Washington Free Beacon

Biden-era Environmental Protection Agency employees spent work hours implementing diversity, equity, and inclusion policies throughout the agency—focusing in particular on “de-gendering” bathrooms, hiring more gay and transgender employees, and introducing new gender-neutral honorifics such as “Mx.,” according to internal agency documents and communications reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon.

Under the leadership of then-EPA administrator Michael Regan, in 2021, the agency created an employee-led “DEIA implementation team” that was empowered to establish workgroups and take DEI-related actions. The goal, according to the Biden EPA, was to “embed” DEI agency-wide, create “cultural change,” and establish the agency as a DEI model for the entire federal government.

The EPA documents—which were first obtained by the watchdog group Functional Government Initiative and shared with the Free Beacon—show the EPA’s DEI initiatives were largely coordinated by its LGBTQIA+ Workgroup, which reported to senior leadership. The workgroup’s members included a scientist, environmental protection specialist, engineer, plant pathologist, climate policy analyst, attorney adviser, and research ethicist among others.

The documents are the latest evidence of how ingrained DEI efforts were at the EPA and across the entire Biden administration. President Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign took aim at such efforts and, on his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order dismantling all existing taxpayer-funded DEI initiatives and DEI offices. “The public release of these plans demonstrated immense public waste and shameful discrimination,” the order stated.

The agency’s DEI initiatives likely cost taxpayers millions of dollars in man-hours. The average EPA employee’s annual salary is $102,489, 42.9 percent higher than the national average for government employees, while officials known to have been involved in the initiatives were paid as much as $168,400, according to Open Payrolls.

“In the Biden years, Americans endured crisis after crisis, many of them—rampant illegal immigration, draconian COVID-19 measures, and skyrocketing fuel costs—of the president’s own making,” the Functional Government Initiative told the Free Beacon. “What was the administration instead focused on? A phony crisis of inequity, racism, and ‘transphobia,’ which could only be met by wasting vast resources on un-American, divisive initiatives.”

“Unfortunately, the EPA wasn’t alone: the rot grew across the federal government with the encouragement of the administration,” it added. “This was not presidential leadership, but rather government dysfunction.”

The EPA’s LGBTQIA+ Workgroup, meanwhile, outlined its DEI-related activities during a summit in September 2023 hosted by the left-wing group Out and Equal.

According to slides of its presentation reviewed by the Free Beacon, the group’s top recommendations for the EPA were to “de-gender” restroom and locker room access, increase participation in voluntary self-disclosure of sexual orientation and gender identity, incorporate LGBTQIA+ prospective employees into recruiting activities, add gender pronouns on email signatures, and change internal style manual requirements for gendered honorifics.

The workgroup noted in the presentation that it met weekly to craft its recommendations and that it informed EPA leaders in 2023 that it would not sunset as originally planned, and would continue meeting.

And the group achieved many of its objectives: Across the EPA’s 118 facilities, the group said the agency’s number of gender-neutral restrooms and gender-neutral locker rooms swelled to 140 and 15, respectively, as a result of its work. The Biden EPA also committed to constructing all-gender restrooms in future building renovations, continuing to retrofit existing restrooms, and replacing male/female signage on existing single-use restrooms with signs that are more inclusive.

The EPA workgroup added that, if it felt internal resistance to the changes, it would “educate contractors and EPA employees on why these changes are needed.”

In addition, because of the workgroup’s advocacy, the EPA added pronouns to emails, targeted specific offices where people were “misgendered” with expanded trainings, and issued an October 2023 memorandum authored by then-deputy administrator Janet McCabe allowing employees to select their preferred honorifics such as “Mx.” instead of “Mr.” or “Mrs.”

“This update also includes some very important improvements that will help advance diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility in our writing,” McCabe wrote in the memorandum.

Since Trump took office, however, the EPA has gutted DEI and related environmental justice activities. Administrator Lee Zeldin, for example, has announced that the agency has canceled millions of dollars in DEI spending and placed 171 DEI and environmental justice employees on administrative leave.

“The previous Administration used DEI and environmental justice to advance ideological priorities, distributing billions of dollars to organizations in the name of climate equity. This ends now,” Zeldin said last month. “We will be good stewards of tax dollars and do everything in our power to deliver clean air, land, and water to every American, regardless of race, religion, background, and creed.”

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Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University graduate student who served as lead negotiator for the student group behind the illegal encampments that plagued campus last spring, is in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody after the Trump administration revoked his student visa, a senior State Department official confirmed to the Washington Free Beacon.

Khalil’s attorney said federal immigration authorities detained Khalil on Saturday night at his university-owned apartment in execution of a State Department order to revoke his student visa. A public ICE database lists Khalil as being held in an Elizabeth, N.J., detention center. A senior State Department official confirmed that Secretary of State Marco Rubio directed the visa revocation.

“This should serve as a warning to foreign students on temporary status in America—under this administration, if you support terror groups, we will deport you,” the official told the Free Beacon.

Khalil was one of the Columbia University Apartheid Divest student leaders who organized the encampments. He led negotiations with the school as they unfolded, demanding divestment from Israel. Khalil pledged further unrest in the buildup to the spring semester, telling the Hill he would continue to push Columbia to divest from Israel by “any available means necessary.”

“And we’ve been working all this summer on our plans, on what’s next to pressure Columbia to listen to the students and to decide to be on the right side of history,” Khalil said. “We’re considering a wide range of actions throughout the semester, encampments and protests and all of that. But for us, encampment is now our new base.”

Khalil has openly discussed his student visa status and his upbringing in Syria, including in an interview with Qatar-funded network Al Jazeera.

Columbia issued a statement on Sunday that did not directly address Khalil’s detention and instead referenced “reports of ICE around campus.”

“Consistent with our longstanding practice and the practice of cities and institutions throughout the country, law enforcement must have a judicial warrant to enter non-public University areas, including University buildings,” the statement read. “Columbia is committed to complying with all legal obligations and supporting our student body and campus community.”

