I Like JD Vance So Much That I Want Him Primaried Hard

 

I may be JD Vance’s biggest fan. It’s not just that he’s a fellow Ohioan, though that’s important. It’s not just that he overcame adversity to earn the credentials smug libs treasure and then turned it around and owned said libs. It’s not even that he is cool enough to own his memes and is personable in person – in this gig, I meet a lot of politicians, and far too many of them are mindless automatons who are always spewing clichés and bending with the wind. Not him, and definitely not his wife, who is as bright as she is delightful. It’s not like I pal around with the guy; I’ve met him a couple of times, but he is uniquely impressive. He is impressive enough that I forgive him for being a Marine instead of a veteran of the decisive branch of American military power, the United States Army. And he has been doing an incredible job. He can not only articulate the America First case but prosecute it. That’s why he’s the heir apparent to President Trump – he’s the guy who can take America First to the next level. And this leads me to perhaps the most important reason why I’m such a fan – the media and the Democrats have already started fretting that he’s worse than Donald Trump, that he makes President Trump look like one of the George Bushes.

Sign me up. I want JD Vance to be our nominee in 2028.

But it’s because I am such a JD Vance fanboy, such an unabashed supporter, that I want another quality Republican to primary the hell out of him. I want him to have an opponent who takes off the gloves, gets in the ring, and rumbles with bare knuckles, biting, and hair pulling.

I want JD to head into the convention battered and bloody, tired, and tested. It’s not because I dislike him. It’s because I really like him. And because I really like him, I don’t want a coronation. I want armed combat.

There are some good reasons to avoid a Republican primary and go with a coronation in 2028. It’s less expensive, in some ways it’s less risky, and it unites the party earlier. But there are better reasons to make JD Vance earn the crown.

Remember the last presidential candidate who got handed the nomination? If you look at some of the polls, she’s the most likely to be the nominee for the Democrats in 2028. Kamala Harris got the nod not by going out there and winning it but by being handed it, in part by her own machinations, but also, in part, by Joe Biden’s last manifestation of conscious action, where he decided to hang that Chardonnay-swilling millstone around the neck of the party that had just fit him with cement overshoes. She ran against Donald Trump, who had been on the campaign trail, who had won a primary, and who was tan, rested, and ready to rock. She wasn’t. She was a mess. She didn’t have an effective organization, she didn’t have the relationships, and she didn’t have the practice. She didn’t have the killer instinct honed by months of political combat against Democrats. She wanted to take the presidency the same way she took the nomination, by default, hoping it could be just handed to her by virtue of who she was. And she was surprised when she found out that she was losing because of who she was. She was surprised because she hadn’t been out there with real voters for years and had no clue that she was repellent to a wide range of normal people, including people who had voted Democrat forever.

I don’t want the first time JD Vance comes up against someone coming at him with a knife in the 2028 campaign to be after the nomination. The guy is a fighter, as he proved by slapping the show tunes out of the mouth of Tim Walz. But even Mike Tyson trained. He sparred. He threw punches and took them. You need that before you enter a general election campaign. A candidate needs to work out the kinks during the primary – obviously, Tim Walz’s kinks are quite different from JD’s, but you get the point. You need to get up to speed in March, when you’re tussling against another Republican. You can’t wait for September, when you are in the midst of the general election. You need to figure out what your weaknesses are and work on them and figure out what your strengths are and how best to exploit them.

And it’s not just the candidate, but his organization. You can’t win without a functioning team, and teams take time to build. Some people aren’t going to be able to hack the jobs you give them, and you’re going to have to replace them. All of them have learning curves. Their curves need to be learned well before the home stretch. All cylinders need to be firing when you get that nomination because the clock is ticking, and you must be full steam ahead when facing the general election tsunami of shady foreign billionaire dark money and election fraud, as well as the affluent wine women, race hustlers, welfare cheats, and perverted deviants who are the key constituencies of the Democratic Party.

JD’s strengths are Trump’s track record, his story, and his ability to communicate. His press conference in the wake of the shooting of that poet in Minneapolis was masterful. He demonstrated strength, commitment, and willingness to never play the left’s game. That the regime media hates him is the kind of endorsement any Republican could want. 

