Today’s Supreme Court decision overturning Affirmative Action may be the most momentous legal decision of the decade. Forget returning discretion in abortion to the states. That’s a win, I grant you, but while the legions of those unborn at the hands of Abortion-Americans have contributed to the demographic hole that the regime is attempting to fill with mass migration, it’s the Affirmative-Action Americans that are the root cause of the competence crisis collapsing our civilization’s complex systems. Every incompetent diversity hire that gets elevated beyond their ability is a double-whammy, not only jamming an idiot into a position whose responsibilities they can’t meet, but simultaneously preventing a capable professional from filling that role. As our corporations, bureaucracies, agencies, and universities have filled up with Affirmative-Action Americans in pursuit of a triple-A ESG rating, they have grown steadily less functional. Everything takes longer and costs more even as quality degrades and accidents proliferate.
It’s the same deal with college admissions, which was the specific matter at issue in the Students for Fair Admission v Harvard case that the Supremes just decided. Every diversity admit brought in on the strength of the colour of their skin or the pronoun of their gender is a place that is not taken by a qualified kid whose grades and test scores have demonstrated the intellectual capacity to undertake their chosen program of study. The kids who do get admitted can’t hack it, resulting in curricular rigour getting diluted and graduates whose DIEvy League credentials are as a meaningless as a certificate of Social Justice League superherodom found at the bottom of a box of Queer-E-Os. The kids who don’t get admitted just get demoralized. Why try if it doesn’t matter? Why study? What’s the point? Competence gets killed at both ends.
And I do mean killed. Middle-aged white guys are killing themselves with alcohol, oxycontin, and self-administered bullets at an unprecedented rate – so rapidly that the life expectancy of white men, specifically and uniquely, has actually declined in recent years. You get to the point in your life where you should have a wife, a house, kids, and a loyal hound named Rover, where you should be hitting the high point of your career as you come into the full flower of your professional capabilities. Instead you keep getting passed over for promotion because you have the same skin colour as guys who owned slaves over a century ago, in favour of people who are actually descended from slave-owners, as essentially every American black is, but very few American whites are. Or maybe you just can’t get hired, at all. And so one day, deep in the grips of whatever substance you’re using to cope, contemplating the impossibility of ever retiring given that you’re already living on your dwindling savings1, let alone succeeding in the Darwinian struggle, you finally listen a little too closely to that black dog who sits on your chest every night, panting like Cerberus in your ear as sleep evades you.
That’s what Affirmative Action has accomplished. Thirty-three thousand, five hundred and seventy four white men dead at their own hand, in 2021 alone.
Affirmative Action was never supposed to be permanent. Every time it’s come before the Supreme Court, the justices specified that it would surely be in place for only a few more years. It was premised on the idea that disparities in educational, socioeconomic, and professional outcomes between the races and sexes were due to the legacy of racism and sexism. Centuries of discrimination had held back blacks and women, kept them from obtaining the training they needed to become competent, respected, and successful members of the professional-managerial class, and therefore a temporary corrective thumb on the scale needed to be applied. The desired equality that did not exist in fact would be enforced by fiat until nature conformed, and genuine equality became real, men and women, whites and blacks and Hispanics and Asians, finally rendered as functionally fungible as theory said they were supposed to be.
Except, of course, they weren’t, never have been, and never will be. Equality is an abstraction that doesn’t exist in nature. You can write down x=y/z and solve for z, and this is perfectly sensible, and even useful, but in the real world two apples are never precisely identical in taste, nutrition, size, weight, or freshness, even when picked on the same day from the same tree. Just so, no two humans are identical, even so-called ‘identical twins’ can be distinguished if you look closely enough. And just as no human is truly interchangeable with any other human, so too with the sexes and the races. There are differences. Those differences are biological. They are hard-wired. They are not open to alteration by means of any government policy save, perhaps, several centuries of ruthless eugenic breeding. Sometimes those differences are irrelevant to the matter at hand; sometimes they are highly relevant, and will lead to very different outcomes, in the aggregate, between those groups.
