By Ben Johnson

At the beginning of his administration, President Joe Biden explained why he planned to institute Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs across the federal government. “[O]ur soul will be troubled as long as systemic racism is allowed to persist,” he said. Yet a new study finds that being exposed to DEI training or materials makes people more likely to agree with statements made by Adolf Hitler — yes, “literally Hitler.”

Researchers had subjects read “anti-oppressive DEI educational materials frequently used in interventional and educational settings.” Then they presented subjects with a series of statements based on quotations from Adolf Hitler, replacing the word “Jews” with “brahmins,” the favored class in India’s caste system. The subjects “exposed to the DEI content were markedly more likely to endorse Hitler’s demonization statements, agreeing that Brahmins are ‘parasites’ (+35.4%), ‘viruses’ (+33.8%), and ‘the devil personified’ (+27.1%),” the study found. “These findings suggest that exposure to anti-oppressive narratives can increase the endorsement of the type of demonization and scapegoating characteristic of authoritarianism.”

Rather than engendering racial harmony, DEI training made subjects hypersensitive to sleights and likely to detect offense where none was given, researchers discovered. “[W]hile purporting to combat bias, some anti-oppressive DEI narratives can engender a hostile attribution bias and heighten racial suspicion, prejudicial attitudes, authoritarian policing, and support for punitive behaviors in the absence of evidence for a transgression deserving punishment,” added the researchers from Rutgers University Social Perception Lab and the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) in their study titled “Instructing Animosity: How DEI Pedagogy Produces the Hostile Attribution Bias.”

Further, they concluded, DEI trainings’ extreme and often distorted view of race relations creates participants’ “demands for more anti-oppressive DEI training, creating a self-reinforcing cycle of suspicion and intolerance.”

“Diversity, Equity and Inclusion — those are three words that sound great but, when implemented into the policy by the Biden administration, have been very devastating, even toward the stated goals that they claim to espouse,” Rep. Michael Cloud (R-Texas) told “Washington Watch” last week.

The chairman of the anti-discrimination organization Do No Harm, Stanley Goldfarb, had previously linked DEI to anti-Semitism. Hitler regularly accused Jews of discriminating against ethnic Germans and conspiring to enrich themselves from German labor — much as DEI and allied radical theories accuse white people of doing today.

DEI Promotes Racial Discrimination

DEI self-consciously bases itself on critical race theory (CRT). The Marxist-inspired ideology holds that all differences in outcome between ethnic groups stem exclusively from racial discrimination, that American society systemically discriminates against minorities, and that all white people share in unearned privilege. “[N]o white member of society seems quite so innocent,” wrote CRT pioneers Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic in their book “Critical Race Theory: An Introduction.” Teachers in Buffalo, New York, taught students that “all white people play a part in perpetuating systemic racism.”

To overturn alleged “systemic racism,” CRT/DEI activists urge the federal government and private employers to discriminate in favor of racial minorities. Ibram X. Kendi wrote in his bestselling book, “How to be an Antiracist”:

“[R]acial discrimination is not inherently racist. The defining question is whether the discrimination is creating equity or inequity. If discrimination is creating equity [minority wealth], then it is antiracist. If discrimination is creating inequity, then it is racist. Someone reproducing inequity through permanently assisting an overrepresented racial group into wealth and power is entirely different than someone challenging that inequity by temporarily assisting an underrepresented racial group into relative wealth and power until equity is reached. The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.”

Kendi removed this passage from the Kindle version of his book sometime last year, complaining it had “been heavily quoted by the conservators of racism to attack me and this book.” Kendi made a stealth edit, allegedly to make it “harder to distort the meaning of these sentences.” The updated passage changes the words but not the meaning, stating:

“The only remedy to negative racist discrimination that produces inequity is positive antiracist discrimination that produces equity. The only remedy to past negative racist discrimination that has produced inequity is present positive antiracist discrimination that produces equity. The only remedy to present negative racist discrimination toward inequity is future positive antiracist discrimination toward equity.”

Public opposition to DEI’s advocacy of racial discrimination against white people has led numerous corporations to step away from the controversial ideology. Walmart recently walked back its DEI policies, joining such corporate titans as Caterpillar, Boeing, and Toyota.

Yet DEI and CRT currently thrive on college campuses. Two out of three major universities require students to take courses in DEI, according to the Goldwater Institute. The Supreme Court ruled last June that racial discrimination in college admissions violates the 14th Amendment. “To rigorously enforce yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling, I will eliminate all ‘Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion’ programs across the entire federal government,” promised then-presidential candidate Donald Trump.

