I’m reminded of an old lawyer joke along the same lines:
Question: What do you call a thousand lawyers at the bottom of the ocean?
Answer: A good start.
Twitter has a diversity, equity and inclusion department. Like many companies, Twitter calls it something other than that because that phrase is now a joke. Recall how proud the Left was of “woke” until “woke” became a joke.
Under various names, this DEI crap is everywhere. Any organization of any size – say bigger than about 50 people – now has a DEI person or even a whole DEI department. At Twitter, the department comprised 30 men and women and etc.
Bloomberg News reports that 28 of those 30 have been laid off since Elon Musk took over the company. Bloomberg of course frames this news as a tragedy. In fact – er, actually in their opinion presented as fact – it’s a tragedy of epic proportions. Bloomberg laments that the DEI staffs of tech firms everywhere have been particularly decimated in the recent tech layoffs.
Bloomberg complains that this DEI crap was probably just window dressing, and the companies and colleges signing up for it never really believed in it.
Unlike Bloomberg, it’s been my assumption and fervent hope all along that companies were indeed insincere in their DEI initiatives. No right-thinking profit-seeking shareholder-serving organization could sincerely think that merit should be replaced with skin color and bedroom habits. So why did companies go so far down that path?
The reason is that the DEI people (or is it “peoplx”?) have largely owned the companies. Not in the legal sense, but in the real sense. Their putative bosses – rational businessmen and women – could not stand up to the DEI crap without being deemed bigoted.
No one likes to be deemed bigoted. So the compliant bosses just went along in deferring to the young, arrogant, stupid diversity czars who’d majored in something young, arrogant and stupid like Diversity Studies. Times were good, profit margins were fat, and this crap was affordable.
No more. Times are leaner, margins are skinnier, and crap is for cutting.
As for colleges, however, I dare not entertain such thoughts. Colleges are currently stagnant cesspools of anti-western, anti-intellectualism. They are unaccountable for the toxic lies they spread and the authoritarianism with which they spread it. Colleges still favor skin color and bedroom habits over merit, they do so sincerely, and they will continue to do so for a while.
When was the last time you saw layoffs at a college? It took decades for colleges to become anti-intellectual gulags. It took the dying of enlightened scholars over the course of a generation and their replacement by decrepit authoritarians.
It will now take decades to liberate the gulags. It will take the dying of the authoritarians. It will take a passing of the torch of enlightenment they smothered, now cold and dead, to an unindoctrinated generation. It will take the new generation’s brave relighting of that torch.
It’s not easy but it’s happened before.
I have no illusions that I’ll live to see the torch burn again in colleges, hot and bright, but I hope to at least see the relighting. What happened at Twitter is a good start.
Watch for my book next month, “High Attitute — How Woke Liberals Ruined Aspen”
the Aspen beat 
In the wake of the train derailment in Ohio, I heard that Northern Pacific has an extremely high DEI score. It seems to correlate well with incompetence. The recent push to hire pilots based on melanin levels instead of aptitude has resulted in several near collisions and a recent death of an Atlas Air pilot due to his being put in the cockpit before sufficiently trained.
Who thinks this madness is working?
On the bright side, so many young males have become self-made victims of this woke madness that they have become undatable. No woman wants a man-boy they cannot respect. As a 62-year-old, balding, single male, disabled veteran, not a year goes by without at least one or two beautiful 20-something hotties propositioning me. Many ask me outright to have sex with me. I’m not rich and I’m not particularly handsome, but I am the recipient of a classical education so I can think. I love the great good Donald Trump did for our country. I am politically conservative and know without a doubt that basement Biden, the corrupt old liar who can’t think his way off a stage, stole the last election.
Leftists will tell you that I am to be shunned. I laugh at their imbecility. I have an amazingly beautiful 32-year-old girlfriend who is smarter than me and is also quite wealthy. Don’t be a leftist nerd and you can have these things too!
“not a year goes by without at least one or two beautiful 20-something hotties propositioning me”
When it’s two, I think I’d go along. Don’t want to hurt their feelings….
I was amazed that as a 70 year old professor (in good physical shape) that I continued to be ‘approached’ by young women who weren’t even in my classes and so could get no such benefit. Luckily for me, I’ve been very happily married to the love of my life for decades, so I wasn’t tempted.
My 50-year-old son (an electrician) reports similar events. I’m guessing it has something to do with being obviously confident traditional males.
But one of the course I taught was Human Resource Management, and the crippled personalities who have been being shoved into HR everywhere are at the root of most of the DEI madness, in my opinion. Having no ‘center’ they have latched onto DEI to give themselves purpose. It’s pathetic. They’re now as bad as Social Work grads.
Dr. Beaton, Great Post. DEI was just to field complaints about anything, anyone was offended by … dress codes, offensive FB posts by anyone, pronoun police, blah blah … then they attend conferences (HR folks run in herds), find CBTs to foist on unsuspecting participants and employees, avoid lawsuits and bad press … BTW: they’re breeding all throughpout the DoD and service academies, Regards
“Diversity, Equity, Inclusion “ sounds like some Soviet era “Peace” front which was against all wars except when it involved Communist aggression. which they wholeheartedly approved of.
Our education system and Universities are at the root cause of all of our problems. As Dennis Prager has stated, sending your kids to college is like playing Russian Roulette with their minds. Just not worth it in many cases. I totally concur. I have several friends who have essentially lost their kids to the crazy nonsense (brainwashing) that they are spewing. Family dinners are no longer much fun. The daughters seem to be especially susceptible to the propaganda.
Daughters and girly-men sons. This is how we get Jacinda Arderns and Justin Trudeaus running entire nations.
The racketeering of the grievance industrial complex. For decades now our economy has devoted billions of dollars to DIE, and yet we’re told that things have only gotten worse. (Apparently, according to the President “lynching” is still a thing. Who knew?)
One of the best features of capitalism is “creative destruction”, where unprofitable or otherwise useless activities eventually die and capital is then devoted to more productive purpose. Now that industry and especially the tech sector is no longer swimming in easy cash, people and activities that are not contributing to the bottom line are on the chopping block.
Unfortunately, academia is still insulated from this market hygiene. Student loans backed by the government with absolutely no consideration as to how it is to be “invested” by the student or will be paid back will see to it that collages will remain swimming in cash and under no pressure to change. Until academia is made to respect the same market forces that private industry must face by the elimination of such subsidies, it will continue to do what it’s been doing.
The lawyer joke needs updating. I’d rather see a thousand college administrators at the bottom of the briny deep, with millstones around their necks — from every major university. There are that many of them, and they’re way more malignant than the average attorney.
Don’t forget—add hospital administrators to your academic drones, and quintuple your thousand! As of now, we have more administrators than beds!
DEI goes hand in hand with mandatory vaccines.
So many Leftists simply cannot comprehend that when politics is more important than scientific studies and the people involved are actual science based workers it results in a shortage of nurses.
Absolutely stupid.
A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both. ~ Milton Friedman
What do you call it? Happy Days. DIE is meant to divide and create tensions among Americans.
Success!
Ouch! Misspelled your own book title. “High Attitute?”
It’s a play on words. You’ll see
Rough justice, evil being flayed.
Just LOVE the sound of…..
The “Woke Social Justice TOILET” being FLUSHED over and over and over again !
I have a dream . . . that one day all of these DEI demagogues will discover, like Angela Davis, that they had an ancestor on The Mayflower.
Enjoyed this entire line of commentary from people who still have the too-rare combo of brains and intestinal fortitude; our national epidemic of insanity must give way to truth and common sense …
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