In the wake of the horrific and historic assassination of the brilliant young conservative Charlie Kirk, there has understandably been increased focus on the rhetoric that preceded and followed the event. The overwhelming majority of Americans <a href="https://s3.us-west-1.wasabisys.com/media.deseret.com/media/misc/pdf/kirk-sky-national.pdf">(86%)</a> express concern over political violence, with <a href="https://statesunited.org/resources/political-violence-survey/">78%</a> believing it has escalated in recent years, and 57% saying it is a major problem — the highest response to that question in the last two years. 
When it comes to assessing blame, Americans are unsurprisingly <a href="https://www.deseret.com/u-s-world/2025/09/15/political-violence-america-charlie-kirk-shooting-morning-consult-poll/">split along partisan lines</a> on culpability, with the plurality of respondents believing the Left and Right bear equal responsibility. However, they find agreement in blaming politicians on both sides as being the key instigators.
Republicans point to examples of Hillary Clinton calling Trump supporters “deplorables;” Biden telling us that it’s time to “put a bulls-eye on Trump;” Maxine Waters telling supporters to “create a crowd and … push back” and during the 2021 unrest in Minneapolis “to get more confrontational;” Schumer telling Supreme Court Justices “… you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you;” Dan Goldman telling an MSNBC interviewer that Trump “has to be eliminated;” Vice President Harris telling everyone that Trump and MAGA supporters were “a threat to democracy;” and of course, the countless references to Trump and MAGA supporters being Hitler, Nazis, fascists, and Gestapo.
Democrats counter with references to Steve Bannon referring to the political opposition as “criminals, vermin,” and “enemies of the republic;” Trump telling supporters to “fight like hell” and claiming he called white supremacists “very fine people;” Marjorie Taylor Greene suggesting a “peaceful national divorce” between red and blue states; Trump calling Democrats “scum, garbage” and “enemies of the people;” and Musk posting that “The Left is the party of murder.”
It is much more emotionally engaging to discuss the implications and injustices of rhetorical content, but regardless of which side has been more vitriolic, there is a far larger, more influential factor that supersedes all of it: Who controls the dominant media platforms — and specifically, the digital platforms. And that dominance overwhelmingly belongs to the Left. The result is that the Left’s messages and hyperbole are broadcast to dramatically more people, dramatically more frequently, and on dramatically more channels. Further, competing or contradictory messaging is far more likely to be absent or censored on the Left’s channels, so their audience is fed a much more homogenous diet of narratives.
Consider three important media domains: 
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">The Legacy Media, with centralized and professionally produced content, including television, radio, and newspapers (CNN, Reuters, Fox News, The New York Times, NPR, BBC, etc.)</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Social media — with user-generated content, no editorial oversight, and algorithm-generated visibility (Facebook, X—formerly Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit, etc.)</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Search (Google, Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, etc.)</li>
</ul>
The waning, but still significant, mainstream media are <a href="https://www.mrc.org/liberal-mediaevery-poll-shows-journalists-are-more-liberal-american-public-and-public-knows-it">dominantly Left-leaning and becoming more so</a>. Research has shown that members of the media are <a href="https://ballotpedia.org/Fact_check/Do_97_percent_of_journalist_donations_go_to_Democrats">overwhelmingly liberal</a>, with the vast majority of them supporting Democratic candidates. In 2016, 96% of journalists’ donations went to the Hillary Clinton campaign. <a href="https://www.mrc.org/node/90399">Media Research Center found</a> that 92% of Trump coverage during the 2020 presidential campaign was negative – even more so than the relentless, hostile coverage he received in 2017. When examining bias in mainstream/traditional media, <a href="https://www.biasly.com/media-bias-chart/us-main/?">studies</a> have concluded that upwards of 60% of these outlets are left-leaning. But that doesn’t tell the whole story because that percentage is based on the number of outlets, regardless of the audience size for that outlet. When considering the total audience size and the percentage of it that receives information with a left-leaning bias, the <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/20/2025/06/pj_2025-06-10_news-media-sources_report.pdf">bias number climbs closer to 75%</a>. The percentage of Americans viewing a liberal bias in the mainstream media has doubled since 1985.
However, traditional media are quickly being pushed aside by social media, where the leftist bias is even more pronounced. The top social media companies are all Left-leaning (See <a href="https://www.cato.org/commentary/how-did-ai-get-so-biased-favor-left">here</a>, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Rigged-Media-Democrats-Seized-Elections/dp/168451259X/">here</a>, <a href="https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/social-media-trump-conservative-bias/">here</a>, and <a href="https://twitterfiles.substack.com/p/the-censorship-industrial-complex">here</a>). Meta, the undisputed king of social media, owns Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger, reaching approximately <a href="https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-networks-ranked-by-number-of-users/">4 billion users</a> and controlling 75-80% of the social media market worldwide. Alphabet Inc., a smaller behemoth that owns Google and YouTube, has just surpassed $3 trillion in market cap and reaches some <a href="https://datareportal.com/reports/digital-2025-sub-section-top-social-platforms?">2.2 billion users</a>. A collection of companies, including those owning TikTok, Douyin, WeChat, QQ, and Snapchat, reaches an additional <a href="https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-networks-ranked-by-number-of-users/?">3.5 billion users</a> combined. Musk’s little X is much further down the list with a mere 500 million users.
I previously described social media as the <a href="https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/08/the_federal_government_colluded_with_social_media_to_control_content_so_what.html">800-pound gorilla in a rapidly shrinking cage</a>, noting that usage has skyrocketed from 5% in 2005 to over 70% today. Some estimates indicate that as much as 38% of all internet time today is spent on social media. Considering Facebook alone, the vast majority (nearly 70%) of <a href="https://www.demandsage.com/facebook-statistics/?">Facebook’s nearly 3 billion users</a> visit the site daily, and more than half of them visit it several times per day. 
The younger generations are particularly fond of social media, with a strong plurality — some <a href="https://www.weforum.org/stories/2025/07/news-consumption-social-video/?">44% of Americans aged 18 to 24 and 34% of those aged 25 to 34 </a>— reporting that they now obtain their news and information from social media and video formats, rather than traditional media. This trend is accelerating worldwide, raising concerns about misinformation, algorithmic bias, and the blurring of entertainment and news.
What about when audiences go searching for information on their own? Most commonly today, this means using a computer, and in this world, Google controls a whopping <a href="https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share?">90% of the search market</a>, processing some <a href="https://sqmagazine.co.uk/google-search-statistics/?">8.9 billion search requests</a> per day, amounting to over 5 trillion annually. Over 70% of all clicks go to the top 5 search results (hence the industry joke that the best place to bury a dead body is on the second page of results for a Google search — because nobody ever looks there). They control a significantly larger share (<a href="https://www.theglobalstatistics.com/google-statistics/?">95%</a>) of the global mobile search market.
Just prior to the 2022 midterm elections, <a href="https://www.allsides.com/blog/google-news-shows-strong-political-bias-allsides-analysis">researchers found that the plurality of articles returned</a> for a Google search under the term “election” were from the New York Times and CNN (44%), with 0% from center or Right-leaning outlets. In 2023, <a href="https://www.allsides.com/blog/google-news-shows-strong-political-bias-allsides-analysis?copilot_analytics_metadata=eyJldmVudEluZm9fbWVzc2FnZUlkIjoiMXB5eDR2NGs1WnJkVDYxR3RWcXA4IiwiZXZlbnRJbmZvX2NvbnZlcnNhdGlvbklkIjoiOURMZ3dnaG5tdFlhWHpzc0xiZGVzIiwiZXZlbnRJbmZvX2NsaWNrU291cmNlIjoiY2l0YXRpb25MaW5rIiwiZXZlbnRJbmZvX2NsaWNrRGVzdGluYXRpb24iOiJodHRwczpcL1wvd3d3LmFsbHNpZGVzLmNvbVwvYmxvZ1wvZ29vZ2xlLW5ld3Mtc2hvd3Mtc3Ryb25nLXBvbGl0aWNhbC1iaWFzLWFsbHNpZGVzLWFuYWx5c2lzIn0=">the same research firm found</a> that 61% of the articles posted on the Google News homepage came from Left-rated sources, with only 3% coming from Right-rated sources. Repeated samplings produced very similar results.
<a href="https://www.gotchseo.com/google-biased/?">Another research firm</a> used 50 politically charged search terms with Google and found that the results were demonstrably left-leaning. Consider their results for the following:
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">“Black Lives Matter” — 9 out of 10 results from Left-leaning outlets.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">“Border wall” – 7 of 10 results Left-leaning.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">“Dreamers” – 6 of 10 results Left-leaning.</li>
</ul>
Conversely, searches for “immigration policy” or “gun control facts” would surface snippets from CNN, NYT, or Vox, while conservative sources were buried or absent. Notably, the researchers attribute some of the results to the dominance of left-leaning outlets in Search Engine Optimization, rather than to algorithmic intent. Regardless, the result in the output is the same.
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In his 2019 testimony before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee, Dr. Robert Epstein, a self-proclaimed lifelong Democrat, argued that Google posed a threat not only to democracy but also to human autonomy. He has focused particularly on ephemeral search results — the auto-complete function that Google and others provide, which offers suggestions for alternative or additional phrasing. As but one example, he found that typing “Hillary Clinton is…” yielded suggestions like “winning,” “awesome,” and “qualified,” while “Donald Trump is…” produced “dangerous,” “racist,” and “a liar.” He <a href="https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Epstein%2520Testimony.pdf">concludes</a>: 
<blockquote>We are all aware that Google deletes or blocks access to videos on YouTube, which it owns, but few people are aware that Google blocks access to millions of websites. By the way, it is not just conservative content that gets censored . . . The problem with Google is not that it censors conservatives; the problem is that it has the power to determine what content billions of people worldwide will or will not see. No single entity – especially a private company that is not accountable to the public – should have such power.</blockquote>
It is clear that all three domains — the legacy media, social media, and search — are all heavily Left-leaning. Consider what this dominance means for the sheer volume of leftist information and rhetoric being broadcast and received. Put aside for the moment the questions of whether Democrats are using more pernicious or violent language than republicans. That issue pales in comparison to the question of how frequently their message is being broadcast — how many videos, shorts, stories, op-eds, posts — the sheer volume of minutes that will be devoted to the Left&#8217;s position versus the Right&#8217;s and whether any counter to it will be available.
The Left has a massive, pervasive, powerful, and sophisticated digital network, which I previously analogized to a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/as-democrat-warplane-takes-flak-audacity-remains-intact?author=Greg+Salsbury&amp;category=News&amp;elementPosition=6&amp;row=0&amp;rowType=Vertical+List&amp;title=As+Democrat+Warplane+Takes+Flak,+Audacity+Remains+Intact">stealth fighter</a>. Comparatively, conservatives have a Sopwith Camel. It is why on any number of issues, from Russiagate to Charlottesville misquotes, to Trump’s comments about COVID and bleach, to Charlie Kirk’s killer being right-wing, a shockingly high percentage of Americans still believe the lies that were broadcast ad nauseam despite their thorough debunking. Until conservatives can deal with the massive differential in scale, reach, and volume, “turning down the rhetoric” will remain a far lower priority issue.
* * *
Greg Salsbury, Ph.D. is former president of Western Colorado University and Board of Advisors member for <a href="https://starrs.us">STARRS.US</a>. He earned his Ph.D. in Communication from the University of Southern California and an M.A. from the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at USC.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

