Good on the Ohio Senate: Getting DEI out of colleges

Good on Jerry Cirino in the Ohio Senate for introducing the SB1 Bill, which Governor DeWine just signed into law.  And good work to the GOP in both Houses at the Ohio Statehouse.  SB1 is the Enact Advanced Higher Education Act, which targets reform of higher education by banning diversity, equity, and inclusion programs (DEI), prohibiting faculty strikes, and implementing various other reforms at public colleges and universities.  DEI programs have been a disaster for our culture because they do not inspire greatness, but conformity to a standard that does not produce success in society.  This Bill is the first of many to come, which is necessary in public education in general because it has become so severe and out of control that there is no way to work with it any longer.  Equity and inclusion are not communist strategies, as clearly outlined in Marx’s written works, and do not inspire greatness in society.  It is a communist value system that does not belong in a competitive, capitalist culture.  What is disguised as fairness is a radical left-wing weapon designed to undermine our society from the inside out, and rot the minds of our children before they are ever able to fend for themselves as adults.  When this bill was first introduced, it naturally caused a lot of comment and protest. Therefore, it was good that the Senate stuck together and rallied behind Jerry Cirinio.  We need a lot more of these kind of bold bills in the Ohio Statehouse from both sides.  For too long, we let a small minority of communist oriented voices speak and cry for things because they were the only ones who showed up to the hearings, and politicians assumed that meant that they were in the majority.  And that the media would take up the cause and carry communist ideas that they would support by default.  But not this time.

To achieve the kind of competition that Vivek Ramaswamy aims to bring to Ohio through a merit-based pay system, we need significantly more of the 2025 version of SB1.  Most teachers, when you talk to them one on one, without the politics of a teacher’s union lingering in the background, agree with merit-based, competitive pay models.  They probably even vote for Republicans.  And increasingly they support Trump in the White House even if they don’t admit to it in public.  DEI programs have been horrible in the private sector, and they have slowed down the world horribly.  Everywhere we go these days, from drive-thru windows at McDonald’s to advanced manufacturing companies, we have a massive global society that can’t do much of anything right, especially hit a production target.  The quality of products in every industrial sector is declining, mainly because almost every HR department in the country has made DEI a priority, where compassion has become the standard, rather than practicality.  You can feel sorry for someone coming from a rough background, but do you want them making your hamburger at a drive-thru?  A society of broken people has given us production standards not focused on doing a good job, but on hiring people because of their skin color, sexual orientation, and even age status, rather than pushing employees to improve so they can compete for the best job and inspire great production.  Hard work has gone out of fashion mainly because DEI programs disguised as fairness have killed it, and Karl Marx is laughing in his grave at the poison he infected the world with, and many terrible people made into policy because they wanted to rule the means of production from behind a veil of control and influence.  DEI programs have been taught in schools for decades, and they have been horrible for the subsequent generations trying to make it in the adult world, and that compliance standard has been way off the mark. 

At a Lakota School Board meeting recently where they were complaining about just 9 million dollars in lost revenue due to charter schools providing options for kids to attend and to take their money with them, one of the new guys, Doug Horton said to the members of the meeting that he supports Ed Choice programs, but that he essentially didn’t, talking out of both sides of his mouth, because he didn’t think people were leaving the school due to a political exodus.  Parents concerned about Lakota’s support of DEI programs and Critical Race Theory did not believe these factors were the reason students were being pulled from the school to attend other educational options.  And as he said it, he said it with a straight face as if everyone was supposed to believe it.  That is precisely the kind of person that DEI has produced in the world, and why parents are growing increasingly dissatisfied with the public education environment.  I have heard for a long time at Lakota that school board members would deny that Critical Race Theory, which is a spawn of DEI programs, was even happening.  They would tell complaining parents that there was no evidence of Critical Race Theory.  You know why they said that?  Because they refused to look at it, and their public policy, established by many thousands of lawyers across the nation, has a standard policy when it comes to all DEI programs, which is to deny, deny, and deny, until you die.  And even then, continue the practice.  Lie to the parents.  Lie to the people who pay the tuition at these now worthless colleges, and make suckers out of them in public.  And when they talk about these things in public testimony, turn off their mic so there is no record of the exchange. 

School board people like Horton at Lakota know why parents are leaving the district, but what they say in public indicates an intent to mislead.  Just as they say that their purpose is to implement political DEI projects into the schools no matter what parents think about it, because that is their key to federal money, to build a management structure of DEI programs no matter what people really want, because as education institutions, they are all about money.  They don’t try to gain independence from federal mandates and state laws that are attached to funding because their teacher unions are primarily concerned with maintaining the lowest standard they can get away with to maximize their financial gain.  And DEI for them has been a massive cover story of corruption and deceit disguised as helpful fairness. It has been everything but fair, and it has made our students and our productive society much worse by bringing to our competitive workplaces communist ideas that have worked nowhere in the world, in any place.  They don’t work in China either, by the way.  The people there have a strong work ethic due to their culture, and they can afford to throw bodies at problems.  But communism as a DEI model doesn’t work anywhere, and any exchange program that partners with China should have never occurred in an education program.  China is a communist country, and there is nothing we need to learn from them.  The members of the Ohio Senate were wise not to take the bait and learn a valuable lesson from the Trump administration.  Stop listening to these communist fools, such as the dead weight protesting the signing of SBI in Ohio.  We don’t want losers like that setting the standards in Ohio, or anywhere.  Listening to them, as we have in the past, has not improved our world. Instead, they made it all, much, much, worse.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Why DEI Was Always a Dumb Idea: What we learned from the Swordsman Scene in ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’

