Study Unsurprisingly Shows DEI Initiatives Increase Hostility, Racial Tensions, and Authoritarian Tendencies

While diversity training has existed in some form since the 1960s, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) really took off in 2020 with the George Floyd protests and subsequent conversations about racial justice. Whether it was through the use of lectures, trainings, or educational materials, DEI was supposed to have such lofty goals as creating awareness of diversity, reducing bias, fostering a culture of respect, and empower individuals from historically underrepresented groups. 

It turns out that the theory behind DEI does not play out in practice. Earlier this month, a study released from the Network Contagion Research Institutes and Rutgers University (Jagdeep et al., 2024) found that DEI practices increased the likelihood of participants to be irrationally confrontational and antagonistic. This new study focused specifically on training that that emphasizes awareness of and opposition to "systemic oppression," which is a common topic from such lecturers as Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo. The themes that run common in the anti-racist work that the researchers analyzed are as follows:

1. White supremacy and racism are a systemic and nearly universal norm, mindset, or worldview. 
2. Normal institutions and Western ideologies are secretly enforcing racist agendas. White people are the intended beneficiaries. 
3. The universality of white supremacy agonizes people of color by virtue of endless hostile encounters. 
4. Western countries are compromised by virtue of their racist ideology and past. 
5. Anti-racist discrimination is the only solution to racist discrimination. 

What did the authors find? Across all groupings, the researchers found that instead of reducing bias, it engendered a "hostile attribution bias." This bias amplifies perceptions of bias where none existed, particularly when there is no evidence whatsoever of racism or discrimination (see below). This makes sense when you are told that racism lurks around every corner and is baked into our institutions. It explains why woke people cannot distinguish between correlation and causation when it comes to disparity. 

Not only did participants experience increased hostility, but they were more likely to punish perceived perpetrators (see below), whether that came in the form of protesting people, demanding public apologies, or calling for people to relocate. 

DEI training does not provide enhanced interracial interactions or camaraderie. There are baseless suspicions that encouraged punitive attitudes. What is even more alarming is that participants' levels of left-wing authoritarianism (LWA) predicted an increased willingness to punish and higher hostile attributions. 

As the authors point out, this left-wing authoritarianism "may further create a culture of fear and rigidity instead of constructive change." No kidding! The negative effects of DEI do not surprise me. I first pointed this out in 2018 when analyzing the empirical literature on diversity training and how diversity training frequently backfires because focusing on race that much reinforces stereotypes rather than mitigates them. 

When I recently praised Matt Walsh for exposing the DEI scam in his documentary Am I Racist? (see here and here), I pointed out how DEI uses identity politics to emphasize differences over similarities of our common humanity. Even worse, DEI focuses on assigning blame rather than constructive solutions, as is the case with reparations. 

The anti-oppressive themes, elements, frameworks commonly used in modern-day mainstream DEI training that focus on victimhood and oppression are a scourge on society. As co-author Joel Finkelstein pointed out, they are bad ideas because they hurt people. Not only that, but they are prevalent, thereby exacerbating the effects. They create an unwarranted suspicion on our institutions, as is the case with the criminal justice system when there in fact is no systemic racism in criminal sentencing. 

It keeps society obsessed with race rather than create a colorblind, post-racial society. It is divisive as can be with having people focused on race, gender, sexual orientation, or another aspect of identity politics rather than learning to get along with those who are different. Thankfully, such major companies as Wal-Mart, Lowes, and Boeing are realizing its negative effects and I hope more people wake up to its harms. Research on the effects of DEI is important and we need more research like it because DEI lacks empirical support. At that same time, it illustrates something so obvious that I do not need research to discern, which is that DEI is a plague on society that needs to be excised posthaste. 

Palestine and Its Supporters Project Their Most Perverse Proclivities Onto Israel

As if the politics of the Israel-Hamas War did not have enough zaniness, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for alleged war crimes. Forget for a moment that the ICC actually carrying out the arrest would trigger the Hague Invasion Act, thereby giving the U.S. the ability to release the captors and even shut down the kangaroo court. It is the moral inversion with which the ICC issues the arrest warrants. In the twisted world of woke identity politics that has permeated through out multiple international institutions, Jews end up being the aggressors, even as they were being raped, kidnapped, murdered, or decapitated on October 7, 2023. The ICC was created as a "court of last resort" (their words, not mine) to prosecute crimes that de facto have no infrastructure to do so, not take political potshots by going after the leaders of a democratic country that are simply trying to protect its citizens from barbarism. 

