Welcome to the Nonprofits, the weekly show that addresses current events and news items from an atheist and secular humanist perspective. In our first segment this week, the current regime is continuing its war on dei eli slack. What kind of trouble are they causing now?
Well? In February of this year, the Department of Education rescinded to grants that would have helped fund universities and nonprofits.
Across the country.
Specifically, they recentded them specifically because these grants would fund programs dedicated to diversity, equity, and inclusion. So eight of the affected states filed a lawsuit, leading to a federal district court to order the Department of Education to reinstate the grants. So then, following that, the Justice Department, presumably at the behest of the Department of Education, filed the request to the Supreme Court to pause the federal district
Court's order, which the Supreme Court has granted. What that means is that those grants and those funds will remain unavailable and a better society will remain tragically out of reach. The story is from CBS News by Melissa Quinn, published on April fourth, twenty twenty five.
All right, Eli, Well, I mean the current regime obviously has declared war against DEI initiatives here, so how does this particular battle fit into that larger picture of that war.
It's I mean, so the idea here, I think we're probably all on the same page about this is that like making sure that public universities are not like diverse, equitable and inclusive is more important than making sure that they are.
We can't have that.
We can't have that.
So that's sort of I think the message at this sense.
And I think there's a common I mean, it's pretty clear there's a common misconception that a lot of white men have the complaint about DEI initiatives that you know, they don't help white men, And I think that that actually it's not the case that they can't help white men. It's just that it's not designed to help you just by virtue of being a white man. Okay, you know, they can help Christian, you know, religious people like Christian, Jewish and Muslim and Hindu people, as well as atheists.
They can benefit neurodiverse individuals such as those with like ADHD and autism. Ben if it's single working parents veterans, Like I'm trying to say, there's no like straight white male veterans. So I it's it's not an attack on anyone. It's just it's just forcing, you know, to share the stage.
Like just because you're a.
White like you, you weren't born there's nothing about the way you were born that makes you deserve anything any more than anybody else.
Right, right, Well, I suppose when you know, when you have privilege your whole life, then when that privilege is taken, then it seems like persecution. It seems like, you know, you lost your crutch and so now you know you have to walk on your own and that's that's it.
Apparently that's a big a drawback or something. Jonathan. Let's jump over to you here in the article they said quote Attorney General Pam Bondi said that the ruling quote vindicates what the Department of Justice has been arguing for months. Local district judges do not have the jurisdiction to seize control of taxpayer dollars, force the government to pay out billions, or unilaterally halt the president's policy agenda. Do you think Bondi's claim that the courts are overstepping holds water.
Not at all. She obviously doesn't know her job very well. That doesn't surprise me. She was also ag in Florida before she got this job, all right, so she's she's notorious. But you know, the thing that bothers me the most is that her assumption that the courts don't mean anything to the presidency or the administration. That is absolutely false. Any can stop an action of the administration if that administration is breaking federal law, and with the current administration
that's not an unusual occurrence apparently. But yeah, if the lower court, district court says, Okay, you can't do this because it's unconstitutional, they have the option of what they did here, bring it up to the Supreme Court. And if they do, the Supreme Court has the option of saying, no,
we're not going to look at this. You know, it depends on how busy they are, a bunch of other stuff, what the merits of the case are, what the findings of facts, where there's a whole bunch of stuff that goes into this is very complex, But they definitely have the right to tell the administration to stop. Otherwise our government is broken, and that I think is the baseline thing they want to do here. They want to make sure that even the courts can't stop what they're trying
to do for an authoritarian government. And that to me is criminal in itself, Unamerican in itself, it's absolutely Unamerican. And Pam Bondi knows better than this. You know, she does have a law degree. You think she would have at least taken one course in the Constitution, you know, being the highest law the land. People, you can't just willy nilly decide that it doesn't.
Apply to your right.
The courts decide that, and the Supreme Court is the supreme arbiter of the courts. So if it goes to them and they say, okay, the lower court probably didn't need to do this, or I don't think it's the same thing, or they have another argument, than fine, they are They tend the Supreme Court tends to take cases that involve a possible constitutional crisis, which is courts tell them to do something and they don't do it as a constitutional crisis, and there's no there's no checks and
balances anymore. At that point. There's no way that if you are unjustly treated by your government that you can raise that up to the government and the justice system and get justice for an illegal or unjust act. So that's my opinion on that that quote is just totally off the wall.
Yeah, and I think what's ironic about it too, is that what she's saying is that how dare you, Colurts. You know, you're one branch of the government. You can't unilaterally stop this other branch of the government from unilaterally deciding what money goes where.
You know, how dare you?
It's their job, that's what they do.
Yeah, exactly right.
