A liberal billionaire hedge fund manager from Harvard was jolted out of his slumber when he investigated pro-terrorist group Hamas/anti-Israel protests at his alma mater and came to realize that DEI is a POLITICAL movement and its “ideological heritage is inherently inconsistent with basic American values.”
WELCOME TO REALITY!
Now we can only hope that the Pentagon comes to this same realization and stops pushing the divisive, harmful, radical far-left political ideology on troops who are SICK OF IT! (See 1,000 comments from people in the military community).
And especially America’s military service academies where the students are sick of it also. (See Boots on the Ground)
The CRT/DEI agenda in the Department of Defense is dramatically harming and weakening our nation’s military, and only countries like communist China could truly benefit from the policies that have been forced on the military.
You’ve read what other liberals like Bari Weiss and Fareed Zakaria have realized about DEI. Read on to see how another one, Bill Ackman, came to see the light:
In light of today’s news (resignation of the Harvard president), I thought I would try to take a step back and provide perspective on what this is really all about.
I first became concerned about Harvard when 34 student organizations, early on the morning of October 8—before Israel had taken any military actions in Gaza—came out publicly in support of Hamas, a globally recognized terrorist organization, holding Israel “solely responsible” for Hamas’ barbaric and heinous acts.
How could this be? I wondered.
When I saw then-president Claudine Gay’s initial statement about the massacre, it provided more context (!) for the student groups’ statement of support for terrorism.
The protests began as pro-Palestine and then became anti-Israel. Shortly thereafter, antisemitism exploded on campus as protesters who violated Harvard’s own codes of conduct were emboldened by the lack of enforcement of Harvard’s rules, and kept testing the limits on how aggressive, intimidating, and disruptive they could be to Jewish and Israeli students, and the student body at large.
Sadly, antisemitism remains a simmering source of hate even at our best universities among a subset of students.
A few weeks later, I went up to campus to see things with my own eyes, and listen and learn from students and faculty. I met with 15 or so members of the faculty and a few hundred students in small and large settings, and a clearer picture began to emerge.
I ultimately concluded that antisemitism was not the core of the problem. It was simply a troubling warning sign—it was the “canary in the coal mine”—despite how destructive it was in impacting student life and learning on campus.
I came to learn that the root cause of antisemitism at Harvard was an ideology that had been promulgated on campus, an oppressor/oppressed framework, that provided the intellectual bulwark behind the protests, helping to generate anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hate speech and harassment.
Then I did more research.
The more I learned, the more concerned I became, and the more ignorant I realized I had been about DEI, a powerful movement that has not only pervaded Harvard but the educational system at large.
I came to understand that diversity, equity, and inclusion was not what I had naively thought these words meant.
I have always believed that diversity is an important feature of a successful organization, but by diversity I mean diversity in its broadest form: diversity of viewpoints, politics, ethnicity, race, age, religion, experience, socioeconomic background, sexual identity, gender, one’s upbringing, and more.
What I learned, however, was that DEI was not about diversity in its purest form.
Rather, DEI was a political advocacy movement on behalf of certain groups that are deemed oppressed under DEI’s own methodology.
Under DEI, one’s degree of oppression is determined based upon where one resides on a so-called intersectional pyramid of oppression where whites, Jews, and Asians are deemed oppressors, and a subset of people of color, LGBTQ people, and/or women are deemed to be oppressed.
Under this ideology which is the philosophical underpinning of DEI as advanced by Ibram X. Kendi and others, one is either an anti-racist or a racist. There is no such thing as being “not racist.”
Under DEI’s ideology, any policy, program, educational system, economic system, grading system, admission policy (and even climate change, due its disparate impact on geographies and the people that live there), etc., that leads to unequal outcomes among people of different skin colors is deemed racist.
As a result, according to DEI, capitalism is racist, Advanced Placement exams are racist, IQ tests are racist, corporations are racist—in other words, any merit-based program, system, or organization that has or generates outcomes for different races that are at variance with the proportion these different races represent in the population at large is by definition racist under DEI’s ideology.
In order to be deemed anti-racist, one must personally take action to reverse any unequal outcomes in society. The DEI movement, which has permeated many universities, corporations, and state, local, and federal governments, is designed to be the anti-racist engine to transform society from its currently structurally racist state to an anti-racist one.
After the death of George Floyd, the already-burgeoning DEI movement took off without any real challenge to its problematic ideology. Why, you might ask, was there so little pushback?
The answer is that anyone who dared to raise a question that challenged DEI was deemed a racist, a label that could severely impact one’s employment, social status, reputation, and more. Being called a racist got people canceled, so those concerned about DEI and its societal and legal implications had no choice but to keep quiet in this new climate of fear.
The techniques that DEI has used to squelch the opposition are found in the Red Scares and McCarthyism of decades past. If you challenge DEI, “justice” will be swift, and you may find yourself unemployed, shunned by colleagues, canceled, and/or you will otherwise put your career and acceptance in society at risk.
