Tag Archives: DEI

Equity is Failing,
And We Are Better Off

By Anthony Trevlac

  • May 12, 2024
  • 5-min read

Unfortunately for people who are smart and knowledgeable, most public policy, even at its highest levels, is determined by something other than logic or facts. Examples abound.

Equality is a foundational value in our country. Historically, that has meant equality of opportunity and equality before the law. Those are defensible, widely loved elements of the American Dream. They fit cleanly into a society where people can be as successful as their ability and effort will take them.

Equity (the “E “in “DEI”) is an entirely different concept. Its supporters use it interchangeably with words like equality, in an effort to obfuscate its true meaning. But equity, as practiced by the Biden Administration, means treating certain races more favorably than others. It is the opposite of equal opportunity.

Equity rests not on any identifiable, defensible, or constitutional principle, or even on any generally accepted social norm. There is no tenet of traditional liberal thought that supports discrimination based on membership within a group. And discrimination is the core concept behind equity.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits that, as SCOTUS has ruled. But that is what Biden and Harris repeatedly did, hiring and promoting people based on race, appointing judges or selecting candidates based on race, and even allocating governmental largesse based on the race of the recipient, and not on need.

Emotions always come into play. Anyone brave enough to question equity is at risk (or inevitability) of being accused of racism. Equity, as practiced by Biden-Harris under the orders issued on “Day One,” proscribes that government benefits and opportunities be allocated based first on race, not merit.

If you weren’t a preferred sex or race, Joe Biden didn’t consider you for his VP slot or for his SCOTUS appointment. He said so. Both selections were therefore made, in a nation of about 330 million people, from a pool of less than 8 million. Equity is the enemy of equal opportunity and merit.

Calling someone names is the go-to tactic for people who have lost an argument. Calling someone racist is possibly the most egregious charge that can be made against them in contemporary American. If you ask questions about DEI, you are very likely to be called a racist. Very few people are brave enough to even ask questions about what is meant by equity. Even asking the question can result in raised voices and pointed fingers.

Emotion is powerful. If you convince an audience that you are on the side of love, compassion, and justice you will probably prevail. But if emotion isn’t tied to facts and reason bad law inevitably results.

Leftists are obsessed with viewing everyone in groups. Very little of their agenda can survive even a cursory dose of common sense. The left prevails when voters make decisions on broad emotional appeals rather than details and facts.

This just in: Groups don’t do things, people do. All members of a group – any group – are not the same. Yet we use broad categories like Hispanics or Asian Americans, that suggest they are uniform.

Asian Americans are…. well, what? Is a Korean the same as a Japanese person? Are all Chinese people the same? If not, why do we lump them into categories as if they were? The reason is that emotion is an easier tool to wield when the facts are made deceptively simple.

A friend once said it is “…easier for people to believe a simple lie than a complex truth.” The leftist narrative maintains that all Black people are victims, and all white people are oppressors. That is the core of Critical Race Theory and the driving force behind the Democrat agenda. But in America, Black Americans are not the only group that has suffered economically compared to their neighbors. Neither are white people outperforming everyone else. The most successful groups in America are Asians and Indians, not whites. But those details are inconvenient to leftist race-baiters.

The emotional and group-based appeals of the left fall completely apart once people start considering what their policies really mean. No reasonable person argues that every person of any group is oppressed or that every person of any group is privileged. There are too many examples that prove otherwise.

I know people of Cuban heritage who hate Mexicans, Mexicans who hate El Salvadorans, and Cubans who hate some other Cubans. Should this surprise us? Only if we haven’t been paying attention. People act as individuals, not groups, and no policy developed for broad group appeal can ever bring justice. Stop pretending it will.

The theory is that equity will make up for past injustices. The problem is that isn’t possible. We might as well dedicate ourselves to preserving unicorns. It can’t happen and never will. It is not possible to make up for past injustices or to make it as if they did not occur in the first place.

Two reasons: you can’t change the past (if this is news to you, please report to the Department of the Obvious for further information). Plus, the supposed “cures” aren’t applied to the people who were injured. In the case of slavery, for example, those people are no longer among the living. Neither are slaveholders. You can’t atone for injustices to one person by giving benefits to someone else.