The warped sense of morality goes beyond the ICC trying to persecute Israel for the "crime" of defending itself against racist, genocidal terrorists or making a moral equivalence between Hamas' belligerence and Israel defending itself from such barbarism. There is a classic case of projection here. In psychology, projection is a defense mechanism in which one consciously or unconsciously attributes their traits, thoughts, or feelings onto others. You are probably wondering what psychology has to do with Middle Eastern geopolitics. The answer? What those on the pro-Palestine side accuse Israel of are acts that Arab nations or the entity known as Palestine have either committed already or would like to commit against Israel and the Jewish people.

Colonizer. Israel is not a settler colonizer. Israel gained its land fair and square, whether it was through international law with the West Bank or a legitimate case of casus belli, as was the case with the Golan Heights and the Sinai Peninsula in the Six-Day War. It is also worth pointing out that Israel gave the Sinai Peninsula back to Egypt in the 1970s to make peace. 

There is only one Jewish state on the planet and it is about the size of New Jersey. Since Israel is the indigenous land of the Jewish people, Israel is a textbook example of decolonization. You cannot colonize your own land. Colonization comes from an outside force. If you want a lesson on true colonizers, look at how much land the Muslim caliphs conquered since the 7th century and the fifty-plus Muslim-majority nations that currently exist. And if "from the river to sea, Palestine will be free" does not make it clear enough, they always wanted all the land and still do because the "grievance" is not about peace. If they cared about peace, they would not have rejected the numerous opportunities presented. Much like has been the case in Islamic history, the goal of the "Palestinian people" is domination, plain and simple. 

Genocide. As I pointed out last year in my critique of the genocide accusation, Israel is by definition not committing genocide and is doing what it can to minimize civilian casualties, which is a tall order in urban warfare. Let us ignore a fact that Gazan civilians have been receiving the food aid equivalent of 3,000 calories a day (Fliss-Isakov et al., 2024)....that is when Hamas is not busy stealing the food and starving its people. I hate to break it to the ICC, but starvation and suffering are common in war: "Normalcy ends [in war], things run out, people go hungry, people suffer, people die. It is dreadful. It is why, ideally, wars should not be started." 

Hamas losing a war that it started is not genocide. But Hamas does not care about the suffering of its civilians. For Hamas, maximizing casualties and human suffering while garnering international sympathy is a military tactic, much like its calls for a ceasefire are. It is why Hamas stores military munitions in civilian infrastructure and uses its own citizens as human shields. More to the point, Gaza's population has grown nearly fivefold since 1950, according to United Nations data. It has also grown 2.02 percent since the October 7 attacks. If this were an actual genocide, Gaza's population would not be growing the way it has. 

Finally, Hamas has wanted to wipe Israel off the map since its founding in 1988. You can read Hamas' original charter for yourself, especially the Introduction and Article VII. On October 7, 2023, it committed an act against Israel, the largest pogrom against Jews since the Holocaust, with genocidal intent. After the October 7 attacks, Hamas official Ghazi Hamad vowed to repeat the October 7 attacks until Israel is annihilated. With all the wars, the intifadas, and suicide bombing, Hamas and other Palestinian organizations have made it crystal clear that they would wipe out Israel and the Jews if they had the military advantage. 

Oppressor/Apartheid State. I have refuted the apartheid claim in 2023, 2016, and 2012, which is why I will not go into too much detail today. I will say that all citizens are equal under Israeli law and Arabs hold influential positions in Israel, whether as members of Israeli Parliament, diplomats, police officers, doctors, or the Israeli Supreme Court. Jews and Arabs can take the same public transit and have access to universities, theaters, cinemas, beaches, and other places. Israel is nowhere near the definition of apartheid that is under the 1998 Rome Statute, which would be defined as a system of legalized segregation in which one racial group is deprived of civil rights. 

I would accuse Palestine of being an apartheid state, except for two main issues. First, there has never been a sovereign Arab nation-state known as Palestine. Two, prior to the current war with Hamas, Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza in 2005. There is not a single Jew for the Gazan government to oppress. And if you want to see who is oppressing its citizens, look at Freedom House's analysis of how Hamas oppresses its own people by curtailing political rights and civil liberties in Gaza. Israel ranks significantly better on Freedom House ranking, which is another signal that the ICC's arrest warrants are politics masquerading as legal proceeding.

