Why DEI Is Finally On The Chopping Block In D.C.

The other day we talked about some of the encouraging signs that Republicans in Congress are going to be a lot more responsive to their voters this time around. Unlike what we saw following the 2016 election, it doesn’t look like Republican lawmakers are deathly terrified of the Left anymore. They’re not worried about being called “bigots” or “transphobes” — at least not nearly to the same extent they were during Donald Trump’s first term. It’s still early, obviously, but the preliminary indications are good.

And these indications keep getting better and better. On Wednesday we saw yet another sign that Republicans in Congress are actually going to start doing what their voters want. And in particular, it’s a sign they’re going to follow through with the Trump administration’s legislative agenda, which involves dismantling DEI policies at every level of government and throughout the country.

The House Oversight Committee met yesterday to mark-up a bill called the Dismantle DEI Act of 2024. This is a bill that was co-sponsored by JD Vance and Michael Cloud, a congressman from Texas. The bill would undo every single one of Joe Biden’s many executive orders on DEI — including his executive orders mandating DEI in every federal agency, as well as his executive order establishing a “Chief Diversity Officers Executive Council” to coordinate affirmative action throughout the government. Even more importantly, the bill would also ban federal contracts from going to any company with a DEI policy.

In terms of concrete steps, the bill would force every single government agency to shut down their DEI office and fire everyone in it. And those employees can’t be reassigned throughout the government, either. They have to pack their bags and find another job. Everyone remaining in the federal government, meanwhile, will be barred from ever discriminating against anyone — or “in favor of anyone” — on the basis of race, sex, national origin, and so on.

For Democrats, this bill is obviously a major threat. Democrats went all-in on identity politics a long time ago, and now their entire party is defined by it. They have entire caucuses in Congress that are segregated by skin color, ethnicity, sexual orientations, and so on. As we saw during the campaign, Kamala Harris’ supporters voluntarily segregated themselves into “White Dudes for Harris,” “Black Women for Harris,” and a million other subgroups. Democrats have calculated that racial animosity and racial guilt can be leveraged for political gain — and up until the most recent election, it looked like they might be right.

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But now it doesn’t look that way anymore. The momentum has shifted decisively against this kind of flagrant race hustling. All of the emotion and moral panic from 2020 is long gone. People are thinking clearly again. Now Democrats actually have to provide coherent, well-reasoned arguments in favor of the DEI policies they’ve been supporting for so long. And, as yesterday’s mark-up hearing in the House of Representatives demonstrates, Democrats are completely and comically incapable of doing so.

I’ll start with the opening remarks by Jasmine Crockett (D-TX), who represents Texas in Congress (and specifically the Dallas area). I’ll get to other lawmakers’ opening statements as well, because a lot of them are worth talking about. But Jasmine Crockett’s comments stand apart. They are, without a doubt, some of the most ridiculous, untrue, and unhinged arguments you will find in support of DEI — which is really saying something. And they suggest very strongly that DEI is about to be completely eradicated in the federal government. With defenders like this, DEI doesn’t need critics, honestly. It helps that Crockett has the IQ of a baby squirrel.

Here’s how her statement began. She starts by touting her own extensive credentials, and then launches into a really astonishing monologue. Watch:

You might think that makes no sense. You might think it’s strange that a congresswoman is comparing “diverse” human beings to low-quality food items. You might even think that it’s the single most strained, irrelevant analogy you’ve ever heard. But you’ve got to ask yourself: Did you major in business at Rhodes College? Because, in case you didn’t hear, Jasmine Crockett did major in business at Rhodes College. So it’s pretty safe to say she knows what she’s talking about. You don’t just invest in vanilla wafers. You’ve got to add chocolate cake and Twinkies to your portfolio, too. And DEI is just like that, apparently.

