'Infinite diversity': Actress in canned 'Star Trek' series warns against 'whitewashed' sci-fi



The most notably progressive "Star Trek" series will be canceled by CBS Studios and Paramount+, prompting one of its actors to demand the show's lore nevertheless become more "woke."

Studios were so supportive of "Star Trek: Starfleet Academy" that Paramount+ picked it up for a second season before the show even aired; but that will be all.

'The world is still not ready to hear the message of love, peace, [and] infinite diversity.'

The show's demise began when it launched for free on YouTube — an already bad sign — garnering just over 85,000 views in the first 24 hours; not good for a show with an estimated budget of $10 to $20 million per episode.

Nothing could prepare audiences for the show's trajectory though. The new series boasted polyamorous refugee Klingons, Stephen Colbert, and gender activist Tig Notaro playing a teacher pushing DEI ideology on cadets.

Progressivism certainly flowed through the series' actors. Case in point, Gina Yashere, who played Lura Thok.

Yashere took to Instagram after the show's cancelation to declare that audiences aren't ready to hear about love and tolerance and that future iterations must avoid becoming too white.

RELATED: New 'Star Trek' DEI disaster flops despite airing for free: A 'huge, gay, glee club middle finger'

"Obviously, the world is still not ready to hear the message of love, peace, infinite diversity, acceptance, the eschewing of violence and senseless wars," she said in a video, first reported by Fandom Pulse.

She added, "And 'Star Trek' will be back stronger than ever. And preferably with the same message and not completely whitewashed."

In her written caption, Yashere made it abundantly clear she was proud of the show's woke ideology as well.

"Be safe out there peeps. Stay woke. Wokeywoke. Wokest of the woke. Wokeyliscious. A cacophony of woke."

The show's messaging was never left for interpretation either. Its actors and showrunners will have to come to terms with the fact that they fully presented their intent, and it was not viewed favorably.

RELATED: Polyamorous refugee Klingons: New 'Star Trek' writer makes 'three-parent household' a priority

Photo by Michael Tullberg/Getty Images

When the show first aired, series creator Alex Kurtzman said he was "not slowing down on representation in any way," while characterizing "representation" as being the "beating heart" of the show.

Karim Diane, who played the aforementioned Klingon who wore a skirt and dress, said back in January that his character would have his sexuality "explored."

This manifested in a Klingon/human love story the character had with an allegedly "nonbinary" person.

Diane has since promised the second season is "basically just Season 1 turned all the way up."

In a statement to Variety, both CBS and Paramount said that while they were "incredibly proud of the ambition, passion, and creativity" the series showcased, it will not receive a third season.

Variety also reported that "Starfleet Academy" failed to secure a significant audience and did not rank among Nielsen's Top 10 charts for streaming viewership.

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Welcome to the new high-school activism: One side chants, the other gets punished



For weeks, students at hundreds of schools across the country have walked out of class to protest Immigration and Customs Enforcement actions. At Rincon High School in Arizona, leaders of the Latino Student Union organized a walkout to oppose the Trump administration’s immigration policies.

The next week, some of those same students demanded the removal of a Turning Point USA club from the Tucson Unified campus. Members of the Latino Student Union petitioned the school board to bar the conservative club from meeting on school property, claiming its presence made them feel “unsafe” and accusing it of a “track history of presenting hate and presenting fear.”

As American life grows more polarized, young people face mounting pressure to treat opposing speech not as something to answer, but as something to silence.

Arizona was not a one-off.

Last fall, students at Royal Oak High School in Michigan walked out over the formation of a Turning Point chapter. One protest organizer complained that the club “spreads conservative views ... and those aren’t things that we promote in our school.”

That statement tells you plenty. Students increasingly invoke the language of safety and inclusion not to protect their own right to speak, but to suppress the speech of others.

