After Trump’s Victory, DEI Is On Life-Support – Pull The Plug
Our Op-Ed in The NY Post: “Trump’s win, driven by a broad multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-religious coalition, puts DEI on life support. It’s time to pull the plug and let DEI die.”
Donald Trump was catapulted to victory by a broad multi-racial multi-ethnic multi-religious coalition. This win destroys the entire premise of the leftist Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion agenda that we are a nation of feuding identity groups.
According to exit polls, one third of voters “of color” voted for Trump, including 54% of Hispanic men (up from 36% in 2020) and 37% percent of Hispanic women (up from 30% in 2020) voted for Trump. Starr County, Texas, a border county whose population is 97% Hispanic, voted for Trump by 16 points.
Clearly, the ever-growing Hispanic voting population refused to get sucked into DEI electoral games. So too, Trump’s share of Asian voters increased from 34% in 2020 to 38% in 2024.
Almost two-thirds of the Native American vote went to Trump – the highest rate of any ethnic group in the nation. The Trump coalition was far more diverse than any of the Democrat-aligned elitist schools who shove DEI down the throats of students.
The repudiation of DEI identity politics was clear. It’s only being kept alive by the Democratic Party, leftist activists groups, and a multi-billion dollar DEI industrial complex of foundations, consultants, and government bureaucrats.
Trump’s election shows that it is time to end the DEI racialization of everything. After Trump’s victory, DEI is on life support. It’s time to pull the plug and let DEI die.
There is no simple answer to the DEI problem, but the Trump victory gives us a chance to start mapping out DEI’s demise.
Kemberlee and I explored how to end DEI once and for all in an Op-Ed in The NY Post, Trump’s win put DEI on life support— here’s how he can pull the plug:
With President-elect Donald Trump’s victory, radical and discriminatory Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs could be — finally — on the way out.
DEI has captured almost every level of education and government.
Our CriticalRace.org project has documented how deeply DEI permeates higher education, medical schools and even elite private boarding schools.
The Biden-Harris team itself was birthed by DEI, after then-candidate Joe Biden came under intense pressure to pick a “woman of color” as his running mate.
His choice, Kamala Harris, fully embraced DEI in her 2024 campaign, even creating Zoom calls for different racial, ethnic and sex-based interest groups: “White Women for Harris,” “white dudes,” “black women” and so on.
Turns out, voters didn’t buy Harris or the DEI she was selling
Trump’s win, driven by a broad multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-religious coalition, puts DEI on life support.
It’s time to pull the plug and let DEI die.
In a July 2023 video posted as part of his Agenda 47 policy series, Trump focused heavily on his promise “to fire the radical Left accreditors that have allowed our colleges to become dominated by Marxist Maniacs and lunatics.”
Elon Musk, Trump’s new government-efficiency adviser, re-circulated the video this week, indicating its importance in the president-elect’s agenda.
Focusing on accreditors will make a real difference long-term.
The US Department of Education has oversight authority over higher education accreditation agencies — and groups like the American Bar Association, for example, use legislative-appointed near-monopoly status as a means of driving DEI into universities and graduate schools.
Trump has also promised that his Department of Justice will “pursue federal civil rights cases against schools that continue to engage in racial discrimination,” defying the Supreme Court’s landmark 2023 decision outlawing affirmative action in admissions
We are all for that, but to ramp up the pressure Trump should also empower private parties to pursue those actions.
Our Equal Protection Project has filed more than 40 civil rights complaints with the Department of Education, leading half of the schools involved to change or drop discriminatory criteria after adverse publicity and public shaming.
But don’t leave it to slow-acting government agencies alone to do this work: Trump can also work with Congress to empower groups like ours, giving us standing to sue in court in our own name under civil rights laws and agency regulations.
Individual victims of DEI often fear retribution and will not sue in their own name, so their grievances go unanswered.
If advocacy groups have standing in court, we can pursue their cases while protecting victims’ safety.
All of the above are systemic changes that will have a lasting impact.
But the quickest fix should be Trump’s highest priority: Cutting off the supply of money that feeds the DEI industrial complex on campuses and elsewhere.
People are entitled to their viewpoints, but they are not entitled to federal money to promote discriminatory conduct.
The federal government must eliminate funding for any program, anywhere in the federal government, that includes race- or ethnicity-based eligibility or preferences — including the use of DEI statements for admission, hiring or promotion.
Indeed, it’s also time to cut federal funding completely for any institution, public or private, educational or otherwise, that uses such discriminatory DEI criteria.
That’s a much-needed hammer over the heads of institutions that play whack-a-mole, repeatedly setting up discriminatory programs and dropping them only after public complaints.
Only the credible threat of losing federal funding will wake up the wokesters.
The Trump administration should also initiate the revocation of federal non-profit status of foundations that fund openly discriminatory grant programs, like those of the Rhode Island Foundation, which recently came under fire for a student loan forgiveness program that benefited only non-white teachers.
