I’m not an American, and have always found US lawmaking hard to understand.
But as a general principle, shouldn’t legislators be making laws and not presidents by administrative fiat? Likewise, shouldn’t justices be interpreting the hard cases rather than de facto making new laws themselves?
I doubt we are. I’m mean the Europeans have the European Commission issuing cross border regulations that bypass national legislatures. British parliamentary systems with the majority controlling both executive and legislative seems to this American as a form of presidential fiat. Brazil is ruled by the chief justice of the Supreme Court. I don’t know much about India, but I’ve read their courts are hopelessly clogged up and corrupt. I haven’t even mentioned China or Russia.
I’m no expert, but wouldn’t the Europeans have some of the same problems we have with the administrative state taking a wide latitude to implement poorly written statutes?
Yes, as a general principle, legislators should legislate. The left in the US, frustrated that they couldn’t have their goals implemented legislatively, resorted many years ago to using the executive branch and especially, the courts, to gain their way.
The executive branch controls the vast federal bureaucracy, to which congress has delegated much of its power. One example is the EPA. Congress has given it the power to implement environmental regulation. The EPA decided that it was going to consider CO2 to be a pollutant, and thus subject to regulation. The EPA was sued for this, and the Supreme Court decided that the EPA does, in fact, have the power to decide what they are permitted to regulate.
In truth, Congress doesn’t do much except posture these days.
Congress is supposed to declare war, something that hasn’t been done in decades, despite the fact that we have been more or less continuously involved in wars for the past 80 years.
Roosevelt felt it necessary to have Congress pass the lend-lease act before opening up the Arsenal of Democracy to the UK. Compare that to the tens of billions being supplied to the Ukrainians with nary a peep.
There is practically no way for the American people to have its voice heard any longer. That’s why presidential elections have become so critical. I laughed when I heard Trump was running in 2016, but he might be the most consequential president since Reagan.
That is how it works but the executive branch has discretion in how it enforces the law. The supreme court rules that discriminating against whites in college admissions violates the equal protection clause of the constitution (conceded- I don't know if that's what they decided; this is an example). President Biden could tell his underlings that they should not assume this applies more broadly and also no one is getting promoted for doing anything about it. Then President Trump could tell his underlings the opposite.
I don’t know about Europe, but the administrative state exploded in size and power in the 70s. Republicans fought this for a while, but by the 90s both parties were cool with it. It’s a pure Democrat stronghold of its own now. If it was ever anything else…
"After years of being called a Nazi while putting forward one modest incremental reform at a time, only to be stalled in the press and the courts, Trump’s strategy this time around is to blitzkrieg the opposition into a rout the way the Wehrmacht psychologically broke the mighty French army, which had stood like a lion on the Western Front during the Great War, in a few days in May 1940."
Absolutely, a great metaphor. Not only did Trump hit the ground running, with an avalanche of huge changes, but the opposition is in shock, there has barely been any response let alone resistance. Those of us here in England who have just sat through 14 years of conservatives doing absolutely nothing conservative, in order to be loved by the Guardian, who hated them anyway, are in awe.
Near as I can tell from social media posts, they are focusing on pointing out (usually non-existent) technical errors. I've had two friends post nonsense about how the poorly worded definitions of male and female in the Trump order has now reclassified every citizen as female. I point out how their argument is doubly wrong and they don't care.
Honestly if they are paralyzed and wasting their time on that, Mr. President Trump has more time and lattitude than I thought
Perhaps running a business that built things made Trump attuned to what real people think when it comes to Affirmative Action. Real people know about incompetents getting jobs that they didn't deserve. Real people know about incompetents in jobs who were in over their heads. Trump built hotels and casinos for decades. He couldn't afford Affirmative Action incompetents.
Trump also seems to know what the average conservative voter thinks about affirmative action. Conservative voters have been saying bad things about Affirmative Action for decades. Finally, these conservative voters have a President interested in their views. The Bushes, Dole, Romney, McCain and even Reagan didn't seem to care about what conservative voters thought about Affirmative Action. Trump is different.
