Outlawing the Enlightenment

16 million dollars has been invested into the Democrat Primary Race--the Primary(!)--over Bowman's House seat.

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So, how's the 320 million dollar Gaza Humanitarian Pier going? This is looking very Afghanistan Withdrawl-like.

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A ransomware group known as LockBit claimed to have hacked the Federal Reserve Bank

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Hamas Skimmed $1 Billion in U.N. Aid for Weapons and Tunnels, Suit Says.
About 100 Israelis sued the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, saying it pays local employees in dollars that buoy the terrorist group.

(NYT Headline)

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Outlawing the Enlightenment

Rufo has an article in City Journal on DEI. Not the Journal's best but its initial concept is that the public university is the result of a "compact." Public universities in the United States originally rested on an agreement between the citizen and the republic: the citizens would provide funding for the university to train young people to advance the public interest and the common good. In recent years, however, this compact has disintegrated, and considerable efforts will be needed to rebuild it.

He uses the University of Colorado Boulder’s DEI program as an example.

"The basic predicate of CU Boulder’s DEI program is that “Black, Indigenous and People of Color,” or “BIPOC,” students are failing because of “white supremacy culture.”

What is white supremacy culture? According to CU Boulder’s DEI documentation, it includes “individualism,” “perfectionism,” “a sense of urgency,” “worship of the written word,” and “objectivity.” These traits are supposedly vestiges of “whiteness” and unavailable to racial minorities—an unintentionally bigoted attitude.

Next, CU Boulder’s DEI bureaucrats would have you engage in a 21-day “Racial Equity Habit Building Challenge.”

One of the resources included in this program is a guide on “How to Be a Better White Person.” The document supplied a protocol on how to accomplish this task. Step one: “Realize you’re white.” Step two: “Recognize your privilege.” Step three: “Know things.” Finally, from a related resource, instructions on how to be an “ally” to racial minorities: “Transfer the benefits of your privilege to those who lack it”; “amplify the voices of the oppressed before your own”; “acknowledge that, even though you feel pain, the conversation is not about you.”

This is not the language of an academic program but of an abusive relationship.

Unfortunately, the language of DEI has also taken hold in CU Boulder’s curriculum. For example, the university has recently included a course on “Critical Whiteness Studies.” The syllabus is replete with activist terms, such as “institutionalized whiteness,” “white privilege,” and “white fragility.” The basic concept is that “whiteness” is an irreducibly malicious essence, loaded with ancestral guilt.

Human history is brutal and filled with injustice. But to scapegoat one population group, European whites, as the essence of evil is nothing but propaganda. Obviously, none of this meets any genuine scholarly standards—and that’s a pattern characteristic of DEI.

Finally, DEI is used as a justification to hire scholars of favored demographics and ideologies. CU Boulder has explicit and implicit racial quotas in hiring, which, in theory, violate the law. According to one professor, more than 90 percent of recent hires at CU Boulder’s College of Arts and Sciences have been diversity hires. Of the remaining 10 percent, some might lay claim to other protected identities, such as “LGBTQ,” reducing the percentage of “oppressors” even further.

This is unethical and immoral. But under DEI, it is a requirement of social justice.

The problem with DEI is not merely administrative or curricular. When its principles are adopted wholesale, DEI compromises the fundamental purpose of the university and the basic compact between the citizen and the state.

In fact, the degeneration of universities into centers of ideological activism—which American taxpayers are currently subsidizing—violates basic democratic principles to such an extraordinary degree that we urgently need to implement dramatic reforms."