DEI Dies at DOD
A series of orders impacting military education.
Helene Cooper, NYT (“Pentagon Furthers Crackdown on Diversity Policies With Fresh Order for Review of Library Books“):
The Pentagon continued its purge of anything related to diversity, equity and inclusion on Friday, ordering all military leaders, commands and academies to review all of the books in their libraries that address racism and sexism.
A memo issued Friday appeared to be Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s latest broadside against diversity and equity programs and materials. The memo was signed by Tim Dill, performing the duties of defense under secretary for personnel.
The memo said books about diversity were “promoting divisive concepts and gender ideology” that “are incompatible with the Department’s core mission.” It requires all department leaders to identify books that fall into that category and remove them from military library shelves by May 21.
At that point, the memo says, there will be further instructions on which books will be permanently removed.
This expands a similar purge recently at the Naval Academy library, in Maryland. Last month, civilian Navy officials, following orders originating from Mr. Hegseth, pulled from shelves books including one that critiqued “The Bell Curve,” a 1994 text that argues that Black men and women are genetically less intelligent than white people. But the academy kept “The Bell Curve” itself on its shelves.
In a separate memo Friday, Mr. Hegseth also said that there would be “no consideration for race, ethnicity or sex” in admissions to U.S. military academies, which, he said, will focus admissions “exclusively on merit.” He ordered the service academies to rank candidates with “merit-based scores.” It was unclear what exactly that meant, but Mr. Hegseth added that “merit-based scores may give weight to unique athletic talent or other experiences such as prior military service.”
Andrew deGrandpre, WaPo (“Hegseth escalates targeting of race, gender in military’s academic settings“):
The Pentagon on Friday directed the nation’s prestigious military academies to end consideration of race, gender and ethnicity in their admissions processes, and begin a purge — along with other Defense Department academic institutions — of educational materials focused on those “divisive concepts.”
Beginning with the service academies’ next admission cycle, prospective students will be evaluated for acceptance based “exclusively on merit,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth wrote in one of two policy memos released by the Pentagon. The document emphasizes that “no consideration” be given to candidates’ race, gender or ethnicity, but factors such as “unique athletic talent” and previous military service may be taken into account.
“This ensures only the most qualified candidates are admitted, trained, and ultimately commissioned to lead the finest fighting force in history,” Hegseth’s memo says. “Selecting anyone but the best erodes lethality, our warfighting readiness, and undercuts the culture of excellence in our Armed Forces.”
The U.S. Military Academy at West Point, the U.S. Naval Academy and the U.S. Air Force Academy each ended their race-conscious admissions policies earlier this year, soon after President Donald Trump’s return to office.
The academies’ admissions practices have been the subject of legal scrutiny for the past few years, with the Supreme Court in 2024 denying a conservative group’s emergency request seeking to prevent the U.S. Military Academy at West Point from considering race when choosing its next class of cadets. The high court two years ago rejected the use of affirmative action in college admissions but left unsettled the specific question of whether race may factor in admissions to the service academies, whose graduates go on to serve as military officers.
The military is among the nation’s most diverse institutions, but it has struggled to recruit people — particularly in specialized fields such as cybersecurity and linguistics. Expertise in areas like artificial intelligence also is a fast-growing emphasis for the Defense Department.
To better compete with private-sector employers mining the same talent base, the Pentagon for several years sought to emphasize diversity and inclusivity, arguing that to do otherwise limits the military’s recruiting pool and therefore jeopardizes Americans’ safety.
Hegseth, by contrast, has said “the single dumbest phrase in military history is ‘our diversity as our strength.’”
The second memo released Friday instructs each of the military services to scour the library collections maintained by their educational institutions — not only the academies, but the various leadership schools attended by military officers later in their careers — and “sequester” materials covering a range of subjects relevant to race and gender.
Greg Jaffe, WaPo (“The Pentagon’s Culture Wars Strike West Point“):
Four days after he was sworn in as defense secretary, Pete Hegseth directed the military service academies to scrub their curriculum of ideologies President Trump had deemed “divisive,” “un-American” and “irrational.”
Hours later, department heads at West Point sent civilian and military professors emails asking for their course syllabuses.
Some professors said they assumed the school would defend its academic program. Instead, the U.S. Military Academy’s leaders initiated a schoolwide push to remove any readings that focused on race, gender or the darker moments of American history, according to interviews with more than a dozen West Point civilian and military staff. Most spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak with the media without the academy’s approval.
