The Beginning of the End of DEI – In the Private Sector and Our Universities

By Janet Levy | AM Thinker | Dec 9, 2024

Ferraris are priced between $250,000 and $600,000, but it’s not enough to have the money to buy these pricey Italian sports cars.  The company’s Diversity and Inclusion Charter demands that buyers and their families pass “social status” background checks to “ensure they fit the mold of the brand and its desired image.”

Talk about cultivating “inclusivity!”

In a similar charade of ‘woke’ virtue signaling, luxury car maker Jaguar unleashed a futuristic ad in a pinkish palette featuring men posing as women. There are no cars in it, so it’s no surprise that it landed like a lead balloon and joined the pantheon of duds like the Bud Light ad featuring trans activist Dylan Mulvaney in a bubble bath.

The Bud Light ad sparked a consumer backlash on social media, including calls for boycotting the beer brand.

In Go Woke, Go Broke: The Inside Story of the Radicalization of Corporate America, Charles Gasparino called the Bud Light fiasco the “desecration of a great American brand.”  The book—which opens with an account of an incredibly farcical discussion at Goldman Sachs over whether ordering Chick-fil-A sandwiches is sufficiently woke—exposes many such woke/DEI debacles and the brand destruction they wreaked.

Fortunately, the efforts of people like Gasparino (a seasoned business reporter who knows what makes companies succeed or fail) and anti-DEI campaigner Robby Starbuck are paying off. Moreover, the resounding victory of President-elect Donald Trump—who made a campaign pledge to dismantle “divisive,” “un-American” DEI programs—has catalyzed a corporate retreat from leftist “wokeness.”

After Starbuck told Walmart he was investigating their DEI practices, the retail chain – America’s largest private sector employer, with over 4,600 units in the U.S. – announced plans to end its DEI initiatives.  It has agreed to drop the term ‘DEI’ and instead focus on “Belonging for All.”  Not only that, it will stop financing events aimed at influencing children sexually; scrap the Corporate Equality Index, a benchmark created by the Human Rights Coalition (HRC) to monitor LGBTQ+ policies; remove gender-neutral terms such as Latinx from documents; end a program incentivizing suppliers who hire LGBTQ+, racial minorities, and women; discontinue racial equity training; and stop funding the Center for Racial Equity.  Walmart will no longer sell products such as chest binders marketed, among others, to “transitioning” children.

Many other major companies have followed suit.  Molson Coors, Ford, Lowe’s, Harley-Davidson, and Toyota are dumping the Corporate Equality Index.  John Deere will no longer participate in “cultural awareness” parades, etc., and instead focus on professional development and recruitment of talent.  Toyota will “refocus its DEI programs” and stop sponsoring LGBTQ+ events; its community activities will now align with “STEM education and workforce readiness.”  Tractor Supply Co., an animal feed and farm equipment retailer, is abandoning all DEI goals and programs and will no longer sponsor pride events.

Gasparino and Starbuck have succeeded because they have relentlessly criticized, mocked, and exposed the hypocrisy of companies embracing DEI instead of focusing on efficiently delivering goods and services and bringing profits to shareholders. Starbuck is effective because he has a huge social media audience, and Elon Musk has reshared many of his posts on X.

“No industry should feel safe.  As we head into Christmas, I will likely turn my sights to retailers who depend on the majority of Americans who just elected Trump with the popular vote,” says Starbuck, who is committed to preserving traditional American culture.  His current efforts are trained on Target and Amazon, which he says are “acting crazy out there with wokeness.”  Target sells items such as a girl’s swimsuit with “extra crotch coverage” for male genitalia and “Satanist-inspired” clothing. At the same time, Amazon banned Starbuck’s documentary War on Children, which exposes the political agenda to push gender transitioning.

The perfidy of DEI is that, in the name of promoting equality, it is a program of reverse racism, dividing people, mandating equal outcomes instead of equal opportunity, and jettisoning the pursuit of excellence that made America great.  Trump is focused on expunging DEI from both the private sector, where it was gradually taking firm root, and the universities, hotbeds that indoctrinate the young and eventually feed corporations and government with executives and bureaucrats steeped in leftist-woke ideology.

On the corporate front, he is expected to sign an executive order requiring companies conducting business with the federal government to end their DEI programs. In higher education, he has asked Christopher Rufo, a DEI critic and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, to devise a plan to reduce federal funding for universities promoting such programs.

The message from the incoming White House is clear: restore merit and excellence to our educational institutions. This is a welcome message because more and more parents are questioning the radicalizing impact of a college education that promotes woke and divisive agendas. According to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, first-year college enrollment has dropped 5% in the past year, while a recent Gallup poll found that confidence in higher education has dropped 57% in less than a decade.

The leftist-woke tentacles reach deep into K-12 education, too, for the U.S. Department of Education, under its Education Innovation and Research (EIR) program, favors research and studies prioritizing DEI. Neetu Arnold of the Manhattan Institute found that when grant proposals are evaluated, DEI-based research is often prioritized over the research design’s quality and rigor. In some cases, the racial makeup of the research team is considered before releasing funds.  Equity-focused projects are held to lower methodological standards, and applications that don’t present plans for recruiting underrepresented groups are less likely to be funded.  The EIR program released $284 million in 2023; the estimated available amount for 2024 is $251 million.

Most conservatives are convinced that DEI initiatives amount to reverse racism.  But it also turns out that DEI is counterproductive.  A recent study – Instructing Animosity: How DEI Pedagogy Produces the Hostile Attribution Bias – by the non-profit Network Contagion Research Institute found that DEI narratives (including DEI training programs) fostered in participants a cognitive bias that made them more likely to interpret everyday or ambiguous situations as deliberately hostile or targeting them for their race, religion, or sexual orientation.  The authors conclude that DEI interventions are harmful because they heighten racial suspicion, prejudice, and authoritarian policing while reinforcing the oppressor-victim dichotomy and encouraging punitive behavior even when evidence of a transgression is absent.

Thanks to President-elect Trump, writers like Gasparino, and relentless activists like Starbuck, who advocate traditional American values – hard work, merit, innovation, individualism, and equality of opportunity – over race, sex, or sexual orientation, it now seems that private enterprise and education may after all be saved from the poison of DEI.

America’s return to an ethos emphasizing individual capability, achievement, and a level playing field for all instead of wallowing in victimhood, fostering resentment, and seeking undeserved benefits – much awaited through the Biden years – may finally be happening with Donald Trump’s triumph.  Now, it’s time to make America great again.  Ridding the private sector and the education system of DEI is an appropriate beginning.