“The principles that built great American companies are simple: Hire the best people, serve your customers well and let merit and financial results determine success. While expanding opportunity and making employees feel welcome are worthy goals, how D.E.I. policies were carried out often strayed from these foundational principles and might have even created other forms of discrimination.”

It might have even created other forms of discrimination! Gee, ya think?

In a jaw-dropping example of the “Tell me something I don’t know” variety of journalism, the New York Times gives us “Working at Anheuser-Busch, I Saw What Went Wrong With the D.E.I. Movement” (Gift link!). Anson Frericks tells us that water is wet with the solemnity of a doctor announcing a cancer diagnosis. He was shocked–shocked!—when his company, having announced its commitment to “DEI,” turned down a beneficial distribution arrangement with another company because “being associated with Black Rifle was too politically provocative, especially in progressive circles.” This, in 2022, two years after the beginning of the George Floyd Freakout, made Anson realize that his employers were more interested in virtue-signalling to the Looney Left than selling beer.

What did he think “diversity, equity and inclusion” was going to mean?

He writes,

In 2021 the company started using online dashboards that gave managers a breakdown of their employee base by demographic characteristics.

Then the company created annual performance targets linked to the company’s environmental, social and governance strategy, of which D.E.I. was one component, for thousands of employees. It was clear to me that if teams didn’t check the right boxes, managers could be punished. Promotions could be withheld. Bonuses could be lost. That year, senior executives, including me, attended weekly meetings to discuss D.E.I. initiatives. These meetings often distracted from more critical business matters, like the fact that the company risked losing employees as the Great Resignation set in. (Anheuser-Busch declined to comment for this article.)

Anheuser-Busch was hardly alone. At least 70 big companies — from Airbnb to G.E. — had set public targets for gender diversity hiring. Among the worst examples of efforts to accomplish D.E.I. goals was a diversity training course offered to Coca-Cola employees via a third-party platform that urged workers to “be less white,” which the presentation helpfully defined as being “less oppressive,” “less arrogant” and “less ignorant.” A course in Kentucky reportedly told nurses that “implicit bias kills,” that white privilege is a “covert” form of racism and that nurses may contribute to “modern-day lynchings in the workplace.”

“I should have seen it coming,” he concludes. Well, duh. I saw it coming. Anyone whose brain hadn’t been melted by all the somber, nauseating TV ads with a sepulchral voice intoning “in these difficult times” had all the evidence necessary to conclude that The Great Stupid was upon us, as we were throttled with non sequiturs like the practice of showing every couple on TV as bi-racial and appointing, promoting, and seeking black women for every management and leadership vacancy were rational responses to a white cop in Minnesota negligently killing a black perp who was resisting arrest while overdosing on a drug cocktail. This was, says the author, “an early sign that too many American corporations had forgotten who their customers were.”

And that two many educational institutions had forgotten what “education” was.

And that too many journalists had forgotten what “discrimination” means.

And that one whole American political party had forgotten what their own country was all about.

He concludes, “I believe Anheuser-Busch, like many companies, stands at a crossroads. It can struggle under a polarizing policy, or it can help lead American business back to the principles that made it great in the first place — principles that unite rather than divide, that reward results rather than identity. Today companies have an opportunity to demonstrate how true inclusion works: by judging people as individuals, not as members of groups.”

That’s all it takes to get published in the New York Times, now, eh? Stating what Americans and the corporate sector had understood for decades as if you have discovered that Rosetta Stone?

It took exactly one reader’s comment, the first listed (now the third), to explain this bizarre phenomenon. Here’s “Amy,” a 40 year veteran of Fortune 500 companies (she says): “Blaming DEI is racist, and spreads bigotry by stereotyping entire groups, implying all people in a group are inferior.”