MONDAY: Gail Collins went to the Dylan film!

MONDAY, JANUARY 27, 2025

Bret Stephens on DEI: Gail Collins says she went to the Dylan film—but in her new Conversation with Bret Stephens, she doesn't say whether she liked it.

Stephens says he's planning to see the film. But in his new Conversation with Collins, he spends a substantial chunk of time saying what he doesn't like about the Trump White House sequel so far.

What doesn't Stephens like? "The list is so long," he says. Then he provides this list:

Trump Explodes Out of the Gate

[...]

Bret: The Jan. 6 pardons were awful. So was the pardon of Ross Ulbricht, the founder of an online drug market. Withdrawing Secret Service protections for Mike Pompeo and John Bolton and other former members of his administration is disgraceful and will haunt him if Iran makes good on its efforts to kill them. The sale of Trump crypto tokens is tawdry and unethical, at best, though very much on brand for the purveyor of Trump Steaks.

Gail: Love that one.

Bret: The effort to revoke birthright citizenship and overturn 160 years of jurisprudence on the 14th Amendment is abominable, though I was glad to see a Reagan-appointed federal judge immediately denounce the move as “blatantly unconstitutional” and temporarily block it. Looking forward to the Supreme Court following the judge’s lead, 9 to 0.

Gail: Yes! Yes!

Bret: We should not have Hegseth as defense secretary; in fact, we should never have a defense secretary who can’t get a single member of the opposing party to vote for him. And the idea that Elon Musk has an office in the White House when he has billions of dollars of business before the federal government is appalling.

I’m probably forgetting something, but yeah, there’s a lot not to like. And yet—

Gail: Oh, no, don’t “and yet” me.

For Stephens, a man of the center right, the list goes on and on. 

Awful? Disgraceful? Tawdry? Unethical? Abominable and appalling? 

Stephens, a man of the center right, finds a great deal not to like! And yet, by that time he assembles that list, he has already said this:

Bret: Any thoughts on Trump’s orders ending D.E.I. programming in the federal government?

Gail: The idea that government agencies should try to stress diversity, equity and inclusion in hiring decisions was heir to the historic fight for desegregation in civil service. Reformers argued that Americans of all races tended to do well if they came from middle-class families with ties to their communities and that the next step should be programs to open up educational and employment opportunities for everybody else.

Seems very appropriate that the administration pushing back is one that tends to regard political loyalty as the most important criterion for almost any job.

Bret: The central problem with D.E.I. is neither diversity nor inclusion. It’s the word “equity,” which in theory ought to mean simple fairness but in practice meant pervasive racial and gender gerrymandering based almost exclusively—and unconstitutionally—on considerations of group identity rather than individual qualifications. It also led to the creation of D.E.I. bureaucracies in thousands of institutions, from universities to corporations, whose employees too often acted as Soviet-style political commissars, enforcing all kinds of intrusive orthodoxies that tried to dictate not only how other employees or students were supposed to act but also how they were supposed to think and speak.

Anyone who has sat through a D.E.I. training seminar—by turns saccharine and scolding, treacly and tendentious—knows what I mean. It just turned people off, including a lot of well-meaning people who are all for inclusivity as a value. Trump getting rid of it is the best thing he’s done in office so far, as far as I’m concerned.

At this site, we've never "sat through a D.E.I. training seminar." But we've read the books and we've scanned the brochures. On that basis, we feel fairly sure that we know what Stephens is talking about.

In that exchange, Collins offers the lofty ideas behind the fundamental concept of "DEI." Stephens moves in a different direction. In effect, he's saying something like this:

There's no such thing as a good intention which can't be unwisely pursued.

For ourselves, we wouldn't know how to evaluate an order as sweeping as the one Trump has issued. How many good programs are possibly being thrown away, along with some which may resemble the portrait Stephens offers?

That said, we'll take a guess:

Blue America almost surely lost quite a few votes thanks to some of the dumber applications of this theoretically good idea. Simply put, we Blues aren't anywhere near as smart as we persistently claim to be. We've proven this again and again with respect to these topics, and we continue to do so.

Before the week is done, we'll offer a brand-new example. Every time some of this unhelpful folderol hits the fan, a Trump voter gets his wings.