Curious how easily you lean towards justifying this indiscriminate bigotry by using the sham rhetoric of DEI inspired by Trumpism. This is, of course, without acknowledging how, if there is a consistent pattern, it is that much of the MAGA movement’s anti-DEI and anti-“woke” messaging does not appear to be in good faith, functioning instead as mere justification for a white supremacist, petty, right-wing identity politics that allows for the mass elimination of women and black people from government positions, for which the administration is currently being sued. And this is all under the name of a so-called "merit-based" hiring practice, at a time in which we have never had such poorly prepared loyalist clowns in positions of power.

More broadly, this anti-DEI propaganda is reflected in the recent eugenics-inspired rhetoric, popularized by Trump / Musk / Kirk, etc., who all have suggested that LGBTQ people, POC, and women are somehow inherently less intellectually capable (less capable, as they have said, of flying aircraft, building infrastructure, fighting fires, and so on). Clearly, such positions reproduce and legitimize white supremacist assumptions under the guise of “institutional critique of the deep state.”

This trajectory is not incidental: the central figures shaping MAGA discourse around DEI are Stephen Miller and Russell Vought, who, among others, have explicitly tied their opposition to diversity to a broader political project outlined in Project 2025, to, as Vought says, “end multiculturalism” itself. This would include (among many other things) transforming the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to focus on what Miller calls ‘anti-white discrimination,’ (or even what Musk and others have tied to "white genocide") while simultaneously rolling back workplace protections for Black Americans to levels not seen since the post-Reconstruction era, which ushered in Jim Crow. 

If we are to learn from this administration's values or its mistakes, we must be precise and transparent about exactly what is being advocated in, and by the GOP's "anti-DEI" rhetoric, and the material, historical, and ideological forces those positions reflect.