A gay whistleblower just punked Colorado’s DEI machine
FEBRUARY 03, 2026
DEPROGRAMMING THE CULT:
1 hour ago
Tuesday, February 3, 2026
Why is it available to non citizens?
Medi-Cal spends $608M monthly on cooking, cleaning home services, even for illegal immigrants
EXCLUSIVE: China-Linked Groups Join Push to Defund ICE
EXCLUSIVE: China-Linked Groups Join Push to Defund ICE
Canada’s British Columbia Ends Failed Experiment in Hard Drug Legalization
Canada’s British Columbia Ends Failed Experiment in Hard Drug Legalization
The Canadian province of British Columbia (BC) has ended its experiment with legalizing hard drugs, and the consensus among both public officials and citizens is that the program was a complete failure.
“This pilot was designed as a time-limited trial with ongoing monitoring built in so we could understand what was working, what wasn’t and where changes were needed. However, the pilot hasn’t delivered the results that we hoped for,” BC health minister Josie Osborne said on January 14 when announcing the impending end of the program.
Anti ICE vigilantes: It's how the frug cartels work...who gave them policing powers?
Anti-ICE agitators set up blockade on Minneapolis street, check drivers’ license plates
"It looks like in our system your plates came up as an ICE plate," an activist said in a video recorded Monday. In another, anti-ICE agitators are seen assaulting reporter Jorge Ventura.
An unsettling scene unfolded on Minneapolis streets over the weekend as anti-ICE activists turned public roadways into impromptu checkpoints and blockades — while Minneapolis police at one point looked on and walked away.
Social media videos show agitators blocking streets with furniture and stopping cars in Minneapolis — even apparently cross-referencing plates against a database of ICE vehicles before letting drivers through.
A barricade built from recliners, gates and other odds and ends blocked a city street in the area from 32nd to 34th and Cedar Avenue.
When Minneapolis police officers approached and urged the group to move the obstruction “for fire trucks and ambulances,” the protesters didn’t budge — insisting they could shift it if an emergency vehicle came along — and officers eventually left without enforcing the move, a video shows.
The Minnesota Department of Public Safety told Alpha News in a statement that “blocking or barricading public roadways creates a public safety threat because it could prevent or slow police, fire, EMS, or other first responders from getting to residents who need their help.”
“For specific examples of alleged roadway blockages in Minneapolis, we would refer you to the Minneapolis Police Department just as we would to other local agencies who would be the leads in their cities or counties,” the agency said.
Alpha News reached out to the Minneapolis Police Department for comment but did not receive a response by deadline.
Anti-ICE activists running plates
Other videos show anti-ICE activists approaching vehicles and checking their license plates.
“It looks like in our system your plates came up as an ICE plate,” a man says to an Uber driver for reporter Jorge Ventura in a video recorded Monday. “I just wanted to come through and see what was up.”
Another video shows Ventura being assaulted by activists who were stopping vehicles in the street.
“Moments ago I was just assaulted by left-wing activists in South Minneapolis for reporting on a roadblock protesters set up and checking cars for ID’s,” Ventura wrote. “The activists grew angry when I shot footage of them turning around some vehicles that appear to be ICE agents [and] they tried to steal my phone and shove me back into my vehicle.”
On Monday afternoon, after Alpha News reached out, the city reportedly cleared the blockade.
This article was updated with a comment from the Minnesota Department of Public Safety.
Democrats have knack for losing documentation just like they did with the J6 hearing tapes
Investigators Can’t Find Tapes Showing Fulton County’s 2020 Ballot Count Started At Zero, Board Says
A member of the State Election Board revealed that the ‘tapes’ used to verify that ballot counters started their counts at zero may be missing.
A gay whistleblower just punked Colorado’s DEI machine
In the comic books, Galactus devours worlds without discrimination. In real life, that role belongs to the Democratic Party.
You can see it play out in Minneapolis right now. Colorado offers its own case study. That’s where Rich Guggenheim is under attack inside the Colorado Department of Agriculture because he thought being a plant health programs manager meant focusing on — stay with me — plants, not pronouns.
Most people choose comfort. They tell themselves they agree with freedom, but they live like they don’t. They fear conflict more than they fear losing the country.
