The Patriot Post® · Cashing in on the Diversity Racket

With apologies to female Patriots everywhere, there’s a hilarious scene in the movie “As Good as It Gets” in which Jack Nicholson, who plays a well-known novelist, is approached by a star-struck young female reader. “How do you write women so well?” she gushingly asks.

Distracted, impatient, and in no mood for banter, Nicholson replies, “I think of a man, and I take away reason and accountability.” Then he gets on the elevator and off he goes.

Why do we share this sexist clip? Because it perfectly captures our thoughts on the “diversity consulting” industry. There’s no reason to it, nor any accountability. And yet it’s thriving, raking in millions of our hard-earned taxpayer dollars, thanks to the Diversicrats and their outsized influence in all levels of government.

Take the Mid-Atlantic Equity Consortium, for example. It’s a social justice nonprofit — or an “equity consulting firm” for those who’d rather call a guy who pumps gas a “petroleum transfer technician” — that’s funded entirely by our taxpayer dollars. As The Washington Free Beacon’s Chrissy Clark and Joe Schoffstall report, the consortium “conducts ‘anti-racist audits’ for corporations and schools, often in partnership with far-left groups such as the Southern Poverty Law Center. The consortium was recently awarded a lucrative contract by Maryland’s largest school district and works with educators across 15 states.”

P.T. Barnum might never have said “There’s a sucker born every minute,” but if he did, he was no doubt thinking about the sort of chump who’d pay good money to be told he’s a racist. Thank you, sir. May I have another?

Would that these racial-grievance grifters were limited to bilking the government. At least then we’d know where our tax dollars were being wasted. But, as Clark and Schoffstall write, “Equity firms have profited greatly from the burgeoning anti-racist movement in academia. The MAEC was awarded a $454,680 contract with the Montgomery County Public School district to conduct an ‘anti-racist audit’ of the school’s policies; in nearby Loudoun County, a similar consulting firm raked in $422,500 in two years. Prominent diversity consultants, such as White Fragility author Robin DiAngelo, make nearly $13,000 for a speaking gig on college campuses.”

It pains us to say it, but regular readers of The Patriot Post know all about Racist Robin, a white woman who’s somehow overcome her pallor to become one of the nation’s most successful race hustlers. Our Thomas Gallatin covered her lucrative two-hour shakedown of the University of Kentucky back in July, writing, “DiAngelo promoted her latest ‘woke’ work, the obtusely titled White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism.” As Gallatin dryly noted, “No one ever told DiAngelo that racism has been one of the most widely and repeatedly discussed issues in this nation since the civil-rights era of the 1960s.”

All isn’t lost, however. City Journal’s Christopher Rufo, for one, doesn’t believe that taxpayers should be funding the indoctrination of government employees via “divisive pseudosciences” such as critical race theory, and President Donald Trump seems to agree.

In September, the president issued a lengthy and detailed executive order banning federal contractors from teaching “this malign ideology [that] is now migrating from the fringes of American society and threatens to infect core institutions of our country.”

Executive orders are, of course, orders rather than laws, so a future administration could simply undo Trump’s anti-anti-racist EO. But at least we’d get a good sense of how that future administration believes our hard-earned tax dollars should be spent.