Was DEI A Failure?

We signed some executive orders. They

were uh very important.

>> The largest companies in America are

dismantling something they spent

billions of dollars building, and they

are doing it faster than almost anyone

predicted. In January 2025, the

president of the United States signed

executive orders that erased 60 years of

federal diversity policy inside 48

hours. My administration has taken

action to abolish all discriminatory

diversity, equity, and inclusion

nonsense. And these are policies that

were absolute nonsense. Agencies had

until January 22nd to close their DEI

offices. Staff were laid off by the end

of the month. Government websites went

dark. Entire departments that had taken

years to construct disappeared in days.

Several federal departments removed

their DEI focused web pages after

President Donald Trump signed a sweeping

executive order dismantling the federal

government's diversity and inclusion

programs. By February 2026, the Equal

Employment Opportunity Commission, the

EEOC, sent warning letters directly to

Fortune 500 CEOs, board chairs, and

general counsel threatening potential

federal litigation against companies

that continued running certain DEI

programs. Federal employees are

receiving emails warning that they could

face repercussions if they do not snitch

on their co-workers who work in

diversity, equity, inclusion, and

accessibility positions. The federal

government's own civil rights attorney

was now threatening to sue corporations

for civil rights programs those

corporations had spent 5 years building

in response to civil rights pressure.

The Human Rights Campaign maintains a

corporate equality index, a benchmark

that companies spent years lobbying to

appear on. In 20125, 377 Fortune 500

companies participated in it. By 2026,

that number had collapsed to 131, a 65%

decline in a single calendar year.

Between January 2023 and May of 2025,

Fortune 100 companies reduced references

to DEI in their official corporate

communications by 98%. Companies that

spent millions crafting DEI mission

statements scrubbed those words from

their website with the same speed they

had used to put them there in the first

place. More than 2,600 jobs with

diversity or DEI in their titles were

eliminated in a 2-year period. The

career path that corporate recruiters

were once calling the hottest in America

in 2021 had become, and NPR's own words,

a toxic wasteland.

Walmart, Target, McDonald's, Meta, Ford,

Amazon, Goldman Sachs, IBM, Croup,

Harley-Davidson, you name it. Within

roughly 12 months, every major American

corporation, eliminated its DEI

programs, dissolved its diversity teams,

or quietly rebranded the function under

different language while hoping nobody

looked too closely. So, right now, some

major companies are pushing back against

anti-diversity, equity, and inclusion

policy that

>> basically say that masculinity is bad.

The retreat is political, legal,

economic, and cultural all at once

because DEI did not fail in one way. It

failed in several. The original

intention was real. The money spent was

real. So was the backlash. And the gap

between what DEI was supposed to be and

what it became in practice is what made

the whole structure so brittle that one

presidential election and a handful of

legal rulings knocked the most of it

over in just under a year. So this is

the complete story where DEI came from,

what it turned into, whether the

programs actually worked and what

happens now that the whole apparatus is

coming apart.

The story of DEI starts not in a

corporate boardroom, but in 1866, right

after the Civil War ended, Congress

created the Freed Men's Bureau to give

formerly enslaved people access to food,

jobs, education, and land. By any

reasonable definition, it was the first

federal affirmative action program in

American history.

President Andrew Johnson vetoed the

legislation that would have given it

real enforcement power. His argument was

that the program discriminated against

white people and the claim that the

government equity programs unfairly

burden white Americans was not invented

by talk radio hosts in the 2020s. It was

actually Andrew Johnson who made it in

1866. Jim Crow laws then spent the next

70 years building a legal architecture

of second-class citizens for black

Americans. The postworld war II economic

boom that created the American middle

class specifically excluded black

veterans from the GI Bill benefits,

Federal Housing Administration loans,

and union wage structures that allowed

white working families to buy homes and

accumulate wealth. Those exclusions were

not random or incidental. Congress and

federal agencies designed them

deliberately. Federal housing policy

redlinined black neighborhoods out of

mortgage eligibility. Federal

architectural programs paid black

farmers less and denied them loans at

rates far higher than white farmers

received. So these were not cultural

attitudes. They were codified federal

policies. Then President Kennedy signed

Executive Order 10925 in 1961, inserting

the phrase affirmative action into

federal vocabulary for the first time.

citizens of the country which they're

sent to doing the same work, eating the

same food, speaking the same language.

