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Sobering Up After DEI

DEI, diversity, equity, inclusion, regulations

Some universities and companies have been retreating from their obnoxious DEI policies. We can now add Jack Daniel’s to the list.

One of the lamentable ideological fads of recent years, DEI (“Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion”) programs are a vicious form of race-based and sex-based affirmative action.

All such policies subordinate merit to irrelevant but politically preferred physical characteristics.

So far as I know, old-style affirmative action at least was not normally accompanied by mandatory indoctrination and mandatory testimony by applicants about how they would cherish and uphold the ideology of compensatory racial and sexual discrimination. But such indoctrination and litmus tests are standard features of many contemporary DEI regimes.

Which are now minus one, thankfully, as Jack Daniel’s announces that it will be ending DEI initiatives, such as a social credit system and “quantitative workforce and supplier diversity ambitions.”

The Dallas Express says that the whiskey distiller is decoupling from DEI because it is “facing backlash.” Specifically, thanks to the impending attention of Robby Starbuck, “an activist known for successfully putting a spotlight on companies like Harley-Davidson and John Deere” for their DEI policies.

Starbuck said on Twitter that he had been “set to expose” Jack Daniel’s, which perhaps was tipped off by his visiting of employee LinkedIn pages. “We are winning and one by one we will bring sanity back to corporate America.”

He adds that if you want your own workplace’s DEI policies exposed, you can email “tips and evidence” to him at EliminateDEI@protonmail.com.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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national politics & policies political challengers

RFKj+T

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Democrat party, president, endorsement

RFK, Jr., is clearly more afraid of Democrats wielding power than he is of former President Donald Trump. That’s why the independent dropped out of the presidential race last week and endorsed Mr. Trump, the Republican Party nominee. 

“I began this journey as a Democrat,” explained Robert Kennedy, Jr., stating that it was “the party of my father [the likely Democratic presidential nominee in 1968, when he was assassinated], my uncle [President John F. Kennedy, assassinated in 1963], the party which I pledged my own allegiance to long before I was old enough to vote. I attended my first Democratic Convention at the age of six. . . .”

But last October, RFK, Jr., left the Democratic Party, arguing that Democrats have “departed so dramatically from the core values that” he “grew up with,” that it has “become the party of war, censorship, corruption, big Pharma, big Tech, big Ag, and big money.” 

And he also acted out of necessity, when the party “abandoned democracy by canceling the primary to conceal the cognitive decline of the sitting president.”*

Kennedy bitterly complained about the efforts of Democrats to deny him a spot on state ballots, blasting “DNC-aligned judges” that threw him “and other candidates off the ballot — and” have attempted “to throw President Trump in jail.”

NBC News suggested that Kennedy sees Trump as “a partner — and a fellow victim.” Probably so, but RFKj specifically cited “Free speech, the war in Ukraine, and the war on our children” as “the principled causes that persuaded [him] to leave the Democratic Party and run as an independent, and now to throw [his] support to President Trump.”

Kennedy Democrats for Trump?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

* RFK, Jr., wondered aloud: “How did the Democratic Party choose a candidate that has never done an interview or debate during the entire election cycle?”

NOTE: Mr. Trump reportedly promised Mr. Kennedy that, if elected, he would release all the classified material related to his uncle JFK’s assassination. A pledge Trump made in 2016 and did not keep.

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media and media people national politics & policies

Democrats Move On

The long decline of major-media news journalism has been quite a story. We’ve been following it for years — perhaps all our lives. 

Back when there were only three channels in the U.S., and when most cities had a newspaper or two, all competing to “cover the news,” we thought that there was some objectivity to it all — that facts were paramount. That may have been naive. But with the rise of cable television news and the 24-hour news “cycle,” and then Internet blogging, vlogging, and podcasting, all fixed around a few social media company platforms, all pretense of rigorous reporting has evaporated. 

Even corporate tool Stephen Colbert now admits that the very idea of objectivity is popularly regarded as a joke.

As it was in the beginning of the country — with Federalist papers competing with Republican papers — so it is today, except most major media outfits are Democrat, and only one major channel, Fox News, presents anything like a “Republican” spin on “the news.”

So, let’s congratulate the Democrats for finally recognizing reality.

At their national convention, just wrapped up, most journalists were not allowed on the floor. Press passes were given to loyal Democratic “journalists,” sure, but not to any of the few still trying to do actual reporting. Glenn Greenwald was refused a pass.

