Diversity Idiocy Is Rearing Its Head, Looking for Big Money Following Chauvin Verdict

Vicki McKenna is a heretic and radio
personality in Madison, Wisconsin.

Update: Madison West High School principal apologizes for email scheduling racially segregated meetings

Madison, Wisconsin — Diversity consultants look to ramp up their snake oil sales in the wake of important legal victories against racism, especially George Floyd.

Race consultants are making out like bandits sermonizing their fallacious drivel to corporations, police departments, universities, and all manner of education.

Here in Madison, Wisconsin local radio personality Vicki McKenna has had enough.

Vicki McKenna blew the whistle on the Madison Metropolitan School District's politically correct-identity politics tripe in the wake of the verdict against the killer cop Derek Chauvin.

The School District featured Zoom links for "white parents" and for "parents of color," in strict accordance to the ridiculous way liberal dogma describes race and racism.

This idiocy was too much. Writes McKenna:

Jim Crow 2.0, courtesy of the Madison School District. pic.twitter.com/qMKwHu4mMp

— Vicki McKenna (@VickiMcKenna) April 23, 2021

McKenna is right. Her tweet was picked up by Glenn Greenwald who added his own experience with the separate-by-color, identity politics practice.

For the last (and actually only) diversity session I attended before leaving The Intercept, the highly-paid outside consultant emailed everyone before saying employees would be divided by race into different rooms (white room & POC room) and it was shocking. Now it's standard: https://t.co/0c6YmFMCX0

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) April 23, 2021

Near the start of the session, before we were segregated by race, one employee of mixed race -- one white parent, the other parent Indian-American -- nervously and earnestly asked which room she should go into. This dividing people up this way is going to have long-term impact.

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) April 23, 2021

Most of us have had our own experience with diversity consultants.

At one well-meaning company, (though the diversity consultants were cynical), a week-long diversity training seminar feature consultants explaining that we all have biases, a comment on human nature that we are just empty vessels to be filled somehow with prejudices, with no mention how critical reasoning and independent thinking played into who we are.

On the last day, each of the seminar participants confessed to her bias. Some mentioned Italian people, some mentioned black people, and so on.

When it my turn, I announced I had no biases and I was disappointed that everyone had jettisoned rational thinking to adopt bigotries. It's idiocy.

A friend at the company asked how the seminar went and I told her. She said, her admission of people against whom she had a bias was, 'Germans of a certain age."

Diversity consultants are good for a laugh, but this swindle is taking our country by storm.

Matt Taibbi too had a good laugh, but these corporate-consultant hucksters rake in a lot of money from credulous liberals.

Writes Taibbi in his scathing review of Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility last year:

A core principle of the academic movement that shot through elite schools in America since the early nineties was the view that individual rights, humanism, and the democratic process are all just stalking-horses for white supremacy. The concept, as articulated in books like former corporate consultant Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility (Amazon’s #1 seller!) reduces everything, even the smallest and most innocent human interactions, to racial power contests. ...

DiAngelo isn’t the first person to make a buck pushing tricked-up pseudo-intellectual horseshit as corporate wisdom, but she might be the first to do it selling Hitlerian race theory. White Fragility has a simple message: there is no such thing as a universal human experience, and we are defined not by our individual personalities or moral choices, but only by our racial category.

If your category is “white,” bad news: you have no identity apart from your participation in white supremacy ('Anti-blackness is foundational to our very identities… Whiteness has always been predicated on blackness'), which naturally means 'a positive white identity is an impossible goal.'

DiAngelo instructs us there is nothing to be done here, except 'strive to be less white.' To deny this theory, or to have the effrontery to sneak away from the tedium of DiAngelo’s lecturing – what she describes as 'leaving the stress-inducing situation' – is to affirm her conception of white supremacy. This intellectual equivalent of the 'ordeal by water' (if you float, you’re a witch) is orthodoxy across much of academia.

Greenwald too has been bashing this hokum for years:

The diversity and inclusion consultancy industry is creepy, authoritarian, cultish and toxic, with a painfully cramped and stilted understanding of how people interact with each other and the rules they must obey. There's a reason - several reasons - the corporate world loves it.

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) June 29, 2020

Radical, independent thinkers lead the most recent movement against American racism. 

Let's foster young intellectuals, and not suppress their minds with dogma.

