Campus beat: UVA’s Huge DEI Spending
“The University of Virginia (UVA) has at least 235 employees under its ‘diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI)’ banner” for an estimated $20 million cost, thunders Adam Andrzejewski at OpenTheBooks.
The top such staffer takes home $587,340 including benefits; “for comparison, Glenn Youngkin, the governor of Virginia earned $175,000.”
“It takes tuition payments from nearly 1,000 undergraduates just to pay their base salaries.”
“UVA has a much deeper DEI infrastructure” than the recently axed public-university setups in Florida, which means “tens of millions of dollars in student tuition and taxpayer monies are flowing into promoting anti-American notions and radical philosophies.”
Witness one DEI staffer citing “the opioid epidemic in Appalachia as an example of ‘white toxicity.’” The only answer? “Reform or abolition.”
Elex watch: Sleepy Joe’s Policies Trigger Nightmares
“President Biden is in trouble,” declares Scott Walker at The Washington Times.
“Poll after poll” shows Donald Trump beating him “in every battleground state.” He’s losing blacks, Hispanics, even the young.
They’re “concerned about border security,” drug-trafficking, public safety. Biden rails like “an angry old man” and “tells us that Bidenomics is working — we’re just too stupid to know it.”
“Voters in my home state [Wisconsin] are tired of these failed policies.”
A typical family pays $900 more a month to afford the same things. In the larger cities, they see homelessness, drug abuse, crime.
On Saturday Night Live, “a skit called the president ‘Sleepy Joe.’ That suggests an image problem. But it’s his policies that are causing most Americans nightmares.”
From the left: The US Goes Samizdat
“I’m honored to be chosen for the Samizdat prize, but also a little horrified that such an award is now necessary,” muses RacketNews’ Matt Taibbi.
Samizdat, meaning “self-publish,” refers to “the advanced system of alternative media that ultimately broke” the Soviet state.
Before “the Internet gave ordinary people access to information in ways that before had never been allowed,” US “politicians needed the mainstream press to reach high office,” a system Donald Trump “destroyed.”
In response, governments turned “the anarchic potential of the Internet” — “something like the ‘Self-publish’ culture of the Soviet Union” — into “an instrument of surveillance and social control.”
We need “new ways of getting the truth to each other.” “The good news? As the Soviets proved, lies don’t have staying power.”
Conservative: Behind Presidential Unpopularity
National Review’s Jim Geraghty challenges the claim that US presidents, and Western leaders generally, are stuck being unpopular because we’re simply “in an era of such widespread voter discontent.”
If so, “why is Vermont governor Phil Scott able to earn an 84 percent job approval rating from his constituents? How did Republican Wyoming governor Mark Gordon get himself a job approval rating of 74 percent?”
State leaders in Hawaii, Alabama and New Hampshire are also polling strongly.
Comparing presidents to governors” may be “apples-to-oranges,” but “am I crazy for thinking that a whole bunch of governors have broader appeal because they’re not running around,” like Biden and Trump, “declaring that they’re ‘battling for the soul of the nation’ or pledging, ‘I am your retribution?’”
Maybe “voters just want to see people running their governments efficiently and wisely.”
Foreign desk: Hold South Africa’s Leaders Accountable
“It’s time for Congress and the Biden administration to start helping South Africa’s people hold their current President, Cyril Ramaphosa, accountable,” argues Orde F. Kittrie at The Hill.
“The ANC is longer the moral beacon it was under Mandela” as a “2022 report into corruption during the presidency of Jacob Zuma, Ramaphosa’s predecessor, revealed ‘the looting of billions of dollars from South Africa’s state coffers’ and ‘how almost every arm of the state was suffocated and left bankrupt by leaders’ of the ANC.”
Yet the Biden “administration has not imposed corruption sanctions against any South African official.”
It’s time to face “Ramaphosa’s corruption challenges and terrorism ties” and “end impunity for corrupt South African officials.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board