Denny Carter: Almost Everyone Loves DEI Now

By Denny Carter

The way Trump regime officials tell it, and the way mainstream media outlets repeat it – sometimes verbatim – you’d think the question of whether the United States should promote diversity is precisely a 50-50 issue. You’d think there are exactly as many Americans who vehemently oppose diversity as there are Americans who support the maintenance of a multicultural democracy.

You would be wrong to believe this reflects reality in any way, if the actual numbers are to be believed. There is nothing close to a durable American constituency for tearing down Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programs and replacing them not with meritocratic systems, but with straight up in-your-face white supremacist retrenchment.

The constituency for the regime’s appalling AI-powered attack on diversity in the ranks of government agencies, the military, and academia is, in fact, vanishingly small — the kind of fringe that can be ignored if politicians want to ignore it.

Beyond the chinless Elon Musk fanboys posting racist memes on X from their mother’s basements and commanding Grok to make them a digital girlfriend – the only kind of woman that doesn’t find them repulsive – there isn’t an appetite for taking a hatchet to diversity efforts as some kind of solution to whatever ails the nation.

Fewer than two in ten Americans surveyed by The Economist and YouGov in late February said bolstering diversity in the US makes the country a “worse place to live.” Not even a quarter of white folks said diversity would be a detriment to the country, and nearly seven in ten self-identified independents said increasing diversity would make the US a better place or not make much of a difference.

So-called “non-MAGA” Republicans, whatever that means, are cool to the regime’s flailing efforts to kill DEI, which have gone as far as firing high-ranking women and Black people in the military at the behest of fascist online posters who have directed the regime’s actions since it took power in January 2025. While some 2025 polls found more Americans buying into the wretched idea that diversity efforts had gone too far, the February 2026 data suggests a good chunk of those people soured on anti-DEI politics after watching Republicans’ attacks on diversity play out. The viciousness with which the regime has sought to dismantle diversity may have planted the seeds of Woke 2.0, which is more clear-eyed and angrier than Woke 1.0.

Back to The Economist/YouGov findings. Explicitly stating a more diverse US makes the country a worse place is an extraordinarily loaded position and tells me a few things about the respondents. They are textbook white supremacists in that they believe in the genetic superiority of the white race and their worldview is tragically anchored in hierarchies of oppression – the soul-corroding idea that if I’m not atop that hierarchy, my enemy will be. They have bought into the right-wing unreality in which civil rights have gone “too far” and now constitute systemic discrimination against white Americans.

This is how you get an Education Department secretary who says with a straight face that she will fight for equal treatment for all American students by dismantling DEI initiatives in public schools. Within this sordid right-wing unreality – their own invented world shaped and reinforced through their powerful social media media machine –  white students are the ones facing repression today. This is one example of many from the second Trump term, and thankfully a federal judge recently saw through this bad-faith attack and slapped down the Education Department’s covert, racist directive.

This fake reality is also why the regime’s U.S. Equal Opportunity Employment Commission – a body charged with enforcing laws that make it illegal to discriminate against a job applicant or employee – is now asking white Americans to file complaints against companies that hired a person of color over them. Under the sheen of caring about equity and inclusion, the right-wing hacks who work for the Trump regime pretend to be freedom fighters for the dispossessed – in this case, white dudes forced to compete for jobs (and status) with women and people of color. They even use the language of civil rights as cover for their hideous little plans, hoping, I suppose, that shredding diversity initiatives across the country will gain wider acceptance.

These vile anti-diversity efforts, however, have not seen anything resembling popularity, as The Economist found in striking numbers. That four in ten self-identified MAGA respondents agree that diversity makes the country a worse place to live is unsurprising; that it’s not seven or eight out of ten highlights how small the constituency that backs the regime’s half-assed attempts to rewrite American history actually is. 

Removing a plaque commemorating the struggle of enslaved people – only to have a judge immediately demand its restoration – is not going to undo generations of progress, however slow and painful that progress has been. It might give regime officials a dopamine rush and draw praise from loveless weirdos on X, but it does nothing to achieve their overarching goal of repealing the achievements of the Civil Rights movement, which they consider a historical mistake in need of correction.

The Economist/YouGov polling revealed a desire among right-wing Americans to move beyond the push to make the United States a fairer and freer place for all. More than half of Republican respondents said Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream of racial equality and equity has already been achieved. A mere 12 percent of Republicans said it had not been realized. Black and Latino respondents, as you might imagine, were much less certain.

If you, like me, are white and have lots of white family and friends, you’ve probably been told – at a safe distance from mixed company – that slavery and Jim Crow and systemic discrimination belong to the past, that it has been dealt with, that we can and should move on from the messiness of righting historical wrongs. The laziness of this sort of thinking is designed to be politically convenient.

A society that collectively decides racism has been “solved” – that all of those pesky little boxes have been checked – can justify a government and workplaces that side with white guys like me. Bleeding DEI dry requires an acknowledgement that things have been fixed, not just among white people, but among everyone. Without that widespread belief,  diversity efforts will survive this blackpilled regime and one day thrive in a nation that has watched what anti-DEI politics look like and not liked it, not one bit.

Denny Carter is the owner of BadFaithTimes.com, which has a twice-weekly newsletter. You can follow Denny on BlueSky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.