This is getting shared a lot, so you know what, fine. Against my better judgement: challenge accepted. I’ll take the bait.

But if I’m going to take the time to do this, you have to hang around a minute afterwards for my explanation of why liberals shouldn’t share memes like this anymore. You have to hear me out on why this falls under a rhetorical umbrella that is too worn out and raggedy to keep any of us on the left dry anymore.

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I’ll do the thing. But then you have to listen to why we should stop asking people to do the thing. Deal?

Good, here we go.

In the interest of balance, I’m going to give The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly for each of the D.E.I. letters. And because it’s been in the news, The Ugly in each case will refer to a bizarre, little-reported hiring scandal at the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

Trump, Plane Crashes, and DEI

In the wake of the horrifying midair collision between an Army Blackhawk helicopter and a passenger jet over the Potomac River, Donald Trump barely waited 60 seconds before blaming the whole episode on “DEI” (which, for those of you just waking up, stands for Diversity, Equity & Inclusion). He was rightly called out for shooting from the hip and, by his own admission, casting blame without even pretending to have the full facts.

A lot of it was deflection, intended to obscure the role Trump’s own, harsh policies may have played in what happened. For example, the FAA had been without an administrator since Trump’s first day back in office? Why? Because the guy running the show, Michael Whitaker, fell afoul of Elon Musk by fining SpaceX for failing to comply with launch safety guidelines. Whitaker (who was unanimously confirmed to a five year term) quit early because he knew he was going to get fired as soon as Trump Elon got around to it, and he figured he’d save himself the trouble.

Trump also gutted the Department of Homeland Security’s Aviation Security Advisory Committee, part of a sweeping move to disband all DHS committees on the grounds that they should be presumed to be “wasteful” until proven otherwise. The FAA, by the way, was already in the midst of a staff shortage, particularly affecting air-traffic controllers (ATCs).

Since Republicans are slash-happy sadists who barely think government should exist except to pay their salaries, and Democrats are feckless pussies who can’t bring themselves to explain to the American people that a functioning government costs money, we end up with important agencies and departments performing high stakes work without the resources to do it.

In this case, there have been reports that controllers in the tower at Ronald Reagan International Airport were doubling up on tasks that would usually have been assigned to one person only, and that they were doing this because they simply didn’t have enough people to do the job right. If true, that’s damning, and Trump owns a piece of it. This is his second term. He could have fixed this the last time he was in office and he didn’t.

So there’s a lot of blame to go around. Trump knows it, and his DEI dig was partly an attempt to make sure none of this mess lands on him (sorry, kind of a grim choice of words there).

But Trump’s bluster aside, rapping the FAA on the knuckles for letting DEI run amok was not completely out of left field. And it wasn’t completely unjustified.

I’m going to avoid going into too much detail summarizing the (quite insane) hiring scandal at the FAA, and the class action lawsuit aimed at redressing it. Not because the story isn’t interesting - my God it is - but because Fox Business’s Adam Shapiro, who initially broke the story, and Jack Despain Zhou (a.k.a. Tracing Woodgrains), a journalist who brought it back to life, deserve every ounce of credit and every click of traffic for their hard work.

You should, at this point, take a break, digest their accounts in full (links in the comments if you’re reading this on Facebook), then come back here to lap up my analysis. We’ll be touching on some bits and bobs from the saga, but especially if you’re of the opinion that concerns over DEI are invalid, or a stalking horse for racism, you really owe yourself a glimpse of the other side of this coin.

Okay, without further ado:

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DIVERSITY

The Good

Say you’re leading a marketing team charged with selling widgets to the American people. Your goal, obviously, is to sell as many widgets as possible to as many people as possible. You look around the room and you realize that, to a man, your entire squad consists of 20-something white boys who look like they just tumbled out of an ASU frat house.

This, you correctly realize, is a problem. America is a diverse country, with lots of different types of people. The factors that might motivate a washed up frat boy from Arizona State to buy your widget may not be the same things that appeal to a working mother of three, a black retiree, or a newlywed gay couple buying their first home. So how do you figure out what makes those other people tick, and what’s going to persuade them to reach for your widget instead of the other guy’s? One fairly easy way is to hire some of those other people, ask them, and let them bring their unique, *diverse* experiences to the table.

