America's Talking - Feds Create Race, Gender Speech Codes for Scientists to Direct Report Language

Episode Date: April 7, 2023

The National Institute of Standards and Technology, a federal and science technology office, has made race and gender speech codes for its scientists a top priority. The guidance, for example, tells federal employees not to use the words "blacklist" or "whitelist" because of the racial connotations and also cautions against "using terms that assign a gender to inanimate objects, such as male/female connectors." Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/america-in-focus/support Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Hello and welcome to America and Focus powered by the Center Square. I'm Dan McAulb, executive editor of the Center Square Newswire Service. Joining me today is Casey Harper. The Center Square is Washington, D.C. Bureau Chief. Because of the Easter holiday, we are recording this a day early on Thursday, April 6th this week. Casey, you've been covering what at least critics call the woke federal government, how President Biden's administration has been inserting equity, fairness, inclusion issues into national politics. policy, federal policy. You broke another story this week regarding that. Tell us a little about it. Yeah. This story is about a little known but well-funded federal agency called NIST. It is kind of, it's the National Institute of Standards and Technology. It's a federal technology office that helps with, I guess, inventions, helps us stay competitive with, you know, nations like China. It's innovation. It's science. That kind of thing. It works with scientists a lot. You know,

we uncovered some pretty interesting details about, of course, their taxpayer-funded, about their gender and speech codes and how they've directed their scientists, what they can and can't say in reports. And a lot of it really toes the line of the liberal gender ideology and critical race theory doctrine instead of become really controversial and really popular among federal agencies. I mean, some of the, you know, most interesting examples, you know, scientists can't use the terms blacklist or white list, which is really, you know, common in tech and computer science and things, blacklist and white lists because of the racial connotations, which just objectively those words, the origins of those words have no racial.

In their initial conception in English, they had no racial meaning. And they actually, the words actually predate the United States of America as a whole. So it's not like these words were invented in the antebellum south or something. So I think that's worth noting. But, you know, and then there's stuff about gender. Like you can't use, if you've ever worked like an electrician or something, you know all about male and female connectors, but you're not allowed to use under these speech codes. You can't assign gender to kind of these physical objects. And so these are just two examples

of the kind of thing that's going on. So you might say, well, why does this matter? I mean, what does this have to do with science? Right. Well, exactly. And then the other, the bigger thing is this is a big part of a very large trend. Why I'm personally interested in this is because these ideas, of course, around critical race theory and also gender ideology are only becoming more controversial, not less controversial. Some issues, they start out controversial and over time, American people kind of come around. But gender and critical history is not like that, actually. And the story I cite a Pew Research, which shows that over the last, you know, five years or so, Americans have actually become less convinced about gender ideology. So, for instance, now 60% of

Americans say a person's gender is actually determined by their sex assigned at birth, which, of course, is the complete opposite of what is taught in a lot of universities about gender intersectionality. But that 60% is actually higher. It's been rising since 2017. So in the last few years, Americans have become more and more skeptical of gender ideology. And of course, critical race theories become more and more controversial. But even with that really unsettled question by the American public, federal agencies are fully embracing this to the tune of millions and millions of taxpayer dollars. And so that's where we come in and why I'm interested in it. You know, we cover the taxpayer angle at the center square.com. And if you're listening to this, your taxpayer dollars are

funding these kind of reports, these kind of ideas, these federal agencies, which really receive very little supervision from Congress or anyone else, you know, the inspector generals, sometimes write reports that hardly anyone reads. They're just, it's kind of a wild west and they're spending this money and they've totally embraced intersectionality in this report. It's just one of many, you know, examples we've been writing about. You've covered similar types of stories about this ideology that the Biden administration is putting on, for example, through the Department of Defense and the Pentagon and what they're doing with the military. Briefly summarize that. Yeah, I mean, there's been a couple of examples. I mean, NIH National Institute of Health has funded. I wrote a story

while back about the researching, you know, spending millions of dollars on equity issues and advancing LGBT ideas instead of their core purpose, which is researching medical cures. And you, yeah, you reference the Pentagon, which is a great example, the, the, the Pentagon really got a lot of flack, no pun intended in recent weeks, because of how they've been spending millions and millions of dollars on diversity equity inclusion offices, putting books about white privilege in the military school libraries because military school, you know, for military families and things like that. So much money goes into training and diversity equity inclusion, which is the buzzword for the offices within federal agencies that advance these ideas. And they're spending,

this isn't small amounts of money. It's millions and millions of dollars going to. towards this stuff. And this is all while the Pentagon, for example, is having a lot of trouble meeting the weapons requests of Ukraine. It's really the Ukraine conflict has exposed that our Pentagon is not nearly as prepared to meet some of these weapons requests as many would have hoped. So we're already running out of like things like Stinger missiles and we can't make them fast enough to supply Ukraine, which of course has its own, is alarming for its own reasons, you know, as far as our national defense and also very illuminating if we ever. did something like try to defend Taiwan, which would be very risky, very, very difficult logistically

because Taiwan's on the other side of the world right in China's backyard. And so I started raising the question, would we even be able to if we wanted to? I mean, let alone would it be an American interest? So Pentagon's having all these issues dealing with all these problems and on the side, they're just siphoning off millions of dollars to gender and CRT kind of things. Now this week, you uncovered the same kind of thing with the National Institute of State. standards and technology. I know you're going to keep digging into this story. Casey, what are the federal government's priorities and what should they be? Anyway, we are out of time. Listeners can keep up with this story and more at thecenter square.com. Or Casey Harper, I'm Dan McHale. Thank you for

listening.