CITY JOURNAL
Didn’t Earn It: For more and more Americans, these words spell out the real meaning of DEI
John Tierney
June 4, 2024

George Orwell despaired at the linguistic atrocities of propagandists, but he did offer one bit of hope in his famous essay, “Politics and the English Language.” While lamenting that “political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible,” he noted that some abuses of the language were vulnerable to “jeers” from a few critics. “Silly words and expressions have often disappeared,” he wrote, “not through any evolutionary process but owing to the conscious action of a minority.” So perhaps a jeering minority will rid us of today’s most egregiously indefensible phrase: “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.” It’s a textbook example of doublespeak, the term inspired by Orwell’s 1984 dystopia in which the Newspeak language enables citizens to engage in “doublethink”—simultaneously holding two contradictory beliefs. The words in DEI sound like admirable goals, but the officials mouthing them are working to do just the opposite, as Florida governor Ron DeSantis observed when he banned DEI initiatives at public universities. READ MORE

CITY JOURNAL How DEI Inspires Jew Hatred After DEI took hold at Penn, anti-Semitic fervor on campus intensified. At first glance, DEI seems to have little connection to the Jewish people or the Jewish state. It is more often associated with efforts to recruit more minority students by lowering admissions standards, creating racially discriminatory scholarships, and setting racial quotas. While I witnessed all that and more before my retirement from Penn in 2021, I also came to see that subscribing to DEI almost inevitably resulted in attacking Jews.