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The Archaeology of DEI

AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster

Not since Hiram Bingham found the lost Inca city of Machu Picchu in 1911 has such a vanished civilization been found in such a state of preservation as the ruins of the Biden administration overrun by the MAGA forces in January 2025. The character of the 2024 election appears, in its profound extent and vast difference from the Biden administration, to more constitute a color revolution than a routine change in political party. A scope of the sweep can be gathered for President Trump's inaugural speech which lays out a "Golden Age of America," a break with the defensive and retrograde past, and even the promise of a U.S. flag on Mars, all of it built on the wreckage of Obama's third term.

It's easy to forget that Obama's third term had its own aspirations. It was once the future. The Lost Empire of the Woke like every civilization before and since, had its dungeons, hieroglyphics, its cosmic projects, secret tunnels, and networks. They may not have called them that but that's what they were. 

The woke project was nothing if not an empire of the mind. It had a well-developed system of beliefs, a worldview, and even a program of terraforming. It had billions in funding and came within an ace of establishing itself as orthodoxy. Of course, it left its stamp in the ruins. Whether you love it or hate it, the woke stood for the road not taken, its proud tower of beliefs which today are in the hands, temporarily so they hope, of unbelievers. Like Bingham the explorer, the intruders will wander among them in wonder.

Among their monuments was Executive Order 14035, a coordinated government-wide initiative to promote diversity and inclusion in the Federal workforce and expand its scope to include equity and accessibility and its various outliers. From this milestone radiated the DEI highways. At UC Berkeley alone, the Division of Equity & Inclusion had a budget of $36 million and 1,087 full and part-time workers. This was only part of a burgeoning network. For those who think the image of MAGA explorers finding a vast lost city of the woke is fanciful, one should note that the woke see the interlopers exactly the same way: as unwelcome barbarians trespassing on their sacred ground, the defilers of their great city.

European newspapers described the coming “vengeful second term” with apocalyptic dread and said that “the United States was bracing for a new era of disruption and division... few imagined then that Trump, twice impeached and now a convicted criminal, would set foot inside the White House again." But even ideologies in decline do not surrender without a fight. 

California has announced its intention to "Trump-proof" the state. "Gov. Gavin Newsom called Thursday for lawmakers to return to the Capitol for a special session to protect 'California values' in preparation for former President Donald Trump’s return to the White House... The special session would be the first of multiple actions on behalf of his administration and the Legislature to begin strengthening the state’s defenses against what Newsom said was an incoming federal administration that had threatened California on multiple fronts." 

Unsurprisingly, the European intelligentsia was also at the forefront against the invaders. "Days after the U.S. election, Sweden’s Göteborg Film Festival, the most important event for the Scandinavian film industry, announced that its 2025 event (Jan. 24 to Feb. 2) would include a special section focusing on 'the power of civil resistance and disobedience,' featuring films with themes that would incite the MAGA faithful."

But confidence in the fightback is more brittle than it has been in a long time. The old swagger is gone. If there's one thing that makes the left nervous, it's the MAGA tech bros, shorthand for the "genius billionaires" in IT, biotech, and space travel. The progressives have traditionally seen themselves as intellectually superior. But the tech bros have shaken their self-confidence. In reality, the tech bros may not be any smarter overall than the rest of humanity. But they are smart enough to neutralize the mystique of the atheist intellectual Man of the Future that has so long been part of their stock in trade. Suddenly they seem like second-raters by comparison.

The fall of a priesthood is perhaps the moment when a city first begins to fall into decay when it slowly but inexorably joins the ranks of desuetude and takes its place in the parade of the lost. Decline for a city begins not when its stonework begins to crumble but when its ideas no longer hold the community imagination together. When all of a sudden arguments from authority cease to rain down from the temple steps and the masses, long presumed stupid, realize that there is a real world of knowledge out there beyond the power of their civilization's orthodoxy to prescribe. Then they leave the black stones, wander forth, and forget the temples were ever there till time and chance should bring some scholar thence.

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