Two classes — an English and a history course — were scrapped midsemester for noncompliance with the new policy.
A history professor who leads a course on genocide was instructed not to mention atrocities committed against Native Americans, according to several academy officials. The English department purged works by well-known Black authors, such as Toni Morrison, James Baldwin and Ta-Nehisi Coates, the officials said.
Mr. Hegseth’s order, which was issued in January, and West Point’s response have shaken the academy and led many civilian and military professors to question the school’s commitment to academic freedom. At least two tenured professors have resigned in protest in recent days.
The academy’s leaders have long had to balance conflicting demands. West Point is a degree-granting institution, and its commitment to academic freedom is codified both in law and its own regulations. It is also part of the Defense Department, and its leaders are obligated to follow legal orders from the president and the Pentagon.
[…]
Mr. Hegseth’s order and the changes it triggered have forced West Point professors and administrators to wrestle with a series of difficult questions. Should they resist Mr. Hegseth’s order or resign in protest? Its language was confoundingly vague. Were there ways to work around it? What was best for the cadets, for the academy, for the Army?
Some long-serving leaders at the academy have chosen to quit.
In early March, Christopher Barth, West Point’s senior librarian, announced that he was leaving after 14 years for a job at another college. Mr. Barth’s counterpart at the U.S. Naval Academy had already been told to remove 381 books from the campus library that ran afoul of Mr. Hegseth’s order. Mr. Barth had also been told to identify titles that potentially violated the order, West Point officials said.
He told his staff that he had been reading the American Library Association’s ethics guidelines. “I’ve already compromised them several times,” Mr. Barth said, according to three people who were at the meeting. “I can’t do it anymore.”
Graham Parsons, a tenured philosophy professor, similarly wrote in a New York Times guest essay published on Thursday that Mr. Hegseth’s order and the changes that followed at West Point had politicized the academy and made it impossible for him to do his job.
“I am ashamed to be associated with the academy in its current form,” he wrote.
A tenured professor in the English department who had been at West Point for nearly a decade hit her breaking point in late April when a university administrator told her that she was no longer permitted to teach an essay by the novelist Alice Walker.
[…]
The professor said she knew her resignation was unlikely to make a difference at West Point. “I could set myself on fire in the middle of the parade grounds and it would be forgotten about tomorrow,” she recalled telling her bosses.
[…]
Dr. Parsons, the philosophy professor who recently resigned in protest, said he spent February and March trying to figure out what he should do.
On April 10, he accepted a one-year visiting professor job at nearby Vassar College. The move meant that he would lose the economic security that came with a tenured position. It also meant leaving West Point, a place that had been his professional home for 13 years.
The next day he told his supervisors he was quitting. He expected a difficult conversation. “I was very tense,” he recalled.
But his supervisors did not ask him why he was giving up his tenured position for a temporary job, he said, and he did not volunteer an explanation.
“I think there’s just a lot of desire to avoid the reality of what’s happening here,” Dr. Parsons said.
It’s difficult in most of these cases to tell were the line is between following the lawful orders of the chain of command and overreacting to vague guidelines. But it’s not the least bit surprising to me that DOD educational institutions, all of which are led by uniformed officers, are doing very little to resist these pressures. Not only are they duty-bound to follow lawful orders, many are likely in agreement with Hegseth that the focus should be on “lethality” and wonder why service academies were teaching Alice Walker to begin with. And even those who fully understand the value of a broad-ranging education that challenges cadets’ preconceptions are unlikely to fight the chain of command over a particular reading in a single course.
Civilian professors at these institutions, including myself, are in a different boat. We don’t have a chain of command, just bosses. We’re hired for our subject matter expertise and to provide institutional continuity, not rotated out every two or three years to keep the institution’s grounding in the operating forces fresh. And, theoretically at least, we have considerably more academic freedom, especially in criticizing administration policy.
West Point and Annapolis are undergraduate institutions and thus have a much broader curriculum than the staff colleges and war colleges, which teach more senior officers at later stages of their careers. Their lesson plans and libraries almost certainly have far more materials that run afoul of the order than is the case for us.
A colleague at the Naval War College, an endowed chair in ethics, has resigned effective the end of this academic year. Given the vagaries of the academic job market, that’s a courageous and difficult decision. But I don’t know how you’d teach philosophy or serve as a librarian under these strictures. It’s one thing to have to be more careful about what you say and write than you’ve been accustomed to; it’s another thing entirely to be put in a position where you have to teach things you don’t believe.
