https://www.theepochtimes.com/gop-senator-questions-white-privilege-trainings-at-fed-funded-nuclear-lab_3468911.html
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) is seeking an explanation as to why the United States’ leading nuclear safety laboratory spent taxpayer dollars to lecture its staff about “white privilege.”
In an Aug. 13 letter (pdf) to the Department of Energy (DOE), the largest funder of the lab, Hawley called for “a comprehensive review of its procedures and practices to ensure that taxpayers are no longer required to fund such divisive and ineffective trainings.”
Hawley was referring to a series of training sessions that Sandia National Laboratories paid for at a Santa Fe, New Mexico, resort, where Sandia’s white male executives were sent last year to learn about their “white privilege” and the supposed harmfulness of their “white male culture.”
Leaked materials from the sessions were published earlier this month by Christopher Rufo, head of the Center on Wealth and Poverty at the Discovery Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank.
“Employees must expose the ‘roots of white male culture,’ which consists of ‘rugged individualism,’ ‘a can-do attitude,’ ‘hard work,’ and ‘striving towards success’—which sound good, but are in fact ‘devastating’ to women and POCs [people of color],” he said, citing the materials in an Aug. 12 tweet.
“Taxpayers funded this? At a resort?” Hawley responded on Twitter on the day of sending his letter.
Sandia, which is responsible for the safety of the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile, is run by Honeywell, but is wholly government-funded. It has received more than $3.7 billion in federal dollars this year, Hawley said.
