SCOOP: @CVSHealth CEO Larry Merlo earned 618 times more than the median CVS employee salary, while simultaneously promoting the idea that America is "racist" and forcing hourly-wage workers to deconstruct their racial and sexual "privilege."
Here is the full story.👇
Last year, Merlo—who has since retired—launched an extensive race reeducation program, built on the core tenets of critical race theory, including "intersectionality," "white privilege," and "unconscious bias."
Merlo hosted a conversation with critical race guru Ibram Kendi, who told 25,000 CVS employees that "to be born in [America] is to literally have racist ideas rain on our head consistently and constantly." As a result, Americans are "completely soaked in racist ideas."
Kendi argued that two- and three-year-old children are deeply racist: "Our kids are basically functioning on racist ideas, choosing who to play with based on the kid's skin color." The solution, in part, is to "diagnose" them as "racist" in order to help them become “antiracist."
In a mandatory training, CVS executives forced hourly-wage employees to deconstruct their racial and sexual identities, then rank themselves according to their "privilege"—a practice informed by the theory of "intersectionality."
Examples of privilege, according to a checklist, included "celebrat[ing] Christmas," "hav[ing] a name that is easy to pronounce," "feel[ing] safe in your neighborhood at night," and "feel[ing] confident in my leadership style."
In another module, CVS executives created detailed racial etiquette "reference cards" telling employees stop using "problematic phrases" such as "I'm not racist," "I'm colorblind," "I grew up poor," "peanut gallery," and "we must stand up for minorities."
The irony of these corporate "privilege" programs is inescapable. Last year, CEO Larry Merlo earned 618 times the median CVS employee salary, yet still lectured his 300,000 employees—many of whom live in poverty—about their "privilege."
Corporate "diversity and inclusion" programs are a scam: far from being a bottom-up program of empowerment, the new ideology of "antiracism" allows elites to assuage their guilt and shift blame to the average American.
P.S. I'm working on a ten-part investigative series on critical race theory in America's Fortune 100 companies. To get the latest stories, sign up for my free newsletter here:
The Right must be more selective in the people it welcomes into the firmament. Conservatives have been locked out of elite institutions for so long, many will accept any celebrity that signals opposition to the Left—even a common pimp with a social media following.
There is a real danger that the Right becomes a dumping ground where failed celebrities land. While we should welcome high-quality defectors, we must have enough self-confidence to draw boundaries and reject those who simply want to farm the Right for clicks and power.
Two things happening here:
1. The Right's organic institutions have difficulty producing viable elites.
2. The Right's media figures feel pressure to chase the algorithm and a) turn themselves into Catturd-style slop; b) engage with human bait such as Andrew Tate for virality.
The Left is spiritually stuck in 1963. Their entire politics is a reenactment. Boomer libs want to live in an endless loop of the civil rights era, but America has moved on and we do not need to indulge their fantasy of permanent adolescent rebellion.
We've had the Great Society and the Civil Rights Act—which, in fact, led to systematic discrimination on behalf of minorities—for 60 years. We've spent trillions on the Left's social utopia. But they still pretend they're "marching on Washington" with the dispossessed.
These people are incapable of taking responsibility for the regime they have created. They can only imagine themselves in opposition because they have no desire to grapple with the failures of their policies and the reasons for continuing inequalities. It's stupid songs forever.
The cause here is noble, but the implementation, like the related executive order, is a misstep. The whole point of the "abolish DEI" campaign is to stop having special carve-outs, programs, and commitments on the basis of race or ethnoreligious identity. The better approach is to have a single colorblind standard that will fight harassment and discrimination against any group. We can have a Task Force on Campus Equality, which, in practice, will address the significant antisemitism problem, while retaining the higher principle.
I laid out the basic argument with Jenin Younes in the Free Press, related to the Antisemitism Awareness Act: thefp.com/p/dont-expand-….
Supporters of this initiative should ask themselves: How is it reasonable to support a Task Force on Antisemitism while opposing an Ibram Kendi-style Task Force on Anti-Black Racism (i.e., DEI)? And by the same principle, how is it reasonable to support a Task Force on Antisemitism without also supporting a Task Force of Anti-White Racism and a Task Force on Anti-Asian Racism, both of which are widespread on campuses? How is it consistent for the administration to abolish DEI, then establish a special task force for one, rather than all, of these groups?
It's a serious problem, as I've showed in my reporting, but all of it can be addressed by delineating the behavior of the perpetrators—harassment, disruption, occupation, support for terror, etc.—in a colorblind manner.
EXCLUSIVE: Kamala Harris plagiarized at least a dozen sections of her criminal-justice book, Smart on Crime, according to a new investigation. The current vice president even lifted material from Wikipedia.
We have the receipts. 🧵
The investigation was conducted by Dr. Stefan Weber, a famed Austrian "plagiarism hunter" who has taken down politicians in the German-speaking world. We independently confirmed multiple violations, which are comparable in severity to the plagiarism found in former Harvard president Claudine Gay's doctoral thesis.
We can begin with a passage in which Harris discusses high school graduation rates. Here, she lifted verbatim language from an uncited AP/NBC News report:
EXCLUSIVE: Northwestern Law Review published a special issue featuring only black women. But, according to material unearthed in a new lawsuit, the issue was rife with plagiarism.
This is how DEI corrupts academic standards. 🧵
Lawyer Jonathan Mitchell has filed an updated lawsuit against Northwestern Law School and its far-left former dean, @DBRodriguez5, for alleged racial discrimination in hiring. As part of this complaint, Mitchell identifies significant plagiarism by a prominent DEI hire and the law school's DEI-obsessed academic journal.
@DBRodriguez5 According to the lawsuit, Northwestern hired Myriam Gilles, a black woman, and, apparently, overlooked Professor Gilles's massive plagiarism, because, Mitchell alleges, the university prioritized diversity over merit.
EXCLUSIVE: We have discovered that migrants are, in fact, eating cats in Ohio. We have verified, with multiple witnesses and visual cross-references, that African migrants in Dayton, the next city over from Springfield, barbecued these cats last summer. christopherrufo.com/p/the-cat-eate…
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