National Review senior editor Charles C. W. Cooke, on today’s edition of The Editors, said that “there’s no point denying” the veracity of claims by Compact magazine author Jacob Savage that DEI has come for white men in recent decades.
“It seems entirely obvious that what is described in that Compact piece happened and happened at scale,” Cooke said. “The only defense of it is the original defense, which a few people have been willing to make. ‘Yes, we did that, and it was good.’ If you take that view, though, you are in favor of racial discrimination.”
What does this mean? “You are asking for the government, universities, and private enterprise to judge people based on the color of their skin or other immutable characteristics.”
“Simple man that I am,” said Cooke, “I think racial discrimination is bad. And I think that it was bad in the 1960s when it was primarily directed at African Americans. And I think it is bad in 2018, when it’s primarily directed at white men.”
Cooke was emphatic that such actions and mindsets are “incompatible with the promises of the Declaration of Independence, the presumptions of the Constitution, and the theories that underpin the United States.”
“I don’t know, for those who deny that this was happening, how it is possible to reconcile what basically every major institution in America said out loud, especially after the craziness that accompanied the murder of George Floyd. I don’t know how it is possible to reconcile that with a denial. Of course that happened. Of course it did.”
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