By William McGimpsey

Mere days into the new Trump administration and DEI mandates have been abolished, official government policy is there are only two genders, and Lyndon Johnson’s executive order authorising affirmative action has been terminated.

Trump promised in his inauguration speech to forge a new society based on “colourblind meritocracy”. It’s still early days, but the indications are he’s serious.

The symbolism of the inauguration occurring on Martin Luther King Day was not empty. King is famous for his “I have a dream” speech, where he called on America to “rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed”, namely that “all men are created equal.” He had “a dream that one day my four little children will live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character.”

However, in practice that is not what the civil rights era ushered in. The Civil Rights Act and later executive orders gave rise to a system of systemic privilege for ethnic minorities, women and gays. This was reflected in affirmative action programs, diversity initiatives, and minority protections in the law that were never extended to the white heterosexual majority. These programs all came at the expense of straight, white males and conservatives, who in effect are systemically discriminated against by these programs. But it also resulted in a stultifying inefficiency across government and eventually even private sector businesses due to the best candidates being kept out of jobs. Not only that, but every organisation had to take on the function of promoting diversity, equity and inclusion as well as fulfilling its core function: you cannot serve two masters, and these requirements destroyed the proper and efficient functioning of whatever institutions they were implemented in.

The fruits of MLK’s labours were thus in many ways the opposite of his “dream”, namely a nation where opportunity and privilege were allocated according to the colour of the skin rather than the “content of one’s character”. In other words, King was the midwife of wokeness, rather than “colourblindness”.

The Trump 2.0 administration seems determined to “repeal and replace” wokeness so that America can live out the true meaning of King’s creed. For what it’s worth, I think this is a vast improvement. It should not be society’s final destination however, merely our first stop along the way.

What is wokeness?

The term “woke” originally meant being alert to issues of racial injustice. It was a term that gained traction amongst African American civil rights activists and from there seeped into the public consciousness. Barack Obama did much to popularise it when he used it during his presidency.

Wokeness became a ruling ideology – one that was implemented post the 1960’s cultural and civil rights revolution in the US, and subsequently exported across the rest of the Western World. Its summum bonum was achieving socio-economic equality between all groups as defined by race, sex, sexuality and more recently gender identity.

It attained hegemonic status – being taught in the schools and universities, becoming unchallengeable within public sector bureaucracies, and informing mainstream media coverage of stories. Woke dogma became very difficult to criticise: if you tried, you were accused of various isms and phobias and made a persona non grata, in some cases losing your job, friends and prospects for social advancement.

Proponents of woke attempted to insert diversity requirements into every level of the power structure – every management team, corporate board, or advisory panel was supposed to include a variety of people from across the ethnic, sexual and gender groups. This is what DEI meant. Presumably the idea was that at every level of society compromises would have to be sought across the different groups so that all would be kept happy. Under this institutional setup “equity” becomes the most important consideration at every level by default.

A defining characteristic of wokeness is its denial of the existence of innate biological differences. Take the trans issue: wokesters wanted to sell you on the idea that whether you are a man or a woman has nothing to do with chromosomes, genitals, or ability to conceive and bear children, but rather has everything to do with how you feel. This is a radical, revolutionary, new approach to the idea of sex, based on the experience of people with gender dysphoria – something previously considered a mental illness.

To most people this is radically counter-intuitive, if not insane.

To make matters worse, women have sex-based rights. Sometimes these rights are specifically set out in law, such as the protections for women in anti-discrimination law. Other times they are customary or normative – such as the convention that we have around men’s and women’s toilets, or separate male and female sports divisions.

But if being a woman is about how you feel, rather than what you are biologically, then you end up with the absurd situation of biological males who identify as trans competing in women’s sports, using women’s toilets, and availing themselves of the anti-discrimination laws. All of which effectively eliminate the sex-based rights of women for all practical purposes.

The Roxanne Tickle case in Australia proved the point. Anti-discrimination laws established to protect women from being discriminated against were exploited by a biological man identifying as a so-called “transwoman” and used against an exclusive women’s platform. Laws designed to protect women were used against them.

