By Thomas Ultican 5/7/2025
Donald Trump kicked off his anti-DEI campaign during his first term by signing Executive Order 13950 which prohibited federal agencies and contractors from conducting DEI-related training. Now, he is back to complete his racist plan with new executive orders. Christopher Rufo and Robby Starbuck appear to be the phony intellectual heft behind his benighted agenda.
Many right-wingers are out to end Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programs. The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, wrote on X, “DEI is just another word for racism.” Musk’s central complaint is DEI unfairly harms White people. Billionaire hedge-fund manager, Bill Ackman, wrote, “DEI is racist because reverse racism is racism, even if it is against white people.” However, there is a long history of non-Whites in America not getting into schools or being hired when they clearly had the better credentials. Apparently this does not a concern to these White billionaires.
Rufo claims about DEI, “It’s the old Marxist idea of treating people unequally in order to equalize their outcomes.” Sadly, on the MAGA right, the politics of “red bating” has been rescued from Joe McCarthy’s ash heap. Calling someone a “commie” is a weak argument against DEI.
McKinsey & Company is not known to be an ultra-leftist organization still they provide a useful definition of DEI:
“Diversity is defined as having a presence and representation of people who are different. This includes but is not limited to race, gender, disability, religion, sexual orientation, political affiliation, age, languages, and nationalities.
“Equity, which is often confused with equality, is defined as the act of implementing processes that are just and fair across the various groups of people.
“Inclusion is the state in which all groups feel included because they are recognized and receiving beneficial access to programs, systems and power and are not discouraged due to their personal characteristics. As these three definitions are combined, one can see evidence that DEI is needed.”
In the corporate world McKinsey & Company is not alone. Taylor Tedford of the Washington Post reported, “In his annual letter to shareholders this year [2023], JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon emphasized that DEI ‘initiatives make us a more inclusive company and lead to more innovation, smarter decisions and better financial results for us and for the economy overall.’”
Boston Consulting Group is another entity not known for its leftist tendencies. It says DEI initiatives can boost profits, reduce employee attrition and increase employee motivation. This comes from their research based on data provided by more than 27,000 employees in 16 countries.
The fact is non-White males and women are not competing on a level playing field when it comes to hiring, admittance to training programs or gaining promotions. DEI programs work to rectify this. Now, the President is claiming it to be a “WOKE” agenda of liberals working against White people. That is simply a lie.
Rufo and Starbuck
Christopher Rufo was born August 26, 1984 and grew up in Sacramento, California. His path to fame and power in rightwing politics opened while he was a research fellow at the Christian think-tank, Discovery Institute. This small Seattle institute is most famous for promoting “intelligent design” in high school science classes and opposing Darwinian Theory.
In her book School Moms, Laura Pappano shared about Rufo:
“In ‘White Fragility’ Comes to Washington,’ Rufo claimed that diversity trainings at several federal agencies were part of ‘the creation of a new, radical political consciousness.’ He also miss-defined this new consciousness as CRT, writing, ‘Critical race theory—the academic discourse centered on the concepts of ‘whiteness,’ ‘white fragility’ and ‘white privilege’—is spreading rapidly through the federal government.’ The erroneous definition of CRT caught on. Rufo tweeted about it. Then, on August 17, 2020, Rufo was a guest on Fox’s Tucker Carlson Tonight, where he described critical race theory as spreading ‘like wildfire’ across American institutions.”’ (Page 77)
A few weeks later, Rufo, back on Carlson’s show, claimed, “Conservatives need to wake up that this is an existential threat to the United States” and looking into the camera stated:
“The president and the White House, it is within their authority and power to immediately issue and executive order abolishing critical race theory. I call on the president to immediately issue this executive order.” (Page 78)
Amazingly, President Trump complied two days later.
Robby Starbuck is part of the Millennial Generation (also known as Generation Y) born 2/27/1989. He claims his mother and grandparents fled Cuba during the 1960s to escape the Castro regime. Starbuck began his career in Hollywood where he started a production company and worked on commercials, films and music videos for artists like Akon and Smashing Pumpkins.
Starbuck has become a leader for right-wing hostility to DEI programs, climate science and LGBTQ rights.
He claims corporate policies to slow down the effects of human-caused climate change do “nothing positive for society.” Starbuck says the climate has “always changed” and human beings have “very little control” over it. In their article about his activism, CNN states:
“This is false. It is the overwhelming consensus of scientists that human-generated fossil fuel pollution – what comes from burning coal, gas and oil – is the primary cause of global warming.”
He was an out spoken Republican in 2015. After not finding much support for his political ideology in California, He and his wife Landon moved to Tennessee. CNN reports, “Landon Starbuck has been a leading advocate in Tennessee for right-wing causes like banning both transgender-affirming medical care for minors and drag shows with children present.”
Starbuck hits on all of the right-wing agenda including during the pandemic when he campaigned against Covid-19 masks and vaccine mandates.
He asserted to CNN that corporate DEI programs are “evil” and a “Trojan horse for pushing leftism.”
Rufo and Starbuck are the brain trust behind President Trump’s anti-DEI posture.
A Map to Justice
In his Book Dangerous Learning, Derek Black laid out the almost two centuries of efforts to undermine black education.
The landmark case of Mendez v. Westminster in 1947 challenged the segregation of Mexican-American students in California schools. The treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 brought vast areas populated by Mexicans (present-day California, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, and parts of Colorado and Wyoming) into US control. Soon White populations turned intensely anti-Mexican and until the California case, Mexican children were segregated away from White students.
After the completion of the transcontinental railroad, Chinese immigrants who worked on the western end of the endeavor were looking for new opportunities. White westerners terrorized them away from their communities.
American Indian children were taken from their homes and put into reeducation camps aimed at destroying their Indian culture.
These acts were not because White people are so terrible. It was the fruit of ignorance. Never before had so many disparate cultures interacted. By dint of numbers and wealth, White people dominated. Physiologists tell us about three phenomena that promote racism; “categories, which organize people into distinct groups; factions, which trigger ingroup loyalty and intergroup competition; and segregation, which hardens racist perceptions, preferences and beliefs.” These are all naturally occurring and the only solution to them is education.
A note of warning to the left is Harvard Professor Danielle Allen’s observation:
“Across the country, DEI bureaucracies have been responsible for numerous assaults on common sense — certain mandatory diversity training initiatives come to mind — but the values of lowercase-i inclusion and lowercase-d diversity remain foundational to healthy democracy.”
Yes, it is true that liberals can be just as boneheaded as right-wing ideologues. That said, being opposed to climate science is really stupid and opposition to all DEI initiatives is the same as supporting White nationalism.
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