#DEI president

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Charles Gasparino

Published: Jul 6, 2024

There is a raging debate in corporate America on the future of DEI, aka Diversity ­Equity and Inclusion, because it is literally destroying businesses that go there.

And yet the American public may soon be subjected to DEI writ large in the next president of the United States, if Kamala Harris finds her way to the top of the Democratic ticket while Joe Biden wilts away as the party’s presidential nominee after his horrific ­debate performance. 

Yes, maybe the most irrepressibly fatuous politician in America may become the leader of the free world because the Democratic Party is unable to break its DEI stranglehold. 

Harris is already being hailed as the president-in-waiting as her boss Sleepy Joe — despite his defiant TV vow to George Stephanopoulos Friday night to stay in the race — increasingly faces reality that his chances of besting Trump are slim.

Calls that he should step down are mounting, paving the way for his VP to land at the top of the ticket.

Even if does stay and achieves the near impossible by pulling out a victory, you can bet he won’t survive four years.

Harris becomes the nation’s first DEI president by default. 

For the American people it would be such an unfair and odd coronation.

Remember, she’s part of an administration that gave us inflation, world chaos and an open border that literally invites terrorists to enter the country and kill people.

She has spent nearly four years as Biden’s No. 2 flubbing every assignment given to her, including the border mess. 

That’s on top of her manifest ­unlikability; her word salad whenever she tries to sound smart; her cackle when she laughs; her vaulting ambition.

She once suggested during a 2020 primary debate that her current boss was a racist for being against federally mandated busing.

But Biden’s busing stench wasn’t nasty enough to stop her from jumping at the chance to serve as his VP when DEI came calling. 

Following the 2020 death of ­George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police, the pressure on Biden to pick a woman of color as his running mate was intense.

(And he boxed himself in by publicly saying his running mate would be a woman.)

Harris checked all the boxes: Her father, an academic with a Ph.D., is from Jamaica; her late mother, a biologist, was Indian.

VP Harris was a California state attorney general and a US senator. 

Weak record 

Yet if you delved, you would see a weak record of accomplishment, and weird personal tics (that aforementioned laugh), and an intense desire for power.

First Lady Jill Biden is said to have hated her but as one Dem operative told me before Joe Biden made her his VP: “She’s black and that is all that matters.” 

DEI, of course, is a construct first embraced by academia, the lefty political class and then business that posits the world needs to be observed in terms of those historically oppressed (people of color and of diverse gender classifications) at the expense of the oppressor (namely white people and particularly white men).

Jobs, image making, TV programming must be seen through this warped view of reality. 

It’s a topic I cover in my upcoming book “Go Woke, Go Broke,” ­illustrating how DEI had been ­ingrained in the corporate culture before the American people began to revolt.

Examples are endless.

Among them, Disney’s DEI mandates pushed so-called “queerness” into cartoons; trans women found their way into beer commercials; and there was a white-male hiring freeze at many corporations until relatively recently. 

It’s fair to say the high-water mark of DEI was after Floyd’s death and continued for three years.

Now, corporate America is backtracking feverishly because while Americans respect the desire for diversity, they hate DEI’s purely idiotic demands where the offspring of rich South Americans get jobs over a white coal miner’s daughter.

It’s also patently illegal; the SCOTUS ruling outlawing affirmative action for college admissions is a precedent that lots of businesses want to avoid. 

And they are, or at least starting to.

Consider the giant retailer Target.

In 2023, CEO Brian Cornell said, “The things we’ve done from a DE and I standpoint, it’s adding value, it’s helping us drive sales, it’s building greater engagement with both our teams and our guests.”

That was his rationalization for a massive Pride Month merchandising display in his stores — complete with mannequins wearing so-called tuck-friendly bathing suits, books about trans children being sold next to rainbow-colored onesies. 

Then came the customer backlash from those who didn’t appreciate being indoctrinated when they shop.

