Professor Arthur R Jensen, LA Times

When Merit-Based Hiring is Deemed Racist 

by Ilana Mercer 

As individuals, we all want the best doctors treating us, the best pilots flying the airplanes we board, the best engineers designing the bridges we cross, the best scientists inventing and bringing to market the medicines and potions we ingest*.

 Yet the American Idiocracy is moving to equate merit-based institutions with institutionalized racism.

Tucker Carlson, likely the only merit-based hiree at Fox News, recently divulged that a member of the Trump administration was overheard (by a thought-police plant) expressing a preference for merit-based recruits for his department.

Egad, and what next!

Google, a tool of the Idiocracy, appears to have scrubbed its search of this latest episode in “The Closing of the American Mind.” However, it’s no secret that the education system already excludes the most naturally gifted, independent-minded individuals from fields in which they’d excel. 

In any event, when the best-person-for-the-job ethos gives way to racial and gender window-dressing and to the enforcement of politically pleasing perspectives, things start to fall apart. A spanking new bridge collapses, new trains on maiden trips derail, Navy ships keep colliding, police and FBI failure and bad faith become endemic, and the protocols put in place by a government “for the people” protect offending public servants who’ve acted against the people.

As in this writer’s birth place of South Africa, the U.S. government has a pyramid of hiring preferences. Guess which variables feature prominently in its considerations? Complexion or competency?

Consider the procurement pyramid that went into destroying the steady supply of coal to South-African electricity companies. Bound by Black Economic Empowerment policies, buyers buy spot coal, first from black women-owned suppliers, then from small black suppliers, next are large, black suppliers, and only after all these options have been exhausted—or darkness descends, whatever comes first—from “other” suppliers.

The result: an expensive and unreliable coal supply and rolling blackouts.

Everywhere, media are congenitally incurious and corrupt. They aren’t digging. But it’s likely that similar considerations will go a long way in explaining the collapse of a Florida university campus pedestrian bridge, under which people were pulverized.

So far, the attitude of those who’re doing this can be summed thus: Shit happens.

As for the public; it receives no follow-up and learns to demand none. Hence, “The Closing of the American Mind.”

But if American institutions continue to subordinate their raison d’être to politically dictated egalitarianism, reclaiming these institutions, private and public, from the deforming clutches of affirmative action will become impossible.

It might already be impossible.

For example: former FBI agent and patriot Philip Haney was dismissed by Barack Obama from the Department of Homeland Security and is nowhere to be found in the Trump Administration. This brilliant man’s goal was to do his job: stop Muslim terrorists in the US.

Alas, the intricate program and extensive network of contacts Haney developed were nixed, because political priorities had come to dominate the agency. As a result, innocents died.

Treason? I’d say so. So, where are the purges?

What were once merit-based institutions are being hollowed-out like husks through preferential, non-merit-based hiring, quotas, set-asides, not to mention the policing of thought for political propriety.  

No longer beholden to the unifying, overarching value of merit, institutions, moreover, become riven by tribal feuds and factional loyalties—both in government and in business alike, where it is well-known that newly arrived “minorities” hire nepotistically.

Across the American workplace, the importance of “meritocratic criteria” such as test scores or “minimum credentials” has been downplayed, if not downright eliminated as “inherently biased against minorities.”

The U.S. government hasn’t had an entrance test since … 1982. It abandoned both the Federal Civil Service Entrance Examination and the Professional and Administrative Career Examination (PACE) because blacks and Latinos were much less likely to pass either of them.

In academia, law schools have lowered the bar in admissions and on the bar exam. Universities run a “dual admissions system”—“one admissions pool for white applicants and another, far less competitive, pool for minorities.”

The institutionalized American “quota culture” has been imposed by administrative fiat, courtesy of the “The Power Elite”—that engorged “administrative state” under which Americans labor.

For the purposes of conferring affirmative action privileges, American civil servants have compiled over the decades an ever-growing list of protected groups, “as distinct from whites.”  

In addition to blacks, the list entails mainly minorities such as Hispanics—Chileans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Dominicans, and Mexicans—Pacific Islanders, American Indians, Asian/Indians, Filipinos, Vietnamese, Cambodians (and homosexuals).

If the kind of immigration policies instituted by the über-left American Idiocracy (it includes most Republicans) continue apace, the institutional tipping-point will be reached in no time.

The reason is the “immigration-with-preference paradox,” first noted by Frederick R. Lynch, author of “Invisible Victims: White Males and the Crisis of Affirmative Action” (1991).  

Once mass immigration became a bipartisan policy, millions of imported non-black minorities were—still are—given preference over native-born American citizens. No sooner do these minorities cross the border, legally or illegally, than they become eligible for affirmative-action privileges.

These preference policies govern both state- and big-business bureaucracies, which seem to have voluntarily (and energetically) embraced them, if only to subdue their white workforce.

It goes without saying that “those who came to this country in recent decades from Asia, Latin America and Africa” did not suffer discrimination from our government, and in fact have frequently been the beneficiaries of special government programs.”

There’s a world of difference between compelling minority recruitment to equal the proportion of minorities in the population and enforcing majority recruitment to equal the proportion of the majority in the population.

In South Africa, the majority is targeted for affirmative action: 75 percent of the population! In the U.S., it’s the minority.

South Africa underwent an almost overnight political transformation. One day a white, relatively well-educated minority dominated all institutions; the next, a skills-deficient black majority took over. Nevertheless, South Africa’s hollowed-out establishments are a harbinger of things to come in the U.S., where minorities will soon form a majority.

If American institutions have not yet collapsed entirely under the diversity doxology’s dead weight, it’s because the restructuring of society underway is slower.

Again, this will change once minorities in the US form a majority, as they soon will due to continued, unabated, mass immigration from the Third World.

*Editorial Note: or as Arthur R Jensen remarked concerning the failure of compensatory education, “In other fields, when bridges do not stand, when aircraft do not fly, when machines do not work, when treatments do not cure…one begins to question the basic assumptions, principles, theories and hypotheses that guide one’s efforts”, How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement? Jensen was also a perceptive critic of affirmative action.

All citations are from “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa,”by ilana mercer.

Ilana Mercer has been writing a weekly, paleolibertarian column since 1999. She is the author of “The Trump Revolution: The Donald’s Creative Destruction Deconstructed” (June, 2016) & “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America From Post-Apartheid South Africa” (2011). She’s on Twitter, Facebook, Gab & YouTube.