Wednesday Potpourri

First, the scandal du jour involves the Transgender Day of Visibility. Apparently, this made-up holiday always falls on March 31-- why not the ides of March, you will be thinking-- and this year March 31 was Easter Sunday, the holiest day in the Christian calendar.

So, the Biden administration issued a proclamation, in the name of POTUS himself. When he was criticized by Republicans like House Speaker Mike Johnson, Biden denied the facts. He claimed not to have said that.

One suspects that tired old Joe did not know that the proclamation had been issued in his name. He is too senile to pay very close attention to the workings of the White House.

We also learn that 38% of Americans believe that if Joe Biden is elected in 2024 he will not live out his term. A vote for Biden is thus a vote for Kamala Harris. Yikes.

Second, while Biden has done everything in his power to desacralize Easter, he was all-in with prayers for Ramadan. 

Third, it looks like the era of DEI is winding down. Corporations are becoming more skeptical of diversity initiatives and are downplaying their commitment to it.

Axios reported:

Diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, was the hot thing in corporate America a few years ago. Now: not so much.

Why it matters: The business community, long averse to political risks or controversies, backed away from DEI programs over the past two years in the wake of widespread attacks from lawmakers, high-profile rich guys and conservative activists like former Trump aide Stephen Miller.

The big picture: Companies that never cared much about DEI, or that fear lawsuits over programs, are using the moment to back away. Others are sticking with these efforts but doing it quietly.

Between the lines: Some business leaders are increasingly reluctant to speak publicly about the subject, but behind the scenes they're fed up with DEI, Johnny Taylor, president of the Society for Human Resource Management said in a January interview with Axios.

Fourth, at the Powerline blog John Hinderaker takes the measure of national attitudes toward DEI:

Woke capitalism is one of the strange phenomena of our era. I understand why government agencies might go in for DEI (Didn’t Earn It), since government at all levels is mostly in the hands of liberals and government employees, by their nature, are inclined to social engineering. But why corporations should sign up en masse for this left-wing nonsense is beyond me.

It is beyond most Americans, too. Rasmussen asked more than 1,200 Americans whether they are familiar with DEI and whether they think it has a positive or negative impact on companies. The linked article’s text is a little garbled, but this is what the pollster found:

Sixty-four percent (64%) of those surveyed are familiar with DEI….

So quite a few people, around a third, said they were not “familiar…with diversity, equity and inclusion policies, usually abbreviated as DEI.” Of those who are aware of DEI, a plurality think it has a harmful effect:

[J]ust 25% of American Adults think diversity, equity, and inclusion programs make companies better…while 34% think DEI is making companies worse. Twenty-five percent (25% say) DEI programs don’t make much difference and 16% are not sure.

Those who say they are very familiar with DEI are most negative toward it, perhaps because of personal experience:

Among Americans who are Very Familiar with DEI, 51% say such policies are making companies worse.

Rasmussen asked separately whether respondents think DEI programs make companies’ products or services, in the form of entertainment, better or worse. The results were similar:

37% of Americans believe diversity, equity and inclusion programs are making products and entertainment worse, while 22% think DEI is making them better.

Fifth, the student government of Harvard Law School passed a resolution accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza.

To which Larry Summers responded by suggesting that these students are damaging their reputations and making all graduates of Harvard Law School less desirable as hires.

Sixth, now that the Harvard law students have embraced Hamas propaganda, the Times of Israel reports that Hamas is collapsing, thanks to the Israeli military efforts. This, via Israeli defense minister Gallant:

“In the last week or two, hundreds of terrorists have been captured and what they say about what happened to them tells the whole story. They say that Hamas is collapsing from within, the price they are paying is very heavy,” Gallant said following an assessment at the 98th Division’s headquarters.

“We’re going to eliminate everyone who was involved in the events of October 7, the junior [officials], the senior ones and the very senior ones; those who were inside [Israel] or who gave instructions,” he said, referring to the date of Palestinian terror group Hamas’s massive attack on Israel that started the ongoing war.