We're going to put particular emphasis

on those men and women who have skills

in teaching, agriculture, and in health.

>> The order required federal contractors

to treat employees without regard to

race, creed, color, or national origin.

President Johnson's Civil Rights Act of

1964 made workplace discrimination

illegal under title 7. His executive

order 11246 in 1965 required federal

contractors to take active steps toward

equal employment opportunity. In 1971,

the Supreme Court's Griggs vuke power

rule added the disparate impact

doctrine, holding that even raceneutral

policies could constitute illegal

discrimination if they produced racially

imbalanced outcomes. An employer did not

need to intend discrimination. If the

system produced discriminary results,

the law still applied. Xerox employees

created the first corporate employee

resource group in 1965, organized by

black workers responding to pay

disparities for about three decades

after that. The broader equal

opportunity framework operated largely

in the background of corporate life.

Companies maintained compliance

programs, filed required paperwork, and

stayed out of federal enforcement

trouble. The efforts were real and often

useful, but they were not trying to

reshape anyone's ideology. They were

trying to fix specific documented legal

problems. The phrase diversity,

equality, and inclusion as a unified

three-word corporate framework started

gaining real traction in the 1990s and

picked up speed through the 2000s. By

2015, DEI had become standard HR

vocabulary at most large corporations.

McKenzie published influential reports

in 2015 and 2018, claiming that

companies with more demographic

diversity were 35% were more likely to

outperform financially. That figure

spread through every corporate boardroom

in America and became the central

business case for DEI spending. The

research measured correlation, not

causation. McKenzie never claimed

otherwise, but corporate communications

quickly turned a correlation finding

into a casual argument, and the argument

stuck. A 2024 review published in the

econ journal Watch found no reliable

causal link between the diversity

metrics McKenzie measured and financial

performance. But by that point, American

companies had already built an $8

billion per year industry on the

premise. May 25th, 2020 changed the

scale of everything. If you or your

child spent years growing up on social

media and experienced serious mental

health struggles, you should hear this.

Recently, a jury ordered Meta and

YouTube to pay millions for their role

in designing and promoting addictive

platforms. They knew their apps could

contribute to anxiety, depression, and

body image issues, but did not share

those risks while prioritizing profits.

The recent historic verdict underscores

the consequences of those decisions.

Now, Morgan and Morgan is stepping up to

hold these platforms accountable for the

harm they caused. Click the link in my

bio to take a short quiz. You may be

entitled to a potential recovery of over

$1,000.

Minneapolis police officer Derek Schovin

knelt on George Floyd's neck for 8

minutes and 45 seconds. Regardless of

any debate of what happened or why, in

the end, Floyd died and a bystander

filmed the entire thing. And that

footage ended up reaching every phone in

America within hours. The protests that

followed were the largest the country

had seen since the 1960s.

Corporate America responded at a speed

and scale that had no historical

precedent. Within one year of Floyd's

death, America's top 50 companies

pledged nearly $50 billion towards

racial equality. Walmart committed $100

million to a new center for racial

equity. DEI job postings increased 123%

between May and September 2020.

Companies tripled their hiring of chief

diversity officers. McDonald's declared

Floyd one of us in a national commercial

and pledged 35% representation of

underrepresented groups in leadership by

2025. Bank of America committed $1

billion to racial equality. Goldman

Sachs, JP Morgan, and virtually every

other major firm issued statements,

hired consultants, and stood up new

internal departments. USC professor

Shawn Harper, himself a DEI advocate,

later described much of this by saying,

"Companies moved not because they were

genuinely committed, but because they

were afraid. Afraid of social media,

afraid of boycots, afraid of being

associated with the wrong side of a

national reckoning. Programs built on

institutional fear rather than

institutional conviction are inherently

fragile, and the fragility became

apparent the moment any serious counter

pressure arrived. The global DEI market

totaled $7.5 billion in 2020 alone.

American firms spent approximately $8

billion annually on a consulting and

training industry that had grown from

corporate compliance into a full

professional ecosystem. Chief diversity

officers, DEI software platforms, equity

audits, unconscious bias workshops, and

mandatory training programs sold on

annual renewal contracts. The Biden

administration channeled over $1.1

trillion dollar in federal program

budgets through DEI related frameworks

across $460 identified programs,

including $269 million to the Pentagon

and $16 million in a single year for

third-party diversity training inside

federal agencies.

