Biden Backs Away From 'Woke' Crime Policies but not all Democrats are Following

by W. James Antle III for Washington Examiner

When President Joe Biden was elected in 2020, he campaigned as a supporter of the racial justice protests that broke out following George Floyd's death in police custody.

"'I can't breathe. I can't breathe.' George Floyd's last words. But they didn't die with him. They're still being heard. They're echoing across this nation," Biden said in Philadelphia amid the civil unrest and riots unfolding in major cities throughout the country.

"They speak to a nation where too often just the color of your skin puts your life at risk,” he continued in his Floyd remarks. The white police officer who knelt on the unarmed black man’s neck was later convicted of murder and federal 

Three years after Floyd's killing gripped the country, Biden is trying to gently nudge the Democratic Party away from “defund the police” and other progressive causes that damaged the party down-ballot, even as he won the White House while at the same time holding on to the coalition that elected him.

It’s a delicate balance Biden must continue to strike in his reelection bid next year.

The challenge this poses was on display in recent days. Biden marked the third anniversary of Floyd’s death by vetoing a congressional attempt to overturn police reforms enacted by the Washington, D.C. city council.

“The Congress should respect the District of Columbia’s right to pass measures that improve public safety and public trust,” Biden said in the message to Congress accompanying his veto. “I continue to call on the Congress to pass common-sense police reform legislation. Therefore, I am vetoing this resolution.”

But not long before that, Biden stunned many Democratic lawmakers by signing similar legislation reversing a D.C. crime bill that lightened sentences for certain offenses. "I support D.C. Statehood and home-rule — but I don’t support some of the changes D.C. Council put forward over the Mayor’s objections — such as lowering penalties for carjackings," Biden tweeted ahead of the Democratic-controlled Senate vote to overturn it.

“We should all agree: The answer is not to defund the police. It’s to fund the police,” Biden said in his 2022 State of the Union address as top House Republican leaders applauded. “Fund them. Fund them. Fund them with resources and training.”

The president’s influence on the rest of his party has been mixed. Candidates who were deemed tougher on crime won Democratic primaries for mayor in New York City and Philadelphia, but more lenient progressives were elected mayor in Los Angeles and Chicago. The latter result was especially surprising given a violent crime wave in Chicago that has received national attention.

"He believes that we should fund the police and give law enforcement the resources they need for effective policing," White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said of Biden the day after the Chicago mayoral runoff. "That is something that the president has been very vocal about and has taken action."

Instead Biden has often accused Republicans of wanting to defund the police. That was a core argument the White House made against the House-passed bill during the debt ceiling standoff, calling the GOP measure "the biggest vote to defund law enforcement in American history."

The president and his deputies have said the same of GOP efforts to crack down on the FBI and Justice Department in the wake of controversial Trump investigations. They have also pointed to attacks on Capitol police during the Jan. 6 riot.

"Let me say this to my MAGA Republican friends in Congress: Don't tell me you support law enforcement, if you won't condemn what happened on the 6th," Biden said in a speech last year, repeating variations of the multiple times since. "Don't tell me. You can't do it. For God's sake. Whose side are you on?"

Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris reacted to the Floyd protests at a time when their once painstakingly established law-and-order credentials were being scrutinized by progressive and other votes. Biden was being criticized, even by former President Donald Trump, for his role in passing the 1994 crime bill as a senior senator from Delaware.

The legislation was an attempt to help another Democratic president, Bill Clinton, defuse the crime issue ahead of a difficult midterm election cycle. By the time Biden won his party’s presidential nomination, it had fallen out of favor and was blamed for contributing to the mass incarceration of black Americans.

Harris similarly rose through the ranks politically through her reputation as a tough prosecutor in California. But her reputation as “Kamala the Cop” helped derail her own presidential candidacy, particularly in a viral debate moment with Tulsi Gabbard in 2019.

“Senator Harris says she’s proud of her record as a prosecutor and that she’ll be a prosecutor president,” Gabbard said at the time. “But I’m deeply concerned about this record. There are too many examples to cite but she put over 1,500 people in jail for marijuana violations and then laughed about it when she was asked if she ever smoked marijuana.”

Biden made Floyd’s death central to his battle for the “soul of the nation.” Harris promoted a controversial bail fund in Minneapolis, where Floyd was killed.

