Everybody Loves DEI Now

The way Trump regime officials tell it, and the way mainstream media outlets repeat it – sometimes verbatim – you'd think the question of whether the United States should promote diversity is precisely a 50-50 issue. You'd think there are exactly as many Americans who vehemently oppose diversity as there are Americans who support the creation of maintenance of a multicultural democracy.

You would be wrong to believe this reflects reality in any way, if the actual real-life numbers are to be believed. There is nothing close to a durable American constituency for tearing down Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programs and replacing them not with meritocratic systems, but with straight-up, in-your-face white supremacist retrenchment.

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The constituency for the regime's appalling, AI-powered attack on diversity in the ranks of government agencies, the military, and academia is, in fact, vanishingly small. It is the kind of constituency that can be ignored if politicians want to ignore it.

Beyond the chinless Elon Musk fanboys posting racist memes on the X platform from their mother's basements and commanding Grok to make them a digital girlfriend – the only kind of woman that doesn't find them repulsive – there isn't an appetite for taking a hatchet to diversity efforts as some kind of solution to whatever ails the nation.

Fewer than two in ten Americans surveyed by The Economist and YouGov in late February said bolstering diversity in the US makes the country a "worse place to live." Not even a quarter of white folks said diversity would be a detriment to the country, and nearly seven in ten self-identified independents said increasing diversity would make the US a better place or would not make much difference.

So-called non-MAGA Republicans, whatever that means, are cool to the regime's flailing efforts to kill DEI wherever it stands, going as far as firing high-ranking women and Black people in the military at the behest of fascist online posters who have directed the regime's actions since it took power in January 2025. A few national polls in 2025 found more Americans buying into the wretched idea that diversity efforts had gone too far and needed to be scaled back. The February 2026 polling suggests a good chunk of those people soured on anti-DEI politics after watching Republicans' attacks on diversity play out in every corner of American society. The viciousness with which the regime has sought to dismantle diversity may have planted the seeds of Woke 2.0, which is more clear-eyed and angrier than Woke 1.0.

Back to The Economist/YouGov findings: Outright saying a more diverse US makes the country a worse place is extraordinarily loaded. It tells me a few things about the respondent: They are classic, textbook-style white supremacists in that they believe in the genetic superiority of the white race, their worldview is tragically anchored in hierarchies of oppression – the soul-corroding idea that if I'm not atop that hierarchy, my enemy will be – and they have bought into the right-wing unreality in which civil rights and the promotion of diversity has gone too far and now, 61 years after passage of the Voting Rights Act, constitutes systemic discrimination against white Americans.

They Want The Robots To Be Racist

I have a bad habit of pretending the right-wing mind is some labyrinthian construct that one can only comprehend by sinking oneself into the deepest depths of conservative thought. Then I see right wingers begging machines to be racist and I realize how fucking stupid I’ve been, how needlessly

Bad Faith TimesDenny Carter

This is how you get an Education Department secretary who says with a straight face that she will fight for equal treatment for all American students via directives aimed at dismantling DEI initiatives in public schools. Deep within the sordid right-wing unreality – their own invented world shaped and reinforced through their powerful social media media machine – it is white students facing repression today in U.S. schools thanks to DEI policies that have – in the minds of true believers – flipped the hierarchies of oppression. This is one example of many from the second Trump term, and thankfully a federal judge recently saw through this bad-faith attack on DEI efforts in public schools and slapped down the Education Department's covert, racist directive – one that was never going to survive outside the right's unreality.

The fake reality in which anti-DEI policies are necessary is also why the regime's U.S. Equal Opportunity Employment Commission – a body charged with enforcing federal laws making it illegal to discriminate against a job applicant or employee – is asking white Americans to file complaints against companies that hired a person of color over them. With the sheen of caring about civil rights and equity and inclusion, the right-wing hacks who work for the Trump regime can pretend to be freedom fighters for the dispossessed, in this care white dudes forced to compete for jobs (and status) with ladies and people with brown and black skin. They even use the language of civil rights as cover for their hideous little plans, hoping, I suppose, that shredding diversity initiatives across the country will gain wider acceptance.

These vile anti-diversity efforts have not seen anything resembling popularity, as The Economist found in striking numbers. That four in ten self-identified MAGA respondents agree that diversity makes the country a worse place in which to live should be surprising to exactly no one. That it's not seven or eight out of ten MAGA freaks who say this highlights the smallness of the constituency that backs the regime's half-assed attempts to rewrite American history in the image of those who despise the country as it currently exists.

Removing a plaque commemorating the struggle of enslaved people – and having a judge immediately demand the restoration of the plaque – is not going to undo generations of progress, however slow and painful that progress has been. It might give regime officials a dopamine rush and draw praise from loveless weirdos on X, but it does nothing to achieve their overarching goal: Repealing the achievements of the Civil Rights movement, which they consider a mistake of history in need of correction.

Republicans Say Racism Is Over

The Economist/YouGov polling revealed a desire among right-wing Americans to be move beyond the push to make the United States a fairer and freer place for all. More than half of Republican respondents said Martin Luther King, Jr.'s dream of racial equality and equity had been achieved. A mere 12 percent of Republicans said MLK's dream of freedom for people of color in the US had not been realized.

Black and Latino respondents, as you might imagine, seemed a lot less certain about the fate of MLK's dream than Republican respondents.

If you, like me, are white and have lots of white family and friends, you've probably been told – a safe distanced from mixed company – that slavery and Jim Crow and systemic discrimination belongs to the past, that it has been dealt with, that we can and should move on from the messiness of righting historical wrongs and clearing a path for a sustainable multiracial, multicultural democratic republic. The laziness of this sort of thinking is designed to be political convenient.

When this thinking seeps into the worldviews of those with immense wealth and power, namely the billionaires who own our social media algorithms and the U.S. Supreme Court justices who are waging open war with the country's judiciary, you get body blow after body blow to the foundation of representative democracy. Belief that racism is indeed over – or that the Civil Rights movement went too far in correcting injustices – is the fuel for the Court's obliteration of the Voting Rights Act (VRA), for one particularly fucked up example. When a majority of the body that has the final say in the nation's laws buys into the unreality in which the VRA is either unnecessary in the third decade of the 21st century or actively discriminatory toward white people, this thinking becomes everyone's problem. The load-bearing aspect of democracy can't hold.

A society that collectively decides racism and repression and discrimination have been solved – that all of those pesky little boxes have been checked – can have a government and workplaces that side with me, the white guy. Bleeding DEI dry requires an acknowledgement that things have been fixed, not just among white people but among everyone. Without that widespread belief, you have diversity efforts surviving this blackpilled regime and one day thriving in a nation that has watched what anti-DEI politics look like and have not liked it, not one bit.

Follow Denny Carter on BlueSky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.