What DEI felt like inside American

workplaces between 2020 and 2024 was an

experience that generated the backlash

that eventually dismantled the whole

structure.

Companies rushed to implement mandatory

unconscious bias training, anti-racism

workshops, and sessions built around

frameworks developed by authors Ibram X

Kendy and consultant Robin D'Angelo.

D'Angelo's framework of white fragility

held that white discomfort or resistance

during racial discussions was itself a

form of racism, a construct that made it

logically impossible for a white

employee to disagree during a training

session without proving the trainer's

point. An employee who said, "I'm not

sure I agree with this," in a DEI

session risked being labeled as a racist

for saying it. The structure of the

framework removed the possibility of a

goodfaith disagreement. In early 2021, a

training session at Coca-Cola reportedly

instructed employees to try to be less

white, which the training materials

defined as being less arrogant, less

oppressive, and less defensive.

Screenshots of the slides spread

everywhere.

Coca-Cola distanced itself from the

framing, but the phrase entered

permanent cultural circulation as

shorthand for exactly what critics of

DEI meant when they argued the framework

had moved from addressing discrimination

to indicting an entire racial group. In

2017, Google software engineer James

Deorse circulated an internal memo

arguing that biological differences and

interests alongside discrimination

contributed to the gender gap in tech.

Google fired him within days. The

accuracy of his biological claims was

debated by scientists. But the speed and

totality of his termination sent a

message that most employees absorbed

clearly that expressing skepticism of

DEI frameworks in a corporate setting

carried serious career risks. The

Society for Human Resource Management

documented what it called diversity. The

pattern of organizations seeking

diversity of appearance while demanding

complete ideological conformity from

employees. Research found that one in

five employees reported being excluded

or pushed out of their organizations

because their beliefs diverged from DEI

orthodoxy. HR departments for a

significant portion of the workforce

transformed into political enforcement

mechanisms rather than neutral arbiters

of workplace disputes. The case of Dr.

Yoel Inbar became symbolic of a broader

problem in academia. Inbar was a well-

reggarded psychology professor at the

University of Toronto on track to join

UCLA's psychology department until 66

students petitioned against his hire.

His offense was that he had questioned

on a podcast whether DEI statements had

measurable value. He didn't oppose DEI.

He just raised empirical questions about

its efficacy. UCLA declined to extend an

offer. A respected academic lost a

faculty position for expressing measured

evidence-based skepticism about a policy

in public conversation. Universities had

begun requiring DEI statements from all

faculty job applicants as a condition of

academic employment. Critics from across

the political spectrum compared them to

loyalty oaths. At many institutions,

diversity offices evaluated these

statements before academic departments

reviewed the candidates's research

record, meaning ideological conformity

served as a filter applied before

scholarly merit entered the process.

Multiple law reviews argued the practice

violated both Title 7 and foundational

principles of academic freedom. Faculty

who declined to write sufficiently

enthusiastic statements were regularly

screened out before their work reviewed

any substantive consideration. Pew

Research C Center's 2024 survey measured

the results of all of this. 52% of US

workers said focusing on DEI at work was

mainly a good thing, down from 56% the

year before. 21% called it mainly a bad

thing, up from 16%. A majority of

workers believed DEI practices helped

black women, black men, Hispanic women,

and Asian women. Only 14% believed DEI

practices helped white men. 36% of

workers said DEI practices hurt white

men, making white men the only group in

the survey where hurts significantly

outweighed helps. Among white adults

specifically, 47% said DEI hurt white

men. A separate Forb survey found that

nearly 70% of white men reported feeling

forgotten when it came to their

company's DEI strategy. The zero sum

arithmetic drove much of this. When

companies announced hiring goals

explicitly tied to race and gender,

workers did the math themselves. A goal

of increasing minority representation

and leadership position means by

definition reducing the representation

of everyone else. For white men who were

already skeptical that corporate culture

valued them, see an explicit groupbased

hiring targets published in corporate

communications read as confirmation. The

perception was not always accurate in

its specifics, but it was widespread,

and widespread perceptions produced real

behavioral consequences. Male labor

force participation in the United States

fell from 86.6% in 1948 to 68% in 2024.

