Pirate Wires - The End Of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion | Pirate Wires Podcast #28 🏴‍☠️

Episode Date: January 5, 2024

EPISODE #28: Happy New Year! The Pirate Wires crew is back! We may be in the new year, but the Claudine Gay discourse has decided ride into 2024 with us. We discuss the recent resignation of Claudine Gay from Harvard, the embarrassing (yet predictable) media response, the citizen journalism that took down Claudine, the end of DEI, and the vibe shift of race relations in the country within schools and the workplace. Featuring Mike Solana , Brandon Gorrell, River Page, Sanjana Friedman Subscribe to Pirate Wires: https://www.piratewires.com/ Topics Discussed: https://www.theindustry.pw/p/gay-might-be-out-but-dei-is-still Pirate Wires Twitter: https://twitter.com/PirateWires Mike Twitter: https://twitter.com/micsolana Brandon Twitter: https://twitter.com/brandongorrell River Twitter: https://twitter.com/river_is_nice Sanjana Twitter: https://twitter.com/metaversehell TIMESTAMPS: 0:00 - Welcome Back To The Pirate Wires Pod! Like & Subscribe! 1:30 - Claudine Gay Resigns From Harvard 9:15 - The Wild Takes Online - From Plagiarism = Racism to Scalping 19:00 - The Changing Rules Of Racism 28:30 - Vibe Shift - Is This The End Of DEI?? (Maybe not..) 48:30 - It's Time To End Racial & Gender Quotas 52:00 - Thanks For Watching! PW Launch Coming Soon?! Like & Subscribe - See You Next Week! #podcast #woke #politics #harvard #claudinegay #DEI #racism #culture #technology

Judgment, gay. Defiant school pres resigns over anti-Semitism plagiarism scandals. Harvard's president's resignation highlights new conservative weapon against colleges, plagiarism. Why black excellence is never enough. The next president of Harvard University must be a black woman. Plagiarism is the new scalping in the right-wing arsenal. We're not f***ing racist. We're not doing hiring quotas, and we're not doing gender quotas. Welcome back to the pod. It is 2024. I hope you guys had a great new year. Today, we are talking about the only thing we could possibly be talking about, the absolute icon, the legend, Claudine Gay. This is the now disgraced former president of

Harvard University. We are going to talk about a few things here. I mean, everyone's kind of like, should she have been fired? Should she not have been fired? I can get into that a little bit, but I'm more interested in sort of why is this story such a huge deal? So what happened? Why are people absolutely obsessed with it on the left, on the right? What does Claudine Gay represent? What are we really talking about here? Because I do think it is very important. We're going to talk about the role of Twitter in all of this and the much discussed vibe shift. Is DEI over? Is it just beginning? What's going on there? Certainly, we can talk about it now. That feels different. But let's just start with the story at hand. Claudine Gay, president of Harvard. The background on Claudine is she was a very powerful bureaucrat

at Harvard before she became president. She was also one of the sort of big figures supporting maybe DEI. Certainly, this is the frame that we've seen in the press since. River, a handful of things that she's worked on in the sort of early days before the drama began. So before she was president, she was Dean of the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Science. dean of the harrow faculty of arts and science um and when she was there she did a couple of like blm era things like 2020 she commissioned a task force to diversify portraits in certain buildings so essentially like affirmative action for paintings in 2022 she implemented an initiative that was actually commissioned by her irups to dename certain buildings and signs named after people in the past who are considered racist now because they owned slaves or because they lived in the 1800s i guess she oversaw affirmative action um as dean

when she was over the arts and sciences department but i mean that was already kind of in place um and when affirmative action was struck down if you remember the supreme court case that shut down affirmative or struck down affirmative actions that was actually harvard that was a plaintiff in that case she said that the pursuit of racial justice would go on and essentially conveyed that harvard was going to do whatever it could legally to continue to find a legal workaround to. Yeah, it's illegal now, but we're still going to do it. Yeah, we're going to find a loophole, basically. And then after the infamous congressional hearing.

So that's just now we're talking now a couple of months ago now. This is the Claudine Gay and the other two college presidents, they're at the hearing and they kind of fail to adequately condemn anti-Semitism or calls for genocide on campus. At least that is the take on the right and among, I would say, a lot of Jewish people in America and sort of like some elements of the media. There's disagreement there though. We had a whole podcast about that. Yeah. Yeah. I think they kind of treated it more as a legal hearing than as like the show trial which i mean like all congressional hearings if you're going to call before congress like that's a show trial you just say all the congressional hearings i was saying this why we should there's no reason to even have them

they they first of all they shouldn't be televised if you could the only thing way i can think of a congressional hearing really mattering is if you have people in Congress who are trying to pass laws on certain issues, like for example, AI regulation. That's a great opportunity to bring in experts in the field to ask questions about this thing that you don't understand because you're a legislator, not a guy building AI. So if the doors were closed and these were not opportunities to create commercials for campaigns and to grandstand, then maybe there would be some utility in it. But no, of course not. Now, I mean, Claudia and Gay is one of every, I've never seen a congressional hearing that wasn't just an opportunity for congressmen to grandstand. I've never seen one that wasn't that.