The strategic shift worked, to an extent. The Biden-Harris ticket won voters who said their top concern was racial inequality by 75 points, according to the Washington Post exit poll. That’s 9 points better than they did with voters whose top issue was COVID-19. But Democratic data scientist David Shor found that perceptions the party supported things like defunding the police hurt down-ballot candidates, including among conservative-leaning nonwhite voters. Democrats experienced slippage with Hispanics in competitive races. Trump won nearly one in five black men.

Biden and Harris will seek reelection amid signs of flagging enthusiasm among black voters and with crime still a major issue with the broader electorate. A Washington Post/Ipsos poll of black voters found 49% said Biden’s policies made no difference to their community while 58% said they made no difference to them personally.

Remembering how these issues have hurt Democrats in the past, Biden won’t go as “woke” on crime or immigration enforcement as the most liberal members of his party. Neither can he ignore the coalition that elected him the first time.

X22, On the Fringe, and more- May 29

 

It Was Always Only About Power With the Left ~ VDH

For the left-wing elites, the cause is but a means to personal and professional power.

by Victor Davis Hanson for American Greatness

Why do so many liberal climate-activist grandees fly on private jets? Or why do those who profited from Black Lives Matter have a propensity for estate living? Or why do the community-activist Obamas prefer to live in not one, but three mansions? 

The answer is that calls for radical equity, “power for the people,” and mandated equality are usually mostly sloganeering for those who enjoy power and the lucre it brings, and their wish is to augment both for themselves. The result is that the issue du jour of mandated equality often becomes secondary if not irrelevant. There is neither fear of inconstancy nor hypocrisy, given the central theme that governs a leftist party line is political utility—or the ends of power always more than justify the hypocritical means used to obtain it. 

Spout racialist nonsense for 40 years? Harass women and young girls by blowing in their hair and squeezing them too tightly? Create a family grifting syndicate to leverage foreign cash in quid pro quo fashion? Praise racial segregationists?  

Joe Biden did all those things and more. But he also did them in service to a supposed noble cause, sort of like the current board president of the NAACP promoting a black travel ban on Florida, while he lives—in Florida!

Keep political utility in mind and the baffling hypocrisy of the Left makes all too perfect sense. 

January 6 vs. the “Summer of Love” 

From all the tens of thousands of January 6 Capitol protesters a small percentage entered the Capitol itself. Of that group, an even smaller number committed violent acts. Most of those seriously injured that day were among the protesters themselves. Despite official propaganda, there were not five police officers killed on January 6 as alleged by the Left. 

Instead, the only likely death at the hand of another was the diminutive, 5’2’’, 14-year-military veteran and unarmed Ashli Babbitt. She was lethally shot by a Capitol officer Michael Byrd for the likely misdemeanor of trespassing and—illegally entering a broken window to the Capitol.  

Yet over a thousand protesters were arrested, tried, and mostly convicted of various charges from parading without a permit to insurrection. Many of them were sentenced to long prison sentences. Some may spend most of their remaining lives in prison.  

The Left has justified long sentences on three grounds: One, the protesters targeted iconic government buildings as the object of their attacks. Two, the protesters were ideologically motivated and seemed bent on insurrection to warp the political process. Three, the protesters were attempting to nullify an election by their massing at the Capitol and therefore questioned the very integrity of the 2020 election.  

In theory these were legitimate reasons to treat harshly any convicted of such insurrectionary crimes. But in reality, the Left cared little about its pretexts justifying harsh responses, much less proving their charges. What mattered were the political opportunities offered by January 6, and the chance to leverage the occasion to consolidate power.  

Why and how can one assume that? 

In 2020, for 120 days, left-wing mobs led by Antifa and Black Lives Matter wrought far greater destruction in nonstop rioting, arson, looting, and assault. Over 35 people died. Two billion dollars in property damage followed. Some 1,500 officers were assaulted and injured. Over 14,000 protesters were arrested.  

Yet few were convicted of any serious crimes; fewer were sentenced to long sentences—given prosecutors, state and federal, claimed the violence was merely a result of protesters exercising their “constitutional right” of dissent.  

Left-wing politicians and activists from then-vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris (“They’re not going to let up, and they should not, and we should not.”) to Nikole Hannah Jones (“Destroying property, which can be replaced, is not violence.”) either excused the often violent protests or urged that they continue.  

Far from sending in 20,000 federal troops, as occurred after January 6, the Left demanded that then President Trump not resort to such Draconian measures.  

