The big news here in Portland, Oregon, is that a high school baseball player used a “racial hate speech” slur during a pregame, player-only huddle.

The slur itself has been kept from the public lest we all die of shock. I’m sure none of us has ever heard such a word.

Naturally, the media was called in, so the student leaders got to practice their TV interview skills.

One interesting thing about the incident: It happened at a prominent Catholic school in town, Central Catholic.

Unforced error

The reaction of the Central Catholic administration was the other interesting thing. Check this out:

The baseball team immediately canceled and forfeited the game they were playing.
Then, they forfeited the next day’s game as well.
The entire baseball team was then marched onto a stage at a special school assembly and made to publicly apologize to their classmates.
Then, they sent everyone home for the next two days, for COVID-style “remote learning.” (That’s right, not the baseball player who said the slur, but the WHOLE SCHOOL was sent home.)
They did this so that faculty and staff could prepare “to respond to their students' needs” when they were allowed back into the building.

Which meant that another couple of days would be spent processing the trauma and psychological suffering they’d been put through.

This all occurred even though the only students who actually heard the “racial hate speech” slur were the players on the baseball team.

Heaven help us

Central Catholic is a typical Catholic high school. Its students are good at sports. It has solid extracurriculars. It is considered a notch above the local public high schools in educational standards.

Historically, all Catholic schools were known for a certain traditionalism regarding student behavior and teaching philosophy.

If you wanted your child to have an education tainted by the latest social trends and political ideologies, you sent them to public school.

If you wanted a more classical education, with a more disciplined and rigorous approach, you sent them to a Catholic school.

But that’s no longer the case, apparently. Even a public high school wouldn’t shut down its entire campus for two days over one baseball player saying one bad word.

In the beginning was ... the Word

I’m going to take a wild guess and predict that the “racial hate speech” slur was probably based on a common derogatory derivative of the antiquated term "negro" — as further appropriated and transformed by hip-hop culture. Because of hip-hop's massive popularity, this "soft A" variant has become a more-or-less neutral form of address among young people of all races.

Our entertainment industry has bombarded young people with this word for decades, making it sound funny and cool. And then our academic communities act like it’s the gravest sin to repeat it.

Obviously, it is not a word that should be used at school. It's vulgar and still retains some of its capacity to degrade and insult. But a two-day shutdown of the entire student body? With a school-wide assembly? And the local media alerted? And almost an entire week lost processing the trauma?

How about the administration has a stern talk with the baseball player? In private?

Truant believers

But that would be too easy. Never mind that the kid’s high school career will be ruined by this obvious overreaction. What was important was allowing the administration to advertise its moral superiority.

The student body was also inspired to take advantage of this educational opportunity. A week after the initial controversy, students walked out of class in protest. “Not enough has been done!” they claimed, as they assembled outside to loiter in the street and watch TikTok videos on their phones.

Naturally, the media was called in, so the student leaders got to practice their TV interview skills.

This is what is being taught at Catholic school these days. Complain. Protest. Disrupt. And above all, don’t go to class and learn anything.

CBS/Getty Images

Mater DEI

One thing this controversy demonstrates is that a Catholic school is no longer a protection from woke ideology. It is, in fact, almost a guarantee of it.

So what are parents to do if they want their kids at a genuinely Christian school? Like a school where there aren’t Pride flags and sex manuals in every classroom. Where kids are not diagnosed with ADHD or toxic masculinity. Where America is not constantly slandered and vilified by radical leftist textbooks.

There are still some authentically Christian schools in Portland. I’m assuming they are authentic because they are small, they are self-contained, and they keep to themselves.

You would barely know these schools exist if you didn’t go looking for them. They dare not draw attention to themselves, lest our “social justice” local government — or our politicized media — invent some reason to attack them.

Bad education

So what was Central Catholic really up to during the racial slur controversy?

It was virtue signaling. Pretending it is more righteous than you are or I am, by wasting everybody’s time with performative outrage.

