UC Berkeley Law Review Poised To Delete All Application Records After Editors Pledged To Select Applicants Based on Race

The flagship law review at the University of California, Berkeley, is poised to delete all internal application records after the Washington Free Beacon reported on the journal's use of personal statements to promote a "diverse membership," sparking concerns that the journal is attempting to destroy evidence that could be used against it in the event of a discrimination probe.

The post UC Berkeley Law Review Poised To Delete All Application Records After Editors Pledged To Select Applicants Based on Race appeared first on .

Berkeley set out to defend DEI — and found no financial upside



A new study meant to reassure corporations about diversity, equity, and inclusion programs has delivered an awkward finding for DEI advocates: Keeping the programs produced no measurable financial advantage over abandoning them.

Researchers at the University of California in Berkeley compared S&P 500 companies that maintained DEI after President Trump’s January 2025 executive order with companies that scaled back their commitments. Firms that kept their programs performed about as well in stock returns and revenue as those that retreated.

Whether a company favors DEI or rejects it, executives cannot assume that a politically popular label will protect conduct that violates anti-discrimination law.

The authors and sympathetic news coverage emphasized the other half of that result: Companies could keep DEI without suffering a significant financial penalty. CBS News framed the finding that way, as did a subsequent Forbes analysis. But the conclusion cuts both ways. If companies paid no price for keeping DEI, they also paid no price for dropping it.

For investors, that raises a straightforward question: Where is the financial return from DEI?

The researchers found no statistically significant revenue or stock market advantage from maintaining the programs during the period they examined. Their paper reports an estimated effect on revenue close to zero. That does not prove every DEI initiative is worthless. It does mean this study offers no measurable payoff for the policies its authors defend.

DEI advocates have spent years insisting that diversity improves the bottom line. McKinsey’s influential reports linked leadership diversity with financial outperformance. But a 2024 reanalysis of its findings failed to reproduce statistically significant relationships using U.S. public-company data. A 2025 review found the broader empirical case considerably less certain than the confident corporate sales pitches suggest.

Companies that believe particular DEI practices improve performance should identify those practices and produce evidence that their gains are real and repeatable. The obligation to prove the promised return belongs to the people making the promise.

Even a demonstrated financial benefit would not settle whether a practice is ethical or lawful. The moral defense of DEI deserves scrutiny too. A corporate policy that uses race or sex to distribute opportunity may generate its own grievances, regardless of the language used to promote it.

Employment discrimination complaints have hardly disappeared. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission received 88,201 new charges in fiscal year 2025, roughly level with the previous year and substantially above 2021. Those figures alone cannot tell us how many complaints involved DEI. They do underscore why employers should examine the legal consequences of their hiring and promotion rules.

The Berkeley paper also reveals an unmistakable political perspective. It refers to the Trump administration as a “regime,” discusses what its authors regard as “democratic erosion,” and describes the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and George Floyd collectively as “murders.” It suggests that organized corporate resistance can hinder the consolidation of executive power.

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Paras Griffin/Getty Images

Those judgments do not, by themselves, invalidate the statistical analysis. They do help explain the argument the authors want their findings to support: Corporations should feel free to maintain DEI as an expression of political and moral commitment, even without a measurable financial gain.

But companies face risks beyond the market response measured in the study. Public controversy can damage a brand, and legal enforcement can carry a steep price.

Consider Cracker Barrel’s 2025 rebranding backlash. Critics connected its logo redesign to broader complaints about the company’s “woke” direction. By mid-September, its shares had fallen nearly 16% since the August announcement, customer traffic had weakened, and the company had reversed course. A logo controversy is not a controlled test of DEI policy. It is a reminder that political and cultural backlash can have financial consequences.

The federal government has supplied a more direct warning. In April, IBM agreed to pay more than $17 million to resolve Justice Department allegations involving discriminatory employment practices and federal contracting. Deloitte settled for $21.5 million in August, and Accenture agreed to pay $25 million in September to resolve similar allegations. The settlements resolved government claims without findings of liability, but the costs were real.

