A beloved educator was branded as a bigot in a series of DEI sessions. The Free Press reveals the details—and exclusive audio—from a story of public shame.
No self-respecting person would ever adhere to any ideology that says that you do not get to have an opinion on a subject because of the color of your skin or any other immutable physical characteristic. Imagine being told "your job in this work, as white people, is to believe" and just nodding your head in silent agreement.
I am so thankful I jumped ship from progressive ideology several years ago so that I don't have to live my life in silent self-loathing. It's wonderful being able to think for myself and take pride in who I am because of how I live my life and what I mean to my friends and family, without shame or guilt for my gender or ethnicity. I would pity the people who think their job is to "just believe" if I didn't find them so pathetic.
In 1911 Booker T. Washington wrote: “There is a class of colored people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs-partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances because they do not want to lose their jobs.”
Today’s DEI hucksters are corrupt avatars for that “class,” and resemble nothing so much as the brown shirts of Germany.
“Diversity is our strength” is a cynical fiction. Our strength is a unanimity of purpose, a communion, as it were, of different peoples united in helping elevate each other. Our strength is undermined and sullied by those who would Balkanize us on racial lines while reaping a profit from that very enterprise. The obsession with race is misplaced and dangerous.
DEI needs to be dismantled. It is the very definition of structural racism.
I live in Canada, and hear very little about this in the media. Thank you for covering this Supa, Ari and FP. I work for the government, and every day walk around on eggshells, worrying that I might say the wrong thing and lose my job. It can happen to anyone.
DEI cultist Kike Ojo-Thompson sounds like a modern day Jim Jones.
And just like the BLM movement, DEI will be proven to be a huge grift. Unfortunately, b/c its now infected the universities and board rooms, the con will just take longer to be realized & rooted out. But without question it will end up eating itself from within....
Ojo-Thompson could just as well be a German in 1930 talking about the humiliation of the Treaty of Versailles and reparations and assigning blame accordingly.
This fellow sounds like a wonderful, caring, sensitive guy, but while those are admirable qualities in times of peace, they are lead weights in times of strife. He might have looked to his fellow Canadian, Jordan Peterson, as an inspiration for stiffening his spine. Standing nearly alone, every day Peterson meets toe-to-toe the haters, the lazy DIE - NOT DEI - sorehead grifters with silly made-up names who have nothing to offer except their own anger. He is constantly calling out the communist love-child of Castro who now runs the place, and all the other lunatics, counterfeits and psychopaths of the Woke era. He has what Napoleon called, "two o'clock in the morning courage." Get some, Bub.
You cannot give an inch. You cannot second-guess yourself; you cannot split the baby - and most of all you cannot ever apologize. Yes, this is a tragedy. It always is when bullies win, and if you kill yourself, they win. Courageous men stood together in Colonial America; they stood together in England in the summer of 1940, when defeat seemed inevitable, and they prevailed. We can prevail against this lunacy, too.
I attended my first "official" DEI session at work a few weeks ago and was sick to my stomach afterwards. I was labeled an awful, entitled, white male boomer by the young, angry, black presenter just by virtue of the color of my skin and my hair (both white).
There was no sense even attempting to argue that my grandparents were all immigrants from Italy who worked like dogs as laborers and servants to get ahead in life, and who proudly studied hard to become legal American citizens. Obviously - they never owned slaves. Or my dad, who worked long, hard hours in a foundry after fighting bravely for our country in WWII, how he scrimped and saved to meet his promise to help pay for a portion of my brothers' and my college tuitions. Or how my brothers and I all worked multiple jobs while in high school and college to pay for college tuition and expenses.
DEI says that because we're white, we were entitled. Period. Boy, it didn't seem that way growing up.
Although I'll be retiring in a year or so, I was implicitly forbidden to say anything during the meeting, or run the risk of ruining my good standing at my company and in the industry where I've worked full time for almost 45 years. So I sat quietly during the session feeling more and more despondent.
To get a sense of the pervasiveness of this horrible rot, just read the comments to stories and editorials in the New York Times and the Washington Post.
Let this be a reminder to me. Be in strong community, for support, to be a support. Our world is so fragmented and forces are trying to bring their breaking point to our lives. We need to be together more, hug more, listen more. And continue to hold our values as sacred and one another as sacred. These forces can't win. Love and light wins. That is the message for me. I can't speak for anyone else.
