Murray recounted the story of Boris Pasternak referencing Shakespeare’s Sonnet 30—“When to the sessions of sweet silent thought/I summon up remembrance of things past”—at a 1930s Stalinist writers’ conference and how that may have saved the great Russian writer from being purged. He was yet to write his masterpiece “Dr. Zhivago.”
The Orwellian distortion of English—that language of Shakespeare’s—in our “they/them” era has tremendous ramifications for the increasingly totalitarian world in which we live.
It’s a harbinger of and a preparation for worse things to come and is, in essence, neo-Stalinist.
Among the most dangerous of these distortions is “equity,” which comes from the same Latin root as “equality” and once meant roughly the same thing.
As Mike Gonzalez wrote more than a year ago in “Biden’s Embrace of ‘Equity’ Means He’s Abandoned the Quest for Equality,” “Equity has now come to mean the functional opposite of equality.”
“Four legs good, two legs bad” or something like that.
How is this manifesting, indeed expanding beyond comprehension, under the new governance of Rice?
(An interesting question is, is it the tale wagging the dog here? Is Rice what we’ve been looking for all along—the true functioning president?)
Nevertheless, legally speaking, by executive order, President Joe Biden has given Rice power for a “racial equity” makeover of the federal government. This would mean establishing “Agency Equity Teams” in all departments for, shades of Chairman Mao, “reeducation.”
And when they say the federal government, they say virtually all of it, meaning the following:
The Department of State The Department of the Treasury The Department of Defense The Department of Justice The Department of the Interior The Department of Agriculture The Department of Commerce The Department of Labor The Department of Health and Human Services The Department of Housing and Urban Development The Department of Transportation The Department of Energy The Department of Education The Department of Veterans Affairs The Department of Homeland Security The Small Business Administration The Social Security Administration The General Services Administration The Environmental Protection Agency The National Aeronautics and Space Administration The National Science Foundation
But what’s “equity” in modern Biden/Obama/Rice terms? I’ll give you my definition. It’s simply “affirmative action” taken to the nth power.
That the American public doesn’t like affirmative action in the first place has been well-documented by Pew polls and elsewhere. However, that doesn’t stop our leadership, in the grand tradition of totalitarians who think they know best.
In this instance, they don’t. Affirmative action, as it was once called, and “equity,” as it’s now called in its more extreme version, actually work against the people they’re supposed to help for a number of reasons.
For one, it’s insulting to those people in its implication that they aren’t meeting and couldn’t meet the standard; many can and more would be able to succeed without “equity.” But those who achieve through this system will always have doubts about themselves, even when unnecessary.
The system also encourages laziness and, simultaneously, racism. If all you need to do to get a certain job is be a certain color, then you don’t need to work as hard to obtain the skills to gain that position. This, of course, encourages and indeed creates mediocrity (and not inconsequentially ensuing depression, as noted above).
Affirmative action—whatever its initially good intention—and its evil spawn “equity” are therefore self-fulfilling prophecies and inherently racist.
So cui bono? As usual, the people in power. Rice and Obama both are people “of color,” in that other hideous Orwellian term, but neither has much or anything to do with the black man or woman on the street. They’re one-percenters as far away from that fate as one can imagine.
Martha’s Vineyard is the other side of the moon from districts of Memphis—a three-hour drive from me—that have turned into black-on-black killing grounds similar to parts of Chicago.
“Equity” has literally no meaning to those benighted people living in such a tragic situation, children shot in the streets.
Obama, Biden, and Rice have done nothing for them. I would wager that they wouldn’t know how and devote literally no thinking to solving that situation, caused largely by the breakup of the black family spoken of so eloquently by the likes of Larry Elder and Ben Carson.
“Equity” is virtue signaling at its purest, a lot of hogwash signifying nothing and actually taking us backward, as do all aspects of “wokeness.”
The peremptory takeover of the U.S. government by the unelected Rice should never have been allowed to happen, although it now clearly has.
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