Such as, for example, white boys and Asian boys excelling in electrical engineering when compared to, say, Guatemalan girls. Which was more or less the core of the complaint brought against Harvard by Students for Fair Admission, who noted that white and Asian boys were dramatically underrepresented at the formerly august academy in comparison to their test scores, which as the Supreme Court agreed was decisive evidence of racial discrimination, which as the Supreme Court furthermore affirmed was in direct contradiction with the Constitution’s 14th Amendment, the equal protection clause. Of course the Supreme Court did not unanimously affirm these obvious truths: the decision was split six/three along “ideological” lines, which is to say that the two Affirmative-Action Americans on the bench (who know full well how they got their positions), and of course the nice Jewish lady who reflexively has her sisters’ backs, argued in their typically histrionic and incoherent fashion against the obvious justice of the Students for Fair Admission’s cause.
There is effectively nothing we can do about nature, aside from ignoring it, which we have been doing, and which has inevitably proved disastrous. Interestingly, however, the destruction of organizational competence resulting from affirmative action is inevitable even if there are no intrinsic biological differences, as can be demonstrated using formal logic when proceeding from the axioms of affirmative action proponents themselves.
In any case, Affirmative Action is now constitutionally dead in the United States.
That doesn’t mean it’s dead dead. Oh no, dear reader, I do not think for a moment that Mordor’s hordes will take this defeat lying down. The built-in constituency for Affirmative Action is large and institutionally powerful. The outposts of the zampolit are dug in like fat tics in HR departments, admissions offices, Studies faculties, diversity offices, and the like throughout every major and minor church of the Cathedral. They are true believers, fanatic tranissaries of the Woke faith, comprised of the auxiliary battalions of ethnic and sexual minorities that know a good thing when they see it, and the dark convents of middle-aged white women driven mad by their haunted wombs, who have latched on to their substitute babies like prematurely spayed bitches neurotically clinging to their wubbies. Affirmative-Action Americans aren’t going anywhere without a fight.
There’s no doubt that the universities are already holding emergency Zoom meetings, institutional email servers and Slacks going white-hot as the midwit administrators strategize over how to comply with the new letter of the law while openly violating its spirit. The path followed by California’s universities provides an obvious way forward for them. A ballot initiative all the way back in 1996 banned Affirmative Action in the state. Universities responded by brazenly ignoring it, and when challenged on this, simply tossed merit-based criteria such as high school GPAs and SAT scores into the shredder. If admissions are made completely arbitrary, at the utterly subjective whim of admissions officers who are not required to justify their decisions on any quantitative basis, it becomes very difficult to prove that they are discriminating on the basis of their favoured identity groups. Even though everyone knows that they very obviously are.
That’s exactly what I expect the DIEvies to do, as well as all of the many much less prestigious universities whose own Affirmative Action policies are now equally illegal. Justice Roberts has apparently specifically said that they cannot just use admissions essays, or whatever, to try and get around this; but on the other hand, the fool waffled and said, oh well you can still consider how applicants are ‘inspired’ or whatever because of their lived racial experiences. So the universities will just say, great, we’re really inspired by black and brown and Hispanic kids, and instead of saying Asian boys have ‘bad personalities’ or whatever they’ll just shrug and say, well they weren’t inspiring, and neither were the white kids.
This is great.
It will tear away whatever tattered shreds of academic respectability they still cling to in order to hide their increasingly shameless reputation, like the last rags of false modesty being stripped from a prostitute still trying to pretend to a snickering public that she is a woman of standing and virtue. Once admissions have discarded all reference to those troublesome quantitative measures that expose their identity grift for what it is, it will be very difficult for employers, or anyone else, to keep a straight face when graduates bizarrely insist that their sheepskin means something.
The universities can either start behaving sensibly, or set themselves on fire. Like a junkie who’s skirted a bit too close to the edge and come back a few times too many thanks to last-minute narcan infusions, we all hope that they make the right decision, of course we do, but, well, we all know the way to bet. As the universities immolate what remains of their DIEing prestige, all that’s left is for the Internet’s open source ersatz university to figure out a superior credentializtion system, and it is over for the incompetocracy.