In 2024, Cornell reduced Target’s Pride displays enough that no one really noticed.

So much for DEI adding value. 

Some Dems I speak to caution me it’s not all DEI giving Harris the edge to replace Biden.

She is, after all, the VP. If she’s on a new ticket, it gets to keep money raised already, not start from scratch. 

OK, but I can’t imagine money will be an issue.

One possible nominee, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, is a billionaire.

The Dem money machine on Wall Street and Silicon Valley is formidable. 

Yet the country might just be stuck with Harris as president if Sleepy Joe wins and stumbles his way to resignation while in his second term, or if Biden drops out in the coming days and she ­becomes the nominee. 

All because DEI is the Democratic Party’s touchstone, no matter how much evidence amasses that it’s a failed ideology. 

--

[busterballsblog]

Kamala Harris Is A Failure As Border Czar

[cyarskaren52]

Ditto! You read it right & I agree with you!

[wretchedwitchpussy]

why are they saying everything is DEI now. just go back to calling people slurs if that's what you mean you fucking cowards lol

[adelle-ein]

i think being constantly exposed to massive amounts of antisemitic vitirol from all directions including nearly all of my former friends may have had some degree of negative impact on my mental health

[roboe1]

In The News Today: 7/22/2024.

Disaster Support Bangladesh Orders Internet Blackout Amid Student Protests In Bangladesh, authorities have implemented a sweeping internet blackout as student-led demonstrations intensify, demanding changes to the public sector employment quotas. The focus of the protests is a contentious policy reserving a third of government roles for family members of the veterans of the 1971 War of…

[vpofcookies]

I just learned so many things

Why are committees organized this way. Everything is a disaster

[omarfor-orchestra]

Ma perché l'unica che ci dà content è quella che fa la preside?

[kinialohaguy]

By Any Other Name

Aloha kākou. By any other name and by any means necessary. That has been the mantra the democrats have been using to stay in power for decades. With each regime has seen a decline in American values and wealth. After nearly four years of horrific pain this regime has inflected onto the American people and to President Trump’s administration, the people have delivered a solid mandate. We have had…

[jangillman]

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DBBWjpHOtjn/?igsh=MW03MTducXZ4MjB5NQ==

[cyarskaren52]

The anti-cancel culture folks are predictably quiet about what’s happened to Claudine Gay. Of course.

[abigailspinach]

Conservative activist launches $1bn crusade to ‘crush’ liberal America

Leonard Leo was architect of effort to secure conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court

https://www.ft.com/content/0b38aaed-ec58-40cd-9047-0c7b7b83164a

The conservative activist who led the crusade to overhaul the US legal system is making a $1bn push to “crush liberal dominance” across corporate America and in the country’s news and entertainment sectors. In a rare interview, Leonard Leo, the architect of the rightward shift on the Supreme Court under Donald Trump, said his non-profit advocacy group, the Marble Freedom Trust, was ready to confront the private sector in addition to the government. “We need to crush liberal dominance where it’s most insidious, so we’ll direct resources to build talent and capital formation pipelines in the areas of news and entertainment, where leftwing extremism is most evident,” Leo told the Financial Times.

Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of FT.comT&Cs and Copyright Policy. Email licensing@ft.com to buy additional rights. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article service. More information can be found here. https://www.ft.com/content/0b38aaed-ec58-40cd-9047-0c7b7b83164a