Thankfully, the impact on our curriculum is relatively negligible. The main materials impacting the Security Studies department that we need to scrutinize is related to the Women, Peace, and Security initiative. We’re ostensibly mandated to support it by Act of Congress signed into law, ironically enough, by President Trump early in his first administration. But, really, we’re talking a handful of article-length readings over the course of the academic year.
The larger impact on military education is harder to assess. One presumes much of this will be reversed under the next administration. But four years is the entirety of a cadet’s time at West Point or a midshipman’s at Annapolis. Multiple staff and war college cohorts will be impacted. Those graduates will be somewhat less prepared to deal with some really complex issues.
The degree to which race, ethnicity, and sex impacts selection for the academies is not an issue I’ve looked into in a very long time. I would imagine that we’ll have slightly fewer Black and Hispanic graduates over the next few classes if the selection process is truly race-blind. But, perhaps ironically, we could have far, far more women. For example, the incoming West Point Class of 2028 had 1216 students, of which only 280 were women. The Annapolis Class of 2028 had 1183 entering students, of whom 371 were women. The Class of 2030 might look quite different.
“Exclusively on merit” are ya kidding me? Pete Hegseth, merit? Huh? WTF? Bizarro World…
Give Secretary Hegseth’s focus on “warrioring” — I believe he’s called it that — I’m waiting for the memo terminating logistics courses at the Academies. Also terminating the Army Corps of Engineers civilian activities. I have long thought the Corps will eventually lose their battle with the Mississippi River at the Old River Control Structure complex, but didn’t think it would be because they were ordered to just give up.
Recoiling from vague has always confused me, vagueness is only a problem for those hoping to minimally comply. We know the intent and the vagueness of the order provides innumerable opportunities to throw roadblocks in front of the intent.
@Michael Cain: You’re comparing logistics and DEI in terms of fighting effectiveness?
How do you define merit? For so many years the definition of merit assumed that you were a white male, which I suspect is part of Hegseth’s goal. But leaving that aside and assume that we really wanted to have true merit how do we do that? Is a kid with a kid with a supportive family who went to a well funded suburban school who got an SAT of 1500 better than a kid with a single mom who had to work part-time to help support the family and went to a run-down, poor school with literally no books in the classroom who got an SAT of 1420?
AS somewhat of an aside, given the realities of the modern era, how much do we hang on to the big bruiser warrior model for everyone in the military? You really do need people with excellent IT skills, mechanical skills, engineering skills and even medical skills. How much does it matter that they can do push ups?
Steve
This was published a couple days ago (gift link):
West Point Is Supposed to Educate, Not Indoctrinate
@steve:
At the Trump/Hegseth DOD, by blood-alcohol level and drunk texts.
@Jc:
MAGA’s incompetent, unqualified cabal has made a better case for affirmative action and DEI than liberals have.
The DoD memo says, “A strong officer corps is essential to ensuring the United States military remains the most lethal the world has ever known.”
Whatever strong means, I’d prefer that the service academies admit candidates with high leadership potential to lead a diverse (in some respects) military force, and with the intellectual capacity to excel at social sciences and humanities as well as the organizational and technical complexities of warfare.
@steve: “How do you define merit?”
Good question. The memo says, “Going forward, MSAs shall rank-order candidates by merit-based scores within each nomination category as described in 10 U.S.C. §§ 7442, 7443, 8454, 8456, 9442, and 9443.” I’m not about to dig into those references, but I wonder if the academies will have the latitude to weight applicant scoring for non-athletic hooks such as low-income and first-generation–the kinds of things that may be considered by other exclusive schools.
That statement may be begging the question. Question: Will the graduates of your course be equally capable, more capable, or less capable of doing their jobs in the absence of reading “a handful of article-length readings?” If that topic is of no particular import to the subject matter you’re teaching (and inclusion of that topic constitutes dilution of the subject matter rather than an enhancement), then elimination is not only not deleterious but rather, desirable.
Expanding that point, we may be a one of those crossroads where we need to examine what the various functionary agencies of which our government is made are intended to accomplish. Retreating back to the subject of national defense, if, in the words of Rush Limbaugh, “armies are for killing people and breaking things,” then the changes Hegseth is advancing may not be the rumblings of a witless moron, but rather the insight of an idiot savant. (Indeed, it’s certainly possible that in such a case, a witless moron/idiot savant may well be the ideal candidate for SecDef, but I digress.) It all depends on the goal.
