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[Order Daniel Greenfield’s new book, Domestic Enemies: HERE.]
DEI is so unpopular that it’s being renamed. Like a mafia informant hiding out from his old pals, some consultants are trying to rebrand DEI as IDE. There are only so many ways to move the same letters around to form an acronym that isn’t as lethal in connotation as IED or DIE.
And if IDE doesn’t work out, expect to see some EID offices around before long.
Conservative states have started cracking down on DEI offices at publicly funded colleges, and so the University of Iowa now calls its DEI office the “Division of Access, Opportunity and Diversity” while the University of Oklahoma renamed its racism stronghold the “Division of Access and Opportunity.’ At the University of Tennessee, it’s the “Division of Access and Engagement” while at Louisiana State University it was more awkwardly renamed to the “Division of Engagement, Civil Rights & Title IX”. Utah Valley University’s DEI office adopted the meaninglessly bland title of the “Office of Institutional Engagement and Effectiveness.”
Much like changing DEI to IDE, liberals playing mad libs with buzzwords like “access’”, “engagement” and “opportunity” will just mean more of the same under a different name.
A rose by any other name may smell as sweet, and a racist organization is going to be just as racist even if you rename the KKK and announce you’re admitting black people (this actually happened under Obama) or call DEI the Division of Effective Engagements and Opportunistic Access. The problem isn’t with the three letter name and can’t be fixed by moving it around.
It’s hard to say whether colleges believing that changing DEI’s name will fix everything is an insulting or accurate assessment of elected officials who have the attention span of mayflies and won’t even notice or care that the same DEI system is still up and running by another name.
Corporations have also changed the buzzwords that they use. Now that DEI is unpopular and legally risky, the HR departments are emphasizing “inclusion” as a safer brand. Diversity has come to be associated with discrimination and equity with a Marxist ideology that mandates cutting some people down so that the preferred groups may be able to advance. Inclusion has the least negative connotation and that’s why IDE seems safer than DEI.
Put “inclusion” first and no one will be able to argue, sue or ban the new DEI brand.
But there isn’t an underlying issue with the words “diversity” or “equity”, the problem is that they represent an ideology whose idea of diversity, equity and inclusion is discriminatory and punitive. Inclusion that’s smuggling the same ideology in its back pocket is still just as bad.
The Left has a long history of rebranding to fight a backlash. It wasn’t all that long ago that “woke” was a hip leftist self-definition before it was adopted as a derogatory term by critics and now the only people still using it are either on FOX News or in Hollywood. Within a few years a popular term had vanished among wokes without them becoming any less ‘woke’.
“Liberal” went through the same phases of pride, mockery and shame more times than anyone can count. What was once a badge of pride turned into a Rush Limbaugh skit. “Progressives” had their day and the term “socialist” was only recently embraced again by the American Left.
At interviews about my book, ‘Domestic Enemies: The Founding Fathers’ Fight Against The Left’, I’m often asked if the lefties of George Washington’s day called themselves that. Even though the term “left” does date back to the French Revolution, the answer is no they did not.
Historically, leftists were often defined by the names that their opponents called them. And that’s still true today. But that’s not because leftists are hapless victims of a conservative culture. Rather the other way around. Leftists strive to appear to be an indistinguishable part of the culture. That’s why media stories routinely refer to “right-wing” or “conservative” groups, but rarely to leftist ones. A news story that mentions the David Horowitz Freedom Center will call us “right-wing extremists” while ProPublica or the Southern Poverty Law Center will be described as nonpartisan public policy and civil rights organizations. The Left wants to be invisible.
Standing out as a distinct group will only get in the way of its long march through America.
That’s why leftist rallies are always “grass roots” even when they’re all waving the same signs, reciting the same chants and all their organizations are funded by the Ford Foundation. FOX News is “right-wing”, but CNN, MSNBC and the New York Times are just “journalists”. Republican positions are identified as distinctly ideological, but Democrat positions are just sensible common sense reforms to ensure good government and make life better for all.