And this happened in Oregon, which famously ranks near the bottom of every national educational metric. In Portland, most parents’ choice of schools is: bad, worse, or terrible.

That is, until you realize there are a few actual Christian schools around. Just don’t tell anyone where they are!

DEI went into hiding — but remains as dangerous as ever

Between January 2023 and May 2025, Fortune 100 companies reduced their use of the term "DEI" by 98%, according to an analysis by Gravity Research.

Within weeks of President Trump's executive order targeting federal DEI initiatives, major corporations including McDonald's, Walmart, and Target announced they were ending DEI programs.

Conservatives celebrated as one company after another backed away from the acronym that had dominated (and in many cases terrified) corporate America for years.

That celebration was premature.

The goal is no longer to showcase diversity initiatives. The goal is to make those initiatives invisible and permanent.

DEI is far from dead. According to “inclusion consultant” Lily Zheng, its disguise is now called FAIR: Fairness, Access, Inclusion, and Representation. "It's not just a communications rebrand," Zheng recently told Time magazine. "It's not just that we're avoiding the letters DEI and trying to replace it with FAIR. It's that the work itself is evolving."

What Zheng calls "legacy DEI" focused on visible programs like heritage months, diversity training sessions, and demographic targets. These programs were public-facing, easy to identify, and therefore vulnerable to political pressure. The new approach abandons surface visibility in favor of work to change what Zheng calls "systems."

Instead of counting the number of women or people of color in leadership positions, FAIR focuses on changing institutional systems. Instead of heritage celebrations, FAIR embeds what it calls "inclusion" into hiring algorithms, promotion processes, and organizational structures.

The goal is no longer to showcase diversity initiatives. The goal is to make those initiatives invisible and permanent.

Progressives adapted after losing Virginia elections in 2021. Teachers' unions suffered a historic defeat. Rather than retreat, Data for Progress and similar groups spent millions analyzing voter habits and anxieties, then redesigned their campaign around different messaging. By 2023, Democrats won nearly every close Virginia race.

Progressives don't abandon goals when challenged. They simply adapt their methods. Similarly, when conservatives successfully challenged outrageously unconstitutional explicit DEI programs, the machinery wasn't dismantled. It burrowed deeper into institutional foundations, where it became harder to identify and harder to remove.

J. David Ake/Getty Images

Companies dropped "DEI" and adopted phrases like "universal fairness," "algorithmic bias mitigation," and "inclusion by design." The framing shifted from blatant identity-based preferences to much more subtle process-based interventions.

In my book, "The Political Vise," I describe group identity politics as organizing around grievance rather than achievement. This fact explains why DEI programs can never declare victory and dissolve. If equity were achieved, the machinery would become unnecessary. The system requires permanent grievance to justify permanent intervention.

Legacy DEI focused on representation metrics that could theoretically be satisfied. FAIR abandons those metrics in favor of systemic analysis that can never be completed.

There are always more systems to audit, more processes to redesign, more barriers to identify, and more marginalized people to uplift. A company can cancel a heritage month event, but it cannot skip the algorithmic audit hardwired into its hiring platform.

President Trump's executive order triggered the strategic retreat. The grievance lobby, however, wasn’t giving up without a fight. Its members demanded that companies and public institutions find other ways to keep DEI alive. By January 2026, when Zheng described the FAIR framework to Time magazine, the evolution was complete.

Trump’s March 2026 executive order requiring federal contractors to certify that they do not engage in discriminatory activities based on race or ethnicity suggests the Trump administration recognizes the evasion.

The order notes that "some entities continue to engage in DEI activities and often attempt to conceal their efforts." But just prohibiting "disparate treatment based on race or ethnicity" can't root out systems-based approaches that claim to focus on universal fairness while pursuing the same demographic outcomes through different methods.

Roberto Schmidt/Getty Images

DEI under any name serves the larger goal of institutionalizing learned helplessness. It teaches that your struggles result from discriminatory systems rather than personal choices, that flourishing depends more on institutional intervention than individual effort. Worst of all, it teaches dependence. And a lot of progressives are deeply invested in maintaining that dependence.

