DEI
RIP DEI?
From the Brownstone Institute
It wasn’t that long ago that America’s strongest and most important export was American culture and the global dissemination of the American Dream. From movies to music, from blue jeans to drive-in movies, and from fast food to fashion, there wasn’t a single country in the world or a single cohort of teenagers and young adults that didn’t want what America was offering.
Unfortunately, throughout the progression of the Vietnam War, American culture started to cannibalize itself. The anti-war, hippie, and protesting counterculture took the reins. American cultural institutions and artists pivoted away from patriotism and moved toward anti-Establishment and anti-Western positions for a variety of reasons, both ideological and financial.
Protest became the foundational position of a generation of artists, musicians, and thinkers. As a result, America’s most powerful civil export was completely defenestrated. The left took ownership of American culture and rebellion. And since then, the American left has adopted an increasingly aggressive and metastasizing woke ideology. The result has been the near complete ideological capture of most of American civil society.
Undeniably, there has been a near ideological capture of public education, public health administration (as evidenced by the Covid years), the legacy media, and the judiciary to name a few spheres of DEI influence. Woke ideology has arguably been the most noxious and dangerous export that America has ever sent out into the world and it didn’t seem like there was an end in sight.
But then, remarkably, in November 2024, America rolled out a blockbuster, the likes of which have never been seen before. It was the greatest comeback story in American history: The Return of President Trump. And in an instant, faster than a speeding bullet, faster than you could sing a chorus of YMCA, led by President Trump, American politics and corporate America began a slow and steady retreat from DEI policies.
These toxic notions have not only poisoned civic life in America and throughout the Western world but have also resulted in public policy decisions that have resulted in catastrophic loss of life and property. The apex of this policy disaster can clearly be seen within the raging blaze of fire in Los Angeles and in all the DEI policies that led to a Dante’s inferno in America. Los Angeles, where the Mayor was in Ghana when disaster hit. Where there was no water in the hydrants, the infrastructure was crumbling, and where diversity was the policy priority for the LAFD and where $1 million of civil service salary buys precisely three woke hires named Kirsten, including one Kirsten who says it’s your fault if you end up in a fire, and where the Governor of California prioritized fish over humans.
Over the past several decades large swaths of corporate North America were bullied by a loud and vocal woke minority into adopting some of the most aggressive and ridiculous DEI and ESG policies on earth. Some corporate converts set their compasses to DEI like a north star and flopped spectacularly. Many, like Bud Light, are still licking their wounds from their predictable and avoidable “Go woke, go broke” fiasco while other companies like Jaguar remained impenetrably thick-skinned and were rightly ridiculed and mocked for brand murder, dare we call it brandicide?
But now, the vibe shift is impossible to miss or ignore. In recent weeks, we have seen President Trump set his sights on DEI in the military and American corporations like Apple and Volvo starting to sing from the new hymn sheet, along with retail giants like Costco.
And incredibly, this was just the tip of the anti-woke iceberg. In early January, following an earlier, fall visit by Mark Zuckerberg to Mar-a-Lago, Facebook announced that it would be discontinuing its third-party “fact-checkers” (i.e. “censorship”) program and cutting its DEI hiring initiatives. And now, they are dropping like flies! McDonald’s and Amazon are the latest to axe their DEI programs.
Unfortunately, the astonishing and heartbreaking scenes in Los Angeles are a direct result of abject mismanagement of the city and state and exacerbated by unqualified hires and anti-human, anti-common sense policies that should never, ever have been permitted to escape the faculty lounges, let alone leap into civic life. The woke petri dish has already created colossal havoc in every element of civil society in America and in much of the rest of the Western world. Deep reflection and immediate change are needed.
If the deep blue voters of California recognize the folly of their choices and the destruction-driven bent of their elected leaders, if they demand answers and repudiate their woke ways, perhaps there is hope. For the good of the country, and indeed the entire Western world, America’s most poisonous export must be put to pasture once and for all.