Approximately 6.8 million prime age

working men currently sit outside the

workforce entirely. Many of those men

connected their displacement to a

broader cultural shift they experienced

as devaluing their contributions and

actively deprioritizing their

advancement. Regardless of how much that

connection was structurally accurate,

economic insecurity combined with

cultural messaging that centered their

demographic group as the source of

societal problems produced predictable

outcomes. The DEI mayor episode

illustrated how toxic the dynamic had

become in life. After the Francis Scott

Keybridge collapsed in Baltimore in

2024, critics on social media

immediately labeled Baltimore's black

mayor, Brandon Scott, the DEI mayor,

implying incompetence attributable to

diversity hiring rather than to his

actual qualifications. Scott had a

legitimate political career. So, the

insult landed the way it did because it

piggybacked on documented cases where

employers had publicly lowered

qualification standards in the name of

representation and announced those

decisions openly, beating a stereotype

that critics were able to weaponize

against anyone who held office while

black. When Boeing and United Airlines

publicized explicit pilot diversity

goals, critics attached those

announcements to safety incidents in

ways the evidence did not support. But

corporate communications teams had

written those critics the material they

needed by publishing numerical targets

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Whether DEI programs actually worked is

the question advocates consistently

avoided. And the peer-reviewed answer is

honestly mostly no. In several

measurable ways, the programs actually

made things worse. Harvard Business

Review published a landmark 2016

analysis reviewing decades of corporate

diversity efforts. Researchers found

that positive effects of diversity

training rarely lasted beyond a day or

two and that multiple studies showed

mandatory training could activate bias

or spark backlash rather than reduce

either. And this psychological mechanism

is well documented. Mandatory training

that forces employees to actively

confront racial stereotypes can

reinforce those stereotypes rather than

diminish them. Telling someone not to

think about a pink elephant reliably

produces the opposite. Lisa Legal at the

University of Toronto found in

laboratory experiments that raced

focused DEI campaigns applying strong

social pressure on people to be non-p

prejudiced produced heightened levels of

bigotry in subjects who felt coerced.

Mandatory virtue reliably produced the

opposite of the virtue. A large field

experiment published in the proceedings

of the National Academy of Sciences, the

PNAS, studied 3,6 participants at a

global organization. Thor online

diversity training produced some

attitude change but limited behavior

change was explicitly described as not a

panacea for remedying bias in the

workplace. A metaanalysis covering

decades of studies found effect sizes

near zero in rigorous peer-reviewed

research. And crucially, as study

quality improved with larger examples

and randomized designs, the apparent

effect of DEI training decreased

further. The more careful the

measurement, the smaller the result.

Twothirds of human resource specialists,

the professionals actually designing and

running these programs, reported that

diversity training produced no positive

effects. Boston University's 2023

systematic review found that the vast

majority of existing studies suffered

from significant methological problems

with small group sizes, no control

groups, predominantly female

participants, and almost no follow-up

studies measuring whether effects lasted

beyond the immediate training period.

Researchers at BEu concluded that the

field cannot definitively demonstrate

that most DEI workplace programs

produced lasting positive outcomes. DEI

advocates regularly pointed to pre and

post surveys showing that participants

responded with more supportive answers

after training. Measuring whether

employees can repeat what they're just

being told in an environment where their

career advancement depends on giving

approved answers produces self-reported

data that tells you nothing reliable

about actual attitudinal change. The

surveys measured compliance performance,

not genuine belief. The University of

Michigan case stands as a comprehensive

case study in what 250 million dollars

of DEI spending accomplished at a major

research institution. Um M required

every department to adopt DEI

implementation plans. Administrators

created an entire class of enforcement

positions dedicated to DEI doctrine

across campus. The New York Times

investigation found that none of this

meaningfully increased minority

enrollment or improved minority students

sense of belonging on campus.

Researchers found instead a campus where

administrators, faculty, and students

had been set against each other in

sustained racial conflict that deepened

divisions and undermined academic

freedom. Um M spent $250 million making

the problem measurably worse. Academic

standards produced a parallel crisis.

