A few years ago, the principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) vaulted to national prominence. Having first gained institutional traction in the mid-to-late 2010s, DEI initiatives spread exponentially after the summer of 2020, amid the flurry of anti-racist activism that followed George Floyd’s death. Fortune 500 corporations, major nonprofit organizations, large professional firms and associations, and institutions of higher learning launched DEI programs if they had not already. DEI became a nationally recognized brand and multi-billion-dollar industry. 

But for nearly two years now, institutional DEI has been in retreat. The retreat began in the summer of 2023, when the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in college admissions. A more decisive shift occurred after the October 7, 2023, attacks on Israel. Hamas’s assault was still underway when campus groups across the country publicly blamed Israel. A couple months later, the presidents of Penn and Harvard—institutions not known for protecting conservative speech—equivocated in legalese when asked whether calls for the genocide of Jews violated their schools’ codes of conduct. As Israel’s invasion of Gaza unfolded, a stream of commentators argued that Israel, not Hamas, bore primary responsibility for the civilian bloodshed. More than a few said Israel was perpetrating a genocide. 

These developments offended many Americans, who deduced that many progressives, including those in the DEI industry, were insensitive to Jewish suffering and undisturbed by anti-Semitism. In this context, the usually sympathetic New York Times published critiques of DEI, including an August 2024 guest essay, “DEI Is Not Working on College Campuses. We Need a New Approach,” and an October 2024 investigative report, “The University of Michigan Doubled Down on DEI. What Went Wrong?” 

Anti-DEI efforts shifted into overdrive with President Trump’s victory in the 2024 election. Roughly fifteen states had already passed laws targeting DEI, but Trump took sweeping federal action. His administration eliminated DEI departments and laid off DEI staff across the federal government. It ordered federal contractors and grantees to terminate DEI programs. Recently, it has used federal funding to pressure elite universities to implement various DEI-related reforms. 

Considering these developments, many believe that DEI is dead. That may be true of the DEI brand. According to several recent studies, nearly 40 percent of American companies and a similar proportion of universities have renamed their DEI programs or intend to do so. While the terms inclusion and inclusive remain widespread, diversity and especially equity are giving way to access, engagement, opportunity, belonging, community, and excellence. JP Morgan, for example, now promotes diversity, opportunity, and inclusion, and McKinsey has dropped the term “equity” from its website. The Chief Diversity Officers at Google and Walmart have become the Vice President of Googler Engagement and the Chief Belonging Officer, respectively. Harvard’s Office of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging is now the Office of Community and Campus Life and is headed by the former Chief Diversity Officer.

But DEI (including rebranded DEI) remains a growth industry. Jobs in DEI continue to increase, albeit at a lower rate than in 2021 and 2022. More companies are increasing DEI-related funding than cutting it, and companies that have cut DEI jobs may be outsourcing DEI-like work to consultants. Although many universities have renamed, restructured, and in some cases closed their DEI offices, few have laid off DEI staff. An ongoing report on DEI reform at more than 100 universities cites just a few examples of layoffs and firings, all in Texas. 

In short, companies and universities are rebranding DEI but not laying off or replacing DEI personnel at scale. Critics of DEI thus worry that little has changed or will change—that DEI’s supposed retreat just means old wine in new bottles. Assuming DEI needs substantive reform or replacement, that is a valid concern, and critics should remain vigilant. 

But meaningful change is underway. The corporate world is substantively evolving, not just rebranding, in the DEI domain. According to a recent survey, 40 percent of companies have eliminated representation goals for racial minorities, women, and sexual minorities. Roughly a quarter are pausing internship and career development programs for these groups. Nearly one in five are pausing participation in external rankings such as the Human Rights Campaign’s LGBT-focused Corporate Equality Index. A growing number are adopting or moving toward institutional neutrality. 

Higher education is changing, too. Diversity statements are gone at Harvard and MIT and in various public university systems. Since the October 7th attacks, well over 100 universities have embraced institutional neutrality. New centers of civic education at state flagship universities have created roughly 200 new faculty lines. At elite universities, classical and religious independent institutes are proliferating. So are internal and external programs designed to expose college students to diverse perspectives and encourage civil dialogue and friendship across lines of difference. College presidents increasingly acknowledge the importance of viewpoint diversity to the academy’s truth-seeking mission. The recent backlash against DEI has led to genuine self-examination, prompting many colleges to pivot away from traditional DEI.