Royal Oak Schools says the district aims to provide “an inclusive, diverse, safe, and student-first environment” in which students will be “embraced, accepted, challenged, and prepared.” Yet schools cannot claim to challenge and prepare students while teaching them that disagreement itself amounts to harm.

These incidents may still be relatively few, but they point to a broader problem: the spread of speech intolerance from college campuses into K-12 education.

A report released in September by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression found alarming attitudes on college campuses. Among roughly 70,000 students surveyed, 34% said violence to stop someone from speaking can be acceptable, while 72% supported shouting down speakers in rare cases.

College pathologies do not stay on college campuses for long.

Through social media, ethnic-studies curricula, school speech codes, and the influence older students exert on younger ones, the campus habit of treating dissent as danger has moved into elementary and secondary education.

The results have already turned ugly.

RELATED: How liberals let America’s colleges collapse into illiberalism

Spencer Platt/Getty Images

After a walkout at Hayes High School in Ohio in February, one senior said the protest “went as peaceful as it could have gone with the amount of anger that we have.” In reality, an altercation between several protesters and one dissenter ended with three students charged with disorderly conduct. The confrontation appears to have begun when walkout participants repeatedly blew whistles in the student’s face.

In Kansas, student counterprotesters from Olathe Northwest High School were attacked while demonstrating across the street from an anti-ICE protest. Their offense? They merely supported the administration and current immigration enforcement.

Thankfully, these incidents remain uncommon. But the trend should concern parents, teachers, and communities. As American life grows more polarized, young people face mounting pressure to treat opposing speech not as something to answer, but as something to silence.

Whatever one thinks of school walkouts, defenders of these protests usually justify them as exercises in civic engagement and First Amendment expression. Fine. But civic engagement does not mean demanding a microphone for yourself and a muzzle for everyone else.

Students need to learn that free speech cuts both ways. They have every right to voice their convictions. They also have a responsibility to defend the rights of people whose views they dislike, distrust, or even find offensive.

If they do not learn that lesson now, student activism will become less about persuasion than coercion. And young Americans will be trained not to practice liberty, but to imitate the tyranny they claim to oppose.

Leftists are already politicizing Chuck Norris’ legacy after death



Following the death of action legend Chuck Norris, what might have been a moment of shared cultural reflection has quickly turned contentious. Leftists are already scrutinizing Norris’ film legacy through a political lens — something BlazeTV host Sara Gonzales is tired of.

“Democrats never waste an opportunity to make everything about politics, make death about politics. ... This guy was a Hollywood icon, a meme legend, and you would think that we could all just be like, ‘Oh, that’s sad that he died,’” Gonzales says.

One article published by Variety magazine makes this clear, with the headline reading, “Chuck Norris Was a Great Action Star — but Politics May Overshadow His Legacy.”


“Yes, he was a Republican, but he didn’t really wear that with a badge on his shoulder or anything, but weirdly, this isn’t even what the article is taking shots at him about,” Gonzales comments, before reading a paragraph from the article.

“Was Norris a brilliant athlete and top-shelf star? Yes. But there’s no denying that his roles were part of a body of work used to show American strength, might, and the pernicious attraction of taking the law into one’s own hands — something that seems less fun in a year in which our country is funneling money into bombing Iran and ICE agents are acting like one-man militias,” the author, William Earl, wrote.

“Given our nation’s divisions in morality, information literacy, and overall sense of reality, it’s easier to see Norris’ characters as justification for a fringe conspiracy movement rather than a moral standing,” he continued.

Earl went on to ask the question that’s on no one’s mind: “When a star is the poster boy for American exceptionalism and might, at what point does his legacy transition from escapism to dangerous propaganda?”

“What an absolute freaking loser,” Gonzales comments.

“The Democrats make everything unfun. They are unfun, miserable, ghoulish people,” she continues. “But you know what? That leaves us with no shortage of things to talk about.”

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Michigan’s El-Sayed Said He Did 'Time' After His Arrest at a Minimum Wage Protest. He Got a Ticket, Records Show.