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It’s Not Just The Rhetoric, It’s Who Controls The Mic

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Charlie Kirk was an alt-right extremist.
Certainly, that’s what many in the so-called mainstream conclude from the collection of carefully culled remarks we are being fed by algorithms designed to maximally outrage us. These preternaturally powerful algos are fueled by bot armies, bad faith domestic players, sociopathic social media business practices, and hostile foreign regimes that seek to divide America.
How many hours of original Charlie Kirk footage do the algos have from which to select? An AI breakdown of Mr. Kirk’s content between podcasts, radio shows, YouTube videos, speeches, debates, and interviews estimates the total time somewhere between 5,000 and 8,000 hours.
If we put this in the context of a job, assuming an eight-hour workday with no breaks, that translates to 625 to 1,000 consecutive work days.
At the upper end, that is two years and nine months of talking.
How many moments of this man’s life have people watched before making up their minds that his assassination must be qualified or even celebrated?
Suppose deep machine learning cast its all-powerful eye on the last 8,000 hours that any of us spoke to find out-of-context moments to maximally denigrate, vilify, and dehumanize us. Do we really believe our character couldn’t be assassinated just as readily?
Do we really believe anyone’s reputation could survive that level of scrutiny and cherry picking?
Yours? Mine? Our family members? Classmates and colleagues? The leaders we support? The athletes and musicians we admire?
Of course not.
But this is the world that we’ve built and allowed. And now it is clearer than ever: Ours is a radicalized culture.
A culture that reduces people to their mistakes, jokes, stupid remarks, contradictions, hypocrisies, blind spots, and contentious assertions is a culture that allows zero tolerance for being human.
A culture that views legitimate political disagreement as an us-versus-them battle with existential stakes, that demonizes the opposition and views them not as factions and individuals but as a monolith.
Why is it radical? Because it remains ossified and immovable, allowing neither nuance nor learning.
A quick online spin shows us the ways that Charlie Kirk, a complex and good man, imperfect like every last one of us, has been hammered flat and dehumanized.
He’s racist… despite running a Young Black Leadership Summit for years, despite his avowed and articulate admiration of black luminaries like Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and Thomas Sowell, despite his mentoring of many young black activists and leaders, and despite his voter mobilization efforts for the black community.
He’s anti-gay… despite welcoming gays into the conservative movement with love and grace, despite his taking fire from actual homophobes and arguing to persuade them, despite his deep friendships with many gay people.
He’s transphobic… despite his multiple kind and respectful discussions with trans students in which he welcomed them and encouraged them toward health and meaning.
He’s a misogynist… despite the fact that he ran a Young Women’s Leadership Summit, elevated women on his podcasts and events, encouraged women to engage politically, uplifted female chapter leaders and ambassadors, and spoke to podcast audiences, which at times skewed 60-65% female.
He’s a violent extremist… despite his countless denunciations of violence and coercion, despite his refusal to fight when challenged, despite his exemplification of debate and discourse.
He’s alt-right… despite the fact that his opinions are not far from average Catholic and Christian views from a single generation ago, despite the fact that he was a bulwark against extremism on his own side, despite the reality that he was hated by Groypers, Nazis, terrorists, and white supremacists.
There seems to be a genuine belief among many that everything Charlie Kirk did was for power, manipulation, and control. A belief that his movement is all grift and corruption. A belief that for him and everyone in his orbit — and what an orbit it was — there was no wisdom, no grace, no care for people or the nation. Nothing genuine, only Machiavellian plans for an evil takeover.
How does this happen?
Our radicalizing media, social and otherwise, has strangled our curiosity, forbidding exploration of opposing notions, ideas, and thinkers. It tells us that we cannot risk contamination with information that might provide nuance and context. It tells us that anyone seeking to offer a different perspective is captured, brainwashed, not to be trusted. It tells us that if we modify our position, we will be outcast as a traitor, despised, one of “them.”
We all know the feeling. A stubborn ping in the chest, a compulsion at the back of our lizard brain that whispers: I’m on the right side of this issue, I just know it. I’m on the right side of history, I just know it. He’s a bad guy, I just know it. I don’t need to see or hear anything else that might disprove or alter my opinion, I just know it.
I just know it. And won’t be told otherwise.
That is what radicalization sounds like.
Terrifying to see in the mirror. Terrifying and shameful.
And it prevents many from gazing with open eyes and an open heart on a tableau that can only be described as biblical. A husband and father shot before his wife and young children at a free speech event on a college campus beneath a sign that says, Prove Me Wrong, in front of 3,000 kids, live-streamed to tens of thousands more. Terrified by the gunshot, his three-year-old daughter ran to him, crying, “Daddy.”
What would have been our overwhelming national reaction to this moment in a time before social media and cable news?
Not moral confusion, equivocation, political expediency — certainly not gleeful malice.
The difference between then and now is our widespread radicalization from being fed selective information 24-7.
This is what it looks like.
It looks like us.
And it will destroy America if we don’t stop it.
Because when we are blinded by radicalization, we are also blind to who our real enemies are.
Our foreign adversaries are feeding this division. Profiteering social media companies with teams of addiction specialists are laser-focused on exploiting our kids. Nihilists who wish only chaos, pain, and destruction.
There are alt-right extremists. Charlie Kirk was not one of them. 

He was the embodiment of how you teach conservative young men and women not to become alt-right extremists.
When challenged to fight by a grown man in front of 2,000 kids, Mr. Kirk said, “The only thing that is preventing us in this country from going to civil war is debate and dialogue… In fact, a mark of civilization is that we don’t have to go to blows and bullets, that we can have discourse and debate… We are going to remain peaceful.”
Again and again this week, I have been told:
Charlie was part of the problem. 
He was a peddler of hate.
He said some horrendous things.
Do you really want to defend him?
That is not a good hill for you to die on.
Is it?
For a man I never met?
For a thinker I considered to be, on many topics, a beneficial adversary?
For the principles he evinced — debate not fists, discussion not bullets, gratitude not grievance, love not hate?
Yes.
It is.
This is a hill for us to die on.
Just like he did.
* * *
Gregg Hurwitz is the New York Times #1 internationally bestselling author of 26 thrillers including the Orphan X series. His novels have won numerous literary awards and have been published in 33 languages. Gregg currently serves as the Co-President of International Thriller Writers (ITW). Additionally, he’s written screenplays and television scripts for many of the major studios and networks, and is an award-winning documentary producer. Gregg also wrote comics for AWA (including the critically acclaimed anthology NewThink), DC, and Marvel, and poetry. Currently, Gregg is working against polarization in politics and culture. To that end, he&#8217;s penned dozens of Op/Eds and pieces for The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, The Bulwark, Salon, and others, and pieces of creative content which have won numerous industry awards and achieved several hundred million views on digital TV platforms. He also helped write the opening ceremony of the 2022 World Cup.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

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‘Do You Really Want To Defend Him?’ Algorithms, Outrage, And The Death Of Charlie Kirk

