From LifeSiteNews

By Matt Lamb

“I will end the government policy to socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life”

President Donald Trump rescinded an executive order that allowed gender-confused people to join the military.

Trump rescinded 78 of former President Joe Biden’s executive orders, including a handful that pushed the LGBT agenda. The decision drew praise from conservative groups.

One of the rescinded Biden directives is “Executive Order 14004 of January 25, 2021 (Enabling All Qualified Americans To Serve Their Country in Uniform),” according to the White House website.

The Biden order made it “the policy of the United States to ensure that all [so-called] transgender individuals who wish to serve in the United States military and can meet the appropriate standards shall be able to do so openly” and without alleged “discrimination.”

It revoked President Trump’s first-term decision to prohibit gender-confused individuals from enlisting in the military.

Trump also rescinded other Biden orders on transgenderism and homosexuality, including several relating to “gender identity” and “sexual orientation.”

The president also made it a policy of the United States that there are only two sexes, male and female. “I will end the government policy to socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life,” Trump promised during his inauguration speech, as reported by LifeSiteNews.

Trump fulfilled that promise on Day One, with an executive order titled “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.”

The order states, in part:

Efforts to eradicate the biological reality of sex fundamentally attack women by depriving them of their dignity, safety, and well-being. The erasure of sex in language and policy has a corrosive impact not just on women but on the validity of the entire American system. Basing Federal policy on truth is critical to scientific inquiry, public safety, morale, and trust in government itself.

Accordingly, my Administration will defend women’s rights and protect freedom of conscience by using clear and accurate language and policies that recognize women are biologically female, and men are biologically male.

The executive order also affirms that sex is immutable.

It also took aim at the Supreme Court’s Bostock v. Clayton County decision. This decision, authored by Justice Neil Gorsuch, read into federal law a “right” to cross-dress at work. Trump said the decision should not be used to eradicate single-sex spaces, such as in education and prisons. Transgender activists have tried to use it to block laws against  drugs and surgeries and used it to sue a Catholic hospital for not removing a gender-confused woman’s healthy uterus.

The executive order also rescinded various guidance documents and letters promoting Transgender ideology.

The order also states:

Agencies shall remove all statements, policies, regulations, forms, communications, or other internal and external messages that promote or otherwise inculcate gender ideology, and shall cease issuing such statements, policies, regulations, forms, communications or other messages. Agency forms that require an individual’s sex shall list male or female, and shall not request gender identity. Agencies shall take all necessary steps, as permitted by law, to end the Federal funding of gender ideology.

Conservatives praise Trump’s support for biological reality

Trump’s swift action to uphold the two sexes and to ensure women are not housed in prisons or have to share locker rooms with men drew praise from conservative groups.

“Today, President Donald Trump has begun the effort of restoring our nation to the principles that made it great. He’s off to an excellent start,” American Principles Project President Terry Schilling stated in a news release.

“With the hundreds of executive orders signed today, President Trump has taken important steps to eliminate gender ideology and DEI from our government, depoliticize our military and justice system, and reinstitute protections for free speech and religious liberty,” Schilling stated.

The president “has made clear he understands and is prepared for the task ahead,” Schilling said, noting there is more work to be done. “We look forward to working with the incoming administration to ensure the president is able to deliver on his ambitious, pro-family agenda.”

Christian legal nonprofit Alliance Defending Freedom also celebrated the sex definition order, calling it “momentous” and a return to “reality and common sense.”

‘The fight against gender ideology is far from over, and Alliance Defending Freedom is committed to seeing it through to the end,” CEO Kristen Waggoner stated in a news release. “But today, the U.S. government switched sides in that conflict—from promoting the lie to defending the truth.”

She said ADF plans to work with Trump to “restore common sense in American policy.”

Independent Women’s Forum also thanked President Trump for ensuring biological reality is recognized in law.

“The lie that sex is fluid erases and endangers women,” senior legal advisor Beth Parlato stated.

She also said Trump is “bring[ing] back sanity and common sense.”

