Author: Penna Dexter

Penna Dexter
It may not be their ideal life dream, but a Wall Street Journal analysis concludes that “American women have never been this resigned to staying single.”
In response to major demographic shifts and also divergent beliefs about what a family should look like, today’s single women are less anxious to get married than they used to be and less interested in marriage than their male peers.
In her piece, titled “American Women Are Giving Up on Marriage,” Rachel Wolfe, economy reporter for the Journal, writes “A rise in earning power and a decline in social stigma for being single has allowed more women to be choosey.” She cites a 2023 survey of over 5000 U.S. adults conducted by Pew Research Center in which “48% of women said that being married was not too or not at all important for a fulfilling life, compared with 39% of men — up from 31% and 28% in 2019.”
In an American Enterprise Institute survey of college-educated women, also done in 2023, half of respondents said they’re single because they haven’t found anyone who meets their expectations.
Throughout her article, Rachel Wolfe presents stats that show that American women of marriageable age are better educated and have better career prospects than men. She quotes sociology professor Brad Wilcox, a fellow at the Institute for Family Studies who says, “people prefer to date in terms of comparable education or income.”
Lyman Stone, a researcher at IFS points out that “Men’s odds of being in a relationship today are still highly correlated with their income.” In an interview for an article in The Atlantic, he said “a lot of young men today just don’t look like what women have come to think of as ‘marriage material’.”
The bitter fruit of 60’s feminism is that many women really do want marriage, but they don’t think they need it.

Penna Dexter
One of the United Nations’ largest annual feminist gatherings, the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), is meeting in New York. Rebecca Oas from the Center for Family and Human Rights says, this year, there’s “a dramatic mood shift, largely because of the change in U.S. leadership.” A declaration adopted on the first day of the 2-week conference contained some language friendly to the gender identity agenda. But, to the chagrin of representatives from the International Planned Parenthood Federation, references to sexual and reproductive health, reproductive rights, and sexuality education were left out.
Feminists are not happy. Dr. Oas says, normally they ignore conservatives at the CSW. But not this time.
She reports that at a townhall for CSW attendees, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres spoke of a “ferocious backlash against the rights of women and girls” which, he says, “is growing in power and strength.” He opened the Commission with a warning: “The poison of patriarchy is back….with a vengeance.”
A change in the party controlling the White House normally brings a switch in how the U.S seeks to influence international abortion policy. Notably, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio rejoined the Geneva Consensus Declaration, which states that there is no international right to abortion and that no nation is obligated to fund or promote abortion.
UN agencies constantly work to implement a version of gender equality that is outside their mandate. They are supported by certain NGOs and by groups like Women Deliver, which has voiced its concern that conservatives now “hold power in key global capitals.”
Dr. Oas says “The presence of conservative groups at the U.N. is often derided and their messages have been increasingly denigrated as ‘anti-rights,’ including by U.N. officials.”
Conservatives are pushing back with a statement declaring that, in many countries, majorities or sizable minorities of women ”hold pro-life and pro-family values, which ‘are mainstream positions’ and not anti-rights.”
It’s their views that should drive U.N. policy.

Penna Dexter
Thankfully, the predicted long wait to learn the 2024 presidential outcome did not come to fruition last November. But results for many down-ballot races were delayed — some for weeks.
Experts warn that we have much more to do to clean up our elections.
The Daily Signal’s Fred Lucas points to Germany’s recent election in which all votes were counted on election night. We should ask ourselves why we often can’t do that here in the U.S.
Mr. Lucas cites several differences between our elections and those conducted in European democracies:

In many countries, especially parliamentary systems, the ballots are simpler. Germans voted for the party. The U.S. is a larger country with ballots which are longer and more complex.
Plus our system is decentralized. States run their own elections, creating most of their own rules.
But the most consequential cause of delays in vote counting in U.S. elections is the widespread use of mail-in ballots.