Physics professor Alex Small at Calpaly

Pomona documented students arriving in

college calculus unable to complete high

school algebra because K12 schools

pushed students through coursework with

generous grades rather than requiring

genuine mastery. Multiple STEM faculty

at major research universities reported

the same pattern. While equity gets

defined as equal outcomes rather than

equal opportunity, the institutional

response to persistent achievement gaps

becomes lowering standards rather than

raising preparation. The result is

graduates holding credentials that do

not represent the competencies those

credentials are supposed to certify,

which ultimately harms the students

those policies claim to help because

employers discount the degrees and the

graduates bear the professional

consequences. In March 2023, Bud Light's

marketing team struck a sponsorship deal

with transgender influencer Dylan

Mulaney to celebrate her 365 days of

girlhood Tik Tok series. The deal was a

single personalized promotional video,

but the consumer response became the

largest boycott in American beer

history.

>> Andheiser Bush lost more than $1 billion

in sales because of the Budlight

boycott.

>> Sales fell 11% the week ending April

8th. They fell 21% the week ending April

15th. Off-Rise sales dropped 26% by May

1st and 29.5% by the week ending May

20th. Annheiser Bush InBev recorded a

$395 million North American revenue loss

in the second quarter of 2023 alone. The

4-year estimated North American revenue

loss reached $1.4 billion. Modello

Espiel surpassed Bud Light as America's

number one beer, ending a position Bud

Light had held for over two decades.

Local distributors reported sales

dropping 50% immediately. The company

offered $15 rebates and slashed prices

and neither move recovered the brand

standing. The corporate response

compounded the damage. Annheiser Bush

issued a meandering apology and placed

two marketing executives on leave. LGBTQ

advocates attacked the company for

abandoning Mulaney. Conservatives found

the apology insufficient. Moderate

customers switched to Magello Espeel and

largely stayed there. The CEO's public

comment that people basically want to

enjoy their beer without the debate

functioned as an unintentional but

accurate summary of why aggressive

corporate DEI alienated the customers

who mattered the most to the bottom

line. Target ran its own version of the

same disaster in 2023 with expanded

Pride Month merchandise that included

items marketed to children and products

from a designer whose aesthetic imagery

drew immediate controversy. Target moved

some merchandise away from store

entrances under conservative pressure,

which infuriated progressive advocacy

groups who demanded Target restore

everything and publicly denounced

extremists. Target alienated both sides

at the same time. Sales fell, stock

decline, and by late 2024, the company's

stock sat roughly 12% lower with DEI

controversy among the documented

contributing factors. Conservative

activist Robbie Starkbuk spent 2024

systematically targeting major brands

popular with conservative customers,

documented their DEI policies and

detailed social media threads and

threatening or executing consumer

boycott campaigns. Tractor Supply

Company eliminated its DEI roles and

stopped Pride event sponsorships. John

Deere curtailed programs.

Harley-Davidson eliminated its DEI

function entirely. Brown Foreman, the

maker of Jack Daniels, scaled back. Ford

reduced initiatives. Lowe's exited the

human rights campaign's corporate

equality index. Mosen Kors scaled back.

Caterpillar curtailed DEI. Walmart, the

largest private employer in the United

States, renamed its DEI function

belonging, ending supplier diversity

spending goals and closing the racial

equality center it had opened with

$und00 million four years earlier.

Harper, the USC professor, said

something about Starbucks campaign that

cut directly into what had always been

wrong with the institutional structure.

If one person can take to Twitter and

ultimately inflame a campaign to

dismantle DEI in large companies, it

means those things were not strong to

begin with. Most companies and the

people who led them were not committed

to this. Starbucks did not dismantle

genuinely held convictions. He revealed

that most corporate DEI programs had

been built on performance rather than

conviction and collapsed the moment

anyone applied real pressure. Again, the

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As the consumer boycotts were reshaping

corporate behavior, the legal system was

simultaneously producing changes that

would outlast any single election cycle.

On June 29th, 2023, the United States

Supreme Court ruled 6-2 in students for

fair administrations versus Harvard.

Combined with its companion case against

the University of North Carolina, the

court held that Hartford's and UNC's

race conscious admissions programs

violated the equal protection clause of

the 14th amendment. Chief Justice John

Roberts wrote the majority opinion. The

ruling overturned 45 years of precedent

established by the regents of the

University of California versus Baky in

1978 and by Grutder versus Bowlinger in

2023. Edward Bloom brought the case

through his organization students for

fair admissions. Originally challenging

Harvard's treatment of Asian-American

applicants. That framing changed the

political geometry of the fight. The

case was no longer framed as white

Americans versus minority groups.

