There is a raging debate in corporate America on the future of DEI, aka Diversity Equity and Inclusion, because it is literally destroying businesses that go there.
And yet the American public may soon be subjected to DEI writ large in the next president of the United States, if Kamala Harris finds her way to the top of the Democratic ticket while Joe Biden wilts away as the party’s presidential nominee after his horrific debate performance.
Yes, maybe the most irrepressibly fatuous politician in America may become the leader of the free world because the Democratic Party is unable to break its DEI stranglehold.
Harris is already being hailed as the president-in-waiting as her boss Sleepy Joe — despite his defiant TV vow to George Stephanopoulos Friday night to stay in the race — increasingly faces reality that his chances of besting Trump are slim.
Calls that he should step down are mounting, paving the way for his VP to land at the top of the ticket.
Even if does stay and achieves the near impossible by pulling out a victory, you can bet he won’t survive four years.
Harris becomes the nation’s first DEI president by default.
For the American people it would be such an unfair and odd coronation.
Remember, she’s part of an administration that gave us inflation, world chaos and an open border that literally invites terrorists to enter the country and kill people.
She has spent nearly four years as Biden’s No. 2 flubbing every assignment given to her, including the border mess.
That’s on top of her manifest unlikability; her word salad whenever she tries to sound smart; her cackle when she laughs; her vaulting ambition.
She once suggested during a 2020 primary debate that her current boss was a racist for being against federally mandated busing.
But Biden’s busing stench wasn’t nasty enough to stop her from jumping at the chance to serve as his VP when DEI came calling.
Following the 2020 death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police, the pressure on Biden to pick a woman of color as his running mate was intense.
(And he boxed himself in by publicly saying his running mate would be a woman.)
Harris checked all the boxes: Her father, an academic with a Ph.D., is from Jamaica; her late mother, a biologist, was Indian.
VP Harris was a California state attorney general and a US senator.
Weak record
Yet if you delved, you would see a weak record of accomplishment, and weird personal tics (that aforementioned laugh), and an intense desire for power.
First Lady Jill Biden is said to have hated her but as one Dem operative told me before Joe Biden made her his VP: “She’s black and that is all that matters.”
DEI, of course, is a construct first embraced by academia, the lefty political class and then business that posits the world needs to be observed in terms of those historically oppressed (people of color and of diverse gender classifications) at the expense of the oppressor (namely white people and particularly white men).
Jobs, image making, TV programming must be seen through this warped view of reality.
It’s a topic I cover in my upcoming book “Go Woke, Go Broke,” illustrating how DEI had been ingrained in the corporate culture before the American people began to revolt.
Examples are endless.
Among them, Disney’s DEI mandates pushed so-called “queerness” into cartoons; trans women found their way into beer commercials; and there was a white-male hiring freeze at many corporations until relatively recently.
It’s fair to say the high-water mark of DEI was after Floyd’s death and continued for three years.
Now, corporate America is backtracking feverishly because while Americans respect the desire for diversity, they hate DEI’s purely idiotic demands where the offspring of rich South Americans get jobs over a white coal miner’s daughter.
It’s also patently illegal; the SCOTUS ruling outlawing affirmative action for college admissions is a precedent that lots of businesses want to avoid.
And they are, or at least starting to.
Consider the giant retailer Target.
In 2023, CEO Brian Cornell said, “The things we’ve done from a DE and I standpoint, it’s adding value, it’s helping us drive sales, it’s building greater engagement with both our teams and our guests.”
That was his rationalization for a massive Pride Month merchandising display in his stores — complete with mannequins wearing so-called tuck-friendly bathing suits, books about trans children being sold next to rainbow-colored onesies.
Then came the customer backlash from those who didn’t appreciate being indoctrinated when they shop.
In 2024, Cornell reduced Target’s Pride displays enough that no one really noticed.
So much for DEI adding value.
Some Dems I speak to caution me it’s not all DEI giving Harris the edge to replace Biden.
She is, after all, the VP. If she’s on a new ticket, it gets to keep money raised already, not start from scratch.
OK, but I can’t imagine money will be an issue.
One possible nominee, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, is a billionaire.
The Dem money machine on Wall Street and Silicon Valley is formidable.
Yet the country might just be stuck with Harris as president if Sleepy Joe wins and stumbles his way to resignation while in his second term, or if Biden drops out in the coming days and she becomes the nominee.
All because DEI is the Democratic Party’s touchstone, no matter how much evidence amasses that it’s a failed ideology.
Charles Gasparino is the author of the forthcoming book “Go Woke, Go Broke: The Inside Story of the Radicalization of Corporate America.”
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