No, no, that's what they're for after that hearing though um harvard's office of equity diversity inclusion and belonging uh which was under her purview as president deleted a bunch of documents from its websites which were mostly like white fragility type uh stuff you know like you should feel bad and like think about racism all the time like that sort of thing i didn't realize that so following the controversy the controversy before congress what documents specifically were deleted were they her pieces or things that she was sharing what was it no it was just documents that were uh i think basically just like infographic type stuff um in that standard art form what is it called the uh uh corporate memphis

with the where they all look like they have like elephantitis or whatever yeah it's just yeah yeah yeah there's like always one with like a crutch and one with an afro and one that's bald or a woman yeah and a hijabi who's like a hijabi or whatever yeah yeah um so yeah i mean my my general take is that like she yes she did all of this stuff but like all of the elite universities were doing this type of shit around the same time i don't think that she's really the final boss that she's of like dei or whatever that she's being made out to be she was like clearly a diversity hire and i think that's kind of what ticks people off is that like she was kind of a shoddy academic who didn't really, her work wasn't really groundbreaking. She really didn't put that much out. There was that

plagiarism scandal, which I looked into that. And it mostly just seems like she was being sloppy. Like she wasn't actually stealing anybody's ideas. She just wasn't like- Let's just back up. So we have the background on Claududine gay we know kind of what she was doing before she became president she does become president there is a question of like is she qualified for this or are we just looking for a black woman to be the president um this poses another question that we i hope we'll get into a little bit earlier uh a little bit later today which is like what the concept of dei does to black people specifically um where you know your work is constantly called into question now for valid reason because you actually actively have people saying we are doing

racial quotas we are hiring people because they're women because they're black like what does that do like now there's like i didn't know jack shit about claine Gay until this month, right? Like who did? The knee jerk assumption though, is that this is a diversity hire. It's not really fair in my opinion, but that's also the system that we live in. But following all of this, right? She's president. You have the anti-Semitism stuff blowing up. People are furious. Someone leaks a dossier. Lee Fang was just doing some reporting on this today, actually, breaking. We're recording on Thursday. This will come out on Friday. So Thursday, Lee Fang, Thursday of this week, Lee Fang

puts out a piece on this dossier that had been circulating before her congressional hearing with the examples of plagiarism. And you say it's sloppy. Technically, it's plagiarism and you say it's sloppy, technically it's plagiarism. By Harvard's definition is plagiarism. I've looked at them side by side. It's very blatant and bad. And you can make an argument for sure. And I understand it that maybe she's just an idiot or sloppy or whatever, but it's chronic. There are 50 plus examples at this point. By New Year's Day, there's 50 plus examples. It's not like a word or a sentence. It's like full blocks of text interspersed with her own few words. Sometimes the citations are not even on the page. That is wild to me. I've never written that way. I can't imagine writing that way. But she's fired or she resigns. So on New's day, they're Harvard standing behind her. Donors

are standing behind her. Everyone is saying, this is just, you know, a right wing witch hunt. This is, uh, the free beacon, which is certainly a conservative news outlet. Um, in, in conflict, uh, in conjunction with the work of Christopher Rufo, who is a right wing activist or trying to destroy this woman who they consider to be the DE final boss and uh you know because she's the de facto leader of academia in america she runs harvard the most important college in the world um and uh they stand by her until new year's day when even more allegations come out um and finally she resigns and uh mostly a nice letter but she also blames racism then she's in the new york times doing an

op-ed about it and let's just take a sampling of like the media's reaction to this which is i would say frustratingly predictable so you have uh well you have the you have the new york post also predictable um judgment gay defiant school pres resigns over anti-semitism plagiarism scandals but plays the victim huge capital letters harvard dropout the scandal was made for the post i feel like yeah they love it man they're always one day someone's gonna give the post it's due like they are there they're in the thick of it there's they never miss a controversy they never drop a headline like they there's there's an art to what they do and i really hope one day someone gives them that and like a beautiful novel about just like the what what they represent there's some genius behind the headlines that

works there that's been there for 30 years forever right so is it him or is it like it's the culture the institution like are people at the new york post constantly like that's not good enough for the new york post like we need to wreck people with this like like we need people to say oh my god and clutch their pearls how did like're going to walk into the New York Post with a benign headline, get out of here. Go back to the Miami Herald or whatever. Okay. So that's the New York Post, but the rest of the media is pretty lockstep on the completely other end of the spectrum. You have Claudine Gay. This is her opinion. What just happened at Harvard is bigger than me. And there I do agree with her. We'll get into it in a minute.

