Tag Archives: DEI

A Must Read by Victor Davis Hanson

By J Robert Smith

July 29, 2024
2-min read

Certainly, guilt over their largess, together with our 21st century
secular update of sanctimonious New England puritanism, explain
this overweening left-wing new zealotry
to change the world, but largely at others’ expense.
They are the descendants of Salem, who share the same
superstitions and fanaticism to punish all
who doubt their purity and wisdom.

— Excerpt, Victor Davis Hanson, America’s Lab Rats?

There’s no one better than Professor Victor Davis Hanson in surveying the national landscape and providing comprehensive diagnoses of what ails America.

The nation’s cultural divide is at the heart of the troubles and conflicts that beset the country. A mega-wealthy elite – representing a tiny percentage of the U.S. – have embraced radical beliefs and values. They’re the cutting edge. They have sought for nearly a generation to inflict their radicalism on us, the majority who instinctively reject the elites society-destroying experiments. Theirs is, as Professor Hanson points out, an insufferable sanctimony borne of their professional accomplishments and the wealth produced. Further, as with the old Puritans, their righteousness is to be regarded as unassailable. The penalties for doing otherwise promise to be severe.

All true, but Professor Hanson’s diagnoses lead us to an inevitable conclusion. There’s no accommodation with these wealthy radicals and their minions. How do you find accommodation with people who have no intention to meet others somewhere in the middle? They aren’t content to limit themselves in any way.

Their intention is to conquer America. We are to be subjugated to their anti-God, debauched morality. We are to meekly surrender our lives to woke and DEI (diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) orthodoxies. If we suffer – if our families, friends, and neighbors suffer – it’s in service of their twisted concept of social justice. We will bend knees or suffer even greater depravations and humiliations.

This is an internal conquest. It’s a rough parallel, but what is happening now does hold some similarities to the subjugation that the American Indian experienced.

Yet, tens of millions of Americans aren’t a stone age people. We are the doers and builders and maintainers of America. We are the nation’s backbone – break it, and the nation breaks, too. But that appears the intent of the elite.

How does this end? It is a zero-sum game. It’s intended by the elite to be just that. No guess is ventured here as to the particulars of how this intensifying conflict resolves, but it must resolve with a victory for traditional America. Not defeating this determined foe means there won’t be much left of the America that a multitude of patriots died for.

Professor Hanson’s article can be found at his website, “Blade of Perseus.”

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Racist Leaders Presume You Are, Too

By Rob Meyne

Feb. 4, 2024
3-min read

The names of many contemporary movements, organizations, and legislation are focused-grouped tested to ensure they sound as appealing as possible. Nomenclature has a lot to do with the ability to successfully market something.

Terms like Black Lives Matter, or Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), or the Inflation Reduction Act are designed to generate support for policies that do not reflect what their name suggests.

No reasonable person questions that black lives matter. Nor do they oppose the ideas of inclusion or inflation reduction. Yet frequently a majority of reasonable people oppose the specific actions being taken in pursuit of those objections. The devil is always in the details.

Years ago, you may recall there was opposition to harvesting tuna, because marine mammals were often killed in the process. Accordingly, there was a suggestion that tuna operators should form an alliance and call it “Friends of the Dolphin.” No doubt you could have generated cash contributions to such a group from a lot of people who would have been horrified to find out what it really was.

If you’ve paid attention to the dumpster fire that is also known as the Biden Administration, you will remember they tried to enact components of the “Green New Deal” (AKA, the Green New Steal). These were radical revisions to the way we use and generate energy, manufacture and distribute products, and to whom we give huge taxpayer-funded subsidies. It was politically unpopular and economically devastating. The bill went nowhere. So, they just called it the Inflation Reduction Act. Members of Congress had only a few days to read the thousand page bill, and team Biden just put most of the elements of the Green New Steal into it.

The voters don’t like it? Simple: change its name and pass it anyway.

If you said you were opposed to the Inflation Reduction Act people thought you were in favor of inflation. Sadly, this kind of disingenuousness, and outright lying, drives much of the political process.

Monikers like DEI are crafted to sound like a commitment to a laudable goal but do nothing to tell you the nuts and bolts of the proposals. You can certainly favor the concepts of DEI without favoring the methods leftist elites use to make them happen. The left routinely disguises their true intentions – their actual policies – by labeling them in a misleading way.

It has often been said the left succeeds when the people are not informed but conservatives succeed when they are.

Consider this: any policy that treats people differently based on their skin color or national heritage is racist. That is the definition of racism; treating people differently because of the amount of melanin in their skin. Yet that is exactly what most DEI programs require.

Equity, in fact, is the polar opposite of equal opportunity. Equity requires the allocation of benefits and opportunities based on race. Management by equity requires that merit be a secondary consideration. That is an uncomfortable reality, but until we come to grips with it, we will continue to struggle to find answers to some of our most important problems.

For as long as I can remember, I have been astonished at how people on the left look at everything through the lens of race. Leftist leaders simply don’t believe race isn’t the first thing conservatives think about when they begin their day. Most Democratic leaders assume we are all obsessed with race because they are.

Perhaps more than anything, solutions to problems of race will elude us as long as half the nation assumes the other half shares their obsession with race. Saying that out loud is not likely to make you friends among Democratic leaders.

More to come.

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Equal Opportunity for All Should Be Our Goal

By Rob Meyne

Jan. 21, 2024
5-min read

In 2011, Chicago pastor Corey Brooks lived for a while on the roof of an abandoned motel in his South Side neighborhood. He was protesting urban violence and hoping, through contributions, to raise money for a community center.

Brooks is a longtime advocate for people in his neighborhood, a devout Christian, and a respected leader. In the thirteen years since he lived on that roof, Brooks has learned firsthand of the damage being done to young blacks by contemporary Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) efforts and Critical Race Theory (CRT).

Brooks has become a vocal and effective opponent of DEI, CRT, and other schools of thought that teach Americans that you’re either a victim or an oppressor based on your skin color. Brooks writes intelligently and clearly in a piece from Tablet Magazine. It is worth the read.

DEI has evolved into a catch-all phrase that leftists use to refer to everything that is good and worthwhile about fighting racism. If DEI a just referred to good faith efforts to lift up people who might need a helping hand, that would be one thing. No serious and sane person would object to that. That is not what DEI is. As is so often the case with the gospel of the left, the reality of their policies is different from their rhetoric.

It is likely that most people who embrace equity – people who run our schools, have jobs in corporate HR, or maybe work for a non-profit – talk about the concept as if it is a general, all-encompassing effort to pursue a fair and equal world. One doubts that most equity devotees can even define what it means. Most such people no doubt mean well. But the problem is they end up giving energy and momentum to a disastrous concept they don’t actually understand.

The people who implement equity as a policy, however, know that it isn’t the same thing as equality of opportunity. Equity demands equal results based on one’s membership in a group; equal opportunity has a goal of a color-blind society, where effort, talent, and merit matter and skin color cannot hold you back.

In practice, as it is actually implemented by government, DEI tells us that wealth, opportunity, rewards, and benefits should be allocated according to race, sex, and national origin, not by merit. It is all about racial quotas and rejects the role of merit in our society. DEI is perfectly suited for a socialist society but is antithetical to our own.

CRT is an intellectually vacuous set of objectives that have their roots in the Frankfurt School of communism. Yes, no one likes to admit that, and it doesn’t make one sound less conspiratorial to point it out, but it is true. Critical theory in general began with Marx and others who saw all of society as a war between the classes.

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