Diversity
August 20, 2025 — Scott Johnson
I want to recognize Harvard Professor Steven Pinker for concisely rendering the quote of the day in the video clip below. Professor Pinker draws on the famous observation in Voltaire’s Essay on Universal History that the Holy Roman Empire was “neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.” I have drawn on that quote a few times myself to make a similar observation regarding the Southern Poverty Law Center, as in
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May 17, 2025 — Scott Johnson
Everything National Association of Scholars President Peter Wood writes is worth reading. Among his many books, for example, I would point to 1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project and Diversity: The Invention of a Concept. All his books — his Encounter Books page is here — are of interest. In the June issue of The Spectator’s World edition he has the essay “The Trump administration is giving us
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February 14, 2025 — Steven Hayward
The Wall Street Journal has reported on “How Colleges and Universities Get Around State DEI Bans,” and it ain’t exactly missile science. Administrators hide behind vague standards of “accreditors,” and/or simply change the names of programs and job titles. Like this: This is why the Trump administration has to go scorched earth on this whole corrupt (and expensive) racket. Meanwhile, here is the only DEI statement any college needs from
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January 27, 2025 — Steven Hayward
The Wall Street Journal Monday carried a blockbuster op-ed from John Sailer of the Manhattan Institute and Louis Galarowicz of the National Association of Scholars on rampant (and illegal) race-based hiring at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where as many readers know I was an inmate for a year back in 2013-14. (And I’ll be visiting in April for their annual Conference on World Affairs as a speaker.) Their findings
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January 26, 2025 — Steven Hayward
It’s pretty obvious right now that the commissars of the DEI world are going to ground, and trying to get around the ban on DEI from Trump and several state-level initiatives such as Texas and Florida by renaming the identity politics offices, and/or moving personnel to other units or giving them different job titles. Like this: To be sure, these subterfuges will need to be rooted out by diligent surveilance,
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January 22, 2025 — Steven Hayward
Trump promised back in 2016 that there’d be so much winning that we’d get tired of all the winning. And he’s certainly delivered in his first 24 hours on the job. But no, I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of this much winning. I could do a whole gallery of items about all the winning from the first day, but my eye caught a story from the Times of
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January 22, 2025 — Scott Johnson
With the adoption of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, equal treatment without regard to race became the law of the land — for about 30 seconds. As he shepherded the bill through the Senate, then Minnesota Senator Hubert Humphrey declared on the Senate floor: “I will eat my hat if this leads to racial quotas.” Humphrey served as vice president at the time President Johnson began the great undoing
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November 22, 2024 — Steven Hayward
John noted here that Jaguar decided to “Bud Light” itself in spectacular fashion. It turns out it’s even worse than he thought. Here’s Jaguar’s new brand manager, Santino Pietrosanti, speaking at something called the “Attitude Awards.” Attitude indeed. He missed his calling to be a factotum in the Biden Administration. (It’s just four minutes long, but it seems much longer.)
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June 27, 2024 — Steven Hayward
Tractor Supply Co., that is. Faced with the possibility of a Bud Light-style consumer boycott, Tractor Supply Co. released the following statement today (click to embiggen): UPDATE by JOHN: If you are wondering what a company like Tractor Supply (!) could possibly have done to merit that abject apology, check out this tweet, and especially the video, by Robby Starbuck: It’s time to expose Tractor Supply. It’s one of the
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March 10, 2024 — John Hinderaker
I think the answer to that question is Yes. In reality, the whole point of DEI is bigotry, so the fact that its exponents keep getting outed as haters is not at all coincidental. The latest case comes from Johns Hopkins, where the Chief Diversity Officer at Johns Hopkins Medicine has resigned following a hateful outburst: The Chief Diversity Officer at Johns Hopkins Medicine resigned on Tuesday after criticism stemming
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March 10, 2024 — John Hinderaker
DEI (racial and other quotas) is intrinsically evil. At The Hill, Matt Cole and Chris Nicholson reveal a shocking, practical downside to DEI hysteria: “DEI killed the CHIPS Act.” The issue is critical because Taiwan now produces 90% of the world’s advanced microchips, and China has indicated its intention to annex Taiwan in the near future. So the CHIPS Act sought to incentivize chip production in the U.S. Unfortunately, that
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March 1, 2024 — Steven Hayward
Bryan Caplan, professor of economics in George Mason University’s excellent economics department, has a long article out today with the James Martin Center about the attempt to impose a mandatory “Just Societies” course for all students at George Mason starting next fall, and the course is a total ideological DEI wokefest. He also has a separate Substack article that goes into lengthy detail. Partly because Caplan blew the whistle on
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February 25, 2024 — Steven Hayward
This morning I stumbled across a Tweet linking to an Australian “60 Minutes” segment about the unassimilable migrants that are causing the crime rate and other social dysfunctions to soar in Sweden. Turns out the episode is seven years old, but since we don’t see Australia’s “60 Minutes” here (and our CBS “60 Minutes” won’t touch this subject with a ten meter pole), I doubt little has changed in the
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January 27, 2024 — Scott Johnson
Roger Kimball’s New Criterion editorial on “DEI’s dangerous lies” is titled “Gay science,” in honor of sacked Harvard president Claudine Gay. Roger’s editorial lacks only some accompanying reference to Nietzsche’s The Gay Science, which I actually read under the tutelage of my political philosophy teacher last year. It was in The Gay Science that Nietzsche announced “God is dead.” I thought Roger’s editorial might have announced that Harvard is dead.
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January 20, 2024 — Scott Johnson
James Piereson contributes to understanding the deep meaning of Claudine Gay and the regime of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in his New Criterion column “DEI boomerang.” The title does not do it justice. Here is the concluding chunk: College presidents, if they are not members of the Democratic Party, invariably come into office pledging to enlarge the diversity regime, which further cements the party–academic alliance. College faculties are overwhelmingly Democratic
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January 18, 2024 — Lloyd Billingsley
The Federal Aviation Administration, under a national outreach program for diversity and inclusion, is pushing to recruit workers with total deafness in both ears, blindness, missing extremities, partial paralysis, complete paralysis, epilepsy, severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability and dwarfism. John Hinderaker wonders, “How crazy are these people?” and as Paul Simon might say, the FAA is still crazy after all these years. Joe Biden’s pick to head the FAA was
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January 17, 2024 — John Hinderaker
It is slowly dawning on liberals across America that DEI is, in most contexts, illegal. The whole point of DEI is to discriminate against disfavored groups, and in favor of preferred groups. Liberals have a hard time understanding that there is anything wrong with this, but the courts–most notably, recently, in the Harvard and UNC cases–are beginning to set them straight. In many states, legislators aren’t waiting for litigation to
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