The news comes amid a flurry of actions from the Trump administration to deport pro-Hamas visa holders, something President Donald Trump promised to do on the campaign trail. In his second week in office, Trump signed an executive order instructing federal agencies to investigate and deport anti-Semitic resident aliens, including those on visas, who have violated U.S. law.

The State Department revoked the visa of a university student for the first time on Thursday, citing the individual’s prior involvement in criminal activity tied to Hamas-supporting campus disruptions. Khalil’s arrest came two days later and does not come as a surprise—the encampment negotiator was included on a shortlist of pro-Hamas student visa holders that anti-Semitism watchdog group Betar USA presented to the administration, the Free Beacon reported last month.

On Friday, meanwhile, Trump’s newly formed task force to combat anti-Semitism announced it had revoked approximately $400 million in federal grants and contracts to Columbia over its failure to curb anti-Semitism in the aftermath of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, terror attack on Israel. Columbia’s interim president, Katrina Armstrong, issued a statement that acknowledged Columbia’s “failures and shortcomings” and pledged to work with Trump administration officials “to address their legitimate concerns.”

“Columbia is taking the government’s action very seriously. I want to assure the entire Columbia community that we are committed to working with the federal government to address their legitimate concerns,” Armstrong wrote. “To that end, Columbia can, and will, continue to take serious action toward combatting antisemitism on our campus.”

Two days earlier, Columbia student radicals stormed a Barnard College campus building for the second time in a week. During the first storming, they sent a security guard to the hospital and caused $30,000 in damages. On the second occasion, the agitators distributed Hamas propaganda meant to justify Oct. 7. Within hours of the Trump administration’s funding cut announcement, Columbia suspended its four students who had been arrested while clashing with police during the more recent incident.

The administration appears likely to pull more taxpayer funds from Columbia. The anti-Semitism task force is actively probing $5 billion worth of Columbia’s grants and contracts over the Ivy League institution’s “apparent failure” to protect Jewish students.

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The Lenten season has begun, which for Catholics is a time of prayer, fasting, and abstinence. A friend suggested I give up alcohol for Lent. And maybe I can give up breathing too. I jest—people have given up far more and for a lot longer. 

Which brings me to Rabbi Meir Y. Soloveichik, who reviews Forbidden: A 3,000-Year History of Jews and the Pig by Jordan D. Rosenblum.

“In a relatively concise work, Rosenblum takes us on a comprehensive tour, from classical sources to modern literature and movies. (Disappointingly, while Plutrach receives his due, The Simpsons is not a pop culture source cited by Rosenblum—not even a scene known to fans featuring a group styled ‘The Rapping Rabbis’ chanting, ‘Don’t eat pork/not even with a fork/can’t touch this!’) The historian introduces the reader to a veritable smorgasbord of sources that is a bona fide intellectual feast. And yet: As the book reached the modern era, Rosenblum appears to valorize, or celebrate, Jews who have embraced the tabooed animal whole hog, and who defend themselves in Judaic terms. It is here that I lose my appetite for his argument.

“Let us begin with the culinary conundrum. As described in the Bible, any number of creatures are designated as forbidden food to God’s covenant people. A kosher animal must both chew its cud and feature split hooves; this, Leviticus further explains, would prohibit creatures that have have only one of these signs (a camel is a ruminant but has no real hooves, and a pig has split hooves but is not a ruminant). Kosher fish must feature fins and scales, thereby forbidding shellfish, as well as other marine life such as shark and catfish. Nothing in sacred Scripture singles out the pig as especially forbidden, and a Jew who eats shrimp is violating Torah law as severely as one who ingests pork. Thus, there is no source in the biblical period that marks the pig as an animal that is particularly repugnant. Why, then, is abstention from pork so affiliated with Jewishness?

“The answer, Rosenblum shows, lies in history. It was only during the Second Temple period, Rosenblum notes, that the Jews became particularly known by Gentiles for their refusal to eat pork, while Jews, in turn, began to see pork as forbidden food par excellence. This began, he shows, during the persecution of Judea by the Syrio-Greek Seleucid Empire, in which the Maccabean revolt, and the story of Hanukkah, ultimately unfolded. Stories of Jewish martyrdom, described in the second Book of Maccabees, described Jews who refused to ingest pork on pain of death. Thus, for Rosenblum, ‘the particular role the pig plays in Second Temple martyrdom narratives directly leads to its outsized historical influence.’ Meanwhile, the fact that Jews refrained from enjoying what was, in Simpsonian terms, a ‘wonderful, magical, animal,’ attracted the attention and the curiosity of pagans, either because Jews were known for abhorring the animal, or because it was so strange to Romans that Jews would deny themselves this particular pleasure.

“Eventually, as Rosenblum recounts, the rabbis returned the favor by utilizing the pig as a scripturally inspired metaphor for Rome itself. Because the pig was the one animal in the ancient world that featured the more noticeable kosher sign, split hooves, but still lacked the required rumination, the Talmud depicted the animal as an embodiment of hypocrisy, and therefore comparable to the abhorrent world power that had destroyed Judean Jerusalem and turned it into a pagan city: ‘Just as the pig, when it lays down puts forth its hooves as if to say “I am clean,” so too does this Evil Empire commit robbery and violence [while] giving itself the appearance as if holding court.'”

You can always count on Peggy Noonan to bring home the bacon in her weekly Wall Street Journal column. The former Reagan speechwriter recently published a collection of essays, A Certain Idea of America: Selected Writings. Noah Gould gives us a review.

“Noonan makes arguments most compellingly by example. As in the enduring speech in response to the Challenger explosion, which she wrote for Reagan, Noonan references great men of history and poetry to help make sense of larger issues. The Challenger explosion was not an isolated moment of time, but 390 years after ‘the great explorer Sir Francis Drake’ died at sea. The comparison places what might otherwise be seen as a random tragic event within the context of the epic history of explorers reaching new horizons.