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America is in a global artificial intelligence (AI) race. The stakes are historically high with economic and national security implications. As President Trump <a href="https://x.com/DavidSacks/status/1949249312363626843">declared</a> in July, “Whether we like it or not, we are suddenly engaged in a fast-paced competition to build and refine this groundbreaking technology that will determine so much about the future of civilization.”
The President, First Lady, and the Trump Administration are taking decisive steps to ensure America is prepared and positioned to win one of the most consequential competitions among nations in modern history, determining future global dominance.
On Thursday, First Lady Melania Trump hosted a meeting of the White House Task Force on Artificial Intelligence Education. Michael Kratsios, Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, serves as the chair of the task force. Other members include the Secretary of Agriculture, Secretary of Labor, Secretary of Education, Secretary of Energy, Director of the National Science Foundation, Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy, Special Advisor for AI and Crypto, Assistant to the President for Policy, and Assistant to the President for the Office of the First Lady.
<div id="attachment_969609" style="width: 875px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-969609" class="size-large wp-image-969609" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/GettyImages-2233064229-865x576.jpg" alt="Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Meta Platforms Inc., from left, US President Donald Trump, First Lady Melania Trump, and Bill Gates, chair of the Gates Foundation, during a dinner with tech leaders in the State Dining Room of the White House in Washington, DC, US, on Thursday, Sept. 4, 2025. Trump said he would be imposing tariffs on semiconductor imports &quot;very shortly&quot; but spare goods from companies like Apple Inc. that have pledged to boost their US investments. Photographer: Will Oliver/EPA/Bloomberg via Getty Images" width="865" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/GettyImages-2233064229-865x576.jpg 865w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/GettyImages-2233064229-300x200.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/GettyImages-2233064229-768x512.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/GettyImages-2233064229.jpg 1024w" sizes=" (max-width: 865px) 100vw, 865px" />Will Oliver/EPA/Bloomberg via Getty Images</div>
The task force is providing vital leadership for implementing the actions outlined in the “<a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/04/advancing-artificial-intelligence-education-for-american-youth/">Advancing Artificial Intelligence Education for American Youth</a>” executive order, signed into law by President Trump on April 23. As the executive order <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/04/advancing-artificial-intelligence-education-for-american-youth/">states</a>, the President and First Lady recognize that “to ensure the United States remains a global leader in this technological revolution, we must provide our Nation’s youth with opportunities to cultivate the skills and understanding necessary to adapt to and thrive in an increasing digital society.” K-12 education and workforce development training are foundational avenues for this to occur.
Students need to not just learn about artificial intelligence; education in America must be modernized to incorporate this rapidly advancing technology, thereby personalizing and enhancing student learning.
While artificial intelligence tools are the latest form of student academic dishonesty, they cannot be excluded from the learning process in the future based on fear. Students must be taught and held accountable for the appropriate use. Developers are designing educational technology tools that strengthen critical thinking and other essential cognitive skills — enhancing rather than supplanting learning — to meet the quickly accelerating market demand.
With clarity and candor, the Trump Administration has <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/04/advancing-artificial-intelligence-education-for-american-youth/">cast the vision</a> for charting a strategic path forward: “Early learning and exposure to AI concepts not only demystifies this powerful technology but also sparks curiosity and creativity, preparing students to become active and responsible participants in the workforce of the future and nurturing the next generation of American AI innovators to propel our Nation to new heights of scientific and economic achievement.”
As part of promptly putting this plan into action, First Lady Melania Trump recently launched the <a href="https://www.ai.gov/initiatives/presidential-challenge">Presidential AI Challenge,</a> which aims to cultivate interest and expertise in artificial intelligence technology among elementary through high school students and educators. Mrs. Trump beautifully <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Presidential-AI-Challenge-Guidebook-for-Participation.pdf">articulates</a> that the “President’s National Artificial Intelligence Challenge invites every student in America — from kindergarten to 12th grade — to unleash their imagination and showcase the spirit of American innovation.” Speaking directly to students, she explains, “our extraordinary educators will guide and empower you through this process to build a brighter, stronger future for us all.”
Acknowledging that America’s K-12 education institutions are largely unprepared to step into this moment, the Trump Administration has created crucial public-private partnerships to provide resources and advanced technological expertise and tools necessary to bring this vision into reality. Already, over 135 companies and organizations have signed the “<a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/edai/">Pledge to America’s Youth: Investing in AI Education</a>.”
Google CEO Sundar Pichai <a href="https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/education/ai-education-efforts/">announced</a> at the White House Task Force meeting that $150 million of the company’s $1 billion pledge, made in August, will support education and workforce training through AI education grants. This includes $2 million to the Flourish Fund, which provides financial support for nonprofit organizations that assist foster care youth with workforce development tools as they age out of the system. Additionally, it includes $3 million for Code.org to incorporate artificial intelligence features into its curriculum.
Winning the AI race isn’t merely aspirational. The Trump Administration is working with undeniable resolve because winning the AI race is imperative for ensuring the American Dream remains alive and thriving for future generations.
In January, the President hit the ground running, signing the “<a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/removing-barriers-to-american-leadership-in-artificial-intelligence/">Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence</a>” executive order. In July, the White House released the “<a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Americas-AI-Action-Plan.pdf">Winning the AI Race: America’s AI Action Plan</a>.” These executive orders are key, setting the stage to advance artificial intelligence nationwide through accelerating innovation, building infrastructure, and leading the world in diplomacy and security. The action plan <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/2025/07/white-house-unveils-americas-ai-action-plan/">asserts</a>, “Winning the AI race will usher in a new golden age of human flourishing, economic competitiveness, and national security for the American people.”
President Trump has proven he can win, is winning, and will never stop working to win for the American people. And in the race for AI, as in every fight for America’s future, his leadership is driving our nation not only to lead the world, but also to secure a new era of strength and prosperity.
* * *
<a href="https://www.discovery.org/p/ingraham/">Dr. Keri D. Ingraham</a> is a Senior Fellow at Discovery Institute, Director of the American Center for Transforming Education, and a Senior Fellow at Independent Women’s Forum.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

First Lady Melania Trump Hosts White House Task Force On AI Education

The First Lady’s Undeniable Resolve To Win The AI Race

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Most people who engage with AI do so in a fun and marginal way. But there is a very serious political side to it that the Trump administration understands.
In an attempt to actually push artificial intelligence forward, the federal government is pushing for vast energy exploration, which is a very good thing.
AI requires extraordinary energy consumption. China right now is vastly out-producing us on an energy level. They have no environmental regulations, so they&#8217;re ramming through huge energy projects that are designed in order to foster their AI system.
The United States, under President Trump, is opening up the energy sector, which is absolutely necessary. The United States is also deregulating a lot of the tech economy, which is excellent. It means that there will be more capital that flows into the AI race, and that matters for both reasons, military and technological.
American companies are still leading this race. Yesterday, ChatGPT released GPT-5, which is their new flagship AI model. “OpenAI executives called GPT-5 a “major upgrade” over the systems that previously powered ChatGPT, saying the new technology was faster, more accurate and less likely to ‘hallucinate,’ or make stuff up,” The New York Times <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/07/technology/openai-chatgpt-gpt-5.html">reported</a>. “OpenAI has consistently improved the technology that underpins its chatbot. &#8230; OpenAI’s many rivals, including Google, Meta, the start-up Anthropic and China’s DeepSeek, have released similar technologies. This is the first time that OpenAI has used a so-called reasoning model to power the free version of ChatGPT. Unlike the previous technologies, a reasoning model can spend time ‘thinking’ through complex problems before settling on an answer.” 
So, instead of AI being a predictive text mechanism, it basically checks its own work to prevent errors. All of this is indeed transformative, and the U.S. federal workforce is apparently going to be provided access to ChatGPT at essentially no cost. It&#8217;s going to filter through to the federal workforce, which is good.
<h3><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ep-2256-the-ben-shapiro-show?elementPosition=0&amp;row=0&amp;rowHeadline=The+Ben+Shapiro+Show&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Episodes+Carousel">WATCH: The Ben Shapiro Show</a></h3>
But this does raise the question of what we do with China, because it is a race between the United States and China.
There is some conflicting thinking among people on the Right about what to do with China. Some believe that China should be provided access to everything except the H100 from Nvidia, because if we get China dependent on American silicon, they will have to build on our platforms, and that&#8217;s better than them developing their own industry in microchips domestically.
And then there is the side which I tend toward, which is: No, don&#8217;t give China anything. Make them steal it.
The Trump administration seems rather split on this; you&#8217;ll see the Trump administration say China is cheating. President Trump even went after the Intel CEO for having too many close ties to China. Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas had called them out, pointing out that the deep relationship meant that Intel chips were probably getting into China illegally. Cotton wrote an open letter to Intel’s board with questions about the chipmaker’s new CEO Lip-Bu Tan’s ties to Chinese firms. 
I agree with that.
On the other hand, the administration is also opening up the possibility of Nvidia shipping H20s to the Chinese government.
So, a policy must be settled on with regard to how to view China and developments in AI. Are we going to be in an open competition with China? Is it going to be a “frenemy” situation with China?
That remains utterly unclear.
The answer may well determine the future of the United States.

