• Join Puck

    Directly Supporting Authors

    A new economic model in which writers are also partners in the business.

    Personalized Subscriptions

    Customize your settings to receive the newsletters you want from the authors you follow.

    Stay in the Know

    Connect directly with Puck talent through email and exclusive events.

  • What is puck? Newsletters Authors Podcasts Events Gift Puck Careers

The D.E.I. Blame Game

Are panels really flying off Boeing 737s due to wokeness? An honest look at the recent D.E.I. hysteria.

Elon Musk
In making D.E.I. a boogeyman, critics have created a universal scapegoat that offers a cheap and reliable means of stoking fear and agitating the Republican base. Photo: Patrick Pleul/Getty
Baratunde Thurston
April 21, 2024

Just over a year ago, in March 2023, Silicon Valley Bank collapsed in spectacular fashion. The flurry of official postmortems—the Barr report, the O.I.G. report, and the Bair report—all found that the bank’s board of directors had egregiously failed to consider that, in a rising interest rate environment, the bank’s billions in assets (held in long-dated treasuries and bonds) could not cover the bank’s short-dated liabilities during a mass withdrawal event. Of course, that’s exactly what happened. Alarmed depositors rushed to get their money out, and boom, the third-largest bank run in U.S. history was on.