“Expect us to increase support for organisations that call out companies and financial institutions that bend to the woke mind virus spread by regulators and NGOs, so that they have to pay a price for putting extreme leftwing ideology ahead of consumers,” he said. Leo has spent more than two decades at the influential Federalist Society, guiding conservative judges into the federal courts and the Supreme Court itself. In 2018, conservative justice Clarence Thomas joked that Leo was the third most important person in the world. Leo’s efforts culminated under Trump’s presidency, when three Federalist Society-backed judges were appointed to give conservatives on the Supreme Court a 6-3 supermajority, and profound influence over US law. The court has since then ruled to overturn the right to an abortion, among other long-sought rightwing causes. In 2020, after Trump lost the election, Leo stepped back from running the daily operations of the Federalist Society, while remaining its co-chair. The following year, Leo founded Marble, with a $1.6bn donation from electronic device manufacturing mogul Barre Seid, to be a counterweight to what he said was “dark money” of the left. He spent about $600mn in its first three years, according to public financial disclosures. Leo said his goal was to find “very leveraged, impactful ways of reintroducing limited constitutional government and a civil society premised on freedom and personal responsibility and the virtues of western civilisation”. The $1bn money machine is now funding the conservative mission against private institutions, opposing diversity, equity and inclusion policies, climate and social concerns in investing and the “debanking” of politically conservative customers, in addition to taking on the public sector. The non-profit is increasingly interested in launching campaigns against “woke” banks and China-friendly companies involved in everything from food production to autonomous vehicles in the US and potentially Europe. Leo also intends to invest in a US local media company in the next 12 months, although he has not decided which, and is building conservative coalitions through groups such as Teneo Network, a club with chapters across the country. He also confirmed that Marble had since 2021 helped fund organisations that launched campaigns against companies with DEI, ESG and other initiatives, including BlackRock, Vanguard, American Airlines, Coca-Cola, State Farm, Major League Baseball and Ticketmaster. This year, Marble aided a variety of conservative groups in their campaigns against TikTok on the grounds that it was a threat to children and US national security. President Joe Biden signed a bipartisan bill to force TikTok’s Chinese parent company to divest from the video-sharing platform.

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Leo’s rise to be among the US’s most powerful conservatives has drawn scrutiny from liberal attorneys and Democratic politicians. Earlier this year, he refused to comply with a subpoena from Senate Democrats investigating undisclosed gifts to Thomas and Justice Samuel Alito revealed by ProPublica. In 2020, Leo joined the for-profit public advocacy firm CRC Advisors. Bloomberg has reported that an array of non-profits have paid CRC at least $69mn since Leo became its co-owner and chair. While Marble funds Trump-aligned advocacy groups, it is not donating money to sway the 2024 presidential election, Leo said. The non-profit is instead helping the Republican effort to end the Democratic majority in the Senate, which confirms judges and justices. “The political environment is more topsy-turvy and more uncertain than it’s ever been in my lifetime,” said Leo. “Political investing is not as good a bet as it used to be.”

[writerchixz]

A letter to Joy Reid

To: Joy Reid, I saw your plea to the American people about “these (maga) people” are trying to erase the twentieth century. Let me explain how that proved your irrelevance! 1.The current elected President of the United States obviously has one of the many forms of dementia. Therefore, he cannot be making any decisions. Anyone with a brain has known this at least 3 years. You and others have…

[lady-raziel]

because there is nothing to lose the people saying biden should resign now so kamala can still be the first female president are absolutely right but why stop there? inauguration day is 70 days away let's make "president for a day" a real thing. say "fuck it we ARE going to do the arbitrary quota DEI bullshit you accuse us of" and speedrun first [category] presidents. revolving door type thing.

first female president. first openly gay president. first transgender president. first president who has been to space. first president gamer president. first mime president. just play president bingo and hit as many categories as possible while we still can. make all of trump's #47 merch unusable by forcing him to be the 115th president instead. who cares anymore let's peacefully transition power but do it in the most chaotic hot-potato way possible

[roboe1]

In The News Today: 8/1/2024.

Border agents seize record amount of fentanyl in Arizona bust (Credit: Director of Field Operations for the Tucson Sector Guadalupe H. Ramirez) Customs and Border Protection reported on Thursday that it made a record bust of illegal fentanyl pills in Arizona last month. Border agents seized approximately four million blue fentanyl pills weighing more than 1,000 pounds on July 1, setting a new…

[grison-in-space]

you know what else fucks me up about the US election? one of the things that has left me reeling in bewilderment and grief this month?

