For years conservatives would say that once the fantasy-land-immersed college undergrad snowflakes got out into the “real world,” they’d change. What actually happened was that they changed the “real world,” and the latest example is how our military is transitioning from passé political correctness to the steroid-engorged version called “wokeness.”
Far from their mandate to “kill people and break things,” as radio giant Rush Limbaugh would put it, the military now is breaking standards, meritocracy included.
Reporting on this Monday evening, Fox News host Tucker Carlson began by mentioning that president-suspect Joe Biden was boasting about how there “are more people of color in our Cabinet” and “more women” than ever.
“Biden isn’t even bothering to try to convince you that he’s choosing the most competent people for key jobs,” laments Carlson. “Instead, he’s telling you what they look like.”
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Now the armed forces, perhaps trying to get ahead of the twisted curve and avoid the wrath of incoming cancel-culture cultists (leftists), is ratcheting up its diversity obsession correspondingly. As Carlson tells us:
The military, we have all been told since childhood, doesn’t care what you look like, what your parents did, or where you’re from. They care about your performance. That’s why the U.S. military is impressive and why they’ve been able to keep us from being invaded, because they only care about what matters, and what matters is protecting the United States.
Not any more. Last week, Acting Secretary of Defense Chris Miller, announced that the U.S. military will be changing its standards from top to bottom. This is not to create a more effective fighting force to save your children from China or other foreign domination. No, it’s in order to conform to policies formulated by the Pentagon’s so-called Diversity and Inclusion Board. You can imagine what those policies are. Strict affirmative action, hiring and promoting by appearance, the elimination of objective standards. According to Miller, who should be ashamed of himself, these extremist left-wing social engineering projects are “moral imperatives” in the armed forces, though he did not explain why .
Of course not, because here is no reasonable explanation — nor is one deemed necessary. It’s dogma.
Troubling is that the military even has a “Diversity and Inclusion Board” to begin with and that it still exists after four years of President Trump (perhaps a testimonial as to the Deep State’s intransigence). But don’t be surprised. “Diversity” is all the rage (and profitable). NYC’s small K-12 Dalton School plans to hire 12 diversity officers; Yale University already has 150 full-time ones.
All this social engineering and money spent might be worth it if it yielded fruit. But the reality is that while diversity may be a physical reality, it’s not a “strength” but an obstacle to be overcome. FACT: There’s no indication at all that greater diversity yields better performance.
Moreover, correlation seems to suggest the opposite. For example, “Israel, Japan and South Korea are among the world’s least racially diverse nations,” wrote the late Professor Walter E. Williams in 2017. “In terms of academic achievement, their students run circles around diversity-crazed Americans.”
Unfortunately, though, and in keeping with how liberals make mistakes and conservatives then conserve those mistakes, even people on the right go wrong on diversity. Just consider how Carlson’s guest, ex-marine and Fox News contributor Joey Jones, stated during his interview (video below) that “we probably don’t have enough African-American generals and leaders of service.”
Question: How many are “enough”?
As to this, approximately 80 percent of NBA players are black despite that demographic being only 13 percent of our population. So do we have “enough” whites, Hispanics, and Asians in pro basketball?
Women constitute zero percent of NFL, NHL, and MLB players. Is that “enough”? And Jews have won approximately 22 percent of the world’s Nobel Prizes despite being less than two percent of its population. Do other groups have “enough” Nobel Prizes?
The answer is — if you believe in meritocracy, as we all should and must — it is just that, meritocracy (along with groups’ varying interests), that determines what’s enough. As soon as you say under a meritocratic system that there’s not enough of a given group in a given field, it means you’re using something else as a yardstick to determine “appropriate” numbers. What would this be?
It ends up being the ideologically colored judgment of whatever social engineers happen to be in power, and they’re not nearly as just as meritocracy. When a politically disfavored group is disproportionately numerically dominant in an area — such as men in STEM — it’s assumed a result of discrimination that requires government intervention as remedy.
But it’s a different story when a politically favored group has such numerical dominance or when its under-representation benefits it; examples are, respectively, blacks in the NBA and women constituting only eight percent of workplace deaths. Then the disparity is chalked up to innate differences or, more likely still, is just ignored.
Another example is how when blacks and Hispanics are suspended and expelled from school at rates greater than their student-body percentages would suggest, it’s considered a great and intolerable trespass. But that boys are thus punished at far greater rates than girls goes unnoticed.
Oh, here’s another group disparity often going unmentioned, one causing our obsession with group disparities: Leftists are grossly over-represented in academia, media, government, and entertainment. And I’ve a strong suspicion that, in this case, it has nothing to do with meritocracy.
