I still think that ultimately Nathan Cofnas's strategy against DEI is the best one in ensuring that Wokism will never reappear, because it's the only one that actually manages to effectively tackle Wokism at its roots:
Or, alternatively, I guess that you could simply get people to stop caring about group achievement, income, et cetera gaps and aggressively focus on lifting all boats. But good luck with that! Sometimes relative status also matters in life, not just absolute status. In the words of Greg Cochran, would you prefer to be the king of kings in a jungle or a flight attendant on an intergalactic spaceship?
We should be on the lookout for rebranded DEI and not work with or do business with organizations still practicing it (if possible, might not always be).
This is an excellent analysis and also alludes to how academia will seek to undermine the intent of the EO as part of the "resistance". I would be interested to hear people's thoughts on the following likely next steps that will arise in wake of this decision:
1. When lawsuits are filed against universities for continuing to practice DEI discrimination, will the federal government weigh in by using the defunding death penalty on institutions in support of these suits?
2. With the effects of DEI discrimination going back at least 30 years in academic hiring, what will happen when candidates for jobs who were discriminated against via affirmative action/DEI policies begin filing class actions suits against academic institutions? Specifically, what happens if the courts rule that the only solution to the systemic discrimination in hiring is to render MANY if not all these academic hirings as tainted and demand these institutions dismiss the tainted hires and reopen searches for massive numbers of positions?
Biden was not smart enough or competent enough to resist caving to the far left wing of his party. He left the Democratic Party in shambles from which it may never recover.
If the remaining party leaders (whoever they might be) were smart (which they are not) they would look closely at at Trump’s many executive orders (EO’s) and maybe find a few popular ones that they could agree with and then use those along with the more popular positions that they currently endorse as the basis for a resurgence in 2026 and 2028.
So what’s currently in their bag that people don’t hate and what can be done with them to make them more salable to a majority.
First, a woman’s right to an abortion is one but many believe there should be some time limit put on its availability. So consider limiting it to the first trimester except to protect the health of the mother or when the fetus is not viable.
Second, most people are worried about climate change but the intermittent renewable energy sources located far from load centers Democrats are currently pushing will never provide reliable energy. The best answer is nuclear power plants located at existing coal fired plant locations that already have cooling and distribution infrastructure. We also should be leading an international effort to develop geoengineering solutions to the problem because we will never reduce carbon emissions in time to stave off disaster.
Third, most people support vaccinations when their development is transparent and their use is voluntary. Use that approach to offset the current anti-vaccine rhetoric of the Republicans.
Back to Trump’s executive orders. There are three worth considering supporting.
The first of these EO’s recognizes that open borders are politically unacceptable and that the age of mass migration is over. Importing millions of people who will work for next to nothing just to be here destroys the wages of working class Americans and drives up housing costs when we can't house our own citizens. People cannot overpopulate their home country and just expect to move to greener pastures. There are no more green pastures. They need to voluntarily reduce their own country's population to an environmentally sustainable level, stay there and work to improve their living conditions.
His second acceptable EO addresses the insanity of gender identity which denies the reality of human sexuality and results in men invading women’s sports, and spaces, and even more diabolical the mutilation of innocent children in pursuit of the impossible.
Finally his EO that corrects the craziness of DEI which discriminates against whites, Asians and men in attempting to cure past discrimination against others is absolutely the correct approach. Who could believe that creating a new privileged class and a new discriminated against class would provide a solution to the problem? Not to mention that it’s clearly unconstitutional.
Would these actions help the Democrats recover? Who knows but absent change there is no hope for them.
Dave, consider this a friendly warning. Although there is nothing offensive in your post, the vast majority is not relevant to the main post. My commenting guidelines are summarized at the end of the post; the full description can be found here:
Section 2A is quite explicit about not permitting exactly the type of thing you just posted. However, see 2C, if you would like to propose a separate post on your recipe for the Democrats, do send me an email about it.
Here is the full text of the "stay relevant" guideline:
2. Stay relevant to the original post
A. Don’t get on your irrelevant hobby horse and denounce the idiots on some some partisan side you despise. If I post something here about, say, flaws in some published article that I characterize as infected with leftist propaganda, this does not liberate you to post a mini-blog about the real or imagined evils of Democrats or liberals. You are welcome to do that of course — on your own blog site.
B. Don’t ask why the post did not address X, unless X is directly relevant to the post. For example, if a post is on microaggressions, do not ask why the author did not address gender-affirming medicine, Israeli “genocide,” or K-12 education (this type of thing has actually happened in previous posts). If the post is on microaggressions, and you are aware of some paper or essay about microaggressions that challenges or contests the claims in the post, that would be completely fine to bring up.
