Federal agencies should keep their ears out for “buzzwords” that indicate the presence of un-American diversity trainings, the White House budget chief said in an interview Tuesday.
Russel Vought, the White House budget chief, said in a memo on Friday that President Donald Trump had ordered him to sniff out and eliminate all diversity training sessions in the federal government that included discussions of critical race theory or white privilege, or that otherwise asserted that America or any given race (presumably white people) was inherently racist. Vought referred to them as “un-American propaganda training sessions.”
He subsequently bragged on Twitter Tuesday about cancelling one such training at the CDC, which purportedly would have featured Camara Phyllis Jones, an epidemiologist and past president of the American Public Health Association.
In an interview with Vought published Tuesday, Ben Domenech, co-founder of the conservative news site The Federalist, asked what exactly the end product of the Trump administration’s hunt for offensive material would be.
Vought said he intended to produce “detailed guidance for federal agencies — including buzzwords, things that they need to be aware of, [and] ways that these became particularly embedded in different agencies.”
Vought said he wasn’t opposed to all diversity trainings — just the “problematic” and “Marxist” ones that assert America is plagued by systematic racism, which he said are “designed to divide the country.”
“It’s impossible for a regime to survive when its federal government is telling its federal workers that the very country that they are serving, let alone citizens that support it, are propagating a racist system,” Vought said.
