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Forget DEI, we need to embrace MEI: meritocracy, excellence, and intelligence

Published

1 year ago

17 minute read

From LifeSiteNews

By Robert Malone

Countering DEI globalists like BlackRock’s Larry Fink and the World Economic Forum, a young entrepreneur named Alexandr Wang has taken a stand, provided leadership, and is triggering a new movement—hiring and promoting based on MEI: merit, excellence, and intelligence.

Silicon Valley experienced an earthquake on June 13, 2024. This geological event was definitely not televised, but it triggered aftershocks from progressive corporate media like Fortune magazine (which, in a typical propaganda move, cites unnamed “experts” in its reporting on the topic). The earthquake was a consequence of the widespread excesses and consequences of the DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) hiring and promotion policies that have been actively promoted by the World Economic Forum and its leading corporatist sponsors including Blackrock, Vanguard, State Street and World Economic Foundation (WEF) favored consulting group McKinsey & Company.

To advance and enforce their DEI agenda, which plays a key role in the WEF-promoted vision of “Stakeholder Capitalism”, the WEF has created the “Global Parity Alliance”. The WEF, which defines itself as a key player in an emerging global government (in partnership with the United Nations), has structured this alliance of corporations to implement DEI initiatives across the globe rapidly.

The Global Parity Alliance, a cross-industry group of companies, is not just taking action, but accelerating it. Their urgency to promote diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I) in the workplace and beyond is palpable, and their commitment to this cause is unwavering.

This group, the Global Parity Alliance, is not just a collection of companies. It’s a community of like-minded organizations, all striving for the same goal-better and faster DE&I outcomes. By sharing proven DE&I best practices and practical insights, they are inviting others to join them in this important work.

To realize the promise of diversity, the Global Parity Alliance members and identified DE&I lighthouses will work to close opportunity gaps faster in the new economy.

According to Blackrock CEO Larry Fink, the WEF DEI initiative intends to (quite literally) force the implementation of social engineering/”stakeholder capitalism” DEI policies as the basis for corporate hiring and promotion rather than focusing on profitability, return on investment, and shareholder/owner value measured by financial outcome measures.

The problem with this globalist “can’t we all get along” Kumbaya naïveté is that the dogs of investment are not eating the dog food. And, of course, inquiring minds are raising questions after the serial DEI financial fiascos of Target and its line of transgender attire for infants, InBev with its transgender Bud Light advertising campaign, Disney with its corporate commitment to woke/grooming everything, farming icon John Deere’s surprise discovery that flyover state farmers were not buying into its DEI genuflecting to the WEF, and WEF partner CrowdStrike crashing the world wide web.

To say that the financial genius of the WEF globalist leaders is looking a bit threadbare is a self-evident understatement. Oh yeah, and then there is the US Secret Service and the attempted Trump assassination. As covered in this recent Fox Business News segment, the natives are becoming restless, and drumbeats are being heard in the distance.

Now is an excellent time to remind all concerned that Larry Fink and Blackrock’s corporate financial ascendency is just another classic tale of DC/Democrat crony capitalism. Fink and company are not business masterminds. They are merely garden-variety Obama cronies parading around and masquerading as captains of industry. I admit to a growing sense of schadenfreude with the perverse logic inherent in all this. Perhaps merit-based selection of federal contractors actually results in better outcomes than just allowing politicians to develop public-private partnerships based on cronyism?

Please consider this AI-generated summary of BlackRock’s rise to global financial dominance, primarily based on “Times of India” reporting, for those who are not singing along with the bouncing ball.

During the 2008 financial crisis, BlackRock played a significant role in the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) under the Obama administration. Here are key points:

  • TARP’s Legacy Securities Program: In 2009, the Obama administration’s Treasury Department partnered with BlackRock to manage the Legacy Securities Program, a component of TARP. The program aimed to remove toxic assets from banks’ balance sheets, stabilizing the financial system.
  • BlackRock’s Acquisition of Merrill Lynch’s Assets: In September 2008, BlackRock acquired a significant portion of Merrill Lynch’s troubled assets, including mortgage-backed securities, for $3 billion. This deal helped stabilize Merrill Lynch and prevented a systemic crisis.
  • BlackRock’s Management of TARP Assets: As part of the Legacy Securities Program, BlackRock managed a portfolio of troubled assets, including mortgage-backed securities and other complex financial instruments. This role allowed BlackRock to profit from the recovery of these assets, while also helping to stabilize the economic system.
  • Larry Fink’s Relationship with Obama: BlackRock’s CEO, Larry Fink, developed a close relationship with President Obama and his administration. Fink was a key advisor on financial matters, and BlackRock’s expertise was leveraged to inform policy decisions.
  • Thomas Donilon’s Connection: Thomas E. Donilon, former National Security Advisor to President Obama, is currently the Chairman of the BlackRock Investment Institute. During his tenure as National Security Advisor, Donilon worked closely with Fink and other financial leaders, including Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner.

