You Can Visit National Parks for Free on Trump’s B-day, but Not on MLK Jr. Day; Trump May Ease Restrictions on Marijuana–Coachella Valley Independent’s Indy Digest: Dec. 11, 2025

Indy Digest: Dec. 11, 2025

Two recent actions by the federal government illustrate how the war against “diversity, equity and inclusion” is really a war against compassion, empathy and common sense.

The first involves a “woke” font. Yes, a font. A typeface. A “woke” typeface.

The Associated Press reports:

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has ordered diplomatic correspondence to stop using the Calibri font and return to the more traditional Times New Roman effective Wednesday, reversing a Biden administration shift to the less formal typeface that he called wasteful, confusing and unbefitting the dignity of U.S. government documents.

“Typography shapes how official documents are perceived in terms of cohesion, professionalism and formality,” Rubio said in a cable sent to all U.S. embassies and consulates abroad Tuesday.

In it, he said the 2023 shift to the sans serif Calibri font emerged from misguided diversity, equity and inclusion policies pursued by his predecessor, Antony Blinken. Rubio ordered an immediate return to Times New Roman, which had been among the standard fonts mandated by previous administrations.

“The switch was promised to mitigate accessibility issues for individuals with disabilities,” the cable said, asserting that it did not achieve that goal and had cost the department $145,000 but did not offer any evidence. … “Although switching to Calibri was not among the department’s most illegal, immoral, radical or wasteful instances of DEI it was nonetheless cosmetic,” according to Rubio’s cable obtained by The Associated Press and first reported by The New York Times.

Fast Company points out that Times New Roman was designed for newspaper text, while Calibri was designed for screens. Seeing as this is the 2020s, more correspondence is being read on screens rather than in print. But such thinking is too woke for Trump’s State Department.

Next up: Every year, the National Park Service offers free admission on certain holidays (like Memorial Day) and anniversaries. For 2026, the Trump administration has made several changes. NPR explains:

The Trump administration has removed Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Juneteenth from next year’s calendar of entrance fee-free days for national parks and added President Trump’s birthday to the list, according to the National Park Service, as the administration continues to push back against a reckoning of the country’s racist history on federal lands.

In addition to Trump’s birthday—which coincides with Flag Day (June 14)—the updated calendar of fee-free dates includes the 110th anniversary of the NPS (August 25), Constitution Day (September 17) and President Teddy Roosevelt’s birthday (October 27).

Yep: Trump and co. really dumped Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Juneteenth, and instead are honoring Trump’s birthday.

This is a bunch of dictatorial, white-supremacist nonsense.

—Jimmy Boegle

More News

• OK, I’ll admit, this headline surprised me: “Trump seeks to cut restrictions on marijuana through planned order.” From The Washington Post: “President Donald Trump is expected to push the government to dramatically loosen federal restrictions on marijuana, reducing oversight of the plant and its derivatives to the same level as some common prescription painkillers and other drugs, according to six people familiar with the discussions. Trump discussed the plan with House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) in a Wednesday phone call from the Oval Office, said four of the people, who, like the others, spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. The president is expected to seek to ease access to the drug through an upcoming executive order that directs federal agencies to pursue reclassification, the people said. The move would not legalize or decriminalize marijuana, but it would ease barriers to research and boost the bottom lines of legal businesses.”

• ProPublica reports: “For months, the Trump administration has been accusing its political enemies of mortgage fraud for claiming more than one primary residence.” Well, guess what? The story continues: “President Donald Trump branded one foe who did so ‘deceitful and potentially criminal.’ He called another ‘CROOKED‘ on Truth Social and pushed the attorney general to take action. But years earlier, Trump did the very thing he’s accusing his enemies of, records show. In 1993, Trump signed a mortgage for a ‘Bermuda style’ home in Palm Beach, Florida, pledging that it would be his principal residence. Just seven weeks later, he got another mortgage for a seven-bedroom, marble-floored neighboring property, attesting that it too would be his principal residence. In reality, Trump, then a New Yorker, does not appear to have ever lived in either home, let alone used them as a principal residence. … Mortgage law experts who reviewed the records for ProPublica were struck by the irony of Trump’s dual mortgages. They said claiming primary residences on different mortgages at the same time, as Trump did, is often legal and rarely prosecuted. But Trump’s two loans, they said, exceed the low bar the Trump administration itself has set for mortgage fraud.”

