I've seen things down in the tunnels. A rat chewing through a wall to get to a cracker that was already on the floor. A pigeon trying to mate with a pigeon-shaped trash bag. But I had never seen a United States senator post a help-wanted ad so cursed that The Atlantic had to stage an intervention.
Here's the case file. Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts went on social media looking for interns for his Boston office. Unpaid glory, free coffee, a lanyard. Standard stuff. Then he added the fine print.
"BIPOC, LGBTQ+, working class, veterans, and other underrepresented candidates with Massachusetts ties are encouraged to apply," the post read.
Bold strategy. Most employers try to attract more applicants. The senator wrote a guest list.
The internet did what the internet does, and critics said the post sounded like it was quietly telling one kind of applicant to sit this one out. Fine. Conservatives complaining about DEI is not news. That happens every 40 minutes, like a train.
What sent me into the tunnels with a flashlight and a notepad was who showed up next. On Friday, The Atlantic, a magazine whose readers own at least three tote bags each, ran an essay by Conor Friedersdorf titled "The DEI Language That's Doing More Harm Than Good." It called the senator's wording "political malpractice."
When The Atlantic says your progressive messaging went too far, that's not criticism. That's a wellness check.
Then a Democratic strategist piled on. Kaivan Shroff told Fox News Digital the post was "exactly the kind of virtue signaling that feeds the outrage cycle without actually doing much for diversity." He said it looked more like "announcing your values than doing the harder work of diverse recruiting."
So, to recap the witness list: conservatives hated it, a liberal magazine diagnosed it, and a strategist from his own party called it lazy. The only group still defending this post is the post.
And here's the evidence that broke the case wide open. The essay pointed to the intern posting from Markey's own Massachusetts colleague, Sen. Elizabeth Warren. Her office calls itself an equal-opportunity employer and encourages "all individuals from all backgrounds" to apply.
Read that again. Elizabeth Warren is the moderate in this story. Somewhere in a tunnel, a rat just dropped his cheese.
Shroff summed it up: "Politics is all about addition and not subtraction." He's right, and it's the most damning sentence in the whole file, because this was a job ad. Job ads have one job. They are the "addition" part of the government.
Think about the actual kid reading that post. Maybe she's 20, waiting tables in Worcester, juggling two shifts and a student loan, hoping one internship gets her foot in the door. She wanted to know where to send a resume. The senator handed her a checklist to see if she's on the approved list of people who are "encouraged."
Fox News Digital reached out to Markey's office for comment. No response yet. Probably still sorting the applicants into piles.
Down here in the tunnels, we have one hiring rule. Can you carry a crumb? You're in. We don't care what tunnel you came from.
Senator Markey could learn a lot from us. He put out a call for new talent and ended up recruiting exactly one group: The Atlantic's editorial board.
This article is satire from The Demorat. It's based on Sen. Ed Markey's public internship post and on reporting by Fox News Digital and The Atlantic, and it's written for comedy.
The real story that inspired this
