As we've covered here in the last couple days, Trump's executive order on DEI ordered the suspension of DEI employees and the closing of their offices. He also included a plan to keep these offices from simply rebranding under a different name and carrying on as usual. That was smart because rebranding is how many academic DEI offices have tried to get by laws aimed at them in the recent past.

While Trump's executive order is aimed at government employees, it is also a warning to their corporate counterparts.

"These actions freeze DEI operations in the federal government with the anticipation of the end of such programs," said Jonathan Butcher, a senior research fellow with the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank.

"Corporations," he said, "should recognize that racial discrimination and racial preferences will no longer go unchallenged by Washington."...

"This is going to start a tidal wave of companies self-censoring and cutting back on those types of DEI efforts for fear of litigation with the federal government on the other end of that," said Joseph Seiner, a law professor at the University of South Carolina. "Even if they're doing everything that complies with federal law, they could still find themselves subject to an investigation, which can be expensive and timely to defend against."

In addition, Trump's revocation of an affirmative action executive order put in place in 1965 is another indication that the anti-DEI push will go beyond government employees to government contractors.

The NY Times published a story today titled "Trump’s D.E.I. Order Creates ‘Fear and Confusion’ Among Corporate Leaders." In other words, corporate DEI leaders are getting the message.

The executive order instructs the federal government to look at private sector D.E.I. initiatives: Each federal agency, it says, will identify “up to nine potential civil compliance investigations” that could include publicly traded corporations, nonprofits and large foundations, among others.

“That discrete number is a way of striking fear into organizations’ hearts,” said Kenji Yoshino, a constitutional lawyer at N.Y.U. who advises some Fortune 500 companies on D.E.I. “They just don’t want to be one of those nine. Until those nine are announced, it’s going to cause others to be risk-averse.”...

With the executive order, Mr. Yoshino said, “Trump is putting the muscle of the executive branch” behind the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision.

The panic isn't just supposition. The Times spoke to a lawyer at a large firm who said he's been taking "tons" of calls from companies wondering if their DEI efforts are in compliance with the law. But, true to form, some DEI leaders are thinking about rebranding to hide their efforts rather than alter them.

“We’re already seeing that this flurry of orders has created fear and confusion,” said David Glasgow, executive director of the Meltzer Center for Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging at N.Y.U. Law...

Mr. Glasgow said he has begun to wonder if it’s time to drop the term “D.E.I.,” now that those three letters have become politically charged.

“If you had asked me a year ago I would have probably said don’t change it,” Mr. Glasgow said. “Over time I’ve become a little bit more convinced that the acronym may be unhelpful, because empty terms make easy targets.”

This is just what the left does. Years ago they were all described as "liberals" and that term became so toxic they started calling themselves progressives. When their brand becomes toxic, as it always does, they simply abandon it and make up a new name to hide behind. Indeed, notice that Glasgow leads the "Meltzer Center for Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging." The move to abandon "equity" in favor of "belonging" is a rebranding effort aimed at dodging anti-DEI laws.

Even so, some of the comments on this story give me hope. If even NY Times readers are sick of this stuff maybe the rebranding efforts will fail.

This stuff was unpopular among most demographics, in fact it's really a liability for the left. And obviously corporations don't actually want to be paying extra salaries for employees who contribute nothing. Nobody will come to the defense of this stuff and it will be quietly forgotten by the time Democrats come back to power.

As a reader in Philadelphia points out, the real problem is that these efforts are ultimately racist in practice.

The goals of DEI are admirable, but in practice it morphed into something much uglier. These programs often ignore individuals and rather treat them as members of a demographic group. A law firm I worked at had a diversity day for its diverse staff and it was essentially a non-whites party, leaving white staff left uninvited to the company lunch. It was strange, likely illegal, and felt something like a racial spoils system. A friend of mine, a college professor at Penn State, was forced to hold his breath in a diversity training longer than the non-white participants so he could feel their pain. A few years later, and Penn State just lost its motion to dismiss his racial discrimination case. Going back ten years to when I was applying for law firms, my law school had diversity fairs, which gave participants early chances to interview for prestigious law firms. There was literally a diversity fair covering every demographic, except straight white men. Women, Black, Latino, Asian, Gay, Bisexual, Queer, and so on. I know this seems just to many, especially this crowd, but at some point we have to ask if we’re being fair, and if this top-down engineering causes more trouble and problems than a straight meritocracy with perhaps targeted relief towards lower income people.

From a reader in Los Angeles.

“Paid parental leave”?  Funny, I don’t remember this being discussed during mandatory DEI “training” sessions.  What I do remember is being instructed to “dismantle my White privilege” and “do the work” of understanding my “toxic masculinity.”

Get rid of it all.

The DEI “trainings” and requirements imposed on employees of every sector looked like something straight out of the Chinese Cultural Revolution:  mandatory “diversity statements,” forced “pledges,” trainings requiring (white) employees to “dismantle their privilege,” etc, etc.  Nonsense at best, sinister thought policing at worst.  It is high time for DEI to be relegated to the dustbin of history.

Even beyond DEI being racist and stupid, it's also useless. We know from real world experience and from social science that it doesn't work and often backfires. Hopefully the pushback from the Trump administration will allow a few more people to stand up to the woke mob and say no to this racialist indoctrination.