You have some really great, one of the highlights, I would say, maybe the highlight was the Associated Press. Harvard's president's resignation highlights new conservative weapon against colleges, plagiarism. You have from Forbes, Claudine Gay resigns from Harvard, colon, why black excellence is never enough. Mark Lamont Hill, who was fired himself from a job at MSNBC, I think, but now he's a very popular, he's still just a popular news influencer. He has his own show. The next president of Harvard University, all caps, must be a black woman. You have. It's Noah Smith laughing at a tweet that is just too good not to include. Plagiarism is the new scalping in the right-wing arsenal, a genocidal practice used by colonists posting bounties for indigenous people. Using violent trophy imagery against a black woman tells you this was never about plagiarism, but reestablishing white supremacy in academia. Even Kendi, who is really the guy behind anti-racism, he works at Boston University, my alma mater, which I am forever embarrassed of. He has a bear. I mean, he had, what was it, $20 million that he just... I mean, this is not... I don't think there was any grift. I think he's

truly just that stupid. He doesn't know what happened to it. Just like blew through it, burned away all of this money he got from the BLM days. But he is the intellect behind anti-racism today. And he says, quote, racist mobs won't stop until they topple all black people from positions of power and influence who are not reinforcing the structure of racism. What these racist mobs are doing should be obvious to any reporter who cares about truth or justice as opposed to conflicts and cliques. Once again, using this language of like violence and killing and what is it? Lynching, right?

To describe the reaction to Claudine Gay. And then Congressman Jamal Bowman, who is an idiot. Again, I almost feel bad picking on these. He's genuinely stupid, but he is a congressman. This isn't about plagiarism or anti-Semitism. This is about racism and intimidation. This makes no one safer. The only winners are fascists who bullied a brilliant and historic black woman into resignation. I do agree that it's historic. She is the shortest tenure of any president in Harvard's 387 year history.

Congratulations. You've made history. 2024, Bowman says, will be a battle for truth, democracy, and our shared humanity. That one I also agree with. So these are the incredible headlines. I mean, there are tons of tweets in here. The back and forth is endless. But this is from the media.

I mean, this is roughly the opinion is like, this woman is being targeted. The scalping thing comes from that AP piece, the original one that said, the main takeaway from this story is plagiarism is now a weapon of the right wing against academics. Within it, they said scalping was a weapon that was used by white people to kill and terrorize indians it does that thing to do like black people were never scalped in this country like they were they're really the only ones who weren't scalped if you think about it because like like there were like cases in the south in the west like where like the army like would pay you to like bring kamachi scalps or whatever like

certain tribes that were they were like at war with and then like the indians would also scalp white people they were like pioneers and stuff but like black people never really got scalped i think like lynching is like obviously too much but at least i guess at least works for like a strained metaphor i didn't see so right i it's weird that we didn't see as much i mean in the mainstream press you're never gonna i mean i don't think you would see someone straight up say this is a lynching i mean this is a woman who got fired for plagiarism that actually exists that you can point to and and and have a conversation about um but i did see lots of this like for me the scalping thing separate from the history of

scalping and it was like a cartoonish frame that it was only used by white people by the AP, which they then had to correct on the page. There's a correction now. Is this use of like, this is violence, right? Like this is classic DEI approach to stuff too. Is it like to, or I would say like the anti-racist approach, whatever, like it's none of these words are sufficient. It's wokeness. We don't have a better word than wokeness, but like that woke perspective is that certain kinds of speech are violent. And they're saying like, this was, I mean, an extreme example of violence. What happened to Claudine Gay was violence. You know,

scalping is used, white supremacy is invoked. This is seen as something much bigger than a woman being fired. And I think that they're right, that it is something much bigger than a woman being fired because of what she represents. Claudine Gay is the DEI bureaucrat. She does, not just to the right wing, but clearly to the left wing, represent a woman who was hired because she was black and a woman, which is important, right? You have Lamont out there saying, there is some innate importance in her being a black woman. There needs to be a black woman as the president of Harvard. They believe that. It is central to why she's there. Because she's a black woman, it conveys some kind of power to the cause.

And so what we're having is a conversation about that. We're having a conversation about diversity, equity, and inclusion. We're having a conversation about racial quotas. We're having a conversation about how do you help underperforming minorities? Is it through this? Is there a systemic problem that we have to defeat? How do you do it? Is it with these programs, the kind that she spearheaded and protected at Harvard? Or is it through merit and meritocracy? And that's a big open question. But I do think,

and we can talk about that now, but I do think that that's actually what we're talking about. It has nothing to do with her. It has nothing to do with Harvard. I don't think it has anything to do with anti-Semitism. I don't think it has anything to do with her. It has nothing to do with Harvard. I don't think it has anything to do with anti-Semitism. I don't think it has anything to do with her congressional... That triggered it, maybe, her congressional... Her congressional hearing is what triggered this whole thing. But that's not why people are talking about it right now. I don't think people care about that at all. I think they care about when they're applying for a job and they're white or Asian, is that going to count against them? I think that's what, and people will say maybe that doesn't exist or whatever, but that's certainly what people believe and that's