But he does have weaknesses. He’s never been an executive, and sorry, being vice president doesn’t count as being an executive. It barely counts as “being” period, though he has managed to do much more than the usual Veep. He’s open to attack because some of his friends have frankly gone nuts, and while his loyalty to people who’ve been loyal to him and his refusal to obey demands that he denounce people – I hate that too; I will choose when and how I address friends and other people I disagree with – have gotten him some negative hits from the right. Some call him an antisemite, which is stupid, but it’s out there and the Democrats – who just discovered Hamas is bad – will hit him on it. He’s got to address that somehow, whether he writes those critics off or reassures them. The Democrats are going to call him a “Nazi” regardless, though they’re going to call everybody a “Nazi.” Still, if in 2028 America is powerful again and the economy is cooking, these weaknesses won’t really matter. He will be the avatar of a golden age, and that is probably a golden ticket to the presidency.

But he still has to get elected, and this is a 50-50 country at the moment. I’d like him to get that primary seasoning, but the question arises of who would challenge the crown prince. After all, everybody is sure that JD is the guy, barring some misfortune that leads to his fall from grace. Anybody risking a race risks exile, because the America First types – being, as they are, the abused women of American politics – are utterly unforgiving of those who fail to meet the MAGA loyalty test. Furthermore, at this point, it looks like a losing battle. The very same things that JD is going to cite to make his case in general, he’s going to cite to make his case in the primary. If the economy is pumping, and America’s enemies are dumping, JD Vance is going to be stumping under the slogan “More of the same, only with fewer tweets about Rosie O’Donnell.” Challengers are always about change; if the Republican general election argument in 2028 is “Don’t Change,” that makes it kind of hard to be a challenger.

That means there can be two kinds of challengers. The first wants to return the party to the rule of the kind of sexually inadequate Bushies whom we long ago repudiated. But hey, if Mike Pence wants to roll the dice, that’s great. Pence isn’t a dumb guy; he’s just an insufferable sissy, Ned Flanders without the edge. He might be able to provide a little pushback to JD, though if JD slaps him, he’ll probably cry. Also, along these lines is Chris Sununu, another moderate/invertebrate. He could probably win in New Hampshire, which is something. Their argument will be, “Sure, America’s enemies fear us, and everybody’s prosperous, but we need to be more sensitive and soft and feminine because reasons, and oh well, I never.” It’s a bad argument, and it won’t get much traction, but it might provide a nice workout for JD as he pummels them into the preferred state of this kind of gooey Republican: submission.

The other kind of challenge would be someone coming from the right. But who could do that? Marjorie Taylor Greene? She’s already at about 47 minutes of her 15 minutes of fame.

The real players probably think this is not their year and will sit it out. Even if Marco Rubio, who has been born again hard after his tragic dalliance with amnesty a decade ago, thought he had a shot this go-round, he’s a key part of this administration, so what’s he going to criticize? Ron DeSantis is a great governor. He might be able to go in arguing that he’s as tough as JD, but that he has extensive executive experience compared to the vice president. I’m not sure how much that’ll matter. And then there’s Ted Cruz. We’ve heard noises that he might think this is his year because he absolutely wants to be president someday. I’ve supported him in the past with money, which is a huge commitment for a guy like me, considering I’m part Scottish. He’s right on policy, though he’s off-putting to a lot of people who confuse politicians with pals. His argument would have to be that he’s going to do what Trump did, but more so. That’s a risky argument because it would allow JD to move to the center of the GOP spectrum, gathering votes from the kind of old-school Republicans who get nervous when people are firm and tough. Yet imagine JD Vance going up against Rubio, DeSantis, and/or Cruz. This would not be iron sharpening iron. This would be diamonds sharpening diamonds. Any of these guys would be an absolute home run as president, and some of them are definitely going to run in the cycles that will follow 2028. 

So, who might jump in and challenge JD this time? Who knows? Regardless, right now the race looks like it’s his to lose, and he will take it by default.

The fact is that there’s going to be a huge temptation within JD’s camp to try to clear the field. There are certainly advantages to doing so. Not being challenged in the primary is not necessarily a recipe for defeat; the lack of testing and tempering, however, is a real concern. There are ways to compensate for it, like practicing fighting the regime media as Veep as he has been, but none are as good as a real primary.

He probably won’t get one. It’s not clear that anyone is going to put up a fight, and less clear that any of them could defeat him. He’s just too dominant. In meme terms, think of a beach ball-headed JD Vance with a sword and a loincloth, on a hill made of the skulls of his foes, flexing as Conan the Presumptive Nominee.

Talking Heads Are Missing Labor Market Strength

 

“America’s Job Market Has Entered the Slow Lane,” reads a recent Wall Street Journal headline. Most of the mainstream media echoes this interpretation, but the reality is much better than the headlines suggest. Indeed, the latest employment data is robust, with jobs going to Americans in the private sector and wages rising faster than prices.

