Make Merit Matter Again

Meritocracy and DEI are fundamentally incompatible, and pushing politically-driven structural programs that prioritize identity over competency is a recipe for civilizational decline.

The Washington Post

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Those of you who check in on the “notes” I share know that I sometimes lurk on Bluesky, the extremely left-wing social media platform where excess of zeal is considered an admirable token of sincerity, so that liberals and progressives openly divulge their most insane thoughts and beliefs. The “hive mind” that’s taken hold of this echo chamber, and the disinhibiting effect it has on what passes for “discourse,” radically limits cognitive capacity and critical thinking while lowering the threshold for hysteria, social contagion, and emotional dysregulation, all of which contributes to a folie à deux phenomenon.

I’m not just talking about random anons, either; there are a ton of prominent people posting bat-shit crazy things under their real names, all of them seemingly under the impression that nobody outside of Team Progress™ is really paying attention.

The primal caterwauling about Trump eliminating the blight of racially preferential treatment implemented across the federal government and private sector¹ — the “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion” initiatives that have socially engineered race and gender into seemingly every aspect of our lives — has been deafening.

As you can probably gather, there have been quite a few nonsensical hair-on-fire posts about DEI as it relates to the recent fatal commercial aviation accident.

But let’s first get something out of the way: For every idiotic Trump-axing-DEI-caused-the-air-crash post, there’s an equally stupid DEI-caused-the-air-crash post from right-wing outrage entrepreneurs on X. I’m talking about people like Laura Loomer, who thinks that because the Blackhawk pilot was a female, attended PRIDE events, and assisted with Medal of Honor and Presidential Medal of Freedom ceremonies during the Biden administration, it means that “DEI was very much involved in this crash.” Pointing to someone’s identity as “proof” that they’re responsible for something like a plane crash is vile, and it feeds into the idea that opposition to DEI is driven by prejudice.

That being said, I feel like it should be expected, and even believe it to be understandable if not entirely warranted, for people to question — not claim without actual proof or evidence, but question — whether DEI could have possibly contributed to a tragedy, given that the Left has spent the past decade establishing non-merit-based-selection/promotion in every corner of society. And if you think I’m exaggerating, I’d encourage you to familiarize yourself with Christopher Rufo’s reporting. He has indisputably proven that major institutions have been systematically removing capable white and Asian people — especially men² — from their ranks in favor of less capable minorities.³

This Progress™ wildly accelerated under the Biden administration, which was basically four long years of woke clerics fanning the flames of fake moral panics to justify the imposition of top-down social transformation projects via the logics and compliance architectures of an extra-constitutional managerial apparatus, using administrative fiats and the levers of the state to subvert inconvenient democratic realities. This new clerisy of crusading moralists was greatly aided by the informal social justice commissariat of AWFL termagants operating in HR departments across America, who’ve long prioritized “diversity” over competency—even in safety-critical agencies and professions.

Take the Secret Service, for example. Remember the July assassination attempt on Trump? To say that his heavily-female security detail did not acquit itself well would be an understatement.

Obvious questions: Why were there so many female agents assigned to protect the leading presidential candidate? Isn’t this supposed to be one of the most elite security details in the world? Shouldn’t it be comprised of Jack Reacher-types, physical specimens, the absolute cream of the crop? How does a fat woman incapable of properly holstering her weapon become a member of the Presidential Protective Division?

The obvious explanation: DEI. The Secret Service has highlighted “diversity” as a key priority, and Kimberly Cheatle, the now former director, pledged to dramatically increase the number of women in the ranks, even making it the agency’s “official policy.” The Secret Service openly boasts that it “prioritizes recruiting women candidates” and has formulated an “affirmative action” plan to increase the number of women, LGBT, Native Americans, and other identity groups.

I’m very conscious, as I sit in this chair now, of making sure that we need to attract diverse candidates and ensure that we are developing and giving opportunities to everybody in our workforce, and particularly women. — Kimberly Cheatle, during a May 2023 interview with CBS

In 2021, for the first time, the special agent training class graduated more women than men. And it’s worth noting that the Secret Service fitness standards are published in two parts: one set for men, and a separate, less rigorous set for women.