One of the lessons with which I came away from reading Locke in sophomore World Civilizations class was that rule by social contract is widely diverse. Not all social contracts grant desirable outcomes to all stakeholders, and minority interests are not always protected. The current DEI conflict rests on that very question of the degree to which we protect minority interests, and the outcome is values neutral to the question of the validity of the contract. [Revisionist History Trigger Warning!!!] In our own history, we have abrogated key features of our own stated core beliefs. Deciding that the “union” must be maintained constituted an abrogation of a core principle in the Declaration of Independence–that peoples have the right to decide to remove themselves from governmental associations that abridge their rights. Twenty-five or so years later, we decided that the rights guaranteed to former slaves in the 14th, 15th, and 16th Amendments were not what we wanted them to have and instituted Jim Crow, poll taxes, literacy tests, and the like. It looks to me like we’re on the frontier of yet another unintentional (?) alteration of the social contract. Fun times!
DEI is new and wasn’t even fully implemented because it was a mandate from the Biden administration, part of his administration’s initiative to make it a core part of almost everything the federal government does. A lot of DEI offices in the DoD were not yet fully staffed (the federal government is usually slow to do even basic stuff), and those that were had new hires, most of whom were still on probation and were fired along with almost all other probationary employees.
If the Trump admin were just rolling that back, I’d be mostly on board. DEI, as it’s been operationalized into actual bureaucracies, has no track record of success at its purported aims, either in government or the corporate world, and Biden’s mandates went way too far (IMO) in promoting it.
But it seems to me what’s happening isn’t a return to the status quo ante under the previous rubrics that variously fell under the EO (Equal Opportunity) umbrella – the pendulum is swinging to the other extreme and nuking even that. It’s all very reactionary and not really about “merit” IMO. It’s emblematic of this administration’s rhetoric and behavior, where opposition to leftist and progressive ideas and institutions seems to be the biggest priority.
While I understand (including from personal experience) the critical need for military personnel to follow lawful orders and the importance of a military culture that cares about the “commander’s intent” and not just rote direction-following (a huge advantage we have over most other militaries), it’s not a good combination when the Commander’s intent is both illiberal and dumb.
@Andy: What should we treat DEI like? It’s opposed to our national ethic of equality as well as the military ethic of merit. It’s founded on unestablished social science which in turn relies on an unconventional, non-rigorous approach to history. It’s something like phrenology or the divine right of kings, but it’s not something from the history books, it’s something people grew up with and it needs to be denounced.
So the Sandy Creek massacre, Wounded Knee, Dachau executions, My Lai, and the several Iraqi civilians
killings will not be taught? Nothing like erasing history to be able to learn from it. It should be noted that Whisky Pete was an advocate of a soldier involved in war crimes.
@Fortune: There is a fair amount of evidence that actual diversity improves incomes. As far as I can remember this mostly relates to having women and racial mnorities involved in the group culture and decision making. However, Would agree that there is little evidence that DEI programs were successful. Looking at minority hiring, especially blacks, there wasn’t much change.
That means a couple of things. First, DEI programs largely failed. There may have been a few that worked but most didnt. I suspect that means most companies weren’t committed, they just did it for signaling. However, it also means that the complaints that lots of white people didnt get jobs due to DEI just arent true.
Steve
@steve:
To this point, the last studies I saw suggested that white women, and then people of Asian descent, tend to be the biggest beneficiaries:
https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/08/us/dei-programs-diversity-list
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michelleking/2023/05/16/who-benefits-from-diversity-and-inclusion-efforts/
The issue is, to your point, exceedingly complex. We know that so called “race neutral” programs tend to reinforce existing divides. We also need to understand we are looking at deeply entrenched generational issues that resist quick solutions.
Yup. And while I am sure exceptions can be found, I suspect that we could find lots of counter examples of other diverse people who were not hired due to implict or explicit bias.
The devil is in the details, especially when the people in charge find more “merit” in white folk, as evidenced by their decision to retain “The Bell Curve” on their library shelves while scrubbing its well deserved critique.
Speaking of “merit,” only the best people for Trump!
As concerning as Hegseth’s “plagiarism” might seem, personally I’m more taken by his “lightweight” approach to a topic for his thesis, which suggests less a deep thinker and more of someone going through the motions to get his card punched:
@Rob1:
There’s the rub with “exclusively on merit.” Does anyone believe that Trump selecting Hegseth for SecDef gave no consideration to his race (white), gender (male) or ethnicity (Nordic?-American)?
