Will Orlando change anything?

However great the shock of the massacre in Orlando, it is only a matter of time before we start hearing again that “diversity is our strength.”

If there is any place in the Guinness Book of World Records for words repeated the most often, over the most years, without one speck of evidence, the “diversity” canard should be a prime candidate.

Is diversity our strength? Or anybody’s strength, anywhere in the world? Does Japan’s homogeneous population cause the Japanese to suffer? Have the Balkans been blessed by their heterogeneity — or does the very word “Balkanization” remind us of centuries of strife, bloodshed and unspeakable atrocities, extending into our own times?

Has Europe become a safer place after importing vast numbers of people from the Middle East, with cultures hostile to the fundamental values of Western civilization?

“When in Rome do as the Romans do” was once a common saying. Today, after generations in the West have been indoctrinated with the rhetoric of multiculturalism, the borders of Western nations on both sides of the Atlantic have been thrown open to people who think it is their prerogative to come as refugees and tell the Romans what to do — and to assault those who don’t knuckle under to foreign religious standards.

The recent wave of refugees flooding into Europe include Muslim men who have been haranguing European women on the streets for not dressing modestly enough, not to mention their sexual molestation of those women.

Smug elites in Europe, like their counterparts in America, are not nearly as concerned about such things as they are about preventing “Islamophobia.”

In the lofty circles of those who see themselves as citizens of the world, it is considered unworthy, if not hateful, to insist on living according to your own Western values or to resist importing people who increase your chances of being killed.

But if you don’t have the instinct for selfpreservation, it will not matter much in the long run whatever else you may have.

America’s great good fortune in the past has been that Americans have been able to unite as Americans against every enemy, despite our own internal differences and struggles. Black and white, Jew and Gentile, have fought and died for this country in every war.

It has not been our diversity, but our ability to overcome the problems inherent in diversity, and to act together as Americans, that has been our strength.

In both World War I and World War II, the top commander of American troops who went into combat against the German army was of German ancestry — Pershing and Eisenhower, respectively. So too was Gen. Carl Spaatz, whose bombers reduced German cities to rubble. Whatever their backgrounds, they were Americans when the chips were down.

Today, that sense of American unity is being undermined by the reckless polarization of group identity politics. That affects not only how Americans see themselves, but how others in our midst see America.

Some people demand American citizenship, as if it is an entitlement, while burning the American flag and waving the flag of Mexico. And the apostles of “diversity” and “multiculturalism” watch in silence.

That includes the president of the United States.

Most people in most groups are decent. But if 85 percent of the people in Group A present no serious problems and 95 percent of the people in Group B present no serious problems, that means you can expect three times as many serious problems when you admit immigrants from Group A.

Unfortunately, there is remarkably little interest in the relevant facts about crime rates, disease rates, welfare dependency or educational deficiencies among immigrants from specific countries. Most debates about immigration policies are contests in rhetoric, with hard facts being ignored as if they didn’t exist.

Tragically, the massacre in Orlando seems unlikely to change that. Too many people have too much invested in their own particular position to change, especially in an election year.

One of the infuriating things about Barack Obama is the way he can be both totally right and totally wrong at the same time, even in the course of a single interview.

A reminder of this came recently in an interview the president gave to Bloomberg Businessweek and Bloomberg News.

There was one Obama in that interview who I wanted to hug and cheer. That was the Obama who criticized, “socialist approaches to the economy that stifled creativity and growth and innovation in India.” And the Obama who said America isn’t close to fulfilling its economic potential. “I do believe we can grow a lot faster than we’re growing right now,” the president said.

Then there is the other President Obama, the woefully out-of-touchwith-reality one I want to grab by the shoulders and ask, “What planet are you living on?”

That is the President Obama who, in this same interview, attempted to generate sympathy for the plight of unionized public school teachers.

Obama said, “Think about how difficult it is right now for a young, idealistic person who wants to go into teaching to figure out how they’re going to live a middleclass life as a teacher. There’s no job that’s more important to our economy than having really good teachers in the classroom, but right now, the way our economy is structured, it’s very hard for young people to make that decision unless the parents are subsidizing them in a fairly significant way.”

That is just nonsense. In Massachusetts, public school teachers earned an average of $74,737 in 2015, according to the Boston Business Journal. That’s significantly higher than the state’s average annual wage of $59,010, and teachers, unlike most other workers, get the summer off. (They can also earn more money by working other jobs in the summer.)

In the New York City public schools, starting salaries for teachers range from $51,650 to $81,346, according to the city’s education department. The most experienced teachers earn $119,000 a year. Benefits include health insurance plans with no employee contributions — rare in the private sector — along with dental, vision, prescription drug coverage, and a retirement plan.

How to “live a middle-class life” as a teacher? Would $119,000 or $74,737 a year, with summers off, or with some additional income from a second working family member, do it? With employer-paid health insurance? You would think that might be sufficient without much additional parental assistance, but the president doesn’t get it.

It’s almost enough to make a person wonder if the president is engaging here in some constituent service — that is, a little favor to the teacher unions that are reliable Democratic donors and political volunteers. He was not, after all, bemoaning the entry-level pay of evangelical pastors, or of lumberjacks, or of radio talk-show hosts or U.S. military personnel, to name some traditionally more Republican-leaning occupations.

The one thing that might indeed make it hard for an entry-level teacher to live a middle-class life would be a load of student debt. There, Obama has been loath to take on another traditional Democratic constituency — university professors — and instead has launched a regulatory crackdown on the for-profit and online providers that have been trying to offer lower-cost alternatives to traditional college and graduate degrees. Obama’s preferred solution has been to attempt to shovel more government subsidies into the existing higher-education system.

It’s nice to see Obama acknowledge that socialism in India stifled creativity, growth and innovation. Missing, alas, is an acknowledgment from the president that it can happen here, too.