Reams have been written about the latest revelations in the Russian collusion hoax that so hamstrung President Trump’s first term. I will summarize below the most important revelations. It’s clear the Administration is taking its time to reveal the investigation’s conclusions for maximum impact -- an impact that I, like Scott Adams, believe will result in arrests of a number of people who pulled off this fraud. But first I want to discuss something which has not received the kind of attention it deserves -- the death of the legal consequences for disparate outcomes and credentialism. 

The Death of Disparate Outcomes

Forty-four years ago, the federal government entered into a consent decree in which it agreed to scrap the Professional and Administrative Career Examination (PACE). It agreed then with the plaintiffs that the test resulted in disparate outcomes, (42.1 percent of white examinees passed the minimum and only 5 percent of black examinees and 12.9 percent of Hispanic examinees did). This week the department moved to vacate that consent decree and the court did so.

WASHINGTON - Today, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division ended a court-imposed decree initiated by the Carter administration, which limited the hiring practices of the federal government based on flawed and outdated theories of diversity, equity, and inclusion. 

In Luevano v. Ezell, the Court dismissed a consent decree based on a lawsuit initially brought by interest groups representing federal employees in 1979. The decree entered in 1981 imposed draconian test review and implementation procedures on the Office of Personnel Management -- and consequently all other federal agencies -- requiring them to receive permission prior to using any tests for potential federal employees, in an attempt to require equal testing outcomes among all races of test-takers.

“It’s simple, competence and merit are the standards by which we should all be judged; nothing more and nothing less,” said U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro. “It’s about time people are judged, not by their identity, but instead “by the content of their character.””

“For over four decades, this decree has hampered the federal government from hiring the top talent of our nation,” said Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Civil Rights Division. “Today, the Justice Department removed that barrier and reopened federal employment opportunities based on merit -- not race.” 

The shift means the federal government can again test applicants for competence. I believe this change will free up private employers as well to resume appropriate testing for open positions as courts no longer consider disparate impact. (In higher education, the Supreme Court has already removed the status of disparate impact.)

This shift, in a well-argued article by “Cremieux,” marks the death of credentialism, which “has polluted the American psyche for generations, and it has impaired the functioning of the job market and the government in the process. At one point, it was believed to be necessary, if not useful, good, and perhaps even complementary to meritocracy. But that belief is delusional, and we are all now victims of credentialism.”

As a result of Luevano, OPM (Office of Personnel Management) tried to create “a new test that could predict job performance on which, black, Hispanic and white applicants would perform approximately qualify.” None of the six tests they developed could do so, so the federal government was forced to give undue weight to credentials.

Today, the disparate impact doctrine is finally -- after decades of unrelenting wins -- racking up defeats. Disparate impact cases against police and fire departments are being dismissed, precedents are being overturned, and, amazingly, consent decrees once considered sacred, which barred the application of tests are being challenged. The most recent and portentous example of this is the Trump administration’s attempt to overturn the Luevano Consent Decree that has barred civil service examinations.

On its own, dissolving Luevano is an incredible and unexpected piece of progress away from credentialism and towards a world where selection is possible again. Most importantly, it signals that the new administration in Washington has a grander goal: ending all Title VI disparate impact regulations and setting up a series of court cases to kick off which will -- quite likely -- make the use of tests in the private sector feasible again. 

This is not the only significant matter challenging earlier rulings on race which so reshaped the country for decades. Congressional race-based districting is next up. 

The US Supreme Court indicated it will consider outlawing the use of race in drawing voting maps, setting up a blockbuster showdown with implications for dozens of congressional districts with predominantly minority populations.

Expanding a Louisiana case already on their docket, the justices said they will consider arguments that the 1965 Voting Rights Act no longer provides a legitimate basis for map-drawers to intentionally create majority-Black or majority-Hispanic districts.

The clash could also upend state and local legislative districts, giving it the potential to have a seismic impact on elections at every level of the US system. The US House had 11 majority-Black and 31 majority-Hispanic districts for the 2022 election, according to a Bloomberg News analysis of the most recent American Community Survey data.