From the Brownstone Institute

By  Laura Rosen Cohen

It wasn’t that long ago that America’s strongest and most important export was American culture and the global dissemination of the American Dream. From movies to music, from blue jeans to drive-in movies, and from fast food to fashion, there wasn’t a single country in the world or a single cohort of teenagers and young adults that didn’t want what America was offering.

Unfortunately, throughout the progression of the Vietnam War, American culture started to cannibalize itself. The anti-war, hippie, and protesting counterculture took the reins. American cultural institutions and artists pivoted away from patriotism and moved toward anti-Establishment and anti-Western positions for a variety of reasons, both ideological and financial.

Protest became the foundational position of a generation of artists, musicians, and thinkers. As a result, America’s most powerful civil export was completely defenestrated. The left took ownership of American culture and rebellion. And since then, the American left has adopted an increasingly aggressive and metastasizing woke ideology. The result has been the near complete ideological capture of most of American civil society.

Undeniably, there has been a near ideological capture of public education, public health administration (as evidenced by the Covid years), the legacy media, and the judiciary to name a few spheres of DEI influence. Woke ideology has arguably been the most noxious and dangerous export that America has ever sent out into the world and it didn’t seem like there was an end in sight.

But then, remarkably, in November 2024, America rolled out a blockbuster, the likes of which have never been seen before. It was the greatest comeback story in American history: The Return of President Trump. And in an instant, faster than a speeding bullet, faster than you could sing a chorus of YMCA, led by President Trump, American politics and corporate America began a slow and steady retreat from DEI policies.

These toxic notions have not only poisoned civic life in America and throughout the Western world but have also resulted in public policy decisions that have resulted in catastrophic loss of life and property. The apex of this policy disaster can clearly be seen within the raging blaze of fire in Los Angeles and in all the DEI policies that led to a Dante’s inferno in America. Los Angeles, where the Mayor was in Ghana  when disaster hit. Where there was no water in the hydrants, the infrastructure was crumbling, and where diversity was the policy priority for the LAFD and where $1 million of civil service salary buys precisely three woke hires named Kirsten, including one Kirsten who says it’s your fault if you end up in a fire, and where the Governor of California prioritized fish over humans.

Over the past several decades large swaths of corporate North America were bullied by a loud and vocal woke minority into adopting some of the most aggressive and ridiculous DEI and ESG policies on earth. Some corporate converts set their compasses to DEI like a north star and flopped spectacularly. Many, like Bud Light, are still licking their wounds from their predictable and avoidable “Go woke, go broke” fiasco  while other companies like Jaguar remained impenetrably thick-skinned and were rightly ridiculed and mocked for brand murder, dare we call it brandicide?

But now, the vibe shift is impossible to miss or ignore. In recent weeks, we have seen President Trump set his sights on DEI in the military and American corporations like Apple and Volvo starting to sing from the new hymn sheet, along with retail giants like Costco. 

And incredibly, this was just the tip of the anti-woke iceberg. In early January, following an earlier, fall visit by Mark Zuckerberg to Mar-a-Lago, Facebook announced that it would be discontinuing its third-party “fact-checkers” (i.e. “censorship”) program and cutting its DEI hiring initiatives. And now, they are dropping like flies! McDonald’s and Amazon are the latest to axe their DEI programs.

Unfortunately, the astonishing and heartbreaking scenes in Los Angeles are a direct result of abject mismanagement of the city and state and exacerbated by unqualified hires and anti-human, anti-common sense policies that should never, ever have been permitted to escape the faculty lounges, let alone leap into civic life. The woke petri dish has already created colossal havoc in every element of civil society in America and in much of the rest of the Western world. Deep reflection and immediate change are needed.

If the deep blue voters of California recognize the folly of their choices and the destruction-driven bent of their elected leaders, if they demand answers and repudiate their woke ways, perhaps there is hope. For the good of the country, and indeed the entire Western world, America’s most poisonous export must be put to pasture once and for all.

Author

Laura Rosen Cohen

Laura Rosen Cohen is a Toronto writer. Her work has been featured in The Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail, National Post, The Jerusalem Post, The Jerusalem Report, The Canadian Jewish News and Newsweek among others. She is a special needs parent and also a columnist and the official In House Jewish Mother of internationally best-selling author Mark Steyn at SteynOnline.com