An Equity-Focused State is a Vise Grip on Civilization
Equality Killed the World of Your Youth
Welcome back, and thanks for reading! For next Tuesday, I have a longer article in the works on potential PRC-connected subversion in a major US company that a paid subscriber requested I write. While I finish up the research and writing on that, my friend Ron Dodson suggested that I dig into the subject of how an equity-focused state acts like a vise grip on civilization, so I have a relatively short article prepared for you on it. Thanks again, and as always, please tap the heart at the top or bottom of this article to “like” the article if you enjoy it, as that is how the algorithm knows to promote it.
On Thursday, I saw this post on X from a Substacker going by “bad cattitude”. It’s an interesting point that many people of a certain age likely agree with:
i suspect that most of what irks gen X is that we had created a fun, freewheeling, post-racial, minimal-politics society, and a bunch of weakminded thieves of joy came along and politicized the world into unfun, identity-based struggle sessions that made everything they touched horrible and divisive.
kids today have no idea how much was taken from them because they have lived their whole lives under wokester warlord hall monitor rule and have never even tasted this joy and freedom.
That is certainly true. Compared to even a few years ago, much less the impression many give of 1985, the world is now a place where fun is constantly cracked down upon by the regime’s janissaries.
Whether it is Greek Life on college campuses getting shut down by finger-wagging scolds in the administration, HR commissars making it illegal to ask out the cute girl at your office, neo-Puritans chanting about “racism” online, or something else, the freewheeling and relaxed atmosphere of the past is gone. Replacing it is the caricature of life in America shown by the image below (yes, this is a real picture from a DEI seminar, it’s not photoshopped):
So, what gives? How did America go from being the “land of the free” to under the bootheel of a caricature of Bioleninism?1
It’s not that just a few people ruined America for everyone, as suggested in the post. Rather, equity and equality became the guiding principles of American life, and the apparatus created to enforce them—the all-seeing, all-knowing Diversity Gulag—made life in America miserable, as is well exemplified by crime and the workplace.
The Rotten Fruit of Enforcing Equality
The problem is this: ever since the Civil Rights Act, the “All men are created equal” line from the Declaration of Independence went from being a vague nod at legal equality for competent white men to a definitive statement that all outcomes must be equal, and if they aren’t, then the government must step in to make them so.
Disparate impact law—the idea that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act “proscribes not only overt discrimination but also practices that are fair in form, but discriminatory in operation”—is the clearest case of this.2 It is effectively illegal to hire the most competent man for the job in America if doing so at scale means “protected classes” (non-whites) are hired less frequently than whites. George HW Bush made that the law of the land after the Supreme Court invented the obscene concept.
But it is bigger than that. This applies to everything. Jury trials in America effectively don’t work because of the current state of racial politics and the resultant focus on “equity” that allows certain demographic groups to get away with race-based jury nullification.3 Anarcho-tyranny and overregulation in the name of equality have turned America’s former urban jewels into hellscapes reminiscent of third-world no-go zones like South Africa.4 Normal crime is allowed for reasons of equity and further exacerbates the South Africanization of America problem.5 A family farm is currently being confiscated by the New Jersey government to make room for favela housing.6 Companies are gloating about refusing to hire white guys.7 On and on it goes. The Equity problem8 is real.
However, there is more going on than the mere fact that the powers that be dislike the Heritage American population and want to suppress its success in the name of “equity”. That’s terrible, but only one of the trees in the forest of problems.
The related problem, one that is articulated well by Jeremy Carl in The Unprotected Class9, is that a vast bureaucratic apparatus has been built up to ensure that the equality and equity machine keeps grinding on. That machine makes life unfun and anything other than lackadaisical or freewheeling, as compliance with it has become the guiding principle of American life and is totalitarian in nature.
But One Example
This is best seen through the lens of the disparate impact apparatus. Think of all that goes into ensuring SpaceX hires enough non-white refugees (the Biden DOJ actually sued SpaceX to make it do this10).
It is not just that the company cannot have an IQ test or like way of screening out the incompetent applicants early on. It is that a whole Human Resources regime must be built up inside the company to ensure that hiring, promotions, raises, performance bonuses, and the like are awarded roughly in line with demographics, though without using quotas.
That in turn requires lots of expensive legal work from in-house attorneys and external council (these firms and the schools that trained them are impacted by disparate impact as well), which slows things down and makes them expensive.
Every manager must always be aware of this and focus on it even at the expense of his work, as it can lead to crushing liability. That’s because on the outside, the DOJ, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), and like agencies are circling like vultures to strike and sue if it does not hire enough “asylum seekers” or black women, though without ever defining what “enough” means. Trial lawyers can piggyback on that investigative work and bring crushing lawsuits.
Those agencies have disparate impact rules. And so on.
