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general freedom ideological culture national politics & policies

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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Thought

Publilius Syrus

Let a fool hold his tongue and he will pass for a sage.

Publilius Syrus, from the Sententiae. Image from the movie “Being There” (1979), from the novel by Jerzy Kosinski.
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Today

Locke & Shays

August 29 marks the 1632 birthday of British philosopher John Locke, author of Two Treatises of Government, and one of the strongest intellectual influences on America’s 18th century independence movement and subsequent constitutional thinking. Locke died on October 28, 1704.

On August 29, 1786, Shays’ Rebellion began. The rebellion was an armed uprising of Massachusetts farmers reacting very negatively against the high debt and tax burdens enacted to pay off the Revolutionary War. This rebellion scared American leaders into revising the Articles of Confederation, a process that led not to a mere handful of changes but to the adoption of a whole new Constitution.

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First Amendment rights international affairs social media

Give Mr. Bean Another Hearing

Mr. Bean, UK, Great Britain, censorship, mind control, authoritarianism

Twelve years ago, Rowan Atkinson of “Mr. Bean” fame took a stand against a law that criminalizes “insulting” speech. He was participating in a campaign to reform Section 5 of the Public Order Act of 1986.

In his remarks launching the campaign, recently resurrected on Twitter, Atkinson said that his concern was less for himself as a person with a high public profile than “for those more vulnerable because of their lower profile. Like the man arrested in Oxford for calling a police horse gay. Or the teenager arrested for calling the Church of Scientology a cult. Or the café owner arrested for displaying passages from the Bible on a TV screen.”

And what about the thousands of cases that “weren’t quite ludicrous enough to attract media attention? Even for those actions that were withdrawn, people were arrested, questioned, taken to court and then released. . . . That is censoriousness of the most intimidating kind. . . .”

And he said more than this. Luckily it’s recorded.

This effectively delivered argument, forceful and often funny, by a well-known personality, had its effect. The Reform Section 5 campaign succeeded. The law was amended.

But the victory, though important, was narrow. And, since that win, sweeping assaults on speech that offends somebody or other continue in Britain, the United States, and other Western countries where people should know better than to emulate the censorship of authoritarian governments to which we aspire to provide an alternative. We’re going to need a lot more funny speeches.

Because this threat to freedom is so serious.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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George Santayana

The world is a perpetual caricature of itself; at every moment it is the mockery and the contradiction of what it is pretending to be.

George Santayana, “Dickens,” Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies (1922).

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Today

Slavery Abolished

On August 28, 1833, the Slavery Abolition Act received Royal Assent, formally abolishing slavery throughout most the British Empire.

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First Amendment rights ideological culture international affairs

EU to Axe X?

Elon Musk, EU, European Union, censorship

Sandro Gozi, European Union parliament member, wants Elon Musk’s Twitter operation gone. Out of the European Union.

Not no matter what. Only if Twitter — “X” — keeps flouting the EU’s censorship rules.

Gozi says: “If Elon Musk does not comply with the European rules on digital services, the EU Commission will ask the continental operators to block X or, in the most extreme case, force them to completely dismantle the platform in the territory of the Union.”

Oh dear.

This threat comes right after EU official Thierry Breton’s threatening letter to Musk about his impending Twitter interview with Donald Trump. Musk told Breton to “[obscenity deleted]” and proceeded with the interview. Other EU arbiters of speech quickly dissociated themselves from Breton’s threat.

So maybe Gozi’s confidence about what fellow EU commissars will do if Musk does not play ball is misplaced. Perhaps the others will think about how Twitter users throughout Europe would react if their X accounts became “ex-” accounts.

Various Italian officials, Gozi’s countrymen, roundly repudiated his gabble.

“Silencing the voice of millions of people in order to strike out at those who think differently from them?” challenged Italian Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini. “Unacceptable and disturbing.”

The political party of Giorgia Meloni issued a statement saying that the “contemporary left [are] allergic to opinions that are not aligned with their mainstream, and inquisitors of anyone who does not submit to their suffocating cloak of conformism.”

Elon Musk likely sees the truth: this fight is winnable.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Mervyn Peake

Other people’s faults can be fascinating. One’s own are dreary.

Mervyn Peake, Gormenghast (1950), Chapter 48.

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Today

Baltic Independence

On August 27, 1991, the European Community recognized the independence of the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Moldova after they had declared their independence from the USSR.

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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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