Donald Trump’s victory was in part a decisive repudiation of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), the odious, unconstitutional, racist, and sexist grift concocted by the extreme Left as a radicalized form of affirmative action. DEI is based on Critical Race Theory (CRT), the doctrine that all whites are bigots. It has been fused into the firmament of academia, government, and business by the far Left, those beholden to it (particularly Joe Biden), and those fearful of it (including corporate boards and CEOs).

DEI and CRT have destroyed the careers of straight white men and Asians, humiliated blacks and other minorities who can excel without preferences, reduced government effectiveness and business productivity, savaged American exceptionalism, violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, and vitiated a century of federal civil rights laws.

Though some studies have found an increase in profitability for businesses with diverse work forces or boards (see here, here and here), those findings confuse DEI with corporate cultures that achieve diversity without prejudice—and improve competence and success by doing so. More importantly, increasing profits is not a jurisprudentially sound justification for ignoring the Constitution, let alone a moral or ethical basis for race or sex discrimination.

While diversity resulting from equal opportunity means the brightest and the best can improve outcomes, DEI isn’t the path to that result. As far back as December 2022, the Harvard Business Review reluctantly opined that the business case for diversity backfires on marginalized groups’ feelings of belonging and weakens support for diversity programs when organizational performance drops. Referring to DEI in education, the Heritage Foundation concluded in 2023, “DEI has failed; we do not need more of it.” And last year The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf acknowledged that the DEI industry is often counterproductive. He wrote that DEI “is undergoing a reckoning of late, and not just in states controlled by Republicans,” adding that “DEI practitioners themselves are raising concerns about how their competitors operate.”

Last month, Rutgers University released a study that observed that 52% of American workers participate in DEI training events at an annual cost of $8 billion, and that these programs reduce empathy, engender hostility, and create prejudice.

The Biden-Harris Administration Zealously Imposes DEI

Despite more than a century of Supreme Court decisions forbidding discrimination on the basis of race, using executive orders, legislation, rulemaking, and contracting requirements, Biden and his team of DEI advocates and beneficiaries zealously imposed this bigoted and demeaning malignancy throughout the federal government, on state and local governments, and on private industry.

On his first day in office, Biden issued a “whole-of-government” executive order to incorporate DEI in all aspects of the federal government; five months later he issued a second order to embed DEI in the federal workforce. The administration issued a Gender Equity Plan in March 2021 that focused on racial minorities and the LGBTQ community, a government-wide strategic plan in November 2021, and progress reports in February 2023 and February 2024.

In 2022, the administration announced that 140 agencies were developing Equity Action Plans for “addressing—and achieving—equity in their mission delivery.” This year it announced that at least 100 agencies, including all cabinet departments, had issued those plans, with many repeatedly updating and expanding their strategies (see, for example, Commerce, Defense, Education, Energy, HHS, Homeland Security, Justice, Labor, State, Treasury, Veterans Affairs, EPA, FEMA, NASA, and the National Science Foundation).

The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021 and the American Rescue Plan and Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 included billions to advance equitable outcomes for restaurant owners, farmers, small businesses, homeowners, and construction companies. Even COVID-19 tests and vaccines were prioritized by race.

The administration ordered 11% of federal contracting dollars to be awarded only to small businesses owned by “marginalized minorities,” increased hiring and promotion of “disadvantaged minority” applicants, and increased grants to disadvantaged minorities for medical research, infrastructure, student aid, and public housing. It humiliated applicants by waiving requirements for black, Hispanic, and Native American students to ensure “application reviews are equitable” (to accept unqualified applicants) and allocated $260 million to help them complete their applications.

Under intense pressure from the administration and vituperative progressives in academia, media, and politics, science and technology departments, engineering and math educators, elementary school teachers, the RAND Corporation, the American Medical Association, the American Bar Association, business leaders, venture capital, and corporate boards (here and here) buckled to the demands of DEI activists.

In a detailed memorandum to the Senate Armed Services Committee, Senator Tom Cotton summarized examples of—and the disastrous reaction among our troops to—compulsory CRT training in the military.

The Office of National Intelligence announced a significant increase in the hiring of minorities, women, and the disabled across the 17 agencies of the U.S. Intelligence Community, and its office of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility launched The Dive, a quarterly magazine focused on the usual woke buzzwords to empower every employee to speak “their” truth.