C. If you would like Unsafe Science to address some topic different than any particular post, email me via the Substack app. You can email a request or even consider doing a guest post. But don’t go off on a complete tangent in the comments just because your favorite topic has not been addressed.
In answer to the author's question, I would say "yes". Never really popular, often only grudgingly accepted, pretty good head start.
I have a lot of thoughts, but I am pretty sure this Executive Order by the President was necessarily done for the right reasons; it is more likely to be the right thing, done for the wrong reasons. I know this article was not meant to be about this administration per se, but that is the context. As early as the late 60's and early 70's there were concerns about the emergence of an imperial presidency. On the first day, hundreds of executive orders, the proclamation of phantom emergencies, and by EO at least one Act of Congress already held to be constitutional by the Supreme Court was effectively abrogated. On the third day, at least one EO has been held by a federal judge to be blatantly unconstitutional. If we were understandably concerned about the leftist tyranny of our academic colleagues, I believe their wrath never compared to the potential our government can unleash on academia (and I am not referring to the former insistence of a DEI plan in your grant). For example, in the last year, Congress successfully calling for the resignation of some admittedly, flawed, feckless presidents, but not before they promised to punish faculty members with certain views.
In this piece, as many I have read recently, I note that Wokeness, DEI, and progressive are used as synonyms or inter-changeably which is bothersome because of the lack of precession. Personally, the words that compose the acronym DEI, individually I would endorse separately as defined in the English language, although not collectively as government or academic policy. Certainly one should endorse genetic diversity and diversity of viewpoints. Equity is treating people fairly, not advantaging one over another for arbitrary, unfair reasons. Inclusion, is similar, not excluding others arbitrarily. Woke comes from"staying woke," of course, slang for staying awake or alert, "don't buy you have been fully integrated." Now it is used quite sloppily. "Woke" policies etc., I believe but some of our political leaders have adopted it as code for something, that might help members of a racial minority in some way. Today's use of "progressive," of course, has nothing to do with TR or that wing of his party.
We may know the proximal causes of the backlash that got us here. How did it evolve to that point, there are analyses and speculation, but it's worth more study of how the vacuum arose that one ideology filled and now another.
Insisting on DEI or abolishing it by Presidential by EO may prove to be equivalent injustices and threats to free inquiry, and certainly the wrong mechanism in both cases.
Sorry it was not clear. The language or terminology use was a comment on the phrasing used in this piece and others not about the EOs. I do object to employment and admissions discrimination that has happened in name of DEI. I also find The flagrant use of EO’s by our presidents in general, and to both encourage and ban DEI in particular to be an objectionable practice. I hope I am wrong but I expect additional political interference of a different ideology in education as has been attempted in Florida.
I'm sorry but this is a strange mixture of semi-objection (?) and naive misunderstandings, whether of the abolition - imagining that the EO "may prove to be equivalent injustices and threats to free enquiry" (which it clearly has no such intention of) - or of the terminology used by the ideologically possessed. You couldn't, for example, reasonably discuss the concept of "exploitation of workers" with a committed Communist by bringing in career paths and wage negotiations and opportunities. They wouldn't listen or appreciate nuances. We can know what "diversity" means, objectively, but it's been used to tell people they can't have a job because they're white. We could discuss what "equity" means, but it's been used to try and ensure equality of outcome, which is absurd. We know what "inclusion" is supposed to mean, but it has in fact been used by the woke in practice to exclude! The EO is not about messing with the English language, it's about stopping people who have been misusing it, against the interests of a free and sane and just society.
Lee, do you think the NIH and NSF will be forced to discontinue their diversity postdoc programs? There are opportunities that are only available to Blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans. Even Asians and Middle Easterners are not eligible.
> "Progressives have labored under the delusion that discrimination against groups they consider to be 'oppressors' or even merely 'not marginalized' or 'not underrepresented' or 'not minoritized' is legitimate, so using different standards in hiring and admissions for progressive diversity is legal. It isn’t."
I remember reading, and being absolutely gobsmacked by, the mantra that "racism = prejudice + power" in the late and entirely unlamented Atheism+ some 12 years ago:
Which I see has been picked and elaborated on by a Wikipedia article, the first version of which dates from 2018:
Wikipedia: "Prejudice plus power, also known as R = P + P, is a stipulative definition of racism used in the United States. .... This view is commonly shared by social liberals and progressives.[8][9] It also been used to define other forms of discrimination such as sexism, homophobia, and ableism."