Note that there were lots of government properties deliberately targeted in iconic fashion. A Seattle police precinct (with officers inside ) was set afire. A mob in Washington, D.C. tried to storm the White House grounds in a fashion that sent the president and secret service agents into a subterranean bunker. A historic Washington, D.C. church was torched. Violent mobs set federal and state courthouses on fire in Las Vegas, Minneapolis, and Portland. 

Second, note these riots and violence were not random. They were coordinated and seemed to wax and wane with some sort of precise coordination—a fact deemed useful in an election year by the Democratic Left.  

In her now notorious self-confessional Time essay, Molly Ball bragged that, “There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes, one that both curtailed the protests and coordinated the resistance from CEOs.”  “The conversation that followed was a difficult one,” Ball explained, “led by the activists charged with the protest strategy . . . We wanted to be mindful of when was the right time to call for moving masses of people into the street.” 

Third, had Trump won the 2020 election, the Left was gearing up for yet another round of violence under the pretense that the election had been stolen, in the fashion of its coordinated Washington, D.C. violence on the day of Trump’s 2017 inauguration.  

Left-wing election denialism—and real efforts to overturn a presidential election—were certainly not new. After the 2016 election, wealthy leftists andcelebrities ran television ads begging electors to reject their constitutional fidelity and the popular vote counts in their states, and instead, in insurrectionary style, cast electoral ballots for Hillary Clinton. 

Prominent leftists from Jimmy Carter to Hillary Clinton also had been on record following the 2016 election claiming that Trump was an illegitimate president and the 2016 election had been rigged in Trump’s favor due to the hoax of Russian collusion.  

Hillary Clinton—who paid Christopher Steele to use Clinton-related fake sources to compile fabrications and destroy her 2016 rival—later even bragged she was joining “La Résistance.” The chairman of the January 6 committee that damned Trump’s supposed election denialism, Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), himself was an election denialist par excellence, who absurdly voted in the Congress to reject George Bush’s popular vote victory in Ohio that decided the 2004 election. 

By any fair measure the violence of 2020 was a far greater and more deadly threat to the republic than anything occurring on January 6, 2021. But most of the 14,000 arrested perpetrators who were responsible for that incredible summer of violence were exempted because their mayhem was deemed politically useful—in the same fashion it was advantageous to turn the buffoonish Capitol protesters into seasoned revolutionaries. The common denominator was only the Left’s efforts to warp events to achieve power. 

Liberalism That Loses Utility is Left Behind 

California has been building massive solar farms in pristine deserts and rural areas. Many spread over thousands of acres and require disruptive supporting infrastructure. In the American Midwest, these new generations of solar farms are unlike anything in our recent past. Often in size larger than Manhattan, they take out of production tens of thousands of acres of prime farmland. 

What is curious about all these next-generation projects is the relative silence of environmentalists to the radical disruptions and dangers they pose to fragile and pristine natural landscapes, rare species of flora and fauna, and quality of life for surrounding rural communities.  

In the case of hundreds of thousands of lost farm acres, prior liberal advocacy for preserving America’s heartland, and its precious family farm acreage and those who work it, likewise go out the window. 

Yet if any clean-burning natural gas plant, affordable housing development, a border wall, retirement community, or farming operation caused as much havoc to the environment as solar—and often wind—farms, there would arise leftist outrage replete with environmentalist-driven court injunctions. In other words, left-wing environmentalism is calibrated only by whether the Left or the Right is reengineering the landscape.

Title IX was an addendum to the 1964 Civil Rights Act that prohibited discrimination on the basis of sex. Through liberal lawsuits and the intervention of activist courts, the statute soon was transmogrified into a sports equity act. Title IX then began to revolutionize high school and college sports programs by demanding equity—in the sense of mandating equal budgets and facilities for women’s and men’s sports.  

The rationale was that women’s athletics could only achieve parity with male sports if they were gifted the same sorts of budgets, infrastructure, and institutional support. Whatever the intent of the original statute, whatever the effects of activist court intervention, the result was that women’s sports did achieve a much higher social and cultural profile.  

So how ironic, then, that a half-century of athletic transformation has been completely undermined by the current ritual takeover of the sport by biological men declaring themselves transgendered women. The transgendered have done more damage in three years to women’s sports than a century of chauvinist pigs. 

