Welcome to episode 48 of the Knight and Rose podcast! In this episode, Wintery Knight and Desert Rose welcome Krista Bontrager to discuss diversity, equity and inclusion. If you like this episode, please subscribe to the podcast, and subscribe to our YouTube channel. We would appreciate it if you left us a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Podcast description:

Christian apologists Wintery Knight and Desert Rose discuss apologetics, policy, culture, relationships, and more. Each episode equips you with evidence you can use to boldly engage anyone, anywhere. We train our listeners to become Christian secret agents. Action and adventure guaranteed. 30-45 minutes per episode. New episode every week.

Episode 48:

Episode  Summary:

Wintery Knight and Desert Rose interview Krista Bontrager about diversity, equity and inclusion. What is diversity? Are there any benefits to diversity? Are there any disadvantages to diversity? How does the concept of representation apply to diversity? Should Christians try to redeem DEI, or should we just avoid it? What is the future of DEI in companies and schools?

Speaker biographies

Krista holds a B.A. in Communications from Biola University. She has two degrees from the Talbot School of Theology: an M.A. in Theology and M.A. in Bible Exposition. She is currently working on a D. Min in Apologetics at Birmingham Theological Seminary. She is an author, podcaster, and former university professor. She has worked professionally in theology and apologetics for 25 years and transitioned into full time ministry with the Center for Biblical Unity in 2021. Krista is co-author of a new book, entitled “Walking in Unity: Biblical Answers to 10 Questions on Race and Racism”.

Wintery Knight is a black legal immigrant. He is a senior software engineer by day, and an amateur Christian apologist by night. He has been blogging at winteryknight.com since January of 2009, covering news, policy and Christian worldview issues.

Desert Rose did her undergraduate degree in public policy, and then worked for a conservative Washington lobbyist organization. She also has a graduate degree from a prestigious evangelical seminary. She is active in Christian apologetics as a speaker, author, and teacher.

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Music attribution:

Strength Of The Titans by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/5744-strength-of-the-titans
License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

Last week, I blogged about a long-time employee of taxpayer-funded National Public Radio, who lamented his employer’s turn from moderately leftist to far-left extremism. He himself was a leftist, but he was getting concerned that NPR had lost any appearance of being a news organization. He expressed hope that the new incoming CEO would be moderate. He was wrong.

Here’s an excellent article from City Journal about the new CEO, written by anti-woke activist Chris Rufo:

Katherine Maher has a golden résumé, with stints and affiliations at UNICEF, the Atlantic Council, the World Economic Forum, the State Department, Stanford University, and the Council on Foreign Relations. She was chief executive officer and executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation. And, as of last month, she is CEO of National Public Radio.

Mere weeks into this new role, Maher has stepped into controversy. Long-time NPR senior editor Uri Berliner published a scathing indictment of the self-professed “public” media service’s ideological capture. Rather than address the substance of these criticisms—which will ring true to anyone who has listened to NPR over the past decade—Maher punished Berliner with a five-day unpaid suspension. (Berliner announced his resignation from NPR earlier today.)

And here is what Rufo’s article is about:

I have spent the past few days exploring Maher’s prolific history on social media, which she seems to have used as a private diary, narrating her every thought, emotion, meeting, and political opinion in real-time. This archive is a collection of her statements, but at a deeper level, it provides a window into the soul of a uniquely American archetype: the affluent, white, female liberal—many of whom now sit atop our elite institutions.

Her tweets about how feminism and global warming validate her failure to marry and have children are very amusing. It’s what you would expect from someone with no earned STEM degrees, and no private sector work experience.

But here is the best part of the article:

The most troubling of these conclusions is her support for radically narrowing the range of acceptable opinions. In 2020, she argued that the New York Times should not have published Senator Tom Cotton’s op-ed, “Send in the Troops,” during the George Floyd riots. In 2021, she celebrated the banishment of then-president Donald Trump from social media, writing: “Must be satisfying to deplatform fascists. Even more satisfying? Not platforming them in the first place.”

As CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation, Maher made censorship a critical part of her policy, under the guise of fighting “disinformation.” In a speech to the Atlantic Council, an organization with extensive ties to U.S. intelligence services, she explained that she “took a very active approach to disinformation,” coordinated censorship “through conversations with government,” and suppressed dissenting opinions related to the pandemic and the 2020 election.

In that same speech, Maher said that, in relation to the fight against disinformation, the “the number one challenge here that we see is, of course, the First Amendment in the United States.” These speech protections, Maher continued, make it “a little bit tricky” to suppress “bad information” and “the influence peddlers who have made a real market economy around it.”

Maher’s general policy at Wikipedia, she tweeted, was to support efforts to “eliminate racist, misogynist, transphobic, and other forms of discriminatory content”—which, under current left-wing definitions, could include almost anything to the right of Joe Biden.

If you are wondering what she did to the NPR whistleblower, she suspended him without pay, and he later resigned, after an uproar from the mob of whiny diversity hires who work at NPR.

Because I work in IT, I am used to working with people who have earned STEM degrees, years of work experience in the private sector, and knowledge of how to solve real-world problems. But occasionally I have a brush with a white female receptionist or administrative assistant or HR generalist, and this is how they talk. Their university experience hasn’t prepared them to produce value for customers. They’ve just memorized a bunch of left-wing slogans and gotten good grades for parroting them. They don’t actually know which policies obtain which results. This talk-your-way-through-life strategy doesn’t work well for most people as far as earning money in the real world. But if you come from a wealthy family, then you can survive, because you have connections to other wealthy people.

Should taxpayers really be forced to subsidize an organization led by a trust-fund baby, who has grown up into an uneducated, unskilled, radical leftist activist?