarthyism.”

Howard Husock, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who had served on the board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, testified that he wanted to remind the committee of where public broadcasting began.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting is the organization that oversees NPR.

It began with the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, he said, and of particular relevance is the mandate from Congress that “public broadcasting from radio and television should, it says, be ‘responsive to the interests of people both in particular localities and throughout the United States.’”

Husock said that that’s where he has concerns about NPR. He pointed to a poll by the Pew Research Center that found “87% of NPR listeners describe themselves as Democrats, 12% as Republicans.”

He said that contrasts sharply with commercial television newscasts, “which are close to 50/50.”

The AEI fellow said that NPR doesn’t act like a “national taxpayer-supported service.”

NPR’s audience is not the product of limited reach, he said, “instead, it produces a product which seems not to attract a broad swath of America.”

That’s largely because of the selection of stories NPR reports. He suggested that changing the outdated Public Broadcasting Act would help alleviate the crisis of the decline of local newspapers.

Husock said that direct funding does not account for most of the taxpayer dollars NPR receives. Instead, “31% of revenues” come from fees charged to local affiliates. That means, he said, that federal money sent through grants to local NPR affiliates is recycled back to the national network.

Media Research Center Executive Editor Tim Graham said in his testimony that bias at NPR isn’t a recent phenomenon and that reporters at the network have intentionally tried, for instance, to derail Republican presidents’ Supreme Court nominees going back decades and that they continued that with the 2018 nomination of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

“In March, between ‘Morning Edition’ and ‘Fresh Air,’ Kavanaugh accuser Christine Blasey Ford was granted an hour of taxpayer-funded airtime to reiterate her unproven charges of teenage sexual assault,” Graham said.

Yet, the network has failed to cover stories that might damage Democrats. He cited the case of Hunter Biden’s laptop, the salacious contents of which were dismissed by many “so-called mainstream media” outlets as “Russian disinformation.”

Graham said that many media outlets were biased when it came to covering that story, but “NPR stood out.” NPR’s public editor dismissed the story as a “politically driven event,” even though the network gave extensive coverage to Blasey Ford’s unproven allegations.

The MRC editor pointed to other examples of what he called bias at the network.

“NPR covered the [former House Speaker Nancy] Pelosi-picked House Jan. 6 Committee live for every minute, and then it couldn’t do a two-minute story on the Biden impeachment inquiry,” he said.

NPR has also “encouraged chaos and disorder in society,” Graham said:

In 2020, NPR’s blog ‘Code Switch,’ with the slogan ‘Race in Your Face,’ posted an interview promoting a new book titled ‘In Defense of Looting.’ On ‘The NPR Politics Podcast’ in 2021, they promoted a book by Yale law professor Elizabeth Hinton saying that protests against policy shouldn’t be called riots; they should be called ‘rebellions.’

On NPR’s ‘Fresh Air’ on April 15, 2023, the movie critic John Powers praised the movie ‘How to Blow Up a Pipeline,’ hailing it as ‘hugely timely.’ You know, this is what NPR is doing.

That’s what NPR is doing with taxpayer dollars, Graham said, “getting behind looting, rioting, and blowing up pipelines. And yet, NPR represents the Republicans as uniquely extreme.”

Boudin’s surprising comment came as part of a larger debate between the Left and Right on criminal justice issues at the March 8 gathering, called “Justice Unveiled: Debating Crime and Public Safety Conference.”

The ousted San Francisco prosecutor led a discussion with California district attorneys that also included Cully Stimson, a Heritage Foundation senior legal fellow who is a crime expert and former prosecutor. (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s news and commentary outlet.)

Stimson, coauthor of the book “Rogue Prosecutors: How Radical Soros Lawyers Are Destroying America’s Communities,” pressed the district attorneys about the so-called progressive prosecutor movement.

Stimson includes Boudin, now executive director of the Criminal Law & Justice Center at Berkeley School of Law, as a member of that movement. Crime increased dramatically during the progressive Democrat’s two years in office, and it continues to be a major problem for San Francisco.