As it goes for sex, so it goes for race. Wokesters deny that innate differences between racial groups really exist (that’s racist), and when you point out scientific studies showing, for example, the differences in average IQ between blacks and whites, they will call it “scientific racism”. What happened to “trust the science” you might ask.

This silliness is behind their claims about systemic racism – because if you remove the real reason why there are inequalities in group outcomes, namely innate biological differences, the only hypotheses that remain in the pool of live explanations are those involving systemic or institutional racism, implicit bias, and so on.

Their game is to lie about innate biological differences, pin all the blame for inter-group inequalities on social structures being unfair, and then use this as an excuse to roll out the programme of DEI, or gay race communism.

Rights are defined in law using words. If you can fudge the definitions of the words, you can effectively take the rights away. If women’s rights apply to men too, then basically there are no women’s rights.

As well as an ideology, wokeness functions as a political formula for legitimating the rule of a particular group, in this case I’m going to call them the “global managerial elite”. This is a group that has developed a method of social control and organisation “managerialism” and aspires to global rule (they are globalists).

Globalists are at war with anything “particular” – anything which separates one group of people from any other and identifies them as different, or having specific rights that apply only to their group. The globalist agenda is to homogenise, level and equalise everything. One reason for this a that a homogenous mass of humanity is easier to manipulate and rule over using the techniques of managerial manipulation.

This process of global homogenisation via mass immigration, and the forceful imposition of discriminatory measures aiming to achieve greater equality between groups, fuelled the fire of the populist backlash that we saw across the Western World that resulted in Brexit, Trump’s election, and the gains made by populist anti-immigration parties across the board – wokeness became decidedly unpopular and is being increasingly rejected around the world as a result.

“Colourblind meritocracy” seems to be the incoming Trump administration’s proferred replacement ruling ideology.

In my opinion this is a significant upgrade. If implemented honestly, it would mean the removal of all the post 1960’s legislative and bureaucratic infrastructure that is based on advancing under-achieving groups and promoting diversity. It should also produce a much more competent, efficient, dynamic and growth-friendly environment as DEI-hires and do-nothing bureaucracies are swept away and replaced with the best and brightest. Freedom of association, which was curtailed by the Civil Rights Act, would also be restored.

Colourblind meritocracy still has problems however:

1. Wokeness didn’t come out of nowhere: it is a response to a very real social and political problem. The existence of racial IQ gaps, along with other biological differences, mean that if “colourblind meritocracy” is applied consistently, African Americans and certain other ethnic minorities will attain very few positions of power, influence and esteem in society. This means that African Americans will not “have a seat at the table” of power in colourblind meritocratic societies, and their perspectives, values and interests may be overlooked, potentially leading to decisions being made about their communities that do not reflect their culture, values or way of life. We might not like the woke response to this issue and think the cure was worse than the disease, but nevertheless it is a real issue and will get significantly worse under colourblind meritocracy. This will probably lead to further calls for change to the colourblind meritocratic framework in future.
2. Merit is not an objective or cross-cultural ideal. Different cultures have different ideas of merit, and hence an answer to the question of who is most meritorious can only be provided to the satisfaction of a majority in relatively culturally and morally homogenous community.
3. The idea of “meritocracy” tells us nothing about who ought to be within the selection pool. One of the most heated online debates recently was over the H1B visa system in the US, where Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy effectively made the argument that “colourblind meritocracy” means that Americans have to compete with individuals from all over the world for their jobs. This is not really what most people think of when they think of a meritocracy – most people think it should be the best citizen of your country who should secure the job. Musk and Ramaswamy attempted to sneak globalism in the backdoor and portray nationalism as a form of DEI. Many people are on board the MAGA movement precisely because it is an explicit rejection of globalism – going against their wishes would split the coalition.
4. “Colourblind meritocracy” is basically a form of wilful ignorance about group differences. In many cases it is appropriate to treat people as “mere individuals” – this is the case most of the time in our personal interactions. But things are different when it comes to important questions of public policy or academic inquiry, where sometimes ethnic, cultural and religious background is important and needs to be taken into account. Immigration and multiculturalism are prime examples. When people enter a country, they not only bring themselves as an individual, they bring their entire genetic legacy, which will persist in the nation over time if they have children. The phenomenon of reversion to the mean makes it necessary to take that ethnocultural background into account in immigration decision-making. The problems of Pakistani rape gangs, Islamic terror attacks, rising crime and failing social cohesion will not be solved by “colourblind meritocracy”: these problems are caused by the policy of multiculturalism itself and can only be resolved by reversing that policy.

