DEI’s tipping point

With the start of the new year, several cracks in the support for the race-baiting propagandistic regime had begun to show. DEI advocate and serial plagiarist Claudine Gay was removed as president of Harvard University. Harvard itself suffered a significant blow to its neo-identitarian aspirations following the Supreme Court’s ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard that struck down its and other schools’ affirmative action policies in admissions. Google, Facebook, and other corporate leaders slashed the DEI personnel budgets they had once publicly championed in greener financial times. Led by Gov. Ron DeSantis’s Florida, a handful of states had outlawed DEI funding at publicly funded universities and institutions.

The heinous on-campus reaction to Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks against Israel, where colleges and universities turned a blind eye to or abetted their students’ and professors’ celebration of murder, rape, and unmitigated terrorism against the Jewish people, spurred countless people to grapple with the reality of the leftist DEI regime they had once ignored. Billionaire donors such as Bill Ackman, Clifford Asness, Marc Rowan, and Les Wexner halted or threatened to rescind their financial support of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and other Ivy League institutions in outrage.

Money talks, and those in corporate America, both financiers and consumers, began to speak up with their wallets against the constant barrage of “The Message” peddled from all corners of public life. Even Disney and ice-cold beer were not exempt from the backlash.

For those of us who have been warning for years about the malevolent and pervasive spread of the divisive racial and identity Marxism masking itself in the cloak of “inclusion” and “anti-racism,” a broader public resistance has been long awaited. Yet to say, as some have done, that the DEI agenda is “on the run” is to understate gravely the reality of the situation. Indeed, even the suggestion that it has reached a “tipping point” somewhat misunderstands the contours of the problem.

It is clear, at least to me, that many of what one could lovingly label as “normal Americans” have finally grasped that what they once derided as “campus craziness” can no longer be ignored as a simple Ivy League fad or hippy-dippy, “kids these days” nonsense that stays in its own intellectual or geographic spheres. You do not have to attend Brown University to hear a lecture on postmodern feminist theory regarding the abolition of gender roles. You simply need to turn on the TV or talk to your child at the dinner table. Parents of elementary school children learned well during the pandemic that even their under-10s were not exempt from being peddled leftist dogmatism on subjects of activism, protest, queerness, unconscious bias, inherited guilt, and the like.

We have collectively moved beyond the “this is a real thing that is happening” phase, which is a salutary development in this fight against identity extremism, which is to say our cultural fight against its own ruination. It was not too long ago that getting anyone not directly affiliated to care what was going on “at some campus somewhere” was an uphill battle. This, in turn, allowed those perpetuating the critical race theory and DEI message to deny anything was afoot at all.

But the reason it matters what type of ideological, professional, practical, and moral instruction is being inculcated in students by colleges and universities is that those students do not remain so: They become graduates, who become employees, who become managers and principals and administrators and vice presidents and CEOs and all the rest. They become not only workers among many, but eventually, they become those making the decisions, replacing whatever mediating presence or professional standards came before. What happens on campus does not stay on campus. It never has.

“Many American pundits seem to firmly believe that the country stands at a precipice in which young, left-wing college students and recent graduates are the leading edge of a rising tide of illiberalism that comes in the form of ‘political correctness’ and poses a clear and present danger to free speech and rational discourse,” Vox co-founder Matthew Yglesias wrote in March 2018. “It is so accepted that there is a growing climate of authoritarianism, that whether or not individual examples are true is fundamentally irrelevant.”

In 2020, as I noted in these pages at the time, Yglesias finally realized that college students graduate. “I am going to have to admit I was wrong and the excesses are spreading,” Yglesias wrote in a series of now-deleted tweets. “I stand by a lot of my criticisms of the anti-PC discourse of five years ago. But I wrongly thought the most egregious excesses of campus activists would stay on campus when they have instead spread as people age into other roles.”

I raise this example again not to embarrass Yglesias — he doesn’t need my help for that — but because this mindset is representative of how many on the Right and in the center have considered college campuses and how we risk compartmentalizing the fight against the ideological poison undergirding the DEI agenda.

Universities, originally tasked with the cultivation of character and the molding of inquiring citizens capable of tending the inherited garden of civilization, have become forces of destruction. Pluralism necessitates the space for competing visions or beliefs, the very foundation of what education is meant to be, yet the regnant ethos of the academy is one of Manichean divisions between good and bad — between morally upright adherents of The Message on one side and backward evildoers and wrongthinkers on the other. Under the guise of celebrating differences and championing diversity, our present educational paradigm is dedicated to othering anyone not totally committed to the progressive catechism, which itself is constantly shifting and evolving.

The realities of this intellectual hypocrisy are readily apparent. Asian students and families were forced to sue for fair admissions because they weren’t considered “appropriate” minorities. Gay and lesbian people who aren’t fully on board with the idea that a man can pick and choose to be a woman and vice versa are lambasted as “not queer enough.” Jews, among the most oppressed peoples in the history of our world, are attacked, both verbally and physically, on campuses as “oppressors.”

