I argued last Friday the craziness about calling everything ‘racist’ wouldn’t be happening without diversity advocates drowning in money and using race to get more. It’s race hustlers and poverty pimps, 2.0.
Antiracist author Ibram X. Kendi got $25,000 for a speech to a nonprofit housing agency in 2021. Like a trained seal, he gave the audience exactly what they wanted to hear: He said America is “deeply racist” and must be torn down and replaced with something completely new. He also called for reparations, forced redistribution in order to eliminate the ‘racial wealth gap’.
Don’t tell him, but 1619 Project creator Nikole Hannah-Jones got a lot more for a speech she gave at a library last year – $40,000. Her whole deal is that America was founded solely to protect the right to own slaves, a thesis that has been widely criticized and debunked by serious historians.
But the big money is in the federal government. The American Rescue Plan contained $130 billion in racial equity grants for cities and counties. The NIH has bought into the whole ‘systemic racism’ trip and is spending big bucks on it – $400,000 to send texts to Latino men telling them to exercise, and a million dollars to support its belief racial discrimination is what causes poor sleep among blacks. Critics have called out the Transportation Department for spending millions on diversity, equity, and inclusion instead of paying proper attention to ensure the nation’s air traffic control system doesn’t go down, as it did last week. Diversity trainers are making a fortune off the federal government.
Left-wing foundations are also pouring millions into diversity and critical race theory. The MacArthur Foundation awarded the 1619 Project’s Nikole Hannah-Jones a $625,000 grant, then donated $5 million to Howard University which then hired her. Foundation money is also behind the National Equity Atlas, which facilitates the redistribution of taxpayer money to census tracts that have higher minority populations and lower income. Other foundations have pledged to spend $150 million and $180 million for “racial justice”, $100 million for “justice and equity”, $100 million for “racial equity”, and $200 million for diversity, equity, and inclusion ‘investments’.
Corporate America is another huge payday. Big companies were falling all over themselves to throw hundreds of millions of dollars at now-disgraced Black Lives Matter and other racial justice initiatives in the George Floyd era. You might be surprised to learn that Coca-Cola paid the NAACP and other civil rights groups to paint Coke’s opponents as racists on such issues as sugar taxes and food stamp funding for soda pop.
I should also mention that one giant German publisher – Bertelsmann – is behind the appearance of Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist and other books that are now staples of Woke literature. Whatever sells.
Sorry, folks, but I can’t take the whole racism trip seriously, not when I know it’s bought-and-paid-for by mega-foundations, giant corporations and, deepest pocket of all, the federal government. I refuse to be tyrannized by the phony hypersensitivities of a small group of hired guns – professional activists, the professionally outraged Left. If you want to have a constructive conversation about legitimate racial grievances, you will not find a more willing partner than me. As for the rest of it, cut the malarkey and get a real job.
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