The left-wing candidate in the Democratic primary for Michigan’s open Senate seat, Abdul El-Sayed, told a labor union audience last month that he put his "body on the line" and did "time" after being arrested at a minimum wage protest in 2018. Police records show that he was briefly detained in a police van and promptly released with a misdemeanor ticket—and the charges were dropped a few months later.

The post Michigan’s El-Sayed Said He Did 'Time' After His Arrest at a Minimum Wage Protest. He Got a Ticket, Records Show. appeared first on .

Insane far-left Democrats OBLITERATED in Illinois primary



A major political shake-up unfolded in Illinois as progressives whose views align with those of "the Squad" were dealt a decisive blow in recent Democratic primaries.

According to BlazeTV host Stu Burguiere, the losses highlight growing fractures within the Democratic Party, particularly between establishment figures and the party’s far-left flank associated with the likes of Jasmine Crockett, Ilhan Omar, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

“What we saw in Illinois was a situation where you’ve got obviously a bright, bright, bright blue state, right? This is the bluest of the blue basically where, you know, you can kind of do whatever you want if you’re a Democrat,” Stu begins.

“So, you have these factions of the Democratic Party warring with each other. They’re fighting, they’re going back and forth trying to take control. Of course, one of the big groups that is trying to do that is the sort of Squad left,” he continues.


“The Squad left,” Stu explains, is the “AOC left.”

“Someone who’s very, very socialist leaning, very, very anti-Israel, very, you know, pro-abortion and trans, everything as far as you can go,” he says.

“And they had a play here in Illinois. They had a chance to do something. They had a chance to move the needle a little bit, and it did not work,” he says, referencing an article by Axios titled, “The ‘Squad’ left suffers complete wipeout in Illinois.”

“The left suffered a virtually total collapse in the Illinois Democratic congressional primaries on Tuesday night — even in races where the AIPAC-backed candidate lost,” the article reads.

“It’s a bad sign for the dozens of insurgent Democrats running in congressional races across the country, both in open seats and as primary rivals to older or more establishment-oriented incumbents,” it continues.

“AIPAC is like, I don’t know, they’re supposedly the ultimate villains of all the world right now because, you know, a lot of people even on the right, certainly plenty on the left, are blaming them for pushing us into war with Iran and, you know, all sorts of different things,” Stu explains.

Stu notes that AIPAC was “very excited” about Illinois’ results, as “they put a lot of money into these races to try to stop very hardcore anti-Israel candidates from winning those primaries.”

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‘The party of hating dogs’: Liberals lose their minds after celebrity attends event to SAVE DOGS at Mar-a-Lago



Actress Katherine Heigl was in attendance at Mar-a-Lago last weekend where she posed for photos with Lara Trump and Jeanine Pirro. And while the left is not happy with seeing the actress there, it was at an event that raised $5.5 million for Big Dog Ranch Rescue.

“Liberals outraged, I told you about everything, including dogs. Dogs,” BlazeTV host Sara Gonzales comments, shocked. “They don’t like dogs. That's how you know they’re not the party for you. They are the party of hating dogs, because there was a big fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago to rescue dogs.”

“Now everyone hates Katherine Heigl for going there and trying to raise money to save dogs,” she adds.


One X user wrote, “F**k her and anyone attending maga-lago for any reason,” while another wrote, “Supporting Nazis. So many orgs that aren’t run by white supremacists. This is a choice.”

However, Heigl wasn’t taking the attacks lying down.

"Animals don’t vote. The only room they don’t like is the euthanasia room at a shelter," Heigl told Page Six in a statement. "They are completely at the mercy of us, and they have no voice of their own."

"This event was about animal advocacy, something that has always been deeply personal to me," she continued. "Anyone who knows me knows that protecting animals is one of my greatest passions."

“The point is, animals, of course, do not knowingly vote,” Gonzales comments, adding, “They’re not involved in our politics. And the charity event raised $5.5 million for rescue dogs.”

