Dismantle the postwar ideological consensus with one weird trick

[This post is free in full. The paywall only covers this month's EXIT cocktail hour invites.]

On Wednesday, President Trump signed “Executive Order—Restoring Equality of Opportunity and Meritocracy”, which declares it the policy of the US Government to “eliminate the use of disparate-impact liability in all contexts to the maximum degree possible”.

The order points out that disparate impact requires large institutions to consider the precise ratio of protected classes affected by every action they take — which in turn generates a totalitarian apparatus of ideological surveillance in every American school and place of business.

The disparate impact standard was first imposed in Griggs v. Duke Power (1971), in which the Supreme Court ruled that Duke Power could not promote on the basis of an IQ test, because 58% of white applicants qualified for advancement, while only 6% of black applicants did.

Chief Justice Burger wrote the majority opinion, saying that “good intent or absence of discriminatory intent does not redeem employment procedures or testing mechanisms that operate as ‘built-in headwinds’ for minority groups”.

Disparate impact liability is the linchpin of the modern ideological consensus.

It severely limits the application of aptitude testing, criminal background checks, dress codes, grooming standards, credit checks, tenant screenings, school discipline policies, voter ID laws, health insurance pricing, zoning and land use, criminal justice, gifted and talented programs, etc. etc.

Disparate impact liability makes it dangerous to hold individuals to any standard which reveals aggregate differences between protected classes — which is to say, any standard of capability or behavior whatsoever.

The problem is not that businesses are forced to consider candidates from groups that are statistically less likely to meet a given standard. The problem is that, when dealing with protected classes at scale, businesses are not permitted to insist on any standards at all.

Unlike the Bolsheviks, who imposed their regime in a single spasm of violence, America's tumor of communist dysfunction grows as standards are challenged one at a time (or revoked pre-emptively to spare the expense.)

But there's literally no limit to it. If a standard is challenged on disparate impact grounds, it will lose — and if it doesn’t lose (as in Wards Cove, which we’ll discuss), Congress will rearrange the law.

So, when we call it a “war on noticing” or a “war on distinction”, these are not cheeky euphemisms for some particular naughty category of “noticing” or “distinction” — it is literally a war on noticing and distinction.

Disparate impact liability doesn’t just abolish “discrimination” in the political sense, but in the bedrock semantic sense:

Any cognition and decision-making that generates action between human beings inescapably reveals aggregate differences between protected classes.

So, disparate impact renders illegal the recognition of patterns as such, the discernment of differences, and choosing between them.

In other words, the 1964 Constitution and its “emanations” literally make the US Government the enemy of consciousness.

But disparate impact is the only thing that makes discrimination law enforceable.

The Griggs v. Duke Power ruling wasn’t an insane overreach of interpretation from the Civil Rights Act — disparate impact is an obvious and necessary mechanism to make discrimination law workable at all.

If you want to refuse service, or fire somebody, or reject a loan application, there’s an infinite set of justifications you can provide that don’t directly implicate a protected class.

This was the situation in Wards Cove Packing Co v. Atonio (1989), where no specific discriminatory practice could be identified.

The Supreme Court initially dismissed the case on those grounds, and placed the burden of proof on the plaintiffs to prove that the aggregate hiring practices did not have a “legitimate business justification”.

But of course that made disparate impact liability (and therefore discrimination law) meaningless.

Unless you run an ad that says, “We don’t rent to Papists” or send an email that says, “you are fired because you are black”, the only way to prove discrimination took place is to look at outcomes in the aggregate — to assess how many black people you have employed, and compare it to how many black people you should have employed.

How many black people should you have employed? Well, in a perfect world where all endowments were bestowed with precise equality, you would hire proportionally.

Given that we do not live in such a world, disparate impact liability imputes the cost of our unequal and fallen condition to the employer — they must hire who they can find at the required proportions, and absorb whatever inefficiencies and absurdities are generated thereby.

Congress quickly patched the hole generated by Wards Cove with the Civil Rights Act of 1991, which removed the requirement to identify a specific discriminatory practice, and placed the burden of proof on the employer to demonstrate that the discriminatory outcome was the result of business necessity (not merely “business justification”).

In other words, you can only defend a standard if you can prove that removing it would put you out of business (and you can’t prove anything of the sort, because that would be racist.)

This is the mechanism that gets Fortune 500 corporations stumping enthusiastically for gay race communism.

Disparate impact liability holds corporate America directly, financially accountable for all “achievement gaps” between protected classes.

The harder it is to find suitable candidates across all the necessary dimensions of intersectionality, the more employers, landlords, and lenders will be required by law to accept unsuitable candidates, and internalize the dysfunctions of the larger society.

For leftists, this is precisely the point of anti-discrimination law. These corporate interests obviously can’t afford to fix these colossal social problems or fully internalize them — but they can very effectively agitate for More Money 4 Dem Programz, and marshal the resources of the state in totalizing egalitarian directions.

(These efforts only grow more enthusiastic as the institutions are increasingly captured over generations by the opportunists they were required by law to hire and promote.)

Of course, if you believe that inequality is the fruit of systemic injustice, none of this appears sinister: from their perspective, these institutions are the problem, and should be made to internalize its consequences just as they should with pollution, or any other negative externality.

So: will Trump’s executive order work?

Disparate impact liability is not a matter of regulation: it’s the Supreme Court’s interpretation of laws passed by Congress.

More than that, it is the ideological keystone of the post-1964 “liberal world order.” Without disparate impact liability, discrimination law is toothless.