There is also the inconvenient fact that not all slaveowners were white. Records aren’t particularly reliable – we can’t look up their Instagram accounts – but it is certain several thousand Americans owning slaves were themselves black or of mixed race. Some also held white indentured servants. Irish people were among America’s first slaves.

Modern equity programs maintain that all members of certain groups are victims, they have all been held back and have all been denied a chance to succeed. They also maintain that all white people are oppressors and themselves advantaged. Really? Neither of these points are true.

When you elevate one group, you devalue another. That has always been the catch-22 behind affirmative action and equity, and law has finally come to grips with it. SCOTUS says so, as do the federal statutes. Will the woke left ever stop viewing the whole world as a Marxist struggle of the classes? Don’t count on it.

Please share!

A Must Read by Victor Davis Hanson

By J Robert Smith

  • July 29, 2024
  • 2-min read

Certainly, guilt over their largess, together with our 21st century
secular update of sanctimonious New England puritanism, explain
this overweening left-wing new zealotry
to change the world, but largely at others’ expense.
They are the descendants of Salem, who share the same
superstitions and fanaticism to punish all
who doubt their purity and wisdom.

— Excerpt, Victor Davis Hanson, America’s Lab Rats?


There’s no one better than Professor Victor Davis Hanson in surveying the national landscape and providing comprehensive diagnoses of what ails America.

The nation’s cultural divide is at the heart of the troubles and conflicts that beset the country. A mega-wealthy elite – representing a tiny percentage of the U.S. – have embraced radical beliefs and values. They’re the cutting edge. They have sought for nearly a generation to inflict their radicalism on us, the majority who instinctively reject the elites society-destroying experiments. Theirs is, as Professor Hanson points out, an insufferable sanctimony borne of their professional accomplishments and the wealth produced. Further, as with the old Puritans, their righteousness is to be regarded as unassailable. The penalties for doing otherwise promise to be severe.

All true, but Professor Hanson’s diagnoses lead us to an inevitable conclusion. There’s no accommodation with these wealthy radicals and their minions. How do you find accommodation with people who have no intention to meet others somewhere in the middle? They aren’t content to limit themselves in any way.

Their intention is to conquer America. We are to be subjugated to their anti-God, debauched morality. We are to meekly surrender our lives to woke and DEI (diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) orthodoxies. If we suffer – if our families, friends, and neighbors suffer – it’s in service of their twisted concept of social justice. We will bend knees or suffer even greater depravations and humiliations.

This is an internal conquest. It’s a rough parallel, but what is happening now does hold some similarities to the subjugation that the American Indian experienced.

Yet, tens of millions of Americans aren’t a stone age people. We are the doers and builders and maintainers of America. We are the nation’s backbone – break it, and the nation breaks, too. But that appears the intent of the elite.

How does this end? It is a zero-sum game. It’s intended by the elite to be just that. No guess is ventured here as to the particulars of how this intensifying conflict resolves, but it must resolve with a victory for traditional America. Not defeating this determined foe means there won’t be much left of the America that a multitude of patriots died for.

Professor Hanson’s article can be found at his website, “Blade of Perseus.”

Please share!

Racist Leaders Presume You Are, Too

By Rob Meyne

  • Feb. 4, 2024
  • 3-min read

The names of many contemporary movements, organizations, and legislation are focused-grouped tested to ensure they sound as appealing as possible. Nomenclature has a lot to do with the ability to successfully market something.

Terms like Black Lives Matter, or Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), or the Inflation Reduction Act are designed to generate support for policies that do not reflect what their name suggests.

No reasonable person questions that black lives matter. Nor do they oppose the ideas of inclusion or inflation reduction. Yet frequently a majority of reasonable people oppose the specific actions being taken in pursuit of those objections. The devil is always in the details.

Years ago, you may recall there was opposition to harvesting tuna, because marine mammals were often killed in the process. Accordingly, there was a suggestion that tuna operators should form an alliance and call it “Friends of the Dolphin.” No doubt you could have generated cash contributions to such a group from a lot of people who would have been horrified to find out what it really was.

