DEI Purity Test: New PRSA E-mails Show How NomCom Sausage is Made

“Sausage-making” is — in the literal sense — rather ugly business.

That’s the reason why it’s a term often used as a metaphor, to describe behind-the-scenes ugliness concealed by corrupt leaders to trick people into consuming / buying into said ugliness, otherwise “packaged” as something else entirely.

Over the past 10 years, I’ve often noticed how perfectly nice, well-intentioned, and professional public relations practitioners have been roped into running for the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) PR trade group National Board, often naïve to (or disbelieving of) the association’s long-running partisan and financial corruption (sausage-making).

After all, no one in the U.S. PR industry could possibly say they weren’t warned or that all the signs from a basic online keyword search weren’t there to indicate serious trouble afoot in PRSA, dating back many years (see below for PR trade articles in 2017 and 2018):

Multiple government open records requests conducted since 2024 have yielded tranche after tranche of highly incriminating e-mails and e-mail attachments, between PRSA Board officials, PRSA’s CEO / CFO / other paid staff, and even PRSA’s own legal counsel at Venable LLP, showing precisely how PRSA’s so-called “leadership” sausage is made.

A new records tranche documenting PRSA misconduct is now in.

(BTW … ChatGPT is getting really good at A.I. graphics, with minimal input!)

Obtained in only recent days, the new records reveal secret PRSA National Board Nominating Committee docs, showing how PRSA force-feeds its “doubling down on DEI” mantra as a litmus test for PRSA Board candidate selection.

In 2025, PRSA’s NomCom — chaired by Past PRSA Chair Michelle Egan (of “World’s Most Ethical” infamy) and including the above-quoted Past PRSA Chair Mark McClennan (arguably the Sausage King of PRSA) — forced upon all PRSA National Board candidates a DEI purity-test of sorts.

All candidates were asked a set of mandated, pre-scripted PRSA NomCom questions.

Apparently, PRSA NomCom members are deemed too incompetent or too untrustworthy to come up with candidate questions themselves.

In addition, PRSA NomCom’s overlords even assign seats for NomCom members and distribute a required seating chart for use during the candidate in-person interview process, conducted at massive travel expense in member dollars:

One of the force-fed “Base Questions” asked of all candidates in 2025 specifically called out DEI (by that moniker), framing it to Board candidate interviewees as a PRSA “priority.”

NomCom members then asked all the poor, unsuspecting, deer-in-the-headlight Board candidates to cough up their love language for DEI as they envision it must be embedded in the PRSA membership experience.

Not revealed to candidates:

That PRSA’s NomCom states as its “Purpose” for this question, “evaluate commitment to DEI and understanding of PRSA’s position.”

Clearly, candidates who fail PRSA’s litmus test by not swearing allegiance to DEI (and the DNC, by extension) don’t get placed on the PRSA Nomination slate for the National Board:

Because PRSA is led by so many hyper-partisan left-wing fanatics with zero regard for things like legal compliance, this leading DEI NomCom question has now potentially exposed many PRSA volunteers to compliance problems and employee consequences back at their workplaces.

Every single government-employed candidate standing for PRSA Board leadership (and also every government-employed member of the PRSA NomCom) are now exposed to employment risks, due to their willfully participating in such a legally noncompliant trade association as PRSA, with its DEI mandates.

(I’m aware of more than one person in PRSA National who has lost their job over the years due to their participation in PRSA shenanigans that posed legal liability — or just sheer embarrassment — to their then-employer.)

How / why does unlawful DEI create employee-level legal exposure?

Because, DEI (as PRSA practices it) is outlawed in taxpayer-funded agencies and by taxpayer-compensated government and university personnel (including PRSA members working in government agencies / public universities).

Period-end-of-story:

https://www.justice.gov/ag/media/1409486/dl

For example, PRSA fully advocates — and has even run PRSA-branded webinars teaching others — to use deceptive alternate language and messaging techniques to disguise DEI as something else, with an eye on skirting legal compliance. This below PRSA webinar featuring 2025 National Chair Ray Day of Stagwell / Allison (a federal contractor on “PR” to the DEI-embattled Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.) also featured past Russian Federation Government / Ketchum subcontractor Michael Maslansky of New York-based / Omnicom-owned Maslansky + Partners).

Sound “ethical”?

Looks like PRSA’s Ray Day has cashed in on his “doubling down on DEI” rhetoric to benefit his own for-profit PR agency conglomerate, although Stagwell officials sometimes appear to play both sides of the issue.

At any rate…

Government- and university-employed PRSA volunteers can really get in hot water in their own workplaces, if they are using taxpayer-funded staff time to engage in PRSA’s DEI Gestapo…

…essentially demanding to see PRSA candidates’ “PAPERS!,” so to speak, in proving each candidate worships at PRSA’s altar of partisan ideology — stamped-and-certified by the Democrats.

To be sure, PRSA has not operated / behaved in a nonpartisan manner whatsoever in more than 10 years.

Everyone in the PR industry with a brain knows this fact.

After all, it was during the 2016 Trump / Clinton U.S. Election cycle that Jane Dvorak — then a sitting member of PRSA’s National Board Executive Committee — was openly tweeting this garbage (below) on her then-Twitter handle (@JKDJane — now since deleted) … the same one that PRSA also was citing to promote her and her PRSA content:

Back in 2017, PRSA’s then-Chair Elect, Tony D’Angelo of Syracuse University, would only privately shared with me his own admissions that Jane Dvorak had behaved errantly and like a loose cannon. (After all, @JaneDvorakAPR got booted off Twitter for rule violations even as far back as 2014 — see above — yet PRSA’s NomCom vetted Ms. Dvorak as “A-Okay!” only a few years later to serve as PRSA National Chair.)

