Trump’s War on DEI

And why he'll almost certainly win it.

On his first day back in office, Donald Trump embarked on a veritable ramage of executive action, signing mass pardons, staffing and restaffing the federal government, and issuing executive orders up, through, and back out the wazoo.

He fulfilled, with gusto, his campaign promise to be a “dictator on day one,” delighting his right wing supporters and enraging, quite intentionally, his left wing detractors. One of the more consequential of these executive orders was the rescission of a 1965 directive, Executive Order #11246, which was initially signed by President Lyndon Baines Johnson. That EO laid much of the foundation for what we now call “affirmative action,” and was actually one of the earliest examples of those words appearing in official text.

The undoing of 11246 is best understood as Trump’s opening salvo in his declared “war on DEI” (Diversity, Equity & Inclusion), and was done at the urging of activist Chris Rufo. Rufo is among the bitterest and most effective foes of institutional identitarianism and has become a boogeyman of sorts for lefties, especially in academia. Rufo has rocketed to prominence in conservative circles for his unrelenting, seek-and-destroy approach to all things “woke.”

Since no agreed-upon definition of “woke” exists, I shall proffer my own and hope it floats:

woke

adj.

of or pertaining to a leftist sociopolitical movement characterized by an illiberal fixation on identity and its interplay with societal power and privilege

Crickets

Trump’s nuking of 11246 has been met on the right with gleeful celebration, and on the left with…actually, not that much.

Plenty of Trump’s first day bombshells triggered the expected outrage - especially his mass pardoning of the January 6th insurrectionists and his declaration that the federal government would no longer acknowledge or respect trans identities. But while the anti-DEI order has faced a degree of pushback from DEI advocates, the battlefield has been strangely quiet.

Where are the libtards? Where are their tears to drink? Have they not been adequately owned?

One could almost feel bad for Rufo & co. It has to be a disappointing anticlimax. Here, they’ve spent years building momentum, carrying out targeted assassinations, have finally found themselves empowered to really drop the hammer, and instead of the expected boom, all they got was a meager pfffft.

Why? What happened? Why doesn’t the left care about this enough to be triggered en masse?

The favored explanation still leaves plenty for the right to cheer about: the left doesn’t care because left never cared. There was never universal buy-in for this. This whole woke, PC, DEI, reverse-racist carnival we’ve been suffering through these last years was nothing but a bunch of social justice warrior bullies pushing everyone around, even other libs, and forcing them to dance to their tune.

Well, guess what, commies, the music just stopped!

There’s probably some truth to that. The left’s coalition has always had mixed feelings about affirmative action and its related enterprises. Of course it has. Especially in zero-sum situations like hiring and college admissions, you cannot realistically advantage one group without disadvantaging another. Many, many liberals belong to groups who are expressly offered the poo-end of the stick under this framework. Some of them will accept it, and some will do so gladly. But others are going to balk. Even in the interest of fairness, convincing folks to act against their personal best interest is always going to be a tough sell.

But I don’t think liberal skepticism fully explains what’s going on right now. It’s something bigger, and something deeper. The left’s weak-beer response to the overturning of decades of DEI consensus isn’t just quiet gratitude that Trump finally did their dirty work. They’re not responding to this because they really can’t. What we’re seeing right now isn’t relief, it’s paralysis.

Trump, Rufo, et al have predicated their onslaught not on some arcane piece of right wing, proto-fascist dogma, but on a central pillar of liberalism itself: basic human equality. We’ll get to how they did that shortly, but the important thing to know up front is that Trump’s attack dogs have maneuvered liberals into a position where they can’t speak out against what’s happening without also speaking out against…liberalism.

And as the kids say, nobody’s ready to have that conversation.

Bets

For whatever reason, I keep wanting to write the words “they called our bluff.” Poker imagery is a little off-brand for me, mostly because I suck so horrendously at poker, I don’t even like playing it for matchsticks. It’s also the wrong explanation of this situation.

To call a bluff, somebody else has to be running one, and in this case, nobody is. Bluffs are about dishonesty, and daring your opponents to challenge it. I can see why the right might believe that this is what the left has been up to on affirmative action, DEI, etc. but that’s wrong. The left has never been bluffing on this, as that would imply that they’ve always known they were carrying a bad hand.

