"I first became concerned about Harvard...early on the morning of October 8".
With all due respect, Mr. Ackman, that was your first mistake. For years, Bari Weiss and others have been screaming from the rooftops about how DEI has been a parasite infecting elite universities. You would have heard them if you had been listening.
Better late than never for sure. Hopefully Mr. Ackman will also notice the formerly unprofitable public company Twitter firing 80% of its employees without disruption.
If we are lucky this will cause Mr. Ackman to realize that this ideology’s infiltration of corporate America has resulted in shareholders being defrauded at scale by a ballooning functionless administrative class.
I can’t think of a single major corporation that couldn’t be brought to heel by a class action shareholder suit aimed at what they are spending money on at the personnel level.
The "disruption" (decline in value in Twitter/X) is due to a boycott by DEI-influenced corporations who seek to virtue signal and inocculate themselves from criticism by throwing Musk under the bus for daring to question DEI orthodoxy. But Claudine Gay did what Musk could not - precipitate the end of the DEI racket.
Think it has to do with incoherent content moderation, firing of development teams, businesses not wanting to have their tweets next to white nationalists, and an erratic CEO who retweets white nationalists, crazy conspiracy theories and tells advertisers to "go f-uck themsleves." Think that has more to do with it than whatever boogeyman might be out there.
I predicted this the day Elon took over Musk. While Bari, Nellie, et. all were cheering Musk.
"Elon had a chance to be on the board, but he wanted the whole pie. Well, now he's going to have to eat it - and Elon is a very messy eater. He'll turn Twitter into 4Chan within the year."
So your argument is that, even though traffic is up and the website works the same, there was also a collusive extortion racket orchestrated by the marketing departments of other publicly traded companies??
Well at least we can agree that the discovery phase, where we examine the communications of the left-wing extremists who work in the marketing and PR departments, will be fun.
Okay so you actually have a point this time, Compost. There’s even more crime here than I thought.
If you’re using your position and misappropriating company resources to help Democrats then that’s embezzlement AND a campaign finance violation.
Don't let this conversation be hijacked into an attempt to bash Elon Musk. The critical issue is the destruction of academia and its consequences for our nation. Compost swims in irrelevance.
Oh ... that would be interesting. I think it wouldn't end in the marketing department, it would lead back to DIE policies, and likely back to Black Rock to University Presidents.
You see, University presidents use DIE scores of investment banks to determine which banks get to recruit from their campus. Recruiting from the Ivy League is the life blood of investment banks. So the investment banks set the DIE policies on the corporations for loans and equities. Thus, if marketing didn't make the call on X all by themselves, but at the direction of the C-suite, who acted at the direction of the Investment Banks, who acted at the direction of the Ivy League presidents ... which ultimately goes to GULF (Global University Leadership Forum) which is part of the WEF ... all lines lead back to Dr. Evil himself.
“Disruption” means disruption of service. Company value has nothing to do with the quality of the service.
Also, Musk bought Twitter at the height of a bubble, and he even overpaid for what it was worth then “for the meme.” So the decline is Twitter’s value has more to do with the purchase price and changes in underlying market factors--a.k.a. the value of all tech companies came crashing down as interest rates rose--since the purchase than his management of Twitter.
Things are going pretty well for Elon. Space X doing its thing and he owns 42% of an estimated $150 B valuation. And you may have heard about Tesla. X is small potatoes and he should be able to maintain it in spite of those who would like to shut it down like, well you know....
I just predicted he'd f-ck up Twitter the day he took over
And he has.
No, enlighten me.....who exactly wants to shut Twitter down? The companies who don't want their brands associated with white nationalists posts, etc.? The companies who Elon told to "go f-ck themselves?"
The options aren’t False Thing You Said A or False Thing You Said B.
There’s also option C, reality, which is that the value of Twitter has declined primarily due to economic reasons unrelated to the technical quality of the service the company offers, and Musk is managing the company somewhat erratically. Although, it remains to be seen how his management will affect the company’s value in the fullness of time.
This wouldn’t be the first time Musk has taken an unorthodox approach to business and succeeded.
Twitter was a Ministry of Truth. Now my feed is cluttered with anti-Semites and porn. Musk is richer than God. He is a champion for free speech. He eliminated zoom employees. I am not sure he has made Twitter profitable.
"Now my feed is cluttered with anti-Semites and porn" ... and other sweet lies.
Here's a clue buddy. If you specifically follow Anti-Semites and Porn Stars, you'll see Anti-Semitism and Porn! The Universe is a mirror to your life, the internet doubly so.
I don’t care about twitters market value. Twittering is what birdheads do. It wasn’t a compliment 40 yrs ago and I still view it as stupid.
If it wasn’t for Musk we wouldn’t have a space program. Obama neutered NASA and that was an unfortunate loss for America.
If our institutions of higher learning don’t reverse course immediately we won’t have ppl like Musk to keep America competitive in the tech industry. Gates, like Edison, attained greatness by standing on the shoulders of his tech superiors. He had better business acumen if you want to call unscrupulousness good business. Now Gates supports all this woke crap and is a an acolyte of the climate cult. He wants to seem like a compassionate philanthropist but his multimillion dollar donations aren’t impressive when he has obscene wealth to begin with. It’s more impressive to me when I see what is clearly a blue collar laborer put $10 in the bell ringers buckets.
I’d rather have free speech than a woke machine determining what is acceptable for me to read. That decision is mine alone and should be so for everyone.
So you want the fedzilla to hire all of those minority hires to further swell the ranks of the ultrapowerful unelected bureaucracy? Those "graduates" will need something to do with those $500k sheepskins.
Never mind about just this blow-up issue of Claudine Gay and her plagiarism, the true overall scale of the problem with the Western world's universities is near impossible to overstate. The dismal truth is that whilst Western publics have been mesmerised by the MSM psychodrama of elections and party-political pluralism, a 5-decade long transformation has quietly been ongoing whereby the 'educated' middle-class (the future leaders, professionals and administators) have passed through a rite-of-passage Leftist sheep-dip. A highly seductive 'education' in how to think of yourself as virtuous just by the simple and cost-free adoption of 'correct' opinions. We have quietly got ourselves and our culture into a dreadful mess and the Claudine Gays et al are merely the tip of a very big iceberg. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/invasion-of-the-virtue-signallers
If only it were limited to the universities. Due to the stupidity or calculated evil of school boards and teachers unions it permeates our public schools down to the grade school level.
In York S.C a very conservative community a second grader is using they /them pronouns so yes it is leeching down to grade schools. We need to prevent the flood.
Yes absolutely. It originated in the universities (via the early 20th c. intelleigentsia) and has spread from there right through each and every institution....even to the courts, the police and even to some extent the military. And yes the schools. The main thrust of my comment is that thanks what one might term an academia/media complex, it advanced by not ever becoming a big political story....until now when it's way too late. Comment threads have to be kept short and sweet but I've written about all this at more length..... here: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/are-we-making-progress and here: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/mrs-thatcher-and-the-good-life and elsewhere.
It IS in the military- they have quotas for recruitment and promotions based on equality and not who’s the most qualified. Should be interesting if we find ourselves in a hot war.
To be blunt, recruitment has very little to do with it. This poison has destroyed the very ability of young people to meet any sort of demanding task, let alone actual military training.
As above, so below. Here in charming, wealthy, upper and upper-middle class Wilton, CT we have invested in a shiny new office of DEI for our school system. As far as I can tell, no one has raised any objections to this egregiously offensive intrusion into the minds and hearts of our children. No child shall be spared, from the most capable and bursting full of potential down to those with sadly, crippling disabilities. Our new office of DEI will parse them all into villains and victims. Now isn’t that a dainty dish to set before the king?!! We will produce generations of people filled with hate and self loathing. Things that used to be sins.
My 12 year old grandchild told me about students introducing themselves and stating their preferred pronouns. This happened on the first day of school during covid remote learning...3 years ago. Our schools are immersed in this disgusting ideology.
I think u r right on. We needed the stinking arrogance of Gay et al to wake us up to what’s going on right under our noses. I think, for me, it’s time to start posting on our local neighborhood websites. I know my neighbors won’t want to hear it, but now is the time. The iron is hot. If anyone knows of other towns starting to move against their DEI hollowed-out bastards please let me know. Thank you.
All kinds of Marxism and inappropriate schooling...DEI, trans-'education', asking kindergartens about their pronouns etc. Different states, different counties have different permutations. Some are more gone than others but the teachers coming out of the universities are bringing their 'perspectives' to the classroom. Ask around at your local schools. Find out what's happening. It could be fine. It could be scary or anything inbetween.
My daughter who has Aspergers and severe ADHD had trouble fitting in from birth. She came home from school in thee eighth grade claiming her health class teacher told them there are at least seven different genders. I argued that I found that absurd, there are ppl with varying sexual appetites but that didn’t change their gender. She explained she learned that transgender ppl are truly the gender they CHOOSE and that this is nothing new (a claim that is true in the twisted minds of a rare few ppl) but nothing can change the sex you were born with. Not hormone therapy, mutilating surgeries or wardrobe choices. She of course became very angry.
She also claimed that she learned that Christopher Columbus was a monster who viciously beat the native peoples he encountered. That he sought to enslave them. Neither of these claims are true though they did exercise harsh punishments against a cannibalistic tribe that terrorized the island peoples they first encountered. His first officer stated the natives would make fine slaves but Columbus rejected this idea. Columbus was essentially a sort of evangelical in that he felt compelled to share his Christian world view ( a stated directive in the Bible) which he adamantly believed in.
I explained to her that the world was a different place in the fifteenth century. There were more harsh consequences for criminal behavior.
We cannot prosecute people in the past for acting in keeping with what was normal policies for that time. Any persons simply being unnecessarily cruel at any time is/was wrong. Some common practices such as whipping for infractions or perceived insubordination was common up until the nineteenth century. This is now something most societies completely reject but most societies have a system in place for bringing criminals to justice according to the laws of that land..
This kind of "interpretation" of the past is happening in many schools, especially in blue states. I am talking to my kids consistently, trying to explain to them that yes, things used to be different back then and there is no need to sugar coat the past, but holding historical figures who lived centuries ago by today's standards is meaningless. Our district high school is also big on equity and transgender rights - listening to my high schooler one can conclude that the US biggest threat right now is rejecting justice for LGBTQ+*&^ individuals. Nearly every administrator and teacher indicate their pronouns in their e-mail signatures. However, nothing like that is happening at my other son's school, which is an independent school for gifted. I do call the high school when I receive some ridiculous correspondence quoting Howard Zinn or asking me to sign a permission slip to have my kid participate in the implicit bias test and other such nonsense.
Did you read Ackman's letter? If you like DEI, I guess you like DEI. Most don't when they actually find out what it means in practice. And some school districts are getting into gender ideology introductory material in 1st and 2nd grade. They get into graphic LGBTQ literature a bit later. Once again you may like it but to some of us it reeks of late stage 1st World decadence.
Oh, just a few things for starters ... history is being rewritten from a DEI narrative; children are being politically indoctrinated; children are being sexually groomed/indoctrinated before they should even be sexually aware; parents rights to make key life decisions for their minority children are being subsumed by many schools/school districts; children are being encouraged to question whether they have been born the wrong sex; many schools are withholding critical psychological and developmental information from parents about their child; children are being encouraged to lie to and keep secrets from their parents; etc. ... is that enough to chew on? Please don't take my word for it. Go investigate all these issues for yourself.
You think your references have been more reliable? Really?
Take the red pill and stop trying to pick fights on every thread. That IS trolling. Go stick with “the status quo” and all the leftist morons who have head in butt syndrome.
There are endless reports of widespread indoctrination efforts in pretty much every school district. When the Trump admin wanted to outlaw teaching CRT there was a very left leaning teacher who sent out pledge to continue teaching this egregious (and incorrect) rewrite of not only American history but world history.
She garnered 1,000 signatures of teachers who felt this twisted world view was a truth children should know. I had my own child coming home telling me this nonsense.
It’s not some right wing conspiracy theory. Evidence has been reported in every school system.
Why do you think there were heated debates at school board meetings? There have been numerous videos of kids testifying at such meetings to combat the denial of school administrators that they are teaching CRT. You can call it whatever you want but a spade is a spade.
CRT and DEI have become the standard in most public schools. In Va there was a trans boy who raped a girl in the girls bathroom. The school system simply transferred this student to another school where he assaulted another
child. It’s part of the reason Youngkin was elected Governor.
I cannot believe that anyone who does delve into a variety of sources can possibly refute this. It’s disingenuous at best.
Yup. They keep trying to re-frame it as not CRT/DEI but it’s all the same erroneous screed. They are deliberately confusing young children about their gender, pushing to hide this psychological warfare(my opinion) and promoting drag Queen attire and attitude. I’ve watched some of the drag Queen performances and they are very sexualized, which is very inappropriate for elementary schools.
I don’t think schools should be promoting homosexuality but by the same token they should discourage the disparaging or bullying of any kid for any reason.
Bullying is a problem in every society. It never results in anything good and almost always causes lasting emotional harm. All parents should be responsible to teach kids to be kind. But then not all parents are decent ppl either.
DEI forces are also globalizing, despite huge infusions of American taxpayer billions in contracts, and much more. Heavy international student populations given preference over American -born kids. And not from the Netherlands, but, as we've seen, from non-Western cultures not particularly aligned with American values. "Inclusion"? Only 22 percent of Stanford's class of 2026 is white.
Every kid in America should have to view PragerU videos to disinfect their poisoned young minds. I know many RINOS and democrats would argue the same back and yeah, a whitewashed version of history is what kids are first taught in grades k-3 but you don’t tell them terrible things at that age.
Candace Owens is another fantastic source for putting a clear and easily understood light upon the very wrongly rewritten version of our history kids are being taught. Getting rid of mind killing, CCP controlled social media might help too.
Pushing for better leadership in the teachers unions would most certainly help or place limitations and agreements between them and parent led committees. If they thought they could lose funding for not following guidelines they’d start singing a different tune.
"Never mind about just this blow-up issue of Claudine Gay and her plagiarism, the true overall scale of the problem with the Western world's universities is near impossible to overstate"
Some people "think" the Bud Light/Target catastrophe just happened? By the time those running those businesses thought they had a great idea, were well entrenched in the academe.
Yes as a 70+ year-old I've been watching all this unfold for 50 years. But the biggest shock that nobody foresaw (not me either) was that even capitalist enterprise culture could become woke.
Yes, we all assumed that once these kids graduated from university and joined the real world of business, they would get their heads adjusted back to a proper mindset. But the DEI loons took over corporate boards, with risk management types, that bent to the wishes of the DEI complex for fear of reprisals. Poof. The business world was taken hostage instantly.
Yes I was one of those. I now have a new slogan "But..I..Could..Be..Wrong."
Being 75 myself there are some positives (other than cheap bus fare, and comfort coming before style :-)). You get to say "I've Seen This Movie Before" & "This Too Shall Pass."
I really appreciate the perspective that you and others in their seventies and eighties are willing to share. If only people of your experience were able to spend more time with young impresionable children, like in elementary schools, we might see wiser youngsters.
Not really. By the time children enter elementary school they are well indoctrinated via their smart phones and indulgent parents, and see older people as out of touch and with nothing to tell them. By the time they reach college, they are well and truly gone.
Seemingly shocking , but not so much when you realize they are simply following the money, that’s all. Of course until their shares drop, then there may very well be a course correction.
Having been born in the mid 50’s I had a front row seat to a great deal of social upheaval, significant economic waffling, the rise of political correctness and how it has mushroomed into this societal suicide we have now.
I’m not sure if I should fasten my seat belt or just jump out.
Like most normal people I had long hoped for racial harmony. When I saw Obama get elected I was pleased to see that occur, even though I became significantly more conservative after the peanut farmer president.
I saw the writing on the wall with this DEI nonsense almost a decade ago. It’s been front page for over the past five years so how anyone could be unaware until recently is astounding. This writer has some good recommendations for the fix and I agree with them all. I just think it may be too late to turn this Titanic around cause the iceberg is coming up fast.
Our teachers in grade schools are fully vested in this BS with the exception of just a few. They have been pumping this nonsense into kids heads for at least the past 7 yrs. These kids would need real remedial instruction to begin to reverse the perverted versions of history, biology and government they’ve been taught.
The best way to help disadvantaged kids qualify for admission to higher learning is not lower or remove the bar. We can and should invest more into tutoring to help elevate them. We will already be (and have) churning out kids with degrees who are not equipped to compete in the global market in any field. We will not be on the cutting edge of the sciences in any area here very soon. Kids who are functionally illiterate are being admitted into college and are set up to fail.
Marxism is madness. Communism has failed along with the fully socialist governance of it.