“There’s nothing progressive about the progressive prosecutor movement, at least as you define the word ‘progressive,’” Stimson said.

The Heritage scholar said the movement is dangerous because it does nothing to cultivate public safety or protect victims, but instead focuses entirely on criminal defendants.

Violent crime rates fell in the 1990s for two reasons, Stimson said. The first reason is that states passed laws to keep repeat and violent offenders in prison longer. The second reason is the creation of various courts and alternatives to prison programs.

“Longer [prison] sentences lower recidivism rates,” Stimson said, adding later: “The U.S. Sentencing Commission has seven separate studies that show just that.”

Unfortunately, Stimson said, the progressive prosecutor movement, inspired by those who would abolish prisons, has worked ingeniously to put ideological sympathizers in district attorney’s offices around the country.

Their election gives each prosecutor the ability to reduce the number of prosecutions and the length of sentences, he said.

Stimson then posed a question to the district attorneys about their philosophy.

“An offender-oriented approach to prosecution rests on the unstated and therefore unsubstantiated assumption that the perpetrators of crime stand on the same moral plane as their victims,” he said.

Protecting the vast majority of residents of a community who don’t commit crimes from those who do is a cornerstone of the social contract, Stimson explained.

“How do you, in your role as the [district attorney], uphold your end of the social contract?” he asked.

In his answer, Boudin said that putting more people in prison “of course” reduces the number of crimes. Putting everyone in prison would end crime, he added.

The former San Francisco district attorney then said that those people who have spent the most time in prison are the least likely to recidivate and that we keep convicted criminals locked up for far too long in America.

“That’s a decision we make that separates us from every other civilized country in the world,” Boudin said. “It’s a policy choice, and it really doesn’t have to do with safety so much as a desire for vengeance and retribution, with the history of racism in this country.”

He said the progressive prosecutor movement isn’t about putting defendants over victims.

The Constitution created rights for criminal defendants, Boudin said, but it “does not create rights for victims of crime.”

He then pointed to various services that some states have created for crime victims, such as providing access to therapy and paying for medical expenses.

“Suggesting that because progressive prosecutors seek to comply with constitutional rights, seek to avoid having cases dismissed because of discovery violations, because of racial bias, is somehow tantamount to disregarding victims’ rights is simply not true,” Boudin said.

He then said that prosecutors are not asked to represent victims of crime, but “all of the people of our jurisdictions,” and that focusing on victims disregards the Constitution.

While the national focus of rising crime has been on progressive prosecutors, Boudin said, the “highest murder rates” are in red states and counties. What’s happening in large parts of the country, he added, is the prosecution of poverty.

Stimson disputed Boudin’s claim that red states are driving crime. He mentioned his related research indicating that Democrat-run cities for the most part are producing the crime numbers in red states and counties.

Boudin countered that most cities in America are run by Democrats, so that’s why most high-crime cities are blue. Stimson replied that, according to the U.S. Sentencing Commission, most crime is concentrated in the “inner city” and has been for a long time.

Contra Costa County District Attorney Diana Becton, a Democrat, later weighed in. Becton said she doesn’t focus on politics, but believes that safety is a human right “and everyone deserves that.”

Although she respects Boudin’s viewpoint, Becton said,  she wanted to point out that he “never dealt as a prosecutor for the victims of crime, never looked at the 5-year-old that was shot and had the job of bringing that victim justice.”

“He cares about a lot of things,” Becton said. “But the lens that’s missing is the victim’s lens; it’s completely missing.”

If you go to a doctor for a heart problem, the Contra Costa County district attorney added, you want the doctor to understand hearts. It’s a problem, she said, when those who occupy positions of power, such as district attorneys, “never had the passion to protect somebody who has been victimized.”

Becton wondered aloud how someone who says the Constitution doesn’t recognize crime victims could become a DA.

Justice is not a “theory” or an experiment, she said, it’s about people’s lives.

