DEI still rules the Dems

While some Fortune 500 companies are dropping DEI programs like hot cakes, many in the Democratic Party are not so eager. Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett, who was almost the official face of the House Democrats’ messaging, has been taking her message that “mediocre white boys” are the ones complaining about DEI to the airwaves of cable news.

Now the Democrats’ Senate committee is rolling out a job application form with an optional DEI section where applicants can pick between five sexualities and five genders, with options including “trans* woman / Transfeminine” and “pansexual.” This form was one of the first actions that the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee’s (DSCC) new chief diversity and inclusion officer. 

Not to fear, the DSCC is adamant that being an asexual trans*man wouldn’t help — or hinder — an applicant’s chances. “It is completely optional for you to submit and will be used only for Equal Employment Opportunity reporting and statistical purposes,” the committee writes. “Individual’s information will not be viewed nor used as a part of the recruiting or hiring processes and it will not be shared out to campaigns.”

Slow down Linda

Palm Beach, Florida

After a brief, unsuccessful stint in a Swiss rehab last week, Cockburn took a snowbird flight down to South Florida Wednesday to attend the swanky black-tie optional Samizdat Prize ceremony at the Breakers Palm Beach. The awards, now in its second year, is hosted by the RealClear Media Fund. “We celebrate the journalists and public figures who exhibit unwavering commitment to truth and free speech,” the event description reads.

“This year, the free speech cause is demonstrably better,” said the evening’s compère, an uncharacteristically well-manicured David DesRosiers, the publisher of RealClear. “We went from darkness to light. The Overton Window on free speech went from almost shut to halfway open. A definite improvement over almost shut. But halfway open ain’t fully open. And fully open is the Promised Land we seek.

“There are folks in this room who have demonstrated the courage that we praise here tonight,” DesRosiers concluded. “And many more who are not here. To all of you, you have our respect and keep on being you. Our work is far from over. Truth be told, it is never over.”

This year had a couple of worthy nominees: George Washington University professor Jonathan Turley and Abigail Shrier, author of the egregiously censored book Irreversible Damage. 

And in a show of steadfast commitment to the under-explored concept of American irony, the third gong was picked up by X CEO Linda Yaccarino — exactly a month to the day after her site suspended Spectator writer Jacqueline Sweet for her reporting that debunked the idea that @AdrianDittmann was an “alt account.” That Spectator story had its circulation on X restricted for thirty-six hours and Sweet remains suspended, due to a specious interpretation of the site’s “doxxing” rules, unless she deletes her post sharing it — which, in true New York Post-spirit, she is refusing to do. New Twitter, same as the old Twitter.

Also this week, Yaccarino’s boss Elon Musk had suspended an account for sharing information from a WIRED article about the identities of Musk’s “DoGE” wrecking crew. “You have committed a crime,” wrote Musk, before thanking the interim US attorney for DC Ed Martin for his pledge to “pursue any and all legal action against anyone who impedes your work or threatens your people.”

“Our commitment to preserving free speech around the world will never waver,” Yaccarino posted yesterday. Cockburn can’t help himself seeing l’affaire Sweet as something of a “waver.” Unrestricting her account, one month on, seems like a great way for Linda to demonstrate her newly acknowledged Samizdat spirit…

The three honorees took part in a panel discussion chaired by Palm Beach local Dave Rubin. “We’re going global next year,” DesRosiers told Cockburn after the ceremony. “I’ll pick a Brit.”

In attendance: Rubin, Shrier, Turley, Yaccarino, Eric Bolling, Karol and Shai Markowicz, Pamela Paresky, Leigh Harrington, Raheem Kassam and Gracie Solange Gaylord, Carl Cannon, David and Fabiana DesRosiers, John McIntyre, the Claremont Institute’s Ryan P. Williams, Susan Crabtree, the American Conservative’s Curt Mills, the New Criterion’s Roger Kimball, Encounter Books’s Sam Schneider, Alex Perez, Tiffany Marie Brannon, Lisa Marie Boothe, Matthew Tyrmand and the Babylon Bee’s Seth Dillon.

Who works for Victoria Spartz?

Congresswoman Victoria Spartz may be taking DoGE too seriously. The Indiana Republican, who has had the highest office turnover in the House of Representatives in this millennium, has almost no one working for her, Hill sources flagged for Cockburn.