The DEI movement has also taken control of speech. Certain speech is no longer permitted.
So-called “microaggressions” are treated like hate speech. “Trigger warnings” are required to protect students. “Safe spaces” are necessary to protect students from the trauma inflicted by words that are challenging to the students’ newly acquired worldviews.
Campus speakers and faculty with unapproved views are shouted down, shunned, and canceled.
These speech codes have led to self-censorship by students and faculty of views privately held, but no longer shared. There is no commitment to free expression at Harvard other than for DEI-approved views.
This has led to the quashing of conservative and other viewpoints from the Harvard campus and faculty, and contributed to Harvard’s having the lowest free speech ranking of 248 universities assessed by the Foundation of Individual Rights and Expression.
When one examines DEI and its ideological heritage, it does not take long to understand that the movement is inherently inconsistent with basic American values.
Our country, since its founding, has been about creating and building a democracy with equality of opportunity for all.
Millions of people have left behind socialism and communism to come to America to start again, as they have seen the destruction leveled by an equality of outcome society.
The E for “equity” in DEI is about equality of outcome, not equality of opportunity.
DEI is racist because reverse racism is racism, even if it is against white people (and it is remarkable that I even need to point this out).
Racism against white people has become considered acceptable by many not to be racism, or alternatively, it is deemed acceptable racism. While this is, of course, absurd, it has become the prevailing view in many universities around the country.
You can say things about white people today in universities, in business, or otherwise, that if you switched the word white to black, the consequences to you would be costly and severe.
To state what should otherwise be self-evident, whether or not a statement is racist should not depend upon whether the target of the racism is a group who currently represents a majority or minority of the country or those who have a lighter or darker skin color. Racism against whites is as reprehensible as it is against groups with darker skin colors.
Martin Luther King Jr.’s most famous words are instructive:
“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
But here we are in 2024, being asked and in some cases required to use skin color to affect outcomes in admissions (recently deemed illegal by the Supreme Court), in business (likely illegal yet it happens nonetheless), and in government (also I believe in most cases to be illegal, except apparently in government contracting), rather than the content of one’s character.
As such, a meritocracy is anathema to the DEI movement. DEI is inherently a racist and illegal movement in its implementation even if it purports to work on behalf of the so-called oppressed.
And DEI’s definition of oppressed is fundamentally flawed.
I have always believed that the most fortunate should help the least fortunate, and that our system should be designed in such a way to maximize the size of the overall pie so that it will enable us to provide an economic system that can offer quality of life, education, housing, and healthcare for all.
America is a rich country and we have made massive progress over the decades toward achieving this goal, but we obviously have much more work to do.
Steps taken on the path to socialism—another word for an equality of outcome system—will reverse this progress and ultimately impoverish us all. We have seen this movie many times.
Having a darker skin color, a less common sexual identity, and/or being a woman doesn’t make one necessarily oppressed or even disadvantaged.
While slavery remains a permanent stain on our country’s history—a fact that is used by DEI to label white people as oppressors—it doesn’t therefore hold that all white people, generations after the abolishment of slavery, should be held responsible for its evils. Similarly, the fact that Columbus discovered America doesn’t make all modern-day Italians colonialists.
An ideology that portrays a bicameral world of oppressors and the oppressed based principally on race or sexual identity is a fundamentally racist ideology that will likely lead to more racism rather than less.
A system where one obtains advantages by virtue of one’s skin color is a racist system, and one that will generate resentment and anger among the disadvantaged who will direct their anger at the favored groups.
The country has seen burgeoning resentment and anger grow materially over the last few years, and the DEI movement is an important contributor to our growing divisiveness.
Resentment is one of the most important drivers of racism. And it is the lack of equity (i.e, fairness) in how DEI operates that contributes to this resentment.
I was accused of being a racist by the president of the NAACP among others when I posted on X (formerly Twitter) that I had learned that the Harvard president search process excluded candidates that did not meet the DEI criteria.
I didn’t say that former president Gay was hired because she was a black woman. I simply said that I had heard that the search process by its design excluded a large percentage of potential candidates due to the DEI limitations.
My statement was not a racist one. It was simply the empirical truth about the Harvard search process that led to Gay’s hiring. . . . .
. . . . The Harvard board should not have run a search process that had a predetermined objective of hiring only a DEI-approved candidate. In any case, there are many incredibly talented black men and women who could have been selected by Harvard to serve as its president, so why did the Harvard Corporation board choose Gay?
One can only speculate without knowing all of the facts, but it appears Gay’s leadership in the creation of Harvard’s Office of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging (ODEIB) and the penetration of DEI ideology into the corporation board room perhaps made Gay the favored candidate.
The search was also done at a time when many other top universities had similar DEI-favored candidate searches underway for their presidents, reducing the number of potential candidates available in light of the increased competition for talent. . . . .
. . . . The ODEIB should be shut down, and the staff should be terminated.