Key Takeaways

  1. BlackRock played a crucial role in the Obama administration’s TARP program, managing troubled assets and helping to stabilize the financial system.
  2. Larry Fink’s relationship with President Obama and his administration was significant. Fink served as a key advisor on financial matters.
  3. Thomas Donilon’s connection to BlackRock, as Chairman of the BlackRock Investment Institute, highlights the firm’s continued influence in Washington, D.C.

What the AI missed is that BlackRock was able to leverage its special relationship with the Obama administration and the TARP program to produce the most globally comprehensive database of business transactions that the world has ever known. And then to exclusively datamine this rich insider resource to generate forward-looking predictions, which it leveraged to yield a globally dominant investment portfolio. And now, BlackRock has captured the exclusive (US, of course) contract to manage the rebuilding of Ukraine. Once the US/NATO military-industrial complex has succeeded in depopulating and then occupying that region. See how that works? Thanks, O’Biden/Uniparty. Let’s watch to see how that plays out.

Getting back on track.

As exemplified by the overlapping fiascos of CrowdStrike and the US Secret Service, the whole problem with DEI-based hiring and promotion policies is that they result in a gradual, creeping degradation of organizational competence, which I have previously covered in my recent substack essay titled “The Great Enshittening.”

Here’s the thing: In the 21st century, we are the inheritors of an interlaced network of complex systems, each requiring considerable competence to maintain and almost all of which are currently strained to the breaking point. Electricity grids, air traffic control networks, server farms, food supply chains, global shipping, petroleum, finance, the internet—the list goes on and on. They are all interdependent and at risk of cascading failure. And into this mix, the self-proclaimed geniuses of global governance have injected themselves and their untested theoretical fantasies of “Stakeholder Capitalism.” Which unproven theory is just another way of saying Marxist social engineering lathered up with a thin veneer of Adam Smith to reduce the friction of forced introduction.

Returning now to that Silicon Valley earthquake that I mentioned in the opening.

A young entrepreneur-genius (named Alexandr Wang) has taken a stand, provided leadership, and is triggering a new movement—sort of a back-to-the-future moment. Hiring and promotion based on MEI: merit, excellence, and intelligence. What a novel concept! Many (including Elon Musk) are jumping on this bandwagon and endorsing this breakthrough concept <sarcasm mine>, which was just the way things were in my youth. Little things like acceptance into medical school. Hiring and promotion. Back in the day, it was understood that the business of business was producing quality goods, services, and value, and deriving wealth from honest productivity.

To provide perspective and put in another plug for the Dean of anarcho-capitalism, Murray Rothbard, there are only two ways of accumulating wealth:

  1. Labor: Wealth can be accumulated through productive labor, where an individual creates value by providing goods and services to others. This approach is based on voluntary exchange, where individuals trade their labor for compensation, such as wages or profits.
  2. Theft: Wealth can also be accumulated through theft, where an individual takes wealth from others without their consent. This approach is based on coercion, where one party uses force or fraud to seize wealth from another.

Rather than quote derivative reporting from Fox Business News or even Callum Borchers of the Wall Street Journal, I prefer to let AI technology leader Alexandr Wang do the talking (originally on “X”, of course).

MERITOCRACY AT SCALE

In the wake of our fundraise, I’ve been getting a lot of questions about talent. All of our external success—powering breakthroughs in L4 autonomy, partnering with OpenAI on RLHF going back to GPT-2, supporting the DoD and every major AI lab, and the recent $1bn financing transaction—all of it is downstream from us hiring the best people for the job. Talent is our #1 input metric.

Because of this, I spend a lot of my time on recruiting. I either personally interview every hire or sign off on every candidate packet. It’s the thing I spend the plurality of my time on, easily. But everyone can and should contribute to this effort. There are almost a thousand of us now, and it takes a lot to hire quickly while maintaining, and continuing to raise, our bar for quality.

That’s why this is the time to codify a hiring principle that I consider crucial to our success: Scale is a meritocracy, and we must always remain one.

Hiring on merit will be a permanent policy at Scale.

It’s a big deal whenever we invite someone to join our mission, and those decisions have never been swayed by orthodoxy or virtue signaling or whatever the current thing is. I think of our guiding principle as MEI: merit, excellence, and intelligence.