Eliminating DEI departments and scrubbing corporate websites of diversity language are satisfying, but not final a victory, not when the actual work of grievance culture continues under different names.

With the grievance machinery adopting ever more subtle disguises, the fight to defend merit requires more shrewdness and patience than ever before. We must ask direct questions.

When companies rebrand DEI programs as "universal fairness" initiatives, we must demand to see the metrics. When they tout "algorithmic bias audits," ask what disparities trigger intervention — and what outcomes those interventions produce.

The left hid the machinery underground because the surface became too costly to defend. It is critically important to drag DEI back into the light and destroy it once and for all.

This article was originally published by RealClearPolicy and made available via RealClearWire.

EXCLUSIVE: DOJ Releases a New Report on Anti-Christian Bias | Camille Varone | BONUS

Woke city council rips out anti-crime signs because they're 'racist'

Neighborhood watch programs have long encouraged citizens to take pride in the welfare of their communities and to adopt a proactive approach to crime prevention. While maximizing citizen vigilance and cooperation with lawful authorities has been associated with reductions in crime, some liberals figure such efforts and the corresponding signage to be unnecessarily exclusionary.

After revolting last year against the decades-old program of communal self-defense and surveillance, woke city councilors in Ann Arbor, Michigan, have since blown taxpayer dollars on the removal of all remaining evidence of the city's Neighborhood Crime Watch program.

'Neighborhood watch signs are expressions of exclusion.'

According to the resolution passed by the city council on Dec. 15 directing the removal of over 600 Neighborhood Crime Watch signs in Ann Arbor, "Neighborhood Watch programs emerged in the 1970s during a period of national anxiety about crime and social change" and were "often rooted in assumptions about who did and did not 'belong' in a neighborhood, reinforcing race-based hyper-vigilance and suspicion particularly toward black, brown, and other marginalized residents and visitors."

The resolution claimed that this dynamic in Ann Arbor, a city whose population today is 66.5% non-Hispanic white, "encouraged informal surveillance practices that disproportionately targeted people of color and contributed to patterns of exclusion under the guise of public safety."

Ann Arbor Mayor Christopher Taylor (D). Aaron J. Thornton/Getty Images

The signs that were posted throughout the city not only denoted a supposedly defunct program but anti-crime messages that "do not reflect Ann Arbor's current public safety values or its commitment to nondiscriminatory enforcement, community trust, and safe spaces for all residents and visitors."

Councilwoman Cynthia Harrison said when the resolution passed, "Signs don’t just sit there, they speak. For many people, especially black and brown residents and visitors, those signs have never felt neutral. They signal that unfamiliarity itself is suspicious, that their presence must be justified, that belonging is conditional," reported the Michigan Daily.

Harrison joined Ann Arbor Mayor Christopher Taylor (D) and Councilwoman Jen Eyer on April 21 for the ceremonial tear-down of the final Neighborhood Crime Watch sign.

As their virtue-signaling campaign — which cost the city at least $18,000 from its general fund balance — came to a close, the leftist trio recycled the revisionist gobbledygook from their resolution.

"Neighborhood watch signs are expressions of exclusion," said Taylor, reported MLive.com

Eyer stated, "It really hearkens back to a time when public safety was more about surveillance and exclusion of people from communities and trying to look out for anyone who looked different."

After reiterating that the crime-prevention signs do "not align with our values," Harrison stressed that "this is a great day."

The Michigan Daily reported in March 1981 that "rather than quivering behind bolted doors, some Ann Arbor residents favoring stepped-up police protection are taking matters into their own hands."

The Neighborhood Watch program, formally adopted the previous year in the wake of 30-year-old Rebecca Huff's savage murder, "banded together neighbors in one-block sections of the city who look and listen for signs of criminal activity."

"It's more or less socializing and really getting to know your neighbors," an Ann Arbor police detective said at the time. "People watch each other's property, apartment-sit, and know each other's cars. If a strange car is seen in the area, the residents can obtain the license plate number and call us on a special communication hookup."

