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DEI Was the Biggest Con of the Century
American Greatness ^ | 1 Mar, 2025 | Stanley K. Ridgley

Posted on 03/01/2025 6:23:31 AM PST by MtnClimber

DEI was the biggest con of the century, embedding bureaucratic hustlers in academia while fueling ideological extremism—now, as it collapses, new labels emerge to mask its failure.

This article is adapted from the author’s new book, “DEI Exposed: How the Biggest Con of the Century Almost Toppled Higher Education” (Armin Lear Press.)

The DEI Con has enriched thousands of hustlers nationwide. It has embedded many hundreds of apparatchiks and supernumeraries in college bureaucracies, and it will require herculean efforts to root them all out. And it continues to attack the average person for the most dubious of ideologically motivated reasons in “training” sessions, both on the campuses and in corporate America.

I first heard the actual acronym DEI expressed while I was in a 7-11 on the campus during the early days of the COVID pandemic, and it was two masked graduate students discussing the wonderful employment possibilities of this new initiative, which sounded like someone trying to monetize kumbaya. Already steeped in leftist ideology and its tactic of renaming and relabeling its hooey for new generations of suckers, I was only vaguely aware that this was just the latest brand for the newest social justice foray in higher education.

“Diversity” had already been around for many years, its hustler scratching at the university door. Not actual diversity, mind you, but the skin-deep diversity of noxious racialism tarted-up with fake Enlightenment discourse. This concept of “diversity, equity, inclusion” quickly metastasized until it was everywhere, and this was no accident. It was a bureaucratic initiative designed to anchor a new raft of social justice programs as an inescapable presence on the campus.

It was no accident that it was violence and the threat of violence that opened the door for this effervescence of DEI. It sounded absurd. I knew it was absurd; I knew it was a con. Most people likely knew it was a con but then most people on the campuses also knew to keep their mouths shut in a time of hair-trigger tempers and performative chaos unleashed by well-funded activist groups. No college administration wanted the summer violence of 2020 overflowing onto the campuses. And so they opened the university to barbarian ideas rather than the barbarians themselves.

This was the madness of crowds brought en masse onto the campuses, and it was wildly successful. It achieved this success with a superb combination of psychological factors—relentless hustling, a primitive ideology suffused with mysticism and “indigenous knowledges,” and the barely concealed violent urges of quasi-communist and terroristic revolutionaries. All of this shielded from criticism and even the mildest of questioning.

You knew something was terribly wrong with it.

Anyone on a college campus subjected to the mediocrity of a DEI hustler knew there was something wrong with it.

It was not noble. It was not idealistic. It was not the many wonderful things its proponents said. It was one thing to the public, and it was another altogether when enacted on the campuses. It was weird and alien and hateful at its core, but the public is rarely exposed to any of this. It was the classic Potemkin village offering, with a façade masking a brute, racialist substance.

In other words, it was a con. In fact, it was the biggest Con Story of the 21st century, with America’s universities the biggest suckers imaginable. And the crowning achievement of Western civilization—the modern university—tottered under the assault of mediocrity, racialism, and pseudoscience.

I suppose that folks duped by the big cons will eventually retreat in their embarrassment at having been fooled by one of the shadiest Con Stories ever deployed. Even now, DEI is in retreat. As it plays out in its final act, I assure you that it will dissipate in a flurry of new acronyms and new labels designed to hide its failure.

Its proponents will roll out new slogans to replace the vapid “Diversity is our strength.” Already, “inclusive excellence” is supplanting DEI as this trusty acronym becomes freighted with failure. The Con Story will morph and adapt. Reluctantly. Buzzwords will change, new slogans will be coined, but the underlying ideology will remain the same as it always has. It must serve yeoman’s duty for the Big Con.

Elaborate and elegant Con Stories have played major political roles for centuries, baiting and hooking marks with promises of utopia. The most convincing Con Story of them all is that of Karl Marx, whose fabulous pseudoscience has duped millions of the credulous to support murderous regimes in the name of “social justice.” It still does.

Con Stories are essential to convincing gullible people to act in ways that simply make no sense to a normal person who is tethered to reality. We saw an example of the Con Story’s power in December of 2024.

In the early morning hours, a Con Story duped a privileged 26-year-old by the name of Luigi Mangione to stalk and back-shoot a man he’d never met—a man with wife and two children who guaranteed the health care of hundreds of thousands of Americans through his company. Mangione murdered on the streets of New York for the same reason that extremist ideologues and world-changers always kill. His ideology told him the target was a villain, and he acted.

Let’s be clear. People who think this way are dangerous. They are not temperate, they do not compromise (except for the moment’s expediency), and they are certainly not swayed by the better “argument.” These are the kinds of people who hide inside a crowd, usually masked. Many of them are disturbed mentally.

It’s easy to identify the people who are moving in the Mangione direction, inspired by corrupt ideas and urged to do something rather than sit idle. This is a social pathology, and examples of it are too numerous for any polity to be comfortable.

This is the core of successful social movements and social hustles—to contrive a winning narrative out of confusing facts and isolated incidents to portray a fictional pattern, a nationwide epidemic of, well, something that can be used to make a buck. When the social movement is also a social hustle, the combination is too powerful to resist for con-artists and their suckers.