One thing I’m a bit curious about is the private sector impact. Corporations have been held to ransom for over five decades by the Griggs v Duke Power “disparate impact” decision, which made it de facto illegal for them to evaluate the suitability of job applicants using their own in-house aptitude tests, because if there were differences in outcomes between e.g. blacks and whites, well, you know the deal. Since then this has been upheld by several other rulings on Affirmative Action. The tyranny of the HR harridans is a direct consequence of this: their primary organizational function is to ensure their employers don’t get sued for hiring the wrong amounts of the right groups, or the right amounts of the wrong groups. I understand the new Supreme Court decision doesn’t explicitly address the previous precedents, but apparently the conservative justices have made statements to the effect that any future cases should be decided in the context of the new decision.
Maybe I’m being too optimistic here, but on an obvious interpretation of this is that corporations no longer have as much to fear if they get sued for having oh point five percent too few black ladies in accounts receiving. It might take a bit for this to set in. It will have to get tested in court, and any corporation that does try to test this will face the possibility of a public opinion backlash ... or at least, the C-suite will be worried about this. To the contrary, I expect that a company that simply excised its HR department, and commenced hiring purely on merit, would receive an incredible groundswell of public approval for extending an unapologetic middle finger to Affirmative Action. People hate Affirmative Action. They’re sick of it. It’s absurd, it’s unpopular (save to its recipients ... who are also unlikeable and unpopular), it’s been ruining lives and making everything worse for far too long. A corporation that publicly flouts it, cheerfully goes to court, and then wins, will reap rewards of good will. To say nothing of the rewards of smooth operations and customer satisfaction that come from employees who actually know what they’re doing.
So let’s say some brave company does this, and it works out for them in court, and also in the public arena. We’re in rough economic waters right now. Investment money is tight; staying profitable suddenly matters again. Other corporations will notice, conclude that they don’t want to be the last ones being crushed under the weight of unproductive departments and incompetent employees, and they will start lining up for fat camp, liposuction, and stomach reduction surgery.
Like I said, maybe I’m being too optimistic. I probably am. Time will tell. But in the meantime, the universities just took a massive L, another one of the left’s long-standing legislations from the bench just got undone, and I for one am enjoying the savour of those salty tears.
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Now let’s all have a good laugh at the handful of ugly DIEvy students who, for once in their privileged little lives, didn’t get their way.
AHEM.
When I was younger I wanted to be a professor like Lewis and Tolkein. It wasn't until much later and after much effort and debt that I realized that not only was that life no longer possible, but that institutions like the ones they served actively hated me. It would have been far worse if I had actually gotten some tenured position; having to hide my thoughts every day, parrot opinions I despise, etc. The sad part is, and perhaps others might relate to this, they'll never know how much I would have given. I would have endured poverty, obscurity, toil, all that, to be a university scholar. But in the end, it has forced me to become creative, to make my own way. I teach at the secondary level and do adjunct work, but my real efforts at scholarship are online. Discovering communities like the ones on Substack is a great blessing. For some, I suspect (bearing in mind the sad statistics you note in your article) such outlets are a lifesaver.
John C. Calhoun thought that Jefferson's paean to equality in the Declaration of Independence was fatuous nonsense. He noted that men are born rather than created, and of the only two created beings, one was immediately made subordinate to the other. That men are born means they enter an existing world in different places and with different personal characteristics which are the legacy of their forebears. There is no way to get around this; it is the natural and supernatural order, and efforts to legislate equality will always amount, in the end, to worse oppression than they were meant to remedy.
What galls most people is that the existing order so manifestly rewards mediocrity. People would more readily accept social inequality if the people at the top weren't demonstrably vicious and incompetent. Our society has been peaceful for so long that our elites have been literally able to paper over their weaknesses. That time is coming to an end.
Respect for a brilliant and fast take. Down with the demoralized DIEvy League! Of course affirmative action justices and VP dissented. If Hillary won, the court would have a permanent majority of affirmative action supporters. Meritocracy lives on for now, let’s breathe new life into it.