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inequality
What Americans Need to Know About St. Patrick's Day
It's not about shamrocks and beer.
Mar 17, 2025
St. Patrick's Day is celebrated by millions of Americans every year.
It's a recognition of the shared heritage of two great countries.
But the meaning of St. Patrick is something most Americans get exactly wrong.
This misunderstanding reveals why these two nations—once so similar—are now worlds apart.
Here's what Americans need to know.
***
[Sound of a bullet chambered, waves breaking in indifference.]
Venice Beach, twilight.
I'm minding my own business when—
[Flash]
A gun is pointed at my face.
Random violence. Pointless. American.
But this isn't just about crime. It's deeper.
In America, violence isn't a national crisis—it's a block-by-block lottery. You're safe until you're suddenly not.
I grew up in Ireland, and we simply don't live this way.
Why?
Because violence isn't just about guns—it's about trust.
The Real Heist
[Cut to marble floors, quiet handshakes, silent theft.]
While Americans are busy fighting each other—left vs. right, immigrants, tariffs—the real robbery happens quietly:
- Trust gutted—institutions hollowed until safety nets snap.
- Inequality weaponized—the rich feast; everyone else fights each other over crumbs.
- Desperation manufactured—crime, addiction, despair—all intentional side-effects of profit-driven division.
Ireland is no saint. But this desperation doesn't dominate, because trust—even when imperfect—remains intact. Arguments rarely become instant death sentences. Less inequality means fewer people forced into despair. Institutions still hold, even when they falter.
The difference? People in Ireland still expect their institutions to function. Americans expect them to fail.
Trust itself is being deliberately dismantled, turning neighbors into threats instead of allies.
And when trust collapses, what and who fills the void?
Manufactured Chaos
[Cut to your uncle, veins bulging, shouting about "libtards!"]
Left vs. Right: the puppet show you can't stop watching.
- Two-party spectacle: a staged distraction from real theft.
- Media outrage: addictive scrolling keeping you blind to what's really happening.
- Global chaos: Siding with dictators, up is down, bad is good.
Your neighbor isn't robbing you.
They are. Slashing the federal government, agencies, medicaid, SNAP under the guise of efficiency and long-term good to turn billionaires into trillionaires while consolidating power. All the while…
Pulling your strings.
Carjacking your anger.
They aren't just feeding your fear—they're refining it into a weapon.
St. Patrick's Fire: A Moral Inferno
[Cut to 433 AD. Hilltop. A forbidden flame.]
The Irish High King had one rule: No fire before mine.
Then Patrick lit his fire—a flame of open defiance.
The Druids warned: "If that fire isn't put out, it'll never be extinguished."
They were right. It burned through an empire for 800 years.
So, what's America's fire?
- It's not partisan warfare.
- It's not scapegoating migrants.
- It's a moral stand against those profiting from fear—against those robbing your fundamental right to live without fear.
Who Are the Real Snakes?
Patrick banished snakes from Ireland—but there were no snakes. They were poisoners of trust, hope, and community.
America's snakes?
- Social media owners who profit from, and shape, fear.
- Politicians who weaponize division.
- Corporate interests dismantling your safety to line their pockets.
President Donald Trump isn't fighting snakes—he is the snake. But he's not alone. They're everywhere, wearing different skins, exploiting the fear they manufacture.
The Only Question That Matters This St. Patrick's Day
Forget distractions. Forget the puppet show.
Ask yourself this:
Do I feel safe?
Not just from violence—
- Safe from losing healthcare overnight?
- Safe from sudden joblessness?
- Safe enough to trust your community, your future?
America doesn't have to be this way.
They built it like this.
Which means you can unbuild it. And trust can be rebuilt.
But you must see the snakes. If you don't, you'll never fight the right battle—you'll fight each other while they watch and profit.
***
St. Patrick was a slave. He defied a corrupt king. He lit a fire.
That fire was truth—a moral truth against injustice. And it can't be put out.
It burned through 800 years of oppression, famine, and war.
He didn't just bring religion—he brought something far more powerful.
St. Patrick's Day isn't about shamrocks or beer.
It's about your resistance.
This year, don't just celebrate.
Act.
Light. Your. Fire.
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EPA Will Close All Environmental Justice Offices, Zeldin Says
"So many people will needlessly die because of this," said one critic.
Mar 12, 2025
In the Trump administration's latest move to obliterate three decades of work to address the systemic injustices faced by low-income and minority communities across the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency on Tuesday announced plans to shutter all ten of the agency's environmental justice regional offices as well as its central hub addressing the issue in Washington, D.C.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin sent an internal memo to agency officials saying that "reorganizing" and eliminating the offices would help fulfill President Donald Trump's "mandate" to end "forced discrimination programs.