Boudin answered that he did care about victims and expanded resources to care for them, including court interpreters. He also said, raising his voice, that conservative prosecutors treat victims only as “pieces of evidence” just to send more criminals to prison.

Crime victims don’t just want money as government services, Becton said, they want “justice” and “they want to know there is justice.”

It’s the duty of the district attorney to give them that, she said.

A total of 14,509 illegal aliens were encountered at the southern border Monday by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the Washington Examiner reported, a record for total daily encounters.

This number surpasses a record that was set just last week at a border that has become pure chaos in recent weeks.

“Migrant encounters at the border just hit the highest single day total ever recorded, & CBP has closed down multiple international railway crossings to redeploy personnel for migrant processing, leading to major disruptions in international commerce,” Fox News border reporter Bill Melugin wrote Tuesday in a post on X.

Here’s what it looks like.

BREAKING: Video from a contact on the ground in Eagle Pass, TX right now shows a mass of thousands of migrants waiting to be processed by Border Patrol after they crossed illegally today. I’ve spent hundreds of days there over the last 2+ years and I’ve never seen it like this. pic.twitter.com/JPNYY7sPxI

— Bill Melugin (@BillMelugin_) December 19, 2023

Many Border Patrol agents reportedly are calling it the “worst day they’ve ever seen.”

The pictures and videos are certainly shocking.

The current scene on the Eagle Pass border. I’ve never seen it like this @NewsNation pic.twitter.com/XPU1vpClYj

— Jorge Ventura Media (@VenturaReport) December 19, 2023

The only response from the Biden administration has been to say that the criticism just isn’t fair.

In response to questions Tuesday about the border, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said that she and the president “take offense” to the idea that they aren’t serious about border enforcement.

Karine Jean-Pierre says she is offended when people say Biden isn't taking the border seriously — even as record numbers of illegal immigrants pour across the southern border pic.twitter.com/PNqpTPlfxA

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) December 19, 2023

It’s the American people who should take offense. The White House should feel nothing but shame over its obvious unwillingness to do what must be done to enforce immigration laws and secure the border. At this point, it seems intentional.

For years, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has been saying that the border is “secure,” despite record after record numbers of illegal aliens or illegal crossings being broken and broken again.

We are apparently supposed to just take the Biden administration’s word for it and shut up.

The record set Monday is just the latest reminder of the administration’s complete abandonment of duty.

From the moment Biden arrived in office in January 2021, this has been an unacceptable problem. Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris said they would fix border security by fixing the root cause of illegal immigration, which they insist stems from economic problems in Central and South America.

How is that working out?

Biden, Harris, and Mayorkas haven’t solved anything, and the problem is getting worse here at home. The only thing they seem eager to do is squabble with Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, about his attempts to seal the border while attacking the previous administration.

On the campaign trail, Biden routinely slammed then-President Donald Trump for his immigration policies, which led to record lows of illegal border crossings. Biden is still doing so, despite the obvious signs that his administration’s policies have failed the American people.

The failure is so acute that some Democrat governors and mayors increasingly grouse about the mess they‘re being left with.

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson laughably blamed the Texas governor for the number of illegal immigrants showing up in his city.

The Democrat mayor of Chicago ran on a platform promising he'd make the city a home for the illegal criminals streaming across our border.

Brandon Johnson suddenly sounds different now that his city is going bankrupt and he's losing black voters. pic.twitter.com/jLOV6VWtLv

— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) December 19, 2023

“The issue is not just how we respond in the city of Chicago, it’s the fact that we have a governor … that is placing families on buses … and then they come to the city of Chicago, where we have homelessness, we have mental health things that have been shut down, you have people seeking employment,” Johnson said.

What Johnson is saying is that blue state policies should be exclusively red state problems.

New York Mayor Eric Adams, another Democrat, at least acknowledged where this problem is coming from, even if he just wants voters to get off his back. He said at a briefing for reporters that New Yorkers need to go to “our center of government and raise our voices.”