Last November, Guggenheim logged into a virtual meeting with roughly a dozen department heads. One agenda item covered a grant report tied to pest surveys, “inclusive leadership,” and employee participation in a program called “Colorado for All.”
Because when I think about protecting America’s food supply from pests, my first concern always involves the state’s ideological diversity metrics.
Guggenheim wanted to keep plants healthy. He didn’t have patience for the ritual. He typed a short comment into the group chat: “DEI on steroids.”
That was enough to trigger a full-blown response from Plant Industry Division Director Wondirad Gebru. Gebru paused the meeting and labeled the comment “inappropriate” in front of colleagues. Gebru told Guggenheim to mute his microphone.
Guggenheim did something better. He turned on his camera and accused Gebru, on the record, of viewpoint discrimination.
See, that’s how it’s done, folks. No excuses. Just a jawbone of an ass wielded without apology. Take stupid out to the woodshed and bludgeon it.
“They are trying to frame me as disruptive,” Guggenheim said. “But how can they do that when the topic is actually on the agenda?”
Next, Guggenheim told Gebru via private chat that he would file a formal whistleblower disclosure with U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi at the U.S. Department of Justice. The letter he sent that same day alleged First Amendment violations through viewpoint discrimination and compelled speech, retaliation, and disregard for President Donald Trump’s executive order directing federal agencies to stop promoting, requiring, or funding diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives that impose ideological preferencing.
He filed additional complaints with the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division and the Office of Special Counsel whistleblower channel; an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission inquiry; a Colorado Civil Rights Division/State Personnel Board consolidated appeal; and a state whistleblower complaint.
A month later, Guggenheim received notice of a workplace investigation. The notice offered no specifics about the allegations, the complainant, or the policy at issue. The state hired an outside group to conduct the investigation.
That process is under way as Guggenheim pursues a federal lawsuit against a state whose political class has built a reputation for using institutions as weapons.
Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold tried to keep Trump off the presidential primary ballot before investigators examined her office’s election-security failures. Last year, lawmakers also advanced a regime of pronoun policing and gender ideology that reaches into schools and families and invites the state to play commissar.
RELATED: The taboo conservatives refuse to confront
Blaze Media illustrationColorado’s leadership class doesn’t merely govern. It disciplines.
“Destruction of Western civilization is what queer theory is all about,” Guggenheim said.
Guggenheim is 46. He doesn’t sound demoralized. He sounds ready. He believes Colorado has boxed itself in legally, which left him with a choice: comply, stay quiet, and keep his head down — or put the issue on the record and force a confrontation.
Most people choose comfort. They tell themselves they agree with freedom, but they live like they don’t. They fear conflict more than they fear losing the country.
Guggenheim’s refusal to be emotionally bullied by the pronoun police should shame the rest of us. He didn’t beg for approval. He didn’t bargain. He didn’t self-censor to keep the peace. He documented the coercion and escalated through the proper channels.
One detail makes the story even harder for the usual activists to process: Guggenheim is openly gay.
He still drew the line. He still confronted ideological coercion in the workplace. He still chose risk over submission.
That’s the right standard. What’s your excuse?
Monday, February 2, 2026
We need to reassess the way we treat repeat criminals
Cop killed and another injured after being shot in ‘unprovoked’ attack at Georgia Holiday Inn
A cop has died and another has been left seriously injured after they were shot allegedly by a serial criminal in what police described as an unprovoked attack in a Georgia Holiday Inn hotel room.
Pradeep Tamang, 25, died of his injuries after he was shot allegedly by Kevin Andrews, 35, on Feb. 1.
How leftist ideologues destroy the arts
Pursuit of politics and personalities ruined the Met Opera — America’s biggest performing-arts institution
The Metropolitan Opera has been making headlines lately — for all the wrong reasons.
It’s not that the country’s oldest continuously operating opera company is seeing revived relevance and eager engagement. Quite the contrary.
The storied institution announced in the fall a deal with Saudi Arabia, said to be worth $200 million, to perform three weeks a year as the winter resident company at a $1.4 billion opera house opening in 2028.
It was a much-needed lifeline given that the Met has withdrawn $120 million from its endowment — more than a third of the fund — to cover costs since the COVID pandemic, but it also produced a brutal backlash in the cultural community, given the kingdom’s human-rights issues.