Instead, the Democratic Party let in a whole bunch of “influencers” and TikTokers.

Greenwald sees this as a horrific degradation of the role of honest journalism.

But maybe we should see it as the only sign of honesty we can expect from Democrats.

If propaganda be the norm, accept it and “move on.”

Silly Republicans, stuck in the past, allowed all sorts of reporters into their convention.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Communists Within the Form

“They’re not communists,” comedian Dave Smith recently told Tucker Carlson, referring to leading Democrats such as Nancy Pelosi and Kamala Harris. “They work for big business!”

Sure, but beside the point: they spew out commie talking points not as an excuse to overthrow the state and set up a communist one, but to overthrow the last vestiges of the Constitution — free-speech rights, private property rights, the whole shebang — and consolidate power in the corporatist, neo-mercantilist fascism that yearns to squelch all dissent.

National candidates talking “far left” allows gullible left-leaners to back powerful insiders against the real outsiders, the churchgoers, the small business owners and entrepreneurs, free-lance professionals and the like. 

The real revolution is what Garet Garrett, expanding upon Aristotle, called “revolution within the form.”

So, are Kamala Harris and Tim Walz just “useful idiots” preparing the way for the plutocrats’ totalitarian end game?

Would-be Cackler-in-Chief aside, the Washington Free Beacon’s Alana Goodman posits that Walz may be an out-and-out communist:

  • “As a high school teacher in the 1990s, Democratic vice-presidential candidate and Minnesota governor Tim Walz appeared to extol life under Chinese communism, telling his students that it is a system in which ‘everyone shares’ and gets free food and housing.”
  • “Walz’s rosy description of communism in China is similar to his recent controversial remark that ‘one person’s socialism is another person’s neighborliness.’ It also reflects his longstanding ties to the country.”
  • “After returning to the United States in the early 1990s, Walz started leading trips to China for American high school students, with support from the Chinese government. The trips were ‘arranged by a friend of Walz in China’s foreign affairs department,’ the Star-Herald reported at the time. The Chinese government also provided some of the funding for the program.”

True-believing communists in the old style? Or just woke, post-Marxist totalitarians? 

It hardly matters when the point of what they say is not the dogma, but the performance, allowing them to revolt against us, and the constitutional order we rely upon.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Commie Kamala?

Kamala Harris, communism, socialism, media, economics

“It’s hard to exaggerate how bad this policy is,” Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell wrote last week. 

“It is, in all but name, a sweeping set of government-enforced price controls across every industry, not only food,” explaining Democrat nominee Kamala Harris’s economic program. “Supply and demand would no longer determine prices or profit levels. Far-off Washington bureaucrats would. The FTC [Federal Trade Commission] would be able to tell, say, a Kroger in Ohio the acceptable price it can charge for milk.”

Rampell, certainly no conservative, concluded by suggesting to the Vice-President, “If your opponent claims you’re a ‘communist,’ maybe don’t start with an economic agenda that can (accurately) be labeled as federal price controls.”

The Post’s editorial board also noted that “every campaign makes expensive promises” but “[e]ven adjusting for the pandering standards of campaign economics” her speech “ranks as a disappointment.”

But as destructive as price controls would be, the Post’s Aaron Blake points out that, according to various polls, blaming big corporations for price gouging appears to strike a chord with the public.*

“It’s not just a potent boogeyman,” Blake explains, “it’s a potent boogeyman that deflects blame from the administration that has been in charge these past 3½ years.”

So is Vice-President Harris really a communist or just a run-of-mill blame-shifting politician?

Well, sadly, those two things are not mutually exclusive. She could be [shudder] both.

So, if you are scared that former President Trump will usher in authoritarianism, should he prevail this November, you now know that, instead, you can choose communism.

That is, the Democrats’ excuse-making, blame-shifting, market-killing standard bearer.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Though, the polling shows the public views “increasing oil production” as more effective in bringing prices down. Don’t hold your breath for Ms. Harris and Democrats to endorse that.

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ideological culture media and media people national politics & policies partisanship

Measures of Desperation

news media, bias, propaganda, PSYOP

Desperate times call for desperate measures, the saying goes, but since the Hillary Clinton/Donald Trump contest of 2015-2016, the desperate measures that Democrats and media newsfolk lurched towards have been extraordinary.

