Establishment controlled NGOs like the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation and George Soros’ Open Society Foundation had been pumping billions of dollars into US universities since at least the 1960s, launching social justice programs and placing propagandists into teaching positions with the intent of “manufacturing consent” as Noam Chomsky once dubbed it.

The effort was to control the thinking of a top percentage of American professionals, turn them into rabid adherents of Cultural Marxism and globalism and then send them out into the world to create a progressive trickle-down effect in every major corporate and political institution. In other words, the establishment believed that if they could dominate the professional class with their suits and lab coats and specialized degrees the rest of the public would blindly follow along due to “expert bias.”.

As it turns out, they were wrong.

It took almost ten years to root out this tiny contingent of cult manipulators, but today the woke movement is well and thoroughly exposed. Woke organizations and DEI departments are now in fast decline and even the activists are beginning to admit they’re losing the battle for the minds of the masses. Let’s not forget, only a few years ago the political left denied the DEI agenda even existed and called anyone talking about it a “conspiracy theorist.”

Big Tech companies like Meta and Google made cuts to DEI staffers and resource officers in 2023. Dozens of major corporations are completely dropping their DEI initiatives in 2024. The Hollywood Reporter recently published an article lamenting the fall of DEI in Hollywood, spotlighting a list of DEI producers in an effort to assert that leftist activists still have power in Tinsel Town despite their failing ideology. Gay activist group GLAAD has complained that “LGBT representation” has started to decline in popular entertainment, with only 27% of films and television promoting gay and trans characters (given these people make up less than 3% of the global population, this level of representation is still far too high).

The reason for this precipitous collapse of DEI programs is three-fold:

First, after central banks hiked interest rates and ended QE programs the floodgates of ESG money closed and dried up. Venture capital disappeared and woke companies then had to rely on pure profits to stay afloat.

Second, the mass boycotting of woke companies proved beyond a doubt that there is no market for products that cater to DEI. For many years we have been told that woke is the majority, and anti-woke is a fringe minority. The truth is the exact opposite.

Third, lawsuits over DEI hiring programs are forcing companies to admit there is an element of ant-white and anti-straight prejudice involved in their employment practices. They are beginning to fear the backlash in civil courts, not to mention, hiring poorly qualified employees simply to check diversity boxes is a recipe for financial disaster.

There’s a good reason why the corporate media loses their minds every time there’s a successful boycott of a product like Bud Light or a progressive series like Star Wars: The Acolyte – Each time this happens the event stands as proof that the political left is a paper tiger, a tiny minority with no power or influence beyond their ties to corporations and governments. They are an astroturf movement created by psychopathic billionaires and politicians.

Consumers and the free market have spoken – They don’t like DEI and will not buy DEI products. But leftists insist the public is being “misled” by the right wing. The only way they can keep the farce going is to continue to maintain DEI programs across the board despite public refusal to participate. If corporate programs start to shut down then the entire facade is shattered. DEI finally dies.

This is probably the motivation behind a recent push by the NAACP, the National Organization for Woman and other “civil rights” activist organizations to pressure companies to keep DEI departments in place. At least 19 of these groups penned and published an open letter to corporate leaders of Fortune 1000 companies demanding that they stop cutting woke programs.

The groups claim that “companies that abandon their DEI programs are shirking their fiduciary responsibility to employees, consumers and shareholders.”

Their statement reads:

“Diversity, equity and inclusion programs, policies, and practices make business-sense and they’re broadly popular among the public, consumers, and employees…But a small, well-funded, and extreme group of right-wing activists is attempting to pressure companies into abandoning their DEI programs…”

Leftists always gaslight by accusing their political opponents of engaging in the same kind of sabotage they engage in all the time. In fact, these businesses only have a duty to their shareholders, and their shareholders are tired of losing money. The “corporate citizen” narrative is not going to fly anymore in 2024.

If there was a market for DEI then it wouldn’t matter if conservatives were boycotting these companies. If woke activists were anything other than an insignificant portion of the population then they would be buying up woke products like crazy and proving conservatives wrong. But, they don’t because they can’t.

In their letter, the civil rights organizations, which also included UnidosUS, the Urban League, Advocates for Trans Equality, the National Women’s Law Center and the American Association of People with Disabilities, said divesting from DEI would alienate a wide range of consumers. Again, the opposite is true. DEI propaganda and hiring practices have greatly degraded company performance, product quality and they have politicized consumer markets in a way that has greatly angered Americans. Get woke, go broke.