certainly what people are fighting about right now, I think. Thoughts? I mean, I agree broadly that obviously the DEI component of this is a huge reason why this story has taken off. I do think there's a component of the fascination with Claudine Gay that also has to do with our broader frustration with higher education in this country. And she's kind of the perfect villain in that, you know, in some senses, she was clearly diversity higher. She plagiarized, you know, vast swaths of her doctoral dissertation in a way that I think a lot of people have long suspected academics have, you know, been carving their way forward. And, you know, she's the head of Harvard, which is this institution that represents kind of the pinnacle of this, you know, entrenched academic industrial complex,

almost, where you have all of these people you know who graduate from ivy league institutions or ivy league adjacent institutions and then go on to form part of this professional managerial class that just sort of creates this dei verbiage um and imposes it on people and then has this sense of like intellectual and moral superiority um by dint of the fact that they are associated with universities like Harvard. So I do think there's another component to the Claudine Gay, you know, she's kind of a, I mean, she's not a martyr because I don't think that she's, I mean, she plagiarized her work and I think, you know, should definitely resign. But I do think that the reason why she's being,

I think, you know, should definitely resign. But I do think that the reason why she's being, she's blown up in this moment also has to do with that kind of broader frustration that people feel. Yeah, America doesn't love an academic. Like it doesn't love an intellectual, doesn't love someone who, you know, thinks they're better than everybody.

And that doesn't matter what their color is. That's just like the populist thing that exists in this country. And that's a great point. I think it's also interesting to talk about go ahead oh i was gonna say i think people are kind of frustrated too with like the double speak or at least i am where it's like you read these articles and they were like people think that she was hired because of her race and gender and then like people are like

we the next president of harvard must be hired on the basis of their race and gender it's like okay so like she wasn't but like she should have been or the basis of their race and gender it's like okay so like she wasn't but like she should have been or the next one should be i mean it's it's one of those things where like i remember like when kamala harris got selected i was like yeah she just got selected because she's a black woman and like that it was a mistake obviously because she's not a very talented politician and people and you say things like that and they were like she got there on marriage she got i'm like no biden literally said i'm going to pick a black woman it's like this is the same they say what they're

doing and then they get mad at you for like pointing out what they're doing when justice great replacement thing where like the like the democratic party was like we need more immigrants because they'll vote for us. And then if you say that, it's like blood libel or something. I think it's actually worse. It's more clear cut than that. So the replacement theory thing is a little bit more complicated because you have certain Democrats who say whatever, and you can't really say what the actual strategy of the DNC. There's no one who's been like, here's the DNC strategy. It's just random Democrats who are saying things like, can't wait for white people to be less white people, that's coming and things

like that. And then you have to pretend they didn't say that, but they don't represent all of the Democrats. In the case of something like Kamala or I would say Justice Brown, you have the explicit comment from the person responsible for the selection, right? Biden said that he would make sure that this was a black woman. And so no matter how accomplished this person is, and I would say, even though Brown, I can't stand her, she is accomplished, right? She's an accomplished justice. her. She is accomplished, right? She's an accomplished justice. It doesn't matter because someone just said that the reason you were being hired was because of the color of your skin and

the fact that you were a woman. And I agree. It is this really obnoxious doublespeak where they can say things like that. And then you have to sit there and pretend that they didn't say that. We have to all sit here and pretend that someone was hired for a different reason. We know what the reason was. You were hired for the reason that you said, which is that you are black and a woman. And that's not the kind of culture that any of us want to live in. It's crazy to have been raised, all of us were raised with the rules and it was like racism and sexism were wrong. uh and it was defined in a very obvious and clear-cut way which was judging people based on these things is the example of racism and

sexism and now for the last you know 10 years we've been trying to sort of redefine or we've been we've been expected to accept a redefinition of these words racism and sexism the body has rejected the new organ no one agrees with the new definitions because they're bullshit and um and now we have you know these just i would say argue actually systemically sexist and racist policies in place via uh via dei but what do you guys make of the the we touched on it a little bit earlier. I would really love your opinion on just what it does to minorities in the country who are excelling. Like what do these policies do to them? Um, am I off base? Am I missing some piece of this? Um, like, is it actually,

my assumption is that it's actually just making life for accomplished black people much more difficult. Yeah. I mean, I think that one of the most pernicious and weirdly under-discussed aspects of all the DEI stuff is there's a lot of studies, I think, that show that if you constantly tell minority students, I think they've done studies in math at least and women that they are, it's been found that they're like underperforming vis-a-vis their white or male colleagues.

