When Diversity Kills

How America Lost the Ability to Build and Maintain Civilization

In less than six months during 2017, three different U.S. Navy warships managed to collide with other vessels, killing 17 sailors. Around the same time, PG&E's poorly maintained power lines sparked a wildfire that incinerated 85 people. A ransomware attack shut down the pipeline carrying nearly half the East Coast's gasoline. Hundreds of thousands of shipping containers sat stranded at Los Angeles ports. A train loaded with hazardous chemicals derailed in East Palestine, Ohio. Air traffic controllers cleared a FedEx plane to land on a runway where a Southwest jet was already preparing for takeoff. Contaminated eye drops killed four people and blinded fourteen others.

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But if you think those were bad, 2025 has been absolutely devastating. On January 29th, American Airlines Flight 5342 collided mid-air with an Army Black Hawk helicopter over the Potomac River near Reagan National Airport, killing all 67 people aboard both aircraft. It happened on a clear night with good visibility. Just 24 hours earlier, another regional jet had to abort its landing at the same airport due to a military helicopter in the area. Nine near-miss incidents occurred at U.S. airports in just the first three months of 2023, including two planes that came within 100 feet of colliding. We've had multiple runway incursions, jets veering off runways, and a Delta flight that literally flipped upside down while landing in Toronto during high winds.

These events are symptoms of something far more troubling: America's complex systems are breaking down because we've systematically replaced competent people with diverse ones.

The Golden Age We've Forgotten

Think back to the early-to-mid 20th century. This was when America decided that merit should matter more than your last name or your daddy's bank account. The SAT revolutionized college admissions by letting brilliant kids from nowhere compete with prep school princes. Aptitude tests like the Wonderlic, GRE, and LSAT swept the nation. This system of picking the best people for the job built the Tennessee Valley Authority, split the atom, invented the transistor, and put men on the moon.

It worked. Boy, did it work.

But then came the 1960s, and everything changed.

The civil rights movement was morally necessary and long overdue. But it created an unintended consequence that we're still grappling with today: a direct collision between selecting the most competent people and achieving proportional representation.

Starting in the 1960s, a series of Supreme Court decisions and federal laws established a new principle: any selection process that produces unequal outcomes between racial groups is presumptively discriminatory. This sounds reasonable in theory, but it rests on a problematic assumption—that all groups have identical distributions of talent, interest, and preparation for every possible job.

The result was predictable. Whenever competence and diversity came into conflict, diversity had to win. Not because anyone necessarily wanted incompetent people in important positions, but because the legal and social costs of appearing discriminatory became too high to bear.

The Escalation of Enforcement

Organizations didn't abandon merit overnight. Instead, they developed increasingly sophisticated ways to prioritize diversity while maintaining plausible deniability about competence. Think of it as a three-stage process: Ask, Tell, Make.

Stage One: Ask

First, organizations politely asked everyone to "end bias." They implemented slating guidelines requiring diverse candidates for every position. They mandated structured interviews to prevent hiring managers from discovering they had things in common with candidates. HR departments started questioning managers who failed to hire diverse applicants, creating subtle but powerful pressure to prioritize demographics over qualifications.

When qualified diverse candidates remained scarce, companies would hire executive search firms specializing in diverse talent. When that didn't work, they'd quietly dilute job requirements. A hedge fund might start by requiring former investment bankers with top MBA credentials, then drop the work experience requirement, then hire MBA interns, then settle for fresh undergraduates. Each step expanded the pool of diverse candidates while lowering the bar for competence.

Stage Two: Tell

When asking nicely didn't produce enough diversity, organizations attached concrete incentives. They implemented diversity Key Performance Indicators for managers. They tied executive compensation to diversity metrics. They created public dashboards showing each department's demographic breakdown.