I'm a scientist, y'all.

That means that I am, like most American research scientists, a federal contractor. (Possibly employee. It's confusing, and it fucks with my taxes being a postdoctoral researcher.) I get paid because someone, in the long run ideally me, makes a really, really detailed pitch to one of several federal grant agencies that the nation would really be missing out if I couldn't follow up on these thoughts and find concrete evidence about whether or not I'm right.

Currently, my personal salary is dependent on a whole department of scientists convincing one of the largest and most powerful granting agencies that they have a program that is really good at training scientists that can think deeply about the priorities of the agency. Those priorities are defined by the guy who runs the agency, and he gets to hire whatever qualified people he wants. That guy? The Presidential Administration picks that one. That's how federal agencies get staffed: the President's administration nominates them.

All of the heads of these agencies are personally nominated by the president and their administration. They are people of enormous power whose job is to administer million-dollar grants to the scientists competing urgently for limited funds. A million dollars often doesn't go farther than a couple of years when it's intended to pay for absolutely everything to do with a particular pitch, including salaries of your trainees, all materials, travel expenses, promoting the work among other researchers, all of it—so most smart American researchers are working fervently on grants all the time.

The next director of the NIH will be a Trump appointee, if he notices and thinks to appoint one. NSF, too; that's the group that funds your ecology and your astroscience and your experimental mathematics and physics and chemistry, the stuff that doesn't have industry funding and industry priorities. USDA. DOE, that's who does a lot of the climate change mitigation and renewable energy source research, they'll just be lucky if they can do anything again because Trump nigh gutted them last time.

Right now, I am working on the very tail end of a grant's funding and I am scurrying to make sure I stay employed. So I'm thinking very closely about federal agency priorities, okay? And I'm thinking that the funding climate for science is going to get a lot fucking leaner. I'm seeing what the American people think of scientists, and about whether my job is worth doing. It's been a lean twelve years in this gig, okay? Every time the federal government gets fucked up, that impacts my job, it means that I have to hustle even harder to get grants in that let me support myself—and, if I have any trainees, their budding careers as well!—to patch over the lean times as much as we can.

So I've been reeling this week thinking about how funding agency priorities are going to change. I work on sex differences in motivation, so let me tell you, the politics reading this one for my next pitch are going to be fun. I'm working on a submission for an explicitly DEI-oriented five year grant with a cycle ending in February, so that's going to be an exercise in hoping that the agency employees at the middle levels (the ones that know how to get things done which can't be replaced immediately with yes men) can buffer the decisions of those big bosses long enough to let that program continue to exist a little while longer.

Ah, Christ, he promised Health & Human Services (which houses the NIH) to RFK, didn't he? We'll see how that pans out.

I keep seeing people calling for more governmental shutdowns on the left now, and it makes me want to scream. The government being gridlocked means the funding that researchers like me need doesn't come, okay? When the DOE can't say fucking "climate change," when the USDA hemorrhages its workers when the agency is dragged halfway across the country, when I watch a major Texan House rep stake his career on trying to destroy the NSF, I think: this is what you people think of us. I think: how little scientists are valued as public workers. Why am I working this hard again?

This is why I described voting as harm reduction. Even if two candidates are "the same" on one thing you care about, they probably aren't the same level of bad on everything. Your task is to figure out the best person to do the job. It's not about a fucking tribalist horse race. A vote is your opinion on a job interview, you fucks. We have to work with this person.

Anyway, I'm probably going to go back to shaking quietly in despair for a little longer and then pick myself up and hit the grind again. If I'm fast, I might still get the grant in this miserable climate if I run, and I might get to actually keep on what I'm trying to do, which is bring research on sex differences, neurodivergence and energy balance as informed by non-binary gender perspectives and disability theory to neuroscience.

Fuck.