Ethnic cleansing. Israel has accepted Muslims into its country and has a Muslim population of about 1.8 million. Contrast that to the 10,000 Jews that live in Arab countries. In the mid-1940s, there was anywhere between 800,000 and 1,000,000 Jews in the Arab world. Guess what happened to most of them? In response to Israel becoming a nation-state in 1948, Arab nations ethnically cleansed their countries of their Jews. Many of those refugees moved to Israel where their descendants live today. The fact that there are more Muslim Arabs in Israel than there are Jews in Arab countries is a reality that should speak volumes. 

And in terms of ethnic cleansing, it is not as if Mahmoud Abbas is all that much better than the genocidal Hamas. Abbas already stated that a future Palestinian state would not have a single Jew in it, which is not surprising for a man who blamed the Holocaust on the Jews. Given the current demographics in the Middle East, you cannot actualize that type of nation-state without ethnically cleansing Jews. "From the river to the sea" is a call for ethnic cleansing, if not downright genocide. 

Conclusion. This is not solely about a war in the Middle East, as important as that outcome is for geopolitical purposes. This is about moral clarity. I am not here to say that every last thing the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) does has been or will be perfect. At the same time, there is a distinction as clear as night and day who the good guys and the bad guys are. It should be unambiguous by now that what the pro-Palestine side accuses Israel of are things that the entity known as Palestine would like to do to Israelis, whether that is to colonize, oppress, ethnically cleanse, or systematically erase Jews from the planet. To support Hamas and its ilk is to support genocide, homophobia, anti-Semitism, misogyny, human rights violations, and an assault on moral decency, which is ironic given that the Left has historically advocated against these maladies and yet increasingly comes out on the side supporting the terrorist organization known as Hamas.  

The issue with Palestine is not a matter of a "few bad apples" in their governmental bodies and institutions, but an entire society that generally and fundamentally despises Jews. If Hamas, Fatah, and indeed the majority of the people known as Palestinians had their way, Jews would either not exist in the Middle East or, even more likely, would be wiped off the planet. It is lamentable as it is true that Jew-hatred amongst the Palestinian people is a norm rather than an exception. In an age where moral relativism reigns supreme, we need to find the directness and cojones to call a spade a spade and a Jew-hating terrorist a Jew-hating terrorist.

Should The U.S. Department of Education Be Abolished? And Can It Be?

Now that Donald Trump is President-Elect once more, there is a lot of analysis, speculation, and predicting of what Trump will do during his second term. If Trump is serious about implementing his proposed tariff plan, for example, it will be the biggest coup to U.S. trade since the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act that compounded the effects the Great Depression. Another place of particular interest is that of education. 

Trump wants to end wokeness in education, which is a sentiment I appreciate given how much critical race theory and social justice have permeated the education system. From the looks of it, he wants to forbid Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion (DEI) offices in public schools; forbid classroom lessons on gender identity and "structural racism;" keep male-to-female transgender individuals out of girl's sports; and go after colleges that have allowed anti-semitism to fester on its campuses. 

While Trump wants to reform education, his plan entails more than pulling certain levers around federal funding for public education. One thing this election cycle did, particularly with the Project 2025 controversy, was revive the debate about the U.S. Department of Education (ED). Project 2025 is technically separate from Trump's Agenda 47, but one thing they both have in common is a call to abolish ED, as did the Republican Party's 2024 Platform. I can see there being appeal to the idea:

• Abolishing ED would lower education costs. When thinking about college education, it is ED and its federal student aid that hands-down is the single largest factor as to why college tuition has skyrocketed in the past four decades. 
• Education should be localized, not coming top-down from politicians in DC. Forget for a moment that the federal government has no constitutional authority to govern education. A federal agency is ill-equipped to determine what education priorities are best. To quote the Cato Institute, "A decentralized education system is much better able to reflect and respond to the diverse needs and preferences of a pluralistic society than one controlled from the top."  
• Academic achievement has remained largely unchanged since ED's founding. Math and reading performance on the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) has remained stagnant. This was the case before the pandemic and the subsequent declines in standardized testing that ensued because of school closures. Furthermore, the achievement gap on the National Assessment of Progress (NAEP) and Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) have failed to budge (Hanushek et al., 2019). Average scores for NAEP have only been declining since the pandemic. Since academic achievement has not improved the education of children since the creation of ED, what purpose does ED serve?
•  ED is riddled with operational problems. Look at this report from the government's oversight agency, the Government Accountability Office (GAO). ED was missing key monitoring documents in grant applications (GAO, p. 4), which means ED is not paying attention to where its money is going. ED does not independently assess the accuracy of program data (p. 4), which is poor data quality assurance. Because of data management and poor human capital management, ED has had ongoing issues with performing proper evaluations (p. 7).  

