VIDEO: Reports of the Death of DEI are Greatly Exaggerated

VIDEO: Reports of the Death of DEI are Greatly Exaggerated

On February 19, 2025, the Legal Insurrection Foundation held an online event, Reports of the Death of DEI are Greatly Exaggerated, to address our concern that there was irrational exhuberance over Trump Executive Order and other federal government actions to unwind Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) in education.

It’s not that the EOs and other actions are not impactful, they are. Many people, however, were being unrealistic to think that the deeply entranched DEI ideology would be surrendered by the equally-deeply entrenched faculty, education bureaucracy, consultant class, and supporting foundations and funders. Through our work at CriticalRace.org and EqualProtect.org we understand better than most that DEI has taken on a quasi-religious stature.

We walked through the Executive Orders and other federal actions, and explained how significant they are particularly at cutting off the flow of federal funding to the DEI industrial complex. We also, however, explained how the opposition already was reacting with lawsuits and organizing with the help of blue state Attorney Generals and politicians. This is going to be a years-long battle fought in the trenches, with institutions rebranding DEI and playing definitional games to avoid changing conduct. Outside of education, there are clear signs in the EOs that the Trump administration is going to target discrimination in the private sector, and that will present additional challenges.

The full video is below, with some short transcript excerpts, followed by the slides I showed during my initial presentation.

TRANSCRIPT EXCERPTS

(Auto-generated, may contain transcriptio errors. Lightly edited for transcript clarity.)

WILLIAM A. JACOBSON

Just to give you a preview, I’m going talk about what has happened so far, Executive actions…. I’ll walk through those and I’ll show you what’s happened and I’ll show you what some of the reactions have been. The reason we scheduled this program is there’s so much going on and so much of it is good that I feel there’s almost like a little bit of an over-exuberance about it…. [There’s been] a lot of progress and I’ll give you the punchline now: Enormously impactful things have been done, but nobody should think this is going away….

So what this did, the combination of these two [Executive Orders], eliminated the structural racial equity agenda in the federal government and also ended all DEI mandates, policies, et cetera. And that’s bigger than you think because what people are now waking up to is the fact that much of what we’ve seen was funded by the federal government…. When the federal government maintains grant programs and other programs and contracting programs and all of those things, it forces that into the private sector….

… The next one he signed, which was also that day, as federal hiring. No more federal hiring based on race, sex, or religion. And so, again, what he’s doing is he’s deconstructing, that’s a, a favorite term of the left, he’s deconstructing the federal bureaucracy geared towards supporting and funding DEI initiatives…. And these are areas where, … to the extent the executive, the president, addresses the federal executive branch and federal bureaucracy, he’s at his most powerful and least likely to be challenged, at least challenged successfully….

You have no idea how many hundreds of millions to billions of dollars has flowed to contractors, to so-called non-governmental organizations. Now, if you’re a non-governmental organization and all of your money comes from the government, I’m not so sure you’re a non-governmental organization, but any of us who have worked in this sphere, in the parents’ rights movement … we bump into the consultant class all the time. He has defunded a significant portion of the consultant class….

And he also has continued in that same order, directed the Attorney General to prepare a report, and he’s asked every agency to identify nine targets for investigation…. This is incredibly important because while it doesn’t take any action in and of itself, it seems to be a precursor to action affecting the private sector directly…. And one of the things I want to emphasize here, why DEI is not dead contrary to reports, is it’s going to be much harder to shift this sort of action into the private sector than it has been in the federal government. And that’s where I think the fights are going to be ahead, both legally and culturally….

So there are going to be a lot of lawsuits…. They’re advising people how to get around the law. We’ve seen reports and we’ve had reports on rebranding, hiding it, shifting people around, changing the language, taking things off of websites. Anybody who’s on a college campus, and I am, can tell you this is not gonna go away. There is an entrenched, not just bureaucracy, that’s understating it. There is, it is an entrenched ideology. There are true believers who really, honestly, truly believe that what they are doing is virtuous. That what we are doing in trying to gain a race neutral posture is not virtuous….

Enormous progress has been made. I don’t want understate it or play it down. Truly enormous, impactful things have been done. But nobody should think this is going away. This is going to be a years-long fight.”

KEMBERLEE KAYE:

We have cataloged veterinary schools, which we did kind of as a joke and found that eight of the eleven all have some kind of DEI something happening in a substantial way on campuses. And these are people who treat your cats and dogs and whatever other livestock you have. CRT/DEI is everywhere. I think my point is here that we, and I think we know that on some level, I don’t think we fully grasp the depth to which this is penetrated every single aspect of our lives. Not just education, of course, for the purposes of our work, we focus on education.

One of the things that I did want bring up, because it is very, I think, relevant to this particular discussion, and Bill touched on slightly, we’ve been writing about this for years, and it’s the ways in which we have watched schools in particular sidestep some of the DEI regulations, whether it’s happening at the state level or federal level, and one of the ways that they’ve done this is they offload to third parties.