A bizarre CIA recruitment video encapsulated the madness. In that video, a CIA officer explains: “I am a woman of color…. I am a cisgender millennial who’s been diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder. I am intersectional, but my existence is not a box-checking exercise.” Just what American needs to defeat its enemies.

The Biden Administration’s 2024 Progress Report on Equity highlighted more than 650 actions it took to benefit certain classes of Americans based on their race, sex, or gender identification. Since 2022, the administration has spent tens of billions of taxpayer dollars through its DEI programs, and hundreds of millions more to develop and administer those programs (see here, here, here, here, here, and here). Courts have enjoined or struck down many of these programs for violating the Equal Protection Clause and federal law, while other challenges are awaiting decisions (see here, here, here, here, and here). The Trump Administration must immediately rescind these actions and, except for programs that merit survival after being purged of their DEI elements, cancel them all.

Peak DEI

DEI reached its peak with two Biden picks: Kamala Harris and Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, both of whom were selected in processes limited to black women. Though Democratic politicians and the media were repulsed when Trump referred to Harris as a possible DEI hire, the outrage was performative and unseemly. Given the administration’s intense focus on DEI, we must presume that as a result, many thousands of blacks, women, and LGBTQ individuals received jobs, promotions, and contracts. Harris’s staunch support for DEI (see here, here, here, here, and here) rings hollow if Democrats believe that being a beneficiary of DEI is embarrassing.

State and municipal Democrats and federally funded universities and health care organizations adopted illegal and unconstitutional programs with rights and benefits allocated by race, sex, and gender identification. We were told that math is racist, Asians who oppose DEI are dupes for whites, and social justice comes before patient care. Thousands of K-12 schools introduced curricula based on The 1619 Project, which “aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery…at the very center of the United States’ national narrative,” while thousands more incorporated CRT and DEI through “action civics” and ethnic studies. Confounded by the weak academic performance of minority students, Oregon eliminated the problem by eviscerating the state’s educational standards.

Violating the First and Fourteenth Amendments, federally funded universities and the U.S. State Department required their professionals to pledge fealty to DEI as a condition of being hired and promoted (see here and here).

In 2020, the SEC approved a rule requiring companies trading on Nasdaq to explain any failure to have at least two “diverse” directors, including one who self-identifies as female and one who self-identifies as either an “underrepresented minority” or LGTBQ. In 2021, the Institutional Limited Partners Association, a trade association for institutional investors with more than $2 trillion under management, published a DEI roadmap (since deleted) requiring DEI as part of investment decisions. By 2022, all Fortune 100 companies had DEI plans. That same year, Forbes reported, “There’s hardly a company in America that doesn’t have a focus on diversity, equity and inclusion.” Leading private equity firm Blackstone adopted a company-wide mandate to invest only in companies with diverse boards and DEI policies.

All this was against the backdrop of progressives’ insistence that opposition to DEI is racist. Like the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s 1984, to support this definitionally false assertion, progressives tried to change the definition of “racist” to exclude race-based decisions that benefit blacks or other so-called marginalized minorities. As in 1984, countless dictionaries bent the knee—or gleefully got on board—and changed long extant definitions. Emulating Orwell’s Thought Police, universities and private businesses punished those who would not accept the new definition as though it had always been there.

Americans Oppose DEI

A majority of Americans favor affirmative action and DEI in concept, though contrary to the progressive dogma that has swamped our rights, Americans overwhelmingly and consistently oppose the use of race, sex, or LGBTQ status in admissions, hiring, and promotion.

In a 2016 Gallup poll, 2019 Pew survey, and 2021 College Plus survey, about 70% of those polled opposed the use of race and ethnicity in admissions decisions, including about two-thirds of Latinos and a majority of blacks.

In a January 2024 CRC survey of 1,600 registered voters, 66% disapproved of relying on race, sex, or gender identity for hiring or promotion. The results were similar among men, women, Republicans, Democrats, independents, conservatives, and moderates. Even liberals disapproved by a margin of 54% to 34%.

In a July 2024 survey of 2,100 likely voters by the Manhattan Institute, respondents across the partisan spectrum rejected race-conscious policies. Just 21% (36% of Democrats, 37% of blacks, and 35% of Latinos) agreed with the statement, “We should focus on creating a race-conscious society to repair the harms of the past by developing policies that benefit marginalized groups.” Majorities across all demographic groups agreed that “We should focus on creating a color-blind society where everyone is treated equally regardless of the color of their skin.”

