Conservatives understand DEI as the practice of critical race theory (CRT). CRT derives from Marxism. Karl Marx advocated class warfare between owners and workers. CRT/DEI creates class warfare between minorities against whites. Instead of eliminating unlawful racism under the law that has existed for decades (Title IX of the Civil Rights Act of 1967), DEI promotes racism based on skin color.

Consideration of race in admissions was ruled unlawful in two recent Supreme Court cases, Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) v. Harvard and SFFA v. University of North Carolina. Up until June of last year, colleges and universities were allowed to discriminate in favor of blacks and Hispanics over whites with better qualifications. That is now banned. Therefore, it is hard to understand how DEI can stand, as it expressly discriminates against whites. This has been extensively covered by hundreds of articles in conservative media, proving its negative impact on the military, just as one example. Articles by this author describing in great detail the harmful effects of DEI on the military can be found at STARRS.

There is a growing chorus of noted liberals who are also sounding the alarm about DEI.

Bari Weiss was an opinion editor and writer at The New York Times up until 2022. She left the NYT, citing bullying by colleagues and an “illiberal environment.” She and others formed the Free Press, a popular and growing free speech platform on Substack. She says: “We have been seeing for several years now the damage this ideology has done: DEI, and its cadres of enforcers, undermine the central missions of the institutions that adopt it. But nothing has made the dangers of DEI more clear than what’s happening these days on our college campuses — the places where our future leaders are nurtured. It is there that professors are compelled to pledge fidelity to DEI in order to get hired, promoted, or tenured.”

Bill Maher is a famous liberal comedian whose show “Real Time with Bill Maher” has been on HBO for 22 years. In his show, he has taken on wokeness in our society, the numbers of DEI staff at colleges and universities, the suppression of free speech on campus, the nonsense of San Francisco’s “crazy” racial reparations, racial quotas for airline pilots, and equity versus equality in his classic humorous and mocking style.

Andrew Sullivan is a prominent liberal intellectual and has come out vigorously against DEI. “We’ve got an enormous problem with DEI,” he says. “It goes completely against what all of us seek when we need the best surgeon to operate on us, the best engineer to design a new bridge or the best pilot to safely fly us home. Even though we all know this, many of us have been afraid to say this lately. It is entirely rational and humane to seek out the best qualified people to fill jobs. Full stop. Although it is often a challenge to decide who is the best qualified person for the job, there is no close competitor to basing our decisions on merit.” See his recent article at Dangerous Intersection.

Elon Musk, owner of Twitter (now X), was quoted in Forbes correctness and ‘woke’ culture.“

Glenn Loury is the Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences and Professor of Economics at Brown University. "I’ve spent a lot of time picking apart the hollowness and cynicism of university DEI programs on my show and in this newsletter,” he wrote at Substack. “I can see the damage DEI has done to the university’s mission, but usually the planning stays behind closed doors. There’s a reason for that. With the ballooning presence of DEI programs in university org charts, the diversity industry has taken on a life of its own. It employs many, many thousands of people, and a lot of them are handsomely remunerated. There’s money in DEI. And where there’s money, there’s a vested interest on the part of DEI officers, consultants, deans, and many others in keeping the project going, keeping the dollars flowing, and keeping the paychecks coming.”

Jason Hill is professor of philosophy at DePaul University and the author of the groundbreaking What Do White Americans Owe Black People: Racial Justice in the Age of Post-Oppression. He says: “It has been more than fifty years since the Civil Rights Act enshrined equality under the law for all Americans. Since that time, America has enjoyed an era of unprecedented prosperity, domestic and international peace, and technological advancement. But the dominant narrative, repeated in the media and from the angry mouths of politicians and activists, is the exact opposite of the reality. They paint a portrait of an America rife with racial and ethnic division, where minorities are mired in a poverty worse than slavery, and white people stand at the top of an unfairly stacked pyramid of privilege.”

Bill Ackman is a lifelong liberal, a billionaire, a graduate of Harvard, and a huge Harvard donor. He is also an opponent of DEI and its foster-child anti-Semitism. He posted a 4,000-word criticism of DEI to X, and it says in part, “Under DEI, one’s degree of oppression is determined based upon where one resides on a so-called intersectional pyramid of oppression where whites, Jews, and Asians are deemed oppressors, and a subset of people of color, LGBTQ people, and/or women are deemed to be oppressed.” Furthermore, “DEI is racist because reverse racism is racism, even if it is against white people (and it is remarkable that I even need to point this out).”

Prominent liberal thought leaders are laying bare the evil nature of DEI. Let us discard DEI to the dustbin of history.