Internally there are a plethora of terms that the Left uses to identify and define its beliefs, but once they are smuggled outside, they are supposed to lose their ideological identification. So it was with DEI. Like “diversity”, it was turned into a generic term in workplaces. Once it was ideologically typed, it had to be discarded and replaced with even more generic terms.
And that is what’s happening now.
The Left is a series of secret societies. And it still operates through conspiratorial means. In America, only its most extreme elements are willing to identify themselves by name. Its movements define themselves primarily by issues rather than ideology. They protest for the ‘environment’ or against ‘hate’ and ‘war’, they are ‘community organizers’ fighting ‘poverty’’, but rarely are they identified as what they are, radical activists imposing a leftist ideology on us.
What does the Left fear? Like Rumpelstiltskin, someone saying its name out loud.
In George Orwell’s 1984, the socialist dictatorship imposed ‘Newspeak’: a manufactured language in which dissenting ideas cannot be expressed. The American Left uses the institutions under its control to perpetuate its own ‘Newspeak’ in which it does not exist.
The moment that people are given words like “wokeness” or “cancel culture” to crystalize what they have been experiencing, liberal comedians start talking about being afraid to make jokes, students complain about intimidation in class and workers start suing companies for discriminating against them on political grounds. Suddenly, people can talk about it.
And the leftist institutions pull up stakes, loudly declare that no such thing exists (and if it does, it’s a good thing) and begin changing all the labels exactly as they are now doing with DEI.
Naming the enemy may seem minor, but it is no small thing. Name it and you pull away its mask. Name it and millions of apolitical people have a name to put to their experiences. The people yelling at them, threatening them and scolding them are not just “crazies”.
They’re leftists.
Unlike Rumpelstiltskin, naming the Left alone won’t defeat it, but it tears away the disguise under which its activists rule over us and reveals that all of the people wrecking the country are not acting alone, they’re not irrational, incompetent or corrupt: they’re members of a movement.
And then they lie, they run for cover, they whine about “red-baiting” and are on the defensive. Name them, identify them and define them, and for the first time, they are on the ropes,
Name the Left. Destroy the Left.
Awesome article, Daniel!
One of the Left’s most foul attributes is its love of lying. They are acolytes of the Father of Lies.
Seriously, listen to any Democrat. 90% or more of what they says is lies.
DEI: Diversion, Effrontery and Iniquity
Name the Left. Destroy the Left.
Brainwashing is the only thing that keeps the left in power.
And half of the population of America, US citizens, are brainwashed.
Unbrainwashing them is a near impossibility.
Good people have no choice other than to circle the wagon,
take care of yourself, family and kindred spirits and friends.
The American Apocalypse is closer than anyone can imagine.
The left’s “love of lying” often comes with a generous amount of wiggle room.
iI believe the heading, “INSIDE EVERY PROGRESSIVE IS A TOTALITARIAN SCREAMING TO GET OUT” is SO VERY TRUE. Thank you, Mr. Horowitz,.
Their … “love of lying” has yet to be held accountable with absolutely “NO” consequences and/or justice. Until that occurs, don’t expect a course change.
Radical leftists are radical leftists.
How about the Office of Preferential Treatment for Undesirables? OPTU is for rejects and misfits from all over the world.
Oh yes, the Left always has to rebrand it’s evils, as they did with global warming, rebranded to climate change. I note also they rebranded the debunked PCR test during the scamdemic, calling it the antigen test, which, when I dug into it, was the very same thing.
“Name the Left. Destroy the Left.”
Ok then, President Bush’s “Office of Faith-Based Initiatives”, Catholic Charities, Lutheran Services (which sponsored Ilhan Omar and her family), Methodist, Baptist, Episcopalian, etc., charities, all receiving millions upon millions of tax-payer dollars from the Biden administration to destroy this country through illegal immigration invasion.
All in the name of Christian altruism, you are your brother’s keeper.
