Vermont Department of Health tells public to avoid using words like 'son' or 'daughter'



The Vermont Department of Health issued a caution this week not to use the words "son" and "daughter," insinuating that a failure to do so may cultivate unhealthy learning environments.

In a Facebook post shared to its official page Wednesday, the department (VDH) — run by Mark Levine, who was appointed commissioner by Republican Gov. Phil Scott — stated, "Many families and students are getting ready for the new school year. Equity in the classroom is an essential piece of a productive and healthy learning environment."

"When talking about family, it's important to use terms that cover the many versions of what family can look like," said the post.

Accompanying the post was an image titled, "Inclusive Language for Families," which contained instructions on how Vermonters should adjust their vocabularies and mindsets.

According to the VDH, which states elsewhere that "gender is socially constructed," Vermonters should "[u]se 'child or 'kid' instead of 'daughter' or 'son'" because these substitutes are "gender-neutral and can describe a child who may not be someone's legal son or daughter."

In addition to abandoning the centuries-old terms linked, respectively, to the Old English sunu for "male child in relation to either or both parents" and the Old English dohtor for "female child considered with reference to her parents," the VDH urged the sons and daughters of the Green Mountain State to say "family members" rather than "household members" because "not all families live in the same home — think divorced or incarcerated parents, stepsiblings, etc."

'Challenging our instinct or bias to prioritize the needs of white, straight, cisgender, and non-disabled and neurotypical students is the first step.'

Blaze News reached out to the VDH inquiring about what prompted the posting as well as whether there was any scientific basis to its insinuation that the use of the terms "son" and "daughter" was harmful. The department did not provide a response by deadline.

The VDH post seeking further severance of language from biological and conventional meaning was subject to immediate backlash, prompting the department to follow up on Facebook with a message claiming, "This post was intended to encourage using inclusive language when you don't know someone's family situation. This is especially important in settings like classrooms, afterschool programs and sports teams."

"Using language that includes everyone helps children feel seen, respected, and valued no matter how their families are structured," wrote the department, adding a link to a department page about "health equity."

According the department, health equity:

exists when all people have a fair and just opportunity to be healthy, especially those who have experienced socioeconomic disadvantage, historical injustice, and other avoidable systemic inequalities that are often associated with social categories of race, gender, ethnicity, social position, sexual orientation and disability.

The VDH's health equity page indicates why an organization that might otherwise assign greater focus to the local fallout of the opioid epidemic or alarmingly high STD rates is now pestering Vermonters about how they describe their children.

In the interest of "culturally and linguistically appropriate care," the VDH has integrated the National Standards for Culturally and Linguistically Appropriate Services in Health and Healthcare (CLAS Standards) in all of its work.

The National CLAS Standards were developed by the U.S. Department of Health and Health and Human Services' Office of Minority Health in 2000.

The standards call for public organizations to "establish culturally and linguistically appropriate goals, policies, and management accountability, and infuse them throughout the organization’s planning and operations" as well as to "[partner with the community to design, implement, and evaluate policies, practices, and services to ensure cultural and linguistic appropriateness."

Adherents to the standards are expected to learn about various cultural identities, combat bias, respect others' values and communication preferences, and adapt their services to various persons' cultural needs.

The Christian Post noted that in its latest "Health Equity Update," the VDH provides additional tips on how Vermonters help with their leftist social engineering.

The newsletter states, "Supporting the needs, backgrounds, and abilities of all students is a complex task. Challenging our instinct or bias to prioritize the needs of white, straight, cisgender, and non-disabled and neurotypical students is the first step. This will reduce barriers for BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ students as well as those with physical and neurological disabilities."

In addition to de-prioritizing the needs of students hailing from that racial demographic, which makes up around 91% of the state's population, the health organization echoes CLAS literature, stressing that teachers, coaches, "afterschool school providers," and mentors should reflect on their own beliefs and "become more conscious of issues related to racial equity and gender equity."

The VDH is hardly the first institution to urge Americans to drop words leftists believe are offensive or antiquated.

Stanford University, for instance, released an index of "harmful words" in 2022 that it indicated would be eliminated from use and its websites. These words included: "addict," "American," "ballsy," "Brave," "chief," "gentlemen," "he," "straight," "master," and "white paper."

The New Hampshire Journal highlighted how earlier this year, New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu's (R) Department of Information Technology shared a memo claiming the words "citizen," "guys," "he or she," "man-made," "handicapped," "normal," and "elderly," were problematic, exclusionary, and/or harmful.

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'Go DEI': Joy Reid thrilled about the race of the Democrats waging lawfare against Trump



MSNBC's resident race obsessive Joy Reid has expressed great satisfaction that the Democrats presently waging lawfare against former President Donald Trump have a skin color to her liking.