Russiagate Unravels

A number of analysts have done a fine job in summarizing the week’s Russiagate revelations. Jonathan Turley, for example, has set forth one of the best, and if you want the details in an easy to read format, here it is. I urge you to read it all for a detailed and reliable telling of what was revealed so far.

This week, Washington was rocked by new releases in the declassification of material related to the origins of the Russian investigation. The material shows further evidence of a secret plan by the Clinton campaign to use the FBI and media to spread a false claim that Donald Trump was a Russian asset. With this material, the public is finally seeing how officials and reporters set into motion what may be the greatest hoax ever perpetrated in American politics. There never was a Russian collusion conspiracy. This is the emerging story of the real Russian conspiracy to manufacture a false narrative that succeeded in devouring much of the first term of the Trump Administration.

What is emerging in these documents is a political illusion carefully constructed by government officials and a willing media. The brilliance of the trick was getting reporters to buy into the illusion; to own it like members of an audience called to the stage by an illusionist. 

He deftly details step by step how they pulled this off. As he observes, there’s a great deal more to come, including naming the foreign sources who played along with the Democrats’ trick. Readers of the New York Times and Washington Post would be well-advised to look at other sources of information about the great unraveling: “The media (including the Washington Post and New York Times, which won Pulitzer Prizes for reporting on the debunked claims) are apoplectic in dismissing these disclosures. The last thing they will do is report on how they helped sell a political hoax. The problem is that they never said it was a trick. They said it was the truth. That is why they cannot honestly cover the story. To do so would not be coverage, it would be a confession.”

Jeff Childers predicts where this is heading:

First, the Trump Team is serious. We are now in the second week of a steady drip of increasingly detailed disclosure. The Fox “burn bags” article, which I’ll discuss more in a moment, shows coordination with the media. This is not an example of the Trump Administration finding a single inelegant email and running off half-cocked.

Durham’s 306-page annex was not redacted in one day. It must have taken weeks of wrangling with a half dozen agencies to agree on final redactions. So this is a slow burn. It is a controlled release. As we’ve previously suspected, this is yet more evidence that they are creating a public permission structure for arrests.

For a cogent example of similar thinking: Pundit Scott Adams recently opined that, to him, what was once unthinkable has now become necessary.

CLIP: Scott Adams explains how Trump is carefully persuading the country that arrests will happen (4:54).

I am more convinced than ever that arrests are now a certainty. Don’t worry about statutes of limitation.

But arrests are not even the most astonishing conclusion we can glean from the new declassifications.

???? One of the most salacious and intriguing facts appeared in the Fox story. It described how Kash Patel found loads of incriminating, top-secret RussiaGate documents stuffed into burn bags in an unrelated SCIF (a secured information storage area). In other words, the documents were supposed to have been destroyed -- including Durham’s classified annex.

Exactly. It’s obvious someone in the hoax loop was supposed to destroy the documents, but instead saved incriminating documents, placed them in burn bags, hid them, and directed Patel in which vacant room in the vast FBI complex to find them. 

The most probable conclusion from these facts is that one of the key conspirators is cooperating. Which means they have everything.

If I can see this, it means the conspirators can surely see it, too. Which means they can’t talk to each other anymore; it’s not safe. They don’t know who’s talking, and they know the DOJ has enough evidence to get FISA warrants to monitor their comms. So the conspiracy has collapsed; the center could not hold.

It’s every man for himself now.

As the noose tightens and the conspirators try to obscure what happened in op-eds and TV appearances with the concordance of friendly media, it would be wise to copy and heed Cynical Publius’ admonition:  “The Hillary campaign, the Obama Administration, Deep State operatives embedded in the first Trump Administration, and the media conspired to use fabricated intelligence information that they all knew was false to cripple Trump v1.0's ability to govern and to try to imprison Trump and his inner circle.”

Everything else is part of a continuing effort to gaslight you.