“Likewise, in this volume, historical touchpoints shed light on issues of today. Ulysses S. Grant getting arrested by a policeman instructs on the rule of law and decency. An interview with Oscar Hammerstein pleads for political restraint among cultural elites. The death of Queen Elizabeth II allows reflection on faith and tradition. Taken together, these discrete examples give a cumulative case of what Noonan values.

“A strong moral voice and clarity on tough issues is often missing in the thousands, maybe tens-of-thousands, of opinion pieces shot back and forth each day in the world of pundits and ‘thought leaders.’ The supply of easy opinion is abundant, but not clear moral reasoning. Noonan provides this repeatedly, avoiding schoolmarmy lectures and reasoning from fundamentals. Her tenure of 20-plus years at the Wall Street Journal in addition to her successes as a speechwriter lend weight to these discussions, although even her early writings contain that moral golden thread. I credit that thread in giving her the ability to cut through the noise on a busy opinion page.

“The crisis we face, Noonan argues, is a ‘fundamental confusion’ about ‘who we are’ as Americans. The little things—how senators dress or empty office buildings—are all details that matter in a much larger sense. She calls Senator John Fetterman (D., Pa.) a ‘different kind of phony’ and the atmosphere reveals how Americans ‘insist on preeminence … while increasingly ignoring our responsibilities.’ Empty office buildings reveal an air of ‘post-greatness’ that threatens an America like that shown in an Edward Hopper painting, ’empty streets, tables for one, everyone at the bar drinking alone.'”

Speaking of drinking, have you read the new bio of Earl Weaver? Matt Lewis has. He reviews The Last Manager: How Earl Weaver Tricked, Tormented, and Reinvented Baseball by John W. Miller.

“Any book about Weaver is bound to be packed with stories of his legendary run-ins with umpires. He was the first manager in decades to get ejected from a World Series game, somehow managed to get tossed from both games of a doubleheader—twice—and once was even ejected mid-game for smoking in the dugout. (He subsequently had a secret cigarette pocket sewn into his jersey to skirt the rules.) Miller’s book delivers plenty of these epic umpire battles, but I’ll resist spoiling most of them here.

“Behind the theatrics, however, was a guy who viewed the game differently. While everyone else was obsessed with batting averages, Weaver cared more about on-base percentage and timely home runs. He came to despise the sacrifice bunt (why give away an out?). He turned shortstops into power hitters, moving 6’4” Cal Ripken Jr. from third to short and paving the way for future MLB stars like Derek Jeter. He platooned players before it was cool, squeezing 36 homers and 98 RBIs out of a three-man rotation in left field in 1979. This is to say, he re-created star players ‘in the aggregate.’ Billy Beane and the Moneyball crew should’ve sent him royalty checks.

“Where did this knack for data and analytics come from? Miller suggests it came from his Uncle Bud, a bookie who helped raise him in St. Louis. Whatever the inspiration, Weaver was thinking in probabilities decades before the sabermetric crowd made it standard practice. And he wasn’t just a numbers guy. He was the first manager to use a radar gun. His ingenuity even extended to the field itself. He had the Orioles’ groundskeeper doctor the field—muddying the basepaths to slow fast opponents, and hardening the infield to create tricky hops for bad defenders. It was brilliant, it was petty, and it worked.

“He even helped develop a baseball video game that eventually led to John Madden Football. Think about that: Earl Weaver is at least partially responsible for the most dominant sports video game of all time. Not bad for a guy who looked like he spent his afternoons drinking Pabst Blue Ribbons and screaming at neighborhood kids to stay off his lawn.”

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… What do you think of the assertion that it is precisely the most proper type of meat that Jews avoid eating?
… I heartily agree with it, but I have another question. Do they abstain from eating pork by reason of some special request for hogs or from abhorrence of the creature? Their own accounts sound like pure myth, but perhaps they have some serious reasons which they do not publish.

—Plutarch

Homer: Wait a minute wait a minute wait a minute. Lisa honey, are you
saying you’re *never* going to eat any animal again? What about bacon?
Lisa: No.
Homer: Ham?
Lisa: No.
Homer: Pork chops?
Lisa: Dad! Those all come from the same animal!
Homer: [laughs sarcastically] Yeah, right Lisa. A wonderful, magical animal.
—The Simpsons, “Lisa the Vegetarian”

In the first century, an Alexandrian Jewish philosopher journeyed to Rome to defend, in the presence of the emperor, against certain charges leveled at the Egyptian-Jewish community. But the Roman emperor Gaius, known as Caligula, had more gustatory matters on his mind. “Why,” he asked Philo, “is it that you abstain from eating pig’s flesh?” This, Philo ruefully recounts, provoked “a violent laughter” by his adversaries in the throne room, as “they wished to court the emperor out of flattery, and therefore wished to make it appear that this question was dictated by wit and uttered with grace.” To this Philo did his best to explain Jewish law, but others were still stuck on matters culinary. “There are also many people who do not eat lamb’s flesh which is the most tender of all meat,” another Roman commented. To this, Philo reports, Caligula laughingly commented, “They are quite right, for it is not nice.”

This ostensibly ludicrous scene actually captures an enormity of Jewish history, and it is one of the many moments briefly referenced in Jordan D. Rosenblum’s book Forbidden: A 3,000-Year History of Jews and the Pig. The subtitle is true to its claim: In a relatively concise work, Rosenblum takes us on a comprehensive tour, from classical sources to modern literature and movies. (Disappointingly, while Plutrach receives his due, The Simpsons is not a pop culture source cited by Rosenblum—not even a scene known to fans featuring a group styled “The Rapping Rabbis” chanting, “Don’t eat pork/not even with a fork/can’t touch this!”) The historian introduces the reader to a veritable smorgasbord of sources that is a bona fide intellectual feast. And yet: As the book reached the modern era, Rosenblum appears to celebrate, or at least empathize with, Jews who have embraced the tabooed animal whole hog, and who defend themselves in Judaic terms. It is here that I lose my appetite for his argument.