Author
MxM News
Quick Hit:
The U.S. Department of Labor has scrapped nearly $600 million in foreign aid grants, including $10 million aimed at promoting “gender equity in the Mexican workplace.”
Key Details:
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Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer and Deputy Secretary Keith Sonderling were credited with delivering $237 million in savings through the latest round of canceled programs.
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Among the defunded initiatives: $12.2 million for “worker empowerment” efforts in South America, $6.25 million to improve labor rights in Central American agriculture, and $5 million to promote women’s workplace participation in West Africa.
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The Department of Government Efficiency described the cuts as necessary to realign U.S. labor policy with national interests and applauded the elimination of all 69 international grants managed by the Bureau of International Labor Affairs.
Diving Deeper:
The U.S. Department of Labor on Wednesday canceled $577 million in foreign aid grants, including a controversial $10 million program aimed at promoting “gender equity in the Mexican workplace,” according to documents obtained by The Washington Post. The sweeping decision to terminate all 69 active international labor grants comes as part of a larger restructuring effort led by John Clark, a senior DOL official appointed during the Trump administration.
Clark directed the department’s Bureau of International Labor Affairs (ILAB) to shut down its entire grant portfolio, citing a “lack of alignment with agency priorities and national interest.” The memo explaining the cancellations was first reported by The Washington Post and highlights a broader shift in federal labor policy toward domestic-focused initiatives.
Among the eliminated grants were high-dollar projects that had drawn criticism from watchdog groups for years. These included $12.2 million designated for “worker empowerment in South America,” $6.25 million targeting labor conditions in Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador, and $5 million to elevate women’s workplace participation in West Africa. Other defunded programs involved $4.3 million to support foreign migrant workers in Malaysia, $3 million to improve social protections for internal migrants in Bangladesh, and $3 million to promote “safe and inclusive work environments” in Lesotho.
The Department of Government Efficiency, also involved in the review, labeled the grants as “America Last” initiatives, and pointed to the lack of measurable outcomes and limited benefits to American workers. The agency commended the leadership of Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer and Deputy Secretary Keith Sonderling for securing $237 million in savings during this round alone.
The cuts mark the second major cost-saving move under Chavez-DeRemer’s leadership in as many weeks. Just days earlier, she canceled an additional $33 million in funding, including a $1.5 million grant focused on increasing transparency in Uzbekistan’s cotton sector. Chavez-DeRemer, a former Republican congresswoman from Oregon, was confirmed as Labor Secretary on March 11th by a bipartisan Senate vote of 67-32.
For years, major corporations bragged about their wonderful Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs. They’re good for business and morally correct, they said. So why are they now cutting those programs?
Robby Starbuck says these programs once got a lot of buy-in, because people wanted to be nice! But DEI came to mean much more than just being nice.
Starbuck says what it looked like in practice was “crazy trainings” and “overtly racist hiring practices.” Now lots of people agree with him.
Companies actually take notice when Starbuck tells his many followers about their DEI programs. Often the programs get dropped.
That’s the power of free speech.
After 40+ years of reporting, I now understand the importance of limited government and personal freedom.
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Libertarian journalist John Stossel created Stossel TV to explain liberty and free markets to young people.
Prior to Stossel TV he hosted a show on Fox Business and co-anchored ABC’s primetime newsmagazine show, 20/20. Stossel’s economic programs have been adapted into teaching kits by a non-profit organization, “Stossel in the Classroom.” High school teachers in American public schools now use the videos to help educate their students on economics and economic freedom. They are seen by more than 12 million students every year.
Stossel has received 19 Emmy Awards and has been honored five times for excellence in consumer reporting by the National Press Club. Other honors include the George Polk Award for Outstanding Local Reporting and the George Foster Peabody Award.
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To get our new weekly video from Stossel TV, sign up here: https://www.johnstossel.com/#subscribe
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