In almost every category of competition—track and field, swimming, team sports—prior women’s records have been shattered by athletes who enjoy huge advantages in natural musculoskeletal mass, body size and weight, and innate strength. In the Cold War past, males competing as females were largely a Soviet or Eastern European phenomenon—most notably the Ukrainian sisters, Tamara and Irina Press. The communist bloc, as the Third Reich had earlier in the case of Heinrich Ratjen, scored propaganda points by using males to win “women’s” events.  

Soon in reaction, hormonal testing and eventually DNA tests were used to ensure an equal playing field for biological women. No matter. What was once a feminist issue is now considered a right-wing hate crime of insisting that biological males not be allowed simply to redefine an entire segment of American life and culture.  

Note that the Left has sided against feminism in its near hysterical promotion of its newest cause célèbre, transgenderism. Note further that biological women do not win many, if any, events as transgendered males, despite the shibboleth that one can construct one’s own sexual identity that will be equivalent to a biological one. 

Finally, note that there is no transgendered effort to create a separate category of transgendered sports. Apparently a transgendered Olympics or NCAA event would not offer transgendered contestants and champions the attention and lucre they now achieve by dominating women’s sports. Again, “equity” and feminism were never left-wing positions, but simply useful malleable issues to embrace or reject depending on where and how contemporary political advantage was calibrated. 

From Reining in Abuse to Cheering It 

Read the contemporary news accounts of the 1975-76 so-called “Church Committee,” a select Senate committee formed to expose and rectify dangerous abuses of civil rights and constitutional norms by the CIA, NSA, and at times the FBI.  

Most Democrats cheered the post-Watergate committee on, eager to virtue signal as civil libertarians and to stop the rogue and often politically weaponized antics of our investigatory and intelligence agencies.  

But while there were true civil libertarians, Left and Right, who weighed in on the committee, the general left-wing giddiness over the investigations was predicated on the post-Watergate Democratic revival—one that ensued from ridding the nation of Richard Nixon and using his disgrace to discredit what were considered conservative institutions.  

Fast forward to 2015-23. Over the last eight years it is hard to imagine any illegal act that the CIA, NSA, or FBI would not commit. Their directors—James Clapper, John Brennan, and Andrew McCabe—have all confessed to lying under oath. A more insidious Robert Mueller, James Comey, and Christopher Wray simply invoke amnesiac excuses or plead ignorance when asked directly about the wrongdoing of their agencies or investigations.  

The U.S. government, along with the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, paid a foreign national to spy on a rival campaign, compile lies about a rival candidate, and then spread them through government and the media. The FBI arguably sought to alter both the 2016 and 2020 elections. 

In this same eight-year period, a FISA court was deluded, and an FBI lawyer altered court documents. Phone records were wiped clean. Subpoenaed devices were destroyed. Key evidence that affected a current campaign was put under FBI wraps. Agents openly texted their intent to ensure a predetermined presidential election result. Americans in general were routinely spied upon. Many were framed by FBI skullduggery and had their lives ruined.  

The extent of the lawbreaking and the warping of elections dwarfs anything discovered during Watergate. And yet the Left never objected to these violations of civil rights or the illegal freelancing of intelligence agencies. Far from it—the Left cheered on the illegality.  

Why? Because for them hating or worshiping the CIA, NSA, and FBI—or for that matter the Pentagon, IRS, and Justice Department—was never a matter of consistent principle. Instead these bureaucracies were deemed pathological when associated with conservatism and traditionalism, and angelic when their extralegal efforts were put to use for the progressive agenda. 

There are some grassroots leftists who are deluded into sincerely believing “equity” can be achieved by government confiscation and redistribution. But for most of the elite, the cause is a means to personal and professional power, a fact that explains why one day walking only on four leftist legs is alone correct, the next day just two.

America’s Hatred For Merit Is Leading Us To Total Incompetence

What we should expect in the coming years is 

a widespread crisis of competence afflicting 

every nook and cranny of American life.

by Alexander Zubatov for The Federalist

With every new revelation of how dumb and incompetent our nation has become, there has been an increasingly desperate push to blame it all on the pandemic, whether learning loss or long Covid brain fog or the general stress of the Covid era.  