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James Talarico found a verse — and twisted the meaning



Democrats can learn. Political survival demands adaptation, and lately some on the left have started studying their Republican opponents with something like anthropological curiosity. They watch Republicans work a crowd and ask a practical question: What works?

One answer keeps recurring. Republicans like to quote the Bible.

Christians should stay alert. Not everyone who borrows the language of faith speaks truth.

You can picture the light-bulb moment. A candidate cites Scripture. The audience nods. Somewhere, a strategist thinks: Let’s find a guy who can do that for us.

Enter James Talarico, the Texas Democrat nominee for U.S. Senate who quotes Scripture all day long.

That tactic may sway voters who enjoy hearing a verse, even when it gets pulled out of context to bless ideas Scripture condemns. Christians who know their Bibles will spot the move fast.

Jesus warned about this exact type: “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits.”

A Bible verse proves nothing by itself. Wolves can quote Scripture, too. So can the devil.

The question is what the verse is being used to defend.

The abortion argument

Talarico claims Genesis 2:7 teaches that a human being becomes alive, and worthy of legal protection, only at first breath.

Wrong. The verse describes Adam’s creation. God formed the first man from dust and then breathed life into him. That account does not describe ordinary human development in the womb. It describes a singular act of creation.

Every other human life begins at conception. A distinct organism exists from that point, with its own DNA and its own trajectory of development. Scripture treats unborn children as living persons. Psalm 139:13-16 speaks of God knitting a child together in the womb.

Even if someone granted Talarico’s “first breath” premise for argument’s sake, the logic collapses quickly into moral absurdity. It pushes abortion right up to delivery. Some activists embrace that conclusion. Most Americans recoil, however, because they sense the truth: Killing a fully formed child moments before birth differs only in location from killing the same child moments after birth.

The ‘nonbinary God’ argument

Talarico also claims God is “nonbinary,” as if that settles the modern LGBTQ agenda.

God has no biological sex. God is spirit. That does not erase the created order for human beings.

Scripture speaks plainly: God created humanity male and female. Genesis 1:27 teaches it. Jesus repeats it when he addresses marriage: “From the beginning of the creation, God ‘made them male and female.’”

Christian teaching on marriage does not float as an arbitrary rule. It rests on creation itself, and Jesus affirms it.

RELATED: Talarico self-owns when he warns fascism will ‘be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross’

Photo by Gabriel V. Cardenas/Bloomberg via Getty Images

The rainbow vs. the Ten Commandments

Talarico asks why a rainbow flag in a classroom counts as indoctrination while posting the Ten Commandments does not.

The answer isn’t complicated. The Ten Commandments summarize foundational moral truths about God, human life, and justice. They shaped the moral vocabulary of Western civilization for centuries.

The rainbow flag represents a moral program that rejects the biblical account of sex, marriage, and human nature. The two messages do not belong in the same moral category.

Fruit tells the truth

Jesus gave a practical test for identifying false teachers: Look at the fruit.

When someone uses Scripture to justify abortion or to deny the created order of male and female, the fruit shows itself. The apostle Peter warned about this kind of manipulation: “Untaught and unstable people twist [the Scriptures] to their own destruction.”

Christians should not get impressed because a politician can quote a verse. Even Satan did.

The question is whether the Bible is being handled faithfully or weaponized to sanctify fashionable sins.

Stay awake

Christians should stay alert. Not everyone who borrows the language of faith speaks truth.

Know the word of God. Test what you hear against it. Teach your children to do the same.

That’s how you recognize wolves, even when they show up in sheep’s clothing with a Bible in hand.

NYT columnist makes SICK comments about white people — John Doyle responds



A viral video is making waves online after journalist Wajahat Ali, journalist for the Daily Beast and the New York Times, posted a clip declaring that white Americans have already “lost” the demographic future of the country.