Does involvement with that sound fun and exciting? Is it like the classic aesthetic and attitude of the Space Age? No, of course not. Because the totalitarian force demanding DEI compliance is such a heavy burden and encompasses so much of life, it’s depressing and degrading, oppressive and soul-crushing. In the days of yore, doing something exciting at work was fun and cool while still challenging. Now, the challenge is in dealing with the DEI regulators and HR commissars, and that crushes all the fun and excitement.
The Issue Times Infinity
In short, the machinery involved in just watching one company that is relatively unaffected by disparate impact because of the difficulty of the work is immense and expensive.
Now imagine that as applied to every company, from behemoths full of sinecures for the incompetent, like Coca-Cola, to small companies just struggling to get off the ground: all of them, so long as they have 15 employees or more,11 have to comply, and the machinery to ensure compliance is immense.
The panopticon already exists, and it exists to ensure black women who show up late to work 47 times win $11 million for “racism” when they get fired (this too actually happened).12
Further, there is no clear standard that can be used so that a company can ensure it isn’t breaking the law.
“Discrimination,” meaning not hiring enough members of protected classes, whatever their competence, is illegal. Racial quotas are also illegal, and so general demographic numbers can’t be used to prevent accusations of illegality. And so there is an ever-dangling sword of Damocles in corporate America: one must discriminate against white men constantly to ensure it never falls, and the advantage to the post-war regime comes from it never falling.
All of that means that the workplace, except in the smallest companies, is oppressive. The sort of fun and excitement that people reference in the 80s…that’s gone. You can’t get away with it anymore for reasons of DEI and HR, and instead exist to feed the behemoth and survive the panopticon.
An Even More Egregious Example
Yet more egregious than the disparate impact machine is the DOJ’s Community Relations Service. Formed as part of the Civil Rights Act, it exists explicitly to further the Civil Rights agenda. As Auron MacIntyre notes, its “goals have included increasing black representation, transgender youth visibility, and planting mosques in Christian towns.”13
Usually, however, the goal of CRS is to do what its founder, Bertram Levine wanted: make it nearly impossible for white Americans to push back against the Civil Rights Act. It has founded NGOs with the explicit goal of harassing "lily white towns,” has worked with the FCC to threaten radio stations with losing their license unless they hire more black anchors, and works to block white Americans from reacting to black race riots.14 Often, it is involved in working with groups like BLM to train personnel and ensure those race riots happen.15 Further, it is known for pressuring white parents whose children die in incidents of black crime to forgive the attackers and say the incident wasn’t racial, threatening to withhold or block prosecution if the parents don’t do so.16
CRS has a ~$25 million budget.17 So, every year, the tax dollars of thousands of Americans collectively pay for a government agency that was formed for the explicit purpose of making their lives worse and making it impossible for them to push back against that diversity-inflicted diminished quality of life, even to the point of threatening parents whose children were killed by black criminals. That is what the equity machine looks like at its nastiest.
If you are interested, here is a video from Academic Agent that explores the matter in depth:
And That’s Just Two Examples. Imagine The Others
Again, those are just two of the many “equity” laws America has. All of that bureaucratic apparatus built up inside and outside companies to ensure the incompetent get jobs for racial reasons is but a sliver of the problem.
Once the similar situation that comes from Title IX is considered, the various other race laws are added into the equation, the Americans with Disabilities Act is thought of, and all the other, similar laws are noted, the conclusion cannot but be shock that anything of note gets done in America and our neighborhoods haven’t been burned to a crisp.
Every law of that sort requires not only a vast internal machine geared toward ensuring compliance, with all the expense that entails, but an external bureaucratic engine that is even more expensive and yet more punitive.
That is totalitarian, and the results are the sort of unfun struggle sessions the original post references. They’re the natural outgrowth of the machine “we” have built to enforce equity.
Where the Fun Went
So, to answer the question at the start of this, that is where the fun went. It was stifled by the Diversity Regime’s Enforcement Branch.
America, sometime around the 1960s, decided that egalitarianism—meaning the idea that the state ought crush any differences in human accomplishment, at least those differences between various socio-economic classes and racial groups, so as to present the appearance of total equality of outcome as created by total equality of capability18—should be allowed to destroy America, if that is what it took to create a more “equal” society.19
Importantly, that requires enforcement, and the machine described above is how it is enforced. From juries to school principals, university admissions officers to corporate HR reps, much of the economy consists of handcuffing those who would otherwise accomplish something notable with the fetters of DEI-related law.20
It took a few decades for that idea to settle in. The Supreme Court was intimately involved, as shown in Griggs v. Duke Power and related cases having to do with Civil Rights,21 Congress aided and abetted most of it, Republican presidents like Nixon and Reagan refused to backtrack on what Democrats like Carter and LBJ pushed forward, and the destruction of Old America was solidified when HW Bush made disparate impact part of the American legal code.
