In the United States, the 1964 Civil Rights Act and associated “disparate impact” jurisprudence make it a violation of federal law to arrange a business or workplace in a way that differently affects different races, except in very narrow relation to the requirements of the job at issue. This principle has led to preposterous shenanigans, such as a years-long battle (Ricci v. DeStefano) between black and non-black firefighters in New Haven Connecticut. Lower courts ruled that, under Title VII of the 1964 Act, the city was forbidden to use the results and established criteria of a promotion evaluation exam process, because to do so would preclude promotion of any black firefighters, while promoting over a dozen non-black firefighters. The US Supreme Court ruled that the city was forbidden to not use the results, also citing Title VII. Since the 1964 Civil Rights Act rests on a patent fallacy — namely, that the various races within humanity are not substantively and irreducibly dissimilar — nonsense is sure to follow.

The sort of egalitarianism motivating the 1964 Civil Rights Act is motivated not only by utopian idealism, but also by power politics. By their immutable nature, and as an inevitable result of Darwinian evolution, people like those who are like themselves, and dislike those are unlike themselves. Thus if a government forces dissimilar people to live as classmates, neighbors, and coworkers, the aggregate social capital of those people is reduced, and so their ability to defy and restrain the tyranny of that government is reduced. Thus tyrants promote egalitarianism with this covert motivation, while overtly promoting the features of egalitarianism that are appealing to a foolish populace (as all populaces are, almost all the time, for essentially intractable reasons).

Famine in Ukraine, 1932-1934 — everyone's equal when they're dead; Stalin equalized 1.0×107 in this episode.

Due to the actual psychology of socialists, the taxing of the wealthy is frequently taken to excess, culminating in jealousy-fueled bonfires, as in France, Germany, Russia, China, and southeast Asia. Socialist history is littered not just with the corpses of the propertied, but with those of intellectuals and artists disfavored by the government, indeed with those of anyone who is seen to persevere with individual thinking, and is evidently littered with the cinders of their immolated works.

The very vocabulary of the socialists — describing those who are economically successful or biologically fortunate as “privileged” and those who are not as “underprivileged” — provokes jealousy and reveals their twisted mindset, wherein economic and biological circumstance is the consequence not of industry, parentage, and chance, but of patronage — from government, in particular, from social authority, in general, and from divine (or rather, diabolical) favor, cryptically. In the Soviet Socialist regime of Russia, whole pseudoscientific theories — Lysenko's pseudotheory of genetics, for example — were conceived to feed their ideological appetite to view the human constitution as something wholly within reach of government regulation and socialization, and hence equalizable by edict. Effacing individual distinctions also facilitates shepherding of the nation, because the population is in theory made into just so many interchangeable parts, the removal of any one of which (through act of government or otherwise) has (also only in theory) no significant consequence.

Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck

Charles Darwin himself subscribed to Lamarckism, the early evolutionary doctrine of Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck (1744-1829) that “driving forces of nature” motivated individual organisms to improve, which improvements were subsequently passed on to their progeny. In The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication (1868), Darwin proposed a theory of “pangenesis” whereby information-bearing particles from throughout a creature's body accumulate in its sex organs and subsequently are passed on to its offspring. He discussed his Lamarckian theory, particularly its relevance to animal husbandry, with his half-cousin Francis Galton. It was by citing Darwin that Lysenko provided a defense for his Lamarckism, notwithstanding Gregor Mendel's theory of inheritance (“Experiments on Plant Hybridization”, 1866), the somatic-germ cell dichotomy theory of August Weismann (1890s), and the proclamation of Mendel's laws of inheritance by Hugo de Vries (1900), each of which gave the lie to Lamarckism. For his part, Galton coined the term “eugenics”, and is considered to be the founder of the movement that culminated in the race purification programs of National Socialist Germany (with American dynasties such as the Harrimans and Rockefellers helping finance the progression).

Socialists have often claimed Darwin as one of their own, largely because he overthrew the orthodoxy regarding man's origins, and maintained that all species including man are fundamentally mutable. Darwin even had a flirtation with the noble savage myth popularized by Rousseau. This was, however, thoroughly dashed by his encounter with the indigenous people of Tierra del Fuego. In The Voyage of Beagle, Darwin writes of his 1832 encounter: “when pressed in winter by hunger, they kill and devour their old women before they kill their dogs [...] Was a more horrid deed ever perpetrated, than that witnessed on the west coast by Byron, who saw a wretched mother pick up her bleeding dying infant-boy, whom her husband had mercilessly dashed on the stones for dropping a basket of sea-eggs!”. He concludes the chapter, “I believe, in this extreme part of South America, man exists in a lower state of improvement than in any other part of the world“, but that the Fuegans are likely “superior in mental capacity” to the Australian aborigines. The socialists who claim him obviously miss his main points, that practical utility is the determinant of phylogeny, that differentiation and stratification through isolation and open-ended competition is the natural way of things, and that losing in that competition means extinction — as, indeed, the Fuegans have been since 1960.

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In the US, the most prominent nuts and bolts of the socialists' egalitarian program are progressive income taxes (economic discrimination favoring poor people), radical feminism (sexism favoring women), affirmative action (racism favoring non-whites), and the Americans with Disabilities act (economic and lifestyle discrimination favoring disabled people). The people who benefit from this government-imposed discrimination are coddled as totems to existential equality — Barack Obama is the greatest example of this dynamic. There is, of course, also outright government-administered charity (poverty and disability stipends, financially qualified public housing, food stamps, medicaid) that the government finances by taking from those it has declared ineligible for that charity. Even Social Security can be interpreted as an egalitarian program, since its purpose is to put the retired and elderly on an economic footing similar to that of younger working people, by taking from the latter and giving to the former. Social Security as currently formulated is not a savings program: payments to beneficiaries continue as long as the beneficiaries stay alive, and none of the payments they made before retirement can be inherited or otherwise assigned, even if the person dies before receiving any benefits.