If the DEI label is losing traction and institutions are substantively evolving, what, if anything, might replace DEI? Some, like Jonathan Haidt, have urged universities to choose the pursuit of truth over the pursuit of social justice (a synonym of DEI). Others have proposed that companies replace DEI with MEI—merit, excellence, and intelligence. But DEI advocates regard DEI as compatible with, and largely orthogonal to, truth and excellence. For them, DEI is a moral endeavor to improve the internal culture and values of institutions. This moral endeavor, they believe, requires institutions to prioritize the needs of certain groups, especially racial minorities, women, and sexual minorities.  

The problem with DEI is that, as a moral endeavor, it tends to become narrow and divisive. Despite the best intentions, DEI conveys to people that if they do not fit into the designated marginalized categories, they do not need institutional support and should focus on helping those with less privilege. Inevitably, some find this alienating or unfair, particularly if they have suffered a kind of adversity that DEI does not seek to ameliorate. Also, in any institution, some members will simply disagree with DEI’s premises. They may find the identitarian framing corrosive or think the particular focus on race, sex, and sexuality is misplaced. They may subscribe to traditional views of sexual morality or believe that DEI’s claims of oppression are overstated. 

A more uniting moral vision is needed. Causes like viewpoint diversity and new frameworks like pluralism are steps in the right direction, but they do not suffice as moral alternatives to DEI. The push for greater viewpoint diversity in higher education implicitly accepts diversity as a central moral value and seeks to enlarge the concept by adding a viewpoint axis to existing axes like race, sex, and sexuality. The pluralism framework offers recognition to conservative and religious viewpoints and promotes civil dialogue and mutual understanding between opposing ideological camps. Though laudable, these approaches do not posit a universal good or moral value that would unite people in their diverse identities and viewpoints and give people a reason to be civil and seek to understand each other. 

Personalism does this. Personalism begins from the premise that every human being has measureless dignity, simply by virtue of his or her humanity. In broad terms, an institution with a personalist culture seeks to protect and honor the dignity of every member and seek his or her flourishing. This approach naturally preserves what is right and good in DEI while guarding against its missteps. On one hand, personalism aligns with DEI’s mission to combat unjust race-, sex-, or sexuality-based prejudice, which undermines human dignity. But unlike DEI, personalism focuses on what unites people: their status as human beings and their membership in a particular institution. Personalism is skeptical of identity-based discrimination in any direction and recognizes that tension and conflict are resolved through relationship and sympathy more than through trainings and bureaucracy. Above all, personalism attends to the well-being of every employee, including through the promotion of universal virtues like justice, generosity, and fortitude. 

Concretely, institutions seeking to adopt a personalist approach can take various actions. They can encourage job-crafting, a practice that increases worker fulfillment by allowing employees to shape their roles in accordance with their needs, skills, and passions. They can promote balance by expecting high performance but also urging employees to unplug after work and focus on family, friends, and other pursuits. They can institute worker well-being programs, which have led to improvements in employee mental and physical health and social connectedness. They can sponsor employee reading, discussion, and accountability groups designed to foster more virtuous habits. They can make it a priority to recognize and celebrate individuals for growing in character, mastering tasks, or making significant contributions to the institution. They can stress that members of the community must respect others’ viewpoints but never be forced to accept them. They can practice identity-blind, merit-based hiring and compensation.

These are just examples, and there are many more. The point is that personalism offers a way forward that is more fully adequate than traditional DEI to what helps human beings flourish. As DEI retreats, let us hope and seek to ensure that personalism advances. 

Image licensed via Adobe Stock.

Full transcript: https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/events/event.dir.html/content/vaticanevents/en/2025/5/18/regina-caeli.html

“Whoever…willingly and knowingly helps in the promulgation of heresy…   is suspected of heresy.” -Canon 2316, Code of Canon Law (1917-1982)

But what if Pope Prevost really is being accompanied by the spiritual presence of Bergoglio? Shouldn’t we take him at his word?

