Dear fellow Americans and citizens of the world: an awful idea is being rammed down our throats and too many of us simply nod our heads like compliant sheep. The toxic concept of which I speak is ‘equity’, not to be confused with equal opportunity – which is a noble idea and must always be integral to American society.

DEI – which stands for diversity, equity, and inclusion – is all the rage. Woke corporate America is increasingly mandating DEI training for its employees and creating ludicrous positions such as DEI Director. Colleges and universities – long a staple of the American left – have proudly incorporated DEI into their mission.

Many Americans applaud DEI, mistaking it for a formidable weapon against racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and practically all other forms of unjustifiable discrimination. But we need to extinguish it from our lexicon just as quickly as we inserted it.

DEI is a sandwich composed of two delicious and nutritious pieces of bread (diversity and inclusion) containing a slice of hemlock (equity) between them.

You see, diversity can very often be a win-win-win. A more diverse student body or workforce has three big advantages. First, it directly empowers those who otherwise would not be given the opportunity to be part of it; second, it provides more instances for diverse groups of individuals to interact and collaborate with one another, thus breaking down the walls of xenophobia; and third, it allows intellectual discourse and strategic planning to flourish amid a plethora of perspectives based on varied life experiences.

Unfortunately, particularly in the case of the media, academia, and Hollywood, diversity is usually limited to traditional racial, ethnic, and gender demographics, but ignores diversity of political thought. Apparently, the pseudointellectual eggheads who think up this stuff consider it more important to have a classroom full of Bernie Sanders voters who are a well-balanced mix of male, female, nonbinary, black, white, Asian, and Latino than it is to have a proportional mix of students who think the best person to lead the country is Bernie Sanders, Mitt Romney, Donald Trump, or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. But, I digress.

Next, there’s inclusion. It carries diversity to the next level. It’s not enough to create diversity in order to check a box, it’s important to make those individuals feel welcome. Like diversity, inclusion is wonderful idea, one emblematic of a civilized and empathetic society.

Then, there’s that proverbial hemlock, equity, which should be the obvious answer to the question: in DEI, which of these three does not belong? Or better yet: which of these three has absolutely no business being associated with the other two?

The United States is known as the land of opportunity. A place where it’s illegal to deny someone a chance because of race, nationality, gender, and other factors that have nothing to do with skill, ability, merit, or performance.

For instance, equal opportunity gives me the chance to try out for the NBA. Never mind that I’m decades past my prime and that even in my heyday I was nowhere near the player any of the pros are. At least I’d be eligible to try to make the team and not be denied because, say, I’m Greek and Orthodox.

Equity, however, would ensure I’d make the team by creating special rules for me to compensate for any physical limitation. For instance, I’m just under six feet tall, which in basketball makes me tiny. Equity would provide me with special rules, whereby I can bring a stepladder to climb onto the backboard and sit on the rim. My teammates could then lob me the ball and I could just drop it into the basket from my perch ten feet above the ground. Also, my opponents, being players with eminently better skills than mine, would have to wear blindfolds to make things more even.

And that’s the problem with equity: ensuring equal outcomes. Everything would be a tie. The fastest runners wouldn’t win at the Olympics because they’d be forced to run with 50-pound weights attached to their bodies to slow them down.

The architects of equity are attempting to eradicate the reality that people are born with certain advantages and disadvantages that sometimes never change, despite an equal opportunity to compete. And that’s OK. The fastest runners are supposed to win the big shiny trophies.

But equity is being portrayed as something else, such as scholarships for inner-city kids.

In that sense, equity sounds a lot like affirmative action (which in any case should be based on socioeconomic status, not race). But it’s a lot worse; it’s affirmative action on crack.

Important public safety entities such as police and fire departments have relaxed their standards to ensure more equity. Astonishingly, our Department of Defense has a DEI component. Does this mean boot camp is watered down for athletically challenged recruits? But it appears the Defense Department hasn’t quite figured out what equity means. In some areas, it’s left out altogether, while in others it’s referred to as equality.
Nonetheless, equity has permeated our nation’s fabric and is bent on establishing equal outcomes everywhere.

Accordingly, it’s time to get the E out of DEI. Sure, we could replace it with a better word beginning with E, such as empathy or empowerment, but the same deceivers who use ‘immigrant’ to describe all foreign-born persons in the United States so as to blur the line between legal and illegal status would easily swap equity back in to the DEI mantra.
Instead, let’s go with DOI, the O standing for opportunity. As in equal opportunity, for all. Diversity, opportunity, and inclusion. Three great virtues that are quintessentially American. Whereas equity is unmistakably Marxist.