Let us begin with the culinary conundrum. As described in the Bible, any number of creatures are designated as forbidden food to God’s covenant people. A kosher animal must both chew its cud and feature split hooves; this, Leviticus further explains, would prohibit creatures that have have only one of these signs (a camel is a ruminant but has no real hooves, and a pig has split hooves but is not a ruminant). Kosher fish must feature fins and scales, thereby forbidding shellfish, as well as other marine life such as shark and catfish. Nothing in sacred Scripture singles out the pig as especially forbidden, and a Jew who eats shrimp is violating Torah law as severely as one who ingests pork. Thus, there is no source in the biblical period that marks the pig as an animal that is particularly repugnant. Why, then, is abstention from pork so affiliated with Jewishness?

The answer, Rosenblum shows, lies in history. It was only during the Second Temple period, Rosenblum notes, that the Jews became particularly known by Gentiles for their refusal to eat pork, while Jews, in turn, began to see pork as forbidden food par excellence. This began, he shows, during the persecution of Judea by the Syrio-Greek Seleucid Empire, in which the Maccabean revolt, and the story of Hanukkah, ultimately unfolded. Stories of Jewish martyrdom, described in the second Book of Maccabees, described Jews who refused to ingest pork on pain of death. Thus, for Rosenblum, “the particular role the pig plays in Second Temple martyrdom narratives directly leads to its outsized historical influence.” Meanwhile, the fact that Jews refrained from enjoying what was, in Simpsonian terms, a “wonderful, magical, animal,” attracted the attention and the curiosity of pagans, either because Jews were known for abhorring the animal, or because it was so strange to Romans that Jews would deny themselves this particular pleasure.

Eventually, as Rosenblum recounts, the rabbis returned the favor by utilizing the pig as a scripturally inspired metaphor for Rome itself. Because the pig was the one animal in the ancient world that featured the more noticeable kosher sign, split hooves, but still lacked the required rumination, the Talmud depicted the animal as an embodiment of hypocrisy, and therefore comparable to the abhorrent world power that had destroyed Judean Jerusalem and turned it into a pagan city: “Just as the pig, when it lays down puts forth its hooves as if to say ‘I am clean,’ so too does this Evil Empire commit robbery and violence [while] giving itself the appearance as if holding court.” Rosenblum captures the rabbinic feeling about Rome precisely:

The pig publicly displays its cloven hooves, as if to claim that it is pure. But do not judge a book by its cover, because the external, seemingly pure body of the pig conceals its impure innards. It does not chew the cud and therefore is not kosher. So too, The Pig puts on a grand show in public, claiming to run impartial law courts. But scratch the surface, and you will find a violent and corrupt Rome.

This is exactly right, and the point deserves elaboration. Those who have admired the ancient Romans have also, at times, noted with disdain the way Jews resisted the pagan practices of the empire. Edward Gibbon rapturously recounted what he seemed to see as a pluralistic paradise: “We have already described the religious harmony of the ancient world, and the facility with which the most different and even hostile nations embraced, or at least respected, each other’s superstitions.” And yet, he scornfully continues, “A single people refused to join in the common intercourse of mankind,” such that “a sullen obstinacy with which they maintained their peculiar rites and unsocial manners seemed to mark them out a distinct species of men.” The Jews in the empire, for Gibbon, “yielded a stronger and more ready assent to the traditions of their remote ancestors than to the evidence of their senses.”

But of course, as Prof. Steven Smith has noted, for Gibbon to celebrate the empire as a harmonious place was to ignore “the vast slave populations, the ubiquitous brothels staffed by desperate and downtrodden women, the lethal savagery of the gladiatorial games, the widespread practice of infanticide, and the dismal tenement housing afflicted by fire and filth and disease.” In a similar sense, rabbinic texts utilize a forbidden animal in order to make a homiletical point: to morally celebrate the Roman Empire is to put lipstick on a pig. To identify an animal that has one kosher sign but not the other with Rome is to reflect the way in which Jews disdained the pagan allure of the Roman world. To put it slightly differently, Jews have been proud of the fact that they have remained true to ways of their ancestors even when, to others, they appeared pigheaded.

It is with this in mind that we may approach a phenomenon that Rosenblum admiringly examines as his book reaches its conclusion: Jews who not only eat pork, but utilize Judaic concepts in order to explain it. For Rosenblum, this violation of Torah law is itself a Judaic act. “In my view,” Rosenblum reflects, “these Jews should be understood as transgressing as a means of expressing; their rejection is a form of acceptance, and hence, it is a key part of the conversation.” For Rosenblum, the humorist David Rakoff’s essay is the truest “masterpiece” on “Jews, pig, and identity.” Let us study the passage Rosenblum cites, in which Rakoff invokes the well-known tradition of shattering a glass vessel at a Jewish wedding:

And yet, with all of this, I almost never feel more Jewish than in that moment just before I am about to eat pork. Allow me to horrify kosher readers when I draw a parallel between that instant and the custom of breaking a glass at a Jewish wedding, the perfect illustration of the Jewish worldview. In this sober evocation of the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 A.D. is a reminder that all joy houses the Newtonian capacity for an equal and opposite sorrow. As a Jew Who Eats Pork, extolling the boundless perfection of the baby pig at NY Noodletown at the corner of Bowery and Bayard necessarily requires a simultaneous split second of acknowledgment along with my blithe rhapsody that this is meat ineluctably bound up with my grim history. Otherwise, I’d just be a guy eating pork.

Rosenblum embraces this. Here, he argues, “the act of eating pig is a bite-sized moment of sorrow and joy, of shattering glass and putting the broken pieces back together, and of transgression and affirmation.”

To this rabbinic reader, such a statement is horrifying. While the tradition of shattering a glass at a Jewish wedding has, as Rosenblum notes, a complex history, it has come to be identified as a reminder of the Roman destruction of Jerusalem, and of all the horrors that followed Jews in exile. To celebrate a wedding as the glass is broken is to defiantly insist that Jewish identity continues in the face of all attempts to ensure the contrary. The glass ritual recalls, in other words, the tragedies that Jews did not choose, as well as the heroism with which Jews retained their patrimony during persecution.

