Or perhaps those already working in the State Department prided themselves on how ultracompetitive it is to win a job as a foreign service officer (FSO)—securing such a position is something of an elite accomplishment—and therefore perhaps they tried behind the scenes to preserve State’s long-established meritocratic character.

Be that as it may, Ambassador Gina Abercrombie-Winstanley, who has served as State’s diversity and inclusion officer since April 2021 (and who plans to step aside soon), defended the department’s push for more DEI in the coming months and years in congressional hearings last week. Among other details, Abercrombie-Winstanley noted that more than 80 percent of the State Department’s diplomatic corps currently is white, implying that that percentage may be too high from a DEI perspective.

The common political slogan used to sell DEI initiatives to the public is that its proponents want such-and-such a workforce to “look more like our country as a whole.” On a superficial level, that slogan may seem innocuous and unobjectionable, but on closer examination, it’s problematic. If looks make the difference between an employee doing a good job or a not-so-good job, then looks would be an important factor in hiring. In reality, however, looks by themselves don’t cut it.

As is always the case with DEI, it introduces a battle of the Q’s—quotas on one hand versus qualifications and qualities on the other. Imagine a volatile political situation in a South American country. The American president wants to pursue a policy of maintaining contacts with various political figures and parties in that country without offending any of those parties since they don’t trust each other. That can require very delicate diplomacy. Do you think the Secretary of State or one of his top deputies would say, “Wait a minute, it’s about time we put a black gay person out there to speak on behalf of our country”? Don’t you think it would be better to deploy a FSO who understands the history, economics, culture, tradition, and language(s) of that country—one with a deep feel for personal sensitivities in that country, and someone who has the moxie and wisdom to accurately communicate our government’s intentions while not committing any potentially disruptive verbal faux pas? We certainly don’t want to risk triggering an international incident just so someone can say domestically, “Well, at least our State Department matches the demographic profile of American society.”

What concerns me most about what looks like the Biden administration’s push for more blacks and fewer whites in the State Department is that the president’s proposed budget calls for $76 million to be spent by the State Department in the next year on DEI initiatives. $76 million?! I realize that amount is probably considered pocket change in today’s Washington, but you could hire 500 people to work in DEI at State for $150,000 in annual salary and still have change left over.

Abercrombie-Winstanley says that State wants to be able to provide a precise breakdown of the composition of its workforce by race, gender, ethnicity, status of disability, etc. Pardon me, but why would State need millions of dollars to do this when computers can keep track of each employee’s identity and print out updated profiles of the entire workforce as often as wanted?

Or maybe the plan for the $76 million is to “beat the bushes” and see how many more of various minorities State can drum up through various recruitment and advertising activities. This is the approach that some colleges have taken. They hire a DEI officer whose job amounts to scouring the countryside to locate members of the desired minority group. Then they convince them to enroll in the DEI officer’s college. (Alas, in the college town where I lived for years—not in Grove City, where I taught —the students that were recruited by DEI turned out to be a disaster for the college. They just weren’t able to handle the coursework.)

The question that State will inevitably have to deal with, whether they like it or not, will be whether the people they’re looking for even exist—that is, whether sufficient numbers of members of various minority groups have the professional expertise and personal qualities needed to handle the formidable challenges of a FSO.

Certainly, in this day of Zoom conferences and instant communications, State can find inexpensive ways to send recruiting materials to every college in the land without coming close to spending $76 million. If they want to try to find more qualified minorities, fine, but throwing a lot of money at the problem seems gratuitous.

One problem with the DEI movement is that they’re looking for a quick fix to a longstanding problem. It is true that certain minorities seem underrepresented in important places like the State Department. But what if the desired numbers of truly qualified minorities just aren’t there? We, as a society, need to address the root causes of underqualified minorities. My nominee for first among those root causes is the sorry state of public education in so many of our inner cities. I say that as one who did some teaching in urban schools decades ago, both visiting a number of schools in a substitute capacity and then teaching and counseling at a special inner-city school for dropouts. Frankly, by the time students left those broken schools (finally escaping from them), they were doomed never to acquire the intellectual skills needed for a demanding job like FSO.

If the Biden administration wants to start expanding opportunities for minorities, it should turn its attention to improving education. That means somehow breaking away from its codependence on teachers’ unions and making school choice universal. Fix the schools, and over the next generation, many of the undesirable racial and other disparities in the adult job market will show marked improvement.

Article cross-posted from our premium news partners at The Epoch Times. Image by AgnosticPreachersKid, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

There was the customary ideological fanaticism—the insistence that we radically retool our societies on the basis of computer models that don’t come close to matching climate realities (and daring to call those who question the validity of faulty models “ideologues”). There was the stubborn refusal to conduct a balanced cost-benefit analysis of increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, literally ignoring CO2’s manifold benefits (e.g. a vast greening of the planet, longer growing seasons and increased agricultural productivity, reduced deaths due to cold, and a 99 percent reduction in the death rate from weather events due to economic and technological advances powered by fossil fuels) as well as ignoring other known influencers of climate such as solar and volcanic activity, fluctuations in Earth’s orbit, albedo (cloud cover), ocean currents, etc.

