The Diversity Industry: Guilt-Leveraging at America’s Universities

Rockwell’s invitation, speech, and its relatively courteous reception at MSU occurred in a historical period to be designated as “BD,” “Before-Diversity.” BD was a time when men were men and women still seemed to like them. Back then, “African-Americans” were politely called “colored people” — not to be confused with “people of color.” What a difference a preposition can make. Life, BD, was also a bit more carefree and relaxed, before the widespread installation of professional scolds to regulate our conversations and enforce their enlightened norms of sensitivity. At American universities in the 1960s “diversity” had not yet become the prime mover in the “mandatory chapel” sessions conducted by cult-Marxist appointees following a liturgical script of egalitarian devotion.

“Diversity” back then was just a word that aroused no particular emotion and with none of today’s odious ideological trappings. “Diversity” was merely the opposite of “sameness” or “uniformity.” In some cases, diversity was a good thing, as in a “diversity of options.” In other cases, sameness or uniformity was the desideratum, as in “same high quality,” or a “uniform” approach. There were no Vice-Presidents for Diversity and Inclusion, no diversity conferences to go to, no mandatory diversity workshops and seminars you were forced to attend, no entertaining spectacles of desperate, frantic university administrators climbing up over each other’s backs to vehemently proclaim their “commitment to diversity.” Real, self-proclaimed Nazis could be invited to campuses. Polite and well-spoken, they were viewed as “interesting,” regarded more with curiosity than as threats; half the country was not said to be in the grip of fascism.

In 1905, the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce announced that “pragmaticism” would be the best, single word to capture his work, saying that it was “ugly enough to be safe from kidnappers.” “Diversity,” like “gay,” unfortunately, was not ugly enough to save it from the multicultural kidnappers, who made it into a tool to help them, as the historian Leonard Shapiro once described Soviet propaganda, “produce a uniform pattern of public utterance in which the first trace of unorthodox thought reveals itself as jarring dissonance.” Universities must now, above all, be about “diversity.” Utterance of that word is the unmistakable, rigorously uniform signal that tightly scripted rituals of moral affirmation and admonition are about to begin. Everyone present must nod vigorously in unanimous approval to avoid falling under suspicion. Failure means expulsion, or worse.