That means we hire only the best person for the job, we seek out and demand excellence, and we unapologetically prefer people who are very smart.

We treat everyone as an individual. We do not unfairly stereotype, tokenize, or otherwise treat anyone as a member of a demographic group rather than as an individual.

We believe that people should be judged by the content of their character — and, as colleagues, be additionally judged by their talent, skills, and work ethic.

There is a mistaken belief that meritocracy somehow conflicts with diversity. I strongly disagree. No group has a monopoly on excellence. A hiring process based on merit will naturally yield a variety of backgrounds, perspectives, and ideas. Achieving this requires casting a wide net for talent and then objectively selecting the best, without bias in any direction. We will not pick winners and losers based on someone being the “right” or “wrong” race, gender, and so on. It should be needless to say, and yet it needs saying: doing so would be racist and sexist, not to mention illegal.

Upholding meritocracy is good for business and is the right thing to do. This approach not only results in the strongest possible team, but also ensures we’re treating our colleagues with fairness and respect.

As a result, everyone who joins Scale can be confident that they were chosen for their outstanding talent, not any other reasons. MEI has gotten us to where we are today. And it’s the same thing that’ll get us where we’re going, as we embark on our next chapter focusing on data abundance, frontier data, and reliable measurement to accelerate the development and adoption of AI models.

Alex

If you are committed to Making America Great Again, then be like Alex. Pursue MEI, not DEI, in all of your management practices.

For the sake of the broader community and mitigation of enshittification risk, if for no other reason.

Reprinted with permission from Robert Malone.

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Taxing food is like slapping a surcharge on hunger. It needs to end

Published on December 20, 2025

By

This article supplied by Troy Media.

Troy Media By Sylvain Charlebois

Cutting the food tax is one clear way to ease the cost-of-living crisis for Canadians

About a year ago, Canada experimented with something rare in federal policymaking: a temporary GST holiday on prepared foods.

It was short-lived and poorly communicated, yet Canadians noticed it immediately. One of the most unavoidable expenses in daily life—food—became marginally less costly.

Families felt a modest but genuine reprieve. Restaurants saw a bump in customer traffic. For a brief moment, Canadians experienced what it feels like when government steps back from taxing something as basic as eating.

Then the tax returned with opportunistic pricing, restoring a policy that quietly but reliably makes the cost of living more expensive for everyone.

In many ways, the temporary GST cut was worse than doing nothing. It opened the door for industry to adjust prices upward while consumers were distracted by the tax relief. That dynamic helped push our food inflation rate from minus 0.6 per cent in January to almost four per cent later in the year. By tinkering with taxes rather than addressing the structural flaws in the system, policymakers unintentionally fuelled volatility. Instead of experimenting with temporary fixes, it is time to confront the obvious: Canada should stop taxing food altogether.

Start with grocery stores. Many Canadians believe food is not taxed at retail, but that assumption is wrong. While “basic groceries” are zero-rated, a vast range of everyday food products are taxed, and Canadians now pay over a billion dollars a year in GST/HST on food purchased in grocery stores.

That amount is rising steadily, not because Canadians are buying more treats, but because shrinkflation is quietly pulling more products into taxable categories. A box of granola bars with six bars is tax-exempt, but when manufacturers quietly reduce the box to five bars, it becomes taxable. The product hasn’t changed. The nutritional profile hasn’t changed. Only the packaging has changed, yet the tax flips on.

This pattern now permeates the grocery aisle. A 650-gram bag of chips shrinks to 580 grams and becomes taxable. Muffins once sold in six-packs are reformatted into three-packs or individually wrapped portions, instantly becoming taxable single-serve items. Yogurt, traditionally sold in large tax-exempt tubs, increasingly appears in smaller 100-gram units that meet the definition of taxable snacks. Crackers, cookies, trail mixes and cereals have all seen slight weight reductions that push them past GST thresholds created decades ago. Inflation raises food prices; Canada’s outdated tax code amplifies those increases.

At the same time, grocery inflation remains elevated. Prices are rising at 3.4 per cent, nearly double the overall inflation rate. At a moment when food costs are climbing faster than almost everything else, continuing to tax food—whether on the shelf or in restaurants—makes even less economic sense.

The inconsistencies extend further. A steak purchased at the grocery store carries no tax, yet a breakfast wrap made from virtually the same inputs is taxed at five per cent GST plus applicable HST. The nutritional function is not different. The economic function is not different. But the tax treatment is entirely arbitrary, rooted in outdated distinctions that no longer reflect how Canadians live or work.