While Neighborhood Watch is officially no more in Ann Arbor, vigilant residents don't need signs or permission to look after their communities and can always share insights and tips with one another on apps like Citizen and Nextdoor.

According to Neighborhood Scout, the likelihood of becoming a victim of a property crime and a violent crime in the Democrat-run city is 1 in 47 and 1 in 296, respectively.

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Trump’s antitrust policy is working for everyday Americans

Everything feels more expensive in 2026, and health care is no exception.

While gas prices and grocery costs tend to dominate the political conversation, health care affordability remains one of the biggest financial pressures on working families.

One major reason is a lack of real competition. More than 95% of health insurance markets in the United States are highly concentrated, dominated by one or two companies with the power to drive up costs and limit consumer choice.

That is exactly why the Trump administration’s antitrust policy is so important.

The Trump administration has not hesitated to confront corporate behavior that distorts markets or threatens American interests.

The Federal Trade Commission’s new health care task force signals that President Trump understands what Washington too often ignores: When markets stop working for everyday Americans, government needs to step in to restore competition, lower prices, and protect consumers.

Trump’s antitrust policy, which is pro-consumer, pro-competition, and grounded in common sense, is making real progress toward that restoration.

FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson made that clear last year when he said the agency would stop “picking winners and losers” and focus instead on removing regulatory barriers that suppress innovation and hurt the American people.

That approach reflects a return to the traditional consumer welfare standard, the idea that antitrust enforcement should focus on whether consumers are actually being harmed by reduced competition. This ensures regulators are focused on results and not politics.

The results on this are clear. The Trump administration has not hesitated to confront corporate behavior that distorts markets or threatens American interests.

For example, the FTC has challenged the left’s toxic corporate practices like DEI and environmental, social, and governance investing. Earlier this year, Ferguson sent a letter to 42 big law firms, warning them that their use of DEI constituted an anticompetitive business practice and could bring legal consequences.

The FTC has tackled ESG too, threatening litigation against investors who attempt to block U.S. coal production in favor of a “net-zero” energy agenda, among other actions.

Meanwhile, the antitrust cases against Meta and Google are still moving forward because the concern is real: These companies have become so powerful they can choke off competition and influence what millions of Americans see online.

Last year, the Trump administration also secured a $2.5 billion settlement with Amazon over its unethical business practices.

Carol Smiljan/NurPhoto/Getty Images

This is what Democrats fail to understand about Trump. He is willing to take on corporate power to ensure markets work for the people.

That is also why the administration made the right call in stepping away from absurd Biden-era enforcement like the case against Pepsi over discounts offered to large retailers. During inflation, the last thing Americans need is government attacking lower prices.

The same logic applies to strategic deals that strengthen America against foreign adversaries. The Trump administration allowed the Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Juniper Networks merger to move forward after Biden blocked it. A stronger American tech company would be better positioned to compete with Huawei, the Chinese giant tied to espionage and intellectual property theft.

Trump’s team understands what the last administration did not: Antitrust does not exist in a vacuum. Competition matters, but so does national security.

Trump’s antitrust agenda is revealing a broader shift away from ideology and back toward realism. By restoring the consumer welfare standard, his administration is focusing on protecting consumers, strengthening domestic industry, and defending American interests.

Trump and Ferguson understand that antitrust policy can push back on ideological coercion, protect America’s competitive edge, and make life more affordable for working families, all while keeping consumers and competition at the center of the analysis.

For families being squeezed by rising health care and grocery costs, this is real relief. The FTC may fly under the radar, but under Trump it has become an important part of a broader America First agenda built on common sense and affordability.

'Call Sign Courage': One soldier's fight against creeping Marxism in the military

Filmmaker R.J. Moeller has a keen sense about people and pairings.

He recalls helping to connect Dennis Prager and comic Adam Carolla, two media personalities with wildly different skill sets and backgrounds. Yet Prager and Carolla clicked, and they toured the country as a very odd but endearing couple. They later co-starred in the 2019 documentary “No Safe Spaces,” which Moeller produced.