If we don’t stop the uniparty from continuing down this path, our nation will be destroyed. Not from climate change, but by civil war.
I think a big part of the reason for people being unaware of it for so long is that the underlying causes have been (and still are) misunderstood. People focus in too much on 'Wokeness' as a belief system whereas it is really more of a diseased PSYCHOLOGY.. This psychology is a (longstanding) disdain of university 'educated' white people for their less 'educated' white peers. All the shallow sanctification of 'oppressed' 'identities' is at bottom mostly a proxy swipe by the 'virtuous' 'educated' white intelligentsia at their notional 'deplorable' peers. Of course 'educated' non-whites have now latched on to it too... (it's just too self-flattering for them to pass up on)..............It's also a misunderstanding in my view to see it as a new thing.... it's just that the vast expansion of tertiary education has put it on an exponential upward surge in recent times.
You have one BIG BLIND SPOT in your EXCELLENT thoughts on these issues and it is in your “own house”.
Corporations like yours with ESG scores and DEI also bow to the pressure of victim oppressor ideology. DEI/ESG recruiters in the corporate financial world (with diversity analytics tools as pointed out in todays WSJ by the CEO of Paradigm Staffing), prioritize applicants that check the right diversity box so even the most qualified straight white male doesn’t get invited to participate in the recruitment process or gets sacrificed on the altar of DEI in the final rounds. see https://www.privatefundscfo.com/a-seat-at-the-table-inclusion-has-become-a-crucial-factor-in-pe-talent-recruiting/ This is rampant in PE and the financial world right NOW!
The reason why, as Graham Cunningham bluntly states, is “The Left’s appeal to the prosperous middle class is an essentially narcissistic and performative one; offering a way to feel more sophisticated than thou and a cost-free way to feel virtuous.” I know this is a hard truth wrapped in good intentions. Being born in 1963 to white upper middle class Jewish parents. I was raised with a constant drum beat of rising up against the white dominant culture ( now considered the oppressor) as our noble cause. To be absolved the “white patriarchy” of our comfortable upper middle class suburban life we sought the constant endorphins of “speaking truth to power.” But in the end, it was as toxic as it was intoxicating. As white wealthy Jews we MUST first take the painful step of turning inward. My Jewish, intermittent fasting, yoga pantsed, Range Rover driving, hate doesn’t live here lawn signers, BLM donor, suburban moms were GOB SMACKED when the black/ brown, lgbtqia2s+ and other assorted bag of rainbow haired pierced radical campus progressive community was screaming for the genocide of Jews on their babies 70k a year elite college campuses.
We must stop rationalizing this for our own need to be more virtuous than our other white peers and cut the head off the victim oppressor reward for immutable traits industrial complex and dig deep into all of the processes, relationships, memberships, donations, actions etc. that feed this in our own lives and that includes the hiring at companies like yours or Apollo, Goldman etc. Just as we have seen our institutions like Harvard fall to the take over of “spoilt-brat radicalism” and the left-wing fraud “a posh person’s mind games” “corroding us from within” (quoting from Graham Cunningham’s article) we need to own the role we played in this and continue to play and clean our own house too before they fall like the Harvard's of the world!
You have one BIG BLIND SPOT in your EXCELLENT thoughts on these issues and it is in your “own house”.
Corporations like yours with ESG scores and DEI also bow to the pressure of victim oppressor ideology. DEI/ESG recruiters in the corporate financial world (with diversity analytics tools as pointed out in todays WSJ by the CEO of Paradigm Staffing), prioritize applicants that check the right diversity box so even the most qualified straight white male doesn’t get invited to participate in the recruitment process or gets sacrificed on the altar of DEI in the final rounds. see https://www.privatefundscfo.com/a-seat-at-the-table-inclusion-has-become-a-crucial-factor-in-pe-talent-recruiting/ This is rampant in PE and the financial world right NOW!
The reason why, as Graham Cunningham bluntly states, is “The Left’s appeal to the prosperous middle class is an essentially narcissistic and performative one; offering a way to feel more sophisticated than thou and a cost-free way to feel virtuous.” I know this is a hard truth wrapped in good intentions. Being born in 1963 to white upper middle class Jewish parents. I was raised with a constant drum beat of rising up against the white dominant culture ( now considered the oppressor) as our noble cause. To be absolved the “white patriarchy” of our comfortable upper middle class suburban life we sought the constant endorphins of “speaking truth to power.” But in the end, it was as toxic as it was intoxicating. As white wealthy Jews we MUST first take the painful step of turning inward. My Jewish, intermittent fasting, yoga pantsed, Range Rover driving, hate doesn’t live here lawn signers, BLM donor, suburban moms were GOB SMACKED when the black/ brown, lgbtqia2s+ and other assorted bag of rainbow haired pierced radical campus progressive community was screaming for the genocide of Jews on their babies 70k a year elite college campuses.
We must stop rationalizing this for our own need to be more virtuous than our other white peers and cut the head off the victim oppressor reward for immutable traits industrial complex and dig deep into all of the processes, relationships, memberships, donations, actions etc. that feed this in our own lives and that includes the hiring at companies like yours or Apollo, Goldman etc. Just as we have seen our institutions like Harvard fall to the take over of “spoilt-brat radicalism” and the left-wing fraud “a posh person’s mind games” “corroding us from within” (quoting from Graham Cunningham’s article) we need to own the role we played in this and continue to play and clean our own house too before they fall like the Harvard's of the world!
This starts at the elementary school level. Parent, grandparents, aunt and uncles be aware of what is going on at your child's school. DEI is at our local elementary school. Grades are inflated, teachers afraid to speak out, because of retribution. Chaos!
Sally Kornbluth at MIT should resign. Actually all 3 University Presidents that Elise Stefanik questioned in front of Congress should be fired.
Exactly….it took a terroriist attack to open your eyes…how about the conservative speakers who have been shouted down for years…the BS speech codes…excellent faculty driven out for stating facts to students who only want feelings….and administrators who back the kids instead of the professors when the indoctrinated mob comes for a professor who asks them to debate a topic….anyone listening outside the crazy left bubble knows all of this has been happening for 10+ years. So yeah…better late than never but can it be turned around or is the rot too deep….
Right. We've been screaming into the wind for many years. Why did it take such an outrageous agregious situation as miscreant students rioting for Hamas to get some mainstream liberals to see reality?
Because for longer than that they’ve been blinded by leftist propaganda. Some unwittingly, many by choice. Our higher learning institutions were infiltrated just after WWII by radically left ideologues that saw the best avenue for reshaping western thinking was through education. They have been stealthy and unfortunately successful.
McCarthy wasn’t entirely insane, a bit too zealous for most and media at the time had already shifted to a more liberal world view. Not that I think some middle ground is wrong but this new leftist authoritarianism is so far left it meets the extreme right. I don’t see significant differences between fascism and oppressive communism. But we are hell bent on getting there.
I wonder if it’s too little too late to put some brakes on before careening off the cliff.
To his credit, Mr. Ackman jumped all over this and has been instrumental in getting Harvard's president to resign in shame. Technically, it was the plagiarism that got her, but her inability to answer a simple question -- an easy question -- has been exposed for all to see. Is he late to the party? Who in the business world is in front of him. Now, we need to see if he sticks with it and brings his wealthy Wall Street friends along. Harvard should not see a dime until major changes are made.
The General Assessment that i've seen is that plagarism pushed Gay out (but she's still in - as a Professor), and not AT ALL due to her being blind to or uneffected by antisemitism or hooliganish behavior -- and its impact on learning. Question 1: Is it OK to be a Harvard Professor that committed plagarism? (seems so) Is it OK to be a Harvard President without any concern about a) hate against Jews (blacks, yeah --no good - that's a non-starter, for Gay) or b) against KKK-like behavior (short of cross-burning and lynching) against Jews (blacks, again, can't do that). Question 2: What are the ethical standards for anyone and everyone to be eligibl;e to join or remain on the Harvard Board of Overseers? Question 3: What is the real Harvard culture, and why?
Another of this fancy man's mistakes was saying antisemitism is the worst at Harvard in its 500 years. I guess he thought it was better for Jews when none of them were admitted at all.
Rich man whines about whatever. No story here, folks, move along.
Bari… Jordan Peterson… Gad Saad… Glenn Loury… Thomas Sowell… Shelby Steele… the list of those calling BS on DEI is incredibly long. I know Ackman is super busy but the writing has been on this wall for a very very long time.
Bari herself was late in recognizing DEI for the poison that it is. As with Ackman, it took her ox being gored to open her eyes to the metastasizing cancer of leftist nihilism that has been destroying this country since the '60s. (Remember Students for a Democratic Society/SDS, the Symbionese Liberation Army/SLA, the Black Panthers (Leonard Bernstein's cause celebre), and Barack and Michelle Obama's personal favorites, Weather Underground bombers Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn)? The Left always ends up eating its own...but not until after demolishing the lives of countless others. Tragically, only the exposure of the rabid antisemitism spewed by the leftists he'd so proudly and lavishly funded was sufficient to dispel Ackman's willful blindness.
Wow bro, you drank all the coolaid to come to that conclusion. 21% of Israelis are “Palestinians” aka Arabs.
You posted a link that supposedly proved abuse of children by the IDF yet it’s opening statement clearly states “uncorroborated”
reports. I’m sure there are some misguided/bad actors in the ranks of the IDF. Their overall record is very different than the leftist clowns want to paint them as. Just like there are some bad cops, most are good and want to do the right thing.
You are an antisemite. The actions of Hamas, Hezbollah and unfortunately too many Arabs is indefensible. Israel has been under attack since its reestablishment in 1958
Nonsense. Zionists returned to the Zion - the historical birthplace of Jews. It is Hamas that states the extermination of Jews in its charter. And to be clear, there were no “Palestinians” in its current sense at that time.
Claudine Gay was hired following the same process that led to Kamala Harris. The only surprise here is that so many people were surprised how her tenure ended.
Actually it was the same process that led to Barack Obama, which I believe had a lot to do with the DEI movement taking hold. His presidency was extremely divisive in this country and the opposite of what he could have been as the first black president.
Oh, come on. Obama gave an incredible and inspiring presentation at the Democratic National Convention that showed that he was a force to be reckoned with. It was obvious that he was one of the best people to lead this country. He earned the ability to be president on sheer talent and ability. And his presidency and its accomplishments proved that he was more than capable.
He was capable, though he had little experience of note prior to being elected. I am referring more to his socialist/neo-marxist leanings and his divisive rhetoric. Anyone who becomes President in the US and tells the population that successful people “didnt earn that” and created a class-based culture of blame and hatred is dangerously divisive.
Well when you tell people the wealthy built their wealth on the backs of others who arent as wealthy, it drives the whole “equity” of outcomes argument as opposed to an equity of opportunity. Ans creates jealousy, and a “give me my fair share” culture as opposed to earning it. I think “they didnt earn that” is just wrong. It serves the simplistic oppressor/oppressed narrative which is also a false distinction for the most part and doesnt accuratey describe most of what people now ascribe it to.
I think you are stretching things here. The bulk of Obama's public record is very inclusive. It's not fair to cherry pick the exceptions. As to claims of socialism and Marxism, he did nothing of the kind while in office. Obamacare itself is a compromise. This country should have socialized medicine like Canada, Engliand and other countries do. He did the best he could, and certainly was no socialist.
Actually he never said “earned that”… he used the word…build. He was simply stating the fact that for every successful person, someone, some thing, some circumstances helped you get there. Esp in this country. He wasn’t talking about oppressed and oppressors. He was stating a simple truth. He was making the case to increase taxes on the very wealthy, which I support. (Bill Clinton left office with a budget surplus. Bush came into office, lowered taxes on wealthy and surplus gone). Anyone in upper middle class knows it’s easier to make money once you have some.
Anyhow I googled and this came up…obamas entire comment
You're joking, right? His resume was paper thin. He had and has no core competency. He was a very gifted orator, and the people who elected him hoped he could take us to a post-racist America. He did the opposite. His accomplishments were negligible. Even as a Socialist he was a failure because he was too attracted to the good life and famous people. A huge disappointment and squarely in the bottom tier of all U.S. presidents.
He destroyed any hope for unifying what we now call race politics. Example?
- people who cling to their guns and religion
- if I had a son, he would have looked like Trayvon Martin
- (from Michelle) I fear for my daughters every time they get in a car
Take any of those comments, make the target a Black, and have them come from any other race than a Black. It would be condemned. Obama, having been deified, went unchecked. And we will live with that now for decades.
You’ve gotta be white. (I am). He was commenting on the tragic killing of a young black kid targeted because he was black by a self appointed vigilante. When he said that line about “they didn’t earn tha” he was referring to those who make it big in this country don’t do it alone....they have the education, infrastructure and everything else this country offers. Gosh you talk about victim complex...methinks you’ve got it bad.
Here is the complete quote “You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.
And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations”
He was talking about middle class folks who were left behind by both parties!
Many have died because of his negligent remarks. He was a good orator but when he had to comment off the cuff he stumbled like most ppl.
Wealth redistribution IS socialism. It has destroyed every society it’s tried in because , like the saying goes, eventually you run out of other peoples money.
It is and always will be true that there are ppl who are born into opportunity but our system is the only type where you can work your way up. It takes exceptional character and is hard but lots of people have success stories in western society.
I caution anyone ever holding the Clinton’s up as examples of good anything. They have been corruption inc. I know they haven’t been nabbed yet and most likely never will but then how long did it take to legally take down Al Capone? There are many other notorious criminals that have eluded prosecution by exploiting it
yet I believe in it regardless of its weaknesses. Just because there is known dubious activity doesn’t equate to criminal charges.
I think the Obamas were groomed to be what they became for years before finding themselves in the WH. I did agree with some of Michelle’s concerns in that obesity and poor diets were the biggest threat to the health of children.
Do you want a flash light to help with the search and rescue?
Seriously, how is it that our race relations deteriorated significantly during the admin of our first black president? Most ppl I know were encouraged at the prospect even if they didn’t agree with his politics.
He made seriously poor remarks before he had the facts about two separate incidents. He used rather rude remarks regarding Christian’s and their support of our 2A rights.
If a white candidate made disparaging remarks about any group of ppl of color, lgbtq, Muslims or Jews they’d have never made it to the W. H. and rightfully so. I guess Christian’s aren’t as thin skinned as other groups and don’t need the coddling.
He gets a two out of five stars from me. Pelosi and Schumer get a minus two out of five. They are both awful people and have done more harm than good. Nan needs to just retire and we NEED term limits but somehow the very people who’d be affected are the only ones with the legal means to create them. HOW STUPID IS THAT?!
Anyhow, thank you for sharing your thoughts on the matter. I hope you (and the whole damn country) have a great new year.
As I asked my late father in early 2008, when did the ability to deliver a good speech off a teleprompter qualify one to be president? I told my dad I would vote for Obama if he could name one thing that Obama had done in his entire life up that point that qualified him to be president. He couldn’t. I guess that makes me a racist.
Obama never held a regular job. He grew up with a silver spoon and was raised by a disgruntled expat but still never hurt for stuff like decent shoes. I will give his mother credit for ensuring her children get to know real poverty up close but not necessarily experience it like their less fortunate neighbors.
His only real job was being a professional activist and then running for the senate where his performance wasn’t particularly stellar.
Rather than cement racial harmony he actually was racially divisive and was the impetus of racial violence not seen in decades. His rhetoric inspired the ambush murder of a whole lot of police officers.
He’s certainly not stupid so I can only surmise that his actions were deliberate and had the desired effect. He set up the mood for the 2020 summer of “love”(hate) that continues to be a problem with Antifa establishing a strong hold in the rural surroundings of Alabama.
He got us involved in international agreements that are globally destructive such as the Paris Accord which has been based on manipulated data (aka BS) and has already wreaked havoc in several countries. His admin was dismissive of all republicans or conservatives of any stripe as well as unnecessarily punitive to the public at large.
He gutted our space program, advocated like all tyrants to disarm the public. It’s the first step taken by most authoritarian regimes before bringing the hammer of oppression down.
If he’s so worried about climate change and the seas rising why did he purchase the big island fortress on Martha’s Vineyard? It’s also a very white community so I guess he really does identify with his own white heritage at least a little. He advocated for using CRT in our federal agencies, military and public education as well as DEI. He was on that bent while still in office.
He wasn’t our worst president ever but wasn’t far from the bottom.
Well, we certainly have a different interpretation of the facts. I have not dealt much with Obama's history, but I had a friend at the Unitarian Universalist church I attended in Summit NJ who knew Barry Obama when he was a pre-teen and attended Sunday School at the Unitarian Universalist church in Hololulu. Barry was living with his maternal grandparents at the time - they are long-tern UUs. "Silver spoon" is a definite misnomer. Comfortable middle class is the way he was raised.