Meanwhile, as Rosenblum himself teaches us, the pig came to be associated by Jews with the stubborn refusal to abandon their faith, even in the face of challenges they did not choose. Here, a total inversion of the past takes place: A Jew chooses to eat pig, and invokes the memory of those martyrs who died at the hands of the very empire Jews compared to this animal in order to justify and Judaize an act that those very same martyrs would have seen as a betrayal. It is to seek to create a sacred silk purse out of a sow’s ear.

Explaining Jews that partake in pork need not be complicated. Pork is delicious (or so I have it on the authority of Plutarch and Homer Simpson). For some Jews today, that fact is more important than the fact it is forbidden by Jewish law, and more important, it seems, than the fact that other Jews have died a martyr’s death rather than eat it. But a ham-eating Jew who guiltily reflects on the horror with which his ancestors would have regarded his meal is not sanctifying, or Judaizing, his violation of the Torah. His meal is in no way comparable to a rite at a Jewish wedding, which is seen as the ultimate embodiment of Jewish continuity. In the end, he is just a guy with guilt eating a pig. All else is hogwash.

Forbidden: A 3,000-Year History of Jews and the Pig
by Jordan D. Rosenblum
NYU Press, 272 pp., $30

Meir Y. Soloveichik is the rabbi of Congregation Shearith Israel in New York City and the director of the Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought at Yeshiva University.

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John W. Miller’s The Last Manager might sound like the kind of overcooked title you slap on a clickbait article, but the bold assertion has merit. Once upon a time, managers mattered. Then free agency and analytics handed the keys to the players and the nerds in the front office, and suddenly, the guys in the dugout were about as influential as the kid trolling the upper deck selling hot dogs.

Except, that is, for Earl Weaver, the diminutive skipper of the Baltimore Orioles—who somehow thrived in both eras because he was a genius, a lunatic, or both.

Before 1976, baseball players were essentially indentured servants. Sure, they could retire and open a car dealership if they had the cash, but they weren’t free to take their talents to Miami—or the highest bidder. This old system—terribly unfair to the players but fantastic for fans of small-market (read “poor”) teams—meant that smart managers could squeeze every ounce of talent out of a roster held together with chewing gum and blind optimism.

Then came free agency. And money. Scads of money. By 1980, just four years after the rules changed, the average MLB salary had tripled. Suddenly, the teams with deep wallets had a huge advantage, and managers couldn’t just bark orders like a factory foreman on a deadline. They had to manage in the modern sense: talk, persuade, and play nice. The old-school tyrants were shoved aside. But somehow Weaver barely missed a beat.

The numbers back it up. From 1968 to 1982 (not counting two strike years), Weaver’s Orioles, led by stars like Jim Palmer, Brooks and Frank Robinson, Boog Powell, and Eddie Murray, won at least 90 games in 11 out of 12 full seasons. They averaged 97 wins a year. Weaver’s 1969-70 Orioles are the only team in history to win 108+ games in back-to-back seasons. Think about that. The Yankees, the Dodgers, the Red Sox—none of them pulled that off. But a foul-mouthed chain-smoker with the temperament of a caffeinated badger managed it in Baltimore.

Some critics fault him for winning just one World Series (1970) despite four appearances. But that’s like criticizing a chef for earning only one Michelin star while running four top-tier restaurants—it’s still a rare and elite accomplishment. Besides, the 1983 Orioles—the last Baltimore team to win it all—were largely a product of Weaver’s vision, even if he retired a year too soon to share in the triumph.

Any book about Weaver is bound to be packed with stories of his legendary run-ins with umpires. He was the first manager in decades to get ejected from a World Series game, somehow managed to get tossed from both games of a doubleheader—twice—and once was even ejected mid-game for smoking in the dugout. (He subsequently had a secret cigarette pocket sewn into his jersey to skirt the rules.) Miller’s book delivers plenty of these epic umpire battles, but I’ll resist spoiling most of them here.

Behind the theatrics, however, was a guy who viewed the game differently. While everyone else was obsessed with batting averages, Weaver cared more about on-base percentage and timely home runs. He came to despise the sacrifice bunt (why give away an out?). He turned shortstops into power hitters, moving 6’4″ Cal Ripken Jr. from third to short and paving the way for future MLB stars like Derek Jeter. He platooned players before it was cool, squeezing 36 homers and 98 RBIs out of a three-man rotation in left field in 1979. This is to say, he re-created star players “in the aggregate.” Billy Beane and the Moneyball crew should’ve sent him royalty checks.

Where did this knack for data and analytics come from? Miller suggests it came from his Uncle Bud, a bookie who helped raise him in St. Louis. Whatever the inspiration, Weaver was thinking in probabilities decades before the sabermetric crowd made it standard practice. And he wasn’t just a numbers guy. He was the first manager to use a radar gun. His ingenuity even extended to the field itself. He had the Orioles’ groundskeeper doctor the field—muddying the basepaths to slow fast opponents, and hardening the infield to create tricky hops for bad defenders. It was brilliant, it was petty, and it worked.

He even helped develop a baseball video game that eventually led to John Madden Football. Think about that: Earl Weaver is at least partially responsible for the most dominant sports video game of all time. Not bad for a guy who looked like he spent his afternoons drinking Pabst Blue Ribbons and screaming at neighborhood kids to stay off his lawn.

Weaver’s own playing career never took off, though not for lack of talent. In a cruel twist of fate, his minor league team hired a player-manager who played the same position as him. Guess who got most of the playing time at second base? Baseball writers called it unfair. Weaver called it life. He figured he had time to make the big leagues. He didn’t. Instead, he became one of the greatest major league managers in history.

His personality? Volcanic. According to Miller, he drank like a 1950s ad executive: four cocktails and multiple beers a day—a habit that occasionally led to embarrassing situations. He rode his players hard but let bygones be bygones. And if a player ignored his orders and it worked, Weaver rolled with it. “Weaver loved winning more than being right,” Miller writes. If only more leaders thought like that.

