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.

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.