 A few moments ago, we heard a reading

in which John tells us he saw “a new heavens and a new earth.”

Our world is beautiful!

Every day, as spring unfolds, it’s more marvelous.

Think of all his wonders to behold:

rivers and meadows, waterfalls and canyons,

snow-caps and rain forests, deserts and oceans—

Think of all the forms of life that fill the earth.

When night falls, look up and behold

the spangled sky, littered with gaudy extravagance.

Imagine what wonders fill the countless galaxies!

You fall asleep, dreaming of them!

What a world—why make a new one?

Because it is damaged.

I left out one part of God’s Creation: US!

Human beings have not only the greatest potential—

but we can also do the greatest damage.

So, you and I are the ones who need to be made new;

and a new us means a new heavens and a new earth.

What might that be like?

Well, imagine we could somehow extract from this world,

all the envy, and greed, and pride…

all the anger and apathy and selfishness?

That would be a “new heavens and a new earth”!

That and more is what John saw.

So: how do we get there?

Today you and I celebrate the Lord rising from the dead,

same as every Sunday, but especially in Easter Season.

Ah, but there’s something special today!

Many fellow believers here

will receive the Eucharist for the first time!

So I just asked: how do we get to the new Creation?

The Eucharist is how we get there.

Jesus told us many things.

He said, “I am the Bread of Life”;

He said, “my flesh and my blood are truly food and drink.”

In a few minutes, at this altar,

you’ll hear him say, through me,

“This is my Body” and “This is the Chalice of my Blood.”

So, all that points to the Eucharist we share.

In today’s Gospel, Jesus spoke of “glory”:

The Father gives glory to the Son;

and the Son shares his glory with us.

That happens through the Eucharist.

Boys and girls, I know that your teachers and parents

have taught you many things about the Eucharist.

We believe that we’re together

with Jesus, Mary, the saints and angels—

all heaven and earth, right here in the Mass!

You and I know that we don’t come to receive the Eucharist,

unless we have faith, unless we turn from our sins,

and unless we are ready to live as part of His Church,

the New People, his chosen Bride.

So, the Eucharist is not a gift just for us:

this isn’t a “look at me, I’m special,” day.

Instead, this is a day Jesus chooses us in a new way,

to be givers and sharers of his life, with others.

All this is how we become his new creation.

We might wish for a “one-and-done” process to holiness.

But that isn’t how it works.

You were baptized as babies;

then you had to grow up some, before this day.

And far more lies ahead for you.

God wants us to grow into that new Creation.

And that’s the same for everyone here.

Yes, including grandma and grandpa.

Each of us needs to keep growing in holiness.

Let me tell you a secret…

The communion that matters the most,

isn’t the first…but the last one!

Remember I said, this Creation is wonderful—

but a new one is coming, far better?

This first communion is wonderful;

but the last one—the one that takes us from this world to the next – 

that’s the one to get excited about:

because that communion will never end!

Grownups, maybe you’re looking back

on your first communion.

But don’t look back, look forward—

to your next one, and to that last one!

And, if it’s been a while, do as these young people did:

go to confession, and make another “first” communion,

back on your way to that forever communion!

Boys and girls, I just want to end by saying “Thank you!”

Your eagerness, your joy, is a powerful example for everyone here.

I said a moment ago Jesus wants you to share

the new life he gives you in the Eucharist.

And already, you are witnesses to that 

by your joy and faith and reverence today. Thank you!

Ankara’s “greatest desire” is to see Moscow and Kiev reach a “definitive result” in peace talks, the president has said

Türkiye is ready to continue mediating between Russia and Ukraine to help end the conflict, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said, hailing the recent talks in Istanbul.

Speaking to reporters on Saturday, Erdogan described the recent round of Russia-Ukraine talks – the first direct engagement between the two sides since 2022 – as critical to settling the conflict.

“Bringing the delegations of the two countries together in Istanbul is extremely important for the end of the war that started on February 24, 2022, and for the establishment of peace in the region,” he said, as quoted by TRT Haber.

The Turkish president said his country is “not just saying ‘let the war end,’ we are also proposing methods, preparing the ground and making calls for this.”