Asian-Americans, a minority group that

had faced documented discrimination

through American history, were

demonstrabably penalized by Harvard's

system, which capped their

representation to benefit other minority

groups. The constitutional argument

became far cleaner, and dismissing the

lawsuit as simple racial resentment

became far harder. Corporate legal teams

began reviewing hiring programs,

supplier diversity initiatives, and

mentoring programs that reserved slots

by demographic group within days of the

ruling. Reverse discrimination lawsuits

multiplied. The Novant Health case

produced a verdict exceeding $10 million

on a reverse discrimination claim. The

Supreme Court's 2025 ruling, Ames versus

Ohio, lowered the legal bar for majority

group plaintiffs pursuing discrimination

claims, making it easier for white or

male employees to sue over DEI hiring

decisions they believed had cost them

positions. President Trump signed three

executive orders in his first two days

back in office that constituted the most

sweeping federal action against DEI

programs in American history. Executive

Order 14151 signed January 20th, 2025

required the termination of all DEI

offices, programs, and training across

every federal agency. Agencies had until

January 22nd to shut the offices down

and until January 31st to lay off the

staff. All DEIA related government

websites and social media accounts were

ordered taken offline. Executive Order

14173 signed the following day revoked

Executive Order 11246, the Lynden

Johnson mandate that required federal

contractors to take affirmative action

for 60 years. The order directed the

attorney general to identify private

sector companies with egregious and

discriminary DEI programs and develop

enforcement plans and required federal

contractors to certify that they were

not running programs that violated

anti-discrimination law. The enforcement

plan named major corporations, financial

institutions, airlines, law enforcement

agencies, medical institutions, and

universities as specific targets. In

February 2026, EEOC Chair Andrea Lucas

sent warning letters directly to Fortune

500 CEOs, board chairs, and general

counsel. These personal letters named

executives and threatened potential

litigation from the federal government

against diversity programs those

companies had created partially to

satisfy federal expectations from a

previous administration. The corporate

retreat accelerated. 20% of companies

eliminated their DEI programs entirely

following Trump's re-election. Fortune

100 companies reduced DEI references and

official communications by 98%. The S&P

500 share of companies disclosing women

in management data fell from 71.2% to

55.1%. More than 2,600 DEI job titles

were cut. The Human Rights Campaign's

corporate equality index dropped from

377 Fortune 500 participants to 131, a

65% collapse in one year, and state

governments had already moved. Florida

and Texas led a wave of legislation

prohibiting DEI offices at public

universities and barring diversity

statements in hiring decisions. By late

2024, Florida, Texas, Utah, Alabama,

Iowa, Idaho, Kansas, and Indiana each

had passed similar legislation. The

University of Florida eliminated its

entire DEI staff. The Iowa episode

captured what the rebranding game had

produced. After Iowa passed its DEI ban,

Governor Kim Reynolds referred the

University of Iowa to its attorney

general after video surfaced of a

university administrator explaining on

camera how staff were deliberately

hiding DEI activities under different

names to avoid state law enforcement.

The College of Pharmacy at the

University of Florida rebranded DEI as

accessibility, belonging, and community.

Law schools renamed Dean for inclusion

positions as dean for experimental

learning and engagement. administrators

caught on video describing how they

concealed programs from their own

elected government had stripped the

entire enterprise of whatever remaining

credibility it had. The anti-dei

movement for all its victories was at

the same time also ignoring evidence

that did matter. Audit studies using

identical resumes with different names,

one white sounding and one black

sounding, have consistently shown that

black sounding names receive

meaningfully fewer call backs with all

other qualifications held constant. But

is the answer to prioritize black people

over white people? No. Most normal

people would say don't include names on

resumes and make it based on

qualifications only. A 2023 analysis of

97 US employers found measurable racial

gaps in hiring contact rates. The

problem DEI was designed to address

didn't disappear during the years DEI

programs were being dismantled. Federal

merit-based hiring frameworks do not

account for three decades of audit

evidence showing that actual human

hiring decisions are not made on merit

alone. In specific context, demographic

representation produces measurable

improvements that go beyond symbolism.

Police departments serving minority

communities, medical providers treating

minority patients, and teachers in

majority minority schools all show

better outcomes when practitioners share

some background with the communities

they serve. The mechanism is not

representation for its own sake. It is

trust, communication, and institutional

credibility with populations that have

historical reasons not to extend it

automatically. Patricia Devine at the

University of Wisconsin Madison spent 15

years developing an evidence-based bias

habit breaking training program that

produced documented effectiveness across

rigorous experimental trials. Her

approach is voluntary in design, focused

on specific behavioral habits rather

than political ideology, and structured

around psychology that reflects how

attitudal change actually works.

