I think this article is correct in identifying bad faith, but I don't think conservatives are really wrong that many people have embraced equality of outcome as

I think this article is correct in identifying bad faith, but I don't think conservatives are really wrong that many people have embraced equality of outcome as the goal and the yardstick against which everyone is measured against. You can see this in many tech-oriented diversity discussions where diversity advocates will brush off any discussion of "the pipeline problem" as meaningless. Which is understandable since this can be an easy way to disclaim any responsibility, but it also makes discussions difficult because these metrics don't tell us anything about where in a system inequality exists and assumes that every actor in the system has a responsibility to ensure equal outcomes regardless of anything upstream of them and any other interests (e.g. making money) that they might have. You see this pretty starkly in work on Fairness in Machine Learning, where it is clear that you have to specify exactly what your fairness criteria are, and it turns out that what many people actually want is equality of outcomes. This is some interesting reading on the topic: https://www.propublica.org/article/bias-in-criminal-risk-scores-is-mathematically-inevitable-researchers-say https://www.propublica.org/article/bias-in-criminal-risk-sco... In any case, I'm not sure what the point of this article is; is the argument that equality of opportunity is unachievable "absent a degree of social engineering that would make Chairman Mao blush", so we should seek equality of outcomes instead?