You seem to imply that his work as a community organizer is not a real job. The sounds like some sort of insult. It is certainly a mischaracterization of what he did, just like you mischaracterize his upbringing. And you forget that he was a professor at the University of Chicago Law School. That's not a real job?
So far as I know and based on the public record (I checked his Wikipedia page), your statements about Obama are a deliberate distortion. Get your facts straight first at least. As far as your interpretation of the facts, well, I doubt that I buy into your viewpoint.
Being smart and being a capable POTUS are two entirely separate criteria. We need to think more about executive skills, at the margin, than legislative experience. There are plenty of capable legislators in Washington to handle legislation. Our best proving ground for a POTUS is one of the fifty governors, particular leading a state that is less uniform in its voting.
In retrospect Sir, u raise what seems a very valid and compelling point. It is, like as not, the reason his administration was so thoroughly lackluster and disappointing – a sort of black guy playing a white guy’s role. It was sad to watch, crushing even, but the immoral and untenable thinking that underpinned it never occurred to me. Thank you for that.
This child of the 60’s who marched for Civil Rights adds the following to help others who don’t seem willing to see the truth of the Obama disaster: it was like going to the home of the big Italian family Nextdoor for Christmas Dinner and being served Egg Salad Sandwiches. But it wasn’t funny; instead, it hurt.
OK, to be fair, Barack Obama did have to face the merit test of the voters. Perhaps too many voters bought into DEI ideology, but that doesn't lessen the fact that he passed the test. I agree his presidency ended up being divisive, but he was elected on (perceived) merit.
Perceived, yes. But his accomplishments were paltry and unimpressive. He did know how to whip up a crowd and trick them into believing that voting for him would absolve them of their white guilt.
April 13, 2008, attacking gun owners and people of faith: “You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”
Oct. 25, 2010, on a Univision interview, on punishing enemies: “If Latinos sit out the election instead of saying, ‘We’re gonna punish our enemies and we’re gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us,’ if they don’t see that kind of upsurge in voting in this election, then I think it’s gonna be harder and that’s why I think it’s so important that people focus on voting on November 2.”
April 2013, attacking wealthy Americans: Obama insisted “the wealthiest Americans should pay their fair share” although he admitted he paid less than half the standard rate for his income bracket.
July 1, 2014, attacking the GOP: “Middle-class families can’t wait for Republicans in Congress to do stuff. So sue me.”
August 2014, attacking police: “There’s no excuse for police to use excessive force against peaceful protests or to throw protesters in jail for lawfully exercising their First Amendment rights.”
April 2015, attacking Christians: “On Easter, I do reflect on the fact that, as a Christian, I am supposed to love. And I have to say that sometimes, when I listen to less than loving expressions by Christians, I get concerned. But that’s a topic for another day.”
Yeah they always end up doing the opposite of what they’re trying to do.
My favorite version of this is that the $50 trillion safety net debt bomb, which has accumulated largely by paying out benefits to elderly white Christians, will have to be paid off by the mostly black and brown future population of the country. Chef’s kiss.
Nonsense! He was ELECTED by a clear majority of the people (unlike others we could mention) on a message of hope and inclusiveness. The only “divisive” thing about his presidency is that electing a black man offended so many; I mean, the nerve of those people! An uppity black!
And can't write a legal dissent by citing any actual law, precedent etc. her one and only "opinion" as a SC Justice was nothing but regurgitated "social" justice tripe.
Her tenure didn't end, it reverted -- From Douglas Murray/The Telegraph: This already very privileged woman is going to remain on the teaching faculty of Harvard with a nice pay package of around $900,000 a year. Victimhood turns out to be nice work if you can get it.
In honor of the Sopranos(Carmela Soprano), and because Black names are made up and frequently misspelled, I have given her this new name. Is it a Hindu name- Shaquaa Nd, shenijka( the j is the newest), Shawonder? Most readers know the score!
When we fall over each other to select a person from a particular group, we betray the insecurity we feel that such a candidate might actually be worthy absent their racial “plus”.
Because this eventually becomes exposed to performance, it will not be held aloft forever. Because a smaller percentage of women are willing to work at the expense of being a parent, we already see the demands for greater leave and flexibility and a demand to accommodate…all fine if you are treating the workplace as a family promoting enterprise, not so clear cut for the single women and men who are able to fully dedicate themselves to a career and need to throttle their output back.
Freedom is hard and frustrating, but we have to accept that it results in unequal outcomes…the alternatives are full-on tyranny or socialism. Which of the latter two appeals to someone who has tasted freedom? Even Socrates knew you had to lie to people to accept the constraints of a non-free polity.
"From your lips to God's ear". Notice how I am quoting someone, hence the quotation marks. I would cite the original author of those word but I don't know who that is. The only thing I know is that they did not originate with me. I'm not a plagiarist!
The actual plagiarism, though troubling, is relatively minimal and under different circumstances might be forgivable, but that is not the real story. The real story is an institution as well as any individual is vulnerable personally and publicly when there is a DEI hire. DEI hurts everyone. DEI must end. This Gay debacle demonstrates the flagrant absurdity of the DEI model of higher education. It must be soul crushing for Dr. Gay to suddenly realize she was a token all along. Harvard will not recover unless they replace the entire board.
No, the plagiarism is not minimal nor is it forgivable. Not plagiarizing is a central tenet of scholarship. As an academic, I'm not only scandalized by her plagiarism, but by the sparseness of her publication record. While I agree with Ackman that academic credentials aren't as important as business acumen in a university president, the fact is, she was supposedly chosen for her academic credentials as well as other qualities. 17 papers in a 26-year career is nothing (and it's worse that apparently 11 were partly plagiarized). And she's in a discipline in which she should have published at least one book. That is a really, really skimpy record.
Plagiarism could get a paltry student expelled 30 years ago. Now it can get you a high profile job - president of Harvard to President of the US it matters not
I got busted for plagiarism in the 3rd grade. Before I even knew the word and its meaning, a lesson I never forgot. Ms Gay was probably learning the symbolism of the Pride flag and using preferred pronouns in the 3rd grade. No time for learning about plagiarism.
Agree, she never possessed qualities necessary to be a president of Harvard. But the same goes for the much celebrated Ibram X Kendi - what kind of scholar is he, exactly? What stellar scholarly research has he produced?
And this is the real tragedy of DEI. The ones who are supposedly helped most are actually hurt the most. Her appointment blocked someone truly deserving. It is a mirage, a good way to crush hope, subjugate, and marginalize. "She was a diversity hire", adding to the stereotype that is driving modern racism and sexism.
"For Harvard, her own dignity and our national commitment to assessing Black people (and all people) according to the content of their character, she should step down."
We all see someone wonderful when we look in the passing shop windows; so did she, and now she doesn't. We should have some sympathy, and END DEI! It provided her and many others with a gulling mirage of whom they imagine they are, whom she imagined she was. It was not the glass ceiling she shattered but the amusement park mirror that only verified her narcissism. Now broken.
Her resignation statement ascribed her resignation to racism and asserted the 'integrity' of her scholarship. There was no apology for plagiarism. She is now a lecturer but retains the president's salary of $900,000. Without a book she doesn't qualify for Assistant Professorship but no doubt she can now write a book on how racists forced her to resign
She blamed her resignation on racism. To a hammer, everything is a nail. Soul crushing would mean a disparity between perception and reality - but to her, everything is racism. That’s her entire reality. She was hired, built her career on this, and has resigned based on this. From racism she was created and to crying racism she will return. So no, her soul is intact, as long as it can still squeeze some victimhood tears out of someone.
Minimal? They are at 50 individual instances of plagiarized documents and counting. I just hope Rufo et al keep digging. Gay deserves to have her credentials stripped.
Plagiarism should never be forgivable regardless of the person’s color. The Board knew all about it and she was hired because in the upside down DEI universe plagiarism isn’t” troubling” , only having the correct ideology. Meritocracy and truth are an anathema to the Woke practitioners. It will. Be a big job to keep the fight going to dismantle the DEI establishment- religion. The so called fields of gender and race studies are vacuous and need to go.
Completely disagree. I was a mere college student not following an academic path..... it was pretty clear in my basic writing classes the seriousness of properly attributing and the penalties involved. The number one university in the world certainly has to take this very seriously .
"In order to be deemed anti-racist, one must personally take action to reverse any unequal outcomes in society."
It seems to me that it's more accurate to say that being "anti-racist" requires only that one say (post on social media) the correct things. My oldest daughter is very concerned about racism, structural racism, yadda yadda Black, yadda white men, yadda.
One of the obvious disadvantages for black children is their very low school achievement in math. I asked my daughter, a math graduate student, if she had thought of volunteering as a math tutor in a school in a low-income area, and she looked at me as if I were from Mars.
As long as it’s “the system” - an evil, amorphous blob - that’s seen as the problem, individual actions are seen as a drop in the bucket - a waste of time. So the school system has turned into an activist factory to tear down “the system.” And that, at its core, is the destructive, putrid Marxist mindset.
Not sure if your daughter has been infected by the mind virus, but it certainly has captured the majority of two generations in the West. Look at Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and most of the countries in Europe for how things will get even worse here in the US if it isn’t stopped now.
Not just a waste of time, but actively bad, since it eases suffering in the current system and thus delays the total revolution that all the right people know is necessary.
Must be nice to believe that personal charity is bad, while charity with other people's money, via simply voting the right way, is a supreme moral act.
In Canada, DEI is even infecting Christian charities. Before you make a donation to any charity, see what their website says about DEI. If they support it, don’t give them your money.
Why give your money to an institution that supports an ideology teaching that you didn’t honestly earn it in the first place?
Good idea! I also have noticed that my city government has an antiracist strategy and it promotes hiring based on DEI. My local school board has a director of DEI. My credit union also gives money to DEI programs. Most Canadians do not seem to understand the true meaning of DEI and Antiracism so there are few people speaking out about this issue. Sad.
One of the problems with black children is that they don't have two parents at home ensuring they do their homework, and helping them answer questions when they have them. A culture of focusing on education as a central priority of the family is key to the success of Jewish and many Asian cultures: not the color of their skin.
We have to be able to say this, and work to fix it if we are even going to get black people out of their cycle of low achievement and poverty. DEI just lowers the standards for everybody so progressive people can feel good about the outcomes.
I believe that’s the kind of thing Roland Fryer was saying, what he was researching, and what he was in fact actively working on, to raise black students up through a school program in Harlem, when Claudine Gay got him suspended from his tenured professorship at Harvard. After which she was rewarded with the presidency of the university. The fact that DEI/ anti-racism is rotten to the core is evident when its proponents like Gay actively work against real scholars like Roland Fryer (who came from a poor, black American family rather than Gay’s own middle class Haitian family) who are doing boots on the ground work for black development.
Could not agree more. DEI is about cultural retribution and financial expropriation, instead of examining the root causes of problems in education ACROSS races. Black leadership (and most white leadership in the academy) are focused on Kendism instead of truly solving problems.
Thomas Sowell has been saying this for decades. So have Glenn Loury . Mcwhorter, Coleman Hughes . Listen to the podcast Econtalk interview with Roland Fryer ( Harvard economist who’s research findings did not fit the DEI theology and Claudine Gay went after him. He is black from a disadvantaged upbringing )
Agree 100%. I follow Econtalk and Coleman. If feels like black activists are more interested in expropriation and retribution instead of doing the hard work of fixing the rot in their own cultures. And BTW, lots of white kids have the same issue. It's not a color/race thing.
And Fredrick Douglass and Booker T. Washington said it years before Sowell did, and somebody shut them up. I guess the "cancel culture" started way back.
Anyone not black who raise this very basic, rational point will be automatically demonized as racist. If you're not black you are not allowed to criticize or even give helpful suggestions about what can help black people. If you even point out something obvious and doesn't take "lived experience" to see, you'll still be a racist for "talking over black people". On the off chance that someone actually allows you to speak and you say something helpful, you're still racist for being a "white savior" or some such if you're not white.
Leftist would rather let black people rot than to risk being called racist. Staying on the sideline and watch the cycle of low achievement and poverty repeat itself is "being respectful".
"I demand that you listen and understand me as a _____ person".......which is then followed shortly by "Because you're white, you can never understand me".
Yes, make them put their time where their mouth is. Good parenting for sure.
I have a daughter in a similar situation and she has assured me that she is helping others on campus. I’d like to “audit” what she is telling me, but I know that would hurt too much.
I (a youngish millenial) recently went through this a few years ago. I realized that posting on social media does absolutely nothing but make ME feel better.
I think she has an old Accord. It's just the way their generation thinks. Having the correct sentiments makes you part of their Good Group. Actually doing something specific for individuals is a surprising concept.
Fascinating. Can you tell us how the conversation with your daughter proceeded from there? How to reprogram your daughter and others in her age cohort?
Yes. Because while she's "very concerned" about racism she doesn't really want to help minorities. Just give them a passing grade and advance them. Thereby making sure they stay ignorant.
I read this on your X post and was actually thinking "I wish The Free Press would publish this - this deserves the widest possible audience." Bravo. This needs to be clearly stated over and over again by as many people as possible.
Please don’t forget the role of the US Department of Education Office of Civil Rights, Department of Justice Office of Violence Against Women, the White House “Not Alone” task force, Civic Nation and others in all of this. Without the unregulated “Dear Colleague” Title IX letter of 2011 being used to bring activism onto campus, to create bloated administrations for the Title IX directives and to recruit students for the “survivor” movement, none of this would have happened. Russlynn Ali who signed the 2011 “Dear Colleague Letter” went to work for Laurene Powell Jobs at XQ Institute “DEI” “Reimagining Education”. Stanford Law Professor Michele Dauber who called a Harvard professor a “Shitty White Male” was a co-drafter of the “Dear Colleague” letter while her husband, Ken Dauber, consulted for the DoE OCR. He was an early hire at Google. Dauber orchestrated the recall of Judge Aaron Persky after she’d colluded behind the scenes of the high profile trial of Brock Turner. Plagiarism? Stanford put up a bench with a quote from the Emily Doe letter which was read by Chanel Miller but not written by her even though it is credited to her. Liz MaGill was Dean of Stanford Law at the time. She said nothing and went on to UPenn. The goal in 2011 was to change America forever - that’s apparent in the emails from Russlynn Ali. The goal was to get rid of due process. That’s also apparent. The goal was to racketeer and profiteer off private campuses under the guise of social justice entrepreneurship enterprises. The White House hired interns from Harvard and elsewhere for “Community Outreach” to do this. Wagatwe Wanjuki, Tina Nguyen, Laura L Dunn to name a few. The WH and UN and SKDK worked with social media networks and influencers as proven in ReWire Magazine in 2014. They wanted to reach certain demographics so they hired Emma Watson to reach the Harry Potter Generation for the #HeForShe campaign. They celebrated their victories with the number of clicks they got on social media links, failing to admit that SKDK and other PR companies were buying fake engagement as admitted by Hillary Rosen. SKDK represented “Its On Us” which is part of Civic Nation which is headed by Valerie Jarrett and has Tina Tchen on the board. This is not social justice, it is not charity, it is opportunism - they figured out how to suck money out of schools across the nation to feed their self-serving profiteering warped causes. Many of us have believed in passing on to the next generation the generosity and charity that made our educations possible. But what this crowd have done is shown that our gifts are not going towards those who deserve an education but towards dishonest enterprises using non-profits to make millions under a social justice banner. It’s beyond wrong. It’s criminal.
Thank you. I do sincerely believe that criminal prosecutions are in order. Lynn Rosenthal from Obama’s DOJ OVW said in 2014 at the Dartmouth Sexual Assault Summit that the reason that administration focused on campuses was in order to influence generations to come. What has happened was deliberate and it was organized and it has cost the public billions in federal funds, cost schools millions in lawsuits, led to the denial of civil rights under Title IX and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act while enriching social entrepreneurs who figured out who to game the system by recruiting, training, commanding media, social media and growing their organizations wealth and power.
