Comment by hypeatei
1 month ago
> Democrats ran a long and successful campaign to crush anti-woke dissent, for instance. Broke lots of laws (and still do!)
Citation/elaboration needed. Same goes for the Title IX comment. How did Biden "compel speech" on campuses?
> and they wielded power to make sure the same was true in many non-gov institutions
Again, cancel culture, no matter how aggressive, is not the same as using the monopoly on violence to get your way. Woke mob vs federal agents. You could argue that some of Trump's actions like his lawsuit against the pollster aren't an official government action, but it certainly is a huge break from norms for a sitting President to sue over speech he doesn't like.
> explicitly make the leap from "flag burning" to "running a campaign of crushing dissent"
It's much more than just flag burning, as I've shown.
I appreciate you engaging.
1) https://speechfirst.org/case/title-ix/ is the third ddg result for title ix compelled speech. Basically, the feds under Biden were going to compel use of people's preferred pronouns. Ideally it would have failed in court.
Elaboration: For a very long time, in many states and parts of the federal government, there has been overt discrimination on the basis of race, sex, disability status, etc. in direct and obvious violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Things like skin-color quotas for hiring, preferences for vendors, etc. You're certainly familiar. They hired people who would, at the very least, not speak out against their regime's practices, and ideally who would help perpetuate them.
> Again, cancel culture, no matter how aggressive... It's not just twitter mobs. To get the large gov't grants necessary to be successful in science, for instance, it was ~mandatory for the past while to have a DEI angle on your application. Many forms actually had a section for it. So, in this case, the gov't isn't using its monopoly on violence exactly, but it's not cancel culture. (and of course there were many grants funded that weren't just a DEI angle, it was 100% DEI bullshit)
"A huge conspiracy to overtly break the law" is what DEI was and still sadly largely is.
> were going to compel use of people's preferred pronouns
This is the exact mindset I mentioned above where Democrats are judged based on what they might've done or might happen, while Trump has clearly done things that go against our basic rights yet they're being shined in the same light. To be clear: I'm not saying we shouldn't criticize policy proposals.
> "A huge conspiracy to overtly break the law" is what DEI was and still sadly largely is.
DEI is a very wide tent, and the intentions of it are to widen the hiring pools to consider more people. If there are specific programs breaking the law, then those can be discussed specifically. Right wingers are typically for meritocracy (which has been shown to be a red herring with this loyalist admin, but w/e) and in theory they'd actually support a wider pool of people being considered.
Academia can be quite left leaning, so training about white supremacy or woke shit there is certainly over the top, but I have a problem with the broad brushes you're applying to something that has a lot more nuance. If this lawlessness was as pervasive as you make it seem in every sector, wouldn't we have seen a major loss in court already that requires these programs to be axed across the board?
Biden's new Title IX rules became law on August 1, 2024 so they weren't "might". Thankfully, we only had a few months under this particular imposition on our basic rights and push never came to shove. We agree that Orange Man does some Bad Things. I would bet history will look more kindly on him than society does now, though.
> the intentions of it are to widen the hiring pools to consider more people.
I think this is a charitable take. To "consider" more people. But: 1) considering people takes resources, and if there's an optimal amount of "considering" to do and you force the pool one way or another...you're forcing people out as well as in. There's no way to "consider" more people efficiently. It's a nice lie that many people told themselves and others.
2) More importantly, and because of 1), this is not generally how it worked imho. We got quotas and mandates, people were put to the "bottom of the pile" (i.e., their applications not looked at). It was clear-cut illegal discrimination at large corporations and in academia, and there's plenty of direct first-hand evidence of that (including here on HN). I saw it myself many times (admittedly in academia, which as you rightly point out is a white-hot ball of crazy in this regard).
3) I'm not going to do it, but I think it wouldn't be hard to find evidence of high-level people who were inflicting DEI explicitly saying it wasn't about "widening the hiring pools to consider more people", but rather directly about removing white people from power and replacing them with black, brown, gay, female, or ideally some combo people. Nothing to do with "considering", just a power grab under an alternative metric for fairness they called "equity".
As for court losses: https://reason.com/2023/09/07/affirmative-action-loses-in-co... Affirmative action is over, is the biggest one
https://www.scotusblog.com/cases/case-files/ames-v-ohio-depa... is another big one
More minor but: Executive Order 14151 "Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing" was blocked but now is un-blocked and enforceable nationwide: https://apnews.com/article/dei-trump-administration-appeals-...
EO 14173 "Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity" had an injuction, but that injunction was stayed https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/marylan...
It appears to me that these programs pretty much have been axed across the board.