In his book, The Myth of Voter Suppression, Fred Lucas notes that nearly three fourths of countries in the European Union “don’t allow mail-in voting without specific reasons.”
According to J. Christian Adams, President of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, “These countries have in-person voting at the polling place and have results on election night.” What’s more, he says, “every European country except Britain has voter ID requirements.”  In the U.S., several states lack this fundamental protection.
Election law attorney, author and podcaster Cleta Mitchell founded the Election Integrity Network, a coalition dedicated to the security of every American vote. She recommends several commonsense protections. One that should be a no-brainer is: Do not let non-citizens participate in our elections. A federal bill requiring voter ID, the SAVE Act, awaits a vote in Congress.
Ms. Mitchell also says we should return to election-day and precinct-based, supervised voting. And paper ballots. For more, see Votefair2026.com.

Penna Dexter
As the transgender agenda began to unravel, author J.K. Rowling posted her summary of the damage it’s done, including this:

Gender ideology has undermined freedom of speech, scientific truth, gay rights, and women and girls’ safety, privacy and dignity. It’s also caused irreparable physical damage to vulnerable kids.
Nobody voted for it, the vast majority of people disagree with it, yet it has been imposed, top down, by politicians, healthcare bodies, academia, sections of the media, celebrities and even the police.

Here are just three actions the Trump administration has already taken to dismantle this woke regime:
On February 5, National Girls and Women in Sports Day, surrounded by crowd of female athletes, President Trump signed an executive order titled, Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports. The president warned education institutions and their athletic associations, “if you let men take over women’s sports teams or invade your locker rooms, you will be investigated for violations of Title IX and risk your federal funding.”
Secondly, two days after Attorney General Pam Bondi was sworn in, the administration reversed its position in a case currently being considered at the U.S. Supreme Court. In December, the Court heard oral arguments in U.S. v. Skrmetti. the Biden Administration’s challenge to Tennessee’s law protecting minors from gender transition procedures. The Bondi Justice Department has dropped all opposition to the law.  .
Twenty-five other states have similar laws. A ruling in Skrmetti, will affect challenges to those laws. So, the Supreme Court will continue to deliberate and resolve this case.
Finally, pursuant to another of President Trump’s executive orders, the administration is rewriting admissions requirements, ceasing the funding of gender transition procedures and otherwise moving the military away from transgender tyranny in favor of restoring a “warrior ethos.”
There is more being done, and much more to do. And Congress must act to make sure this rejection of trans tyranny is permanent. 

Penna Dexter
In a recent sermon, my pastor declared: “The most significant decision we make every week is whether we will go to church.”
Church attendance is declining as the culture secularizes. Our pastor, Paul Donison, told us that during the pandemic, 40 million Americans stopped going to church and the numbers have continued dropping.
Dr. Ryan Burge is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Eastern Illinois University. He researches religiosity and political behavior in the United States and publishes a substack called “Graphs about Religion.” His findings show religious practice diminishing in all major demographic groups over the last 15-20 years. He says, “every group is leaving religion, even among conservatives and Republicans, the group that is typically tied to religion.”
Polls reveal that about a quarter of Americans identify as evangelicals. But many evangelicals report they’re not attending church. Dr. Burge says, “non attenders are taking on the label.”
When asked about church attendance, self-identified Christians who don’t attend church offer explanations like: “I don’t need to go” or “I can worship on my own” or “I find God in nature.”
If you’re in that category, read Psalm 27.
King David faced adversity when surrounded, betrayed, or even exiled. The psalm says the  sanctuary is the thing he asks God for. That’s where he longs to be.
It’s in the sanctuary where he sees the splendor of God, where he’s given a new perspective on his circumstances. He seeks to “inquire in his temple” (v.4, ESV). It’s there, he will find “shelter in the day of trouble” (v.5).  And he will “offer in his tent sacrifices with shouts of joy” (v.6).
David feared he’d be forsaken, but concluded: “the Lord will take me in” (v.10).
We can worship by an ocean or a tree. But Pastor Donison speaks the truth: we need biblical preaching and sacraments to show us the fullness of who God is.
So, dear one, go to church.

