Diversity Thursday

stay on the offensive

It’s been three weeks since we’ve done a DivThu—my least favorite type of post—so let’s take a walk around the waterfront to see what is going on

In general, things are looking up after many years of both benign and malignant neglect.

As we’ve discussed and known for the last two decades+ during this fetid turn of the rent-seeking sectarian diversity industry—hijacking a needed and honorable drive for equal rights the previous decades—forcing its business model on our culture and military: it could not survive two things:

1. The light of day.

2. The follow-on question.

They succeeded for a long time during their long march because when they brought their sectarianism with one hand, they brought a weapon with the othe.

If anyone resisted or simply tried to stay neutral, they were destroyed, isolated, or “othered.” Hang one person, motivate a thousand—in the finest Marxist-Leninist-Maoist traditions they came from.

In the last few years, slowly as we’ve on DivThu here and on the OG Blog, the tide has changed.

Those who supported treating people as individuals with dignity—as opposed to sorting them into mutually antagonistic groups kept in conflict by rewards and punishments based on immutable characteristics—suddenly started to see that they were not one of a few; they were part of a many.

Bravery is contagious. While the line troops, one by one, started to pop their heads up from cover, forward-thinking groups with smart legal minds and financial support pushed through the legal system towards the only real correction we could hope for—to the Supreme Court.

In a broad-ranging overview of the state of play against the cancerous diversity industry—and stacking up the wins for the good faith actors—I recommend reading Don Surber’s “Did DEI Die?”

He starts with what we celebrated 11 short months ago, the general victory of Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard”

Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard may prove to be the most important Supreme Court decision on race since Brown v. Board of Education. Like the Brown case, Students v. Harvard used the color blind 14th Amendment to end systemic racism in education. In Brown, the racism was against black people. At Harvard, the racism was against Asians in admissions.

In his concurring opinion, Justice Thomas hit upon the root problem with liberalism.

He wrote, “The great failure of this country was slavery and its progeny. And, the tragic failure of this Court was its misinterpretation of the Reconstruction Amendments, as Justice Harlan predicted in Plessy. We should not repeat this mistake merely because we think, as our predecessors thought, that the present arrangements are superior to the Constitution.”

…

Students v. Harvard case ended affirmative action without saying affirmative action. The 1970s were filled with foolish ideas — avocado green refrigerators — and affirmative action was the worst. Leftists replaced equal opportunity with equal outcome. In college admissions, this meant the bar was lowered for black applicants and raised for Asians.

Remember, there was a carve-out for the service academies that we covered in the linked posts above. That stopped the case from being a full victory, but that will follow.

I want you to keep that in mind as you read the following.

In Students v. Harvard, the Supreme Court forced colleges to CYA on admissions. The Ivy League brought back SATs and ACTs to determine who gets in. The cream is rising to the top.

USA Today reported, perhaps with a tear in the duct:

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology's incoming freshman class this year dropped to just 16% Black, Hispanic, Native American or Pacific Islander students compared to 31% in previous years after the U.S. Supreme Court banned colleges from using race as a factor in admissions in 2023.

The proportion of Asian American students in the incoming class rose from 41% to 47%, while white students made up about the same share of the class as in recent years, the elite college known for its science, math and economics programs said this week.

MIT administrators said the statistics are the result of the Supreme Court's decision last year to ban affirmative action, a practice that many selective U.S. colleges and universities used for decades to boost enrollment of underrepresented minority groups.

I like how liberals couch their racism as a virtue. The court’s decision shook their little world. Suddenly, the once-poisoned Ivys have embraced equal opportunity again, instead of equity or whatever else they are calling quotas these days.

Courage - and victory - is contagious.

The Students v. Harvard decision finally gave conservatives the moral authority and courage to push back against the racist and sexist DEI programs.

In March, NBC bemoaned, “Republican lawmakers in more than 30 states have introduced or passed more than 100 bills to either restrict or regulate diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in the current legislative session, according to an NBC News analysis.

The story also said, “States such as Florida, Texas and Utah are among the handful whose legislatures have approved bans on DEI efforts in higher education and public offices. In Florida, the Board of Education recently announced a new rule banning public colleges from using state and federal funds on DEI initiatives. Last summer, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed a law to require all state-funded colleges and universities to close their DEI offices.”

We are seeing it in the corporate world as well—a welcome and successful pushback.

The way things are going, the last retrograde public institutions still discriminating on the basis of immutable characteristics will be the US military and the government it is part of.

The diversity industry has a lot of money and power, especially where there is institutional capture or cowardice. What they don’t have is the support of the people.

But a curious thing happened after the court decided in Students v. Harvard: lefties shut up. There were no protests. There were no riots. There were no tents pitched in Harvard Yard. It shows lefties know their racism is wrong and DEI is a loser.

Except for the true believers and the truly hateful, no one really supports the un-American divisions the diversity industry forces on everyone they can for fun and profit. People are just easily intimidated—until they’re not.

Another “W” is that even the Washington Post’s Taylor Telford and Julian Mark are reporting on even more success in the counter-offensive against the Cultural Marxist Diversity Bullies;

Joshua Young, a corrections officer in the Colorado prison system, was shocked by the lessons of the anti-bias training session he was required to attend in March 2021. With its references to “white supremacy,” “white exceptionalism” and “white fragility,” the training sent a clear and disturbing message to his mind: All White people are racist.

“I thought the training was potentially harmful to our staff relationships, relationships between staff and offenders, and undermined us in so many ways,” Young, 47, said in an interview. “It told us basically that … we were unable to treat people fairly just because of the way they look.”

So Young sued, becoming one of more than a half dozen White plaintiffs alleging that workplace bias trainings tread on their civil rights. The cases are part of a broader legal and political backlash that has targeted an array of DEI programs, from corporate fellowships to state and federal programs aimed at ensuring that women and racial minorities have access to jobs, government contracts and other benefits.

In the last six months, there has been a completely unexpected retreat on the corporate side of the house. One of the most successful field marshals in this drive is Robby Starbuck who leveraged a substantial social media presence with well-connected personal networks and a fearless drive:

Robby Starbuck, a former Hollywood music video director turned conservative activist, has caught fire campaigning online against some major American brands’ diversity, equity and inclusion programs (DEI), support for gay Pride marches and LGBTQ events, strategies to slow climate change and other social policies.

Starbuck is both riding a wave of right-wing hostility to DEI programs and corporate advocacy on issues like climate change and LGBTQ rights and advancing the opposition himself. He has channeled energy on the right to target specific brands popular with politically conservative customers — Harley-Davidson, Tractor Supply Co. and John Deere — and relentlessly drawn attention online to their past publicly-stated policies. Starbuck has also claimed credit for Brown-Forman and Lowe’s internal announcements in recent weeks to scale back some of their diversity and inclusion programs.

Feel that? That is the wind at our backs. More. Faster.

There will be setbacks, a few defeats, some incomplete victories—but the tide has turned…maybe.