Today I saw an announcement from the Python Software Foundation that they were withdrawing from a National Science Fund grant because the bigotry in the White House included language like this in the grant contract:
“…do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws.”
Apparently there are further threats of clawing back money it feels was spent on DEI. It’s not just the money from the grant, but ALL funding in any organization that gets a grant is affected by these contracts, and presumably something the government feels they are entitled to.
It always hits hard when I see such brazen examples of Newspeak. This passage is trying to do a couple of things that are downright shady. First, the basic claim that Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is racist towards white people, but then to try to redefine the acronym. This is the sort of thing the fascists do. Orwell made it pretty clear that they shape language to have no permanent meaning. Doug Muder wrote about this in 2021.
This sentence cannot make any sense within itself. You must not follow an ideology while adhering to an ideology. They try to escape this by claiming their ideology isn’t an ideology but “the way things are” and only ideologies deviate from the norm, but they are lying to themselves and everyone else. They can’t stick to a definition of anything, which makes any discussion with them difficult.
We need to call it out for what it is: fascist bullshit.