Adams said that the problem with the crisis of illegal immigration that’s hitting the streets of his city doesn’t stem from New York but from “Washington, D.C.”

City Hall NYC
During a briefing, the NYC Mayor Eric Adams calls on New Yorkers to raise their voices at Washington DC to tell DC to help out with the migrant crisis. The mayor also states that people came up to him telling him they didn't know he couldn't stop migrants from… pic.twitter.com/AcuXS5RKAl

— Viral News NYC (@ViralNewsNYC) December 19, 2023

The mayor is right that New York doesn’t have the authority to deport illegal immigrants or the ability to solve this crisis, but the Big Apple also doesn’t deserve much sympathy. New York declared itself a “sanctuary city” long ago, and now it’s suffering the additional, well-deserved consequences.

Now that city schools and services are being overrun, New York’s Democrat mayor is being put in an uncomfortable position by angry constituents. And he should be.

Illegal immigrants from all over the world know that if they come to the United States, they may get detained by authorities but they also have an excellent chance to remain in this country regardless.

The Biden administration has made sure of that. U.S. Customs and Border Enforcement not only has been overwhelmed by the impossible task it has been given, its agents also have been maligned by the administration just for doing their jobs.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear that any kind of crisis on the border will provoke Biden and company into adopting policies that actually slow down illegal immigration. They will continue insisting that their hands are tied unless Congress passes an amnesty bill and that this is not their fault.

We don’t have border enforcement anymore since Biden came in, not really. We have a border mob created by a dereliction of executive duty.

That’s according to witnesses at a Thursday hearing of the House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.

"One's commitment to free speech means nothing if it does not extend to your political enemies."@Shellenberger details how the federal government worked with social media platforms to censor conservative speech in his opening statement at today's hearing. pic.twitter.com/FOqYyi6rYc

— Weaponization Committee (@Weaponization) November 30, 2023

The hearing was part of a series following up on last year’s disturbing revelations of the so-called Twitter Files.

Among the notable revelations during the massive data release from X, formerly known as Twitter, was that the U.S. government worked with Big Tech companies to manipulate public opinion and silence critics.

Journalist Matt Taibbi was asked by Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., what he thought was the most disturbing allegation against the government in his review of the Twitter Files.

“The regular stream, organized stream, of communication between the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, and the largest tech companies in the country,” he replied.

Author Michael Shellenberger explained the techniques the federal government used to censor speech.

“My colleagues and I published the first batch of internal files from ‘The Cyber Threat Intelligence League,’ which show U.S. and U.K. military contractors working in 2019 and 2020 to both censor and turn sophisticated psychological operations and disinformation tactics, developed abroad, against the American people,” Shellenberger said, the Washington Examiner reported.

Shellenberger noted that while the First Amendment prohibits the government from impinging on the freedom of speech, and the Supreme Court has ruled against working with private parties toward the same ends, there is “now a large body of evidence proving that the government did precisely that.”

Federal courts have ruled against the Biden administration on this issue. In July, a federal appeals court ruled in Missouri v. Biden that what the administration did represented “the most massive attack against free speech in United States history.”

The court issued an injunction on the administration working with Big Tech companies. However, the Supreme Court paused the injunction in October, and the case will be reviewed by the justices.

In a dissent, Justice Samuel Alito said that stopping the injunction could be “giving the government a green light to use heavy-handed tactics to skew the presentation of views” on social media.

So the problem persists.

“The abuses of power my colleagues and I have documented go well beyond censorship,” Shellenberger said. “They also include what appears to be an effort by government officials and contractors, including the FBI, to frame certain individuals as posing a threat of domestic terrorism for their political beliefs.”

In a follow-up interview with Fox News on Friday, Shellenberger said that what the U.S. government did was similar to tactics it uses to go after foreign opponents. In this case, the state was turned on supporters of former President Donald Trump.