Under clear case law, such private discriminatory grant making is illegal, and it too must stop.
Cutting off funding for non-compliance with anti-discrimination laws can begin as soon as Trump takes office. Combined with longer-term systemic changes, such action would help restore equality as our governing principle.
We have an opportunity to destroy divisive DEI once and for all, and to enable Americans of all races and ethnicities to come back together.
Let’s not lose the chance.
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Comments
“ Cutting off the supply of money that feeds the DEI industrial complex on campuses and elsewhere.
People are entitled to their viewpoints, but they are not entitled to federal money to promote discriminatory conduct.”
BINGO!
Cut off all funds for NGO’s while your at it. If States attempt to reshuffle money from the Federal Government to fund them then shut off that money, too.
Kill funding to all NGOs, ‘charities’ and ‘non-profit’ orgs. No grant money, no money for contracts. Shut down the funding pipeline for the institutions/entities the left has taken over and converted to a lefty agenda.
Make it a crime to discriminate on the basis of race and put people in prison.
Off topic,…just a bit?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLMsrPLg2s4
Bet she was a real bundle of joy to work with!
“Act of liberation from the patriarchy “. Sound reasoning.
DEI needs to go but I’m afraid Democrats would dei on this hill before they would allow it..
DEI ing on the hill is good, it can take the form of their being fired. Or maybe the best way to handled this is to make it a criminal offense. Could this be prosecuted using existing civil rights laws?
Le Chatelier’s principle will defeat any plan. The system moves to oppose imposed change.
I think the number of white women in charge of DEI is exaggerated (along with their insufferable egos). A few lawsuits might put the kibosh on their smarmy dictatorships.
The people who make their money from DEI will fight very hard to keep it. VERY hard.
All of Professor Jacobson’s and Kemberlee Kaye’s recommendations sound good and should be pursued to put an end to this DEI insanity but I think that the beast cannot be vanquished until those demented judges who have been handing down insane opinions and rulings on this subject are kicked off the bench – not least of which a few SCOTUS justices who made mockeries of their confirmation hearings with some of their retarded ideas, especially regarding the inability to identify what a woman is, the chuckling claim that “the appeals court is where policy is made” and the thoroughly anti-Western idea that empathy has any legitimate role as the main criterion in a judge or judicial decision.
In addition, and more broadly, there has to be some sort of penalty for judges who are overturned time and again. There must be some penalty for being overturned. Along the same lines, there must be the same sort of limit to lawmakers who run afoul of the Constitution over and over. These things cannot be allowed to happen with absolutely no consequences. There must be a number for which everyone can agree it is just “too much” and serves as clear evidence that the judge or lawmaker either has no understanding of the Constitution or is actively trying to subvert it. This is just plain, common sense.
DEI arose out of this basic problem.
Kill it until it is dead and then keep killing it until its so killed it will never come back to life!
Here’s an obvious change Congress can make. Give white working-age men the same protected-class status everyone else has.
You don’t take anything away from the others, which should make it legislatively easier. Of course it won’t be because what they treasure is the ability to dump on white men from a superior legal position.
But if this cannot be passed, the playing field is still tilted and things can spring back at any moment. The relief from DEI will only be half-hearted, if we don’t fix this asymmetry in the law.
On any campus the DEI juggernaut is the product of collusion between 1) a left-leaning central administration, and 2) the left-leaning activists the faculty senate. If an ENTIRE faculty is polled it will rarely support race and sex preferences in student admissions or faculty hiring — which is why such universal polling is never allowed and is opposed both by central administrations and faculty senates. I believe race and sex preferences would also be opposed by a confidential polling of all department chairs. Especially if the results were reported only for the university as a whole. This would make it less easy for deans and higher administrators to identify the ‘rebels’ in their individual dominions.
All it takes to get the ball rolling is for a couple of tenured or emeritus professors to steal Amy Goodman’s “Democracy Now!” slogan, and put out a call to arms in an ad in the local student newspaper. Move on from there. No rocket science needed and Elon Musk will help out if it is.
DEI should never have existed. We always should have been, and should return to, MEI – Merit, Excellence and Intelligence.
If an organization fills positions via any other means, it will be less than it should be.
DEI/CRT is such a fraud.
I have insider info on a company that where DEI played a large role in it’s downturn (along with stupid white people) and layoffs are in motion big time.
The protected do-nothings are no longer protected. Jaws are dropping. Those under the foot of these people are celebrating. Too bad so many had to suffer, and many others have their careers destroyed or limited for the crime of being a white male.
You made RealClearPolitics front page this morning. Nice.
Prof. Jacobson correctly states, “It’s only being kept alive by the Democratic Party, leftist activists groups, and a multi-billion dollar DEI industrial complex of foundations, consultants, and government bureaucrats.” However, more powerful than any of that, it is kept alive by an army of middle level student affairs administrators at colleges who work at least 40 hours a week to protect their own DEI-focused jobs by making themselves indispensable.