Trump Wages All Out War On DEI

For those who are fans of DEI, yesterday will go down in infamy. It was, you might say, the DEI Pearl Harbor. At 5:00pm, all DEI offices within the federal government closed down. Employees were put on leave, as the first step towards mass-layoffs. The DEI section of every major federal website went offline. The heads of every DEI office in the federal government were rounded up, chained to giant boulders, and tossed into the sea. That last part didn’t happen, but a man can dream.

Back in reality, however, the Office of Personnel Management sent out a notice to the head of every federal agency, instructing them to ask employees, “if they know of any efforts to disguise” DEI programs or personnel in the federal government. Employees have 10 days to disclose any disguised DEI programs or personnel that they’re aware of. Almost immediately, one of these disguises became pretty apparent. It was visible to anyone who checked out the Leadership page of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF).

Specifically, there was an unusual change to the title of one senior official at the ATF. Here’s how the bureau’s leadership page looked at the beginning of the week:

As you can see, a woman named “Lisa T. Boykin” is listed as the Chief Diversity Officer at the ATF. Why does the ATF need a Chief Diversity Officer? What was this person doing every day? Well, who knows. She was collecting a paycheck, at least. We know that. Now that’s supposed to change. But the only change the ATF actually made was in the meaningless title they gave this person. Sometime in the last 48 hours, the page changed. Here’s what the ATF’s Leadership Page looks like now:

Now Lisa Boykin is merely a, “Senior executive.” She’s no longer the “Chief Diversity Officer.” Overnight, she has been graced with a much more generic, completely inconspicuous title. There was no press release about this. They just changed it. Check back tomorrow and the ATF will probably put fake glasses and a mustache on Lisa Boykin and claim her name is really “Larry Soykin” or something. These DEI activists aren’t completely out of ideas. But very soon, they will be completely out of the federal government — at least, that’s the plan.

As recently as a few months ago, a purge like this seemed very difficult to imagine. And it was particularly hard for people on the Left to imagine. When we filmed “Am I Racist?“, the DEI activists we spoke to — from Robin DiAngelo on down — were overconfident to the point of absurdity. That’s one of the reasons we were able to make the film. People always ask how we managed to get the race hustlers and DEI scammers in a room with us. The answer is that we used their own egos and false sense of security against them. They just couldn’t imagine that anyone would ever challenge them or try to embarrass them. That’s the bubble they were in. And now it’s safe to say that the bubble has been pretty well popped.

MATT WALSH’S ‘AM I RACIST?’ NOW STREAMING ON DAILYWIRE+

Now, in fact, their entire industry is crashing down — and not just in the government. The executive orders that Donald Trump has signed are far broader than that. One of the orders, for example, is entitled, “ENDING ILLEGAL DISCRIMINATION AND RESTORING MERIT-BASED OPPORTUNITY.”

And this order explicitly applies to DEI in the private sector.

I further order all agencies to enforce our longstanding civil-rights laws and to combat illegal private-sector DEI preferences, mandates, policies, programs, and activities. … Each agency shall identify up to nine potential civil compliance investigations of publicly traded corporations, large non-profit corporations or associations, foundations with assets of 500 million dollars or more, State and local bar and medical associations, and institutions of higher education with endowments over 1 billion dollars.

In other words, the federal government is gearing up to launch investigations into private-sector entities — whether they’re a university or a hospital or a corporation — that engage in DEI. According to the order, that includes any organization that employs, “dangerous, demeaning, and immoral race- and sex-based preferences.”

The order goes on to revoke an executive order signed by President Lyndon Johnson, which required that federal contractors and the federal government take affirmative action to boost certain candidates based on race, color, religion, and national origin. This has been the law of the land for generations, and no Republican president until now has considered the possibility of ending it. But this time around, the second Trump administration came prepared. It’s one of the first things they got rid of.

WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show

And the importance of that decision can’t be overstated. For decades, the requirement that federal contractors practice affirmative action has forced companies to compare their workforce with the demographic composition of the surrounding community. And then they had to alter their hiring practices to try to find more so-called minority candidates. It’s led to an enormous amount of fraud and waste and inefficiency — and that’s not even getting into how unethical and unconstitutional it was.

But that’s all gone now, at least at the federal level. Trump’s order forbids the federal government from, “allowing or encouraging federal contractors and subcontractors to engage in workforce balancing based on race, color, sex, sexual preference, religion, or national origin.”

Additionally, all federal agencies have to require every grant recipient to, “certify that it does not operate any programs promoting DEI that violate any applicable Federal anti-discrimination laws.” Within 120 days, the attorney general will also outline requirements for colleges and universities, concerning their DEI programs.

This is obviously a sweeping order — one that affects hundreds of billions of dollars in government spending. It’s very bad news for universities like Harvard, and other bastions of Left-wing orthodoxy. It’s the kind of order that you’d expect would lead to a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth on the Left. And certainly that is happening to some extent. But there’s been an interesting wrinkle.

As Chris Rufo reported yesterday: “Tech executives are telling me that Silicon Valley companies will respect President Trump’s ban on discriminatory DEI. Many feel relieved that they don’t have to pretend anymore. ‘Resistance here is basically dead.’”