It would be more accurate to say that the left has gone all-in on what they really hope is a winning hand - what they really need to be a winning hand - and finally, 60-odd years after the game started, the right has decided to call.

It could be several decades again before we know who’s taking the pot, but as the cards start to turn over, the left isn’t about to tempt fate by gloating or strutting. Instead, they’re waiting with bated breath, hoping against hope that they didn’t just kiss goodbye to the kids’ college fund.

The Playing Field

Having reached, I think, the limits of our card analogy, we should circle back to the policy brass tacks.

Executive Order #11246 was a sort of companion piece to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which forbade discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. That act was a seminal piece of legislation that *legally* ended the Jim Crow era and brought full civil equality to those Americans who’d lacked it prior.

But changing the law was one thing. Enforcing it was another.

How, for example, do you know if a person was discriminated against because of their identity, and not because of some other, valid characteristic? Inexperience? Incompetence? Personal unlikability? The short answer is, you don’t. And can’t.

The Civil Rights Act was vital for its time, when exclusion was often proudly and overtly maintained by unabashed bigots. “Whites only” was no longer an allowable condition. For anything. The new rule was a well-earned slap in the teeth to asshole racists whose prejudices would, and could, no longer enjoy the force of law.

Even then though, a lot of wiggle room was left to those who still didn’t want to play nice, but were able to credibly tone it down enough to avoid falling afoul of the law.

Enter Executive Order #11246, which extended the new civil rights law to all federal contractors (a very big club) and required that they take “affirmative action” to address inequality in their workforces. These companies would need to provide documented proof that they weren’t engaging in systematic discrimination, usually, by giving evidence of a sufficiently diverse worker base. The EO didn’t call for *quotas* exactly, but the idea of quotas was intrinsic to the spirit of the directive.

In 1965, when Johnson signed the order, there was no clear definition of “affirmative action.” What we now think of - preferential hiring/admissions/promotions that favor members of historically disadvantaged groups - is a concept that evolved over several decades and several presidential administrations, Democratic and Republican . We’ve haggled over the nitty gritty, but the broadest stroke was always simply that some people deserved an extra boost.

America’s ugly history of racism, sexism, and state-sanctioned, unequal treatment necessitated more than just an end to the madness, according to this take. It required our letting the pendulum swing back, well past the center of oscillation, into territory that benefited those who’d been previously screwed over.

You can’t spend centuries beating the tar out of somebody, stop suddenly, and just say, “all good, right?” You have to take steps - you might say, ”affirmative action” - to heal. And to level the playing field.

Expiration Date?

Here’s the thing though: pendulums swing out, then they come back. If the ultimate goal is to make it stop entirely - to let everyone have the same, fair shake - when do we do that? How do we know it’s time? What are the metrics?

Affirmative action’s proponents - and for a while, that was more or less everyone - never determined this. EO #11246 didn’t have a sunset clause attached. There was no expiration date. And in philosophical terms, having one, even if nobody could agree right away when it should be, was a must.

Imagine a perfectly equal society, one that fully embodies the Enlightenment ideals on which America was founded. In this society, the playing field is glass-flat, such that you could measure it with a laser. Nobody faces discrimination. A person’s race, sex, creed and nationality are as relevant to societal station in this utopia as hair color or favorite X-Man are in ours. In such a paradise, affirmative action wouldn’t just be unnecessary, it would be grossly unjust. There could be no reasonable excuse for it, because when everyone’s equal, and you set out to change that, you…get the point.

Of course, America in 1965 was no such utopia, and never had been. Something needed to be done for the folks we’d just begrudgingly decided to stop messing with. But again, whether or not it was made plain in the text of the EO, affirmative action - whatever that was going to mean - would have to be a temporary measure. It was intended to even the scales. Once they were even, we would stop, right? We wouldn’t need it anymore, and we could all join hands in building the promised future.

Rhetorical Shackles

The most honest defense of affirmative action is that yes, it’s unfair, but it’s fair that it’s unfair. After so many centuries of unfairness in one direction, a little unfairness in the other is just what the doctor ordered. Nobody really loves putting it this way, because even in retaliation, we don’t like admitting that we’re intentionally treating people unfairly, let alone because of their gender or skin color. But justifiable or not, that’s ultimately what affirmative action is. We’re fighting fire with more fire.