Affirmative action is one of those rare issues that even liberals have been hesitant to support enthusiastically in public, where most often it is conservatives that hold their tongues or provide a million disclaimers. I think we all know that affirmative action is fundamentally unconstitutional.
There is a substantial collection of minority professionals who made careers in the affirmative action/EEOC/Federal contract compliance/Minority Enterprise edifice. If this is fully disassembled, it will be very challenging for them to find comparable opportunities. When I was an executive I argued hard against placing minorities in these roles. They should not have been created in the first place.
When the EEOC first flexed their muscle to attack discriminatory employment practices in the early 1970s, they also selected a few “whales” as prominent examples. GE, AT&T, GM were hit with a broad-based charge…and forced to negotiate. Some practices were very obvious, such as paying women lower hourly wages for identical jobs. They changed quickly.
Hiring practices were a thornier issue. Real illegal discrimination blended with lack of available talent to make progress difficult.
If the current administration prevails in dismantling the DEI/AA system, it is unlikely that graceful counsel will be forthcoming from our Federal Government.
"is the argument that laws and programs implemented to eliminate historical barriers to opportunity for underrepresented groups "
Did they eliminate historical barriers and the threat is that they will grow back if the program is eliminated? Or did the programs fail? Or are they working sooooo slowly that we might as well not have them and just wait for history to swing in the correct direction?
With apologies to Steve Sailer, it's almost as if Trump spent the prior four years seethily analyzing how the deep state thwarted him the first time and plotting a better strategy.
The articles quoted might give you the impression that everyone hired, whether permanently or via contract, through AA or DIE is about to get fired. No way. The people getting fired are those running the DIE efforts, not the people hired because of them. A full-time VA employee once boasted to me it would take an act of congress to fire him; the joke was not original to him.
The article mentions that some of the contracting programs have been in place for decades. Sure, but those contracts don't run for decades, just the programs. Surely a DIE contractor who has been suckling at the government teat for decades has picked up the expertise to get those contracts fair and square by now.
It became clear during the third generation of DEI government enforced racial preferences, that neither diversity nor equal opportunity was the aim. The DEI crowd revealed over time that they held no virtuous value system in opposition to race based hatred’s or “privileges”. They simply wanted a change in management.
They wanted to be handed positions rather than earn them. It’s a passive aggressive way of going about things.
I remember a white professor telling about how they need more non white professors but he didn’t resign so a black professor could be hired (that’s who DIE is really an out). The progressives were smart - they didn’t mass firings but incremental hiring so they could eventually get a critical mass and hire their own people.
Affirmative action makes sense. Slavery was a great moral crime, the settlement of the continent involved many great moral crimes against Indigenous peoples. Basic principles of justice that you could explain to a 5 year old are operative in affirmative action.
What does not make sense is the idea that "underrepresentation" is on its own evidence of great moral crimes; that being a recent immigrant Nigerian physician means you have the same kind of moral claim on America that an ADOS American does. What does not make sense is the notion that "diversity" has inherent moral qualities of goodness.
People can object to affirmative action but it's not inherently silly as a guide to policy in the United States.
Affirmative action, if we’re going to have it, should be like tribal membership. If you aren’t 100 percent descended from American blacks born before 1980, forget it.
We actually have a pretty solid system for determining who is eligible for affirmative action for being black: at least one of your parents must have identified as a member of the black community and been socially acknowledged by other members of the black community as a member. There are remarkably few disputes over who is black in the US. (while there are lots of scandals about women academics for claiming to be American Indian).
Immigration complicates that issue, but a simple rule would be that you have to have one black direct ancestor on the 1960 Census (or have been identified yourself on the 1960 Census as black for the elderly).
Let’s say then that my 100 position is too extreme. I’m ideologically hostile to it, so perhaps less concerned about the practical side.