Miller doesn’t sugarcoat things. Weaver was complicated. A paradox. He was vulgar, profane, and politically incorrect; yet he was quick to forgive and open minded to new ideas. He pushed to make Frank Robinson baseball’s first black manager, among other generous acts. He was, in short, the kind of guy you’d either love or hate, possibly both within the same conversation.

The book delivers some outstanding one-liners about (and by) Weaver:

“I gave Mike Cuellar more chances than my first wife.”—Weaver (regarding a talented O’s pitcher he had to let go)

“At first, it shocked me that a major-league manager would yell at a player like that, and then I realized I’m gonna benefit from listening to this asshole.”—former Oriole catcher Rick Dempsey

When outfielder Pat Kelly, a devout Christian, told Weaver he should “walk with the Lord,” Weaver shot back, “I’d rather you walk with the bases loaded.”

Ultimately, The Last Manager isn’t just about Weaver—it’s about the death of his kind. Today, managers have been largely domesticated. And baseball, in the process, has lost something: the fiery, brilliant, and infuriating characters who made the game unpredictable and, let’s face it, a hell of a lot more fun.

Miller doesn’t just tell Weaver’s story. He implicitly suggests that baseball was better when guys like Weaver were calling the shots. And after reading his book, it’s hard to disagree.

The Last Manager: How Earl Weaver Tricked, Tormented, and Reinvented Baseball
by John W. Miller
Avid Reader Press, 368 pp., $30

Matt Lewis is a lifelong Orioles fan and the author of Filthy Rich Politicians: The Swamp Creatures, Latte Liberals, and Ruling-Class Elites Cashing in on America (Center Street).

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Less than a month ago, Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas supposedly ended “pay for slay,” the infamous program through which Abbas uses a ballooning share of his authority’s budget to pay terrorists and their families. On Thursday, those terrorists lined up at the PA’s post offices to get their money as usual.

The unimpeded flow of “pay for slay” funds isn’t a surprise. Both Abbas and other Palestinian officials“reaffirmed their support for mass murderers of Israelis in general and the terrorism payments in particular” following Abbas’s February decree outlining purported reforms to the terrorist payment system, our Andrew Tobin reports from Jerusalem. Still, it is “the clearest sign yet that the Palestinian Authority does not intend to follow through” on those reforms.

READ MORE: Palestinian Authority Appears To Resume Terrorism Payments It Vowed To End

“SHALOM COLUMBIA”: That’s how the White House announced it had pulled $400 million worth of grants and contracts from Columbia “over its failure to protect Jewish students from antisemitic harassment.”

The Trump administration’s anti-Semitism task force launched a review of the Ivy League institution’s federal funding on Monday. By Friday morning, Columbia lost nearly a tenth of the $5 billion in federal funding commitments it enjoys.

The speedy turnaround reflects the high-priority nature of the administration’s efforts to combat campus anti-Semitism. The Justice Department launched a task force on the issue in early February, and it has hit the ground running particularly following Education Secretary Linda McMahon’s confirmation on Monday.

Columbia hasn’t addressed the funding cuts specifically, but hours after they hit, it did announce the suspension of four students who occupied the Barnard library on Wednesday.

READ MORE: Trump Admin Slashes $400 Million In Federal Funding to Columbia, Citing Ivy League School’s ‘Inaction’ in the Face of Anti-Semitism

Under normal circumstances, an EPA grantee receives taxpayer funds to perform a specific service over a defined period of time. The Biden administration’s $1.9 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund grant to New York-based eco group Inclusiv has taken on a different structure—one that is impeding the Trump EPA’s oversight efforts.

Inclusiv is using the overwhelming majority of the money—$1.7 billion—to fund not its own operations but rather green projects taken up by local organizations across the country. To do so, it transferred $651 million to 108 credit unions across 27 states and Puerto Rico. Now, those credit unions will select local groups who want access to the funds, cutting the EPA out of the process entirely, our Thomas Catenacci reports.

“The passthrough structure of these grants is a significant deviation from how EPA regularly conducts oversight of grantees,” agency spokeswoman Molly Vaseliou told us. “EPA has no visibility nor role into understanding how these taxpayer dollars are being spent on the ground.”

The structure “raises additional questions about the EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund in particular,” writes Catenacci. “Zeldin has likened the program to a ‘green slush fund’ and has opened broad probes into the fund as a whole.”

READ MORE: Biden-Backed Green Group Transfers $651 Million in Taxpayer Funds to Credit Unions Across the Country, Impeding Trump Admin Oversight

Away from the Beacon:

• Muriel Bowser’s administration quietly removed a webpage that championed D.C.’s “sanctuary city” status before tearing down a homeless encampment near the State Department. Progress!
• Al Sharpton’s nonprofit—the same one the MSNBC host used to rake in $500,000 from Kamala Harris for their pre-election interview—is hosting the “fearless” Al Green at its annual convention in April. Sharpton lauded Green for “boldly walking out” of Trump’s congressional address (he was forcibly removed from the chamber).
• As the Trump administration scrutinizes NPR’s taxpayer funds, two of the organization’s South Carolina stations are going independent, citing their desire to “reduce reliance on national programming hours and expand our coverage of local issues that matter to our community.” In other words: They don’t need NPR’s descriptions of Hamas’s “somber” hostage celebrations.

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The imploding relationship between Ukraine and the United States has upended global politics. Ukrainian forces are still slogging it out against Russian invaders without U.S. intelligence and weapons deliveries, even as President Trump tries to halt Moscow’s attacks with threats of tariffs and new sanctions. The Europeans are trying to cobble together alternatives to American assistance, and even some of Donald Trump’s greatest admirers, like Nigel Farage and Giorgia Meloni, are aghast at American actions.

This is all part of breaking up the current version of the American-led international order, which many Trump supporters think is long overdue. As Marco Rubio said before the meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky, “the big story of the 21st century is going to be U.S.-Chinese relations,” and “it’s not a good outcome for America or for Europe or the world” if “the Russians are permanently a junior partner to China.” In Asia, which will ultimately feel the effects of this change as much as Europe, each country’s reaction depends on its view of American leadership.

