Some more background on why Trump’s executive order rescinding affirmative action was so massive.
▪️The Civil Rights Act never defined discrimination. So when Johnson issued EO 11246 prohibiting discrimination among certain govt contractors, what did that mean? Not a whole lot at the time, but that quickly changed.
▪️At the time the Civil Rights Act was passed, discrimination was widely thought to be the purposeful exclusion (or inclusion) based on race. Over time, the courts and govt bureaucrats interpreted discrimination to mean disparate impact, which is how “woke” ideology snuck in and took over.
▪️No longer did discrimination have to do with an employer’s intent. Any hiring practices or decisions that appeared to benefit one group or disadvantage another was deemed discriminatory. After all, one key tenet in woke ideology is that if a minority group isn’t sufficiently represented it’s because of discrimination/racism.
▪️This is why IQ and other aptitude tests all but vanished in hiring. If your test ends up favoring one group over another, it was deemed discriminatory and illegal. Physical standards for women had to be lowered for jobs like police and fire fighters. Even literacy tests for teachers have been subject to civil rights lawsuits.
▪️If you’re thinking that no matter what a company does there will be disparate impact, you’re correct! The disparate impact standard meant that companies had to collect and obsess over race and gender data among their employees. If the numbers were “problematic” you needed a plan.
▪️Under this standard, virtually every company could be in violation of employment law, so what to do? Get an HR department, declare your company is committed to diversity, equity and inclusion, institute sensitivity training and hope the bureaucrats leave you alone.
▪️Ironically, when the Civil Rights Act was passed, there was much worry from legislators about disparate impact and reverse discrimination. The promoters of the bill went out of their way to promise reverse discrimination would never happen. The legacy of this is that any sort of explicit hiring quotas are forbidden.
▪️But it took less than a decade after its passage for disparate impact to become the standard and for the woke ideology to backdoor slowly become enmeshed in corporate hiring practices. While quotas are forbidden, so is hiring the wrong amount of certain races and genders.
▪️There are several steps needed to undo this, but rescinding Johnson’s EO is one of the most important. This, combined with the president encouraging companies to not practice DEI and eventually, the SCOTUS removing the disparate impact standard and clarifying the definition of discrimination in the CRA, will go a long way.
I first critiqued this terrible take by looking at how food has actually improved substantially. Even though I said the same could be done in every category, people said “you’re only doing food.” So let’s do air travel and see why it’s not gotten better, not worse.
▪️Aircraft have greatly improved. Just 15-20 years ago, many domestic routes (~15%) were flown by turboprops like the Brasilia, Dash 8 or Saab. Now, almost everything is in jets, and most aircraft have WiFi. Some even have Starlink, where you probably have faster WiFi than your home. Most major airlines offer dozens or hundreds of movies and shows to watch.
▪️Newer designs like the 787 have lower cabin altitudes and improved humidity, which make a huge difference in passenger comfort on long haul flights. The first/business class international market has gotten very competitive globally, with many carriers offering excellent service and amenities. Pods, suites, showers, etc. Coach still sucks but is dramatically cheaper ...
This is the complete opposite of an empirical fact. The right has now joined the left in being pessimistic about the modern world and completely unappreciative of the amazing abundance we now have. I’ll just focus on food here, but you could do it for almost every category.
▪️Fresh produce used to be available only in season. In the winter it was canned or frozen. People used to send fruit for Christmas gifts, it was that much of a luxury good. Now, you can get giant, sweet berries year around in every grocery store. Corn on the cob in February. Not to mention once rare items like dragon fruit, heirloom tomatoes or baby bok choy.
▪️If you didn’t live on the coast, seafood was either not available, frozen, or extremely expensive. If you lived in the Midwest and traveled to coastal locales you would quite literally be able to eat food you had never seen. Salmon has become much more abundant and accessible. You can get fresh ahi at Walmart today. Sushi and oyster bars exist everywhere ...
▪️This is a proposal that pertains only to graduate level nursing degrees, not undergraduate ones (which were never considered professional degrees). The proposal will have a 30-60 day public comment period next year, where groups can object, before the DoE will decide on it.
▪️This is about how much federal student loans someone can take out for a particular degree. The cap on graduate degrees is $100k ($20,500/yr), while a “professional degree” limit is $200k ($50k/yr).
▪️Under the new rule proposal, professional degrees include:
🔹Pharmacy
🔹Dentistry
🔹Veterinary medicine
🔹Chiropractic
🔹Law
🔹Medicine (including osteopathic medicine & podiatry)
🔹Optometry
🔹Theology
▪️The nursing degrees excluded are ones like master of science in nursing (MSN), doctor of nursing practice (DNP) and PhD in nursing. These degrees would be limited to $100k in federal student loans, like all other graduate degrees.
▪️These changes came from the One Big Beautiful Bill’s...
