The war on DEI is a smoke screen

Violent metaphors abound for what’s happening in Washington: Elon Musk and his allies have taken a slash-and-burn approach to the government and a sledgehammer to government institutions, doing away with supposed waste and excess while leaving the fundamental structure intact. All of this is being done with the stated goal of ridding the federal workforce of the scourge of wokeness and DEI” diversity, equity, and inclusion, a term that has become a catchall for anything Musk and other MAGA insiders don’t like. USAID is DEI. The National Institutes of Health is DEI. The National Endowment for the Arts? Obviously DEI. We can probably all agree that the woke word cloud at the FBI Academy in Quantico is DEI. Major broadcasters are pushing DEI on their viewers; public school teachers are using it to indoctrinate impressionable young students. The only solution to this is, of course, to defund and dismantle everything.

The war on DEI is a smoke screen; its an opportunity to unite various conservative factions under a single rallying cry, giving them a common enemy on which to blame their myriad concerns. It unites recent converts to the cause, like Musk, wit …