With the "equity" push, the overlords may have found their most effective means yet of imposing tyranny on us

 A while back, at my Substack, Precipice, I wrote a piece titled "The Sliver of Terrain I Inhabit Grows Narrower Still." It further developed a them I've visited there occasionally - namely, the struggle to adhere to a truly conservative vision in an age in which Trumpism has assumed the role of progressivism's chief combatant. As I've exhaustively explained, at Precipice, here at LITD and elsewhere, Trumpism and actual conservatism are markedly different critters, and the peril in the conflation of the two weakens the case against the progressive agenda.

In the latest essay on the subject, I make note of a further complication: that of the non-Trumpist conservative who minimizes, or at least cares not to discuss more than glancingly, the machinations of the Left:

There are two types of people who frustrate me to no end with their perpetuation of the message that concern about this is overblown. For shorthand, I’ll use individuals who embody the two types of argument for saying so.

It gives me no pleasure to call either of them out. I greatly admire both of them, and feel the work they do generally speaking is invaluable.

Let me start with Heath Mayo, the founder of Principles First. It was supremely important that that movement appeared when it did, and its importance continues to this day. But Mayo, whose presence on Twitter is considerable, is so focused on the ill-advised nature of the Florida legislature’s tactics that he risks coming across as oblivious to the very real damage late-stage progressivism is doing to Western civilization’s spiritual health. He’s a solid conservative. I know that. But there is more to conservatism than the limited-government pillar.

Then there’s David French. I hesitate to take issue with him, given the risk thereby incurred that one gets associated with Sohrab Amari-ism. Let me state with no ambiguity that I am not in Amari’s camp.

In fact, my frustration with French is rooted in his main virtue. He is first and foremost a Christian, a real, deep and sincere one. He has the heart of one who is constantly looking to see if he has a plank in his own eye, as we all should. But it leads him to say some things that, frankly, I don’t think serve the moment well, such as that “how you love your friends might be more important to our nation than what you think of CRT.” 

Mr. French, with all due respect, the racialization of everything, along with the sexualization of everything, is a real and urgent problem.

Furthermore, the way he frames such things leaves him open to mocking from some truly scurrilous figures who, despite their vileness, have followings and influence. Since we’re naming names, I’ll say that Kurt Schlichter comes to mind in this regard.

I start this post the way I do because the Left's intention to bring every last individual in our society to heel grows more menacing by the day. 

If one loves freedom, particularly freedom to come to one's own conclusions about human interaction, one cannot fail to see the darkness our federal government wishes to subject us to:

Under the Biden administration, more than 90 federal agencies have pledged their commitment to equity by adopting action plans that put gender, race and other such factors at the center of their governmental missions.

The Equity Action Plans, which have received little notice since they were posted online last month following a document request from RealClearInvestigations, represent a “whole of government” fight against “entrenched disparities” and the “unbearable human costs of systemic racism.”

The equity blueprints show that:

• The U.S. State Department is keen on exporting American-style gender and race consciousness into foreign diplomacy and across the globe. Citing “identity” and “intersections of marginalization” as focal points, State Department officials acknowledge that promoting these Western concepts in foreign lands may clash with “societal norms” and elicit an “unwillingness to cede power by dominant groups.”
• The Environmental Protection Agency plans to tap into “community science” from tribal nations and other interest groups, in addition to relying on academic peer-reviewed research. As the agency shifts its enforcement focus from responding to complaints to proactively initiating its own investigations, the EPA plans to fund “community scientists” to supply evidence of what it calls environmental racism and other corporate practices to be targeted for federal investigation.
• The Smithsonian Institution is embedding diversity and equity in “everything we do” across the labs and collections that make up the world’s largest museum complex. The Smithsonian has, like other agencies, enthroned a Head Diversity Officer position to coordinate these efforts, and will refocus its energies to explore “how race has informed all our lives” and affirm “the centrality of race in America.”

The Equity Action Plans are a response to an executive order President Biden signed on his first day of office in January 2021, committing his administration to pursuing “a comprehensive approach to advancing equity for all, including people of color and others who have been historically underserved, marginalized, and adversely affected by persistent poverty and inequality.”

And these Equity Plans are not an end but a means:

The Equity Action Plans are only the first step in what the Biden administration calls a “generational commitment” to redressing historical disparities between political identity groups. But the full implications of the Biden strategy are obscured by the fact that the documents are short on specifics and larded with standard governmentese and boilerplate language about promoting best practices, collecting data, reducing barriers to government procurement, and contracting with disadvantaged and underrepresented groups.

In a typical bureaucratic passage, the Justice Department's plan includes a commitment to “ask each of its major procuring bureaus to identify at least two contracting opportunities for HUBZone small businesses each fiscal year for 4 years, or until the statutory goal of 3% is met, and to compete those contracts exclusively among HUBZone firms.”

But the documents are also open-ended and can serve as a platform for significant change. In a sweeping, general statement, the Department of Agriculture vows to “continue to integrate civil rights and equity in the design of its policies and programs that span the entirety of its mandate, including areas such as food security, nutrition, natural resources and conservation, rural development, and more.”

Representatives of several groups that filed public comments described the comments as generic but promising an important first step toward empowering historically marginalized communities.

“For the most part they say the right things,” said James Goodwin, senior policy analyst with the Center for Progressive Reform, one of the nearly 500 groups that filed public comments to guide the creation of the Equity Action Plans.

“But you know words on paper are very different from action. What’s most important is that an agency’s culture changes to incorporate a lot of these things,” Goodwin said. “A lot of these things can be relegated to a check-the-box exercise which doesn’t make a major impact in the day-to-day actions of an agency, or it can be fully integrated into an agency’s DNA.”

As I noted in a piece here at LITD a while back, this is also happening the local level:

The codification of DEI into an imposition of rules and even laws is not confined to coastal areas or the federal level of government. 

There is a city, with a manufacturing-based economy (that is, it's not some insular bubble of egghead-ism), in the heart of an ostensibly rock-ribbed red state in which local government, the local community college, the local K-12 school district, hospital, newspaper, major employers and religious coalition have banded together to coordinate efforts to impose DEI on all aspects of daily life. 

The message is clear: You will be made to put your fellow human being's demographic classification front and center in your dealings with him or her. 

And the emergence of this term "equity" merits some discussion. Until recently, I'd never heard it used in any context other than as the portion of a piece of property one is buying on loan that one has already paid for. Why has it supplanted the term "equality"? 

“Equity” is the relative newcomer to the [DEI] trinity. It is a substitute for “equality,” because equality before the law, equality of opportunity, and moral equality fail to deliver the wished-for result, which is redistribution of all social goods in strict proportion to the relative size of a minority group to the general population. Equity is a wish-fulfillment word masquerading as a justice claim.

 There is only one way this upending of what we've always been about as a nation is going to have any kind of chance at being rolled back: unflinching courage on the part of everybody who can see what's happening.