Leftist academics are like the scorpion in the Parable of the Scorpion and the Frog—they simply MUST be commissars ordained from on high to socially engineer, it's their nature and why they get out of bed in the morning.
They might not all be Marxists but they are all Marx-ian, meaning that their most sacred belief is: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world...the point, however, is to change it." And they even embarked upon a Marx-ian project to distribute all assets and accolades from each according to his membership in an oppressor class to each according to his membership in an oppressed class.
It's been about 2 generations now since Left professors and bureaucrats (mostly in the Humanities) repurposed their positions into priests of utopian egalitarianism and swapped out education for indoctrination. Trump should be applauded for ripping up these noxious weeds at their roots, but it's only a (great) first step. The Marcuseans did not march all this way just to turn tail at the first major defeat—they need to be chased out of every institution until the real first purpose of education becomes paramount: teaching and inspiring students, not meeting the social and political needs of disaffected adversary intellectuals.
Thanks Lee. One step in the right direction. Decades more work to right the ship and reprogram education and society. Appreciate your commitment to the meritocracy. It's awful working in research and being surrounded by midwits without commitment to rigor and objectivity. 25 years ago was superior in so many ways that no one is aware.
Lee, I work at a three letter Federal agency. This morning there was an email for the whole Workforce that read essentially, "DEI strategic plan revoked, effective immediately." Now I don't know what larger effect it will have on the workforce but I'm hoping it will get me out of the stupid yearly mandatory training about stuff like respecting pronouns!
Do you know the state of play on disparate impact? As I understand it, the disparate impact standard it was created by judicial rulines, not EO's or statute -- but I am not sure of that. If so, it probably can't be overturned by EO, and would require a law, which will be much harder than an EO -- and, as far as I know, is not even on Trump's radar (all the chatter I hear about legislatin is about the budget, taxes, and immigration).
I still think that ultimately Nathan Cofnas's strategy against DEI is the best one in ensuring that Wokism will never reappear, because it's the only one that actually manages to effectively tackle Wokism at its roots:
https://substack.com/home/post/p-156012182?source=queue&autoPlay=false
Or, alternatively, I guess that you could simply get people to stop caring about group achievement, income, et cetera gaps and aggressively focus on lifting all boats. But good luck with that! Sometimes relative status also matters in life, not just absolute status. In the words of Greg Cochran, would you prefer to be the king of kings in a jungle or a flight attendant on an intergalactic spaceship?
We should be on the lookout for rebranded DEI and not work with or do business with organizations still practicing it (if possible, might not always be).
Well researched piece Lee, thanks.
This is an excellent analysis and also alludes to how academia will seek to undermine the intent of the EO as part of the "resistance". I would be interested to hear people's thoughts on the following likely next steps that will arise in wake of this decision:
1. When lawsuits are filed against universities for continuing to practice DEI discrimination, will the federal government weigh in by using the defunding death penalty on institutions in support of these suits?
2. With the effects of DEI discrimination going back at least 30 years in academic hiring, what will happen when candidates for jobs who were discriminated against via affirmative action/DEI policies begin filing class actions suits against academic institutions? Specifically, what happens if the courts rule that the only solution to the systemic discrimination in hiring is to render MANY if not all these academic hirings as tainted and demand these institutions dismiss the tainted hires and reopen searches for massive numbers of positions?
Biden was not smart enough or competent enough to resist caving to the far left wing of his party. He left the Democratic Party in shambles from which it may never recover.
If the remaining party leaders (whoever they might be) were smart (which they are not) they would look closely at at Trump’s many executive orders (EO’s) and maybe find a few popular ones that they could agree with and then use those along with the more popular positions that they currently endorse as the basis for a resurgence in 2026 and 2028.
So what’s currently in their bag that people don’t hate and what can be done with them to make them more salable to a majority.
First, a woman’s right to an abortion is one but many believe there should be some time limit put on its availability. So consider limiting it to the first trimester except to protect the health of the mother or when the fetus is not viable.
Second, most people are worried about climate change but the intermittent renewable energy sources located far from load centers Democrats are currently pushing will never provide reliable energy. The best answer is nuclear power plants located at existing coal fired plant locations that already have cooling and distribution infrastructure. We also should be leading an international effort to develop geoengineering solutions to the problem because we will never reduce carbon emissions in time to stave off disaster.
Third, most people support vaccinations when their development is transparent and their use is voluntary. Use that approach to offset the current anti-vaccine rhetoric of the Republicans.
Back to Trump’s executive orders. There are three worth considering supporting.