They'll actually do worse on tests if you tell them that like before they take the tests. And it makes sense because if you're constantly signaling to people that they're expected to underperform or that somehow there have to be these exceptional measures taken such that they, you know, perform the way that their white or male peers perform in the sciences or whatever, you can see how that would create this kind of inferiority complex almost in people. And then for people who are performing well, of course, their work sort of gets written off as like, oh, well, you're just, you know, a DEI hire, or maybe, you know, you're here, you know, if you're a woman in STEM or something, you're here because we needed to have a token woman on the team or something like that. So I do think it creates all kinds of psychological complexes

that are not healthy for people. One of the things that I realized during the course of this whole story was that it seems now that the left has a different opinion about institutions in higher education than the right. It seems like because they're now saying that well because you see a lot of a lot of people on the left on twitter saying well a lot of people played a lot of people in academia plagiarize so we should be going after them too um and generally a pop like being like yeah she plagiarized but so what or she just copy and pasted um sentences but not she didn't copy somebody's idea um essentially apologizing for plagiarism but i feel like they really missed the they either missed the forest for the trees there um the

forest being the fact that harvard harvard is supposed to be an elite institution with integrity, where the best of the best are leading the best of the best students. So you should not have a mediocre scholar as the president of Harvard. You should have somebody who's an intellectual powerhouse. Clearly, Claudine Gay is not., if they're apologizing for plagiarism, maybe they don't actually think that Harvard and our institutions are places for, um, the,

for elite people to like, literally like high powered intellectuals to, um, to work on their ideas and to, and to, um, to, to do that work.

Maybe they think of it as something else you know a place for um for status for yeah it's a place where you go to get sort of named as important and that's why they see the sort of dei stuff as so valid because it's like well there should be an even distribution of something like status they don't care about academic merit or what your SAT scores were. That's something that people who love DEI fundamentally seem to not understand because I think you're right. I think they are definitely like the person, the people who love harvard the most are right wingers they're the ones who still believe in the idea of harvard as a in an important institution in the same way they talk about art or cathedrals or something like they're the only ones who still believe in that shit

everyone else is like this is just where we make bureaucrats and um and high status bureaucrats at that. And so, yeah, it's not that hard to do those jobs and we don't need you to be that smart. It doesn't actually matter. You don't have to be a brilliant academic. Yeah. I also think it's kind of funny when people are like, why don't we just run all... Why are we singling out Claudine Gay and not other professors for this kind of treatment? Because it's like, you know, with the rise of AI, they probably could, at some point we probably could just run all tenure track professors in the US's dissertations through plagiarism checking software. And I'm sure that heads would roll. Well, it's coming. That I think for sure is the, if my read of the internet is correct, like the sort of conversation that's happening there, this is what people want to do. And this is what maybe the EP is really talking about. Like they're predicting, you're right. Like this, the institutions are perceived, specifically college, colleges, academia is perceived as a sort of like the death star of the left wing.

And they rely on this illusion of integrity that doesn't seem to really actually to exist, in fact, or at least in there are all sorts of people who are not worthy of the word integrity. I think that they're correct that this is going to become something that happens. I think you're going to see tons of plagiarism stuff come out. And that is just, it's like an interesting way to go after someone who uses their integrity themselves as a kind of weapon, right? When you have a Harvard professor sit down and be like, I stand for something really important, but actually they're just espousing politics. This is like how journalists say that they stand for the principles of truth and searching,

whatever it is. But actually it's like, they're clearly motivated by politics. This is now, this sort of honesty filter is going to now be applied. It's already been applied to the journalists. Now it's going to be applied to academics. And I don't know how academics are going to survive that, honestly, because unlike, I mean, the media doesn't get any money. At least the New York Times is not getting money from the government. But Harvard got $1.5 billion is what I read from, it was Chamath was writing about this. I don't know. Can we get a fact check on that? How much money did Harvard get? How much money does Harvard get from the government? Hmm.

2021 was 625 million. I don't know. It's a lot of money. We're not going to be doing that anymore. Like that's going to become, that is going to become a constant political football. Yeah. And I think it's also going to affect a lot of, I mean, the DEI sort of academics are going to be easy targets because some of them are just so transparent in their plagiarism and they just lift, you know, carbon copy citations from other scholars. But I also think it's going to come for scientists

because a lot of studies that don't replicate are probably going to be exposed as fraudulent. And then the kind of policies that those studies are used to support will also, then the kind of policies that those studies are used to support will also hopefully be called into question. But that's what happened at Stanford last year. What happened at Stanford? The president was, he basically was made to resign because it came out that, so he's a neurobiologist, I think, or a neuroscientist. And the student newspaper actually broke a very long investigative story, suggesting that the sort of keystone Alzheimer's paper that he had published early

in his career was based on misrepresented data. And this led to a long ongoing investigation where it was found that like several of his papers misrepresented data. And the papers were sort of heralded as this milestone in Alzheimer's research. And he eventually resigned this summer and retracted the paper, I think a few weeks ago. It's crazy because I was told that this kind of thing would never happen to a white man. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. I want to talk a bit about the vibe shift Yep, exactly. Yeah. Obviously, whether it's fair or not, Claudine Gay came to represent DEI conceptually for a lot of people. Through her, this conversation started to happen. Is it fair for someone to be hired based on their race or their gender, which are practices that she supported while at Harvard, and also called into question just sort of like, again, conceptually through the anti-Semitism thing, because that is a question of like, who counts as a minority? Do Jews count as a minority? When they don't feel safe on campus, does it count? This is on the heels of the Supreme Court ruling about Harvard's unfair admissions process, or let's not say unfair, let's say racially and