It’s funny how President Joe Biden and the Left always say that Trump is destroying democracy. They would know something about that, I suppose. They’ve turned attacks on democracy into a science.

That’s certainly one of the most disturbing and telling chapters in American history. That the federal government has been actively coordinating with private companies to crush domestic foes is in some ways worse than if the government just did it alone.

It means that many big companies, especially in Big Tech, are willing to make themselves an appendage of the federal government. The distinction between the government and the private sector has effectively been blurred.

Not only does it appear that Democrats and the Left want to put Biden’s 2020 and possibly 2024 presidential opponent in jail, it looks like they want to target Trump’s supporters, too.

What does that mean for elections in this country? Is even the idea of self-government becoming a farce as unelected federal bureaucrats manipulate public opinion on a whim and get whatever president they choose?

Whatever form of government that is, it’s a far cry from the limited constitutional republic this country was created to be.

Deep blue, out-of-touch cities in the San Francisco Bay Area often like to play United Nations, so that’s hardly news. What created a firestorm on social media is what happened after a line calling Hamas a “terrorist” organization was offered to the resolution.

All hell broke loose. For hours, speaker after speaker condemned the label. (The resolution passed, but without the amendments, which were defeated.)

Watch the video for yourself. It speaks volumes about unfiltered left-wing politics.

WATCH: Last night's #Oakland City Council meeting was disturbing. The council chambers were plagued for hours with support for terrorists, #antisemitism, and denial of the October 7th attacks. The Jewish community in the Bay Area stands strong against hate, and we call on our… pic.twitter.com/9cbHcGFMAw

— JCRC Bay Area (@SFJCRC) November 28, 2023

“The notion that this was a massacre of Jews is a fabricated narrative. Many of those killed on Oct. 7, including children, were killed by the IDF,” said one woman, referring to the Israel Defense Forces.

Another speaker said that condemning Hamas is the product of “old white supremacists.”

Gen Z leftists showed up in force.

A young woman wearing a face mask said that “calling Hamas a terrorist organization is ridiculous, racist, and plays into genocidal propaganda that is flooding our media, and we should be doing everything possible to combat.”

Another young woman, also wearing a mask, said: “I support the right of Palestinians to resist occupation, including through Hamas, the armed wing of the unified Palestinian resistance.”

In a smaller sense, the video certainly brought shame to the city of Oakland. I say that as a native of Oakland.

While the Oakland City Council devotes time to worthless virtue-signaling and giving an extended sounding board to pro-Hamas leftists, the city faces acute problems. Crime and homelessness are out of control.

An August report from KTVU-TV found that “violent crime is up 12% since last year at this time, and robberies increased 30% year-over-year.”

KTVU, Oakland’s Fox network affiliate, also reported in August that there had been 11,000 reported burglaries to that point this year, a 44% increase from the same time the previous year. Given the general lack of enforcement and punishment for criminals, I’m guessing that the total number of unreported burglaries pushes the number up much higher.

Violent crime had already spiked considerably since 2020’s summer of riots. In Oakland, the trend continues. While the NFL’s Oakland Raiders left town a few years ago, pirates have now showed up on Oakland’s shorelines. Yes, pirates.

Homeless encampments around the Bay have doubled as miniature pirate coves. Boats and properties in Oakland harbors are frequently raided.

Security in Oakland comes only for those who can afford it. Wealthier neighborhoods are now hiring private security to deal with robberies and break-ins. It’s a true progressive paradise. But for those who pay attention to its troubles at all, Oakland has become a laughingstock. That conclusion brings me no joy.

It’s a basic conservative impulse to love where you come from. Unfortunately, while there are still a handful of things I love about Oakland and the Bay Area, what it has become makes me sad and sick.

I loved my Oakland A’s baseball team, which will also soon be gone. I love my family and friends. I love the pleasant weather and natural beauty. I love the Oakland Zoo. But the ethos of the city and the people who run it are contemptible to me.