WAIC World Artificial Intelligent Coference

​​​​Battling China Over AI And America’s Future

​​​​Battling China Over AI And America's Future

Ben Shapiro

China

Energy

For Uber, it’s time to get either new lawyers or new executives, because its new “Women Preferences” policy is obvious sex discrimination that violates the law. If we owned stock in the company, we’d sell it to avoid a loss from the big-dollar lawsuits that are sure to ensue for this ham-fisted “equity” scheme.
Recently, Uber <a href="https://www.uber.com/newsroom/women-preferences/">announced</a> that in the interests of making its “platform better for women,” it is implementing a “Women Preferences” pilot program that will give women riders &#8220;more ways to choose rides with women drivers&#8221; and women drivers the option “to request trips with women riders, including during peak earning hours like evenings.” In other words, Uber will be empowering its drivers to ignore, that is, discriminate against, male riders. Kind of reminds one of a time when taxi drivers all too often sped up and drove past black residents trying to hail them for a ride. Now, such conduct is prohibited by law.
The only difference between the racist taxi drivers of old and the sexist Uber drivers of new is that the digital “drive-by” discrimination is based on sex instead of race. But both are prohibited under the law.
Uber’s announcement claims this new policy is “designed to give women riders and drivers more choice, more confidence, and more flexibility.” However, “more choice, more confidence, and more flexibility” does not provide a company with a license to violate state and federal anti-discrimination laws.
Uber also brags in its announcement that it started this program in, of all places, Saudi Arabia. You know, one of the world’s most discriminatory countries, where women are treated as second-class citizens.
Yes, you read that right. Uber started its “Women Preferences” pilot program in the unenlightened Middle Eastern nation only after Saudi Arabia finally gave women the right to drive in 2019. That’s a remarkable delay, given that the first woman to be <a href="https://transportationhistory.org/2022/03/02/women-in-transportation-history-anne-rainsford-french-bush-automotive-pioneer/">issued</a> a driver’s license in the District of Columbia (Anne Rainsford French) received it in 1900. But what more would one expect from a nation that didn’t grant women the right to vote for the <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-35075702">first time</a> until 2015?
Uber’s lawyers seem to need a refresher on the law.
As a company incorporated in California, Uber is subject to the state’s <a href="https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection.xhtml?lawCode=CIV&amp;sectionNum=51">Unruh Civil Rights Act</a>, which prohibits discrimination by all business establishments open to the public in California. Among others, it applies to hotels, restaurants, stores, theaters, taxis, and yes, rideshare companies like Uber and Lyft. California-based businesses that serve the public must treat everyone equally — regardless of their race, religion, sex, or disability, among other protected characteristics.
What’s more, federal law — the <a href="https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/civil-rights-act">Civil Rights Act of 1964</a> — prohibits discrimination in public accommodations as well. And while sex is not a protected category under Title II of the Civil Rights Act (like race is), Title VII of that same Act prohibits sex discrimination and harassment in employment contexts. That means that male Uber drivers who are not provided with the same sex-selective rider options as their female colleagues may have a claim for discriminatory treatment under that federal law, as well.
This isn’t the first time that the rideshare company has been accused of violating civil rights law. In 2017, Uber <a href="https://www.eeoc.gov/newsroom/uber-pay-44-million-resolve-eeoc-sexual-harassment-and-retaliation-charge#:~:text=The%20pre%2Dlitigation%20agreement%20was,retaliation%20after%20January%201%2C%202014.">agreed</a> to pay out $4.4 million in fees to settle a class-action lawsuit charging that the company had failed to adequately address sexual harassment by its drivers against female passengers. The same year, Uber software engineer Susan Fowler wrote a blog post that went viral in which she <a href="https://time.com/5784464/susan-fowler-book-uber-sexual-harassment/">accused</a> the Silicon Valley-based company of sex discrimination and harassment — both violations of Title VII.
And in 2021, the U.S. Department of Justice sued Uber, alleging that the company had violated the Americans with Disabilities Act by charging wait time fees to riders with disabilities who took longer to get in Uber vehicles. Uber eventually agreed to <a href="https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/uber-commits-changes-and-pays-millions-resolve-justice-department-lawsuit-overcharging-people#:~:text=(Uber)%20to%20resolve%20a%20lawsuit,discriminatory%20fees%20due%20to%20disability.">settle</a> the lawsuit, and paid millions in compensation to affected riders.
Uber’s new policy also allows riders to “select the ‘Women Drivers’ option when requesting a ride.”
If you want to avoid a taxi, bus, train, or airplane because you don’t like the race or sex of the driver or pilot, you can do that. While that might evidence questionable moral beliefs, it doesn’t violate state or federal law — after all, consumers exercise preference in the market all the time. But the private companies and local governments who own those taxis, buses, trains, and airplanes cannot engage in the same type of discriminatory “preferencing.”
Uber is rolling out this program in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Detroit, and says it is doing so “after extensive testing and feedback from global markets like Saudi Arabia, Germany, and France, where women-only options have been well received.”
Uber’s conduct in “global markets like Saudi Arabia” is blatantly illegal in the United States, regardless of whether it’s “well received” or not.
* * *
Hans von Spakovsky is a Senior Legal Fellow at the Heritage Foundation and former Counsel to the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights at the U.S. Justice Department.
Sarah Parshall Perry is the Vice President and Legal Fellow of Defending Education and former counsel to the Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Education.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

Crowdsourced taxi driver talking to a passenger in the back seat

Uber’s New ‘Women Preferences’ Program Violates Civil Rights Law

Uber’s New 'Women Preferences' Program Violates Civil Rights Law

Civil Rights

Discrimination

Heritage Foundation

Saudi Arabia

Uber

Women

Since the October 7, 2023, massacre perpetrated on Israeli citizens by Hamas, with the subsequent response by Israel to declare war and enter the Gaza Strip to defeat Hamas, overt anti-Semitic sentiment has erupted on college campuses across America. Citing reports of “widespread antisemitic harassment,” the U.S. Department of Education is now <a href="https://www.ed.gov/about/news/press-release/us-department-of-educations-office-civil-rights-sends-letters-60-universities-under-investigation-antisemitic-discrimination-and-harassment">actively investigating</a> 60 institutions of higher learning.
Unfortunately, anti-Semitism is also playing out in K-12 education, particularly in a number of Northern California school districts like Pajaro Valley Unified School District (PVUSD), Palo Alto Unified School District (PAUSD), and Menlo Park City School District (MPCSD). These and other districts are embroiled in controversy over California’s Ethnic Studies curriculum mandate.
Many Californians are aware that in October 2021, Governor Gavin Newsom signed <a href="https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=202120220AB101" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Assembly Bill 101 (AB101)</a> into law, requiring all students graduating from high school in the 2029-2030 school year to take at least one semester of ethnic studies. The intent, per the state’s <a href="https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/cr/cf/esmc.asp" target="_blank" rel="noopener">California Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum</a>, is to encourage cultural understanding of the struggles of equality, equity, justice, racism, ethnicity, and bigotry that have been prevalent throughout the history of America.
What is less known is that California first considered a draft Ethnic Studies curriculum co-authored by Community Responsive Education (CRE) founder and director Allyson Tintiangco-Cubales, which was rejected by the State Board of Education as being offensive to the Jewish community. Consequently, upon signing AB101, Newsom <a href="https://www.gov.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/AB-101-Signing-Message-PDF.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener">wrote a letter</a> to the State Assembly that noted the bill “expresses the Legislature&#8217;s intent that courses should not include portions of the initial draft curriculum that had been rejected by the Instructional Quality Commission due to concerns related to bias, bigotry, and discrimination.”
The distinct anti-Jewish bias in the previous draft curriculum led Jewish community leaders, as well as the California legislature’s Jewish caucus, to lobby for removal of the offensive material. But that didn’t stop Tintiangco-Cubales, with other like-minded educators, from marketing the rejected curriculum, which they have labeled the <a href="https://www.liberatedethnicstudies.org/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum</a> or simply “Liberated.”
Given that AB101 allows school districts to either adopt the revised model Ethnic Studies curriculum or develop their own, PVUSD initially elected to bring on Tintiangco-Cubales and CRE as the sole contractor to develop a custom curriculum. As feared by the Pajaro Valley Jewish community, the PVUSD ethnic studies curriculum has been infused with “Liberated” anti-Semitic language in English, History, and Art classes, as well as one standalone ethnic studies class mandated by California.
In a recent <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/sarahhernholm/2024/05/02/new-paradigm-or-political-agenda-ethnic-studies-vs-liberated-es/?sh=29c3732a52aa">article</a> examining the “Liberated” ethnic studies curriculum, Sarah Hernholm noted how the curriculum characterizes Zionism as a settler colonial movement. Such a description deprives the Jewish people of their historical ties to the land of Israel, dating back to around <a href="https://www.history-of-israel.org/history/time_line.php" target="_blank" rel="noopener">1000 B.C.</a>, as well as their right to self-determination as a people. The “Liberated” curriculum also <a href="https://ceasefiretoday.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">links to a site</a> calling for a ceasefire in Gaza which describes the root causes of violence in Gaza as the “Israeli military occupation and apartheid.”
Concerned Jewish organizations have written letters to PVUSD expressing their opposition to the “Liberated” curriculum. The Simon Wiesenthal Center asked PVUSD to not renew its contract with CRE due to its blatant anti-Semitism. Local Santa Cruz County rabbis asked the same, and further asked PVUSD to develop a curriculum that will unite, not divide, the PVUSD community. And from the very beginning, the California Legislative Jewish Caucus has argued that this curriculum promotes anti-Semitism by denigrating Jewish identity and singling out Israel for condemnation.
The Pajaro Valley Jewish community members I spoke with made it clear they support ethnic studies but oppose anti-Semitism and what they assess as an erasure of the American Jewish experience in the curriculum. After hearing testimony from the community in September 2023, the PVUSD board decided not to renew the contract with CRE and stuck to their decision, despite pressure from vocal activists who support CRE. 
Yet while the controversial curriculum remains, board members and members of the community have been publicly attacked as white supremacists, racists, and genocide supporters by ethnic studies teachers, students, anti-Israel activists outside PVUSD, and University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC) professors who have waded into the PVUSD controversy.
Jewish community members fear that adoption of this ethnic studies curriculum is a portent of things to come nationally. <a href="https://campusdirectory.ucsc.edu/cd_detail?uid=cjhong" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Dr. Christine Hong</a>, Department Chair of the openly <a href="https://calendar.ucsc.edu/event/education-department-colloquium-do-palestinian-lives-matter-in-teacher-education-centering-an-anti-zionist-commitment-in-early-childhood-teacher-educationhttps:/calendar.ucsc.edu/event/education-department-colloquium-do-palestinian-lives-matter-in-teacher-education-centering-an-anti-zionist-commitment-in-early-childhood-teacher-education" target="_blank" rel="noopener">anti-Zionist</a> Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES) at UCSC (who was subject to a recent <a href="https://ia600402.us.archive.org/9/items/2-final-hjaa-report.-the-soil-beneath-the-encampments/OCR%20UC%20resolution%20letter%2012-20-2024.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener">federal investigation</a> into charges of faculty anti-Semitism), has led the charge of UCSC faculty, appearing many times at PVUSD board meetings and insisting that Tintiangco-Cubales and CRE provide PVUSD what she deems as the only acceptable ethnic studies curriculum.
Alarmingly, Dr. Hong has also been actively involved in a working group seeking to develop the California high school ethnic studies <a href="https://edsource.org/2022/uc-considers-imposing-criteria-for-californias-high-school-ethnic-studies-classes/670186" target="_blank" rel="noopener">requirement for admission</a> into the UC school system. This would have national implications – if the curriculum is accepted for admission to UC schools, the requirement could then be imposed on all other states as well.
California has exported bad policies to other states in the past — on energy, gig workers, and firearms, to name a few. It now seems to be flirting not only with inflicting on its own students a divisive approach to teaching ethnic studies but exporting its radical teaching nationwide. Hopefully the U.S. Department of Education will take note of what’s going on at the K-12 level in California before it too becomes a national problem.
* * *
Walter Myers III is a Senior Fellow at the Seattle-based Discovery Institute and an adjunct faculty member at Biola University’s Talbot School of Theology.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
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HIgh School Graduation

