There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true. —Soren Kierkegaard. "…truth is true even if nobody believes it, and falsehood is false even if everybody believes it. That is why truth does not yield to opinion, fashion, numbers, office, or sincerity–it is simply true and that is the end of it" – Os Guinness, Time for Truth, pg.39. “He that takes truth for his guide, and duty for his end, may safely trust to God’s providence to lead him aright.” – Blaise Pascal. "There is but one straight course, and that is to seek truth and pursue it steadily" – George Washington letter to Edmund Randolph — 1795. We live in a “post-truth” world. According to the dictionary, “post-truth” means, “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” Simply put, we now live in a culture that seems to value experience and emotion more than truth. Truth will never go away no matter how hard one might wish. Going beyond the MSM idealogical opinion/bias and their low information tabloid reality show news with a distractional superficial focus on entertainment, sensationalism, emotionalism and activist reporting – this blogs goal is to, in some small way, put a plug in the broken dam of truth and save as many as possible from the consequences—temporal and eternal. "The further a society drifts from truth, the more it will hate those who speak it." – George Orwell “There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.” ― Soren Kierkegaard
SiriusXM’s Megyn Kelly told ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith on his show Wednesday that the push for diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) has “created more of a divide” between races in the U.S.
Over the years, DEI initiatives have expanded into both the education and business sectors, with the Biden-Harris administration allocating over a trillion dollars to implement the agenda across federal agencies. On “The Stephen A. Smith Show,” Smith asked Kelly about her opposition to DEI.
“If this nation — whether it’s corporate America or beyond — was exercising fairness and truly looking for the best candidates and not engaging in favoritism that favored primarily white males then there would have never been any need for DEI,” Smith said. “Just like there would not have been any need for affirmative action or other things. So for me when I think about it, that’s what I believe folks who speak against DEI, specifically on the right, obviously, are missing. They don’t bring up that element. To that you say what?”
“Well, I think it’s mixing a lot of things. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with diversity, and if I were remaking America I would make sure we had it in all forms in all places. I’d make sure we have lots of different people with lots of different backgrounds and lots of different ideological views running different corporations. But that’s not really what DEI is,” Kelly said.
A study published in March by the Functional Government Initiative and the Center for Renewing America said the Biden-Harris administration spent $1.1 trillion implementing 460 DEI-related programs across 24 federal agencies. Kelly said her issue with the push stems from its heavy emphasis on the “equity” aspect, calling out how her children have been taught about the push in their schools.
WATCH:
“DEI is mostly focused on the ‘e’ the ‘equity,’ which is just a joke. Equity means you have the right to end up in the same place, irrespective of how much effort goes into it. That is not an American value. That is not something I value in or share in at all,” Kelly said. “Diversity is a different story, and I think we really were working toward it, and we were doing pretty well as a country.”
Kelly said that during her time in college in the 90s, “race was being diminished” and becoming less of a focus. She said, however, the setback came when race became “the top thing that we were supposed to notice about other people,” which she believes “created a wall between us.”
“By the way, most of DEI hiring and firing and whatever practices are illegal. It is illegal to even count race as a factor in hiring or firing. All these companies and these banks who are like, ‘Well, in the end, it tips the scales if she’s a woman or if he’s a black man.’ Wrong,” Kelly said.
“You just violated the law. You’re not allowed to consider it at all. But we lost our minds after George Floyd. We decided we were gonna throw the law out the window or just not enforce it and start living and dying by immutable characteristics,” Kelly added. “Like I should get extra points because I have a vag or you should get extra points because your skin is brown. It’s just utter madness.”
Since reentering office in January, President Donald Trump has dismantled DEI initiatives across government and education. One of his first actions included a Jan. 20 executive order declaring an end to “radical and wasteful government spending” on DEI programs and preferencing.
(Featured Image Media Credit:Screenshot/YouTube/”The Stephen A. Smith Show”)
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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 licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.