Thank you. It’s research. It is research I was compelled to undertake after sensing something was wrong in the sensationalist coverage of the criminal trial of New Hampshire v Owen Labrie in 2015. I had no idea about the rot I would discover and the fact that his trial was used to push an agenda and that St Paul’s School was targeted, he was framed and that the White House “Not Alone” task force advisor S. Daniel Carter admitted to me personally that the real interest in his partner, Laura L Dunn, attending the trial as “personal representative” for the “victim” was in St Paul’s School as opposed to Labrie himself. The goal was to get inside St Paul’s School, to insert a “compliance” officer who would introduce maxient.com Stasi-like reporting software and the goal was to extort St Paul’s School. An attempt was made to bribe Owen Labrie in 2017 while he was waiting for his appeals. Congresswoman Ann Kuster has a hell of a lot to answer for. She shut down ABC/GMA in July 2019 from airing an interview with him which would have exposed all of this. His accuser, Chessy Prout, was recruited, aged 15 by the White House “Not Alone” task force - months before trial. A team of attorneys, PR specialists, Gov Affairs specialists were sent up to New Hampshire to train the prosecutors and control the media. They left a paper trail behind. Chessy Prout became an “ambassador” for PAVE www.shatteringthesilence.org which got called out as 100% lies in 2020 by Melinda Coleman. Then she joined Vital Voices founded by Hillary Clinton with PR from SKDK. Then she pivoted to promoting BLM. Rep. Ann Kuster told Congress “We are all Emily Doe” in 2016. She used to be a lobbyist for Rohypnol. She just spotted the opportunity to get money to New Hampshire from the DOJ OVW which could be used to support elections via the NHCADSV whose director of public affairs, Amanda Grady Sexton, saw the Labrie trial as an opportunity. She was also on Senator Jeanne Shaheen’s re-election campaign committee and the NHCADSV worked with Laura L Dunn and co to spin the narrative which then led to them getting kick backs from the civil suit settlements and a contract with St Paul’s School. NHCADSV is a publicly funded non-profit and a vendor for the DOD but the State of New Hampshire claims that it is a private non-profit and therefore not accountable to the public. It’s IRS Form 990s are opaque. It is partnered with UNH which has received several million from the DoJ OVW to develop “Bystander” and “Know Your Power” biased training which it now markets under Soteria Solutions - recognized for entrepreneurship using federal grants. The prosecutors in NH v Owen Labrie and Law Professors at UNH said that they were interested in ‘private” institutions. Yes - they were being given public grants to go after private institutions and to blackmail them and extort them under social justice. And it was perfectly fine for them to frame scholarship students who would fit the profile they were looking for and to profile campuses to fit the profile they were looking for to achieve this. They left a huge paper trail behind and I hope that federal prosecutors will start looking into this. It defrauded the public and put lives in serious harm’s way. It led to the suicide of Dartmouth Professor David Bucci, the denial of rights to Saifullah Khan at Yale, to the denial of rights for thousands of others and it was all orchestrated and coordinated.
He is so right. Though I must say, it took him so long to realize this was happening? I guess the elite truly live in a bubble. Hopefully he can convince more of his cohorts and they help push the reversal of this rot not just in our education system but in our businesses and institutions.
He's still living in a bubble as he obviously still has no clue that when the leftists say "women" are oppressed, they're not actually talking about women. Ackerman mentioned "women" twice. Both times it was clear to me he doesn't know what a "woman" is under the doctrine of DEI.
Can't think of many HBS alums that I've been truly inspired by recently - Bill is one of them, truly a profile in courage imho. We need 10x more folks like him.
I appreciate Mr. Ackman taking the time to focus on these issues for several months. He is correct that a mere change at the top of these universities is insufficient. Other university presidents (two I get communications from) have avoided much of the harsh scrutiny., but they continue to support DEI and fail to see how that doctrine is contrary to Western values and political thought and can easily become anti-White, anti-Mainland Asian, and antisemitic. It started with a critique of so-called ethnocentrism, the fact-value distinction, moved on to multiculturalism, then affirmative action, diversity obsession and finally the full-fledged DEI catechism. Enough.
I should clarify: strike Mainland Asia, insert East and South Asian. Of course Japan and Taiwan are islands. DEI favors 'Pacific Islanders' but I assume that excludes Japan and Taiwan. I fear that pretty soon our Vietnamese Americans (that would invoke SE Asia) will be labeled as White Adjacent as they continue to demonstrate talent and initiative while seeking no special treatment.
SO many people don’t realize they have used words to hoodwink and manipulate people. What Bill said is correct “ DEI was not about diversity in its purest form. Rather, DEI was a political advocacy movement on behalf of certain groups that are deemed oppressed under DEI’s own methodology.”
Yes they do. For example, the definition of "racism," that Bill Ackman used is the one I use, but it is NOT the one used by leftists. They have changed the definition of that word, at least when they use it, to mean something along the lines of "white people using the race of minorities as a selection criterion instead of merit." So beware, when speaking with one of them, that this key word does not mean to them what it may mean to you.
We need to pushback hard and call out “anti-racism” for the racism that it is.
As Konstantin Kisin said recently in one of his excellent Triggernometry interviews, When in history has focussing on race ever brought good results for a society?
The racial essentialism of today’s so called anti-racists, like BLM, is no different from or better than the white (I will not use a capital “w”) supremacy it claims to replace.
I say it claims to replace because black power groups like BLM happily skip right over the race neutral colour blindness promoted by MLK and the initial Civil Rights Movement, as if they were never a real thing, with real power for change via black development as argued for by Shelby Steele, Robert Woodson, Glenn Loury, John McWhorter, and recently Coleman Hughes.
If you haven’t read Shelby Steele’s “The Content of Our Character” in a while, or ever, I highly recommend it.
(Thanks to John McWhorter for including it in his 2023 year end book recommendations).
Yep. He apparently thinks "women" means women as we used to understand it. He doesn't realize when they say "women are oppressed", they're talking about a new kind of women. The ones at the pinnacle of the oppression hierarchy. The old kind of women in the mean time are having all their rights as women dismantled.
"While slavery remains a permanent stain on our country’s history—a fact that is used by DEI to label white people as oppressors—it doesn’t therefore hold that all white people, generations after the abolishment of slavery, should be held responsible for its evils."
No, Mr. Ackman, slavery is no more a stain on America's history than it is on the history of virtually every other nation of the world that once practiced slavery and many that practice it today. Furthermore, no white person in America today can be held responsible for slavery. Slavery has been illegal in America since 1865, with the ratification of the 13th Amendment and I doubt anyone living has come close to achieving the age of 160. So this is all nonsense. The only thing that the DEI movement will do is succeed in dividing Americans by skin color; devolving us to tribalism and creating actual racial supremacists. DEI must DIE.
I would argue that America was and is the original anti-slavery country. It was Britain, France, Italy, Spain, and all the other European countries that brought slavery to the New World. Within 30 years of its founding, the United States had outlawed slave trade, and slavery was gone completely within 90 years of its founding. Yet it is somehow the USA that gets blamed for it.
Yeah yeah. Then explain the history of the West Indies. Or how an entire subcontinent was subjugated until after WWII. Every country has its own cross to bear. The US is not the uniquely guilty slave country. The Soviets enslaved Eastern Europe and China enslaves its population today.
In the British West Indies slavery was abolished in 1833. The French islands earlier. Only 750,000 dead in a bloody civil effectively ended slavery here. Only in the US was it so closely tied to race. Slavery took other forms in the aftermath. Race was again the determinant. I oppose most affirmative action, and all DEI, reparations etc. Those too will continue to make blacks dependent on government based on a supposed inferiority .Those who call for a new civil war and secession are buffoons who believe no African-American has their job based on ability. Wiser heads need to prevail. Currently the loudest voices want hand out eternally or think they are ready to reenact the civil. war. My primary concern is this country and today there is much more yelling and grandstanding than listening and reflecting.
Grow up. Tell the black Jamaicans about how the UK abolished slavery in 1833 and race didn't matter any more. How many Americans are calling for a new civil war? It's just hyperbole. Almost everyone understands that our last Civil War was not one - it was a regional conflict. Civil wars are ugly; race wars even uglier. That's why the lies that the Democrats - and sadly, you - peddle are so dangerous as they continue to foment grievance and hatred.
Thanks Bruce, came here to say just this. I work/have worked with too many successful black and brown folks to believe skin color has anything to do with anything worth doing. Real Mexican food being a notable exception, but again, I know some gringos who do fair interpretations. Not to toot my own horn…
One could argue that, considering the principals that our country was supposed to be founded on, ANY slavery is a pretty big stain. What he said can still be true even if America was ahead of the curve on getting rid of slavery. And the "Everyone else was doing it" helps explain why we were too...but it doesn't absolve us. Especially when our leaders espoused so much about people's inalienable rights and freedom and the like.
Who the F cares? Everyone who owned a slave in America is dead. Does slavery negate the words of the Declaration of Independence? Does serfdom negate Magna Carta? Go preach to people who will actually fall for such silliness.
And yet the entire MSM and political class took turns scolding Nikki Haley to make sure she never forgets our country's original sin. She, a non-white daughter of immigrants who weren't even here until long after slavery had ended, must also repent in 2024. What gives?
Is past liberal and general support for Black Lives Matter, including from the Jewish leadership/community, a similar mistake? And if so, what should be done now/by whom -- and why did that transpire? Is there a fair comparison between BLM founders living in opulance then with Hamas leaders living in opulance in ways that are useful? Should this entire matter be prominent in the upcoming Presidential election?
As a Jew I’ll take a stab at this. Education and learning is part of the Jewish ethos. So is “ tikkun olam” improving the state of the world. So is being kind and good to the downtrodden. Jews know deeply what it is like to be persecuted . So many Jewish leaders marched with MLK
This is a perfect storm for being suckered into this DEI nightmare especially if it is formulated as “ correct past wrongs”. My understanding is these hard left Jews are well intentioned but sorely misguided. Some have woken up since 10-7/. Others are sadly and shamefully still committed to this crazy ideology.
The more religious the Jewish community the more conservative the politics. Those communities are more insular and very traditional .
Suckered also into the BLM nightmare, are you implying? If so, who do you expect the suckerees are?, and in what segment of our society are they represented? Then, please continue: what should be done and by whom? Bari Weiss and her organization seem useful and engaged on that score.
Yes, a direct linkage. BLM and DEI support is very intertwined. Add “Free Palestine” in there too! They are all movements based on the same faulty oppressor ideology.
The oppressor/oppressed ideology is known as cultural Marxism. It is seductive in its simplicity (who doesn’t like a nice, neat binary view of every single problem?) and in its supposed end goal of helping those who have less.
But its application in real life, to economies and cultures, is destructive to human flourishing - without free speech and thought, the defence of individual human rights is not possible.
My prescription for universities is to make Thomas Sowell required reading for students across all faculties. Sowell believes in facts, not fairytales. His works command respect.
"I first became concerned about Harvard...early on the morning of October 8".
With all due respect, Mr. Ackman, that was your first mistake. For years, Bari Weiss and others have been screaming from the rooftops about how DEI has been a parasite infecting elite universities. You would have heard them if you had been listening.
Still - better late than never.
Better late than never for sure. Hopefully Mr. Ackman will also notice the formerly unprofitable public company Twitter firing 80% of its employees without disruption.
If we are lucky this will cause Mr. Ackman to realize that this ideology’s infiltration of corporate America has resulted in shareholders being defrauded at scale by a ballooning functionless administrative class.
I can’t think of a single major corporation that couldn’t be brought to heel by a class action shareholder suit aimed at what they are spending money on at the personnel level.
"The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy."
- Oscar Wilde
“What would you say…..ya do here??”
-John C McGinley as Bob Slydell in ‘Office Space’
The Bobs
That is a fantastic scene!!!! His reading of that line is phenomenal!
Ah. I should have read a few replies prior to posting.
And the govt bloat should go as well
"Without disruption."
https://www.techspot.com/news/101371-report-shows-x-now-worth-715-less-than.html
The "disruption" (decline in value in Twitter/X) is due to a boycott by DEI-influenced corporations who seek to virtue signal and inocculate themselves from criticism by throwing Musk under the bus for daring to question DEI orthodoxy. But Claudine Gay did what Musk could not - precipitate the end of the DEI racket.
Think it has to do with incoherent content moderation, firing of development teams, businesses not wanting to have their tweets next to white nationalists, and an erratic CEO who retweets white nationalists, crazy conspiracy theories and tells advertisers to "go f-uck themsleves." Think that has more to do with it than whatever boogeyman might be out there.
I predicted this the day Elon took over Musk. While Bari, Nellie, et. all were cheering Musk.
"Elon had a chance to be on the board, but he wanted the whole pie. Well, now he's going to have to eat it - and Elon is a very messy eater. He'll turn Twitter into 4Chan within the year."
What is the "DEI racket?"
You have a weird obsession with Musk.
Not at all.
Just enjoying that another one of my predictions has 100% been proven accurate.
So, everytime you, or anyone else opens their mouth, I will remind them of that.
So your argument is that, even though traffic is up and the website works the same, there was also a collusive extortion racket orchestrated by the marketing departments of other publicly traded companies??
Well at least we can agree that the discovery phase, where we examine the communications of the left-wing extremists who work in the marketing and PR departments, will be fun.
Okay so you actually have a point this time, Compost. There’s even more crime here than I thought.
If you’re using your position and misappropriating company resources to help Democrats then that’s embezzlement AND a campaign finance violation.
Why do you bother replying to this imbecilic troll?
Because one day, he thinks he'll win.
You're right, Richard. Musk is killin' it. Things are going great.
Not at all like I predicted on here when he first bought the company.
Don't let this conversation be hijacked into an attempt to bash Elon Musk. The critical issue is the destruction of academia and its consequences for our nation. Compost swims in irrelevance.
Hope Ackman brings that same energy.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/neri-oxman-wife-of-harvard-donor-bill-ackman-is-accused-of-plagiarism
What's Hillsdale up in Michigan doing these days?
"the discovery phase"
Oh ... that would be interesting. I think it wouldn't end in the marketing department, it would lead back to DIE policies, and likely back to Black Rock to University Presidents.
You see, University presidents use DIE scores of investment banks to determine which banks get to recruit from their campus. Recruiting from the Ivy League is the life blood of investment banks. So the investment banks set the DIE policies on the corporations for loans and equities. Thus, if marketing didn't make the call on X all by themselves, but at the direction of the C-suite, who acted at the direction of the Investment Banks, who acted at the direction of the Ivy League presidents ... which ultimately goes to GULF (Global University Leadership Forum) which is part of the WEF ... all lines lead back to Dr. Evil himself.
Ok. Musk is killin' it. Things are going great.
Yeah.....when is the lawsuit, this "discovery phases" happening again?
Did Elon tell you that?
What I predicted 100% came to pass. Sorry.
My argument is that the value has dropped 71%....as I predicted it would.
Yeah.....let me know when this "discovery phase" is supposed to happen.
“Disruption” means disruption of service. Company value has nothing to do with the quality of the service.
Also, Musk bought Twitter at the height of a bubble, and he even overpaid for what it was worth then “for the meme.” So the decline is Twitter’s value has more to do with the purchase price and changes in underlying market factors--a.k.a. the value of all tech companies came crashing down as interest rates rose--since the purchase than his management of Twitter.
Ok. Musk is killin' it. Things are going great.
Things are going pretty well for Elon. Space X doing its thing and he owns 42% of an estimated $150 B valuation. And you may have heard about Tesla. X is small potatoes and he should be able to maintain it in spite of those who would like to shut it down like, well you know....
Oh, He's doing fine. That's not the issue.
I just predicted he'd f-ck up Twitter the day he took over
And he has.
No, enlighten me.....who exactly wants to shut Twitter down? The companies who don't want their brands associated with white nationalists posts, etc.? The companies who Elon told to "go f-ck themselves?"
That’s not what I said.
The options aren’t False Thing You Said A or False Thing You Said B.
There’s also option C, reality, which is that the value of Twitter has declined primarily due to economic reasons unrelated to the technical quality of the service the company offers, and Musk is managing the company somewhat erratically. Although, it remains to be seen how his management will affect the company’s value in the fullness of time.
This wouldn’t be the first time Musk has taken an unorthodox approach to business and succeeded.
Thomas, just fyi, you will notice that these guys all uniformly write “Nah” when you debunk their State narrative, which they are just regurgitating.
They write “Nah” because it makes them seem confident and dismissive, even though they are getting crushed.
They are also trained to use this emoji
😏😏😏
for the same reason.
Nah. You just wrote a long paragraph trying to massage the word "disruption." That is what the "option" is. "Somewhat erratically" Lol! Yeah.....ok.
Nothing "remains to be seen."
I predicted he'd turn it into 4Chan the day he bought it.
Succeeded? In what? Rockets that blow up and cars that drive into walls?
Maybe he should go back to his promise to end world hunger.
Are you related to Kamala Harris?
BINGO!
Twitter was a Ministry of Truth. Now my feed is cluttered with anti-Semites and porn. Musk is richer than God. He is a champion for free speech. He eliminated zoom employees. I am not sure he has made Twitter profitable.
"Now my feed is cluttered with anti-Semites and porn" ... and other sweet lies.