The Justice Department also issued guidance outlining its view of unlawful discriminatory practices tied to federal funding. Whether a company favors DEI or rejects it, executives cannot assume that a politically popular label will protect conduct that violates anti-discrimination law.

The Berkeley study shows that companies maintaining DEI suffered no detectable financial penalty in the period examined. It also fails to establish a financial reward. Advocates who want shareholders, employees, and customers to support these programs still owe them a case grounded in performance, ethics, and law. That case cannot rest on assurances that DEI is harmless.

​Young men are being left behind



From a young age, we ask kids what they want to be when they grow up. Firefighter, doctor, president, mechanic, astronaut, teacher, actor — the list goes on.

Dreams shift as children discover their gifts, what they enjoy, and where the two overlap. The kid who wanted to be a doctor might change his mind after finding out he can design spaceships and likes math better than anatomy.

What discoveries, studies, and breakthroughs are missing from academia simply because the men who would have made them were unfairly denied the opportunity?

Allowing people to follow their dreams has always been an American aspiration and part of what makes our country exceptional. Yet today, one group of Americans — young men — is at risk of being shut out from their dreams, largely through no fault of their own.

Mountains of evidence show that our education system and economy are increasingly leaving boys and men behind. This is a national crisis our political leaders must urgently acknowledge and address.

For Exhibit A, simply look at the last 50 years of wage trends. Although earnings for women have steadily increased, nearly doubling in the last half-century, men’s wages have remained largely stagnant. Indeed, while the inflation-adjusted median full-time wage for women has grown by $21,750 since 1976, it has increased for men by only $7,570.

But it gets worse. In August, 98% of U.S. job growth went to women according to government statistics. While female employment has grown by 870,000 since last year, male employment has contracted by 1.5 million. Roughly one-third of men are not participating in the labor force, including over half of young men ages 16-24.

The same trend is happening in college participation. In the mid-1990s, American men and women ages 25-34 were equally likely to have completed college, but the gap has ballooned since then. Today, about 47% of young women have a bachelor’s degree compared to 37% of young men. Women make up about 55% of U.S. undergraduate enrollment, while men account for 40% (with the remaining 5% being unknown or unreported).

Male education and workforce success directly impact family formation. Women are more likely to marry a man with a steady income, and men are more likely to want to work if they have something to work toward. But couples are told to wait until they have financial stability before having kids, a goal that is increasingly difficult to reach, leading them to have fewer children.

And while feminists may cheer the number of women in the 9-to-5 work world, it has not come without a cost. As many observers (including Elizabeth Warren before she entered politics) have pointed out, more mothers entering the workforce has made households increasingly reliant on both parents working to stay afloat, creating a “two-income trap.” It is financially unfeasible for many women to stay home with their children, even when they want to.

Many factors have led us to the current status quo. American industrial and trade policy over the last half-century has shipped many blue-collar jobs overseas while driving down wages for those who remain. Economic policy influenced by feminism has convinced many women to invest in careers rather than family. But we should not overlook another important driver of young men’s present disadvantage: the rapid proliferation of DEI across society.

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Blaze Media Illustration

Jacob Savage’s essay in Compact magazine last December highlighted the devastating impact of the DEI regime on young men. Fittingly titled “The Lost Generation,” Savage chronicled how Millennial and Gen Z men over the last 10 to 15 years have found themselves chained to the same job, or without one entirely, while less qualified but more “diverse” employees rise in the ranks. This practice has run rampant across numerous industries — entertainment, academia, the medical field — with untold casualties.

What film masterpieces did we miss by passing over a promising writer for a more diverse candidate? What medical breakthroughs did we forgo to reach a quota? What discoveries, studies, and breakthroughs are missing from academia simply because the men who would have made them were unfairly denied the opportunity?

Fortunately, DEI has been in retreat lately, thanks in large part to the Trump administration’s crackdown. DEI has also declined in popularity in the workforce, though it still boasts majority support amid widespread ignorance about its true consequences. Even so, DEI remains a powerful force that could regain greater influence if political conditions become more favorable.