“Our greatest desire is to obtain a definitive result from the peace talks. Therefore, we are determined to continue our mediation role for the end of this war. We will make every effort to keep the channels of dialogue open and the negotiations to continue between the parties,” he added, stressing that the conflict cannot be resolved militarily.

During the two-hour Istanbul meeting, Russia and Ukraine agreed to carry out a large-scale prisoner swap and exchange the preliminary terms for a potential ceasefire and discuss a follow-up round of talks.

Türkiye has been a key mediator between Moscow and Kiev since 2022. That year, it hosted peace talks between Russia and Ukraine, which failed to bring about a breakthrough – after what Moscow claims was intervention by former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who reportedly advised Kiev not to accept a deal and keep on fighting. Ankara has also been a regular intermediary in prisoner exchanges between the two belligerents.

Russia has said it is open to dialogue and ready to consider a ceasefire with Ukraine, although it has expressed concerns that Kiev could use the pause to restore its battered military and receive more weapons shipments from the West.

Lisbon has reportedly asked the European Commission to pressure Paris over the stalled expansion of electricity supplies following the recent ten-hour outage

Portugal plans to ask the European Commission to pressure France over limited electricity supplies from the latter, the Financial Times reported on Sunday, citing Energy Minister Maria da Graca Carvalho. The move follows the April 28 blackout that left millions across Spain, Portugal, and parts of southern France without electricity for up to ten hours. 

Portugal is reportedly blaming Paris for failing to complete and expand critical electricity interconnections with Spain – shortcomings that Lisbon argues exacerbated the blackout by restricting cross-border energy support. The power outage has been described as the largest in recent European history. 

Carvalho claims that Brussels has the authority to arbitrate the matter under EU law, noting that the weak interconnections between France and Spain continue to hamper the bloc’s internal energy market.

“We will involve the president of the EC on this to make sure that we are all integrated,” she said, expressing hope for a resolution. “This is a European question, it’s not a question between the three countries.”

She urged the Commission to step in if the internal market is being compromised, emphasizing its power to pressure France into accelerating work on infrastructure.

The Iberian Peninsula has some of the lowest energy connectivity levels in the EU, the FT noted. Power links between France and Spain were automatically disconnected to safeguard the wider European grid after Spain’s system began to fail.

Earlier this week, Spanish Minister for Ecological Transition Sara Aagesen said an initial investigation had revealed that the chain reaction of grid disconnections were triggered by power generation failures in the provinces of Granada, Badajoz, and Seville. 

A preliminary technical assessment by Entso-E, the European association of transmission system operators, reported that 2.2 gigawatts of capacity went offline in southern Spain less than a minute before the full system collapse. The root causes of the substation failures remain under investigation.

The United States of America, as we have known it, Has Been Destroyed by the US Supreme Court

Paul Craig Roberts

“The Supreme Court has just ruled that the worst murderers, drug dealers, gang members, and even those who are mentally insane, who came into our Country illegally, are not allowed to be forced out without going through a long, protracted, and expensive Legal Process, one that will take, possibly, many years for each person, and one that will allow these people to commit many crimes before they even see the inside of a Courthouse. The result of this decision will let more CRIMINALS pour into our Country, doing great harm to our cherished American public. It will also encourage other criminals to illegally enter our Country, wreaking havoc and bedlam wherever they go. The Supreme Court of the United States is not allowing me to do what I was elected to do. Sleepy Joe Biden allowed MILLIONS of Criminal Aliens to come into our Country without any “PROCESS” but, in order to get them out of our Country, we have to go through a long and extended PROCESS. In any event, thank you to Justice Alito and Justice Thomas for attempting to protect our Country. This is a bad and dangerous day for America!” — President Trump, Truth Social, May 16, 2025 at 5:59 PM

https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/114519753109701350 

As I predicted, the liberal-left, committed as it is to the establishment of a Sodom & Gomorrah Tower of Babel, used the mindless judiciary to protect “rights” of non-citizens who broke the law by entering the country illegally. The judges defined the preservation of America in terms of defending “rights” for illegals who are not US citizens to use US courts to evade enforcement of US law. No one knows where these American rights of non-Americans came from, but the morons on the Supreme Court are defending them. The Supreme Court’s ruling against America in favor of illegal aliens  reads like the babel of an insane asylum. Which is what the court is.  Instead of standing when judges enter the courtroom, they should be pelted with rotten tomatoes and rotten eggs.  There is no reason to respect them as they do not respect America and its Constitution. Most of them are activists for overthrowing traditional America.