Here's a clue buddy. If you specifically follow Anti-Semites and Porn Stars, you'll see Anti-Semitism and Porn! The Universe is a mirror to your life, the internet doubly so.
Your definitely not my buddy buddy as for mirrors your projection is noted
I don’t care about twitters market value. Twittering is what birdheads do. It wasn’t a compliment 40 yrs ago and I still view it as stupid.
If it wasn’t for Musk we wouldn’t have a space program. Obama neutered NASA and that was an unfortunate loss for America.
If our institutions of higher learning don’t reverse course immediately we won’t have ppl like Musk to keep America competitive in the tech industry. Gates, like Edison, attained greatness by standing on the shoulders of his tech superiors. He had better business acumen if you want to call unscrupulousness good business. Now Gates supports all this woke crap and is a an acolyte of the climate cult. He wants to seem like a compassionate philanthropist but his multimillion dollar donations aren’t impressive when he has obscene wealth to begin with. It’s more impressive to me when I see what is clearly a blue collar laborer put $10 in the bell ringers buckets.
I’d rather have free speech than a woke machine determining what is acceptable for me to read. That decision is mine alone and should be so for everyone.
It’s a risk I’m willing to take.
So you want the fedzilla to hire all of those minority hires to further swell the ranks of the ultrapowerful unelected bureaucracy? Those "graduates" will need something to do with those $500k sheepskins.
Never mind about just this blow-up issue of Claudine Gay and her plagiarism, the true overall scale of the problem with the Western world's universities is near impossible to overstate. The dismal truth is that whilst Western publics have been mesmerised by the MSM psychodrama of elections and party-political pluralism, a 5-decade long transformation has quietly been ongoing whereby the 'educated' middle-class (the future leaders, professionals and administators) have passed through a rite-of-passage Leftist sheep-dip. A highly seductive 'education' in how to think of yourself as virtuous just by the simple and cost-free adoption of 'correct' opinions. We have quietly got ourselves and our culture into a dreadful mess and the Claudine Gays et al are merely the tip of a very big iceberg. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/invasion-of-the-virtue-signallers
If only it were limited to the universities. Due to the stupidity or calculated evil of school boards and teachers unions it permeates our public schools down to the grade school level.
In York S.C a very conservative community a second grader is using they /them pronouns so yes it is leeching down to grade schools. We need to prevent the flood.
It has permeated American corporations as well. I have seen it first hand in many large companies!
Yes absolutely. It originated in the universities (via the early 20th c. intelleigentsia) and has spread from there right through each and every institution....even to the courts, the police and even to some extent the military. And yes the schools. The main thrust of my comment is that thanks what one might term an academia/media complex, it advanced by not ever becoming a big political story....until now when it's way too late. Comment threads have to be kept short and sweet but I've written about all this at more length..... here: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/are-we-making-progress and here: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/mrs-thatcher-and-the-good-life and elsewhere.
It IS in the military- they have quotas for recruitment and promotions based on equality and not who’s the most qualified. Should be interesting if we find ourselves in a hot war.
That this admin’s position of incompetence and weakness has only increased the likelihood of.
To be blunt, recruitment has very little to do with it. This poison has destroyed the very ability of young people to meet any sort of demanding task, let alone actual military training.
What is happening at the grade school level?
“What is happening at the grade school level?”
——————————
Democrats are sexually abusing the kids.
And do you have evidence to confirm political affiliation?
I'll wait....
It’s the party platform.
Now I have to go look up that quote from Biden about how it’s important to trans the kids because it was clear he was turned on by the concept.
The answer is “No. Only salacious bullshit.”
Ah Kevin, those evil Democrat paedophiles must have escaped from the DC pizza parlour basement and spread throughout the nation...Yup, those Dems.
As above, so below. Here in charming, wealthy, upper and upper-middle class Wilton, CT we have invested in a shiny new office of DEI for our school system. As far as I can tell, no one has raised any objections to this egregiously offensive intrusion into the minds and hearts of our children. No child shall be spared, from the most capable and bursting full of potential down to those with sadly, crippling disabilities. Our new office of DEI will parse them all into villains and victims. Now isn’t that a dainty dish to set before the king?!! We will produce generations of people filled with hate and self loathing. Things that used to be sins.
My 12 year old grandchild told me about students introducing themselves and stating their preferred pronouns. This happened on the first day of school during covid remote learning...3 years ago. Our schools are immersed in this disgusting ideology.
Perhaps you and your friends can do something about it...?
I think u r right on. We needed the stinking arrogance of Gay et al to wake us up to what’s going on right under our noses. I think, for me, it’s time to start posting on our local neighborhood websites. I know my neighbors won’t want to hear it, but now is the time. The iron is hot. If anyone knows of other towns starting to move against their DEI hollowed-out bastards please let me know. Thank you.
Do something about what?
Wilton? Westport's even worse!
It still is sinful and an abomination
but they(teachers unions) think it “progress”.
They cannot see the forest for the trees.
Well....."charming, wealthy" and....assuming white often go together.
What school in Wilton, CT?
What will they not be "spared from" exactly?
All kinds of Marxism and inappropriate schooling...DEI, trans-'education', asking kindergartens about their pronouns etc. Different states, different counties have different permutations. Some are more gone than others but the teachers coming out of the universities are bringing their 'perspectives' to the classroom. Ask around at your local schools. Find out what's happening. It could be fine. It could be scary or anything inbetween.
My daughter who has Aspergers and severe ADHD had trouble fitting in from birth. She came home from school in thee eighth grade claiming her health class teacher told them there are at least seven different genders. I argued that I found that absurd, there are ppl with varying sexual appetites but that didn’t change their gender. She explained she learned that transgender ppl are truly the gender they CHOOSE and that this is nothing new (a claim that is true in the twisted minds of a rare few ppl) but nothing can change the sex you were born with. Not hormone therapy, mutilating surgeries or wardrobe choices. She of course became very angry.
She also claimed that she learned that Christopher Columbus was a monster who viciously beat the native peoples he encountered. That he sought to enslave them. Neither of these claims are true though they did exercise harsh punishments against a cannibalistic tribe that terrorized the island peoples they first encountered. His first officer stated the natives would make fine slaves but Columbus rejected this idea. Columbus was essentially a sort of evangelical in that he felt compelled to share his Christian world view ( a stated directive in the Bible) which he adamantly believed in.
I explained to her that the world was a different place in the fifteenth century. There were more harsh consequences for criminal behavior.
We cannot prosecute people in the past for acting in keeping with what was normal policies for that time. Any persons simply being unnecessarily cruel at any time is/was wrong. Some common practices such as whipping for infractions or perceived insubordination was common up until the nineteenth century. This is now something most societies completely reject but most societies have a system in place for bringing criminals to justice according to the laws of that land..
This kind of "interpretation" of the past is happening in many schools, especially in blue states. I am talking to my kids consistently, trying to explain to them that yes, things used to be different back then and there is no need to sugar coat the past, but holding historical figures who lived centuries ago by today's standards is meaningless. Our district high school is also big on equity and transgender rights - listening to my high schooler one can conclude that the US biggest threat right now is rejecting justice for LGBTQ+*&^ individuals. Nearly every administrator and teacher indicate their pronouns in their e-mail signatures. However, nothing like that is happening at my other son's school, which is an independent school for gifted. I do call the high school when I receive some ridiculous correspondence quoting Howard Zinn or asking me to sign a permission slip to have my kid participate in the implicit bias test and other such nonsense.
"All kinds of Marxism and inappropriate schooling...DEI, trans-'education', asking kindergartens about their pronouns etc. "
-At what kindergarten are kids being talked to about gender reassignment surgery/transgender issues.
"the teachers coming out of the universities are bringing their 'perspectives' to the classroom. "
-What perspectives exactly? Like on things like the Holocaust or Jim Crow? Are they leaning to far to one side?
Did you read Ackman's letter? If you like DEI, I guess you like DEI. Most don't when they actually find out what it means in practice. And some school districts are getting into gender ideology introductory material in 1st and 2nd grade. They get into graphic LGBTQ literature a bit later. Once again you may like it but to some of us it reeks of late stage 1st World decadence.
When you get there, we'll let you know.
So, you've got nothing?
Oh, just a few things for starters ... history is being rewritten from a DEI narrative; children are being politically indoctrinated; children are being sexually groomed/indoctrinated before they should even be sexually aware; parents rights to make key life decisions for their minority children are being subsumed by many schools/school districts; children are being encouraged to question whether they have been born the wrong sex; many schools are withholding critical psychological and developmental information from parents about their child; children are being encouraged to lie to and keep secrets from their parents; etc. ... is that enough to chew on? Please don't take my word for it. Go investigate all these issues for yourself.
Why respond to the troll who probably doesn’t even have kids or imo is even in the US?
Lol. Have discussed my son, Grayson, on here before. Absolutely live in the U.S. as well.
Try again.
These are the trolls outside of the U.S. you need to worry about:
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20191020-the-war-on-truth-how-israels-social-media-trolls-conquered-facebook/
https://www.thefp.com/p/how-us-public-schools-teach-antisemitism
Lol! You just cited TFP?
Shit. I thought I had scrolled past compost #2.
You think your references have been more reliable? Really?
Take the red pill and stop trying to pick fights on every thread. That IS trolling. Go stick with “the status quo” and all the leftist morons who have head in butt syndrome.
There are endless reports of widespread indoctrination efforts in pretty much every school district. When the Trump admin wanted to outlaw teaching CRT there was a very left leaning teacher who sent out pledge to continue teaching this egregious (and incorrect) rewrite of not only American history but world history.
She garnered 1,000 signatures of teachers who felt this twisted world view was a truth children should know. I had my own child coming home telling me this nonsense.
It’s not some right wing conspiracy theory. Evidence has been reported in every school system.
Why do you think there were heated debates at school board meetings? There have been numerous videos of kids testifying at such meetings to combat the denial of school administrators that they are teaching CRT. You can call it whatever you want but a spade is a spade.
CRT and DEI have become the standard in most public schools. In Va there was a trans boy who raped a girl in the girls bathroom. The school system simply transferred this student to another school where he assaulted another
child. It’s part of the reason Youngkin was elected Governor.
I cannot believe that anyone who does delve into a variety of sources can possibly refute this. It’s disingenuous at best.
Yup. They keep trying to re-frame it as not CRT/DEI but it’s all the same erroneous screed. They are deliberately confusing young children about their gender, pushing to hide this psychological warfare(my opinion) and promoting drag Queen attire and attitude. I’ve watched some of the drag Queen performances and they are very sexualized, which is very inappropriate for elementary schools.
I don’t think schools should be promoting homosexuality but by the same token they should discourage the disparaging or bullying of any kid for any reason.
Bullying is a problem in every society. It never results in anything good and almost always causes lasting emotional harm. All parents should be responsible to teach kids to be kind. But then not all parents are decent ppl either.
DEI forces are also globalizing, despite huge infusions of American taxpayer billions in contracts, and much more. Heavy international student populations given preference over American -born kids. And not from the Netherlands, but, as we've seen, from non-Western cultures not particularly aligned with American values. "Inclusion"? Only 22 percent of Stanford's class of 2026 is white.
You might find this interesting on the spread of DEI: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/how-diversity-narrows-the-mind
Whose the minority?
Every kid in America should have to view PragerU videos to disinfect their poisoned young minds. I know many RINOS and democrats would argue the same back and yeah, a whitewashed version of history is what kids are first taught in grades k-3 but you don’t tell them terrible things at that age.
Candace Owens is another fantastic source for putting a clear and easily understood light upon the very wrongly rewritten version of our history kids are being taught. Getting rid of mind killing, CCP controlled social media might help too.
Pushing for better leadership in the teachers unions would most certainly help or place limitations and agreements between them and parent led committees. If they thought they could lose funding for not following guidelines they’d start singing a different tune.
"Never mind about just this blow-up issue of Claudine Gay and her plagiarism, the true overall scale of the problem with the Western world's universities is near impossible to overstate"
Some people "think" the Bud Light/Target catastrophe just happened? By the time those running those businesses thought they had a great idea, were well entrenched in the academe.
Yes as a 70+ year-old I've been watching all this unfold for 50 years. But the biggest shock that nobody foresaw (not me either) was that even capitalist enterprise culture could become woke.
Yes, we all assumed that once these kids graduated from university and joined the real world of business, they would get their heads adjusted back to a proper mindset. But the DEI loons took over corporate boards, with risk management types, that bent to the wishes of the DEI complex for fear of reprisals. Poof. The business world was taken hostage instantly.
You could see it in the late 60s, when the lawyers took over the music business. It was a forerunner of what has happened since.
Yes I was one of those. I now have a new slogan "But..I..Could..Be..Wrong."
Being 75 myself there are some positives (other than cheap bus fare, and comfort coming before style :-)). You get to say "I've Seen This Movie Before" & "This Too Shall Pass."
I really appreciate the perspective that you and others in their seventies and eighties are willing to share. If only people of your experience were able to spend more time with young impresionable children, like in elementary schools, we might see wiser youngsters.
Not really. By the time children enter elementary school they are well indoctrinated via their smart phones and indulgent parents, and see older people as out of touch and with nothing to tell them. By the time they reach college, they are well and truly gone.
Don't Mess With Old People. "Life In Prison" Is No Longer A Deterrent. :-)
Or someone who is a history nerd can say the same as well :)
Humans always want to think of themselves as novel or enlightened. But it’s all been done before in some way.
I prefer Unlicensed Non-Certified Historian. Sounds better! :-)
What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun.
Ecclesiastes
One of the things I've notice in history. Often Something Happens
Everything is fine THEN The Rhine River Freezes an here comes 120's of 1000's of Germanic Tribes. And the want n on The Party.
Archduke Ferdinand's driver gets lost and stops right in front of a Serbian assassin who is Lost himself!
And the military!
Seemingly shocking , but not so much when you realize they are simply following the money, that’s all. Of course until their shares drop, then there may very well be a course correction.
Wow. You put that together VERY nicely!
Having been born in the mid 50’s I had a front row seat to a great deal of social upheaval, significant economic waffling, the rise of political correctness and how it has mushroomed into this societal suicide we have now.
I’m not sure if I should fasten my seat belt or just jump out.
Like most normal people I had long hoped for racial harmony. When I saw Obama get elected I was pleased to see that occur, even though I became significantly more conservative after the peanut farmer president.
I saw the writing on the wall with this DEI nonsense almost a decade ago. It’s been front page for over the past five years so how anyone could be unaware until recently is astounding. This writer has some good recommendations for the fix and I agree with them all. I just think it may be too late to turn this Titanic around cause the iceberg is coming up fast.
Our teachers in grade schools are fully vested in this BS with the exception of just a few. They have been pumping this nonsense into kids heads for at least the past 7 yrs. These kids would need real remedial instruction to begin to reverse the perverted versions of history, biology and government they’ve been taught.
The best way to help disadvantaged kids qualify for admission to higher learning is not lower or remove the bar. We can and should invest more into tutoring to help elevate them. We will already be (and have) churning out kids with degrees who are not equipped to compete in the global market in any field. We will not be on the cutting edge of the sciences in any area here very soon. Kids who are functionally illiterate are being admitted into college and are set up to fail.
Marxism is madness. Communism has failed along with the fully socialist governance of it.
If we don’t stop the uniparty from continuing down this path, our nation will be destroyed. Not from climate change, but by civil war.
I think a big part of the reason for people being unaware of it for so long is that the underlying causes have been (and still are) misunderstood. People focus in too much on 'Wokeness' as a belief system whereas it is really more of a diseased PSYCHOLOGY.. This psychology is a (longstanding) disdain of university 'educated' white people for their less 'educated' white peers. All the shallow sanctification of 'oppressed' 'identities' is at bottom mostly a proxy swipe by the 'virtuous' 'educated' white intelligentsia at their notional 'deplorable' peers. Of course 'educated' non-whites have now latched on to it too... (it's just too self-flattering for them to pass up on)..............It's also a misunderstanding in my view to see it as a new thing.... it's just that the vast expansion of tertiary education has put it on an exponential upward surge in recent times.
“Rite-of-passage sheep-dip”! BRAVISSIMO!
IKR?! Perfection😉
Thank you....even though I spelt it wrong!
No matter … while the AI can auto-correct, only the man can think 🙏
Well you'll find plenty of thinking at https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/
Bill-
You have one BIG BLIND SPOT in your EXCELLENT thoughts on these issues and it is in your “own house”.
Corporations like yours with ESG scores and DEI also bow to the pressure of victim oppressor ideology. DEI/ESG recruiters in the corporate financial world (with diversity analytics tools as pointed out in todays WSJ by the CEO of Paradigm Staffing), prioritize applicants that check the right diversity box so even the most qualified straight white male doesn’t get invited to participate in the recruitment process or gets sacrificed on the altar of DEI in the final rounds. see https://www.privatefundscfo.com/a-seat-at-the-table-inclusion-has-become-a-crucial-factor-in-pe-talent-recruiting/ This is rampant in PE and the financial world right NOW!
