By ilana mercer
As individuals, we want the best doctors treating and operating on us, the best pilots flying the airplanes we board, the best engineers designing the bridges we cross, the best scientists inventing and bringing to market the medicines and potions we ingest.
Yet the American Idiocracy is moving to equate merit-based institutions with institutionalized racism.
Tucker Carlson, likely the only merit-based hiree at Fox News, recently divulged that a member of the Trump administration was overheard (by a thought-police plant) expressing a preference for merit-based recruits for his department.
Egad, and what next!
Google, a tool of the Idiocracy, appears to have scrubbed its search of this latest episode in “The Closing of the American Mind.” However, it’s no secret that the education system already excludes the most naturally gifted, independent-minded individuals from fields in which they’d excel.
Race preferences notwithstanding, requirements for social activism of the right kind, for volunteerism and worldviews of the left kind, for working exclusively toward the best grades: These are things girls do better than boys.
In any event, when the best-person-for-the-job ethos gives way to racial and gender window-dressing and to the enforcement of politically pleasing perspectives; things start to fall apart.
A spanking new bridge collapses, new trains on maiden trips derail, Navy ships keep colliding, police and FBI failure and bad faith become endemic, and the protocols put in place by a government “for the people” protect offending public servants who’ve acted against the people.
As in this writer’s birth place of South Africa, the U.S. government has a pyramid of hiring preferences. Guess which variables feature prominently in its considerations? Complexion or competency?
Consider the procurement pyramid that went into destroying the steady supply of coal to South-African electricity companies. Bound by Black Economic Empowerment policies, buyers buy spot coal, first from black women-owned suppliers, then from small black suppliers, next are large, black suppliers, and only after all these options have been exhausted—or darkness descends, whatever comes first—from “other” suppliers.
The result: An expensive and unreliable coal supply and rolling blackouts.
Everywhere, media are congenitally incurious and corrupt. They aren’t digging. But it’s likely that similar considerations will go a long way in explaining the collapse of a Florida university campus pedestrian bridge, under which people were pulverized.
So far, the attitude of those who’re doing this can be summed thus: S-it happens. Deal.
As for the public; it receives no follow-up and learns to demand none. Hence, “The Closing of the American Mind.”
But if American institutions continue to subordinate their raison d’être to politically dictated egalitarianism, reclaiming these institutions, private and public, from the deforming clutches of affirmative action will become impossible.
It might already be impossible.
For example: Former FBI agent and patriot Philip Haney was dismissed by Barack Obama from the Department of Homeland Security and is nowhere to be found in the Trump Administration. This brilliant man’s goal was to do his job: stop Muslim terrorists in the US.
Alas, the intricate program and extensive network of contacts Haney developed were nixed, because political priorities had come to dominate the agency. As a result, innocents died.
Treason? I’d say so. So, where are the purges?
What were once merit-based institutions are being hollowed-out like husks through preferential, non-merit-based hiring, quotas, set-asides, not to mention the policing of thought for political propriety.
No longer beholden to the unifying, overarching value of merit, institutions, moreover, become riven by tribal feuds and factional loyalties—both in government and in business alike, where it is well-known that newly arrived “minorities” hire nepotistically.
Across the American workplace, the importance of “meritocratic criteria” such as test scores or “minimum credentials” has been downplayed, if not downright eliminated as “inherently biased against minorities.”
The U.S. government hasn’t had an entrance test since … 1982. It abandoned both the Federal Civil Service Entrance Examination and the Professional and Administrative Career Examination (PACE) because blacks and Latinos were much less likely to pass either of them.
In academia, law schools have lowered the bar in admissions and on the bar exam. Universities run a “dual admissions system”—“one admissions pool for white applicants and another, far less competitive, pool for minorities.”
The institutionalized American “quota culture” has been imposed by administrative fiat, courtesy of the “The Power Elite”—that engorged “administrative state” under which Americans labor.
For the purposes of conferring affirmative action privileges, American civil servants have compiled over the decades an ever-growing list of protected groups, “as distinct from whites.”
In addition to blacks, the list entails mainly minorities such as Hispanics—Chileans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Dominicans, and Mexicans—Pacific Islanders, American Indians, Asian/Indians, Filipinos, Vietnamese, Cambodians (and homosexuals).
If the kind of immigration policies instituted by the über-left American Idiocracy (it includes most Republicans) continue apace, the institutional tipping-point will be reached in no time.
