It’s a centerpiece of the entire plan to remake America in a purely progressive image and it will not be easy to defeat. Recent victories aside, conservatives shouldn’t be celebrating. They should be girding for a much longer battle ahead.
Harvard President Claudine Gay’s fall from grace earlier this month, complete with a golden parachute worth some $900,000 per year, has become a case study in the corrosive, corrupting nature of the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion agenda. Here was a woman who was never qualified to lead one of the most prestigious organizations in the history of the known universe, having written barely a dozen “academic” papers and apparently plagiarized much of them at that, who proved completely unable to clearly state the reality that no Harvard student should be allowed to publicly call for the killing of another, much less call for the killing of another student’s entire ethnic group. The story neatly encapsulated two aspects of the DEI agenda. First, people are recruited and promoted based on their ethnicity, skin color, and gender rather than their qualifications, replacing the actual merits of an individual person with the accidents of their personal and family history, elevating the group rather than the person. Second, moral clarity, that is judging each situation based on a set of uniform principles, is replaced with relativity, where the marginalized or oppressed group is granted rights and forgiven sins that would never be accepted in supposedly “privileged” groups. We know this because Ms. Gay would have had no problem whatsoever promptly condemning and then immediately expelling a white person who called for the return of slavery because white people are said to be privileged. Palestinians and their supporters, however, are oppressed, and therefore they can openly advocate genocide. Hedge Fund billionaire and Harvard donor, Bill Ackman, who was a critical voice in Ms. Gay’s resignation, put it this way. “DEI is racist.” “The E for ‘equity’ in DEI is about equality of outcome, not equality of opportunity…DEI is racist because reverse racism is racism, even if it is against white people (and it is remarkable that I even need to point this out).” He continued, “Under DEI, one’s degree of oppression is determined based upon where one resides on a so-called intersectional pyramid of oppression where whites, Jews and Asians are deemed oppressors, and a subset of people of color, LGBTQ people and/or women are deemed to be oppressed.”
Mr. Ackman reached this conclusion after visiting campus in the aftermath of Ms. Gay’s disastrous Congressional testimony, which prompted more research into DEI. “The more I learned, the more concerned I became, and the more ignorant I realized I had been about DEI, a powerful movement that has not only pervaded Harvard, but the educational system at large. I came to understand that Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion was not what I had naively thought these words meant. I have always believed that diversity is an important feature of a successful organization, but by diversity I mean diversity in its broadest form: diversity of viewpoints, politics, ethnicity, race, age, religion, experience, socioeconomic background, sexual identity, gender, one’s upbringing, and more. What I learned, however, was that DEI was not about diversity in its purest form, but rather DEI was a political advocacy movement on behalf of certain groups that are deemed oppressed under DEI’s own methodology.” Mr. Ackman has since founded a think tank to further combat this ideology and its implementation in American institutions, from academia to business to the government. These and other developments have led many conservatives to believe that we’ve reached peak DEI and the bubble has figuratively popped. The Wall Street Journal recently claimed as much, writing “Pop Goes the DEI bubble.” In fact, “The unraveling of ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ initiatives had already begun—five states banning DEI programs; Google, Facebook and others cutting DEI staff; Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard—well before Harvard President Claudine Gay was demoted.”
In Andy Kessler’s view, “DEI was doomed to fail. The uniformity of thought known as intersectionality, fostered by DEI, meant all oppressed people must support all others who are oppressed. But that idea burst on Oct. 7 when Hamas raped, murdered and kidnapped Israelis. Many liberals, especially Jewish ones, couldn’t support genocidal ‘colonized’ terrorists. Pop! The long march is in retreat.” Further, a companion ideology, ESG, Environmental, Social, and Governance principles, is already in retreat, peaking “last June, when BlackRock CEO Larry Fink said he would stop using ‘the word ESG anymore, because it’s been entirely weaponized.’ Never mind that performance of ESG funds has been sketchy and that BlackRock had been adding the label ‘sustainable’ or ‘ESG’ to funds and charging up to five times as much. Then a study published in December by Boston University’s Andrew King found ‘no reliable evidence for the proposed link between sustainability and financial performance.’” Mr. Kessler continued to accurately describe what me and many others find so odious about these related programs. “Most offensive to me was DEI’s devious underlying agenda: societal design. Blinded by fanatical devotion, activists were pawns for the cause of reshaping the world into a collective utopia to be run, of course, by progressive, self-identifying elites. That was the ‘my truth’ that Ms. Gay invoked on her exit. Critical theories and Marxist techniques would take power from you and me, using big government as the enforcer.” He also found necessarily authoritarian tendencies underlying both of these dogmas. “While Marxism is a means of gaining power to implement societal design, it quickly turns authoritarian. There was very little free speech at Harvard—the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression ranked it last of all colleges last year. Those against the societal-design agenda were shouted down. Dissent was met with accusations of privilege or cancellation. Conform or be cast out. On a larger scale, the Biden administration co-opted social media to censure opposing views.” Ultimately, Mr. Kessler believes the market will prevail, “The good news is that economics eventually outlasts the control freaks. Central planning loses. Real life is about markets that every day transmit trillions of price signals of human desires. Those prices inform production much better than any government bureaucrat or Harvard professor.”