gender-based admissions process. Some people maybe think that's fair. But we're having that conversation now. And people are out there saying, I mean, huge people, Elon Musk, every day it feels like is saying DEI is racist. It is synonymous with the word racism. To have a program at your tech company where you are looking, you're tracking the gender and race of other people, that's racist. I want to read Brian Armstrong's tweet from yesterday, which was really remarkable to me because I think for someone like Elon Musk, Elon is massive and he owns Twitter and he clearly does not give a fuck what anybody thinks. And there's like a little bit of a Kanye West thing about him where he can almost get away with stuff because, I mean, Kanye didn't get away with everything at the very end.

They got him. But for a long time, he could get away with pretty much anything because he was just that guy who said shit. And Elon has kind of fashioned himself as that. And he's the richest man alive and runs 12 companies and is just, you're not going to really come for him. He's not going to shut up. that are not quite at Elon's level, I think it's a lot harder for them to speak up. And there's a question of like, why would you speak up about anything that you don't have to, you don't really need to? But here he is, Brian Armstrong, who famously put out his memo at his company at the height of the kind of crazy cultural authoritarianism a couple of years ago. And he said, we're not going to be doing politics at work anymore. You're not going to be talking about politics in your Slack channel. We're talking about cryptocurrency and Coinbase. And those are the things that are permitted. And if we're taking public positions, which he does,

our political positions, which he does take publicly often, they're going to be about our field and our company, and that's it. And a lot of people resigned because of that. He paid them to do so, 60, I believe, and never turned back. Facebook quietly copied him after that. That's their policy as well. And he got tons of backlash for it, but survived and remained quiet relatively on this kind of stuff after that. So here's Brian Armstrong talking about a Bill Ackman essay on this subject of Claudine Gay and the DEI stuff. Well said, he says. Hopefully this marks the beginning of the end for DEI as a movement, which got horribly corrupted by Marxist thought and a return to a true meritocracy. One thing not often discussed is

it's just not unethical to hire based on race or gender and undermines the candidates who get hired this way. It's also illegal in all 50 states. Any search which explicitly had race or gender as a requirement arguably broke the law, and we may see legal action on it, including one Supreme Court justice and one California senator, among many examples. This is wild from a big CEO in tech. He is not only saying we're not doing DEI anymore, which two years ago would have been unthinkable. He would have immediately been called a white supremacist. You would have seen this all over every single tech journal. He's saying you're going to get sued. He's telling other CEOs not

to do it. And this is a movement. You see huge influential, you see Paul Graham coming out against this stuff. Obviously, the Founders Fund people have been coming out against this stuff forever. Peter Thiel, who I work for at Founders Fund, wrote literally a book called The Diversity Myth 20 fucking years ago. I mean, he's been on this train, but to see it permeate from that world of VC to the highest CEO, there's Elon, but then at every level, you have Brian Armstrong saying it as well. This is very much a choice now that CEOs are able to make. They don't have to have these programs and they can say to their recruiters who... I was talking to someone the other day. He's a series A company. He has a recruiter who he's been very clear with. We're not hiring based on race and gender. Over and over and over again, this has to come up because it keeps creeping in. We're not doing this. We're not doing this. We're not doing this. We're hiring on merit only. The expectation is that the team should be

naturally diverse because there are plenty of talented people all over the place, but we're not doing this. We're not doing quotas. Saw this document where there were little marks next to names for potential candidates. And he was like, what is this? And it was, the recruiter had to sort of admit, well, this is, they're asterisks for diversity. These are either racial minorities or they're women or whatever. And it's like, this is, they're asterisks for diversity. These are either racial minorities or they're women or whatever. And it's like, this is coming, like the CEO can explicitly say, do not do this. I do not want to do this. And there's still pushback. It still creeps in because it's so strong, this belief. It is like really ingrained in people that this is the right thing to do. But now you have an additional, you have people like... You have the entire... You have industry leadership,

not only from venture, but really the important thing is executives in major companies saying this. And you have this additional legal thing that no one is really... There are a handful of lawsuits in play right now targeting both Amazon and Meta, but this is all on the heels of the college lawsuits, which seem to indicate that if you were discriminated against based on your skin color at a major company, if you were passed up for a promotion, or if you were explicitly fired maybe to maintain a racial quota that was advantageous to the company for whatever reason, you have an opportunity to sue. And Brian is sitting here saying what I think every CEO I've talked to believes, which is not only is this wrong, I'm pretty sure it's opening us up to litigation.

