By Meta-Content Generator A.J. Liebling, Yard Editor Larry Lowell,
and Aviation Correspondent Douglas Corrigan
The recent defenestration of ex-Harvard President Claudine Gay and an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 Max have a surprising link: both are connected to the inchoate evil that is DEI, which stands for Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion, unless you are part of the great right-wing grievance machine, where it stands for the triumph of evil coastal elites.
Don't believe me? Just ask the most meritorious columnist in America, former National Review table-pounder David French, now peddling his wares in The New York Times:
Uh-oh. This sounds serious. And who better to remind us of the dangers of DEI than a former writer for a magazine that for decades opposed the Civil Rights Act and upheld white supremacy, including gems like this:
“Why the South Must Prevail” is shocking to the 21st century reader. The piece put National Review on record in favor of both legal segregation where it existed (in accordance with the “states’ rights” principle) and the right of southern whites to discriminate against southern blacks, on the basis of their “Negro backwardness.” The editorial defended the right of whites to govern exclusively, even in jurisdictions where they did not constitute a majority of the population.
In the same op-ed, Buckley concluded that as long as African Americans remained “backward” in education and in economic progress, Southern whites had a right to “impose superior mores for whatever period it takes to affect a genuine cultural equality between the races.” ...He offered no guidance as to how blacks might attain what he called “cultural equality,” save for by the sufferance of the white population.
But don't worry: years later self-proclaimed intellectual William F. Buckley said he was sorry. And since no lasting harm was done by 350 years of armed and entitled racist garbage like this, there's no reason to worry about it anymore.
According to French, that is.
Before we get to French's half-assed effort to define DEI, let's see how it is used out in the real world. Here's an example of a hiring policy of a well-known law firm not known for hiring third-raters just to advance the woke agenda, to put it mildly:
Gee, if Cravath can commit to DEI without being compelled to hire idiots like Clarence Thomas, maybe DEI is not the clear and present danger that David French and his fellow apologists for white supremacy think it is.
Let David try to explain:
To put it simply, the problem with D.E.I. isn’t with diversity, equity, or inclusion — all vital values. The danger posed by D.E.I. resides primarily not in these virtuous ends, but in the unconstitutional means chosen to advance them.
That's certainly simple, although meaningless.
Although he won't come right out and say it, as a veteran right-wing litigator, he's trying to suggest (without having the intellectual courage to state plainly) that any effort to remedy the continuing effects of America's 425 year love affair with racism is unconstitutional because it would entail taking race into account in making various decisions, like who should be President of Harvard. While this is a popular theory among white reactionaries, it doesn't happen to be – true. As a very meritorious double-Harvard grad wrote last year:
This contention blinks both history and reality in ways too numerous to count. But the response is simple: Our country has never been colorblind. Given the lengthy history of state-sponsored race-based preferences in America, to say that anyone is now victimized if a college considers whether that legacy of discrimination has unequally advantaged its applicants fails to acknowledge the well-documented “inter- generational transmission of inequality” that still plagues our citizenry.
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| Remember when police were chosen on merit alone? |
Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, 600 U.S. ___ (2023)(Jackson, J. dissenting)
The two dissents dissect the ridiculous anti-text anti-original intent argument that the post-Civil War amendments mandated “color-blindness.”
Guess David isn't too interested in dissenting opinions. Instead he harps, as did the right wing advocacy group that sued Harvard, on the supposed ill-treatment of Asian-American Harvard applicants:
it is difficult to ignore the overwhelming evidence that Harvard attempted to achieve greater diversity in part by systematically downranking Asian applicants on subjective grounds,
The process was so devastating to Asian-American applicants that they constituted only 24% of the entering Harvard class at issue, although they represent a full 6% of U.S. population.
It's peculiar that white men seem very upset about this supposed injustice, while Asian students themselves do not. In fact, major Asian-American student organizations at Harvard supported the University's position.
French goes on to cite vaguely university disciplinary processes that he claims fail to attain the Constitutional standard of due process, which is by definition not applicable to private colleges and universities. Or, for that matter, to newspapers, who can s***can whichever columnist they want for any or no reason. We think he must have learned this tidbit at Harvard Law School, but who knows?
What's really going on here, in addition to white supremacy, is white men's fears that they are losing their privilege, or what they like to call “merit.”
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| Remember when soldiers were chosen by merit alone? |
Even French, to his credit, can't swallow the Sissy SpaceX white racist crap about how DEI supposedly led to the door of that Alaska Airlines 737 falling off (the entirely made up theory is that somehow unqualified hires were too stupid to attach the bolts).