Another diversity instance that my libtard self has always been broadly supportive of: the Supreme Court. The highest court in the land is tasked with guarding the top of a legal pyramid that impacts every last one of us. If every last person on that court ever up until a few years ago was a white guy, it’s hard to claim with a straight face that the unique, diverse concerns of all Americans are being factored into the vital decision-making undertaken by that group.

Some people are skeptical of diversity initiatives, and I think some of their disagreements are cogent, especially in settings where you really want merit to be paramount. Like, maybe, on the high court of a powerful nation. But ultimately, in team settings - and SCOTUS is a kind of team - I’m very sympathetic to the idea that diversity, in and of itself, adds value. In a scenario where you’ve got two, otherwise-equal candidates, where one is going to tick a diversity box and the other isn’t, I think it is justifiable to opt for the one who offers that diversity.

You can agree or disagree, but those are my priors on this.

The Bad

But…valuing diversity as well as merit is one thing. Prioritizing diversity over merit is a much harder practice to defend.

Back to SCOTUS, Joe Biden made a seriously boneheaded move when he announced in advance that his SCOTUS nomination was going to be a woman of color.

To be very clear, my beef is not that he nominated a woman of color. It’s that he telegraphed his intention to do so before he did it. The only reason for his broadcasting that plan was that he was trying to scoop up brownie points from the social justice gremlins.

The result though, was that Ketanji Brown Jackson, who is both highly capable and highly qualified, will forever have a black mark next to her name. It will always be remembered that she got where she got via an unearned advantage; the color of her skin.

Whether her skin color may have disadvantaged her in any number of other ways throughout her life - and she’s old enough that we might assume it did - is immaterial. Ketanji Brown Jackson’s relevance to our lives is that she’s a powerful justice. If she wasn’t picked fairly, and if there were better people who didn’t get that post because of their skin color, people get to care about that. And they get to think it’s wrong.

Liberal advocates for diversity need to remember two things:

The first is that if diversity, by itself, is a strength, they need to say that. That is an argument that washes. It’s much less compelling to frame diversity as a necessary correction to historical injustice. Because the obvious end point to that claim is that people who have caused no harm themselves should be punished for harms caused by others in order to heal people who were not themselves harmed.

In ancient Greek philosophy, I believe that’s what’s referred to as a “moral and logical clusterfuck.”

But the second thing is actually more important, and that’s that diversity efforts, more often than not, are double-edged swords. To get credit for valuing diversity, you cannot help but taint the beneficiaries of your efforts, because you can’t collect the points without signaling that something other than their skills got them where they landed. If Joe Biden wanted a black woman for SCOTUS, he should have just…picked a black woman for SCOTUS. Instead, he chose to toot his own horn, and now Justice Jackson has to spend the rest of her career paying for it.

The Ugly

Okay, so marketing teams, SCOTUS, maybe fair enough. Diversity plausibly has some value. Anywhere where it doesn’t?

Buckle up, friends.

If you were to make a list of everything I don’t care about, in order of how much I don’t care about it, with the top of the list being populated by items like my wife and kids (things I largely do care about) and the bottom of the list containing items like…whatever Kylie Jenner just did, Olympic curling, or whether it’s really true that hummus is bad for you, at the dead-ass, rock bottom of that list, you would find:

the skin color of the people who make sure airplanes don’t crash in midair

Literally. I can think of not one other thing in this universe that I care less about than that. With regard to an air traffic controller, I am more interested in their star sign, their favorite pizza topping, and the consistency of their cousin’s last bowel movement than I am interested in how much melanin they have in their bodies.

As a nervous flyer, I am ruthless and unapologetic on this score. I don’t care if there’s a history of discrimination in the industry, I don’t care if there are societal factors that make some people more fit for this work than others, and I don’t care one iota about producing an equal outcome in the distribution of who ends up controlling the air traffic over my head.

All white? Fine. All white men? Fine. All white men who went to ASU? Fine. And by the way, this extends in all directions. All black? Also fine. All black women? Fine. All black trans women with physical disabilities? As long as they’re the best suited to the task, FINE.