Righting a wrong with another wrong though requires the presence of a pretty clear wrong to right. Right?

So a key feature of the “woke” era has been a steadfast, angry refusal to acknowledge that basically any progress has been made at all since Johnson signed EO #11246. There’s little danger of attaining enough success to warrant an end to affirmative action if you never concede success at all. If things are still very, very wrong.

If you’ve ever made the mistake of trying to point out to a woke person that, in fact, the 1960s was a while ago, and a pretty different time, you’ll know exactly the shape these exchanges take:

“Hey, at least things are better than they used to be, right?”

“That’s just systemic white supremacy talking. Why don’t you listen, check your privilege and do better.”

This play works. If nothing is any better, there’s no need to wonder about putting this affirmative action thing to bed. It isn’t so much moving the goalposts as pretending not to be able to see them at all. The road to realization of the American ideal is literally without end. Not only will America never be a finished project (arguably, a useful conceit) America will never be anything but a hopelessly slanted wasteland. A racist and sexist hellscape, the terror and daily violence of which could only be denied by someone who is evil.

Starting around 10 years ago, discourse pertaining to fair vs. unfair applications of affirmative action came to an abrupt halt. Not so much in court, but in the public square, the matter was closed, fuck you very much.

The country is irreparable trash. How dare anyone suggest it can be redeemed by a level playing field. We’re grabbing the pendulum right out here where it is and we’re holding onto it, because this is where it fairly belongs. We’re so far from an expiration date, the concept itself is offensive.

Incidentally, this newer philosophy has a name: critical theory. As in, “critical race theory,” which preceded “DEI” as the catch-all conservatives used to attack woke stuff. The idea is that equality isn’t sufficient to produce equity. America is too screwed up to expect equal performance from formerly unequal players, so we have to do something more. We need to pass out some step stools to get everyone up on the same level. Critical theory wasn’t much more than a niche, academic concern until wokesters took it mainstream and got militant about it. But once they did, it changed the shape of the conversation entirely.

Initially, it worked wonders (not the policy, the militancy). To express even mild skepticism of affirmative action - an outgrowth of critical theory, and something we’d spent the 90s openly arguing about - was now to out oneself as a Racist. People could get professionally disciplined or excluded for doing it. The identitarian left was riding high. But the upshot of their rigidity was that it gave their opponents an opening. Conservatives had nothing to lose now. If the matter was really closed - if proponents were really going all-in - then why not just call the next time their turn came around?

More than that, the left began to signal that it was officially, institutionally, abandoning the civil rights era beliefs that had informed affirmative action in the first place. Remember, in 1965, we didn’t need this because people were unequal, we needed it because their context was. We needed to help folks navigate a system that had been designed to hold them back.

That idea evolved though, into something much sharper. Sure, the context was unequal…but who made it that way? Somebody did this. Somebody was benefiting. And somebody needed to pay. Affirmative action wasn’t just something minorities deserved, it was something white people deserved too, goddammit.

This thing had a brand new purpose, and a new lease on life. Values such as colorblindness, innate equality, the relevance of merit, the supremacy of civility - values that had become so ingrained for so much of America that they transcended party and ideology - all those were passé.

The legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.? Content of character over color of skin? Naive. Unequal to the task. Even invoking King became a sort of cringe tell that a person was not sufficiently *with it*.

In one of the most shameful displays of this new ethos, writer and public intellectual, Coleman Hughes (who is black) gave a TED Talk in 2023 on the forgotten importance of a colorblind society. Whiny bedwetters on the TED staff had an open meltdown over Hughes and his dangerous, MLK-inspired ideas being “platformed.” They claimed Hughes, by being invited to speak, had made them “unsafe.” The talk was nearly called off, and was only saved through a heinous compromise in which Hughes was allowed to spread his poison only on the condition that he afterward be subjected to - I don’t really have the words for it - a weird, moderated conversation with Chris Andersen, the TED boss, in which Anderson challenged Hughes’s ideas and Hughes was made to re-articulate them in embarrassingly gentle terms.