As compelling as this case is, I have to ask how viable of an endeavor abolishing ED would be. The Republican pledges to eliminate ED date back to Ronald Reagan's first time in the early 1980s. When Trump began his first term and had both chambers of the legislative branch, he did nothing, even in spite of there being legislative proposals to abolish it. 

On top of the historical intransigence, there is the issue of political feasibility. On the one hand, Pew Research survey data indicate how Americans feel about ED has a partisan divide, i.e., most Democrats like ED (62 percent) and Republicans dislike ED (at 65 percent). On the other hand, about two-thirds of Americans believe that too little is being spent on education (AP-NORC). Yes, Republicans in Congress and White House could make it more likely, although they lack a large enough majority to get past the filibuster. Conversely, it would be difficult for the U.S. government to spend more on education without ED or at least other U.S. federal agencies fulfilling that role in education. 

Even if ED itself is abolished, there is the question of whether its functions and duties would disappear or simply be transferred to other government agencies or cabinet departments. For example, federal student aid would most likely go to the Department of Treasury's Federal Financing Bank. Plus, few politicians would be inclined to slash or end funding for low-income students (Title I) or IDEA funding for students with special needs. 

So why should the U.S. taxpayers continue to fund an agency that received $228 billion in funding last fiscal year? It was not as if the American people received zero education prior to 1979 and that education magically appeared in 1979 with the creation of ED. The United States was successful without one and I am sure we could be successful if it were eliminated, especially given the cost and inefficacy of ED. 

At the same time, "Eliminate ED" needs to be more than a fancy slogan. In addition to getting past the political hurdles, proponents would need a solid plan of how to revert the role of education to state and local governments because it would take a lot of effort to modify the statutes, regulations, and bureaucracy surrounding ED. Otherwise, "Eliminate ED" is as hollow of a pledge as when the Republicans called to eliminate Obamacare last decade.

Public Health "Experts" Did Not "Follow the Science" During the Pandemic: 2024 Edition (Part II)

Misinformation was abound during the COVID pandemic. It did not come from the skeptics, but from the so-called public health "experts," as well as governments purportedly fighting misinformation to deflect from its own misinformation campaign. Speaking of which, the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations recently released a report criticizing "We Can Do This," which was a $900 million HHS advertising campaign aimed at promoting various pandemic measures. Whereas Part I of this blog series focused on the scientific aspects that had public policy implications (e.g., natural immunity), this Part will cover the misinformation from the U.S. federal government that was masquerading as science. More specifically, I will use the aforementioned House report to illustrate the misinformation.

Vaccine misinformation. It is true that the Pfizer vaccines were shown to be 95 percent effective at preventing disease. However, the Food and Drug Administration made clear in its December 2020 emergency use authorization announcement that they did not know how long the vaccines last nor that it would prevent COVID transmission (House, p. 8). As I pointed out in October 2022, the Pfizer CEO did not know either. This misinformation is significant because the CDC was pushing vaccines to get back to "a pre-pandemic normal," even saying that "you will not get COVID if you get vaccinated" or that "vaccinated people do not carry the virus." This argumentation was the basis for COVID vaccine passports and vaccine mandates, and yet it turned out to be unsubstantiated.

Face mask flip-flopping. At the beginning of the pandemic, the Surgeon General, the World Health Organization, and even Dr. Anthony Fauci, the man who claims that he represents science, were against the use of face masks (House, p. 10). In April 2020, the CDC did an about face and campaigned for mask wearing, even though there was zero scientific rationale for the about face. 

This reversal set the scene for other inconsistencies in messaging, a topic I covered as early as May 2021. By the end of 2020, the WHO had limited and inconsistent evidence on face masks for healthy individuals, which is hardly "following the science." Although the data were becoming clearer in 2021 about face masks' ineffectiveness at preventing COVID transmission, it took until January 2022 for the CDC to admit that cloth masks and face coverings do not work. It was not until December 2022 until Biden's former COVID coordinator Ashish Jha to finally admit that "there is no study in the world that shows that masks work that well." Yet CDC Director Rochelle Walensky showed that she does not care about scientific evidence or rigor by continuing to advocate for face masks in February 2023. 

Mask mandate on domestic and international travel. Shortly after entering the White House, Biden imposed a face mask for most forms of international and domestic travel (House, p. 13). You can read my December 2021 analysis on why face masks on airplanes was especially ridiculous. 

