Trump is Quietly Eviscerating the DEI Regime

The Trump administration is waging a necessary, multifront battle to collapse a DEI regime that’s poisoned Western institutions and caused Americans to lose faith in the equal application of standards and laws.

President Donald Trump’s first 100 days of his second term have been filled with a flurry of executive actions not seen since the New Deal. Though much talk and media narratives have focused on trade, immigration, and countless other things, where Trump has triggered perhaps the most seismic change in how our federal government works is on DEI and civil rights.

Last Wednesday, Trump signed an executive order called “Restoring Equality of Opportunity and Restoring Meritocracy,” that didn’t get nearly as much attention as it deserved.

In the order, the Trump administration took aim at disparate impact theory, which is how civil rights law has been twisted to promote discrimination in the name of equality. Disparate impact theory holds that any example of racial disparity in numbers is an example of racism that civil rights law could be applied to.

This is, for instance, how the Obama administration’s Department of Justice used dear colleague letters to threaten schools to remove discipline from classrooms. They argued that because more black students were disciplined by schools than other students this was an example that the school’s policies were racist and subject to possible DOJ lawsuits or removed federal funding.

The result for many schools was a disaster. Discipline broke down, standards were lowered, good teachers left the profession, and the quality of education got worse.

That was just the tip of the iceberg.

Heather MacDonald, writing in City Journal, explained how the executive order could potentially affect law enforcement.

The order begins a review of federal consent decrees that rely on disparate-impact analysis with “the implied goal of dissolving those decrees.” She wrote that dissolving those decrees will free “departments from a costly yoke of superfluous red tape but will also defund the federal monitor racket, whereby monitors earn millions of dollars declaring for years on end that the overseen police department has yet to comply punctiliously with an average of 200 or so mandated reforms, often regarding paperwork.”

So, Trump’s executive order does two things. It brings America closer to colorblind federal enforcement of laws, and it boots woke apparatchiks out of their well-ensconced positions of power. In the last few years, they certainly held a lot of power as DEI was enforced everywhere from college campuses to corporate boardrooms.

Disparate impact theory was at the heart of the 2020 Great Awokening that focused on “systemic racism” as the primary issue facing Western societies.

This ethos was best symbolized by the writings of Ibram X. Kendi, the “anti-racist” author who briefly became the institutional Left’s swami for all things race related before he got exposed as a fraud. Kendi was openly for racial discrimination to make up for what he saw as past and present racism so generally and vaguely defined that it could be applied to virtually any law or institution. For instance, Kendi argued at one point that lowering capital gains taxes was racist.

With this sort of standard being applied to civil rights law, America would almost certainly be stuck in an endless loop of racial grievance, discrimination, and retribution. And for a few years under President Joe Biden, it certainly seemed like that’s what we were doomed to suffer.

What the Trump administration is doing with last week’s executive order and many others is aligning the enforcement of civil rights law with a definition that most Americans actually agree on. Poll after poll shows that Americans don’t want DEI foisted on them, they don’t want affirmative action in even the bluest of blue states. What they want is a genuine equal application of the law. They want this country to fulfill the promise of 1776, not force us all to live the lies of 1619.

Trump is removing the DEI cancer from our federal government by both eliminating government DEI programs and changing the legal enforcement method whereby it was foisted on public and private institutions across the country.

While this cancer is far from cured—it’s metastasized in many institutions, especially in higher education—Trump is delivering a serious blow to the DEI state that’s hopefully going to be solidified long-term when combined with the larger cultural “vibe shift.”

Make no mistake, Ivy League schools and countless elite institutions will try to continue programs and policies that rely on disparate impact theory. They’ll change the name of departments, concoct cleverer admissions policies that lead to de facto racial quotas, and do whatever they can to maintain the old system while they hope to wait out Trump and his counterrevolution.

Nevertheless, what’s happening in the White House right now is a big deal. It’s the reset this country needed to rid itself of Kendi-ism and restore that old-fashioned American ideal of equality before the law.

The post Trump is Quietly Eviscerating the DEI Regime appeared first on The Daily Signal.