Then, as if to prove why the company’s having trouble raising money at home, audiences savaged its just-ended run of the Bizet classic “Carmen.”
The ripped-from-the-headlines production, brought back from the 2023-2024 season, moves the action from 1820 Seville, Spain, to modern-day America.
Instead of sumptuous costumes and striking sets, star mezzo-soprano Aigul Akhmetshina traipsed across the stage in denim cutoffs and cowboy boots, while bass-baritone Christian Van Horn’s Escamillo crooned his “Toreador Song” dressed as a rodeo rider.
Carmen works not in a cigarette factory but for an arms builder, and the troops were transformed, as many saw it, into ICE agents.
It wasn’t money, though, that led superstar tenor Jonas Kaufmann to declare at year’s end he’d no longer appear at the Met.
The big box-office draw — one of the greatest singers of his generation — heavily hinted that Met leadership was behind his decision.
“I felt very bad about how they treated the chorus and orchestra in the pandemic. They didn’t get paid at all. Musicians had to move out of New York or move in with their parents. I did a live-streamed concert and asked listeners to donate. That didn’t go down well,” Kaufmann told BBC Radio’s Norman Lebrecht.
(Carnegie Hall announced last week Gustavo Dudamel’s first appearance there as New York Philharmonic leader, this fall, will be an opera in concert starring Kaufmann.)
Then a real bombshell dropped a week and a half ago: Peter Gelb, Met general manager, said the company is laying off about 10% of its 200+ administrators, chopping a new production from the next season and temporarily cutting the salaries of the 35 executives who make more than $150,000 annually, including Gelb’s $1.4 million and music director Yannick Nézet-Séguin’s estimated $2 million.
The Met might sell its theater’s naming rights.
It’s already looking for someone to buy its two Marc Chagall murals, valued at $55 million, made specifically for the space — though on the condition the murals stay put, with the new owner’s name displayed on a nearby plaque.
The news shook the arts world but “is not surprising to anyone in the building,” a Met employee told The Post.
The Saudi agreement remains unsigned, he alleged, adding that “there’s a bit of mystery surrounding that deal.”
Gelb cited a delay in explaining his cuts.
“I understand the Saudis have had to recalibrate their budgets because of their own economic concerns,” he told The New York Times. “I’ve been assured that it’s going to go forward. But we have been waiting for some time.”
It’s not the only issue, an insider told The Post: “There is a lot of friction from Met chorus members and orchestra and staff members who are gay and/or Jewish in particular [and] are concerned about safety.”
The employee agreed — but explained the Met’s situation is desperate.
“How money comes in and out of that building is an incredibly complex thing,” he said. “They need that Saudi money now, and the Saudi money isn’t coming yet, and so they have to figure out other ways to continue to operate.”
How did America’s greatest operatic institution get to the point of needing Saudi money to cover its $330 million annual operating budget?
Ticket sales account for less than a third of that.
“Nine [wealthy] families keep the Met alive in New York City,” the employee bluntly said. “Maybe 30 years ago in New York City, there were a lot of people that had that kind of capacity. And the Met was an institution they wanted to give their money to, and it meant something. It had social capital. Those people are dying off.”
Their children are less interested in continuing contributions. And the new tech titans aren’t proving to be big arts fans.
“The one counterexample,” the employee said, is Nvidia’s recent $5-million-a-year pledge to the San Francisco Opera, “a major get. Seattle Opera was never able to get Microsoft to donate.”
Gelb also canceled one of his biggest moneymakers, declaring Russian star soprano Anna Netrebko would no longer grace the Met’s stage after Russia launched its 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Netrebko spoke out against the war but wouldn’t sufficiently criticize Vladimir Putin to Gelb’s liking — though he’s allowed plenty of other Russians who’ve sung at Russian state-sponsored events to stay.
He called her antiwar statements “disingenuous,” claiming “she condemned the war purely out of expediency.”
The employee said it was “very unfair” for Gelb to use Netrebko so he could make a show of “taking a big stand”: “It all felt very cruel.”
“Everybody at the Met has a personal relationship with Anna,” the employee added, calling her cancellation “grotesque.”
