Heather Mac Donals: Reject the Deversity Mandate

Heather Mac Donald wrote what could be considered the most important piece of social commentary in a very long time today at City Journal.  It takes great courage today to write the Truth, and Heather Mac Donald never shrinks from that task.  Here is the entire piece:

President Donald Trump is facing a revolt from his base for having signed the bloated omnibus spending bill that torpedoes his “drain the swamp” pledges. But the president now has an opportunity to achieve a small measure of redemption: he should offer loud and unequivocal support to Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, who is being hammered for reportedly having rejected identity politics in favor of meritocracy. 

Zinke is facing a storm of media criticism from liberals for allegedly saying that diversity is “not important,” though his office denies that he said this. The same sources that reported Zinke’s comments say that he followed up by stating that what he cared about was excellence—and that by hiring the best people, he would in fact put together the most diverse group anyone has ever had. This second statement is a cowardly concession (as is his denial of his initial diversity observation, assuming that he made that initial statement). Sometimes meritocracy will yield diversity; sometimes it won’t. The point is that it doesn’t matter. Diversity should not be an end in itself; excellence is the goal. 

Rejecting the primacy of diversity constitutes a head-on assault on the received wisdom of Washington and elite American culture. Gender and racial quotas have been the order of business for the last three decades. The #MeToo movement has only intensified pressures on public and private organizations to hire based on sex and skin color. The result: wasted resources, the sidelining of merit, and ever more virulent and irrational identity politics. The rule of the diversity regime is that you’re required to be fanatically obsessed with race and gender until you aren’t—because at that unpredictable moment, whenever it comes, noticing race and sex becomes racist and sexist.

What’s fantastic about the Zinke story, which appears to be gaining momentum, is that the Interior Secretary is being condemned for allegedly saying that he discounts racial categories in hiring, and prefers “having the right person for the right job.” This position, uncontroversial for decades, was the essence of Martin Luther King’s vision of a colorblind, merit-based society. Treating people the same way regardless of their race or sex used to be considered the definition of fairness; now it is understood to be vicious and intolerable. Kristen Clarke, president of the National Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, writes of Zinke, “the racist views harbored by members of this administration and their failure to ensure diversity must be condemned.”

The most distinctive moment during the 2016 presidential campaign was Trump’s insistence that he did not have time for political correctness, in response to then-Fox News host Megyn Kelly’s feminist naggings. Here is a moment for the president to make good on that pledge by rejecting the relevance of race and gender to any job within his administration. As for Zinke, even if he didn’t reject diversity explicitly, he ought to do so now.

Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal, and the author of the New York Times bestseller The War on Cops.

Anthony Esolen: True Deiversity (Crisis Magazine)

Anthony Esolen writing today at Crisis Magazine:

You could not have, among the Christians of old, some people who still sacrificed to Bacchus and men who still went after boys and women who still procured abortions; that would have been the same old world, with a little perfume. So now we cannot have a diversity that means no more than conformity to the world. Things are clearer than ever. Unity in Christ alone can give the world the diversity it needs.

http://www.crisismagazine.com/2017/true-diversity-in-unity

Fr. Schall on The Paris Statement

Fr. Schall writing today at Crisis Magazine on The Paris Statement.  The first link is to Fr. Schall's piece; the second is to The Paris Statement.

http://www.crisismagazine.com/2017/paris-statement-defends-old-europe-values?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+CrisisMagazine+%28Crisis+Magazine%29

https://thetrueeurope.eu/a-europe-we-can-believe-in/

17. The false Europe also boasts of an unprecedented commitment to equality. It claims to promote non-discrimination and the inclusion of all races, religions and identities. Here, genuine progress has been made, but a utopian detachment from reality has taken hold. Over the past generation, Europe has pursued a grand project of multiculturalism. To demand or even promote the assimilation of Muslim newcomers to our manners and mores, much less to our religion, has been thought a gross injustice. A commitment to equality, we have been told, demands that we abjure any hint that we believe our culture superior. Paradoxically, Europe’s multicultural enterprise, which denies the Christian roots of Europe, trades on the Christian ideal of universal charity in an exaggerated and unsustainable form. It requires from the European peoples a saintly degree of self-abnegation. We are to affirm the very colonization of our homelands and the demise of our culture as Europe’s great twenty-first century glory—a collective act of self-sacrifice for the sake of some new global community of peace and prosperity that is being born.

Lying for Diversity at Claremont McKenna

"The first thing a man will do for his ideals is lie."
Joseph A. Schumpeter

Score another victory for Diversity over Truth.

Charles C. Johnson, a Los Angeles based writer and graduate of Claremont McKenna College, wrote a very sad piece for City Journal about his alma mater.  Seems this once great college has been lying about the SAT scores of students admitted there ("in some years, some individual SAT scores were simply made up") in order to expand racial preferences in its admissions. "It’s probably no coincidence" that the manipulations began soon after the college received a $700,000 grant to do just that.

To read the whole piece go HERE.  A clip that summarizes the fraud follows:

Vos (dean of admissions) was an enthusiastic supporter of racial preferences and a vocal critic of California’s Proposition 209, which in 1996 banned state colleges from admitting students on the basis of race, ethnicity, or sex. During his tenure, CMC’s admissions policies led to higher acceptance rates for blacks and Latinos and lower ones for whites and Asians. According to the Claremont Independent in 2006, “statistics provided by the admissions office show that it admitted roughly 45 percent of both black and Hispanic applicants, [versus] 22 percent of the white applicants and 17 percent of Asian applicants.” Given this history, it’s probable that Vos’s preferential policies resulted in lower average SAT scores than he would have liked and led him to make his disastrous fabrications.

"The truth that makes men free is for the most part the truth which men prefer not to hear."
Herbert Agar