Lower-income households disproportionately bear the cost. They spend 6.2 per cent of their income eating outside the home, compared with 3.4 per cent for the highest-income households. When government taxes prepared food, it effectively imposes a higher burden on those often juggling two or three jobs with limited time to cook.

But this is not only about the poorest households. Every Canadian pays more because the tax embeds itself in the price of convenience, time and the realities of modern living.

And there is an overlooked economic dimension: restaurants are one of the most effective tools we have for stimulating community-level economic activity. When people dine out, they don’t just buy food. They participate in the economy. They support jobs for young and lower-income workers. They activate foot traffic in commercial areas. They drive spending in adjacent sectors such as transportation, retail, entertainment and tourism.

A healthy restaurant sector is a signal of economic confidence; it is often the first place consumers re-engage when they feel financially secure. Taxing prepared food, therefore, is not simply a tax on convenience—it is a tax on economic participation.

Restaurants Canada has been calling for the permanent removal of GST/HST on all food, and they are right. Eliminating the tax would generate $5.4 billion in consumer savings annually, create more than 64,000 foodservice jobs, add over 15,000 jobs in related sectors and support the opening of more than 2,600 new restaurants across the country. No other affordability measure available to the federal government delivers this combination of economic stimulus and direct relief.

And Canadians overwhelmingly agree. Eighty-four per cent believe food should not be taxed, regardless of where it is purchased. In a polarized political climate, a consensus of that magnitude is rare.

Ending the GST/HST on all food will not solve every affordability issue but it is one of the simplest, fairest and most effective measures the federal government can take immediately.

Food is food. The tax system should finally accept that.

Dr. Sylvain Charlebois is a Canadian professor and researcher in food distribution and policy. He is senior director of the Agri-Food Analytics Lab at Dalhousie University and co-host of The Food Professor Podcast. He is frequently cited in the media for his insights on food prices, agricultural trends, and the global food supply chain. 

Troy Media empowers Canadian community news outlets by providing independent, insightful analysis and commentary. Our mission is to support local media in helping Canadians stay informed and engaged by delivering reliable content that strengthens community connections and deepens understanding across the country.

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Business

Deadlocked Jury Zeroes In on Alleged US$40 Million PPE Fraud in Linda Sun PRC Influence Case

Published on December 20, 2025

By

Sam Cooper's avatar Sam Cooper

A jury of New Yorkers will return to court Monday, heading into their second week of deliberations in a landmark foreign-agent and corruption trial that reaches into two governors’ offices, struggling to decide whether former state official Linda Sun secretly served Beijing’s interests while she and her husband built a small business and luxury-property empire cashing in on pandemic-era contracts as other Americans were locked down.

On Thursday — the fourth day of deliberations — the jury sent federal Judge Brian Cogan a blunt note saying they were deadlocked on the sprawling case, in which the federal government has asked jurors to accept its account of a complex web of family and Chinese-community financial transactions through which Sun and her husband allegedly secured many millions of dollars in Chinese business deals channeled through “United Front” proxies aligned with Beijing.

The defense, by contrast, argues that Sun and her husband were simply successful through legitimate, culturally familiar transactions, not any covert scheme directed by a foreign state.

“We deeply feel that no progress can be made to change any jurors’ judgment on all counts,” the panel wrote Thursday. “There are fundamental differences on the evidence and the interpretation of the law. We cannot come to a unanimous decision.”

Cogan reportedly responded with a standard “Allen charge” — an instruction often used in deadlock situations, urging jurors to keep an open mind and continue deliberating. Because a juror had to be replaced due to travel commitments, the reconstituted panel will need to restart deliberations from square one on Monday.

According to a message the U.S. Justice Department sent to The Bureau on Wednesday, the panel had already asked for transcripts from four witnesses — Sean Carroll, Mary Beth Hefner, Karen Gallacchi and Jenny Low.

Those requests underline just how dense the case is — and how much money was at stake in the pandemic-era PPE deals at the heart of several key counts. Sun and her husband, businessman Chris Hu, face 19 counts in total, including Sun acting as an unregistered foreign agent for the People’s Republic of China; visa-fraud and alien-smuggling charges tied to a 2019 Henan provincial delegation; a multimillion-dollar pandemic PPE kickback scheme; bank-fraud and identity-misuse allegations; and multiple money-laundering and tax-evasion counts.

Carroll and Hefner’s testimony is central to the government’s key procurement-corruption allegation. Prosecutors say Sun used her influence to help steer more than US$40 million in PPE contracts to companies tied to her husband in China, with an expected profit of roughly US$8 million — money they allege was partly kicked back to Sun and Hu and funneled through accounts opened in Sun’s mother’s name and via friends and relatives.

