If memory serves, Irving Kristol once remarked that the term “peace,” as it was used by the left, “is a Stalinist concept,” since the intent of the so-called “peace movement” was the unilateral disarmament of the West and the triumph of Communism. Today the term “diversity” works the same way: it has become a term meaning the opposite of its dictionary meaning, and is a vehicle for racial division and resentment.

Charlotte Allen writes splendidly in the Weekly Standard about “white privilege” conferences where Orwell would be astounded to find that the hate sessions go for a lot longer than the two minutes prescribed in 1984. Needless to say, the lack of irony is evident in the very fact of such conferences, for who is more “privileged” these days than academics and activists who can travel to these hootenannies where the registration fee alone is $435. But good for Charlotte; my experience, having long ago attended similar preposterous round-robins of radical resentment, is that the worst thing you can do is simply report what is said. Like mushrooms, these kinds of lefty hate-ins flourish best in the dark.

But if you needed fresh evidence, check out this story out of Northwestern University, where a white student was rejected for a diversity appointment because “he is a white heterosexual male.” The student’s name, incidentally, is Stephen Piotrkowski. Just a hunch here, but he sounds like someone with immigrant roots that don’t trace back to the Anglosphere, and as such would represent what ought to be meant by “diversity” if it was meant seriously. (Turns out his sister is gay, but that’s apparently not enough.) But pigment is everything for the diversity-haters.