And we've already seen litigation across not only industry, but obviously academia. It's going to keep happening. That's just a huge major change. Now, the question is, is it a real substantial change? Claudine Gay, final boss of DEI? I don't think so. I know, you had some thoughts about that. I think it's a huge deal that people are talking about this i'm less convinced that um that we're over this stuff for a variety of reasons but i do want to hear from you guys so i know river you said you were not convinced either what is your take on this well i mean i think that her tenure was like pretty par for the course in terms of like modern academia because like this thing is

institutionalized and that's why i don't think that she's the final boss is because like people can complain on twitter or whatever and they can like sort of like offer up claudian gay is like this sacrificial lamb because she was a shitty scholar and like they can have like sort of non-ideological reasons for pressuring her to resign but i mean this is just gonna like continue to replicate itself i mean the the lawsuits that could change something the lawsuits are the only things that can that can change this and even still you know you do have the claudian gaze of the world that we're saying, we'll find a way. In fact, you have President Biden encouraging people to find a way around it and outlining in the college example how possibly you could do that. publicly reveal racial demographics or gender breakdowns or things like this. But the fact that it's a choice is promising. And this vibe shift, I first wrote about the vibe shifts a year ago. It was following Elon's takeover of Twitter. And the vibe shift had been a sort of meme. It's

a funny thing to say, oh, the vibe has shifted. I mean, who knows? Sure, there's someone who wrote something along these lines before I did. But I was really applying it to specifically Twitter, politics, culture, Elon's takeover, what that means for all of us, tech culture, vibe shift. That was the beginning. It was once things were able to be said, that was the beginning. Today, we have people popping off all over throughout the tech Twitter this week, talking about a vibe shift that has happened. Um, it was really bad. You might want to, uh, one thing you could possibly do is like host a conference about forbidden ideas and call it hereticon and like have a high level thesis about,

Hey guys, it's really bad that we can't say important things in 2019 when I published the first essay introducing the concept. Um, but I'm glad people have come around and, uh, and the vibe shift didn't happen today. It happened a year ago. What's happening today is the end of a cultural shift that has concluded in an open conversation about a topic that people had already made up their minds on. That shift had already taken place. The question moving forward is what comes next? And because this stuff has infected every single institution in the country, not just we're talking about academia, we're talking about tech. It's in the military, right? You have budget items, line items for DEI in the tens of millions of dollars. This stuff is everywhere.

I don't know how you roll all that back. Lawsuits are going to do a lot and this will be sort of semi-gradual, but there's a lot there that needs to be... There's a lot of rot that needs to be cut away. You need to build new institutions that bake in the values that are resistant to this kind of stuff. And then as evidenced by my example earlier of my friend at the Series A company, even when you do all of that, even when you state you're building a new institution, you're saying we're not doing this, you still have this creep from people who believe in this fundamentalist idea that there should be racial quotas. Yeah. I think I'm a little bit cynical about the end of DEI, honestly, even though I do agree that there is a very hopeful cultural vibe shift happening just because of how

entrenched so many of these bureaucrats are at every level of local, state, and federal politics. I mean, you know, River, you had this great piece a few weeks ago in the industry about all these executive orders that Biden has sort of enshrining DEI in corporate America. And in San Francisco, you have an Office of Racial Equity, and you've got, you know, the Human Rights Commission and all of these organizations that basically function as make work programs for DEI adjacent activists. And I always think, like, what are these people going to do if we, you know, if the lawsuit when the lawsuits come in and their work becomes obsolete, you're going to have this like massive. I don't know how many people are actually like diversity administrators, but I think there's a lot, this massive class of people who are out of work and fighting tooth and nail to preserve their perverse ideology. And I do think

that there's this kind of people sort of their eyes glaze over when you start talking to them about like the nitty gritty of local politics and sort of these executive orders and that kind of thing so there's an attention problem here where people need to understand you know if we're going to get rid of dei fully uh in the kind of meaningful way it manifests with these massive reallocations of taxpayer money to administrators you're going to have to start looking at that kind of these unsexy local organizations. Yeah. That attention thing is so important and it's how this stuff exists, right? This didn't just happen yesterday. This didn't just happen five years ago. This didn't happen during Me Too. This started before any of us

were born in the sort of affirmative action the original affirmative action conversation that was when it was affirmative action what does that mean that means you have to take affirmative action to correct these racial grievances of the past we're no longer talking about uh we're we've reintroduced the phrase systemic racism but when we're talking about affirmative action we weren't talking about like um the fact that black southerners were prohibited from voting we're talking about like what action can we take to ameliorate these historical issues right like there is a disparity of of uh there's a racial disparity in these following institutions and

we can just correct it top down we have to just do that that's the only way to fix this that's where conceptually this stuff began it was was a long time ago before it hit the academia and became intellectualized and the nineties then died and came back. And then really just sort of mainstreamed in 2020. Yeah. Like my grandparents are retiring. I think my grandpa always said like he owns a business so how how much he will retire he doesn't know but he says he's retiring him like my grandparents generation and they're fairly young for grandparents because my mom had me when she was like a teenager but like they're the last generation of people who are like still even in the workforce

who grew up under segregation and like we're living in such a completely different world than we were back then. It's like you can't even really... My grandparents have talked to me about it, and they were like, no, it was crazy. There were protests. People were like... The first day of integration,

somebody threw a beer bottle at like a black kid who's like walking down the street like it's like really fucked up crazy stuff um and like you did have to have like something extreme where you did actually forcibly like integrate these institutions but like it should have come with like an expiration date because now like we're living in a time where really nobody who's working grew up under that system. And so you're just dealing with a set of people for whom the realities of segregation and Jim Crow are a historical memory. They were not part of your lived experiences as somebody currently in the workforce.