Most documentaries don’t move the cultural needle, but 'Call Sign Courage' gave its star a real-life happy ending.

Moeller also sensed something special about Lt. Col. Matt Lohmeier, a former Air Force pilot fired by the Biden administration in 2021 for slamming the military’s DEI culture on “The Steve Gruber Show.”

Lohmeier decried the military’s diversity initiatives, citing their ties to critical race theory.

That led Moeller to produce “Call Sign Courage: The Matt Lohmeier Story.” The documentary, recently promoted by X’s own Elon Musk on the social media platform, recalls Lohmeier’s battle against a formidable system.

He lost his job at Space Force and his pension, but the military veteran wouldn’t give up. His battle is the heart of “Call Sign Courage." That story felt like a natural for the right documentary filmmaker, Moeller recalls, including Lohmeier’s faith and family connections.

'Jon Hamm meets John Wayne'

“I thought, ‘This dude is special.’ The character, the depth, what he did when no one else wasn’t looking,” Moeller says. It didn’t hurt that his subject “looked like Jon Hamm meets John Wayne.”

Except Lohmeier wasn’t eager for his close-up.

“These news cycles move fast. He was happy to be forgotten about ... he was exploring taking a high school teaching position,” Moeller says.

A mutual friend connected them all the same, and the filmmaker convinced Lohmeier to share his story with the world via film.

“If you give me 12 months ... we’re going to make you a film,” the producer told him, sealing the deal.

Crucial allies

Funding is always tight for documentary filmmakers, but Lohmeier’s story attracted the Heritage Foundation’s attention, which helped pick up some critical fees. The nonprofit helped release the film free on X for a limited time last week. Now, the film — directed by Marshall Lee, who cut his teeth editing movies like "What Is a Woman?" and "Am I Racist?" — is available on Apple TV, Prime Video, and other VOD platforms.

Musk screened the film and helped arrange for the free X window. The result? Moeller says roughly five million people watched some or all of it over the weekend.

Moeller, who also produced “Live Not By Lies” for Angel Studios, understood how his subject matter’s fight to call out the military’s Marxist turn mattered to the film. Not everyone was happy to see that element included in the documentary.

“I cannot tell you how many conservative people in D.C., when they heard about this film or saw cuts of it, said, ‘Eh, don’t talk about Marxism so much.’”

“I’m leaving it in the film ... it’s the most powerful stuff,” he says. “The more they tell us to not talk about Marxism, the more we’re going to do it.”

IFC Midnight

10,000 hours

Moeller is part of an emerging right-leaning brand of storytellers, the kind who once had little access to the public. Now, with X, YouTube, and other social media platforms, he’s able to share his skills with the public.

It all started for him in the existing movie ecosystem.

“I’m proud of the 10,000 hours I put into traditional Hollywood ... you need to cut your teeth out there,” he says. Now, he’s eager to leverage what he calls the “wild, wild west” of storytelling outside the industry’s glittery walls.

“Hollywood failed by overspending and making stuff people didn’t want. Don’t make the same mistakes in the conservative film world,” he says.

The existing film industry “has things to teach us, like professionalism,” he says. “We need to bring in our values, our own money, and our audiences ... we need to be really good stewards of that, to under-promise and over-deliver in this space.”

Making inroads

He remains hopeful that David can, if not slay Goliath, make inroads in the pop culture landscape.

“The center-right entertainment ecosystem is doing its best, and platforms like Angel Studios are taking big swings, but how to find and monetize an audience remains the biggest struggle for independent filmmakers,” he says. “We know the audience is there, but lining up quality work with proper distribution, especially marketing, so that everyone can turn a profit and rinse-and-repeat that 1,000 times is easier said than done.”

Moeller is hard at work on a new project, a pilot for a dramedy called “Are We There Yet?” with comedian Jeff Dye. The show, following a stand-up comedian “struggling with his faith, marriage, career, and sobriety,” will be shopped to streamers and potential buyers this summer, he says.

