Trump has stumbled onto righteous ground with his war on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI). Following the death of George Floyd in 2020, America’s DEI quotient rocketed, seeping into every nook and cranny of the country’s workplaces, schools, and hospitals. No longer. Trump has taken drastic, seismic action within two days of taking office. As a starter, every single federal employee working in DEI has been placed on administrative leave.
This is nothing short of miraculous. DEI is rotten from start to finish and its impact has been deeply regressive and dangerous. It’s not just the money that has been wasted, diverted away from frontline services. Each and every bit of DEI’s governing ideology is mendacious, doing the opposite of what it says.
Under the aegis of DEI schemes, federal and otherwise, there has been thought policing via mandatory unconscious bias training, the curtailment of free expression, no matter how respectful, and an increase in bullying as bosses enforced the ideology. Diversity of thought has been under attack, thanks to the expulsion or exclusion of those who deviate from compulsory wokeness. Meanwhile, “equity” has laid waste to the idea of meritocracy because it says that people from allegedly marginalised backgrounds should get a big leg up throughout the hiring and promotion process, based on skin colour or gender identity alone.
One of DEI ideology’s most poisonous side-effects has been a sharp rise not just in anti-Semitism, but in its acceptability. What we saw taking place on US campuses from Harvard to Columbia to UCLA last spring, as progressive brigands in keffiyehs took to their megaphones to denounce “Zionists” in unmistakeably Hitlerian terms, was directly in line with DEI culture as it has come to be understood in the Anglosphere.
According to the pernicious doctrines of critical race theory that underpin much DEI thinking, Jews are deemed to be both “white” and colonisers and oppressors (as the devious, vicious spin on “Zionists” would have it). Therefore, in DEI world, laying into “Zionists” is considered to be virtuous; since “Zionists”, charged with “systematic” oppression of the Palestinian underdog, must be the enemy of all that is good. In an environment fostering such putrid systems of thought, anyone associated with Israel, which is largely Jews, for reasons that ought to be obvious, becomes fair game.
Ending the use of taxpayer money to fund this ideology is the first big step. The next one will be to finish the job already begun at some of America’s biggest corporates, and excise DEI from all workplaces, schools, and, eventually, from a rising generation’s view of the world.
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