A System That Devours Itself
Magic wands waved by President Ronald Reagan, Pope Saint John Paul II, and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher didn't cause the collapse of the Soviet Union. When countries insist that there's abundant scarcity and teach that freedom is slavery, and people chant slogans they don't believe anymore, those countries cannot survive. When contradictions grow too heavy, the edifice cracks.
In today's Wisconsin, a different ideology is experiencing identical signs.
The gospel of modern academia: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, or DEI, has become the salad bar in Wisconsin's supper clubs; it has started to eat its own disciples.
Need proof?
The University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire reached a settlement worth $265,000 with a DEI staffer who committed the ultimate sin of being a person of the wrong color: white.
The echoes of the Soviet Union don't just whisper in Eau Claire; they roar.
The Wisconsin Case
The perp who took on the role of interim director of Multicultural Student Services at UW-Eau Claire was Rochelle Hoffman, who was given the task of being the shepherd of DEI and leading by sharing inclusion slogans. Before long, she was bluntly told: You don't belong, not because of her skills, or a lack of compassion, but because she's white.
"You hired a White woman as the interim director?" one student allegedly said, according to a federal complaint against the university.
According to the complaint, a different student asked, "Do you personally feel White staff can do as effective a job as a person of color, within a space for people of color?"
Hoffman said she felt she had to resign after eight months of intense hostility and staff questioning her "legitimacy" after being promoted to interim director of the campus's Multicultural Student Services office, the complaint states.
She weathered the cultural storm for eight months, then walked away and filed a lawsuit against the university. The school didn't admit guilt, but with hopes that the story would disappear, it paid Hoffman $265,000 to settle.
Unfortunately for the university, the story revealed something about DEI that some conservatives have turned into evidence that it is a machine that eats its managers, devouring the very people who run it.
Equity Without Equality
As with most social movements, DEI's rhetoric sounded noble.
Diversity should mean difference.
Equity should mean fairness.
Inclusion should mean welcome.
However, like most plans, regardless of application, they share the same concept of being good on paper; however, in reality, each term flipped on itself.
Diversity becomes quotas.
Equity becomes punishment.
Inclusion becomes exclusion.
This case pulled back the curtain, exposing the sin of hiring a DEI leader who is the wrong color. With irony that bloody well bothers the hell out of me—and most of us with a semblance of common sense—a program that exists to end discrimination paid for discriminatory acts.
If equity justifies discrimination, then the entire doctrine of DEI collapses, because it's designed to police fairness, but it turns out to be guilty of practicing the opposite.
No ideology exists when it eats its own.
Division as Survival
For a relatively recent example, consider Prohibition; its goal was to uplift society. Instead, it generated crime, speakeasies, and mobsters (and also became the source of so many books and movies). Prohibition thrived on the vice it claimed to eliminate, until it ultimately collapsed under its own absurdity.
DEI works similarly: unable to coexist in harmony, conflict becomes necessary. Division keeps it relevant; once the obsession over identity stops, funding for the DEI office disappears. It's for this reason that we find manufactured grievances, suspicion rewarded, and resentment that transforms into the engine of its survival.
We're not witnessing inclusion; we see cannibalism.
Soviet Contradictions, American Style
With promises of equality, the Soviet Union promised equality, yet delivered a ruling elite. Promising fairness, but delivering bureaucratic gatekeepers deciding which people count and which don't, engineering a system that survives only by enforcing contradictions.
A typical DEI job posting may read, "Candidates from historically underrepresented groups are strongly encouraged to apply." Which, in plain English, says, "We'll discriminate to fight discrimination."
That same logic led citizens of the Soviet Union to laugh at state-run jokes when slogans didn't match reality.
A nation's future can't be built on that concept. Merit built bridges, skyscrapers, and the rest of the industries, which defined America.
When DEI replaces merit with categories, it doesn't show progress; it shows decay.
History’s Verdict on Purity Campaigns
Purity campaigns throughout history aren't looked upon as successes. The committees built during the French Revolution became fodder for the guillotine. Mao's goal of purging thought during his Cultural Revolution left a trail of wreckage in its wake.
Critics of DEI don't meet the guillotine, but the same logic applies: Define virtue by ideology, exclude people who fall short, pretend justice isn't a double standard. In each era, the logic fails due to its own contradictions.
Although the settlement in Wisconsin is regional, rather than national, it provides evidence that the DEI's collapse has begun.
More Cracks to Come
This lawsuit is one of the first, and it will certainly not be the last. Corporations, acting as quietly as church mice, have been editing their websites to remove DEI language, and job descriptions at universities are changing. Some organizations have buried DEI initiatives under new names. As the system begins to buckle, history becomes rewritten, mimicking the Soviets' efforts to change encyclopedias.
Like deer in the woods, lawsuits leave trails. Instead of hooves, they're paper. Press releases whisper, because payoffs speak louder. The same story becomes repeated every time there's a settlement: a movement promising equity delivers discrimination.
At scale, we see a machine eating itself alive.
The Human Side of the Machine
Behind each contradiction, we find a broken person. Rochelle Hoffman isn't a conservative critic screaming from the rooftops; her job, inside the system, was to make it work. Yet she was devoured by the very program she served.
Hoffman isn't the last: Quietly enduring the same treatment, others find themselves unwilling to speak because of their fear of exile. Silence, sooner or later, breaks, eliminating places to hide.
Final Thoughts
Reagan, Thatcher, and Pope John Paul II didn't create the collapse of the Soviet Union; they pushed smaller boulders down a rocky cliff, creating an avalanche that exposed the truth: it couldn't survive based on its own lies that we all witnessed. Stores without bread, promises without truth, and slogans without believers.
The exact reasons create a climate where the DEI falls; it can't eat its own and expect to survive. Any program claiming to fight discrimination while simultaneously practicing it, excluding rather than including, and delivering fairness by punishing the innocent, doesn't last.
The settlement in Wisconsin is a symptom, not a fluke. Cracks in a dam lead to its collapse. And, like the Berlin Wall, when those cracks are exposed for all to see, the entire façade collapses.
Don’t Let the System Write the Ending
At PJ Media, we cover these stories because the legacy press refuses to do so. They treat DEI’s cannibalism as isolated accidents. We know better. We know a system eating itself cannot stand.
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