This has led to a spate of racist fairy tales about how DEI would lead to incompetent pilots, surgeons, and other worthies because white men would no longer be ushered to the top of the heap. Even the less self-serving argument – that all these goodies should go to those with the best SAT scores and GPA's – disappears on a moment's introspection.
We know pilots and surgeons. I want them to be good at what they do. I also know that beyond some minimum, there's no correlation between test scores and competence at a job that requires diverse skills, like flying or surgery.
I know plenty of Harvard summas I wouldn't trust in the cockpit or with a blade in their hands. A pilot needs to be calm, flexible, and patient and have the ability to multitask, scan, and stay cool in a crisis. A surgeon needs good judgment and good fine motor skills. I can think of plenty of people with good test scores who don't have the skills to slice a salami, much less an abdominal wall.
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| Aviation, before it was ruined by DEI wokeness |
Further, research into the terrible health outcomes between Black and white Americans has told us that Black patients are more likely to trust and comply with the instructions of Black doctors. So if the true measure of medicine is its ability to heal the sick and keep us healthy, then medicine needs plenty of Black doctors and other health professionals to serve the US patient population.
Does anyone think that the rich powerful white billionaires have the best test scores and GPA's? Have you ever talked to one?
On a related subject, if you think that Harvard must admit students only on the basis of the numbers, then you must think that The New York Times must have the same standards. Columns must be awarded only to those with the most glittering degrees from the finest schools.
What were David French's merits exactly? He received his BA from Lipscomb University, widely regarded as the finest institution of higher education in Nashville, Tennessee [That would be Vanderbilt – Ed.].
Lips. Comb. University. Is that the best undergraduate background the Times could have found for the demanding job of Op-Ed columnist? It sounds more like the background of someone who screws bolts for Boeing.
So why was this mook hired?
Here's how Media Matters hailed his hiring:
the New York Times' announcement notably leaves out French’s history as an attorney for the Alliance Defending Freedom, an anti-LGBTQ legal organization designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Moreover, French has a history of expressing troubling sentiments about gay and trans people in conservative outlets ....“I don’t agree that trans men are ‘men’ or that trans women are ‘women,” French said....
Wowzeh.
We all know why French was hired: the Times wanted another literate right-winger they could take out in public. They wanted a staff of editorial columnists who were diverse and inclusive. As their boss and owner put it, even in Fox News's bent retelling:
The New York Times Company Chairman A.G. Sulzberger defended the newspaper saying it does a good job of representing a diverse set of views after being asked why the company's goals don't include the diversity of views.
That's what Harvard wanted in its entering class, too. But what's OK when it benefits a reactionary white graduate of Lipsync University isn't OK when it benefits minority groups who have been systematically assaulted for four centuries.
If you have to ask why such disparate treatment is defensible, either ethically or intellectually, then you probably didn't graduate from Lippitydo University.
And by the way, French, so worked up about the treatment of Asian-Americans in Harvard admissions, doesn't seem to be too upset about the number of Asian-American colleagues on the Times's editorial page. That number is zero. Maybe they're just not good with words?
Speaking of those doors flying off Boeing airplanes and how white racist plug-uglies are lying that it's due to DEI, the real reason that Boeing's planes are shiite is...wait for it...white men:
That [safety-first] ethos is hard to instill using only financial incentives or the threat of firing. What’s really needed is a culture of perfectionism—and that’s what Boeing seems to have lost over the past 20 or so years. To take only the most obvious example: The two fatal crashes of the 737 Max were the result of a new flight-control system that depended on data from a single sensor that had no backup....Designing a system that had a single point of failure violated the canon of aviation engineering, which has always emphasized the need for redundancy in cases where failure would have disastrous consequences. But in the new Boeing, people thought the risk was worth taking—or perhaps the new corporate culture they’d absorbed had simply stopped making them value what the engineers said.
Yes, the same rapacious white plutocrats funding attacks on educational institutions, using DEI as the battering ram to destroy academic freedom and intellectual integrity, were the ones whose greed, arrogance, and incompetence led to the deaths of hundreds and the ruination of a once-great company.
Why? What's gone wrong with white men in this country? Is it the breakdown of the white family? The white penchant for drug and alcohol abuse? The cultural backwardness of many whites, even the richest ones? The white loss of respect for law and order?
We don't know. But unlike French's DEI bogeyman, the rule of rapacious white men is blowing the doors off of our country as we try to navigate through dangerous skies.
I can't wait to read all about it in the diverse opinion pages of The New York Times.
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