{"id":10629,"date":"2024-05-09T21:25:13","date_gmt":"2024-05-09T21:25:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/?p=10629"},"modified":"2024-05-09T22:00:04","modified_gmt":"2024-05-09T22:00:04","slug":"why-do-democrats-fear-the-facts-about-dei","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/?p=10629","title":{"rendered":"Why do Democrats fear the facts about DEI?"},"content":{"rendered":"

This post originally appeared at https:\/\/www.badgerinstitute.org\/why-do-democrats-fear-the-facts-about-dei\/<\/a><\/p>\n

Governor made \u2018equity\u2019 efforts a priority for state government: So what resulted?<\/strong><\/em><\/h4>\n

Among the bits of folk wisdom that rarely work out well: \u201cDon\u2019t ask the question if you don\u2019t want the answer.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

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It\u2019s bad enough applied to the puddle of mystery your car leaves on the driveway: You may need those brakes soon. It\u2019s worse when applied to the racially charged orders the governor put at the top of every state agency\u2019s to-do list. Wisconsinites should know what\u2019s come of all the scurrying that\u2019s ensued, right?<\/p>\n

Nope, said four legislators this week who took that age-old folk wisdom about not asking questions to heart.<\/p>\n

Fortunately, they were in the minority. The Joint Legislative Audit Committee voted 6-4 to instruct<\/a> the state auditor to find out what has come of Gov. Tony Evers\u2019<\/a> 2019 order<\/a> to make \u201cdiversity, equity and inclusion,\u201d or DEI, a central feature of agencies\u2019 plans and to corral every state employee into \u201cmandatory equity and inclusion training.\u201d<\/p>\n

This means the nonpartisan Legislative Audit Bureau will \u2014 I\u2019m paraphrasing \u2014 find out what agencies did to obey the governor, how much they spent doing it, and what has resulted.<\/p>\n

Who could be afraid of that?<\/p>\n

Sen. Tim Carpenter (D-Milwaukee), for one: As the committee prepared to vote<\/a> on Tuesday, he could hold his tongue no more. \u201cI wasn\u2019t going to say anything,\u201d he said before saying he was a history major, that asking whether the governor\u2019s orders were effective would \u201churt veterans,\u201d and that he saw the audit\u00a0 \u201cas nothing more than trying to drag up a boogeyman to try and get people to think a specific way.\u201d<\/p>\n

What way would that be? Carpenter cited the earlier remarks by the committee\u2019s co-chairman, Sen. Eric Wimberger (R-Green Bay), saying, \u201cI thought it was kind of far right-wing, and that kind of tells us the intention of the audit.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2018To them, people are tribal\u2019<\/strong>\u00a0<\/h4>\n

You can judge the right-winginess of the remarks, linked here in full<\/a>, for yourself, but Wimberger mostly lamented the modern redefinition of \u201cdiversity.\u201d It once \u201cwas a quest for diversity of thought,\u201d he said. \u201cIt was race-neutral, and embodied Civil Rights Act era directives to act without regard for race, creed, color, or national origin.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now? Academics and politicians steeped in critical theory \u201cgave up on looking beyond immutable characteristics, believing it an impossibility.\u00a0To them, people are tribal,\u201d inevitably driven by bias.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s \u201cmeant to pit one socially constructed class against another,\u201d Wimberger said. Its demand to statistically match every outcome with Census figures may look noble, but if \u201cstatistical equity is the goal, then DEI advocates must conclude it\u2019s possible to have \u2018too many of those people,\u2019\u201d resulting in, for instance, colleges discriminating against Asians, for example.<\/p>\n

None of this is surprising: As the Badger Institute reported last spring<\/a>, Republican lawmakers long have been appalled both by the corrosive discrimination that Evers\u2019 DEI orders entailed and by the money spent to enforce the new racial hierarchies.<\/p>\n

What is remarkable is the open-ended nature of the mandate to the nonpartisan Legislative Audit Bureau. The bureau\u2019s staff simply has to report back what activities have been performed because of Evers\u2019 order, what\u2019s been spent, and what outcomes have resulted.<\/p>\n

The response of Democrats<\/a> who voted, party-line, against this was that no audit should be done. DEI should be assumed a good thing, since the Pentagon and big corporations have bought in.<\/p>\n

Camouflage<\/strong>\u00a0<\/h4>\n

You\u2019d think that if, unlike Wimberger, you thought DEI was a glorious boon to Wisconsin, you\u2019d want to find out whether state agencies were actually carrying out the orders. But DEI seems to be the priority that can\u2019t bear discussion.<\/p>\n

Even the governor\u2019s order involves verbal camouflage: It starts by invoking our constitution\u2019s guarantee of equality<\/em>, using that word twice before shifting over to \u201cequity,\u201d a word it uses 13 times \u2014 a word, as we\u2019re assured from the commanding heights of society<\/a>, that does not mean the same as equality, that in fact means unequal treatment<\/a> in search of equal outcomes<\/a>. The order starts with the universally accepted ideal before shifting to the sound-almost-alike concept that much of America opposes<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Good for lawmakers for asking the question, whatever the answer will be. Perhaps the audit will vindicate Evers. Perhaps it will find Wimberger was on target in faulting mandatory DEI training for \u201cforcing you to acknowledge you must have less because your group has too much.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wimberger is more or less paraphrasing best-selling author Ibram X. Kendi, who infamously wrote<\/a>, \u201cThe only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.\u201d And Kendi will be featured later this month<\/a> in a daylong webinar about \u201cequity\u201d sponsored by the regulator of all K-12 education in Wisconsin, the Department of Public Instruction.<\/p>\n

The old advice that you shouldn\u2019t ask questions you don\u2019t want answer to works fine for those who don\u2019t mind puddles in the driveway and the four who opposed the audit. The rest of us will eagerly await the answers that might help us put the brakes on.<\/p>\n

Patrick McIlheran is the Director of Policy at the Badger Institute. Permission to reprint is granted as long as the author and Badger Institute are properly cited<\/em>.<\/p>\n

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