Now, admittedly, I didn’t go to Rhodes College. I didn’t major in business. I didn’t even go to college at all. So maybe there’s something a simpleton like myself isn’t grasping about the finer points of Jasmine Crockett’s argument here. But I can say, pretty authoritatively, that the point of a “diverse portfolio” is not to include supposedly “underrepresented” and “marginalized” stocks, for the sake of it. You don’t go to a broker and say, “Hey, I’d like to add some shares of Boeing, because there’s a lot of anti-Boeing bigotry out there and we need to rectify that.” You don’t buy shares in Spirit Airlines because no one else wants them. That kind of strategy would very quickly drive you to bankruptcy.

The point of a “diverse portfolio” is to pick a variety of quality stocks, with enough redundancy that you’re not dependent on any one stock in case things go wrong. You don’t go out of your way to pick bad stocks in order to give them more “representation.” The point of DEI, on the other hand, is to elevate incompetent people and punish more deserving individuals, solely on the basis of characteristics that are irrelevant.

But to be fair, I did interrupt Jasmine Crockett’s monologue. Let’s see what other insights she has for us:

Crockett says she didn’t “ask” to be here, which is true. Really nobody “asked” to be in America. I certainly didn’t. Like Jasmine Crockett, I was fortunate enough to be born in America, which is a country that’s apparently so bigoted, so oppressive and so evil that it made Jasmine Crockett — one of the dumbest women in the entire world — into a member of Congress.

But I guess she’s talking about her “ancestors” and what they chose to do. She wants to know which “white men” were ever enslaved. In order to think that’s a compelling point, you’d have to overlook the Moors’ conquest of Spain (and the enslavement of Christians there), the Barbary pirates’ enslavement of more than a million Europeans from the 16th to the 19th centuries, the Roman conquest of modern-day France, and so on. A lot of the descendants of those white slaves are probably in this country, too. But Jasmine Crockett never advocates on their behalf in any of these hearings. She pretends they don’t exist, actually. To be fair, her knowledge of world history extends as far back as nine seconds ago. Just kidding of course. She also doesn’t know anything about what happened in the world nine seconds ago.

But again, I’m interrupting. Let’s continue:

So now Jasmine Crockett tells us she’s Googled the word “oppression,” which apparently means “prolonged cruel or unjust treatment.” And she says that this can’t possibly apply to white people, for some reason. She never really explains why white people can’t suffer “unjust treatment,” even though they suffer unjust treatment every day. That’s the whole reason this bill is being proposed.

She then launches into that infamous McKinsey study that supposedly shows that DEI somehow makes companies more money. This is a study that never made any sense, because there’s no reason that picking less-qualified candidates would make a business more profitable. But McKinsey kept on repeating this claim — in 2015, 2018, 2020, and 2023. They keep producing this same study, showing that DEI is supposedly a smart financial move for companies.

Then, earlier this year, a group of researchers at “Econ Journal Watch” looked into McKinsey’s claims. They tried to re-run McKinsey’s methodology and they couldn’t replicate the results. The researchers concluded: “McKinsey’s studies neither conceptually nor empirically support the argument that large US public firms can expect on average to deliver improved financial performance if they increase the racial/ethnic diversity of their executives.” The researchers found that, “better firm financial performance causes firms to diversify the racial/ethnic composition of their executives, not the reverse.”

In other words, when firms have a ton of money to spend, they throw it at useless DEI programs. That’s what McKinsey’s data actually showed. It doesn’t show that DEI makes companies money; it shows that companies with a lot of extra money spend their cash on DEI. This is the “data” that, according to Jasmine Crockett, justifies the use of DEI in the federal government. It is completely and totally baseless.

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You’d think a business major and lawyer like Jasmine Crockett would know that. But maybe we shouldn’t be surprised. After all, this is the same Jasmine Crockett who recently touted her “honorary degree” as a serious credential. Watch:

No, the fact you’re a moron makes you unqualified. That’s the entire point of the bill. People are tired of entitled, low-IQ bureaucrats drawing taxpayer-funded salaries to work useless jobs. Americans want their government to start being productive, instead of wasting resources. They also want to end overt racial discrimination. That is, overwhelmingly, where most voters stand on this issue.