I disagree slightly. Because I think the policies you're talking about, the forced integration, they're ideologically separate. So what you're seeing, while Claudine Gay was speaking before Congress, one of the things that came up, and I forget which congressman it was, came up and I forget which congressman it was, black gentleman, I can't remember now, conservative, he brought up the housing at Harvard and the sort of black only housing, which was allowed on campus. And what he was hinting at there was how different things were and how different this conversation is from the 19th. In the 1960s, it was integration. How do we get people together? How do we stop the systemic, the lines that are keeping people apart and allow people into these public places, right? Today, it seems like we're not interested in integration at

all. We're interested in empowering separate racial groups to maintain their separate identities and somehow coexist separately, right? It's the rise of culture. Affirmative action specifically. That served a purpose when you're talking about the University of Alabama in 1965, right? You had to have affirmative action because the administrators genuinely were racists who would not have... Yeah, but affirmative action is much bigger than that. I'm saying ideologically like that stuff is not what we're talking about. They were really not anymore. Now we're talking about multiculturalism. And I think that the empowering of people to maintain differences is like very untenable in a multiracial society. Integration as a concept,

we've lost it. It almost sounds dirty, the idea of integration to say, hey, we need to be doing integration or assimilation. That wasn't a dirty concept even a few decades ago, and now it seems really bad. No, why can't people maintain their different identities? And, uh, you know, we have to learn from different cultures and coexist in this weird sort of, uh, kaleidoscopic way. And it's like, no, that's, that to be the way that we do things in this country. And one of those things, one of those values that we all need to get on board with is that we're not fucking racist. We're not doing hiring quotas and we're not doing gender quotas. We are judging people based on their actual... I'm judging people as a publisher on their content, their literal content, not the content of their character that comes later. The actual content they're producing, that's all I care about. That's all I think that it is fair and just to care about. Sanjana, go ahead. Yeah, I mean, I agree. I just find, honestly,

I agree that affirmative action should have come with an expiration date. I think that's a very true point. And I mean, I think the former president of Yale wrote a book where he made a similar point. I don't know if he's the president actually, but a professor at Yale wrote a book recently where he makes a similar point about that. But I just, I'm constantly infuriated by the DEI stuff because I just find it so patronizing to minority groups and to women and to everyone who it claims that it's trying to elevate. And I think that, you know, at the end of the day, if America doesn't, if America continues to issue meritocracy, it's going to be to our loss because, you know, you can only, you know, equity as a concept,

for example, in mathematical achievement makes no sense. You're always going to have people who are in the lower, you know, 25% of achievement. And you're always going to have people who are in the upper 25%. And the only thing we can do is elevate mediocrity and downplay excellence, basically. And that, I think, will be to our detriment. It'll be to our detriment politically. It will be to our detriment um it'll be to our detriment politically it'll be to our detriment technologically um and so i think that you know there's also a very sort of important um social advancement component to all of this and it's not even helping black americans it's helping elite third worlders who are their their children like clogging cloning gay is like a prime example of that like she's was a professor of african-american history

she's not an african-american she's haitian-american and grew and went to private boarding schools growing up and like did all this like it's actually like if you go through statistics like the i want to say like the something like 60 of like black students at Harvey, uh, um, heart at, uh, like Ivy league universities are not African-Americans. They're the children of Caribbean or African immigrants. So like the original intent is like been completely like,

it doesn't even make sense from the point of like writing the historical, whatever disadvantages of like African-an americans throughout their many many generations in this country it's actually just helping people who you know grew up with parents with master's degrees who just got off the boat yep well it does seem it's uh on its way i don't know out but it's on it's it's on its way to i don't know, out, but it's on its way to, I don't know, further controversy, I guess. We're going to continue to have this conversation, not really at Pyrowire's though, probably, let's be honest. But I think nationally, it's going to boil up over 2024. There are going to be lawsuits and there is going to be a question of whether or not

question of whether or not you are allowed legally as a CEO to discriminate based on race, which is a question I thought we answered many decades ago. Apparently not. I do think we're going to answer it this year in 2024. That's maybe my big prediction for the year. Great to have you all back. Great to be back. Stoked for launch is coming up. Just keep that in the back of your mind. Please rate, review, subscribe, share this with your friends. Tell everybody about the PirateWiresPod and we will see you back here next week. Later.