Publicly, however, Mr. D’Angelo only lauded and praised Jane Dvorak — which tricked and misled thousands of PRSA members to think Jane Dvorak’s rhetoric followed PRSA’s rules and never caused problems… which, of course, was a total lie:

In years since, Jane Dvorak’s erratic online behavior — as a microcosm of PRSA’s own partisan behavior — hasn’t improved.

She tweeted this charming missive just last year, only two months before PRSA’s Gary McCormick nominated Ms. Dvorak for the PRSA Educators Academy David Ferguson Award, as somehow emblematic of top-tier PR professionalism in service to PRSSA students:

A throng of past PRSA National Chairs have used PRSA platforms to spout off left-wing partisan ideology, even when doing so ran afoul of PRSA’s own policies.

Current leadership’s DEI drumbeating is a continued manifestation of that non-compliance. PRSA’s current National Chair, Heide Harrell of Little Rock, Arkansas and a comms director for a public water utility, is a former Hillary Clinton Rose Law Firm marketing director.

So, when PRSA flouts federal and state rules and demands PRSA members adhere to “PRSA’s position” on DEI, then PRSA is placing its own members at risk of losing their jobs, when government-employed PRSA members are otherwise obligated via their employment to comply with federal regulations and also with state laws.

The new government records tranche also exposed a specialized question set for PRSA Officer Candidates (President-Elect, Treasurer, Secretary), with the DEI question’s “Focus” cited as evaluating an officer candidate’s “active DEI commitment.”

FYI — PRSA’s current Board slate to be voted on at the next PRSA Assembly currently has no Treasurer slated, nor any nominees for two additional Board seats. Which explains a lot!

I take this mandate to mean that PRSA officer candidates were required to describe at length how they already have committed PRSA DEI atrocities by violating rank-and-file members’ civil rights of free thought and expression and by retaliating against colleagues who don’t think precisely like they do on partisan matters… although these folks are welcome to clarify my interpretation here.

Speaking of the PRSA “Gator Mafia,“ this year’s 2026 PRSA Nominating Committee Chair who’s running this sham is none other than Joseph “Sacrificial Lamb” Abreu — a long-time PRSA National Board member ethics violator who, as it so happens, works for a government agency in none other than…

THE STATE OF FLORIDA!

I do not believe Gov. Ron DeSantis would approve of Mr. Abreu’s (mis)use of Florida’s government dollars to advance his PRSA career.

Mr. “Sacrificial Lamb” used to work for the Clerk & Comptroller of St. Lucie County, Florida, but he now works in a similar position for the Lee County FL Court of the Clerk & Comptroller.

In the job he holds now for Lee County, Florida, Mr. Abreu has already been found in government records to be siphoning off an inordinate amount of his taxpayer-funded time attending to PRSA tomfoolery, such as this report (below) that Mr. Abreu transferred (using his Lee County Clerk government e-mail) to other PRSA Board leaders in 2022, outlining PRSA’s expensive legal problems in which he himself has been intimately involved, using taxpayer-funded government e-mail servers.

PRSA’s legal problems are never disclosed to new / first-time PRSA Board candidates, who then become liable for prior PRSA Board violations upon January 1 of the year they begin PRSA Board service.

Such diversions of taxpayer-funded resources to PRSA becomes even more problematic legally when it’s being used to advance discriminatory DEI misconduct:

Another completely bogus aspect of the PRSA NomCom process is that director-level candidates in 2025 had to answer a “Custom Question,” dreamed up by whomever was doing the dreaming up.

NomCom members were pre-assigned the question they were allowed to ask only one specified candidate.

The NomCom member’s name assigned to ask the assigned question appears in blue, next to each candidate’s name (see below).

Some of these questions are beyond dunderheaded. Check out the “custom” DEI question asked of “forced out federal worker” Michael Anthony Brown, Sr.

Or how about the question to Brandi Michele Sims — who got a question essentially asking about her marriage / being a wife?

Earlier this year, legally obtained records document that Joseph “Sacrificial Lamb” Abreu was hounding a University of Tennessee-Knoxville employee about again serving on the PRSA NomCom for 2026.

Mr. Abreu stated he planned on “instituting new rules” to “vet candidates.”

Given how PRSA arbitrarily makes up rules as it goes along, I can only imagine the lack of fairness and the egregious, self-serving biases Mr. Abreu’s so-called “rules” inflicted on this year’s candidates. Maybe that’s why this year’s slate is missing a Treasurer and two board director nominees.

What a disgrace!

To his credit, Dr. Joe Stabb at UT basically responded to Mr. Abreu to please go away, essentially:

In sum, it’s a poor reflection on the PR industry that the PRSA trade association is openly trafficking in noncompliant practices.

Maybe the reason PRSA is failing at the level it has already reported earlier this year is because not every public relations professional is falling for PRSA’s act — or their sausage-making.

Mary Beth West, APR, FPRCA, has called for stronger ethical and legal compliance in the PR industry for decades — with PRSA retaliating for her advocacy. She can be followed on X at @marybethwest.