Oakland is an example of how even the most pristine pieces of real estate can be ruined by ideology and an inversion of justice. What’s happening there isn’t an isolated incident, though. It’s an indication of what’s to come, given the current ideological trajectory of our institutions.

While many liberals and Democrats have come out against the pro-Hamas speakers at the Oakland City Council meeting, I only ask: “What did you expect?”

The message of the fanatics at the meeting flows perfectly with left-wing notions of social justice.

Individual acts of evil are irrelevant for the “oppressed” fighting “oppressors.” If we are to take their rhetoric about “colonization” and land acknowledgments seriously, it’s hard to see this ethos not leading to violence or at minimum excuses for violence.

Hamas has gladly picked up on this rising ethos, too. Former Hamas terrorist chief Khaled Mashal said on Saudi television recently that wiping out Israel is entirely justified.

“We are the victims of the occupation. Full stop,” he said, according to The Telegraph of London. “Therefore, nobody should blame us for the things we do. On October 7, October 10, October million. Everything we do is justified.”

Hence, you can see how natural the alliance among Hamas, Islamists, and the far left really is.

Is it any wonder young people are suddenly “discovering” Osama bin Laden’s 2002 message to America on TikTok and finding they agree with it?

I’m sure that more than a few Democrats, especially Jewish Democrats, are horrified by this emerging reality. They should be. But their condemnation of the young, woke pro-Hamas fanatics will fall on deaf ears.

The Left created this monster, and now it’s eating them up. Young leftists took their rhetoric about “systemic racism” and the evils of Western civilization seriously and now they look to destroy it, literally.

Old guard Democrats won’t be able to stave off this rebellion for long.  What’s happened in Oakland won’t stay in Oakland.

As of this writing, 12 appropriations bills need to pass by Sept. 30 or the government will “shut down.” This means that some workers will be furloughed and most agencies will close temporarily.

We had a similar situation last December and the result was a rather pathetic cave by Republican leadership during a lame-duck session and nearly $2 trillion in spending for fiscal year 2023.

This year’s numbers likely will be similar.

The House Freedom Caucus, whose members are conservative Republicans, has vowed to oppose additional spending that leads to more inflation and debt, especially if the federal government continues to let the border crisis burn out of control with no end in sight.

We desperately need to get this problem under control for this country’s future.

At this moment it’s important to take a step back and consider why we seem to end up in these situations all the time. Why is government spending never under control? Why are we always being threatened with a government shutdown and the end of the world?

Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, had an excellent explanation in a lengthy thread Thursday night on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. The crisis, Lee explains, has been concocted by leadership in both parties to maintain high federal spending and suppress individual legislative input.

22. Given that Republicans currently hold the majority in the House of Representatives, rank-and-file Republicans in both chambers generally believe that the Senate should address spending bills only after they have been passed by the Republican-controlled House, as that approach…

— Mike Lee (@BasedMikeLee) September 15, 2023

In his thread, the Utah Republican says party leadership—what he calls the “law firm” (or “The Firm”) of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y.—has caught on to the fact that voters and members of Congress don’t like massive, consolidated spending bills.

More on that in a bit.

Lee then writes about what omnibus spending packages entail and how the process has worked in recent years. Lee says a consolidated spending bill typically is written in secret with a few hand-selected appropriators on House and Senate committees.

Lawmakers then release the spending bill just a few days before a potential government “shutdown.” That way, there is little opportunity for debate and the spending legislation advances without substantial changes.

“At the same time, the fast (almost mindless) flurry of legislative action at the end of this legislative charade gives it the false appearance of democratic legitimacy,” Lee writes.

What’s important to note is that the dividing lines on spending bills aren’t necessarily partisan. This is the “uniparty” phenomenon where leadership on both sides of the aisle basically swims in the same direction.

There tends to be more resistance to this phenomenon among Republicans, Lee says, for two reasons: “(1) government spending inexorably grows, and (2) the spending bills advanced by The Firm tend to unite Democrats while sharply dividing Republicans, producing a net gain for Democrats.”