School closures. Children were not at an elevated risk of transmitting COVID, a reality I pointed out as early as July 2020. Yet school closures were an integral part to the CDC's response to the COVID pandemic. Not only that, the American Federation of Teachers' President, Randi Weingarten, worked with CDC Director Rochelle Walensky to prolong school closures (House, p. 14-15). Not only did the school closures do nothing to help with COVID transmission, but it harmed children in terms of educational attainment, lower future earnings, and shorter life expectancy.  

Conclusion. If you are a taxpayer in the United States, you should be livid. Taxpayers coughed up nearly $1 billion for the government to spread COVID misinformation that ended up harming Americans and upending millions of lives. There was no discussion about the balances between the costs and benefits or a proper risk assessment conducted. There was only fear-mongering in the name of public health. This merits repeating. The government did not have our best interest at heart during the pandemic. 

If we want the American people to have trust in public health officials, an inquiry asking tough questions and holding actors responsible would be a good start. There should also be better oversight over evaluating the safety of vaccines, as well as better data collection on adverse vaccine reactions. Transparency and accountability would be great hallmarks, as well. Finally, the government should not be in the business silence dissenting opinions, especially given how off-base the government was on a myriad of pandemic-related topics. It will take a lot of work to reform HHS in such a manner, but it beats not learning from this pandemic and having the government make the same stupid mistakes during the next pandemic.

Why Do Jews Traditionally Perform a Ritual Immersion for Kitchen Dishes?

This past Monday, I had a day off work for Veterans Day. What did I do for my day off? I went to the mikveh, a bath used for ritual immersion in Judaism. Normally, the mikveh is used for immersing people, whether for such moments as marriage, Yom Kippur, conversion, or in the case of a woman, having completed a menstrual cycle [also known as a niddah]. The thing is that the mikveh is not only used for immersing people. 

This past Monday, I did not go to immerse myself. I went to immerse my new dishes in a process called tevilat keilim (טבילת כלים; alternatively, toiveling). Although I had some Jewish friends hand down dishes to me, I had not bought new dishes for myself in over a decade. Before and after the immersion, I had been asking myself why Jews ritually immerse dishes. The most basic explanation is that the practice of tevilat keilim is based on Numbers 31:22-23:  

"Whether it be the gold, and the silver, the brass, the iron, the tin, and the lead, everything that may abide the fire, you shall make to go through the fire, and it shall be clean. Nevertheless, it shall be purified with the water of sprinklings. And whatever is not used in fire, you shall pass through water."

This ritual purification in the Book of Numbers took place after the Israelites defeated the Midianites in battle. This incident took place in the context of having acquired dishes from a particularly idolatrous people. As such, I could argue that such ritual immersion is no longer applicable in our time, much like the Conservative Movement had done in its responsum. There is that part of me that felt that it was too demanding, cumbersome, irrational, or the notion that ritual purity is out of touch with a modern understanding of the world. There is another part of me that took joy in the practice, which is why I would like to explore a few reasons why tevilat keilim can till have spiritual meaning for Jewish practice in the 21st century.

• Spiritual purification. R. Samson Raphel Hirsch brought up a reason why the Torah mandated the immersion specifically for metal utensils. Animals are incapable of producing metal objects. But both animals and men can and do eat. For Hirsch, metal utensils represented the intellectual and spiritual side of man, whereas eating represented the primal, physical side of man. It is not enough to simply use kitchen utensils. Immersing the utensils is supposed to act as a reminder of how we elevate our everyday, mundane activities by using our intellectual and spiritual sides. It is an integration of making the physical a manifestation of holiness. 
• Renewal. Much like when a person goes through immersion in the mikveh, a kitchen utensil goes through a symbolic transformation. It is not that the object was prima facie impure. It needed to be re-contextualized and re-calibrated into a life of holiness. And if we are able to renew and transform something as seemingly mundane as kitchen objects, then we should be able to a fortiori renew ourselves and start anew. 
• Aspirations in Life. Technically speaking, food in a non-toiveled dish is still kosher. Yet we are supposed to immerse the dishes. The metaphor here is that we are meant to aim high and do our best in our spiritual lives. Spirituality is not an automatic, passive process. It is something that is meant to be intentionally cultivated and pursued to the max. 
• Aligning Your Values. The idols that people in the 21st century are not statues made of stone or wood or such celestial beings as the moon or sun. Plenty of people worship money, fame, or status. Since the initial tevilat keilim was in response to idolatry, I would content that immersing utensils can be an action-based meditation to help us realign our values and ask ourselves what is important to us. 
• Mindfulness. When we take the time and effort to immerse utensils, we remind ourselves that something as small as utensils can have major spiritual significance. Bringing awareness to cooking and eating signals that any objects we may own and use should be done with awareness of their spiritual potential. It means that all items can be a reflection of Jewish values. 
• Jewish distinction. While I found ritual immersion practices in other religions (e.g., Islam Hinduism), there was no religion that had a formalized ritual process for dishes like Judaism has. As such, the practice of tevilat keilim maintains a distinction between a Jewish and non-Jewish way of living. It also helps maintain connection and continuity with Jewish heritage, especially in a predominantly non-Jewish environment.