The first of these EO’s recognizes that open borders are politically unacceptable and that the age of mass migration is over. Importing millions of people who will work for next to nothing just to be here destroys the wages of working class Americans and drives up housing costs when we can't house our own citizens. People cannot overpopulate their home country and just expect to move to greener pastures. There are no more green pastures. They need to voluntarily reduce their own country's population to an environmentally sustainable level, stay there and work to improve their living conditions.
His second acceptable EO addresses the insanity of gender identity which denies the reality of human sexuality and results in men invading women’s sports, and spaces, and even more diabolical the mutilation of innocent children in pursuit of the impossible.
Finally his EO that corrects the craziness of DEI which discriminates against whites, Asians and men in attempting to cure past discrimination against others is absolutely the correct approach. Who could believe that creating a new privileged class and a new discriminated against class would provide a solution to the problem? Not to mention that it’s clearly unconstitutional.
Would these actions help the Democrats recover? Who knows but absent change there is no hope for them.
Dave, consider this a friendly warning. Although there is nothing offensive in your post, the vast majority is not relevant to the main post. My commenting guidelines are summarized at the end of the post; the full description can be found here:
https://unsafescience.substack.com/p/unsafe-commenting-guidelines
Section 2A is quite explicit about not permitting exactly the type of thing you just posted. However, see 2C, if you would like to propose a separate post on your recipe for the Democrats, do send me an email about it.
Here is the full text of the "stay relevant" guideline:
2. Stay relevant to the original post
A. Don’t get on your irrelevant hobby horse and denounce the idiots on some some partisan side you despise. If I post something here about, say, flaws in some published article that I characterize as infected with leftist propaganda, this does not liberate you to post a mini-blog about the real or imagined evils of Democrats or liberals. You are welcome to do that of course — on your own blog site.
B. Don’t ask why the post did not address X, unless X is directly relevant to the post. For example, if a post is on microaggressions, do not ask why the author did not address gender-affirming medicine, Israeli “genocide,” or K-12 education (this type of thing has actually happened in previous posts). If the post is on microaggressions, and you are aware of some paper or essay about microaggressions that challenges or contests the claims in the post, that would be completely fine to bring up.
C. If you would like Unsafe Science to address some topic different than any particular post, email me via the Substack app. You can email a request or even consider doing a guest post. But don’t go off on a complete tangent in the comments just because your favorite topic has not been addressed.
Terrific, thanks.
In answer to the author's question, I would say "yes". Never really popular, often only grudgingly accepted, pretty good head start.
I have a lot of thoughts, but I am pretty sure this Executive Order by the President was necessarily done for the right reasons; it is more likely to be the right thing, done for the wrong reasons. I know this article was not meant to be about this administration per se, but that is the context. As early as the late 60's and early 70's there were concerns about the emergence of an imperial presidency. On the first day, hundreds of executive orders, the proclamation of phantom emergencies, and by EO at least one Act of Congress already held to be constitutional by the Supreme Court was effectively abrogated. On the third day, at least one EO has been held by a federal judge to be blatantly unconstitutional. If we were understandably concerned about the leftist tyranny of our academic colleagues, I believe their wrath never compared to the potential our government can unleash on academia (and I am not referring to the former insistence of a DEI plan in your grant). For example, in the last year, Congress successfully calling for the resignation of some admittedly, flawed, feckless presidents, but not before they promised to punish faculty members with certain views.
In this piece, as many I have read recently, I note that Wokeness, DEI, and progressive are used as synonyms or inter-changeably which is bothersome because of the lack of precession. Personally, the words that compose the acronym DEI, individually I would endorse separately as defined in the English language, although not collectively as government or academic policy. Certainly one should endorse genetic diversity and diversity of viewpoints. Equity is treating people fairly, not advantaging one over another for arbitrary, unfair reasons. Inclusion, is similar, not excluding others arbitrarily. Woke comes from"staying woke," of course, slang for staying awake or alert, "don't buy you have been fully integrated." Now it is used quite sloppily. "Woke" policies etc., I believe but some of our political leaders have adopted it as code for something, that might help members of a racial minority in some way. Today's use of "progressive," of course, has nothing to do with TR or that wing of his party.
We may know the proximal causes of the backlash that got us here. How did it evolve to that point, there are analyses and speculation, but it's worth more study of how the vacuum arose that one ideology filled and now another.
Insisting on DEI or abolishing it by Presidential by EO may prove to be equivalent injustices and threats to free inquiry, and certainly the wrong mechanism in both cases.