Meanwhile, young men continue to suffer. A recent Institute for Family Studies survey found that about half of men ages 18-29 now see the American dream as out of reach. Many have retreated into destructive pastimes such as pornography and gambling, while suicide rates have risen to record highs. The statistics are grim in every direction.

So where does this leave us?

Our young men are still dreaming as they did when they were little boys, but they are being forced to acknowledge that hard work may not be enough to achieve those dreams. In America especially — the country founded on the ability to get ahead and create something spectacular — this is a reality we should not tolerate.

The situation young men face is an issue lawmakers can no longer afford to ignore. We need an economy where men’s skills and contributions are valued and appropriately compensated. We also need to make it possible for a family to raise children on one income. There is no easy fix for these problems. It will necessarily involve a myriad of approaches, from fully eliminating DEI to bringing back blue-collar work and stabilizing our broken dollar, whose debasement undergirds so much of Americans’ current struggles.

To save the American dream from today’s threats, we must tackle this challenge. We owe it to the next generation of boys who still dare to dream.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published in the American Mind.

'The Simpsons' finally brings back Apu — after 9 years of agonizing over political correctness
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'The Simpsons' finally brings back Apu — after 9 years of agonizing over political correctness



After nearly nine years of silence, Apu Nahasapeemapetilon is finally speaking again on "The Simpsons."

But before the Indian convenience store clerk could return to Springfield, the show's writers apparently had some apologizing to do.

'When my agent called me about a "Simpsons" audition, I knew exactly what role it was for, and the idea actually made my stomach sink.'

Thank you, come again

Sunday night's episode, "The Revengening," brought back the once-popular character with a new voice actor, Sunil Malhotra, and a storyline that doubles as an apology for the way the show handled the controversy that drove Apu off the air in 2017.

In the episode, Apu returns to Springfield seeking revenge on the townspeople who abandoned him. He tells them he has spent years on the "island of forgotten garbage," where he encountered another discarded Springfield resident, Dr. Nick Riviera.

"I am the man you left for dead," Apu declares. "I am the one you pretended never existed!"

In a clever bit of self-mockery, the writers have Springfield's residents parrot what sounds like their own years of agonized internal debate over Apu.

Marge — "clearly serving as a mouthpiece for the show's producers," Variety notes — is first to respond: "Apu, we're so sorry we left you for dead. Believe me, we wanted to do the right thing."

Bart admits they were scared and didn't know what to do. Lenny says there were "many internal conversations about it," while Carl concedes that those conversations "kind of just didn't go anywhere."

Homer eventually joins the chorus of apologies, recalling Apu's many contributions to Springfield and admitting that he took his old friend for granted.

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No 'Kwik' fix

Apu had been a fixture on "The Simpsons" since its first season, running the Kwik-E-Mart, shamelessly gouging customers, and occasionally enjoying adventures beyond the convenience store — including a stint in Homer's Beatles-inspired barbershop quartet, the Be Sharps.

He was also at the center of a controversy that erupted following comedian Hari Kondabolu's 2017 documentary, "The Problem with Apu."

The film argued that Apu's exaggerated Indian accent and stereotypical portrayal had helped perpetuate unflattering assumptions about Indian-Americans. Kondabolu was particularly critical of the fact that Apu was voiced by Hank Azaria, a white actor.

But not all Indian-Americans agreed that Apu was a problem. In a 2018 Washington Post essay, Indian-American writer Amar Shah explained that he saw his own father, who had operated convenience stores and gas stations, reflected in the character. Although Shah acknowledged being irritated by Apu jokes as a child, he eventually came to appreciate the similarities between Apu and his hardworking, entrepreneurial father.

"Does he offend me? No, because some part of him is real," Shah wrote.

When Shah asked his father what he thought of Apu, the older man had a less philosophical response: "Who? I don't know who that is. I have an inspection to worry about."

Indian comedian Kunaal Roy Kapur was similarly untroubled by the character's exaggerated accent. In a 2016 NPR discussion, he described Apu's voice as entertaining and funny, saying he had no issue with it.