The purpose of these orders is to produce an officer corps that will not question Trump which exposure to diverse ideas might promote. Trump has said that he wants the kind of generals that Hitler had. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/10/trump-military-generals-hitler/680327/
Trump has overlooked that Hitler’s generals by unquestioning obedience to his orders resulted in a disastrous outcome. Imagine an alternative history where the generals are not totally obedient. In early 1939 they convince Hitler to be satisfied with the outcome of the Munich conference arguing that a pact with Stalin is poison. He keeps the Sudentenland and Austria. No destruction of the cities. Einstein, Pauli, and Bohr stay put and work with Heisenberg to create a great flowering of science.
That is hysterical. We have a nepo baby billionaire as POTUS, a drunk talk show host as SecDef, an actual psycho head case at HHS, a Russian asset as DNI, and an another unhinged billionaire nepo baby running around firing people at random while accomplishing absolutely fuck all. National ethic of equality. No, we told ourselves lies about equality.
You have to be an actual moron to believe the US of A is or has ever been a meritocracy based on equality. Or a racist twat. But I repeat myself.
Personally I’ve never been a fan of DEI programs, but that’s about execution. I’ve never been deluded enough, ignorant enough or dishonest enough to pretend we are an egalitarian meritocracy. Jesus Fucking Christ, we are a country built on slavery, ethnic cleansing and genocide with an utterly dishonest founding myth. Meritocracy. Fuck off.
@Michael Reynolds: I didn’t say our national perfect track record, I said ethic. I didn’t even say our foundation.
@Rob1: Yeah. It does have that “well, duh!” quality to it. Mind you, at the grad school to which I went, one of the professors noted that a large number of grad theses are written mostly for the purpose of showing that a thesis can be written–that the skill set is present. Maybe Princeton isn’t significantly different despite the greater prestige.
@Fortune: Define your terms. When you say “ It’s opposed to our national ethic of equality as well as the military ethic of merit”, what do you mean by the word “equality”? What do you mean by the word “merit”? How could you tell that a military was embracing merit? Who decides what is and isn’t meritorious?
@Kevin:
Allow me to translate. “Merit” means white guy. “Equality” means white guy. All references to virtue mean “white guy” because anyone not a “white guy” is DEI. It’s MAGA math. 1 + 1 = white guy. 2 + 2? Also white guy. Square root of 98,763? White guy.
DEI must be extirpated because sometimes D+E+I does not equal white guy. Which is terribly unfair to white guys. Whatever horseshit these people manage to fart out always means me, me, me, mine, mine, mine white white white. But always with a self-pity sauce, because much as Koreans like kimchee with just about everything, MAGAts need them some self pity. Which is one reason they love that whiny, needy, self-pitying bitch in the White House.
@Fortune:
As I said, I don’t have any significant issues with getting rid of DEI programs. My point is that the admin is going much further than that and replacing them with…well, nothing. It’s one thing to direct the disestablishment of DEI programs and positions or to stop offering DEI coursework at service academies. It’s quite another to purge everything tangentially DEI-adjacent, including supposedly problematic books at school libraries, among many other examples. That has nothing to do with merit or competence, quite the opposite, as it presumes cadets and service members are too stupid or easily influenced that the mere presence of a book in a library is something they need protecting from.
It’s also clear to me that the administration isn’t thinking at all about the long-term effects of these, and many other changes to the military, or their limited lifespan since they all flow from Executive Orders, which all future Presidents can change or rescind. That pendulum can swing back the other way, and hard.
What is merit? Telling the head guy stuff he doesn’t want to hear.
“Emperor, an attack on the United States will not get good access to the oil fields of Brunei.”
“Mein Führer, an attack on the Soviet Union will not cause them to collapse before winter comes.”
“Actually, Mr.President, the defeat of France by Ho Chi Min’s army was not a fluke, and there is no reason to think that we’ll do any better.”
These are examples of ideas of military merit that didn’t happen in real life.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
The thing is that militaries do a lot more than that. Further, all evidence would suggest that our military is phenomenally good at those things. Where we fall short is in winning the peace.
Ours is a command and staff college, aimed at mid-career officers (mostly Marine majors and their equivalents from across the Joint force, interagency, and international allies and partners). Officers on service, joint, and even higher-headquarters (division, corps, and Marine Expeditionary Force) staffs need to weigh all manner of considerations in their operational planning, which should extend through at least Phase 4. WPS is a pretty tangential part of that but plays into it for sure. It’s still to be determined what we replace it with. (We start working that this afternoon, in fact.)
