Above the fold, on page one of the Sunday, January 21 New York Times, the “paper of record” details the Claremont Institute’s central role in opposing “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI) policies in many states, especially regarding education policy. The push for DEI across nearly all facets of American life is but the latest evolution of our modern civil rights regime. The Times reporter signals outrage and incredulity that anyone might be opposed to “anti-discrimination” laws, or the DEI project more generally. But the sad truth is that the 1964 Civil Rights act, and especially its administrative and jurisprudential offspring, have warped American law and culture and traded one set of racial preferences for another.

The demise of segregation and the 1964 Act could have finally ushered in the promise of the Declaration of Independence: a truly colorblind constitution and the banishment of considerations of race in governmental institutions. Instead, we have gotten an increasingly racialized set of bureaucratic and judicial edicts that value Americans—imposing handicaps or conferring privileges—based on accidental human characteristics like race or group identity rather than the special qualities of the individual. Yes, we at Claremont oppose this “anti-discrimination” regime and will continue to do so until it is discredited, defeated, and purged from our national life.

The problem of DEI has, in one form or another, haunted America for decades. It has re-made the workplace. It has distorted our politics. And it has been revolutionizing American education for at least two generations. 

While conservatives slept, these policies became a governing ethos in the country, the diversity persuasion. Today, nearly every facet of our society worships the false and pernicious view that diversity is, somehow, our greatest strength. The clichés of the diversity persuasion are on the lips of “educators,” corporate CEOs, chiefs of police, our elite media, our military leaders, and countless others.  

Claremont has long been critical of such notions. Indeed, we have been around long enough to see today’s diversity fanaticism as but the latest effort to undermine republican self-government and our free society. Tyranny comes in many forms. In the American Revolution, the source of tyranny was a hereditary monarch who governed without the consent of his people. Before the Civil War, tyranny came from slaveholders who, with the sanction of government, denied enslaved blacks equal rights under the law. The Progressive Era brought a threat from an administrative state that would collude with big business to squelch equal protection of the law and subvert the separation of powers and will of the people. The full threat of progressive policy has only been realized under America’s reigning civil rights regime, where business and bureaucracies collude to transform America away from its traditions of free, patriotic citizenship and toward a country with weak, easily controlled subjects cut off from republican control of their government or policy. 

Claremont partners with think tanks and supportive donors who want to expose this gathering tyranny and find ways of preserving our good and decent political institutions and restoring our founding principles. We are especially proud to work with foundations and individual supporters dedicated to exposing and reversing the corruption of our institutions of higher learning. We hire scholars to work with state governments that are interested in destroying DEI policies at colleges and universities and restoring universities committed to reasonable patriotism, genuine research, and workforce education. 

We have compiled the first Black Lives Matter database, to track the pledges that corporate America has made to support the work of the corrupt, anti-American grifters in BLM and related institutions. 

We are working to expose how DEI policies corrupt America’s military, through its education on military bases and at the service academies, and through the ongoing corruption of the officer promotion processes. 

We are also very involved in offering a positive vision of America, what an America freed of the woke pieties about race, gender, sex, and “diversity” would look like. 

This earns us the enmity of America’s corrupt “elite” media. Just in the past three months, the New York Times, Vox, and The New Republic have run lengthy hit pieces about Claremont, trying to tar our scholars with the usual tired accusations. 

Indeed, Claremont and its scholars are guilty of opposing identity politics and noticing certain realities about American political and social life that undermine the conventional conceits and propaganda issuing from the Left side of the culture war.

We think that a decent, enduring civilization must favor enduring man-woman marriage; therefore, we oppose modern feminism and the radical homosexual and transexual rights movements.

We think our reigning civil rights ideology creates a two-tiered system of justice and therefore undermines equal protection under the laws. We think our reigning civil rights ideology alienates many of the best citizens from our country by denying them opportunity and stigmatizing their accomplishment because of their skin color and their position in the “oppressor/oppressed” matrix. 

We think that our reigning civil rights ideology seeks to prevent us from acknowledging the facts of reality and to demand that we believe in lies like all racial disparities are traceable to discrimination. We think it is a grave threat to free speech and free elections. 

We think this ideology supports unhampered immigration, the concentration of power in America’s bureaucracies and courts, and the end of liberty and republican self-government.

We fight DEI because we see it as a mortal threat to the American Way of Life.