Seventh, in the meantime, anti-Semitism is alive and well in America. Katya Sedgwick reports a scene from a synagogue in New Jersey:

Something significant is happening here: a large group of Arabs and allies showed up at a synagogue in New Jersey chanting “we don’t want Israelis here”. It’s a turning point — an entrenched authentic minority American group is being chased out by new arrivals, all with implicit approval of American institutions.

Not a word about this from the Biden administration. Tell me you are not surprised.

Eighth, while the Biden administration, along with Chuck Schumer and Tommy Friedman, believes that the Palestinian Authority ought to be a partner for peace, the following incident occurred in Jerusalem. Reported by Daniel Greenfield:

Earlier this month, Muhammad Manasra, who is affiliated with Fatah, the ruling PLO group behind the Palestinian Authority, and had graduated from the Egyptian Police College, who had served as a Palestinian police officer, at a rank equivalent to major, opened fire at an Israeli gas station, killing a medic, before being taken out by the owner of a Humus restaurant.

Now it happened again, and this time the target was a school bus.

Ninth, on a lighter note, from the Twitter account of Libs of TikTok:

Trans people are the most brave, courageous and resilient people on earth and also their happiness is dependent on you gendering them correctly and if you misgender them they might commit suicide.

Tenth, don’t get sick in America. The following, from Roger Cohen on TomKlingenstein.com. Corporate America is waking up to the failures of DEI, but the medical profession has not gotten there yet:

The medical profession’s leaders, almost without exception or dissent, now vigorously enforce this new orthodoxy of anti-racism. Most notably, they have designed and implemented a new version of medical education explicitly grounded in ideology rather than scientific excellence. In pursuit of this project, the president of the AAMC (which accredits U.S. medical schools) and the chair of the AAMC’s Council of [Medical School] Deans stated publicly in July 2022: “We believe this topic [Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion] deserves just as much attention from learners and educators at every stage of their careers as the latest scientific breakthroughs.”

The AAMC’s DEI Competencies, issued in October 2021, details the new required social justice skills that medical students must acquire. In addition, the AAMC has discouraged the use of the rigorous Medical College Admissions Test (MCAT) as a filter to help select medical students. Dozens of the 158 allopathic (MD granting) U.S. medical schools have made the MCAT optional. Several medical schools, including the prestigious University of Pennsylvania, have programs to admit students from designated “underrepresented” identity groups without requiring the submission of MCAT scores at all. The MCAT itself has been revised to include social justice questions that are easy to ace because the answers are always the same: structural racism is the cause of any group disparities that disfavor underrepresented groups. But even this re-engineered test shows persistent group disparities in test scores, which means that Asian applicants must score almost 4 times higher than black applicants to have an equal chance of admission.

Tenth, in America’s new idiotocracy, the name of Judith Butler has a special place, designating the most profound stupidity. Consider this sentence, taken from Butler’s writings:

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

I did not make that up. I did not find it in the Babylon Bee.

If you are a college student and you are assigned Butler’s writings, drop the course. If you cannot drop the course, then ask for a tuition refund.

Eleventh, you will be happy to learn that J. K. Rowling will not be prosecuted under the ridiculous new Scottish anti-biology law.

Some people are too important to prosecute.

The Daily Mail reports:

As the 58-year-old [Rowling]'s comments whipped up a social media storm, she won support from Prime Minister Rishi Sunak who said: 'People should not be criminalised for stating simple facts on biology.'

A Police Scotland spokesperson said of the tweets: 'We have received complaints in relation to the social media post. The comments are not assessed to be criminal and no further action will be taken.”

Rowling said of the police response: 'I hope every woman in Scotland who wishes to speak up for the reality and importance of biological sex will be reassured by this announcement, and I trust that all women - irrespective of profile or financial means - will be treated equally under the law.' 

She added, in full defiance mode:

If they go after any woman for simply calling a man a man, I'll repeat that woman's words and they can charge us both at once.

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