Prosecutors say the clearest money trail in the Sun case runs through New York’s COVID PPE scramble and a pair of Jiangsu-linked emails.

“What was Linda Sun’s reward for taking official action to steer these contracts through the procurement process? Millions of dollars in kickbacks or bribes. It was money that she knew would be coming her way if she pushed these contracts through,” prosecutor Alexander Solomon told jurors in closing.

He argued that in March 2020, as the pandemic hit, a Jiangsu provincial official in Albany emailed state staff, including Sun, with information on four Chinese PPE and medical suppliers — and that the next day Sun forwarded herself a second email that copied the language about two of those vendors but added a new line claiming that “High Hope comes highly recommended by the Jiangsu Department of Commerce.”

A New York State IT specialist testified that this exact phrase appears only once in the state’s entire email system, in Sun’s self-forwarded message. Prosecutors urged jurors to see it as a fabricated email.

They suggest it is one of a number of frauds and forgeries, including claims that Sun repeatedly faked Governor Kathy Hochul’s signature on invitation letters used to bring Chinese provincial officials into the United States as part of plans to build a large education complex in New York.

On the PPE dealings, prosecutors say that during a period when Sun still had broad latitude to vet vendors, she sent procurement official Sean Carroll a proposal for High Hope to supply five million masks.

Prosecutors say she did not disclose that High Hope was tied to family associate Henry Hua or that she had a financial interest in the deal, but did repeat language that the company “came recommended” by Jiangsu authorities — phrasing Carroll testified he understood as an official validation from the Chinese side.

Prosecutors then linked the High Hope contracts that moved through Carroll’s office to alleged downstream cash flows laid out in a Chris Hu spreadsheet: PPE contract money Hu recorded as owed by Jay Chen, marked as wired into an account called “Golden” and then on to “HC Paradise,” the vehicle Hu allegedly used to pay for a Hawaii property.

In the government’s telling, that is how a doctored Jiangsu government “recommendation” for High Hope ultimately turned into New York taxpayer funds helping to buy a Hawaiian condo.

As The Bureau has reported in detail, prosecutor Alexander Solomon used his closing argument to give jurors one of the clearest open-court narratives yet of how the Chinese Communist Party’s United Front allegedly seeks to shape Western politics through diaspora networks — and to argue that Sun sat at the center of such a network in Albany.

Solomon walked the panel through a cast that ran from Sun’s family and business partners in Queens to United Front–linked association bosses in New York, provincial officials in Henan and Guangdong, and senior staff at China’s New York consulate. In his account, Sun — officially feted in Beijing as an “eminent young overseas Chinese” after a 2017 political tour — became a “trusted insider” who quietly repurposed New York State letterhead, access and messaging to serve Beijing’s priorities on Taiwan, Uyghurs and trade, while keeping that relationship hidden from her own colleagues.

Among the most striking elements of the government’s case, as The Bureau reported from Solomon’s summation, were that Sun allegedly forged Hochul’s signature on multiple invitation letters that Chinese officials then used to secure U.S. visas for provincial delegations — promising meetings in Albany that, Solomon said, no one in state government had actually approved — as part of a broader push by Henan Province to anchor a major education complex in the United States.

He then tied that influence narrative to money: millions in lobster-export deals for Chris Hu, allegedly greased by Chinese officials and New York-based United Front intermediaries; coded “apple” cash drop-offs funneled through third-party accounts; and the pandemic PPE contracts.

In Solomon’s formulation, all of that adds up to clandestine agency for Beijing.

He told jurors that while Sun was boasting to Chinese consulate officials that she could treat Hochul “like her puppet,” she was acting “like an agent,” treating PRC officials as her “real bosses,” and seeking and receiving benefits. Sun kept doing so, Solomon said, even after an FBI agent warned her about the Foreign Agents Registration Act and the risks of working too closely with the consulate.

Defense lawyers for Sun and Hu, in their own summations, urged the jury to reject that picture of a couple monetizing their access to senior American politicians in order to enrich themselves through clandestine business dealings facilitated by community leaders secretly working for Beijing’s United Front units. According to the Global Investigations Review summary and other accounts, they argued that prosecutors have overreached by criminalizing ordinary diaspora politics, networking and pandemic procurement.

On the defense view, much of what the government calls “direction and control” is better understood as routine back-and-forth involving a diaspora liaison in the governor’s office and community or trade groups with ties to China. None of the government’s evidence, they argue, amounts to an agreement to operate under the “direction or control” of a foreign principal — the core FARA requirement.

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