This is an incredibly heartbreaking story but sadly one all too common. As a parent, I have attended these DEI school sessions. My husband and I were the only ones challenging the orthodoxy and we received nasty grams. Our 8th grader at the time was told to sit out from these sessions when they brought them to the classroom. I had it out w the Head of the Middle school. (Turns out that they can’t handle dissent or any pushback whatsoever, relying on their feeble trope of “you are racist if you don’t repent) The more negative feedback we got, the harder we fought, ultimately leaving the school. The school received a lot of negative press (it was a private jewish day school) and our satisfaction is that the revolt has seriously harmed the school- enrollment is way down…perhaps too “down”. We moved to another state and another school, one not indoctrinated with DEI only to find that the board hired one of these NAIS/ISAC DEI recruiters. (The accreditation bodies need to have a reckoning) Back to battle we went and successfully installed an internal candidate who will be amazing. One of us now sits on the Board of Trustees. At a local high school (again private but this is happening big time at public schools where another son attended), a pronoun savvy interim head of school was just announced. Back to the battle field. My kid sister has disowned me because I dare to challenge. The Free Press has been a respite amongst the battles. We are becoming more vocal on LinkedIn to showcase how business DEI also needs attacking as you all heard on that audio. And guess, what….most people agree its garbage but aren’t in a position to speak up, yet that’s what we all must do. Perhaps this is why Vivek Ramaswamy is gaining so much in the polls. He’s unafraid of attacking this and talking about the censorship that is happening now in the US. Free speech/free press - this alone is the hill to die on….
KOJO is just a race-baiting, shakedown outfit. This industry was started in the 1960’s by the Rev. Jesse Jackson and his ‘Rainbow Coalition’. Rev. Al Sharpton continued the grift and even works at it today. Notice how both grifters use a religious title which is helpful in showing folks how pious they are, but in fact Jackson is an adulterer and Sharpton refused to pay his millions of dollars in taxes. KOJO, Jackson and Sharpton have never worked an honest days worth of work. They are shakedown artists preying on sensitive people. They should be shunned.
DEI is about revenge not justice.
If this continues there will be a tipping point and it won't be pretty.
No self-respecting person would ever adhere to any ideology that says that you do not get to have an opinion on a subject because of the color of your skin or any other immutable physical characteristic. Imagine being told "your job in this work, as white people, is to believe" and just nodding your head in silent agreement.
I am so thankful I jumped ship from progressive ideology several years ago so that I don't have to live my life in silent self-loathing. It's wonderful being able to think for myself and take pride in who I am because of how I live my life and what I mean to my friends and family, without shame or guilt for my gender or ethnicity. I would pity the people who think their job is to "just believe" if I didn't find them so pathetic.
Please sue these horrible people into oblivion
In 1911 Booker T. Washington wrote: “There is a class of colored people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs-partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances because they do not want to lose their jobs.”
Today’s DEI hucksters are corrupt avatars for that “class,” and resemble nothing so much as the brown shirts of Germany.
“Diversity is our strength” is a cynical fiction. Our strength is a unanimity of purpose, a communion, as it were, of different peoples united in helping elevate each other. Our strength is undermined and sullied by those who would Balkanize us on racial lines while reaping a profit from that very enterprise. The obsession with race is misplaced and dangerous.
DEI needs to be dismantled. It is the very definition of structural racism.
E pluribus unum.
I live in Canada, and hear very little about this in the media. Thank you for covering this Supa, Ari and FP. I work for the government, and every day walk around on eggshells, worrying that I might say the wrong thing and lose my job. It can happen to anyone.
DEI cultist Kike Ojo-Thompson sounds like a modern day Jim Jones.
And just like the BLM movement, DEI will be proven to be a huge grift. Unfortunately, b/c its now infected the universities and board rooms, the con will just take longer to be realized & rooted out. But without question it will end up eating itself from within....
What do you call someone who hates someone else on the basis of the other person's skin color? Do you need more information to answer the question?
Ojo-Thompson could just as well be a German in 1930 talking about the humiliation of the Treaty of Versailles and reparations and assigning blame accordingly.
This fellow sounds like a wonderful, caring, sensitive guy, but while those are admirable qualities in times of peace, they are lead weights in times of strife. He might have looked to his fellow Canadian, Jordan Peterson, as an inspiration for stiffening his spine. Standing nearly alone, every day Peterson meets toe-to-toe the haters, the lazy DIE - NOT DEI - sorehead grifters with silly made-up names who have nothing to offer except their own anger. He is constantly calling out the communist love-child of Castro who now runs the place, and all the other lunatics, counterfeits and psychopaths of the Woke era. He has what Napoleon called, "two o'clock in the morning courage." Get some, Bub.