I absolutely refuse to link to this travesty. TED does not deserve one click of traffic for it. The best way I can explain the vibe is that it was like telling a ghost story to group of children, then having a dim-bulb adult join you on stage to help explain that it was all just a scary story, and couldn’t actually hurt anyone. That’s an imperfect analogy, but it captures the ridiculous, babying tone of the spectacle as well as I can manage.

Point being, the left’s turn away from Dr. King’s message in the woke era was real. It was severe, it was painful to watch, and it perfectly teed up opponents of affirmative action to undo it all, simply by keeping their feet planted on the ideological territory that had been very recently shared by all.

The result is that affirmative action’s fans are now completely shackled in trying to mount a defense of it. To preserve the institution, they’re having to claim, in one breath, that Donald Trump and Chris Rufo are trying to attack the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement, while in the next breath, attacking that legacy as fundamentally feckless and outmoded.

This cannot reasonably be done. Most liberals do not believe that Martin Luther King’s dream was feckless or outmoded. And since they don’t know how to make arguments premised on that belief, they’re not trying. That was something wild-eyed undergrads just decided one day, and got so mean about it, everyone else shut up. Now that the wild-eyed undergrads have grown into tired, HR scolds, and nobody wants to listen to their crap anymore, normie libs are turning back in the direction of King, only to find his legacy being exalted by…Donald Trump?

The Risks of Engagement

Why did this all happen though? What started it? Why did the left set down this path when so many others were available? Why not just set clear benchmarks for affirmative action from the get-go? Why not negotiate a sunset clause? Why not, at the very least, allow some consensus to be formed about what policy success would look like?

The left didn’t do these things because they couldn’t. And they always knew they couldn’t. The risk was too great.

Built into the idea of affirmative action was an assumption. A bet of sorts. The idea was that, once the weight of discrimination was lifted, the formerly discriminated-against would flourish. Why wouldn’t they, after all, when nothing was left to hold them back?

But what if that wasn’t true? What different groups performed differently for reasons that had nothing to do with the playing field? What if the reasons lay within the groups themselves, in their preferences, interests, and abilities?

Pitted against one another, men tend to be faster runners than women. At the highest levels of athletic competition, this is so reliably true, we’ve created different athletic leagues to give women a fair competitive space and avoid total male domination of sport. That might be fine for the Olympics and the WNBA, but what if a similar dynamic was going to appear in the workforce once access to it was legally pried open for all?

It’s utterly weird to consider now in 2025, but in the mid-20th Century, the western world was embarking on a social experiment the likes of which had ever been attempted at scale in 5,000 years of human civilization. We set out to determine whether women could *gasp* work side-by-side with men.

That we know now that they can doesn’t change the fact that before we knew that…we didn’t all know it. We might presume that women had a pretty good sense they’d measure up, but men obviously didn’t. If they had, this would’ve been tried before.

Put yourself in the shoes of the early activists who pushed for women’s inclusion at work, and who helped create systems like affirmative action that would guarantee they actually got their chance. However confident you were that this would succeed, you couldn’t know it would. And many of your colleagues would’ve thought you were dreaming. A woman CEO? A woman ship captain? A woman fire chief? Preposterous!

So you’d definitely want to avoid identifying a stop date. It wouldn’t do to say, “okay, we’ll give it 10 years, and if women aren’t crushing it by then, we’re going to roll this thing back and send the gals back into their aprons.” Partly, you’d know it would take time for women to settle in, but mostly, you’d know your efforts were going to be under ruthless sabotage by folks who thought baking pies was all the ladies were good for and didn’t want you proving them wrong.

You’d want to do something else too. You’d want to be as vague as humanly possible in determining what would actually constitute a win. You’d want goalposts you could move. You’d want the ability to tweak things, to add and subtract in the event you found something that didn’t work, something that worked well, or something that was counterproductive.

The absolute last thing you’d want would be for critics to be able to say, “Hey, according to your own standards of fairness and equality, everything is fair and equal now. And women still aren’t performing as well as men. Ergo, the problem isn’t the playing field, it’s the players. Women simply don’t belong here, and you can’t say we didn’t try.”

