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.

All this is the result of a growing backlash against DEI and the woke agenda more broadly, as well as a shift in the regulatory landscape thanks to the Supreme Court’s ruling. DEI advocates will naturally claim this is the result of a resurgence of prejudice in America. After all, the nation just elected Trump. But they brought this entirely on themselves. Elon Musk is perfectly correct to talk about the movement as the “woke mind virus,” because it weaponizes our desire to oppose bigotry in order to convince us that certain forms of bigotry are progressive, actually.

One of my early posts was a conversation I had with the geneticist

Razib Khan

, in which we talked about the fact that men are generally more in favor of free speech, and more tolerant of offensive viewpoints, whereas women tend to be more censorious because they hope to nurture environments of tolerance. This may seem counterintuitive, but it does make sense that if you want to create a tolerant community, then as the philosopher Karl Popper wrote in The Open Society and Its Enemies, you must embrace the paradox of intolerance. That is, you must be intolerant of the intolerant. Here is a clip from that post:

Men are becoming more conservative. High school boys are now twice as likely to identify as conservative than liberal while high school girls are nearly three times as likely to identify as liberal than conservative.

It’s not just high schoolers either. A Pew Research survey published in 2014 found that across all 50 U.S. states, the percentage of liberals who are men is less than half. There were only three exceptions — Missouri and New Jersey, where the distribution was a 50/50 split, and Colorado, where 52% of liberals are men.

Since 2014, much has changed. The culture wars have intensified, wokeness has transformed the American political landscape, and free speech supporters have been pushed to the right. Free speech is a traditionally liberal value and, I would argue, the most fundamental of all. But as noted above, men tend to be more tolerant of a broader range of speech. The 2022 College Free Speech Rankings — 24,511 female students, 18,922 male students, and 398 nonbinary students — found that females are more likely to favor censorship for a variety of speech types.

For instance, if a speaker wants to argue that transgender identity is a mental disorder, 85% of female students would oppose that speaker being able to talk on campus, compared to only 58% of male students and 82% of nonbinary students. It’s interesting that female students are even more censorious on this issue than nonbinary students, who are themselves members of the queer community.

If a speaker wants to argue that the 2020 election was stolen, 77% of female students would oppose that speaker being able to talk on campus compared to just 56% of male students. If a speaker wants to argue that abortion should be illegal, 72% of female students would oppose such a speaker compared to 43% of male students.

As Khan explains, women are better communicators who generally tend to be higher in neuroticism and agreeableness, two of the Big Five personality traits, and this leads to less tolerance of speech that is considered offensive. This is true among female friend groups as well as in political spheres. On the contrary, men traditionally have higher tolerance for offensive speech and even use it quite aggressively within their own social circles. Most guys can attest to this.

As a result, a low-resolution way to think about the hysterical and illogical flavor the contemporary progressive movement is to think about your typical Karen, or even more simply, women. The madness of the woke movement overlaps with the madness of the female mind. Likewise, as the right becomes more male, we see it taking on more traits of toxic masculinity. The difference is, men and the right as a whole never strayed very far from the center. But in the past decade or so, women have run all the way to the left and right off the cliff. Disturbingly, this appears to be a global phenomenon, with South Korea being the one exception — but they went hard in the other direction, with Korean men becoming so profoundly racist and sexist in the past decade that this is perhaps the one country were radical feminist accusations of male fascism make considerable sense.

After the George Floyd riots, many Americans were willing to go all in on “racial justice,” and white women proved particularly eager to swap out their morals for some progressive street cred. But the more we signed on to DEI demands, the further its advocates pushed into increasingly asinine and bigoted positions. All white people are racist colonizers. Black people are incapable of racism. Biological men can become biological women just by wishing it were so. Math is racist. America is racist. Apple pie is racist. And then people began to get curious and dig into the ideology that undergirds the movement. And to their shock and horror, what they found was far worse than anything they could have imagined.

