This and that – commenting on commentaries

This week, several items posted on Freedom Net Daily were of particular interest to us here at TPOL. First, DEI (or DIE or DEI(A)) at California colleges, then looking at the “rising” Democratic Socialists (Communists) in the States.

First, we have the commentary DEI“A” Directive Denied as published in Common Sense by Paul Jacob. He writes in part: “Daymon Johnson has been fighting to speak freely. A professor at Bakersfield College, a community college in California, Johnson has for years been bucking a mandate that he parrot the state’s ‘DEI’ and ‘anti-racist’ ideology — well, DEIA now: ‘diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility’ — lest he face disciplinary action or receive the boot. Community colleges, remember, are creations of the state, and Professor Johnson was being forced, by state directive, to mouth specific bureaucratic verbiage as if he were a mere functionary under a central planning board. … this imperfect ruling paves the way for further vindications.”

Well, first, the creation of the DEIA acronym is neat – thank you, Paul! We at TPOL still prefer to refer to it with the more pointed DIE acronym, since that is the objective: to kill what is left of a decent American society and tradition.

But more to the point of why this triggered our interest: Professor Johnson reminds us of those poor misguided people who are counter-protesters so often. You know the ones. They have the signs stating “Keep the government out of our Social Security.” Or perhaps we should be reminded of the poor, deluded people who believe that government-appointed/elected judges can be fair and honest, despite where they get their paychecks and all their wonderful cushy perks from.

Professor Johnson is a part of the state’s apparatus: he is a government employee, and yet he objects to doing what his superiors, his supervisors, in that government, tell him what to do. He is refusing to comply with one of the conditions of his employment. We are not saying that his supervisors, the government agency officials over him, are right to require this particular DEIA allegiance, but does he really have a right to reject it?

More generally, it has been obvious for centuries that those who are employees of state agencies, including academic institutions, and including not just staff and administration, but faculty – even adjunct faculty and such people as assistant instructors and student hires – do NOT have the full “academic freedom” that we as private citizens have, or that those employed by private institutions do. Whether we are talking about pre-school and kindergarten or post-post-graduate research institutions. And whatever the subject of our words and writings may be.

If someone truly values real academic freedom, all they need to do is cut the purse strings from Big Mama Government.

The next commentary comes to us from Town Hall, written by Jay Rogers: The Democratic Socialists Aren’t Fringe Anymore

Mr. Rogers makes many valid points, and provides a very useful (and positively good) viewpoint. He writes in part: “I spend my days reading growth curves. A pension fund’s unfunded liability, a private equity fund’s internal rate of return, a hedge fund’s drawdown. You learn to read a line on a chart the way a doctor reads one on a different kind of monitor. Most political organizations produce a flat line for decades, a small bump around an election, then flat again. The Democratic Socialists of America just produced a line that would get flagged in any diligence memo I’ve written in 30 years. An organization with 6,000 members in 2015 crossed 100,000 in February 2026, and by this July had passed the old high-water mark for American socialism: the roughly 113,000 members the Socialist Party of America claimed at its 1912 peak under Eugene Debs. DSA now calls itself, correctly, the largest socialist organization in American history.”

At the same time, his writing triggers some thoughts that apparently are not common:

For one, the editors of TPOL have longer memories than most. The Deutsche Demokratishe Republik (DDR) collapsed and was absorbed by the Bundesrepublik Deutschland (BRD or FRG: “West” Germany) in 1990. The DDR was a one-party state, ruled by the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED, Socialist Unity Party). That entity had been created in 1949 when the Komunistische Partei Deutschlands,(KPD) absorbed the eastern remnants of the SPD (Social Democratic Party). So-called “reformists” took over the SED (which was 99.9% Communist (international progressive or socialist) in politics) and renamed it the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS: Partei des Demoratishchen Sozialismus).

So those American politicians and their followers, supporters, and puppetmasters honor a proven “successful track record” (in their eyes, at least) of what most of us call the Communist Party: the heirs of Marxist-Leninist political philosophy and action. It that, at least the people like Mandami and others are “honest” in admitting their heritage is international socialism: communism.

But one thing that Mr. Rogers seems to overlook when talking statistics: In 1912, when Debs and fellow Socialists and Communists in the US, claimed 113,000 members, the States had only 95.3 million people: so that 113K amounted to 0.1186% of the population. So today’s 120,000 dues-paying DSA members is of a population of about 342 million. That is 0.033041% of the people living in the US. The DSA may be “the largest socialist organization” in United States history. But it is still very, very much a “fringe party.” Its members are only 3 out of every 10,000 people, and perhaps 6 out of every 10,000 voters. Hardly more than a marble-sized stone on that concrete pavement that you ust drove over: a loud popping noise and nothing more.

But just as that popping sound can cause the driver to overreact and cause a major accident, the loud noises of America’s home-grown communists in 2026 can create a lot of trouble!

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Source: https://freedombunker.com/2026/07/17/this-and-that-commenting-on-commentaries/