A North Carolina official tacitly admitted that DEI necessitates the hiring of unqualified, incompetent individuals as he announced that the state’s Department of Labor (DOL) will ditch DEI for merit-based hiring and evaluation.
Trump’s Office of Personnel Management required information on federal employees’ competence, and his Education Department axed $15 million in DEI university grants. As part of that same trend, at the end of last month, the North Carolina DOL tossed its DEI metrics, as Commissioner Luke Farley finally faced the embarrassing truth that DEI was invented to give unqualified Marxists access to the mainstream.
It is good to see that in North Carolina, which voted for Donald Trump in the 2024 election but did not vote for Republican Mark Robinson for governor, that there are officials willing to admit change is necessary. The NCDOL “will hire and evaluate employees based on merit and on their ability to fulfill our mission to protect the health, safety and well-being of North Carolinians,” Farley said. One area of possible concern is his new, very vague “measure related to safety and health,” but one hopes that he will live up to his stated “goal is to hire and retain qualified, professional individuals who will provide excellent service to our state.”
The reality is that merit-based hiring will never exclude any one race or ethnicity, even if it doesn’t always bring in the “quotas” Democrats want. The U.S. military, for instance, was very diverse long before DEI became a prime focus. And think of how many brilliant and influential Americans there have been of all skin colors, from George Washington Carver to Thomas Edison to Clarence Thomas to Charles Curtis to Ajay Bhatt.
For Our VIPs: Trump Administration: Restoring Meritocracy in Spite of Bureaucracy
Today in the Catholic Church is the feast honoring Josephine Bakhita, an extraordinary Sudanese woman who went from abusive enslavement to freedom and sanctity in Italy. She forgave all those who had tortured or discriminated against her, and in so doing, managed to create love and unity among those around her. Here in America, we had Booker T. Washington, who likewise was marvelously forgiving toward those who had enslaved or otherwise practiced grave injustice toward him.
Washington didn’t have or want to have anything like DEI to give him artificial success. He criticized those who stirred up grievances, achieved greatness through merit, and expected excellence in his students and family, too. “If you want to lift yourself up, lift up someone else,” he advised.
It is, of course, much more difficult to be successful on one’s own merits than on arbitrary characteristics such as skin tone, even in modern America, where most people don’t have to face the sort of systemic prejudice Booker T. Washington experienced. Being excellent at a certain job or skill requires long, hard, consistent work. That’s something woke leftists are largely unwilling to invest. DEI inherently helps unqualified people succeed unjustly while artificially excluding qualified people. That is why its increasing unpopularity post-Trump inauguration is such a victory for our nation, as it struggles out of a morass of mediocrity.
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