The reason why, as Graham Cunningham bluntly states, is “The Left’s appeal to the prosperous middle class is an essentially narcissistic and performative one; offering a way to feel more sophisticated than thou and a cost-free way to feel virtuous.” I know this is a hard truth wrapped in good intentions. Being born in 1963 to white upper middle class Jewish parents. I was raised with a constant drum beat of rising up against the white dominant culture ( now considered the oppressor) as our noble cause. To be absolved the “white patriarchy” of our comfortable upper middle class suburban life we sought the constant endorphins of “speaking truth to power.” But in the end, it was as toxic as it was intoxicating. As white wealthy Jews we MUST first take the painful step of turning inward. My Jewish, intermittent fasting, yoga pantsed, Range Rover driving, hate doesn’t live here lawn signers, BLM donor, suburban moms were GOB SMACKED when the black/ brown, lgbtqia2s+ and other assorted bag of rainbow haired pierced radical campus progressive community was screaming for the genocide of Jews on their babies 70k a year elite college campuses.
We must stop rationalizing this for our own need to be more virtuous than our other white peers and cut the head off the victim oppressor reward for immutable traits industrial complex and dig deep into all of the processes, relationships, memberships, donations, actions etc. that feed this in our own lives and that includes the hiring at companies like yours or Apollo, Goldman etc. Just as we have seen our institutions like Harvard fall to the take over of “spoilt-brat radicalism” and the left-wing fraud “a posh person’s mind games” “corroding us from within” (quoting from Graham Cunningham’s article) we need to own the role we played in this and continue to play and clean our own house too before they fall like the Harvard's of the world!
Bill-
You have one BIG BLIND SPOT in your EXCELLENT thoughts on these issues and it is in your “own house”.
Corporations like yours with ESG scores and DEI also bow to the pressure of victim oppressor ideology. DEI/ESG recruiters in the corporate financial world (with diversity analytics tools as pointed out in todays WSJ by the CEO of Paradigm Staffing), prioritize applicants that check the right diversity box so even the most qualified straight white male doesn’t get invited to participate in the recruitment process or gets sacrificed on the altar of DEI in the final rounds. see https://www.privatefundscfo.com/a-seat-at-the-table-inclusion-has-become-a-crucial-factor-in-pe-talent-recruiting/ This is rampant in PE and the financial world right NOW!
The reason why, as Graham Cunningham bluntly states, is “The Left’s appeal to the prosperous middle class is an essentially narcissistic and performative one; offering a way to feel more sophisticated than thou and a cost-free way to feel virtuous.” I know this is a hard truth wrapped in good intentions. Being born in 1963 to white upper middle class Jewish parents. I was raised with a constant drum beat of rising up against the white dominant culture ( now considered the oppressor) as our noble cause. To be absolved the “white patriarchy” of our comfortable upper middle class suburban life we sought the constant endorphins of “speaking truth to power.” But in the end, it was as toxic as it was intoxicating. As white wealthy Jews we MUST first take the painful step of turning inward. My Jewish, intermittent fasting, yoga pantsed, Range Rover driving, hate doesn’t live here lawn signers, BLM donor, suburban moms were GOB SMACKED when the black/ brown, lgbtqia2s+ and other assorted bag of rainbow haired pierced radical campus progressive community was screaming for the genocide of Jews on their babies 70k a year elite college campuses.
We must stop rationalizing this for our own need to be more virtuous than our other white peers and cut the head off the victim oppressor reward for immutable traits industrial complex and dig deep into all of the processes, relationships, memberships, donations, actions etc. that feed this in our own lives and that includes the hiring at companies like yours or Apollo, Goldman etc. Just as we have seen our institutions like Harvard fall to the take over of “spoilt-brat radicalism” and the left-wing fraud “a posh person’s mind games” “corroding us from within” (quoting from Graham Cunningham’s article) we need to own the role we played in this and continue to play and clean our own house too before they fall like the Harvard's of the world!
This starts at the elementary school level. Parent, grandparents, aunt and uncles be aware of what is going on at your child's school. DEI is at our local elementary school. Grades are inflated, teachers afraid to speak out, because of retribution. Chaos!
Sally Kornbluth at MIT should resign. Actually all 3 University Presidents that Elise Stefanik questioned in front of Congress should be fired.
Exactly….it took a terroriist attack to open your eyes…how about the conservative speakers who have been shouted down for years…the BS speech codes…excellent faculty driven out for stating facts to students who only want feelings….and administrators who back the kids instead of the professors when the indoctrinated mob comes for a professor who asks them to debate a topic….anyone listening outside the crazy left bubble knows all of this has been happening for 10+ years. So yeah…better late than never but can it be turned around or is the rot too deep….
Amen.
Ditto.
Right. We've been screaming into the wind for many years. Why did it take such an outrageous agregious situation as miscreant students rioting for Hamas to get some mainstream liberals to see reality?
Because for longer than that they’ve been blinded by leftist propaganda. Some unwittingly, many by choice. Our higher learning institutions were infiltrated just after WWII by radically left ideologues that saw the best avenue for reshaping western thinking was through education. They have been stealthy and unfortunately successful.
McCarthy wasn’t entirely insane, a bit too zealous for most and media at the time had already shifted to a more liberal world view. Not that I think some middle ground is wrong but this new leftist authoritarianism is so far left it meets the extreme right. I don’t see significant differences between fascism and oppressive communism. But we are hell bent on getting there.
I wonder if it’s too little too late to put some brakes on before careening off the cliff.
Better late than never. Let’s hope we see some real change here.
To his credit, Mr. Ackman jumped all over this and has been instrumental in getting Harvard's president to resign in shame. Technically, it was the plagiarism that got her, but her inability to answer a simple question -- an easy question -- has been exposed for all to see. Is he late to the party? Who in the business world is in front of him. Now, we need to see if he sticks with it and brings his wealthy Wall Street friends along. Harvard should not see a dime until major changes are made.
Bravo!
The General Assessment that i've seen is that plagarism pushed Gay out (but she's still in - as a Professor), and not AT ALL due to her being blind to or uneffected by antisemitism or hooliganish behavior -- and its impact on learning. Question 1: Is it OK to be a Harvard Professor that committed plagarism? (seems so) Is it OK to be a Harvard President without any concern about a) hate against Jews (blacks, yeah --no good - that's a non-starter, for Gay) or b) against KKK-like behavior (short of cross-burning and lynching) against Jews (blacks, again, can't do that). Question 2: What are the ethical standards for anyone and everyone to be eligibl;e to join or remain on the Harvard Board of Overseers? Question 3: What is the real Harvard culture, and why?
She is now a lecturer but retains her president's salary of $900,000
Bari Weiss et al were also complicit for many years before they noticed, and like Ackman, they still fail to appreciate the extent of the problem.
Another of this fancy man's mistakes was saying antisemitism is the worst at Harvard in its 500 years. I guess he thought it was better for Jews when none of them were admitted at all.
Rich man whines about whatever. No story here, folks, move along.
Excellent point but going backward doesn’t help much either.
Of course not. But Ackman is a typical Wall Street predator, and his attempt to butt in should at least be accurate.
That’s a fair point. My one criticism is that he’s a bit late to the party. The Free Press has indeed been way ahead of the curve, as usual.
Bari… Jordan Peterson… Gad Saad… Glenn Loury… Thomas Sowell… Shelby Steele… the list of those calling BS on DEI is incredibly long. I know Ackman is super busy but the writing has been on this wall for a very very long time.
Bari herself was late in recognizing DEI for the poison that it is. As with Ackman, it took her ox being gored to open her eyes to the metastasizing cancer of leftist nihilism that has been destroying this country since the '60s. (Remember Students for a Democratic Society/SDS, the Symbionese Liberation Army/SLA, the Black Panthers (Leonard Bernstein's cause celebre), and Barack and Michelle Obama's personal favorites, Weather Underground bombers Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn)? The Left always ends up eating its own...but not until after demolishing the lives of countless others. Tragically, only the exposure of the rabid antisemitism spewed by the leftists he'd so proudly and lavishly funded was sufficient to dispel Ackman's willful blindness.
What's the "infection?" Not supporting Zionism?
Anti-Zionism is a code phrase for supporting the extermination of Jews.
Ignore him. He’s a angry child seeking attention.
No. Judaism and Zionism are two different things.
Not in this context. They are the same. Just like being anti-Palestine is the same as supporting the extermination of Muslims.
Now, being anti-Hamas is just that... anti-Hamas.
Zionist want to exterminate all Palestinians.
Here's your "context":
https://www.reddit.com/r/israelexposed/comments/18wxwbg/israeli_policemen_brutally_assault_antizionist/
Wow bro, you drank all the coolaid to come to that conclusion. 21% of Israelis are “Palestinians” aka Arabs.
You posted a link that supposedly proved abuse of children by the IDF yet it’s opening statement clearly states “uncorroborated”
reports. I’m sure there are some misguided/bad actors in the ranks of the IDF. Their overall record is very different than the leftist clowns want to paint them as. Just like there are some bad cops, most are good and want to do the right thing.
You are an antisemite. The actions of Hamas, Hezbollah and unfortunately too many Arabs is indefensible. Israel has been under attack since its reestablishment in 1958
Quoting a reddit.com piece. That is sure Bernie Bro's of you.
Maybe it depends on the context, LOL.
Nonsense. Zionists returned to the Zion - the historical birthplace of Jews. It is Hamas that states the extermination of Jews in its charter. And to be clear, there were no “Palestinians” in its current sense at that time.
Being a Jew hater.
https://www.reddit.com/r/PoliticalHumor/comments/18zyxsx/antisemite/
With all due respect Yawbus, this is not a brilliant prose.
Sorry Keith, but define “a prose.”
Totally agree. DEI needs to DIE.
Harvard (et al) is where young minds go to DEI.
Diversity is bigotry.
Equity is serfdom.
Inclusion is destruction.
That appears to about The Shape Of It.
It’s (D)EI, sir.
It took me a few seconds, but I got a good chuckle out of it.
🤓🤓
DEI must DIE!
Or just be killed...🤨
Claudine Gay was hired following the same process that led to Kamala Harris. The only surprise here is that so many people were surprised how her tenure ended.
Actually it was the same process that led to Barack Obama, which I believe had a lot to do with the DEI movement taking hold. His presidency was extremely divisive in this country and the opposite of what he could have been as the first black president.
Oh, come on. Obama gave an incredible and inspiring presentation at the Democratic National Convention that showed that he was a force to be reckoned with. It was obvious that he was one of the best people to lead this country. He earned the ability to be president on sheer talent and ability. And his presidency and its accomplishments proved that he was more than capable.
He was capable, though he had little experience of note prior to being elected. I am referring more to his socialist/neo-marxist leanings and his divisive rhetoric. Anyone who becomes President in the US and tells the population that successful people “didnt earn that” and created a class-based culture of blame and hatred is dangerously divisive.
What? How did he create a class based culture of shame? Example please!
Well when you tell people the wealthy built their wealth on the backs of others who arent as wealthy, it drives the whole “equity” of outcomes argument as opposed to an equity of opportunity. Ans creates jealousy, and a “give me my fair share” culture as opposed to earning it. I think “they didnt earn that” is just wrong. It serves the simplistic oppressor/oppressed narrative which is also a false distinction for the most part and doesnt accuratey describe most of what people now ascribe it to.
I think you are stretching things here. The bulk of Obama's public record is very inclusive. It's not fair to cherry pick the exceptions. As to claims of socialism and Marxism, he did nothing of the kind while in office. Obamacare itself is a compromise. This country should have socialized medicine like Canada, Engliand and other countries do. He did the best he could, and certainly was no socialist.
Actually he never said “earned that”… he used the word…build. He was simply stating the fact that for every successful person, someone, some thing, some circumstances helped you get there. Esp in this country. He wasn’t talking about oppressed and oppressors. He was stating a simple truth. He was making the case to increase taxes on the very wealthy, which I support. (Bill Clinton left office with a budget surplus. Bush came into office, lowered taxes on wealthy and surplus gone). Anyone in upper middle class knows it’s easier to make money once you have some.
Anyhow I googled and this came up…obamas entire comment
https://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/07/did-obama-say-if-youve-got-a-business-you-didnt-build-that
You're joking, right? His resume was paper thin. He had and has no core competency. He was a very gifted orator, and the people who elected him hoped he could take us to a post-racist America. He did the opposite. His accomplishments were negligible. Even as a Socialist he was a failure because he was too attracted to the good life and famous people. A huge disappointment and squarely in the bottom tier of all U.S. presidents.
Bravo.
However, he was pretty smart.
He destroyed any hope for unifying what we now call race politics. Example?
- people who cling to their guns and religion
- if I had a son, he would have looked like Trayvon Martin
- (from Michelle) I fear for my daughters every time they get in a car
Take any of those comments, make the target a Black, and have them come from any other race than a Black. It would be condemned. Obama, having been deified, went unchecked. And we will live with that now for decades.
You’ve gotta be white. (I am). He was commenting on the tragic killing of a young black kid targeted because he was black by a self appointed vigilante. When he said that line about “they didn’t earn tha” he was referring to those who make it big in this country don’t do it alone....they have the education, infrastructure and everything else this country offers. Gosh you talk about victim complex...methinks you’ve got it bad.
Even the ..cling to guns and religion comment is missing context here
Here is the complete quote “You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.
And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations”
He was talking about middle class folks who were left behind by both parties!
Many have died because of his negligent remarks. He was a good orator but when he had to comment off the cuff he stumbled like most ppl.
Wealth redistribution IS socialism. It has destroyed every society it’s tried in because , like the saying goes, eventually you run out of other peoples money.
It is and always will be true that there are ppl who are born into opportunity but our system is the only type where you can work your way up. It takes exceptional character and is hard but lots of people have success stories in western society.
I caution anyone ever holding the Clinton’s up as examples of good anything. They have been corruption inc. I know they haven’t been nabbed yet and most likely never will but then how long did it take to legally take down Al Capone? There are many other notorious criminals that have eluded prosecution by exploiting it
yet I believe in it regardless of its weaknesses. Just because there is known dubious activity doesn’t equate to criminal charges.
I think the Obamas were groomed to be what they became for years before finding themselves in the WH. I did agree with some of Michelle’s concerns in that obesity and poor diets were the biggest threat to the health of children.
What accomplishments?
Racial division, championing Iran, both accomplished what he set out to do.
Bowing on the tarmac to the Saudi prince
Racial division my a--
Do you want a flash light to help with the search and rescue?
Seriously, how is it that our race relations deteriorated significantly during the admin of our first black president? Most ppl I know were encouraged at the prospect even if they didn’t agree with his politics.
He made seriously poor remarks before he had the facts about two separate incidents. He used rather rude remarks regarding Christian’s and their support of our 2A rights.
If a white candidate made disparaging remarks about any group of ppl of color, lgbtq, Muslims or Jews they’d have never made it to the W. H. and rightfully so. I guess Christian’s aren’t as thin skinned as other groups and don’t need the coddling.
He gets a two out of five stars from me. Pelosi and Schumer get a minus two out of five. They are both awful people and have done more harm than good. Nan needs to just retire and we NEED term limits but somehow the very people who’d be affected are the only ones with the legal means to create them. HOW STUPID IS THAT?!
Anyhow, thank you for sharing your thoughts on the matter. I hope you (and the whole damn country) have a great new year.
https://washingtonmonthly.com/2017/01/03/obamas-top-50-accomplishments-revisited/
As I asked my late father in early 2008, when did the ability to deliver a good speech off a teleprompter qualify one to be president? I told my dad I would vote for Obama if he could name one thing that Obama had done in his entire life up that point that qualified him to be president. He couldn’t. I guess that makes me a racist.
A scripted speech when a state senator who usually voted Present 20 years ago. So far with so little only in DEI America
Now THAT's funny. Unless intended as sarcasm.
Of course you jest!
Is this sarcasm? Hope so.
Obama never held a regular job. He grew up with a silver spoon and was raised by a disgruntled expat but still never hurt for stuff like decent shoes. I will give his mother credit for ensuring her children get to know real poverty up close but not necessarily experience it like their less fortunate neighbors.
His only real job was being a professional activist and then running for the senate where his performance wasn’t particularly stellar.
Rather than cement racial harmony he actually was racially divisive and was the impetus of racial violence not seen in decades. His rhetoric inspired the ambush murder of a whole lot of police officers.