Speaking of sacrificing standards at the altar of DEI: In the wake of George Floyd’s death, the U.S. Army launched “Project Inclusion” to “improve diversity, equity, and inclusion across the force,” which resulted in changes to the gender-neutral Army Combat Fitness Test. Why? Because according to a RAND study, women were failing the test at noticeably higher rates.⁴ Democratic senators called for the Army to suspend the test because it “could undermine the goal of creating a diverse force.”

The NYT’s Bret Stephens reported on a memorable exchange in the Senate Armed Services Committee between Christine Wormuth, the Biden administration’s Army secretary, and Tom Cotton, the Arkansas Republican.

“We wanted to make sure that we didn’t unfairly have standards for a particular subgroup that people couldn’t perform,” Wormuth said. “We didn’t want to disadvantage any subgroups.”

Wormuth also claimed that the new standards were “much more challenging” than the previous ones. Cotton, a former Army officer, rightly pointed out that “The new standards are absolutely pathetic.” To qualify for any job in the Army, a young female soldier need only complete 10 push-ups and run two miles in 23 minutes and 22 seconds.

I can walk two miles faster than that.

The Army was not alone in lowering standards. Last year the Navy dropped its previous standard of terminating the careers of sailors who failed two consecutive fitness tests. Lisa Franchetti, the chief of naval operations, wrote that this was done in accordance with the Navy’s efforts to “modernize” and “acknowledge our diverse population.” There’s also been a push to reinstate photo requirements, dropped during the first Trump administration, as part of the application process for promotion. “We look at, for instance, the one-star board over the last five years, and we can show you where, as you look at diversity, it went down with photos removed,” said Vice Adm. John Nowell Jr. When candidates were judged on merit alone in a blind process, diversity “suffered.”

According to Hegseth, “In January 2025, the Army hit its best recruiting number in 15 YEARS.” Doesn’t seem like a coincidence.

And then there’s the Federal Aviation Administration and the air traffic controller (ATC) hiring scandal, which most people don’t know about because the mainstream media has refused to give the story oxygen despite the fact that the Biden administration was sued over it.

Beginning around 2014 the FAA began implementing DEI initiatives to hire more minority air-traffic controllers, scrapping the traditional standardized test⁵ and replacing it with a non-validated “biographical assessment” that awarded candidates points for, among other things, earning poor grades in high-school science, poor communication skills, and having a recent history of unemployment. This biographical assessment was intentionally designed to fail 90% of applicants so that the FAA could “purge” graduates of the Air-Traffic-Collegiate Training Initiative, who were disproportionately white.⁶

Read: DEI fanatics within the FAA, explicitly motivated to engineer racial diversity, substantially weakened the test used to hire ATCs. Then, these same DEI fanatics within the FAA, explicitly motivated to engineer racial diversity, actually replaced the test with a blatantly rigged biographical questionnaire. Oh, and one of these DEI fanatics also happened to be president of the Washington Suburban chapter of the National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees (NBCFAE), and he distributed a list of “buzzwords” to NBCFAE members that would “automatically push their résumés to the top of the file,” and even organized a teleconference for NBCFAE applicants in which he gave them the correct answers to the questionnaire. The FAA later investigated Snow, confirming that he had indeed helped NBCFAE members cheat.

All of this unambiguously happened, shattering the ATC hiring pipeline and causing chronic staffing shortages that persist to this day.

Chart showing the number of certified ATCs in the United States, from a 2023 report courtesy of the National Airspace System Safety Review Team, which warned that “there are 1,002 fewer fully certified air-traffic controllers in August 2023 than in August 2012.” | The Scroll

And here’s The New York Times reporting after last week’s fatal air crash:

Article 1, Article 2, Article 3. NYT also did a story in 2023 about how some ATCs were quitting because they got tired of their coworkers falling asleep on the job, showing up drunk, smoking weed during breaks, etc.

The upshot is that, in the name of DEI, thousands of qualified college graduates with degrees in air traffic management were discarded and never hired because they were white. Donald Trump⁷ made reference to this, for which he was excoriated by the media. JD Vance did a much better job explaining it during an interview with Fox News on Sunday.