Without discrimination law, there is no pursuit of “equity” — and without the pursuit of “equity”, it’s unclear what coherent policy agenda is even available to liberals.

(Probably just the immediate reinstatement of disparate impact liability.)

Successfully abolishing the state’s self-justification through an executive order would be an epochal transformation — a “sixth American republic”, with Trump joining Washington, Jackson, Lincoln, FDR, and LBJ as the father of a new political paradigm.

Gray Mirror

has said that moves like this are meaningless because executive orders have “the legal force of a tweet”, and only matter when commanding the bureaucracy to do what it already wants to do — but based on how DOGE, immigration, and innumerable other Trump battles are going, American politics is rapidly becoming post-procedural.

You can’t really say, “given that the law is written in such and such way, and this department or court has official jurisdiction over X, and Congress is responsible for Y, we can expect outcome Z.”

An executive order may have no more formal legal authority than a tweet — but formal legal authority doesn’t count for much these days.

What matters is whether President Trump will be obeyed by his subordinates, and whether they can extract compliance from their subordinates — or if they will instead listen to some judge in Hawaii or Connecticut who files an injunction.

The Supreme Court may not give the Trump Administration permission to ignore enforcement of a landmark ruling — but he may not need it.

To build anything permanent on the basis of this ruling, you have to believe that Donald Trump and his successors/proxies will achieve permanent control of the state — because a returning Democrat administration would restore enforcement with a vengeance.

It’s not even clear that it would be safe to act on this ruling in the short run. The tug-of-war for the American executive bureaucracy will end with some people going to jail for Just Following Orders — so it all comes down to who those bureaucrats think the strong horse is.

If you're looking for encouraging news:

Trump’s Department of Justice appears to be serious about capturing and redirecting the Civil Rights Division. Asst. Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon is shuffling unfireable bureaucrats into undesirable roles, and forcing them to pursue “a 180 shift from the division’s traditional mission” — punishing discrimination against white men and Christians, and framing official recognition of trans ideology as a violation of the consent and privacy of women and children (which, of course, it is.)

Meanwhile, Democrat politicians are currently telling their angry constituents, “Of course we'd all love to save America from Literal Hitler but there's nothing we can do, you'll just have to vote harder”. They’ve toned down their winking support for spontaneous arson and assassination now that those are being aggressively punished.

Others are ostentatiously breaking the law in defense of violent criminals, which reveals the futility of any appeal to formal process, and provides a straightforward justification to summarily remove the activists from power.

Trump is doing to the administrative state what he has already done to the media:

By defying the long-held conventions and expectations that define their “soft power”, he is forcing them into open confrontation, where their position is much weaker.

This only works because they have so thoroughly discredited themselves that no one really thinks they deserve the deference and good faith they used to ride on. All they have is their incumbency, their authority on paper — but Trump has good postmodern instincts, and is busily deconstructing that authority to nothing.

This means that they have to regain hard, explicit control of the government — and the only way to do that from within the institutions they still control (the media, the NGOs, and the international intelligence apparatus) is to take another whack at a Color Revolution. Anne Applebaum said as much on German TV in March.

But the failing credibility of these institutions makes a 2026 or 2028 Color Revolution significantly more dangerous to ordinary people.

They can’t just tell the people to get out in the street and Demand a Change like they used to. They will also struggle to create a purely procedural state of exception, as they did with COVID. Any crisis sufficient to justify a coup would have to be a matter of fact, since they are no longer able to achieve the desired result through manipulation of opinion.

Besides which, Trump is not just going to war with the Democrats, or even “the deep state”. Trump’s executive actions in his first 100 days are a declaration of war on the global trade regime, the global reserve currency — and now the global postwar ideological consensus represented by the Civil Rights Act.

Even if you believe, as I do, that American liberals are basically ideologically exhausted, there are overseas constituencies who are not — and the opportunity to milk another five or ten years out of the globohomo empire (or at least ensuring that it shatters in an advantageous way) will be irresistible.

So, expect every state-level actor on earth to be on the ground screwing around in the United States for the next two election cycles at minimum.

EXIT has always been about taking a short position in the present system and building for what comes next.

Hopefully “what comes next” will be a strong, self-reliant, and harmonious new order, free from the ideological shackles of egalitarian globalism. There’s a hundred trillion dollars on the table if the Trump administration can weather what is coming.

But whether they figure it out or not, our job is the same. We have to get connected and build. Join us at exitgroup.us, or become a paying Substack subscriber to join us for a cocktail hour near you.

EXIT News

• Last week’s full-group call (4/22) was on preparedness, especially through the 2026 midterms.

• This week’s full-group call (4/29) will be a hot seat for a young brother who needs to get out of Canada immediately.

• Second Great House call this Thursday. Topic: “The Feudal Instinct and Covenant”

• Member Meetup Schedule:

  • Houston meetup will be Saturday, 5/10. Check #texas in the chat for details.

  • Austin meetup will be Friday, 5/16 through Sunday, 5/18. We will be spending a weekend at an Airbnb south of town. Several of the guys are coming from out of town to check out the area. Cocktail hour on Saturday, 5/17 for EXIT members, Substack subscribers, and guests. Check #texas in the chat for details.

• Cocktail hour invites for Houston (5/10), and Austin (5/17) available to subscribers below the paywall. EXIT cocktail hours are a great way to get to know the EXIT guys in your area and see if the group is right for you.