At least one Democrat appeared to understand this. So he took a different approach. Here’s Congressman Jared Moskowitz of Florida arguing that the bill is a bad idea — not because DEI is good, but because it’s supposedly wrong to fire any federal government bureaucrat, for any reason. If you want to close the DEI offices, he says, then you have to re-hire these same employees in another government job. Watch:

Watching this, it’s pretty clear that Democrats believe that we work for the bureaucrats in the federal government. We are their servants. According to Jared Moskowitz, every single federal government employee has the “right” and “privilege” to a job. Even when they’re fired, we have to find them a new job in the federal government, like it’s an adult daycare or something. This is how Democrats plan to keep DEI embedded in the federal government. They want to just shuffle these useless bureaucrats around because, supposedly, they can’t be fired.

If that’s how the civil service laws are currently written, then we obviously need to change those laws. You can’t run a government if you’re obligated to employ professional DEI leeches. That’s not sustainable.No company on the planet works like this. When a private business fires someone for being useless, they don’t have to find them a job in the mailroom or something. This is obscene. Besides, firing bureaucrats is a lot of fun. We should do it at any possible opportunity. 

And to be clear, Jared Moskowitz’s argument is the best one I could find. This is the best Democrats could offer. The rest of their statements were like this one, from Congresswoman Summer Lee of Pennsylvania. Watch:

Well, actually, that’s exactly what DEI does. It’s a “magical pass” that allows people like Kentaji Brown Jackson to serve on the Supreme Court, even though she can’t define the word “woman.” It’s a magical pass that allows Kamala Harris to run for president and serve as vice president, even though no one in the country likes her. It’s a magical pass that allows Claudine Gay to become president of Harvard after writing four papers, most of which were plagiarized. And now, finally, that magical pass is being revoked.

There was something else that Summer Lee said in that clip that was interesting, in the sense that it was even dumber than the things she usually says. She claimed that it’s Republican “conjecture” to say that “remedying past discrimination” can possibly involve discrimination. But I seem to remember, as a renowned DEI expert myself, that a man named Henry Rogers (a.k.a. Ibram X. Kendi) once said, “The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination.”

Apparently Henry Rogers never said that. Apparently that’s “Republican conjecture.” In reality, according to Summer Lee, anti-white discrimination isn’t actually discrimination at all.

We’re now in the phase of DEI’s death spiral where the proponents of DEI are pretending they never said the things they’ve been saying for years. It’s astonishing to watch. Or maybe she’s escalating the rhetoric. Maybe she’s saying white people are so awful that, no matter what you do to them, it can’t possibly constitute “discrimination.” If that’s the case, then presumably you can do whatever you want to white people. Maybe that’s the vision Democrats are outlining in Congress right now.

There’s one more moment that stands out from this sordid excuse for a hearing. It involves Congresswoman Shontel Brown of Ohio, who really thinks she has a “gotcha” moment. Meanwhile no one around her has any idea what the hell she’s talking about. Watch:

So, she begins with a straw man argument. She says Republicans believe racism isn’t real and then says, “Aha! If racism isn’t real, then reverse racism can’t be real, so this whole bill is unnecessary.” Apparently she thinks that’s just going to shut the whole bill down. But there’s just silence, before she’s informed that nothing she said made any sense.

Put aside the fact that “reverse racism” is a redundant expression, and how unbelievably uncomfortable this whole moment was. Instead, imagine — if you can — how much this congresswoman must have rehearsed this moment. Imagine the level of self-confidence she must have, despite the fact she should obviously have no self-confidence whatsoever. It’s inspirational, in a way.

If there’s anything encouraging in this whole debacle, it’s that Republicans are finally making a serious effort to get these leeches out of the federal government. That’s what the Dismantle DEI Act will do. After watching most of this hearing, it’s pretty clear that Democrats have no logical argument for opposing it.

All that’s left to do is pass it into law and terminate as many of these unqualified bureaucrats as possible. To borrow an expression from the great wordsmith Jasmine Crockett, we don’t need vanilla wafers, chocolate cake and Twinkies in the government. We need smart and capable people. And very soon, based on how this hearing went, there’s a real chance we might finally get them.