It would be brand suicide to continue on this path, which is why so many companies are finally backing away. However, is it too late? Did corporations flirt with leftist ideology for too long and lose their customers forever? Only time will tell.

Former Space Force Lieutenant Colonel Matt Lohmeier, who was relieved of command after he spoke out against DEI initiatives in the military in 2021 and says he lost his pension, told guest host Joey Jones on “Fox and Friends Saturday” that the academy “has diversity and inclusion cadet officers” who “report to a separate chain of command.” Jones had referred to an Arizona State University study that found service academies encourage reporting “private conversations that challenge DEI precepts,” asking Lohmeier if he had similar experiences.

“In fact, come to think of it, I did experience that. A fellow commander informed me that they’re aware of my kind of politics and that they’d be happy to turn me into the base commander if I continued to privately criticize our diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives,” he said. “But this problem has grown far beyond what I experienced, personally and professionally in the military workplace.”

“My own alma mater, the U.S. Air Force Academy, has diversity and inclusion cadet officers who wear a special insignia within their cadet squadrons, they wear purple braided rope over the shoulders and they report to a separate chain of command other than their military chain of command, relating to diversity and inclusion issues,” he continued. “It reminds one of Soviet political commissars that have been established both in the Soviet Union and in other Marxist revolutionary efforts throughout the last century.”

Lohmeier called DEI a “very dangerous, very divisive ideology” that is treated “like it is a protected religious worldview” that “others ought to step in line with and support in their words and actions, otherwise face consequences.”

The former commander spoke earlier in the segment about allegedly being fired over his concerns.

“Unfortunately for the American people and for all of the men and women in uniform, it’s been considered for a number of years now to be politically partisan to speak up against diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives,” Lohmeier told Jones. “And of course, anyone who looks into this matter knows it shouldn’t necessarily be considered a partisan issue. I wasn’t interested in being politically partisan while I wore the uniform of the country and was in command of a space force unit, but of course, senior military leaders, especially under the current administration, decided that because of the climate of fear that we had created for ourselves they ought to treat my criticism of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives as partisan and, quote unquote, hold me accountable for speaking out against it.”

The Air Force Academy did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

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To most Americans the choice is clear, and it is time that Congress follows suit and take a stand for it.

DEI is not the noble cause it claims to be. At its core, DEI practices enforce a system where identity traits are valued above individual abilities and achievements. This approach undermines the fundamental American principle that everyone should have an equal opportunity to succeed based on their hard work and qualifications. Instead, DEI policies create an environment of division and resentment, where people are judged by characteristics over which they have no control rather than their skills and contributions.

The extent of DEI’s reach within our government is staggering. From NASA and the National Science Foundation to the Internal Revenue Service and the U.S. Army, federal agencies are mandated to undergo diversity training. These workshops drill tax collectors on “cultural inclusion,” military commanders on so-called “male pregnancy” and nuclear engineers on the “roots of white male culture.” That same training even instructed engineers to write messages to “white women” and “people of color” about their newfound insights, a clear example of DEI’s condescending and divisive nature that places some Americans above others because of their immutable characteristics.

While these divisive trainings—reminiscent of the Maoist struggle sessions in 20th-century China, which were designed to enforce ideological conformity through public humiliation and coercion—represent one of the problematic aspects of DEI that must be rooted out of our government institutions, there are other equally concerning issues. For instance, in 2022, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued guidance that led some states to ration alternative COVID-19 treatments based on race. This policy, driven by DEI mandates, put lives at risk by prioritizing racial considerations over medical need.

Back in 2022, it was reported that the Department of Defense allocated $2 million for DEI programming in schools for military children. These funds could have been used to improve educational resources but were instead diverted to promote a divisive agenda for the children of members of the military.

This misuse of taxpayer money is not just an affront to fiscal responsibility, it institutionalizes discriminatory practices within our government. In 2023 alone, the Biden administration spent over $16 million on diversity training for government employees and requested an additional $83 million for DEI programs at the State Department. The Office of Personnel Management’s DEI and Accessibility office also received $9.2 million of taxpayer money. These numbers highlight the significant financial burden DEI places on taxpayers, all while fostering division in society.

