The Fast Death of DEI

The study NYT and Bloomberg don't want you to see

Dhillon at the 2016 Republican National Convention | Tasos Katopodis

The DEI movement is dying — and fast. President-elect Trump has tapped lawyer Harmeet Dhillon to head the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division as an assistant attorney general, and to use the formidable powers of her new station to wage war on DEI and fulfill the mission of the office, which was created in 1957 to enforce federal statutes prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race, sex, religion, or other immutable characteristics. In other words, DEI’s bread and butter.

There is a particular kind of American theater that reveals itself in moments of ideological collapse, and I have been watching this one with popcorn in hand.

The Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which decisively ended race-conscious affirmative action in college admissions, was the first tremor in what has since become an avalanche. The ruling sent a clear message to the nation: The days of codified racial redress are over. And it’s not just our courts that have shifted on the issue. America’s largest corporations — Meta, Google, Microsoft, Walmart, Ford, and many more — have seen the writing on the wall and are rolling back or slashing their DEI programs entirely. The dominoes are falling fast, baby.

Perhaps the final nail in the coffin was not judicial, corporate, or cultural but scientific: a new study suggests DEI programs not only fail to reduce bigotry but increase it.