Opinion
By Jeff Childers
8/4/25
Good morning, C&C, it’s Monday! The Childers family is roosting back at home in Gainesville, our little hometown, which sprang into the national spotlight while we were away. It’s a pretty good story, and we’ll cover it in the roundup: Florida drops a hammer on my home county for out-of-control liberalism and corruption; the Trump Administration just tore DEI out of the nation’s root system by ending the worst legal development in 50 years; and Jaguar’s disastrous Bud Liting highlights major post-pandemic political realities.
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Although Republicans comprise between 30%-40% of the electorate in my Florida county of Alachua, only two (2) Republicans have ever been elected to the County Commission— since Reconstruction. I am not making that up. One result of uni-party dominance is that local Democrats feel no political constraint whatsoever and often do feebleminded things like openly wishing death on Republicans, as our ungendered school board chair-thing Sarah Rockwell did last week, earning herself (sorry, itself) the keen attention of state officials and a spot in the national conversation. Florida Politics covered the story under the unscriptable headline, “Education Commissioner Kamoutsas threatens salaries of Alachua School Board after Sarah Rockwell’s Hulk Hogan post sparks outrage.”
YouTube: Hodge Twins dissect Alachua County’s mentally ill AWFLs (10:34).
(Seriously, I ask you: what kind of person still wears a mask in 2025? Whatever kind they are, it isn’t safe to be trapped in a broken elevator with them for more than a few minutes. If they get on after you, jump off, politely but quickly. Safety first. But I digress.)
Popular conservative influencers like the Hodge Twins have been marveling over Rockwell’s repulsive behavior and the disastrous aftermath that unfolded at the very next school board meeting, which descended into chaos, accusations of white supremacy (even though Rockwell is pale as a cave snail), and claims of words-as-violence. At one point, the midwits on the board ordered cops to haul a lone conservative parent out of the meeting, supported by rapturous applause and maniacal laughter by the mostly-female attendees (also, troublingly, wearing an alarming number of face masks).
Fortunately for the board, the sane school board attorney immediately counseled against ejecting a parent for their speech— and the school board’s rent-a-mob (there, no doubt, to shield Rockwell from criticism), erupted in uncontrolled outrage. Still, the lone, courageous conservative parent single-mannedly faced down a shrill and furious hornet’s nest of matriarchal mania while the board intentionally failed to maintain order in the meeting.
That wild progressive excess caused the state’s Education Commissioner to recommend docking the county an amount of funding equal to the Board’s combined salaries.
I take no pleasure in reporting my county’s abhorrent behavior. I have tangled with this school board since 2020. In 2021, Alachua’s School Board became the national face of blue-run Florida counties defying Governor DeSantis’s unmasking order, and I was forced to sue them (successfully) to bring them to heel. People, this is the level of sheer liberal lunacy I have long been dealing with in my home county.
Separately on Thursday (also after Rockwell’s MAGA death-wish post), Florida’s Governor DeSantis issued a press release on the state’s website titled, “Florida DOGE Puts Boots on the Ground in Gainesville and Broward County.” Gainesville, my hometown, is the morbidly obese progressive heart of Alachua County. Governor DeSantis is now giving them a long-overdue financial colonoscopy. Most conservatives who live here believe the city and county —featuring some of the highest local tax levels in the state— are a snakepit of corruption.
All this controversy erupted like an undersea volcano while I was away on vacation. Figures. See what happens when I’m gone for few days?
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Just when you thought you understood the scale and scope of the Trump revolution, something like this happens, and it becomes clear we are only seeing the plans through a keyhole. On Friday, Axios ran a quiet but earth-shaking story headlined, “Trump administration rescinds Jimmy Carter‑era DEI mandates for federal hiring.”
A 45-year-old cornerstone of the DEI regime just crumbled into dust. On Friday, the D.C. District Court officially dismissed Luevano v. Ezell, a Carter-era consent decree that banned cognitive testing for federal jobs and birthed the modern DEI mandate in civil service. The Trump administration didn’t just win the motion; they somehow got the plaintiffs to stipulate to dismissal. Axios reported the move as part of a sweeping rollback of civil rights-era policies, quoting DOJ Civil Rights chief (and key covid lawyer) Harmeet Dhillon: “The Justice Department reopened federal employment opportunities based on merit—not race.”