The diversity, equity, and inclusion project, often seen as a major element of the so-called “woke” creed along with green fanaticism, keeps popping up as a possible subtext in a variety of recent tragedies.
In the case of the Los Angeles fires, Mayor Karen Bass, who cut the fire department budget, was warned of the mounting fire dangers of the Santa Anna winds and parched brush on surrounding hillsides. No matter—she junketed in Uganda. When furor followed, on cue, her defenders decried a racialist attack on “a black woman.”
Her possible stand-in deputy mayor for “security” was under suspension for allegations that he called in a bomb threat to the Los Angeles city council—a factor mysteriously forgotten.
The fire chief previously was on record mostly for highlighting her DEI agendas rather than emphasizing traditional fire department criteria like response time or keeping fire vehicles running and out of the shop.
One of her deputies had boasted that in emergencies, citizens appreciated most of all that arriving first responders looked like them. (But most people in need worry only whether the first responders seem to know what they are doing.) She further snarked that if women allegedly were not physically able to carry out a man in times of danger, then it was the man’s fault for being in the wrong place.
The Los Angeles water and power czar—culpable for a needlessly dry reservoir that could have provided 117 million gallons to help save Pacific Palisades—was once touted primarily as the first Latina to run such a vital agency. But did that fact matter much to the 18 million people whose very survival depended on deliverable water in the otherwise desert tinderbox of greater Los Angeles?
In all these cases, the point is not necessarily whether the key players who might have prevented the destruction of some 25,000 acres of Los Angeles were selected—or exempted—on the basis of their race, gender, or sexual orientation.
Rather the worry is that in all these cases, those with responsibility for keeping Los Angeles viable, themselves eagerly self-identified first by their race, gender, or sexual orientation—as if this fact alone was synonymous with competence and deference.
In fact, racial or sex identity has nothing to do with whether a water and power director grasped the dangers of a bone-dry but vital reservoir; whether the fire department must know how many fire hydrants remain in working order; or whether a mayor understood that in times of existential danger she must stay on the job and not fly on an optional junket to Africa.
As of yet, we have no idea exactly all the mishaps that caused a horrific air crash at Reagan Airport in Washington. The only clear consensus that has emerged is that the horrific deaths could have been easily preventable—but were not because, in perfect storm fashion, there were multiple system failures. In that sense, both the Los Angeles and Washington, DC, disasters are alike.
When a military helicopter crashes into a passenger jet in Washington, DC, airspace—an area that has not seen such a disaster for 43 years—the likely cause is either wrongly altered protocols or clear human error, or both.
So, it is vital to discover what the causes of the disaster were to prevent such a recurrence. As in the Los Angeles cataclysm, the role of DEI—the method of hiring regulatory agency administrators, air traffic controllers, or pilots on bases other than meritocracy—becomes a legitimate inquiry.
To dispel such worries, authorities must disclose all the facts as they do when there are no controversies over DEI. Yet we never learned the name of the Capitol police officer who fatally shot unarmed Ashli Babbitt for months, nor received evidence of his spotty service record. The same initial hesitation in releasing information marked news about the ship that hit the Francis Scott Bridge near Baltimore and why traffic barriers were not up in the French Quarter before the recent terrorist attack in New Orleans.
In the Washington, DC, crash, two questions arise about the conduct of pilots, air traffic controllers, and the administrators responsible for hiring, staffing, and evaluating such employees.
The first issue is whether hiring, retention, and promotion in the airline industry or the military is not fully meritocratic. That is, were personnel hired on the basis of their exhibited superior education, practical experience, and superb scores on relevant examinations in matters relating to air travel? Or were they instead passed over because of their race, gender, or sexual orientation?
Was the shortage of controllers a direct result not of an unqualified pool of applicants but rather because of racial restrictions place upon it to reduce its size?