Well, here is one indicator we cannot blame on the pandemic because it has been flashing red since 2006. In a startling reversal of what is known as “the Flynn effect” — the name for the phenomenon in which average IQs had been rising at the rate of 3-5 points per decade since 1932 — a recent study charting the results of nearly 400,000 IQ test samples shows that Americans’ IQs have actually been dropping since 2006, with an effect especially pronounced among those aged 18 to 22. 

The core skills of verbal reasoning (general knowledge, logic, vocabulary), matrix reasoning (nonverbal reasoning such as visual problem solving), and letter and number series (computation and mathematical reasoning) all declined.

The authors suggest the quality of our education is the most likely culprit: “[I]t could be the case that our results indicate a change of quality or content of education and test-taking skills within this large United States sample.”  

It is apparent from many objective markers that the caliber of education has decreased, especially after the 2020 George Floyd riots brought wildly hyperbolic claims of “systemic racism” and diversity politicking to the highest value in the educational pantheon. 

School systems have begun to eliminate honors classes, and advanced placement courses are also being cut. Gifted education has also been under attack, whether in the form of directly eliminating gifted programs, replacing merit-based admissions to selective schools with lottery systems, instituting zip code quotas, or infusing considerations of so-called racial “equity” into the admissions process. 

Mathematics curricula focused on finding correct answers to problems have been branded as furthering white supremacy. Watered-down alternatives supported by questionable research have been adopted instead.  

History has likewise been under attack — and not in the way imagined by those who claim conservatives are trying to whitewash history. Scores in the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) have shown eighth graders’ knowledge of basic history declining since 2014, well before critical race theory was on the national radar, with a further precipitous decline between 2018 and 2022. As of 2014, 29 percent of students who were tested did not meet the lowest “basic” benchmark. By 2022, that percentage had risen to a still more astonishing 40 percent. 

Grades have been rising, while SAT scores have been falling. Average performance is supposed to earn C’s, not A’s. Even as recently as 1990, it was still in reasonable C+/B- territory. But the percentage of high schoolers with an A average went up from an already absurd 38.9 percent in 1998 to a still more absurd 47 percent in 2016. And this is not because kids today are wowing teachers with their stellar performance. Average SAT scores, which reveal the ignorance and incompetence that inflated grades conceal, fell from 1026 to 1002 on a 1600-point scale over the same period.  

In a similar disjunction between grades and test results, more and more schools, especially in poor minority neighborhoods, show a marked discrepancy between passing student grades and state proficiency test failures in the same subjects.  

For example, in New York City, even before the pandemic began, in the largely black and Hispanic Mott Haven neighborhood of the Bronx, 94 percent of students in grades six through eight passed their math classes, but only 2 percent of those students passed state math exams testing their grade-level proficiency. In largely Hispanic Washington Heights, 100 percent of kids passed English language arts, but only 7 percent of those kids passed the corresponding state test. In still other schools in California, failing grades have simply been eliminated and replaced by C’s. 

The educational bureaucracy’s “solution” to such glaring problems has been to lower the standards. Thus, what counts as “basic proficiency” in core subjects like math and English has been gutted. Entire towns, like Schenectady, New York, have been unable to get even a single eighth grader to meet the proficiency mark under the old standard.  

In what is often crowned the nation’s top high school, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Virginia, after considerations of race were infused into the formerly race-blind admissions process, teachers predictably saw the “lowest scores we’ve ever seen” (averages in the low 70s) on trigonometry exams, even though they had lowered standards and made the tests “substantially easier” to accommodate dumber students.  

Many schools have also stopped assigning class rank to students (and have stopped recognizing extraordinary achievement by crowning valedictorians) — with class rank being another measure that would reveal the true pecking order of students that inflated grades conceal. 

Standardized testing requirements for entry into universities have been eliminated, with over 80 percent of four-year colleges not requiring such testing this year. The “pandemic” excuse universities have offered for the move rings hollow, as prominent universities such as Columbia have led the charge to make the change permanent.

The true motivation, we can guess, is the widespread expectation that the Supreme Court will soon bring an end to affirmative action. The expected change has prompted race-obsessed universities to admit less-qualified individuals by eliminating objective metrics such as testing, thereby making the whole admissions process so discretionary and opaque that it will be impossible to peer behind the curtain. 

With dumber students coming to college, rampant grade inflation has taken over universities as well. Only 15 percent of college grades were A’s in the early 1960s, while today that percentage is 45 percent. Even at purportedly elite universities, such as Harvard, the median grade is an A-, and the most common grade is an A.  