Sorry it was not clear. The language or terminology use was a comment on the phrasing used in this piece and others not about the EOs. I do object to employment and admissions discrimination that has happened in name of DEI. I also find The flagrant use of EO’s by our presidents in general, and to both encourage and ban DEI in particular to be an objectionable practice. I hope I am wrong but I expect additional political interference of a different ideology in education as has been attempted in Florida.
I'm sorry but this is a strange mixture of semi-objection (?) and naive misunderstandings, whether of the abolition - imagining that the EO "may prove to be equivalent injustices and threats to free enquiry" (which it clearly has no such intention of) - or of the terminology used by the ideologically possessed. You couldn't, for example, reasonably discuss the concept of "exploitation of workers" with a committed Communist by bringing in career paths and wage negotiations and opportunities. They wouldn't listen or appreciate nuances. We can know what "diversity" means, objectively, but it's been used to tell people they can't have a job because they're white. We could discuss what "equity" means, but it's been used to try and ensure equality of outcome, which is absurd. We know what "inclusion" is supposed to mean, but it has in fact been used by the woke in practice to exclude! The EO is not about messing with the English language, it's about stopping people who have been misusing it, against the interests of a free and sane and just society.
It's a natural reaction to an ideological excess. Everyone knew this was coming except for the blind left.
https://hxstem.substack.com/p/aiming-for-a-neutral-ph-in-stem
Lee, do you think the NIH and NSF will be forced to discontinue their diversity postdoc programs? There are opportunities that are only available to Blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans. Even Asians and Middle Easterners are not eligible.
Yes. But we will see...
> "Progressives have labored under the delusion that discrimination against groups they consider to be 'oppressors' or even merely 'not marginalized' or 'not underrepresented' or 'not minoritized' is legitimate, so using different standards in hiring and admissions for progressive diversity is legal. It isn’t."
I remember reading, and being absolutely gobsmacked by, the mantra that "racism = prejudice + power" in the late and entirely unlamented Atheism+ some 12 years ago:
https://web.archive.org/web/20160507082148/http://atheismplus.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=2632
Which I see has been picked and elaborated on by a Wikipedia article, the first version of which dates from 2018:
Wikipedia: "Prejudice plus power, also known as R = P + P, is a stipulative definition of racism used in the United States. .... This view is commonly shared by social liberals and progressives.[8][9] It also been used to define other forms of discrimination such as sexism, homophobia, and ableism."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prejudice_plus_power
Hopefully Trump's Executive Order will put a wooden stake through the heart of that ideological claptrap.
Leftist academics are like the scorpion in the Parable of the Scorpion and the Frog—they simply MUST be commissars ordained from on high to socially engineer, it's their nature and why they get out of bed in the morning.
They might not all be Marxists but they are all Marx-ian, meaning that their most sacred belief is: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world...the point, however, is to change it." And they even embarked upon a Marx-ian project to distribute all assets and accolades from each according to his membership in an oppressor class to each according to his membership in an oppressed class.
It's been about 2 generations now since Left professors and bureaucrats (mostly in the Humanities) repurposed their positions into priests of utopian egalitarianism and swapped out education for indoctrination. Trump should be applauded for ripping up these noxious weeds at their roots, but it's only a (great) first step. The Marcuseans did not march all this way just to turn tail at the first major defeat—they need to be chased out of every institution until the real first purpose of education becomes paramount: teaching and inspiring students, not meeting the social and political needs of disaffected adversary intellectuals.
Thanks Lee. One step in the right direction. Decades more work to right the ship and reprogram education and society. Appreciate your commitment to the meritocracy. It's awful working in research and being surrounded by midwits without commitment to rigor and objectivity. 25 years ago was superior in so many ways that no one is aware.
Lee, I work at a three letter Federal agency. This morning there was an email for the whole Workforce that read essentially, "DEI strategic plan revoked, effective immediately." Now I don't know what larger effect it will have on the workforce but I'm hoping it will get me out of the stupid yearly mandatory training about stuff like respecting pronouns!
I work for a TA provider funded by several 3-letter agencies, and most of the agency folks and my coworkers are falling apart. And I’m just THRILLED.
And now to eliminate disparate impact and its pernicious influence on testing.
Do you know the state of play on disparate impact? As I understand it, the disparate impact standard it was created by judicial rulines, not EO's or statute -- but I am not sure of that. If so, it probably can't be overturned by EO, and would require a law, which will be much harder than an EO -- and, as far as I know, is not even on Trump's radar (all the chatter I hear about legislatin is about the budget, taxes, and immigration).
No, I do not. But it should be a legal target - unless they could get it overturned by the court.
Thanks for this article and for breaking down the EO and its implications, particularly for academia, for us.