But assuming we’re stuck with it, it has to be overwhelmingly to the benefit of the descendants of those who lived through slavery, Jim Crow, etc. I think that’s a patriotic position, whether I like it ideologically or not.
I’ll take your word for it that figuring out who’s black for these purposes is (blessedly) uncomplicated. But, will it always be? Is the “flight from white”, as you put it, been stomped out? I don’t know.
A corollary to that should be that only white people who have ancestors here from before 1865 should be on the hook for paying the costs of affirmative action.
Why should the descendants of some poor FOB Irish guy who got drafted into the Union Army only to be killed at Spotsylvania be forced to bear the costs?
The purpose of this is just to point out how ridiculous the whole idea of affirmative action is.
Either we continue to discriminate by skin color or we don’t.
It is not about skin color. Descendants of these two populations have unique relationships to U.S. history. It is exclusive and exceptional and however we address it should be exclusive and exceptional. The language of “inclusivity” means Lia Thomas gets to claim he is as hard done by and in need of special consideration as any young person growing up on a reserve or in Gary Indiana.
How many kids born in the US in 2050 will be exclusively descended from American slaves or whites who arrived before 1850? Perhaps a low double-digit percentage.
The US is becoming a multi-racial not a biracial country and everyone is behaving like it’s 1955.
I’ve always been surprised how Hispanics got onto the AA gravy train. They were a non-issue pre-1965 minus some Mexicans and many of these brown people are majority European origin. Look at AOC. Miss Puerto Rico is call overwhelmingly of European origin.
We just had the fiftieth anniversary of the civil rights act. Exactly how long does it seem fair to compel people who had nothing to do with legal discrimination, never mind slavery to give unearned advantages to people who never suffered from legalized discrimination or legalized slavery?
Sure, how long, how far ( reparations? land transfers?) are issues for public contestation. The point is that there is something real at the core of affirmative action, but not at the core of EDI.
A big problem is that the white elite largely reject the racial mean IQ differences of the Bell Curve, so if blacks and Hispanics all but disappear again from elite education and technical professions, to say nothing of upper business management, they're going to scream "racism" again--despite the fact they're the ones making most admission/promotion decisions. "Systemic" doesn't let them off the hook.
I would like to comment on how nice it is to have an adult conversation in a comment section. I’ve pretty much given up on them. I’m sure as Steve’s following on Substack grows it will follow the usual course, but I’m grateful for it while it lasts.
“And is anybody really ready for just how far blacks will fall on a level playing field?”
Great point. It’s going to be galling to American society. Even my well educated moderate to liberal friends who haven’t fallen for the progressive insanity really have no clue how massive these gaps are.
All the more reason to develop a society in which anyone, regardless of "merit," who works hard and plays by the rules can realistically look forward to a rich and fulfilling life. In other words, one that fits the human material that actually exists as opposed to how we might wish it to be: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00U0C9HKW
Opinions about D.E.I. from the NYT, a highly upvoted comment:
“The goals of DEI are admirable, but in practice it morphed into something much uglier. These programs often ignore individuals and rather treat them as members of a demographic group. A law firm I worked at had a diversity day for its diverse staff and it was essentially a non-whites party, leaving white staff left uninvited to the company lunch. It was strange, likely illegal, and felt something like a racial spoils system.
“A friend of mine, a college professor at Penn State, was forced to hold his breath in a diversity training longer than the non-white participants so he could feel their pain. A few years later, and Penn State just lost its motion to dismiss his racial discrimination case.
“Going back ten years to when I was applying for law firms, my law school had diversity fairs, which gave participants early chances to interview for prestigious law firms. There was literally a diversity fair covering every demographic, except straight white men. Women, Black, Latino, Asian, Gay, Bisexual, Queer, and so on.”
I can’t seem to post the link to the story. Title: “Trump’s D.E.I. Order Creates ‘Fear and Confusion’ Among Corporate Leaders” Jan 23/2025
The comments at WaPo were uninteresting because its readers hate Trump so much they attack EVERYTHING he does.