Spartz, who regularly appears among the “Worst Bosses” on the Hill, according to Legistorm’s staff departure tracking, currently has no communications director and virtually no legislative staff whatsoever, aside from a legislative assistant — perhaps not surprising to see from the lawmaker who was charged with bringing an unloaded firearm into an airport.

Her in-district offices aren’t much better. While her Muncie office has both listed offices filled, her Noblesville office is missing a southwest office director, its outreach coordinator, its director of constituent services and its district aide. In further DoGE fashion, her interim district director in that office only graduated college in 2022.

Bowser’s fury

DC mayor Muriel Bowser isn’t likely to be a fan of new legislation from Senator Mike Lee and Congressman Andy Ogles — even though it’s named in her honor.

The Bringing Oversight to Washington and Safety to Every Resident (BOWSER) Act, if passed, would render DC’s mayor largely insignificant, because it would repeal DC’s home rule one year after passage. For most Republicans, Bowser is a frequent punching bag — and not without merit. The Spectator has chronicled the demise of DC neighborhoods such as Navy Yard, which stand out as a “failing experiment in gentrification.”

Lee and Ogles’s views that DC can’t run itself may be correct. Under their law, Congress would be able to change, overturn and impose laws on the capital city. “Washington is now known for its homicides, rapes, drug overdoses, violence, theft and homelessness,” Ogles said. “Bowser and her corrupt Washington City Council are incapable of managing the city. As such, it seems appropriate for Congress to reclaim its constitutional authority and restore the nation’s Capital. The epicenter of not only the United States Federal Government but also the world geopolitics cannot continue to be a cesspool of Democrats’ failed policies.”

Ever since the DC Council passed its Revised Criminal Code Act of 2022, which would have lowered criminal penalties for a series of violent crimes, Republicans (and even some Democrats) in Congress have argued that the progressive left’s takeover of America’s capital needs to come to an end.

While the BOWSER Act faces a tough pass towards passage, there have been a series of high-profile attacks on Democr

atic members of Congress in and around their homes in DC that may prompt several more to hop on board.

AOC’s CoS tries to kick Pelosi’s walking stick away

Nancy Pelosi struck first, but Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez may enact revenge soon enough. Pelosi was at the core of the opposition to AOC’s failed bid to become the senior Democrat on the Oversight Committee — and now AOC’s first chief of staff is primarying the octogenarian Democrat.

Saikat Chakrabarti, AOC’s former chief of staff, is putting generational change at the forefront of his challenge to Pelosi, who was pictured this week walking with two canes as she recovers from a hip replacement. “I respect what Nancy Pelosi has accomplished in her career, but we are living in a totally different America than the one she knew when she entered politics forty-five years ago,” the thirty-nine-year-old Chakrabarti said of his bid.

Prior to working for AOC, Chakrabarti worked for Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign and then co-founded Justice Democrats, a progressive group that helped elect AOC in 2018. After his time as her chief of staff, he worked on advancing the Green New Deal.

Pelosi, for her part, has proved to be an electoral juggernaut — and the Harvard-educated Texas native Chakrabarti seems to have spent relatively little time in her district. Most expect the elder Pelosi’s daughter, Christine, to mount a strong bid when her mom calls it quits — perhaps to spend more time monitoring the stock market.

Kamala’s Joe Rogan Inexperience

Joe Rogan wants to clarify why he never shot an interview with Vice President Kamala Harris. Following a bombshell claim that Rogan and his team “fucked her over and we fucked her over for Trump,” he said on his podcast this week the claim is “incorrect, just not true.”

That allegation, advanced by Harris’s forces in an upcoming book by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, is betrayed by the receipts that Rogan says his team has.

Originally, Rogan said he planned to air podcasts with both Trump and Harris on the same day, and that he offered her a late-night slot following her rare Texas event, which Allen and Parnes suggest was organized in part to allow her to drop into Rogan’s interviews. But the “wokesters” on Harris’s team ultimately axed it. “They thought it was bad optics,” he said.

Trump, on the other hand, “was super easy,” Rogan said. “We offered one day. He said ‘yes.’ That was it. There was no back-and-forth, no stipulations, no edits, just a straightforward booking. Harris’s team, on the other hand, never fully committed.”

There were a number of reasons for Harris’s team to regret dumping Rogan; in under a day, Rogan’s Trump interview broke YouTube’s viewership records, and the podcaster ultimately endorsed the Republican days before the election.

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