On Wednesday, Republicans introduced a bill that would ban Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion practices in the federal government and for federal contractors.
The Dismantle DEI Act, introduced by Sen. J.D. Vance (R., Ohio) and Rep. Michael Cloud (R., Texas), would also bar federal grants from going to diversity initiatives, cutting off a key source of support for DEI programs in science and medicine. Other provisions would prevent accreditation agencies from requiring DEI in schools and bar national securities associations, like NASDAQ and the New York Stock Exchange, from instituting diversity requirements for corporate boards.
"The DEI agenda is a destructive ideology that breeds hatred and racial division," Vance told the Washington Free Beacon. "It has no place in our federal government or anywhere else in our society."
These programs, just to belabor the obvious for a moment, not only violate the basic principle of equal treatment under the law by forcing federal hiring offices to use preferential hiring practices for selected groups, practices which have nothing to do with the job but with specific, irrelevant characteristics of the applicants, but may also actually endanger the country when put in place in institutions like the military services.
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There's little doubt that these practices are detrimental to the agencies where they are being applied.
From NASA and the National Science Foundation to the Internal Revenue Service and the U.S Army, all federal agencies require some form of diversity training. Mandatory workshops have drilled tax collectors on "cultural inclusion," military commanders on male pregnancy, and nuclear engineers on the "roots of white male culture," which—according to a training for Sandia National Laboratories, the Energy Department offshoot that designs America’s nuclear arsenal—include a "can-do attitude" and "hard work."
Is it too much to ask that military commanders, in particular, not be bothered with flapdoodle about "male pregnancy?" Should they not be focused on training on finding bad guys and un-aliving them? To, as was the case not so very long ago, close with and destroy the enemy by fire, maneuver, and shock effect?
What does it profit the country to have nuclear engineers training on the "roots of white male culture," which evidently includes a "can-do attitude" and "hard work?" People with those attitudes are precisely the people we should want overseeing and maintaining our nuclear arsenal. And it doesn't make a lick of difference how much melanin they have or whether they are setters or pointers.
Fortunately, at least outside of the federal government, those practices seem to be giving way to some semblance of sanity — or, at least, turned back on the promoters of DEI.
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Sadly, the Vance-Cloud bill will go nowhere as long as the Senate and the White House are in Democrat hands. Democrats are, after all, the primary vectors for the DEI virus. But it's still worth doing, and the current situation won't last forever. As an election-year ploy, this isn't the worst, it helps the right frame DEI as a boondoggle and provides something of a platform for pointing out the national security dangers in applying this horse squeeze to such things as military promotions. Enough is enough already.
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