This is a riff on a Rich Lowry piece in the Patriot Post
DEI—diversity, equity, inclusion—was a bad idea whose time came with a vengeance during 2020’s Summer of Hate and Riot, but its continued ascendancy may be in doubt.
Its promoters sold the doctrinal framework to the masses to promote fair treatment, access, and full participation for all people, but most especially those who had been “historically underrepresented or marginalized” based on “race,” “gender,” age, dis-ability, sexual orientation, or any other means of identifying a victim group. Sounds good, doesn’t it?
Then the humans got involved, and it got messy.
Like socialism/communism, it looks great on paper, like everyone gets a fair hearing. The trouble was/is, as I said last week, that when you give power to people practicing grievance politics who must have enemies to be “happy,” they don’t limit their reach. Their rage soon attracts people who would abuse the leverage such politics and rage provide. With DEI in the US, the George Floyd-triggered riots amplified by Black Lives Matter and the “social justice” mantras multiplied by weeks of isolation during the house arrest lockdown of 2020 spread the doctrine like wildfire while an em-battled and unpopular Trump administration tried to fight off multiple threats to civil order at a time of a global health faux-crisis that threw rhetorical gasoline on an ideo-logical wildfire while the firefighters were on vacation.
Seminars now available at an airport hotel near you!
Initiatives around DEI suddenly grew, with massive corporate and educational insti-tutional expansion. Reminiscent of the ISO 9000 documentation and training boom of the ‘80s, organizations began heavily investing in DEI to leverage diverse ideas, en-sure their “teams” (everyone suddenly became part of a “team”) reflected broader society, and expand opportunities. Americans have spent an estimated $8 billion a year since that long summer on training sessions, workshops, and educational ma-terial which told their attendees/readers that, de-pending on their race or gender, they were indeed either oppressors (white males) or victims. Trainers/facilitators/slogan-eers assured their audiences that white supremacy permeated the country. The DEI mindset soon dominated human resources departments and college campuses. “Equity” took over all syllabi, even for the hard sciences. Combined with the concept of “woke”—shorthand for “I’m surrounded by oppressors and you are too if you are not a white male”—DEI made many a firm, author and “spokesperson”/shill rich as un-conscious bias training, employee resource groups (ERGs), targeted recruitment efforts, and adjusted promotion criteria to overcome historic biases became not just fashionable, but required. Shelves groan with the literature on how to conduct “self-awareness” sessions, with texts that could have come straight out of North Korean or Chinese “reeducation” camps.
DEI, lo-and-behold, didn’t do what its boosters said it would.
Instead of promoting equality for everyone, it became a cudgel for perceived victims to use on their perceived victimizers, as critics exposed the poisonous hokum—as practiced—as just that. Like other utopian ideas, DEI became known as one of the most morally perverse and damaging fads in recent American history. Rather than pro-moting equal treatment, the doctrine created division. Instead of diversity/eq-uity/inclusion, the theme became division/exclusion/indoctrination, facing legal, polit-ical, and cultural pushback almost immediately, though the narcoleptic Biden admin-istration muted their impact until 2025. People realized DEI practices that prioritize group (called “victim”) identity over individual merit lead to reverse discrimination and compelled speech. As a result, several states and universities scaled back or prohibited state-funded DEI programs, some transitioning back toward institutional neutrality and equal opportunity while others pay lip service to doing so.
The Cases Against DEI
Common sense says this racist hectoring—administered by people who brook no dis-sent—is unhealthy, and the evidence is piling up. Research has suggested that DEI can create negative feelings or make people afraid to speak their minds. An outfit called the Network Contagion Research Institute and Rutgers University Social Perception Lab found DEI amplified “perceptions of prejudicial hostility where none was present before, and punitive responses to the imaginary prejudice.”
If its goal is to create illiberal, racist paranoiacs, DEI succeeds brilliantly.