Republican appropriators, Lee writes, generally favor their spending priorities over policy victories, which keeps leadership happy.

Because of the extremely short timeline on these massive spending bills and the threat of a government shutdown, Lee writes, rank-and-file lawmakers typically are browbeaten into voting “yes.”

Anyone who has followed government shutdown fights over the years knows it’s an iron law of the universe that corporate media narratives always revolve around blaming Republican opponents of runaway spending for a shutdown, rather than the big spenders themselves.

This reality is usually enough to corral members to submit and sign off on the spending, objections or not.

The result of all this is that lobbyists and special interests often have more power than legislators in the spending process because they have the ears of appropriators and The Firm, as Lee calls Senate and House leadership.

“It’s terrible for the American people, who are stuck with the horrible consequences of this shameful dance, including rampant inflation and our $33 trillion national debt,” Lee writes.

Importantly, Lee writes that he doesn’t necessarily have an issue with an omnibus spending bill in general. Where he has a problem is with the secretive, rushed process in Congress that makes genuine deliberation impossible.

Lately, the opposition to these tactics has become more intense as members and voters have caught on to the game. The Firm’s process is evolving to create the illusion that congressional leaders actually oppose the omnibus approach, Lee writes.

“That illusion disappears when, on closer inspection, it becomes evident that The Firm’s new strategy is to promise to pass two or three smaller omnibus measures (sometimes called “minibus” bills) by essentially the same, rigged process long associated with the omnibus,” the Utah Republican writes.

Of the 12 spending bills Congress is working on, only the “MilConVA” to fund military-related construction through the Department of Veterans Affairs has passed through the House. But the bill was consolidated into a “minibus” by The Firm, Lee writes in his thread, with two other spending bills from Democrat-controlled Senate committees.

This move essentially played right into the hands of congressional Democrats and would give them leverage in end- of-the-year spending fights. The minibus plan was scuppered only after a few Republican senators objected and stood their ground.

32. Because @SenRonJohnson courageously objected, shortly after the Senate voted to proceed to the House-passed MilConVA bill, the Senate may now proceed to “regular order” consideration of that bill—unencumbered by The Firm’s manipulative plan to subject the Senate to an…

— Mike Lee (@BasedMikeLee) September 15, 2023

What Lee is getting at here is one of the essential issues with American governance: We desperately need Congress to act like the deliberative body it was created to be, or the idea of self-government at the national level is little more than a farce.

The House Armed Services Committee held a subcommittee hearing Thursday to address whether these programs are making the military stronger or actually are wasting resources, creating more division, and contributing to record-low recruitment numbers.

Here are four takeaways from the hearing.

1. Rise of DEI Administration, Fall of Meritocracy

Rep. Jim Banks, R-Ind., chairman of the Armed Services subcommittee on military personnel, spoke about the problems with diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives in his opening statement.

Banks said that the meritocratic nature of the military, which allows people of diverse backgrounds to succeed, is an important principle to uphold. However, he warned, this ethos may be waning under Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, who was appointed by President Joe Biden.

“We are now in danger of losing those meritocratic principles to the politicization of our armed forces, thanks first and foremost to the ever-expanding bureaucracy of diversity, equity, and inclusion policies, regulations, and trainings,” Banks said.

The Indiana Republican then said this growing effort is based on “faulty science and misguided principles,” and that anti-bias training used by the military in fact may be causing more bias.

“In a review of 418 prejudice-reduction experiments, [Princeton psychology professor] Elizabeth Levy Paluck and co-authors concluded that much of the anti-bias training is, quote, misguided,” Banks said. “And even in the few studies that showed any effect at all in reducing bias, those effects disappeared over a short period of time. Yet the Department of Defense and the [armed] services have embraced DEI training full cloth.”

Banks then noted that Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,  had said in a Senate hearing that the Defense Department “expended 5,359,311 man hours for Secretary Austin’s extremism standdown and an additional 529,711 man hours for DEI-specific training.”