@James Joyner:
Our military has excelled at projecting power to keep the peace, to avoid having to “break things.” Our record of the past 70 years may obscure that, but most of our “hot” military action during that timeframe was elective.
In this aspect, we are configured to fail. More so now that our “soft power” has been gutted by fools.
@James Joyner: That “a handful…” will need to be replaced answers my largely rhetorical question. Thanks. The next question is if “winning the peace” is still part of the new “warrior” ethos. Time will tell.
@Rob1:
So much this.
Fools, indeed.
@Kevin: The devil is ever in the details. And those details are rarely provided.
FWIW, and I know this thread is mostly dead, I agree with @Andy insofar as getting rid of a specific set of training rubrics/policy approaches that sum to a specific thing called DEI, then that might well be fine.
But, as he notes, shuttering a DEI office is not the same thing as pulling books out of the library, or using a list of words as a means of filtering what grants to fund or cancel.
The “anti-DEI” move by the administration is not anti-something specific. It is anti-anything that makes us have to think about the past in a way that may suggest we need to rectify anything.
@Michael Reynolds: When I say equality is our ethic, you pretend I didn’t mean “ethic”, then I call you out on it, and you pretend I didn’t mean “equality”. We have a national ethic of equality, and DEI opposes it. All the nitpicking and ad hominem attacks won’t change it. You want to support bad means claiming they’re for good ends but even then you don’t seem devoted to the ends anyway. Maybe you’re just promoting the bad.
@Fortune:
FWIW, It’s incredibly telling that you have contributed more comments in support of the Trump administration’s anti-DEI policies than against all of the Trump policies you claim to dislike.
And you wonder why folks think you are a crypto-Trump supporter. And I get it, agreeing with people you see as political enemies on anything is deeply uncomfortable for heterodox thinkers.
BTW, I love the quick handwave away of all of the issues where we have historically not complied with “our ethic/ethos” as not being worth considering. Refusing to grapple with how to correct those failures of the past is about as mature as dismissing the goals of DEI as anti-American.
@Matt Bernius:
Indeed. I understand the desire to pretend like the US has a strong ethic of fairness and equality, and that when we find unfairness and inequality, it demonstrates that we have failed our own standard. I used to think that way. It is an appealing position.
But it is impossible to look at our history and say that this is the case. I would hope that we would aspire to such an ethic, but to aspire to something requires work.
DEI, however defined, may not have been the right aspirational road to travel, but to pretend like doing away with it and just asserting “merit” solves anything is pure foolishness.
If generational wealth matters, and it does, then we can’t pretend like where we are now is equitable or just.
Ditto generational educational attainment.
A huge portion of what we all have right now is heavily predicated on the past. On our parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, etc. That past does not determine everything, but it influences a lot.
@Matt Bernius: If someone makes a comment I agree with, I like it. If I don’t have anything to add, I don’t add anything. If someone makes a comment I disagree with, I don’t respond 95% of the time. If someone criticizes me, I don’t respond 80% of the time. So you’re wrong, it’s not telling. It’s also strange you’re more interested in my commenting style than DEI.
I’m not handwaving our historical failures. Our national ethic is to advance toward equality. We do it by telling the truth about our past and working for equality today. DEI tells lies about our past and works toward inequality and resentment.
@Fortune:
Weird deflection… but hey, its sucks to always feel like a victim. And clearly it seems like there is something about DEI that you regularly decide to break your “I don’t respond to 95% of the things I disagree with” rule?
I’m glad to pull some other examples… It just seems like this is a hot button issue for you.
I’m curious about examples of those lies that DEI tells. What are your top, say, 3 DEI lies?
@Matt Bernius: I don’t feel like a victim, I’m a willing participant.
DEI is an issue where the modern leftist / liberal is clearly taking a morally abhorrent position while claiming he isn’t, so it’s an important one to me.
Do you consider the 1619 Project to be DEI? Most historians could give you a list of the falsehoods in it.
@Matt Bernius: Also, not a deflection, an explanation.
@Fortune:
What makes it morally abhorrent? That’s really strong language.
How does DEI compare to… say .. suspension of habeus corpus? Or arresting and jailing people for writing editorials?
Just trying to understand the moral continuum.
So you are saying that everything in the 1619 account as wrong? I don’t think I’ve seen that. Most of the criticism I’ve read by mainstream Historians has been about the interpretation. I’m not sure I’ve seen any significant consensus amoung historians about all the “falsehoods.” See this article for one good exploration of that topic:
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/03/06/1619-project-new-york-times-mistake-122248
Also, how is 1619 tied to corporate or educational DEI initiatives? Are you saying that they require people to read the 1619 project?
