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It’s often hard to discern, definitively, when one societal trend ends and a new one begins. But right now across the United States, one change couldn’t be clearer: Many DEI programs are sputtering or dying, and the anti-DEI movement is ascendant.
Some people, especially but not limited to those on the right, have long viewed contemporary efforts to strengthen DEI practices as performative, meddlesome, or ineffective. In the past several weeks, though, with Donald Trump’s return drawing closer, the DEI opposition has been growing louder. What’s more, this newly emboldened anti-DEI bloc has also gained powerful allies.
Many Americans might not have even been familiar with the concept of DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) until the latter half of 2020, when, following the murder of George Floyd and subsequent nationwide protests against racism and police brutality, many corporations and universities scrambled to bolster their diversity efforts. DEI programs can involve hiring practices, but they also refer to company culture and everyday corporate decisions about how an organization is run. During the final months of the first Trump administration, some people in mainstream circles saw attacking DEI as akin to publicly displaying prejudice. Now, not even five years later, for a large swath of the country, the idea of DEI has become a catchall insult. DEI is part bogeyman, part always-there scapegoat for some combination of bureaucracy, overreach, or mediocrity.
Last week, Trump’s current right-hand man, Elon Musk, blamed the historically destructive Southern California wildfires on DEI practices within the Los Angeles Fire Department. “They prioritized DEI over saving lives and homes,” Musk wrote on X, reposting a document related to the LAFD’s “racial equity action plan” for fiscal year 2020–21. The former Fox host Megyn Kelly likewise went after the LAFD, zeroing in on the organization’s female leadership and its first openly LGBTQ fire chief, Kristin Crowley, who is a 22-year veteran of the department: “Who takes comfort [in] ‘I’m going to die, but it’s in the presence of an obese lesbian’? This is ridiculous,” Kelly said on her podcast.
The actor James Woods, who for a time thought he had lost his home in the Palisades fire, also brought up DEI while attacking Crowley. In a post on X, he highlighted a paragraph from her official bio on the department’s website regarding her commitment to “creating, supporting, and promoting a culture that values diversity, inclusion, and equity.” Those three words were all Woods needed to pounce: “Refilling the water reservoirs would have been a welcome priority, too, but I guess she had too much on her plate promoting diversity,” he wrote.
In his recent appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience, Mark Zuckerberg awkwardly praised “masculine energy” and lamented that “a lot of the corporate world is pretty culturally neutered.” His company, Meta, just confirmed that it intends to scuttle certain DEI programs. Zuckerberg’s Rogan interview, like his cozying up to Trump, is part of a careful calibration, one in which the issue of DEI is top of mind. Stephen Miller, Trump’s incoming deputy chief of staff for policy, reportedly told Zuckerberg late last year that the 47th president is intent on going to war against DEI culture in corporate America. Zuckerberg apparently got the message. In an internal memo obtained by Axios, Janelle Gale, Meta’s vice president of human resources, explicitly said that “the legal and policy landscape surrounding diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in the United States is changing.”
Whether or not you agree with Meta’s decisions about how to run the company, Gale is correct that the landscape is shifting. At the start of the year, McDonald’s announced that it was scrapping its “aspirational representational goals.” Shortly after Trump’s electoral victory, Walmart said that it planned to end its racial-equity training programs for staff and was reevaluating DEI goals around suppliers. But it’s not just the tech bros or corporate behemoths. Last month, the University of Michigan announced that it would end the practice of requiring diversity statements as a component of faculty hiring, promotion, and tenure decisions. The change came following an extensive New York Times Magazine investigation that argued that the school’s costly investment (roughly a quarter of a billion dollars) in DEI initiatives had all but failed.
The battle over DEI will likely get uglier. Hasty policy changes in either direction are unlikely to yield the best results. But one thing that’s obvious is that the onset of post-DEI culture has already taken hold in certain realms. A recent Financial Times story cited an unnamed “top banker” who felt “liberated” and excited at the prospect of no longer having to self-censor. “We can say ‘retard’ and ‘pussy’ without the fear of getting cancelled,” the banker said. “It’s a new dawn.”
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Like millions of Americans, I look forward to a glass of wine—sure, occasionally two—while cooking or eating dinner. I strongly believe that an ice-cold pilsner on a hot summer day is, to paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, suggestive evidence that a divine spirit exists and gets a kick out of seeing us buzzed.
But, like most people, I understand that booze isn’t medicine.
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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.
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