Your detractors would have assumed that being a litigator, or a heart surgeon, or a police detective was like being a runner; men would just always be better at it. Since you were committed to the idea that that was false, you couldn’t allow anyone to pull the plug on this thing before you had time to prove your case.

The left’s project of eternalizing affirmative action was designed to starve of oxygen the contention that maybe people actually just aren’t equal. It worked too, for a very long time.

But the wokes got lazy. And they got arrogant.

Mission Accomplished! Or…

Woke people got so high on their own supply, they started to think they didn’t have to state their case anymore. Their vision of America as a hopelessly discriminatory toilet was so clear, so self-evident and incontestable, giving specifics was now a non-issue.

“What instances of codified discrimination do you think still stand in the way of equal outcomes, and how would you suggest we fix them?”

“Get with the program, man. Haven’t you read up on systemic white supremacy and male privilege?”

“Yeah, but what do those things, you know…mean? And how do we correct them?”

“Stop asking me to perform your unpaid emotional labor.”

This pretty quickly ceased to be persuasive to the center and right. The left had stopped bothering to point out actual obstacles to progress for protected classes, so as soon as the right assumed power, they did the obvious thing: they declared the mission accomplished. If the left, who were after all, obsessed with this stuff, couldn’t point to any real barriers to inclusion or success, they must just not exist. We’re fixed!

And for women, this will probably all turn out okay. We’ve rather decisively answered the question, “can women hack it in the workplace?” They can. And they are. Women outpace and outearn men in many high-paid professions, they earn more college degrees, and they live longer. To the extent that there’s still a problem, it might be the reverse of what it used to be; women being forced into labor, rather than being kept out. A young woman who wants to stay home and raise kids is going to have a very uncomfortable time explaining that choice to her classmates, and an even more uncomfortable time trying to afford it on a single income.

That hiccup aside though, women have attained a level of independence and social capital that rivals what men enjoy. The experiment worked. They’ve flourished. But the picture is sadly different with regard to race.

The Race Picture

Ethnic minorities were later admits to the workforce than women, and were much more reluctantly included, if they were at all. At the risk of once again pushing the wokesters’ grumpy-button, things have gotten better. They just haven’t gotten that much better. Black earners have steadily closed the racial wealth gap, but the gap remains. And remains uncomfortably wide. The same is true of homeownership. Arrest and incarceration rates are shockingly lopsided by race. The acceleration of the drug war in the 80s exploded minority prison populations, and things show little sign of evening.

All in all, this would be a helluva good time for the left to unveil its *specific* explanations for why this is happening, and to point out the *specific* structural inequalities leading to such phenomenally unequal outcomes. Something is clearly broken, and we stand little chance of fixing it if we can’t point *specifically* to what it is.

Our being vague about what affirmative action should mean was useful. It bought us time to let the program work. But being vague about the ways in which we want it to fix things is decidedly not useful. That doesn’t keep our options open, it makes it sound like we don’t really know what we want, maybe because we don’t really know what’s wrong.

But hey, why do any of that hard stuff anyway when it’s so much more fun to just call people stupid racists and yell at them to read more books? To be clear, as a rule, I’m in favor of folks reading books. Books are great! But quite unlike people, books do not all possess equal worth, and are not all deserving of respect, the benefit of the doubt, or indeed, existence.

The high priests of lefty race-essentialism are, without exception, vapid hucksters who can barely string two coherent thoughts together. And when a woke is yelling at you to read something, it’s going to be something written by one of these clowns better than 90% of the time. That’s kind of an unfortunate move on their part. Because actually listening to these goobers can often have the opposite of the effect desired by those hissing angrily at you to do it.

If you haven’t tried reading or listening to Ibram X. Kendi, my first recommendation would be that you keep it that way. If, however, you are possessed of the idea that he is wise, thoughtful, or in any way deserving of his vaunted status as a captain of anti-racist philosophy, nothing will more quickly disabuse you of that view than opening one of his books. To any page. If you can make heads or tails of the drivel that guy puts out there, then good for you, man. You are several steps ahead of me. Robin DiAngelo, of White Fragility stardom is little better.