The EPA's Office of Environmental Justice was opened during the Clinton administration and expanded by former Democratic President Joe Biden, who emphasized the office's mission of ensuring "the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income" with respect to environmental policies.
But Zeldin likened the office's goal of addressing pollution in regions like "Cancer Alley," an 85-mile stretch of land in Louisiana where the high number of petrochemical plants has been linked to higher-than-average cancer rates in predominantly Black and poor communities, to "discrimination"—apparently against wealthy households and white Americans.
"Wait a second, so trying to address environmental pollution and high cancer rates in poor, rural, or minority areas is racist, but the actual fact that polluting is happening is not bad?" asked one critic on social media.
Zeldin's memo came days after the EPA and the Department of Justice dropped a lawsuit filed by the Biden administration against Denka Performance Elastomer plant in Louisiana, where regulators found the company's chloroprene emissions were fueling health problems across nearby communities.
"If anybody needed a clearer sign that this administration gives not a single damn for the people of the United States, this is it," Matthew Tejada, who led EPA environmental justice work for a decade until 2023, toldThe New York Times after Zeldin sent the memo Tuesday.
Zeldin also announced on Monday that he was cancelling 400 grants for environmental justice and diversity initiatives—despite numerous court orders against Trump's attempt to freeze federal funding that has already been appropriated, including one in which the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland prohibited federal agencies from terminating "equity-related" grants.
The administrator claimed Monday that the EPA is "working hand-in-hand with [the Department of Government Efficiency] to rein in wasteful federal spending," but Margie Alt, director of the Climate Action Campaign, said that "cleaning up pollution is only 'wasteful' if you don't believe everyone in America has the equal right to breathe clean air."
"Lee Zeldin's idea of 'accountability' is apparently to create a world of hurt for the most vulnerable while spitting in the face of the law and giving wealthy corporate interests the ability to pollute at will," said Alt. "All the while Elon Musk lines his pockets with billions of taxpayer dollars as his so-called efficiency agents take a hatchet to programs designed to help people at risk survive. Congress must put a stop to Trump's brazen refusal to follow the law and demand these illegally canceled funds already promised to disadvantaged communities are released."
The coming closure of all EPA environmental justice offices suggested that "the GOP way" includes letting "the kids drink sewage water and breathe polluted air to make the 1% richer," said columnist Wajahat Ali.
Former New Hampshire Democratic Party Chair Kathy Sullivan said that for the Trump administration, it is "not enough to ban talking about discrimination," a reference to words and phrases like "inclusiveness" and "inequality" that agencies have flagged in government documents.
"Trump's policies bring back discrimination," said Sullivan.
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Why DEI Was Doomed to Fail
DEI’s fundamental contradiction was this: It argued that race is a social invention—a system created to control people by reducing complexity—yet it never suggested replacing it with a more holistic vision of justice.
Mar 09, 2025
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, or DEI, is collapsing—not just as a corporate initiative, but as an ideological framework.
In what seemed like a flash, it became a dominant force in American institutional life, embedded in HR departments, university policies, and media discourse. And now, just as quickly, it finds itself in retreat, with entire DEI offices being gutted across corporate and academic America.
President Donald Trump’s administration has aggressively targeted DEI, issuing executive orders to dismantle these programs across federal agencies. This federal rollback has emboldened Republican-led states to eliminate DEI efforts within public institutions. Meanwhile, MSNBC’s recent firing of Joy Reid, a vocal defender of DEI who embodied many of its most aggressive tendencies, signals a broader cultural shift.
If we want to build a politics that actually addresses racial injustice, we need an approach that is dynamic rather than static—one that acknowledges history without being trapped by it.
The right celebrates this as a victory over “woke ideology.” The left frames it as yet another example of backlash and white fragility. But these explanations fail to account for why DEI has unraveled so quickly.
The reality is that DEI was doomed to fail—not because the principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion are unworthy, but because the framework built around them was structurally flawed.
DEI’s fundamental contradiction was this: It argued that race is a social invention—a system created to control people by reducing complexity—yet it never suggested replacing it.
Instead, it doubled down on racial categorization, reinforcing the very thing it claimed to challenge. This reification of race, rather than dismantling structures of oppression, helped sustain them, making DEI brittle and politically untenable.
For the left, the lesson here is crucial. If we don’t break out of the rigid, black-and-white thinking that DEI promoted, we will continue ceding ground to the right. The need to discuss race and identity remains vital, but it must be done in a way that opens space for complexity rather than reinforcing the very constructs that uphold division.