I can imagine that some decades ago, there would have been a serious prejudice against hiring non-white people to perform this labor. Such a prejudice would have led to white applicants unfairly benefiting from an irrelevant characteristic - their skin tone - and would likely have led to some qualified people getting passed over because they weren’t pale enough.

To which I say: not fine. Not remotely fine. Kill it with fire! But I really have no interest in allowing the pendulum to swing the other way just to even things out. In aviation, your pal Dave is a merit purist without so much as a glimmer of hesitation.

But not everyone feels that way...

A year or so into Barack Obama’s second presidential term, an outfit called the National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees (NBCFAE, which is a shitty acronym, just by the way…) took a look at the existing crop of air traffic controllers and determined something: too many of them were white. They set out to change this.

Now already, we’re in dangerous territory here, because we’ve subverted Dave’s *cares-about* hierarchy. We’re taking an item from very high on the list (an airplane not falling on Dave’s head) and an item from the rock bottom of that list (skin pigmentation of ATCs) and we’re switching them. This is diversity done wrong.

But what the NBCFAE actually did was quite a bit worse than just confusing priorities. We’ll be diving deeper into this in the sections to follow, but your taster is this:

They looked at the results of the industry’s professional aptitude test, the Air Traffic Skills Assessment Test (AT-SAT) and saw that, on the whole, white test-takers were scoring more highly than black test-takers. Some of the steps they took with this information were defensible. Actually, they were pretty good: establishing ATC training hubs at historically black colleges and universities (HCBUs), for example. But some of the other steps undertaken make my palms sweat.

The NBCFAE had a problem: the AT-SAT was actually a good test. It reliably predicted on-the-job performance. But the racial disparity in scoring was severe; the test was engineered to produce a 60% pass rate, but only 3% of black test-takers were passing. NBCFAE wanted to change this dynamic, but couldn’t credibly argue that the test wasn’t worthwhile because it plainly was. Instead, they set out to determine what would be an survivable tradeoff between “widening the aperture” of ATC candidates and remaining within a window of acceptable performance loss. They ultimately judged that they could diversify the ATC field with only a “relatively small” loss of performance.

And…here’s where old Dave gets off the train for good. Or plane. There is no “acceptable performance loss” I am willing to tolerate for a life-or-death business in which skin color means just, absolutely nothing.

So all that would have been bad enough. But the NBCFAE wasn’t finished. And this story gets so, so much worse.

EQUITY

The Good

I’ll be brief here:

Wheelchair ramps.

Wheelchairs.

Wide bathroom stalls.

Elevators with low buttons.

Elevators in general.

Public education.

Audiobooks.

Easy-mode on videogames.

Braille.

Autistic people having jobs.

Autistic people having friends.

Autistic people having full, independent lives.

Crutches.

Medicine.

Birth control.

Glasses.

Push-up bras.

Sidewalks.

The Wheel (because now I don’t have to be physically strong to haul my goods).

All equity. All good. All enjoy my enthusiastic support.

The Bad

When equity becomes controversial, it’s usually because we’re paying more attention to outcomes and less attention to opportunities. You’ve all probably seen this meme:

On the left, for EQUALITY, we have three people of different heights, all given the same box to stand on. The tall guy doesn’t need his box to see the baseball game on the other side of the fence, the middle guy is fine with the box he has, and the short guy still can’t see the game, even with his box.

On the right, for EQUITY, the tall guy doesn’t have his box anymore but can still see the game just fine, the middle guy has his same box and is also fine, but the short guy now has his initial box plus the tall guy’s box, and he can finally watch the game like everyone else. Yay, equity!

And sure, if all we’re talking about is whether or not little kids should be given boxes to stand on so they can watch baseball games, I think we’re in agreement that they should be. We’re probably also in safe agreement that the adult hoarding a box he doesn’t need and preventing a little kid from watching a ballgame is a sociopathic a*****e and in all probability, a Republican. So obviously, f**k him.

