This intellectual waterboarding is enough to make a person scream. With apologies to Edvard Munch. (Getty Images)

Listen up, people.

It’s time to get woke to the real victims.

Untold Kentuckians are suffering from exposure to “concepts.”

Not just any concepts. DIVISIVE concepts. Ideas that cause discomfort, guilt, anguish, psychological distress, deep dark depression, excessive misery and possibly premature hair loss in white males.

What’s inflicting these horrors? DEI.?

No, not do rei me, that would be in band practice.?

Kentuckians are at risk of being totally bummed out by this insidious three-headed devil that goes by the name of diversity, equity and inclusion.

Let me give you an example. Think about chattel slavery. Now think about how chattel slavery still shapes our institutions and lives. Is that a downer, or what? ?

Oh, I can hear you whiners already. “It’s reality. It’s history. Blah, blah, blah.”

For your information, history can be very triggering.

Historical reality is especially triggering in individuals who have developed a CONSCIENCE.

Thinking about systemic injustice puts impressionable young people at risk. They’ll be sitting there morosely examining their belief systems when they could be cheerfully striving for workforce readiness.

Becoming aware of institutional racism — or sexism, ableism, all the ’isms — can make people feel angry and sad. It can make them want CHANGE.?

We can’t have people seduced into welcoming — I shudder to use the word — “diverse” perspectives to the very rooms where decisions are made about business, medicine, government, education. No telling what that could churn up.

DEI indoctrination threatens the underpinnings of our well-known meritocracy, in which almost all power has traditionally been vested in the hands of white men — where it will be safe, because they know how to guard it.

Thank God, Republican lawmakers are riding to the rescue to liberate Kentuckians from this intellectual waterboarding.

Kentucky Senate leader files bill to curb ‘divisive concepts’ in public higher education

After dedicating themselves last year to freeing Kentucky parents from the right to make medical decisions concerning their transgender children, the GOP has a new bogeyman for a new year.

Senate Bill 6 invites aggrieved victims to sue Kentucky’s public universities and colleges for inflicting “divisive concepts” on unsuspecting students and employees. The penalty for violations would be up to $100,000.

That ought to shut up — maybe even shut down — these so-called diversity, equity and? inclusion programs and spare students and employees the cruelty of DEI training.?

Bravo, also, to Sen. Stephen Meredith for protecting children in public schools through his Senate Bill 93 which adds “belonging” to the ban on the evil triptych.

Let bygones be bygones, for pity’s sake. It’s not like racism or sexism play any part in today’s society, certainly not in the Kentucky legislature.

And it’s not like Republicans are out to stifle free expression or academic freedom; it says so right there in SB 6. Everyone remains free to say whatever they want just so long as they don’t say anything that makes anyone else have a thought that makes them uncomfortable.?

Now that’s what I call education.

Who can argue with Senate Republican Whip Mike Wilson, sponsor of SB 6, when he says: “I respect diversity and inclusion, including everybody. And as far as that is concerned, I think that we’ve done a really good job with all of our laws, federal and state, to combat racism and those kinds of events. And I think we have enough on the books to be able to do that, to include everyone and make sure that we’re reaching out to all students, as far as their intellectual diversity, and that’s one of the things that I think it was hindering, rights of free speech and stuff like that.”

C’mon, Kentuckians, don’t be sheeple. Throw off the chains of DEI and stuff like that.

You have nothing to lose except … your bigotry?