It is as though America has suddenly woken up from a bad dream—ironically and perhaps appropriately, the opposite of “going woke.” The list of companies and individuals dialing back from and/or disavowing DEI- and CRT-related initiatives has taken a sharp uptick. Walmart is the largest of the recent companies joining the list, and even Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has quietly and without explanation removed her pronouns from her X biography. We also see a growing number of women athletes finding their voices in protesting biological males in their locker rooms, showers, and competitions.
Now, with President Trump’s decisive victory, it is as though a once-silent majority feels unmuzzled with regard to DEI and CRT. Finally, they can say that the emperor has no clothes. People feel free to call these preposterous and racist philosophies what they really are—hokum. They are warmed-over Marxism with race, gender, and sexual identification substituting for social class for purposes of establishing the oppressed and oppressors and creating maximum chaos.
in our military. DEI/CRT policies have devastated recruitment, savaged morale, dramatically reduced our war-fighting readiness, and put our national security in danger. The Heritage Foundation—which conducts one of the only comprehensive, non-governmental assessments of our military readiness—for the first time provided an overall rating for 2024 of “weak,” down from “marginal” in 2023.
One of the most touted studies by DEI/CRT charlatans over the last decade was a 2015 study by McKinsey & Company, which claimed to have found a link between company profitability and the numbers of executive women and minority personnel. The Wall Street Journal recently reported on the inability of accounting professors John Hand and Jeremiah Green to replicate McKinsey’s results and claims. The authors concluded,
Combined with the erroneous reverse-causality nature of McKinsey’s tests, our inability to quasi-replicate their results suggests that despite the imprimatur given to McKinsey’s studies, they should not be relied on to support the view that US publicly traded firms can expect to deliver improved financial performance if they increase the racial/ethnic diversity of their executives.
McKinsey felt compelled to respond, pointing out that it had never claimed a causal relationship, only a correlation, and pointing out that those are quite different. Very true, but as the WSJ rightly observed, McKinsey behaved as if there were indeed a causal relationship, frequently referring to the “benefits of diversity” as if that fact were well established. And of course, McKinsey never stopped Democrat Representative Jasmine Crockett from citing the flawed study yet again earlier this month as a reason to oppose the Republican “Dismantle DEI” bill.
Other research shows that DEI policies may actually increase hostility and racial bias. The New York Times conducted an extensive review of the University of Michigan’s DEI program. It is the largest university DEI effort to date—with some $250m of expenditures and more than 200 DEI-focused personnel.
Reviewing the extensive student and faculty survey results, the conclusion was that the program utterly backfired. Students were less likely to interact with people of a different race or religion or with different politics than before the DEI program began, Black student enrollment did not increase as hoped and remained stagnant at about 5%, and students and faculty alike reported that the campus climate was actually worse after implementation of the program.
While the seemingly new woke awakening is encouraging, the DEI/CRT leviathan is far from dead. The seeds of its beginning were in the universities, and that will likely be the last stronghold to give up the fight. In that educational arena, you will likely see the shape-shifting process for the next flavor of Marxism incubating as the leftists experiment with what concepts can find purchase.
For example, the University of Maryland just introduced an “Intro to Fat Studies” course. The three-credit course will supposedly focus on “fatness as an area of human difference subject to privilege and discrimination that intersects with other systems of oppression based on gender, race, class, sexual orientation, and ability.” Get it? Fat people are the oppressed; average-sized people are the oppressors. Sound familiar?
So, what’s next? Perhaps an “Intro to Ugly Studies”—focusing on how less attractive people are discriminated against in everything from social interactions to home loans to employment to rewards. Or “Understanding the Privileges of Competence”—focusing on how skilled people have an unfair advantage in all dimensions of life just because they happened to have developed a particular skill in plumbing, medicine, soccer, etc. Or “Intro. to Oppression of the Un-Brilliant”—focusing on how people of average intelligence or less are severely oppressed by the intelligent class snobs.
You get the idea. The Marxists never gave up—no matter how thoroughly their ideas were debunked in practice—and they likely never will. They will perpetually find some other flavor of oppressors and oppressed. The goal will be the same as with all other Marxist-based initiatives—create resentment, division, chaos, anger, and ultimately revolution. But if we remain highly vigilant and persistent, we can defeat them—just as we always have.
Jesus Christ is King
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