DEI  is an acronym for diversity, equity, and inclusion.

“That is a lot of training hours spent away from honing warfighting capabilities, knowledge, and skills,” Banks said.

2. Recruitment Challenges

Diversity programs are necessary to boost the military, Alex Wagner, the Air Force’s assistant secretary for manpower and reserve affairs, said in his opening statement.

“Intentional diversity and inclusion efforts allow us to tap into the full talents of the American people and then leverage those talents to defend the nation,” Wagner said.

“Our diversity and inclusion initiatives are focused on talent acquisition and development and informed by science and business best practices, congressional mandates, data-focused policy reviews and assessments and the lived experiences of airmen and guardians working together every single day.”

The armed services face a severe recruitment crisis, the worst since the military became an all-volunteer force in 1973. The Army recently dropped physical and aptitude requirements to bring in more recruits.

Rep. Jack Bergman, R-Mich., said readiness needs to be the primary focus of the military. He asked the committee witnesses whether diversity programs have a positive or negative effect on recruitment. They all answered “positive” or “very positive.”

“So why haven’t we made our numbers?” Bergman asked.

After a short period of silence, Bergman pressed the panelists on the question, asking whether diversity, equity, and inclusion programs are solving the problem.

Gilbert Cisneros Jr., under secretary of defense for personnel and readiness, said: “I think DEI is going to give us a larger pool to pull from.”

“I will look forward to the numbers, [since] we see Sept. 30 whether we hit our numbers or not,” Bergman said, referring to the end of fiscal year 2023.

Bergman asked the same question about the effects of diversity programs on retention and promotion in addition to recruitment, to which, again, all the witnesses on the panel replied that there were positive effects.

“The reason I wanted to ask you all those questions is that we’re going to have the same questions next year,” Bergman said. “I’m going to ask it exactly the same way and what I expect when you say ‘positive,’ I want to see numbers.”

3. A Top Diversity Official Who Disparages Whites

Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., asked about Kelisa Wing, the Pentagon’s newly reassigned diversity, equity, and inclusion chief, who has made racially disparaging remarks on Twitter.

Wing, whose Defense Department role since 2021 had been to oversee the Pentagon’s diversity education programs, tweeted this out on July 23, 2020:

I’m so exhausted at these white folx in these [professional development] sessions this lady actually had the CAUdacity to say black people can be racist too. I had to stop the session and give Karen the BUSINESS … we are not the majority and don’t have) why ask for assistance.

The disparaging term “caudacity” refers to “Caucasian audacity,” while “Karen” is a disparaging term for white women.

Stefanik asked Cisneros whether this was an acceptable statement from a Defense Department employee.

“I do agree that that is not acceptable,” Cisneros replied.

Cisneros said Wing had been reassigned to another division without responsibilities for diversity, equity, and inclusion.

4. Political Ideology Invading Military

A significant theme of the House hearing was the injection of political ideology into military practices.

Banks pressed the Pentagon’s Cisneros on how political ideology and political bias are becoming significant problems in the military, fueled by DEI training.

“How do you eliminate political bias or partisan politics from DEI training?” Banks asked.

Cisneros responded that the Pentagon’s DEI training sessions don’t have a political bias.

“For us, it’s about ensuring that people are treated with respect and dignity,” Cisneros said.

“Do you have a discussion on your team on how to eliminate partisan politics and ideology from DEI trainings? Does that discussion ever occur?” Banks asked.

Cisneros responded that it didn’t

Democrats on the House subcommittee insisted that Republicans are politicizing the military by how they call diversity programs into question.

“I feel that the conversation we’re having right now, by its literal nature and its words, is divisive and politicizing of the military,” Rep. Chrissy Houlahan, D-Pa., said. “And I feel as though one of the reasons why—not the reason why—recruiting may be seeing a sag is that people don’t see themselves in the military, don’t see their nation in the military, and I’m embarrassed by the tone and tenor of this conversation.”

Article cross-posted from Daily Signal.