Back in the old days, cigar-chomping, big-city Democrat politicians would sit in smoky back rooms and hand out patronage jobs for their supporters. The ward leader's nephew would get a cushy no-show appointment to the water commission and the wheels of politics were greased.
Today, much of this blatant corruption has been weeded out, but the modern Democrats have found a new, more subtle and much more lucrative way to pay off their allies. It is called Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.
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During the Biden administration, the Department of Education alone spent $1 billion on DEI, and that's just one federal agency. In almost every blue city and suburb in America, local and statewide efforts pour even more money into diversity programs.
Every person who has ever sat through a corporate training session knows exactly what the taxpayers are getting in return for this fortune being funneled to DEI experts and organizations: absolutely nothing.
These hucksters are handed millions by Democrats just for putting together a few Power Point presentations about privilege theory, modes of whiteness, or trans visibility. Boss Tweed and the gang at Tammany Hall would be in awe.
The corrupt union boss used to just get a nice beach house. These DEI people are building corporate headquarters.
One interesting difference between the old corruption and the new is that it used to largely be men in politics giving men in the trades easy jobs to curry favor. But with DEI, it is more often women in politics giving women in the diversity industry jobs.
CNN's Van Jones touched on this the other day in a way that all but gives up the game.
"So far, 300,000 Black women have lost their jobs since Trump became president," Jones said. "For decades and decades, Black women were not very welcome in the halls of corporate America. Everyone knew that. So over the years, many of our best and brightest Black women instead proudly went to work in the public sector."
Note that Jones was not making an argument that these jobs are needed, but rather that they exist as a kind of work program for Black women. He went on to say, "Black women with multiple advanced degrees … near perfect records as voters … respected roles in their churches and sororities … and homes in their own names are facing bankruptcy, foreclosure and economic disaster."
Now, not all of these jobs have been in DEI, but a whole lot of them have been. And here Jones is all but admitting that this is specifically designed to benefit Black women who, by the way, just happen to be the most reliable Democrat voters in the universe.
Over the past several years, the American taxpayer, to say nothing of almost every corporation in the nation, has spent Scrooge McDuck-level money on DEI, but has there been one single success story? One organization that can credibly say, "We are way less racist now?"
Democrats just seem to naturally assume that any time spent talking about the evils of racism and how horrible White people have been and continue to be is time well spent, even more so if they can throw lots of money at it.
But increasingly, as Jones makes clear, it seems that the purpose of DEI is not really to solve racism, something progressives don't actually think is possible anyway, but rather to create patronage jobs for loyal voters.
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In perpetuity.
It is regrettable that thousands of people have invested years of university and professional careers in a DEI industry that has turned out to be a badly failed experiment. But the American people don't want it, and they certainly don't want to pay for it.
There may have been a time when you could look at DEI and say, "OK, let's try it," but that time has passed. This approach to diversity has only made race relations worse, and at this point, to continue to fund it on the taxpayers' dime can only be called corruption.
The smoky back rooms of yesteryear may have given way to alfresco espresso martinis in our modern age, but a patronage job is a patronage job, whether it's sitting in a crow's nest watching a cargo ship get unpacked, or making posters about unconscious bias.
The Trump administration is right to tackle DEI on the federal level and every state and locality should do the same. It's not just a waste of money, it is corruption in action.
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