To combat this, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) and I have introduced the Dismantle DEI Act which would end these practices by broadly prohibiting all DEI-related activities within the federal government. It seeks to cut off funding for DEI trainings, offices and programs and meticulously combs through the U.S. Code to eliminate legal authorizations for these divisive initiatives. By doing so, we are ensuring that these practices are not just reduced, but entirely eradicated from our federal government and the institutions that it mandates.

DEI initiatives, while often presented as efforts to promote fairness, have instead cultivated an environment where people are judged by demographic identifiers rather than their merit. This fundamentally conflicts with the principles of equality and fairness that should be the foundation of our government institutions. By dismantling DEI programs, we are reaffirming our commitment to a system where individuals are evaluated based on their qualifications and abilities, not their race, gender or sexuality.

It is time for Congress to act decisively to eliminate DEI programs and restore a system based on merit and equality. Together, we are committed to taking our message to the American people—a message that promises opportunity for all rather than a select few. The Dismantle DEI Act is a necessary step in restoring to our federal government common sense, fairness and the understanding that all are created equal.

Rep. Michael Cloud represents the 27th Congressional District of Texas and is a member of the House Appropriations Committee, the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability and the House Select Committee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact [email protected].

This article is the exception to that rule thanks to Dilbert creator Scott Adams.

He didn’t come up with the new meaning of the acronym, but he’s spreading it to a wide audience of millions and it’s starting to stick.

Whoever came up with “Didn’t Earn It” as the description of DEI might have saved the world.

Normally, the clever alternative names people use to mock the other side’s policy are nothing but grin-worthy.

This one could collapse the whole racist system. It’s that strong.

Whoever came up with "Didn't Earn It" as the description of DEI might have saved the world.

Normally, the clever alternative names people use to mock the other side's policy are nothing but grin-worthy.

This one could collapse the whole racist system. It's that strong.

— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) March 21, 2024

“Didn’t Earn It.” Wow. Spot on. Let’s all share this as the true meaning of the acronym DEI because it actually makes far more sense than the leftists’ version.

The Pentagon’s anti-white DEI programs for K-12 public school children of service members are still going on, though now they are hidden within the curriculum where few recognize its existence.

“The radical curriculum was not dismantled,” reports Open the Books, which worked alongside journalists, whistleblowers, various investigative nonprofit groups and members of Congress to dismantle DEI in the Pentagon’s K-12 school system.

“Instead, it was stealthily embedded into the lesson plans and classrooms throughout the entire school system.”

According to Open the Books, the Pentagon, under Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, is abusing the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) by blocking details about the U.S. war machine’s DEI policies from coming to light.

“They bamboozled the public with window dressing in Congressional hearings while forcing woke extremism on the roughly 70,000 children of our military service members,” Open the Books says.

(Related: Will 2024 be the year that full-scale medical martial law comes to America?)

Brainwashing America’s children to hate whites with U.S. tax dollars

To put things into perspective, there are around 70,000 children of U.S. military service members enrolled in public schools under the umbrella of the Pentagon who are now covertly being brainwashed into anti-white DEI ideologies and doctrines.

Teachers at the Pentagon’s public schools are free to chat online with students about gender and sexuality in private conversations that are restricted from parental view. In fact, most Pentagon parents probably have no idea such chat rooms even exist as they are operating without parental knowledge or consent.

Children as young as four, if you can believe it, are being lured into LGBTQ+ conversations with public school teachers because elementary schools, the Pentagon says, are the “perfect time” to “really show students the diversity of the gender expression and gender activity.”

The DEI curriculum at large is pro-Black Lives Matter (BLM) and other left-wing causes that, generally speaking, are anti-white in nature. The purpose of these anti-white programs is to “challenge our beliefs, examine our own biases, and reflect on how we need to evaluate the structures and systems in our classrooms.”

There is also plenty of video content centered around “dissent” and “equity,” the purpose being to help public school teachers to brainwash children with “much-needed discussions about implicit bias and systemic racism, human rights, equity, social justice, dissent, protest, and empathy.”

The Pentagon also provides as part of its DEI curriculum a special teacher handbook that discusses how to have “critical conversations” with students about things like race and skin color, identity, privilege, and how “injustice” affects our lives and society.

“These ‘explicit conversations’ provoke ‘strong emotions’ and crying students are expected,” says Open the Books, quoting some of the curriculum material.

