In 404 Media

At the Napa Institute’s conference panel on “Practical Steps for Dealing with DEI,” Holmes sat on a panel with former Trump administration official and current Heritage Foundation fellow Roger Severino.

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Holmes said on the panel that the “mainstream kind of leftist approach to DEI presents us with a lot to push back against.”

“It is really inconsistent with our faith and I also think that this presents us with an opportunity to not only say why we’re against this, why we’re opposed to mainstream DEI initiatives, but it’s important for us to be part of the conservation and to use it to say what we are for and why we have a positive vision and positive solution of DEI in a way that is consistent with our values,” she said.

She said she advises employers to “move away from defining diversity exclusively focused on employees’ race, sex, or other protected category,” and to instead focus on “bringing together employees with diverse backgrounds, viewpoints, perspectives, and beliefs to achieve common workplace goals.” She said employers need to also be “reframing the term inclusion to incorporate that in a way that’s more aligned with our faith.”

It is impossible to say why this book is currently going viral at this moment in time and why it may feel particularly relevant to a workforce of millions of people who have suddenly been asked to agree to be “loyal” and work under the quasi leadership of the world’s richest man, have been asked to take a buyout that may or may not exist, have had their jobs repeatedly denigrated and threatened, have suddenly been required to return to office, have been prevented from spending money, have had to turn off critical functions that help people, and have been asked to destroy years worth of work and to rid their workplaces of DEI programs. Maybe it's worth wondering why the most popular post in a subreddit for federal workers is titled “To my fellow Feds, especially veterans: we’re at war.” 

In exchange for selling them repair parts, Samsung requires independent repair shops to give Samsung the name, contact information, phone identifier, and customer complaint details of everyone who gets their phone repaired at these shops, according to a contract obtained by 404 Media. Stunningly, it also requires these nominally independent shops to “immediately disassemble” any phones that customers have brought them that have been previously repaired with aftermarket or third-party parts and to “immediately notify” Samsung that the customer has used third-party parts.

"Company shall immediately disassemble all products that are created or assembled out of, comprised of, or that contain any Service Parts not purchased from Samsung,” a section of the agreement reads. “And shall immediately notify Samsung in writing of the details and circumstances of any unauthorized use or misappropriation of any Service Part for any purpose other than pursuant to this Agreement. Samsung may terminate this Agreement if these terms are violated."

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The contract shows the incredible level of control that Samsung has over “independent” repair shops, which need to sign this agreement to get repair parts from Samsung. Signing this contract does not even make a repair shop an “authorized” repair center, which is a distinction that requires shop owners to jump through even more hoops.

In theory, the “free market” should reward publications that are doing important work. The more people care about a given issue the more they’ll read news stories about it, which should give publications covering it traffic and ad dollars. In reality, the advertising industry has singled out the issues the audience cares about most, like reproductive rights, as unsuitable to sell ads against, even though a ton of people want to read about them. This helps explain the precarity of publications like Jezebel, despite it being more vital to its audience than ever.

The death of Jezebel under this set of circumstances is particularly cruel considering that voters overwhelmingly voted to enshrine abortion protections and against politicians who made the dehumanization of trans people one of their key policies.

“The closure of Jezebel also underscores fundamental flaws in the ad-supported media model where concerns about ‘brand safety’ limit monetizing content about the biggest, most important stories of the day—stories that create huge traffic because people read and share them,” Jezebel staff said in a statement from its union, the Writers Guild of America. “A well-run company would have moved away from an advertising model, but instead they are shuttering the brand entirely because of their strategic and commercial ineptitude. Jezebel was a good website.”