Although she was attempting to be complimentary of scandal-plagued Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, and New York Attorney General Letitia James, Reid effectively insinuated there was a racial dimension to the three Democrats' prosecution of Trump — something Trump's lawyers have accused Willis of — and that Bragg, at the very least, was the product of discriminatory hiring schemes.

Reid attempted at the outset to ding Trump, suggesting to her like-minded peers on an MSNBC panel Monday that one of the Republican front-runner's lawyers had previously represented the American mobster Venero Mangano.

Having hazarded mental strain to find relevance in the fact, the liberal host suggested that Trump had outdone the underboss of the Genovese crime family by saying mean things about the judge presiding over his hush-money trial in New York, Judge Juan Merchan, as well as about Merchan's adult daughter who previously worked for Vice President Kamala Harris' failed 2020 presidential campaign and for the subsequent Biden-Harris 2020 campaign.

"Donald Trump is at this point outdoing actual mobsters in his attacks on the judge's family, the daughter. And he's doing it to the point that Lawrence [O'Donnell] made, he knows he will never spend a day, a second, a moment in prison," said Reid.

After painting Trump's critiques of apparent judicial bias in a negative light, Reid said that for her, "There is something wonderfully poetic about the fact that despite the fact that even if convicted, he's not going to go to prison, the first person to actually criminally prosecute Donald Trump is a black Harvard grad."

Just as days earlier Reid had suggested there was cause to celebrate O.J. Simpson getting away with allegedly murdering his former abuse victim in part because of his race, the MSNBC host again underscored the importance of race to her in matters where it ought to be immaterial.

Reid went on to suggest in her remarks, captured by RedState, that Bragg is "the very kind of person that [Trump's] former staff, the people who worked for him, Stephen Miller, et cetera, want to never be at Harvard Law School, but he was. And he came out and graduated and he's prosecuting you, Donald."

After accusing Stephen Miller and other former Trump staffers of holding racist views, Reid added, "And a black woman is doing the same exact thing in Georgia and the black woman forced you to pay [a] $175 million fine that is now also in question because the people who put it up, that might not be legit."

Trump's lawyers appear to agree that race has become a factor in his election interference case in Georgia. A January court filing accused Fani Willis of a "glaring, flagrant and calculated effort to foment racial bias into this case" and of using racially charged rhetoric to prejudice prospective jurors against the defendants.

"Donald Trump is being held to account by the very multicultural, multiracial democracy that he's trying to dismantle," continued Reid, who previously expressed outrage that the Republican candidate was allowed to remain on the 2024 ballot in Colorado.

"And for me, there's something poetic and actually wonderful about that. It says something good about our country that we're still capable of having that happen. Go DEI, my DEIs are bringing it home," concluded Reid.

It's unclear whether Reid — having mentioned Bragg's graduation from Harvard, underscored his race, and referred to him as one of her "DEIs" — intended to suggest his success is not the result of individual achievement but rather a discriminatory and controversial advancement scheme that prioritizes immutable characteristics over merit.

Reid suggested late last month that DEI has become racists' euphemism for another word, although she refrained from disclosing what that word might be.

Trump’s trial starts: After failed delay tactics, Trump becomes 1st ex-POTUS to face criminal trialyoutu.be

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'Approximately 1,619 Kendis': Ibram Kendi arrives late to debate about quantifying racism, then fails to get the joke



Anti-white activist Ibram Kendi arrived late to a recent debate regarding the quantification of racism — but just in time to embarrass himself.

The set-up

A political science professor at Kentucky State University suggested in the pages of the National Review last week that intersectionality "is just a badly done 'woke' version of regression analysis."

Dr. Wilfred Reilly wrote that "racism or sexism can only be said to exist where we find that pretty much identical people, who differ only in terms of the characteristic of race or sex, are still being treated differently — after all of the other factors which might explain performance differences between them have been accounted for."

"This sort of real bigotry is, today, fairly rare," said Reilly.

"Many 'intersectional' studies that purport to find giant residual effects of race or sex on some specific thing — individuals' chances of going to prison, let's say — literally just consist of unadjusted comparisons between citizens in two or more different groups," continued Reilly. "This, however, is not how serious people conduct this sort of analysis."

Reilly's assertion prickled one Harvard Ph.D. student who apparently found himself in the unserious camp.

Kareem Carr, a self-described statistician, claimed on X that the argument that racism and sexism "are essentially non-existent because their effects on stuff like income disappear if you control for all relevant variables like education, work history and so on" is wrong.

Having indicated he could explain why Reilly and others were wrong, Carr suggested that "[s]ocial forces like sexism and racism aren't magical. They act through specific mechanisms in the physical world."

