Quote of the Day - Discrimination

What once helped to diminish ancient prejudices was the American creed that no one had a right to discriminate against fellow citizens on the basis of race, gender, class, or religion. And what fuels the return of American bias is the new idea that citizens can disparage or discriminate against other groups if they claim victim status and do so for purportedly noble purposes. - Victor Davis Hanson

One of the saddest things about the Obama and Biden Administrations is how they re-normalized bias. By the end of the George W. Bush Administration, discrimination on the basis of race, motivated by bigotry, was on life support. No, it wasn't entirely gone, but it was fading away. For most people the important question was not "What color are you?" It was "Can you do the job?" It was glorious. When I dealt with a co-worker, I did not wonder whether they got their position because of the color of their skin. They got it because they could perform.

For Obama and Biden, that was a bug, not a feature. Both were grifters, race-hustlers. If bias faded away, they lost their grift. They began stoking the fires of discrimination and disparagement, dividing us not by the content of our character, but by the color of our skin. I saw it growing during the first years of the Obama Administration. Unprincipled people - especially at government contractors - began using accusations of bias as a means of clotheslining career rivals.

Were you in competition for a position or promotion with one of them? Anonymous complaints would be made against you on the ethics hotline, accusing you of racism. It did not matter if the accusation was baseless or distorted. The accused went through an inquisition. Even if you knew who was doing it, you could not confront the individual. That would be retaliation.

By the middle of the Biden Administration, as far as the government went, race was the marker by which people were assigned jobs. It did not matter how incompetent someone was. What mattered was how they filled the grievance matrix. One only has to look at Biden's choices for vice-president and Supreme Court justices to realize how pervasive - and pernicious - the grievance matrix had become.

Checking multiple boxes on the grievance matrix was also a marvelous shield against consequences. No one dared investigate or accuse those with the right national origin, religion, and skin color of criminality or even incompetence. If you did, the accusations were treated as proof of systemic racism against the accused. Instead, in the new race-based justice system, the accuser would be investigated for thought-crime and declared a bigot.

Is it surprising that so much of the fraud uncovered in the last year involved specific ethnic categories? It is not because those groups necessarily had a greater propensity for criminality. (My experience is that a propensity for criminality is independent of race, creed, gender or national origin. Everyone has it.) Rather, it was because these individuals believed they would not be held accountable because of the boxes they checked.

This, in turn, leads many to believe criminality is a racial or cultural trait. For race hustlers, this is a feature. Inciting racial animus strengthens their position. So much so that an organization like the SPLC will subsidize hate organizations to fan the fires of bias and discrimination.

Chief Justice John Roberts is not always right. He was correct, never more so than when he wrote, “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating based on race.” The only way to return to the America that had bigotry on life support is to stop playing the grievance game. To go back to merit. To dismantle Grievance Studies in our Universities, and the DEI departments in businesses and government organizations. To go back to measuring people by the content of their character and not the color of their skin, their gender, their class, or their religion. Even when you personally don't like the category an individual belongs to.