Vice President Kamala Harris recently said, “Equity as a concept says recognize that everyone has the same capacity, but in order for them to have equal opportunity to reach that capacity, well, we must pay attention to this issue of equity.” Aside from constantly playing the Dogberry to Joe Biden’s Verges — these Shakespearean characters are perhaps the most ridiculous being marked for trying to sound more intelligent than they actually are — this promotion of equity on the grounds of everyone having the same capacity is patently false. And yet there’s an insistence from this administration that in order to even the playing field for everyone — especially the historically oppressed — equity must be a priority in every agenda.

The infrastructure spending bill (you know, the one that is partially fueling our current inflation woes) allocated money to fixing roads and highways. But Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg tried to manipulate the spending on highways to undergird the equity agenda. Equity-specific inclusions that are written into the bill include stuff like increasing the number of female truck drivers and allowing prisoners and inmates more access to the Internet.

Buttigieg is one of the main executive department heads who pushes the equity agenda. He has put forward a Reconnecting Communities Pilot (RCP), an entirely separate initiative from the infrastructure bill that will cost American taxpayers $195 million. His justification is that “transportation can connect us to jobs, services, and loved ones, but we’ve also seen countless cases around the country where a piece of infrastructure cuts off a neighborhood or a community because of how it was built.”

Buttigieg is hardly alone. The Department of Labor has allocated $206 million toward “equitable access” to unemployment benefits. The Department of Justice has declared that it will be more active in upholding the woke standard for marginalized communities. The Department of Defense is pushing anti-bias doctrines to “reeducate” our troops — doctrines that are entirely racist and anti American.

The Department of Homeland Security is one of the most egregious. It recently put into operation an Equity Action Plan. According to The Heritage Foundation’s Erin Dwinell, it “includes a number of provisions that fly in the face of anti-discrimination laws, to say nothing of human decency.” The plan discriminates based on skin color, it promotes the use of “gender inclusive” language, and, most importantly, it doesn’t secure the border (which is supposedly its job).

All of these executive branch departments are so invested in the theory of equity that they neglect to examine the effect of their ideas in the real world. They don’t work. On the one hand, equity declares that anyone, if given the opportunity, can do anything regardless of ability or talent. Under this system, those who actually have talents and gifts must be less than what they are in order to be fair to everyone else. Equity also fosters the false belief that those who are “oppressed” are owed something. It creates an entitled and lazy society. Because of this, the great are stifled and the needy are never satisfied. It is not a recipe for success but a study in mediocre conformity.

Political pundit Andrew Klavan made an interesting observation recently by comparing the Left’s love of theory (specifically equity) with those addicted to pornography. Similar to how a porn addict is addicted to the visual perception of women, our elites are addicted to their intellectual perception of reality. Both the woman in the adult film and the theory of equity are shapes, not reality. The porn and theory addicts get so drawn in by the false reality they’ve created that it makes them impotent in real life. But because reality doesn’t satisfy, they double down on their addictions.

Which is exactly what the Biden administration is doing. Its insistence on equity rather than equality and merit has created policy that will ultimately not work in reality, and in fact creates the very problem it seeks to solve: racism.