There’s obviously going to be an official investigation into what caused the crash. From everything that I’ve read, it sounds like it was a combination of factors including error by the Blackhawk pilot. But even if it turns out that the FAA’s DEI-driven push to diversify the ATC ranks at the expense of more qualified candidates played no role in the tragedy, it’s still a massive scandal because it has made air travel less safe.

Contrary to what The New York Times claimed in a Monday article accusing Trump of “attacking diversity,” the vast majority of us who oppose the DEI regime don’t believe that “diversity means incompetence.”⁸

Rather, we believe that the idiocy witnessed at the Democratic National Committee’s leadership vote this past weekend is toxic:

We believe that DEI is merely a tool, a “dominant narrative innovation” used by woke managerial elites comically removed from the constituencies they claimed to represent, conveniently justifying expansion of the Progressive Leviathan by creating identity-based conflict necessitating the extension of administrative authority (under the guise of a patrician system of moral instruction) into previously autonomous domains of activity; that the DEI regime’s bizarre race balkanization rituals have taken America further away from — not closer to — the core ideas adumbrated in the Declaration of Independence; that replacing the old color-blind ideal with a performative social etiquette predicated on the necessity of foregrounding racial difference rather than minimizing it has horribly degraded America’s civic health; that in a competitive system where one person getting a spot means that another person doesn’t, if “diversity” is the goal, then achieving that goal is very likely to come at the expense of pure merit; that when standards are lowered in the name of DEI, then standards are lowered to the detriment of the institution that has lowered them; that when skin color and gender and identity matter more than integrity and merit, you usher in not just mediocrity, but incompetence; that when incompetence becomes the norm within key institutions, widespread systemic failure is inevitable, which is how countries collapse in on themselves like dying stars and implode; and that you’d have to be a moron not to understand that systematically lowering standards in hiring and promotion in industries related to public safety to achieve equal outcomes will affect outcomes.

1. As of Wednesday, DOGE had canceled 104 DEI contracts totalling $1,000,060,792.

2. Hundreds of studies in the past two decades have shown that female applicants for jobs in academia and other industries are now favored over similarly qualified males.

3. It should be understood that the left-wing push for “equity,” AKA equal outcomes, isn’t about lifting up the deserving so much as punishing/penalizing people in possession of a subjectively defined “privilege” enjoyed thanks to an accident of birth. The goal is to bring down those at the top, not elevate those at the bottom. “Equity” is an inherently woke concept. The core of woke ideology is its intensive focus on a person’s membership in certain identity groups based on immutable characteristics such as race, sexual orientation, and gender. These are frequently treated as the defining features of someone’s identity, to which more individual characteristics are subordinate. Wokeness divides people into groups with the explicit aim of elevating some groups over others—just different groups from those seen as benefiting from the current or past hierarchy.

4. The pass rate among men was 92%. Among women, it was 52%.

5. The test was first watered down multiple times for the stated purpose of increasing ATC diversity. Only later was it scrapped altogether.

6. Relevant: Last year Matt Walsh released a report featuring internal footage of Federal Aviation Administration officials “workshopping a plan to reduce the number of white males in aviation.” And the FAA has been actively recruiting workers who suffer “severe intellectual” disabilities, psychiatric problems and other mental and physical conditions under a diversity and inclusion hiring initiative spelled out on the agency’s website.

7. Also worth noting that Trump signed an executive order more than a week before the air crash to stop the discriminatory hiring practices that triggered the lawsuit against the Biden administration, directing the Secretary of Transportation and FAA Administrator “to immediately stop Biden DEI hiring programs and return to non-discriminatory, merit-based hiring.”

8. When asked by reporters if he thought race or gender played a role in the air crash, Trump stated “It may have. I don't know. Incompetence might have played a role. We’ll let you know that. We want the most competent people, we don’t care what race they are.” Vance made a similar statement: “We want to hire the best people because we want the best people at air traffic control, and we want to make sure we have enough people at air traffic control who are actually competent to do the job.” Obviously very controversial stuff.