How big is the DEI bezzle?

With corporations and government throwing less cash at Woke NGOs, amusing frauds are now being revealed.

The right has no shortage of opinion pundits like myself, but it employs only a handful of investigative reporters. I’ve complimented Aaron Sibarium in the past, and now I’d like to do the same for Luke Rosiak.

Here’s a wonderful article by Rosiak in the Daily Wire about the looting of the nonprofit National Diversity Council, a Woke charity that put on conferences charging corporations $4,999 to have their DEI staffers hobnob with celebrities like Bill and Hill, by its three top executives.

National Diversity Council Files For Bankruptcy, Says Top Employees Stole Millions

Board said founder's conduct 'gives rise to criminal liability… at a minimum, a third degree felony.'

By Luke Rosiak

Mar 27, 2025 DailyWire.com

The three executives basically paid themselves a million dollars extra from the NGO, which they marked as “back pay.”

When the charity’s Board of Directors asked for the organization’s money back, the boss R. Dennis Kennedy cloned the National Diversity Council as his private possession, starting a for-profit business with a nearly identical name, reregistering the charity’s trademarks as his own, and setting up counterfeit websites owned by him.

Bill Clinton and Oprah Winfrey are set to keynote a conference run by the alleged thief, apparently through his for-profit firm, next month.

The National Diversity Council filed for bankruptcy on March 17 after its board said in a lawsuit that its founder R. Dennis Kennedy “improperly paid himself millions of dollars from NDC’s donor funds.” The suit said Kennedy “paid himself a grossly excessive salary” while using the nonprofit as a front for his for-profit diversity consulting business called Diversity & Leadership Inc (D&L). …

As board members became suspicious and determined that there was no basis for the payments, Kennedy systematically moved the nonprofit’s trademarks and web domains into his own name, and essentially created a fake organization with the same name that would trick people into paying him directly, the suit indicated.

NationalDiversityCouncil.org now leads to a website of an organization that purports to be the National Diversity Council, listing Kennedy as its founder and no board. Dawn Hooper, an accountant who is managing the bankruptcy for NDC’s board, told The Daily Wire that the site is “not operated by the National Diversity Council.” …

The imposter NDC website advertises a conference in Los Angeles next month from April 7-10, which it says will feature Bill Clinton and Oprah Winfrey. … Conference-goers can meet them for $4,999. …

For years, people were led to believe that the elaborate conference was part of NDC’s charity work, not Kennedy’s for-profit business.

There are probably a hundred hilarious stories like this involving the DEI racket, especially now that the gravy train of the racial reckoning is slowing down.

Economist John Kenneth Galbraith is famous for saying, “Recessions catch what the auditors missed.”

It’s not clear if he personally ever put it that pithily, but here’s a longer quote from his The Great Crash:

In many ways the effect of the crash on embezzlement was more significant than on suicide. To the economist embezzlement is the most interesting of crimes. Alone among the various forms of larceny it has a time parameter. Weeks, months, or years may elapse between the commission of the crime and its discovery. (This is a period, incidentally, when the embezzler has his gain and the man who has been embezzled, oddly enough, feels no loss. There is a net increase in psychic wealth.) At any given time there exists an inventory of undiscovered embezzlement in — or more precisely not in — the country’s businesses and banks. This inventory — it should perhaps be called the bezzle — amounts at any moment to many millions of dollars. It also varies in size with the business cycle. In good times people are relaxed, trusting, and money is plentiful. But even though money is plentiful, there are always many people who need more. Under these circumstances the rate of embezzlement grows, the rate of discovery falls off, and the bezzle increases rapidly. In depression all this is reversed. Money is watched with a narrow, suspicious eye. The man who handles it is assumed to be dishonest until he proves himself otherwise. Audits are penetrating and meticulous. Commercial morality is enormously improved. The bezzle shrinks.