The elision of differences into good versus bad, us versus them, coupled with the never-ending redrawing of lines between oppressors and oppressed leads not to progress or epistemic edification but to the eye-watering stupidity of activists declaring “Queers for Palestine.” Just this week, critical race theory and DEI believers had a devil of a time working out whether it was permissible to post that Aaron Bushnell, the mentally deranged airman who set himself on fire, “rest in power.” (Because, despite apparently committing suicide for the cause of a “free Palestine,” he was, after all, a white man.)

Equipped not with the abilities of discernment or critical thinking but with the zealot’s moral conviction to be on the side of the angels, this educational rot spreads outward from beyond the campus and into the workplace. Rather than molding a responsible citizenry, the academy produces graduates dedicated to what Thomas Sowell aptly termed “the quest for Cosmic Justice.”

As he wrote in his book of the same name, “Cosmic justice is not simply a higher degree of traditional justice, it is a fundamentally different concept. Traditionally, justice or injustice is characteristic of a process. A defendant in a criminal case would be said to have received justice if the trial were conducted as it should be, under fair rules and with the judge and jury being impartial. … Not only does cosmic justice differ from traditional justice, and conflict with it, more momentously cosmic justice is irreconcilable with personal freedom based on the rule of law. Traditional justice can be mass-produced by impersonal prospective rules governing the interactions of flesh-and-blood human beings, but cosmic justice must be hand-made by holders of power who impose their own decisions on how these flesh-and-blood individuals should be categorized into abstractions and how these abstractions should then be forcibly configured to fit the vision of the power-holders.”

This mindset holds that not only is activism necessary but is justified, and it is a belief being taken from the classroom and integrated into the workplace. In its more benign forms, it has given rise to an activist professional class whose entire livelihood is dedicated to perpetuating dogmatism to others. Little wonder the first solution from DEI coordinators to address corporate or classroom racial or gender imbalances involves hiring more DEI coordinators. It manifests in activist teachers justifying denying kindergarteners cubby access and recess time in the name of teaching discrimination, in California administrators denying whole grades of high school students advanced math courses in order to “advance equity.” In the most extreme forms, this quest for cosmic justice gives way to aid and succor for terrorism. This was seen quite clearly in the aftermath of Hamas’s atrocities against Israel, as dozens of pro-Palestinian student groups praised the attacks in Gaza, while some educators, such as one at Stanford University or others at the Berkeley Unified School District, harassed their own Jewish students.

Just this week, violent protesters at the University of California, Berkeley, attacked students attending a talk by an Israeli lawyer. Students were forced to evacuate the venue after vandals broke windows and a door, and several attendees reported to campus police that they were physically assaulted and called slurs, according to the university spokesman. Absent strong cultural guardrails, not to mention institutional or legal punishment, such behavior is allowed to grow and fester. Meanwhile, student perpetrators sugarcoat their dangerous behavior as a socially concerned act of democratic liberation or other such lies. Extremism is painted as protest, vice promoted as virtue. 

Personnel is policy, as the Reagan-era slogan went. And while DEI coordinators and critical race theory workshop instructors are obvious targets, they are far from the only dogmatists poisoning the well of pluralism and shared American identity. Consider the recent contretemps over Google’s Gemini artificial intelligence engine. As could be witnessed all over X and later in articles covering the matter, the search engine’s AI responses are quite obviously coded to elevate certain (read: left-wing) answers and theories while denigrating others, even going as far as to fabricate negative search results when asked to cover conservative-leaning material. As Fox News’s Peter Hasson detailed on X, “Google’s Gemini AI invented fake negative reviews about my 2020 book about Google’s left-wing bias. None of the book reviews — which it attributed to [Matthew Continetti], [Ben Smith] and others — are real.” Perhaps the most widely discussed results involved Gemini’s almost categorical refusal to populate white men in its image rendering. Even when asked to show what the American Founding Fathers or the Nazis looked like, white men were nowhere to be seen (Google eventually apologized for the latter instance, naturally).

While not as flagrantly egregious as involvement in student groups with financial ties linked to terrorist organizations cheering on the rape and murder of civilians, the implications of an artificial intelligence hard-coded with left-wing biases are beyond pernicious. Moreover, it reveals that simply because a company such as Google offloads the salaries of its cushy DEI directors does not mean it has moved away from the mission. Coders have their own ideological inclinations just like anyone else, and when allowed to thrive in a mutually reinforcing monoculture, those subjective beliefs can become indistinguishable from, and in fact the core of, their professional output.

As Milton Friedman put it, “A society that puts equality — in the sense of equality of outcome — ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom. The use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom, and the force, introduced for good purposes, will end up in the hands of people who use it to promote their own interests.”

This is why I caution the idea we have achieved a tipping point, much less anything approaching a victory over the identity-obsessed zealots trampling over the ideals that buoy our civic life. While the public has finally grasped the baleful realities belying the cancerous weed masquerading as “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” its broader tendrils must be identified and excised, root and stem.

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“Pop goes the DEI bubble,” the Wall Street Journal’s Andy Kessler wrote last month. “The long march is in retreat.”

On the contrary, the fight has not been won — it has only finally been joined.

J. Grant Addison is the deputy editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.