Second, were the promoters of DEI confident that they could argue that “diversity, equity, and inclusion” were as important criteria for the operation of a complex aircraft system as the past traditional criteria that had qualified air traffic controllers, pilots, and administrators?
Not only did DEI considerations often supersede past traditional meritocratic requirements for employment, but DEI champions had also argued that “diversity” was either as important to, or more important than, traditional hiring and retention evaluations.
The answers to these first two questions make it incumbent to ask further whether DEI played a role in the Washington, D.C., crash, similar to how it may have in the Los Angeles wildfires.
It is not racist, sexist, or homophobic to ask such legitimate questions, especially because advocates themselves so often give more attention and emphasis to their race, gender, and sexual orientation than their assumed impressive expertise, proven experience, and superior education. In other words, had one’s race, sex, or orientation been incidental to employment rather than essential, such questions from the public might never have arisen.
Finally, what are the problems with DEI that have not just lost its support but put fear into the public that, like the Russian commissar system of old, it has the potential to undermine the very sinews of a sophisticated, complex society?
DEI is an ideology or a protocol that supersedes disinterred evaluation. In that regard, ironically, it is akin to the era of Jim Crow, when talented individuals were irrationally barred from consideration due to their mere skin color. Like any system that prioritizes identity over merit—whether Marist-Leninist credentials in the old Soviet Union or tribal bias in the contemporary Middle East—a complex society that embraces tribalism inevitably begins to become dysfunctional.
DEI does not end at hiring. Rather, once a candidate senses he is employed on the basis of his race, sex, or sexual orientation, then it is natural he must assume such preferences are tenured throughout his career. Thus, he will always be judged by the same criterion that led to his hiring. In other words, DEI is a lifetime contractual agreement, an insurance policy of sorts once DEI credentials are established as preeminent over all others.
The advocates of DEI rarely confess that meritocratic criteria have been superseded by considerations of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Instead, to the degree that they claim such criteria are not at odds with meritocracy, they argue that the methods of assessing talent and performance are themselves flawed. Tests then are unsound and systemically biased and therefore largely irrelevant. Few DEI advocates make the argument that diversity is so important that it justifies lowering the traditional standards of competence.
Once DEI tribal protocols are established, they are calcified and unchanged. That is when supposed DEI demographics are overrepresented in particular fields such as the postal service or professional sports, then such “disproportionality” is justified on “reparatory” grounds or ironically on merit. If other non-DEI groups, by DEI’s own standards, are deprived of “equity” and “inclusion” or “underrepresented,” it is irrelevant. DEI is, again, a lifetime concession, regardless of changes in status, income, or privilege. An Oprah Winfrey or a Barack Obama—two of the most privileged people on the planet—by virtue of their race, at least as it is defined in the Western world—are permanently deserving of deference.
DEI is also ossified in the sense that it makes no allowance for class. Asian Americans, when convenient, can be counted as DEI hires even though, in terms of per capita income, most Asian groups do better than so-called whites. Under DEI, the children of elites like Barack Obama or Hakim Jeffries will always be in need of reparatory consideration but not so the children of those in East Palestine, Ohio.
Because DEI is an ideology, a faith-based creed, it does not rely on logic and is thus exempt from charges of irrationality, inconsistency, and hypocrisy. The belief system feels no obligation to defend itself from rational arguments. For example, are not racially separate graduations or safe spaces contrary to the corpus of civil rights legislation of the 1960s? There is no such thing as DEI irony: the system contrived to supposedly remedy the de jure racism of some 60-70 years ago itself hinges on de jure racial fixations as the remedy—now, tomorrow, forever.
As in all monolithic dogmas such as Sovietism or Maoism, skeptics, critics, and apostates cannot be tolerated. So, in the case of DEI, logical criticism is preemptively aborted by boilerplate charges of racism, sexism, and homophobia. And the mere accusation is synonymous with conviction, thereby establishing DEI deterrence, under which no one dares to risk cancellation, de-platforming, ostracism, or career suicide by questioning the faith.
