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Older men already in their positions held on for dear life, to be sure. They also knew that to speak out against DEI was career suicide: they’d be forced out immediately if they were anything less than enthusiastic. Plenty of examples were made in the years leading up to the Great Awokening: Larry Summers being forced to step down as president of Harvard for suggesting that the under-representation of women in physics was consistent with the greater male variability hypothesis; James Watson, the co-discoverer of DNA, being forced out as the director of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory for publicly suggesting that there might be something to racial differences in IQ; Matt Taylor, lead scientist of the Rosetta mission to the comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, being driven to tears by an Internet mob because he wore a loud shirt featuring prints of hot women at the press conference celebrating the first unmanned landing on a comet. There was no degree of status or power that could protect you. That is not to excuse their cowardly complicity, of course; merely to put it in context. The old white men were not driving the cultural revolution. By and large they were being held hostage by it.
At the same time, older white men were also amongst the silent victims of this regime. The overwhelming majority of old white men are not in any particular position of authority, and those who found themselves between jobs in the 2020s found work particularly hard to come by. If you’re an engineer in your 50s or 60s, good luck getting past HR. If you have a position, good luck getting promoted. Or for that matter, keeping it. By the way, we just hired Sunpreet and his fifty cousins for ten rupees a day, they’ll be replacing you in a month, and if you want to get your severance package we’ll ask that you train them to do your job and sign this non-disclosure agreement.
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THIS is the explanation that was in the back of my head but I could never articulate!
We now know the right thing to say when the argument comes up:
"Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity" is merely a justification for elevating the incompetent over the competent.
It has the force of irresistible truth, because it is the truth and they know it in their bones.