There were recklessly irresponsible and anti-scientific statements, such as that by Simon Stiell, the UN official overseeing their climate change agenda, who stated, “All of the other things—interest rates, cost of living, even wars—come to an end, but climate change just marches on” and that “the damage that is caused by climate impacts … [is] only increasing.”

Stiell ignored the UN’s own published position that “prediction of future climate states is not possible” because “the climate system is a coupled nonlinear chaotic system.” How does he know the climate will become more destructive? He doesn’t—and can’t—know.

COP27 also reached a new low in its ongoing child abuse. For years, the UN climate cabal—in collusion with certain domestic special interests—has been needlessly imposing anxiety and depression on millions of children by filling their innocent minds with unfounded fears of climate catastrophe, depriving the likes of  Greta Thunberg of a normal childhood. At COP27, there was a Children and Youth Pavilion. Ten thousand children were flown in (their jets emitting CO2 all the way) to be exploited as stage props mouthing the desired anti-CO2 nonsense in which they have been indoctrinated.

Theatrics aside, the true agenda of the climate change cabal has (as their leaders have been stating openly for decades) been socialistic in nature—a desire for more undemocratic control over people’s lives and the distribution of wealth. Thus, a primary theme of COP27 was the issue of fairness.

The lip service to “fairness” is best encapsulated in a statement that deserves some sort of prize for most vacuous, most fatuous: “Climate change is deeply unfair.” This statement was made in connection with Pakistan having suffered extreme flooding this year. Yes, those floods are tragic. So was the tornado that destroyed much of Mayfield, Kentucky, last December, the flooding that inundated Hazard, Kentucky, in July, and Hurricane Ian that flattened much of Ft. Myers, Florida, and inflicted fearsome damage on a number of nearby cities on the Gulf Coast. Isn’t it interesting that the UN has been conspicuously reticent about lamenting devastating weather events in the United States?

“Fairness,” of course, has nothing to do with destructive weather events. Such events are mindless and random. They don’t choose where to happen or who to hurt; they just happen, as they have been happening for countless millennia. But that didn’t stop our sensationalistic media from hyping the climate change angle.

For example, CNN reported that the monsoons in Pakistan were by far the wettest since records were first kept in 1961, implying that climate change is responsible. But is it? A weather event being the most extreme in only six decades (a mere blink of geological time) can be extremely misleading. It’s like those who are crying out that wildfires in California are far more frequent than they were 50 years ago, while failing to point out that California wildfires are far less frequent than they were 100 years ago. Data can be used to create misleading impressions simply by choosing the starting point or time frame that most effectively serves one’s agenda.

Related to the disingenuous “fairness” canard promoted at COP27, the message went out, “It’s the underdeveloped countries that suffer the most.” Although this isn’t always going to be categorically true (again, remember the floods, tornadoes, and hurricanes that have battered parts of the USA), it does have an element of truth to it. Less-developed countries often lack the engineering and technological capacity that wealthier countries have at their disposal to mitigate the impact of weather-related events. Where the UN gets it wrong is in implying that it’s unfair that the developed countries used carbon-based fuels to attain their higher levels of affluence, while the poorer countries consumed less of those fuels, and so lagged behind.

Today, in the name of “fairness,” the UN climate change cabal wants the wealthier countries to pay “reparations” to less developed countries—compensation for the alleged sin of being wealthier, which was the result of having used more fossil fuels, thereby supposedly changing Earth’s climate for the worse.

The problem with this line of reasoning is that it isn’t the rich countries’ fault that the poorer countries didn’t avail themselves of fossil fuels. Those unfortunate countries have been held back from economic development by poor governance and unwise policies—policies ranging from socialism to good-old-fashioned corruption. But this didn’t stop the UN from proudly unveiling at the end of COP27 a “breakthrough agreement” to provide “loss and damage” funding for poorer countries hit hard by climate disasters.

Most of you reading this will readily recognize the gross unfairness of making the rich countries pay for the poor countries’ largely self-inflicted failure to develop. However, the unfairness at COP27 is far more vicious than that. The perpetrator of the greatest unfairness is current, not historical. It’s the UN climate change cabal itself that’s guilty. Indeed, even as Germany is dismantling a wind-power installation to extract the coal that’s underneath it (after all, Europeans desperately need reliable energy today) the UN climate change cabal continues to push aggressively for the development of intermittent sources of energy for African nations while blocking and opposing the use of fossil fuels in Africa. Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni has loudly condemned this blatant double standard—as well he should.

The hypocrisy of the UN is vicious. Africans need access to reliable energy far more than they need financial handouts. Former President Donald Trump was right to withdraw the United States from the 2015 UN-crafted Paris agreement. Unfortunately, current President Joe Biden is fully on-board with the UN’s socialistic redistribution of wealth and unjust suppression of African economic development. This is another low point in the Biden presidency. What a shame.

Article cross-posted from our premium news partners at The Epoch Times.