He’s certainly not stupid so I can only surmise that his actions were deliberate and had the desired effect. He set up the mood for the 2020 summer of “love”(hate) that continues to be a problem with Antifa establishing a strong hold in the rural surroundings of Alabama.
He got us involved in international agreements that are globally destructive such as the Paris Accord which has been based on manipulated data (aka BS) and has already wreaked havoc in several countries. His admin was dismissive of all republicans or conservatives of any stripe as well as unnecessarily punitive to the public at large.
He gutted our space program, advocated like all tyrants to disarm the public. It’s the first step taken by most authoritarian regimes before bringing the hammer of oppression down.
If he’s so worried about climate change and the seas rising why did he purchase the big island fortress on Martha’s Vineyard? It’s also a very white community so I guess he really does identify with his own white heritage at least a little. He advocated for using CRT in our federal agencies, military and public education as well as DEI. He was on that bent while still in office.
He wasn’t our worst president ever but wasn’t far from the bottom.
Maureen, great comment.
Well, we certainly have a different interpretation of the facts. I have not dealt much with Obama's history, but I had a friend at the Unitarian Universalist church I attended in Summit NJ who knew Barry Obama when he was a pre-teen and attended Sunday School at the Unitarian Universalist church in Hololulu. Barry was living with his maternal grandparents at the time - they are long-tern UUs. "Silver spoon" is a definite misnomer. Comfortable middle class is the way he was raised.
You seem to imply that his work as a community organizer is not a real job. The sounds like some sort of insult. It is certainly a mischaracterization of what he did, just like you mischaracterize his upbringing. And you forget that he was a professor at the University of Chicago Law School. That's not a real job?
So far as I know and based on the public record (I checked his Wikipedia page), your statements about Obama are a deliberate distortion. Get your facts straight first at least. As far as your interpretation of the facts, well, I doubt that I buy into your viewpoint.
What are his accomplishments?
Love the sarcasm.
Appropriate as ever.
Being smart and being a capable POTUS are two entirely separate criteria. We need to think more about executive skills, at the margin, than legislative experience. There are plenty of capable legislators in Washington to handle legislation. Our best proving ground for a POTUS is one of the fifty governors, particular leading a state that is less uniform in its voting.
No. On TFP.....we all know why he was "divisive." ;)
go away
If only
If only someone could answer how was/what made him "divisive," Bill.
Nah. How was/what made him "divisive," Sheila?
He wasn’t decisive. Lots of white folk didn’t like hearing a black man talking about class and yes, race, issues in this country.
Why are his transcripts “disappeared”
In retrospect Sir, u raise what seems a very valid and compelling point. It is, like as not, the reason his administration was so thoroughly lackluster and disappointing – a sort of black guy playing a white guy’s role. It was sad to watch, crushing even, but the immoral and untenable thinking that underpinned it never occurred to me. Thank you for that.
This child of the 60’s who marched for Civil Rights adds the following to help others who don’t seem willing to see the truth of the Obama disaster: it was like going to the home of the big Italian family Nextdoor for Christmas Dinner and being served Egg Salad Sandwiches. But it wasn’t funny; instead, it hurt.
OK, to be fair, Barack Obama did have to face the merit test of the voters. Perhaps too many voters bought into DEI ideology, but that doesn't lessen the fact that he passed the test. I agree his presidency ended up being divisive, but he was elected on (perceived) merit.
Perceived, yes. But his accomplishments were paltry and unimpressive. He did know how to whip up a crowd and trick them into believing that voting for him would absolve them of their white guilt.
Obama was a road for White absolution. And he doubled down, despite his campaign platitudes.
So was his Nobel prize.
St. Barack, that silver-tongued smoothy could sell snow to an Eskimo.
How was he divisive?
He is the sole reason Trump became POTUS. Think about that.
Oh....have thought about it. Quite clearly.
Which is why I'm still not getting a straight, coherent answer from any of you. Think about that.
Now how exactly was Obama's presence in the White House "divisive" and the sole reason for MAGA/Trump? :)
April 13, 2008, attacking gun owners and people of faith: “You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”
Oct. 25, 2010, on a Univision interview, on punishing enemies: “If Latinos sit out the election instead of saying, ‘We’re gonna punish our enemies and we’re gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us,’ if they don’t see that kind of upsurge in voting in this election, then I think it’s gonna be harder and that’s why I think it’s so important that people focus on voting on November 2.”
April 2013, attacking wealthy Americans: Obama insisted “the wealthiest Americans should pay their fair share” although he admitted he paid less than half the standard rate for his income bracket.
July 1, 2014, attacking the GOP: “Middle-class families can’t wait for Republicans in Congress to do stuff. So sue me.”
August 2014, attacking police: “There’s no excuse for police to use excessive force against peaceful protests or to throw protesters in jail for lawfully exercising their First Amendment rights.”
April 2015, attacking Christians: “On Easter, I do reflect on the fact that, as a Christian, I am supposed to love. And I have to say that sometimes, when I listen to less than loving expressions by Christians, I get concerned. But that’s a topic for another day.”
He thought he was an anchor on NPR.
You do know Reagan coined the term “make America great again”.
The economy was much more profitable for ppl of all skin colors of the working class.
Ppl aren’t responding to your constant trolling.
Yeah they always end up doing the opposite of what they’re trying to do.
My favorite version of this is that the $50 trillion safety net debt bomb, which has accumulated largely by paying out benefits to elderly white Christians, will have to be paid off by the mostly black and brown future population of the country. Chef’s kiss.
🤌🤌🤌
Yee gods yes. I make 20 years of it this month.
Obama could’ve done great things with his presidency and he chose to feed division
In many situations, he created division
Nonsense! He was ELECTED by a clear majority of the people (unlike others we could mention) on a message of hope and inclusiveness. The only “divisive” thing about his presidency is that electing a black man offended so many; I mean, the nerve of those people! An uppity black!
His mother was white. His father was likely the product of miscegeny. Doesn't that make him Mulatto?
So many voted for Obama based on his message of hope and change. The end result after 8 years of “hope and change”?….Trump.
How was he "extremely divisive?"
ok you are just trolling people....do not give this troller the time of day
Legitimate question.
I don't remember any of Barack "Nat X" Obama's "Hate Whitey" speeches. Did I miss one?
I know a lot of people were pissed on election night, though.
Excellent point. Don’t forget the most recent Supreme Court justice, you know, the person who can’t say what a woman is….
And can't write a legal dissent by citing any actual law, precedent etc. her one and only "opinion" as a SC Justice was nothing but regurgitated "social" justice tripe.
Her tenure didn't end, it reverted -- From Douglas Murray/The Telegraph: This already very privileged woman is going to remain on the teaching faculty of Harvard with a nice pay package of around $900,000 a year. Victimhood turns out to be nice work if you can get it.
Maybe karmela the VP could be the next president of Harvard
She's too busy at the border.
She's looking after Islamophobia too.
who is "karmela"?
The VP
OK, it's spelled "Kamala", then.
In honor of the Sopranos(Carmela Soprano), and because Black names are made up and frequently misspelled, I have given her this new name. Is it a Hindu name- Shaquaa Nd, shenijka( the j is the newest), Shawonder? Most readers know the score!
What do her lovers call her?
As with Justice Brown Jackson.
When we fall over each other to select a person from a particular group, we betray the insecurity we feel that such a candidate might actually be worthy absent their racial “plus”.
Because this eventually becomes exposed to performance, it will not be held aloft forever. Because a smaller percentage of women are willing to work at the expense of being a parent, we already see the demands for greater leave and flexibility and a demand to accommodate…all fine if you are treating the workplace as a family promoting enterprise, not so clear cut for the single women and men who are able to fully dedicate themselves to a career and need to throttle their output back.
Freedom is hard and frustrating, but we have to accept that it results in unequal outcomes…the alternatives are full-on tyranny or socialism. Which of the latter two appeals to someone who has tasted freedom? Even Socrates knew you had to lie to people to accept the constraints of a non-free polity.
What process is that?
The end of fearing cancellation and the return of courage. This is the best start to 2024!
Amen, amen, amen!! We are hearing “The DEI emperor has no clothes!” more and more now. And not a moment too soon.
"From your lips to God's ear". Notice how I am quoting someone, hence the quotation marks. I would cite the original author of those word but I don't know who that is. The only thing I know is that they did not originate with me. I'm not a plagiarist!
The actual plagiarism, though troubling, is relatively minimal and under different circumstances might be forgivable, but that is not the real story. The real story is an institution as well as any individual is vulnerable personally and publicly when there is a DEI hire. DEI hurts everyone. DEI must end. This Gay debacle demonstrates the flagrant absurdity of the DEI model of higher education. It must be soul crushing for Dr. Gay to suddenly realize she was a token all along. Harvard will not recover unless they replace the entire board.
No, the plagiarism is not minimal nor is it forgivable. Not plagiarizing is a central tenet of scholarship. As an academic, I'm not only scandalized by her plagiarism, but by the sparseness of her publication record. While I agree with Ackman that academic credentials aren't as important as business acumen in a university president, the fact is, she was supposedly chosen for her academic credentials as well as other qualities. 17 papers in a 26-year career is nothing (and it's worse that apparently 11 were partly plagiarized). And she's in a discipline in which she should have published at least one book. That is a really, really skimpy record.
Plagiarism could get a paltry student expelled 30 years ago. Now it can get you a high profile job - president of Harvard to President of the US it matters not
I got busted for plagiarism in the 3rd grade. Before I even knew the word and its meaning, a lesson I never forgot. Ms Gay was probably learning the symbolism of the Pride flag and using preferred pronouns in the 3rd grade. No time for learning about plagiarism.
Agree, she never possessed qualities necessary to be a president of Harvard. But the same goes for the much celebrated Ibram X Kendi - what kind of scholar is he, exactly? What stellar scholarly research has he produced?
Shouldn’t be forgivable at Harvard. At my elementary school maybe.
Soul crushing? I seriously doubt it. She knew all along that she is a fake
And this is the real tragedy of DEI. The ones who are supposedly helped most are actually hurt the most. Her appointment blocked someone truly deserving. It is a mirage, a good way to crush hope, subjugate, and marginalize. "She was a diversity hire", adding to the stereotype that is driving modern racism and sexism.
Exactly! John McWhorter wrote a great piece on this as well: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/21/opinion/harvard-claudine-gay.html
"For Harvard, her own dignity and our national commitment to assessing Black people (and all people) according to the content of their character, she should step down."
Hmmm, interesting question.
Did Dr. Gay know she was a “token” hire all along or was she so blinded by the propaganda that she had not a clue ?
My hope is that she knew all along, but such realization would be devastating for sure.
She wasn’t blinded by the propaganda - she IS the propaganda
She’s going to make millions being a “speaker” I’m sure. No reason to feel bad.
We all see someone wonderful when we look in the passing shop windows; so did she, and now she doesn't. We should have some sympathy, and END DEI! It provided her and many others with a gulling mirage of whom they imagine they are, whom she imagined she was. It was not the glass ceiling she shattered but the amusement park mirror that only verified her narcissism. Now broken.
Yup.
Her resignation statement ascribed her resignation to racism and asserted the 'integrity' of her scholarship. There was no apology for plagiarism. She is now a lecturer but retains the president's salary of $900,000. Without a book she doesn't qualify for Assistant Professorship but no doubt she can now write a book on how racists forced her to resign
She blamed her resignation on racism. To a hammer, everything is a nail. Soul crushing would mean a disparity between perception and reality - but to her, everything is racism. That’s her entire reality. She was hired, built her career on this, and has resigned based on this. From racism she was created and to crying racism she will return. So no, her soul is intact, as long as it can still squeeze some victimhood tears out of someone.
Minimal? They are at 50 individual instances of plagiarized documents and counting. I just hope Rufo et al keep digging. Gay deserves to have her credentials stripped.
Plagiarism should never be forgivable regardless of the person’s color. The Board knew all about it and she was hired because in the upside down DEI universe plagiarism isn’t” troubling” , only having the correct ideology. Meritocracy and truth are an anathema to the Woke practitioners. It will. Be a big job to keep the fight going to dismantle the DEI establishment- religion. The so called fields of gender and race studies are vacuous and need to go.
All the grievance studies need to go. Who would hire someone who has spent 4 years learning about the power of victimhood and complaining?
50+ instances...not forgivable at her level. Otherwise, I agree with most of your post.
Completely disagree. I was a mere college student not following an academic path..... it was pretty clear in my basic writing classes the seriousness of properly attributing and the penalties involved. The number one university in the world certainly has to take this very seriously .
"In order to be deemed anti-racist, one must personally take action to reverse any unequal outcomes in society."
It seems to me that it's more accurate to say that being "anti-racist" requires only that one say (post on social media) the correct things. My oldest daughter is very concerned about racism, structural racism, yadda yadda Black, yadda white men, yadda.
One of the obvious disadvantages for black children is their very low school achievement in math. I asked my daughter, a math graduate student, if she had thought of volunteering as a math tutor in a school in a low-income area, and she looked at me as if I were from Mars.
As long as it’s “the system” - an evil, amorphous blob - that’s seen as the problem, individual actions are seen as a drop in the bucket - a waste of time. So the school system has turned into an activist factory to tear down “the system.” And that, at its core, is the destructive, putrid Marxist mindset.
Not sure if your daughter has been infected by the mind virus, but it certainly has captured the majority of two generations in the West. Look at Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and most of the countries in Europe for how things will get even worse here in the US if it isn’t stopped now.
Not just a waste of time, but actively bad, since it eases suffering in the current system and thus delays the total revolution that all the right people know is necessary.
Must be nice to believe that personal charity is bad, while charity with other people's money, via simply voting the right way, is a supreme moral act.
In Canada, DEI is even infecting Christian charities. Before you make a donation to any charity, see what their website says about DEI. If they support it, don’t give them your money.
Why give your money to an institution that supports an ideology teaching that you didn’t honestly earn it in the first place?
Good idea! I also have noticed that my city government has an antiracist strategy and it promotes hiring based on DEI. My local school board has a director of DEI. My credit union also gives money to DEI programs. Most Canadians do not seem to understand the true meaning of DEI and Antiracism so there are few people speaking out about this issue. Sad.
Didn't teh Salvation Army in the US have a divisive statement on their web site a few years ago too?
I’ve taken a look at their Canadian website and I don’t see any sign of the DEI virtue signalling virus there. https://salvationarmy.ca/locator/
One of the problems with black children is that they don't have two parents at home ensuring they do their homework, and helping them answer questions when they have them. A culture of focusing on education as a central priority of the family is key to the success of Jewish and many Asian cultures: not the color of their skin.
We have to be able to say this, and work to fix it if we are even going to get black people out of their cycle of low achievement and poverty. DEI just lowers the standards for everybody so progressive people can feel good about the outcomes.
I believe that’s the kind of thing Roland Fryer was saying, what he was researching, and what he was in fact actively working on, to raise black students up through a school program in Harlem, when Claudine Gay got him suspended from his tenured professorship at Harvard. After which she was rewarded with the presidency of the university. The fact that DEI/ anti-racism is rotten to the core is evident when its proponents like Gay actively work against real scholars like Roland Fryer (who came from a poor, black American family rather than Gay’s own middle class Haitian family) who are doing boots on the ground work for black development.
Could not agree more. DEI is about cultural retribution and financial expropriation, instead of examining the root causes of problems in education ACROSS races. Black leadership (and most white leadership in the academy) are focused on Kendism instead of truly solving problems.
I wonder if we get too much truth here, they will come after us.
Thomas Sowell has been saying this for decades. So have Glenn Loury . Mcwhorter, Coleman Hughes . Listen to the podcast Econtalk interview with Roland Fryer ( Harvard economist who’s research findings did not fit the DEI theology and Claudine Gay went after him. He is black from a disadvantaged upbringing )
Agree 100%. I follow Econtalk and Coleman. If feels like black activists are more interested in expropriation and retribution instead of doing the hard work of fixing the rot in their own cultures. And BTW, lots of white kids have the same issue. It's not a color/race thing.
And Fredrick Douglass and Booker T. Washington said it years before Sowell did, and somebody shut them up. I guess the "cancel culture" started way back.
Anyone not black who raise this very basic, rational point will be automatically demonized as racist. If you're not black you are not allowed to criticize or even give helpful suggestions about what can help black people. If you even point out something obvious and doesn't take "lived experience" to see, you'll still be a racist for "talking over black people". On the off chance that someone actually allows you to speak and you say something helpful, you're still racist for being a "white savior" or some such if you're not white.
Leftist would rather let black people rot than to risk being called racist. Staying on the sideline and watch the cycle of low achievement and poverty repeat itself is "being respectful".
"I demand that you listen and understand me as a _____ person".......which is then followed shortly by "Because you're white, you can never understand me".
Pick one please.
