DEI Policy and Wokeism – A Recipe for Disaster in America

by SIMPLICIUS THE THINKER

This week a submersible called the Titan was destroyed while descending to view the Titanic. Interestingly, the Titanic itself was once rumored to be named after the ship from the eponymously titled The Wreck of the Titan, a book published in 1898 which eerily features a ship called the Titan hitting an iceberg in the north Atlantic. The submersible, Titan, lost this week even had a crew member aboard whose wife was related to a famed couple that died on the original Titanic.

Confused yet?

It makes no difference, as the Titan’s saga only bookends our broader topic.

More to the point is the increasing burden placed on society by the sinking lead-weights of ‘wokeism’ and DEI policy. This week’s ‘tragedy’ happens to dovetail with a recent article by Harold Robertson entitled:

 
It was a piece recommended the world by Substack’s very own John Carter.

The article takes a desultory tour through the recent history of disasters, crises, and breakdowns in the various institutions of America, linking them all to an epidemic of incompetence brought on by the modern trend of anti-meritocratic promotion of the undeserving due to their perceived “disadvantaged”, “underprivileged”, or “marginalized” statuses.

The author traces the birth of standardized testing and other mechanisms of distinguishing achievers in the early 1900s, which led to an era of vast innovation—from the Manhattan Project and transistors to moon men. But that all hit the brick wall of the Civil Rights movement in the 60s, which saw a tide of pushback begin fretting away the privilege of the qualified:

The resulting norms have steadily eroded institutional competency, causing America’s complex systems to fail with increasing regularity. In the language of a systems theorist, by decreasing the competency of the actors within the system, formerly stable systems have begun to experience normal accidents at a rate that is faster than the system can adapt.

The author’s prognosis is dire: either America regains its selection for competence or it will face disaster.

He goes on to document the step by step deterioration. First, employers did away with standard cognitive batteries for new hires, deemed too ‘unfair’ I suppose, instead leaning on college degrees. But then colleges themselves entirely diminished the worth of those degrees, owing to the very same practice of inclusive ‘equity’ admissions, which privileged applicants from ‘marginalized backgrounds’, fast-tracking them through the programs.

Then we get into the weeds of corporate America, with their KPI (Key Performance Indicators) system of aggressively instituting “diversity” quotas. The author argues this results in the following:

…No white man in middle management will likely ever see a promotion as long as they remain in the organization. This is never expressed verbally. Rather, those overlooked figure it out as they are passed over continually for less competent but more diverse colleagues. The result is demoralization, disengagement, and over time, departure.

Most interesting was the detail about how colleges in California began to circumvent rules against admitting candidates by race. Without the ability to see race on the application, they simply began omitting certain highschools known for being predominantly White or Asian, and over-admitting candidates from the high-percentage Hispanic ones.

This led to the current state of things, where the abolishment of almost all types of admissions and standardized testing is being carried out, with even things like BAR exams slowly diluted to soon-to-be irrelevance:

During COVID-19, the difficulty of in-person testing and online proctoring created a new mechanism to push diversity at the expense of competency: the gradual but systematic elimination of standardized tests as a barrier to admission to universities and graduate schools. Today, the majority of U.S. colleges have either stopped requiring SAT/ACT scores, no longer require them for students in the top 10 percent of their class, or will no longer consider them. Several elite law schools, including Harvard Law School, no longer require the LSAT as of 2023. With thousands of unqualified law students headed to a bar exam that they are unlikely to pass, the National Conference of Bar Examiners is already planning to dilute the bar exam under the “NextGen” plan. Specifically, “eliminat[ing] any aspects of our exams that could contribute to performance disparities” will almost definitionally reduce the degree to which the exam tests for competency.

He argues that ‘subtle’ methods are used to eliminate White men from the employment selection pool, due to hiring or excluding simply by race not being “de jure legal” as of yet. But employers continue to develop creative methods by which to reach their ever-more-draconian race quotas.

For instance, veiled beneath the typical obscurant and ambiguous language, LinkedIn recently rolled out platform options for recruiters to filter potential talent by their race:

 
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This includes being able to “diversify” your talent pool by filtering for female candidates:

Not coincidentally, the Academy Awards also just rolled out their new highly invidious set of diversity requirements for any film to be considered for the Oscars:

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The new requirements are as exhaustive as they are draconian—just read them for yourself to sample the sheer restrictive lunacy of it all.

But the Harold Robertson article goes on to target such critical industries and vocations as air traffic controllers and the U.S. military. The last several years have seen a sharp rise in air traffic related accidents and close-calls just as the loosening of applicant standards have sought to ‘democratize’ the industry by prying it away from the perceived grip of the erstwhile 84% White men who previously dominated the field.

The U.S. Navy, too, has witnessed a rise in accidents and issues of all kinds—not least of which is massive demoralization leading to a huge surge in suicides—because captains report that command continues to prioritize ‘diversity training’ over just….training.

The author runs down the gauntlet of industries co-opted by the insidious plague of DEI standards, a development closely converging with the entirety of the Longhouse premise. Of course, this is a top to bottom operation. BlackRock, for instance, which notoriously has majority control of virtually every major parent corporation in the world, making it de facto the most powerful single entity in existence, has repeatedly signaled, by way of their mouthpiece, CEO Larry Fink, that such diversity measures are in fact mandatory and forced down upon the companies in their portfolio. Watch for yourself:

 
When he says “you’re going to be impacted”, by the way, he means penalized; he’s just too cowardly to use the less euphemistic and more direct language to characterize his company’s heavy-handed policy.