To give you but one example, heteronormativity is considered a form of capitalistic, patriarchal oppression. Anything heteronormative must therefore be inverted. In woke speak, you want to flip the Derridean binary and decenter the Leotardian differend. This includes things like the nuclear family and the prohibition against pedophilia. In fact, woke thinkers have written doctoral dissertations on why the nuclear family is inherently oppressive or why it is wrong to discriminate against pedophiles, which some progressives now call MAPs, or minor-attracted persons.

If there is one issue that will inspire people to violence or to vote for someone they otherwise might hate, it is messing with their kids. So of course, Trump’s presidential campaign made great use of the fact that Vice President Harris has said she would fund trans surgeries for illegal immigrants and prisoners. And of course, when she chose Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, who has turned his state into a “trans refuge” (read: hellscape for parents), it did her no favors. After the election, voters cited as the top three issues on their minds: the economy, immigration, and the trans movement.

And so here we are, with front row seats to the death of DEI and the blessed spectacle of its unraveling.

Now let’s get to that study I mentioned above, “Instructing Animosity: How DEI Pedagogy Produces the Hostile Attribution Bias,” which was published by the Network Contagion Research Institute and the Social Perception Lab at Rutgers University. The study, of course, confirms what many of us already know — efforts to promote “diversity, equity, and inclusion” increase bigotry rather than decreasing it.

For the first of three studies in the report, 423 undergraduates at Rutgers read either antiracist material by Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo or racially neutral material. They then read two identical scenarios about an applicant being rejected from an elite university, but the second scenario was carefully designed to make absolutely no reference to race. What happened? Participants who read the antiracist material saw the admissions officer as racist and were more likely to want to punish the officer.

In the second study, 2,017 Americans read either anti-Islamophobia material from the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding or racially neutral material, then looked at trials for two men convicted on identical terrorism charges — Ahmed Akhtar and George Green. You already know what happened. The folks who read the anti-Islamophobia material perceived Akhtar’s trial as more unfair, whereas those who read the racially neutral material correctly saw no difference at all.

In the third experiment, 847 Americans read material condemning the Hindu caste system or material discussing it in a neutral manner. They then looked at scenario in which an Indian admissions officer at an elite university rejected an Indian applicant. Participants who read the critical material were more likely to think the admissions officer was biased against the applicant because of his caste — and more likely to support actual Nazi rhetoric, such as statements that replaced the word “Jew” with the upper-caste group “Brahmin,” as in “Brahmins are parasites” or “Brahmins are a virus.”

In other words, we now have scientific evidence that DEI makes you see racism where it doesn’t exist, makes you seek to punish people for committing this imaginary racism, and makes you more likely to support literal Nazi rhetoric against people and their entire group for committing imaginary racism. In summary, DEI makes people more bigoted themselves and far worse at spotting bigotry in others. It is the near opposite of everything it has ever claimed to be.

But of course, Ibram X. Kendi stuck to his script and condemned the research as “pseudoscience.”

You might be smiling right now, pleased at the news I have just delivered to your mailbox and fist-pumping DEI’s timely death. But as I’m sure you already understand, they’re not going to give up the fight so easy and although DEI will die, it will remain a zombie among us for decades. I mean hell, we still have Nazis and communists running around. In fact, not even this study, earth-shattering though it is, will move the needle for these folks. Want me to prove it? I’ll bet you’ve never even heard about this study until I just told you. But isn’t that strange? How could the media possibly miss such a major addition to the national conversation on DEI?

The answer is, the media didn’t miss a thing. Thanks to the journalistic work of my brilliant colleague and FIRE’s director of faculty outreach Komi Frey, I am now able to share with you one more disturbing detail in this drugged-out, dragged-on horror show. Namely, although a New York Times reporter expressed interest in writing about the study, and did write about it, and it was greenlit by the paper’s data desk, the editorial staff killed it. Over at Bloomberg, another reporter took interest in the study and was again shot down by a senior editor. And progressives wonder why the public is rapidly losing all faith in mainstream media.