BlazeTV host John Doyle breaks down the clip on “The John Doyle Show” — and he doesn’t appear to be worried about the journalist’s wild claims.

“He is a Pakistani gentleman born to immigrant parents in California. He’s a Muslim leftist, very active on Twitter. So a few months ago, he posted this video essentially as a warning to white Americans, a kind of premature victory lap,” Doyle explains, “you know, practically confirming the idea of what’s been described as the ‘Great Replacement.’”

“You’ve lost. You have lost. You lost. The mistake that you made is you let us in in the first place. That’s the thing with brown people. And I’m going to say this as a brown person. There’s a lot of us. Like a lot. There’s like 1.2 billion in India. There’s more than 200 million in Pakistan. There’s like 170 million in Bangladesh,” Ali said proudly in the selfie video.


“Those are just the people there. I’m not even talking about the folks who are expats or immigrants. There’s a bunch of us. And we breed. We’re a breeding people. And the problem is, is you let us in in 1965,” he continued.

“There were a few of us beforehand, but once you let one of us in, you know what happens with brown folks? Our grandmother comes, our grandfather comes, our uncle comes, our aunt comes, our cousin comes, our second cousin comes, our third cousin comes. Then we have kids, a bunch of kids,” he said, asking, “And then guess what?”

“Some white women, you know, the Western civilization women, the pure women, the American women, quote unquote, the rust belt women, the real women, they like some of us brown folks. We don’t take them. They come to us,” he added.

“So this is obviously just like some irrational bloodlust fantasy. You know, this like cucking fantasy pretending that one, literally white people are being outbred. We are demographically less virile. We’re going to lose because, you know, we’re going to be outbred by people like that,” Doyle comments.

Doyle believes that Ali is “doing a kind of war dance” that Doyle himself sees as "bizarre."

“I think that this person is performing. So I’m going to try to interpret it in good faith. ... You know, the only reason that our country is being flooded with immigrants is because of the decisions of other white people,” Doyle explains, pointing out that those white people, who are the “elites,” are “evil.”

“I think that they align themselves with the third world because they have a bone to pick with the first world, with our civilization. That being said, they are in the driver’s seat to our problem. They are in the driver’s seat to our opposition,” he continues, before addressing Ali, “Not you. You are a pawn.”

“You are brought in specifically because it makes them more powerful, simply because, yeah, you're a number on a piece of paper. You’re not inventing things. You’re not organizing. You are shuffled around,” he says.

“So anyway, he’s trying to take this premature victory lap. It’s very passive aggressive, you know, declaring victory over Americans, white people. We’re going to be outbred or something in our own country. It’s just simply not true,” he adds.

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No kidding: 'Ecofeminist' course at UVA has students consulting goats and lichen about oppression



An alumni group is questioning the academic value of a course on offer at the taxpayer-subsidized University of Virginia — a course taught by a non-straight poet who apparently encourages students to consult animals about their supposed oppression.

The Jefferson Council, an alumni group "committed to leading the University of Virginia back to Thomas Jefferson’s legacy of freedom and excellence," noted Wednesday on X, "A course titled 'Ecofeminist Poetry & Poetics' being taught this spring at the University of Virginia has students 'listen' to plants and animals to better understand how 'settler colonialism' and slavery 'thrive off of the intrinsic interconnectedness between species.'"

'Birds, goats, willow oaks, and lichen will accompany us through the semester.'

"This is a real taxpayer-funded class," the group continued. "Is this what higher education has become?"

The description for the graduate course on the UVA English department's website — which contains quotes from identitarian feminist and LGBT activist Alexis Pauline Gumbs — states:

This interdisciplinary course will interweave brief readings from ecofeminist theory, ecopoetics, and black and indigenous environmental theories with books of contemporary ecofeminist poetry. This curriculum will encourage each of us to see what happens when we “rethink and re-feel,” writes Gumbs, our own “relations, possibilities, and practices” in conversation with the more-than-human world.