But at the risk of blowing your minds, this very popular meme is actually intended to be…metaphorical. Meaning: the baseball game isn’t really a baseball game, height isn’t really height, and the boxes aren’t really boxes.

In a real world setting, the baseball game in the meme might be getting accepted to a college. Height might be the race of the applicant. Having the same, good view of the game might be having an applicant’s racial group be represented in equal proportions to other racial groups on campus. What are the boxes? They might be minimum required test scores, minimum required GPAs, or even outright racial quotas for admissions.

By adding or removing boxes, we’re actually saying that it should be easier for some kids to get into college and, by necessity, we’re saying that it should be harder for others. We are making a clear, direct case that college applicants should not be afforded equal opportunities, and we’re saying that outcomes are more important. Otherwise, everyone would get the same box, and if some still couldn’t see the ballgame, that’d be their problem.

Progressives might persuasively argue that that approach is callous. That it ignores other, unfair reasons why the normal, for-everyone box isn’t sufficient to help some people see the game. I’m entirely prepared to listen to those arguments, and give them a fair hearing. But I think we have to recognize that not everyone is going to have the same values in approaching this problem. That some (yes, particularly those in groups whose boxes are being taken away) are going to think that fairness matters more than results. That opportunity matters more than outcome.

Anyway, the memer wanted an explicit argument against equity, and there one is. I’ll offer another before we move onto our last letter.

The Ugly

One of the boxes FAA applicants could always stand on to improve their chances at getting hired was a 2-year degree certificate from an approved “collegiate training initiative” (CTI). These were basically feeder schools, often attached to a state or community college. Their track record for preparing future ATCs was so good, it was more or less a foregone conclusion that FAA applicants who were CTI graduates were shoe-ins to be hired.

Until, one day, they weren’t. The box was just gone.

Without any warning or explanation, on New Year’s Eve 2013, the FAA blasted a missive to the president of every CTI in the country informing them of some of changes to their hiring policy. Effective immediately, all logged AT-SAT scores were voided, all FAA applicants would be required to pass a “biographical questionnaire” (more on this gem later), and a degree from a CTI would no longer be considered an advantage in hiring.

All the degrees earned by recent graduates? All their test results? All the money they’d spent? Toilet paper.

Why? Go f**k yourself, that’s why.

As these CTIs would soon learn, it wasn’t just the case that their graduates would no longer enjoy favorable treatment. Their awarded degrees would become more like liabilities. The box wasn’t just being kicked out from under them, it was being set on fire. Suddenly, CTI heads couldn’t get their emails returned. Their graduates were getting the cold shoulder from the FAA. And nobody could figure out why. Overnight.

Oh and that “biographical questionnaire?” Yeah…stay tuned. And take your blood pressure meds.

INCLUSION

The Good

Granted, I’m a little, weeny snowflake, but I actually think it’s better if people avoid using racial slurs at the office. It strikes me as both plausible and reasonable that, say, a black employee working in an environment where N-Bombs are being dropped left and right might come away with the impression that he isn’t really welcome there.

Also, and while yeah, I’m a little old fashioned, I think it’s probably better if men in the presence of ladies avoid doing things like graphically describing their bodily functions or sexual trysts.

When we talk about inclusion or “inclusivity,” that’s usually the kind of thing we mean.

Do we have a system here that makes certain people feel left out? If so, and assuming that’s not our intention, what can we do to fix it?

Are we saying things that are unintentionally hurtful? Should we say other, less hurtful things instead? These are valid questions pertaining to inclusion, and a person really has to be the victim of a severe ideological poisoning to not be in favor of at least some of this work.

The Bad

But but but! There are some problems with inclusivity. Namely, that when done the wrong way, it can be pretty…exclusionary. It can even be alienating.

Usually, when we’re focusing on being inclusive, we’re focusing on language. Actual, you-don’t-belong-here exclusion is often illegal, so we don’t generally have to expend much energy fighting it. But the focus on language can easily become counterproductive and annoying.

Example: liberals are fond of taking the piss out of conservatives for panicking every year over the supposed “WAR ON CHRISTMAS.”

In this house, WE SAY MERRY CHRISTMAS!

Lol, right?

