SC274-4

https://www.globalresearch.ca/biden-power-grab-executive-order-installs-equity-commissars-rule-bureaucracy-centralize-power/5809353

Biden’s Power Grab: Executive Order Installs “Equity” Commissars to Rule the Bureaucracy and Centralize Power

On February 16, President Joe Biden issued an executive order titled

“Further Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through The Federal Government”.

The order is supposed to level the racial playing field by “addressing systemic racism in our Nation’s policies and programs”, but it does nothing of the kind.

In truth, the order represents a massive and disturbing restructuring of the federal government in a way that fundamentally changes the manner in which the agencies operate. The new system will feature “equity” commissars who will have nothing to do with “systemic racism”, but will be appointees designated to enforce the edicts of the state.

The senior agency official (in these agency equity teams) will then coordinate with the “Gender Policy Council” which is directly linked to the executive branch of government. In short, the administration is methodically building the basic scaffolding for a centrally-controlled police state masquerading as social justice operation. For all intents and purposes, the equity agenda is a cleverly-phrased moniker that conceals a plan to exert absolute control over the entire sprawling bureaucracy. Here is an excerpt from the White House print-out:

Each Agency Equity Team shall be led by a designated senior official (senior designee) charged with implementing my Administration’s equity initiatives, and shall include senior officials from the office of the agency head and the agency’s program, policy, civil rights, regulatory, science, technology, service delivery, financial assistance and grants, data, budget, procurement, public engagement, legal, and evaluation offices, as well as the agency’s Chief Diversity Officer, to the extent applicable. Agency Equity Teams shall include a combination of competitive service employees, as defined by 5 U.S.C. 2102(a), and appointees, as defined in Executive Order 13989 of January 20, 2021 (Ethics Commitments by Executive Branch Personnel), and, to the extent practicable, shall build upon and coordinate with the agency’s existing structures and processes, including with the agency’s environmental justice officer designated pursuant to Executive Order 14008 of January 27, 2021 (Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad), and with the senior agency official designated to coordinate with the Gender Policy Council pursuant to Executive Order 14020 of March 8, 2021 (Establishment of the White House Gender Policy Council). (“Executive Order on Further Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through The Federal Government”, The White House)

In other words, these new equity commissars will not only oversee the many areas of government involvement (aka– civil rights, regulatory, science, technology, service delivery, financial assistance and grants, data, budget, procurement, public engagement, legal, and evaluation offices etc) but will also be in a position to determine how those activities are portrayed to the public.

Just as the Vaccine narrative was crafted by big pharma, Madison Avenue and an accommodating media, we expect that senior agency officials will generate propaganda that aligns with the Party Doctrine while advancing the agenda of elites.

And, what assurances do we have that these “designated senior officials” will limit their supervisory duties to issues strictly related to equity, after all, equity is a fluid and potentially expansive term that could be used to include virtually anything. And, that, of course, is the real objective, to use equity as a fig leaf for controlling every nook and cranny of the federal bureaucracy. Here’s more from an article at Federal News Network titled “3 requirements for agencies under Biden’s new executive order on equity”:

Agencies have until this September to submit an equity action plan to the newly created White House Steering Committee on Equity. Ambassador Susan Rice, the White House’s Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy, will serve as chairwoman of the steering committee….

…agency heads will also have to appoint a senior official to lead the equity team, in partnership with each agency’s chief diversity officer. The equity teams will also work with each agency’s environmental justice officer, as well as the White House Gender Policy Council...

Additionally, agencies should proactively engage with underserved communities, for example by holding listening sessions and outreach events. These engagements will help agencies inform their equity action plans, annual budget submissions and grants and funding opportunities, Biden said….(“3 requirements for agencies under Biden’s new executive order on equity”, Federal News Network)

When did Susan Rice become a champion of racial justice and underserved communities of color?

Never. Rice is a political powerbroker whose intimate grasp of the federal government puts her in the unique position of a trusted insider who knows how to serve her masters behind the cloak of racialist propaganda. This whole charade has nothing to do with equity or any of the other liberal claptrap the administration is peddling. This is a old fashioned power grab.