DEI is also incoherent. It is essentially a reversion to tribalism in which solidarity is predicated on shared race, sex, or sexual orientation, not through individual background, particular economic status, or one’s unique character. No DEI czar knows why in the pre-Obama era, East Asians did not qualify for DEI status, though they seem to now, or when and how the transgendered were suddenly not statistically still traditionally .01 percent of the population but, in some campus surveys, magically became 10-20 percent of polled undergraduates. No one understands what percentage of one’s DNA qualifies for DEI status, only that any system of the past that fixated on ascertaining racial essentialism, such as the one-drop rule of the old South or the multiplicity of racial categories in the former South Africa, or the yellow-star evil of the Third Reich, largely imploded, in part by the weight of its own absurd amorality.
DEI never explains the exact individual bereavement that justifies preferentiality. All claims are instead collective. And they are encased in the amber of slavery, Jim Crow, or homophobia or sexism of decades past. Social progress does not exist; the malady is eternal. The candidate for DEI consideration never must ascertain how, when, or where he was subject to serious discrimination or bias. And that may explain all the needed prefix adjectives that have sprouted up to prove these -isms and -ologies exist when they otherwise cannot be detected, such as “systemic,” “implicit,” “insidious,” or “structural” racism rather than just “racism.”
DEI never envisions its demise or what follows from it, much less whether there are superior ways to achieve equality of opportunity rather than mandated results. The beneficiaries of DEI seldom ponder its efficacy, much less whether resources would be better allotted to K-12 education during the critical years of development. And they certainly show little concern about those often poorer and more underprivileged who lack the prescribed race, gender, or orientation for special DEI considerations.
In sum, because of these inconsistencies, Donald Trump may well be able to end DEI with a wave of an executive order—simply because its foundations were always built of sand and thus any bold push would knock over the entire shaky edifice.
LTRP Note: The following is posted for informational and research purposes.
By Casey Chalk The Federalist
DEI is a calamitous, insidious evil that, if not systematically expunged from American institutions, will destroy them and us.
Aslew of companies in the last year have backtracked on their “diversity, equity, and inclusion” initiatives. McDonald’s and Meta were the most recent to fall, with activist Robby Starbuck claiming credit for persuading Mickey D’s to abandon DEI because diversity quotas discriminate against white applicants and diversity goals punish companies not sufficiently “diverse.” As the Los Angeles wildfire catastrophe shows, diverting funds to DEI causes can also result in less money for essential services such as firefighting.
These accusations against DEI are accurate and reason enough to end their influence over corporate America and federal, state, and local governments. But as someone who recently completed his employer’s DEI training, I can tell you DEI is much, much worse than a system that, ironically, is prejudicial against whites, males, and “cisgenders.” It is a calamitous, insidious evil that, if not systematically expunged from American institutions, will destroy them and us. Click here to continue reading.
McDonald’s has joined the growing list of companies that have scrapped their diversity targets.
In a statement posted on its corporate website on Monday, the company revealed that it had recently carried out a Civil Rights Audit to assess its current policies.
The statement read:
Last year, we completed a comprehensive Civil Rights Audit (CRA) that looked at all aspects of inclusion across our system.
We also engaged with shareholders to understand their expectations and assessed the overall landscape of shareholder proposals.
Following the Supreme Court ruling in STUDENTS FOR FAIR ADMISSIONS, INC. v. PRESIDENT AND FELLOWS OF HARVARD COLLEGE, we also assessed the shifting legal landscape to anticipate how this ruling may impact corporations such as McDonald’s.
And finally, we benchmarked our approach to other companies who are also re-evaluating their own programs.
As a result of this audit, McDonald’s will implement the following changes:
We are retiring setting aspirational representation goals and instead keeping our focus on continuing to embed inclusion practices that grow our business into our everyday process and operations.
We are pausing external surveys to focus on the work we are doing internally to grow the business.
