President Donald Trump kept a major campaign promise this week when he terminated all diversity, equity, and inclusion mandates. With the stroke of a pen, he freed the government from checking imaginary boxes on race, gender, and sexuality and returned to a focus on merit.
While some bemoan this move, many, including businesses, would argue that good old-fashioned hard work just came back into style. In fact, the death of DEI didn’t start with a presidential executive order. In the private sector, major corporate institutions such as Lowe’s, John Deere, Harley Davidson, Tractor Supply, and Ford Motor Company had already begun dismantling DEI practices in their companies. They weren’t afraid of Trump. They were ready to focus on their employees, customers, and businesses without threats of debanking and public humiliation.
Trump ended the derogatory practice of calling people “DEI hires” on his first day in office. He has made it clear that he does not accept discrimination in hiring. The American dream is possible based on how hard you work, not what you look like. It is what the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. meant by judging one by the content of his character, not the color of his skin.
In his inaugural speech, Trump said, “I stand before you now as proof that you should never believe that something is impossible to do.” He added, “In America, the impossible is what we do best.” American independence, freedom, and ingenuity can ultimately never be thwarted by leftist utopian mandates because they are fantasy not rooted in the real world.
As a woman who has worked in both female-dominated and male-dominated industries, I assure you that forcing unnatural diversity won’t make a workforce or university body great and won’t end discrimination. In fact, DEI has triggered a new level of frustration and discrimination across the country.
I recently sat with a Silicon Valley tech executive attending his first Republican event after DEI policies victimized his family. As an Asian American, his son had just been rejected from his dream Ivy League university. The student was overqualified, but pointy-headed social tinkerers chose to rip away his dreams because of the race category he checked on his application. The father began researching and found that hardworking Asian Americans were being rejected by universities across the country because they were believed to be occupying too many seats. Keep in mind, these were spots they earned but were now being given to students who had not worked nearly as hard. His niece decided to test the DEI practices by applying as a transgender student. She was immediately accepted. A shock wave went through the whole family, changing their politics and their views on lab-grown diversity.
This family, like many others, believed in opportunities for everyone, except for those who didn’t earn them. They found out the hard way that phony, calculated diversity does not exemplify the values of hardworking Americans. Is that to say no one is ever discriminated against in the hiring process? Of course not. But the government, a think tank, or even a corporate DEI department can’t stop a jerk from being a jerk. However, the public can stop bigots with their own voices in ways they never could in the past. Employees can share their experiences on social media, Glassdoor reviews, or other rating platforms.
Last spring, a popular conservative branded regular people as DEI hires when he expressed concern over flying in a plane with a black pilot or dealing with a woman at the customer service desk. While my initial reaction was anger at this type of rhetoric and the pain it causes for hardworking and worthy women, black people, and others, without that unvarnished opinion, I don’t think the average American could see the true damage done by DEI.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Today, I am grateful to people such as Charlie Kirk, who are willing to offer some of the worst-case scenarios to prove how dangerous DEI can be for those of us who have endured the ugly label: “DEI hire.” Our approach is different, but his spotlight exposed that every time quotas are instituted, standards drop. Conservative leaders helped to break the chains choking corporate America and allowed companies to fight for merit because the culture was shifting that way.
America is not perfect. We are not naive about that. But the lab-grown utopian mandates are not the solution. The golden age of Trump has begun, and together, we will fight for the American dream for all people based on merit, hard work, and character and end the failed social experiment of DEI for good.
Tudor Dixon is a former Republican gubernatorial nominee, executive in Michigan’s steel industry, breast cancer survivor, and working mother of four girls. She is the host of the Tudor Dixon Podcast.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