They resolve the contradiction with, "just shut up and obey."
My colleague said it best. You will never find a single illiterate Jewish child.
Yes, make them put their time where their mouth is. Good parenting for sure.
I have a daughter in a similar situation and she has assured me that she is helping others on campus. I’d like to “audit” what she is telling me, but I know that would hurt too much.
To speak is to be virtuous
To act is for the other person
Thus the thinking of the next generation
It often seems like it. I hope they'll grow out of that and be helpful.
I (a youngish millenial) recently went through this a few years ago. I realized that posting on social media does absolutely nothing but make ME feel better.
Good insight. And doing something practical to help people (animals, trees, whatever) will do a lot more to make you feel better.
A limousine liberal if I've ever heard one
I think she has an old Accord. It's just the way their generation thinks. Having the correct sentiments makes you part of their Good Group. Actually doing something specific for individuals is a surprising concept.
Fascinating. Can you tell us how the conversation with your daughter proceeded from there? How to reprogram your daughter and others in her age cohort?
Iirc, she said she was too busy to do anything specific to help actual black people.
Yes. Because while she's "very concerned" about racism she doesn't really want to help minorities. Just give them a passing grade and advance them. Thereby making sure they stay ignorant.
I read this on your X post and was actually thinking "I wish The Free Press would publish this - this deserves the widest possible audience." Bravo. This needs to be clearly stated over and over again by as many people as possible.
It got 4.6million views on X this far. I assume that is more than the Free Press readership, but I understand the sentiment and it fits well here!
The way the essay reads, as a manifesto, Ackman could well apply for Gay's position himself. Why not?
Slam Dunk, Bill! Thanks for leading the way.
Well, he's actually following (see comments above), but he's putting his considerable weight behind it, which is all for the good.
Please don’t forget the role of the US Department of Education Office of Civil Rights, Department of Justice Office of Violence Against Women, the White House “Not Alone” task force, Civic Nation and others in all of this. Without the unregulated “Dear Colleague” Title IX letter of 2011 being used to bring activism onto campus, to create bloated administrations for the Title IX directives and to recruit students for the “survivor” movement, none of this would have happened. Russlynn Ali who signed the 2011 “Dear Colleague Letter” went to work for Laurene Powell Jobs at XQ Institute “DEI” “Reimagining Education”. Stanford Law Professor Michele Dauber who called a Harvard professor a “Shitty White Male” was a co-drafter of the “Dear Colleague” letter while her husband, Ken Dauber, consulted for the DoE OCR. He was an early hire at Google. Dauber orchestrated the recall of Judge Aaron Persky after she’d colluded behind the scenes of the high profile trial of Brock Turner. Plagiarism? Stanford put up a bench with a quote from the Emily Doe letter which was read by Chanel Miller but not written by her even though it is credited to her. Liz MaGill was Dean of Stanford Law at the time. She said nothing and went on to UPenn. The goal in 2011 was to change America forever - that’s apparent in the emails from Russlynn Ali. The goal was to get rid of due process. That’s also apparent. The goal was to racketeer and profiteer off private campuses under the guise of social justice entrepreneurship enterprises. The White House hired interns from Harvard and elsewhere for “Community Outreach” to do this. Wagatwe Wanjuki, Tina Nguyen, Laura L Dunn to name a few. The WH and UN and SKDK worked with social media networks and influencers as proven in ReWire Magazine in 2014. They wanted to reach certain demographics so they hired Emma Watson to reach the Harry Potter Generation for the #HeForShe campaign. They celebrated their victories with the number of clicks they got on social media links, failing to admit that SKDK and other PR companies were buying fake engagement as admitted by Hillary Rosen. SKDK represented “Its On Us” which is part of Civic Nation which is headed by Valerie Jarrett and has Tina Tchen on the board. This is not social justice, it is not charity, it is opportunism - they figured out how to suck money out of schools across the nation to feed their self-serving profiteering warped causes. Many of us have believed in passing on to the next generation the generosity and charity that made our educations possible. But what this crowd have done is shown that our gifts are not going towards those who deserve an education but towards dishonest enterprises using non-profits to make millions under a social justice banner. It’s beyond wrong. It’s criminal.
Criminal prosecutions sound like a good idea.
Thank you. I do sincerely believe that criminal prosecutions are in order. Lynn Rosenthal from Obama’s DOJ OVW said in 2014 at the Dartmouth Sexual Assault Summit that the reason that administration focused on campuses was in order to influence generations to come. What has happened was deliberate and it was organized and it has cost the public billions in federal funds, cost schools millions in lawsuits, led to the denial of civil rights under Title IX and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act while enriching social entrepreneurs who figured out who to game the system by recruiting, training, commanding media, social media and growing their organizations wealth and power.
Tour de force!
You are a real source for the making of this mess. Important information. Thank you
Claire, this is some journalism here!
Thank you. It’s research. It is research I was compelled to undertake after sensing something was wrong in the sensationalist coverage of the criminal trial of New Hampshire v Owen Labrie in 2015. I had no idea about the rot I would discover and the fact that his trial was used to push an agenda and that St Paul’s School was targeted, he was framed and that the White House “Not Alone” task force advisor S. Daniel Carter admitted to me personally that the real interest in his partner, Laura L Dunn, attending the trial as “personal representative” for the “victim” was in St Paul’s School as opposed to Labrie himself. The goal was to get inside St Paul’s School, to insert a “compliance” officer who would introduce maxient.com Stasi-like reporting software and the goal was to extort St Paul’s School. An attempt was made to bribe Owen Labrie in 2017 while he was waiting for his appeals. Congresswoman Ann Kuster has a hell of a lot to answer for. She shut down ABC/GMA in July 2019 from airing an interview with him which would have exposed all of this. His accuser, Chessy Prout, was recruited, aged 15 by the White House “Not Alone” task force - months before trial. A team of attorneys, PR specialists, Gov Affairs specialists were sent up to New Hampshire to train the prosecutors and control the media. They left a paper trail behind. Chessy Prout became an “ambassador” for PAVE www.shatteringthesilence.org which got called out as 100% lies in 2020 by Melinda Coleman. Then she joined Vital Voices founded by Hillary Clinton with PR from SKDK. Then she pivoted to promoting BLM. Rep. Ann Kuster told Congress “We are all Emily Doe” in 2016. She used to be a lobbyist for Rohypnol. She just spotted the opportunity to get money to New Hampshire from the DOJ OVW which could be used to support elections via the NHCADSV whose director of public affairs, Amanda Grady Sexton, saw the Labrie trial as an opportunity. She was also on Senator Jeanne Shaheen’s re-election campaign committee and the NHCADSV worked with Laura L Dunn and co to spin the narrative which then led to them getting kick backs from the civil suit settlements and a contract with St Paul’s School. NHCADSV is a publicly funded non-profit and a vendor for the DOD but the State of New Hampshire claims that it is a private non-profit and therefore not accountable to the public. It’s IRS Form 990s are opaque. It is partnered with UNH which has received several million from the DoJ OVW to develop “Bystander” and “Know Your Power” biased training which it now markets under Soteria Solutions - recognized for entrepreneurship using federal grants. The prosecutors in NH v Owen Labrie and Law Professors at UNH said that they were interested in ‘private” institutions. Yes - they were being given public grants to go after private institutions and to blackmail them and extort them under social justice. And it was perfectly fine for them to frame scholarship students who would fit the profile they were looking for and to profile campuses to fit the profile they were looking for to achieve this. They left a huge paper trail behind and I hope that federal prosecutors will start looking into this. It defrauded the public and put lives in serious harm’s way. It led to the suicide of Dartmouth Professor David Bucci, the denial of rights to Saifullah Khan at Yale, to the denial of rights for thousands of others and it was all orchestrated and coordinated.
This is head-spinning.
It is. Let’s hope honest federal prosecutors pay attention and actually do something.
He is so right. Though I must say, it took him so long to realize this was happening? I guess the elite truly live in a bubble. Hopefully he can convince more of his cohorts and they help push the reversal of this rot not just in our education system but in our businesses and institutions.
He lived in the same bubble many Democrats did and still do, not just the elite.
He's still living in a bubble as he obviously still has no clue that when the leftists say "women" are oppressed, they're not actually talking about women. Ackerman mentioned "women" twice. Both times it was clear to me he doesn't know what a "woman" is under the doctrine of DEI.
Can't think of many HBS alums that I've been truly inspired by recently - Bill is one of them, truly a profile in courage imho. We need 10x more folks like him.
I appreciate Mr. Ackman taking the time to focus on these issues for several months. He is correct that a mere change at the top of these universities is insufficient. Other university presidents (two I get communications from) have avoided much of the harsh scrutiny., but they continue to support DEI and fail to see how that doctrine is contrary to Western values and political thought and can easily become anti-White, anti-Mainland Asian, and antisemitic. It started with a critique of so-called ethnocentrism, the fact-value distinction, moved on to multiculturalism, then affirmative action, diversity obsession and finally the full-fledged DEI catechism. Enough.
I should clarify: strike Mainland Asia, insert East and South Asian. Of course Japan and Taiwan are islands. DEI favors 'Pacific Islanders' but I assume that excludes Japan and Taiwan. I fear that pretty soon our Vietnamese Americans (that would invoke SE Asia) will be labeled as White Adjacent as they continue to demonstrate talent and initiative while seeking no special treatment.
Thank you Bill for leading the charge. The rot of DIE/ESG ideological capture runs deep throughout all of our institutions. Many of the Harvard Corporation board members are Obamassars (Obama Commissars): https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/how-to-get-into-harvard-gay-bobo-corporation
PS: Nice How To format ;)
SO many people don’t realize they have used words to hoodwink and manipulate people. What Bill said is correct “ DEI was not about diversity in its purest form. Rather, DEI was a political advocacy movement on behalf of certain groups that are deemed oppressed under DEI’s own methodology.”
DEI uses Newspeak, straight out of Orwell’s 1984.
Yes they do. For example, the definition of "racism," that Bill Ackman used is the one I use, but it is NOT the one used by leftists. They have changed the definition of that word, at least when they use it, to mean something along the lines of "white people using the race of minorities as a selection criterion instead of merit." So beware, when speaking with one of them, that this key word does not mean to them what it may mean to you.
Good point. Always clarify definitions.
We need to pushback hard and call out “anti-racism” for the racism that it is.
As Konstantin Kisin said recently in one of his excellent Triggernometry interviews, When in history has focussing on race ever brought good results for a society?
The racial essentialism of today’s so called anti-racists, like BLM, is no different from or better than the white (I will not use a capital “w”) supremacy it claims to replace.
I say it claims to replace because black power groups like BLM happily skip right over the race neutral colour blindness promoted by MLK and the initial Civil Rights Movement, as if they were never a real thing, with real power for change via black development as argued for by Shelby Steele, Robert Woodson, Glenn Loury, John McWhorter, and recently Coleman Hughes.
If you haven’t read Shelby Steele’s “The Content of Our Character” in a while, or ever, I highly recommend it.
(Thanks to John McWhorter for including it in his 2023 year end book recommendations).
Yep. He apparently thinks "women" means women as we used to understand it. He doesn't realize when they say "women are oppressed", they're talking about a new kind of women. The ones at the pinnacle of the oppression hierarchy. The old kind of women in the mean time are having all their rights as women dismantled.
"While slavery remains a permanent stain on our country’s history—a fact that is used by DEI to label white people as oppressors—it doesn’t therefore hold that all white people, generations after the abolishment of slavery, should be held responsible for its evils."
No, Mr. Ackman, slavery is no more a stain on America's history than it is on the history of virtually every other nation of the world that once practiced slavery and many that practice it today. Furthermore, no white person in America today can be held responsible for slavery. Slavery has been illegal in America since 1865, with the ratification of the 13th Amendment and I doubt anyone living has come close to achieving the age of 160. So this is all nonsense. The only thing that the DEI movement will do is succeed in dividing Americans by skin color; devolving us to tribalism and creating actual racial supremacists. DEI must DIE.
Even this poor chap feels the need to virtue signal in his takedown of virtue signaling.
Interesting he still feels the need to pay obeisance to race
I would argue that America was and is the original anti-slavery country. It was Britain, France, Italy, Spain, and all the other European countries that brought slavery to the New World. Within 30 years of its founding, the United States had outlawed slave trade, and slavery was gone completely within 90 years of its founding. Yet it is somehow the USA that gets blamed for it.
England abolished slavery before the United States as did France. England did far more than any country to stop the slave trade.
Yeah yeah. Then explain the history of the West Indies. Or how an entire subcontinent was subjugated until after WWII. Every country has its own cross to bear. The US is not the uniquely guilty slave country. The Soviets enslaved Eastern Europe and China enslaves its population today.
In the British West Indies slavery was abolished in 1833. The French islands earlier. Only 750,000 dead in a bloody civil effectively ended slavery here. Only in the US was it so closely tied to race. Slavery took other forms in the aftermath. Race was again the determinant. I oppose most affirmative action, and all DEI, reparations etc. Those too will continue to make blacks dependent on government based on a supposed inferiority .Those who call for a new civil war and secession are buffoons who believe no African-American has their job based on ability. Wiser heads need to prevail. Currently the loudest voices want hand out eternally or think they are ready to reenact the civil. war. My primary concern is this country and today there is much more yelling and grandstanding than listening and reflecting.
Grow up. Tell the black Jamaicans about how the UK abolished slavery in 1833 and race didn't matter any more. How many Americans are calling for a new civil war? It's just hyperbole. Almost everyone understands that our last Civil War was not one - it was a regional conflict. Civil wars are ugly; race wars even uglier. That's why the lies that the Democrats - and sadly, you - peddle are so dangerous as they continue to foment grievance and hatred.
But then, the Chinese in China love it -- they've always loved it, or name the time they didn't.
Thanks Bruce, came here to say just this. I work/have worked with too many successful black and brown folks to believe skin color has anything to do with anything worth doing. Real Mexican food being a notable exception, but again, I know some gringos who do fair interpretations. Not to toot my own horn…
I missed something here, about, "Real Mexican food." I've loved it, ever since we'd go on liberty to Tijuana, 1956. Haven't had much "Real," since.
Great point.
One could argue that, considering the principals that our country was supposed to be founded on, ANY slavery is a pretty big stain. What he said can still be true even if America was ahead of the curve on getting rid of slavery. And the "Everyone else was doing it" helps explain why we were too...but it doesn't absolve us. Especially when our leaders espoused so much about people's inalienable rights and freedom and the like.
Who the F cares? Everyone who owned a slave in America is dead. Does slavery negate the words of the Declaration of Independence? Does serfdom negate Magna Carta? Go preach to people who will actually fall for such silliness.
And yet the entire MSM and political class took turns scolding Nikki Haley to make sure she never forgets our country's original sin. She, a non-white daughter of immigrants who weren't even here until long after slavery had ended, must also repent in 2024. What gives?
Is past liberal and general support for Black Lives Matter, including from the Jewish leadership/community, a similar mistake? And if so, what should be done now/by whom -- and why did that transpire? Is there a fair comparison between BLM founders living in opulance then with Hamas leaders living in opulance in ways that are useful? Should this entire matter be prominent in the upcoming Presidential election?
It has been a nearly lifelong disconnect for me that such a high percentage of Jews are hard leftists.
As a Jew I’ll take a stab at this. Education and learning is part of the Jewish ethos. So is “ tikkun olam” improving the state of the world. So is being kind and good to the downtrodden. Jews know deeply what it is like to be persecuted . So many Jewish leaders marched with MLK
This is a perfect storm for being suckered into this DEI nightmare especially if it is formulated as “ correct past wrongs”. My understanding is these hard left Jews are well intentioned but sorely misguided. Some have woken up since 10-7/. Others are sadly and shamefully still committed to this crazy ideology.
The more religious the Jewish community the more conservative the politics. Those communities are more insular and very traditional .
Suckered also into the BLM nightmare, are you implying? If so, who do you expect the suckerees are?, and in what segment of our society are they represented? Then, please continue: what should be done and by whom? Bari Weiss and her organization seem useful and engaged on that score.
Yes, a direct linkage. BLM and DEI support is very intertwined. Add “Free Palestine” in there too! They are all movements based on the same faulty oppressor ideology.
The oppressor/oppressed ideology is known as cultural Marxism. It is seductive in its simplicity (who doesn’t like a nice, neat binary view of every single problem?) and in its supposed end goal of helping those who have less.
But its application in real life, to economies and cultures, is destructive to human flourishing - without free speech and thought, the defence of individual human rights is not possible.
My prescription for universities is to make Thomas Sowell required reading for students across all faculties. Sowell believes in facts, not fairytales. His works command respect.
Yes, yes, yes and yes.
Absolutely