Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, who claims he wants to “unify” the country along with Vice President Kamala Harris, oversaw training sessions for veterans and teachers that were segregated by race, ethnicity and gender.
Of course, much of this division was based on the infamous triplet of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), which in progressive jargon means uniformity, inequity, and exclusion — meaning white people, especially heterosexual white men, shouldn't even apply.
Judging the “diversity” of homeless people
Homelessness among veterans is a serious problem. According to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, there were 35,574 homeless veterans in the United States last year. Of those, 57 percent were white.
But when Walz’s VA held a series of training sessions for homeless veterans in 2022 and 2023, it explicitly excluded most white men. The department’s “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Working Group to End Veteran Homelessness” was seeking veterans with “homeless experiences” who “identify as BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color), LGBTQIA+, and/or women.” The only way straight white men could attend these “social justice” sessions, for which they were paid $50 per hour up to a maximum of $2,500, was to appear as a “stakeholder or ally” of a favored group.
“The Minnesota Department of Veterans Affairs cannot give up to $2,500 to minority and female veterans who have experienced homelessness, but will give it to white male veterans who have experienced homelessness only if they are willing to present themselves as 'allies' to minority and female veterans,” U.S. Civil Rights Commission Commissioner Gail Herriot told the Washington Free Beacon. “It's still discrimination. It violates both the Constitution and Title VI. I don't know why this is so hard for a state agency to understand.”
But when state agencies are filled with left-wing bureaucrats and political appointees, there can be no discrimination against white men, who are, after all, the “privileged” even if they happen to be living on the streets of Minneapolis in January.
Restorative injustice
Walz’s Department of Education is even more committed to a DEI plan than the Department of Veterans Affairs. Whether it’s curriculum or teacher training, education bureaucrats know how to divide and conquer.
The ministry has been conducting “restorative practices” training for teachers and school personnel since at least 2022. According to a webpage about the 2022 training, “Restorative Practices (RP) is an approach that schools can use to improve school environments and repair harm, based on the knowledge and worldviews of many Indigenous cultures.” Indigenous cultures are automatically assumed to be superior to cultures that are not blessed with melanin simply because they are blessed with melanin.
One aspect of the sessions is an “affinity community of color,” which is “reserved for people who personally identify as BIPOC” to “celebrate culture, connection, and collaboration” and have “brave, equitable discussions.” There are no “affinity communities” for white people, who are instructed to “attend trainings in other circles.” This year's sessions allowed non-BIPOC people to attend, but only if they “embraced restorative practices in the pursuit of equity.”
In 2020, the Ministry of Education published a document on “staff support sessions” and also suggested the creation of “affinity groups”.
For example, hold a space for people of color to talk about how George Floyd's death has affected them, while white staff members talk to each other about their reactions to the death… All groups of participants can learn from each other without causing further harm to those most affected by systemic racism.
Walz's involvement in DEI
While Walz defenders may discount these programs as the creations of Education Department bureaucrats, there's no denying the fact that the governor is directly responsible for an equally controversial ethnic studies curriculum aimed at schoolchildren. As The Wall Street Journal reported in August:
Walz signed legislation establishing the initiative in 2023. The department's standards and benchmarks, approved in January, require first-graders to “identify examples of ethnicity, equity, liberation, and systems of power” and “use those examples to construct the meaning of those terms.”
Fourth-graders must “identify the processes and effects of colonization and examine how discrimination and oppression against different racial and ethnic groups have produced movements of resistance.” High school students are instructed to develop analyses of “racial capitalism” and “anti-Blackness” and are taught to see themselves as part of a “racialized hierarchy” based on “dominant European standards of beauty.”
Walz can't escape responsibility for other radical policies at the Department of Education either: His “administration has relied on committed political activists to guide the creation and implementation of state education policy,” the Times noted. Unsurprisingly, those activists tend to come from one side of the political spectrum — the most extreme side.
Governor Walz has also been successful in incorporating DEI into health care. Last month, the Free Beacon reported that Governor Walz “signed legislation that would establish racial quotas across the state's health department in 2023, from a requirement that two members of a pregnancy task force must be 'Black or African American,' to rules governing the composition of a 'health equity' council.” Legal experts told the website that these policies are also almost certainly unconstitutional.
This shouldn’t come as a shock to anyone who doesn’t believe Waltz’s “Midwestern Dad” propaganda campaign, nor to anyone following the Biden-Harris administration, which has been similarly divisive in its pursuit of DEI. But it’s further evidence that the Harris-Waltz “unity” campaign is total bullshit.