We see this often where the money is going to consultants and then the school can say, well, we’re not actually hosting it. It’s this other entity that’s been contracted by whomever. So they have a little bit of distance between that, which is part of why what Trump has done. And with some of the audit that’s happening with U-S-A-I-D and some of the other federal government entities is so important because funding is being cut off to some of these third party entities that I don’t think any of us were aware we were actually funding with our tax money. So that’s particularly important.

We’ve seen too where even on the AI front, we’ve written about this a lot as well, that there’s certain quotas that are being built into artificial intelligence. We’ve dug into a situation, even with LinkedIn where we had substantial evidence to suggest that it was likely that there were quotas happening. You might not know if you were an employer…that certain candidates were being presented to you based on metrics you had not selected. Likewise, certain candidates were being left out. And as a candidate, you may not know that you weren’t being presented if you did not meet certain DEI check boxes. So this is everywhere.

We also see word games. Progressivism is fantastic at renaming things and rebranding things. We’ve seen this in many, many different fronts, in many different battles publicly, even on the abortion front, right? No one calls it abortion anymore. It’s always pro-choice, which of course sounds much more palatable than pro-abortion. So they’re very, very good at coming up with terms that allow them to, not just in the narrative side, but legally sidestep some of these requirements. And really, that’s where we come in with the research that we’re doing.

We did publish a report last year where we looked at how higher education is rebranding DEI, and the results are exactly what you would expect, which is, that’s exactly what they’re doing.

And so what we did is we started with states that had taken some kind of legislative action against DEI in higher education. From there, we looked at the largest schools in those states to see what, if anything, had changed post-legislative action. We found what many netizens are finding as they’re watching things happening on the federal level, where you might have the same person who’s now in a different role with a very similar title, but there’s no acronym mentioned. Now, of course, we don’t know exactly what that person’s job title is, whether they’re doing the exact same job that they were doing before. But we’ve even seen the preemptive disbanding of departments. I think it was one of the University of Arkansas satellites — we wrote about this two years ago, how they saw what was coming — so they preemptively moved all of those administrators and the funding into different departments, departments with different titles, they’re still doing the same work, right? In some ways, that makes our job a little bit more difficult because we have to dig much, much further than we did before. But these are not isolated incidents.

In the report that we had published, we had someone from a University of Texas satellite campus saying that you just “do it anyway.” You know, you just keep on doing it anyway. Even if the state’s saying you can’t support DEI anymore, you just have to call it something different. So again, on some level, I think we’re aware of this, but as we’re monitoring this, I think it’s going to be very important.

We do have a database that catalogs DEI certificate programs. We looked at the top 100 schools, just colleges and universities. Of those 100 schools, 53 of them had some kind of DEI certificate program. So that would not necessarily be your typical — it’s not a degree program. They’re typically marketed towards business professionals. And so we created a database to monitor which schools are doing that, the content of those programs, and are now following up to see. And I think one of the very important functions that we are in a space where we’re really able to make some ground and push for change here is to expose the gaps in what’s happening legislatively or legally or executive on the executive side between what they’re doing there and what’s actually happening on campuses.

And so we’ve moved on a little bit, we’re still maintaining our databases there, but towards the end of last year, we moved into more data analysis and digging into what’s happening on some of these campuses. I think especially as we’re seeing more states going into this school choice battle, I know I’m in Texas and right now we have a massive bill that’s being pitched to school choice. It’s not, though, it’s just a subsidized voucher program — finding out what’s happening in the private school level is going to be increasingly more important, especially if they’re now going to be getting state monies, which means that states have greater control over what happens in those those schools. But all of that to say we have our work cut out for us.

We’ve cataloged it. We have the evidence, we have all of the proof, which we’ve been telling people about for the last several years, and now we’re able to track because we have historical record and we archive all of our links, which is also very helpful. We have historical record of what they were doing and can compare to what’s happening now. And really looking down the road, that’s what we’ll be spending a lot of time of our time on the critical race project doing. I think in some ways results will be heartening. In some ways they won’t, because as Bill has said, we’re very aware of the fact that you cannot executive order away this ideology. It’s so deeply entrenched. The last thing I’ll say before we move to questions is that we had done a report a couple years ago where we looked at schools in California and we called it who’s teaching the teachers.

And that’s another important piece in this whole puzzle, You have these teachers who are coming out of these schools and they’re being educated and taught that these things are part of childhood development. This is not just an ideological thing, but they are being told that in order for children to progress properly as people, they must first value one another on race and be race conscious. And so we have an entire generation of teachers now that has come through these kinds of training, and now they’re in public schools, they’re in private schools, they’re in the education field, they’re administrators. So this is not something that is a one-off fix. It’s not something that Congress could pass a bill and it magically goes away because these people are still there thinking the things they’re thinking, believing the things they’re believing. In many ways our work is much more important now than it was even before Trump was reelected and sworn in.

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