For threatening to ding DEI, Democrats denounced the 45th president as a fascist. Biden charged Trump with “echoing the same exact language used in Nazi Germany.” After receiving the 2024 Democratic presidential nomination — despite bypassing the primary process — Vice President Kamala Harris closed her campaign by calling Trump a threat to “our democracy,” falsely accusing the former president of threatening to use the military against “the enemy within” on election day 2024, and agreeing with the statement that “Donald Trump is a fascist.” The Associated Press reported that two-thirds of Kamala Harris supporters named the so-called threat to democracy as their top issue.

DEI and Acts of Political Violence

President-elect Trump and those close to him have suffered as a result. He experienced two attempted assassinations on the campaign trail this summer. On Wednesday morning, the day before Thanksgiving, the Trump campaign announced several Cabinet nominees faced “violent, unAmerican threats to their lives and those who live with them.” The threats included bomb threats and “swatting” — falsely calling the SWAT team to target a family. “This is what happens when you call a major party candidate ‘literally Hitler’ and ‘a threat to [d]emocracy’ for years,” observed former Michigan State Representative Brett LaFave.

DEI concepts have exploded into violence in the past. The target of Nashville school shooter Audrey Hale, who identified as a transgender man named Aiden and killed six people at Covenant School last March, exhibited signs of CRT-based self-loathing. In her journals, Hale referred to herself as a “white nothingness” festooned in thoughts of “white privilege [sic], an embarrassment to self.” Later, she wrote, “I am nothing. Brown love is the most beautiful kind.” She referred to her future victims as “white privileges.”

The federal government’s caricature of Trump voters has denied them aid after this summer’s hurricanes. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) 2022-2026 Strategic Plan ranks as “Goal 1: Instill Equity as a Foundation of Emergency Management.” A FEMA worker, Marn'i Washington, instructed canvassers to avoid storm-ravaged Florida homes that sported signs supporting Donald Trump for president. Washington later said she was “simply following orders” from above: FEMA characterized Trump supporters as anti-government and potentially violent.

“I can tell you for this particular incident, at the direction of our employee, 20 homes were skipped,” testified the Biden administration’s FEMA administrator, Deanne Criswell, before the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability on November 19.

The same day, the committee passed the Dismantle DEI Act (H.R.8706), introduced by Cloud, by a 23-17, party-line vote. Among its other provisions, the Dismantle DEI Act would end all federal training that requires employees to agree “that a particular race, color, ethnicity, religion, biological sex, or national origin is inherently or systemically superior or inferior, oppressive or oppressed, or privileged or unprivileged.”

“DEI programs masquerade as fairness while instead fostering division, inefficiency, and discrimination in our institutions,” commented Cloud in an email sent to The Washington Stand. “The Dismantle DEI Act takes aim at this harmful ideology and will root it out of our government.”

“True justice is — and must remain — blind. It should not consider race, sex, or other characteristics when evaluating an individual. Instead, it must focus on fairness, merit, and equal opportunity,” Cloud told the committee before the vote. DEI represents “a dangerous detour that risks erasing the strides we’ve made toward a more perfect union. By dismantling these harmful policies, we can reaffirm our commitment to the ideals of equality, merit, and justice that make our nation great.”

Outgoing conservative Rep. Bob Good (R-Va.) introduced two bills to right DEI-inspired discrimination emanating out of the government into the private sector. The No Discrimination in Housing Act (H.R.10195) would prevent large corporate landholders that have a DEI initiative, such as Vanguard and Blackstone, from receiving the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC). The Flexibility in Housing Act of 2024 (H.R.10194) would halt the implementation of a Biden-Harris administration rule from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) requiring HUD grant recipients to implement equity-driven housing plans.

Christians Oppose the Suspicion and Offense at the Heart of DEI/CRT

Christians should welcome bills that eliminate DEI, CRT, and other forms of left-wing discrimination from government, education, and broader society. Further, Christians must make clear such racial discrimination is incompatible with the word of God. Christian love “is not easily provoked” (I Corinthians 13:5). “He who busies himself with the sins of others, or judges his brother on suspicion, has not yet even begun to repent or to examine himself so as to discover his own sins,” wrote St. Maximos the Confessor. Conversely, the Greek word translated as “the devil” (δι?βολος) literally means the “accuser, slanderer.”

Ironically, DEI supporters will likely impute false racist motivations to these bills, while slouching toward endorsing the words of the most racially focused totalitarian of the 20th century — and the spiritual power that stands behind all forms of ungodly oppression.

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.