Think of the potential for corruption if the new system operates as I expect it to operate. Who will decide how contracts are issued and to which companies? What are the chances, for example, that a corporation owned by a Christian conservative would prevail in a competition with a big donor to the Democratic party?

And what about new hires? Would applicants for employment have to profess their support for the doctrinal positions of the Democrat party including racial equity, gender, climate and whatever other spurious mumbo-jumbo the party is pushing at the time ? And what about compliance? Is compliance going to be determined by politically-connected committees comprised of party loyalists and members of the donor class?

Keep in mind, every federal agency will be required to “proactively engage with underserved communities, for example by holding listening sessions and outreach events.” How is that going to work? So, now the Secretary of Defense or the the Secretary of the Treasury or the Administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration or the the Director of the National Science Foundation are going to convene “rap sessions” with minority communities or town hall meetings where the local folks can complain that they are not fairly represented? Can we expect General Mark Milley to show up at a gym on Chicago’s south side so he can ask the attendees, “Are we sending enough lethal weapons to Ukraine to meet your expectations?

No, the aim here is to create unachievable goals so the “designated senior officials” can coercively reshape the agency in a way that better fits the elite agenda. After all, no one on the Biden team conjured up this monstrosity. Like the Patriot Act, this executive order was crafted by special interests who are now actively creating the government they’ve always wanted. By using Biden as their front-man and the “equity” bunkum to hoodwink the public, they are well on their way to controlling all the levers of bureaucratic power and terminating representative government once-and-for-all. Here’s more from Biden’s executive order:

We have taken historic steps to advance full equality for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex (LGBTQI+) Americans, including by ending the ban on transgender service members in our military; prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation, gender identity, and sex characteristics across Federal programs; and signing into law the Respect for Marriage Act (Public Law 117-228) to preserve protections for the rights of same-sex and interracial couples. My Administration is also implementing the first-ever National Strategy on Gender Equity and Equality to ensure that all people, regardless of gender, have the opportunity to realize their full potential.” (“Executive Order on Further Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through The Federal Government”, The White House)

What a pathetic deception clearly aimed at diverting attention from the nuts-and-bolts restructuring that is going on right before our eyes. Biden cares as much about “gender identity” as he does about the destitute and poisoned people of Palestine, Ohio. Here’s more from Biden:

Each Agency Equity Team shall be led by a designated senior official (senior designee) charged with implementing my Administration’s equity initiatives, and shall include senior officials from the office of the agency head and the agency’s program, policy, civil rights, regulatory, science, technology, service delivery, financial assistance and grants, data, budget, procurement, public engagement, legal, and evaluation offices, as well as the agency’s Chief Diversity Officer, to the extent applicable….

So without congressional consultation, review or approval, the Biden team is forging ahead the most radical and far-reaching overhaul of the federal bureaucracy in the nation’s 247 year history. These new “Agency Equity Teams” will meddle in every area of government activity– not to improve the lives of ordinary black and brown people in underserved communities– but to ensure that the system functions in a way that best serves the interests of Biden’s paymasters. Isn’t that really what’s going on? Here’s more from the order:

There is hereby established a White House Steering Committee on Equity (Steering Committee), which shall be chaired by the Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy. The Steering Committee shall include senior officials representing policy councils and offices within the Executive Office of the President, as appropriate. The Steering Committee shall:

(i) coordinate Government-wide efforts to advance equity;

(ii) coordinate an annual process to consult with agency heads on their respective agencies’ Equity Action Plans, established in section 3(a) of this order. (The White House)

There it is in black and white: Central planning writ large. They want to run the whole kit-and-cabootle from the office of the Dear Leader. This isn’t about equity. This is about power; raw, political power. Here’s more:

Equity Action Plans described in subsection (a) of this section in order to reinforce agency efforts to meaningfully engage with and invest in underserved communities and advance equitable outcomes.”

This is undiluted hogwash. Not one person of color will see their life improved due to Biden’s executive order nor was that the objective to begin with.

This is a giant restructuring project. Can you see that? Can you see that equity is just the mask behind which the real objective is concealed? The real goal is to install political operatives in positions of power across the federal government and put them under the control of the executive. It is the centralizing of power across the bureaucracy.

