Equity is the New Communism

The Biden administration is ordering state and local governments to submit ‘equity plans’ or lose federal funding. This latest shot in the long “war against the suburbs” is part of former Rep. Marcia L. Fudge’s plan, as the boss of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, to “weave equity throughout HUD’s work”.

Weaving equity into all of government has been the biggest agenda of the Biden administration. After taking office, it ordered every single agency to come up with an equity plan. State and city governments often already demand equity plans for nearly everything. Those who don’t, are quickly learning the Marxist jargon, the bureaucratic systems and the paperwork of ‘equity’.

In under a decade, equity plans have become widely embedded in American life. And they serve the same function that Communist Party dogma did in the USSR or Communist China.

Equity is a political statement of allegiance. It demands that individuals or institutions subscribe to a leftist worldview, that they formally repeat party dogma, such as that America is an inherently unfair society and that government regulations are the only remedy, that white people are racist, and that everyone is obligated to engage in a constant process of self-examination.

At the heart of equity is the rejection of meritocracy, of individualism, and, in a bitter irony in the wake of MLK Day, the idea that we should be judged not by skin color, but by the content of our character.

Even more insidiously, implementing equity plans involves hiring equity specialists, activists who function as political commissars, tasked with conducting indoctrination sessions, forcing ideological changes and purging personnel deemed insufficiently loyal to the Left.

Equity plans have embedded a layer of ‘equity commissars’ at every level of society.

Universities, governments, corporations and virtually every institution now have their own equity bureaucracy. The number of equity executives doubled within a decade. DEI programs shot up from 27% to 41% in employee ‘benefits’ programs between 2017 and 2022. In the insurance industry they rose from 40% to 60%, from 15% to 40% in personal consumer services, and from 30% to 48% in management and consulting.

As Glassdoor points out, “There was one exception to the trend: Government & Public Administration. In 2019, Government & Public Administration was the leader across industries for access to DE&I programs; by 2022, it was solidly middle of the pack. It was the only sector where access to DE&I programs declined from 2019 to 2022.”

The Biden administration’s mandate for every part of government to generate equity plans has been working to remedy that plan. The equity plans it generates force local governments and federal contractors to incorporate their own equity bureaucracy into their organizations. Anyone who does business or receives money from the government will ultimately have to take a knee.

Conservatives used to laugh at woke students studying lesbian poetry or the works of black Marxists. They ridiculed the idea that those worthless degrees would ever lead to jobs. That laughter was, as if often is, a foolish underestimation of the scope and sophistication of the enemy’s strategy. Those same students are now executives at Fortune 500 companies. And they’re implementing policies to get rid of older white male and female employees.

But racial conflict is, like class warfare before it, only the outward facade of the program.

Leftists always claim that they’re seizing power in the name of some disadvantaged group. France’s Jacobins, Russia’s Bolsheviks and China’s Maoists murdered, collectively, millions of people, most of them “working class”, in the name of protecting the working class. Black communities are more devastated than ever by equity policies.

Equity, like unions and the various worker committees implemented as part of a class warfare program, organize workers, embed leftist activists within every company and organization, and consolidate them within the larger objectives of the ‘party’. Union membership had sharply dropped and, despite some recent successes, failed to reach white collar workers, let alone executives or management. Equity programs, among many other things, create ‘unions’ that are intended for the growing share of white collar workers and even include executives. The affiliate groups that they spawn in every workplace organize workers by race, gender and sexuality without even pretending to advocate for their economic interests the way that the unions do.

Class warfare operated under the premise that a free market economy was inherently unfair. Equity employs the similar idea that race and sexuality are inherently unfair. While unions at least organized all workers, equity pits workers against each other and scapegoats white male employees who are earning the same amount and enjoy no other advantage than skin color.

This same mindset is applied across the board to people, to policies and communities.

Equity is much more comprehensive than class warfare and much more usefully destructive. The intangibility of microaggressions or unconscious bias means that employers can no longer even point to statistical metrics like black and white or male and female employees being paid the same amount. Equity only uses statistics to prove guilt, not to disprove it.

Some governors and executives have recognized equity for what it is, a leftist hostile takeover of American life that duplicates much of the program of Communism under the guise of civil rights, that uses white guilt and racism to take over our institutions and destroy our freedom.

Most have not.

Equity is an extension of the old diversity programs But unlike the antiquated diversity programs, equity’s DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) extend their reach to everything.

Using the Ibram X. Kendi false choice between either racism or anti-racism, every organization is forced to make a comprehensive commitment to a leftist program of eliminating everything that is not embodied by the leftist conception of anti-racism which, at latest count, includes human equality, individualism, political dissent, meritocracy and all of western civilization.

Every organizational policy and communication must accord with anti-racism or be branded as racist and an obstacle to equity in the workplace.

In 2020, that suddenly meant every single company issuing statements in support of Black Lives Matter. In the past, diversity would have meant recruiting black employees. Equity’s DEI however requires affirmative statements of political allegiance to leftist causes.

That is why every company is now ‘woke’. It didn’t happen overnight. Leftist takeovers often appear instantaneous when they are actually the result of long marches that were being slowly implemented while most normal people were too busy going on with their lives to pay attention.

People have begun paying attention. But battling equity means a lot more than issuing statements condemning critical race theory. Equity needs to be weeded out of American organizational life in the same way that Communism had to be weeded out of unions in a previous century. The problem is much worse in the 2020s than it ever was in the 1920s.

Some past radical administrations in the twentieth century aggressively muscled unions and their radical organizers into the workplace, but the Biden administration has built them into every part of government, including the military, and is expanding the scope for equity far beyond employment and into every policy program. The goal is to have equity be the operating system for government, corporations, nonprofits, education and every possible area of life.

At the corporate level, executives have been persuaded, browbeaten or intimidated into believing that without equity, they’ll never be able to compete for the diverse workers of tomorrow. Some are pursuing equity to bribe local or national political interests by employing their political allies. What they have really succeeded in doing is infecting the American corporation and workplace with a consolidated leftist activist class to a degree that not even the wildest Communist conspirator could have imagined a few generations ago.

This is a crisis that is rapidly leading to the downfall of the United States. Woke corporations, from tech monopolies to finance platforms, are contriving to make the Constitution a dead letter. Elections are being rigged not only by nonprofits, but by vast amounts of private capital. The evolving new social credit system and totalitarian system is a public-private-radical alliance.

America’s institutions are being captured from the top down. And equity, like environmentalism, is one of the key forces responsible for politicizing what was once apolitical. Equity, as many have observed, is not equality, but equity, more importantly, is tyranny.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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