After granting sexism and racism special powers, Carr then had his followers imagine that the impact of the "racism" could be tracked and measured.

— (@)

Carr later admitted that it is "hard to frame this issue objectively."

The Kendi scale

Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, responded to Carr's post, asking, "What is the scientific definition of 'racism' here? How do you measure it quantitatively? How do you determine the causal influence from racism to intermediary institutions to individual income?"

"With what controls?" added Rufo. "And what is the current quantity of racism in the United States?"

Colin Wright, the evolutionary biologist behind "Reality's Last Stand," had an answer ready for Rufo: "Depends on what units you use. But assuming you're using the Kendi scale, as is standard in the US, then approximately 1,619 Kendis."

Wright clarified, "For those not familiar with the Kendi scale, 1 Kendi refers to the quantity of racism, measured in Kendis, in order to reach 1 Kendi."

Ibram Kendi, originally Ibram Henry Rogers, is the identitarian academic who runs the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University — the race-obsessed center that recently fired half its staff and is facing an inquiry over allegations of employee exploitation, poor pay, failing to provide any halfway decent research, and a mismanagement of $43 million in donations, according to the Washington Post.

As the inquiry may soon confirm, Kendi's expertise is not managing think tanks but rather in accusing multitudes of Americans of racism. His antidote is, evidently, more racism.

"The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination," Kendi wrote in 2019. "The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination."

The figure Wright used in his joke appears to have been aimed at "The 1619 Project," Nikole Hannah-Jones' fact-averse revisionist history, which spun out a derivative containing direct contributions from Kendi.

Rufo pressed the joke further, writing, "Can't believe we're approaching 1,619 ku of racism in America, in 2024. We need the Department of Antiracism to shut it down—15 days to slow the spread."

On Sunday, Kendi seized upon Wright's days-old joke, writing, "In your imaginary, racism does not exist but the 'Kendi scale' does exist? I am not familiar with the 'Kendi scale' but I am familiar with racism."

"I suspect this is one reason why people like this become propagandists. It is easy to deny reality and make things up," added Kendi.

— (@)

Colin Wright responded to Kendi, "It's just a joke dude."

Wright later noted with apparent glee, "Kendi thought my post about measuring racism in America using the 'Kendi scale,' which I said came out to '1619 Kendis,' was serious. I even defined the units of the Kendi scale with Kendi-esque circularity."

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Ayanna Pressley blames racism for pharmacy closure in crime-ridden neighborhood



Businesses continue to flee various Democrat-controlled cities in the face of unrelenting crime and ruinous leftist policies.

Israel critic and gun-control activist Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) recently figured out who to blame for this unfortunate trend: not the criminal elements directly responsible or the leftist in the mirror who championed "unrest in the streets," but rather the very businesses forced to pull up stakes on account of persistent risks to their workers and the guarantee of financial ruin.

According to Pressley — a member of "the Squad" who in recent years supported defunding the police while blowing taxpayer money on her own private defense — at least one business is fleeing on account of racism contra desires to survive and thrive.

Walgreens recently announced that it is permanently shutting down its location on Warren Street in Boston's Roxbury neighborhood, one of the most dangerous areas in the city. The Roxbury closure is the fourth Walgreens branch to shutter in Boston since November 2022, reported WBUR-FM.

"With Walgreens' goal to be the independent partner of choice, not just in pharmacy but also in health care services where we can improve health care, lower costs, and help patients, we need the right network of stores," a spokesman for the company said in a statement obtained by WHDH-TV.

Walgreens is reportedly planning to shut down 200 stores nationwide.

"When faced with the difficult decision to close a location, several factors are taken into account, including our existing footprint of stores, dynamics of the local market, and changes in the buying habits of our patients and customers, among other reasons," added the spokesman.

Areavibes indicated on the basis of FBI data released in September 2023 that Roxbury's rate of violent crime is 214% higher than the national average. Its property crime rate is 48% higher than the national average. The region has a overall crime rating of F (the lowest possible rating).

The local Walgreens appears to have been a popular target for robberies and shoplifting.

The Boston Globe indicated that by late 2022, Walgreens and similar stores had resorted to locking up everything from toothpaste to bigger-ticket items on account of massive spikes in theft. This appears to be a problem affecting businesses in Democratic cities across the country.

The National Retail Federation's latest security survey indicated that "retail crime, violence and theft continue to impact the retail industry at unprecedented levels," adding that shrink represented $112.1 billion in losses in fiscal year 2022.

Pressley took to the House floor Tuesday to condemn the DEI-captive company's decision.

"Walgreens is planning to close yet another pharmacy in the Massachusetts 7th. This time on Warren Street in Roxbury — a community that is 85% black and Latino," said Pressley. "This closure is part of a larger trend of abandoning low-income communities like the previous closures in Mattapan and Hyde Park."

