The death rattles of DEI

Corporations are losing patience with the frauds they have enriched.

In 180 AD, the Roman satirist Lucian wrote an account of a man called Alexander who had founded a cult of the serpent-god Glycon. According to Lucian, Alexander was much in demand as a prophet, and would charge money to answer questions from those seeking the wisdom of the serpentine deity that he had invented. Lucian records that he ‘gleaned as much as seventy or eighty thousand [drachmas] a year’.

Some of our modern-day Alexanders take the form of ‘diversity experts’ who have made a fortune from the snake-god of DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion). These cheerless mountebanks form part of an industry that rakes in a whopping eight billion dollars annually. According to Glassdoor, a website that provides salary estimates, a Chief Diversity Officer earns an average of $250,000 per year. Oppression is a lucrative business.

Perhaps the most egregious example is that of Robin DiAngelo, a self-proclaimed expert in ‘whiteness’, who charges $14,000 for every speech, and earns $728,000 every year. At one of her speeches at Coca Cola, DiAngelo’s advice to employees was to ‘try to be less white’. As the comedian Heydon Prowse observed: ‘anyone who has had the misfortune of passing a group of Eton boys at Notting Hill Carnival will know that trying to be less white is literally the whitest thing anyone can do’.

But it looks as though the gravy train might finally have been derailed. Yesterday, the This Isn’t Working podcast posted an image of a statement from Jake Graf, a regular DEI speaker who, according to his website, ‘works with organisations to improve LGBTQ+ representation, mental health awareness, and trans inclusion’. In his statement, posted on LinkedIn, Graf struck a sombre note:

‘The pendulum of progress swings in mysterious ways. Just months ago, following the Supreme Court ruling and subsequent EHRC interim guidance, businesses rallied with open arms and vocal support for their trans team and clients. Now, that warmth has slowly given way to a worrying silence, as if someone pressed pause on the march toward inclusion.’

The half-hearted poeticism barely masks the anxiety of man who fears that his racket has been exposed. The predominance of the creed of DEI, and its usurpation of meritocracy as the guiding principle in the corporate world, is a testament to the success of culture warriors. They have made plenty of know-nothings very wealthy by promoting ideology as though it were uncontested truth. But now it might well be coming to an end.

Very little in the way of expertise is required for such roles. Adam Szetela, author of That Book Is Dangerous!: How Moral Panic, Social Media, and the Culture Wars Are Remaking Publishing, has pointed out that ‘sensitivity readers’ are remarkably unqualified to do anything. ‘You don’t go to school to become a sensitivity reader,’ he said in an interview for the Telegraph. ‘I’ve talked to people in publishing and when I ask, “Where did you get a sensitivity reader from?”, they literally just go to X and type in “sensitivity reader”. It sounds wild when I say it out loud.’

But then, how could one find a genuine expert in a subject that is based on so little substance? Corporations may just as well invite ‘experts’ in the mythologies of J.R.R. Tolkien. These highly-paid visiting speakers could discourse at length on the creation narratives of the dwarves, the genealogies of the shire, or the legends of elvish lore. But none of this is going to help your average corporate employee meet his productivity targets.

Both Middle Earth and DEI are based on elaborate fictions, and neither are of any use when it comes to running a business. How can any DEI guru offer sound advice when their entire objective is to mislead? The rapid spread of the trend has largely depended on good natured people assuming that ‘equity’ is a synonym for ‘equality’. In truth, ‘equity’ necessitates treating people unequally in order to equalise identity-based outcomes. Similarly, ‘diversity’ is best decoded as ‘political homogeneity’ and ‘inclusion’ as ‘exclusion of nonconformists’.

It was always a con. The hiring of DEI speakers was a relatively simple way for corporations to demonstrate that they were ‘progressive’, even when the outcomes were regressive in the extreme. It didn’t have to be this way. Companies only needed to ensure that there was no discrimination against employees on the basis of immutable characteristics, and that merit and hard work were rewarded. There was never any need to open the gates to these high priests of a religion that very few believed in.

Lucian tells us that Alexander the fraudulent prophet came to an unpleasant end. His snake god had assured him that he would live to a hundred and fifty and then perish by a stroke of lightning. But he died before the age of seventy, his leg and groin infested with maggots. And when the doctors examined his body, they discovered that his impressive head of hair had been a wig. Nothing about this man had been authentic.

I wouldn’t wish such a maggoty fate on anyone, even the charlatans of DEI. Thankfully, their bogus industry is being dismantled, and corporations are no longer offering huge sums of money to be hectored by ideologues. These frauds have had a decent run, but now the wigs are coming off.

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