Some of the few truly entertaining moments you’ll find in politics are the times when activists who are extremely ideological — the total fanatics — suddenly have to confront the reality that they’re losing.
You’ll remember that when Donald Trump won in 2016, we saw a lot of that. HBO captured footage of Ben Rhodes, the Obama adviser, sitting shell-shocked on a bench for several minutes when he realized that Hillary Clinton wasn’t going to be president. There was also the famous woman screaming and howling as Trump was inaugurated, who became an instant meme. These kinds of moments are great because if you’re a sane person, it’s a win-win. Your enemies aren’t just being defeated; they’re also providing some unintended humor on the way out.
Yesterday in the state of Utah we were treated to another one of these moments. The state senate overwhelmingly passed a bill that will dismantle all “diversity, equity and inclusion” programs in the government as well as the public education system. As the Salt Lake Tribune reports:
The wide-sweeping proposal requires that diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, offices at the state’s eight public colleges and universities, specifically, be reframed. They can no longer be race- or gender-based, but instead must cater to all students as generalized student success and support centers. .. [The bill] additionally bans schools and government employers from asking job applicants for a statement about their beliefs on diversity or inclusion, and [schools and employers] could lose state funding for violating that. And all entities would be required to eliminate any training on ‘discriminatory practices’ while replacing that with instruction on free speech from all viewpoints.
This is, by far, the most sweeping anti-DEI bill that’s ever been proposed in this country. And just for good measure, the Utah Senate also passed a separate bill banning men from entering women’s restrooms. The governor has indicated he’s going to sign both of these bills, so in all likelihood, very soon they’ll become law.
For DEI race hustlers, this is their Ben Rhodes, “crazy-lady-screeching-at-the-inauguration” moment. This doesn’t just mark the rollback of their ideology in Utah, it’s also virtually certain to inspire similar bills all over the country and create a kind of domino effect. Already, states like Oklahoma, Florida and Texas have taken their own steps to end DEI. And now the process looks like it’s going to accelerate.
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Here’s the fun part. Democrats in Utah, as you might imagine, didn’t take this news very well. So they did what any mentally unbalanced, crazy person would do in this circumstance. They all dressed in black and solemnly held a funeral for DEI, because in their words, “they are hurting.” There was no casket as far as I can tell, but they did have a eulogy and a strict dress code for the occasion. Watch:
HAPPENING NOW: Utah's Democrats are wearing all black, asking @GovCox to veto two controversial bills dealing with DEI and bathroom access.
They say they're in black because they are "hurting" that these bills are likely to pass. @KSL5TV #utpol pic.twitter.com/FzVJqjVQeT
— Lindsay Aerts (@LindsayOnAir) January 25, 2024
Imagine the process of arranging something like this. Did they all get on a conference call and say, “Hey everyone, it looks like that bill that bans racial discrimination is going to pass, so we’re going to hold a funeral for DEI. Be sure to wear all black.” And then no one thought that was remotely unusual or weird in any way. All of them apparently thought that, by color coordinating, they’d lend some gravity and seriousness to the situation. But of course, they did the opposite. There is not a single living creature who saw this press conference in Utah and felt anything other than amusement and second-hand-embarrassment for everyone involved.
Actually, the more you watch this DEI funeral, the more humiliating it gets. You may have noticed that the Democrats didn’t simply coordinate their clothing. They also coordinated their positions at the press conference. All of the white guys are conspicuously located in the back. You can barely see them. The women are up front. The Utah Democrats didn’t specifically call attention to this staging, like they did with the clothing, but it’s not hard to figure out the message. They’re once again highlighting the fact that DEI means that white guys go to the back of the bus. Even the white guys who are on board with DEI are subjected to this humiliation because they’re inferior, solely by virtue of their skin color. This is a fundamental principle of DEI, and they will continue to embrace it even as the DEI scam collapses around them.
At the same time, there was one candid, slightly less choreographed moment from the Utah capitol the other day. The Salt Lake Tribune captured this image of trans activists storming the capitol, presumably because they’re upset about the other bill (the one that keeps men out of women’s bathrooms):
Ban of transgender people from Utah’s public bathrooms passes Senate https://t.co/lOELr3cNzs pic.twitter.com/H1zXWN8way
— Salt Lake Tribune politics (@SLTribPolitics) January 25, 2024
It’s a shot of two very angry individuals — one of them wearing a mask for some reason — holding signs that read, “Trans Joy is Power.” But if you look closely at their faces, you can’t help but notice that “trans joy” looks a lot like blind, homicidal rage. This is always the case with “trans joy.” We hear a lot about it, but nobody has ever seen anything resembling joy from any trans activist. This photo went viral for obvious reasons. For one thing, it’s like a Babylon Bee photo, except in real life. But the photo also does a great job of capturing the anger and bitterness of deranged activists who know they’re losing. They don’t have time for debates or logic or anything like that. All they can do is rage, and they know it.
We’re seeing a similar phenomenon play out in the journalism industry, or what’s left of it anyway. Faced with a very public and overwhelming rejection of everything they stand for, journalists are not pondering their failures. They aren’t wondering why everyone hates them. Instead, they’re wallowing in self-pity and frustration, just like the trans activists.