Leftist discourse on race is an impenetrable bubble of mind-numbing horseshit that, to quote Peter Griffin, insists upon itself. Its stranglehold on our ongoing racial reckoning cannot be explained in any better way. It’s a latticework of ideas-laundering, circular logic, buzzwords, bad faith, and just straight-up woo woo that has backed the entire liberal project into such a dark corner, it’s genuinely hard to see a way around it. Terms like “systemic racism” and “institutional whiteness” have, in a technical sense, meanings. You can write about these things or talk about them in a classroom. But they’re so hopelessly broad as concepts that they serve less to clarify our problems with race than to obscure them.

“What are some examples of systemic racism?”

“Examples? It’s everywhere!”

“So like, is it in the room with us right now?”

“It’s in you, man!”

Okay, I’m obviously taking the piss now. But I’m not straw-manning. Not much anyway. This stuff really is that shallow. You cannot extend a concept to cover anything, anywhere, anytime you need it and not expect it to become diluted.

And naturally, in the heyday of wokery, anyone who challenged these framings or pointed out that the emperor’s clothes were looking awfully sheer, was accused of being blinded by either privilege or malice. It was unhelpful in the extreme, and most especially for the leftists driving it all because it made their ideas extremely brittle. The new guys have had a remarkably easy time breaking them all to pieces.

The REAL Racists

All of this nonsense has left liberals wide open to the charge that they are the Real Racists. The notion isn’t a new one by a long shot - “welfare is a plantation,” and all that - but it's had new life breathed into it by the muppet babies who took over left-wing messaging 10 years ago.

It is actually very difficult to find examples of legal, systemic discrimination based on race or gender in the United States. That’s good news, and it’s part of why the wokesters stopped pointing them out (that, and their own hubris). But as the early architects of affirmative action recognized, there was always going to be a risk in allowing folks to claim that the playing field was fixed. If it was, and if some people still weren’t playing well, the responsibility for that might rest with them. That’s a mighty uncomfortable thing to face for a movement that likes to imagine “marginalized groups” as just needing its rescue from a bad system. The left was supposed to follow a careful script with all this, stringing affirmative action along slowly, in perpetuity. They got tired of that, got way out in front of themselves, and now the right has called time’s up on the whole project.

I don’t know what’s in Chris Rufo’s heart. It’s possible, I suppose, that he’s a villainous racist who just wants to drive non-whites out of good jobs. That’s certainly what leftists think of him. But if I had to guess, I’d bet he doesn’t give two shits about the ethnic makeup of America’s workforce. If he succeeds in ripping down our DEI infrastructure and his efforts yield no aesthetic changes - same proportion of whites to blacks to Asians and so on - I imagine he’d be delighted. It would completely validate his life’s work. He’d get to say, “See? I told you. We didn’t need this.” The real question, as I see it, is will leftists be able to acknowledge it if things turn out okay? Can they stomach so much humble pie?

After all, which side is now saying “everyone is equal and can handle fair competition,” and which side thinks that removing identity-based advantages is a catastrophe? Which side is predicting that ditching the step stools offered to minorities will lead to an all-white workforce in a few years? I’ll give you a hint: it ain’t conservatives!

Assuming the MLK-was-boring-actually mantle was a terrible (and frankly weird) direction for the Democratic Party to take. I mean, fair enough. Why wouldn’t it be a good idea to obnoxiously reprimand anyone clinging to the notion that our most venerated martyr had good things to teach us? I guess anyone could make that mistake…

But it’s landed us in quite the rhetorical funhouse. We have to somehow fight for a policy that hasn’t fully worked in the 60-odd years we’ve been trying it, largely because its not fully working was part of the plan. We have to do this by claiming that Martin Luther King, Jr.’s ideas about race were artless and unsophisticated, that we know better now, and that people we consider part of our coalition can’t possibly thrive without our helicoptering. For us to be proved right, these people - our people - will have to crash and burn and embarrass themselves. And if they don’t, that’s actually worse for us, because it robs us of our reason for being and means that vital players on our team - players without whom we cannot win elections - don’t need to be on our team at all anymore.

It takes a special brand of fuckup to engineer conditions this ridiculous: the Democratic Party, ladies and gentlemen.

We’ll be here all week!

Don’t forget to tip your waitress.