Trump’s DEI Move Is One to Celebrate - The two-year campaign for colorblind equality just notched its biggest win yet.

Yesterday, President Trump signed an executive order abolishing the “diversity, equity, and inclusion” bureaucracy in the federal government.

The move marks a stunning reversal of fortune from just four years ago, when Black Lives Matter, critical race theory, and DEI seemed unstoppable. Following the death of George Floyd, left-wing race activists made a blitz through America’s institutions, rewriting school curricula, altering government policy, and establishing DEI offices in major universities, big-city school districts, and Fortune 100 companies. The Biden administration immediately followed suit, mandating a “whole-of-government equity agenda” that entrenched DEI in the federal government.

No more. President Trump has rescinded the Biden executive order and instructed his Cabinet to “terminate, to the maximum extent allowed by law, all DEI, DEIA, and ‘environmental justice’ offices and positions,” and “all ‘equity action plans,’ ‘equity’ actions, initiatives, or programs.” In other words, President Trump has signed the death warrant for DEI within the federal government.

How did we get here? Through patiently building a movement and winning the public debate. At the beginning of 2023, I worked with Florida governor Ron DeSantis to launch the “abolish DEI” campaign. We began by terminating the DEI bureaucracy at New College of Florida, a small public university in Sarasota, where I serve as a trustee. The reaction from the racialist Left was intense. Protesters descended on the campus and the left-wing media published hundreds of articles condemning the move. But we held firm and made the case that public institutions should judge individuals based on their accomplishments, rather than their ancestry.

The argument began to take hold. The polling data indicated that Americans supported a “colorblind society” over a “race-conscious society” by large margins. Even the New York Times, one of the largest boosters of left-wing racialism, started publishing pieces that criticized DEI. At the same time, the Black Lives Matter movement was ensnared in scandals and the leading intellectual voices of DEI, such as Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo, faced sustained public scrutiny and seemed to disappear from the spotlight.

We pushed onward. Governor DeSantis led the way, signing legislation abolishing the DEI bureaucracy in all of Florida’s public universities. A dozen other red states followed, restricting DEI programs and banning DEI-style discrimination in their public institutions. The process became a virtuous cycle: each state that passed an anti-DEI bill reduced the risk of the next state doing the same. The campaign moved from the realm of debate to the realm of policy.

Trump’s victory over Kamala Harris on November 5 sealed DEI’s fate. Corporate America, including companies such as Walmart, and Meta, interpreted the event as an incentive to change, voluntarily terminating their DEI programs before Trump took office. Mark Zuckerberg made it explicit, arguing that the country had reached a “cultural tipping point,” which convinced him to stop DEI programs. And Zuckerberg, along with numerous other tech titans, were prominently seated at the inauguration yesterday.

In one way, Trump’s executive order yesterday was priced in—people knew it was coming. Still, it is a crowning achievement for those who have built this campaign from the ground up. There will be many fights ahead—the bureaucracy will attempt to evade the order, and more needs doing on civil rights reform in general—but, for the moment, we should celebrate. The forces of left-wing racialism are on the defensive, and the forces of colorblind equality are on the move.

None of it was inevitable—and nothing will be going forward, either. It has taken courage, hard work, and more than a little luck. But this is undoubtedly a moment to feel optimistic. America’s institutions are not beyond correction, as many feared. The American people were wise enough to realize that their country might not have survived four or eight more years of government by DEI. They spoke on November 5, and now President Trump is acting accordingly.

What the Left fails to understand is just how corrosive and destructive DEI and Affirmative Action are to the very people those things are supposed (in their minds) to aid.

In my mind, the very worst (to them) is that if someone of one of those groups holds a position of any kind, they will always have the sword of "Affirmative Action Hire" hanging over their head either justifiably or unjustifiably.

When you see disaster occur to a place like Los Angeles due to extremely poor mismanagement or malmanagement and you find that the three most important positions bearing on the disaster are all lesbians, hired by people whose goal was not to manage the threat of fire, but to have more "representation" in positions of authority such as these three:

Then it isn't homophobia, racism, or sexism that causes people to think that people were hired not primarily on their suitability, aptitude, or competence at a given job, but for the various checkboxes that were checked in the hiring process.

If people are being chosen to perform a task that they fail at, and they are all chosen on the basis of something other than competency (such as skin color, gender, sexual preference, or, in the case of the doctored image above, moles on the right side of their faces) then normal, sensible, thinking people are going to rightly conclude that they were all chosen because they had moles on the right side of their face rather than their ability to manage the threat of fire.

And that damage that does to women who are good at their jobs who make occasional mistakes (as we all do) or blacks who occasionally have bad outcomes at tasks (as happens to all of us) or lesbians who make poor choices at managing the threat of fire (as administrators in the firefighting field sometimes do) is unfairly heaped on competent people who make mistakes as well as rightly heaped on the three female lesbians above.

That is one of the main reasons I stopped watching NFL football. Idiocies like the “Rooney Rule”.

Even when it was supposed to serve a purpose, I despised it, for the same reasons in my post above. Any black or other minority coach who got their job due to the “Rooney Rule” is going to have a tighter coat to wear (fairly or unfairly) because of it.

The good and competent black coaches won’t have the latitude given to non-minority coaches, because people will conclude they weren’t hired for their competency, but for the color of their skin, and will logically, though rightly or wrongly, judge them on that.

It breeds injustice. If there were no “Rooney Rule”, and there was no public push by the NFL to hire people based on the color of their skin, then racists would be the only ones who would judge that coach’s performance based on the color of their skin. But because there IS a “Rooney Rule”, non-racist people who possess common sense will rightly assume that hiring on the basis of skin color has a role in the poor performance of a coach, ie. Someone hired because they are not competent, but fulfill a racial checkbox.

I used to be a Patriots fan and a big (rabid) NFL fan since about 1971 but I parted ways with the NFL on things like this, the Kneeling, the “Rooney Rule”, and their deliberate push to exclude white males from their preferred customers, even though I would suspect they constitute a wide majority. (granted, it could be simply that they decided that they had white males locked in so they focus ALL their advertising on blacks and females, but I still see that as driven by the same thing, DEI scores)

I loved watching Jerod Mayo as a player, the kind of linebacker I always admired. Smart, big, tough, fast, and aggressive. I had stopped following the team back around 2019 or so, but when I heard he was made coach, I wanted him to succeed. But then I began hearing how woke he was, and how much he supported it all, any interest in his ability to coach vanished. At that point, I no longer cared what happened to him or how he did. When he was fired, it was no surprise to me, and didn’t care a bit.

If you were an alien and saw broadcasts from Earth of all commercials, you would assume that blacks and other minorities made up the vast majority of the population. I know they likely mainly do it to elevate their corporate DEI scores, but it doesn’t change the perception.

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