Displaying posts published in

February 2023

The Sudden Dominance of the Diversity Industrial Complex by Thomas Hackett

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2023/02/14/the_sudden_dominance_of_the_diversity_industrial_complex_880202.html

Little more than a decade ago, DEI was just another arcane acronym, a clustering of three ideas, each to be weighed and evaluated against other societal values. The terms diversity, equity, and inclusion weren’t yet being used in the singular, as one all-inclusive, non-negotiable moral imperative. Nor had they coalesced into a bureaucratic juggernaut running roughshod over every aspect of national life. 

They are now. 

The “diversity industrial complex” has arisen suddenly, with no fanfare on the order of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1961 warning of a “military industrial complex” in his farewell address.
Wikipedia

Seemingly in unison, and with almost no debate, nearly every major American institution – including federal, state, and local governments, universities and public schools, hospitals, insurance, media and technology companies and major retail brands – has agreed that the DEI infrastructure is essential to the nation’s proper functioning. From Amazon to Walmart, most major corporations have created and staffed DEI offices within their human resources bureaucracy. So have sanitation departments, police departments, physics departments, and the departments of agriculture, commerce, defense, education and energy. Organizations that once argued against DEI now feel compelled to institute DEI training and hire DEI officers. So have organizations that are already richly diverse, such as the National Basketball Association and the National Football League.  

Many of these offices in turn work with a sprawling network of DEI consulting firms, training outfits, trade organizations and accrediting associations that support their efforts. 

“Five years ago, if you said ‘DEI,’ people would’ve thought you were talking about the Digital Education Initiative,” Robert Sellers, University of Michigan’s first chief diversity officer, said in 2020. “Five years ago, if you said DEI was a core value of this institution, you would have an argument.”   

Diversity, equity and inclusion is an intentionally vague term used to describe sanctioned favoritism in the name of social justice. Its Wikipedia entry indicates a lack of agreement on the definition, while Merriam-Webster.com and the Associated Press online style guide have no entry (the AP offers guidance on related terms). 

Yet however defined, it’s clear DEI is now much more than an academic craze or corporate affectation.

James Clapper Can’t Stop Lying He knew exactly what he was doing. By: David Harsanyi

https://thefederalist.com/2023/02/14/james-clapper-cant-stop-lying/

In an interview with The Washington Post’s “fact checker,” former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper contends that Politico misled the public about a letter he and 50 other former intel officials signed during the 2020 presidential campaign warning that the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story could be Russian deception. “There was message distortion,” Clapper tells The Washington Post. “All we were doing was raising a yellow flag that this could be Russian disinformation. Politico deliberately distorted what we said. It was clear in paragraph five.”

It was not clear, at all. The purpose of the letter, apparent then as it is now, was to discredit the Post’s scoop and provide Democrats and the media with ammunition to reject it. Of course intel officials couldn’t definitively say that Hunter’s emails, which implicated Joe Biden as a business partner, were concocted by Putin’s spooks. They had no access to the laptop. The purpose was to enlist former intel chiefs to cast doubt on the story. A perfunctory CYA paragraph doesn’t change anything.

The laptop lie began, as is often the case, with Adam Schiff, the California congressman who used the intelligence committee as a partisan disinfo clearinghouse. As soon as the story broke, Schiff claimed that “we know” — a phrase he used numerous times — that the emails had been planted by the Kremlin. By then, though, everyone understood the congressman was an irredeemable liar. The director of national intelligence, John Ratcliffe, issued a statement stressing that, actually, there was no evidence to back Schiff’s claims.

That’s when Natasha Bertrand, the dependable Dem dupe who had passed along so many other fake stories for the intel establishment, “reported” in Politico that more than 50 former senior intelligence officials had signed a letter asserting that the laptop “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” The most notable signees were Clapper, a man who ran a domestic surveillance program and then lied about it to Congress, and former CIA director John Brennan, a man who once oversaw an operation of illegal spying on a Senate staffer, and then also lied about it to the American people.

Genocide in Nigeria: The Biden Administration’s Cover-Up by Raymond Ibrahim

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19402/genocide-in-nigeria

[T]he Biden administration’s decision to delist Nigeria from the list of Countries of Particular Concern was “inexplicable,” according to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom

Christians are being butchered — “purged” — in Nigeria at an alarming rate.

In 2022 alone, 90% of all Christians around the world who were killed for their faith… were slaughtered in Nigeria. On average, that is 14 Christians killed for their faith every day in Nigeria — at least one Christian every two hours.

In just the first month of 2023, in January alone, Muslims slaughtered approximately 60 Christians in Nigeria, raided churches, and kidnapped women and children.

[O]n January 31, 2023, Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ), introduced a bipartisan resolution calling for not only the return of Nigeria to the State Department’s CPC list, but for the appointment of a special ambassador to monitor the situation.

“[The Fulani] demonstrated a clear intent to target Christians and symbols of Christian identity such as churches, and, during attacks, shouted ‘Allah u Akbar,’ ‘destroy the infidels,’ and ‘wipe out the infidels.’… [Despite this] the Department of State mischaracterizes or incompletely characterizes the increasing incidents of large scale violence … [as] solely attributable to competition for scarce natural resources resulting from climate change.” — U.S. House Resolution “Expressing the sense of Congress regarding the need to designate Nigeria a Country of Particular Concern.”

The new resolution also, rather refreshingly, calls out Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari—himself a Fulani, who “has favored and promoted fellow Fulani and other northern Muslim ethnic groups,” while others, chief among them Christians, “are denied equal rights.”

“It’s tough to tell Nigerian Christians this isn’t a religious conflict since what they see are Fulani fighters clad entirely in black, chanting ‘Allahu Akbar!’ and screaming ‘Death to Christians.'” — Sister Monica Chikwe, Nigerian nun, cruxnow.com, August 4, 2019.

[B]y removing Nigeria from the CPC list in November, 2021, the Biden administration was simply returning to the status quo. Although jihadists had slaughtered and terrorized Nigeria’s Christians all during President Barack Obama’s eight-year tenure, when Biden was his Vice President (2009-2017), and although the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom had, beginning in 2009 and every year afterwards, repeatedly urged that Nigeria be designated as a Country of Particular Concern, the Obama administration had obstinately refused to comply.

It was only in 2020, under the Trump administration, that Nigeria was first designated as a CPC — only to be removed the following year under Biden.