In other words, according to Rufo’s reporting, these executives were experiencing a kind of Stockholm Syndrome for the past several years. They knew that DEI was destructive for their business. They wanted it to go away. But they felt they had no choice but to endorse it, because on top of the legal requirements, they didn’t want to upset Left-wing activists and the corporate media. They lacked the spine to stand up for their own business interests. They felt trapped, so they went along with it. This may sound like convenient excuse-making, but it actually sounds very plausible. After all, tech companies care the most about making money. You don’t become a tech billionaire without understanding how to turn a profit. DEI is obviously and self-evidently bad for business because it forces you to hire people who are not qualified for the job. It actually makes perfect sense that these companies would be relieved to be done with it. It’s not an excuse, though. If anything it just makes them look worse. DEI proliferated not because all of these companies believed in it. But because they were all cowards who didn’t have the gumption to speak out, even for the sake of their own economic self-preservation.

It’s worth asking whether this response applies to the Left more broadly. One of the most fascinating things about Trump’s full scale assault on gender ideology and DEI in government is the relative lack of Left-wing hysteria over it. Certainly there has been plenty of whining and scolding about it. But there haven’t been protests in the street or widespread panic. The outrage — from my vantage point — hasn’t quite reached the fever pitch you would have expected. Even the media, from what I can tell, seems to be relatively muted (by their very low standards) in their reaction. Here for example is a decidedly low-energy segment from MSNBC the other day. You’d think they’d be up grabbing their pitchforks because of the return of fascism to America. But instead, this is what they came up with:

So they certainly don’t approve of Trump’s policies. But you wouldn’t call that a hysterical meltdown. The anchor cites that fake McKinsey study about how DEI supposedly improves companies, which we’ve talked about and debunked many times before. And then the reporter says conservatives want to take us back to colorblind, merit-driven society, as if that’s a bad thing. But it is, again, a bit low energy. Contrast this with the hysteria in the days after Trump’s first inauguration, and there’s really no comparison. Back then, everything Trump did was part of a Russian plot to destroy American democracy. Everything was cause for panic. Everything was a five alarm fire.

This has been the response to pretty much all of Trump’s executive orders — from his order ending DEI at the FAA, to his order declaring that indeed, there are only two genders, and that gender ideology is dead. This is the most far reaching executive assault on Left-wing ideology ever launched by any president. There isn’t a close second. It is truly unprecedented. And yet the Left’s reaction hasn’t matched the moment. Especially by their normal standards of hysteria. Why is that?

The lack of mass protests in the street may be easy enough to explain. It’s very cold. We know that Left-wing activists are very dedicated to their causes, as long as that dedication doesn’t require them to endure even the slightest bit of discomfort. Also you’d probably have to pay the protesters more than their usual rate, given the weather conditions. Maybe it’s more than George Soros is willing to shell out. But that’s not the whole story.

There is also, as we’ve discussed this week, a kind of emotional burnout. The Left has been screaming hysterically about Trump for ten years. It’s just not possible to keep up that level of performative outrage indefinitely. Eventually you lose a bit of steam. On top of that, the Left is in organizational and ideological disarray. They have no clear leader. No clear agenda. No clear political identity. All of that serves to mute the response to these moves by Trump.

But on top of all of those factors, I also have to wonder if at least some on the Left are maybe, to some extent, even if subconsciously, sort of relieved to be done with DEI, gender ideology, and the rest. After all, these things are so absurd on their face that almost no one could have ever really, truly believed in them. Almost no one wants to be in the position of having to defend some crossdressing man who’s crying because he can’t disrobe in the women’s changing room. Almost no one actually thinks it’s a good idea to prioritize diversity in air traffic control hiring. DEI and gender ideology require a suspension of basic common sense so extreme that few people could ever achieve it. Everyone else was just pretending. We have suffered through an era of American history where millions of people were pretending to believe the most absurd propositions ever put forward. Now that the cultural tide has changed, the pressure to pretend has been greatly lifted. The true believers in DEI and gender ideology now look around to discover that they are without allies. Trans activists and DEI race hustlers were holding all of those people hostage. But the Right’s political and cultural victories have taken away their ammunition. It is hard to keep your hostages in line when they find out that your gun has no bullets. In other words, for some who ostensibly appeared to be “on the Left,” we are their liberators.

That’s just a theory anyway. I believe there’s an element of this, at least for some on the Left. I certainly think it’s the case for business owners and corporate America. But regardless, one thing we know for sure is that this somewhat eerie lull won’t last. The true believers and powers that be on that side of the fence aren’t going to abandon their agenda. They won’t surrender to the Right and call it a day. They’ll regroup and probably come back with something even crazier than DEI and gender ideology. That’s what we can assume, if history is our guide. And it should be.

In the meantime, the fact is that pretty much everyone in this country — including anyone who flies on a plane, who sends a child to college, or applies for a job or a federal contract — is already benefiting from the second Trump administration. This is the swift restoration of sanity that a majority of Americans voted for. Common sense has made a comeback. Team Sanity is winning for the moment. But Team Insanity will be back. And it’s up to us to be ready for them.