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Archives for March 2025

U.S Department of Education Launches Anti-DEI Portal Amid Threats To Pull Federal Funding For US Colleges and Universities

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The Department of Education issued a stark warning to school staff and faculty, instructing them to report  on educators accused of teaching race or identity conscious curricula. This directive comes two weeks after the department ordered schools to dismantle all diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies, marking a significant escalation in efforts to restrict classroom discussions on race and identity.

On February 27, The US Department of Education launched the “End DEI” database allowing parents, students, and teachers to report instances of discrimination based on race or sex in public schools. This escalation is part of a broader crackdown that began two weeks ago when the department issued a mandate requiring schools to dismantle all (DEI) policies. 

At the time, officials justified the move as a necessary step to maintain “academic neutrality” and bring back merit based learning in public education. The two-week deadline forced schools across the country to rapidly revise curricula, remove DEI-related initiatives, and  in some cases, disband staff positions dedicated to equity and inclusion.

“Pursuant to OPM guidance, the Department will continue its comprehensive review of all agency programs and services to identify additional initiatives and working groups that may be advancing a divisive DEI agenda, including programs using coded or imprecise language to disguise their activity,” said the department of education in a press release.

Prior to the decision, critics warned that the move was part of a wider effort to censor educators and erase discussions about racism in the classroom. Now, with the newly announced reporting system, concerns are growing that the crackdown is far from over, raising questions about how far the department is willing to go to police what is taught in schools.

It’s consequences could be potentially dangerous for school staff members. Some advocates suggest that the mere existence of the portal could encourage people to target teachers and also result in drawbacks in federal funding.

In an effort to steer President Trump’s executive order, 20 Democratic-led states and the District of Columbia filed a lawsuit in federal court in Boston to block the Trump administration’s plan to dismantle the Department of Education and lay off nearly half its staff. The plaintiffs argued that his policy to get rid of the agency would severely challenge the department’s ability to oversee federal educational programs and protect civil rights on school grounds. 

The  case is ongoing.

However, as schools navigate this new landscape, its consequences  on educators and students are only beginning to unfold. As educators and school districts face mounting pressure to comply with the new directives, students and parents are  left with an increasingly uncertain and politically charged educational landscape. 

MSNBC Lets Go of Primetime Anchor Joy Reid And POC Colleagues In Major Network Shakeup

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After nine years, Tv Host Joy Ann Reid is leaving the network as the company announced it is canceling her show including Alex Wagner and Jonathan Capehart’s evening programming  as part of a major restructuring at the network. 

Following the announcement, #Winwithblackwomen, a community  dedicated to the advancement of Black women, scheduled an emergency zoom call in support of Reid, who also joined the call.  

In the meeting, Joy expressed her disappointment and sadness of her show ending and talked about her initial guilt for covering The Black Lives Matter Movement, justice for Asian Americans, and denouncing violence in Gaza but says she isn’t sorry. 

“My show had value,” said Joy. “I’m not sorry, I am not sorry that I stood up for those things… I am not sorry, I am just proud of my show.”

This all comes as MSNBC President Rashida Jones, the first Black executive to lead a cable news network stepped down last month after four years at the company. It is rumored that her departure is a result of disagreement over the direction of the network amid the pending buyout to Comcast. 

In her stead, the company announced her Interim replacement, Rebecca Kutler, a former CNN executive. Since taking over, kutler has made drastic changes across the networks daytime, weekend, and primetime schedules while also laying off nearly 100 of its union staffers at the same time. 

While the company stands on this being part of the company going a different direction, viewers and advocates are sounding the alarm on the shift, insisting that The Reid Out’s cancellation is not a coincidental casualty but an act of retaliation. As for Wagner and Capehart, fellow news colleagues believe that their demotion is only another example of how the network values its POC reporters given the network’s troubled past with its Black journalists and pointed out its decision to get rid of two of its only primetime shows anchored by persons of color as a clear message.

In response to the news, longtime TV Host Rachel Maddow criticized the network on air calling it a “mistake” to let the former primetime host walk out. 

“ In all of the jobs I have had in all of the years I have been alive there is no colleague for whom I’ve had more affection and more respect than Joy Reid.” Maddow said. “Personally I think that it is a bad mistake to let her walk out the door, it’s not my call. I understand that but that is what I think.”

