Live and Let DEI

The origins of Trump's war on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion can be found in Richard Hanania's book "The Origins of Woke"

Although “DEI” stands for “diversity, equity, and inclusion”—three unassailably positive attributes that all organizations, in sectors public and private, should strive to achieve—MAGA has adopted those three letters as a pejorative blanket term for people of color, women, non-Christians, immigrants, and the LGBTQ population: all of the protected classes under Title VII, basically. It’s a one-size-fits-all dog whistle. Blaming, say, the California wildfires on “DEI” is like inculpating Blacks, women, Jews, migrants, Lesbians, gays, and trans people simultaneously.

Small wonder Trump has taken to the term. For him, “DEI” is the new n-word, the new c-word, the new s-word, and the new f-word, all rolled into one. (It’s also, as I’m not the first to point out, the first initials of his three oldest kids, but that’s just an ironical chef’s-kiss, and Donald, like all MAGA, is oblivious to irony.) I assumed that his frequent use of the term on the campaign trail was Lee Atwater stuff: next-wave Southern strategy—blood-red meat for both his troglodytic base and his more well-to-do supporters with axes to grind, like hedge fund guy Bill Ackman.¹

But then he won, and kept at it. And then he was sworn in, and the eradication of DEI became—somewhat surprisingly, and for reasons both sinister and murky—an important Trump Redux initiative. Even the newly-minted Attorney General, the grotesquely corrupt Pam Bondi, has made the War on DEI a Day-One Justice Department priority.

Why is eliminating DEI in the federal government so critical to Donald Trump (and to our Apartheid Nazi shadow president, Elon Musk)? Where is this coming from? And, more importantly, where is it going? Are they simply rolling back protections to make it easier to sexually harass the women in their employ? To make it legal to not offer leases to Black families? To gay-bash? Or is something more sinister at work here? Is the end goal a 21st century incarnation of slavery?

As it turns out, I didn’t have to look far for an answer. It was right there in my own archives. The eradication of DEI is one of the proposed initiatives of the NRx: the neo-reactionary right. You know—the Dark Enlightenment.

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(Note: this section, lightly edited, is from the two-part series I wrote about the Dark Enlightenment 14 months ago.)

In a video promoting his Teneo Network, an outfit Pro Publica describes as a “Federalist Society for everything,” Leonard Leo—rightwing SCOTUS whisperer, co-founder of said Federalist Society, reactionary legal activist, Knight of Malta, and beneficiary of $1.6 billion to put to work on his radical Catholic agenda—says: “I spent close to 30 years, if not more, helping to build the conservative legal movement. And at some point or another, I just said to myself, ‘If this can work for law, why can’t it work for lots of other areas of American culture and American life where things are really messed up right now?’” He goes on to explain that these problems in American life and culture involve “wokeism in the corporate environment [and] in the educational environment.”

“The idea behind the network and the enterprise we built is to roll back liberal dominance in many important sectors of American life,” Leo continues. “I had a couple of decades or more of experience rolling back liberal dominance in the legal culture, and I thought it was time to take the lessons learned from that and see whether there was a way to roll back liberal dominance in other areas of American cultural, policy, and political life.”

But how do they plan to decontaminate corporate America and the U.S. public education system of virulent wokeness? Is it even possible, in the Year of Our Lord 2025, to roll back liberal dominance in cultural, policy, and political life?

For this, we turn to another darling of the NRx movement, 39-year-old Richard Hanania, “an intellectual muse of the Silicon Valley right,” in the phrasing of New York’s Zak Cheney-Rice. His book, The Origins of Woke: Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics, tackles these important questions.

Armed with a law degree and a Ph.D. in poli-sci, Hanania is a former research fellow at the University of Texas and the founder of the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology. He’s also a former blogger, who, Cheney-Rice explains,

between 2008 and 2012…posted pseudonymously on several white-supremacist and misogynistic websites, including VDare and [neo-Nazi] Richard Spencer’s Alternative Right. Hanania inveighed against miscegenation, called for the sterilization of Black people with a “low IQ,” and claimed that women “didn’t evolve to be the decision makers in society.” He confesses he “had few friends or romantic successes and no real career prospects” at the time and was projecting his “personal unhappiness onto the rest of the world.”

Hanania has since recanted, cleaning up his public image if not his hateful politics, and garnering praise along the way from such prominent New Right admirers as Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, J.D. Vance, Vivek Ramaswamy, David Sacks, and Christopher Rufo, DeSantis’s hatchet man at the New College of Florida, last seen rolling a proverbial woodchipper into the Department of Education.