The relentless virtue-signaling language in the order is the same obfuscating blather you would expect from a professional confidence huckster. It’s the type of language that people use when they want to pull the wool over your eyes. It’s important that people apply their critical thinking skills to see through this ruse and try to understand where Biden’s handlers want to take us. We are on the well-beaten path to police-state tyranny and it will take a colossal effort to turn things around.

....

https://brownstone.org/articles/a-contagion-of-cowardice/

A Contagion of Cowardice  

Jordan Peterson’s interview with Jay Bhattacharya is one of the more insightful conversations to come out of the post-pandemic period. It’s fascinating to see Peterson coming to terms with the sheer scale of the lockdown during which time he was rather sick. We could have used his voice then and I have no doubt that he would have been fantastic. 

Fortunately for the whole world, we did have Jay. It’s not just his credentials or his position at Stanford University. It’s his erudition that gave him the reach to make sense of our times. In this interview, Jay explains the unfolding of events in ways I personally found compelling. 

Summing up his message, the response upended a century of public-health practice based on computer modeling that was not informed by any medical knowledge or public-health experience. That modeling came to be fused with a military-style response that waged a war on a pathogen with no exit strategy.

That was further complicated by severe political division. Even though the lockdowns began under the Trump administration, opposing them mysteriously came to be seen as “right-wing” even though the pandemic policies violated every civil liberty, massively harmed the poor, divided the classes, and trampled essential freedoms, which one might suppose were concerns of the left, once upon a time.

Jay knew from the beginning that these policies were a disaster but his method of dissent was to stick with the genuine science. He worked with colleagues very early in the pandemic on a study from California that proved that this war on the “invisible enemy” was futile. Covid was everywhere and only a mortal threat to a narrow group in the population needed to have its guard up while the rest of society moved on. That study was released in April 2020 and the implications were undeniably devastating to the war planners and the lockdown pushers. 

The conclusion of the study seems rather commonplace now: “The estimated population prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in Santa Clara County implies that the infection may be much more widespread than indicated by the number of confirmed cases.” But at the time, when dissent was rare if non-existent in scientific literature, and when the planning elite had declared its number one goal was to track, trace, and isolate, and thereby minimize infections through compulsion while we wait for a vaccine, this conclusion was anathema. 

That’s when the attacks began. It was like he had to be shut down. The popular press began to go after him savagely, smearing both the study and his motivations (this later became outright censorship). At this point, he began to realize the intensity of the campaign against dissent and the push for full unity in favor of the policy response. It was not like normal times when scientists could disagree. This was something different, something fully militarized, when a “whole-of-government” and “whole-of-society” consensus was being demanded by every institution. That meant no heresies against orthodoxy were allowed. 

At this point, the interview breaks and Peterson begins to ask probing questions of the sort he likes concerning the spiritual struggle all of us face in life, a subject that clearly consumes him. Peterson believes that all seeming political struggles are ultimately personal ones. Do we back off and acquiesce to conventional wisdom or do we continue to walk toward the light as shown by our conscience? 

He asks Jay if he faced this moment, and Jay admits that he did indeed face this. He realized that continuing in this direction – researching to discover facts and telling the truth as he saw it – would massively disrupt his career, his life, and everything he had worked for. Everything would be different, away from comfort and into an uncertain and isolated frontier. 

He faced that choice and made the decision to go ahead, undeterred. But the decision cost him dearly. He could not sleep. He lost tremendous amounts of weight. He faced social and professional ostracism. He was dragged through the mud daily in the press and scapegoated for every policy failure. He was accused of conspiring with the purveyors of dark money and every other form of professional corruption. He found himself vexed beyond which he had ever been in his entire career. But still he forged ahead, eventually gathering with other scientists to make what is now a famous statement of public health that has stood the test of time. 

It’s fascinating to consider how few in academia and professional life made this choice. And the reasons why are also intriguing. Many in these high-end professions, particularly in academia, have far less job flexibility than we think. We might suppose that a tenured professor in the Ivy League could and would say anything he wants. 