It is bad enough that such things are being taught to innocent children in the first place, let alone the fact that the Pentagon is hiding the curriculum while lying to the American public that it supposedly does not exist.

If you are interested in seeing who the vendors are that ally with the Pentagon to provide DEI curriculum, as well as probe the payments being made to facilitate it, check out the Open the Books full background dossier on the group’s investigation in to the matter.

Leave a comment about this story on The Liberty Daily Substack.

Brainwashing children into DEI is a deep state dream come true. Find out more at Genocide.news.

Sources for this article include:

• OpenTheBooks.substack.com
• NaturalNews.com
• OpenTheBooks.com

Oh, sure, perhaps flyers will die more frequently in fiery collisions or when unbolted aircraft doors shoot off into the clouds, but at least they will leave this mortal coil knowing that the people who build and pilot consumer aircraft represent such an amazing infusion of “diversity” that even the dumbest and most temperamentally unstable among us have been “included” in the life-and-death trust exercise of not falling out of the sky.

That’s what real “equity” requires — redistributing the earned responsibilities of those who have demonstrated merit and commitment to those who have demonstrated mediocrity and unreliability.  It’s why the globalists’ forced DEI standard (diversity, equity, and inclusion — barf!) across the public and private sectors should be more accurately returned to DIE — because wherever the deadly acronym dilutes excellence, living safely becomes less likely.

Come to think of it, Joe Biden is DIE’s perfect mascot.  Angry, confused, and incompetent Old Joe is the Chief Dolt and Grand Pooh-bah of an ass-backward system where the least capable in society thrive.

Given the U.S. government’s love affair with censorship and propaganda, I sometimes imagine future historians piecing through the shards of Western civilization in order to understand the reasons for its collapse.  According to the prevailing “narrative,” everything right now is tremendously great!  We are told that the economy is strong, that crime is under control, that our borders are secure, that paying twenty bucks for a fast-food hamburger is cheap, and that endless war produces endless peace.  According to the news media, Americans have never had it so good!  How then, third-millennium anthropologists might wonder, did everything go kaput so quickly?

Well, hopefully, someone in the future will stumble across a time capsule with Joe Biden’s linguistically challenged press conference from the other day, in which he angrily denounced the Potemkin special counsel’s legal conclusion that, while Decrepit Joe committed federal crimes damaging to America’s national security, he is nevertheless too senile to prosecute.  “The alleged ‘president’ of the allegedly ‘most powerful nation’ in the world betrayed his country, was too incompetent to stand trial, but remained perfectly competent to run for re-election?” some future human chronicler might ask before letting out a high-pitched, “Eureka!  Now I get why everything died suddenly!”

“Died suddenly” might just become the catchall epithet (or maybe epitaph) for our age.  Right now the medical community continues to destroy what’s left of its reputation by refusing to connect the dots between increased rates of cancer and heart disease and the global rollout of the mostly mandated pharmaceutical injections not only falsely touted as cures to COVID, but also falsely labeled as “vaccines.”  Every time a fourteen-year-old athlete “dies suddenly” on the gridiron or basketball court, the ethically compromised killers in white coats throw out all kinds of ludicrous explanations for why healthy young people are losing their lives.  It was stress!  It was red meat!  It was racism!  Or the increasingly ubiquitous it must have been climate change!

It’s funny, if not disturbing, to see all the people who changed their first name to “Doctor” struggle to reach the most obvious conclusion: that an experimental mRNA serum rushed to market without necessary testing or proper scrutiny might be to blame.  Elementary school children with a rudimentary understanding of the Scientific Method and medical ethics would understand the potential harm from requiring healthy patients unlikely to die from COVID to nonetheless be “treated” with untested “vaccines.”  Yet the “first, do no harm” swarm of group-thinkers, who have trouble realizing when pharmaceutical companies are using humans as guinea pigs to make billions in profits, jumped-to and insisted that the whole global population must be injected with possible poisons.

Why would you experiment on anybody unless it was absolutely necessary (and then done only with informed consent)?  Why would you recklessly expand that experiment to the whole human race?  Only the “scientific experts” could trip over such basic precepts of medical ethics on their way to creating a potential global catastrophe.

You would think that the same medical community that unwittingly conspired with evil pharmaceutical companies to hook millions of Americans on OxyContin and other opioids would have been more skeptical when magical COVID elixirs were quickly developed and marketed as cure-alls.  Alas, the gullible are getting only more gullible.  Perhaps this is why “climate change” is still the globalist boogeyman that haunts so many pliant imaginations around the world.  The unscrupulous authorities who lied about the efficacy of lockdowns, masks, and experimental “vaccines” would never lie about “climate change,” right?