Only 24% agreed that blacks and Latinos are “permanently oppressed” by white supremacy. Fifty percent to 37% (13% undecided) supported banning colleges and universities from considering the race of an applicant when making decisions about admissions and employment, and a plurality (44% to 42%) supported ending mandatory diversity training in schools. Seventy-one percent opposed the government taking race into account when making hiring and contracting decisions. Further, 60% agreed it is unfair for government to favor businesses owned by blacks and Hispanics, including pluralities of Democrats and Latinos, while a small plurality of black voters (37% to 30%) said it’s fair to favor minority-owned businesses.

Lest there be doubt as to the meaning of the 2024 election, a post-election survey of 3,262 voters conducted by Blueprint, a polling organization that helps Democrats, found that among all voters, the third-most-cited reason for rejecting Harris—and the most cited reason among swing voters who voted for Trump—was her focus on cultural issues rather than helping the middle class. Sixty-seven percent of swing voters who chose Trump viewed Democrats as “too focused on identity politics.”

These results should stiffen the Right’s resolve to destroy DEI, but the obligation to do so is found in our Constitution and laws. It is fortuitous that the deleterious consequences of DEI, public opinion, decency, morality, ethics, and common sense on the one hand, and the Constitution and federal statutes on the other, align.

More than once, the Supreme Court has observed that “distinctions between citizens solely because of their ancestry are by their very nature odious to a free people,” e.g., Rice v. Cayetano (2000) and Hirabayashi v. United States (1943). As Chief Justice John Roberts declared in 2007, using racial discrimination to undo racial discrimination doesn’t work: “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race” (Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1). In Shaw v. Hunt (1996), the Court put it directly: “Racial classifications are antithetical to the Fourteenth Amendment.”

The Beginning of the End

Last year, Chief Justice Roberts took a wrecking ball to affirmative action in university admissions in Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) v. Harvard College, forcing universities to reconsider their policies. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, since then, 213 campuses in 33 states have implemented changes in their DEI policies. Bans or cutbacks were announced by state systems in North Carolina, Florida, Texas, Utah, Wyoming, Iowa, and Georgia, and laws were enacted prohibiting DEI loyalty statements in Alabama, Kansas, and Idaho. However, private universities have been slower to act, and some universities have apparently renamed or reconfigured affirmative action and DEI departments in an effort to sidestep the Court’s decision.

Under legal pressure from Edward Blum, the man behind SFFA, Stephen Miller’s America First Legal, and other conservative groups, along with investor pressure created by Robby Starbuck, among others, major corporations have begun to roll back DEI, including Walmart (the nation’s largest employer), Harley-Davidson, Ford, Toyota, Lowe’s, Deere & Co., Molson Coors, Boeing, Stanley Black & Decker, Microsoft, Meta, Zoom, and law firm Winston & Strawn.

In January 2024, 59% of the 300 C-suite executives polled by DEI consulting firm Littler agreed that the backlash against DEI had increased since the SFFA decision. In February, at least 50 bills were pending in 20 state legislatures to eliminate or restrict DEI. In March, Republicans disbanded the House’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion, and in June, the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences eliminated DEI loyalty pledges for new hires. That same month, CNN begrudgingly conceded that businesses are reexamining the efficacy of DEI initiatives, and that “people positioned to champion DEI initiatives sense that America’s meritocracy is weakening [from use of DEI].”

DEI advocate Kenji Yoshino, a professor at New York University and the director of the Meltzer Center for Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging, recently conceded that any organization that provides a palpable benefit to a person based on race, national origin, or sex now runs a potential legal risk, and that it will be “virtually always illegal” for government or a private entity to use racial classifications for hiring, promotion, or other benefits.

Though hopeful that DEI will survive, Sacha Nauta, the social affairs editor for The Economist, wrote after the election that “If 2020 was the year when diversity, equity and inclusion schemes ballooned and bosses declared their undying commitment, then 2024 marked the start of the anti-woke backlash. This pummeling will continue in 2025 and spread.”

It is time to restore sanity and integrity. Trump and his cabinet nominees have affirmed that eradicating DEI is a priority. They must carry through on their pledges, using legislation that will withstand a change in administration, as well as litigation and court settlements that will be difficult to undo and executive orders that will accelerate the exorcism. The Trump Administration cannot restore the principles and promise of American exceptionalism without ending DEI.