Luevano’s demise isn’t just a policy tweak. It’s another tectonic shift. The decree had barred aptitude tests since 1981 and imposed two race-preferential hiring tracks, gatekeeping credentialism, and boosting the unqualified. Now, the gates are open again. Federal hiring is poised to return to a selection-based system, and private employers will probably rush past. After decades of progressives slavishly worshiping the golden calf of credentials, the meritocrats have finally come down from the mountain.
Let’s tackle a little history so we can understand what just happened.
🔥 Before Luevano, applicants for most federal jobs had to take something called the “Civil Service Exam.” The CSE was a standardized, general cognitive ability test the federal government used to assess applicants for entry-level white-collar jobs, especially the so-called “professional and administrative” positions (GS-5 through GS-9). It primarily tested I.Q. —general intelligence apart from formal education— in terms of verbal, mathematical, and analytical reasoning.
The CSE worked well, ensuring the federal government was generally staffed with smart people. But in 1979, a group of Black and Hispanic plaintiffs sued, arguing that the CSE resulted in a disparate impact for minority candidates. They didn’t claim intentional discrimination, but rather that, statistically speaking, the test produced racially disparate outcomes.
The Carter Administration didn’t fight the lawsuit. Carter’s DOJ essentially agreed, and entered into a voluntary “consent decree” that abolished a mandatory CSE, banned any future replacement test, and automatically made eligible any candidates with a 3.5 GPA or a top-third class ranking— thereby effectively substituting credentials for capability.
Thus, Luevano’s Consent Decree became the original root or wellspring of what would inexorably metastasize into the formal DEI infrastructure, which first took hold in the federal government and then infected every company doing business with the government, through contractor mandates and purchasing preferences. Over the years, it predictably mushroomed far beyond race to ritualistically preference sex, national origin, atypical sexual proclivities, insanity (“neurodivergence”), and most recently, outright, bona-fide mental disorders like gender dysphoria and autogynephilia.
That’s all over now. And the implications are staggering.
🔥 Possibly the most annoying symptom of the DEI credentialist era was the rise of the so-called “expert class” of midwit officials making policy and swanking their credentials throughout the pandemic. There are so many examples. Transsexual, luggage-stealing nuclear waste disposal directors. Senators cosplaying as Indians. Doctors who believe men can get pregnant. And my favorite example: obviously sick people running our public health system, such as LA County’s corpse-like health supervisor, Barbara Ferrer:
This kind of deranged thinking —the terror of using merit or inherent intelligence in hiring— infected everything. I have written extensively about the “big freeze” in arts, culture, and science that caused the post-millennial period to be the least fruitful era in modern history. For one example, in 2020, the American Economic Review published a paper concluding that, despite ubiquitous computers, the Internet, and more money than Solomon dreamed of, research productivity still fell sharply during the previous two decades:
“Everywhere we look,” the researchers said, “we find that ideas are getting harder to find.” If only someone could have seen this coming.
It is difficult to find a Nobel prize in the post-2000 period worth discussing at all.
And since grades and degrees became the new currency for earning well-paying employment instead of merit, skills, or qualifications, the Academy began aggrandizing an outsized political influence. Going to college became not just something kids did to pursue their interests, but they did it just to have a chance of getting a job. A vast parade of horribles ensued: grade inflation, social promotion, rising costs of college degrees, and a sprawling, federally-guaranteed student loan industry that collected in advance the first twenty years of kids’ expected earnings.
It no longer matters how smart a kid is. Critical thinking became a handicap. It now mostly matters only where kids went to school, and how well they conformed by pleasing their grade-awarding professors.
By cutting all this off at the original roots, President Trump has reset the game. Merit is back. The sharp decline in good ideas is almost over. Since it touches everything, it is literally impossible to imagine how wonderfully this single change will affect the arts, sciences, economy, and culture.
For much more along these lines, I recommend Daniel Cremieux’s excellent Substack article, written back in March, when the DOJ initially challenged Luevano, and exploring the awe-inspiring possibilities if the Consent Decree ended (which it just did): “The End of Credentialism?”
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Last week, we watched American Eagle sell out of jeans after running ads featuring blonde, white Sydney Sweeney, which for some indecipherable reason triggered a tsunami of liberal virtue-signaling. But a quiet counterpoint story emerged around the same time. Car and Driver ran the article under the generous headline, “JLR CEO Adrian Mardell to Step Down Ahead of the Brand’s Contentious Rebrand.” In other words, the CEO suddenly and unexpectedly quit. Rats and ships and so forth. But also: so much more.
Jaguar’s “rebrand” was horrifying enough. Jaguar plans to “transition” its iconic luxury brand to a single, electric model, shown above in pink, which is the main color pushed in all the company’s promo pictures. But the new model isn’t even out yet. Instead, Jaguar’s problems are better compared to Bud Lite, except —if you can imagine it— even worse.