To further accommodate increasingly brittle students, a growing number of universities have moved away from assigning grades for student work. Such creeping grade inflation and grade elimination have driven a steady, across-the-board rise in college graduation rates. On the surface, things look great: a significantly greater percentage of students are graduating from college than did a few decades back. Under the surface, however, universities are simply handing over more diplomas to uneducated morons, who can then proceed to worm their way into the workforce and go around thinking they represent a higher species of being than their non-college-educated peers. 

University curricula have likewise been under attack. Works of great literature that challenge stale ideas and open complacent minds, serving as Kafka’s “ice ax for the frozen sea inside us,” have been de-canonized and replaced by third-rate productions of the identity grievance industry. Requirements to learn classical languages — Greek and Latin — have been dropped from prestigious university classics departments supposedly devoted to the study of the classical literature of Greece and Rome. 

Grad schools have felt the same tremors. Facing pressure from the powerful diversity lobby, leveling the usual charges of “systemic racism,” more and more medical schools have begun eliminating the MCAT exam that used to be a universal requirement for admission. Similarly, the American Bar Association’s Council of the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar, concerned about inadequate diversity in the profession, recently voted overwhelmingly in favor of a proposal to eliminate the LSAT exam aspiring attorneys must take as a gateway to law school admission. 

As educational standards at schools, universities, and professional schools crater, it only makes sense that those lower standards would be pushed further down the line and find their way into the professional world. Measures such as lowering bar exam cutoffs for admission to the practice of law or turning the U.S. Medical Licensing Exam, which was long relied on by residencies to pick their trainees, from a graded test into a pass-fail test must be implemented because too many aspirants to these prestigious professions, especially from minority backgrounds, will otherwise be unable to compete. 

If anyone imagines that it will be possible to keep these steadily creeping markers of dumbness, ignorance, and incompetence to educational institutions and out of the workplace, they are dreaming.  

In his brilliant and prescient 1997 book, The Revolt of the Elites, the left-populist Christopher Lasch argued that our elevation of “diversity” to the paramount value in our society was a prescription for the dumbing down of our civilization.  

“A respect for cultural diversity,” he wrote, “forbids us to impose the standards of privileged groups on the victims of oppression. This is … clearly a recipe for universal incompetence.”  

What we should expect in the coming years is a widespread crisis of competence afflicting every nook and cranny of American life. Expect to encounter doctors who do not know fundamental human biology, lawyers who lack the capacity to reason, and bankers, engineers, and rocket scientists who cannot do basic math and rely increasingly on “smart” AI to do their work for them.

And that means more crashes of every sort, whether financial crashes, ecological crashes, plane crashes, or crashes among poorly engineered self-driving cars, which lead to injuries that medical malpractice then turns into crashes of our delicate biological systems. 

The great 19th-century Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt, followed in this respect by Friedrich Nietzsche, diagnosed the “agon,” the competitive struggle for excellence in every walk of life, as the highest value in classical Greece. Athletic competition of the sort that gave rise to the Olympic Games that we still cherish today served as the model, but academic and aesthetic pursuits, such as poetry, followed suit. Such universal competition created a fiery crucible within which every species of excellence could be refined and cultivated.  

Education was no exception to this rule. Subjects such as gymnastics, music, and poetry were taught through healthy competition. The ordinarily negative feeling of envy was channeled to drive individual achievement and the greater collective good until envy gave way to reverence and the pursuit of excellence for its own sake. As Nietzsche summarized it, “Every talent must develop by fighting.”  

This vision of education in ancient Greek society may appear quite foreign to us now, and indeed, it may have been better suited to a small, close-knit, and homogeneous society where only free males were educated, leaving much of the population behind. Our large, diverse nation, in which we make the noble effort to educate everyone, no matter their sex, economic or social class, or ethnic or racial origin, could never abide such a starkly agonistic system. Yet the example remains instructive precisely because we have strayed very far in the opposite direction.  

We are frightened of competition, of pitting students against one another and seeing who will emerge victorious. We are more comfortable awarding participation trophies than trophies acknowledging extraordinary achievement, which we reflexively brand “racist.” Rankings, grades, test scores, and every other objective measure that threatens to sort the wheat from the chaff discomfit us because they expose the persistence of black underachievement, which will never disappear until we cease once and for all to treat black people as lesser beings in need of a pale-skinned helping hand.  