Coercive, shame-based, one-time

mandatory training reliably fails to

change behavior and often increases

resentment. Targeted, voluntary,

evidence-based behavioral intervention

can produce voluntary change. Corporate

DEI programs scaled the version that

fails and called the expansion of that

version progress. Deote research found

that organizations with genuinely

inclusive cultures, meaning cultures

where people of different backgrounds

feel actually welcomed and heard rather

than administratively categorized, are

twice as likely to exceed financial

targets, three times as likely to be

high performing, and six times more

likely to generate meaningful

innovation. The thing corporate DEI

apparatus rarely produced was a

genuinely inclusive culture. It produced

compliance infrastructure the

bureaucratic appearance of inclusion

while frequently generating the opposite

because mandatory performance of

inclusion produces surface compliance

and quiet resentment rather than genuine

belonging. Generational attitudes

confounded every simple narrative of the

DEI debate produced. A global IPSO

survey of 31 countries released in 2025

found that 60% of Gen Z men believed

that women's equality initiatives

discriminated against men. a 20% gap

with Gen Z women at 40%. Gen Z

respondents at 57% and millennials at

60% were more likely than baby boomers

at 43% to say things had gone far enough

on gender equality. More than half of

Gen Z and millennials believed men were

being asked to do too much in support of

equality goals. The finding that most

complicated the standard generational

narrative was that Gen Z men were more

likely than baby boomer men to say that

a stay-at-home father is less of a man.

25% versus 11%. The generation raised

with the most progressive cultural

messaging around gender held more

conservative views about male gender

roles than the generation that preceded

it. Younger men absorbed the message

that their traditional roles were being

devalued and simultaneously concluded

that the new equality frameworks came at

their direct expense and responded not

with progressive alignment but with a

conservative backlash specific to their

generation. Jordan Peterson, a

University of Toronto psychology

professor, built a global audience of

young men, arguing that post-modern

ideology, was colonizing universities

and institutional messaging required men

to feel ashamed of their nature. Joe

Rogan gave anti-Dei arguments three-hour

unedited conversations reaching millions

of listeners that traditional media

gatekeepers would never have platformed.

Andrew Tate, considerably more extreme

in his methods, found an audience among

men who felt the mainstream cultural

message designated them as the problem.

Now, the accuracy of these figures

specific arguments vary significantly.

But their audiences grew because those

arguments matched feelings that men held

from their own experiences in schools,

workplaces, and corporate training

sessions. Deoid's 14th annual survey of

more than 23,000 Gen Z and millennial

workers globally found that these

generations still expect companies to

take genuine positions on fairness and

inclusion. They want substantive

commitment to those values. They are

simultaneously and increasingly allergic

to the bureaucratic performance of those

values. Younger workers can tell the

difference between a company that

actually treats its people fairly and a

company that runs mandatory annual

training and considers its obligations

discharged. The chief diversity officer

role became the most visible

institutional symbol of the DEI

apparatus's structural problem.

Companies hired CDOS at unprecedented

rates after the Floyd protests. At least

60 public companies appointed their

first ever diversity leader in 2020. DEI

roles increased 55% in that single year

and compensation packages at major

corporations routinely exceeded $500,000

annually. Russell Reynolds, the

executive search firm, found that 60% of

CDOS at S&P 500 companies left their

positions between 2018 and 2021. Average

CO tenure fell from 3.1 years to 1.8

years by 2021, compared to CEO average

tenure of 5 years. Visor, another search

firm, found that companies hired CDOS

with great fanfare and then gave them

inadequate resources, no real

organizational authority, no clear

metrics for success, and the impossible

dual mandate of achieving demographic

transformation while also managing the

psychological fallout from the training

programs those same cos were running.

Companies set the roll up to fail and

then they were surprised when it did

fail. The tech industry's 2022 and 2023

layoff wave hit DEI departments

disproportionately. By the time

executive orders arrived, companies had

already hollowed out much of the DEI

infrastructure. The industry had built

itself on the assumption that companies

were genuinely committed. Most were not,

and the first serious reversal of

pressure proved it. Several patterns

will define what comes next.