China also wants to tear down the international order, but they want to replace it with a Chinese model rather than an American update. For Beijing, war in Eastern Europe is not so bad if the Europeans don’t rouse themselves. Watching America’s partners expend American munitions on Russian targets without replacing them is far better than staring down those same weapons across the Taiwan Strait.

Beijing is relishing the growing divide between the United States and its European allies too. Chinese envoy Lu Shaye said, “the Trump administration has implemented a brazen and domineering policy towards Europe … honestly, from a European perspective, it’s quite appalling.” He encouraged the Europeans to “reflect on this and compare the Trump administration’s policies with those of the Chinese government.”

Trump’s Ukraine maneuvers, however, could result in less Chinese influence. The Ukraine mineral deal could reduce Chinese economic leverage over the United States. Since Beijing is as eager to turn other countries into dependent serfs as Trump is to make America’s allies more self-reliant, Xi Jinping would not like a Russo-American thaw any more than he liked North Korea’s closer collaboration with Russia.

America’s most formidable ally in Asia, Japan, is more troubled. Japan is building up its military largely to maintain the American-led order. Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba said last week that Europe’s security is “inseparable” from Asia’s, and that what happens in Ukraine today could occur in Asia tomorrow. Japan’s Self-Defense Forces rely on American support to function well, so as one cabinet member said, Trump’s treatment of Ukraine “is unbearable when you think about Asia.”

Tokyo also tried to flip Russia and got burned. Former prime minister Shinzo Abe spent years hoping to reach an accommodation with Russia and negotiate a treaty to formally end World War II. His attempts to keep Russia and China apart came up short though, and now Russian and Chinese forces routinely menace Japan.

Even talking about pulling a “reverse Nixon” brings up bad memories there. Contrary to popular belief, Richard Nixon did not engineer a split between the Soviets and Chinese, who had already fought battles over their disputed border years before Henry Kissinger’s first secret visit to China. Even so, the Nixon administration surprised Japan when it publicly announced the opening, so Japan sees this less as a strategic masterstroke than a painful betrayal.

In India, meanwhile, few tears will be shed at the funeral of any American-led international order. It has never been, or sought to be, closely integrated in the American security and economic system, and like the European Union it would rather be America’s equal than its junior partner. Indian foreign minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar said this week that the United States “is moving towards multipolarity, and that is something that suits India.”

A rapprochement between America and Russia would also be a godsend for India. Two years ago, Jaishankar pointed out, “for us, there are three big Eurasian powers, Russia, China, and India.” India’s goal is to form a majority out of those three, which will be easier with U.S. backing. Many Indians also hope that the United States will overlook Iran’s “death to America” fixation and make up, and it is not clear which aspiration is more realistic.

The arms and intelligence suspensions in Ukraine will confirm Indian suspicions about the United States. Indians carefully track American criticisms of their religious freedom and human rights records. New Delhi wants American weapons, which Ukraine has shown are often better than Russian equivalents, but not if Washington could cut them off for human rights or other reasons. An Indian military that diversifies its purchases and is less effective weakens the balance of power in Asia.

Trump’s calculation is that he can tear down the existing order and rebuild it to suit his preferences faster than the Chinese or others can. This week, he fired the pistol, and it’s off to the races.

The post What Trump’s Triangulation Means for Asia appeared first on .

The Environmental Protection Agency has no ability to track or conduct oversight of more than $650 million in taxpayer funds that a Biden-backed green group wired to dozens of credit union accounts last month, the agency told the Washington Free Beacon.

In mid-February, the New York-based eco group Inclusiv—which received $1.9 billion last year as part of the EPA’s $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund program—transferred $651 million to 108 credit unions across 27 states and Puerto Rico. The group said the credit unions would use the funding to offer financing for green energy projects such as solar installations and electric vehicle chargers within their jurisdictions.

Inclusiv initiated the transfer on the same day that EPA administrator Lee Zeldin discovered that the Biden administration had parked $20 billion in Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund funding in accounts at an outside financial institution, limiting federal control and oversight of the money. In collaboration with the Department of Justice, Zeldin ultimately froze the accounts, but not before Inclusiv completed its transaction.

“The passthrough structure of these grants is a significant deviation from how EPA regularly conducts oversight of grantees,” EPA spokeswoman Molly Vaseliou told the Free Beacon. “EPA has no visibility nor role into understanding how these taxpayer dollars are being spent on the ground.”

Traditionally, the EPA selects which projects to fund and distributes grants directly to developers. In this case, however, Inclusiv solicited grant applications from credit unions who will then select which projects the federal funds will finance and determine the terms developers must meet—a setup that takes the EPA entirely out of the loop.

It’s the latest issue to emerge from the Biden administration’s efforts to rapidly implement massive green energy programs during its final months in office. And it raises additional questions about the EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund in particular—Zeldin has likened the program to a “green slush fund” and has opened broad probes into the fund as a whole.

After Zeldin’s team located that $20 billion in program funding at an outside financial institution, the Free Beacon reported that the Biden EPA had awarded $2 billion of that sum to a brand new environmental group linked to Georgia Democratic politician Stacey Abrams and another $5 billion to a senior Biden EPA official’s most recent employer.

Inclusiv’s $1.9 billion grant was also part of that $20 billion sum.

Overall, in April 2024, the EPA dished out that $20 billion to just eight nonprofit organizations—some of which had been formed for the sole purpose of receiving the funding. The Biden administration designed the program to act as a “green bank,” meaning those eight award recipients will act as pass-throughs, doling out subawards and deciding which green projects to fund nationwide.

“This award will enable us to direct grants and assistance to high-impact credit unions and cooperativas that create the conditions for an inclusive and equitable transition to a greening economy,” Inclusiv president and CEO Cathie Mahon said in August.

According to an “investment strategy” document Inclusiv submitted to the EPA last year and reviewed by the Free Beacon, the group intends to use $1.7 billion to award pass-through grants. The remaining $187 million, it said, will be used to fund its own operations and technical assistance services.