There’s a lot to celebrate in the Labor Department’s monthly jobs report for December, from who is getting jobs to the kinds of jobs being created, as well as how much people are getting paid.

For example, native-born employment rose by more than two million in 2025, while the number of foreign-born workers with jobs increased by less than 400,000. This was the best December on record for the number of native-born Americans with jobs. It’s especially important that we’re seeing this positive change from where we were trending previously.

During nearly the entire final year of the Biden administration, the annual change in native-born employment was negative, meaning Americans were losing jobs. All the supposed job growth during that time was going to foreign-born workers, a category which even the Biden Labor Department had to admit contained an unknown number of illegal aliens.

It’s no exaggeration to say that President Donald Trump is returning the American labor market to the American people.

In terms of the number of jobs added in December, the monthly survey of businesses showed an increase of just 50,000, but the survey of households showed the number of people employed jumped by 232,000. There’s an explanation for this difference if we dig further into the report, and it indicates a very positive development in the labor market.

The number of multiple jobholders plunged by 444,000 last month, the second-largest drop since the government-imposed Covid lockdowns. Simultaneously in December, the number of part-time jobs declined by 740,000 while full-time employment shot up by 890,000.

A holistic view of these various labor market data paints a positive picture. People were exchanging multiple part-time gigs for a single full-time job in December. It may not show up in certain aggregate figures, but individuals were improving.

Let’s say someone quits three of those part-time jobs and replaces them all with a single full-time one. That’s a net reduction of two payrolls, so it reduces the headline jobs number even though the person is better off. This is very likely the dynamic that was at play last month, hence the number of people employed rose more than four times faster than the number of jobs.

It’s the opposite of what happened in many months during the Biden years. When inflation spawned a cost-of-living crisis, many Americans had to take on a second, or even a third, job to make ends meet. That increased the headline jobs figure, all while folks’ finances deteriorated.

There’s more good news in terms of where jobs are being created. All the net job growth in 2025 came from the productive private sector, while government jobs declined, due entirely to federal layoffs. It’s a positive development, but it drags down the headline jobs number.

The job cuts to the bureaucracy in Washington, DC, resulted in a net decrease of 277,000 payrolls from January of 2025, when Mr. Trump took office, through December. This is the smallest the federal workforce has been since 2014, which is great for America. People are moving out of the unproductive public sector and into the productive private sector -- the opposite of the Biden years.

Lastly, there’s good news on the wage front, where earnings are rising faster than prices. That’s important because it means not only are people’s paychecks getting bigger, but that those paychecks can buy more. Inflation-adjusted (real) weekly paychecks are up about 1.5 percent under Mr. Trump’s second term, after they fell 4 percent under Joe Biden.

So, despite all the naysayers, Trump’s first year back at the helm saw a labor market undergo badly needed structural changes that are making Americans better off. The damage left by the Biden administration isn’t all gone, but we’re heading in the right direction.

The Decline of Christanity Is More Worrisome Than the Rise of Artificial Intelligence

 

person 1:  we’re going to talk one more dust-off here before we take a break and that would be the worrisome competition between rampant, growing, irreligiosity versus artificial intelligence.  

Are you worried about either one of these or which one worries you more? And I just heard you talk about your religiosity on a piece of wood in Libya. But go ahead, Victor.  

person 2: You mean the decline of religiosity.   https://playlist.megaphone.fm/?e=THEDAILYSIGNAL2712590858

person 1: Yes, the decline of religiosity. 

person 2: I’m more worried about it. In “The End of Everything,” I looked at a popular account, as I said, of an AI simulation the Pentagon ran where they programmed self-survival into an intercontinental ballistic missile and put it on a computer simulation. 

And it was headed toward our enemy, and then they pushed the kill button, and on its own the thing circled back and was going to hit the Pentagon, and they couldn’t stop it.  

In other words, in that process of giving self-preservation prompts, electronic prompts to this AI, it went on beyond that and said anybody who tries to blow me up, I’m going to go back and get. So they cancelled that. 

So, I am worried about that. But I’ll give you another example. I got a pathology report. I couldn’t understand anything. Anything. It was the TBGA 168, my gene is heterogeneous for this particular adenoma, all this stuff.  

I just typed “Grok,” and I cut and pasted it. You know what I mean? And I could not believe it. This has scanned 421 scientific articles. Two minutes later, it gave me the most clear, succinct explanation of exactly what percentage this is, what would happen here.  