The course syllabus notes that "birds, goats, willow oaks, and lichen will accompany us through the semester as we too attempt to listen across species," reported the College Fix.

University records show that associate professor Brian Teare, a "queer"-identifying climate alarmist who specializes in environmental humanities and "queer theory," has taught versions of the ecofeminist course for several years.

RELATED: Why do state schools bankroll people who despise the state?

Photo by Carol M. Highsmith/Buyenlarge/Getty Images

John Gardner, president of the Jefferson Council, told the College Fix, "It is surprising to the extent that such an inane and clearly agenda-based politicized course could find its way into the curricula of any respectable institute of higher learning."

"It is not surprising to the extent that over the past decade or more the increasingly left-wing politicized faculties of most universities have turned their curricula into woke fantasylands," added Gardner.

'It is more suitable to be a course taught in Orwell’s "1984."'

Teare and the university did not respond to a request for comment from Blaze News.

Gardner referred to three other radical courses at the university that warrant concern: "Women and Gender in the Deaf World"; "Gender, Body Image, and Social Activism"; and "Queer Judaism," which poses the question, "What if we approached Judaism as a queer religion?"

"There are many others with the common theme that they are mostly narrowly focused on allegedly marginalized ‘identity groups’ based on race, gender, or ethnicity and are often intended to promote a predetermined agenda," said Gardner.

The alumni group's president noted that Thomas Jefferson founded the university because "he felt it was important to have an educated and informed citizenry to sustain a successful republic."

Gardner suggested that courses like Teare's "are not meant to follow truth, but to advance a political/social agenda. It is more suitable to be a course taught in Orwell’s '1984' than at Mr. Jefferson’s university."

In 2025, UVA received over $338 million dollars in funding from the state.

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'Case about swinging d**ks': Fed-up Trump judge tears apart woke colleagues for forcing Christian female spa to admit men



A federal judge minced no words in his dissenting opinion regarding the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals' refusal on Thursday to rehear the case of a Christian-owned women's spa forced by Washington state into admitting men.

Judge Lawrence VanDyke, an appointee of President Donald Trump, wrote, "This is a case about swinging d**ks."

''Sometimes, it feels like the supposed adults in the room have collectively lost their minds.'

"The Christian owners of Olympus Spa — a traditional Korean, women-only, nude spa — understandably don't want them in their spa," VanDyke continued. "Their female employees and female clients don't want them in their spa either. But Washington State insists on them. And now so does the Ninth Circuit."

The family-owned spa was accused of discrimination in 2020 for refusing access to a trans-identifying male whose penis was intact, and has been fighting an uphill legal battle ever since. In May, a three-judge Ninth Circuit panel ruled against the spa, holding that the First Amendment rights of its owners had not been violated by the state.

The spa subsequently petitioned the Ninth Circuit for a panel rehearing and/or a full-court rehearing of the case. Those were denied, prompting VanDyke to go nuclear:

Sometimes, it feels like the supposed adults in the room have collectively lost their minds. Woke regulators and complicit judges seem entirely willing, even eager, to ignore the consequences that their Frankenstein social experiments impose on real women and young girls. Yet if harmful and unfortunate consequences were all this case was about, we’d have to shrug and say: "That’s what comes with living in a democracy." Unless the Constitution is implicated, we get what we voted for “good and hard."

But some fundamental rights, like the right to the free exercise of religion, are constitutionally protected precisely to avoid majoritarian infringement. Unfortunately, in this case the panel majority has allowed Washington State bureaucrats to trample on such rights long secured by the Constitution.

VanDyke tore apart his colleagues' reasoning, stating that:

  • "[Washington Law Against Discrimination] is not generally applicable because it treats comparable secular activity more favorably than Olympus Spa's religiously motivated activity";
  • "WLAD's application is not neutral because it facially differentiates among religions based on theological choices by granting an exemption to only a small set of favored religious activities"; and
  • "WLAD's woke redefinition of 'sex' undermines the hard-fought legal protections granted to women as a class and undercuts established criminal laws against voyeurism and indecent exposure."

