Why Meta’s decision to abolish DEI might be a turning point

Christopher F. Rufo

Last week, Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, formerly Facebook, made a stunning announcement. He was abolishing the company’s DEI programs and discontinuing its relationship with fact-checking organizations, which he admitted had become a form of “censorship.” The left-wing media immediately attacked the decision, accused him of embracing the MAGA agenda, and predicted a dangerous rise in so-called disinformation.

Zuckerberg’s move was carefully calculated and impeccably timed. The November elections, he said, felt like “a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech.” DEI initiatives, especially those related to immigration and gender, had become “disconnected from mainstream conversation”—and untenable.

This is no small about-face. Just four years ago, Zuckerberg spent hundreds of millions of dollars funding left-wing election programs; his role was widely resented by conservatives. And Meta had been at the forefront of any identity-based or left-wing ideological cause.

Not anymore. As part of the rollout for the announcement, Zuckerberg released a video and appeared on the Joe Rogan podcast, which now functions as a confessional for American elites who no longer believe in left-wing orthodoxies. On the podcast, Zuckerberg sounded less like a California progressive than a right-winger, arguing that the culture needed a better balance of “masculine” and “feminine” energies.

Executives at Meta quickly implemented the new policy, issuing pink slips to DEI employees and moving the company’s content-moderation team from California to Texas, in order, in Zuckerberg’s words, to “help alleviate concerns that biased employees are excessively censoring content.”

Zuckerberg was not the first technology executive to make such an announcement, but he is perhaps the most significant. Facebook is one of the largest firms in Silicon Valley and, with Zuckerberg setting the precedent, many smaller companies will likely follow suit.

The most important signal emanating from this decision is not about a particular shift in policy, however, but a general shift in culture. Zuckerberg has never really been an ideologue. He appears more interested in building his company and staying in the good graces of elite society. But like many successful, self-respecting men, he is also independent-minded and has clearly chafed at the cultural constraints DEI placed on his company. So he seized the moment, correctly sensing that the impending inauguration of Donald Trump reduced the risk and increased the payoff of such a change.

Zuckerberg is certainly not a courageous truth-teller. He assented to DEI over the last decade because that was where the elite status signals were pointing. Now, those signals have reversed, like a barometer suddenly dropping, and he is changing course with them and attempting to shift the blame to the outgoing Biden administration, which, he told Rogan, pressured him to implement censorship—a convenient excuse at an even more convenient moment.

But the good news is that, whatever post hoc rationalizations executives might use, DEI and its cultural assumptions suddenly have run into serious resistance. We may be entering a crucial period in which people feel confident enough to express their true beliefs about DEI, which is antithetical to excellence, and stop pretending that they believe in the cultish ideology of “systemic racism” and race-based guilt.

DEI remains deeply embedded in public institutions, of course, but private institutions and corporations have more flexibility and can dispatch with such programs with the stroke of a pen. Zuckerberg has revealed what this might look like at one of the largest companies. Conservatives can commend him for his decision, while remaining wary. “Trust but verify,” as Ronald Reagan used to say, is a good policy all around.

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Owen Klinsky

The Net Zero Asset Managers (NZAM) coalition — a United Nations–sponsored collection of financial services companies that have pledged to negate their portfolio’s greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 or sooner — suspended activities after investment firm BlackRock announced its departure from the group, according to a press release.

BlackRock, which manages more than $10 trillion and has been a leader in environmental, social and governance (ESG) investing, announced its exit from NZAM Thursday, with its Vice-Chair Philipp Hildebrand saying the firm’s involvement in the environmental coalition “caused confusion regarding BlackRock’s practices and subjected us to legal inquiries from various public officials.” Now, NZAM has pressed pause altogether, halting operations while it conducts a review of its activities, an NZAM press release published Monday said.

JUST IN: The UN-backed Net Zero Asset Managers (NZAM) group has announced that it will be shutting down completely, following @BlackRock‘s departure. pic.twitter.com/o5htgvFEiH

— Will Hild (@WillHild) January 13, 2025

A slew of other financial services had left NZAM prior to BlackRock’s Thursday exit, including Goldman Sachs Group, Wells Fargo & Co., Citigroup, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase & Co. BlackRock’s exit came amid a broader corporate strategy shift away from ESG investing, with the firm only supporting about 4% of the 493 environmental and social investment proposals that shareholders put forward between the end of June 2023 and the end of June 2024, down from a rate of 47% in 2021.

BlackRock was a major supporter of ESG investing in years prior, with CEO Larry Fink saying in 2020 that “climate risk is investment risk” and that climate change would lead to a “fundamental reallocation of capital.”

“The destruction of NZAM is a huge win for consumers,” Will Hild, executive director of the conservative nonprofit Consumers’ Research, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Although there is a lot of work left to be done, what was effectively a cartel of asset managers has finally ceased taking the focus of businesses off of consumers, raising prices for everyday Americans everywhere from the gas pump to the grocery store.”

When reached for comment, NZAM referred the Daily Caller News Foundation to its press release.