In the thrilling submarine movie, The Hunt for Red October, the authority of Russian sub captain Sean Connery is challenged by the political officer whose job is to ensure that the sub is run in accordance with Soviet party ideology. The man’s interference becomes so aggravating that Connery’s character kills him. We are facing a similar threat from a mountain of diversity executives.

Employing significant numbers of diversity executives is all the rage. The average university, for example, now has 45.1 people dedicated to promoting diversity on campus. The University of Michigan has a whopping 163 diversity officers. That’s 2.3 diversity officers for every one member of its history faculty. Is it any wonder that college tuition has skyrocketed?

A political commissar or political officer is responsible for ideological conformity in military units to ensure party control of the unit. Political commissars were heavily used in the Soviet Red Army, as well as in the armed forces of Nazi Germany. The U.S. can now be added to the list.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) executives -- our political commissars -- are tasked with enforcing leftist policies in corporations, universities, and government agencies. They do not contribute to the competent functioning of those institutions and in fact may detract from their profitability and efficiency.

A recent example is Stanford Law School, where the school’s diversity, equity, and inclusion dean, Tirien A. Steinbach, encouraged students to prevent a federal judge from speaking at a university function. Court of Appeals Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan was invited by the student chapter of the conservative Federalist Society to address the student body at the prestigious law school. The judge was targeted by a group of leftist students because of his ruling on a transgender pedophile in 2020, where he refused to allow her bid to get her name changed. The protestors claimed the judge had committed crimes against women, gays, blacks, and trans people.

Duncan was repeatedly shouted down and drowned out by the angry students who screamed that they hoped Duncan's daughters would be raped. He was unable to give his prepared remarks. The behavior of the protesting students was a clear violation of the school's free speech policy.

Adding to the insanity was an impromptu lecture by Steinbach. Instead of calming the students down, the diversity executive piously lectured Judge Duncan for six minutes. She asserted that free speech did not justify giving Duncan a platform and scolded him for doing "harm" with his rulings. Steinbach deliberately subverted a critical takeaway for law students, namely learning how to be aware of opposing points of view. This does not bode well for the kind of lawyers that Stanford is turning out.

Can it truly be said that Stanford is better off for employing a diversity dean? Steinbach has contributed to the demise of Stanford Law’s reputation. This is an example of how our institutions are being harmed by their reliance on DEI commissars.

Another recent example involved the Pentagon’s diversity chief, Kelisa Wing. Wing made a series of racist statements about white people. "I'm exhausted with these white folx," she wrote. "[T]his lady actually had the CAUdacity to say that black people can be racist too… I had to stop the session and give Karen the BUSINESS… [W]e are not the majority, we don't have power," Wing said in a tweet. Caudacity is a slang term that is used to describe white people. "If another Karen tells me about her feelings,” Wing wrote, “I might lose it."

Wing was appointed as diversity, equity and inclusion chief at the Pentagon’s education section, which services over 60,000 military-connected children at 160 schools around the globe. As reported by Fox News, Wing stated that her goal was to "tear down the system" in education. She asserted that it is time for a "racial reckoning" and "revolution.” In response, Rep. Elise Stefanik, who sits on the House Armed Services Committee, said, "This woke ideology is destroying our military and poisoning the minds of American children." Wing and other diversity commissars attempt to justify their divisive racist behavior by cloaking it under the banner of diversity.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion are words meant to deceive the American public. Their meaning has been distorted by the Left. To progressives, diversity is an attempt to divide Americans between alleged oppressors -- heterosexual white males -- and victimized minorities. According special privileges to minorities via diversity is the Left’s way of marginalizing white people.

Diversity is destroying the critical American value known as meritocracy. Meritocracy and diversity are opposites. Instead of hiring and promoting people based on competence, advocates for diversity want advancement to be based on race and gender. Heather Mac Donald, author of The Diversity Delusion, has warned about the consequences of this trend. China and Russia, she says, are meritocracies. When you are a scientist in China, they don’t give a damn about your race and gender. If the U.S. succumbs to identity politics, we will never be able to compete on the world stage.

Another problem we face is the Left’s demand for equity, which means equality of outcome. Everyone should have the same income, job success, house, neighborhood, etc. Equity attempts to achieve its warped conception of fairness by treating people differently based on their skin color. The downside to equality of outcome is that it can never be accomplished without control by a coercive centralized authority.

Biden’s latest executive order attempts to provide that coercive authority. It requires that every federal agency must hire equity commissars to ensure that all new federal employees will be selected based upon their skin color so that preference can be given to non-whites. This is now the official policy of the U.S. government.

After all the hullabaloo, DEI initiatives have not been successful. “It shouldn’t be surprising that most diversity programs aren’t increasing diversity,” reports the Harvard Business Review. “Laboratory studies show that this kind of force-feeding can activate bias rather than stamp it out. In analyzing three decades’ worth of data from more than 800 US firms and interviewing hundreds of line managers and executives at length, we’ve seen that companies get better results when they ease up on the control tactics.”

The drive for diversity, equity, and inclusion, wrote Bret Stephens in the New York Times, “is insulting to everyone who still believes we should be judged by the content of our character. It shouldn’t be hard to see that trying to solve the old racism with the new racism will produce only more racism,” Stephens concludes. “Justice is never achieved by turning tables.” Justice is never achieved by hiring boatloads of diversity commissars.

Ed Brodow is a conservative political commentator and author of nine books including his new #1 Amazon Best Seller, AMERICA ON ITS KNEES: The Cost of Replacing Trump with Biden. His website is www.edbrodowpoliti.cs.com

Image: Public Domain