But Larry seems to be a worried guy lately, as it’s been newly announced that BlackRock is now ponying up a pretty sum for an executive security detail for him to rival that of kings:

 
Larry’s better instincts appear to warn him that his policies aren’t too popular with the plebs they trample. The type of mind-altering and inhuman practices Larry and the boys are pushing are doing real harm to society and putting in power people of an increasingly deranged stripe as their ‘revolutionary vanguard’. Just take a look at Human Rights Campaign President Kelley Robinson’s uncanny mental gymnastics in attempting to justify her unconscionable denial of male-female differences in sports recently at a Congressional hearing on “LGBTQA rights”.

 
She actually has the gall to claim that there are no physical differences between the genders at all; and in front of Congress, to boot.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, in a similar hearing, this loyal vanguard footsoldier masquerading as an “expert” made an even more preposterous claim: that if Mike Tyson were to identify as a woman, he should be allowed to fight other women—because, clearly, there are no physical or biological differences at all.

 
This is beyond simple ‘clown world’, folks. This is not a point and laugh while glibbing, “Look at those silly people.” These are actual dangerously subversive combatants of a secret front pushing a global experiment like no other, intended to completely erode humanity’s ancestral memory and vital instincts, replacing them with something synthetic and arbitrary.

Another great article by Neofeudalism outlines exactly the mechanisms by which the ‘leftists’ have hijacked culture:

Some of the “stick” tactics sociopathic liberals use to pressure corporate types include the following:

1. HR Departments: “Civil rights” law made “discrimination” illegal so corporations must keep a large human resources department and are subject to the latest fads and whims of a society forever lurching leftwards.  Failure to abide by the latest laws and trends results results in lawsuits and decreased profits.

2. Defining norms: Leftist control over education (especially academia) and media give them the power to define normalized standards of behavior, resulting in brainwashing of both elites and the masses. Being a CEO doesn’t make someone impervious to this process.

3. ESG scores and stakeholder capitalism: Globalist organizations (e.g. UN) and financial institutions (e.g. BlackRock) create things like ESG scores which act as a social credit system for corporations that bullies them into implementing “woke” policies under threat of financial ruin.  BlackRock uses the Orwellian term “Stakeholder capitalism” for their bullying, and they invest 401k and pension funds into various stocks but retain the voting shares of the people who invest with them. Meanwhile, BlackRock took in a large portion of the Federal Reserve’s ETF investments (which the Fed had printed out of thin air), showing the deep interplay between public/private partnerships. Such partnerships are common in 21st century America because the government sees itself limited by the Constitution over what it can accomplish, so they incentivize, cajole and threaten corporations to carry out their unconstitutional bidding indirectly on their behalf— Twitter, Facebook and Google are all subject to it.

Now it’s become a point of pride to introduce an ever-accelerating regime of ‘firsts’, flogging us with the lie that anything done for the first time must inherently have value, or be some kind of civil rights achievement. Recent announcements have feted the first female flight crew as well as the first LGBT flight crews:

 
But the problem is, as society fractures and atomizes into ever-disparate shards of isolated ‘identities’, it’ll see a freshet of increasingly meaningless ‘firsts’ touted for their perceived ‘significance’, which, conveniently, no one will be able to explain. The first trans flight crew, first dwarf flight crew, first trans dwarf flight crew, the first down syndrome flight crew, the first trans-down-syndrome flight crew, and on and on until it loses all meaning.

We are devolving into a society of meaningless performative virtue signaling which often emptily valorizes groups that either hardly need, want, or even care to be so valorized. Will the remnants of the Hopi Indian tribe somewhere out in the Arizona bluffs really care or find meaning or consolation in some white liberal performative stunt like ‘the first trans Hopi Indian flight crew’?

In his excellent and thought-provoking article, William M. Briggs explains the mathematical certainty that this fractionalization creates a snowball effect by which it becomes impossible for companies to not discriminate against one victim group or another. From the introductory article of his series, he writes:

It is easy to imagine situations that, as Victims proliferate, it will be impossible not to be guilty of “discrimination.” The smaller the Victim group is, as a percentage of the population, the more difficult it is for every employer or organization to have just that percentage (or more) of Victims as employees or members. There are so many black women “lesbian” migrant Victims to go around, for instance.

He goes on to correctly note the raft of possibilities: hair texture victims, height victims, weight victims, etc. One thing his analysis omits is the fact that victim groups themselves grow in Western countries like a bacteria culture in a petri dish. The reason is that as fringe groups who have yet to be afforded the cachet and advantages of victimhood see other groups profiting from same, it spurs those as-of-yet unheralded groups into aggressive activism in the hopes of being accepted into the ‘official’ victim class, with all its attendant privileges.

This has an accelerant effect as every other group experiencing perceived victimhood crawls out of the woodwork to grab their share of the pie. And then we have a situation as William M. Briggs describes: where employers are incapable of satisfying the strict quotas of each multiplying sub-group, like disabled trans weight-challenged Hopi diabetics, or whatever.

This all ties back to BlackRock and the ESG/DEI quotas and credits which penalize companies for not adhering to the insanely warped demands of inhuman culture engineers. The billionaire elite families that contrive these rules from the safety and comfort of their parterred mansions, secluded from the filth and fug of real humanity, believe themselves ennobled custodians of society for elevating the unwanted, marginalized dregs as if such oblivious re-engineering of nature could not possibly have disastrous results on the natural order of things.

In reality, much of their impetus likely cleaves to more devious designs. Rather than generously uplifting the deprived for holistic ends, they use them as the radicalized revolutionary vanguard against the sector of society which represents their only political and ideological threat: those “cisgender, old White men” they loath so much.

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