Needless to say, progressive proponents of DEI are not going to give up on the cause so easily. Thus, it was no surprise that The New York Times was out front with an op-ed singing the practice’s praises, claiming “Critics of D.E.I. Forget That It Works.” In the opinion of Dr. Caroline Elkins, Dr. Frances Frei, both professors at Harvard Business School, ironically, and Anne Morriss, a co-author of Move Fast and Fix Things: The Trusted Leader’s Guide to Solving Hard Problems, everyone actually wants the same thing: “competitive organizations where everyone who shows up to work has a fair shot at success.” In other words, DEI – much like Critical Race Theory and anti-racism before it – is not what the critics claim. It’s entirely different, focused on merit and maximum performance because “Persuasive scholarship has identified the ways in which we become more effective leaders when we collaborate skillfully with people who don’t already think like us — people with different perspectives, assumptions and experiences of moving through the world.” For example, some of the research they cite looked at the performance of individuals versus homogenous and diverse groups, finding that “all-male teams outperformed individuals nearly 60 percent of the time, but gender diverse teams outperformed individuals almost 75 percent of the time. Teams that were gender and geographically diverse, and had at least one age gap of 20 years or more, made better decisions than individuals 87 percent of the time. If you’ve ever called a grandparent for advice or tested an idea with a skeptical teenager, you get what this research was trying to quantify. We often learn the most from people who think most differently from us.” Further, diverse teams prosper when there is “psychological safety,” meaning individuals are “more likely to share their views in an environment that does not belittle, or worse, punish those who offer differing opinions, particularly to more powerful colleagues. In a recent study of 62 drug development teams, Ms. Edmondson and Henrik Bresman found that diverse teams, when assessed by senior leaders, outperform their more homogenous peers only in the presence of psychological safety.” The DEI program, you see, is entirely focused on this effort and there are no politics involved, “Inclusion work, done well, seeks to scale these kinds of results. Among other payoffs, organizations that get inclusion right at scale seem to be smarter, more innovative and more stable.” (One wonders if they have seen Disney’s bottom line recently, or Budweiser for that matter.) They concluded, “We know that historical change is like sleep. It happens gradually, sometimes fitfully, then all at once. We are in the fitful stage of our evolution toward truly inclusive organizations. But let us not get confused: Inclusion is an end goal that channels universal hopes for meritocracy, reflects America at its best and creates the foundation for an even more competitive future.”
Much of this is undoubtedly true in principle, except that none of this is what DEI looks like in practice. Different viewpoints are not the objective and never have been, or at least have not been for as long as anyone can remember. No advocating for DEI has ever, as in not once in the entire history of the universe, said we need to get more conservatives involved, or recruit poor white people from impoverished backgrounds in Alabama. Much like Critical Race Theory, whatever the theoretical underpinnings might have been at some point, DEI has become a purely progressive exercise in practice, promoting anti-racist dogma and elevating those they perceive as disadvantaged purely because they are seen as disadvantaged. Once again, we know this from their own statements. Earlier this month, the once prestigious Johns’ Hopkins University’s Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion was forced to withdraw its “Diversity Word of the Month” after public outcry. “Privilege,” the withdrawn email began, “is a set of unearned benefits given to people who are in a specific social group. Privilege operates on personal, interpersonal, culture, and institutional levels and it provides advantages and favors to members of dominant groups at the expense of other groups.” The email went on to provide a list of those so gifted undeservedly: White people, able-bodied people, heterosexuals, cisgender people, males, Christians, middle or owning class people, middle-aged people, and English speaking people. All of these groups, “believe they have earned the privileges they enjoy or that everyone could have access to these privileges if only they worked to earn them,” but “privileges are unearned and are granted to people in the dominant groups,” all said without any evidence, of course. The email was ultimately withdrawn, but the time spent conceiving it, writing it, and sending it the first time should tell one all they need to know about the focus of DEI. These initiatives are frequently accompanied by internal groups segregated according to ethnic background, fostering exclusion rather than inclusion, and anti-racist “training” aimed exclusively at white people. Coca Cola, for example, made headlines in 2021 by urging employees to be “less white,” because in “the U.S. and other Western nations, white people are socialized to feel that they are inherently superior because they are white.” To do so, white people should be “be less oppressive,” “less arrogant,” “less ignorant,” “listen,” “believe” and “break with white solidarity.” Imagine, if you will, what the reaction would be if a workplace urged people to be “less black” and to do so blacks need to be “less ignorant?”
Whatever the case, it’s hard to believe The New York Times when they insist the primary purpose of any of this is performance, leading to the only obvious conclusion: It’s about power. Embedding DEI in business and academia has offered progressives the opportunity to control policies, hire and fire, and promote individuals that embrace their agenda, while stifling opposing points of view because to voice them would be “arrogant” or “ignorant.” DEI and ESG should properly be seen on a continuum starting with Critical Race Theory. CRT is the means to indoctrinate the young into believing white people have committed some singularly monstrous sin and continue to do so simply by being white, and to convince minorities that they are all part of a spectrum of endless oppression. DEI and ESG are a means to control organizations from within, ensuring they are aligned with the progressive agenda and advancing progressive goals. The combination of the two is intended to produce a citizenry primed to accept the need for this agenda, and ready to enact it across every institution imaginable. Both are extensions of the essentially Marxist program, repackaged for the modern age with our own idiosyncrasies and concerns. Therefore, the practice will not go quietly into that good night, it’s a centerpiece of the entire plan to remake America in a purely progressive image and it will not be easy to remove it. Recent victories aside, conservatives shouldn’t be celebrating. They should be girding for a much longer battle ahead.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 