The judiciary has also created a fourth branch of government, the civil service or executive branch employees, who the judiciary has now made independent of presidential control.

So, five months into the presidential  term, my prediction has come true that the Democrats, committed as they are to the replacement of white racist Americans with people of color, would use the courts to defeat the will of the people as expressed in the presidential election.

Americans do not realize, despite the over-abundance of evidence, that they have been in a civil war for many years.  That a civil war was underway became completely and totally clear in 2016 and again in 2020 and again during the Biden regime’s illegal prosecutions of Donald Trump and falsely accused and incarcerated “insurrectionists.”  That the US Department of Justice and federal courts could be used to imprison American patriots who protested a stolen presidential election demonstrated for even morons to see that the Democrat liberal-left was committed to overthrowing America.

Parents in every state had the evidence before their noses every day of the school year.  In place of education, white kids were taught, and still are, that they are racists, along with their parents and grandparents, that they might have been born into the wrong body, that gender is unrelated to biology and determined by self-declaration. Parents who resisted sex change operations for their underage children risked losing them to seizure by Child Protective Services.  Young kids were being sexualized at an early age, taught how to give oral sex and to copulate. The Democrats heavily into pedophilia are creating receptive children for themselves. Merit was abandoned as a basis for admission to quality schools for the gifted and as the basis for graduation, resulting in the destruction of the educational experience once offered to the gifted, people America certainly needs. Corporations and even the military sidelined hiring and promotion for white heterosexual Americans in order to give illegal preference to DEI. Corporate advertising promoted, and still does, miscegenation. Democrat political jurisdictions permitted Antifa and Black Lives Matter to loot and burn white business areas of cities and refused to prosecute.  Laws were passed that reduced the accountability of people of color for crimes.

For these and many other reasons enough of the insouciant American population saw the light and responded by electing an American as president.  It only took 7 Supreme Court justices and a sprinkling of Democrat federal district judges to defeat the American people’s uprising.

Americans need to understand that the Supreme Court with its ruling has destroyed America.  A country that cannot defend its borders and that cannot deport illegal entrants is described in Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints, a description of the fate that awaits white Americans, but Americans cannot stop scrolling their cell phones long enough to read a book that tells their future.

If Americans understood what awaits them, it is possible that they could save themselves if there was a massive violent uprising, but the people are too weak-minded and weak-willed to save themselves even if they could face up to the threat.

With my prediction that Trump’s agenda would be blocked proven true, I am encouraged to offer another prediction.  The Democrats will steal the mid-term elections.  The RINO Republicans, media, and judiciary will help them in order to get rid of Trump.  Next, President Trump will be successfully impeached, and he and members of his government and supporters will be prosecuted.  White heterosexual Americans will be discriminated against in every aspect of life.  All who protest will face charges.  The United States of America is about to disappear.

My backup prediction is that the American Establishment will override the Democrat liberal-left, because the ruling establishment sees Trump as an effective agent for their construction of an American neo-colonial empire consisting of Greenland, Panama, Gaza, and the Middle East (see today’s companion article.)  This opens up new avenues of plunder for the ruling elite.  The destruction of American unity that the Democrat liberal-left has achieved plays into the hands of the elite as the absence of unity prevents constraints on their privatization of government.  Now that I think about it, my backup prediction could well be the most likely one.

Has the leftwing stolen our youths?

You can see here in this young white American female how successful the anti-American left has been in using its control over US education to brainwash white American students.  This one takes the side of immigrant-invaders and she thinks it is illegal to detain illegal aliens.

Of course, this could be a Democrat Party anti-Trump propaganda video.