What kind of monsters would tell the world that carbon is killing the planet if the science isn’t sound?  Maybe the same globalist monsters who used COVID as a propaganda vehicle for establishing a “Great Reset” are also interested in using “climate change” hysteria to convince people that they must surrender their private property, privacy, and human rights in order to survive.  Would an ethically challenged scientific community work with an even more ethically challenged political class to push a “climate change” hoax that justifies the erosion of individual liberties and the implementation of widespread communism prepackaged in an irrational fear of hydrocarbons?  Duh, of course it would.  When governments became the de facto funders of all academic research in the West, impartial, rigorous, and objective scientific inquiry “died suddenly,” too.

In the “died suddenly” era, authorities don’t seek truth; they seek politically convenient “narratives” that protect the entrenched power of the status quo.  False “experts” fabricate false “realities” that serve as intellectual prisons for weak minds.  The truly astounding thing is that some of today’s most “educated” people are the ones most susceptible to propaganda.  Designer degrees reflect not a proven capacity for critical thinking, but rather a cerebral vulnerability to rigid programming.

Case in point: the “trans” movement.  Nowhere in human history has any society struggled with the biological distinctions separating men from women.  Only in our absurd present age have the most credentialed twisted their neurons into such knots that they know less than those who never had a written language.  One psychologist informed doctors at a medical convention that parents who do not believe that their “trans” children should be pumped full of sterilizing puberty-blockers or have their bodies mutilated are the ones with a “mental illness.”  Increasingly, the “expert class” insists that people not suffering from psychological delusions are the ones who should be branded as delusional and dangerous.

This State-sanctioned “trans” insanity reminds me of a recent “diversity” exhibition in London that pushed the preposterous lie that “Britain was black for 7,000 years” before any white people arrived.  For the academics involved, fraudulent history is good if it advances politically useful narratives.  For everyone else, DIE-obsessed “experts” just look crazy.

At some point, a critical mass of people will reject a governing system overrun by misanthropes, lunatics, sadists, and liars.  Populations do not obey those undeserving of respect.  When respect for authorities “dies suddenly,” old orders will not survive.

The resurfaced clip, which is circulating on X (formerly Twitter) – you can also watch it below – comes at a pertinent time when DEI is getting slammed in popular culture as a sham.

NBC reports, US companies spent $8 billion dollars on DEI programs in 2020.

The DEI grift creates a toxic racist workplace and simultaneously bankrupts the company. pic.twitter.com/wLnq5gAhth

— Mythinformed (@MythinformedMKE) January 7, 2024

The episode of the Mehdi Hasan Show from which the above clip was taken was called “Why White Progressives are Part of the Problem.” It called out DEI, critical race theory (CRT), and other anti-white trends that have emerged in recent years to denigrate and minimize whites throughout American society.

(Related: Be sure to check out what less than three decades of diversity, equity, and inclusion did to Johannesburg, South Africa, which has turned into a “crumbling hellscape.”)

Anti-white racism is trendy

In the interview, Hasan asked DiAngelo about her book, called “Nice Racism,” and what it has to do with corporations spending money on DEI and anti-white race workshops. What Hasan wanted to know is whether or not all that spending actually works towards company goals, allowing them to play “racism get out of jail free” cards.

“Well, I don’t think it does work if it’s not sustained and consistent,” DiAngelo responded. “So, if it’s a one-time thing – a check the box kind of approach – it’s not going to keep going. It has to be sustained.”

“I really would have us question why we think there would be a simple answer or solution. We can take this workshop – or we should be able to take this workshop – and figure out something as perennially complex and deep and enduring and highly adaptive as racism.”

The latest iterations of alleged racism are now being called things like “voter suppression” and “laws enacted that say you can’t acknowledge that racism exists,” as well as efforts to “teach the history of the civil rights movement.”

This ever-moving target known as “racism” has to constantly be addressed by racial training, otherwise the average person would miss it. In other words, “racism” as it is currently defined in popular culture does not exist – unless, of course, we are talking about anti-white racism, which is being institutionalized at the corporate and academic level across America.