Azaria eventually agreed with the criticism of his portrayal. In 2020, he announced that he would no longer voice Apu, and the show's producers subsequently declared that white performers would no longer voice nonwhite characters.

The bizarre decision led to the recasting of other characters, including Dr. Hibbert and Carl Carlson. But Apu was effectively sidelined. Although he occasionally appeared in the background, he hadn't spoken a word since October 2017.

Until Sunday.

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L-R: Hank Azaria. Alexandra Wyman/WireImage; Sunil Malhotra. Brian To/FilmMagic

'I am Apu!'

Apu's new voice belongs to Indian-American actor Sunil Malhotra, who told Variety that his initial reaction to being offered the role was hardly enthusiastic.

"When my agent called me about a 'Simpsons' audition, I knew exactly what role it was for, and the idea actually made my stomach sink," he said.

Malhotra wondered whether the writers had learned from the controversy, whether Apu could be reinvented, and whether the character's return could acknowledge past mistakes without disappointing longtime fans.

His reservations were personal. The actor said he had turned down his first professional acting offer 28 years earlier because it required him to play a stereotypical "Hindu guy."

"To be the butt of the joke wasn't something I was willing to do, and I've turned down similar work multiple times since," he explained.

Before accepting the Apu role, Malhotra insisted on meeting with showrunner Matt Selman and co-executive producer Cesar Mazariegos. He ultimately described the experience of working with the producers as collaborative and said bringing Apu back felt like a reclamation.

The actor was particularly pleased with the episode's climactic moment, when Apu removes his disguise and loudly announces his identity.

"I'd be lying if I didn't say that the sweetest part of all was unleashing that righteously rage-fueled 'I am Apu!' — on behalf of so many of us — over and over in the studio until we got it just right," Malhotra said.

He added that he hoped the episode was "equally satisfying for longtime fans" as it was for "other South Asian kids who, like me, stopped watching at some point along the way."

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The global meritocracy myth sells Americans’ inheritance cheap



Americans are being told that restricting legal immigration would rig the competition for jobs and college seats. Apparently, allowing citizens to compete with the entire planet is “meritocracy,” while giving them preference in their own country is “discrimination.”

The argument has gained force as scrutiny moves from illegal crossings to work visas and foreign student admissions. Employers use H-1B visas to recruit skilled workers, and public universities often collect higher tuition from students who live outside their states. Critics of tighter visa rules portray any preference for Americans as a kind of affirmative action for the native-born.

A nation is its people, not an economic zone meant for optimization. Even if a global meritocracy were possible, it would be immoral to subject your nation to it.

The claim assumes something remarkable: America exists chiefly to administer a worldwide talent contest. Its citizens have no special claim on the institutions, industries, and opportunities their country built.

Even on its own terms, the global meritocracy argument collapses under scrutiny. It’s a myth.

Merit requires standards, judges, and rules. A perfect score wins in bowling; a low score wins in golf. Hit the pins with a golf ball on a bowling lane and nobody objects. Roll that same ball across a putting green with your hand and you have cheated. What counts as skill depends on the rules of the game. Standards require a recognized authority too.

University admissions present a far harder problem. Americans argue endlessly about standardized tests, grades, extracurricular activities, and what a degree should prove. Colleges that abandoned entrance exams are now restoring them, while others still refuse to consider scores. Even within one country, administrators cannot agree on what qualifies an applicant.

Now expand that disagreement worldwide.

Some countries place extraordinary pressure on students to excel in examinations that determine their educational futures. Others rely more heavily on interviews, recommendations, or years of coursework. Each system rewards different habits. More importantly, credentials are only as reliable as the institutions that issue them and the people who verify their authenticity.

Academic fraud also complicates the picture. Cheating and plagiarism plague American schools, and universities abroad confront their own scandals. Cheating and plagiarism are endemic in China and India. India’s University Grants Commission maintains a public list of institutions that lack authority to award degrees, but diploma mills where credentials are manufactured at scale remain rampant.

An American diploma hardly guarantees competence, either. Universities have diluted requirements, expanded administrative bureaucracies, and sold credentials whose value employers increasingly question. Yet the remedy for weak standards is honest verification, not faith that a global marketplace will somehow discover merit on its own.