The Origins of Woke is a fleshed-out version of a piece Hanania wrote on his newsletter a few years ago, “Woke Institutions is Just Civil Rights Law.” He begins that piece by offering his own definition of “wokeness,” which, in his mind, has three components:

1) A belief that any disparities in outcomes favoring whites over non-whites or men over women are caused by discrimination (Sometimes wokeness cares about other disparities too, like fat/nonfat, but those are given less attention. I’m putting aside LGBT issues, which seem to be at an earlier stage of wokeness in which the left is still mostly fighting battles regarding explicit differences in treatment rather than disparate outcomes, although the latter does get attention sometimes.)

2) The speech of those who would argue against 1 needs to be restricted in the interest of overcoming such disparities, and the safety and emotional well-being of the victimized group in question.

3) Bureaucracies are needed that reflect the beliefs in 1 and 2, working to overcome disparities and managing speech and social relations.

“Each of these things,” he says, “can be traced to law.” He then proceeds to make that case.

And in this, Hanania is not wrong. The federal government really did take the lead combatting discrimination (in the way it should have but didn’t during the Reconstruction period). The Civil Rights Act of 1964 did indeed prohibit discrimination based on race and gender; in Title VII, it established “protected classes” that include race, color, religion, sex, and national origin. Griggs v. Duke Power Co. (1971) really did bar the use of standardized intelligence tests in hiring. Executive orders issued by JFK in 1961 (E.O. 10925), LBJ in 1965 (E.O. 11246), and Richard Nixon, of all people, in 1969 (E.O. 11478), really did require that contractors and employers “take affirmative action” to avoid discrimination. (To many conservatives, “take affirmative action” is a euphemism for “discriminate against straight white cis men with impunity”—except that they would never use the woke term “cis.”)

Hanania continues:

As Harvard sociologist Frank Dobbin wrote in Inventing Equal Opportunity, it was civil rights law that revolutionized the American workplace. Corporations started to hire full time staff in order to keep track of government mandates, which were vague and could change at any moment. There was a sense of “keeping up with the Joneses,” in which every company and institution had to be more anti-racist and anti-sexist than the next one, leading to more and more absurd diversity trainings and other programs.

The key word in that paragraph is “absurd.” Is it absurd to want to establish places of business free of harassment? Is it absurd to not want employees to be denied opportunity because they are Black, or Jewish, or women, or were born in Romania? Is it absurd for businesses to establish practices of DEI—diversity, equity and inclusion—to make all employees feel like they belong? Corporate America has been swayed by the business case for diversity, which should be obvious: the wider the net, the bigger the talent pool; the bigger the talent pool, the more talented the employees; the more talented the employees, the better the company.

Peter Thiel disagrees, as Peter Thiel will. “DEI will never d-i-e on its own,” he writes oh-so-cleverly in the blurb for the book. “[W]e need the sticks and stones of government violence to exorcise the diversity demon.”

There is a way to perform a diversity exorcism. Hanania points out that “the anti-woke seem unaware that the things they care about have much to do with policy. They treat every cultural outrage as an isolated event, as just another instance of elites deciding to be ‘woke,’ without such decisions being connected to anything government has ever done.”

If, as Hanania argues, “every one of the main pillars of wokeness can be traced to new standards created by regulators and courts, mostly in the 1960s and 1970s but updated over time,” then a coordinated anti-woke movement has simply to undo all of that: deregulate restrictions on societal behavior. He says that

an anti-wokeness agenda would involve, at the very least,

1) Eliminating disparate impact, making the law require evidence of intentional discrimination.

2) Getting rid of the concept of hostile work environment, or defining it in extremely narrow and explicit terms, making sure that it does not restrict political or religious speech.

3) Repealing the executive orders that created and expanded affirmative action among government contractors and the federal workforce.

That, I think, is what all these anti-woke politicians want to see happen. Ultimately, they want a return to the Mad Men days when white men were able to pat their secretaries on the rear end, bar people of color from management, and shove Jesus in everyone’s face even if it makes their Jewish or Muslim or lapsed Catholic employees uncomfortable. (If you ask me, they are all just butthurt that assholes aren’t a protected class under Title VII.)

[End of previously published material.]

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In the introduction to The Origins of Woke, Hanania writes:

On more than one occasion, I have been talking to a highly intelligent conservative activist who was shocked when I told him that there is an executive order mandating that all large government contractors adopt affirmative action programs. The corollary is that an executive order could — at least in theory — also end such programs. Why hasn’t any Republican president even felt pressure from his base to undertake such an action, much less actually do it?

Fast forward to February 2025. A Republican president has indeed felt pressure from his base—or, at least, the billionaire libertarian Apartheid enthusiasts in his ear—to undertake such an action, and has done something about it.

As Hanania explains in his January 22 newsletter:

In my chapter on policy suggestions, I wrote that repealing EO 11246 was low-hanging fruit, but a more aggressive approach would involve banning government contractors from engaging in DEI policies.

