Exclusive Inclusion

No whites allowed at a South Puget Sound community college event.

Diversity, Equity, Inclusion.

DEI.

A cause that transitioned some time back from a movement to a business. As in Big Business. As in Corporate America, where seemingly every company has a DEI department, complete with mission statement, goals, and apparatchiks making sure that the employee ranks are sufficiently sprinkled through with all-but-straight-white-men (ABSWM).

In keeping with modern leftism's conflation of identity and every other aspect of an individual (as in, your skin color, gender, and sexual orientation define who you are), DEI doesn't include any consideration for diversity of opinion, of political leanings, of life experiences (other than a presumption that if your skin is not-white, you de facto have a "diverse" life history vs, in more 2023 jargon, white-cis-hetero-males (WCHM), no matter whether both your parents are Ivy League graduates pulling in half a million a year).

As Thomas Sowell snarkily observed:

I'm of the opinion that the C-suite types in most of these companies exercise and embrace DEI as a defensive measure, as a preemptive effort against the scolds and harridans whose only form of fulfillment in their otherwise-miserable lives is pointing accusatory fingers.

The true believers are more likely to nestle in those DEI departments, where they can stand apart from real world considerations like competitive pressures that would favor filling positions with the best candidates (i.e. on merit alone), identities notwithstanding.

My cynical take on DEI doesn't carry through to academia, where I'm convinced many of the people in charge are true believers.

Yet true diversity, the sort that'd actually have a chance of accomplishing what universities purport to with their quotas and disparate treatment of candidates based on skin color, would seek to aggregate people from as wide range of actual life experience as possible.

This is the sort of "discrimination" that might remain permissible should the Supreme Court rule this coming summer as sanity demands on two affirmative action cases (Students for Fair Admissions Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College, and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina). A "diverse" student body would be more enhanced by folding in kids from Appalachia, deep-south Mississippi, the Ozarks, West Texas, a Los Angeles barrio, and Wyoming cattle country in addition to those that emerge from big cities and metro areas, and that's before adding in those from other countries (or American kids who spend many years in other countries, for that matter).

Do they practice that sort of life-diversity accretion? I'm sure some of that might come into play, but let's be real - the tallies they use to prove diversity do not reflect that. Instead, they are about how many black and latino students, how many women, how many gender-non-binary, and the rest of their carefully curated identity checklist. Nor do we see demonstration of effort to draw a spectrum of ideologies or beliefs. When was the last time you heard about Harvard or Yale offering "studies" courses that study anything beyond the preferred narrative of WCHM-oppressor vs ABSWM-oppressed?

Since modern culture is about excess and one-upmanship, merely tipping the scales is no longer enough. We are seeing examples of overt segregation and exclusion popping up across the landscape. Colleges creating no-whites-allowed dormitories, classes and seminars where WCHM are not only disinvited, but told they cannot attend. This is bleeding through to the real world, with the NHL attempting to hold minority-only career conferences (they've since backed down), and a restaurant denying a Christian group service for the crime of wrongthink.

That there are laws against racial discrimination and regarding public accommodation doesn't seem to bother those who cleave most to unfettered government power in making things "better." Discrimination and exclusion are AOK if they're done to the right (pun intended) people.

It's a far cry from the old days of free speech, which included the ACLU's defense of Illinois Nazis' rights.

As Glenn Greenwald reports, Brazil is about to grant the government power to censor speech, under the guise of banning "fake news and disinformation." Worse, they're about to empower themselves to punish anyone who authors and disseminates falsehoods. With the government as the arbiter, of course.

What could go wrong?

Greenwald also notes that there are people within our borders looking with keen interest at Brazil's endeavor, hoping that they might build a similar 'Ministry of Truth' here. That there are people in America, and more than a fringe few, who’d want government to censor what it decides is “fake news and disinformation” and to jail its originators and sharers horrifies me.

Humanity's greatest horrors have been of the "ethnic cleansing" sort. Tribes have slaughtered each other since the dawn of humanity, for the crime of being "other." Religions across history have produced countless massacres, even among people who are, to outsiders, indistinguishable in appearance. Humanity has matured greatly in the past couple hundred years, as Enlightenment values that include the premise of equality and the sovereignty of the individual have risen above the various forms of tribalism that are wired into our lizard brains. That lizard brain wiring has managed to insinuate itself again, sadly, via wokeism, and we witness our supposed Best-and-Brightest actively sorting people into "us" and "other," with woe and misery to be inflicted without compunction on the "other."

The irony would be laughable if it weren’t so tragic.