@Matt Bernius:
BTW, this “any mistakes disqualifies the value of a book” is a strange approach to take for someone who keeps hand waving away all the examples of us not living up to our national ethos of equality and meritocracy (or apparently having any interest in grappling with the long term impacts of those failings and any needs for correction).
It might be useful to list specific falsehoods within the work rather than simply saying “its wrong.”
Boring the libs has replaced owning the libs.
@Fortune:
Is it important enough to tell us what you find morally abhorrent?
To echo Matt: what are the top three ways “DEI” is morally abhorrent?
What does DEI mean to you?
@Matt Bernius: It’s morally abhorrent to treat people differently on the basis of race and sex, particularly to move a system of laws toward increased discrimination on the basis of race and sex. Do you agree?
@Matt Bernius:
I don’t understand why you do this. You know “something contains falsehoods” isn’t the same thing as “something is all falsehoods”. Why say it? Everyone on Outside the Beltway already agrees with you, you don’t have to trick them into agreement. It’s tiring when you do this. Don’t pretend you care about meaningful dialogue while you try to do this.
@Fortune: Listen moron. If a man says he has a work ethic but lies on his ass all day–you are stupid enough to try to convince a smart person–that said man has work ethic. Because, of course he spouts all the cool saying and platitudes (look it up) about work and it’s virtues.
Ethic is an action. If you were the Christian you claim to be, I could simply say ‘a tree is known by its fruit’. But, because you are a Pharisee, you focus at the outside of the cup to conveniently ignore its inside.
Go ahead–get rid of DEI, That means less white women (who sided with Trump in 2024) and less Asian women (less potential partners for simp white men) in the workplace. You aren’t getting rid of the people you think you are.
@Fortune: Then why do you support the status quo, which does treat non-whites and non-men differently than white men? ….hmmmmm
@Jim X 32:
I suspect that if this conversation goes far enough, it will ultimately be that they are choosing to be treated different than white men and are responsible for that gap.
I will bet you dollars that we will ultimately hear about how Bill Cosby is right and this is almost exclusively a problem from within their own communities. Push further and you’ll hear about how the problem is that they think White men are bad.
I’ve had this conversation way too many times not to know where it will go with people who are unwilling to admit any possibility that the past impacts people’s presents or futures.
Jim Brown beat women because he liked to beat women. They say the women he beat got off easier than the ones he…well, anyway, I still think getting beaten by a football player must have been pretty bad. Whatever his background, he had moral agency. He chose to do violence, and anyone who praises him or uses his name online is endorsing his violence.
@Fortune: Jim Brown also told white men (like you) that they were full of shit. So that makes him a hero to me…and yes, I do endorse violence– against anyone who considers violence as an option against me, my family, or black people. You think all Liberals fall into the Dr King camp? Lol. FAAFO
Now, to get back to your other, more simpler game. “Fortune” is antithetical (look it up) to Bible truth–a concept lauded by unbelievers, idol worshipers, and heathen. Even Devil worshipers don’t acknowledge “Fortune” as a factor in life’s unfolding. One might deduce that a person that praises and acknowledges Fortune is worse off than even Devil worshipers. At least they know who they are–
@Jim X 32: Jim Brown beat black women.
@Matt Bernius: Yep, that’s why it’s better to cut to the chase and confront these people. The operating concept for civil society is: You get something, I get something. These people are the opposite: You get nothing, but I get everything. They can’t even acknowledge fair points made by people not part of the cult.
They think they are the smartest and toughest people in every room and lack humility and civility. But over the next few years everything they’ve been indoctrinated about as it pertains to little L and Big L liberals is going to have a harse clash with reality.
@Fortune: Trump raped White Women
Do you like my deflections? Many say they are the best deflections ever written. Much better than the weak and pitiful deflections you used to weasel out of responding to my question of why you support the status quo that promotes white men over merit.
Sad.
@Jim X 32: I don’t support Trump. Never have. You picked a rapist as your screen name. I chose Fortune after the magazine, it means nothing to me. Your hero beat and raped women, but you’re willing to overlook it because he also hated white people.
@Matt Bernius: Additionally, “morally abhorrent position” is not self-explanatory in the sense that the statement reveals what position held is the morally ahborrent one. “We have a national ethic of equality, and DEI opposes it” is similarly not self-explanatory given that it is a statement of belief disguised as a statement of fact. DEI specifically rejects the claim to a national ethic of equality. Declaring that one exists is an insufficient refutation.