I enjoy the implication that left wing Times readers would be upset that Trump is confusing corporate leaders.
The examples of DIE above sound awful. It makes me grateful how mild by comparison is what I have been subjected to at my job, just a fairly even handed almost but not quite amusing video. I've had faaaaaaaar more training on how not to sexually harass over my career. At one job, at which I was a contractor, I got four trainings in that per year, two from the contract company and two from the customer.
Then at a recent gig I was mentoring a young woman on programming and the CEO (who had faced accusations) was adamant that I keep the door to my office open while doing so. She kept closing it. I considered getting up and walking past her to open the door, but the anticipatory awkwardness of doing so kept me in my seat.
I think all this stuff is here to stay in one form or another until we have a genuine worker shortage.
I always call Curtis Yarvin the Fifth Ramone.
Looks like Ross Douthat is getting his steady dose of Steve (and Curtis).
See his "Cultural hegemony requires a light touch" opinion piece in today's NYT.
I’m not an American, and have always found US lawmaking hard to understand.
But as a general principle, shouldn’t legislators be making laws and not presidents by administrative fiat? Likewise, shouldn’t justices be interpreting the hard cases rather than de facto making new laws themselves?
Why is America so odd in this regard?
I doubt we are. I’m mean the Europeans have the European Commission issuing cross border regulations that bypass national legislatures. British parliamentary systems with the majority controlling both executive and legislative seems to this American as a form of presidential fiat. Brazil is ruled by the chief justice of the Supreme Court. I don’t know much about India, but I’ve read their courts are hopelessly clogged up and corrupt. I haven’t even mentioned China or Russia.
“I’m mean the Europeans have the European Commission issuing cross border regulations that bypass national legislatures. “
Not really true. European Commission proposes legislation but it must be agreed by European Parliament and EU member states then
The European Commission has more narrow powers (carefully defined by law) to set various regulatory standards. But it’s not fiat lawmaking.
I’m no expert, but wouldn’t the Europeans have some of the same problems we have with the administrative state taking a wide latitude to implement poorly written statutes?
No.
I guess they live in utopia.
This is the same EU that fined Hungary 200 million euro for failing to follow its asylum policy. Oh, plus 1 million a day after that.
No.
Things are just a lot more codified and there is less executive and judicial discretion.
Law (which is often bad) is made by legislators.
Yes, as a general principle, legislators should legislate. The left in the US, frustrated that they couldn’t have their goals implemented legislatively, resorted many years ago to using the executive branch and especially, the courts, to gain their way.
The executive branch controls the vast federal bureaucracy, to which congress has delegated much of its power. One example is the EPA. Congress has given it the power to implement environmental regulation. The EPA decided that it was going to consider CO2 to be a pollutant, and thus subject to regulation. The EPA was sued for this, and the Supreme Court decided that the EPA does, in fact, have the power to decide what they are permitted to regulate.
In truth, Congress doesn’t do much except posture these days.
Congress is supposed to declare war, something that hasn’t been done in decades, despite the fact that we have been more or less continuously involved in wars for the past 80 years.
Roosevelt felt it necessary to have Congress pass the lend-lease act before opening up the Arsenal of Democracy to the UK. Compare that to the tens of billions being supplied to the Ukrainians with nary a peep.
There is practically no way for the American people to have its voice heard any longer. That’s why presidential elections have become so critical. I laughed when I heard Trump was running in 2016, but he might be the most consequential president since Reagan.
That is how it works but the executive branch has discretion in how it enforces the law. The supreme court rules that discriminating against whites in college admissions violates the equal protection clause of the constitution (conceded- I don't know if that's what they decided; this is an example). President Biden could tell his underlings that they should not assume this applies more broadly and also no one is getting promoted for doing anything about it. Then President Trump could tell his underlings the opposite.
I'm certain it works the same way in Europe.