Yesterday, as one of our Weekend Updates, we considered the current pickle in which the corporate news media finds itself. 

Fearing that they had contributed to the defeat of Hillary Clinton by covering the news of her emails and other scandals, corporate newsrooms cooked up a new ethical rule: Do not report on stories based on data — no matter if confirmed — that may have been leaked by foreign malefactors, such as “the Russians.”

With that rule they suppressed, online, news about the Hunter Biden laptop and its contents, calling it “Russian disinformation.” Twitter banned the news source long enough to get Biden elected, and then the “Russian” story unraveled.

Now that same rule would, if consistently applied, work against reporting on Trump’s current email leakage.

But it’s not just media malfeasance that is desperate, as Stephen Cox explains at Liberty. Referring to the ousting of Joe Biden from the 2024 Democratic presidential ticket, Mr. Cox writes that while this variety of machination is new to America, it is very old, historically: this is “the kind of thing the Roman imperial families used to do. This is the kind of thing the Bolsheviks used to do. The difference, of course, is that the Democratic Party oligarchs have lots and lots of money to enforce their will.”

Enforce it they do. Consider how many in the news media played along with Biden’s senescence, right up until they all proclaimed it obvious and disqualifying. They “turn on a dime.”

“Fragile regimes have a way of bringing the house down with them,” notes Cox. But why is it Trump who sends Democrats into paroxysms of terror?

Twenty years ago, Trump might have been dismissed out of hand. He isn’t now, and neither is Kamala Harris — a woman with all the charm of Hillary and all the competence of Sleepy Joe.

Desperate times, indeed. And Americans know it. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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What Neighborliness Is Not

Tim Walz, socialism, communism, white dudes, Kamala Harris, racism

In a late July mass videochat session, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz did not in any way acknowledge the cringe in the name of the “White Dudes for Kamala Harris” fundraiser. 

But the governor did advise his supporters to at least talk to their political opponents. 

“Look, I got a Florida Man as a brother,” Kamala Harris’s VP sidekick said. “We all have him in our families, but these are our neighbors and our relatives, and at heart, they’re good people. They’re not mean-spirited. They’re not small. They’re not petty like they hear on stage.”

But what are these MAGA folk? How does the governor who signed a bill directing public schools to freely distribute tampons in boys’ restrooms as well as girls’ characterize people disinclined to approve of such a thing? “They’re angry, they’re confused, they’re frustrated, they feel like they got left behind sometimes.”

Somehow, Walz neglects how they feel betrayed by past representation, and are aghast at the craziness of . . . Tim Walz . . . who tells his fellow “white dudes” to “reach out, make the case.”

So, a case for what? Tampons everywhere?

Well, socialism. “Don’t ever shy away from our progressive values,” Walz said. “One person’s socialism is another person’s neighborliness.”

That’s where I bet he loses his “Florida Man” brothers. 

A politician talking up socialism is never pushing “neighborliness.” Such politicians are always pushing increased expropriation (taxes), increased regulation, and massive subsidy. 

Most who feel “left behind sometimes” are not asking for subsidies, much less the “neighborliness” of regulators and taxmen. And when they hear the word “socialism,” their trigger fingers itch. They know that over a hundred million people were killed, last century, by self-described “socialist” leaders, outside of war.

Killing fields do not make good neighbors.

Meanwhile, one of the most important critiques of socialism is that of Ludwig von Mises, who showed that without markets in capital as well as consumer goods, chaos and poverty reign. Without price signals, goods can only be misallocated.

Like putting tampons in boys’ bathrooms.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

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Unburdened by the Leftism

Kamala Harris, commie, communist, left, progressive

Democrats have effectively sidelined the biggest story of this election year — the assassination attempt upon the candidate the party has sought to destroy since 2015 — with a brazen switcheroo-coup from presidential candidate Sleepy Joe to the once-widely disliked Vice President Kamala Harris.

It was all done unceremoniously and undemocratically in a breathtakingly daring backroom duress deal, detailed by Seymour Hersh.

Also itemized last week? The cover-up of Kamala Harris’s record. In “Kamalaflage: Dems race to expunge the evidence of Harris’ leftist history,” Jim Bovard informs New York Post readers about the media’s memory-holing. 

