Richard Hanania
Appearances
Today, Explained
The man who helped kill DEI
While those quotes you write at the beginning, I will grant you that those are things that I wouldn't stand by and nobody else should.
Today, Explained
The man who helped kill DEI
I had an article which eventually turned into my book, The Origins of Vogue, which argued that a lot of the cultural issues that conservatives were mad about, a lot of the ideas about disparate impact, a lot of the ideas that you couldn't be hard on crime because it has an impact on one group of people more than the other group of people, or you couldn't have standardized tests and so forth.
Today, Explained
The man who helped kill DEI
A lot of that was kind of baked into civil rights law, not necessarily the text of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. but a lot of judicial interpretation and executive action that came in the years and decades that followed. So I was arguing that conservatives were upset about this thing they called DEI or wokeness, and they were seeing it as mainly a cultural issue.
Today, Explained
The man who helped kill DEI
Oh, look at Target, look at the State Department, look at what they're all doing. And my argument was like, there is a policy agenda here that you can focus on.
Today, Explained
The man who helped kill DEI
So it was right away, it was something that conservatives were already interested in. And they just wanted to, they needed to understand there was a kind of, you know, a policy solution to the problems they were concerned about. You know, at some point, I wrote a review, Vivek Ramaswamy, when he was, you know, unknown before he was running for president, wrote a book called Woke Inc.
Today, Explained
The man who helped kill DEI
I reviewed it for a publication called American Affairs. I criticized it based on some of my ideas that he didn't talk about civil rights law, that a lot of we were concerned about the same things. But he didn't bring up the kind of history that I talked about here. He actually reached out and we started to be in touch based on that. I explained to him a lot of these things.
Today, Explained
The man who helped kill DEI
Um, he started talking about it. He started going on the campaign stump later when he was running for president and saying, first day, I will repeal executive order one, one, two, four, six. And this was the executive order that, uh, I mentioned in my book that Johnson signed in 65.
Today, Explained
The man who helped kill DEI
Trump actually gets into office and Trump does sign a repeal of Executive Order 11246 and does a lot of the other things that I recommended. So it was it was quite a journey where I think I played some role in putting these ideas on the map.
Today, Explained
The man who helped kill DEI
So the goal of ending Executive Order 11246 was part of a broader project to take government out of the idea of that it should be taking consideration of race and sex or enforcing such considerations onto the private sector in terms of hiring, in terms of promotion. There's perhaps a role for the government to play in terms of
Today, Explained
The man who helped kill DEI
Ensuring non-discrimination as discrimination was understood, the concept was understood in 1964 when the Civil Rights Act was passed. But a lot of the sort of cultural changes within institutions were kind of adopted as a defense against potential lawsuits and against potential violations.
Today, Explained
The man who helped kill DEI
loss of government contracts and these other ways that government sort of put some on the scale to shift the culture for corporate America and educational establishments culturally towards the left on identity issues. So I wanted less DEI, less race, sex-based governance, and less of a kind of government kind of encouraging institutions to take positions that a lot of Americans don't agree with.
Today, Explained
The man who helped kill DEI
Well, that's true. I would respect business decisions on these things. I mean, if they want to have a kind of program, that's one thing. But these were mandates coming from the government and also the subjects of lawsuits.
Today, Explained
The man who helped kill DEI
And sure, there's one thing you could say, well, I want to do market research on Hispanics or maybe have someone in the room who knows something about women's products or things like that. I don't think that there's necessarily a strong correlation between that and, say, demographic balancing based on census categories. And I go into how the census categories were determined.
Today, Explained
The man who helped kill DEI
It's kind of arbitrary, right? I mean, it's like, you know, the government cares that you have a certain number of blacks or Hispanics. They don't care if they are black. immigrants who just came here yesterday, or they are people who are culturally completely assimilated into the mainstream, as long as they have a Hispanic name.
Today, Explained
The man who helped kill DEI
So there are good corporate reasons to sometimes take into account race, sex, cultural background. I don't deny that. I don't think that that's necessarily what civil rights law has been forcing on companies.
Today, Explained
The man who helped kill DEI
I was happy. I mean, it felt good that I had written about a topic, that I had this kind of idea in my head. I wasn't anybody special. I didn't have any reason to think anyone would listen to me. And eventually I saw the outcome that I wanted. So I was elated at the time.
Today, Explained
The man who helped kill DEI
Absolutely, Noelle. I think one reason I'm not even, you know, I've had some contacts with the Trump administration. I think one reason I've not been even closer to the Trump administration is that I've been highly critical of a lot of the non-DEI related actions that he's taken. I agree with you. I think that these Some of these picks are certainly not merit-based.