I don’t know about Europe, but the administrative state exploded in size and power in the 70s. Republicans fought this for a while, but by the 90s both parties were cool with it. It’s a pure Democrat stronghold of its own now. If it was ever anything else…
"After years of being called a Nazi while putting forward one modest incremental reform at a time, only to be stalled in the press and the courts, Trump’s strategy this time around is to blitzkrieg the opposition into a rout the way the Wehrmacht psychologically broke the mighty French army, which had stood like a lion on the Western Front during the Great War, in a few days in May 1940."
Absolutely, a great metaphor. Not only did Trump hit the ground running, with an avalanche of huge changes, but the opposition is in shock, there has barely been any response let alone resistance. Those of us here in England who have just sat through 14 years of conservatives doing absolutely nothing conservative, in order to be loved by the Guardian, who hated them anyway, are in awe.
Near as I can tell from social media posts, they are focusing on pointing out (usually non-existent) technical errors. I've had two friends post nonsense about how the poorly worded definitions of male and female in the Trump order has now reclassified every citizen as female. I point out how their argument is doubly wrong and they don't care.
Honestly if they are paralyzed and wasting their time on that, Mr. President Trump has more time and lattitude than I thought
Perhaps running a business that built things made Trump attuned to what real people think when it comes to Affirmative Action. Real people know about incompetents getting jobs that they didn't deserve. Real people know about incompetents in jobs who were in over their heads. Trump built hotels and casinos for decades. He couldn't afford Affirmative Action incompetents.
Trump also seems to know what the average conservative voter thinks about affirmative action. Conservative voters have been saying bad things about Affirmative Action for decades. Finally, these conservative voters have a President interested in their views. The Bushes, Dole, Romney, McCain and even Reagan didn't seem to care about what conservative voters thought about Affirmative Action. Trump is different.
Affirmative action is one of those rare issues that even liberals have been hesitant to support enthusiastically in public, where most often it is conservatives that hold their tongues or provide a million disclaimers. I think we all know that affirmative action is fundamentally unconstitutional.
"Bushes, Dole, Romney, McCain"--none of these were what you could call conservative.
I have to think that Steve’s buddy Stephen Miller is behind much of the DEI and immigration changes.
There is a substantial collection of minority professionals who made careers in the affirmative action/EEOC/Federal contract compliance/Minority Enterprise edifice. If this is fully disassembled, it will be very challenging for them to find comparable opportunities. When I was an executive I argued hard against placing minorities in these roles. They should not have been created in the first place.
When the EEOC first flexed their muscle to attack discriminatory employment practices in the early 1970s, they also selected a few “whales” as prominent examples. GE, AT&T, GM were hit with a broad-based charge…and forced to negotiate. Some practices were very obvious, such as paying women lower hourly wages for identical jobs. They changed quickly.
Hiring practices were a thornier issue. Real illegal discrimination blended with lack of available talent to make progress difficult.
If the current administration prevails in dismantling the DEI/AA system, it is unlikely that graceful counsel will be forthcoming from our Federal Government.
Think of all the funds spent in creating DEI PowerPoint presentations. The horror!!
"is the argument that laws and programs implemented to eliminate historical barriers to opportunity for underrepresented groups "
Did they eliminate historical barriers and the threat is that they will grow back if the program is eliminated? Or did the programs fail? Or are they working sooooo slowly that we might as well not have them and just wait for history to swing in the correct direction?
With apologies to Steve Sailer, it's almost as if Trump spent the prior four years seethily analyzing how the deep state thwarted him the first time and plotting a better strategy.
The articles quoted might give you the impression that everyone hired, whether permanently or via contract, through AA or DIE is about to get fired. No way. The people getting fired are those running the DIE efforts, not the people hired because of them. A full-time VA employee once boasted to me it would take an act of congress to fire him; the joke was not original to him.
The article mentions that some of the contracting programs have been in place for decades. Sure, but those contracts don't run for decades, just the programs. Surely a DIE contractor who has been suckling at the government teat for decades has picked up the expertise to get those contracts fair and square by now.
