NEW: Many states and cities now have bias reporting systems for citizens to report each other for "hate speech." Oregon's hotline solicits reports of "offensive jokes" and even logged the Israeli flag as a bias incident when I reported a display of one. Wokeness is not dead.🧵

This week my family said goodbye to our dog, Nutmeg, who came to us as a puppy my freshman year of high school. She brought joy (and mischief) to our lives for 15 years. Mercifully, she never tried to eat our bird. Here’s what she looked like:

Tldr: The Volcker Alliance started as a nonpartisan organization devoted to public service and clean governance. Now—after years of grants from progressive foundations—it looks more like a DEI patronage network. Read the full story here:

While its grant to the Volcker Alliance did not mention race, the foundation requires staffers to describe how projects will affect "people who are Black, Hispanic, and Native American."

The Lumina Foundation, meanwhile, announced in 2021 that it would prioritize grants "designed to benefit people of color" as part of a new, "equity-first" approach to grantmaking.

The group's evolution reflected the way in which large foundations push progressivism onto their grant recipients. The MacArthur Foundation describes DEI as a "core value" and earmarked its $2 million grant for "developing leadership pathways for diverse individuals."

The alliance launched the Increasing Diversity in Government initiative with a $150,000 grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and helped expand ASU's Next Gen Service Corps—which prioritizes "traditionally underrepresented" groups—with $350,000 from the Lumina Foundation.

But as more liberal funders entered the mix, the group began to evolve from a good-governance policy shop to a progressive patronage network. In 2022, the alliance received more than $2 million from the MacArthur Foundation to create race-based internships and fellowships.

In its early years, the alliance focused mainly on state budget policy and did not discuss diversity issues at all. Its initial backers were Bridgewater founder Ray Dalio, a center-left billionaire, and the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to fiscal restraint.

As the deans of their respective institutions, summit members play a major role in faculty hiring and oversee nominations for the Future Leaders initiative, the program that refers minorities to "academic leadership opportunities."

A working group within the summit—co-chaired by Virginia Commonwealth University's Susan Gooden and Syracuse University's David van Slyke—spent the past year analyzing the "racial makeup of faculty of schools of public service."

It has also enlisted the deans of more than 75 schools of public policy to increase the "socioeconomic, racial, and ethnic diversity of public service leadership," an initiative known as the Dean's Summit.

The organization says it is "doubling down" on efforts to "propel diversity in government hiring" and runs a research project on how state governments can use behavioral science to attract "underrepresented applicants."

"A nonpartisan...civil service, selected based on merit and retained based on performance, is a bedrock of our democracy," the group said in a statement. But the alliance's own programs suggest it has abandoned the performance-based principles it claims Trump is jettisoning.

When the alliance was founded in 2013, it portrayed itself as a no-nonsense organization focused on the "nuts and bolts" of governance. More recently, it has become a vocal critic of what it describes as Trump's "unprecedented threat to our nation's public service tradition."

Another program, the Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC) Future Leaders Network, offers what appear to be race-based fellowships and internships to "underrepresented" groups, though the program description does not define that term.

The alliance's Future Leaders of Schools of Public Service initiative, launched in 2022, refers "BIPOC colleagues" to "academic leadership opportunities" and is overseen by the deans of major public policy schools.

NEW: The Volcker Alliance, founded in 2013 by Ronald Reagan's Federal Reserve chair Paul Volcker, describes itself as a "nonpartisan" organization "dedicated to empowering the public sector workforce." In reality, it's working to inject DEI into academia and government.🧵

SCOOP: The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission launched its first DEI-related enforcement action in federal court under the Trump administration, filing a subpoena on Thursday to compel Northwestern Mutual to comply with a subpoena on its diversity policies, the Free

“You know that guy who thrives on taboo-breaking and says that Jews control the US government? Let’s have Chuck Schumer introduce a resolution condemning him for anti-Semitism. That will show him!” Hard to imagine a stupider strategy.

This is onanistic virtue-signaling whose only effect will be to exoticize—and thus empower—a virulent anti-Semite.