Author: John Combs

As one of his many first acts as the new king of the free world, Donald Jordana Trump has written an executive order rolling back diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) schemes that he calls “dangerous, demeaning and immoral” and if only he’d found an ‘E’ word instead of ‘demeaning’ he could have done something clever there.

A government memo written in large Sharpie letters has told federal agencies to put all diversity staff on immediate paid leave.

“Yeah, it’s a win-win for me,” commented self-proclaimed diversity hire, Eric Trump. “I don’t have to work and I still get paid? Hell yeah, what’s not to like?”

The memo gives instructions to put staff on leave, report back with how they’ve done that, submit a plan for further staff reductions, AND report any effort to disguise DEI programs with “coded or imprecise language” whatever that means, could they be more precise?

In the kerfuffle, Elon Musk has reportedly also been put on leave. Internal documents from the Office of Personal Management (OPM) suggest that Musk might have been a DEI hire all along having ticked the boxes on his application for ‘African’, ‘probably on the spectrum’ and ‘just generally unemployable’.

So to explain for the people in the back row: the idea is that DEI is supposed to compensate for those traditionally discriminated against by gender, ethnicity, sexuality, religion, disability and trivia knowledge. Opinions on DEI predictably divide along political lines with the liberal left LAMEstream media saying it’s a necessary policy to help rectify hundreds of years of injustice and unconscious biases. The conservative right COOLstream media say that it’s fundamentally unAmerican and unDemocratic and unMeritocratic and unConstitutional, people should be hired on ability, not anything else and to do so is in fact the prejudiced option.

The truth is both opinions are correct but who is right? Does DEI actually address inequality or does it just get abused? Can people hire fairly PURELY based on merit without any other biases getting in the way? The problem is not a disagreement with whether DEI works or is fair, the problem is that both sides aren’t in agreement with the initial premise that there even is any inequality. The left says there are still deeply entrenched disparities whilst some on the right say no, racism ended with Obama (or something, idk). Keep going right and the extreme opinion is that there is inequality and that’s a good thing, the wHites should be out on top, but now we’re into plain old-fashioned racism.

The difficulty is that all these arguments and opinions are all swirled up in each other making it hard to separate good-faith arguments from your classic bigotry. And that confusion isn’t helped by the left seeing that swirly mess and crying ‘racist’ because it’s the most hyperbolic retort like what I just did a paragraph ago.

Maybe that’s too forgiving to Trump. It’s hard to look at a mass firing of theoretically underrepresented people and not think it’s mean-spirited. Without an agreement on the initial problem and without an agreement on whether the solution works, it feels more like political flexing than an actual step to making things better.

What do you think? Email in or comment below with your favorite death threat.