Last November, Spiked magazine held a discussion panel on “Is the left eating itself?” at which appeared ex-Evergreen State College professor and self-described progressive Bret Weinstein. You may recall that Weinstein was chased off campus by a mob of social justice warrior students.

Weinstein answered yes to the question, the only possible response. Except for the amplification that they’re eating everything else, too.

Why the voracious appetite?

“I recognized that there was a hidden dichotomy between two populations within the left.” He continued, “One of those populations earnestly wishes equality, and there can be some debate over what it is that is being equalized, but virtually everybody on the left would say that they are for equality of opportunity. “Then there is another population that does not wish equality of opportunity, what it wishes to do is to turn the tables of oppression…you would discover that some of the people who had been pursuing some nominal version of equality were really about some radical version of inequity with new people at the head. And I do think that is what we are facing.”

Genuine equality of opportunity is rare, found only in carefully controlled situations. Take runners toeing the line in a race. Everybody starts in the exact same position, measured down to the millimeter. Any runner found edging off the mark before the gun, even by a fingertip, is disqualified, or causes a re-do.

But this careful scrutiny only occurs because the runners have proven themselves eligible to participate in the race in the first place. Years of inequality (training, biology, etc.) went into creating a moment of controlled equality of opportunity.

It’s also plain that this controlled equality is expensive. The groomed track, trained judges, even the audience: it all adds up. What’s maybe not as obvious is the glaring inequality necessarily created in this mini-equalitarian scenario. Not just that only the best runners will be there, but they will either be all men or all women.

True, some of the women might be men pretending to be women, as in this race, but the natural and ineradicable inequality between the sexes will be manifest. Who would host a race pitting the best men against the best women? Who could doubt the outcome? Only somebody who is convinced in genuine equality and who desires equality of outcome.

There is no evidence of genuine equality. All outcomes, except in specialized or trivial circumstances, are unequal. Men and women do not race equally in the sense the top runners will be on average male, nor do they take math tests equally in the sense the top and bottom scores will on average be male. Men and women have never produced equal outcomes (in these senses). There is no observation that confirms equality. Yet some still believe in it. This can only be the result of ideology, which is the only possible way thousands of years of observation can be dismissed in favor of theory.

Those who preach for equality of opportunity generally believe in equality in general, though they will claim this equality is occult. Genuine or true equality really does exist, but it is hidden or suppressed, and there would be genuine real equality of outcome if not for forces holding back equality. That these forces exist is, of course, proof in inequality, at least in ability to wield these forces. Believing in forces thus disproves equality.

At any rate, nothing but equality of outcome will do for some. And by equality of outcome, what supporters mean is the superior result of some favored group or groups.

Here’s the headline: Oxford University gives women more time to pass exams.

Students taking maths and computer science examinations in the summer of 2017 were given an extra 15 minutes to complete their papers, after dons ruled that “female candidates might be more likely to be adversely affected by time pressure”. There was no change to the length or difficulty of the questions.

Equality demands men and women are no different, therefore equality of outcome should result. When it does not, forces are at work. At the least, it must be that men are better suppressing women who take math and science tests, or that women can’t face the pressures of testing as men can. True inequality must exist. So equality is false. Thus there is no reason to expect equality of outcome.

In this case, changing the test time changed nothing: “Men continued to be awarded more first class degrees than women in the two subjects.”

The next step is to change the tests, and make them so that equality of outcome occurs. Equality, since it doesn’t exist, must always be enforced by artificial means. And, of course, this force proves the inequality. Satisfaction will only be announced when more women than men produce top scores.

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