This content was recorded by Victor Davis Hanson prior to his Dec. 30 medical operation.
(Daily Signal)—Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. We’ve talked in the past about the problems with diversity, equity, and inclusion. That’s the rubric for what, I guess, we could call mandated equality of result, rather than of opportunity. But it’s been in the news lately because there’s a common denominator between the $9 to $10 billion, and climbing, fraud among the Somali community—some of them—in Minnesota.
Here in California, we’re looking at $60 to $70 billion fraud, involving everything from homeless funds that were misspent through corruption, wasted, and unemployment insurance, etc., etc. We have the problem with the truck drivers. We had 17,000 licenses given to illegal aliens in California and put many of us in danger who drive frequently on the California freeways. That’s true nationwide as well.
And then, of course, the unknown number, it’s in the several millions, somewhere between 8 and 12 million, who came in under the Biden administration.
But they were all given exemptions, is what I’m trying to say. And the exemptions were subtle and insidious, but they were characterized that they were DEI. In other words, all of these different groups were categorized by officials as on the victimized, oppressed side of the lecture. And therefore, they were not completely audited. Because, if they had been audited, the cries of racism, nativism, etc., prejudice, bias would’ve been voiced. And people didn’t want to be exposed to that.
What happens, then, when you have DEI, there is no deterrence. The particular groups that are favored on non-meritocratic grounds feel that if the society, at large, does not audit them the way—whether that’s immigration audits or welfare audits, or unemployment audits—then why would they audit them under further circumstances? So, that creates a self-perpetuating, almost a self-motion machine that they will continue to engage in activity for which they don’t feel there will be any consequences. And deterrence is lost.
More importantly, if you are a DEI beneficiary—in other words, you applied to college and your SAT scores or your grade did not otherwise qualify you, or you’re a professor who plagiarized but was given a pass because of DEI grounds—then what happens is you must continually make the case that you are a victim because that alone will explain why you got this position, why you got this admission, when you did not have otherwise standard meritocratic qualifications. And that means you’re always going to be on the hunt for victimization.
If you’re Joy Reid and you can’t do a podcast without spouting racist nonsense, and your audience is crumbling and eroding, then you say that you’re constantly a victim of racism. If you’re on “The View,” and you have a one-dimensional view of race, and you’re boring, and you’re losing market share, you say it’s because of yet another incident of racism that you felt.
The other thing that’s a problem with DEI, there are no qualifications now. Once you destroy meritocracy for one group, then all groups feel, well, these people were given particular advantages. So, why don’t we get them?
And you know, the funny thing about it is we did have a kind of DEI for very wealthy people, very connected people, the children of billionaires, the children of college deans, who were given admission advantages or were hired in what we call the old-boy network. But meritocracy was supposed to be the antidote.
So, DEI was, in a very strange, ironic way, just the twin of the old-boy network, substituting race for money and influence that the old-boy network exercised. That was the fuel that drove that.
Finally, there’s a couple of final things. It’s costly because once you add layer under layer under layer of nonproductive people, who are not teaching in the university, they’re not doing research, but they’re monitoring everybody’s syllabus, they’re looking for DEI owes among applicants, they are perched on hiring committees, they have a huge bureaucracy, and they’re nonproductive.
They’re very similar to the commissar system in the Soviet Union that was very, not just a sin of commission, that they were wasting resources and causing a lot of problems and killing people, but a sin of omission, that by funding the commissars, you were not funding science or you were not funding meritocratic military schools. You were appointing military officers in World War II on the basis of their ideology rather than on their proven excellence on the battlefield. So, it doesn’t have a good history—DEI.
And one thing that we’re watching now, as the Trump administration makes a very persuasive case that DEI violated the civil rights laws of the 1960s, specifically ’64 and ’65, and the Supreme Court ruling of 2023, there is no moral, legal support for it anymore. And yet, we have this vast, top-heavy infrastructure—this ossified, calcified, DEI apparat—and it’s not legally or morally justified.
So, it’s gonna be very interesting to see what happens to the DEI complex. But let’s hope that it dies on the vine, at last.
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