This week, for example, the Los Angeles Times laid off more than 20% of its newsroom. This is the paper that, in just the past couple of years, has run headlines like these:
- “Larry Elder is the Black Face of White Supremacy. You’ve Been Warned”
- “Mocking anti-vaxxers’ COVID deaths is ghoulish, yes — but may be necessary”
- “White drivers are polluting the air breathed by L.A.’s people of color”
White drivers are polluting the air breathed by L.A.’s people of colorhttps://t.co/1cBp2TTay6
— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) March 9, 2023
Apparently, we’re not talking about principled journalists holding the powerful to account. These are ghoulish activists who want to cause a race war and dance on the graves of their political enemies. And you can say — well, not everyone in the newsroom may have agreed with those headlines. But the fact is, none of them condemned any of this. None of them spoke out, or reconsidered the wisdom of working for an organization that would publish garbage like this. And we all know why that is: The staff of the LA Times was openly racist and overtly hostile to anyone they disagreed with. That showed in their “journalism,” and most of the public found it to be completely repulsive. So the paper started losing something like $40 million a year. And now the newsroom has been gutted as a result.
But in the wake of these cuts, there has not been a single LA Times employee — current or former — who has said, “Hey, maybe we shouldn’t have wished for the death of our enemies.” Not a single one, as far as I can tell, has said that it was a bad idea to publish an article accusing white people of poisoning the “people of color” in Los Angeles. In fact, the opposite has been happening. LA Times employees have been defending their coverage.
One LA Times reporter, Sarah D. Wire, insisted the other day that the article about white drivers “polluting the air” was great journalism. She wrote, “Ah yes, how dare we inform people about a USC study that found pollution in Los Angeles disproportionally impacts the communities that highways run through…”
Ah yes, how dare we inform people about a USC study that found pollution in Los Angeles disproportionally impacts the communities that highways run through…
Journalists' job is to inform their community https://t.co/LPPVMedmZd
— Sarah D. Wire (@sarahdwire) January 24, 2024
So she still doesn’t get it. She’s not even trying to get it. Even now, after everyone has pointed out to her that “white drivers” aren’t the only ones driving on Los Angeles’ highways, Sarah D. Wire at the Los Angeles Times doesn’t see the problem with the headline. And keep in mind, this is one of the few people who wasn’t fired this week at the LA Times. This is supposedly the cream of the crop. That’s how committed this organization is to fomenting race hatred by lying to the public.
Just to be sure I wasn’t missing anything, I spent some time looking through the Twitter/X feeds of current and former LA Times employees. I wanted to see if any of them were showing any introspection whatsoever. I wanted to see, for example, if any LA Times reporters expressed regret for predicting a year ago that Twitter would implode — because you have to admit, it’s pretty ironic that the LA Times imploded, and Twitter/X is still around. But I didn’t find anything like that. Instead, the more I looked, the worse it got.
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As Chris Rufo noted, the post-layoffs statement from the LA Times’ various “diversity caucuses” didn’t even attempt to defend their work on the basis of quality or merit or profitability. Instead, they all invoked various racial grievances:
The announcement today. .. has devastating implications for Black, Latino, AAPI and other journalists of color. … If these layoffs are allowed to go through, … the Latino Caucus will lose 38 percent of its members. The Black Caucus will lose 36 percent of its members. The [AAPI] and Middle East, North Africa and South Asia caucuses will lose 34 percent of their combined membership.
So it’s all racial bean counting, to the very end. And no one at the LA Times seems to realize how normal people are perceiving all of this.
Yesterday, the LA Times’ Noah Goldberg tweeted out this photo of an empty LA Times newsroom, apparently to garner sympathy:
The LATimes newsroom today. What’s missing pic.twitter.com/p85IJbeltU
— Noah Goldberg (@Noah__Goldberg) January 24, 2024
Literally no one reacted with sympathy to that photo. Tim Pool had maybe the best response:
This is like taking a picture of a kitchen and lamenting there are no roaches running around.
Then, after the post was completely dogpiled by thousands of people, Goldberg tweeted:
Well I’ve gone viral apparently among people who think the LA Times is staffed by journalists who advocate for white genocide and are propagandists. They all believe that the layoffs were good.
Well, that constitutes some accurate reporting from the LA Times, at least, but no one was allowed to celebrate it. Goldberg very quickly locked the replies to that tweet. This is what journalists have to do now —They’re hiding from the customers they’re supposedly serving. And yet, somehow, they’re still in denial about why everyone has so much disdain for them. Even after so many publications have been conducting layoffs this year — including Sports Illustrated, the LA Times, TIME, Business Insider, Forbes, Conde Nast and the New York Daily News — these hacks are still convinced that they’re irreplaceable. The remaining workers are even going on strike in many cases, as if that’s magically going to generate the money that these businesses need in order to pay them. But it didn’t work for the LA Times, and it won’t work for the New York Daily News or Forbes either.
That’s because, in the end, reality is non-negotiable. That’s true for every industry, whether it’s DEI or journalism. You can only sustain a fantasy for so long. And as journalists and DEI bureaucrats are discovering, sooner or later, whether you hold a funeral for it or not, the fantasy has to end.