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Blaze Media Illustration

Culture adds another complication. Americans generally expect a posted store price to apply to every customer. In markets where bargaining is customary, skill can mean negotiating the lowest price through patience, personal relationships, and persistence. The same conduct can be admired in one setting and treated as manipulation in another.

Importing large numbers of people also imports habits, expectations, and assumptions about fairness. A country that refuses to acknowledge this invites conflict over the rules by which everyone is expected to live.

We have our own contradictions. Universities and employers spent years elevating diversity goals alongside measures of achievement. Courts and lawmakers have pushed back against some of those practices. On paper, federal law prohibits hiring discrimination based on race, sex, and national origin. Still, anyone who watched institutions defend racial preferences should be skeptical when those same institutions suddenly invoke neutral merit as an unquestionable principle.

The H-1B debate raises a separate problem. Federal rules require employers to pay visa workers at least the applicable prevailing wage or the wage paid to comparable employees, whichever is higher. The program was not written as permission to hire foreign workers at half price. But wage safeguards are only as good as enforcement, and employers can still gain leverage when a worker’s legal status depends heavily on keeping a particular job.

That dependency can hurt both the foreign employee and the American applicant. An employer may prefer the worker who has fewer options. Calling the resulting arrangement a free and fair contest does not make it one.

Even a perfect ranking of talent would not answer who America's schools and employers ought to serve. An American need not prove superior intelligence or virtue to claim a privileged place in his own country.

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The case against the feasibility of a global meritocracy is sound, but the most important argument against the practice is one of ownership. A nation is its people, not an economic zone meant for optimization. Even if a global meritocracy were possible, it would be immoral to subject your nation to it.

The opportunities inside a country do not emerge from the ether. Americans inherit institutions built through generations of work, investment, and sacrifice. They finance schools, build infrastructure, defend borders, and bear the cost of political failure. The inheritance carries a moral claim, just as children have a claim to their parents’ estate.

Americans may welcome foreign talent when it serves their interests. They can debate which visas advance national purposes and how many to grant. They are not obligated to treat every qualified applicant on earth as equally entitled to the opportunities their country provides. Citizenship must carry a claim that a temporary visa cannot erase.

Calling visa restrictions “DEI for Americans” turns national obligation into an accusation of unfairness. Advocates of limitless competition insist that any preference for Americans violates meritocracy, even while relying on institutions that cannot agree on merit's meaning or enforce its rules. Their supposedly neutral standard disguises a political demand.

A nation that treats its people as interchangeable bidders in a global labor auction has surrendered its purpose. America was not built to supply corporations with cheap labor or universities with tuition-paying students. Americans have every right to prefer their own people, especially in employment and college admissions. Their future should not be sacrificed on the altar of economic ideology.

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Steve Deace: Those who control the storytelling control the culture



What can America's most successful movies tell us about America itself?

Steve Deace, Todd Erzen, and Aaron McIntire set out to answer that question by examining the 25 highest-grossing films in U.S. history — when adjusted for inflation of course.

From "Gone with the Wind," "The Ten Commandments," and "The Sound of Music" to "Star Wars," "Titanic," and today's blockbuster franchises, the list offers a window into the stories that once united the culture.

"The Graduate" made the end of the list, which Deace calls “the only intentionally subversive film on this list.”

Erzen notes that it’s a “really well-crafted” film about “people living hollow, empty lives.”


“They’re just, you know, going in any direction they can think of to find some level of meaning and purpose. That’s a conversation worth having,” he says.

“That is the conversation that’s being buried by most people. Like there’s a lot of young white men who are struggling for meaning and purpose, and they’re choosing video games over a lot of other things,” he continues.

“Today,” he adds, “it’s just about victim culture and whiny grievances and DEI, and you know, who wants to be a part of that?”

McIntire points out that there’s “a gap there from 1999 to ... 2014, 2015.”

“That was the era of 'Harry Potter,' 'Lord of the Rings,' 'Avatar.' ... Those were, I thought, cultural icons. They are cultural icons,” he says.

