I’ve written a number of articles over the years about how the political left is engaged in a ‘war on’ something or other. Be it a War on Words, a War on Men, a War on the Police, or a war on some other thing, the political left always seems to be at war with some central part of Western Culture that the left wants to destroy.

And let me be clear that when I say ‘the left,’ I am not talking about everyone who considers themselves ‘on the left,’ or as ‘a progressive,’ or as ‘liberal,’ or as ‘a Democrat.’ I am generalizing a political opinion that is very popular ‘on the left,’ but I do not mean to imply that it is held by everyone on the left. If you are on the left and you do not hold this view, I am pleased about that.

Today we are seeing something I did not think we would ever see, in spite of the fact that I’ve been watching it in Canada for some time. Today we are witnessing a War on Competence.

I knew there was a War on Competence in Canada as soon as Justin Trudeau was elected Prime Minister. Justin Trudeau is incompetent, and one of the first things he did was to announce that half of his cabinet would be women. There is no problem with Justin Trudeau making half his cabinet women. My problem is with the methodology he uses to make that decision.

To illustrate, consider the bricklayer profession. 97.1% of all bricklayers are men. We could ask ourselves what it says when we live in a society where the vast majority of women do not want to be bricklayers, or we can simply accept the fact that bricklaying is a profession that, for whatever reason, seems to appeal more to men.

Interestingly, the Nordic countries have done more than any other countries on Earth to level the cultural playing field between men and women, and rather than this bringing employment numbers between men and women closer together in every field, it has had the effect of pushing those divisions even further apart, raising the question of whether or not having equal representation in the bricklaying profession is even a valid goal. If women, by and large, don’t want to be bricklayers, the only two ways to make the bricklayer profession equal would be to force women to lay bricks against their will, or to ban bricks.

Similarly, the pool of people qualified to be members of Justin Trudeau’s cabinet should reflect the proportion of qualified applicants and not the proportion of Canada’s overall population. 30% of Canada’s parliament is female, so one would think if Trudeau wanted to hire the most competent people, somewhere around 30% of his cabinet would be female – not 50%. By forcing half his cabinet to be women when half the talent pool he has to draw from is not, Justin Trudeau has to hire some people who are not the most qualified.

Also, note that Canada’s Parliament is now 30% female. It was less than 20% female when Justin Trudeau decided to make half his cabinet women.

Joe Biden similarly announced, while running for President, that he would hire people based on gender, race, and sexual orientation, regardless of whether or not they were qualified for the positions he would place them into. This is how we got ‘Pothole’ Pete Buttigieg as Secretary of Transportation and Kamala Harris as Vice President.

The American People are not always concerned with how qualified someone is to hold high office, either, which is how Joe Biden and John Fetterman got elected. John Fetterman could not even carry a conversation, yet somehow the people of Pennsylvania felt he was the perfect person to debate matters of national significance on the Senate floor. The people of Pennsylvania decided that electing someone who had just had a debilitating stroke (and who was arguably America’s worst mayor before the stroke) rather than electing someone else who was vastly more qualified. Why did people vote for Fetterman? There are probably a lot of reasons, but at least one of them was to avoid being ‘ableist.’

To avoid looking ableist, Pennsylvania elected someone who is not able to do his job. That, by extension, means those voters are as stupid as Joe Biden and Justin Trudeau.

At least Joe Biden voters could say they had cause to vote against Donald Trump (for things that, for the most part, were not true). What was the major scandal plaguing Doctor Oz’s campaign? Fetterman accused him of drinking red wine.

Joe Biden has given us Agency Equity Teams for every single agency under his Administration, and has ordered every federal agency to create Equity Action Plans, making hiring decisions based on gender, race, and sexual orientation, and making delivering equitable outcomes for the American people based on gender, race, and sexual orientation the new primary role of every department of every agency in the Federal Government.

Now – just to be clear, diversity and inclusion are good goals, and we would expect a diverse and inclusive country to become more equitable among groups over time (unless we enact things like the War on Poverty to prevent that), but when we try to force the issue by making things like race, gender, and sexual orientation a part of our hiring decisions, or when we completely change the focus of the Federal Government to one of disparate treatment under the law, we do the country a grave disservice.

Was Pete Buttigieg personally responsible for the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, and the resulting mushroom cloud that spewed phosgene gas (the most deadly gas used in World War One – it killed 85,000 soldiers) across half of Pennsylvania and Ontario? Probably not, but a competent Secretary of Transportation might have limited the number of cars a single train can carry to something below 150 cars. The entire train was more than a mile and a half long. The train operators actually did everything right, but the train was so large that it would have taken 12 miles to come to a stop, and by the time the train operators knew there was a problem, they just did not have that long.

Pete Buttigieg was not worried about train safety, as he knew absolutely nothing about trains. All Pete Buttigieg knew was that he believed in equity, and though I can’t think of anything equity has to do with transportation, Pete Buttigieg’s focus was on the white supremacy he sees in construction companies (and roads).

Pete Buttigieg was not hired for his competency, so it should come as no surprise that he is incompetent. It should come as no surprise when incompetent people do incompetent things. In the case of Pothole Pete, his plan to address the East Palestine debacle was to go on vacation. Enjoy your vacation, Pete!

It is hard to imagine what an equity focus in the Department of Transportation might look like, other than bad decision-making with all things transportation, but it is easier to envision what this will look like when applied to other Federal Agencies. The IRS, as one example, can use taxation to make everyone earn the same amount of money after taxes. Should a doctor make more than a burger flipper? Someone who was not hired for being competent will make that decision.

The Department of Education can ensure that nobody learns more than the weakest student. The Department of Energy can ensure that we are all limited in terms of the energy we are allowed to use and the forms of energy we have access to. The EPA can ensure that rural communities have the same levels of pollution as do industrial areas. The Department of Justice can selectively enforce laws to ensure that we have the proper distribution levels in our federal prisons, and can force state and local police to do the same.

And in all cases, the people who will make the decisions about how our country is run, what it looks like, and what the people are allowed to do, will have been hired without any consideration given toward their competence.

Colleges have already hired armies of Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity (DIE) workers, and college costs have exploded accordingly while the quality of education colleges provide has been destroyed. We have entire fields that have absolutely no use in the real world, except to crank out more idiots.

We can expect the cost of every federal agency to explode, as well as an army of diversity officers joining their ranks, and as these agencies become more and more filled with incompetent people, we can expect them to make the country worse and worse for everyone in it.

The idiots in charge, by the way, won’t suffer any of the ramifications for their own decision-making. People are dying in Ohio and Pennsylvania (ironically not the part that voted for Fetterman) while Buttigieg enjoys his vacation.

What we can expect going forward is for our government to make an ever stronger commitment to hiring incompetent people, who will, in turn, control an ever larger part of our lives. Everything from the type of transportation you are allowed, to the temperature you are allowed to set your house to, to the type of stove you can buy and the food you are allowed to eat, is going to be decided by people who have no idea what they are doing, and who are united only by their shared hatred of the United States and its citizenry.

We may not be a nation of idiots, but we are about to become a nation run by idiots – even more so than we already are.

It will be interesting to see how quickly the impacts of this change are felt. It may be the most sweeping change in US history.

Image: AP