And look, okay. Conservatives can be hysterical douchebags about this, so a certain amount of ribbing is well-earned and well-deserved. But also, they’re not just making this stuff up. It really is a thing that *some* liberals do: encouraging the use of “Happy Holidays” over “Merry Christmas,” on the grounds that, how will our Jewish brothers and sisters feel if they see a Christmas tree but no menorah?

So to my lib friends, pick a lane. If you want to push “Happy Holidays,” push it. But then don’t gaslight conservatives for noticing.

These squabbles can have real consequences too. When the SCOTUS overturned Roe v. Wade, abortion access, one of the left’s most serious priorities, came under its worst threat in 50 years. What happened next?

What should have happened was the left uniting. We should have come together, set aside other grievances we had with each other, and gotten ourselves laser-focused on how we were going to preserve access to reproductive healthcare for women who needed it. This was, after all, one of the reasons we were on the left in the first place. If we weren’t going to do this, what the hell were we showing up for at all?

Well, it turns out, there was another fight to be had - a fight so important, it started to eclipse the Dodd decision and ensure that rather than band together, the left would eschew the pursuit of policy solutions in favor of just mercilessly tearing each other apart.

The fight? The merits of talking about all this without using the word “woman” and how important or not it was to make sure people were using more *inclusive* language like “pregnant person,” “birthing person,” or [seriously, just put me out of my misery] “chestfeeding.”

As a big, libtardy marshmallow, I am actually quite sympathetic to the idea that people with biologically female reproductive anatomy, who can and do get pregnant, but who identify as male should not face systemic exclusion from organizations like Planned Parenthood because of their gender identity.

But - and this may get me in some trouble - I submit that actually, most trans men are not complete morons. I further submit that trans men can be counted on to know that literature regarding uteruses or due dates may pertain to them too. And that they should not be assumed by default to be emotionally unstable time bombs who are going to detonate in the event they read the word “woman” in a brochure and realize that the information is relevant to them also.

Finally, and this is really my point, I think that even if inclusivity concerns like that have some merit, they have far less merit than concerns over actual, material access to this health care. I’m not putting the blame for failing to answer Dobbs on trans people, their allies, or even DEI more broadly. But I think that bending over backward to make sure that we were saying “birthing persons” and not “women” was more about virtue-signaling than illuminating, informing, or safeguarding access to care.

It wasn’t the only problem we had at the time, but it sure didn’t help. And it was a damn weird thing to decide to care about right at that moment. The people who insist on our having these dumb fights are engaged not in a good faith effort to include people, but in a bad faith power-flex to exclude them.

Because that’s a big part of what this does, and I don’t think this fact can be reasonably denied. For every trans man made to feel safe and welcomed by a phrase like “birthing person,” there might be ten or more cis women who feel harassed and alienated by the tip-toeing around the word “woman.” Especially when the topic is one of the most special, sacred biological functions associated with womanhood.

I have heard the counter arguments here. I have listened, as instructed. And what I’ve concluded is that sure, you can draw up a hypothetical scenario in which a trans person could be made to feel less included by language that doesn’t acknowledge their gender identity. But after years of this discourse, there can be no excuse for you not knowing that supposedly-inclusive language like this also agitates a lot of other people.

If, on balance, you still think it’s still a good move to opt for “birthing persons,” you should absolutely make that case. If you think that a cis person who would complain about such a thing must be a transphobic write-off, you can say that too. But if that’s your position, you need to at least be open about the fact that you are making a values judgement. You are determining that the potential inclusion of one group is more important than the potential exclusion of another.

You do you. I can’t set your priorities for you. But you’re pretty lamely letting yourself off the hook if you’re pretending that there’s no calculus here at all. Or that “inclusivity” is a completely benign force that only an evil bigot would resist.

And if this argument questioning Inclusion doesn’t satisfy you that I’ve honored the terms of the meme, try these other ones: inclusive language is hard to follow for non-native speakers, hard for autistic people (who struggle with our tendency to use language to euphemize or wishcast), and, not that that DEI stans will give a s**t but still… it’s politically charged. In a way that appeals to the left and antagonizes the right. Which is another way of saying that it’s not really inclusive at all, isn’t even intended to be, and everyone f*****g knows it.