I promoted my ideas to conservatives, including on Vivek’s podcast in early 2023, not long after telling him about EO 11246 for the first time. As Vox noted, he soon started promising to repeal the order on his first day in office if elected….[I suggested] to him that a Republican president go further than that and use a new EO to ban DEI among contractors.

With Trump, it took two days. But we’ve gotten to the same place. Yesterday, the president signed a new executive order with the title “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity.” Section 3 repeals Executive Order 11246, giving contractors only 90 days before they must stop acting in accordance with previous rules. It then lays out new requirements.

(ii) The Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs within the Department of Labor shall immediately cease:

(A) Promoting “diversity”;

(B) Holding Federal contractors and subcontractors responsible for taking “affirmative action”; and

(C) Allowing or encouraging Federal contractors and subcontractors to engage in workforce balancing based on race, color, sex, sexual preference, religion, or national origin.

As I suggested Trump do, it then goes on to mandate color blindness.

(iii) In accordance with Executive Order 13279 of December 12, 2002 (Equal Protection of the Laws for Faith-Based and Community Organizations), the employment, procurement, and contracting practices of Federal contractors and subcontractors shall not consider race, color, sex, sexual preference, religion, or national origin in ways that violate the Nation's civil rights laws.

(iv) The head of each agency shall include in every contract or grant award:

(A) A term requiring the contractual counterparty or grant recipient to agree that its compliance in all respects with all applicable Federal anti-discrimination laws is material to the government's payment decisions for purposes of section 3729(b)(4) of title 31, United States Code; and

(B) A term requiring such counterparty or recipient to certify that it does not operate any programs promoting DEI that violate any applicable Federal anti-discrimination laws.

(c) The Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), with the assistance of the Attorney General as requested, shall:

(i) Review and revise, as appropriate, all Government-wide processes, directives, and guidance;

(ii) Excise references to DEI and DEIA principles, under whatever name they may appear, from Federal acquisition, contracting, grants, and financial assistance procedures to streamline those procedures, improve speed and efficiency, lower costs, and comply with civil-rights laws; and

(iii) Terminate all “diversity,” “equity,” “equitable decision-making,” “equitable deployment of financial and technical assistance,” “advancing equity,” and like mandates, requirements, programs, or activities, as appropriate.

Section 4 directs agencies to start looking for instances of violations of non-discrimination laws, as interpreted by the Trump administration of course, among private firms, non-profits, colleges and universities, and accreditation agencies.

As to the next steps, well, we need only read Hanania to see where this headed—at least in the legal context. The Origins of Woke has become a Baedeker for the Redux. “There are still other suggestions in my book, particularly eliminating disparate impact, that are yet to be implemented,” he writes, “but with Trump in office and conservatives in control of the courts I think it’s only a matter of time.” (From the DOJ website: “The disparate impact regulations seek to ensure that programs accepting federal money are not administered in a way that perpetuates the repercussions of past discrimination.”)

In a January 21 newsletter, “The Ultimate Guide to Trump’s Day 1 Executive Orders,” he opines:

At the very least, government should not be into the race, sex, and LGBT bean counting business. This is the most low-hanging fruit, because it is what the executive branch directly controls. Yet I was hoping for more. As I explain in The Origins of Woke, one of the most important things an administration can do on this front through executive order is end mandatory affirmative action among government contractors, which forces DEI policies onto a huge chunk of the private sector. Though still, because Trump has decided to go to war against DEI, government bureaucrats are going to be a lot better in this area, and there will likely be less stringent enforcement of such requirements going forward.

I should add here that Hanania is a smart guy. His arguments are worth considering, even if we don’t agree with them. There’s a lot to be learned from his work. And, nothwithstanding the aforementioned ugly pseudonymous blog posts, he seems to be approaching this from a legal/logical, and not a social or racial or economic, perspective. In other words, he’s not some dumb MAGA racist who has resorted to jurisprudential chicanery to transform personal animus into rule of law. Even so, he is a civil rights law Victor Frankenstein, and the monster he created is on the loose.

The Pelon Thusk Apartheid Billionaire faction championed The Origins of Woke because they correctly saw the suggestions in that book as a means to get what they wanted—which is not necessarily the same outcome Hanania himself wants. “I was pushing anti-wokeness at a time when conservatives were obsessed with the topic and looking for answers,” he reflects. “Now, I want to convince them to be pro-immigration, less nationalistic, and overall act like higher human capital, where the trends are in the opposite direction, so maybe nobody will listen to me anymore.”

Not maybe, Richard. Replace that word with “going forward.” Trump and the Thusk eminences behind him abhor illegal immigration (despite the preponderance of illegal immigrants in their cohort), trumpet nationalism at the expense of national security and prosperity, and are dead-set on increasing dehumanization and mass suffering. Money, power, and harm are the coins of the realm in the Redux. Nothing else matters, including—check that; especially—rational argument.