How A New ‘Ethnic Studies’ Curriculum Promotes Anti-Semitism In California

How A New 'Ethnic Studies' Curriculum Promotes Anti-Semitism In California

Anti-Semitism

California

Ethnic Studies

Israel

Palo Alto

Public Schools

University of California

Apple is the largest company in the world — and, unfortunately, one of the ones most given to leftward corporate drift. Apple is a top-tier sponsor of the Human Rights Campaign, a radical organization that pressures companies to provide puberty blockers under the guise of &#8216;healthcare.&#8217; It <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-takes-down-quran-bible-jehovahs-witenss-apps-in-china-2021-10#:~:text=Apple%20has%20taken%20down%20a,website%20Apple%20Censorship%20on%20Tuesday." target="_blank" rel="noopener">acquiesces</a> to requests from the Chinese Communist Party to censor Bible and Quran apps in its Chinese market. It <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/apple-entrepreneur-camp-program-bars-applicants-based-on-race" target="_blank" rel="noopener">held entrepreneurship camps</a> only for applicants of targeted racial minority groups. And the company <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/j-p-morgans-hate-list-1503619180" target="_blank" rel="noopener">donated</a> a million dollars to the widely-discredited Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization that routinely blacklisted conservative organizations, such as Alliance Defending Freedom and Moms for Liberty, as extremists without cause. In a sea of companies that have kowtowed to woke corporate activists, Apple stands apart as one of the worst actors in this space.
That’s why it came as a welcome surprise to hear Apple CEO Tim Cook address the changing climate around diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts at the company’s annual meeting yesterday. In response to a shareholder question my firm asked about DEI, Cook responded, &#8220;As the legal landscape around this issue evolves, we may need to make some changes to comply, but our north star of dignity and respect for everyone and our work to that end will never waver.” 
President Trump quickly <a href="https://www.reuters.com/technology/trump-says-apple-should-eliminate-diversity-policies-2025-02-26/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">responded</a> to Cook’s remark, noting on Truth Social that “Apple should get rid of DEI rules, not just make adjustments to them.”
That’s a big hint that things may be changing for Apple in the future. There’s almost no doubt this is Apple adapting to the new corporate world, where championing DEI is no longer a mainstay of corporate policy but a real source of legal and reputational risk from an administration that’s made rooting out discriminatory ‘diversity’ programs one of its primary missions. But that doesn’t mean we can’t treat this as a positive development for Apple’s political neutrality and fiduciary focus. Although Apple has opposed many efforts from conservative shareholders to get the company ‘back to neutral’ on politics, let’s take Tim Cook’s statement on its face. As someone in the weeds on fighting biased corporate policies, here are 4 ways Apple can bring its corporate policies back in line with being business first.
<h3>End Partnership With The Human Rights Campaign</h3>
If Apple publicly drops its partnership with the Human Rights Campaign and ends its participation in the HRC’s Corporate Equality Index, it might be the biggest sign that it’s serious about making changes to its public perception. For companies serious about their fiduciary duty, severing ties with the HRC is the first step, with companies like Walmart and Target having publicly walked away from the organization in the recent past. If Apple wants to drop a major PR liability overnight, throwing the HRC’s mailer in the trash and never responding again would be a good start.
<h3>Take Pro-Fiduciary Shareholders Seriously</h3>
Apple’s meeting yesterday was notable in that its entire shareholder agenda was from investors who aren’t ESG/DEI-aligned. 3 years ago, Left-wing, DEI aligned shareholders dominated Apple’s agenda and set the tone for who exactly was influencing the company. Now, the opposite influences are being felt and yet the company hasn’t exactly been forthright in responding to them.
The firm I work for, Bowyer Research, represented conservative shareholders at Apple’s annual meeting yesterday. We got to witness first-hand the company’s disingenuous dodging of not only questions about the company’s divisive charitable partnerships and lax approach to curbing online child exploitation, but the company’s coverage of transgender surgeries and hormone regimens for children (coverage that’s required as part of its HRC partnership). If the company is serious about its response to the large-scale vibe shift in corporate America, it could stand to actually listen to the shareholders and institutions that are fueling it.
<h3>Actually Ditch Discriminatory DEI Programs</h3>
This was the obvious one. It’s beyond clear that diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in corporate America do more to create risk and politicize brands than they do to ensure political neutrality. Costco is a perfect example — its defense of DEI resulted in Al Sharpton making it the focus of his pro-DEI messaging (spoiler alert: Al Sharpton filming propaganda videos at your store is not what political neutrality looks like). IBM is another example — its alleged use of racial quotas is so egregious that it’s brought a <a href="https://ago.mo.gov/attorney-general-bailey-files-suit-against-ibm-for-violating-the-missouri-human-rights-act/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">lawsuit</a> from the Missouri Attorney General’s office, along with a shareholder proposal from the Heritage Foundation demanding transparency on the risks such diversity initiatives create. When other tech giants, including <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-layoffs-dei-leader-email-2024-7" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Microsoft</a> and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/feb/05/google-dei-trump" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Google</a>, begin slashing DEI initiatives, Cook’s admission about changes is an indicator that Apple can see which way the wind’s blowing.
Right before Christmas last year, Apple melted thousands of hearts with a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/this-non-woke-pro-family-apple-ad-is-making-everyone-cry" target="_blank" rel="noopener">wholesome, family-first ad</a> about how its AirPods Pro 2 made life more meaningful for the hearing-impaired. That kind of messaging acknowledges a simple truth: it’s Apple’s products, not its radical corporate partnerships or its donations to partisan groups, that have made the world a better place. If Apple accurately reads the room on corporate culture, Cook’s hint at “making changes” will mean tangible efforts to get the company out of divisive politics and back to making innovative products that create human flourishing in a way that no DEI program ever could.
* * *
Isaac Willour is an award-winning journalist focusing on race, culture, and American conservatism, as well as a corporate relations analyst at Bowyer Research. His work has been featured at outlets including USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times Opinion, C-SPAN, and The Daily Wire. He is a member of the Young Voices contributor program and can be found on X <a href="https://twitter.com/IsaacWillour" target="_blank" rel="noopener">@IsaacWillour</a>.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

Apple Will Add 20,000 US Jobs Amid Threat From Trump Tariffs

‘We May Need To Make Changes’: Here’s How Apple Can Delete DEI

'We May Need To Make Changes': Here’s How Apple Can Delete DEI

Apple

Corporations

Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI)