Trump Was Wrong About Tariffs Being Great in the Late 19th Century

Now that Donald Trump is the President-Elect for the upcoming term, we have to brace ourselves for the ramifications of a Trump presidency, both good and bad. One thing that Trump made clear during his campaign is that he would like to raise tariffs even more so than his first term. Trump made statements that he would like to raise tariffs on China at least to 60 percent, as well as 10 percent on all other countries, including allies. As I brought up last month, that would harm small business and the everyday working American because it would cost jobs, decrease personal income, lower the GDP, and make consumer goods more expensive.

Shortly before the election, Trump interviewed with the famous podcaster Joe Rogan. In this interview, Trump floated the idea of eliminating the income tax in favor of tariffs. Trump referred to President William McKinley as "The Tariff King" and posited that the United States was so rich in the late 19th century. There is one minor detail with that assertion - it is historically inaccurate. 

Earlier this month, economists from the University of Sussex and University of California-Davis released a research paper on the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) entitled Did Tariffs Make American Manufacturing Great? New Evidence from the Gilded Age (Klein and Meissner, 2024). The economists matched tariff data from 8,300 products with state-level manufacturing from 1870 to 1909. They then used price changes and tariff rates to determine efficacy. Guess what they found? 

The United States was a manufacturing powerhouse in spite of the tariffs, not because of the tariffs. The paper found that industries with higher tariffs had lower productivity, not higher productivity. Furthermore, the tariffs did raise the number of firms, but did so by protecting smaller, less productive firms. As a result, it kept laborers trapped in a job with little to no future. The tariffs of that era increased consumer prices, which lowered living standards for the everyday American. If that were not enough, here is the punch line and bottom line finding of the paper: 

"[We] can, with great certainty, rule out the idea that high tariffs played a strong role in boosting labor productivity in American manufacturing. American productivity leadership, emblematic of this period, was almost certainly not a function of U.S. trade policy and tariffs." 

I am glad to see robust research showing how the protectionist narrative does not withstand scrutiny, but the findings are hardly surprising. The George W. Bush steel tariffs cost the country 200,000 jobs and $4 billion in lost wages. The tariffs from Trump's first term cost the economy $51 billion annually, not to mention reducing wages by 0.14 percent and reducing employment by 166,000 jobs. And then there is the matter of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act that hurled the United States into the Great Depression. In its October 2024 World Economic Outlook, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) calculated that global tariffs could reduce the GDP by 0.4 percent in 2025 and 0.6 percent in 2026. If successful, Trump's tariffs would mean increased costs, lower employment, and lower wages for Americans. For all of our sakes, I hope Trump's tariff proposals were nothing more than blustering pandering to win votes. 

Public Health "Experts" Did Not "Follow the Science" During the COVID Pandemic: 2024 Edition (Part I)

I know that there were presidential elections in the United States this week and the COVID pandemic seems like a distant nightmare we endured, but the truth is part of me still feels irate about what happened. I am not irate about the virus itself, but rather about how governments and so-called public health "experts" across the world reacted. Aside from "Stay at home" "flatten the curve," or "We're in this together," a popular mantra during the COVID pandemic era was "Follow the science." It was quite the clever linguistic ploy when you think about it. If you were against the face masks that did nothing, did not adhere to the lockdowns we knew were ineffective per pre-pandemic guidance, or spoke out against deleterious school closures, you were branded an anti-science kook. 

It turns out that the government officials and so-called "experts" who were advocating for stricter and stricter public health measurements were the ones not following the science. Yes, I was critical of lockdowns and school closures in 2020. It was in 2021 when I wrote a piece entitled When "Follow the Science" Meant Not Following the Science. You can read it here, but I criticized how "experts" were not following the science when it came to lockdowns, school closures, travel bans, cleaning surfaces, social distancing, restaurant & gym closures, and face masks. 