In one experiment, the study’s architects gave one group of students a harmless essay about US corn production to read while another got an essay drawn from the god-father of woke, Ibram X. Kendi, and Robin DiAngelo, the midwife of “whiteness studies.” Then, the researchers asked the students to evaluate a simple, racially neu-tral scenario involving a college applicant rejected by an East Coast university. The students who had read the DEI material were more likely to believe that the hy-pothetical admissions officer was more discriminatory, more unfair, and more harm-ful, as well as guilty of more micro-aggressions, even though nothing in the scenario suggested as much. The Kendi-DiAngelo students were also more likely to want to require DEI training for the admissions officer, to suspend the officer for a semester, and to demand a public apology.
Why let an absence of facts stand in the way of punitive measures?
Meanwhile, reports have declared the University of Michigan’s decade-long, roughly $250 million experiment to integrate DEI into the fabric of the school’s life a failure. Ordinary campus disputes became five-alarm DEI crises; administrators complained about all the new DEI-created paperwork, and students and faculty became afraid to say anything that might offend anyone, ever, maybe.
In a survey released in late 2022, [U of M] students and faculty members reported a less positive campus climate than at the program’s start and less of a sense of belonging. Students were less likely to interact with people of a different race or religion or with different politics.
New York Times Magazine
Then there was that beer commercial, and 7 October.
This dynamic has reappeared throughout corporate America. One notorious case was a beer commercial for a brand that was losing 21-25-year-old male customers and came up with a whole new demographic to reach, putting a young transsexual on a beer can to “celebrate” a year of living as the sex opposite his birth. Sales of the brand tanked; the VP in charge of the brand got fired. Months later, Islamist terrorists in-vaded Israel from Gaza, killing over 1,200 people, many recorded LIVE and trans-mitted around the world. American college campuses exploded, much to the surprise of many, to support the murderers, accusing the Israeli victims of, well, being Israeli “colonizers.” While the mainstream media tried neutrality, their tacit support for both the protests (as shaming editorials decrying law enforcement efforts) and the ter-rorists (questioning not the attacks but Israel’s calculated, methodical response) caused public confidence in mainstream media to plummet as fast as the beer sales did, and have been dismal since. There are signs, though, that that wave has crested. Walmart stopped using the terms diversity, equity, and inclusion, and ended various DEI-related initiatives. Other companies pulled back as well. The trend will pre-sumably only speed up as DEI and woke as corporate strategies have been consistent losers.
But there are still the schools.
But schools, colleges, and universities persist in beating the DEI/woke drum despite the bad press outside the halls of academia, and they do it because they can; the fi-nancial impact hasn’t hit them yet. Teacher union officials scream into microphones, “Say the words! D!E!I! Say the words!” ironically sounding like George Wallace chanting “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever!” That pretty plainly shows where the teacher’s unions’ heads are, and it isn’t with their students. When someone can sing a song to the tune of the old Dr. Pepper commercial lampooning an ideology like woke or DEI:
I‘m a Victim! You’re a Victim! He’s a Victim! She’s a Victim!
Wouldn’t you like to be a Victim, too?
Chorus: Reparations! Seek Reparations!
It may be time to rethink any strategic or intellectual ideas you had to exploit either “woke” or DEI, if you had any.
The Roots of Samurai Rage And Fear: Japan’s Path to Armageddon
Publishing on 7 December 2026! The samurai were famously intolerant of criticism and saw the prosperity of the West as something of an insult.
Pre-Order on Amazon Today!
And Finally...
On 24 October:
1812: The Battle of Maloyaroslavets in Russia between Russian forces and the retreating French takes place. This action forced Napoléon’s 24,000 surviving men to retreat northwest across a more barren landscape, ensuring starvation would reduce their numbers. Russian and French casualty counts at Maloyaroslavets were about the same: 8,000 each.
2003: British Airline Corporation Concorde trans-Atlantic airline service ends at Bristol Filton Airport outside Bristol, England. The supersonic airliners offered 3-1/2 hour England-New York flights for $4000 a seat by the end, but still couldn’t make money flying. Of the 20 aircraft built, the owners have parked all 19 survivors; museums now hold eighteen.
And today is 40-HOUR WORK WEEK DAY, marking the day in 1940 when the 40-hour work week became a universal standard for hourly wage labor in the United States. The standard came after the Ford Motor Company had implemented it years before, but before the US set aside the standard briefly during WWII.