Most documentaries don’t move the cultural needle, but “Call Sign Courage” gave its star a real-life happy ending.

“The Trump campaign found out about the fact that we were telling Matt Lohmeier's story, and they invited him to a campaign rally in North Carolina right before the 2024 election,” he says. “At that event, Trump offered Matt a position in his administration.”

Disney down on DEI, says ex-staffer: 'The vibe shift is real'

A former Walt Disney Company employee says he is cautiously optimistic about the company's direction, even when it comes to progressive ideology.

Josh Daws, a software engineer with 12.5 years at Disney, revealed on X on Wednesday that he was laid off as part of a Disney restructuring in which 1,000 people lost their jobs.

'It's much better internally now.'

The employee dump, which Disney said was part of an effort to "streamline operations," inspired Daws to answer reader questions about his tenure. Many queries regarding Disney's push for diversity, equity, and inclusion ensued.

DEI decline

The ex-Mouse House employee told fans they may finally be able to breathe easier, with Disney likely on the tail end of its inclusion era.

Daws told one user that DEI at Disney "peaked in 2020" but has been in a "steady decline" since. "It's much better internally now. The vibe shift is real," he wrote.

The engineer told another questioner that he was not a fan of the company's DEI infrastructure, adding that it has "toned it down a ton since Trump was elected."

Daws also answered a question related to who he believes is responsible for the diversity push the company has gone through.

'A vocal minority'

When asked why Disney seemingly "hate[s] conservative Christian[s]" while promoting the "LGBTQ agenda" at every turn, Daws — a Christian himself — attributed it to a "very small and vocal minority of the company."

"Most folks just want to make cool stuff," he added.

Daws also confirmed the company is well aware of how "out of touch" it is with fans. When asked if he had had many other Christian co-workers, Daws replied, "Not enough but more than you might think."

Throughout the question-and-answer session, Daws remained cautiously optimistic about the direction of Disney, while being careful not to insult his former employers.

AI no 'threat'

On the topic of AI, Daws was less circumspect, affirming that Disney would incorporate it as a way to cut costs. "No threat to them."

While Daws acknowledged that AI could be blamed for his firing "on the grand scale," he noted that his status as a remote worker was a more immediate factor.

When approached by Blaze News, Daws declined to give further comments about the company.

The Walt Disney Company did not respond to requests for comments regarding Daws' claims about DEI or AI.

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Crewmen Waiting To Be Rescued Don’t Need DEI, They Need A Competent Military

Congress should enshrine into federal law the merit principles that have produced recent remarkable military successes.

Our local Catholic school sent everyone home for 2 days. You'll never guess why.

Unforced error

Heaven help us

In the beginning was ... the Word

Truant believers

Mater DEI

Bad education

EXCLUSIVE: DOJ Releases a New Report on Anti-Christian Bias | Camille Varone | BONUS

Woke city council rips out anti-crime signs because they're 'racist'

Trump’s antitrust policy is working for everyday Americans

'Call Sign Courage': One soldier's fight against creeping Marxism in the military

'Jon Hamm meets John Wayne'

Crucial allies

10,000 hours

Making inroads

Disney down on DEI, says ex-staffer: 'The vibe shift is real'

DEI decline

'A vocal minority'

AI no 'threat'

Exclusive: Virginia School District Encourages Student Commitment To DEI As Major Achievement Metric

Crewmen Waiting To Be Rescued Don’t Need DEI, They Need A Competent Military

Cincinnati councilwoman suggests mob attack on white victims was justified: ‘They begged for that beatdown!’

Democrat melts down after Secretary Doug Burgum drops bombshell about NGOs during committee hearing

Unforced error

Heaven help us

In the beginning was ... the Word

Truant believers

Mater DEI

Bad education

'Jon Hamm meets John Wayne'

Crucial allies

10,000 hours

Making inroads

DEI decline

'A vocal minority'

AI no 'threat'

We’ll keep you informed with top stories for conservatives who want to become informed decision makers.