George Floyd Murder Shows: Police Lie, Cheat, Defame, Kill and Man, They Hate Black People

Madison, Wisconsin — Just before 3:00 p.m., April 20 Central time, I checked Twitter and read human rights attorney Laura Nirider writing that a verdict had been reached in State vs. Derek Chauvin.

The little prick is guilty on all counts, I said. 

It seemed improbable to me the jury would deliberate only some 8 hours and bring back a not guilty verdict, so I was optimistic the human garbage Chauvin would face decades behind bars. 

I took pleasure in musing Chauvin would face violence most of his life for what the bastard did to George Floyd. 

No love in my heart for police anymore.

The Minneapolis Police of course tried to lie their way of out this murder, as police do, reporting the day after the May 25, 2020 murder that a "medical incident during police interaction," had resulted in a fatal, (Business Insider).

The Boston Review's Lydia Pelot-Hobbs concludes the hostile police force with its gangsters' us-v-them psychology needs to abolished.

Pelot-Hobbs is not alone.

Most who encounter routine violent incursions, constant menacing, malice, and pathological dehumanization conclude in part that abolition needs to be at least a part of the discussion.

From Georgia to Wisconsin to Minnesota, the way police dehumanize, humiliate and debase people at traffic stops is repulsive enough, nevermind the murders for the moment.

It gives me license and registration, it doesn't move, it turns off the phone, or else it get tazed.

What the fuck is wrong with you, buddy?

Police take up massive chunks of municipal budgets, so a cop spends 20-30 years living off the people he fucks over, retires and then lives off his pension. Gangsters.

For a how-to get rid of police, see Boston Review's Power over Policing.

I Can Breathe Now

From the Minnesota Coalition homepage: A mural at Cup Foods, the death scene, is hollowed ground to George Floyd.

Tales of Wisconsin Police Chiefs

Madison, Wisconsin — The future of policing in America seems as bleak and hopeless as the Vietnam War in 1969.

That's because police presented as reformers still abstain from recognizing and publicly characterizing the most vicious acts perpetrated upon the citizenry, and thus our republic.

Madison, Milwaukee and Minneapolis instruct.

The Madison Police and Fire Commission decided to reject the advice of human rights groups, and instead selected a new police chief in open defiance of community concerns of racism, and perceived adversarial posture of cops and police unions (The Capital Times, Community Response Team, Madison Wisconsin (Facebook)).

In Milwaukee, a corrupt judge, Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Christopher Foley, reversed the Milwaukee Police and Fire Commission's decision to demote an authoritarian Police Chief, Alfonso Morales. 

Morales is threatening federal litigation to get as much money out of Milwaukee tax-payers as possible, a pursuit joined by police political forces bleeding the beleaguered city best known for segregation and criminal police (Racine Journal-Times).

In Minneapolis, the new police chief, Medaria Arradondo, says he want to build trust between cops and the very community that cops have abused, but says nothing about making the department worthy of that trust (Minneapolis Star-Tribune).

Arradondo calls the George Floyd suffocation murder at the hands of racist cops, "tragic," writing "in the wake of the tragic death of George Floyd ... ." 

This passive-voice noting of a police killing reads as though George Floyd died at the hands of benign, third-party circumstances, and not the murderous organization Arradondo has led since 2017.

Arradondo does not take responsibility for what these cops did or acknowledge his own role in cultivating the human garbage in blue.

Meanwhile, in Madison retired Madison Police Chief Noble Wray has been picked by the Democrat Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul to determine if the racist Kenosha cop Rusten Sheskey's shooting Jacob S. Blake seven times in the back merits criminal charges, after reviewing the Dept of Justice investigation by cops, for cops, (Wisconsin DoJ).

Not one of these administrative cops have any moral authority. Not one has accurately described what police have become in American society: Murder clubs, and right-wing political machines feasting on the community with violence.

The time for reforming police is over. 

One step away from the unacceptable status quo is a new policy mandating that cops will not administer cops locally, and will not investigate cops for the simple reasons that cops cannot be trusted, should not be trusted.

Only civilians with records of human rights and civil liberties work are capable of stopping this brutal and violent force that tries to emulate a military organizational force and views citizens as objects.

Democrat Pols Work to Block George Floyd Trial from Public View, Want No TV Broadcast

A Dead Black Man

Madison, Wisconsin — The George Floyd murder video gives the world a look at the Minneapolis Police Dept — vicious, racist, a black man suffocated to death by the sadistic Derek Chauvin, brandishing a smirk for onlookers pleading for Mr Floyd's life: Nothing can touch me.

