Black Medal of Honor Recipient Disgraced by Department of Defense

 The US defense department webpage celebrating an army general who served in the Vietnam war and was awarded the country’s highest military decoration has been removed and the letters “DEI” added to the site’s address.

On Saturday, US army Maj Gen Charles Calvin Rogers’s Medal of Honor webpage led to a “404” error message. The URL was also changed, with the word “medal” changed to “deimedal”.

Rogers, who was awarded the Medal of Honor by then president Richard Nixon in 1970, served in the Vietnam war, where he was wounded three times while leading the defense of a base.

According to the West Virginia military hall of fame, Rogers was the highest-ranking African American to receive the medal. After his death in 1990, Rogers’s remains were buried at the Arlington national cemetery in Washington DC, and in 1999 a bridge in Fayette county, where Rogers was born, was renamed the Charles C Rogers Bridge.

Maya Yang @ The Guardian

Remember just a few years back when Black republican senator Tim Scott was chastising Biden and the Dems for suggesting the US was a racist society? Well, it is shamefully racist what the Grump admin is doing with this anti-DEI stuff now. I can't believe this will sit well with veterans but Grump has insulted them before and I'm told he's still popular with the military and police, as if anybody should find that reassuring. I gather the neoliberal argument coming from the admin is that this "shock doctrine" stuff, shutting down government services, will hurt temporarily but once all the waste and deadwood is cleared away it's going to be back to boom times for the economy. And they seem to believe it but they sound increasingly like fascists and religious cult zealots; dismissive of any contradicting evidence. Musk may have some deep AI research tools but the cuts so far stand out for being arbitrary or prejudiced, some personal grievance of Musk's, and virtually nothing that could be reasonably called "waste." What it feels like to me is we're veering closer to general strike like conditions. The Dems will not or cannot stop the destruction. The courts are too slow and/or corrupt. This stuff is so insulting and degrading to so many: veterans, government workers, farmers, educators, scientists, foreign trade, industries that depend on immigrant labor, lawyers, consumers, protesters, etc. It's as if they were trying to alienate everyone but the billionaires and the most rabid Christian Nationalist bigots. How long will everyone else, super majorities of the country after all, put up with it? 

Banned Words United for Multicultural Democracy (and the Gulf of Mexico)!

Psych professor puts Grump's banned words to good use on Diane Ravitch's blog: 

"Join me, activists and advocates, in the project of smashing barriers, interrupting oppression, searching out our own biases, respecting pronouns, increasing diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace, and fighting for social justice. Let us join in allyship and provide culturally responsive, identity-affirming care to marginalized, underserved, and/or vulnerable populations. We will think historically and systemically from an intersectional, feminist, anti-racist, anti-colonial position. We will celebrate our diverse backgrounds and cultural differences. We will fight for accessible mental health care and embrace climate science. We will challenge institutional racism and call out hate speech. We will not tolerate discrimination against people, whether the discriminatory words or actions are based on race, ethnicity, citizenship, country of origin, sex, gender, sexual preference, (dis)ability, religious beliefs, socioeconomic status, or any other aspects of our cultural identities. We are a nation of indigenous people and immigrants. Harm to one of us is harm to all of us. WE WILL NOT BE SILENCED — especially in and around the Gulf of Mexico."

The War on Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion

 “It has taken two hundred and thirty-two years and a hundred and fifteen prior appointments for a Black woman to be selected to serve on the Supreme Court of the United States. But we’ve made it. All of us,” she [Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson] said. “Our children are telling me that they see now more than ever that here in America anything is possible.” 

But it is also true that the existence of these highly successful Black people has obscured the harsh fact that tens of millions of ordinary Black people suffer from high rates of poverty, homelessness, hunger, and other measures of deprivation. For example, though the U.S. is currently experiencing historic lows of unemployment, Black workers still face nearly twice the rate of unemployment of white workers. A 2021 study based on an experiment that sent out eighty-three thousand fictitious job applications with random characteristics to the hundred and eight largest employers in the United States found that “distinctively black names” reduced the “probability of employer contact.” According to the study, twenty-three of the employers were “found to discriminate against Black applicants.” In 2022, Wells Fargo was forced to pay eight million dollars to more than thirty thousand Black job applicants to settle a claim based on a Department of Labor lawsuit, which alleged that the bank interviewed Black applicants for jobs that had already been filled in order to fulfill diversity requirements. The United States is awash in racism even as some Black people have risen to the highest ranks within our country—including the Presidency."