Notwithstanding the intrinsic racial discrimination of affirmative action, and continuing if scattered and sporadic agitation for racial integration (and even segregation, as the UK Commission for Racial Equality suggested in March 2005), socialists in fact rhetorically deny the very existence of distinct races within humanity, with elaborate pseudoscientific rationales. This ostrich-head-in-the-sand outlook is now nearly consensus in the academy, made all the more remarkable by the recent proliferation of race-specific medicines, for which patents have been granted. In concert with multiculturalism, the result is perpetuation and exacerbation of ethnic and racial segregation. Revealingly, it is socialists who campaign to make or keep primary education in the native language of immigrants, particularly Hispanics, and promote such atrocities as education in “Ebonics” (e.g. in Oakland California). Ward Connerly, author of Creating Equal: My Fight Against Race Preferences (Encounter Books, 2000), notes that the appellation “African American” is inherently racist as used by socialists, who insist on it in references to Americans with any African ancestry (noting the absence of similar practices in the use of terms like “Scandinavian American”, “Italian American”, “Irish American”, etc.). He says the term was coined by Jesse Jackson, whom he counts among the “civil rights professionals” that he observes have no interest in putting themselves out of business by succeeding in the causes they advertise. As mentioned above, there is a dark and hidden motive for this systematic separation of ethnic outsiders: disfranchisement and the facilitation of later persecution. Socialism is simply allergic to ethnic diversity — indeed, to diversity of any kind. This has been widely observed, notably by socialist David Goodhart of The Prospect, in an essay titled “Too Diverse?”. As they use the term, “diversity” usually refers to campaigns to extend the reach of rigid cultural conformism to wider and more comprehensive populations. In this vision, it is the obsolete ethnic history of the affected people that is diverse, not their present philosophy.

Nonetheless, socialism does not long remove itself from its most fertile soil “ the ethnically homogeneous nation. Because of inherited instincts that encourage people to share with and protect those who are similar to them, socialism thrives on racial and ethnic homogeneity. Consider the example of the US state of Vermont. In the 2000 US census, Vermont reported a 96.8% “White” population, the highest proportion of any state, and far higher than the national proportion, 75.1%. In the 2000 US election, Green Party candidate Ralph Nader garnered 7% of Vermont's vote, second only to Alaska's 10% (and then, probably only because a Bush landslide was inevitable in Alaska, making strategic Gore votes futile there). (Gore won Vermont by 10%, but this is actually close compared to results elsewhere in the Northeast: Gore won Rhode Island by 29%, Massachusetts by 27%, and New York State by 25%.) Bernie Sanders, since 1991 Vermont's sole member of the House of Representatives (reelected seven times) and now the junior senator from Vermont, is the only socialist in Congress who identifies himself as a “socialist” rather than a “Democrat” (Sanders consistently votes with the Democrats, obviously). Jim Jeffords, succeeded in the Senate by Sanders, in 2001 premeditatively betrayed the Republican party, handing control of the Senate to the socialists (Jeffords also voted with the Democrats). In Spring 2005, he travelled to communist Cuba to promote political and trade ties with Vermont, advocating an end to US sanctions, and signing a memorandum of understanding regarding agricultural exports. On 2005-Mar-23, referring to the US liberation of Iraq from the Ba'ath Socialist regime there, Jeffords told National Public Radio “I think it was all done to get--all that's the end result is going to be some oil agreement and the loss of life that we had. And the cost of it, to many was just a re-election move and they're going to try to live off it and probably start another war.” And of course, Howard Dean, former governor of Vermont, made a name for himself in national politics by espousing just these sorts of conspiracy theories, and in 2005 was named chairman of the Democratic National Committee in an election that became uncontested after his rivals all dropped out under pressure.

National Socialists burning books, Germany, 1933 — every page is equal when it's ashes

In the English speaking world, the socialists have of late (starting in earnest during the 1980s) insisted on gender-neutralizing of all nouns, featuring such atrocities as “chair” for “chairman”, “snowperson” for “snowman”, “personhole” for “manhole”, and “s/he” for “he”. Most of their program consists of exsanguinating substitutions such as “letter carrier” for “mailman” and “fireperson” for “fireman”. More revealingly, they have taken to referring to females with the male form of a word when a female form is common in the language, as “actor” for “actress”, “steward” for “stewardess”, “sir” for “ma'am” (e.g., in Hollywood depictions of the military — although acting awards are still given separately to the “best actor” and “best actress”, underscoring the ever-present incoherence and hypocrisy of the socialists), and “guys” to refer to mixed or female company. Most outrageously, they insist that two men can marry, or two women can marry, notwithstanding Webster's crystal clear description of the millenia-old institution, “the mutual relation of husband and wife” (and of “husband” as “a married man” and “wife” as “a married woman”).

The common theme is a demented refusal to concede that men and women are biologically and mentally different. And there is sectarian strife: when actress Jada Pinkett Smith told an audience at Harvard (2005-Feb-26), “Women, you can have it all — a loving man, devoted husband, loving children, a fabulous career. They say you gotta choose. Nah, nah, nah. We are a new generation of women. We got to set a new standard of rules around here. You can do whatever it is you want. All you have to do is want it.”, Harvard Bisexual, Gay, Lesbian, Transgender, and Supporters Alliance co-chairman Jordan Woods told the Harvard Crimson “Some of the content was extremely heteronormative, and made BGLTSA members feel uncomfortable.” The socialists seek not so much to impose a new definition of marriage, as a new definition of man and woman — of humanity — as they have always sought. And this brings us back to their prodigious capacity for making men and women miserable, and eventually, making them into corpses.