Here’s a story that starts with a claim, because that’s how it first came to me on Facebook. It’s about an event I’d never heard of till today, whose kernel appeared on social media some weeks ago, and has since proliferated across Meta platforms, X and TikTok.

Based on what I saw, I thought I understood it. More on that later but let’s begin there.

A call to Blackout the US economy overtly for DEI

Some US Democrats have a plan! On February 28 they’re calling on Americans to stop patronising businesses that have ceased employing people on the basis of “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” (DEI), in preference for people actually possessing the skills, promise and merit to do their jobs.

These Democrats say that America has become dumb having elected Donald Trump president a second time, and letting Elon Musk—the unqualified richest man in the world worth $360+ billion dollars—downsize the public service.

America is dumb, they say, because it wants to downsize the cost of government in a nation owing $36.5 trillion dollars, and it wants to end a 2020’s employment policy that has fed off Black Lives Matter to catapult unqualified people, of all backgrounds, into roles harmful to shareholder and national interests—while prioritising social engineering over business plans.

So, on February 28 2025, these clever Democrats want Americans to boycott businesses that have stopped DEI. These include:

Meta, Google, Amazon, Target, Walmart, McDonalds, Pepsi, Coke, Disney, Ford, Tesla, gas stations. And all credit cards. Yes.

We’ve seen the stupidity of the Arab-funded and US-domiciled antisemitic Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement before. Millions of dollars in, little consumer impact out.

You see, like these charlatans who continue to use their Israeli-made Intel chips in their computers and Israeli-tech-run smartphones while spreading their BDS message, this latest batch of Democrats forgets that on Feb 28—they won’t be able to tell the world about their narcissism on Facebook, Instagram or Gmail!

And don’t forget the wads of cash the poor of course keep under their pillows, now needed to buy groceries—but only if necessary—as the Blackout message goes. Comrades, why not just fast?

The most important message for these comrades of course is: Make sure that you deny the lowest-paid people in the US economy their income.

Not only those who’d serve you at these businesses, but those who service the infrastructure behind them—the parts, trucks and delivery vans; the shelf stockers and IT folks who keep your clicks working; the desperate not just in the US but in the Developing World who work behind the scenes so that you get your orders on time; and the extremely poor in the Third World who sweat in factories to make the goods you now seek to slow down.

It’s kind of like you wish to colonise the economy—or worse yet: while you’re criticising Trump for snuggling up to Russia’s Putin, you’re calling back the depraved days of communism under the USSR’s Stalin.

The question is why? It’s not DEI.

It’s because Hamas has lost the war in Gaza, and you just can’t stop feeding your constant need for belonging to a crowd, while the ringleaders keep grifting the donations out of your pockets.

There’s one thing that surprises me though. It’s the name you’ve chosen for this day.

In Australia, when the power goes out we call it a “Blackout” but in the US it’s always been a “Power Outage”. I’d just assumed that in the US, “Blackout” had racist connotations, hence the alternative used.

But on February 28 the Democrats want to call it an “Economic Blackout”. Strange. Wouldn’t “Shutdown” have been safer? Unless, there’s another motivation.

Indeed it’s not actually unique after all

Well, in researching this more it seems that my intuition was right. “Blackout Day” in name, has been a call particularly since 2020. And that’s when BLM took off against Trump. I wrote sympathetically about Lafayette Square at the time. Yep, there’s certainly money being made in Blackouts.

But the story keeps getting weirder

And the more I looked, the weirder this story got by the hour. The meme that I saw on Facebook associating this Blackout with DEI has disappeared online. I can’t even find it on a Google search.

In searching though, an article by hoax-breaker Snopes popped up and that was unusual.

Firstly, Snopes referred to the event in the past tense.

Then it described it as an act of mere undefined anarchy—thought up by one white dude, and since adopted by a multitude of heads via social media.

Apparently there were claims that the event was associated with a Boston College historian Heather Cox Richardson, who wrote the book “To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party”, which I coincidentally own. Richardson had since taken to Facebook though to utterly deny any support or connection.

What then does this mean?

Quite frankly, this proposed “day” is a social nonsense that, indeed, some Democrats, notably civil rights minister Al Sharpton, have hopped on for causes ranging BLM, anti-Greed and in Sharpton’s case DEI.

It’s a socially irresponsible mass of confusion that will only hurt the most vulnerable. It’s a manifestation of the mob needing something to protest, for self-fulfilment.

Just looking at the myriad memes regarding it reveals no cohesion. One graphic called for no online orders from restaurants! Some want no transactions at all.

© 2025 Adam Parker.

Picture credit: X February 25 2025.