I mean, that's literally why we have the multiple branches of the government is for those checks and balances, and so trying to say that, you know, employing those checks and balance is is somehow unilaterally designating billions of dollars. No,
this is money that Congress already vote. You know, they've already designated for this kind of thing, and you know that's really that's really their job, right, that's you know, Congress is the one who controls the purse strings, and so, you know, it's really really off the mark, and it's it's very frustrating to hear this kind of thing over and over and over again, and it's just it's just enough to drive a person crazy. Uh So, having said that, let's jump back to Eli here and just real.
Quick because I got a question from it.
But before I bet she probably did take exactly one constitution of course, and it was probably something like a biblical interpretation of the constitution.
You know, that could be that could be.
So well, Eli, you you were as we were just talking about we we we see that de I is really being mischaracterized here and and that's merely to uh, you know, what DEI does is it's intended to level the playing field for groups that are starting out at a disadvantage. It's not the prob you know, the the the theory behind this philosophy is not to raise one group up above any other group. It's to balance that
playing field. It's to give them, it's to give them a leg up, but it's to give them a leg up from the hole that they're in, not to you know, to get a leg up over any other group. So why would why would this current regime be against any of against that kind of thing.
Because and you kind of touched on it earlier.
Not only is it it doesn't feel to the people that have the leg up already. When you give everyone else the same leg up, it doesn't feel like everyone else is getting a leg up. It feels like you're getting dragged down. They feel like they're like they feel like when you're used to winning at the expense of everyone else, and then they that stops happening. Now you're not winning as much because we're taking care not to make sure that your success is not at the expense
of others. And so when that success starts to decline or change or whatever it may be, you start to feel like you're at a disadvantage, and that disadvantage is being manufactured by this thing that is giving other people the same, you know, not the same advantages you have, but just leveling the playing field so that your advantages
don't really come into play unfairly when they shouldn't. So it's this idea that it's it's it's the idea of taking the least persecuted group and you know, convincing them that they're being persecuted. We see that in like a couple of different contexts that we talked about a lot,
but that's what's happening here. It's the idea that DEI is persecuting white men because like, oh, I lost my job you know because of the I Well, that means that you only had your job because you were a white man, So right, right, like shut shut up and let somebody qualified you know your position, right.
We shine light on the problem. Is that you know that's uh, that shouldn't be an issue.
Right, Yeah, that means it work.
So so are you saying then that opposition to the to these policies is to protect a privilege or is it to specifically to put down these other groups? I mean, is it is it positive discrimination for uh, for oneself?
Basically?
I mean, the the people that are pushing these kind of things through are you know, largely white male Americans, And you know, is it is it just to push up that group or is it to push down the other group? Or is it just a lucky happenstance that they get to do both at once.
I think probably, if I'm being charitable, it's more likely that more human behavior, more human behavior, is motivated by selfishness than by malice.
Right, So I think if.
I'm being charitable, I could probably be convinced with little effort that it's it's just for the purpose of maintaining the advantage, because like when you're when you're succeeding, you don't want anything to you know, affect that or like get in the way of that.
So I can I can empathize with that.
Instinct, but it's it's not conducive to like a society, I guess.
So, so you're saying it's more just a the Uh, these marginalized groups are really just collateral damage, and you know it's just a we're sorry. You know, we didn't want to, but we had to to to to maintain the status quo. And it's just kind of the price of participation.
In this in this game, right, Like it's like it's like you or me, And if I can silence you, I don't have to think about the fact I don't have to think about you, and so then it's.
Just made I don't have Yeah, Jonathan, what are your thoughts on that? Do you think that this is a discriminatory process or or or is that just is that a feature or a bug?
It's a feature? This is actually uh they have they're racists. Let's face it, they're racists. These people they're they're attacking are not of their tribe and they just feel like the American UH, America should be for white cis male, heteronormative people, and everybody else should just be servants, you know. That's it. That's women included. Are are not part of this. It's male. And since the men have been losing their competitive edge because they no longer have the system working
to give them a competitive edge. Once that's gone, they have to be like everybody else and they can no longer claim to be better than people just by existing. And that is it. And the administration is twisting doing a backwards somersault to a catch twenty two landing, you know. So that's how they're trying to manipulate the narrative of it, not what's actually happening, but the narrative that they want everybody to believe is happening. And that's what they've been
doing for a lot of things. The first thing that I think of when I think of these sorts of activities is that they're attacking what is preventing them from doing what they want. So if you're attacking DEI, you don't want equality, right, you don't want diversity right, right, you don't want any of that. That's you don't want any of that quote unquote wokeouness. You don't want people to be taking into account that some people in certain
societal groups are not allowed to do certain things. They say, well, they're they're this, or they're that, they're lazy, they're this or that, and you know, or they're you know, they're you know, some other derogatory term. And the thing is that that's not the case at all. What it is is they want to make it look like their oppression of a group is actually a good thing.
