Secretary of State Marco Rubio has issued an order for diplomats to stop using a word processing typeface he considers too woke, and go back to using Times New Roman, Reuters reported on Tuesday.
Rubio’s order reverses a 2023 directive from Antony Blinken, then-President Joe Biden’s Secretary of State, which “had switched to Calibri, a modern sans-serif font, saying this was a more accessible font for people with disabilities because it did not have the decorative angular features and was the default in Microsoft products.”
A Dec. 9 cable proclaims, “To restore decorum and professionalism to the Department’s written work products and abolish yet another wasteful DEIA program, the Department is returning to Times New Roman as its standard typeface,” arguing that serif fonts are a better fit for official work.
It’s yet another front in Trump’s efforts to dismantle so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs that seek to improve participation by discriminated groups in public and professional life.
“Trump, a Republican, moved quickly after taking office in January to eradicate federal DEI programs and discourage them in the private sector and education, including by directing the firing of diversity officers at federal agencies and pulling grant funding for a wide range of programs,” said the report. “DEI policies became more widespread after nationwide protests in 2020 against police killings of unarmed Black people, spurring a conservative backlash. Trump and other critics of diversity initiatives say they are discriminatory against white people and men and have eroded merit-based decision-making.”
In some cases, however, even Republicans have worried that Trump’s war on DEI programs has gone too far. After Trump killed a program that awards grant money to colleges with large Hispanic student bodies,
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