Today, Explained
The man who helped kill DEI
They don't even rise to the level of kind of public decorum and ethics you often expect from someone who's going to be in the FBI director or the head of the Department of Defense. And so, yes, I don't think those are the only two choices. D.I. race based kind of governance or people that Trump thinks looks good on TV.
Today, Explained
The man who helped kill DEI
I think you could have a merit based system that that looks at people, takes them as individuals, takes to count their qualifications, takes into account what the president is trying to accomplish and that has more responsible people in positions of power.
Today, Explained
The man who helped kill DEI
So members of your audience who are skeptical of the Trump administration and many of their hiring practices, I would I would concur with their judgment.
Today, Explained
The man who helped kill DEI
Well, it's been actually a very long time. It's not like, you know, the last month or so. I've been this weird position where I am conservative and I do want to be constructive and conservative. When Trump looked like Trump was going to be the nominee and he might be president, I wanted my ideas to be listened to and I wanted them to do certain things.
Today, Explained
The man who helped kill DEI
At the same time, I don't just write about DEI. I write about a wide range of topics that I say what I believe on those topics. I think there's a level of corruption here, a level of blatant sort of corruption to the way government is working. It's unprecedented, at least in our recent history. I was always against social media censorship. I thought this was a way to suppress conservative voice's
Today, Explained
The man who helped kill DEI
But then Elon Musk buys Twitter. I'm happy. I say, OK, we're going to have free speech. And my goodness, it's become it's become a sewer. You know, I think that honesty and virtue and politics matter. And what I've seen from the conservative movement or I've seen from MAGA and the conservative movement in general as it's become MAGAfied has just horrified me.
Today, Explained
The man who helped kill DEI
Yeah, I'm unhappy. We all know Trump's flaws. I thought that he was going, you know, the first administration, though, we saw him surround himself with mostly responsible people. And so you can have a distaste for Trump and say, look, he's still putting the same judges on the federal judiciary that DeSantis or, in many cases, Ted Cruz or Jeb Bush would have.
Today, Explained
The man who helped kill DEI
And so you could say, well, I don't like Trump. He's sort of distasteful. But the movement is more than just Trump. Now, you can't really say that anymore. I mean, he's picking people who nobody would have believed possible could have a high-level government position, like Robert F. Kennedy, like Kash Patel. That's not true here. These are people who would only be chosen, appointed by Trump.
Today, Explained
The man who helped kill DEI
And so the Trump administration, if you're just looking in terms of pure policy, there's a lot I like. There's no reason to kind of be too upset there. But if you're looking at kind of where the movement is going, its level of sign of virtue and how
Today, Explained
The man who helped kill DEI
political movements and how people in power should behave and act and their relationship to truth and the relationship to the rest of society, I think it's gotten pretty bad.
Today, Explained
The man who helped kill DEI
The Epstein files are about to drop and it's going to be insane.
Today, Explained
The man who helped kill DEI
Yes, I can't lie to you and tell you that those weren't sincere beliefs. Some of the ways I phrased it was sometimes getting a rise out of people, but I can't deny that I did hold those views. This, I should note, was around 2010, 2011, so by the time it came out in the Huffington Post, it was about 12, 13 years later.
Today, Explained
The man who helped kill DEI
But yeah, I had some views that I now consider repugnant, and I was actually writing against before – that August 2023 exposition in the Huffington Post. So yes, I can't deny that I did have views like that at the time.
Today, Explained
The man who helped kill DEI
I think I was just young and angry. I saw these ideas that you couldn't talk about certain things like male-female differences, the idea that America was a racist country, which I didn't believe at the time and I don't believe now, or at least racist enough to explain disparities between groups of people. I didn't like censorship. I didn't like a lot of the things that
Today, Explained
The man who helped kill DEI
Conservatives in later years would turn against DEI, which was kind of at an early stage right there. And so I was angry. I was looking for people who were angry like me. And I think it was probably a lot of personal things going on in my life. By about 2012, 2013, I had sort of grown out of it, which I think often happens.
Today, Explained
The man who helped kill DEI
Well, I would make a distinction between that and the earlier stuff. I mean, there's a long intellectual tradition of people not believing in And that kind of naive sort of form of direct democracy going back to the American founders to today, and even before the American founders going back to the ancient Greeks.
Today, Explained
The man who helped kill DEI
And, you know, I said Appalachians and inner city Baltimore, I was saying generally poor communities, which are on average, um, you know, less informed about politics and have views that, you know, might not be the most coherent about making policy. Bringing up the Jews in that context was defending, you know, Jews saying, accepting your premise, if Jews do control America, what's the alternative?
Today, Explained
The man who helped kill DEI
Jews could, quote, unquote, control America in your views, the views of the anti-Semites, because they are disproportionately a smart, educated community. group of people. And I say smart, educated people having disproportionate power in society is a good thing. So I don't see that as racist or hateful or anything like that.