The scope of that funding dwarfs the amount of money Inclusiv previously handled. In 2023, Inclusiv reported $11.9 million in revenue and $10.1 million in expenses, according to the group’s most recent tax filings.

“This is borderline fraudulent. It is just like a money laundering scheme,” said Travis Fisher, the director of energy and environmental policy studies at the Cato Institute. Fisher is the author of a forthcoming report that concludes Biden-era green programs created “an overwhelming and undue burden on taxpayers.”

“I am frustrated to my core,” Fisher told the Free Beacon. “One thing that I think is even more frustrating is when we compile the entire spending of all of what the Inflation Reduction Act authorizes, it is such a staggering amount of money that the part that we’re talking about that is probably fraudulent, or at the very least shady and questionable, is a tiny fraction of the total spending.”

“By comparison to the rest of it, it seems small,” he continued. “They thought they could fly under the radar with that and we were essentially all fooled and caught flat-footed.”

Inclusiv did not respond to a request for comment.

The post Biden-Backed Green Group Wired $651M in Taxpayer Money to Credit Union Accounts. The EPA Says It Now Has No Oversight of the Funds. appeared first on .

Washington, D.C., authorities cleared a homeless encampment near the State Department on Friday, following President Donald Trump’s call for a citywide cleanup.

Video footage shows officials dismantling tents near an expressway, while another clip captures a woman being detained at the site as she shouts profanities. Work crews began clearing the area on Thursday, the Washington Post reported.

The cleanup comes after Trump on Wednesday warned D.C. mayor Muriel Bowser (D.) that she must remove homeless encampments in her city or face federal intervention.

“We have notified the Mayor of Washington, D.C., that she must clean up all of the unsightly homeless encampments in the City, specifically including the ones outside of the State Department, and near the White House,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “If she is not capable of doing so, we will be forced to do it for her! Washington, D.C. must become CLEAN and SAFE!”

While D.C. had already scheduled the removal of 10 encampments across the city between February 27 and March 13, Bowser decided to expedite the cleanup near the State Department following a Wednesday call with the Trump administration, a city spokeswoman told the Post.

Trump last month said the federal government should “take over the governance” of the nation’s capital, as the Constitution permits, arguing that local leaders are not doing enough to address crime and homelessness. “I think that we should govern the District of Columbia,” Trump told reporters. “I think that we should run it strong, run it with law and order, make it absolutely flawless.”

Bowser has signaled a greater willingness to work with Trump’s second administration. The mayor said in December that she had a “great meeting” with Trump to discuss their priorities for the city, The Hill reported. The mayor on Tuesday indicated that the city might paint over the Black Lives Matter Plaza near the White House, replacing it with murals as part of the city’s America 250 project ahead of the nation’s 250th anniversary next year.

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The Trump administration’s multi-agency task force to combat anti-Semitism announced the immediate cancellation of approximately $400 million in federal grants and contracts to Columbia University over its failure to curb campus anti-Semitism in the aftermath of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, terror attack on Israel.

The departments of Justice, Health and Human Services, and Education, along with the General Services Administration, announced the move Friday. Two days earlier, Columbia student radicals stormed a Barnard College campus building—the second time in a week. Within hours of the funding cuts, Columbia suspended its four students who had been arrested while clashing with police during Wednesday’s incident.

“Since October 7, Jewish students have faced relentless violence, intimidation, and anti-Semitic harassment on their campuses—only to be ignored by those who are supposed to protect them,” Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said. “Universities must comply with all federal antidiscrimination laws if they are going to receive federal funding. For too long, Columbia has abandoned that obligation to Jewish students studying on its campus. Today, we demonstrate to Columbia and other universities that we will not tolerate their appalling inaction any longer.”

It’s possible more cuts are coming. The Trump administration’s newly formed multi-agency Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism announced Monday that it was probing $5 billion worth of Columbia’s federal funding and threatened to issue stop orders affecting over $51 million in active contracts.

“Freezing the funds is one of the tools we are using to respond to this spike in anti-Semitism. This is only the beginning,” the task force’s head, Leo Terrell, said. “Cancelling these taxpayer funds is our strongest signal yet that the Federal Government is not going to be party to an educational institution like Columbia that does not protect Jewish students and staff.”

Columbia receives over $1 billion in federal research grants, accounting for nearly one-fifth of its overall $6.6 billion in yearly operating revenue, according to a 2024 report by the Trustees of Columbia.

“We are reviewing the announcement from the federal agencies and pledge to work with the federal government to restore Columbia’s federal funding,” a Columbia spokeswoman told the Washington Free Beacon. “We take Columbia’s legal obligations seriously and understand how serious this announcement is and are committed to combatting antisemitism and ensuring the safety and wellbeing of our students, faculty, and staff.”

On Wednesday, Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) and Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP)—the Ivy League institution’s most anti-Semitic student groups—led a mob that stormed a Barnard College library on Wednesday. Once inside, the agitators handed out Hamas propaganda justifying the Oct. 7, 2023, terror attack. They demanded the immediate reversal of the recent expulsions of three Barnard students, “amnesty for all students disciplined for pro-Palestine action,” and a complete “abolition of the corrupt Barnard disciplinary process.”

The Barnard administration allowed the police to clear the building after the radicals refused to leave when a bomb threat was called in. The agitators clashed with police in the courtyard outside, resulting in nine arrests. Four of those were Columbia students, while one attended Barnard.

A week earlier, on Feb. 26, CUAD and SJP led another mob into a different Barnard building, sending a security guard to the hospital and causing $30,000 in damages.

After the anti-Semitism task force announced its probe, Columbia president Katrina Armstrong said, “We look forward to ongoing work with the new federal administration to fight antisemitism, and we will continue to make all efforts to ensure the safety and wellbeing of our students, faculty, and staff.”

Last week the task force announced that Columbia was among 10 schools it would visit to meet with university leadership and impacted students to determine whether any disciplinary actions are justified for the school’s failure to shield Jewish students and staff from illegal discrimination.

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