There is an alternative solution to wokeness and DEI that addresses these problems, one that people on the Right have long advocated. That is rather than granting these “disempowered minorities” a seat at the table of power to ensure the values and interests of their communities are appropriately catered to, we instead grant their communities a degree of independence, self-determination and self-governance. In the long-run I think people will come to see this as the common-sense middle-ground compromise between wokeness and colourblind meritocracy, as it maintains most of the benefits of both approaches while mitigating the worst drawbacks of each.

My challenge to the proponents of colourblind meritocracy

Let’s say 5-10 years from now all the enabling legislation has been passed, all the bureaucratic changes have been made, all our businesses and organisations have adapted and we’re living in a fully operational colourblind meritocracy.

Imagine you are a low-level policy analyst in the Department of Immigration and you have been asked to prepare a briefing for the Minister on changes to the immigration system that would improve society. My question is this: In the colourblind meritocracy, will that low-level policy analyst be free to include in his briefing information about the harms diversity causes to social cohesion, social trust and the general wellbeing of citizens? Will he feel free to include information like the fact that people of African descent are 17 times more likely to commit violent crime? What about information about differences in IQ between races? Would he feel comfortable recommending preventing Africans from migrating into the country? Or Muslims? What about recommending the immigration settings promote ethnic, cultural and religious homogeneity rather than diversity? Or will that low-level policy analyst be disciplined for including such things in his briefing? Will such actions prove “career limiting” as they say – condemning the poor analyst to be sidelined, treated with passive aggressive disdain and looked over for promotion until he gives up and takes up a career elsewhere.

This is not a moot point. This is my personal experience and the personal experience of many others in our society – not just in the government, but in academia, in the corporate world, basically everywhere. For society to function properly, we have to be able to tell the truth about important and controversial matters. My provisional support for the idea of colourblind meritocracy hinges on this – if that briefing can be written without the writer facing negative personal or professional consequences, I will grant my interim support to colourblind meritocracy as it is a significant improvement over the status quo, if not, I cannot support it. I am not interested in defeating woke censorship and cancel culture only for it to be replaced with colourblind and meritocratic censorship and cancel culture – we have to have a society where people can tell the truth.

However, over and above being able to write the briefing, in the society I’m striving for the Minister would actually implement its recommendations – because they are correct, and would improve the quality of life of the country’s citizens…which is the whole point. A good society would not be “colourblind”, which after all is a form of disability, it would openly acknowledge truths about racial differences rather than indoctrinate its citizens with (supposedly noble) lies about racial equality.

Martin Luther King isn’t the only person to ever have “a dream”, I’ve got one too. I’m not going to deliver it in a grand speech in front of the Washington Monument with the passionate delivery of a Southern Baptist Minister. My dream is simple and stands on its own merits – I have a dream that a young men like William McGimpsey can live in a nation where their lives aren’t ruined for telling the truth about controversial issues, where courage and independent thought are rewarded rather than punished, and where patriotism is considered a virtue rather than a form of bigotry.

“Colourblindness” is ultimately a form of cowardice. It is a refusal to deal honestly with the difficult issue of innate human differences and instead try to sweep it under the carpet. That’s not going to work in the long-run. My eyes are wide open on this issue and yours should be too – whereas we were once blind, now we see.