RUTHFULLY YOURS

President Donald Trump is facing a revolt from his base for having signed the bloated omnibus spending bill that torpedoes his “drain the swamp” pledges. But the president now has an opportunity to achieve a small measure of redemption: he should offer loud and unequivocal support to Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, who is being hammered for reportedly having rejected identity politics in favor of meritocracy.

Zinke is facing a storm of media criticism from liberals for allegedly saying that diversity is “not important,” though his office denies that he said this. The same sources that reported Zinke’s comments say that he followed up by stating that what he cared about was excellence—and that by hiring the best people, he would in fact put together the most diverse group anyone has ever had. This second statement is a cowardly concession (as is his denial of his initial diversity observation, assuming that he made that initial statement). Sometimes meritocracy will yield diversity; sometimes it won’t. The point is that it doesn’t matter. Diversity should not be an end in itself; excellence is the goal.

Rejecting the primacy of diversity constitutes a head-on assault on the received wisdom of Washington and elite American culture. Gender and racial quotas have been the order of business for the last three decades. The #MeToo movement has only intensified pressures on public and private organizations to hire based on sex and skin color. The result: wasted resources, the sidelining of merit, and ever more virulent and irrational identity politics. The rule of the diversity regime is that you’re required to be fanatically obsessed with race and gender until you aren’t—because at that unpredictable moment, whenever it comes, noticing race and sex becomes racist and sexist.

What’s fantastic about the Zinke story, which appears to be gaining momentum, is that the Interior Secretary is being condemned for allegedly saying that he discounts racial categories in hiring, and prefers “having the right person for the right job.” This position, uncontroversial for decades, was the essence of Martin Luther King’s vision of a colorblind, merit-based society. Treating people the same way regardless of their race or sex used to be considered the definition of fairness; now it is understood to be vicious and intolerable. Kristen Clarke, president of the National Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, writes of Zinke, “the racist views harbored by members of this administration and their failure to ensure diversity must be condemned.”

There was a headline recently about the death in Kenya of the last captive northern white rhino.

This item has not yet made the MSM, but give it time. The bloviating MSM is pretty desperate for news of any kind that will shoot down Trump, and I’m certain that a determined “reporter” will come up with ambiguous and verbose parallels between Trump and the dead rhino. Perhaps the rhino shed his yellow hair?

At the moment, however, the MSM is gathering steam to make a major impeachment-worthy story over Stormy Daniels’ claim that over a decade ago (or more) she hugged Donald Trump in amorous and scandalous collusion. It is supposed that no American president ever had “relations” with a “loose” woman; one supposes that JFK was a chaste Catholic, and that FDR was a pillar of sexual propriety, as well, and that having such a tête-à-tête proves that a man who so dallied was not qualified to sit in the Oval Office. Name me a president who never had sex with any women outside his family circle. Jimmy Carter, perhaps. The MSM is no doubt hoping that Stormy will help to accomplish what Humpty Dumpty Robert Mueller failed to do after a year of “investigating” the existence of a prancing unicorn. The Mueller investigation, amounting to likely thousands of pages of useless documents, has the credibilityof the Steele Dossier, with the consistency of a dandelion puff.

The subject here is not Trump’s extracurricular adventures, which I think most Americans care very little about, but rather, freedom of speech, here and abroad. Germany’s outlawing freedom of speech concerning the opposition to and criticism of Islam is by now old hat.

The MP for the hard-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party detected in the force’s multilingual new-year greeting a bid “to appease the barbaric, Muslim, rapist hordes of men”. The next day her tweet—and, for 12 hours, her entire account—vanished from Twitter. In the subsequent political storm Alice Weidel, co-leader of the AfD, came to Ms von Storch’s defence: “Our authorities are subordinating themselves to imported, rampaging, groping, punching, stabbing migrant mobs,” she tweeted. That, too, was promptly deleted.