DiAngelo endorses what are known as “affinity groups” that she says are an advanced technique used in DEI training. In short, affinity groups are groups of people who are separated by race because there “are aspects” of DEI reprogramming that require people of different races to be taught “separately.”

The people who are hired to lead DEI brainwashing programs typically make a lot of money – upwards of hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars annually goes to each and every DEI leader.

The Chief Diversity officer and related support staff at the University of Florida, for instance, are paid a whopping $750,000 a year. The University of Central Florida‘s Vice President for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, as well as the president’s assistant, together boast a combined salary of $445,000 per year.

MEMO: All state university & college systems in Florida have been required to report expenditures and resources utilized for campus activities related to diversity, equity, and inclusion and critical race theory. Stay tuned. pic.twitter.com/E4Z4zLuJgC

— Bryan Griffin (@BryanDGriffin) January 4, 2023

The latest news about the anti-white takeover of corporate America can be found at RaceWar.news.

Sources for this article include:

• ThePostMillennial.com
• NaturalNews.com
• ThePostMillennial.com

The total percentage of American organizations with a DEI budget dropped 4 percentage points, from 58% in 2022 to 54% in 2023, while the number of organizations with a DEI strategy fell 9 points in that same time frame, according to a report from consulting firm Paradigm. DEI initiatives in the workplace gained huge traction following the death of George Floyd, which encouraged companies to divert resources to the practice, but now “external forces,” including tightening economic conditions as well as public and judicial pressure, are pushing back on those efforts.

“After two years of unprecedented investment sparked by 2020’s racial justice movement, this year, global momentum around DEI slowed,” according to the report from Paradigm. “There are a number of headwinds contributing to this shift: the first is economic uncertainty that not only led to reduced spending across the board, it also firmly shifted the power balance back to employers.”

Despite the decline in funding, there was a 6-point increase in the number of companies that had a senior DEI leader and an 8-point increase in organizations that had goals related to representation for women in leadership from 2022 to 2023, according to Paradigm. A total of 20% of companies in 2023 had goals related to increasing employment related to race or ethnicity, which is a 4-point increase year-over-year.

The shift follows concerns from companies that the Supreme Court could target DEI and race-based hiring in the workplace the same way it struck down race-based admissions at colleges and universities earlier this year. A pair of decisions by the Supreme Court in June involving Harvard and the University of North Carolina cumulatively ruled that using race as a factor in college admissions is not permissible under the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

“Over the past several months, we’ve heard from a number of HR leaders who are de-emphasizing data and analytics as a part of their DEI efforts, in response to the changing legal landscape and increased scrutiny on DEI efforts,” according to the report from Paradigm.

Only 26% of companies examine the final results of hiring by race or ethnicity, while 33% analyze promotions in the same manner, according to Paradigm. Around 36% of organizations measured the attrition rate of their employees by race or ethnicity.

Businesses pulled back from hiring in October, adding only 150,000 jobs for the month compared to 297,000 in September, while unemployment ticked up to 3.9% from 3.8%. The Leading Economic Index predicted that 2024 will only see 0.8% in the U.S. economy due to a possible recession.

Sound off about this article on The Liberty Daily Substack.

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Or perhaps those already working in the State Department prided themselves on how ultracompetitive it is to win a job as a foreign service officer (FSO)—securing such a position is something of an elite accomplishment—and therefore perhaps they tried behind the scenes to preserve State’s long-established meritocratic character.

Be that as it may, Ambassador Gina Abercrombie-Winstanley, who has served as State’s diversity and inclusion officer since April 2021 (and who plans to step aside soon), defended the department’s push for more DEI in the coming months and years in congressional hearings last week. Among other details, Abercrombie-Winstanley noted that more than 80 percent of the State Department’s diplomatic corps currently is white, implying that that percentage may be too high from a DEI perspective.

The common political slogan used to sell DEI initiatives to the public is that its proponents want such-and-such a workforce to “look more like our country as a whole.” On a superficial level, that slogan may seem innocuous and unobjectionable, but on closer examination, it’s problematic. If looks make the difference between an employee doing a good job or a not-so-good job, then looks would be an important factor in hiring. In reality, however, looks by themselves don’t cut it.