Woke Culture

A decade ago, Apple CEO Tim Cook gave a stirring convocation address to the graduating class of George Washington University.
“The sidelines are not where you want to live your life,” Cook said. “The world needs you in the arena. There are problems that need to be solved. Injustices that need to be ended.”
Cook’s message was right but was missed by conservative shareholders, who for far too long sat on the sidelines while activists on the far-Left, like the radical Human Rights Campaign, Engine No. 1, and As You Sow, have staged a hostile takeover of Corporate America.
In the process, seemingly invincible brands like Bud Light, Target, and Disney bent the knee to these activists and ended up losing billions of dollars in value. Worse, a host of once-cherished American brands have been hijacked, transformed into tools wielded by ideologically driven forces. These actors pursue agendas that clash head-on with the core beliefs of the companies’ own shareholders, as well as the bedrock principles of free markets and constitutional liberties that define our nation.
That’s a problem. One might even call it an injustice that needs to be ended.
Your rights as a shareholder in many ways mirror your rights as a citizen. Like elected officials in Washington, D.C., or your state capital are accountable to their voters, leaders of publicly traded companies answer to their shareholders. That includes major stockholders like Cook, but also everyday Americans who invest in a variety of ways, including through a 401(k) or other investment products. So, just like at the ballot box, your vote matters at the annual shareholder meetings of the companies you own.
Yet, unlike the political process, many Americans simply don’t exercise their voting rights as shareholders. Instead, they delegate that right to activist investment or proxy advisors who often vote against their values. Like a football game where only one team takes the field, the score is as lopsided as you would expect.
Fringe groups pushing extreme ideas understand this all too well. Take the HRC’s current requirement that companies must pay for life-altering and experimental puberty-blocking drugs and cross-sex hormones for children as part of their healthcare plan to earn a coveted 100% on the so-called “Corporate Equality Index.”
The HRC <a href="https://reports.hrc.org/corporate-equality-index-2025" target="_blank" rel="noopener">touts</a> 765 businesses — including Apple — that bow to this demand, but it couldn’t be further out of step with most shareholders. Nearly 7 in 10 Americans <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/05/05/trans-poll-gop-politics-laws/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">oppose</a> puberty blockers for young children and the U.S. Supreme Court is currently <a href="https://adflegal.org/press-release/supreme-court-decide-whether-states-can-protect-children-experimental-medical/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">considering</a> whether to uphold a Tennessee law protecting children from this practice, with similar laws in a total of 27 states likely affected by the decision.
Thankfully, shareholders who represent mainstream American values are finally taking Cook’s advice and getting in the game. Working with dozens of values-aligned investors, financial advisors, corporate engagement advisors, and state financial officers that together represent over $250 billion in assets under management, Alliance Defending Freedom and Inspire Investing are leading the charge with a coalition that has filed over 68 shareholder resolutions at over 50 corporations this year alone.
For the first time, we are setting the agenda for corporate America. And that’s clearest to see at Cook’s Apple, where all four resolutions on the proxy ballot for the company’s Feb. 25 annual meeting come from our values-aligned shareholder allies.
Inspire Investing filed a resolution calling on Apple executives to report to their shareholders the impact of partnering with divisive groups like the HRC and the <a href="https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/03/the-southern-poverty-law-center-is-everything-thats-wrong-with-liberalism" target="_blank" rel="noopener">highly discredited</a> Southern Poverty Law Center, which played a <a href="https://judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/republicans-judiciary.house.gov/files/evo-media-document/2023-12-04-the-fbis-breach-of-religious-freedom-the-weaponization-of-law-enforcement-against-catholic-americans.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener">prominent</a> role in the FBI’s <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&amp;v=aEyd3ErNZ04" target="_blank" rel="noopener">targeting</a> of Roman Catholics and parents protecting their kids by speaking out at school board meetings during the previous administration.
Other resolutions include a call for transparency on ethical AI data collection and usage, as well as a directive for Apple to stop discriminating against employees under the financially and legally risky banner of DEI policies from the National Center for Public Policy Research. Meanwhile, Bowyer Research worked with the American Family Association to <a href="https://wng.org/opinions/forbidden-fruit-1739862491">file</a> a proposal asking Apple leadership to explain why it removed an iOS software function designed to identify child sex abuse material — a decision that has led company leaders to admit Apple has become “the greatest platform for distributing child porn, etc.”
Apple should at least see the merit in this proposal, but instead, they are pushing shareholders to reject it — and even tried to dodge accountability altogether by begging the SEC to keep it off their proxy statement. The SEC said no, thanks to ADF’s intervention.
A decade ago, Tim Cook told graduates, “There are problems that need to be solved. Injustices that need to be ended.” Today, the injustice lies in Apple and other corporate giants ignoring shareholders, aligning with divisive groups, and silencing dissent — all while straying from the values that built them.
Freedom and free market loving shareholders are done watching from the sidelines. We’re in the arena now, holding Cook and his peers to their own call: end the injustices, starting with providing accountability to your shareholders.
* * *
Jeremy Tedesco (@Jeremy_Tedesco) is senior counsel, senior vice president of corporate engagement at <a href="http://www.adflegal.org/?utm_source=wallstreetjournal&amp;utm_medium=oped" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Alliance Defending Freedom</a> (<a href="https://twitter.com/ADFLegal">@ADFLegal</a>). 
Robert Netzly (@RobertNetzly) is CEO of Inspire Investing (@InspireAdvisor).
The views expressed in this piece are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

Apple Holds Annual Worldwide Developers Conference

How Conservative Shareholders Earned A Seat At The Corporate Table

Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF)

Human Rights Campaign

Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC)

China has released a brand new artificial intelligence model. It&#8217;s called DeepSeek, and some people are comparing this Chinese technical advancement to Russia&#8217;s Sputnik moment back in 1957 when Russia launched a satellite into orbit, shocking America&#8217;s technological cadre.
DeepSeek is an artificial intelligence company that was trained on chips far less sophisticated than the Nvidia chips that have been the driver of the AI revolution.
To review: Artificial intelligence has progressed tremendously over the course of the last three to four years. For example, ChatGPT is basically good at virtually everything, and it is only one step removed from being able to progress even further in the real world.
You can prompt ChatGPT, for instance, to put together a travel itinerary for any location on the globe. Right now, a “book” button is only visible, but soon, it will be active; you will be able to actually book. It is going to change how we do our jobs in many different industries.
It was assumed that America had a massive lead in the AI industry. Why? Because AI works with incredible levels of data to use very sophisticated microchips, typically created by Nvidia and then produced at TSMC, which is an actual semiconductor factor in Taiwan.
<h3><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/bss-ep-2126-member-exclusive" target="_blank" rel="noopener">WATCH: The Ben Shapiro Show</a></h3>
Firms like META have been investing billions of dollars into AI, OpenAI, and Google. All of these various companies have been spending billions of dollars buying these Nvidia microchips that are designed to process huge quantities of data because that&#8217;s how AI actually works — to crunch as much data as humanly possible.
It works through a matrix that determines which words in any given sentence are the most important, and then it predicts what the next word in a sentence is going to be. This is why you can prompt ChatGPT to write a joke about a duck in the style of Charles Dickens.
It does all that simply by cramming extraordinary amounts of data, which takes enormous amounts of energy and numbers of sophisticated microchips. 
At least, that&#8217;s what everyone thought — until a little bit earlier this week. China released DeepSeek, which is apparently just as sophisticated as ChatGPT but costs a fraction of the cost to produce. Instead of using Nvidia sophisticated microchips, it uses less sophisticated microchips.
That&#8217;s the reason why Nvidia, which had been moved up to a trillion-dollar market cap and had grown massively in the last three or four years, dropped almost 20% in the stock market because suddenly it appears the barrier to entry in AI has dropped precipitously as well.
It is less expensive than was originally thought to develop a very sophisticated AI. This is why a huge number of stocks that were tied into American AI dropped as well.
There&#8217;s a much more competitive sphere now.
It’s quite possible that AI was being overvalued, that all of these various companies were being overvalued, that the situation resembles the tech bubble in the late 90’s, that a huge amount of money is being invested into AI. But it&#8217;s not clear how much revenue is actually going to be generated by AI in the real world.
This happens very often when new technology creates a speculative bubble. The market tends to wipe out a lot of the speculation. What then remains are the long-lasting gains from the technology.
The dot-com bubble, for example, did not end the internet. Instead, the dot-com bubble was created by enthusiasm for an entirely new wave of products, and it turned out that a lot of that enthusiasm was put in the wrong places. But it didn&#8217;t mean the internet didn&#8217;t transform life. It did.
And the same thing is going to be true of AI.
A lot of the current, highly valued stocks may be overvalued at this point. Many of these companies that were assumed to have an oligopoly and enormous power in the air market may not have as much power as they thought.
America needs to win the battle for AI.
DeepSeek monitors all your data. DeepSeek is doing the same thing as all other various Chinese companies: mining your data to an extraordinary extent, the same way TikTok is a Chinese psyop that is designed to draw enormous amounts of American data to it.
DeepSeek’s user agreement <a href="https://chat.deepseek.com/downloads/DeepSeek%20Privacy%20Policy.html">admits</a>, “We automatically collect certain information from you when you use the Services, including internet or other network activity information such as your IP address, unique device identifiers, and cookies. We collect certain device and network connection information when you access the Service.”
President Trump spoke on Monday and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/01/27/deep-seek-ai-markets-nvidia/">stated</a> that the news regarding DeepSeek was “a wake-up call for our industries that we need to be laser-focused on competing to win.”
After praising American scientists, he said the situation could be “very much a positive development. … Instead of spending billions and billions, you&#8217;ll spend less and you&#8217;ll come up with hopefully the same solution. Under the Trump administration, we&#8217;re going to unleash all our tech companies and we&#8217;re going to dominate the future like never before.” 
This is correct. When the cost of actually being able to participate in this market goes down, more innovation and competition will ensue, which is good.
But if we are in competition with China, which we certainly are, then we need to be using every resource at our disposal and not hamstringing our ability to compete with the Chinese by putting tariffs on semiconductors, which drives up prices for precisely the companies we need to actually outcompete the Chinese on this basis.
American ingenuity nearly always wins in the end.
It just needs to be turned loose.

Illustrations Of DeepSeek As The Chinese AI App Causes NASDAQ Rout

Did China Just Drink Our Milkshake?

