Updated on Apr-28-2018
The Democratic National Committee has multiple open vacancies in the tech department including IT Systems Administrator, Product Manager, and Chief Security Officer. Madeleine Leader, the DNC Data Services Manager, sends an email to employees asking for help filling in those vacancies – “feel free to forward on to your contacts.” Then comes a hummer: “I personally would prefer that you not forward to cisgender straight white males, as they are already in the majority.”
“Cisgender” means not transgender according to the language spoken in the DNC. The conservative media did chide the DNC for the discriminatory intent of this email but missed the more important story. This email shows (independently of other evidence) that the Democratic Party became obscurantist to the bone. Even in its internal operations it does not care about technical knowledge, competence, ability, skills, experience, and other attributes that distinguish a good engineer/scientist/worker from a bad or fake one. This is why it still believes in the climate pseudo-science. This is why its presidential candidate failed to secure her illegal email server. And this is why the self-incriminating emails of John Podesta came to public view on the eve of the elections. This dirty laundry came to the public view because DNC has been hacked but by an individual known as Guccifer 2.0, not connected to Russia. He might be even an American citizen or permanent resident. His writing feels sincere and authentic. From Guccifer 2.0 FAQ:
“I was born in Eastern Europe. I won’t answer where I am now. … I can work wherever there’s an Internet connection. … I feel free in any free country.
It seems the guys from CrowdStrike [the computer security company hired by DNC] and the DNC would say I’m a Russian bear even if I were a catholic nun in fact. At first I was annoyed and disappointed. But now I realize they have nothing else to say. There’s no other way to justify their incompetence and failure. It’s much easier for them to accuse powerful foreign special services.
I don’t want to disappoint anyone, but none of the candidates has my sympathies. Each of them has skeletons in the closet and I think people have a right to know the truth about the politicians.”
(I have professional experience in the computer networks security and can only laugh at the media’s insinuations that the hackers responsible for the release of the DNC internal emails from October-November 2016 have been identified and connected to foreign powers. The Obama administration kept the U.S. internet insecure and vulnerable to foreign espionage and influence operations. Multiple massive data breaches in the national security targets by China have been reported and nobody knows how many breaches went unreported or even undetected. There’s no doubt that Russia, China, other foreign governments and NGOs continued such lucrative operations against all targets of value, including the DNC and RNC. But, conspiracy theorists ignore the fact that Putin preferred the election of Hillary, just like almost every other foreign government did.)
This story should be connected to a recent example of academic obscurantism. A professor at the University of Illinois wrote that, “mathematics itself operates as Whiteness” – in an anthology for math teachers! The real scandal is not in what she wrote. It is in the approval of this garbage by the university
University of Illinois interim Provost John Wilkin told Fox News that Gutierrez is an established and admired scholar who has been published in many peer-reviewed publications. (White privilege bolstered by teaching math, university professor says – Fox News, 10/24)
and in the absence of outrage from what used to be the academic community.
This Democratic Party ruled the U.S. for eight years and still rules many states. The harm it has inflicted on the national security, defense, education, infrastructure, and productive economy is probably beyond the imagination of an average citizen or a Trump administration member. The institutions, politically aligned or to the left from the Democratic Party, have fallen as low as it did. Academia, media, professional societies, etc. are probably in need of being rebuilt almost from scratch.