As is always the case with DEI, it introduces a battle of the Q’s—quotas on one hand versus qualifications and qualities on the other. Imagine a volatile political situation in a South American country. The American president wants to pursue a policy of maintaining contacts with various political figures and parties in that country without offending any of those parties since they don’t trust each other. That can require very delicate diplomacy. Do you think the Secretary of State or one of his top deputies would say, “Wait a minute, it’s about time we put a black gay person out there to speak on behalf of our country”? Don’t you think it would be better to deploy a FSO who understands the history, economics, culture, tradition, and language(s) of that country—one with a deep feel for personal sensitivities in that country, and someone who has the moxie and wisdom to accurately communicate our government’s intentions while not committing any potentially disruptive verbal faux pas? We certainly don’t want to risk triggering an international incident just so someone can say domestically, “Well, at least our State Department matches the demographic profile of American society.”

What concerns me most about what looks like the Biden administration’s push for more blacks and fewer whites in the State Department is that the president’s proposed budget calls for $76 million to be spent by the State Department in the next year on DEI initiatives. $76 million?! I realize that amount is probably considered pocket change in today’s Washington, but you could hire 500 people to work in DEI at State for $150,000 in annual salary and still have change left over.

Abercrombie-Winstanley says that State wants to be able to provide a precise breakdown of the composition of its workforce by race, gender, ethnicity, status of disability, etc. Pardon me, but why would State need millions of dollars to do this when computers can keep track of each employee’s identity and print out updated profiles of the entire workforce as often as wanted?

Or maybe the plan for the $76 million is to “beat the bushes” and see how many more of various minorities State can drum up through various recruitment and advertising activities. This is the approach that some colleges have taken. They hire a DEI officer whose job amounts to scouring the countryside to locate members of the desired minority group. Then they convince them to enroll in the DEI officer’s college. (Alas, in the college town where I lived for years—not in Grove City, where I taught —the students that were recruited by DEI turned out to be a disaster for the college. They just weren’t able to handle the coursework.)

The question that State will inevitably have to deal with, whether they like it or not, will be whether the people they’re looking for even exist—that is, whether sufficient numbers of members of various minority groups have the professional expertise and personal qualities needed to handle the formidable challenges of a FSO.

Certainly, in this day of Zoom conferences and instant communications, State can find inexpensive ways to send recruiting materials to every college in the land without coming close to spending $76 million. If they want to try to find more qualified minorities, fine, but throwing a lot of money at the problem seems gratuitous.

One problem with the DEI movement is that they’re looking for a quick fix to a longstanding problem. It is true that certain minorities seem underrepresented in important places like the State Department. But what if the desired numbers of truly qualified minorities just aren’t there? We, as a society, need to address the root causes of underqualified minorities. My nominee for first among those root causes is the sorry state of public education in so many of our inner cities. I say that as one who did some teaching in urban schools decades ago, both visiting a number of schools in a substitute capacity and then teaching and counseling at a special inner-city school for dropouts. Frankly, by the time students left those broken schools (finally escaping from them), they were doomed never to acquire the intellectual skills needed for a demanding job like FSO.

If the Biden administration wants to start expanding opportunities for minorities, it should turn its attention to improving education. That means somehow breaking away from its codependence on teachers’ unions and making school choice universal. Fix the schools, and over the next generation, many of the undesirable racial and other disparities in the adult job market will show marked improvement.

Article cross-posted from our premium news partners at The Epoch Times. Image by AgnosticPreachersKid, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The House Armed Services Committee held a subcommittee hearing Thursday to address whether these programs are making the military stronger or actually are wasting resources, creating more division, and contributing to record-low recruitment numbers.

Here are four takeaways from the hearing.

1. Rise of DEI Administration, Fall of Meritocracy

Rep. Jim Banks, R-Ind., chairman of the Armed Services subcommittee on military personnel, spoke about the problems with diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives in his opening statement.

Banks said that the meritocratic nature of the military, which allows people of diverse backgrounds to succeed, is an important principle to uphold. However, he warned, this ethos may be waning under Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, who was appointed by President Joe Biden.

“We are now in danger of losing those meritocratic principles to the politicization of our armed forces, thanks first and foremost to the ever-expanding bureaucracy of diversity, equity, and inclusion policies, regulations, and trainings,” Banks said.

The Indiana Republican then said this growing effort is based on “faulty science and misguided principles,” and that anti-bias training used by the military in fact may be causing more bias.