Regardless, so many Americans have had their minds programmed with disinformation that it will be extremely difficult for Trump to Make America Great Again.

https://x.com/libsoftiktok/status/1923084437023076847 

It brings me back to my little, humble parish of Saint Joseph Church in Augusta, Georgia where I was a member from 1960 to 1976, the age of 6 to 22. 

Although a civilian parish in the Diocese of Savannah, most of the laity were active or retired Army. Thus in the early 1960’s, we had war brides from Italy (my mother being one of them) as well as from Austria, France, Germany, Yugoslavia, Poland and other places in Europe. We also had many Korean brides from the Korean War and soon to have many Vietnamese brides from the Vietnam War. 

The Mass we all attended was the Traditional Latin Mass. No language group had their own Masses isolated from other language speaking groups in the parish. We were all united by the Latin Mass. 

It wasn’t until about 1970 I think, that the Korean community in my parish grew so much that with the vernacular Modern Mass they sought a Korean priest to offer Mass for them in Korean. Thus they became their own Mass community separate from the other Masses in the parish.

What a joy it was, though, before the Balkanization of languages in our Latin Rite, to be with so many different nations, peoples and languages at our Sunday Mass in little old St. Joseph Church in Augusta, Georgia. What a cosmopolitan parish it was united under one roof and one Mass in our Risen Lord Jesus Christ. 

Right-wing EU critic George Simion is running against pro-EU Bucharest Mayor Nicusor Dan in the second round

Romanian voters returned to the polls on Sunday, May 18 for the second round of a presidential election rerun following a court-annulled vote last year. The runoff is between George Simion, a critic of Brussels who has been banned from entering Ukraine, and Nicusor Dan, the pro-EU mayor of the capital, Bucharest.

Around 19,000 polling stations have opened across Romania for the second round of the election. Voting began at 7am local time (4am GMT) and is scheduled to end at 9pm, with exit polls expected soon after.

George Simion, the leader of the right-wing Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR), came in first in the initial round earlier this month with 40.96% of the vote – nearly 20 percentage points ahead of Bucharest Mayor Nicusor Dan, who came in second. Recent polls, however, show a tighter race, with one reporting a tie and another giving Dan a narrow lead.

Dan, who is running as an independent, is a Sorbonne-educated mathematician who entered politics after years of activism. He has pledged to fight corruption, reduce economic inequality, and maintain strong ties with the EU and NATO. He also claims that Romania’s support for Ukraine is vital to national security.

Simion opposes EU bureaucracy and Brussels-mandated policies, which he has described as part of a “greedy and corrupt bubble.” He supports what he calls a “Europe of sovereign nations” and has positioned himself as a defender of “traditional values,” in contrast to “globalist ideologies.” He has denied being anti-European, describing his alliance as “Eurorealist, not Euroskeptic,” according to Politico.

Although Simion has insisted he is not pro-Russian, he opposes sending weapons to Ukraine and has called for a negotiated settlement to the conflict between Moscow and Kiev. He has also praised US President Donald Trump, calling him “a symbol of freedom,” and has said he would reverse what he describes as an “anti-American shift in Europe.”

The election follows the annulment of the previous vote, in which independent right-wing candidate Calin Georgescu led in the first round with 23% of the vote. Romania’s Constitutional Court overturned the results, citing electoral irregularities and allegations of foreign interference, including campaign activity on TikTok and suspected Russian “hybrid” influence. Moscow has denied having any involvement.

Georgescu was later barred from running again by the Central Electoral Bureau (BEC), which cited his alleged “anti-democratic” and “extremist” positions and procedural violations. The court upheld the BEC’s decision.

Simion has publicly supported Georgescu, arriving with him at a polling station on Sunday. He previously said he might appoint him prime minister if elected.

READ MORE: Ban of RT journalist proves Romanian election a ‘meme’ – Moscow

On the eve of the vote, Simion claimed that voter manipulation was taking place in Moldova, where many Romanian citizens are voting. He has also deactivated his TikTok and Facebook accounts, citing compliance with the election silence rules.

After Simion’s strong showing in the first round, Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu resigned and announced the Social Democratic Party’s withdrawal from the ruling coalition, stating that the bloc no longer has political legitimacy. The PSD has said it will not support either candidate in the runoff.