“In 2019, GovTrack labeled Kamala Harris the ‘most liberal’ senator — further to the left than even Bernie Sanders — but this month deleted the webpage that said so,” explains Mr. Bovard.

So, what’s to the left of a “democratic socialist”?

Maybe the Vice President was channeling her father, a Post Keynesian (far, far left if not exactly Marxist) economist, when she pushed the progressives’ beloved “equity” theory of equality, which she explicitly construed as equality of outcomes. 

If you wonder how far to the left she has gone, consider her work to help BLM-associated rioters. “In 2020, as looters and arsonists ravaged Minneapolis after the killing of George Floyd, then-Sen. Harris urged people to donate to the Minnesota Freedom Fund ‘to help post bail for those protesting on the ground in Minnesota.’” 

Bovard says this appeal “effectively exonerated anyone committing violence or other crimes, portraying them as worthy of speedy release from jail — but the bail fund paid to release rapists and child molesters and future murderers, not just looters.”

Now, fittingly, Harris has chosen Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate, the man who in 2020 “allowed rioters to burn down half of Minneapolis.”

Would a Democratic president want to burn down half of America?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Repeal Obamacare

Kamala Harris, Donald Trump, MAGA, socialism, debt, lizard

Oy vey! Given the alternative of Donald Trump on the one hand and — now that Biden has bailed — a bad-as-Biden Biden-substitute on the other, Americans must re-level their look at the lesser of two evils.

It may be difficult to resist hoping that Trump gets elected this November to allow many of the Democrats’ worst initiatives be left to die on a withering vine. (Examples of the worst: Congress-bypassing regulations designed to penalize production of gas-powered cars and outlaw certain freelance or contract work.)

Still, the candidate and his party have many flaws.

We cannot forget that. Indeed, with their abandonment of the tiniest desire to reduce the size of the federal leviathan, remembrance should be easy. 

Shrink government? Radically reduce spending? Reduce debt? No such goal was seriously pursued in the first Trump administration, and no such goal is mentioned in the twenty-point Trump-Republican Party platform.

There’s talk of tax cuts, ending inflation (somehow), diverting spending from Democratic projects. Sure. But the platform insists that Social Security and Medicare programs not be modified in any way. 

In any way!

And about Obamacare — the biggest expansion of the medical state in recent years, which Republicans had once pledged to repeal — the platform is mute.

The 2016 platform said that improving healthcare “must start with repeal of the dishonestly named Affordable Care Act of 2010: Obamacare,” a declaration retained in 2020. Now it’s gone. Republicans seem to have succumbed to the strategy of turning Obamacare into yet another supposedly unassailable, supposedly inextirpable entitlement program.

Unfortunately, you don’t recover or expand liberty by accepting every expansion of serfdom.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Kamala’s Cast on Noncitizens

Kamala Harris, immigration, voting, elections

How did Kamala Harris vote?

The Vice President’s hometown of San Francisco is one of 17 cities that allow noncitizens to vote in local elections. Like 75 percent of those cities (according to verify.com), the City by the Bay also offers that vote to noncitizens in the country illegally. 

Not included in this list of cities is New York City, as the Big Apple’s measure providing the vote to nearly a million noncitizens is still being battled in court. Or Boston, which only awaits approval by the Massachusetts Legislature.  

Neither are Telluride, Colorado, nor Yellow Springs, Ohio, on the list. Voters in both states, in 2020 and 2022, respectively, passed statewide constitutional amendments to say only U.S. citizens can vote in all state and local elections, canceling those local ordinances. Beginning in 2018, six states have enacted Citizen Only Voting Amendments, and eight more states will vote on them this November. 

Back in 2016, San Franciscans narrowly passed Proposition N giving noncitizen parents and caregivers, legally documented or not, voting rights in school board elections. Harris had been prosecuting attorney in San Fran before becoming California’s attorney general. As AG, Ms. Harris ran for the U.S. Senate and would have gone to vote for herself on Election Day 2016 . . . and on Prop N. 

Surely, she didn’t forget to vote on the proposition. Right?

So, how did she cast her ballot: in favor of providing noncitizens here illegally the franchise? Or not?

If she ever does a non-scripted interview, perhaps an enterprising journalist might pop that question. Or perhaps a voter in swing states such as North Carolina and Wisconsin — where Citizen Only Voting Amendments are on the ballot — will ask Vice President Harris. 

Answer, please. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

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