DEI Must Die • Eagle Forum

What are the problems with DEI that have not just lost its support but put fear into the public that, like the Russian commissar system of old, it has the potential to undermine the very sinews of a sophisticated, complex society?

1. DEI is an ideology or a protocol that supersedes disinterested evaluation. In that regard, ironically, it is akin to the era of Jim Crow, when talented individuals were irrationally barred from consideration due to their mere skin color. Like any system that prioritizes identity over merit — whether Marist-Leninist credentials in the old Soviet Union or tribal bias in the contemporary Middle East — a complex society that embraces tribalism inevitably begins to become dysfunctional.
2. DEI does not end at hiring. Rather, once a candidate senses he is employed on the basis of his race, sex, or sexual orientation, then it is natural he must assume such preferences are tenured throughout his career. Thus, he will always be judged by the same criterion that led to his hiring. In other words, DEI is a lifetime contractual agreement, an insurance policy of sorts once DEI credentials are established as preeminent over all others.
3. The advocates of DEI rarely confess that meritocratic criteria have been superseded by considerations of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Instead, to the degree that they claim such criteria are not at odds with meritocracy, they argue that the methods of assessing talent and performance are themselves flawed. Tests then are unsound and systemically biased and therefore largely irrelevant. Few DEI advocates make the argument that diversity is so important that it justifies lowering the traditional standards of competence.
4. Once DEI tribal protocols are established, they are calcified and unchanged. That is when supposed DEI demographics are overrepresented in particular fields such as the postal service or professional sports, then such “disproportionality” is justified on “reparatory” grounds or ironically on merit. If other non-DEI groups, by DEI’s own standards, are deprived of “equity” and “inclusion” or “underrepresented,” it is irrelevant. DEI is, again, a lifetime concession, regardless of changes in status, income, or privilege.
5. DEI is also ossified in the sense that it makes no allowance for class. Asian Americans, when convenient, can be counted as DEI hires even though, in terms of per capita income, most Asian groups do better than so-called whites. Under DEI, the children of elites like Barack Obama or Hakim Jeffries will always be in need of reparatory consideration but not so the children of those in East Palestine, Ohio.
6. Because DEI is an ideology, a faith-based creed, it does not rely on logic and is thus exempt from charges of irrationality, inconsistency, and hypocrisy. The belief system feels no obligation to defend itself from rational arguments. For example, are not racially separate graduations or safe spaces contrary to the corpus of civil rights legislation of the 1960s? There is no such thing as DEI irony: the system contrived to supposedly remedy the de jure racism of some 60-70 years ago itself hinges on de jure racial fixations as the remedy — now, tomorrow, forever.
7. As in all monolithic dogmas such as Sovietism or Maoism, skeptics, critics, and apostates cannot be tolerated. So, in the case of DEI, logical criticism is preemptively aborted by boilerplate charges of racism, sexism, and homophobia. And the mere accusation is synonymous with conviction, thereby establishing DEI deterrence, under which no one dares to risk cancellation, de-platforming, ostracism, or career suicide by questioning the faith.
8. DEI is also incoherent. It is essentially a reversion to tribalism in which solidarity is predicated on shared race, sex, or sexual orientation, not through individual background, particular economic status, or one’s unique character. No DEI czar knows why in the pre-Obama era, East Asians did not qualify for DEI status, though they seem to now, or when and how the transgendered were suddenly not statistically still traditionally .01 percent of the population but, in some campus surveys, magically became 10-20 percent of polled undergraduates. No one understands what percentage of one’s DNA qualifies for DEI status, only that any system of the past that fixated on ascertaining racial essentialism, such as the one-drop rule of the old South or the multiplicity of racial categories in the former South Africa, or the yellow-star evil of the Third Reich, largely imploded, in part by the weight of its own absurd amorality.
9. DEI never explains the exact individual bereavement that justifies preferentiality. All claims are instead collective. And they are encased in the amber of slavery, Jim Crow, or homophobia or sexism of decades past. Social progress does not exist; the malady is eternal. The candidate for DEI consideration never must ascertain how, when, or where he was subject to serious discrimination or bias. And that may explain all the needed prefix adjectives that have sprouted up to prove these -isms and -ologies exist when they otherwise cannot be detected, such as “systemic,” “implicit,” “insidious,” or “structural” racism rather than just “racism.”
10. DEI never envisions its demise or what follows from it, much less whether there are superior ways to achieve equality of opportunity rather than mandated results. The beneficiaries of DEI seldom ponder its efficacy, much less whether resources would be better allotted to K-12 education during the critical years of development. And they certainly show little concern about those often poorer and more underprivileged who lack the prescribed race, gender, or orientation for special DEI considerations.

In sum, because of these inconsistencies, Donald Trump may well be able to end DEI with a wave of an executive order — simply because its foundations were always built of sand and thus any bold push would knock over the entire shaky edifice.