Good point about who WON’T be getting fired.
The history of official racial discrimination (both anti-black and anti-white government action) shows:
1. You can get a lot of what you want, as long as you don't overstep.
2. The further and longer you go, the more difficult it is for you to see where the overstep line is.
3. Therefore, no side can long term resist overstepping.
Maybe the Republic will actually survive. There's a lot to fix.
It became clear during the third generation of DEI government enforced racial preferences, that neither diversity nor equal opportunity was the aim. The DEI crowd revealed over time that they held no virtuous value system in opposition to race based hatred’s or “privileges”. They simply wanted a change in management.
They wanted to be handed positions rather than earn them. It’s a passive aggressive way of going about things.
I remember a white professor telling about how they need more non white professors but he didn’t resign so a black professor could be hired (that’s who DIE is really an out). The progressives were smart - they didn’t mass firings but incremental hiring so they could eventually get a critical mass and hire their own people.
“It’s almost as if bureaucrats tend to oppose the will of democracy unless their pensions are put at risk.“
That’s the core of it. Trump has flipped the old saw that says you don’t crap where you eat: he’s crapping where they eat.
It’s shit and awe.
Affirmative action makes sense. Slavery was a great moral crime, the settlement of the continent involved many great moral crimes against Indigenous peoples. Basic principles of justice that you could explain to a 5 year old are operative in affirmative action.
What does not make sense is the idea that "underrepresentation" is on its own evidence of great moral crimes; that being a recent immigrant Nigerian physician means you have the same kind of moral claim on America that an ADOS American does. What does not make sense is the notion that "diversity" has inherent moral qualities of goodness.
People can object to affirmative action but it's not inherently silly as a guide to policy in the United States.
Affirmative action, if we’re going to have it, should be like tribal membership. If you aren’t 100 percent descended from American blacks born before 1980, forget it.
I don’t think you have to be 100% for tribes. You do have some ancestry, but not 100%.
Sure - I’m just making an analogy. The main point is that you should have show overwhelming ADOS ancestry.
We actually have a pretty solid system for determining who is eligible for affirmative action for being black: at least one of your parents must have identified as a member of the black community and been socially acknowledged by other members of the black community as a member. There are remarkably few disputes over who is black in the US. (while there are lots of scandals about women academics for claiming to be American Indian).
Immigration complicates that issue, but a simple rule would be that you have to have one black direct ancestor on the 1960 Census (or have been identified yourself on the 1960 Census as black for the elderly).
But doesn’t systemic racism operate at the visual level?
What is the causal mechanism that means an ADOS suffers a disadvantage that the child of Nigerian doctors doesn’t?
No one seriously think that Peter Thiel (born in Germany) is more or less white than George W Bush whose last ancestor arrived in 1654.
Either being visibly of identifiable African heritage is the source of discrimination or it isn’t.
Let’s say then that my 100 position is too extreme. I’m ideologically hostile to it, so perhaps less concerned about the practical side.
But assuming we’re stuck with it, it has to be overwhelmingly to the benefit of the descendants of those who lived through slavery, Jim Crow, etc. I think that’s a patriotic position, whether I like it ideologically or not.
I’ll take your word for it that figuring out who’s black for these purposes is (blessedly) uncomplicated. But, will it always be? Is the “flight from white”, as you put it, been stomped out? I don’t know.
A corollary to that should be that only white people who have ancestors here from before 1865 should be on the hook for paying the costs of affirmative action.
Why should the descendants of some poor FOB Irish guy who got drafted into the Union Army only to be killed at Spotsylvania be forced to bear the costs?
The purpose of this is just to point out how ridiculous the whole idea of affirmative action is.
Either we continue to discriminate by skin color or we don’t.
It is not about skin color. Descendants of these two populations have unique relationships to U.S. history. It is exclusive and exceptional and however we address it should be exclusive and exceptional. The language of “inclusivity” means Lia Thomas gets to claim he is as hard done by and in need of special consideration as any young person growing up on a reserve or in Gary Indiana.
