February 28, 2023

How are we to understand the Biden administration’s executive order to go full DEI for the whole federal government? I mean, if we need to purge the federal government from stem to stern of systemic racism and enforce diversity, equity, and inclusion, the federal government must be a veritable hornet’s nest of racism, sexism, homophobia, and hate. Otherwise we wouldn’t need a whole-of-government effort to stamp it out. And, of course, we are talking about Democrats. No Republican has had a shot at a Fed job for a generation.

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But how can this be? Our liberal friends have been running the federal government, man and boy — and now gender non-binary — for not less than 90 years, at least since FDR was inaugurated and cranked up the federal government to ramming speed with a ton of new liberal programs. Our liberal friends have run a race program — fighting systemic racism! — for the last 55 years, from quotas to Affirmative Action to Diversity to Reparations. And that’s not enough? Our liberal friends have ballooned total government spending from 8 percent GDP in 1910 to 37 percent GDP expected for 2023, and they still have to crank it up?

Time was when an avuncular Barack Obama patronizingly opined to a roomful of supporters in 2008 about “bitter clingers,” the pathetic residents of Midwestern towns where “the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them.” So, if they lost their jobs 40 years ago, and are just sitting there, hundreds of miles away from any federal office, I guess No Problem on the DEI front, right Barack?

Time was when the nation’s aunt Hillary Rodham Clinton matronizingly opined to a roomful of supporters in 2016 about a “basket of deplorables… racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it.” Doesn’t seem like much of a national problem, does it, if they are mere deplorables in a basket. Of course, at the time, experts agreed, Clinton was going to beat Trump in the election, going away.

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In the event, against all odds and the experts, Donald Trump won the election in 2016. But no problem, the FBI went to work inciting bitter clingers into an assassination plot against Michigan’s governor. And the entire intelligence community went to work purging MDM (that’s misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation for you rubes) from social media, and putting FBI officials into Twitter to supervise delta-minus wokey morons like Vijaya Gadde and Noel Roth and make sure they made the right decision on misinformation about Hunter Biden’s not-computer.

Still, you can’t be too careful, so it’s sensible to go belt-and-suspenders and hose down J6 “armed insurrectionists” with “rubber bullets, gas canisters, flash grenades” pour encourager les autres. And then lock away a bunch of the deplorable rioters in jail without bail, and throw the book at them.

But the question arises: if Trump supporters are bitter clingers, and deplorables are beneath our concern, darling, and if our loyal intelligence community and DoJ and justice system are making chopped liver of any far-right conspiracy theorists that dare to show themselves on the terraces of the Capitol, then why do we need a full-government DEI program supervised by the reliable Susan Rice? Does that really make sense?

It does to me. It makes complete sense.

If you believe in the ideas of Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt that politics is the distinction between friend and enemy, then you know that any competent politician is always urging his supporters onward to fight the enemy — but not hate the enemy, oh no! Candidate Joe Biden made it clear that the two enemies of the U.S. are climate change and systemic racism. In consequence he has spent the last two years mobilizing the nation for World War Climate, with vast expenditures to make the nation carbon neutral and spread EV charging stations across the fruited plain, and he has been taking the fight to the vile perpetrators of systemic racism.

But politics is not just about taking the fight to the enemy. It is also about rewarding your friends. So of course, the Biden administration is showering the voters of liberal North Seattle with subsidies and tax breaks to help them get behind the wheel of their first EV. And of course, he is providing vast incentives to expand renewable energy.