Behind the scenes in May, Democrats worried.

Most larger cities are run by Democrat administrations, so how is it that militarized and openly racist municipal police feel free to perpetrate a slow-motion holocaust of black and brown people? Folks might be asking.

Black folks dying is the way it is and the way it should be, is the Democrat consensus. This is an outlook shared by Biden, Obama, from Kenosha, Wauwatosa, Milwaukee, Chicago, Madison and Minneapolis. That's just around here.

Look, Democrats don't like niggers any more than Republicans, that's the truth. You see their black hair, their dark skin — they get what they deserve. And Floyd, that boy sure talked a lot for someone who couldn't breathe, ha ha.

In my state, Wisconsin, we know how to handle Black Lives Matter and their friends who object to George Floyd and other folks getting murdered. 

Throw their black asses in prison, pass laws to protect statues, harass uppity black candidates and then pontificate how protesters need to learn about proper challenge to black people getting iced. 

For example, Wisconsin State Sen. Tim Carpenter (D-Milwuakee), ever more outlandish to Wisconsin Democrat Party silence, remains engaged in his crusade against two Black Lives Matter protestors, Kerida O’Reilly and Samantha Hamer, who are wrongfully accused of a violent felony by Carpenter for their work in solidarity with black folks at June protest. Carpenter knows they're wrongfully accused.

So, it comes as no surprise Democrat Minnesota State Attorney General Keith Ellison and Democrat  former acting U.S. Solicitor General Neal Katyal are calling for the criminal trials of Minneapolis police to be shielded from broadcast, blocked from public view.

This is because homicidal police are Democrat creations, and what is bad for police is bad for Democrats.

Hennepin County Judge Peter Cahill ordered the proceedings broadcast on video last month so the world can see and understand.

The Democrat Party since mid-November has been working feverishly to stop the 2021 trial broadcast, asking Cahill to reconsider.

Now, jurists are objecting to the ridiculous position of the Democrat Party censoring the trial of murderous human garbage.

Writes Elura Nanos in Law and Crime:

Whatever the limitations required by the Minnesota General Rules of Practice, Ellison and his team have gotten the issue all wrong. They should not only consent, but rather enthusiastically invite cameras into this courtroom. As prosecutors, their client is the public – and few cases demand public scrutiny and access more than this one does. ...

Without losing sight of the heartbreakingly needless loss of the man himself, the death of George Floyd has become about much more than Floyd the individual. The case sparked a national awakening, tipping public consciousness toward a new level of recognition of some unacceptable deficits woven into the fabric of our society. Sure, Black Lives Matter existed before Floyd’s death, but the BLM protests that ensued during the COVID-19 pandemic may have constituted the largest movement in U.S. history.

Not the time for more censorship, not the time to look away.

Police Are the Problem

Update: "On Sunday afternoon, a veto-proof majority of Minneapolis City Council members will announce their commitment to disbanding the city’s embattled police department, which has endured relentless criticism in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, on May 25." - The Appeal  


Madison, Wisconsin — "You can’t tell me when that man had his knee on my brother’s neck, taking his life away, with his hand in his pocket, that smirk on his face didn’t say, 'I’m protected,'" said Stephen Jackson, retired NBA player and friend of George Floyd, (Gay, Wall Street Journal).

The police entitlement on a personal level is the belief — internalized perhaps — that I have a right to kill you, to inflict harm, torture, assault, harass, defame and assassinate your character because I am the police, you are not. 

And, I don't like your black hair, your dark skin, or your politics; and if you're white, I still might not like you, and I am God.

This collective malignant narcissism thrives in police culture, and the community here, and of course not just here, knows it.

A city of Madison cop told me a couple of years back that there was a substantial rush of early retirements from non-killing cops who were fed-up with being becoming social outcasts, virtual untouchables in the community.

Police psychology has never been well-explained despite worthy effort in  social psychology during the 1950s-70s that tried to find out how NAZI Germany and other fascistic states could have happened, how people could have jettisoned their own sense of morality and followed the anti-human directives of sick institutions and states.

Police tend to be anti-intellectual, careerist, hostile and authoritarian in their psychology. And duplicitous and tribal. Assholes.

Below is video from this weekend in Minneapolis of police passing peaceful citizens and shooting pepper balls at the human beings. Assholes. How many police will object? How about sexually assaulting women in LA. Cops did it, it's funny, right?