I want to highlight a few more to illustrate how the fear-mongering and the obsession with COVID-related costs ignored all the costs that stringent COVID policy had on us all. First, I want to point out a video by Umeå University research fellow Dr. Rachel Nicoll on following the real science and some of the highlights illustrated by her article at Daily Sceptic. Second, the U.S. Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations released a report late last month highlighting various moments of COVID misinformation from the U.S. government.  I am going to focus on Dr. Nicoll's comments in the Part and the U.S. House report in Part II.

Natural Immunity. It was annoying to hear during the pandemic about how "unprecedented" was because it was not. As a matter of fact, our previous knowledge on coronaviruses contributed to creating a vaccine so quickly. There were hundreds of coronaviruses prior to the pandemic, the two most famous being SARS and MERS. As Dr. Nicoll points out, about 50 percent of us had pre-existing immunity to COVID from prior common cold coronavirus infections. 

In 2023, I wrote about natural immunity and COVID. I illustrated how the choice to vaccinate was one of individual benefit, not societal. It made the vaccine mandates and vaccine passports unnecessary. Dr. Nicoll brought up other costs related to natural immunity. The public health measures implemented meant that the lack of interaction with others weakened our immune system. It is why we saw an explosion in cold and flu once COVID receded. Instilling fear and anxiety all did not help our immune systems, and nor did staying locked down and being deprived of sunlight and physical activity, the latter of which increased obesity in the U.S. by nearly 10 percentage points.  

COVID is airborne, but experts kept saying otherwise. One of the scientific debates during the pandemic about the nature of COVID was whether or not COVID was airborne. Droplets are larger; are released when you cough, sneeze talk, or breathe hard; and settle rapidly. Conversely, airborne particles become aerosolized, travel longer distances, and can stay in the air for a long time. 

In March 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) claimed that COVID was not airborne and went as far as stating that claims to the contrary were "misinformation." It took WHO until December 2021 to get around to admitting that COVID was airborne. Why so long? Think about it from a policy standpoint. The policy justification for lockdowns, school closures, and travel bans make more sense with a virus transmitted by droplets. Since COVID was an airborne disease, it made zero sense because the virus was going to reach us all eventually; and it pretty much did. My hypothesis is that like other pandemic public health measures, this was not out of concern of public welfare, but greater power. 

PCR Testing. Testing was supposed to be a preventative way of spreading COVID to others. By identifying who had COVID, we could have those individuals isolate while they recover from the illness. There was one problem with these tests. The cycle thresholds for the PCR tests were too high. The high cycle thresholds meant that it was ineffective at determining whether people were actually contagious. After all, you can still have some of the viral genetic material in your system weeks after the period of infection. In other words, these "false positives" unnecessary isolated a whole lot of people. This was especially cumbersome for those who were travelling when receiving their positive PCR test. 

The Word "Latinx" Backfired with Latino Voters (And It Should Be No Surprise)

Although I am glad it is almost Election Day, I also think about election dynamics and how voting patterns change over time. The Latino population in particular comes to mind because of how much the Latino population has grown in recent years. As the Pew Research data indicate, the Hispanic population grew from 9.7 million in 1970 to 62.1 million in 2020. With a U.S. total population of 331.4 million in 2020, that would make the Hispanic population 18.7 percent of the U.S. population, a percentage that is anticipated to grow. 

While U.S. Latinos have a history of disproportionately voting Democrat (a lot of that having to do with immigration), those trends have shifted more Republican in the 21st century, as the data from Cornell University's Roper Center show. Why are Hispanic voters leaning more Republican? According to a new research paper from professors at Harvard and Georgetown Universities (d'Urso and Roman, 2024), one such explanation on why Latinos are more likely to vote Republican has to do with the term "Latinx."

For those who are unaware, "Latinx" is a gender-neutral alternative to the words "Latino" and "Latina" that was invented by activists in 2004 to describe those of Latin American descent. While it has existed since 2004, it started to gain traction among the political Left, celebrities, and activists in the mid-2010s. So-called "progressives" thought "Latinx" was to be this wonderful, inclusive term. It turns out that the term had the opposite effect on the vast majority of the Latino community, as the aforementioned study found.