I really loved the book about Howard Kazanjian called A Producer’s Life.  I’ve referenced it many times over the last several weeks because it was an enjoyable book.  It’s the most fun I’ve had reading a book in a while, and it is one that I promised myself I’d read if Trump was re-elected into the White House.  I wouldn’t let myself think about these kinds of things as what is in Howard’s book prior, even if I do love the topic.  For a large part of my life, I wanted to be a filmmaker, and Hollywood producers like Howard Kazanjian were the kind of people who inspired me.  He produced most of my favorite movies from a key period, when he was on top of the Hollywood pile with Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and many others, with films from 1975 until 1982.   Howard was always good, but if you are trending good movies and who made them over the entire history of Hollywood, this specific period set the stage for what the industry would become, and mean to the world as a whole regarding entertainment.  So, I find it very interesting to study what went right and wrong during this period.  Ironically, learning these things is precisely why understanding DEI policies and why they failed is important.  Because currently, after the Trump election and his spectacular victory, the world is giving up on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs, and rightfully so.  We’re not talking about a Republican versus Democrat position here; Howard Kazanjian, I would say, probably leans toward Hollywood liberalism and likely wanted Kamala Harris to win the election.  But with Trump back in office, the world is a lot better, and I have more tolerance for people who are not so bright on political matters.  Which is why I couldn’t let myself read a book like this before the election. 

In that book, I read a good illustrative example of why DEI failed and why companies needed to get rid of it for the sake of everyone.  Picking employees based on their skin color or assuming they are equal to other people and that they should be included in something just because they exist was always ridiculous.  Some people are better than others, and if you want something to be good, you have to find the best people and put them in place; that’s good management.  And in the movie business, good people are few and far between.  But Howard Kazanjian, during that period I mentioned, found a way to be around the best people in the business, and specifically, a conversation I had never heard about regarding the famous swordsman scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark, being filmed in 1980 for a 1981 release.  Everyone, no matter who they are, knows the scene.  Indiana Jones is looking for his lost girlfriend, Marian, who the Nazis have captured on the streets of Cairo.  And he has to stop them with a glorious shootout with lots of explosions and good stuff.  Along the way, Indiana Jones is stopped by an Arab swordsman who wants to fight.  But the hero doesn’t have time for it.  What does he do?   People remember with great recollection that Indy pulls out his gun, shoots the villain on the spot with no fanfare, and gets back to looking for his girlfriend.  In all the documentaries of how that movie was made, we learned that Harrison Ford was sick that day and just did the scene as a joke because there was supposed to be a fight with bullwhips that was very elaborate, and the whole crew was sick of filming take after take.  When Spielberg saw what Harrison Ford did, he wanted to keep it as a new version and print it for the film.  But there was more to the story I heard in this book on Howard Kazanjian for the first time.

George Lucas still wanted his bullwhip fight scene.  One of the reasons he was making Raiders of the Lost Ark as the executive producer was to create a modern version of the kind of movies he liked as a kid, and he wanted a classic bullwhip fight like might have been in Don Q Son of Zorro, or Zorro’s Fighting Legion.  And he wasn’t convinced that just having Indiana Jones shoot the bad guy and get on with his business was the right thing to do.  So, here were the most talented filmmakers in movie-making history who disagreed with this famous scene.  So what were they going to do?  George Lucas decided to run two film versions by a test audience, one Spielberg’s way, the other with the bullwhip fight.  They were going to let market desire determine the film’s final version.  So they played George’s version first to a test audience.  People came out of the movie liking it, and Paramount Pictures felt they had a hit.  It was a good movie.  But when Spielberg’s version was seen, people applauded when Indiana Jones shot the swordsman.  And it became everyone’s favorite moment in the movie, even after all these years.  They made 5 Indiana Jones films over the next 40 years, but none would ever have a better moment than that one to mass audiences. 

Ultimately, even with all the talent of all these people involved, it was the marketplace that picked the scene. The filmmakers came up with ideas, but to determine the success of the enterprise, they tested the waters with market analysis. The audience clearly picked one version over the other, and the rest is filmmaking history.  Presently, they are test-screening the new Captain America movie for Disney, and it is going through all kinds of trouble because nothing is working.  The film is filled with a bunch of woke politics, and people don’t like it.  It’s going to bomb when it hits theaters in February.  Ultimately, that is why DEI programs destroyed market share and value for all companies, from cookie makers to high-tech offerings.  DEI was an imposed value put on the marketplace that would have been similar to George Lucas keeping his whip fight in the movie because he wanted it, to force the audience to like it because he did.  Instead of listening to them, which is what happened.  When companies try to impose themselves on the public and force values on them that they don’t have, failure is almost assured.  However, when products appeal to the audience’s sentiment, great success is possible.  It is rare because good ideas are complex, and companies often hang on to them even if the market pressure rejects them.  Only to plot an enterprise to its doom.  But when we say that getting rid of DEI suits all businesses everywhere, this is what we mean and why.  In capitalism, value serves the marketplace.  In authoritarian governments, values are imposed, and a monopoly status is sought that limits the viability of options.  And the world is far worse off because of it.  The best example of why some ideas work over other ideas can sometimes come from interesting places, which is undoubtedly the case with a movie most people agree has some value to them over time, and that is how Indiana Jones was created in that old classic movie, Raiders of the Lost Ark

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707