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor @ NY-er

If living wage jobs get harder to find, and they have since at least 1980 because of anti-union gov policies, frozen minimum wages, outsourcing and neoliberal globalization, but at the same time government jobs are being filled disproportionately by Black people (as mentioned in the story) what is that going to look like to working class white people finding it increasingly difficult to find living wage work? But the living wage squeeze isn't because of gov DEI policies, Black unemployment still doubles that of whites, Taylor points out; it's because beginning with Reagan the gov gave up on supporting full-employment and working class living wages. And, really, race and ethnic divisions have always been a favorite tool of capital in dividing and conquering labor rights. P.S. Also, adding to the "cutting off your nose to spite your face" list we've been informally compiling about conservatives, turns out white women have been the biggest beneficiaries of DEI policies.  

"Masculinity Is Good, DEI Is Cancer, And The Military Should Kill All Dems: So ... your average modern conservative?"

“The income inequality in this country and cost-of-living is outrageous,” he [Matthew Livelsberger, Vegas Cybertruck Exploder] added, clearly unaware of who supports policies designed to combat those things. “The number of homeless on our street is embarrassing and disgusting. Have some pride and take care of this.”

I’m pretty sure the solution to this plan, as per those he would like to rally around, would be something along the lines of throwing them in prisons or bringing back workhouses.

“Stop obsessing over diversity,” he wrote, getting back on message. “We are all diverse and DEI is a cancer. Thankfully we rejected the DEI candidate and will have a real President instead of Weekend at Bernie’s.”

Well gee. Maybe we wouldn’t need things like DEI if people like this guy didn’t believe, despite all the easily available evidence to the contrary, that a white guy must be more qualified than a woman of color.

This guy is wacky, but he’s exemplary of something I’ve been saying for a long time now — and no, not just that the people who pull this kind of shit usually turn out to really hate women. It’s that there are so many people out there who have the economic policies of Republicans and Democrats completely switched around in their heads. Or maybe not that, exactly. It’s almost more that these people have convinced themselves that Republicans stand for everything they want and like, even when they are out here actively proposing the complete opposite."

Robyn Pennacchia @ Wonkette

Several steps removed from the 24/7 news avalanche by design, having to ration my intake for mental health reasons like most everybody else I know, even I noted how all the talk about Livelsberger, another untreated PTSD veteran turned violent berserker, went silent as soon as his communications and so real motivations surfaced. I'm assuming his "Weekend at Bernie's" reference refers to Biden but the rest of the same sentence clearly refers to Harris. So, yeah, the cybertruck guy was mixed up. I saw an election campaign sign in my affluent neighborhood (I live on the poor side of town, down by the railroad tracks, by the way) that read: "RFK- Make America Healthy Again." There is a gobsmacking upside-downland quality to our current social hysteria that is unnerving, to say the least. You could say such violent wingnuts as Livelsberger have always been part of America. True. But has there ever been so many of them and whatever their problems have they ever been so pervasive? Pennacchia's take rings true with me with this slight tweak: they, angry white men bent on deaths of despair, in the main identify with Grump Republicans as their party of angry white men and then fit everything else (any actual grievances or proposed solutions) to fit that identification. 

"If there is anything that says social media, it’s chatting with people who do not actually exist" and Anti-DEI idiocy

"The demand that Costco abandon DEI came from some conservative “think tank” called the National Center for Public Policy Research, an anodyne name for a group that spends its time trying to get companies to pretend problems such as climate change and bigotry don’t actually exist. Which is about the level of intellectual robustness we would expect from an organization that puts a hack like Peter Schweizer, the nativist who wrote Clinton Cash and has worked on documentaries with Steve Bannon, on its board.

Costco’s board, to its credit, did not cave into this swill the way other companies have done in a never-ending quest to satisfy the perpetually unsatisfied dipshits of the Right. It’s worth quoting at length:

Our success at Costco Wholesale has been built on service to our critical stakeholders: employees, members, and suppliers. Our efforts around diversity, equity and inclusion follow our code of ethics:

For our employees, these efforts are built around inclusion – having all of our employees feel valued and respected. Our efforts at diversity, equity and inclusion remind and reinforce with everyone at our Company the importance of creating opportunities for all. We believe that these efforts enhance our capacity to attract and retain employees who will help our business succeed. This capacity is critical because we owe our success to our now over 300,000 employees around the globe.

God, yes. It is crazy how some anodyne corporate gobbledygook about respect and diversity can actually serve as an emotional release of sorts. But restating basic values of human dignity and respect is something so few people in power do anymore, and won’t happen very often in our emerging tech broligarchy."

Gary Legum @ Wonkette

Not that Clinton Cash or the Clinton Foundation aren't relatives of the massive shakedown operation Grump runs out of his role as POTUS. They are. But at least the Clinton's didn't mix their grift with white supremacy and fascist violence. It is an obvious and crucial difference.