Some of the Trump judge's colleagues couldn't handle his criticism and frank language.

RELATED: WATCH: Talarico self-owns when he warns fascism will 'be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross'

Annie Wells/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

Mary Margaret McKeown, an appointee of former President Bill Clinton who previously ruled against the spa, said in a statement that was joined by over 25 other Ninth Circuit judges that the American legal system is "not a place for vulgar barroom talk" or a "place to suggest that fellow judges have 'collectively lost their minds,' or that they are 'woke judges' 'complicit' in a scheme to harm ordinary Americans."

McKeown claimed that VanDyke's language — not her decisions — "undermines public trust in the courts."

VanDyke said in response to his colleagues' pearl-clutching:

My distressed colleagues appear to have the fastidious sensibilities of a Victorian nun when it comes to mere unpleasant words in my opinion, yet exhibit the scruples of our dearly departed colleague Judge Reinhardt when it comes to the government trampling on religious liberties and exposing women and girls to male genitalia. That kind of selective outrage speaks for itself. The public deserves a court that is actually trustworthy. We should be earning that trust, not demanding it like petty tyrants.

"Sometimes 'dignified and civil' words are employed to mask a legal abomination. ... Sometimes coarse and ugly words bear the truth," VanDyke added.

Go deeper

The spa, owned by a theologically conservative Christian family, is modeled on jjimjilbang, sex-segregated bathhouses in Korea, and requires that guests be nude inside the pool area.

Court documents state the spa required that entrants "physically present in the nude as ... female," further noting, "Biological women are welcome." Under the rules, female-identifying males were welcome just so long as they had "gone through post-operative sex confirmation surgery." In other words, penises weren't permitted.

In 2020, Caleb Richmond — a trans-identifying male who was once married to a woman and now goes by Haven Wilvich — attempted to use the Washington Law Against Discrimination to gain access to the spa. The spa reportedly denied the man access, prompting him to file a complaint with the Washington State Human Rights Commission.

When the WSHRC notified the spa that it had received a discrimination complaint, the spa asserted that its "biological women"-only policy was in keeping with state law and "essential for the safety, legal protection, and well-being of our customers and employees," court documents said.

'Washington has perversely distorted a law that was enacted to safeguard women's rights to strip women of protections.'

Although initially defiant, the spa signed a pre-finding settlement agreement requiring compliance with WLAD while reserving the right to mount a constitutional challenge.

Richmond reportedly boasted online that he had successfully found a way to legally invade the women's sanctuary. He wrote, "I did it," adding he got "the main naked lady spa in the area to change their policies and allow all self-identified women access regardless of surgery and genitals."

Richmond further suggested that he was "more woman" than any of his female critics because he is "an intentional woman whereas they are only incidental."

Myoon Woon Lee, the owner of the spa, sued the WSHRC, claiming that the WLAD, as enforced, impinged upon his "traditional, theologically conservative" Christian values and put his female clientele at risk.

A Washington District Court judge dismissed the case with prejudice in 2023, but Lee appealed to the Ninth Circuit.

A three-judge panel ruled in May 2025 that the spa cannot sue the WSHRC on First Amendment grounds. The majority held that the enforcement of WLAD "did not impermissibly burden the Spa's free speech," that the spa is "not an expressive association," and that "eliminating discrimination on the basis of sex and transgender status is a legitimate government purpose."

Judge McKeown stated in her May opinion for the majority, "The HRC's enforcement action against Olympus Spa was a straightforward application of Washington's statutory scheme."

Judge Kenneth Lee, a Trump appointee, said in his dissenting opinion, "Washington has perversely distorted a law that was enacted to safeguard women's rights to strip women of protections. The women and girls of Washington state deserve better."

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