According to the New York Post, Jaguar sales in Europe flatlined— by an astonishing 98% drop. That’s not a typo. They only sold 49 cars in all of Europe in April, which compares unfavorably to the 2,000 sold last April, 2024.
The company’s woes are being blamed on its much-ballyhooed “re-brand.” This year, the ultra-luxury carmaker also “transitioned” to a new marketing campaign. If you thought Dylan Mulvaney was a bad idea, the Jaguar managers said, “hold your lite beer and watch this.” They green-lighted a series of ads featuring “colorful characters” and no cars. The ads are indescribably painful to watch. See for yourself:
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/rLtFIrqhfng?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0
Watching that ad feels like slowing down to inspect a highway collision. You can’t help it, even though what you are looking at keeps getting worse. What I’d most like to know is how much Jaguar paid for that ad campaign. I’m beginning to suspect I am in the wrong line of work. Whatever they paid, it was too much.
I guess Jaguar decided its new electric customer base is flamboyant transexxuals. This lesson in marketing self-destruction is remarkably similar to Bud Lite’s incomprehensible decision, since Jaguar’s classic market actually trends very conservative: people who value iconic, traditional, understated luxury brands with a cherished historical aesthetic. Think wood-trim dashboards, Connolly leather, and Le Mans racing victories.
Ironically, the campaign is titled, “Copy Nothing,” but the ad copies the most tired visual tropes of 2020s progressivism and features characters who are all the same —gender confused— but in different neon colors. Ironically, it’s not even individualistic. At best, the ads illustrate tribal conformity.
If Jaguar is reacting at all, it’s reacting slowly. In March, Jaguar announced it was “reconsidering” its relationship with its PR firm, Accenture Song. But so far, the creatives remain in place, and the ads still race into oblivion on the automaker’s official platforms. Even CEO Martell, who just quit, plans to continue through the end of the year. Say what you want about Bud Lite, but that company reacted at lightspeed compared to this.
There’s much we could say. We could compare Jaguar’s self-immolation to, not just Bud Light, but American Eagle’s even more “transgressive” —but commercially successful— Sydney Sweeney campaign. Instead, let’s consider the cultural moment itself.
🔥 In 2019, men painting their nails and wearing dresses to the Oscars was edgy. But in 2025, saying “boys and girls are different” is even edgier. Real rebellion now looks like dad jokes, beards, dresses, eating meat, and practicing monogamy. What changed?
It was Covid. Covid was the great pivot. The blast crater at the center of the radical cultural revolution between 2019 to 2025 is shaped like a spike protein. Covid wasn’t the direct cause; it was the accelerant, the revelator, the institutional unmasker. Pandemic stress tore the mask off the machinery behind the narratives, revealed what elites actually think of normal people (the “herd”), and taught millions to doubt what they’re told.
Politically, covid fractured the traditional left-right axis. Democrats were exposed as liars; the party was not, in fact, the party of working people, it was the party of the jab-or-terminate policy. It did not actually believe that “a woman has a right to choose” or “my body, my choice,” not when it came to forced injections of experimental drugs. Instead, a virus revealed that Republican libertarianism protected individual rights, whereas Democrats think individual rights are more like privileges to be suspended when they become politically inconvenient.
Even now, the Democrat brand is “resist authority,” but ironically it still aligns with every traditional institution.
Covid made the impossible possible. The exposure of the Democrats’ real brand paved the way for the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade and greased the skids for Trump’s re-election. So in a sense, Jaguar’s misguided ad campaign mirrors the modern Democrat party.
Jaguar’s goofy, neon-hued, conformist ad campaign doesn’t just mirror the aesthetic of the modern Democratic Party. It mirrors the Donkey Party’s entire operating delusion: the belief that symbolic identity signaling can substitute for substance, that moral preening is persuasive, that delivering useful products is just a distraction, and that the audience will never notice the contradiction between words and actions.
Can you see it? The trajectory between the covid crisis, Syndey Sweeney’s tight genes, Trump’s hyper-masculine tariffs, and the DOJ restoring the merit-based civil service exam? It’s a straight line. It’s the ultimate covid miracle: the crisis that was supposed to lock down humanity ended up unlocking reality.
Have a magnificent Monday! Then drive back here tomorrow morning, for another delicious and provocative roundup of essential news and commentary.
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The views expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Citizens Journal Florida