Why was "Latinx" such a turn-off for Latinos that it made them more likely to vote Republican? The authors of the study believe it is "Identity-Expansion-Backlash Theory." The authors created the term to describe a theory in which Latinos are against the term "Latinx" because it is conservative and/or religious Latinos driving the trend. In other words, they believe that anti-LGBT bigotry in the Latino community is responsible for the backlash. More on that in a moment, but I want to ask something first.

Is every Latino on the planet going to embrace LGBT individuals with open, loving arms? Of course not! There is still machismo that is prevalent in Latino culture and homophobia is very much a real phenomenon in Latin America. But if it were truly that bad, there would not be multiple Latin American countries that have legalized same-sex marriage, including Argentina, Ecuador, Colombia, Brazil, Chile, and parts of Mexico. I am not here to say that views of LGBT individuals in Latin America are ideal. Latin American countries have not quite made the progress of the Western world, but it is miles ahead of Muslim-majority countries. Remember that a) there is not a Muslim-majority country that has legalized same-sex marriage, and b) there are multiple Muslim-majority countries that legally punish gay and lesbian individuals with jail time and/or execution. 

But I digress. Let us get back to why so many Latinos take issue with the term "Latinx." I first wrote on this topic in 2019 and again in 2022. Let me tell you there are multiple reasons to dislike the word "Latinx" that have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with anti-LGBT bigotry:

• The use of the letter "x" to denote a gender is foreign to the Spanish language.
• The suffix "-x" does not grammatically or orally correspond with the Spanish language. 
• This inoperability in the Spanish language excludes millions of Spanish speakers, not only working-class and everyday Spanish speakers, but also the nonbinary and gender-neutral Hispanics the term was purportedly meant to help. 
• Not only is it inoperable in Spanish, but it is clunky in English. Language is meant to be clear when communicated. "Latinx" fails at that endeavor spectacularly.
• "Latinx" is a term mainly used by Left-leaning, college educated, English-speaking individuals, Hispanic or otherwise. Not only does it come off as elitist and virtue-signaling, but it is not reflective or inclusive of the vast majority of the community it is supposed to represent. 
• It is condescending to have a group of people (predominantly white "progressives") to complain about colonialists having imposed cultural norms in the past all the while trying to come in and tell Hispanics, many of whom are working-class, how to speak Spanish and impose an Anglophone norm of "-x" in the process.  
• If proponents of "Latinx" had any cultural comprehension or awareness, they would know that there are such pan-ethnic terms as Hispanic and Latino, not to mention the fact that it is quite common for Latinos to self-identity by the country of origin rather than a pan-ethnic term. 

I wish that the authors of the paper, who both have PhDs, could be better with critical thinking and come up with a list of all possibilities for a given phenomenon instead of the one that supposedly confirmes their preconceived notions. But on the Far Left, everything is due to racism and bigotry. There cannot be any other possibility than bigotry. This explanation by the authors is both ideologically driven and unfalsifiable, not to mention a false and simplified view of a world that has complexity. I do not have a PhD, and yet I was able to come up with a solid list of reasons why "Latinx" is such a turnoff to the Spanish-speaking community in the United States without having to resort to the argument of bigotry.

“Latinx” has been around for two decades and it should be no mystery as to why most Latinos are not using it and why many dislike it. It is foreign to the Spanish language. It is downright weird to many Spanish-speakers to use a word like "Latinx" in the Spanish-speaking world, as polling from Pew Research in September indicates. It is the beginning of linguistic imperialism to impose such an Anglophone change on Spanish speakers, a classical instance of the pot calling the kettle black coming from the woke Far Left. 

Aside from my strong objections with the term "Latinx," I find it compelling that the word is reprehensible to a statistically significant number of Hispanics in the United States where they change their voting patterns in response to it. I can see why they would change their votes. "Latinx" is not about inclusion. It is telling Latinos that their culture, norms, language, and values are wrong, as the tone of the authors in this study convey. "Latinx" is not about one word. It is an attack on a way of life and a way of speaking an entire language. 

I am not saying that "Latinx" is the single most important issue in U.S. politics. Looking at Gallup polling, there are issues such as the economy (inflation in particular), immigration, crime, the federal budget, poverty, and housing affordability that make that list. What the findings with politicians' usage of the term "Latinx" does show is how disconnected the political Left is with the Latino community. It is emblematic of how the Far Left has taken a grip of the mainstream Left, particularly when it comes to language. If the mainstream Left does not want to be off-putting to Latino voters, it should abandon this linguistic locura to not come off as so extreme and instead find a way to speak to what is important to the vast majority of Latino citizens.