“And then on top of that, once you get past that 14-, 15-year gap, the movies that are on this list, the entries that are on this list, what do they have in common?” he asks, answering himself, “They’re franchises.”

“So nothing original,” Deace comments. “Everything’s a derivative.”

“That’s not a good trend line in my estimation, but it kind of fits hand in glove with not only the big picture culturally that we’re seeing, but particularly in Hollywood,” McIntire adds.

However, while the left has run Hollywood for quite some time, Deace points out that the right is gaining ground in this part of the culture war.

“To our credit, if you look at films like 'Young Washington,' you’re seeing us, you know, beginning to seize the opportunity,” he explains. “It does show right now, the opportunity that exists to gain a serious beachhead within the most powerful pop culture medium in the history of this entire planet.”

And this is important, he explains, because “who controls a culture's stories and myths controls a culture every single time.”

“If we gain a serious beachhead in the storytelling realm, folks, then that’s worth five to ten Senate seats,” he adds.

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The danger of calling the left stupid



A long list of prominent conservatives have referred to leftists and Democrats as dumb, stupid, incompetent, crazy, and insane. In 2007, Ann Coulter wrote the book “If Democrats Had Any Brains, They’d Be Republicans.” Both Rush Limbaugh and President Trump regularly referred to Democrats as “Dumbocrats.” More recently, the leader of the House Freedom Caucus called Democrats “the crazy party,” and JD Vance framed the contrast between the parties as “common sense vs. crazy.”

Matt Margolis titled a piece in PJ Media this year “Democrats Are Too Stupid to Heed This Warning” and posited that somewhere between the 1990s and today, the Democratic Party lost its mind. Some of this stuff gets a chuckle, but conservatives need to be careful with this narrative.

Calling an adversary’s actions crazy or stupid implies that those actions produce an outcome fundamentally different from what their architects intended.

Conservatives need to understand that this tactic can not only contradict the more serious messages they’re trying to convey about leftist policies, it can also remove responsibility from leftists for their malevolence.

Consider a recent interview in which Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) explained that the left’s open-border policy was part of a shrewd, long-term plan to bring in new Democrat constituents, with sanctuary-city policies as another step in that plan. Yet in the same interview, he called the policy “just stupid” and “one of the dumbest policies I’ve ever heard of,” and, in a later interview, adding that “just about every single position today’s left adopts is crazy.”

So we are told that leftists are shrewd, long-term planners who are simultaneously stupid and crazy. Which is it? The distinction may seem trivial, but it’s not.

We need to distinguish between leftist leadership and its dominant agenda on the one hand and its useful idiots on the other.

To be clear, there are certainly some dim bulbs among the left — both in leadership and rank and file. Showcase examples include Vice President Kamala Harris, who frequently struggles to articulate coherent sentences; Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.), who worried during a congressional hearing that Guam might “tip over and capsize” if it became too populated; and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), who told us that America with defunded police would look just like the wealthy white suburbs.

On a broader scale, consider millions of California voters who knowingly continue to vote for politicians whose policies have devastated the Golden State.

But these examples aside, the overarching leftist agenda — and the people who genuinely understand, subscribe to, and orchestrate it — cannot simply be dismissed as stupid. Doing so is dangerous.

The rise of the New Left

As has often been the case with radical leftist movements in the United States, their stated objective is to dismantle existing American institutions, traditions, and governing structures in favor of a fundamentally different social order. Put simply, they despise America as it currently exists.

Once you understand this premise, their positions look less like harebrained, stupid, illogical, or unworkable ideas, but more like carefully conceived, sometimes ingenious tactics intended to advance that larger objective.

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Sorbetto/Getty Images

In this light, things like defunding the police, draconian regulations and carbon taxes, mothballing coal and nuclear plants, wide-open borders, turning a blind eye to Medicaid and NGO fraud, supporting genital mutilation of minors, opposing voter ID, massive expansion of entitlement spending, lowering combat readiness standards in the military in the name of gender equality, and support for adversaries like Hamas can be understood not as disconnected examples of incompetence, but as elements of a broader ideological program.