I had never used it really before. But I’ve been using it the last month. It’s amazing.  

The only thing I’m worried about is … Stupid Victor is so stupid. He doesn’t even know what’s going on. I’ve been teaching at a certain place, and I had noticed that some students were writing beautiful stuff.  So just as an example I thought, “Well, I’d like to write a book about Epaminondas the Great,” and I just said, “Could you please write an essay on what were the chief achievements of Epaminondas?”  

And it started coming out. And I remember it had the style and prose and syntax of some of the people that I had in class. And my wife taught class, she’s a PhD at a community college, and she is far more schooled than I am. And she said, “Well, Victor, you know, there are programs that can spot that.”  

So that is a danger. But I think, all in all, AI will be valuable if carefully controlled. Not regulated to the point of death but monitored. 

But I am very worried about secularism, atheism. If you don’t believe in any transcendence then it affects your … humanism that says that you’re only here and now, there’s no mystery anymore. I mean, you don’t know why you’re here. 

And the neoplatonism of the early church. When the words of Jesus Christ were recorded both orally and later in the ensuing century by the four gospels, they needed an architecture for a church. They were very learned people for the next 400 years, Jerome, Augustine, et cetera. So, they did look at neoplatonism.  

And you know, in Plato, it’s very clear that your soul is immortal and your body is not, and the metaphors that Socrates uses are the lyre, what we would call the harp. 

Say you’re playing “Old Lang Syne” on the harp, and then you destroy the harp, does the song disappear? No. It only becomes reified when it has a body, an instrument. And in their way, theirs is not a Christian, but it’s a transmigration of soul. 

So, you die, and then your soul was either dented or ruined by your appetites, and you’re given a reincarnated body until you get it right.  

Finally, you don’t have to go through this process of memory, losing memory, who you were, new identity.  

But the point I’m making is even the pagans believed that there had to be some transcendence. It’s imprinted on our brain. And for people to say there’s not, it’s just a nihilistic creed in my view.  

And yeah. It’s very valuable. I don’t want to get into what particular creed you are. I’m just saying that the Judeo-Christian tradition … 

And by the way, Jack, you pointed out that we’re very confused in America why we have suddenly substituted the Judeo part, the Old Testament. I was listening to Steve. 

person 1: We talked about that on a recent podcast. Yes, go ahead. 

person 2: I knew Steve Bannon. I like Steve Bannon. But he was giving a talk. And he just said, we’re going to Christianize the country. And I thought, you mean you’re going to re-emphasize the Judeo-Christian creed. And he didn’t say Judeo-Christian tradition, which would include the Old Testament and the contributions of Jewish culture to Christianity, or the fact that Jesus was Jewish himself. 

I think it’s very important that you have a Judeo-Christian dominant tradition with exceptions that you are tolerant of Buddhists and Muslims and other people without diluting the main tradition that affected the Founders. It’s essential. 

person 1  Right. To act like the Founders were blasé, not ignorant, but uncaring about the Old Testament and Moses and the gang is just a lie. 

person 2: My grandmother was a devout Methodist and took me to church. My parents were not devout. They were Christians. They had grown up in kind of a very rigid religious environment, so they kind of rebelled, I think. But they made it clear they believed in Christianity to me, and they felt that.

But my grandmother would take me, and she would give me 20 cents for each poem I [recited]: 

“Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray my Lord the soul to keep me. If I should die before I wake, I pray my Lord the soul to keep If I should live for other ways, I pray the Lord to guide my ways.” 

25 cents, 1959. 

person 2: That’s a lot of money! 

person 1: So, I remembered them all. Yeah. I think Christianity’s done a wonderful thing. The country will not survive without it. 

Jan. 6, 5 Years Later—Were We Played?

 

I wanna return to the Jan. 6 demonstration that turned into a riot. Everything that we’ve been told by that narrative from the Left seems inaccurate. They told us it was an organized insurrection. They used the word insurrection.

Remember, in the second impeachment, indictment of Donald Trump, and the trial, remember, was held after he left office and he was acquitted by the Senate, but the word was insurrection. And we know that special counsel Jack Smith wanted to use that term, insurrection, but he felt that since no one had been charged with insurrection for a hundred years, he dare not do it.

But we were told that it was a pre-planned armed takeover, a coup, but there was always something wrong about the left-wing narrative of Jan. 6 because we knew there was a massive demonstration. We knew it turned violent outside. And we knew that people were sort of invited in maybe because they, the guards inside the Rotunda and the Capitol, had no other alternative.