@Fortune: You chose Fortune because you worship Mammon—like all anti-Christs. I pointed out your fruit was rotten and you lashed out in predictable fashion typical of a ‘give us Barabbas’ type person.
Do you have any intelligence deflections that might stimulate an emotion beyond condescension? Something really thought provoking this time. I know you will never answer a question but at least type something that would show some evidence of deeper thought.
@Fortune:
FWIW, I’m using the same rhetorical style that you are.
You make exceedingly bold statements: i.e. that DEI is morally aborant. Or that DEI=1619. Or that because 1691 contains falsehoods then it’s demonstrates that DEI is wrong.
I live in a much more nuanced zone. It’s worth exploring what “falsehoods” mean. Are we talking about false facts or interpretations of history you disagree with.
And if containing falsehoods is enough to eliminate a book or remove all it’s meaning, then should we ban any book that contains falsehoods? See for example “The Bell Curve” which numerous scholars have found false and misleading statements in. Or I’m happy to grab any number of political right books which have also been found to have lots of falsehoods or bad history in them.
I’m just asking you to defend the position your very strongly took in serious ways–what I’m told real heterdox thinkers are interested in doing. And what you come back with is more broad statements.
I understand if you don’t want to take the time to write out a long response. But if that’s the case, then just admit it.
But hopefully you can see how “1619 contains undefined falsehoods so the book is bad and the book is DEI therefore DEI is bad” is a poor strawman. And at the same time the moment people want to talk about historic wrongs and the role they have had at setting up very demonstrable inequalities into and including today’s society that make “equality” a problematic concept you retreat to “but there is all this NUANCE… stop talking in broad generalizations!”
Beyond constantly positioning yourself as a “victim because of your heterodox thinking” the most clear thing that goes across all your posts when push comes to shove is “nuance for my positions and things I want to defend, no nuance for anyone else and the positions they want to defend.”
What can I say it’s boring and predictable. And usually I try to ignore it. But after seeing you again go after DEI as “morally aborhant” with such passion, I though it necessary to point out that this is a topic that is pretty guaranteed to get you to comment on it.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
Totally agree.
@Fortune:
Just to be clear, I don’t respond to get agreement from others. And I’m not trying to trick other.
It’s sad that you decide to project “tricks” onto me. I really try to avoid doing that in my writing. I’ll work to be more aware of that.
So asking you to actually unpack and engage in a more nuanced argument is not a step towards meaningful dialog? Or is it simply disagreeing with your absolute position?
What would have been a meaningful response to what you presented–I mean beyond agreeing?
Look, let’s make this easy–if your preference is to be able to make broad comments like “DEI is anti-American and morally abhorent” and then not have them questions or criticized just let us know and I’m happy to oblige.
@Jim X 32: I picked the name Fortune from the magazine. I’d change it to Field and Stream tomorrow except people on Outside the Beltway are obsessed with their theories about conservative commenters and old screen names.
You chose the name Jim Brown because you consider him a hero. He’s your hero because he’s hateful on race. You admitted it. You could have looked up to someone like MLK who believed in nonviolent protest and nonviolent sex, but you chose violent protest and violent sex. It’s relevant in two ways. One, it’s how you don’t add to the discussion but try to bully people. Two, it’s right to the core of the issue about DEI. Trump’s raping is a distraction because no one’s saying he deserves to be a rapist because of his skin color. Brown’s raping is relevant because you want to judge people only by their race and their racial hatred, and you’ll ignore a person’s actions. You’re the perfect spokemsan for DEI.
DEI is morally abhorrent because judging people by race and actions is depraved compared to judging them on their actions. You’re only one step worse, judging on race only and not actions.
@Matt Bernius:
So you think I use tricks.
@Matt Bernius:
So you’re using tricks in response.
@Matt Bernius:
So you’re not using tricks?
Or maybe you just hate getting called out on them.
One thing is for sure. Fortune would rather argue about screen names and parse comment box rhetoric than actually explain their positions.
This is a reminder to all, myself included, as to why they are not honest interlocutors.
I know we all think that at some point, they will actually make an argument and present evidence.
They won’t. The track record is clear.
@Fortune:
For the record, there is no policy about changing your screen name.
And the “obsession” in question is about people who are banned and yet can’t quit us and come back with new names.
If you want to be “Field and Stream” have at.