Wagner and Capehart have not said anything about the decision, but the network has announced that in place for the 7pm show it will debut a new lineup show with MSNBC reporters Symone Sanders Townsend, Michael Steele, and Alicia Menendez. 

Conservative coffee company holds Tesla Cyber Truck raffle

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1775 Coffee, a Rumble partner brand, is giving away a Tesla Cyber Truck in an April, 20 raffle.

Tesla is no stranger to car giveaways—this time it’s using coffee as an advertising vehicle.

A 2024 Tesla Cyber Truck is up for grabs in a Miami-based coffee company raffle that ends April 20. 1775 Coffee, which enlists conservative political actors and media personalities like Donald Trump Jr. and political commentator Dave Rubin to swear by its “fuel for the anti-woke folk,” now entices consumers with one of the latest truck models from Elon Musk’s car company along with a $30,000 cash prize.

The coffee company’s brand draws inspiration from the American Revolution, its coffee acting as a “defiant middle finger to the bland monotony of corporate coffee chains and their modly brews,” according to the company website. Now, 1775 Coffee is partnering with the nation’s 9th largest public company by market capitalization in Tesla to promote its anti-corporate products.

The coffee brand markets its products as a healthy alternative to mass-produced, big-name brand coffee. The first of the raffle’s four tiers, labeled “You’ll finally realize why Corporate coffee sucks,” ranges from $1 to $99 purchases.

1775 Coffee is owned by Stardust Group, a family of companies founded and operated by entrepreneur Foster Coulson, who has in the past partnered with conservative public figures to expose his brands to the MAGA wellness community.

“I don’t endorse any viewpoints of others that isolate a specific group of individuals or spread hate,” Coulson responded to CBC News in an email in October 2024.

1775 Coffee recently partnered with Rumble, a Canadian video platform popular among conservatives and a long-standing business partner of President Trump’s media company and Truth Social platform, to launch a Rumble-branded coffee beans for “freedom-loving people to enjoy.”

The company’s official Twitter/X account, @rumble1775, has reposted videos of Russell Brand driving around in the Cyber Truck leading up to the raffle’s close. An October ad rallied its viewers to participate in “saving the world from ‘woke’ coffee,” a term used often by the conservative community to demean progressive values.

“Not only is Rumble going to lead the way in video and cloud, but we are going to partner with brands that are willing to build long-term advertising relationships with us,” Rumble CEO Chris Pavlovski said in a press release. “If large corporate advertisers are afraid to advertise with specific audiences, we will just build the product lines to take them on.”

Tesla cancels dealership opening event amid protests

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Protestors around the country have targeted Tesla showrooms, privately-owned Tesla vehicles and charging stations in retaliation to Elon Musk’s government involvement.

Tesla canceled a grand opening event for its latest New Hampshire dealership scheduled on Thursday, March 13, ahead of a planned protest outside the new location.

The local protest is the latest in a nationwide and international-reaching movement known as”Tesla Takedown,” aimed at hindering co-founder Elon Musk’s business in retaliation to his actions as Trump-appointed leader of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). The movement ranges from picketing outside Tesla showrooms, vandalizing charging stations and other physical properties to divesting in the car company altogether.

The TeslaTakedown page on ActionNetwork encourages the public to “sell your Teslas, dump your stock (and) join the picket lines.” Despite the grand opening cancellation, demonstrators gathered outside the Portsmouth, N.H., Tesla dealership throughout the day, at one point being asked to move from the store’s entrance by police.

“We are out in mad force right now because we are not going to let them take away our democracy,” protestor Diane Kolifrath told Yahoo News. 

Actions taken against Tesla have turned criminal, with an uptick in reports of people vandalizing the cars and opening fire outside dealerships in recent months. No injuries have been reported.

The targeted attacks are in protest of Musk’s government involvement—which is responsible for mass federal worker layoffs this year—rather than his car company. In Washington, D.C., protestors gathered outside the U.S. Treasury Building for a “Nobody Elected Elon” rally in February. But those far from the nation’s capital have decided to target his business instead.

Experts say this conflation stems from how indiscernible Musk and Tesla are from each other and how Tesla property is a physical manifestation of something closely identifiable to the billionaire.

