Diversity training disaster

All big American companies now require DEI training: diversity, equity and inclusion.

All big companies!

Really.

It sounds responsible. But it turns out DEI courses are often useless and sometimes racist.

First comes groveling.

My new video about DEI shows a conference that begins with a “land acknowledgement.”

A Microsoft employee apologizes for taking land from “the Sammamish, the Duwamish, Snoqualmie, Suquamish, Muckleshoot” and more.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ written statement to Tucker Carlson heard around the world last week on the Russia-Ukraine war has caused nothing short of a fullscale meltdown from the arrogant, consistently wrong-thinking, military-industrial complexaddled band of bipartisan dunderheads who collectively comprise the American ruling class’s foreign policy “blob.”

The reality is that the governor, also a likely 2024 presidential candidate, should wear the blob’s dripping scorn as a badge of honor.

These “blobsters,” oftentimes think tank and punditry Boomers or Gen Xers who came of political age during the Cold War, typically suffer from a first principles-level delusion about whether America’s triumphalist post-Cold War unipolar moment still exists. (It does not).

Accordingly, blobsters know one modus operandi only: more intervention and more escalation.

Abba Eban once famously

Iraq is now an Iranian satrapy, Afghanistan is now run by the Taliban, and Libya, over a decade post-Samantha Power/Hillary Clinton-led intervention, is still riven by a jihadist civil war. In most vocational settings, a track record of such obvious repeated failures gets you fired and perhaps blacklisted. For Beltway blobsters, such prognostications can merit a promotion, at least when Boeing or Northrop Grumman has something to say about it.

Seriously: Outside the corridors of Beltway groupthink, who in their right mind would still listen to these people for sage foreign policy counsel?

Apparently not Ron DeSantis. The Sunshine State governor, in his statement to Mr. Carlson, bemoaned the extent to which America’s increasingly weaponsentrenched, rhetorically absolutist and fiscally incontinent posture in Ukraine distracts from urgent problems at home, such as the horrific drug overdose epidemic inflicted upon our nation’s youth by a wide-open southern border and the vicious drug cartels that operate with impunity in northern Mexico. Even worse, from the blobsters’ blinkered perspective, Gov. DeSantis had the temerity to — egad! — reject the notion that further American entrenchment in a “territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia” represents a “vital national interest” for the U.S. For that, declasse Beltway neoconservatives and liberal humanitarian interventionists have derided Gov. DeSantis as a “Putin apologist” or, as befits a group of people unable to process a foreign conflict outside a dichotomous World War II paradigm of full-scale war pitting absolutist good against absolutist evil, as a reincarnation of Neville Chamberlain. But Gov. DeSantis’ statement to Mr. Carlson is emphatically correct.

Toward the beginning of the conflict, there was indeed a real threat of Vladimir Putin toppling the Volodymyr Zelensky regime.

But despite the lingering presence of intermittent rocket fire in and around Kyiv, the overwhelming majority of the fighting since last May — when Russian tanks that had encircled Kyiv in anticipation for a possible final assault on Zelensky largely retreated — has been relegated to far-flung provinces in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine and Crimea.

As this column has repeatedly noted and as has been documented ad nauseam more generally by anyone willing to listen, the Donbas region is composed of towns and enclaves of decidedly mixed Russian and Ukrainian ethnic backgrounds. The specific national borders drawn there today, following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, are simply arbitrary. Crimea, for its part, has spent most of the past few hundred years under Russian control.

So with the Zelensky regime secure from being toppled — especially secure, as of late, due to Europe’s recently increased arms shipments — and with the main question now pertaining to the precise boundaries and contours of an ultimate settlement, how exactly is the conflict not a “territorial dispute”? And what exactly is the “vital national interest” for the U.S. in ensuring Ukraine retains every single square foot of disputed territory, even if some of those square feet in the Ukrainian far east are — heaven forfend! — Russianspeaking towns that may well want to be part of Russia? Is poking the world’s largest nuclear arsenal as much as we have already done, and as much as the blob still want to do, seriously worth “upholding international norms,” or whatever other unthinking drivel the blobsters regurgitate?

The truth is that the vitriolic reaction to Gov. DeSantis last week says everything about the blob’s debilitating personal and vocational insecurities, and nothing about Gov. DeSantis’ call for measured prudence in Eastern Europe. Gov. DeSantis’ critics — besides the obvious kneejerk Democratic partisans — are