Last week, a jury found in favor of Sarah Fendley and Big City Coffee in her tort claim against Boise State University. Fendley claimed that BSU administrators — notably Vice President of Student Affairs Leslie Webb and Chief Operating Officer Alicia Estey — violated her 1st amendment right to free speech by pushing her off campus in response to her public support of law enforcement.
The jury awarded Fendley $3 million, with an additional $1 million in punitive damages from Webb.
I wrote about Sarah’s story two weeks ago, highlighting the way in which DEI — the official cult of diversity/equity/inclusion — was to blame for the affair. Now that the case is done, it’s time for Idaho lawmakers and citizens to begin the process of eviscerating DEI from our public institutions.
If you have only listened to leftists defending DEI, you might wonder what is the big deal. It’s about inclusion, right? Let’s just all get along. Sen. Melissa Wintrow even described campus DEI programs as helping veterans navigate university on the Senate floor last year.
Yet the proof in the pudding is in the eating. DEI adopts a Marxist view of society, one in which there are oppressor classes and oppressed classes. This operates on numerous axes: Along racial lines, white people are the oppressors and everyone else is oppressed. Along gender lines, men are oppressors while women are oppressed, and straight people are oppressors while so-called nonbinary or nonconforming people are oppressed. Along religious lines, Christians are oppressors while everyone else is oppressed.
You see where this is going. Through the magic of intersectionality — that is, combining all these axes — straight white Christian men are the ultimate villains.
This strikes most straight white Christian men as odd. We’ve been taught all our lives about the value of diversity, and we all learned in grade school that Martin Luther King Jr. wanted us to look beyond skin color to the content of people’s characters. We decided that the values of Western Civilization — hard work, honestly, loyalty, punctuality, precision, excellence, etc. — were universal values, ones our ancestors had no special claims on.
We might not see color, but DEI commissars do. Those values that we consider integral to building and maintaining a good society are now denounced as whiteness and white supremacy. Several years ago, the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture published a sheet listing what it called “assumptions of whiteness and white culture” that included many things we once considered universal values:
Yesterday, I wrote about how the leftist conception of diversity is literally only skin deep, as they assume that other cultures have the same beliefs and values that are inculcated in American universities, and only skin color (and perhaps cuisine) vary. Yet here is the opposite — leftist race baiters calling the values that built Western Civilization whiteness and worthy of disdain.
Consider that our Constitution is built upon many of the values decried as whiteness on that document. Without its foundations in English Common Law, protecting private property, normative Christianity, protecting individual rights, and being able to think objectively, our Constitution would be meaningless. Take away these things and what happens to our country? What is to stop our society from becoming Haiti, where roving warlords impose their will at gunpoint and cats are the not even the most extraordinary item on the menu?
The purpose of DEI is not to foster inclusion, but to create division, to tear down the structures that made civilization possible in the first place. DEI is embedded not only in public colleges and universities, but in entertainment, news media, corporate HR departments, and the highest levels of government. Any opposition to the DEI agenda is labeled hate and racism, as if those are magic words than can overpower facts and logic.
In my article about Big City Coffee, I wrote about DEI activists like Jeremy Harper, who holds a sinecure at BSU that allows him to organize protests and attack American institutions such as law enforcement on the taxpayer’s dime. Tanisha Jae Newton, radicalized since high school, has bounced around from one leftist nonprofit to the next, and faced no consequences for putting up a billboard showing a burning police car.
Despite our Legislature trying multiple times to stop DEI programs at public colleges and universities, they simply ignore the law and carry on practicing this new cultic religion. BSU continues to offer courses such as “Foundations of Ethics and Diversity” that includes assignments instructing students to write about their privileged backgrounds and times in which they didn’t feel “safe”:
“Safety” is a word that is grossly misused by DEI apparatchiks. The student activists who demanded BSU oust Big City Coffee from campus said its presence caused students of color to feel “unsafe”. Student activists said the same thing about Boise police officers, who were contracted to provide security on campus.
I honestly don’t know if these people are serious. Is it possible for people who raise their fists in defiance, who swear to crush white supremacy, crush the patriarchy, and crush Western Civilization, feel “unsafe” because a middle aged woman who sells coffee and pastries expressed her support for the police?
Jeremy Carl has done yeoman’s work in bringing the pernicious scourge of anti-white racism into the light. His recent book The Unprotected Class lays out in great detail how racism against white people has become the de facto stance of American society. Carl explains how, in the name of combating discrimination against blacks, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 created a legal mechanism to discriminate against whites, as well as any other group categorized as an “oppressor” class in the DEI hierarchy.
Jeremy Carl is coming to the belly of the beast this week to make his case. TP USA has invited Carl to BSU tomorrow evening to talk about his book and what he sees going on in our society, and you’re welcome to meet him:
So what can we do to stop this erosion of our cultural institutions and return to a place where all people are judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin?
First, taxpayers need to stop funding these racist programs. It’s time for the Legislature to put its foot down. While BSU president Marlene Tromp should be held responsible for what goes on at the university, an even deeper problem is the system that produces these programs in the first place. The individuals are interchangeable. When Claudine Gay was ousted as president of Harvard University for anti-Jewish statements and rampant plagiarism, the system simply inserted another DEI apparatchik in her place. This will keep happening until the system itself is dismantled.
Second, and perhaps even more importantly, it’s time to stop taking this nonsense seriously. There’s a story that the second iteration of the Ku Klux Klan, which gained political power in the 1920s and 30s, was undone by a serious of Superman radio serials in the 1940s. An activist had infiltrated the Klan and learned the details of their esoteric rituals, which he shared with writers at DC Comics. With their silly pretensions exposed and mocked, the Klan went from a powerful organization to a laughingstock, and never recovered.
The DEI industry is in a similar position. Right now it is feared — if activists target your business for being insufficiently diverse, it could mean bankruptcy or worse. Organizations like BSU pay DEI apparatchiks six figures to shield themselves from accusations of racism. Like the Klan, the DEI industry has a lot of silly pretensions, such as intersectionality, lived experiences, safe spaces, and white fragility. Once people learn that it’s okay to laugh at these grifters, then they will lose their power.
Perhaps the man and the hour have finally met. Matt Walsh and the Daily Wire just released Am I Racist?, a humorous film documenting Walsh’s attempts to figure out the DEI ecosystem. Despite being ignored by professional reviewers, boycotted by several theaters, and denounced by the usual suspects, the film opened at #3 in the nation last weekend, and Walsh says it will be expanding to more theaters soon. People who have seen it say it’s hilarious in the way it exposes the DEI grifters while not coming across as overtly political.
Hopefully the DEI industry will follow the KKK into the dustbin of history. Racism is racism, whether it comes wearing a white hood or a raised fist.
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