“Tesla is an easy target,” Randy Blazak, a sociologist who studies political violence, told CBS. “They’re rolling down our streets. They have dealerships in our neighborhoods.”

SEC targets ESG investments from BlackRock, Vanguard, asking for new 13D filings

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The Jeffrey Energy Center coal-fired power plant operates near Emmett, Kan., Saturday, Jan. 25, 2025. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel, File)
The Jeffrey Energy Center coal-fired power plant operates near Emmett, Kan., Saturday, Jan. 25, 2025. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel, File)

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) introduced new guidance on Feb. 26, requiring major asset managers like BlackRock and Vanguard to shift from 13G to more complex 13D filings when advocating for environmental, social, and governance (ESG) changes.

As the Trump administration and White House advisor Elon Musk call for a rollback in ESG investing, asset managers now have to prepare a more complex 13D filing for such investments, in the name of increasing transparency. Passive investment funds are facing stricter regulations, with reduced influence on corporate policies.

The SEC’s new rule also reclassifies ESG engagement as activist investing, forcing firms to disclose their strategies in greater detail.

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BlackRock, one of the world’s largest asset managers with approximately $11.6 trillion under management, has built its reputation on passive funds and ETFs. In recent years, the firm has scaled back its support for ESG-focused shareholder resolutions, arguing that many are unwarranted.

In a statement to Reuters, BlackRock denied such actions were leveraged or influenced by its shareholder, to exert control over publicly traded companies. The firm also noted that “we are complying with the new requirements including by highlighting our role as a ‘passive’ investor at the start of each engagement.”

BlackRock recently withdrew from the Net Zero Asset Managers group, amid increasing regulatory scrutiny and legal challenges from public officials. 

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Trump’s anti-ESG sentiments can be traced back to June 1, 2017, when he announced in the Rose Garden of the White House during his first term that the U.S. would pull out of the Paris Climate Agreement. 

The return of Donald Trump as U.S. president has led to increased regional divergence in sustainable finance, with the U.S. adopting a more conservative stance compared to Europe.

His administration has also frozen federal funding for several environmental programs, including grants for climate research under the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), renewable energy initiatives within the Department of Energy, and conservation efforts managed by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

Upstream asset managers follow hedge funds in ramping up crypto investments

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In this Feb. 7, 2018 file photo, a neon sign hanging in the window of Healthy Harvest Indoor Gardening in Hillsboro, Ore., shows that the business accepts bitcoin as payment. (AP Photo/Gillian Flaccus, File)
In this Feb. 7, 2018 file photo, a neon sign hanging in the window of Healthy Harvest Indoor Gardening in Hillsboro, Ore., shows that the business accepts bitcoin as payment. (AP Photo/Gillian Flaccus, File)

Interest in crypto investing continues to grow as Congress announced the formation of a cryptocurrency working group on Feb. 4, following former President Donald Trump’s executive order last month, according to Reuters.

Asset managers at all other levels are also testing the waters of crypto investing as the U.S. government increases efforts to integrate digital assets into the existing financial system.

A bill proposed today in North Carolina, the NC Digital Assets Investments Act, would authorize the state treasurer to purchase certain virtual currencies, primarily Bitcoin, as part of managing state investment pools, including the Highway Fund and the Teachers’ and State Employees’ Retirement System. Under the legislation, digital assets could comprise up to 10% of any fund.

Major institutional players are expanding their stakes in crypto. Hedge funds were early adopters, and now U.S. endowments and foundations are joining the rush, drawn by potential upside risk. 

“We don’t have a crystal ball on what cryptocurrencies will become in 10 years,” Chun Lai, chief investment officer of the $4.8 billion Rockefeller Foundation, told the Financial Times. “We don’t want to be left behind when their potential materializes dramatically.”

A 2023 EY report predicted institutional interest in digital assets would continue to grow. “Most institutional investors believe in the long-term value of blockchain and crypto/digital assets and plan to scale digital asset investments over the next two to three years,” the report said, “Investors are also interested in tokenized financial assets, and institutions are actively exploring tokenizing their own assets.”

Even in 2023, hedge funds were an outlier in crypto adoption. “Given their risk-on nature, hedge funds are a notable exception, with 36% of respondents allocating more than 5% of their portfolios to the asset class,” the EY report found.