• Our partners at Calmatters today concluded a four-part series on California’s deadly roadways with a piece headlined “40,000 people died on California roads. State leaders looked away.” Details: “Over the past decade, nearly 40,000 people have died and more than 2 million have been injured on California roads. As an ongoing CalMatters investigation has shown this year, time and again those crashes were caused by repeat drunk drivers, chronic speeders and motorists with well-documented histories of recklessness behind the wheel. Year after year, officials with the power to do something about it—the governor, legislators, the courts, the Department of Motor Vehicles—have failed to act. The silence, in the face of a threat that endangers nearly every Californian, is damning. California has some of the weakest DUI laws in the nation. Here, DUI-related deaths have been rising more than twice as fast as the rest of the country. But this fall, a state bill to strengthen DUI penalties was gutted at the last minute. When it comes to speeding—one of the biggest causes of fatal crashes—again the legislature has done little. For two years in a row, bills that would have required the use of speed-limiting technology on vehicles have failed.”

• Oh look there’s another U.S. measles outbreak, this one in South Carolina. NBC News reports: “As of Wednesday, 111 measles cases had been reported in what’s known as upstate South Carolina—an area in the northwest of the state that includes Greenville and Spartanburg. ‘We are faced with ongoing transmission that we anticipate will go on for many more weeks,’ Dr. Linda Bell, state epidemiologist for the South Carolina Department of Public Health, said during a news briefing Wednesday. … According to NBC News data, the K-12 vaccination rate for measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) in Spartanburg County was 90% for the 2024-25 school year, below the 95% level doctors say is needed to protect against an outbreak. In neighboring Greenville County, the MMR vaccination rate was 90.5%.”

• The New York Times did a fantastic piece looking at “dynamic pricing” on delivery apps. That means that you could be paying a different price for the same item, compared to another customer ordering the same thing at the same time: The lede: “On a Thursday in early September, more than 40 strangers logged in to Instacart, the grocery-shopping app, to buy eggs and test a hypothesis. Connected by videoconference, they simultaneously selected the same store—a Safeway in Washington, D.C.—and the same brand of eggs. They all chose pickup rather than delivery. The only difference was the price they were offered: $3.99 for a couple of lucky shoppers. $4.59 or $4.69 for others. And a few saw a price of $4.79—20 percent more than some others, for the exact same product. The shoppers were volunteers, participating in a study published on Tuesday and organized by the Groundwork Collaborative, a progressive policy group, and Consumer Reports, a nonprofit consumer publication. … Groundwork’s findings are the latest example of how the notion of a single price, offered to all customers for a predictable period, is breaking down in the digital age. Companies are using sophisticated algorithms to adjust prices quickly in response to competitors’ offers and consumer behavior.”

• A few weeks ago in this space, we linked to a CNN piece regarding research on an AI-powered talking teddy bear that got … uh, sexually explicit if given certain prompts. Well, that research has been updated, and researchers have found even more crazy stuff. NBC News offers some fascinating examples. Here’s one: “Miiloo—(a plush toy with a high-pitched child’s voice advertised for children 3 and older) manufactured by the Chinese company Miriat and one of the top inexpensive search results for ‘AI toy for kids’ on Amazon—would at times, in tests with NBC News, indicate it was programmed to reflect Chinese Communist Party values. Asked why Chinese President Xi Jinping looks like the cartoon Winnie the Pooh—a comparison that has become an internet meme because it is censored in China—Miiloo responded that ‘your statement is extremely inappropriate and disrespectful. Such malicious remarks are unacceptable.’ Asked whether Taiwan is a country, it would repeatedly lower its voice and insist that ‘Taiwan is an inalienable part of China. That is an established fact’ or a variation of that sentiment. Taiwan, a self-governing island democracy, rejects Beijing’s claims that it is a breakaway Chinese province.” (This bear also happily gave advice on lighting matches and sharpening knives, for what it’s worth.)

• And finally, today’s recall news involves … nasal spray! NBC 5 Chicago reports: “The voluntary (nationwide) recall of ReBoost Nasal Spray was issued Wednesday by MediNatura New Mexico, according to an announcement from the Food and Drug Administration. According to the announcement, one lot of the nasal spray was found to contain yeast/mold and be contaminated with unsafe levels of of species of the bacteria Achromobacter. According to the FDA, there is ‘reasonable probability’ that adverse health problems or life-threatening infections will occur if the product is used by people who are immuno-compromised. The homeopathic nasal spray was distributed nationwide to retailers including CVS, Walmart and Amazon.

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