The ODEIB has already taken down much of the ideology and strategies that were on its website when I and others raised concerns about how the office operates and who it does and does not represent.
Taking down portions of the website does not address the fundamentally flawed and racist ideology of this office, and calls into further question the ODEIB’s legitimacy.
Why would the ODEIB take down portions of its website when an alum questioned its legitimacy unless the office was doing something fundamentally wrong or indefensible?
Harvard must once again become a meritocratic institution that does not discriminate for or against faculty or students based on their skin color, and where diversity is understood in its broadest form so that students can learn in an environment that welcomes diverse viewpoints from faculty and students from truly diverse backgrounds and experiences.
Harvard must create an academic environment with real academic freedom and free speech, where self-censoring, speech codes, and cancel culture are forever banished from campus.
Harvard should become an environment where all students of all persuasions feel comfortable expressing their views and being themselves. In the business world, we call this creating a great corporate culture, which begins with new leadership and the right tone at the top. It does not require the creation of a massive administrative bureaucracy.
These are the minimum changes necessary to begin to repair the damage that has been done. . . .
–
Bill Ackman is the CEO of Pershing Square, who has bachelor’s and MBA degrees from Harvard. This piece originally appeared as a post on Ackman’s X account. Follow him @BillAckman.
In light of today’s news, I thought I would try to take a step back and provide perspective on what this is really all about.
I first became concerned about @Harvard when 34 Harvard student organizations, early on the morning of October 8th before Israel had taken any military…
— Bill Ackman (@BillAckman) January 3, 2024
DEI is the repackaged Marxism in the name of anti-racism. Mao divided Chinese into Oppressor vs Oppressed by using “Class”, 5 black classes vs. 5 red classes, they fought each other like enemies, 20M died during the Cultural Revolution. DEI used race, same communist tactic.
— Lily Tang Williams (@Lily4Liberty) January 3, 2024
This is what happens when a society sits back and allows an ideological woke movement to take control of its most fundamental institutions, it’s good to see it beginning to be exposed for what it is.
— Klay Thompson (@Thompsonklay) January 3, 2024
Coming from Eastern Europe, I was very frustrated in the recent years when trying to explain these things to people born and raised in the West. DEI and all those woke ideologies are Communism personalized for the West, and we all see the results.
— SaintGemain (@DanielI11207139) January 3, 2024
More Tweets in response to his article:
“This is very honestly the best explainer I’ve ever read on this topic. It’s not bits and pieces. It’s all of the relevant information in one post. I truly hope the entire ideology of DEI can be banished forever. It has created so much hate/resentment/division in our society. This is not who we are or who we should aspire to be. Grab the best and the brightest. There are plenty to choose from of all races, all sexes, all ideologies, and all everything else. America does not want to be a socialist nation. It was never meant to be one. Equality for all, equity no. And, I don’t know if anyone knows this, but Biden has written DEI and equity into many of his Executive Orders, so our own government is discriminating and pushing us away from merit and capitalism.”
“It is amazing how many people think they are doing blacks a favor by exempting them from standards that others are expected to meet.” — Thomas Sowell
“We need to recognize DEI for what it is. Communist Entryism into all our institutions. It drives out the good faculty members, only to be replaced with allies in the Marxist cause. We see it everywhere. We must end DEI once and for all.”
“Thank you for your part in tackling this important issue. And I applaud you for doing the research on DEI and discovering for yourself what so many of us have understood for years: it’s nothing more than Marxism/Communism in woke clothing. This is an extremely toxic far-left ideology, but it’s an issue for all of us, and it will take all of us to put it where it belongs: in the dustbin of history. I agree—let’s return to MLK’s maxim of judging people solely by the content of their character. Only then can America heal and once more take its rightful place as the world’s moral leader.”
“It’s remarkable to see you realize this stuff in 2024. Better late than never but wow are you late to these realizations.”
“Hopefully this is the beginning of the end for DEI.”
“#DEI is a tool for forcing organizations and individuals into Left (Marxist) Authoritarianism, and labeling non-believers as deplorable. It provides both the belief framework, but also a network of political commissars (“The HR Department”) to enforce it upon all of society.”
“Many of us screamed the dangers of woke / DEI for the past 15 years, as Silicon Valley and the mainstream left supported it and made it thrive. It’s sad that so many rationale voices were not heard until now. It would have been much easier to fix this 10 years ago.”
“One of the most…if not THE most prolific explanations/analyses of the DEI debacle Unfortunately for the rest of us, DEI has seemed into everything. Private sector, government, academia…all of our institutions. It’s been cemented by positions at all levels…Zampolits as they were called in Soviet Russia…party leaders who made sure party edicts were carried out tomorrow to bottom In America, it’s an industry…a multibillion dollar industry and dismantling it softly will be difficult It must be minimized, it must be marginalized before people can unify despite this caustic, divisive ideology Good luck…either we dismantle it, or America ceases to remain the beacon of freedom in the world. It will turn America, a once strong capitalist, independent state into ruin if left unchecked.”
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