Among hedge funds trading in traditional markets, 47% had exposure to digital assets in 2024, up from 29% in 2023 and 37% in 2022, according to the Global Crypto Hedge Fund Report, published in October 2024 by the Alternative Investment Management Association and PwC. Among those already invested, 67% planned to maintain their current level of crypto investments, while the rest planned to increase exposure by the end of 2024, the survey found.

Elliott Investment Management, a roughly $70 billion fund, likened the trend to a crowd of sports bettors, writing in a Jan. 31 letter to clients that it “has never seen a market like this,” according to the Financial Times, which reviewed the document.

Meta Prepared to Roll Out Community Notes Testing Across the United States

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In January Meta announced an end to its third party content moderation policy. It will be replaced with X inspired community notes and the company is set to launch a beta version this week. It will be tested by pre-registered users before a public release.

Community notes is a user driven fact-check model to hold the community accountable and stop the spread of misinformation by lending abstract, unsupported ideas a reliable context. Originally known as birdwatch, it was used by Twitter to prevent misleading posts, before its acquisition in 2022 by Elon Musk, who renamed it community notes.

How does it keep misinformation in check? 

Community notes use public sentiment and collective guidance to keep misleading posts at bay and lend credibility to the truth through relevant context and reliable sources. A user can flag deceiving or ambiguous information on a post and add notes to it, however, it gets published publicly only if it is supported by other contributors.

A screenshot of how community notes work on X.

In January, Meta announced that it will use X’s open source algorithm and program information and improve it for its own platforms. It is now ready to launch a beta version for its users in the US where contributors will be able to write and rate notes across the three Meta platforms, Instagram, Facebook and Threads. 

These notes will not immediately appear publicly and so far 200,000 potential contributors in the US have signed up to be a part of the testing across the three apps. The waitlist is still open for interested users and Meta will use it to analyse “the writing and rating system before any notes are published publicly,” according to Meta’s official website.

It will be limited to 500 characters per note and will be published publicly after consensus from other contributors with diverse opinions.

Meta argues that this feature will increase transparency on the platform and give respite to users who were initially sent to Facebook or Instagram jail due to content moderation policies. Users often complain of bias and lack of verification when their accounts are put in “jail” which results in restricted reach and inability to comment for a limited time. Often reconsideration requests are also automatically rejected and cause users with large following and branded content distress.

Critics are concerned that this might lead to widespread misinformation across the platforms.

Meta will launch the model for public consumption in the US after initial testing and it will be sometime before it launches internationally. Until then, Meta will continue to use third-party fact-check models in the other countries.

In the World of Artificial Intelligence Meta is Vying to Make it First

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Mark Zuckerberg promised an “intense” year to tech giant Meta’s employees at the company’s Q4 earnings call and even after delivering on some of its promises, Meta’s stocks dropped around 15.85% in the past month.

Consumer interest wavered after its recent policy changes in January, announcing an end to third party fact check, replacing it with community notes. It also got “rid of a number of restrictions on topics like immigration, gender identity and gender,” as mentioned on its official website.

However, amidst these lay-offs and restructuring, Meta AI is expanding. The company’s careers portal features over 40 new internship opportunities in various artificial intelligence roles, to work on a year “when a highly intelligent and personalized AI assistant reaches more than 1 billion people,” Zuckerberg said in Meta’s Q4 earnings call.

Even with a social media trend in the background with users announcing departures from Meta owned platforms and generating hashtags like “boycott Meta” and “boycott Zuckerberg,” Meta recently celebrated 1 billion downloads of Llama- an open source collection of all its AI models.

In the past month Meta announced a standalone Meta AI app to be launched in the second quarter of 2025, as first reported by CNBC. It faces competition with Open AI’s ChatGPT, Alphabet’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude AI.

Meta is also set to launch a new Llama 4 AI software with agentic capabilities and announced that it will be the intelligence behind AI agents. In a bid to be at the top of AI innovations, Meta is working with Taiwan-based chip manufacturing company TSMC to develop in-house AI chips, an attempt to significantly cut costs and reliance on Nvidia’s GPUs.

If successful, it should work to the company’s advantage, especially with Baidu’s recent releases of its two new AI models- Ernie X1 and Ernie 4.5 at significantly reduced prices than its competitors DeepSeek and OpenAI. 