How many kids born in the US in 2050 will be exclusively descended from American slaves or whites who arrived before 1850? Perhaps a low double-digit percentage.
The US is becoming a multi-racial not a biracial country and everyone is behaving like it’s 1955.
I’ve always been surprised how Hispanics got onto the AA gravy train. They were a non-issue pre-1965 minus some Mexicans and many of these brown people are majority European origin. Look at AOC. Miss Puerto Rico is call overwhelmingly of European origin.
We just had the fiftieth anniversary of the civil rights act. Exactly how long does it seem fair to compel people who had nothing to do with legal discrimination, never mind slavery to give unearned advantages to people who never suffered from legalized discrimination or legalized slavery?
It’s an outrage.
Sure, how long, how far ( reparations? land transfers?) are issues for public contestation. The point is that there is something real at the core of affirmative action, but not at the core of EDI.
A big problem is that the white elite largely reject the racial mean IQ differences of the Bell Curve, so if blacks and Hispanics all but disappear again from elite education and technical professions, to say nothing of upper business management, they're going to scream "racism" again--despite the fact they're the ones making most admission/promotion decisions. "Systemic" doesn't let them off the hook.
I would like to comment on how nice it is to have an adult conversation in a comment section. I’ve pretty much given up on them. I’m sure as Steve’s following on Substack grows it will follow the usual course, but I’m grateful for it while it lasts.
Thank you all.
Having to pay stops some trolls.
“And is anybody really ready for just how far blacks will fall on a level playing field?”
Great point. It’s going to be galling to American society. Even my well educated moderate to liberal friends who haven’t fallen for the progressive insanity really have no clue how massive these gaps are.
All the more reason to develop a society in which anyone, regardless of "merit," who works hard and plays by the rules can realistically look forward to a rich and fulfilling life. In other words, one that fits the human material that actually exists as opposed to how we might wish it to be: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00U0C9HKW
Opinions about D.E.I. from the NYT, a highly upvoted comment:
“The goals of DEI are admirable, but in practice it morphed into something much uglier. These programs often ignore individuals and rather treat them as members of a demographic group. A law firm I worked at had a diversity day for its diverse staff and it was essentially a non-whites party, leaving white staff left uninvited to the company lunch. It was strange, likely illegal, and felt something like a racial spoils system.
“A friend of mine, a college professor at Penn State, was forced to hold his breath in a diversity training longer than the non-white participants so he could feel their pain. A few years later, and Penn State just lost its motion to dismiss his racial discrimination case.
“Going back ten years to when I was applying for law firms, my law school had diversity fairs, which gave participants early chances to interview for prestigious law firms. There was literally a diversity fair covering every demographic, except straight white men. Women, Black, Latino, Asian, Gay, Bisexual, Queer, and so on.”
I can’t seem to post the link to the story. Title: “Trump’s D.E.I. Order Creates ‘Fear and Confusion’ Among Corporate Leaders” Jan 23/2025
The comments at WaPo were uninteresting because its readers hate Trump so much they attack EVERYTHING he does.
Law firms are some of the worst offenders and were early adopters of diversity chiefs.
I enjoy the implication that left wing Times readers would be upset that Trump is confusing corporate leaders.
The examples of DIE above sound awful. It makes me grateful how mild by comparison is what I have been subjected to at my job, just a fairly even handed almost but not quite amusing video. I've had faaaaaaaar more training on how not to sexually harass over my career. At one job, at which I was a contractor, I got four trainings in that per year, two from the contract company and two from the customer.
Then at a recent gig I was mentoring a young woman on programming and the CEO (who had faced accusations) was adamant that I keep the door to my office open while doing so. She kept closing it. I considered getting up and walking past her to open the door, but the anticipatory awkwardness of doing so kept me in my seat.
I think all this stuff is here to stay in one form or another until we have a genuine worker shortage.
The implication is that even a great many left wing NYT readers don’t like DEI.