"These closures are not arbitrary and they are not innocent," continued the radical leftist. "They are life-threatening acts of racial and economic discrimination. ... Shame on you, Walgreens."

— (@)

Democratic Massachusetts Sens. Ed Markey and Elizabeth Warren joined Pressley earlier this month in injecting race into the matter, claiming that Walgreens was partaking in a trend of pharmacies "moving away from black and Latino neighborhoods to mostly white, higher income areas."

"These closures reflect a larger legacy of historic racial and economic discrimination, which has created pharmacy and food deserts and a lack of access to reliable transportation," added the race-obsessive Democrats.

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EEOC commissioner humiliates Mark Cuban over his failure to comprehend the Civil Rights Act: 'Dead wrong'



Race-obsessive billionaire Mark Cuban continues to publicly defend the organizational discrimination scheme known as DEI — a numbers game in which human beings' immutable characteristics and sexual preferences are factored into hiring and advancement decisions.

In his continued attack Sunday on color-blind meritocracy and what he previously termed "DEI-Phobi[a]," Cuban outed himself for apparently engaging in discriminatory practices. Although he may not have seen it that way, a commissioner from the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission intervened to inform him the matter was clean-cut — and he was on the wrong side of it.

Cuban was arguing on X with the Rabbit Hole, a user who has previously hammered the billionaire for his "DEI Denialism."

In a Substack piece earlier this month, the Rabbit Hole discussed the mental gymnastics Cuban and other corporate bigwigs perform in their efforts to defend DEI. The critic suggested their routine comes down to a lack of familiarity with the issue, an inability to digest arguments, and apathy in the face of facts.

Cuban afforded the Rabbit Hole an opportunity to test this theory, engaging the critic in a debate Sunday on the question: "Should candidate selection, at any level, consider non-merit based criteria like race and sex?"

The debate began when Cuban shared a link on X to an NBC News article entitled, "How right-wing influencers turned airplanes and airports into culture war battlegrounds."

The Rabbit Hole wrote in reply, "When shown proof of how DEI discriminates, you wrote it off by stating private entities can do whatever they want. Since then the goalposts have repeatedly been shifted. Given the weak nature of your defenses of DEI, I suspect there is no real rebuttal to the criticisms myself and others have raised."

Cuban jumped into the fray, pushing back against the notion that "seeking out members of a certain demographic to fill [a] role" was reprehensible.

"You are a CEO of a successful company that has 30 employees that are all black women, and you think a different perspective will help you grow the firm," wrote Cuban. "So you decide you want to hire a white man? You would be against that right?"

The Rabbit Hole held firm and answered in the affirmative, stressing, "I believe in a colorblind meritocracy; this means I am against forms of hiring which undercut merit including forms of hiring which cut out merited individuals over their group association(s)."

Turning the tables, the Rabbit Hole asked the billionaire whether he has "hired people on the basis of demographics on the belief that doing so better positioned your companies to succeed?"

Cuban claimed that while he has "never hired anyone based exclusively on race, gender, religion," "race and gender can be part of the equation" if that would put his business in the best position to succeed.

In response to Cuban's damning answer and apparent admission of a race-factored hiring approach, the Rabbit Hole responded, "Thank you for your transparency."

@mcuban \u201cAnd yes, race and gender can be part of the equation.\u201d\n\nThank you for your transparency.\n\nTitle VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex and national origin.
— (@)

EEOC Commissioner Andrea L. Lucas ultimately weighed in, lending her expert insight on discrimination law and humiliating Cuban in front of millions of users.

"EEOC Commissioner here. Unfortunately you're dead wrong on black-letter Title VII law," wrote Lucas. "As a general rule, race/sex can't even be a 'motivating factor' — nor a plus factor, tie-breaker, or tipping point. It's important employers understand the ground rules here."

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 notes that "an unlawful employment practice is established when the complaining party demonstrates that race, color, religion, sex, or national origin was a motivating factor for any employment practice, even though other factors also motivated the practice."

— (@)

Lucas provided Cuban with a link to "further information about the relevant legal standards, and corresponding potential risks" pertaining to DEI practices should he "need a primer on the law."

Missouri Sen. Eric Schmitt subsequently told Cuban, "Call your lawyer."

America First Legal noted, "This is the beauty of @X --here you have [Mark Cuban] openly admitting to violating black-letter employment law, and getting admonished/corrected in real-time by an EEOC Commissioner. ... For the entire world to see."

Cuban doubled down on his remarks Monday, stating, "Race is part of the equation never the deciding factor. As is diversity of background."

@FutureConfirmed Race is part of the equation never the deciding factor. As is diversity of background
— (@)

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