With the upcoming LlamaCon, Meta’s first ever generative AI dev conference to be held on April 29, consumers can look forward to Meta sharing the latest on all its open source AI developments. 

US Tech Fights Back as Investors Wonder if Nvidia Downward Trend is Over

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Nvidia investors wiped nearly $600 billion from the chip maker’s value on Monday. Nvidia stock is down 15% on a 5-day rout because of a new Chinese AI company called DeepSeek. And it might be just the beginning. 

Nassim Taleb, known for forecasting ‘Black Swans’, told Bloomberg News on Tuesday that Nvidia’s performance is just an idea of what investors who blindly invested in AI are going to face. 

But American AI companies are fighting back. OpenAI announced on Thursday that it has signed an agreement with the U.S. National Laboratories to “supercharge their scientific research using our latest reasoning models.” 

OpenAI said that sharing its technology with the nation’s top scientists “aligns with our mission of building generative AI to benefit humanity, and we believe the U.S. government is a critical partner to achieve this goal.” 

OpenAI is also claiming that DeepSeek, the low cost high-performance Chinese genAI, distilled its knowledge out of OpenAI’s models.

The Chinese startup AI model seems to rival ChatGPT’s performance at a fraction of its costs, making markets question whether the amount of money deployed to OpenAI, Nvidia, and its US peers has really been worth it. 

Amid the AI community, however, DeepSeek’s impact on US tech stocks was not taken as a surprise. “DeepSeek is a proof that everything was a matter of architecture and modeling optimization” said Dimas Timmers, an entrepreneur leading research and development in human-centered AI. 

He claims that OpenAI’s gigantic machine learning architectures are inefficient in the long run and DeepSeek created a way to use reinforcement learning and latent space. 

“They did something really stupid but brilliant, it gave the AI time to think. The result is 95% cheaper, just because it optimized the architecture.

On the other hand, investors are taking a different approach. Alastair Rampell, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, wrote on a FreePress post that by making its model open-source, the Chinese hedge fund behind DeepSeek “has confirmed how counterproductive the Biden administration’s pro-containment, pro-hegemony, anti-open source AI strategy had been.” 

Rather than blaming the US companies’ performance, Rampell recalled that former President Joe Biden issued an executive order “which sought to constrain computers under an arbitrary threshold, bar open source as an alleged threat to national security, and effectively allow regulatory capture by the biggest players.”

On LinkedIn, Jean Boivin, Head of the BlackRock Investment Institute, Global Head of Research at BlackRock, noted that “it is much too soon to conclude that capital spending by U.S tech on the AI buildout is overdone.”

Nvidia Shares Rise Ahead of Earnings, Morgan Stanley Analysts Remain Bullish

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Nvidia stock rose 3.16% on Thursday as investors reiterated their pick on the AI chipmaker ahead of its Q4 earnings report on Feb. 28. 

While longer-term risks such as the emergence of DeepSeek triggered an Nvidia selloff last month, analysts from Morgan Stanley said the firm’s near-term business prospects remains strong, and “Blackwell supply visibility continues to build.” Blackwell is a graphics processing unit (GPU) microarchitecture developed by Nvidia.

Nvidia stock is still down 9% from its record high. While investors are still cynical, Morgan Stanley analysts, “remain very optimistic on how the balance of the year plays out,” as demand is strong for Blackwell in all forms. 

On Thursday, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) announced that it has shipped its first Blackwell family-based solution. The company said in a press statement that the system is designed to help service providers and big companies quickly deploy large, complex AI clusters with liquid cooling solutions to optimize efficiency and performance. HPE shares closed the day up 0.90%. 

Morgan Stanley analysts Joseph Moore, Mason Wayne, Ella Tulchinsky, and Shane Brett said DeepSeek is a strong evolutionary upgrade in the AI space, “but one of many that took place in the last year”. 

“It is similar to Alibaba’s latest release, or Google’s Gemini flash 2 release,” they wrote.  “Talking to our cloud contacts, we are hearing that none of this changes the plans of any of the major participants.”

Analysts also believe the selloff in AI stocks could set up a different financing environment, since in the past year any advancement in AI was viewed positively. 

“Now there is likely to be somewhat more scrutiny, given the perceptions around limitations on scaling,” they argued.