The Ugly

We just talked about language and how it intersects with the concept of inclusivity. But what about inclusion efforts that have nothing to do with the way we speak? That have to do with actual, physical, you-get-to-be-here-now inclusion?

Said no one ever: “There are too many competent people here. Our organization really needs to be more inclusive of folks who are incompetent, unskilled, or otherwise likely to be worse at their jobs than the people we have now. Let’s get right to work on that!”

Except…oops. That, in fact, is what the FAA concluded circa 2013. That’s precisely what they set out to do, even if a thirst for incompetence wasn’t the stated motivation. As we discussed, under the guidance of the NBCFAE, hiring preferences at FAA were shifted intentionally away from candidates who’d trained at good schools, away from candidates that had good test scores, and toward candidates who could boast neither attribute.

But how did they select those candidates? How did they ensure that the right (which in this case meant non-white) applicants made it through, but that the wrong (which in this case meant white) applicants would be barred?

Easy. They cheated!

They designed as an added screening tool a biographical questionnaire designed to yield them the right sort of people while keeping out the riff raff. Remember how the AT-SAT was engineered to produce a 40% fail rate? This new questionnaire aimed for a fail rate of 90%. And the questions themselves were pretty hard to defend as being relevant to the work of an ATC.

The whole test is here, but I’ll offer just one sample question:

Which of the following is your greatest strength?

* Ability to follow instructions

* Work ethic

* Practical knowledge and work experience

* High quality standards

* Ability to work well with others

Some of the questions - questions this oblique and silly - were weighted such that one wrong answer led to an automatic fail and to disqualification from consideration. Just, bye!

I don’t even know what the right answer to that question is supposed to be! Fortunately for our purposes, the right answer is irrelevant. Not just to me, but to the test itself. My point isn’t to show you that the test was hard. My point is that the test’s designers didn’t care what the right answers were, because the test was mostly designed not to have any. It was designed solely to yield a workforce with a specific racial aesthetic.

I hear you ask: but how did they ensure that white people would fail and non-white people would pass?

Good question, with another easy answer: they gave the correct answers in advance to black prospects and admonished them not to share those answers with their white counterparts. Which is just…

I realize that the last ten years have been a strange period in our cultural trajectory, but I’m honestly curious how this practice could possibly be defended. I mean, even the most head-up-the-ass social justice dead-ender would, I think, struggle to convincingly excuse this.

In a message obtained by the class action suit’s plaintiffs, FAA employee, Shelton Snow, was recorded explaining that his group (it’s not clear whether he was referring to NBCFAE itself or just to its system of holding conference calls with black FAA applicants to clue them in) “wasn’t for caucasians, it wasn’t for, you know, the white male, it wasn’t for an alien on Mars.”

The good news here is that the questionnaire is now kaput. The FAA was made to stop using it just a few years after its initial deployment. But a lot of the damage was done. The Obama-era regime at FAA worked so hard on including the formerly-excluded and excluding the formerly-included that they interrupted the ATC staffing pipeline.

Remember that it takes years to train and qualify for this work, so even a return to relative normalcy was’t an immediate fix. Add to this other budgetary problems and political food fights, and what you get is a vital, life-or-death service being performed by overworked, overtired, overstretched, underpaid employees, some of whom are not the best people for the job, and some of whom going to make mistakes.

I’m a teacher. If I zone out at work, my kids get a few extra minutes of free time. If an air traffic controller zones out at work, hundreds of people die. These are not workers from whom we can safely expect “more with less.”

The Meme Sucks Anyway

Persuasively or not, I think I have answered the meme’s challenge to express opposition to the D, the E, and the I without falling back on a “thought-terminating cliche.”

That’s a helluva dandy phrase: “thought-terminating cliche.” It just has no fair application to this topic. What’s more “thought-terminating?” Recognition that DEI has overstepped its mandate in a multitude of ways, even if it was initially well-intentioned? Or reducing any criticism of it to just racists being racist?