President Trump

Last night, President Biden gave his farewell address.
On his way out, he decided to give an Eisenhower-like warning. Dwight Eisenhower, in his farewell address, famously inveighed against the military industrial complex.
I happen to be a believer that Eisenhower’s remark was one of the dumber statements he ever made. The military industrial complex theory, which was pushed by a Marxist-leaning sociologist named C. Wright Mills, says that the defense industry drives America toward war. It is a fool&#8217;s way of explaining how foreign policy actually works.
But somehow, Biden found an even bigger fool’s way to explain American policy.
On his way out, he warned about a tech oligarchy. Let&#8217;s be clear. One of the key reasons Biden became president in 2020 was because of the tech oligarchy working with his people — shutting down, for example, the Hunter Biden laptop story so he could win.
It turns out that billionaires disproportionately support Biden and his party. But Biden decided he would weigh in about the supposed “tech oligarchy.”
What Biden really means is that the people he wants to run the country are career bureaucrats and politicians who have never run a popsicle stand.
There are two alternatives. Either the people are going to be left to their own devices to actually hire people, build businesses, and run their own lives — or Joe Biden will run their lives.
<h3><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ep-2118-member-exclusive" target="_blank" rel="noopener">WATCH: The Ben Shapiro Show</a></h3>
Biden has never worked a real job in his entire life. He&#8217;s been politicking since the age of 29. He wasn’t even old enough to be in the Senate when he was elected to the Senate. And now, he&#8217;s 173-years-old, and he inveighed against the oligarchy in which he has been a key cog for his entire adult life.
He <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2025/01/15/remarks-by-president-biden-in-a-farewell-address-to-the-nation/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">stated</a>:
<blockquote>Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead.
We see the consequences all across America. And we’ve seen it before, more than a century ago. But the American people stood up to the robber barons back then and busted the trusts.
They didn’t punish the wealthy. They just made the wealthy pay the by — play by the rules everybody else had to. Workers won rights to earn their fair share. You know, they were dealt into the deal, and it helped put us on the path to building the largest middle class and the most prosperous century any nation the world has ever seen, and we’ve got to do that again.</blockquote>
Biden’s idiotic notion that we have to break the modern robber barons, that it&#8217;s people like Elon Musk and the tech bros who are really the problem, is garbage. 
Who do you think is creating the productivity, the innovation, and the jobs that Americans have? It isn&#8217;t Joe Biden. It isn&#8217;t the government. This is the key conflict of vision between people like Biden and those of us who actually like free markets, free enterprise, and freedom in general. Biden believes that by freedom, we mean the government should allocate to you a particular role in life.
When those of us on the other side refer to freedom, we mean that we should all be able to rise and fall on our own merits, and those actions generate positive externalities for everyone.
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It’s repugnant to listen to Biden whine about the oligarchy while he himself has never produced a positive thing in his entire life. Then, he inveighs against people who actually do the producing, who actually do the innovation, who make life better for literally hundreds of millions of people.
Meanwhile, he&#8217;s been a complete leech on the ass of society for five decades, talking about the oligarchs.
You know who is truly an oligarch? Somebody who uses unearned power, somebody who is given power by the American people to crack down on the freedom of others for redistributive purposes. That person is much more of an oligarchy than whatever supposed oligarchy Biden’s talked of.
What a terrible old man.
I cannot wait for him to be out of the White House.

President Biden Delivers Farewell Address To The Nation

Biden’s Farewell Address: Four Years Too Late

Biden's Farewell Address: Four Years Too Late

Joe Biden

Presidency

President Donald Trump’s inauguration is just around the corner. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg donated $1 million to the inauguration fund. Jeff Bezos and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman did the same. Zuckerberg, however, has gone further, actually announcing <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/meta-axes-dei-programs-in-the-lead-up-to-trumps-inauguration" target="_blank" rel="noopener">real policy change</a> that the incoming Trump administration will approve of.
Many conservatives are dismissive of Zuckerberg’s announcement that Meta will no longer censor political speech, mute conversations about hot-button social issues, and discontinue its egregious “fact-checking” program. They ought not to be. I believe the change is real and the motivation genuine.
Meta’s censorship sins run very, very deep.
As early as 2015, Meta (then Facebook) was putting its thumb on the scale in favor of Left-wing politicians. It interfered in the 2016 election by suppressing stories critical of Hillary Clinton. In 2018, the company was actively working to prevent Republican candidates from communicating with their constituents. In 2020, it was secretly colluding with the Justice Department to keep the American people from learning about the Hunter Biden laptop. That action alone may have cost Donald Trump his reelection.
On issue after issue, Facebook has deliberately attempted to suppress free speech. Conservatives questioning COVID and its origins have found themselves censored, even banned from the platform. Ditto for anyone questioning climate change. Ditto for anyone questioning child mutilation.
<ul>
<li>Condemn illegal immigration — censored.</li>
<li>Promote the pro-life cause — censored.</li>
<li>State that Biden was putting America into a recession — censored.</li>
<li>Object to federally-funded crack pipes — censored.</li>
<li>Criticize the “Zuckerbucks” scheme to hijack local elections — adios.</li>
</ul>
The list is seemingly endless. At <a href="https://www.mrc.org/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">the MRC</a> we have tabulated 1,725 times Meta has censored conservatives. Tens of thousands of conservatives have been banned — and that includes the president of the United States.
Some have suggested that the president-elect put the fear of the Lord into Zuckerberg <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/trump-zuckerberg-have-dinner-together-at-mar-a-lago" target="_blank" rel="noopener">when they met</a> at Mar-a-Lago recently, and perhaps that’s true. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to simply conclude that Meta’s “about-face” this week was motivated merely out of fear of reprisals.
Consider: Zuckerberg could have resolved the problem by just putting an end to it. No video, no public humiliation. Just a four word memo to his staff: “You censor, you’re out.” It was as simple as not giving cause for future complaints.
But that’s not what he did. He released a video he knew would become front page news nationwide. In it, he unequivocally admitted conservatives had been right all along; unequivocally acknowledged Meta had violated the public trust by suppressing free speech; and unequivocally committed to a new policy championing the First Amendment.
He also fired his entire so-called “fact-checking” operation. These were the hardened leftists responsible for the bulk of that fascistic censorship. They were the fuel behind the killing machine of any user’s account that posted stories about election interference, Joe Biden’s mental acuity, or the origins of the Wuhan virus.
But then he added something else. He announced he is moving the remainder of the content team out of Palo Alto, which he once described to me as the “heart of leftism in America,” and into the heart of freedom — Texas.
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Conservatives should consider that if there were anything like a Christmas card list in Palo Alto, his name has been scratched off. In the eyes of Silicon Valley, Zuckerberg is a traitor.
Let’s be clear: Zuckerberg is a leftist, of the hard Left variety. So why put out that video? Because one can be on the far-Left of the political spectrum and still be a champion of free speech. Ironically, it has historically been this community, driven by libertine impulses, that most embraced free speech.
I have met and corresponded with Zuckerberg several times. I believe he’s in this camp. I also believe that within the Meta universe, there will be plenty of employees who will try to undermine him, just as Twitter employees tried with Elon Musk. Censorship will continue; leftists who understand the power of social media are not about to relinquish it. But maybe, just maybe, it will be the exception to the rule. Maybe, just maybe, the rules have changed.
Time will tell. Trust, but verify.
But let the conversation continue. If you thought Meta was bad, it has been angelic compared to Google. That company is out of control with its efforts to undermine democracy and Congressional hearings are in order to investigate their activities. TikTok is a tool of the Chinese government, the greatest threat to the United States, and has no business being in business in our country.
There are many other ventures on the rise in the emerging AI world that will certainly threaten conservatives’ ability to communicate in the public square. All must be confronted.
But for the moment, let’s consider that maybe, just maybe, Mark Zuckerberg has done something good.
* * *
L. Brent Bozell III is the founder and president of the Media Research Center and founder of the Free Speech Alliance.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