Excellence and success cannot be bought through giveaways and reality-denying decrees. We can eliminate failing grades, but we cannot eliminate failure. When our economies, our bodies, and our engines begin to sputter, our mounting bill will come due.

The invoice will bear the following description: rather than forcing individual and collective excellence to emerge as the natural outgrowths of a culture that incentivizes and exhorts us to overcome every species of adversity and rise to greatness, we tried to skip to the punchline. We hoped to use the blunt instrument of so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion to engineer a racially proportionate outcome we did not earn and do not deserve. As a result, we got exactly what we did deserve — failure and incompetence at every level.  

Your Tax Dollars: Government Accountability Office Mandates What Employees Can and Can't Say

Bob Hoge reporting for RedState 

Ever wonder where your tax dollars are going? They don’t seem to be doing much to lower crime or solve the homelessness crisis. All too often these days we find that our money is going to fund indoctrination efforts by the Biden administration as they force their woke brand of justice on society—whether you like it or not.

The latest victims are the 3,100 employees of the Government Accountability Office (GAO) who have been told to avoid “gendered language” in the workplace. According to its website, the Office wasn’t created to engage in social activism, but instead to keep an eye on the government itself. Their website describes their function:

GAO provides Congress, the heads of executive agencies, and the public with timely, fact-based, non-partisan information that can be used to improve government and save taxpayers billions of dollars.

Our work is done at the request of congressional committees or subcommittees or is statutorily required by public laws or committee reports, per our Congressional Protocols.

An internal memo dated October 2022 and obtained by The Daily Mail, however, shows that they have other ideas in mind. The 3,000+ word missive penned by the  “chief diversity management officer” demands that workers not use “wording that diminishes anyone’s dignity.” It sounds like a noble enough goal—until you hear some of the words like “manpower” that are considered triggering. Have you ever heard someone use a phrase like, “We don’t have enough manpower for that job” and immediately thought that someone would find it deeply insulting? If you have, you’re probably one of those people who sit around searching for things to be aggrieved about.

More from the memo:

Inclusive language allows us to support GAO’s mission by appropriately addressing all members of society. [I throw the red flag right there, folks. the use of the word “members” is extremely inappropriate and offensive.] Writing inclusively means your words, phrases and tone are free from assumptions, implications, and connotations that may exclude people or perpetuate misconcenptions. The overarching goals are to respect the identitites and prerefences of all people and to avoid wording that diminishes anyone’s dignity or humanity.

If I’m working for the GAO, I’m thinking to myself, what does all that gobbledygook actually mean in practice? They supply more confusing guidance filled with buzzwords to help explain:

“When it is necessary to refer to sex or gender identity, be aware of the distinction and avoid equating the two,” the leaked memo reads.

“Sex is a classification of people into categories such as male, female or intersex on the basis of biological characteristics.

“Gender identity is a person”s innermost concept of self as male, female, a blend of both, or neither.

“Gender identity may align with the sex a person was assigned at birth (cisgender), another sex (transgender), or neither.

“A person whose gender identity does not align with their sex assigned at birth or with another sex may identify as nonbinary, agender, or gender fluid, among other identities.”

Maybe it’s just me, but I think the employees should be focused on holding the government to account and detecting financial irregularities, not obsessing about their gender identities. Aren’t there some important issues out there?

There’s more stupidity, but you get the idea: don’t call illegal aliens illegal aliens, use footnotes “when your choice of inclusive language could be unfamiliar or confusing,” don’t use “differently abled” (which until recently was deemed considerate), etcetera, etcetera.

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) had an appropriate response:

If Biden and the radical leftists in his administration focused on the real problems facing America — forty-year high inflation, out of control crime, open borders and a flood of deadly drugs — instead of forcing a woke ideology down our throats, our country would be in a far better position to tackle the problems he has exacerbated.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) was equally scathing:

The GAO is tasked with investigating federal spending and performance, but under President Biden they’re wasting valuable government time and resources on regulating language.

While it’s nice to be polite, this whole exercise reeks of silliness, especially when as RedState‘s streiff reported, the GAO doesn’t “doesn’t know why and may not even care” about the disastrous military recruiting numbers our forces are experiencing. Maybe they should spend some time on that?

The government should not be dictating social policy on its workers or on its citizens. Increasingly however under Biden’s administration, the federal bureaucracy often seems to be preoccupied with anything except their actual jobs.