12-6-24

We are in the throes of the nomination and confirmation process for the

incoming Trump Administration…..by and large, I’m very satisfied with the pool of

candidates for all of the major positions that have been tapped thus far…..I

haven’t tracked all of them, I don’t know any of them personally, but what I can

see I like…..and one of the things I see is that nowhere in the mix has President-

elect Trump bragged that he is proud to nominate any single one of them because

they are “breaking a glass ceiling”……glass ceiling’s are not all that they are

cracked up to be…..if it just so happens that the best person for the job just so

happens to be the first woman, first black man, first veteran, first purple dude

from the dark side of the Moon, great! But they should never be tapped for any

position because of their skin color, lifestyle or gender…..never…..that is

antithetical to meritocracy……what’s funny is that Trump has indeed picked a

highly qualified and highly diverse group of folks…..black, white, first generation

Americans, male, female, you name it….and they are all highly qualified…..and the

liberals don’t know what to do with that…..they need to have the

intersectionality’s of the group labeled in advance…..that’s how this works!

Right?.....well, if you’re more into glass ceilings getting cracked than you are into

running the country well, then sure…..but most of us just want the best candidate

based on merit, skill, acumen, experience……

I’ve had some experiences at hiring and firing over the years….one of the lessons

that I learned the hard way caused me to coin a phrase: “I will hire the person

before the resume”….but by saying that I’m not talking about their external

qualities….I’m referring to the strength of their character…..once I’m satisfied that

the person is the kind of person that brings true value to the team then I go next

into their actual qualifications….the things that are on the resume, like skills,

education, experience…..to put it in HR terms the background check comes first

and the resume comes next…..its the basics of merit-based employment….that

you hire someone not on their appearance, or how it makes your company look

to outsiders, but on what makes your organization the most effective at what it is

supposed to be doing…….if we don’t demand that our government return to the

idea of finding the best person for the job then we will continue to receive

mediocrity, and at worst, actual disaster…..

I had an experience once that galvanized me into the belief that a person should

never be given a position that they had no right or capability to perform…..on my

second deployment to the Global War on Terror, this time to Baghdad, I had my

team augmented with several individuals with whom I had never worked

before…..one of them seemed solid, he seemed like he knew his stuff…..it was his

second deployment as well….he jumped right in during what I quickly discovered

was a honeymoon period…..as time went on he became more and more

disruptive, belligerent even…..his communications became short, and it came to a

head when he bucked my authority during a very dicey combat operation late one

night in central Baghdad……I wrote him up….a counseling statement for the

record to establish what I was concerned would need to be a paper trail….that

didn’t sit well with him and the behavior did not change……in the coming weeks I

finally took steps and had him relieved of duty in the war zone, and sent him

packing with his bags and baggage to our Battalion Headquarters……that’s when I

began to get word from others that “oh by the way” this wasn’t the first team he

was kicked off of…..oh, really?! Do tell….because that was not on the record for

unwitting future bosses like me to see…..it turns out he had been relieved of duty

on his team in Afghanistan…..so I submitted all counseling statements and then

prepared to write my Officer Evaluation Report since he had technically been

under my rating scheme long enough….but I was told not to do it, that it would be

done by someone else….I was not satisfied and so I submitted a memorandum for

record of the information that I would have included in his evaluation…..I learned

that a few weeks later he was given his own team in another part of the Area of

Operations…..by the end of the tour his new team couldn’t stand him and he

refused to come to their awards ceremony when they received their

commendations and medals for time in the war zone……

It was that singular experience that convinced me to never allow myself to be

forced into hiring someone simply because of external qualifications…..when

someone is allowed to have a position of responsibility without the truth of their

character, their abilities, or their actual experiences being at the forefront….well,

everyone loses……that guy was on my team creating havoc in the war zone

because someone in his past saw fit to let it ride and let future bosses deal with

it…..and that guy got his own team after being dismissed from two others simply

because someone didn’t want to deal with it…..that is the antithesis of merit-

based hiring…..

The Biden administration took poor hiring practices to entirely new levels……in a

desperate effort to break every perceived glass ceiling….to merely check off the

blocks of perceived outward intersectionalities…..to advance the liberal cause of

“diversity, equity and inclusion” the Biden administration saddled the American

people with one questionable hire after another……

We now have the first Supreme Court Justice who was advanced by the Biden

team solely on the first hurdle of being a black woman…..certainly she is a jurist,

with a resume that is strong….but do we know for a fact that she was the best

possible candidate for the job when everyone who is not a black woman was

immediately excluded…..

We have a press secretary that draws the ire of the White House press corps daily

for reading her pre-planned responses and treating members of the press

dismissively, even rudely…..so much so that one member of the press corps went

on a national broadcast to point out how rude and ill-equipped she is and that he

has been openly discriminated against for daring to ask hard questions…..but hey,

she did break the glass ceiling as the first ever openly gay black female press

secretary……

Or how about the now-former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Spent Fuel and

Waste Disposition in the Office of Nuclear Energy, with a top-secret clearance

mind you, crowed to the world at large how he had been proud to have been the

breaker of the glass ceiling of all glass ceilings as the first non-binary cross-

dressing Deputy Assistant Secretary of anything…..he was brought up on felony

charges for theft and grand larceny that could net him 15 years in prison…..never

mind that his far-too-open-book life should have disqualified him for a clearance

or position of any kind in government, what with his noted positions on keeping

information from parents of children in the school he used to work in, or his

lecture series on gay kink and fetish, and the constant parade of photos on every

form of media of him in outlandish garb and even with bondage gear…….

These are the kinds of things that happen when a hiring process is more

concerned with “breaking glass ceilings” than they are with creating an effective

organization…..it is one thing to be an advocate for equal pay for women for

equal work done….it is important that handicapped individuals are not excluded

from positions that can otherwise reasonably accommodate their handicaps…..no

one should ever be told that they cannot have a job because of their skin color, or

their religion……but when we move past that point and flip the script altogether

and say that hiring is now based on whether you have enough people on the roll

of a certain skin color, or that you’re hiring is tainted by a need to be seen as

having enough LGBTQ staffers, especially when all else about the person’s past is

disregarded in order to bring the focus to their outward intersectionalities…..well,

then merit-based hiring is gone…..we are no longer hiring the best

candidates…..we have allowed DEI to go from diversity, equity and inclusion to

actually stand for destruction, exhaustion and implosion……

The Trump administration is moving us away from trying to find the next glass

ceiling to break…..because glass ceilings, well they’re really not all they’re cracked

up to be

And that’s a wrap for the Rightside Way!