DEI’s fatal flaw is that it traps itself in a closed loop. It rightly argues that race is a historical construct—a tool of power designed to enforce hierarchy. Yet instead of pushing beyond this construct, it reinforces race as fixed and immutable. The result is an ideological contradiction: Race is framed as an arbitrary invention, yet treated as an unchanging, permanent reality.
James Baldwin exposed the hollowness of racial constructs decades ago. In “On Being ‘White’… and Other Lies,” he wrote: “The crisis of leadership in the white community is remarkable—and terrifying—because there is, in fact, no white community.”
Baldwin understood that whiteness, like all racial identities, was not a biological or cultural fact but a political invention—a shifting construct designed to serve power. Yet DEI never seriously engaged with this idea. It simply replaced one rigid racial hierarchy with another, treating whiteness as an unchanging position of privilege while treating other racial identities as fixed sites of oppression.
This rigidity meant that DEI operated as a closed system, reasserting racial categories rather than interrogating them. It failed to engage with race as a lived, historically contingent process—one shaped by history, class, and material conditions.
By doing this, DEI alienated people across the political spectrum. Many white people, even those who consider themselves progressive, felt that DEI erased any meaningful discussion of economic struggle or historical complexity within whiteness.
Meanwhile, many people of color found DEI’s racial framework superficial—offering corporate-friendly language about inclusion while doing little to address material inequalities. The framework functioned as a kind of racial accounting system, but it lacked a clear political vision for building solidarity.
Sheena Mason, a scholar of racial theory, has articulated the deeper flaw in this approach: “To undo racism, we have to undo our belief in race.”
This insight is crucial. If race itself is a construct designed to justify social stratification, then maintaining race as a primary framework for addressing inequality only reinforces the divisions we claim to want to overcome. Yet DEI never suggested dismantling the concept of race—it only sought to redistribute power within its existing framework.
This was a fatal mistake. Modern genetic science has definitively debunked the biological basis of race. There is more genetic diversity within so-called racial groups than between them. The racial categories that shape our politics and institutions are historical inventions, not natural facts.
Yet DEI, instead of leveraging this knowledge to transcend racial essentialism, entrenches race as the defining lens for justice. This approach not only deepens social division but also makes the left vulnerable to the right’s attacks.
By insisting on the permanence of racial categories, DEI created an ideological framework that could be easily caricatured as divisive and exclusionary—giving conservatives an easy target while failing to deliver meaningful change.
Racial discourse often eclipses broader discussions of material conditions, making it harder to address economic inequality in a meaningful way.
Patricia Hill Collins, a foundational thinker in intersectional theory, has observed that, “Race operates as such an overriding feature of African-American experience in the United States that it not only overshadows economic class relations for Blacks but obscures the significance of economic class within the United States in general.”
DEI’s fixation on race, detached from material conditions, contributed to this very problem. By prioritizing racial categorization over economic struggle, it often obscured the broader systems of inequality that shape American life.
This not only made class politics more difficult to articulate but also allowed racial identity to become a stand-in for structural critique—reinforcing an identity-based framework that often benefited elites more than the working class.
With DEI collapsing, the question becomes: What comes next? The right hopes this marks the end of racial discourse altogether. That cannot happen. Structural racism, economic exclusion, and historical injustice are still deeply embedded in American life. Ignoring the function of racism and racial categories plays into the hands of those who want to maintain both racial and economic inequality.
But we cannot simply replace DEI with another rigid, prepackaged framework that reproduces the same mistakes. If we want to build a politics that actually addresses racial injustice, we need an approach that is dynamic rather than static—one that acknowledges history without being trapped by it.
This means recognizing that racial categories are not timeless truths but historical constructions that have been shaped by economic, political, and social forces. It means rejecting the idea that people are permanently locked into racial identities that define their entire experience. And it means moving beyond an approach that focuses primarily on representation and inclusion toward one that addresses material conditions to redistribute power.
DEI’s failure provides an opportunity for the left to rethink how it engages with race and identity. We need to stop seeing race as an unchanging structure and start understanding it as something that can be transformed. Morgan Freeman put it bluntly in an interview, stating, “I don’t want a Black History Month. Black history is American history.”
This is the kind of shift we need—one that integrates historical understanding rather than segregates it, one that moves past “race”—which we know doesn't exist—as a fixed identity category toward a broader, more holistic vision of justice.
The goal should not be to replace DEI with another top-down, bureaucratic approach, but to build a new paradigm that is open, flexible, and capable of fostering real solidarity.
If the left fails to do this, it will keep losing to the right. And if that happens, the backlash against DEI will not just be the end of a flawed initiative—it will be a major setback for the broader struggle for justice and equality.
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