Penna Dexter
Who or what is to blame for the scale of the wildfires that destroyed massive swaths of Los Angeles this winter?  Some politicians point to climate change and fossil fuels. Two California legislators have filed a bill to allow insurers and homeowners impacted by the fires to sue oil companies for their losses.
Lawmakers hope to cover damages the state is liable for through its underfunded insurance, the last resort for millions of Californians as state-imposed price controls have driven private insurers out of the state.
Tom McClintock, 8-term member of Congress from California, says climate change is not the culprit here. It’s the state’s “environmental and social policies.” In a Wall Street Journal, op ed, Rep. McClintock says California’s once-competent fire management policies and infrastructure, explain “why fires became less threatening throughout most of the 20thcentury.”  He points to federal environmental legislation, first passed in the 70’s, which has been taken to extremes in California. Consequently, forest thinning projects cost millions and take an average of 5.3 years to be approved. Brush suppression is made more difficult.  Cattle grazing “has largely been regulated out of use.” And “leftist officials neglected the region’s basic water infrastructure” in favor of wind and solar spending.
The 21st–century result: devastating loss of forests and homes. There are fixes for aging water lines, pumping systems, water tanks, and even reservoirs. But they have mostly not been implemented. National Review’s Noah Rothman describes a “bombshell” report, published in the Los Angeles Times, which could help Angelinos hold leaders to account “for their maladministration.” This review of thousands of pages of state, county and city records “reveals how thoroughly officials in Southern California dropped the ball when it came to fire management.” But, officials and the press have mainly tried “to persuade the public that the details revealed in this report amount to “misinformation.”
Our country has bold new leaders. Californians should find some. 

Penna Dexter
The Department of Education is not needed. More evidence surfaced recently in results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, given to 4th and 8th graders every two years. Average NAEP scores in both grades are down 2 points since 2022. A third of eighth graders scored “below basic” in reading, a record low. And math scores continue to drop. The money we throw at the problem is not helping.
President Trump supports abolishing the Department of Education. Since only Congress can shut it down, advisors are debating the specifics of an executive order. The Wall Street Journal learned that the order is expected to “shut down all functions of the agency that aren’t written explicitly into statute” and “move certain functions to other departments.”
The order would also call on Congress to develop legislation to abolish the department. House Education Committee Chair Tim Walburg (R-Michigan), supports doing so, but expects Senate resistance. A recent Wall Street Journal poll shows 61 percent of registered voters want the department’s funding protected.
Betsy De Vos, Secretary of Education during President Trump’s first term wrote, “I can say conclusively that American students will be better off without.”
In an article for The Free Press, Secretary DeVos says she found, during her tenure, that “the Department of Education has almost nothing to do with educating anyone.”
Last year, Congress appropriated nearly $80 billion for education. Mrs. DeVos says, upon receipt of funds, the department‘s bureaucrats ”add strings and red tape, peel off a percentage to pay for themselves, and then send it down to state education agencies.” She recommends that Congress eliminate the middleman and send education funding straight to the states and schools as a block grant.
She says Congress should pass Universal School Choice — giving parents more authority.
Enforcing civil rights law should be shifted to the Department of Justice. And student loans should go to the banks.
Then, close the department’s doors.

Penna Dexter
A presidential transition always involves firing federal bureaucrats that populated the previous administration. The Trump team entered office motivated and prepared for this work — and rightly so.
The Napolitan Institute, an organization founded by pollster Scott Rasmussen, recently released a poll of Washington DC-based federal bureaucrats. Sixty-four percent of those who voted for Kamala Harris for president said they would not follow a lawful order from President Trump if they disagreed with it. Forty-two percent of federal government managers,with annual salaries of $75,000 or more, said they plan to politically oppose the administration.”
Senator Rand Paul told The Daily Signal that any government employee who refuses a lawful order by the president “should be fired for cause — immediately.”
The trouble is that there are career bureaucrats — often lifelong federal employees —who are protected from termination because they are not classified as policy-making executive branch employees.
Some of these employees do influence policy.
During his first term, President Trump experienced intense opposition from certain progressive bureaucrats. So, he issued an executive order creating a new category of federal employee: “Schedule F.” These are previously-protected employees whose jobs do entail making certain decisions that impact policy. Under the Trump order, these employees would no longer be shielded from termination for “perceived disloyalty to the president and his agenda.” The rule stipulates that “the President have appropriate management oversight regarding this select cadre of professionals.”
President Biden repealed the Trump order upon entering office. And, he implemented a rule that prevents the firing of career civil servants,
Federal employees that have “policy-making and policy-influencing roles” can form part of the deep state that plagues incoming presidents when they try to implement conservative policies. That’s why President Trump is restoring Schedule F.
Congress should now consider enshrining it into Federal law.
As Senator Katie Britt of Alabama put it,  “Civil servants must serve our nation, not their political party.”

