Democrats will try to give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to diversity, equity, and inclusion. But the Left cannot reverse the fatal wounds that President Donald Trump dealt this system of state-sponsored racism, as Fox News anchor Will Cain correctly describes it.

Fetishistic, twisted, and cruel programs such as these are now kaput:

• PBS allocated $1.3 million to “allow indigenous journalists to challenge existing narratives about climate change.” Cecilia Loving, the network’s recently resigned senior vice president for DEI, launched “indigenous healing circles.” According to Josh Code of The Free Press, an internal 2023 presentation explained that “the vulnerability, intimacy, and trust developed through the safe container of circles supports our endorphin system, which in turn stimulates more trust.”

• Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency unearthed $101 million in U.S. Department of Education DEI grants including one for “faculty workshops [titled] ‘Decolonizing the Curriculum.” Another aimed to “help students understand/interrogate the complex histories involved in oppression, and help students recognize areas of privilege and power on an individual and collective basis.”

• A “vast DEI bureaucracy” within the U.S. military has promoted “race- and sex-based scapegoating and stereotyping,” reports Arizona State University’s Center for American Institutions.

• MaineHealth hospital DEI executive Ryan Polly hosted an “anti-racist prayer” in 2023. He beseeched fellow Caucasians to apologize for being white and “challenge the systems that have been designed to give us the advantage and oppress everyone else.”

Trump’s Jan. 21 executive order dispatched these racist shenanigans before a firing squad.

“Long-standing federal civil rights laws protect individual Americans from discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin,” Trump’s order began. “As President, I have a solemn duty to ensure that these laws are enforced for the benefit of all Americans.”

Trump then lamented that DEI policies “not only violate the text and spirit of our long-standing federal civil rights laws, they also undermine our national unity, as they deny, discredit, and undermine the traditional American values of hard work, excellence, and individual achievement in favor of an unlawful, corrosive, and pernicious identity-based spoils system.”

Also, Disney, Harley-Davidson, Walmart, and other companies are pounding private-sector nails into DEI’s casket.

So, what will replace DEI or, more accurately, outlive its demise? These small-government leaders are highly optimistic about what tomorrow will bring:

• “After President Trump ended DEI policies in one fell swoop, the radical Left’s predictable meltdown ensued,” Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, told me. “Now, they’re shamelessly fearmongering, telling Americans that President Trump and conservatives are attempting to strip them of their civil rights, openly discriminate based on race, and deny candidates based on their religion. This is all a lie. Conservatives are on the right side of history, and we should not be shy about pushing back on the Left’s lies and dishonest tactics. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is intact, respected, and upheld, and the removal of DEI policies furthers its goal of ensuring we have a society that does not judge individuals based on race, sex, religion, or anything other than merit, as it was intended to be.”

• “Assuming Trump’s order to abolish DEI programs survives judicial challenges, the various civil rights acts Congress has passed will remain in force,” predicts Roger Pilon, the Cato Institute’s senior fellow in constitutional studies. “What will end is the discrimination those DEI programs entail—in the name of antidiscrimination.”

• “The end of DEI heralds the return of meritocracy,” says Horace Cooper, a fellow cofounder of Project 21, the black-conservative network. “Smart blacks, browns, and whites need not fear they won’t be allowed to achieve. A merit-based society is far from the return of Jim Crow. Jim Crow specifically stood for the notion that talent had to take a back seat to race. It was immoral, yes, but it was also inefficient because it precluded on the basis of race individuals regardless of how capable they were. America’s Golden Age absolutely requires a full-throated embrace of merit. I, for one, welcome it!”

• “The near disappearance of deliberate, invidious discrimination against legally protected classes gave rise to the DEI complex in the first place,” explains the Manhattan Institute’s Heather Mac Donald, author of the jaw-dropping jeremiad “When Race Trumps Merit.” “If actual, invidious discrimination were such a problem, the race hustlers would not have found a substitute for it. Real discrimination will remain illegal and actionable—if anyone can find it.”

Specifically, post-DEI, the Civil Right Act of 1964 will function, as will America’s entire antidiscrimination infrastructure—from the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division to attorneys general’s offices in all 50 states to equal-employment agencies in city halls across America. Hundreds of public interest law firms and thousands of individual attorneys will remain all too eager to file private lawsuits on behalf of those who claim discrimination in workplaces, public schools, and government contracts.

If firefighters, police officers, or teachers do not get raises or promotions because their bosses hate blacks, despise Hispanics, cannot stand gays, or are terrified of women, those folks can sue for promotions, raises, back pay, and other forms of relief. DEI’s demise will not resurrect Jim Crow, unleash homophobes, or empower male chauvinists.

What will vanish are conference rooms full of “diversity consultants” who badger white people into feeling guilty about their pallor while telling blacks that their dark skin will cripple their progress and condemn them to poverty and injustice, because that’s how “the system” works. 

Coca-Cola’s DEI efforts urged employees to become “less white” by being “less oppressive,” “less arrogant,” and by making a “break with white solidarity.” The United Federation of Teachers announced a seminar on how to develop “resistance against the harmful effects of whiteness in our lives.” After a backlash erupted, the teachers union stood down. Seattle hosted a training program for “white city employees” to acknowledge their “complicity in the system of white supremacy.” The Seattle School Board declared that “math is a tool for oppression.”

Trump is burying this destructive nonsense.

As DEI is lowered into its grave, the civil rights protections secured by the Freedom Riders, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and other heroes of Black History Month will keep protecting genuine victims of actual discrimination, whenever they emerge.

Meanwhile, Americans can wish a fond “good riddance!” to DEI’s obsessive, relentless clawing at this country’s racial wounds, so that they never heal.

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.

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