America Works. DEI Doesn’t.

Good evening all,

Good news. Last week I posted an op-ed by Pastor Corey Brooks of Project H.O.O.D. on his thoughts on DEI and why he disagreed with Mark Cuban’s views. We had originally submitted that op-ed to several news outlets but did not hear back. So we posted it on X (Twitter) and here on Substack. The response was overwhelming. Everyone from Elon Musk to Megyn Kelly responded to it and we garnered over a million views.

Last Friday, Tablet Magazine reached out to the pastor and asked him to write a new take on this DEI controversy that focused more on his community. What he produced is a strong essay, in my opinion, that clearly articulates the superiority of the American values over the DEI ideology.

With his permission, I’m posting a brief section here — you can always jump to the whole article and the link is here:

Let me give you an example of what my life as a pastor to my struggling community is actually like. One late night several years ago, I remember looking out my office window across the street at the empty lot where I had dreams of building a community center when I heard footsteps in the hallway. One never knows what to expect in this neighborhood and the last person I expected to see was Jonathan Watkins. I knew him around as a gang member and had tried to talk to him several times.

He stepped into my office, looked at me, and said, “Pastor, I just had my first kid and I lost her today.”

That morning he had strapped his 6-month-old baby girl, Jonylah, into the car seat. He was about to drive her to day care when a bullet entered through the car window and killed her instantly. Jonathan was shot badly, too. He belonged to a gang, and the shooting was gang related.

The pain on Jonathan’s face was terrible. I knew retaliation was on his mind since so few murders around here are ever solved. I feared losing him back to the streets.

Over the next several months, I counseled him in the ways of Christ and how to live on the legal side of the world. He went through job trainings, learned how to build credit and opened his first bank account. I got him a job working for Pat Milligan at Metro Ford.

Then one day he quit and disappeared. He told Pat that he could make more money in the streets than washing and buffing these cars. I also knew that he had bought a gun in the days after his baby’s death and that he knew the identity of the killer. I feared losing him to prison or worse.

I feared that I had failed to help Jonathan. I knew the struggles he faced, inside and outside. God can be a powerful help in a troubled man’s life. So can regular work. So can having a mentor who knows your situation and can help you understand your responsibilities to yourself and to your community. But in that moment, I feared that the forces arrayed against Jonathan, and within Jonathan, were simply too great for him to overcome. As someone who lives and works on the South Side of Chicago, I understood what he was up against.

DEI ideology didn’t offer Jonathan a better life; it has no ability to help him. It doesn’t offer faith, and it doesn’t offer meaningful work. It doesn’t live with us on the South Side of Chicago. It’s manipulative rhetoric, a way of exploiting Jonathan’s tragedy, and the tragedy of thousands of young men like him, on behalf of professional-class ideologues who seek to use our pain to fuel their rise through American institutions. Their stock-in-trade is a soul-destroying poison whose moral and real-world effects are as negative for our communities as those of any other drug that is sold here.

For full article, click here.

A huge thank you to our subscribers who have been sharing our content — truly appreciated. We hope you share this piece to spread the word of the pastor’s work on the South Side. For more information: www.ProjectHOOD.org.

All my best,

Eli