Penna Dexter
As evidenced by the crowd at last weeks’ March for Life on the National Mall in Washington DC, the pro-life movement is alive and well. In a post-Roe world, it’s still needed.
Vice President J.D. Vance joined the marchers, thanking them for showing up in such large numbers on “this especially frigid January.”  He made it clear he’s one of them, and  described their cause as “our movement.”
In a video message, President Trump pledged that in his second term, he will “protect the historic gains” made in his previous administration and will block the “push for a federal right to unlimited abortion on demand.”
Both the president and vice president made clear that targeting of “Americans of faith” and pro-lifers by the U.S. Justice Department will end.
President Trump told the marchers, “I am releasing the Christians and pro-life activists who were persecuted by the Biden regime for praying and living out their faith…”
Vice President Vance referred to failures by our nation to foster a culture of life, stating “our country has not stepped up in the way you have.”
Sadly, his statement aptly describes a recent action by the United States Senate.
Every January, before the March for Life, Congress considers an important piece of pro-life legislation. This year’s bill was the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, introduced by Senators James Lankford (R-OK) and Jim Banks (R-IN).
 On January 9th, the new Senate Majority Leader, John Thune, (R-SD) held a vote on it.
The bill does nothing to limit access to abortion. It simply requires that babies who are born alive—having survived an attempted abortion—will receive appropriate medical care. It’s a simple argument: Leaving this baby to die would be infanticide.
The motion for cloture failed 52-47, with every Democrat voting against moving the bill forward.
This extremism helped give us a Vice President who marched for life, carrying a sign that reads, “I Am the Pro-life Generation.”

Penna Dexter
In one of his final lawless acts, just three days before leaving office, President Biden proclaimed that the Equal Rights Amendment is “the law of the land.” Congress passed this amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1972 and gave it seven years to achieve ratification by three fourths of the states.
Proponents claimed the ERA would protect women’s rights by prohibiting discrimination based on sex.
Thirty-five states ratified. In a constitutionally questionable move, Congress extended the deadline three more years. Still the amendment failed to garner the necessary support of 38 states. Five states rescinded their ratifications. The ERA expired. It’s dead.
The ERA would not protect women’s rights. Over a decade of consideration, it became clear it would severely undermine many commonsense protections for women and could be used to end even modest restrictions on abortion.
According to Kristin Waggoner, President of Alliance Defending Freedom, the ERA is worse today than it was in the 70’s. She points out: “the word ‘woman’ never appears in the ERA.” Instead,” she writes, “the amendment focuses on ‘sex’ — a word increasingly in danger of becoming meaningless as ideologues push to disassociate the term from biology and replace it with ‘gender identity’.”
Under state and local ERA-type policies, women and girls are already seeing their physical privacy, their athletic opportunities, even their physical safety compromised.
In a misguided attempt to revive the ERA, Nevada and Illinois passed bills to “ratify” the amendment. Virginia did so in 2020. Supporters claimed victory. But, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Council, twice, declared the ERA “expired.” So did the DC Circuit Court of Appeals.
The Archivist of the United States would be the person responsible for the amendment’s publication. Dr. Colleen Shogan and her deputy declared, just last month, that the ERA “cannot be certified as part of the Constitution due to established legal, judicial, and procedural decisions.”
Someone must kill the Zombie ERA.