But everything after that was too clear-cut. The Democrats had the Jan. 6 committee, and then we know that some of the tapes and testimonies were not kept safely, they’re not accessible. Now, some of the witnesses were kind of berated. Then we also learned that Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s nominations were not accepted for the first time in House history.

And the only way you could get on the committee, if you were Republican, were if you either had no political future, like Adam Kinzinger, or you were doomed to defeat in your next election, like Liz Cheney.

So, there was something weird about—now we’re hearing more weird things. They just arrested the so-called pipe bomber, and this was very strange because we were told by the Biden Justice Department they didn’t know who he was, there was no information, but he was probably a, you know, a participant in the right-wing terrorist activities that day. So, it was to their political advantage, apparently, not to really pursue the investigation.

A new administration comes in and they just start tracing the cellphone imprint of various people and they look at their sales records where they bought this particular item in the pipe bomb, and they came up with a Brian Cole Jr.

He’s a young African American man from a middle-class family. He says he’s an anarchist. Initial reports seem to suggest he was on the left and had empathies with Black Lives Matter and Antifa, but the evidence is so fragmentary, we’re not sure. He had four hours of testimony in which he purportedly today confessed. And now he says he thought Trump was robbed of the election.

So, we don’t know exactly what his empathies were, but it was, apparently, incumbent upon the Biden administration not to investigate who this pipe bomber was and to leave it out there as if he was a part of a violent resistance. And that is consistent with the misinformation that we had and the fake news about the entire day.

Remember, Kamala Harris, when running for president, she said Jan. 6 is the same thing, it rests with, it’s parallel to, it’s comparable to Pearl Harbor, 2,400 dead, or 9/11, 3,000 people dead. And of course, how many people died? Well, we know five people died, but how many people died violently? That’s the key.

The key thing to remember, that the violent deaths were one, maybe two—a Trump protester that was caught in the scramble and the pressure between the crowd and the police. but really one, Ashli Babbitt, a 14-year veteran who was unarmed and was committing a misdemeanor of entering a broken window.

She was shot by Officer Byrd lethally, and then, all of a sudden, we never really knew who Officer Byrd was, we were told it was a justified shooting. We never learned that he had a checkered record, that he was, you know, clumsy, lazy with his gun, that he was—had left it and people had found it in a Capitol restroom.

So, they wanted to suppress the information and suggest that she was an insurgent. That was complete misinformation. Then we were told there wasn’t really any FBI informants, and then-FBI Director Christopher Wray said he didn’t know. And only with a change of administrations did FBI records come out that there was probably somewhere between 250 and 275 actual FBI agents or informants in the crowd.

And remember that Matthew Rosenberg, the Pulitzer Prize reporter for The New York Times, had told us at the time, in an ambush interview by Project Veritas, when he nonchalantly was talking to someone he didn’t know was associated with Operation Veritas, he said there was a ton of informants there and he knew them.

And then, of course, Donald Trump said assemble peacefully and patriotically to the Capitol. Not like Kamala Harris, who, in the year before, 2020, had told people that the George Floyd riots should not stop, they will not stop. She called them demonstrations, but they were riots. And she said nor should they stop, they’re gonna go onto the election.

Add it all up, and the latest revelations that there is a pipe bomber and he was angry at the Democrats because he left something at the Democratic Party, a Republican, we don’t know. We don’t know whether his anarchist sympathies mean he is on the left. It’s very improbable to think that they would be on the right, even though he thinks Donald Trump got robbed of the elections.

But maybe he wants to pose as a right-wing person and confirm the predestined narrative that this man must be a right-wing, violent person, and he thinks maybe the Left will be go easy on him, or maybe he thinks that Donald Trump will pardon him. I don’t know. But the whole thing is mysterious.

And to sum up everything we’ve been told about Jan. 6 from the congressional committee to Kamala Harris’ description of it, to comparisons with the four-month, $2 billion, 35 dead, 1,500 police officers, prior riots, arson attacks on courthouses, police precincts that was never really mentioned as a comparable crisis in the republic, all of these things, a number of FBI informants, a number of FBI agents, any effort to find the pipe bomber, the treatment of the January—it was all never transparent. We never got the honest story.

So, that begs the question, why? Why didn’t they just come out and say, “Here’s all the information”?

And the reason is, they wanted to cement a narrative in everybody’s mind that a reckless demonstration that turned into a riot was a pre-planned insurrection by Donald Trump, who ordered it, and therefore, should forfeit his political career, and he should never be allowed to run for office. And they impeached him and they wanted that narrative to stick. And it was a complete fabrication.