Corporate language will continue

changing while some underlying programs

quietly persist. The 98% drop in DEI

terminology and Fortune 100

communications does not mean companies

have abandoned concern for workplace

demographics. Belonging, equitable

access, and talent development are

replacing the DEI acronym in official

communications. Gravity research found

companies are relying on neutral framing

to maintain internal priorities while

navigating federal scrutiny. Some of

this rebranding reflects a genuine

evolution toward less corrosive, more

evidence-based approaches. Some of it is

the same programs running under

different names. The Iowa case

represents the second category. The

administrators who were caught on camera

are not alone. Legal risk will reshape

corporate practices more durably than

any executive order. With EEOC Chair

Andrea Lucas actively threatening

Fortune 500 companies, corporate HR

teams are systematically removing any

program that could be characterized as a

race or gender preference while

restructuring mentoring, leadership

development, and employer resource

groups to be legally universal rather

than demographic group specific. Those

structural changes will outlast the

administration that created the

pressure. State and federal law will

diverge in ways that create years of

complex compliance problems. California,

New York, and Illinois are each

strengthening anti-discrimination

enforcement framework simultaneously as

the federal government retreats from

DEI. Companies operating nationally face

contradicting requirements subject to

what California law requires and what

federal executive orders now prohibit,

and the litigation generated by that

contradiction will run for years,

regardless of which party controls the

White House. AI hiring tools are

emerging as a potential path past the

cultural war entirely. Companies

deploying algorithm audits and fairness

reviews of AI hiring systems can argue

for legally defensible, mathematically

documented approaches to reducing

discriminatory outcomes without

mandatory training programs, diversity

goals, or ideological commitments. If

the target shifts from changing human

attitudes through workshops to auditing

and correcting algorithmic bias through

engineering, the entire architecture of

DEI changes and most of the cultural

conflict that defined DEI between 2020

and 2025 becomes structurally

unnecessary. The Rasmusen poll released

in 2025 found that 43% of Americans view

DEI as an excuse for discrimination.

Only 33% said DEI improved companies and

34% said it made companies worse. Among

respondents who were very familiar with

DEI programs, 51% said outcomes had

deteriorated under them. The people with

the most direct experience were most

likely to conclude the programs had

failed. The AP NORC poll from July 2025

found that only one-third of Americans

believed DEI initiatives had reduced

discrimination against women, Hispanic

people, or Asian-Americans. Roughly 4 in

10 believed DEI had helped address bias

against black people. DEI's primary

stated benefit. Nearly 30% of Americans

believed DEI initiatives had increased

discrimination, including discrimination

against white people. DEI got its

founding problem right. Documented

provable discrimination against black

Americans, women, and other groups

produced real, measurable harm across

generations, and that harm created

legitimate demand for a policy response.

The legal frameworks, Title 7, the equal

protection clause, and early affirmative

action mandates produced real progress.

Specific targeted evidence-based

interventions produced genuine

improvements in specific contexts. The

original impulse and the original tools

had genuine merit. What followed after

2020 was an overcorrection. The movement

shifted from addressing specific

documented discriminatory practices to

implementing sweeping ideological

frameworks applied universally without

reference to evidence of effectiveness.

It elevated group identity over

individual dignity. Corporate HR

departments became political enforcement

mechanism. Workplaces became

environments where employees calculated

their career costs of honest

disagreement before opening their mouths

in training sessions. Billions of

dollars in consulting contracts produced

little measurable benefit. DEI advocates

alienated moderate white voters,

working-class voters of all backgrounds,

skeptical academics, and eventually

young men across racial lines by using

corrosive shamebased approaches that

provoked resistance rather than building

the broad coalitions the cause needed.

The anti-Dei movement in term correctly

diagnosed most of these pathologies

while simultaneously conflating the

dysfunction of the implementation with

the legitimacy of the original problem.

Eliminating DEI offices does not

eliminate the resume callback gaps that

audit studies have documented for three

decades. Disbanding chief diversity

officer positions does not close the

lending discrimination gaps that federal

data has measured for just as long.

Whatever comes after DEI will eventually

have to address the conditions that

produce DEI or those conditions will

produce the next generation of demand

for remediation. Andrew Johnson made

that mistake in 1866 and the country has

made some version of it several times

since. I'll see you in the next one.

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