Penna Dexter
I love living in Texas but, by birth and upbringing, I’m an LA girl — born in Pasadena, raised in a beach town, and educated at a university near downtown.
I’m mourning the massive damage and destruction to life, homes, businesses, and landmarks in places I’ve loved.
I remember dreading the Santa Ana winds, which sweep down from the deserts. They come every year and, because California is dry, they bring fires.
The LA Fire Department has over a hundred years’ experience fighting these fires. Each year, when the Devil Winds came, they’d be on it. Lately, the job is taking much longer.
What’s making things harder? Neglect, leftist environmental policy, and poor leadership.
Decaying power lines have been a huge problem — now (supposedly) being addressed. California promised to do better at keeping forest floors “cleaned” of burnable fuel. But “green” pushback prioritizes the “ecosystem” over humans. Voters have demanded new reservoirs. None have been built since 1979. Construction on a new one won’t begin until 2032.
Fire hydrants started running out of water during the first day of this year’s firefighting. Years of bad water policy means there’s insufficient water to fill the reservoirs they have.
In 2008, California began diverting 100 billion gallons of water per year away from Southern California and into the Pacific Ocean to “save” a fish, the Delta smelt. Governor Gavin Newsome has refused to restore the flow of excess rainwater and snow melt from the north to Southern California.
LA Mayor Karen Bass knew of the huge fire risk. Recently, she cut department funding.
And Kristin Crowley, LA’s first female and LGBTQ Fire Chief has wide experience in firefighting. But “promoting a culture that values diversity, inclusion, and equity” is her stated priority. LA’s three top fire officials are lesbian women. Few males are hired as firemen.
There’s another sad reality: Insurers have been cutting coverage in at-risk areas.
California needs a political reckoning – and our prayers.
Follow this link to an interactive map: https://bit.ly/CALFIRE3Dmap

Penna Dexter
Whenever there’s a new session of Congress, the House of Representatives adopts a new set of rules to govern the way it conducts business. Four years ago, then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi introduced, and the House passed, a resolution aimed at making all House rules “gender inclusive.”
The resolution expunged sex-specific words from House rules.
So where the terms “father” and “mother” had previously appeared in the House Code of Official Conduct, they were replaced with “parent.”  “Husband” and “wife” became “spouse.” ”Son” and “daughter” became “child.” And “brother” and “sister”: ”sibling.”
It really gets awkward: “Aunt” and “uncle” were replaced with “parent’s sibling” and “cousin” became “sibling’s child.” For in-laws, the terms are “parent-in-law”, “child-in-law” and “sibling-in-law.” The absurd list goes on. There’s even a section that eliminates all gendered terms.
To be clear, these changes only affected the rules document and do not prevent the House members from using gendered language in floor speeches or legislation. But this hat tip to the far Left’s desire to eliminate every distinction between the sexes is silly and just makes it harder to communicate clearly.
This ridiculous action by the 117th Congress should have been reversed two years ago by the 118th Congress, But, with extended wrangling over who would be speaker, this crucial task was skipped
The Wall Street Journal recently published an op-ed by Washington attorney Eileen O’Connor calling on members to now complete what she calls “The House’s Unfinished Gender Business,” and restore the “pre-117th Congress’s language.”
That language, Ms. O’Connor argues, is the opposite of gender inclusive. “It denies the existence of the sexes and the words used to describe their relationships to each other.”
She writes, “When even elected officials can’t bring themselves to acknowledge the basic facts of life, it is no wonder the rest of society loses its nerve as well.”  The House should restore clarity to its rules and eschew all gender-blending nonsense.

Penna Dexter
“Some people are calling it a “Vibe Shift.”  Before anyone is sworn into office, we are seeing the fruits of the November election. There’s a new optimism as we reflect on the things that need change. There’s much to pray for, so let’s begin:
Heavenly Father, we’re grateful that voters rejected the gender ideology that allows, even encourages, the mutilation of bodies, especially the bodies of children. Bring us aid and wisdom to banish it from our government, our education system, our military and our national psyche. Help the confused to understand we humans are created, male and female in Your image.
If there’s a vibe shift, let us take advantage of it to get rid of the DEI mentality that rewards identity over real accomplishment. 
Lord, remove from government any tendency to force hardworking Americans to pay the rightful bills of favored interest groups. We ask You to help our leaders enact policies that will bring able-bodied men, who have become discouraged from working, back to productive lives. 
Lord, restore a culture of life and marriage and lawfulness.
Let’s allow Psalm 128 to guide us as we seek the Lord’s blessing in 2025.
Holy God, in the coming year, let us be a people who fear You as we increasingly understand your power and might.
May we walk in Your ways. 
Father, grant us the opportunity to eat the fruits of our labor.
May our society flourish as we delight in Your will and walk in Your ways.
May more of us marry and form godly families.
Let marriages prosper and be blessed with children who thrive under the loving care and discipline of their parents. 
In Your great wisdom, help us to discern good from evil and provide us with good things all the days of our lives.
Let us be godly influences in the lives of our children’s children.
And grant us Your peace. 
In Jesus Name, 
Amen

