On Monday the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, launched an attack on the “insane priorities” of Joe Biden’s administration when it came to spending American money overseas through USAid, a federal agency that John F Kennedy established when he was president.
USAid, aka the United States Agency for International Development, has attracted the attention of Elon Musk, whose “department of government efficiency” claims to be aiming to cut the United States’ federal budget by a third.
To do this he will have to take on more than USAid, whose overall expenditure of $50 billion a year is a puny fraction of the trillions spent by the US government. But USAid presents an attractive target that appeals to voters who are less than keen on giving money to foreigners.
While the bulk of the agency’s budget goes toward health, education and anti-poverty programmes in poor countries, it also makes cultural grants – which are what attracted Leavitt’s scorn this week: “$1.5 million to advance DEI in Serbia’s workplaces,” she read out, referring to one of several diversity, equity and inclusion projects; “$70,000 for a production of a DEI musical in Ireland, $47,000 for a transgender opera in Colombia, $32,000 for a transgender comic book in Peru. I don’t know about you, but as an American taxpayer I don’t want my dollars going towards this crap.”
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She also said: “If you look at the waste and abuse that has run through USAid in the past several years, these are some of the insane priorities that that organisation has been spending money on.”
Noses twitched immediately in Ireland at the second item on her list. The transgender Colombian opera singers could look after themselves, but what was this about a DEI Irish musical? It wasn’t long before our old friends the internet sleuths had established that the €67,500 or so in question had gone to a production company associated with the Other Voices festival.
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By this stage Irish racist Twitter was fully aroused and pointing the finger at any production that didn’t have an all-white cast. And lunatic Catholic Twitter was doing the same for any show that had dared to mention mother and baby homes.
The woke extravaganza in question was actually something called Dignity, a live-streamed set of performances from the US ambassador’s residence in the Phoenix Park in September 2022 that featured, among others, the American folk musician Rhiannon Giddens, the Italian instrumentalist Francesco Turrisi, the singer-songwriter Mick Flannery and the fiddler Martin Hayes.
Having examined the evidence on YouTube, I regret to inform you that there is nothing about white fragility, queer theory or any of the other progressive shibboleths that have attained the same status in this White House that the dictatorship of the proletariat had for the un-American activities committee of the US House of Representatives in the late 1940s.
It is certainly true that the accompanying promotional bumf for the gig (which was sponsored by the well-known radical agitators Coca-Cola and PwC, among others) was full of the sort of platitudes that were so in vogue in the faraway days of the early 2020s.
“The Biden administration is committed to principles of diversity, equity, inclusion, and access,” we were informed. “With this event we aim to highlight and celebrate the work that the embassy, the Irish Government and our partners are doing to advance DEI throughout Irish society. These ideals have long underpinned the strong relationship between both countries.”
Not any more.
It has already become a truism, but the United States’ 180-degree turn over the past three weeks is more akin to regime change in a dictatorship than the peaceful transfer of power in a democracy.
That poses a challenge for everyone. It is not surprising that the businesses that were happy to incorporate DEI into their corporate strategies, along with some of the more dubious internal policies that accompanied them, are now competing to see who can ditch those policies fastest.
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What might be more interesting is to keep an eye on whether the Department of Foreign Affairs and Culture Ireland do something similar, at least in their dealings with the US.
The scorched-earth tactics being implemented by Musk will be a test of how intellectually robust and how well supported these ideas really are. But even those sceptical of them should beware the far more intolerant backlash being promoted by the likes of the neoreactionary academic Patrick Deneen.
The analyst Tyler Cowen offers a perceptive insight into Trumpian thinking. “You will not win all of these cultural debates, but you will control the ideological agenda,” he wrote this week. “Your opponents will be dispirited and disorganised ... Then just keep on going. In the long run, you may end up ‘owning’ far more of the culture than you suspected was possible.”
The next gig at the ambassador’s residence is going to look a little different.