The opposite is true. They are not like the barber or auto mechanic who can leave one job and easily start another a few blocks away or in a different town. They are, in many ways, trapped in their own circle of influence. They know this and dare not depart from industry norms. And too often those norms are formed by funding. Yale University, for example, gets more overall revenue from government than from tuition. That’s typical among such institutions. And now we know that media and tech are also on the payroll. 

These conflicts of interest combined with careerism played themselves out in brutal ways over the last few years. The high-end professionals who left their jobs to work in the Trump administration, for example, found that they had no jobs waiting for them at all when that presidency came to an end. They were not welcomed back, certainly not by academia. They were discarded. I personally know of many cases where people on advanced career tracks lost all merely by agreeing to what they believed would be public service. 

The lockdowns era made this much worse. All over the country, scientists, media figures, writers, think-tank officials, professors, editors, and influencers of all sorts were pressured to go along. Not just that: they were threatened to go along. And it wasn’t just the opinions that mattered. There were all sorts of compliance tests along the way. There was the “social distancing” test. If you didn’t practice in it, that somehow marked you as an enemy. The masking was another: you can tell who was who and what was what based on the willingness to cover one’s face. 

The vaccine mandate, appallingly, became another wedge issue that enabled all kinds of professions to purge people. Once the New York Times claimed (summer 2021) to have evidence that the unvaccinated were more likely to be Trump supporters, that did it. The Biden administration and many university administrators felt that they had the ultimate weapon to achieve the purge about which they had longed dreamed. 

Comply or get tossed out. That was the new rule. And truly this largely worked. Diversity of opinion in many sectors of society – media, academia, corporate life, the military – is dramatically reduced after this epoch. It doesn’t matter that courts later came along to say it was all bad law. The damage had been done. 

Still, we have to be curious about those who did not go along. What drove them to depart from their fellows? This is why Gabrielle’s Bauer’s book Blindsight Is 2020 is so valuable. It doesn’t cover them all but it does highlight the voices of many who dared to think for themselves. And yet here is the truth: among this dissident set, very few aren’t doing something completely different today from what they were doing in 2019. They have changed jobs, changed professions, changed towns and states, and even seen families and friendship networks shattered. 

They all paid a huge price. I’m not sure I know any exceptions to the rule. Going against the grain and daring to stand up for truth in a time of totalitarianism is exceedingly dangerous. Our times have proven that. (Brownstone’s Fellows program is designed to give many of these purged people a bridge to a new life.) 

I titled this article a contagion of cowardice. It might be too severe to call it that. Many people went along for entirely rational reasons. Another point to consider is that moral teaching in the great religions has not typically required absolute heroism. What it does require is not doing evil. And those really are different things. Staying quiet might not be evil; it’s only the absence of being heroic. St. Thomas even writes this in his treatise on moral theology: the faith celebrates but never requires martyrdom. 

And yet it is also true that heroism in our times is absolutely necessary for the preservation of civilization when it is so brutally under attack. If everyone chooses the safe path, and crafts one’s decisions around the principle of risk aversion, the bad guys truly do win. And where does this land and how far can we slide into the abyss under those conditions? The history of despotism and death by government reveal where this ends up. 

The best case for heroism over careerism and cowardice is to look back over these three years and observe just how much difference a few can make when they are willing to stand up for truth even when there is a big price to be paid for doing so. Such people can change everything. This is because ideas are more powerful than armies and all the propaganda that a machinery of power can muster. One statement, one study, one sentence, one small effort to puncture the wall of lies can bring down the whole system. 

And then the contagion of cowardice comes to be replaced by a contagion of truth. Those who stood up for that form of contagion deserve our respect and gratitude. They also deserve to survive and thrive in the new renaissance that so many today are working to build. 

More than people right now are willing to admit, civil society as we knew it collapsed over these three years. A massive purge has taken place within all the commanding heights. This will affect career choices, political alliances, philosophical commitments, and the structure of society for decades to come. 

The rebuilding and reconstruction that must take place is going to rely – perhaps as it always has – on a small minority who see both the problem and the solution. Brownstone is doing its best and the most possible given our resources and the time in which we’ve had to operate. But much more needs to be done. The rebuilding requires a spiritual-level commitment to intelligence, wisdom, bravery, and truth.