What if I told you that the primary beneficiaries of DEI were white progressive women, and the loss of their cushy, bossy, "bulls**t" jobs is the real reason for all the panic?
You're already nodding in agreement, aren't you?
The selling point for DEI — near as I can tell since lefties would rather accuse critics of racism than defend or sell their policies — is that DEI corrects historical racism, combats systemic racism, and gives businesses a competitive edge.
Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins made that last point a few days ago, claiming that "You cannot argue with the fact that a diverse workforce is better. There’s too much business value [in diversity]." It would be cruel of me to point out that over the last five years, shares in Cisco have underperformed the S&P, with an overall return of 42%. The S&P 500 grew 82% in that same period. Some value, eh?
True diversity of background, thought, priorities, etc., is essential for keeping a business innovative. But DEI is about enforcing progressive groupthink (secondarily) and an all-new category of iron rice bowls (primarily).
So it's fair to conclude that the beneficiaries of DEI aren't the poor downtrodden masses but the HR-on-steroids scolds who run it. And look who they are:
According to BLS, the average U.S. salary in 2024 was just under $60,000, mostly paid to people who have to get things done to earn it. The average DEI CDO salary is 50% higher and goes overwhelmingly to white people, mostly women, who accomplish little but cause headaches for everyone else.
It's all about the money, honey — just like always.
There are dicey legal issues, too. When everybody was busy establishing DEI programs during the BLM madness of 2020, they were apparently too convinced of their political invulnerability to care that DEI is inherently discriminatory — and illegal.
"Everyone understood that [illegal discimination] was going on, in private business as well as universities," Megan McArdle posted on X. "Acquaintances would just outright say 'We're looking to hire a woman of color/queer person/etc for this position.' I never figured out how to politely ask why they were confessing a crime to someone they barely knew."
Times change, and they changed bigly on Jan. 20. The CYA efforts will be a joy to watch, assuming schadenfreude is your thing.
Then again, it would be unfair of me to deny the True Believers™ who are deeply committed to the rot that is DEI. They're in the Air Force, they're in Silicon Valley, they're in your local school district.
SecDef Pete Hegseth is currently dropping MOABs on Air Force officers engaged in "malicious compliance" to undo President Donald Trump's anti-DEI orders to the military. And as for the "bulls**t jobs" I referenced above, you need to read Ryan Zickgraf's exposé of the "diversity hacks" in DEI whose jobs are much more corrosive than old-school make-work positions.
"There was something bitterly ironic about being a straight white guy whose job was to design woke social-media posts — for Pfizer, among others — about the importance of celebrating Juneteenth," Zickgraff wrote about the freelance work he used to do. "But that job was the kind of grift that helps disguise the fact that the whole DEI world is smoke and mirrors."
But it's smoke and mirrors covering up a lucrative field whose practitioners don't have to produce anything anyone can measure.
Now that our long national DEI nightmare is finally ending, that sound you hear is the lamentations of their women (and beta men) — and it is glorious.
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