If you’ve paid attention to the dumpster fire that is also known as the Biden Administration, you will remember they tried to enact components of the “Green New Deal” (AKA, the Green New Steal). These were radical revisions to the way we use and generate energy, manufacture and distribute products, and to whom we give huge taxpayer-funded subsidies. It was politically unpopular and economically devastating. The bill went nowhere. So, they just called it the Inflation Reduction Act. Members of Congress had only a few days to read the thousand page bill, and team Biden just put most of the elements of the Green New Steal into it.

The voters don’t like it? Simple: change its name and pass it anyway.

If you said you were opposed to the Inflation Reduction Act people thought you were in favor of inflation. Sadly, this kind of disingenuousness, and outright lying, drives much of the political process.

Monikers like DEI are crafted to sound like a commitment to a laudable goal but do nothing to tell you the nuts and bolts of the proposals. You can certainly favor the concepts of DEI without favoring the methods leftist elites use to make them happen. The left routinely disguises their true intentions – their actual policies – by labeling them in a misleading way.

It has often been said the left succeeds when the people are not informed but conservatives succeed when they are.

Consider this: any policy that treats people differently based on their skin color or national heritage is racist. That is the definition of racism; treating people differently because of the amount of melanin in their skin. Yet that is exactly what most DEI programs require.

Equity, in fact, is the polar opposite of equal opportunity. Equity requires the allocation of benefits and opportunities based on race. Management by equity requires that merit be a secondary consideration. That is an uncomfortable reality, but until we come to grips with it, we will continue to struggle to find answers to some of our most important problems.

For as long as I can remember, I have been astonished at how people on the left look at everything through the lens of race. Leftist leaders simply don’t believe race isn’t the first thing conservatives think about when they begin their day. Most Democratic leaders assume we are all obsessed with race because they are.

Perhaps more than anything, solutions to problems of race will elude us as long as half the nation assumes the other half shares their obsession with race. Saying that out loud is not likely to make you friends among Democratic leaders.

More to come.

Please share!

Equal Opportunity for All Should Be Our Goal

By Rob Meyne

  • Jan. 21, 2024
  • 5-min read

In 2011, Chicago pastor Corey Brooks lived for a while on the roof of an abandoned motel in his South Side neighborhood. He was protesting urban violence and hoping, through contributions, to raise money for a community center.

Brooks is a longtime advocate for people in his neighborhood, a devout Christian, and a respected leader. In the thirteen years since he lived on that roof, Brooks has learned firsthand of the damage being done to young blacks by contemporary Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) efforts and Critical Race Theory (CRT).

Brooks has become a vocal and effective opponent of DEI, CRT, and other schools of thought that teach Americans that you’re either a victim or an oppressor based on your skin color. Brooks writes intelligently and clearly in a piece from Tablet Magazine. It is worth the read.

DEI has evolved into a catch-all phrase that leftists use to refer to everything that is good and worthwhile about fighting racism. If DEI a just referred to good faith efforts to lift up people who might need a helping hand, that would be one thing. No serious and sane person would object to that. That is not what DEI is. As is so often the case with the gospel of the left, the reality of their policies is different from their rhetoric.

It is likely that most people who embrace equity – people who run our schools, have jobs in corporate HR, or maybe work for a non-profit – talk about the concept as if it is a general, all-encompassing effort to pursue a fair and equal world. One doubts that most equity devotees can even define what it means. Most such people no doubt mean well. But the problem is they end up giving energy and momentum to a disastrous concept they don’t actually understand.

The people who implement equity as a policy, however, know that it isn’t the same thing as equality of opportunity. Equity demands equal results based on one’s membership in a group; equal opportunity has a goal of a color-blind society, where effort, talent, and merit matter and skin color cannot hold you back.

In practice, as it is actually implemented by government, DEI tells us that wealth, opportunity, rewards, and benefits should be allocated according to race, sex, and national origin, not by merit. It is all about racial quotas and rejects the role of merit in our society. DEI is perfectly suited for a socialist society but is antithetical to our own.

CRT is an intellectually vacuous set of objectives that have their roots in the Frankfurt School of communism. Yes, no one likes to admit that, and it doesn’t make one sound less conspiratorial to point it out, but it is true. Critical theory in general began with Marx and others who saw all of society as a war between the classes.

Continue reading

Please share!