I think I’ve also made the case that while reasonable and important criticisms of DEI exist, so do strong defenses. I don’t want to junk the whole project. The problem right now, for DEI’s defenders, is that the people in power very much do.

So guys, I love you, but in the name of holy Saint Joseph of Cupertino (one of the patron saints of aviation - I looked it up) please stop sharing these memes before I lose my mind.

This meme draws its power from a grand, rhetorical reservoir that, for some reason, liberals love the taste of. Everyone else hates it, and it serves no useful purpose that I can see, but you see countless examples of this sort of thing, especially from well-meaning lefties on the internet.

You might call it “the pretense of righteous ignorance.”

It’s the posture that the memer (or sharer) is so pure, so just, and so rightly-ordered that they literally don’t even understand how a person could disagree with them. They can’t understand. Because to understand would require their descent down to a lesser moral plain on which they simply cannot survive.

You’ve all seen it. S**t, most of you have probably done it. I know I have.

Here’s a less loaded example:

“I just don’t understand how you could not like The Shawshank Redemption! It’s like, the best movie ever!”

That’s the pretense of righteous ignorance, right there (only it’s vastly more annoying when applied to politics). What I mean to say is that I, myself, love The Shawshank Redemption, and do not think criticisms of it hold water. And I feel sufficiently passionate about Shawshank that just saying, “I really liked it and I’m sorry you didn’t,” doesn’t cover the scope of my fervor. I have to go farther. I have to style myself as being literally unable to comprehend a person not having liked it. I have to imply that information so foreign will actually not fit in my smart brain or tender soul.

A more honest response could be that, in fact, there are any number of reasons why a person might not like Shawshank, even if I do. Maybe it’s too dark for them. Maybe they prefer movies that tell women’s stories (Shawshank has exactly one female character in the whole thing and it’s the harlot who gets clipped at the very beginning). Maybe they’ve actually been in prison and have no wish to revisit that headspace. Maybe they’ve been sexually assaulted and prefer not to be confronted with cinematic examples of that sort of violence. Maybe they just don’t like Stephen King stories.

The point is, when I pretend to be incapable of understanding why a person wouldn’t like Shawshank, I’m not being truthful. I’m being obnoxious and obtuse.

(Ha. Obtuse. Fans of The Shank will get it).

The meme above pretends not to understand valid objections to DEI work by flattening them into a rank rejection of just…the letters in the acronym.

Sorry, but that’s trash. And it’s pointless.

Liberals might reasonably object to conservatives using “DEI” as a catch-all for everything they don’t like that’s vaguely “woke.” But if there are really people out there who don’t understand that *DEI* is about more than just the dictionary definitions of ‘diversity,’ ‘equity,’ and ‘inclusion,’ then somebody point them out to me so I can go explain it to them. Slowly.

Of course, the confusion isn’t real. It’s pretended. And it’s not the only purpose of the meme, which serves also to imply that anyone against DEI must be a drooling, racist turd who can’t stand being around brown people. I get why that’s an appealing narrative, but it’s kind of convenient, no?

Guess what, Sharon, everyone who disagrees with me is evil!

Now, are there DEI foes who are in it for the racism? Of course. But thanks mostly to Elon’s purge of X’s content moderators, they’re right out in the open now. The people who just don’t want to rub shoulders with non-whites will tell you, very directly, that that’s their issue with DEI. They’re not hiding anymore. Which makes it no longer reasonable to assume bad faith, bigotry, or even just obfuscation on the part of DEI’s critics, many of whom have good points to make.

If libs were in power, I’d still find memes like this one irritating, but I’d ultimately have to conclude that they worked. The left got enormous mileage, for example, out of pretending not to understand what “woke” meant when people referred to it. Now that woke is played out as a term, the left no longer uses it, and the right has trained its fire on “DEI” instead, some on the left are trying to run the same game: feigned befuddlement at what these dirty troglodytes could possibly be on about.

But, importantly, the libs are not in power. And the pretense of righteous ignorance will not move the people who are, most of whom want to hack DEI to death with a splitting maul.

So if there’s any part of this thing you’d like to hang onto - any part at all - knock it off, get your head in the game, and face your opponents like the f*****g grown up you are.

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