Penna Dexter
The massive National Defense Authorization Act passed the U.S. House of Representatives last week. The Washington Stand reports that the bill “takes a sincere stab at some of the worst forms of military wokeness.” The bill was a compromise, but the election results spoke volumes to senators who previously insisted on expanding the draft to women and on rolling back Biden transgender policies. The Washington Stand calls this a “Christmas miracle.”
The legislation strips out Senate language that would have required women to register for the draft. Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) and Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) led against this effort to draft our daughters which Rep. Roy says is “just nonsense in a country of 330 million people.”
Speaker Mike Johnson included a provision that blocks minor children of members of the military from receiving puberty blockers, hormones, and gender mutilation surgeries through military health insurer Tricare. The Speaker said, “Taxpayer dollars should never be used to support procedures and treatments that could permanently harm and sterilize young people.”
Stats from the National Library of Medicine reveal that the hormones and drugs required by a transgender person cost “upwards of $3700 per person, per year. Transition surgeries cost from $20,000 to $150,000 depending upon their complexity.
Also, according to The Washington Stand, “Sources from inside the Trump camp say priority number one is weeding out the thousands of gender-confused troops this administration welcomed into the ranks under the guise of ‘inclusion’.”
The necessity for constant care of a transgender soldier curtails the ability for that person to deploy overseas.  Family Research Council’s Senior Fellow for National Defense, Lt. Col. Robert Maginnis, says “that’s an extravagance the Pentagon cannot afford because it detracts from combat readiness.”
Under the next administration, the woke regime in the military must be rooted out. The sooner we get rid of the distractions and financial drain resulting from the current transgender policy, the better.

Penna Dexter
We are about to have our first openly transgender member of Congress. Democrat Sarah McBride won Delaware’s lone House seat and will be sworn in this January. Since Rep.-elect McBride is a trans woman (a biological male) there’s a bit of uncertainty regarding restrooms and other women’s spaces.
Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina has introduced a couple of measures aimed at protecting women and the spaces designated specifically for their use — i.e. restrooms, changing rooms, and locker rooms. One measure would prevent transgender women from using women’s facilities on the House side of the U.S. Capitol.  The other would extend that ban to all federal property.
Rep. Mace says, as a victim of abuse, “I’m absolutely, 100 percent going to stand in the way of any man who wants to be in a women’s restroom.”
Speaker Mike Johnson has not committed to a vote on either measure but stated that single-sex facilities “are reserved for individuals of that biological sex.” Rep. McBride pledged to abide by those rules, “even if I disagree.”
Still, over time, compliance will suffer. Chris Enloe, writer for The Blaze, says Nancy Mace “should be commended for fighting back against the encroachment of transgenderism.” But, on social media she touts her support for same sex marriage, stating, “I voted for gay marriage twice in fact and would do it again.”
The Blaze’s Chris Enloe points to the “dissonance between these two positions.” He says, “to support the destruction of traditional marriage — in which functional and biological differences are its most important property — is a wholesale rejection of the framework that distinguishes a man from a woman.”
It’s right there in Matt. 19:4. God’s design for marriage is based upon the way He created us: “male and female.” But, society has elevated personal feelings and discarded sex differences as a requirement for marriage.
We’re here, says Chris Enloe, because of those who tried to “erase biological realities when it was convenient.” 