Social Media App Photo Illustration

Why Facebook’s About-Face Is Turning Heads

Censorship

Facebook

Free Speech

Media Research Center

Social Media Censorship

Last week the news broke that Meta — the company that owns Facebook, Instagram, and half the internet — claims it will be pulling back drastically from its censorship policies. Free speech will reign again on Facebook, supposedly. The CEO of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, appeared on Joe Rogan a couple of days ago to elaborate on this decision. Much of what he says in the conversation — along with the entire conversation itself — would have been unthinkable four or five years ago. But times are rapidly changing.
Specifically, in the interview, Zuckerberg affirmed that there&#8217;s nothing wrong with a masculine culture in a workplace — and that, in fact, a lot of companies would benefit from it. Imagine that. Watch:
<iframe loading="lazy" title="001 Zuck" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/aL_ODZpmMCM?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>
&nbsp;
Eight years ago, these are the kinds of ideas that would&#8217;ve — and if you recall the case of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/fired-google-engineer-james-damore-dropped-his-lawsuit-against-company" target="_blank" rel="noopener">James Damore</a> — did get rank-and-file employees fired at Google. And now the head of a major Big Tech company is saying it.
Of course, the obvious response to this interview is that Zuckerberg doesn&#8217;t actually believe any of this. He&#8217;s just saying it because Trump won the election, and he wants to cozy up with power. And that&#8217;s almost certainly true. But it doesn&#8217;t fully capture what&#8217;s going on — which is that there&#8217;s also been a major shift in American culture this time around. After all, Trump won the election back in 2016, too. And Zuckerberg didn&#8217;t say anything like this. Instead his companies reacted by entrenching themselves even deeper on the Left. Now the exact opposite is happening.
In the interview, Zuckerberg suggested that some of Facebook&#8217;s censorship was the result of pressure by the Biden administration, although he claims to have resisted some of it. Watch:
<iframe loading="lazy" title="002 Biden censorship" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/0kEGe4pRgTY?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>
&nbsp;
Of course, it wasn&#8217;t just &#8220;vaccine side effects&#8221; that the Biden administration wanted Facebook to censor. They also wanted Facebook to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story, for obvious reasons. It was a damning account of the Biden family&#8217;s corruption, and no one could really dispute its accuracy because it came directly from Hunter Biden&#8217;s laptop. And Facebook went along with that, too, on the ridiculous theory that the laptop was really some secret scheme by Russian intelligence.
It goes without saying that Facebook could have gone public with these concerns at any time in the last several years. They didn&#8217;t need to wait until Trump won a second term. So, no, we shouldn&#8217;t &#8220;trust&#8221; Mark Zuckerberg, now that he&#8217;s made a calculation that telling the truth is in his best interests. He had a chance to do the right thing when it would have required some measure of courage to do so. Although not that much, considering he was and is a multi-billionaire. That provides you a lot of cover that most of us don’t have. But Zuckerberg waited until now. 
There’s a lot of this going around right now. People who are seeing the light and coming out against wokeness, now that wokeness is a punch line and has no political power and little Cultural power. I welcome these people to Team Sanity. But I don’t trust them, and I certainly won’t congratulate them.
<h3><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/mws-ep-1513-member-exclusive" target="_blank" rel="noopener">WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show</a></h3>
At the same time, again, Zuckerberg&#8217;s shift is a reflection of a broader change in the culture. And it&#8217;s a shift that&#8217;s quite dramatic in some respects. Here&#8217;s how the New York Times is <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/10/technology/meta-mark-zuckerberg-trump.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">reporting</a> on some of the changes at Meta, for example: 
<blockquote>The company removed the transgender and nonbinary &#8216;themes&#8217; on its Messenger chat app. &#8230; That same day at Meta’s offices in Silicon Valley, Texas and New York, facilities managers were instructed to remove tampons from men’s bathrooms, which the company had provided for nonbinary and transgender employees who use the men’s room and who may have required sanitary pads, two employees said.</blockquote>
Yes, tampons have been removed from the men&#8217;s bathrooms at Meta. Presumably the tampons have also been removed from the virtual bathrooms in the Metaverse too, although I don&#8217;t have a &#8220;Meta Quest&#8221; VR headset, so I can&#8217;t verify that at the moment. This is a sudden change that happened virtually overnight, after years of having tampons in the men&#8217;s bathroom. The CEO decides one day to end it. And it ends.
Why did the men’s bathrooms ever have tampons to begin with? Why did he ever think that was a good idea? Did Zuckerberg believe that men could have periods and then see the light after reading a biology textbook? I don’t think so. He knew it was absurd the whole time.
And guess what? There have been no riots at Meta over this change. There have been no massive protests or mass resignations. The Metaverse hasn&#8217;t collapsed. That&#8217;s because everyone at Meta — including the supposedly &#8220;trans&#8221; employees — know that reality is not subjective. They know that men do not need tampons. And now that an adult has told them the truth, they&#8217;re accepting it because they have no other choice.
That&#8217;s all it really takes for a return to sanity. And it&#8217;s happening more and more often.
To give another example — recently a federal court in Kentucky handed the Biden administration a major defeat in a Title IX case. In case you&#8217;re not familiar with Title IX, it&#8217;s a law that prevents sex discrimination in educational programs, including sports, that receive any kind of federal assistance. The Biden administration unilaterally tried to re-interpret Title IX so that it prevents discrimination on the basis of so-called &#8220;gender identity.&#8221; Their rule would have required teachers to use students&#8217; preferred pronouns, among other demands.
From a legal perspective, the Biden administration and trans activists thought they had a winning case. And that&#8217;s because an earlier Supreme Court ruling had held, by a 6-3 vote, that a different provision of civil rights law — Title VII — prohibited discrimination on the basis of so-called &#8220;gender identity&#8221; in the workplace. Gorsuch and Roberts sided with the Leftist judges to come up with that ruling.
But last week, a federal judge in Kentucky held that the same logic doesn&#8217;t apply to Title IX, because Title IX is explicitly focused on sex discrimination — and no other form of discrimination. <a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/25483131-order-in-title-ix-case/?q=eviscerates&amp;mode=document#document/p7" target="_blank" rel="noopener">This</a> is from the judge&#8217;s ruling: &#8220;The entire point of Title 9 is to prevent discrimination based on sex. Throwing gender identity into the mix eviscerates the statute and renders it largely meaningless.&#8221;
This ruling will obviously be appealed, and work its way up the courts. But as it stands, it could lay the groundwork for a new Supreme Court ruling — one that rejects any attempt to conflate &#8220;sex&#8221; and &#8220;gender&#8221; within the meaning of the law.
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A ruling like that would&#8217;ve been hard to imagine a few years ago. But it&#8217;s not hard to imagine anymore. That&#8217;s because, even in places like California — some of the most Left-wing places in the country — there are clear signs that people are tired of this insanity. Consider the eruption of anger over California&#8217;s DEI policies and general incompetence in the wake of these historic fires, which still aren&#8217;t under control.
The corporate press is trying to run the same familiar narrative, where they blame racism and climate change. For example, <a href="https://apnews.com/article/california-wildfire-pacific-palisades-pasadena-altadena-inequality-63ea76d186740359f7f5dd188896354f" target="_blank" rel="noopener">here&#8217;s the AP</a>: 
<blockquote>The California wildfires could be leaving deeper inequality in their wake. .. The fires also burned through a remarkable haven for generations of Black families avoiding discriminatory housing practices elsewhere. They have been communities of racial and economic diversity, where many people own their own homes.</blockquote>
The reaction to this article online has been, as you might expect, universal mockery and derision. People aren&#8217;t persuaded by this anymore. Well, people never were persuaded by it. The difference is that now nobody pretends to be. No one talks like this, unless they&#8217;re a journalist for an outlet like the AP. The rest of us are sharing clips like this one, featuring the chief of the Los Angeles Department of Water &amp; Power. Watch:
<iframe loading="lazy" title="003 LA" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/4TznyI2d60Q?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>
&nbsp;
She says: &#8220;The #1 thing that attracted me to this role&#8230; It’s important for me that everything we do is with an equity lens and social justice.&#8221;
It&#8217;s reminiscent of the aftermath of the Maui fires, when a top official <a href="https://nypost.com/2023/08/19/hawaii-official-worried-about-equity-over-water/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">talked</a> about how access to water should involve &#8220;conversations about equity.&#8221; These are the kinds of clips that have quickly surfaced in the wake of the California fires. And they&#8217;re surfacing because people are tired of DEI hires running their cities into the ground. People are realizing that lives are at stake now.
That&#8217;s especially obvious after the discovery that a key reservoir was <a href="https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-01-10/as-flames-raged-in-palisades-a-key-reservoir-nearby-was-offline" target="_blank" rel="noopener">empty</a> in the Pacific Palisades when the fires began. From the <a href="https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-01-10/as-flames-raged-in-palisades-a-key-reservoir-nearby-was-offline" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Los Angeles Times</a>: 
<blockquote>Officials said that the [Reservoir] had been closed since about February for repairs to its cover, leaving a 117-million-gallon water storage complex empty in the heart of the Palisades for nearly a year.</blockquote>
Keep in mind, that&#8217;s the L.A. Times with that exclusive reporting. That&#8217;s the same paper that called Larry Elder &#8220;the black face of white supremacy&#8221; not too long ago. Then (like Jeff Bezos), the Times&#8217; owner withheld the paper&#8217;s endorsement of Kamala Harris, so they&#8217;d focus more on the news. Now they&#8217;re exposing genuine misconduct and incompetence, no matter how embarrassing and damaging it may be for California&#8217;s Democrats.
You won&#8217;t find a clearer sign that wokeness — meaning the suspension of reality to appease the preferred demographic groups of the Democratic Party — is coming to an end. It may be coming to an end in part because of self-interested political actors like Mark Zuckerberg. But it&#8217;s ending, one way or another, because people are tired of it. When Donald Trump won in 2016, that wasn&#8217;t the case. But if there&#8217;s one overriding reason for optimism for Trump&#8217;s second term, it&#8217;s that this time around, no one — not even Silicon Valley mega-corporations like Meta — is pretending to take this nonsense seriously anymore.
* * *
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Silicon Valley

It’s Not Just The Rhetoric, It’s Who Controls The Mic

‘Do You Really Want To Defend Him?’ Algorithms, Outrage, And The Death Of Charlie Kirk

The First Lady’s Undeniable Resolve To Win The AI Race

Battling China Over AI And America’s Future

Uber’s New ‘Women Preferences’ Program Violates Civil Rights Law

How A New ‘Ethnic Studies’ Curriculum Promotes Anti-Semitism In California

‘We May Need To Make Changes’: Here’s How Apple Can Delete DEI

How Conservative Shareholders Earned A Seat At The Corporate Table

Did China Just Drink Our Milkshake?

Biden’s Farewell Address: Four Years Too Late

Why Facebook’s About-Face Is Turning Heads

Wokeness Is Dying

Menu

Silicon Valley

It’s Not Just The Rhetoric, It’s Who Controls The Mic

‘Do You Really Want To Defend Him?’ Algorithms, Outrage, And The Death Of Charlie Kirk

The First Lady’s Undeniable Resolve To Win The AI Race

​​​​Battling China Over AI And America’s Future

Uber’s New ‘Women Preferences’ Program Violates Civil Rights Law

How A New ‘Ethnic Studies’ Curriculum Promotes Anti-Semitism In California

‘We May Need To Make Changes’: Here’s How Apple Can Delete DEI

How Conservative Shareholders Earned A Seat At The Corporate Table

Did China Just Drink Our Milkshake?

Biden’s Farewell Address: Four Years Too Late

Why Facebook’s About-Face Is Turning Heads

Wokeness Is Dying

Battling China Over AI And America’s Future