If you believe that there is no link between the kind of social fantasy that motivates a Luigi Mangione to backshoot a man he doesn’t know on a New York street and the kind of DEI fantasy that dictates a racialist split on the college campus that slots persons into good and evil, then try this test yourself. I give you a guarantee that persons who cheer the killer Luigi Mangione for his assassination of Brian Thompson also fully support DEI’s personnel, programs, policies, and enforcement mechanisms on the college campuses. Go ahead, ask a person who cheers the assassin if he also supports DEI.

You already know the answer, don’t you?

It’s because this type of person is animated by a vision of the world crafted by some dead scribbler and is a prisoner of ideology, forfeiting the reliable information provided by his own senses and experience.

It’s what happens when a sucker falls hard for a Con Story.


TOPICS: Business/Economy; Society
KEYWORDS: leftism
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To: MtnClimber

DEI was the biggest con of the century

No it wasn’t. Global warming was.


21 posted on 03/01/2025 8:00:49 AM PST by axxmann (If McCain is conservative then I'm a freakin' anarchist.)
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To: MtnClimber

This is a must read for everyone here on FR. Thanks for posting.


22 posted on 03/01/2025 8:32:08 AM PST by wjcsux (On 3/14/1883 Karl Marx gave humanity his best gift, he died. )
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To: MtnClimber

DEI was bad along with the lie that “diversity is our strength” and the whole globull warming BS.


23 posted on 03/01/2025 8:32:44 AM PST by Blood of Tyrants (It is long past time to dump the entire Treasury drawer and throw away the crap.)
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To: MtnClimber

Global Warming/Climate Change is the biggest.


24 posted on 03/01/2025 8:33:32 AM PST by dfwgator (Endut! Hoch Hech!)
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To: Robert DeLong

I would add to your list the censorship in the name of “guardrails” and “fighting extremism”.

That was a vicious scam.


25 posted on 03/01/2025 8:34:23 AM PST by cgbg (The Democrat Party is a criminal enterprise.)
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To: dfwgator
Global Warming/Climate Change is the biggest.

I think so too. It is like teaching children to be afraid of the monster under their bed.

26 posted on 03/01/2025 8:39:32 AM PST by MtnClimber (For photos of scenery, wildlife and climbing, click on my screen name for my FR home page.)
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To: MtnClimber

Racism on the crap end of a stick.


27 posted on 03/01/2025 9:09:56 AM PST by FlingWingFlyer (Schmucky Schumer says that Government "hard workers" are working anonymously.)
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To: MtnClimber
Bigger than covid?

I’d say it was anthropogenic climate change...by a mile.

28 posted on 03/01/2025 9:27:17 AM PST by gundog (The ends justify the mean tweets. )
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To: MtnClimber

Disagree!
The biggest scam has been “climate alarm”...


29 posted on 03/01/2025 9:35:31 AM PST by SuperLuminal (Where is rabble-rising Sam Adams now that we need him? Is his name Trump, now?)
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To: MtnClimber

I was going to say “Climate Change” was bigger, but that is last century.


30 posted on 03/01/2025 9:37:09 AM PST by Cincinnatus.45-70 (What do DemocRats enjoy more than a truckload of dead babies? Unloading them with a pitchfork!)
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To: Restless

Pandemic, Climate Change, DEI , no particular order- hidden Muslim and Chinese immigrants , on and on


31 posted on 03/01/2025 9:40:16 AM PST by Palio di Siena (Kralik…..you get the wallet )
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To: MtnClimber
"Almost" toppled higher education? We've been graduating idiots who can't even form a comprehensible English sentence. Forget about math or science. We rate so far behind our enemies we'll never catch up.

America's enemies played this beautifully.

32 posted on 03/01/2025 9:42:30 AM PST by LouAvul (1 John 2:22: He that denies that Jesus is the Christ is a liar and antichrist. )
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To: FreedomPoster

Sat through a group session something like that in the military, way, way back when it was called “race relations.” The instructor made a slight mistake when, seeing a Chinese-American O-5 in the group, asked, “How does it feel to you, being a minority?” Answer: “I wouldn’t know. The last time I looked, Chinese outnumbered every other group on earth by about a billion people.”


33 posted on 03/01/2025 9:45:31 AM PST by Cincinnatus.45-70 (What do DemocRats enjoy more than a truckload of dead babies? Unloading them with a pitchfork!)
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To: MtnClimber

Well, except for the Fauci Flu scamdemic.


34 posted on 03/01/2025 9:49:50 AM PST by CaptainPhilFan (Donald J Trump: OF the People FOR the People WITH the People)
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To: Cincinnatus.45-70

Ha! Perfect!

I hope the instructor felt properly chastised by that.


35 posted on 03/01/2025 10:00:05 AM PST by FreedomPoster (Islam delenda est)
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To: cgbg

Guardrails doesn’t ring a bell, but fighting extremism is certainly one of them. I was certain I wasn’t hitting all of them. Disinformation is another one, but that is more of a gas-lighting tool used to confuse & divert attentions.


36 posted on 03/01/2025 11:04:38 AM PST by Robert DeLong
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To: FreedomPoster

“DEI/CRT in one image:”

Here’s a video of it with commentary from some ‘brothers’.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWoC90bbsdo


37 posted on 03/02/2025 12:08:08 PM PST by BobL (The people who hate Trump demand that you hate Russia)
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To: BobL

Ain’t nobody got time for that!

Besides, she’s frightening enough in a still pic!


38 posted on 03/02/2025 7:36:41 PM PST by FreedomPoster (Islam delenda est)
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