As legislation filing season is in full swing an opportunity has presented to give you a good look behind the scenes at a brewing scandal, and betrayal, that might as well be preserved as a fossil from a century-ago, such is it’s ubiquitous status as archetypical. Namely, a GOP official, for whatever reason, stuck a knife in the back of the base and snatched defeat from the jaws of victory - at least, that was the intention. However, as outlandish as 4-D chess may be, 2-D chess is, in fact, possible, and this betrayal was outplayed.

https://x.com/MikeBelcher14/status/1990452380882645091?s=20

“In early 2025, a conservative Republican representative introduced House Bill 392 – a straightforward bill to eliminate two specific ideological units in New Hampshire state government: the Office of Health Equity at the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Civil Rights and Environmental Justice functions at the Department of Environmental Services.

The intent was clear to those with eyes to see: end race-conscious resource allocation, end the use of federal E-J-Screen maps to block energy projects and industry, end state-funded trainings that label children or employees as oppressors by birth. A threefold victory against Race Communism, Degrowth Communism and Communist entryism.

The Republican supermajority had the votes. The base expected passage.

Instead, first, an upset occurred when the bill was retained by the committee creating a months-long delay towards any final outcome. Then, a “compromise” emerged.

After negotiations with Democrats and perhaps other talks behind closed doors, another Republican representative offered a floor amendment that simply renamed the “Office of Health Equity” to the “Office of Health Access.” Same staff, same budget, same federal equity grants, same partnerships with the Marxist NGO “Endowment for Health” – only the word “equity” was removed, thereby bypassing the shutdown threat and an intervening Executive Order by the Trump administration.

The Environmental Justice program at the Department of Environmental Services was left completely untouched – not even a Legislative-enforced name change.

Both programs survived the 2025 budget intact. The fiscal notes claiming federal fund loss and the outcry of supposed impacts to various “communities” had done their job.

On paper, the anti-D-E-I effort appeared dead.

But the original strategy had always been two-layered – and the narrow passage of the original bill through committee recently provided the impetus to move to the second prong of the attack.

The sponsor understood a basic reality of bureaucratic resistance: when you target offices by name, administrators simply change the name and wait. A practices-based bill – one that prohibits the actual behaviors regardless of name – is much longer, much more complex, and far harder to pass in a single session because fatigued lawmakers that don’t especially want to do hundreds of pages of reading to understand a bill are more likely to simply find a reason to kill it dead.

So, the name-specific bill was introduced first, knowingly, and hoping that some combination of circumstances would create a media firestorm and raise the profile of the legislation such that these fatigued lawmakers would be willing to listen a bit longer.

Its seeming public defeat – and especially the blatant rename maneuver – followed by a surprise passage through committee created something invaluable: media attention, public outcry, and the opportunity to tell a scandalous story about how one lawmaker changed teams briefly to stop something the base very clearly wanted done.

The shell game is now visible to every voter, every representative, and the opportunity now exists to seize the attention to strike a straight blow with a crooked stick against the enemy.

Earlier in the year came the development that transformed the entire landscape – even for the moderates.

Beginning January twentieth, 2025, President Trump issued Executive Orders 14151 and 14173, which:

• terminated all federal D-E-I and equity programs,

• rescinded Executive Order 12898 and the Justice Forty initiative,

• prohibited the use of race-weighted screening tools by federal agencies,

• directed audits and potential clawbacks of any grant money tied to prohibited equity practices.

The threat narrative the Department of Health and Human Services had used in 2025 – “touch this office and we lose federal funds” – inverted completely.

Continuing the practices now poses the real financial and legal risk.

The compromise of 2025 accidentally handed the reformers perfect leverage for 2026.

Because the public controversy and the rename amendment kept the issue alive through the interim, awareness is now at an all-time high. Legislators who supported the rename can no longer claim ignorance of the true Communist nature of these practices. The base is organized and watching.

A new amendment has been prepared – one that ignores office names entirely and directly prohibits the Communist practices that pervert justice, and, unlike in early 2025, there is at least some chance that such legislation could become law in this environment.

What looked like a loss in 2025 has become the essential predicate for a total victory in 2026.

The rename that was meant to bury the issue instead kept it in the spotlight exactly long enough for federal law to make the stronger, practices-based prohibition politically unavoidable.

This is how legislative chess ought to be played: sometimes the first move is nothing more than operational preparation of the environment to lay the groundwork for a later moves. While the author of the original bill certainly could not have guessed how it would all have come together, you miss every shot you don’t take, so be willing to throw out the bait in pursuit of the big fish.”