MINNEAPOLIS: Several MPD police cruisers drive by peaceful demonstrators and pepper spray them from moving vehicles for no reason. #BLUEFALLpic.twitter.com/aQQMbyYD17

— Chad Loder (@chadloder) June 5, 2020

A few years back, we don't know exactly why Madison police saw it necessary to beat up, taze and punch out a young woman, [a "bitch" as termed by a cop] who had phoned police filing a complaint that her phone had been stolen. The then Madison chief of Police, Mike Koval, termed the assault a "transaction."

Koval, by the way, expressed astonishment in 2017 that condemning police at football game protests for brutalizing black people is "self-absorbed ... diatribe," (WISC-TV). One wonders if Koval understands now.

There were quite a few Koval-approved transactions around here in previous years.

In 2016, Koval, exemplifying police, faced widespread condemnation for verbally assaulting a black grandmother whose young grandson, Tony Robinson, was gunned down in cold blood by Madison Police killer cop, Matt Kenny.

For police, killing is a ritualistic act, always worthy of defense against protesters. Consider, as we work to join the the freedom fighters for George Floyd:

• Ashley DiPiazza, gunned down by Madison Police in 2014, resulting in a record $7 Million verdict against Madison. A new record, and still standing
• Tony Robinson, gunned down by Madison Police in 2015, resulting in a $3.5 Million settlement against Madison. A short-lived record
• Paul Heenan, gunned down by Madison Police in 2012, resulting in a $2.3 Million settlement against Madison. Another short-lived record
  

The city of Madison disputed and criticized every settlement.

For victims of killer cops, inflicted trauma is never healed. Not ever.

But cops like to fuck with people, and not just kill them. Ask any black or brown person, how he feels when he sees a cop in a car coming near him, or saddling in behind him.

Cops are out to fuck with you.

Consider the parable of DeForest, Wisconsin Police Chief Daniel Furseth.

Furseth was caught on video mocking in a pathetic, racist and skin-crawling hostile narrative a group of young black youths out for something to eat.

The racist Furseth on video was too much even for white Wisconsin.

But no worries.

Furseth was quickly hired by the town of Madison, not the City, in October 2018.

An official with the town of Madison police department, not the City, confirmed by phone with me on August 14, 2019 that Furseth is still employed with the Town police, locally notorious for racism, harassment, bogus citations and misconduct.

Furseth and cops feel entitled to terrorize and belittle what the rest of us recognize as human beings.

And Ferseth is the perfect cop because we are not people, and we do not matter, not to cops.

Joe Biden Says Ten to 15 Percent of Americans Are "Not Very Good People"

"Former Vice President Joe Biden told supporters during a virtual town hall on Thursday he estimated 10 to 15% of Americans were 'not very good people' but said the majority were 'decent' people whom the president should work towards uniting," reports Nicholas Wu in USA TODAY.

Biden has divined what percentage of the population is "not very good," to use the phrase of the cognitively challenged presumptive presidential nominee of the Democratic Party, who evidentially has not apprehended empirical science any more than he has police violence, (Bloomberg video).

Biden's remarks were made in an online event moderated by actor Don Cheadle, after being asked what he intended to do for black people if elected president, amid the police murder of George Floyd.

Biden's comments are intended to inform the challenge of mass incarceration and the menace of police, but offer nothing to address the cause of police violence. Police violence is not accident.

What municipal and state police inflict onto the population, especially black and brown, is not a consequence of the number of not very good people among the population.

Joe Biden still does not get it, and he never will.

His remarks are a mambo-jumbo of a confused mind — the perfect Democratic Party candidate for president.

This ought not surprise anyone as this is same politician who bragged about sending 100,000 cops to municipalities to fill jails and prisons.

Biden is the embodiment of the Democratic Party that avoids historical and institutional analyses of what police inflict onto black, brown, native Americans, human beings who may just be targets of opportunity, the labor movement, the civil rights and peace movements.

As Christopher D. Cook writes today in In These Times:

For black and brown people, racism-fueled policing has been here all along—'stamped from the beginning,' as author and scholar Ibram X. Kendi puts it in his bestselling book of that title. Now, many white Americans are getting an acrid taste of this toxic deadly force.

In a 2014 interview, renowned scholar Angela Davis noted, 'There is an unbroken line of police violence in the US that takes us all the way back to the days of slavery.'

Make it known: You do not have vote for Joe Biden.