From that point on, though it was certainly a problem beforehand, things were “settled.” Court cases still could be brought and were brought. Some of them are being fought and won now, as with DEI at universities.22 But, generally, the DEI regime and related laws like Title IX were assumed to be the law and had to be complied with until overturned. They could be fought, and would hopefully be reversed, but in the meantime, every institution and thus every individual had to go along with it.
Such is how the equity apparatus put us all in its vice grip and crushed the “fun” referred to in the tweet that sparked this post. Environments regulated in a limited way generally are conducive to fun. Environments constantly being watched over by the DEI machine, trial lawyers, HR bureaucrats, and federal investigators are not fun, and they do not breed a sense of lackadaisical ease.
Instead, they breed the sort of attitude Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn describes in his The Gulag Archipelago: universal mistrust, suspicion, hate, and decay.
“This universal mistrust had the effect of deepening the mass-grave pit of slavery. The moment someone began to speak up frankly, everyone stepped back and shunned him: “A provocation!” And therefore anyone who burst out with a sincere protest was predestined to loneliness and alienation.”
Yes, there are no death pits for anti-diversity Americans . . . unless you include the victims of crimes the regime refuses to stop for reasons of equity. Regardless, the “universal mistrust” and “loneliness and alienation” are real, and they are why things aren’t fun in the Diversity Archipelago.
For example, a recent study on college students’ interactions found that 88% of them pretended to be more liberal than they really are to fit in, and 73% of them described normal interactions as defined by suspicion and mistrust.23 College isn’t a big party or fun and freewheeling when you’re constantly worried about expulsion and struggle sessions if you don’t mouth the right platitudes. Nor is work fulfilling and exciting when the same interactions characterize it, as they do.
The same is true of primary school: numerous students have been murdered by their “peers” as of late, and often their “peers” had histories of violence that went unpunished by the school for disparate impact reasons.24 Meanwhile, white students face much more severe punishment because schools need to punish whites, who commit far less crime on a per capita basis, in order to be able to also punish black thugs of the sort who murdered Jonathan Lewis…otherwise, disparate impact law is violated.25
That too is no fun; it’s hard to have a good time when you face suspension for being mad at not making it on a team,26 but need to keep your head on a swivel because gangs of thugs that murder people like you go unpunished for disparate impact reasons. The high school environment imagined in the “just have fun” framework no longer exists; the Diversity Gulag killed it.
Then there’s city life. Seinfeld makes it look fun, right? Not when the city lets violent vagrants wreak havoc on law-abiding citizens, your workplace is a mess, your apartment building can’t keep drug-dealing thugs out because of diversity law, and if you say the wrong thing when drinking with your acquaintances, you face firing and cancellation. The Diversity Gulag means the sort of fun that is remembered fondly is long gone.
In short, across most areas of life, the sort of fun and freewheeling world largely devoid of politics that is thought fondly of is dead. It was murdered in service to the equity apparatus, and we all live in the shadow of the gulag erected to enforce it. If you want to have fun again in a freewheeling society, the way to get there is to destroy the DEI Gulag. Destroy every diversity law on the books, including the Civil Rights Act, and then what America used to be will return.
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Bioleninism, by Spandrell, covers the essential essays that develop and explain the theory behind the emergent blend of Leninism and biological disadvantages. As Lenin and the communists rallied the downtrodden to overthrow the bourgeoisie, so bioleninism rallies those with biological or identitarian disadvantages (perceived or inherent) to Leftist causes. In a system based on ability or traditional hierarchies such as a meritocracy or most Western civilizations, these groups would be at the bottom of the ladder - but when the state or culture gives them status, they become loyal warriors of the Left
Get the book on it here: Bioleninism (I am an Amazon affiliate, and will receive a small commission, at no cost to you, if you use this Amazon link or others in the article.)
South Africa did the same thing. Now everyone is about to starve:
That case law described here:
Check it out here: https://x.com/bumbadum14/status/1956124449859887225
Jeremy Carl covers this well in The Unprotected Class
Amen. No small undertaking however, as it has been so deeply embedded into practically all facets of life as we know it.
Tearing down the almost totally unconstitutional administrative state, and getting Congress back to doing its Constitutionally mandated job it so long ago abdicated to that beast is the war we are currently engaged in, that needs to be won.
Problem is not a whole heck of a lot of people who need to be intimately involved on the front lines of said war, even realizes there’s a problem. Or if they do, are resisting it altogether.
God help us!
Thanks to demographic replacement, I do not see how "the world of our youth" can be achieved without the secession of the red states. I do not see a peaceful path back to that world when the blue states still hold power over our lives.