Right, right, re establishing fairness and that kind of thing, quote unquote meritocracy.
Well, if it's meritocracy, there's nothing to change.
Right, Yeah, exactly, exactly.
That's right.
I mean a twisting backwards somersault to rationalize that. So there's a catch twenty two. You can't do it either way and still right right.
Yeah.
Well, we haven't really talked about the specific specifics of these grants that are being canceled in two of them. Two of the targeted grants are funding for a program called the Teacher Quality Partnership Program, and also the other one was the Supporting Effective Educator Development Program, both of which are intended to give new teachers the support and development opportunities they need to become the high quality educators
that we need. You know, we need to have good teachers in this country, and you know, the way to do that is to work from the ground up. We need to attract qualified teachers, attract talented teachers, but then we also need to support them and to nurture them. You know, teaching is a difficult profession. You know, I've been a teacher myself for over twenty five years, and we know that nearly half of all new teachers leave the profession within their first five years. And that that
to me, that's an amazing uh statistic there. And you know you don't see that very often, that that high level of attrition at such an early early moment, and so so it makes all these support programs all that more, uh, all that more important. So how it boggles my mind to even have to ask this question. We'll go to Eli with it first. How could undermining education be seen as a good thing?
Well, I mean you have to take on a perspective that is antithetical to to humanism.
I think.
I think it is in the best interest of the ruling class that those without it, or those outside of it are uneducated or ignorant and can't think about or comment on, or speak intelligently or engage critically about the
goings on of the world. And if that's the case, then they're just kind of forced to listen to what, you know, they're being told, and you know, there's not really like when you don't really have a good method for determining who's telling the truth or not and the answer is that nobody is, then you can get away with with, you know, whatever you want. Like we were saying earlier that you know, the day, you know, the day Internet gets cut off, as you said, there is
the day you know something major just happened. Right, So, yeah, if they can keep people ignorant, if you can undermine education, you can keep your population ignorant. And you can control an ignorant population.
So are you saying that that there's an aspect of like risk management here, right? I mean, just remove possible future threats. I mean is that kind of the deal or is it or is it merely just you know, almost an opiate of the masses kind of thing. Just keep the masses dumb and obedient and and and you know, keep the keep the dollars flowing in.
I guess, yeah, little column a little column B right, right, it's I think go ahead, John.
I was just gonna say that, Yeah, it's if you haven't the only way you have a democracy or republic is with an educated populist. Thomas Jefferson pointed that out. So now if you if you don't have, if you dumb down the population, then you control the absolute narrative. You know, Uh, we're doing the right thing. The economy is going fine. You know, it was the last guy who had the greatest economy, economy and greatest recovery we
ever had, who who messed it up for you? You know, and then you know things that are not in control of the government. Economy is not completely in the control of the government. It's more in the control of the boardrooms across you know, across the world. So you know, it's like there's very little the government can do when there's like inflation and things like that. There's a lot that can do by you know, regulation and things like that. And the Federal Reserve has more power than any other
branch of the government. So but the people who take credit are the people who were elected, even though they probably did very little that actually had an effect. So you know, it's like the whole thing is the same thing. Keep your people to where they don't understand what's going on. You can make everything black or white to them, there's no nuance, so they can just do what you tell them is white, and everything that's black is everything that
everybody else wants, you know. So that's the propaganda point is control the narrative. And to do that, you can't have people who think for themselves or have independent sources of information.
So, Jonathan, I think we got time for one more quick question, and I want that I want to direct this one you and I'll apologize in advance. I want to ask you to take the position of the other perspective on this problem. Here. So, the current occupant of the White House was elected by the American people to take specifically to take the helm and steer the ship, as it were. Isn't this type of action just another way for a leader to provide guidance for the nation they've been entrusted with.
Allegedly elected Anyway, the whole idea is that, yes, the mandate is not a full mandate because he didn't win one hundred percent there are still constituencies that he has to represent, and by deliberately targeting those constituencies, he is not anybody. You know. The current administration is doing things that are pretty much beyond the pale, most of them.
Most of this DEI canceling stuff is illegal. Congress passed these grants, pass this money for that to find how they were supposed to be spent and develop the rules for it. So Congress makes the laws. The administration does not.
Right.
Right, The administration is there to implement the laws as described by Congress. Right, So this is another constitutional crisis going on. If you decide to take the legislative branch into your own hands, what's that say? You know, so that's the question.
Good question, Yeah, And I think that's a good place for us to close out our discussion here