DEI’s destruction hit industries far beyond Hollywood, colleges, media | Opinion
Earlier this month, the right-leaning commentariat was atwitter over an essay in Compact magazine by Jacob Savage about how diversity, equity and inclusion policies in Hollywood, national media and academia had wrecked the careers of a generation of young white heterosexual males who were denied entry level work in order to give jobs in these elite industries to racial and sexual minorities and women. There were columns in The Washington Post and New York Times, and more magazine articles, lamenting the tale and lambasting DEI, along with an endless stream of social media posts on the topic as well as a scoffing backlash from the liberals.
I’ve worked in media for the last 30-some years and I know Compact’s DEI stories were true in the media, and I figure they are true about Hollywood and academia. But the three industries are ridiculously liberal outliers in the spectrum of work in America. I doubted that DEI at a plumbing company in the real world outside New York, D.C., Hollywood and America’s college campuses amounted to much.
So I asked readers of The Point, my conservative newsletter, what their experience was in the last few years. (You can sign up for The Point below.) If you can judge by the deluge of emails from all over the country in my inbox, boy, was I wrong. DEI is very much a thing whether you are a call center denizen, an engineer or a banker.
Even though I asked for stories pro and con, all I got was negative stories (perhaps not a surprise since my audience leans conservative). I asked a dozen of them if I could use their names and to a person, none wanted me to. Some were leery even of my using their state, which tells you all you need to know about the hold that DEI still has on management and human resources around the country, even as the Trump administration tries to shut DEI down.
Divisive training longer, more intrusive
Bret, a middle-aged guy in the Pacific Northwest works in health care, where he says DEI has been a divisive presence. As the years of DEI have passed, training for workers at his employer have grown longer, more detailed and more intrusive. In the most recent year, he was required to take five 90-minute trainings on 1) Identity, Privilege, and Intersectionality 2) A History of Race and Racism in Medicine and Science 3) Social Determinants of Health 4) Gender and Sexual Diversity and 5) Bias and Microaggressions.
That surpasses what I have had to do at a past employer where training was only an hour a couple times a year. I had to answer a test at the end, which infuriated me because I had to regurgitate the left-wing ideology on command of my HR and management betters. Bret, after watching a couple of the trainings, figured out he could just turn down the volume so he didn’t have to listen anymore.
Jan, who was on the job for 23 years, lives in the Kansas City area, where she worked for a major cellphone company in procurement. “Their constant DEI requirements became excessive. We had to take DEI classes quarterly, join a DEI group, and list it all on our performance reviews. We were given a list of DEI groups to join (LBG, race, nationality, etc.) … Upper management email signatures began to list their gender preferences,” she replied to the newsletter.
DEI became part of her daily work as well, “We were forced to list how many minority-owned vendors we gave business to and what our annual spend with them was. Our mandated quota for minority spend was increased every year,” she wrote. She told me that some companies used minority or women fronts to call themselves minorities, while others had to be trained to go through a certification process as only officially blessed minorities counted.
I count myself lucky that there was never a bean-counter approach to DEI in the department where I worked. It would have been a nightmare trying to run columns with an eye to getting experts who checked the right racial boxes. My colleagues who did reporting weren’t so lucky, periodically having to audit the sources they used in their news stories.
Joe, who works for a chemical company at one of their plant sites, reports an experience that rhymes with Bret’s and Jan’s in many ways. He said the mandate was from on high. “All these ‘Focus’/Impact groups of all sorts (black, women, gay, LGTBQ, Asian, etc) had executive leader champions.” Members of these groups could spend work time on their activities, and he grew frustrated as again and again, the real work of his employer was delayed to make time for DEI activities. Oddly, at least to him, he noted that the main beneficiaries of DEI in hiring were white women, not minorities.
‘Real equity worth figuring out and building upon’
Priscilla from Washington state grew angry at hiring that didn’t focus on qualifications first. She strongly believes in equal treatment, but thinks DEI went too far. “Pick the one that offers the most for the company, no matter what he or she looks like. No matter if transgender or with green or purple hair, or from outer space. I don’t care,” she wrote me. “Real ‘equity’ is worth figuring out and building upon,” she said.
The negative stories went on and on from Jack, a chemical engineer, and Bill, who works in insurance in North Carolina. A Hispanic C-suite executive in a Florida financial services company wrote me: “For years I have watched meritocracy die a slow death. DEI dominated hiring and advancement decisions and companies tooted their horns publicly for the misguided practices of favoring certain skin colors, sexual preferences, political alignments and genders over competence and merits. The result of these misguided practices have impacted our employment quality immensely.”
He said he saw the obsession with DEI derail the culture of significant companies in the American economy. DEI, he said, “has created environments of entitlements, resentment, passive resistance, conflict and bias as opposed to the previously predominant corporate cultures anchors of effort, achievement, collaboration and cooperation.“
An observer from 1950s America might have seen those very things in the white workforce as some businesses integrated for the first time, but it is clear that DEI has gone too far.
Everyday people impacted by DEI
The audience of my newsletter is small and by no means representative of the country, but I think there is more to be told about the broad impact of DEI practices, especially over the last five years since George Floyd’s death, when many companies put the effort into overdrive. It is disappointing that something so broadly experienced has until now been nearly invisible.
The people who wrote me aren’t TV talking heads or television industry insiders. They are the kind of people who could be your Boy Scout leader or Sunday school teacher or a worker down at the plant. They’re regular folks who I don’t think have been heard by anyone as HR departments and senior executives imposed a liberal experiment on their work lives in which these regular people never got a say.
It is time for that to change.
This story was originally published December 26, 2025 at 6:07 AM with the headline "DEI’s destruction hit industries far beyond Hollywood, colleges, media | Opinion."
