Imagine having to sit through that struggle session to keep your job. Just damn.
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.
Leftism deals in deception and lies.
Nah, the ten year plot to destroy Donald with a dozen nefarious subplots was the biggest con of the century.
I’d put DEI in 2nd place. “Climate change” gets 1st place.
it is definitely in the top ten ...
In Biden’s last two years, he increased the federal workforce by 50% from 2,000,000 to 3,000,000, all of whom were DEI leftist plants. If they stay, all hope is lost.
Happily, Trump knows this, and is firing all probationary employees hired in the last two years.
The game is afoot, and Trump will chase them all out.
Imagine having to sit through that struggle session to keep your job. Just damn.
“Leftism deals in deception and lies.”
And violence.
L
Perfect FEMA employee...
All of these cons, including climate change, DEI, critical race theory, transgenderism, boys in girls sports, systemic racism, there being a war on women, are all designed to rip this nation apart, because a strong America is threatening to tyranny's designs for world domination.
R vs D Con gives any Con a run for its money...
In a battle with climate conundrum and pronoun wars?
Bigger con than men can be women? Even better women than people who were born with a vagina?
Yes, Climate Change, DEI, CONgre$$,...”it’s all about money, ain’t a damn thing funny.,,,”
DEI was just a renaming of Affirmative Action, which was 60 years old and out of excuses for why it still needed to exist.
As the old Soviet Union found out, imposed ideologies based on lies and ideals - instead of reality and facts - is bound to eventually implode.
DEI was such an ideology, with sometimes disastrous results (such as aviation disasters).
She is cute, elegant and articulate! There are so many clever ways to live decently at the expense of working people, this is one of them.
Certainly one of the biggest. Man-made “climate change” is right up there as well.
DEI is just the latest reincarnation of affirmative action.
They both stem from the false assumption that all races on average are the same, therefore the average results should be equal, and if they’re not it’s because one race is oppressing another, hence the “need” for institutionalized quotas.
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