We are retiring Supply Chain’s Mutual Commitment to DEI pledge in favor of a more integrated discussion with suppliers about inclusion as it relates to business performance.
We are evolving how we refer to our diversity team, which will now be the Global Inclusion Team. This name change is more fitting for McDonald’s in light of our inclusion value and better aligns with this team’s work.
The announcement was celebrated by conservative activist Robby Starbuck, who has led the way in successfully urging companies to scrap their departments, which are designed to prioritize race, gender and other inherited characteristics as opposed to the real merits of job applicants.
BIG news: @McDonalds is ending a number of woke DEI policies today. Now let me tell you what’s changing and how it happened.
3 days ago I told McDonald’s that I’d be doing a story on woke policies there. Today they’ve announced the following changes:
Many other U.S. companies have also scaled back or dismantled their Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs.
Notable examples include Walmart, which ceased considering race and gender in supplier contracts; Boeing, which disbanded its global DEI department; and Google, which reduced DEI staffing amid budget cuts.
Other large companies, such as Toyota, Ford, Harley-Davidson, and John Deere, have also redefined or curtailed their DEI initiatives in response to political pressures.
The tide is turning against the tyranny of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). Academic institutions and corporations alike are waking up to the destructive consequences of woke ideology. Two recent developments, one at the universities in Georgia and the other at Walmart, show that a rollback of DEI is beginning. This rollback is necessary to restore meritocracy to the American system.
In Georgia, the Board of Regents has taken a bold stand. They are dismantling DEI programs and reaffirming the principles of free speech and meritocracy. Gone are the ideological litmus tests and diversity statements for admissions and hiring. Instead, qualifications, knowledge, and abilities are the metrics of judgment. Even more promising, the system is implementing civics education, requiring students to study the crown jewels of the American Republic. Students will not focus on the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. The Georgia Board of Regents stated that these changes will strengthen academic communities and prepare students to be “contributing members of society.” In rejecting ideological coercion, Georgia’s universities are leading the charge to restore intellectual freedom and civil discourse.
Meanwhile, Walmart, the nation’s largest employer, has begun dismantling its DEI infrastructure. Under pressure from activists like Robby Starbuck, Walmart is reviewing its grants and product offerings. The corporation is reviewing those inappropriately targeting children and abandoning divisive terms like “Latinx.” More significantly, Walmart has withdrawn from the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index and is shuttering its Racial Equity Center. These moves signal a retreat from virtue-signaling to focus on serving customers and employees without the baggage of left-wing politics.
These shifts represent the beginning of a necessary cultural course correction. Americans reject policies that sow division and prioritize systems rooted in fairness, excellence, and individual freedom. The fight against wokeness is far from over, but victories like these show us that the tide is turning.
BENTONVILLE, AK — Sources within Walmart’s corporate offices confirmed that the company will be terminating its DEI program and instead adopt a policy of treating all its employees like garbage regardless of their race or gender.
According to several high-ranking Walmart executives, the U.S.-based retail giant was refocusing its efforts to treat all its employees equally awful, rather than giving different treatment to some based on their gender or the color of their skin.
“At Walmart, we’re committed to equality,” said Walmart Executive Vice President Dan Bartlett. “That’s why we will be doing away with any previous DEI-derived policies in favor of an even playing field in which every single one of our employees will be treated like absolute trash. We apologize to all of the worthless individuals working at our stores — including white heterosexual males — who we may have offended in the past due to discriminatory practices and promise to do better by treating everyone like refuse from this point forward.”
When reached for comment, one Walmart employee appreciated the change. “It’ll be nice to be treated like everyone else,” said Jared Sharp. “I’ve worked here for a few years, but I’ve always felt like there were different tiers of employees. Whereas management might treat one group like garbage, another group will be treated like utter feces. Now, we’ll all be equal.”
At publishing time, Target had also announced the end of its DEI program, which was already irrelevant as 100% of its workforce was made up of transwomen of color.
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