Finally, the diversity, equity, and inclusion dominoes are starting to fall. Universities and corporations are waking from their slumbers and realizing that embracing DEI damages their reputations, ability to perform their missions, and sometimes their share prices.
Instead of the harmless cloud of feel-good fluff that the anodyne DEI name seemed to promise, they found they’d imported a crippling ideological tyranny. Now, a few institutions are trickling toward the practical and principled policy of avoiding politics and getting on with the jobs for which they exist. The trickle will, one hopes, become a flood.
Some recent examples include Purdue University, which last week signed on to the 1967 Kalvin Report, under which higher education establishments recognize that they cannot fulfill their mission of free inquiry and the advancement of knowledge if they displace critical thinking with conformity to intensely controversial modish ideas. Harvard, Stanford, Syracuse, and others similarly have apparently seen the light after blundering for a while in the sepulchral intellectual darkness of wokery.
Businesses, too, are learning that they can do themselves more harm than good shackled to the latest ideological obsessions on gender, race, or other intersectional nonsense. Just ask the brewer, Anheuser-Busch, parent of Bud Light, which thought it could get high marks for virtue and win a small new market of drinkers, but instead wrecked its standing in a huge existing market by emblazoning a beer can with an ideological statement in the likeness of a deluded fellow who thinks he is a girl.
Even if some private sector organizations now understand the pitfalls that await them in ideological controversies, however, others still dive in. It is easy to find churches, for example, that still proclaim their faith in Black Lives Matter, posting signs bearing that organization’s logo at their doors. This is despite BLM having been exposed years ago as built on a lie and maintained by financial corruption. Perhaps the latest evidence of self-dealing at BLM, with charity dollars sluicing to the friends and family of leadership, will help nudge institutions to abandon the racial grifters.
The issue is different in the public sector, which is commanded by politicians. It would be naïve, even undesirable, to expect agency policies and rhetoric not to reflect their leaders’ views. However, many public sector bodies seem recently to have shifted toward more aggressive adoption of radical and widely unpopular views.
Many federal agencies are flying the LGBTQ+ flag alongside the American flag, which represents the entire nation. The implicit message is that the LGBTQ+ agenda is as American as apple pie and as representative of who we are and what we stand for as Old Glory. But the T in in LGBTQ+ stands for “transgender” and thus flying the flag aligns the federal government under President Joe Biden with an aggressive agenda to reshape our society in line with the ideas of a tiny cohort suffering from a psychological disorder. Most people don’t want that. The Q stands for the “queer” agenda, which is one of perpetual social revolution, and the general public doesn’t want that either.
Every decision government agencies make is political, and there are different levels of government with varied agendas. However, the huge disparity in how they treat similar offenses produces a mounting sense of gross unfairness and biased justice.
The Delray Beach Police Department recently charged a 19-year-old with felony criminal mischief for doing burnouts with his truck on a crosswalk, leaving black streaks on the LGBTQ+ colors with which it was adorned. The police department expressed outrage over this damage to what it described as a “symbol of unity.” More people probably regard the rainbow crosswalk as a symbol of division and political arrogance.
The pious response of the police in Florida contrasts markedly with the laissez-faire attitude of police in Washington toward worse vandalism inflicted by a pro-terrorist mob spray painting statues in Lafayette Park opposite the White House. Despite the crowd calling for genocide, despite many of them hounding police officers out of the park, and despite their vandalism, no one was arrested, let alone charged with a felony.
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That is because the pro-terrorist crowd is looked on sympathetically by the leftist government of the federal city. But the guy who left contemptuous tire marks on the Delray Beach crosswalk was probably expressing a much more widely held opinion.
Ironically, just north of Lafayette Park, several blocks of 16th Street leading to the North Portico of the White House are defaced with ideological graffiti applied by the District of Columbia government itself. It has painted “Black Lives Matter” in vast yellow lettering the width of the street to express its adherence to a particular viewpoint. There are burnout lines on it, but it is not they but the yellow lettering of Black Lives Matter Plaza, as it is now known, that constitute a defacement of the nation’s capital.