Penna Dexter
The troubled Boeing Company got a new CEO in August. Early on, Kelly Ortberg began winding down DEI at Boeing. DEI — diversity, equity and inclusion — has been around for decades. Diversity requires the elevation of immutable differences — like race, age, ethnicity, religion, gender, and sexual orientation. Equity —often mistaken for equal opportunity — emphasizes equal outcomes. In favor of achieving these, employee merit is necessarily de-emphasized and therein lies the seed of DEI’s failure.
After the death of George Floyd in 2020, Fortune 500 companies launched or beefed up their DEI initiatives. But, when companies that build things take their eye off the ball, quality suffers.
For Boeing, which designs, manufactures, and sells airplanes, 2024 brought massive problems, including the midair separation of a panel from an Alaska Airlines plane, difficulties accessing quality parts, flawed flight control software, a 7–week labor strike, and a severe cash crunch.
A Boeing insider told documentary filmmaker and writer, Christopher Rufo, “An organization can prioritize excellence or diversity, but not both simultaneously.” He said, “DEI is the drop in the bucket, and the whole bucket changes. It is anti-excellence, because it is ill-defined, but it became part of the culture.”
That’s why Kelly Ortberg quietly dismantled Boeing’s DEI department.
Another American corporate giant: the country’s number one employer, Walmart announced it is abandoning DEI.
The Washington Stand reports that when DEI warrior Robby Starbuck began investigating Walmart’s policies, company executives “reached out to him.”
The company has announced it will no longer participate in the Human Rights Campaign’s LGBT shakedown campaign: the Corporate Equality Index. It pledged to remove inappropriate sexual and/or transgender products, and to cancel racial equity initiatives.
Walmart joins a growing list of companies rejecting DEI. American businesses are realizing that the woke DEI agenda is polarizing and stifling for businesses. Some are choosing to return to simply running a business.
Chris Rufo affirms, “A reckoning is underway in corporate America.”

Penna Dexter
Speaking last month before the United Nations General Assembly, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas warned that he intends to submit documents to start the process of expelling Israel from the United Nations. His reason? Israel’s refusal to cede its territory to create a Palestinian state.
U.S. Senator Ted Cruz, discussing the threat on his podcast Verdict, said if Israel is removed from membership, the United States may, itself, withdraw from the U.N.
Senator Cruz says, “If the U.N. expels Israel, the U.S. should halt all funding from America to the U.N.”
The United States is, by far, the U.N.’s largest benefactor.
In a letter to lawmakers, the senator from Texas wrote, “The effort to diplomatically isolate Israel is aimed at ultimately destroying the Jewish state, which is both obscene and antithetical to American national security interests.”
Now may be a good time to discuss U.S. participation in the United Nations. Israel is not the only point of contention.
We should also oppose the ongoing efforts at the U.N. to make abortion an international human right, and its promotion of protected class status based on sexual orientation and gender identity.
U.N. directives often find themselves being debated in Congress. Last week Congressman Nikema Williams, along with 100 Democrat co-sponsors, introduced a resolution declaring an international right to abortion. According to Stephano Gennarini, Vice President for Legal Studies with the Center for Family and Human Rights (C-Fam), “There is no international right to abortion under any treaty ratified by the U.S. government.”
C-Fam’s Friday FAX explains that the U.N. Human Rights Committee, which monitors compliance with U.N. civil rights agreements, “routinely goes beyond its mandate calling on governments to decriminalize abortion in all circumstances.”
Mr. Gennarini also says a treaty has been drafted that treats lobbying and political activity opposing pro-trans policies as crimes against humanity.
The U.S. has leverage at the U.N. Will we use it to stop this stuff?

Penna Dexter
It’s been a long time since conservatives expected fair and balanced coverage of elections by the legacy media. But the Left counts on traditional news outlets to tip the scales with favorable coverage of its candidates and issues.
True to form, major outlets like The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, NBC, ABC, and CBS covered the 2024 campaigns and handled debates and interviews in the biased way they always do. But in this election, the media’s failure to provide truthful and fair coverage hurt the Left.
Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberley Strassel writes, “So long as the left is pointing fingers, let it direct a big, fat digit at the outfit that played the biggest role in losing it the election: the U.S. media.”
We cannot place the media in one overarching category. The Journal itself is legacy media, but its editorial page skews right. Today, Americans have numerous media outlets to choose from.
And so do candidates.
Even The Washington Post points out that “Trump and his surrogates saw incredible value in tapping into a podcast ecosystem that has large numbers of young male listeners who otherwise might have skipped casting ballots.“
Meanwhile much of the media ignored, and expected voters to ignore, border chaos, higher prices, and especially President Biden’s decline. As Kim Strassel points out: “In a world with a competent press, Mr. Biden’s failing constitution would have been front page news.” Instead, the legacy media cooperated with the Democrats in covering it up. If they had done a better job reporting on it, there would have been time to hold a primary which “would have produced a tested nominee.”
Big shock: Americans didn’t buy narratives like “we’re experiencing one of the strongest economies ever” or “crime is falling.”
First Amendment freedoms include the press because the press is meant to provide politicians with “gut checks as to how their policies sit with the nation.” Traditional news outlets face a reckoning.