You cannot give an inch. You cannot second-guess yourself; you cannot split the baby - and most of all you cannot ever apologize. Yes, this is a tragedy. It always is when bullies win, and if you kill yourself, they win. Courageous men stood together in Colonial America; they stood together in England in the summer of 1940, when defeat seemed inevitable, and they prevailed. We can prevail against this lunacy, too.
How bad does this need to get before it is stopped?
I attended my first "official" DEI session at work a few weeks ago and was sick to my stomach afterwards. I was labeled an awful, entitled, white male boomer by the young, angry, black presenter just by virtue of the color of my skin and my hair (both white).
There was no sense even attempting to argue that my grandparents were all immigrants from Italy who worked like dogs as laborers and servants to get ahead in life, and who proudly studied hard to become legal American citizens. Obviously - they never owned slaves. Or my dad, who worked long, hard hours in a foundry after fighting bravely for our country in WWII, how he scrimped and saved to meet his promise to help pay for a portion of my brothers' and my college tuitions. Or how my brothers and I all worked multiple jobs while in high school and college to pay for college tuition and expenses.
DEI says that because we're white, we were entitled. Period. Boy, it didn't seem that way growing up.
Although I'll be retiring in a year or so, I was implicitly forbidden to say anything during the meeting, or run the risk of ruining my good standing at my company and in the industry where I've worked full time for almost 45 years. So I sat quietly during the session feeling more and more despondent.
For a lot of us, that's DEI in a nutshell.
To get a sense of the pervasiveness of this horrible rot, just read the comments to stories and editorials in the New York Times and the Washington Post.
Let this be a reminder to me. Be in strong community, for support, to be a support. Our world is so fragmented and forces are trying to bring their breaking point to our lives. We need to be together more, hug more, listen more. And continue to hold our values as sacred and one another as sacred. These forces can't win. Love and light wins. That is the message for me. I can't speak for anyone else.
DO NOT BE AFRAID!
The DEI and BLM and LBGTQ$ folks are all cowards hiding behind their paper shields of sanctimony. They will all crumble in the face of truth.
No one owns a monopoly on feelings and events that all humans have felt and witnessed.
This is an incredibly heartbreaking story but sadly one all too common. As a parent, I have attended these DEI school sessions. My husband and I were the only ones challenging the orthodoxy and we received nasty grams. Our 8th grader at the time was told to sit out from these sessions when they brought them to the classroom. I had it out w the Head of the Middle school. (Turns out that they can’t handle dissent or any pushback whatsoever, relying on their feeble trope of “you are racist if you don’t repent) The more negative feedback we got, the harder we fought, ultimately leaving the school. The school received a lot of negative press (it was a private jewish day school) and our satisfaction is that the revolt has seriously harmed the school- enrollment is way down…perhaps too “down”. We moved to another state and another school, one not indoctrinated with DEI only to find that the board hired one of these NAIS/ISAC DEI recruiters. (The accreditation bodies need to have a reckoning) Back to battle we went and successfully installed an internal candidate who will be amazing. One of us now sits on the Board of Trustees. At a local high school (again private but this is happening big time at public schools where another son attended), a pronoun savvy interim head of school was just announced. Back to the battle field. My kid sister has disowned me because I dare to challenge. The Free Press has been a respite amongst the battles. We are becoming more vocal on LinkedIn to showcase how business DEI also needs attacking as you all heard on that audio. And guess, what….most people agree its garbage but aren’t in a position to speak up, yet that’s what we all must do. Perhaps this is why Vivek Ramaswamy is gaining so much in the polls. He’s unafraid of attacking this and talking about the censorship that is happening now in the US. Free speech/free press - this alone is the hill to die on….
KOJO is just a race-baiting, shakedown outfit. This industry was started in the 1960’s by the Rev. Jesse Jackson and his ‘Rainbow Coalition’. Rev. Al Sharpton continued the grift and even works at it today. Notice how both grifters use a religious title which is helpful in showing folks how pious they are, but in fact Jackson is an adulterer and Sharpton refused to pay his millions of dollars in taxes. KOJO, Jackson and Sharpton have never worked an honest days worth of work. They are shakedown artists preying on sensitive people. They should be shunned.