If it does damage to America and hastens the great realignment, they support it.

Whether one agrees with that interpretation of any particular policy is a separate question. The important point is that conservatives shouldn’t automatically assume destructive policies are the product of stupidity.

In “America’s Cultural Revolution,” Christopher Rufo explains how the radical left’s approach evolved from traditional Marxist class conflict toward an emphasis on race, gender, and identity. Traditional Marxism defined the conflict largely in socioeconomic terms, pitting the working class against the wealthy. In the United States, however, the middle class proved too large, mobile, and invested in the existing system for a conventional class-based revolution to take hold.

Influenced by thinkers such as Antonio Gramsci and Herbert Marcuse, the New Left increasingly emphasized “the war of position,” “the long march through the institutions,” and racial and cultural identity as alternatives to direct political conflict. Barack Obama became a highly consequential figure in this transformation.

During his 2008 presidential campaign, Obama told an audience in Columbia, Missouri, “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” In the years that followed, he did precisely that.

The media proactively escalated the new narrative, increasing use of the terms racist, racists, and racism by roughly 700% between 2011 and 2019. The phrase “white supremacy” rarely appeared in the media until 2015, but by 2019, the Times and the Post were using it 17 to 18 times more often than in 2014, with similar jumps for “systemic racism,” “white privilege,” “unconscious bias,” and “whiteness.”

Gallup found that the share of respondents who believed black-white relations were “very good” or “somewhat good” plummeted from about 70% to 47% by 2015.

From the perspective of those who designed it, this was a deliberate and consequential political strategy. Arthur Brooks put it well, pointing out that the president ran on optimism and unity but governed on pessimism and division. In 2011, Obama’s Executive Order 13583 cemented DEI language, metrics, and policies across federal agencies. The resulting fallout has been well documented.

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Schöning/ullstein bild/Getty Images

Stupid or strategic?

To call leftist leaders or their policies stupid is therefore more than an unfortunate choice of words. It can mislead conservatives regarding what they are confronting.

We don’t tend to think of stupid people as evil. Perceived stupidity neutralizes perceived intent and, to some degree, perceived blame. “Stupid” is not the word that comes to mind for figures like Stalin, Mao, or Pol Pot, and it would have done us no favors to describe the Axis powers in World War II as merely stupid or crazy.

Calling an adversary’s actions crazy or stupid implies that those actions produce an outcome fundamentally different from what their architects intended. But what if the opposite is true? What if the policies are producing precisely the disruption their architects sought?

Once upon a time, Democrats and Republicans were two parties with broadly similar hopes for America but sharply different views on how to get there. That time has passed.

Conservatives should not lose sight of what they believe to be the left’s overarching mission. They need to describe political actions, and the consequences those actions produce, not simply as the unfortunate results of incompetent or stupid people, but as those of an underlying ideological agenda.

That doesn’t mean every Democrat is a radical leftist, every leftist is an intellectual strategist, or every controversial policy reflects a coordinated conspiracy. Nor does it mean conservatives should stop pointing out genuinely foolish statements or incompetent decisions. It means something simpler: Stop confusing foolishness with strategy.

Some political actors may indeed be foolish. Others may be highly intelligent and deeply committed to an ideological vision conservatives regard as destructive. Those two categories shouldn’t be confused.

If conservatives want to understand and effectively challenge the modern left, they should focus less on calling its leaders stupid and more on understanding what they’re trying to accomplish. That leadership may be insidious, duplicitous, destructive, morally wrong, and in some cases evil. But dismissing them as stupid or crazy risks missing the point entirely.

Let’s start calling them out on what they actually intend to do.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published at the American Mind.

Vibe Shift: Self-Awareness Triumphs at Columbia

Higher-ed haters (of which, sadly, there are many) would have you believe our elite universities are overrun with self-serious scolds. That students and faculty alike inhabit a cloistered fantasy world, consumed by radical ideologies that preclude them from recognizing how absurd they seem to normal people.

The post Vibe Shift: Self-Awareness Triumphs at Columbia appeared first on .