For sure, Trump is keen on Making Discrimination Legal Again. Ed Kilgore reports in a New York article, “Trump’s War on DEI Opens the Door to Jim Crow’s Return,” that “an emerging talking point among Trump advisers that may explain the action on EO 11246 is the Orwellian claim that any effort to reduce discrimination against particular people itself violates ‘color-blind’ civil-rights laws. In this view, legal neutrality toward old-school racial discrimination in employment is the only guarantee we have that ‘merit’ is rewarded.”

He continues:

If that’s the case, you wonder how long it will be before MAGA folk decide that civil-rights laws should be turned upside down to ban anti-discrimination policies altogether as inherently discriminatory. It’s bad enough that Trump and his advisers believe the official discrimination against Black people that characterized U.S. laws and politics from the founding of the Republic until the 1960s is not a problem worth addressing anymore. It’s even worse to claim that the only way to prevent discrimination is to get rid of any effort to address it. That way lies a return to white supremacy in the guise of color-blind “meritocracy.” And it’s also a terrible trend for the women and LGBTQ+ folk who have benefited from the same laws and policies as they were extended into the 21st century.

Stripping legal protections away from women and the LGBT community would make it easier, too, for the Leonard Leo faction to do away with all abortion rights and criminalize homosexuality—two big items on the Opus Dei wish list.

Not only that, but in its zeal and hurry to upend DEI, the Trump Administration has made all of us markedly less safe. In the New Yorker last week, Jay Caspian Kang wrote:

On Wednesday, Tom Malinowski, a former congressman and diplomat, pointed out that Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency had just bragged about ending “DEI scholarships for Burma.” The scholarships in question are through U.S.A.I.D. and granted to young people who are fighting against the dictatorship inBurma, which, as Malinowski noted, has long been a priority in Washington for Democrats and Republicans, including the new Secretary of State, Marco Rubio. “It looks like these geniuses are just going through grant awards and killing anything that uses words like ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusion,’ even though in countries where ethnic and religious minorities are murdered and persecuted, these have long been American goals,” Malinowski speculated.

One can imagine Musk and his staff hitting Control+F on a database of grants for the word “equity,” cancelling any search returns without reading what they’re actually for, and then screenshotting the paperwork to post on Twitter.

This is kinda sorta what’s happening, as it turns out. In Popular Information, Judd Legum and Rebecca Crosby reveal that the nation’s largest and most important intelligence agency is essentially amputating body parts willy-nilly:

Today, the National Security Agency (NSA) is planning a “Big Delete” of websites and internal network content that contain any of 27 banned words, including “privilege,” “bias,” and “inclusion.” The “Big Delete,” according to an NSA source and internal correspondence reviewed by Popular Information, is creating unintended consequences. Although the websites and other content are purportedly being deleted to comply with President Trump's executive orders targeting diversity, equity, and inclusion, or “DEI,” the dragnet is taking down “mission-related” work. According to the NSA source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak to the media, the process is “very chaotic,” but is plowing ahead anyway.

(Very chaotic but plowing ahead anyway: that may as well be Trump’s 2028 campaign slogan.)

We can safely assume that what’s happening at the NSA is happening in every agency of the federal government—with deleterious effects. Whatever your sex, gender, race, religion, country of origin, sexual orientation, or political leaning, the War on DEI is a war on all Americans. The collateral damage will harm all of us—MAGA very much included.

And that, of course, is ultimately the point.

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ICYMI

I have published a book of 15 of my “Sunday Pages” essays, most written between Election Day and the second inauguration. The Age of Unreality: Essays On Literature & Tyranny is now available in paperback on Amazon and at your local bookstore via Ingram Spark, and also as an e-book. Thanks to those of you who already purchased a copy—it is a Top New Release!

I talk about the new book here:

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Photo: Blurb page of Hanania’s book.

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1. On X, Ackman, wealthy CEO of Pershing Square, wrote a screed that contains this: “Under DEI, one’s degree of oppression is determined based upon where one resides on a so-called intersectional pyramid of oppression where whites, Jews, and Asians are deemed oppressors, and a subset of people of color, LGBTQ people, and/or women are deemed to be oppressed. Under this ideology which is the philosophical underpinning of DEI as advanced by Ibram X. Kendi and others, one is either an anti-racist or a racist. There is no such thing as being “not racist.” Under DEI’s ideology, any policy, program, educational system, economic system, grading system, admission policy, (and even climate change due its disparate impact on geographies and the people that live there), etc. that leads to unequal outcomes among people of different skin colors is deemed racist. As a result, according to DEI, capitalism is racist, Advanced Placement exams are racist, IQ tests are racist, corporations are racist, or in other words, any merit-based program, system, or organization which has or generates outcomes for different races that are at variance with the proportion these different races represent in the population at large is by definition racist under DEI’s ideology.”