The reason is the “immigration-with-preference paradox,” first noted by Frederick R. Lynch, author of “Invisible Victims: White Males and the Crisis of Affirmative Action” (1991).
Once mass immigration became a bipartisan policy, millions of imported non-black minorities were—still are—given preference over native-born American citizens. No sooner do these minorities cross the border, legally or illegally, than they become eligible for affirmative-action privileges.
These preference policies govern both state- and big-business bureaucracies, which seem to have voluntarily (and energetically) embraced them, if only to subdue their white workforce.
It goes without saying that “those who came to this country in recent decades from Asia, Latin America and Africa” did not suffer discrimination from our government, and in fact have frequently been the beneficiaries of special government programs.”
There’s a world of difference between compelling minority recruitment to equal the proportion of minorities in the population and enforcing majority recruitment to equal the proportion of the majority in the population.
In South Africa, the majority is targeted for affirmative action: 75 percent of the population! In the U.S., it’s the minority.
South Africa underwent an almost overnight political transformation. One day a white, relatively well-educated minority dominated all institutions; the next, a skills-deficient black majority took over. Nevertheless, South Africa’s hollowed-out establishments are a harbinger of things to come in the U.S., where minorities will soon form a majority.
If American institutions have not yet collapsed entirely under the diversity doxology’s dead weight; it’s because the restructuring of society underway is slower.
Again, this will change once minorities in the US form a majority, as they soon will due to continued, unabated, mass immigration from the Third World.
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Ilana Mercer has been writing a weekly, paleolibertarian column since 1999. She is the author of “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America From Post-Apartheid South Africa” (2011) & “The Trump Revolution: The Donald’s Creative Destruction Deconstructed” (June, 2016). She’s on Twitter, Facebook, Gab & YouTube
Surprisingly, no mention of women, as the beneficiaries of non-merit-based hiring, and discrimination in the award of contracts, quotas, gender gap propaganda, etc.
Apart from their inherent political bias, the real reason that moronic elements in society, have fallen into the trap or assuming merit based hiring and promotion, is ‘racist’ is similar to claims that there’s a ‘gender gap’ in pay.
No doubt there is an element of conscious and unconscious racism and gender bias in all this,. But nevertheless the best qualified applicant for most jobs, especially senior ones which are the product of a long career path, is disproportionately likely to be white or male, as compared with white or male statistical representation in the population as a whole.
But that does not necessarily arise from ‘racism’ in the selection process. It arises because of the disadvantages women and non white male applicants have encounter in earlier life and career.
Women, for example usually have a disrupted career progression owing to family lifestyle choices and many have had different priorities from the start, Women are more rounded characters, whereas men are more obsessed with what they are doing.
Black people tend to come from much poorer socio economic backgrounds and so haven’t had the same life chances.
Black people in particular suffered an additional statistical disadvantage. Three or four generations ago most of those who migrated here, were seduced into coming to the UK specifically to fill low paid jobs in things like factories, transport and the NHS etc. So their families don’t have a culture of going into business on their own.
Many Asians on the other hand, came here following the loss of their businesses at home owing to politically motivated aggression, and the only option they had was to set up in business from the start.
They, like Jews before them, therefore have a more enterprising, education orientated, culture.
It is also genetic fact of life that human (not merely social) evolution has left men, on the whole, more varied in the range of their abilities. They are much more likely to be excellent at something than is a woman, and are equally likely to be terrible at it.
Women on the other hand tend to congregate closer round the statistical ‘mean’.
Therefore, in any skills based meritocracy the top 100 in anything skill or talent in the World will disproportionately consist of men. The difference arises because in evolutionary terms, men, in terms of numbers men are dispensable.
Nearly every women on the other hand, always have something to contribute to the community, so every one needs to be nurtured.
Circumstances disadvantage some people and advantage other. Such is the lottery of life.
I read yesterday of an exact parallel to all this in a completely different context, which illustrates it all perfectly.
There’s is now a campaign in Wales to mark more leniently University Degree Courses completed by students who have been disadvantaged by the Lecturers’ Strike.
That however is a totally dishonest and wrong headed approach. Achievement in education and science isn’t a game where we determine who’s the best after 90 minutes, and pretending, in the interests of ‘fairness’, that someone has achieved the same as someone else, is dangerous and improper.
If these students have any cause for complaint they should to sue the university, and the lecturers concerned, for breach of contract. In the meantime they themselves can also tell any prospective employer what happened and, should they be minded to, the employers can make the necessary allowances.
Lying about the standard they have achieved doesn’t help the world.