A little bigotry, for a treat. It’s been over ten months since I wrote about America’s vibe shift, and a great release of the regressive worm-brained hold on culture — the thought policing, the stylish self-loathing, and the relentless bigotry in service, we were told for years, of ending bigotry. At the top of 2023, emboldened by Elon Musk’s Twitter revolution, exhausted Americans rejected the historic quantities of bullshit they were made to endure throughout the 20-teens and early 2020s, and the culture war was paused. At the time, I used the word “détente.” A brief, strange quiet followed, and then there was a year of backlash.

It’s possible reaction to the One Party State’s Stasi shit was always inevitable, regardless of who owned Twitter. But what we know for sure is this: unshackled by a new, freer social media landscape (or, at least in terms of political speech), cultural reactionaries lit up in righteous fury with their former prison guards, concluding in these final weeks of 2023 with a firestorm of popular outrage surrounding “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion,” or DEI, the racist, sexist operating philosophy of the prior zeitgeist, which has now metastasized at every major institution in the country. Last week, following and in some sense catalyzed by the disastrous congressional hearing of Harvard’s president and unofficial DEI chief Claudine Gay, this backlash reached a fever pitch, at which point Elon entered the chat. “DEI must DIE,” he posted on Twitter to his 166.8 million followers. “The point was to end discrimination, not replace it with different discrimination.” The sentiment, already popular and widely shared among prominent figures throughout the technology industry, the government, and even certain corners of our media, is now ubiquitous. Still, can DEI truly be stopped, or have the apostles of this twisted faith already won?

Let’s start with a steelman. What is DEI? Proponents argue America’s outcomes, roughly defined in terms of income and positions held at high-status companies and institutions, reveal a bias against women and a handful of struggling racial minority groups. Given no explicitly bigoted laws or policies exist, this “white supremacist” bias is determined implicit, and faced with so frightening and formidable a specter as this invisible, all-powerful white supremacy, a blunt, essential course of action has been prescribed in boardrooms across the country. Our medicine: a brute force rearrangement of income and demographic outcomes to be more reflective of the broader national population, regardless of merit, background, or even the demographic breakdown of men and women applying for any given role. The philosophy of DEI is considered new, but it’s existed for many decades, in one form or another. Long ago, you were probably introduced to it by its birth name: “Affirmative Action.”