Penna Dexter
Election day was almost upon us — the editorial endorsing Kamala Harris had already been written — when William Lewis, CEO and Publisher of The Washington Post announced the paper would not be endorsing a presidential candidate, ending a 50-year tradition of doing so.
Immediately after the announcement, The Post began bleeding subscribers — 250,000 of them within four days. Several staff members resigned in protest. Longtime opinion writer Ruth Marcus titled her column, “The Post, the wrong choice at the worst possible time.”
Owner Jeff Bezos wrote his own column explaining that The Post can no longer ignore polling that reveals falling public trust in journalists and the media. “What presidential endorsements do,” he wrote, “is create a perception of bias.” He said, “Ending them is a principled decision.” Other newspapers — The LA Times and USA Today – took the same action citing awareness of their own “lack of credibility.”
The Washington Post is not profitable and is becoming less so. Subscribers are turning to smaller, independent news outlets and social media. But, to do good investigative reporting, a news organization needs a large infrastructure. Covering the U.S. government takes a huge staff. The Post has these things. But, Mr. Bezos wrote, his paper and The New York Times “talk only to a certain elite” and increasingly “only to ourselves.” It would be good to have a centrist DC-based paper. If The Washington Post took serious steps away from its role as purveyor of leftist propaganda, it would be better for all of us.
Mr. Bezos also reportedly told The Post’s management it needs to hire more conservative columnists. Radio host Erick Erickson suggested that, if Mr. Bezos is serious about creating a balance, the paper should also add conservative editors and reporters “to break the leftwing worldview infused into the news product they produce.”
It would take deep structural and ideological shifts for The Washington Post to shed its reputation for extreme bias.

Penna Dexter
A false abortion narrative lives in our presidential politics.
The narrative is that state restrictions on abortion passed since the Dobbs decision in 2022 are placing women in serious danger. Supposedly hospitals, fearing they’ll run afoul of state law, are refusing to treat women for miscarriages or abortion complications.
Abortion advocates, including our vice president, blame the Supreme Court for the death of Amber Thurman, age 28, following a medication abortion. She was 9 weeks pregnant with twins.
Medication abortions accounted for 63 percent of all abortions in 2023. The sustained growth in the use of the abortion pill since it was approved in 2000 is due, in large part, to the FDA’s progressive easing of restrictions on its use. (Many medical experts contend the FDA did not adequately study its safety.) The FDA approved the 2-drug regimen to be used during the first seven weeks of pregnancy and, in 2016, extended the requirement to 10 weeks’ gestation and allowed non-physicians to prescribe the drugs. In 2021 the Biden administration eliminated the requirement that women seeking a medical abortion be evaluated in person by a medical professional.
A Wall Street Journal editorial states the obvious:

“Thurman’s death affirms what antiabortion activists have argued: that the two-pill abortion regimen is far more dangerous than its advocates claim.”

Since Georgia’s abortion law bans abortions after six weeks gestation, Amber Thurman, made an appointment at a North Carolina clinic for a surgical abortion. She arrived too late for the appointment. Rather than reschedule the surgical abortion, Amber opted to begin a medical abortion. She took the first pill and drove back to Georgia. At home, days later, she vomited and passed out. She was taken to a Stockbridge, Georgia hospital. The babies had no heartbeat. Standard treatment involves an antibiotic and a DNC, but it was hours before Amber received either. She died of sepsis.
No court decision or law prevented her timely treatment.