There was a demonstration, there was a riot. It was wrong. But everything else was a Democratic narrative, as we’re seeing most recently with a strange case of Brian Cole that suddenly, suddenly, after four years of Biden DOJ in action, within 10 months, the Trump FBI found out who he was, and that he confessed to that crime of leaving pipe bombs at the DNC in the RNC headquarters.

Minnesota Somali Fraud, Illegal Trucking Scandals Share One Thing: DEI

We’ve talked in the past about the problems with diversity, equity, and inclusion. That’s the rubric for what, I guess, we could call mandated equality of result, rather than of opportunity. But it’s been in the news lately because there’s a common denominator between the $9 to $10 billion, and climbing, fraud among the Somali community—some of them—in Minnesota.

in California, we’re looking at $60 to $70 billion fraud, involving everything from homeless funds that were misspent through corruption, wasted, and unemployment insurance, etc., etc. We have the problem with the truck drivers. We had 17,000 licenses given to illegal aliens in California and put many of us in danger who drive frequently on the California freeways. That’s true nationwide as well.

And then, of course, the unknown number, it’s in the several millions, somewhere between 8 and 12 million, who came in under the Biden administration.

But they were all given exemptions, is what I’m trying to say. And the exemptions were subtle and insidious, but they were characterized that they were DEI. In other words, all of these different groups were categorized by officials as on the victimized, oppressed side of the lecture. And therefore, they were not completely audited. Because, if they had been audited, the cries of racism, nativism, etc., prejudice, bias would’ve been voiced. And people didn’t want to be exposed to that.

What happens, then, when you have DEI, there is no deterrence. The particular groups that are favored on non-meritocratic grounds feel that if the society, at large, does not audit them the way—whether that’s immigration audits or welfare audits, or unemployment audits—then why would they audit them under further circumstances? So, that creates a self-perpetuating, almost a self-motion machine that they will continue to engage in activity for which they don’t feel there will be any consequences. And deterrence is lost.

More importantly, if you are a DEI beneficiary—in other words, you applied to college and your SAT scores or your grade did not otherwise qualify you, or you’re a professor who plagiarized but was given a pass because of DEI grounds—then what happens is you must continually make the case that you are a victim because that alone will explain why you got this position, why you got this admission, when you did not have otherwise standard meritocratic qualifications. And that means you’re always going to be on the hunt for victimization.

If you’re Joy Reid and you can’t do a podcast without spouting racist nonsense, and your audience is crumbling and eroding, then you say that you’re constantly a victim of racism. If you’re on “The View,” and you have a one-dimensional view of race, and you’re boring, and you’re losing market share, you say it’s because of yet another incident of racism that you felt.

The other thing that’s a problem with DEI, there are no qualifications now. Once you destroy meritocracy for one group, then all groups feel, well, these people were given particular advantages. So, why don’t we get them?

And you know, the funny thing about it is we did have a kind of DEI for very wealthy people, very connected people, the children of billionaires, the children of college deans, who were given admission advantages or were hired in what we call the old-boy network. But meritocracy was supposed to be the antidote.

So, DEI was, in a very strange, ironic way, just the twin of the old-boy network, substituting race for money and influence that the old-boy network exercised. That was the fuel that drove that.

Finally, there’s a couple of final things. It’s costly because once you add layer under layer under layer of nonproductive people, who are not teaching in the university, they’re not doing research, but they’re monitoring everybody’s syllabus, they’re looking for DEI owes among applicants, they are perched on hiring committees, they have a huge bureaucracy, and they’re nonproductive.

They’re very similar to the commissar system in the Soviet Union that was very, not just a sin of commission, that they were wasting resources and causing a lot of problems and killing people, but a sin of omission, that by funding the commissars, you were not funding science or you were not funding meritocratic military schools. You were appointing military officers in World War II on the basis of their ideology rather than on their proven excellence on the battlefield. So, it doesn’t have a good history—DEI.

And one thing that we’re watching now, as the Trump administration makes a very persuasive case that DEI violated the civil rights laws of the 1960s, specifically ’64 and ’65, and the Supreme Court ruling of 2023, there is no moral, legal support for it anymore. And yet, we have this vast, top-heavy infrastructure—this ossified, calcified, DEI apparat—and it’s not legally or morally justified.

So, it’s gonna be very interesting to see what happens to the DEI complex. But let’s hope that it dies on the vine, at last.