Didn't Earn It

What DEI really stands for, DeSantis said, is “Discrimination, Exclusion and Indoctrination.”

That formulation hasn’t caught on, but another one has: “Didn’t Earn It.” It went viral this spring after Ian Miles Cheong, a conservative journalist, and Scott Adams, the Dilbert cartoonist, tweeted it to their 2 million followers on X. Adams, who had fearlessly predicted in 2015—six months before the first Republican primary—that Donald Trump would be elected president because of his skill as a “master persuader,” tweeted another forecast: “Whoever came up with ‘Didn’t Earn It’ as the description of DEI might have saved the world. Normally, the clever alternative names people use to mock the other side’s policy are nothing but grin-worthy. This one could collapse the whole racist system. It’s that strong.”

Sure enough, “Didn’t Earn It” has become an Internet meme, a buzz phrase on social media, and a conservative talking point on cable television, radio, and podcasts. It appears in posts linking to Kamala Harris, the plagiarism accusations against DEI officers at Harvard and MIT, the 50 percent failure rate on tests of medical students at UCLA, and the sentencing of a DEI executive for stealing $5 million during her work at Facebook and Nike. In the surest sign of its success, “Didn’t Earn It” has been solemnly denounced by DEI executives, progressive pundits, and the left-wing watchdogs at Media Matters, which was so alarmed that it published a report documenting the phrase’s popularity and—inevitably—labeling it “racist.”

There’s nothing racist about expecting people to earn what they get, which is why the phrase is so powerful.