“In a review of 418 prejudice-reduction experiments, [Princeton psychology professor] Elizabeth Levy Paluck and co-authors concluded that much of the anti-bias training is, quote, misguided,” Banks said. “And even in the few studies that showed any effect at all in reducing bias, those effects disappeared over a short period of time. Yet the Department of Defense and the [armed] services have embraced DEI training full cloth.”

Banks then noted that Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,  had said in a Senate hearing that the Defense Department “expended 5,359,311 man hours for Secretary Austin’s extremism standdown and an additional 529,711 man hours for DEI-specific training.”

DEI  is an acronym for diversity, equity, and inclusion.

“That is a lot of training hours spent away from honing warfighting capabilities, knowledge, and skills,” Banks said.

2. Recruitment Challenges

Diversity programs are necessary to boost the military, Alex Wagner, the Air Force’s assistant secretary for manpower and reserve affairs, said in his opening statement.

“Intentional diversity and inclusion efforts allow us to tap into the full talents of the American people and then leverage those talents to defend the nation,” Wagner said.

“Our diversity and inclusion initiatives are focused on talent acquisition and development and informed by science and business best practices, congressional mandates, data-focused policy reviews and assessments and the lived experiences of airmen and guardians working together every single day.”

The armed services face a severe recruitment crisis, the worst since the military became an all-volunteer force in 1973. The Army recently dropped physical and aptitude requirements to bring in more recruits.

Rep. Jack Bergman, R-Mich., said readiness needs to be the primary focus of the military. He asked the committee witnesses whether diversity programs have a positive or negative effect on recruitment. They all answered “positive” or “very positive.”

“So why haven’t we made our numbers?” Bergman asked.

After a short period of silence, Bergman pressed the panelists on the question, asking whether diversity, equity, and inclusion programs are solving the problem.

Gilbert Cisneros Jr., under secretary of defense for personnel and readiness, said: “I think DEI is going to give us a larger pool to pull from.”

“I will look forward to the numbers, [since] we see Sept. 30 whether we hit our numbers or not,” Bergman said, referring to the end of fiscal year 2023.

Bergman asked the same question about the effects of diversity programs on retention and promotion in addition to recruitment, to which, again, all the witnesses on the panel replied that there were positive effects.

“The reason I wanted to ask you all those questions is that we’re going to have the same questions next year,” Bergman said. “I’m going to ask it exactly the same way and what I expect when you say ‘positive,’ I want to see numbers.”

3. A Top Diversity Official Who Disparages Whites

Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., asked about Kelisa Wing, the Pentagon’s newly reassigned diversity, equity, and inclusion chief, who has made racially disparaging remarks on Twitter.

Wing, whose Defense Department role since 2021 had been to oversee the Pentagon’s diversity education programs, tweeted this out on July 23, 2020:

I’m so exhausted at these white folx in these [professional development] sessions this lady actually had the CAUdacity to say black people can be racist too. I had to stop the session and give Karen the BUSINESS … we are not the majority and don’t have) why ask for assistance.

The disparaging term “caudacity” refers to “Caucasian audacity,” while “Karen” is a disparaging term for white women.

Stefanik asked Cisneros whether this was an acceptable statement from a Defense Department employee.

“I do agree that that is not acceptable,” Cisneros replied.

Cisneros said Wing had been reassigned to another division without responsibilities for diversity, equity, and inclusion.

4. Political Ideology Invading Military

A significant theme of the House hearing was the injection of political ideology into military practices.

Banks pressed the Pentagon’s Cisneros on how political ideology and political bias are becoming significant problems in the military, fueled by DEI training.

“How do you eliminate political bias or partisan politics from DEI training?” Banks asked.

Cisneros responded that the Pentagon’s DEI training sessions don’t have a political bias.

“For us, it’s about ensuring that people are treated with respect and dignity,” Cisneros said.

“Do you have a discussion on your team on how to eliminate partisan politics and ideology from DEI trainings? Does that discussion ever occur?” Banks asked.

Cisneros responded that it didn’t

Democrats on the House subcommittee insisted that Republicans are politicizing the military by how they call diversity programs into question.

“I feel that the conversation we’re having right now, by its literal nature and its words, is divisive and politicizing of the military,” Rep. Chrissy Houlahan, D-Pa., said. “And I feel as though one of the reasons why—not the reason why—recruiting may be seeing a sag is that people don’t see themselves in the military, don’t see their nation in the military, and I’m embarrassed by the tone and tenor of this conversation.”

Article cross-posted from Daily Signal.