And one can’t entirely blame an aging donor base. Opera isn’t loved just by the elderly, after all: The median age of a Met ticket buyer was once 60 and now 40.
Gelb has cited post-pandemic challenges, but he never seems to take responsibility for his failures — he blamed President Trump’s immigration crackdown for last season’s slump in sales.
The employee said the pandemic was simply an “accelerator” of already-existing problems.
As Joe Pearce, the Vocal Record Collectors Society’s president, told The Post, “It constantly amazes me that a city of more than 8 million people cannot find 3,500 or so to fill an opera house every night, especially when some much less populated cities in Europe have two and three opera houses for a population of maybe 1 or 2 million folks. Gelb is, before all else, a hype kind of guy, and he convinces himself that new operas will turn the trick and bring in younger audiences, and he then goes out and we find the first black composers commissioned to write operas or people with very rockish backgrounds . . . often with more attention being paid to the libretto and the social or racial meaning of the story than to the music.”
Take last season. Besides its 3,000 employees, the Met now pays influencers to help sell seats.
It used internet celebrities to promote its opening-night production, “Grounded,” a new “antiwar opera,” as Gelb called it — but that didn’t work.
The opera, about a military pilot who gets pregnant, was the season’s worst attended, selling only 50% of capacity.
Other contemporary, woke operas fared similarly, while great works continued to be the big draws.
As Brooklynite Pearce said, “Mimi’s death brings tears to my eyes today just as it did when I was 13.”
The Met employee isn’t a fan of the “relevancy grabbing” influencer operation. “There’s a very awkward quality to it all,” he said.
Nor does he think the other attempts at relevance work — like politically themed productions put on by Broadway creators with no opera experience at all.
Directors will declare, “’I’m gonna make the new feminist blah blah blah,'” the employee said. “And then you go see it, and none of that is there. All you get is this mostly inarticulate mess of political cliché.”
The insider scoffed, “The creator of the new ‘Carmen’ production was actually unaware as to how the opera ended, reaffirming that the Met continues to prioritize spectacle over substance in hiring decisions.”
It came out after the cuts were announced that director Carrie Cracknell, who works in British theater, and five others who worked on “Carmen” demanded the Met remove their names from the credits of the recent revival.
Their original had bullfighter Escamillo enter the scene in a red Jaguar convertible, with his posse in three pickup trucks.
Getting those vehicles on stage was expensive, so Gelb cut them to save $300,000. This time, Escamillo and his gang walked on stage pushing a motorcycle.
Cracknell was outraged that her vision was destroyed.
Opera insiders would only speak to The Post on condition of anonymity. They’re “terrified” to lose their jobs.
At least one recently fired administrator is suing over the dismissal, an insider said.
There are fewer productions to work on — the company’s gone from putting on between 24 and 26 pre-pandemic to just 17 next season.
How far will the Met finally fall after Gelb’s nearly 20 years at the helm?
“Peter has done a lot of good and meaningfully changed the opera industry,” the employee said. The HD cinema broadcasting Gelb pioneered in the aughts, “whatever the actual effect of that is, for better or worse, changed my life” — exposing him to opera when he had no place to see it in person.
But he’s also “a very flawed leader because he is stuck constantly between trying to make people happy and also steer the ship in a certain way, and he gets paralyzed,” the employee said, calling Gelb a “micromanager” who’s “not focused enough on big picture.ce
His problem can be summed up to: He makes a bet on a creative team, realizes that this creative team, for whatever reason, can’t quite deliver on the grand production that will save opera, but he can’t say no to them. He wants to be seen as a person that supports directors, and so he lets these productions sprawl out and get oversized, and then when they turn out to be a disaster, it’s like he wasn’t at all in control of it, he just throws up in his hands. ‘What can you do?’” the employee said.
“Well, you can find better artists, and you can manage them better, and hopefully then you have a better artistic product to put on stage.”
It wasn’t just audiences that cringed at “Carmen” — the staff did too.
That one dud is indicative of the larger problems at the crucial cultural institution.
“There’s a lot that one could say about the political posturing,” the employee concluded.
“The problem is, people want good work. It’s not about new or old. Make something good.”
It may not solve “the problem of replacing your donor case at the $200 million level. But at least people can’t look at a production like that ‘Carmen’ and extrapolate all this other s–t from it.”
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