DEI: “Don’t think it’s over. These people are digging in. They’re not going to give it up.”
My discussion of how Reports of the Death of DEI Are Greatly Exaggerated: “People should not get complacent. People should not think that just because Trump signed a half dozen executive orders, this stuff is going away.”
I appeared this morning on the Michael Patrick Leahy radio show, the Tennessee Star Report.
I collaborated with Michael back in the day — 2012 when he was at Breitbart — when we and a small number of others drove the investigations of Elizabeth Warren’s Cherokee deception. So it was good to catch up with him.
We talked about my view that there is an irrational exuberance that Trump’s DEI Executive Orders will cause DEI to DIE. Next week Legal Insurrection is having an online event on Wednesday, February 19, at 12:30 ET where we will discuss this, Reports of the Death of DEI Are Greatly Exaggerated (access is free, but preregistration is required).
Here’s the key portion of the interview on DEI:
Founder of @LegInsurrection and Professor of Law at Cornell Law School @wajacobson joins @michaelpleahy to discuss the death of DEI being exaggerated pic.twitter.com/DjyoiUapaT
— Tennessee Star (@TheTNStar) February 13, 2025
[if video fails to load, click here]
Transcript auto-generated, may contain transcription errors, lightly edited for transcript clarity
Leahy: Tell us about reports of the death of DEI being greatly exaggerated.
WAJ: Sure. Well, we have, in addition to legalinsurrection.com, two projects, two websites. One is criticalrace.org, which has interactive maps documenting the spread of critical race theory and it’s offshoots like DEI, throughout education, mostly higher education, and equalprotect.org, which brings legal challenges. So we’re very familiar with the landscape and we’re very familiar with how deeply, deeply embedded these ideologies are throughout the education system, including K through 12 nowadays.
And so what we are trying to call people’s attention to is what Trump is doing with his executive orders is great, it’s fine, it’s going to be impactful, particularly to the extent it cuts off the flow of federal money to these programs. But nobody should kid themselves. This is not going away. They’re already bringing lawsuits, they’re already organizing, they are not going to give up what for most of academia has become its reason to be, which is diversity, equity, and inclusion.
It’s really got a quasi-religious feeling to it on the campuses. And that we are just concerned, that while we’re all in favor of cutting off the flow of money, this is all good, people should not get complacent. People should not think that just because Trump signed a half dozen executive orders, this stuff is going away. And that’s what we’re trying to highlight.
We’ve got an online event coming up next Wednesday, people can sign up at the website, and we’re going talk about that, that this is all good, but don’t get complacent. Don’t think it’s over. These people are digging in. They’re not going to give it up.
Here’s the full segment, in which we reminisced, talked about what it’s like for me to live in deep blue states, and whether I was more or less optimistic about the country than when I started the blog in 2008:
DONATE
Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.
Comments
Must disagree. The more they dig in, the more they will be seen as extremists, enemies of common sense, and rejected by a public that increasingly understands the fraud that is DEI.
Corporations are seeing that DEI is bad business and they are no longer under the gun to incorporate it in hiring and advertising. Yes, it may remain at colleges, which is okay so long as it stays there, but over time even there it will degrade until it’s only part of the mantra of campus radicals, no one else.
Both of you are guilty of using “dig in” as a metaphor without defining it.
If digging in includes subtle ways of subverting the majority (such as youth indoctrination), then it must absolutely be watchdogged and not taken lightly.
They don’t have a choice.
The DEI employees were given massive salaries and invited in “behind the curtain”.
They know too much to fire and they aren’t qualified to do anything else.
Monitor teachers with AI to detect attempts to introduce DEI, CRT and other racist material.
Create a national database of known operatives.
The result will be brazen bias towards light skin toned people whom are merely trying to get through the day.
Death by 1000 paper cuts.
It’s more important than ever to hunt them down and eliminate them. With prejudice.
It’s a mistake to confuse these folks with good faith actors. We found that out with the K-12 school boards during the pandemic. The situation is analogous to Muslims who are encouraged to lie to non-believers.
It’s definitely not over, for precisely the reason WAJ articulates: the wokesters view AA / DEI Kendian “discrimination for the right reasons” to be a moral imperative, and thus are scheming to continue it sub rosa.
But like a seasoned judoka, the administration can yoke this energy and turn it against them.
In order to be eligible to receive federal funds (especially in the form of their students being able to get federally guaranteed student loans), a school must regularly have its CEO certify to DoEd, under penalty of perjury, that the school does not engage in discrimination that violates federal law. The recent EO (and, I’m being told, the coming “Dear Colleague” letters) make it clear that Kendian discrimination programs in admissions, hiring, tenure, promotion, funding, etc., DO violate federal law, and thus the certifications must aver that the school has no such programs.
The woke campus administrators thus will have a choice: (1) tell the truth that they are committed to DEI / AA and thus won’t sign the certification (meaning no federal funds), (2) actually discontinue all DEI / AA discrimation so that the certification is accurate, or (3) continue the DEI / AA programs on the sly and lie about it on the certification.
Option (1) would be financial suicide for almost every school, so it’s off the table. So is option (2) for woke schools (although some will grudgingly take it). Option (3) is what we will see a lot of, especially because schools got used to being able to do it in the past because they knew the Biden administration would do nothing to them even if they openly discriminated against white or Asian men and lied about it.
But what does option (3) portend going forward? As the Zerohedge article that was the subject of a post here a couple of days ago pointed out, schools that take option (3) will now face the possibility of whistleblower qui tam lawsuits under the federal False Claims Act, under which they would be subject to having to repay 300% of all federal funds obtained under a false statement (i.e., the false nondiscrimination certification).
The qui tam plaintiffs’ bar is already salivating at the chance to go after such schools for what could be very big bucks — we’re talking tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars, and a qui tam relator gets to keep 25-30% of the funds recovered. And they will be aggressively recruiting whistleblowers — I daresay every school has dozens of employees who know where the DEI bodies are buried, and it only takes one of them who’d like to be able to take their share of a qui tam recovery and comfortably retire. And because of the stout anti-retaliation provision in the False Claims Act, turning whistleblower could well make the employee effectively unfireable.
All that is needed is for this to happen is for DoJ to put the word out that it encourages such private enforcement efforts (under recent SCOTUS authority, the feds can intervene and dismiss any FCA qui tam case at any time, so having some assurance# that they won’t do so is essential).
A woke university going up against seasoned qui tam litigators (backed by hedge fund-powered litigation funding syndicates) would be a slaughter. Imaging someone who has only played touch football being told they have to strap on the pads and play against a pro football team.
If a couple of high profile schools get tagged in this way, *then* you’ll see the end of DEI in higher education, as continuing it will represent an existential threat to the involved school.
“Imaging” => Imagine
Damn Autocorrect . . . .
Liberal playbook: when the left loses the battle they keep fighting. When the left wins the battle the war is over er and beyond reproach.
No they won’t give in, they will dig in harder because they believe they have righteous superiority. The USSR didn’t roll over and die taking communism with it just because VI Lenin died fairly young. No the USSR dug in and clawed their way to the top of the Russian nation.
We all know what’s going on here. Whites are losing their status as the dominant caste and ‘the moron’ represents their last ,best ,hope of hanging on. Thus the war on DEI , disengenously marketed as ‘ just want to be fair’. ( GAK). Also why he appointed that troglodyte border czar, who is only missing a hood.
Everything rear was DEI has ben relabeled as inclusivity. Nothing has changed.