“The roots of America’s welfare state lie in the Populist-Progressive Era of the late 19th century and early 20th century, especially with the Protestant social gospel movement, which held that Christian ethics and “social justice” should drive public policy, including wealth redistribution, trust-busting, graduated tax rates to punish the rich, cradle-to-grave handouts, and missionary-style imperialistic ventures abroad to spread the faith and make the world “safe for democracy.” The concept of social justice, which jettisoned the idea that we actually earn and deserve what we get in life, was first adopted by the Jesuit Luigi Taparelli in the 1840s, as drawn from the work of St. Thomas Aquinas.” – Richard M. Salsman
Catholic charities and other groups relocating hordes of foreigners from crappy countries do it for money, not altruism.
Catholic Charities is a racket and scam perpetuated on US citizen taxpayers.
Catholic Charities is doing great damage to America and US citizens with its policies encouraging
and administrating the INVASION of America and using US taxpayer money to finance the hordes
of illegal aliens and foreign criminals entering the USA.
.
I see your feigned reform has slipped back into the mire of moral confusion. Is your hatred of faith a result of your inability to sustain any? Or is all of your self-righteous posturing just the prattle of another weak-minded leftist pretending to have some kind of integrity?
If you want to be successful at something, try giving up.
Yes, I AM my brother’s keeper. Two things:
First, these illegal foreign invading criminals are NOT “my brother”. different mother, different father.
Second, God’s Word commands this: if a man WILL NOT WORK, , DO NOT FEED HIM.
So much for all the politico-enablement of evil.
Uh Oh. The THX beer drinking game has spun up. “Christian” and “altruism” have been invoked. Time to crack open a couple of cold ones.
No one understands the Left like Daniel Greenfield.
Thank you, Mark
David Horowitz absolutely does.
Look at the logo for front page magazine:
Inside every progressive is a totalitarian screaming to get out.
It has been there for as long as I can remember.
What Dennis Praeger has been saying as well, for years. He even distinguishes between “liberals” and the “the left.” But maybe there really aren’t any remaining liberals.
That’s a distinction that’s questionable. I feel he clings to a past iteration that may no longer exist. Reminds of Dershowitz continuing to think there’s a worthy Democrat party.
Its the moral question of whether or not we can blame the individual leftist for the harm the left does. I think we can.
“Die Y T” is the acurate name for this movement.
We should all distinguish between “liberals” and “the left,” as the modern democrat party gets away with the benign, former label which is just a plain lie these days.
And speaking of that — and of Orwell — anyone who hasn’t read his “Politics and the English Language” essay should look it up now and read it. It says so much about our current state of things and guarantees that you’ll wince each time you hear an ordinary person pick up the vague, meaningless, political language (such as “in regard to” and other legalese-style phrases that have taken the place of clear-cut language we used to use.)
Personally, if I hear “moving forward’ for “in the future” or “from now on” or “in days ahead” ONE MORE TIME, I’m gonna scream. Enough! (And that’s not even mentioning Cringe’s “top of mind,” a garbled phrase that, I guess, was taken seriously, as it is now being repeated by people who should know better.)
Agree but you misspelled leftist as l i b e r a l
US military units still using terms dei but they cannot alter acronym without official memo. And military sodomy appreciation month coming up. hooray
They are no different than RABID ANIMALS.
About the book, I knew there was a lot of lunacy in the 1800s, as I came across it from time to time, but the book does an excellent job of exposing it, so it is very valuable to me.
Thank you, I wrote it to spread some of that forgotten history around. We tend to forget just how mad a good deal of the 19th century was. Characters who could only exist in novels roamed the earth.
Take Daniel Sickles.
I agree—name the Left as the FAR LEFT RADICAL EXTREMISTS that they are i.e., “Communists” and let them squeal “McCarthyite!”
Then, double down and call them “FascistCommies.”
Fascism and Communism are on the proverbial ‘Left’ under Socialistic Totalitarianism, censorship, indoctrination, discrimination of particular classes and races of people be they Jews or White people along with loss of freedom and individual basic human rights.
Hey, it’s not lying. Just truth transforming. Making truth better. Leave it to the Left to master the art of newspeak. They’ve been developing their own language for years. It’s too bad that so many people are willing to subscribe to it.
Speaking the name has long been seen as a source of power. Socially, using a person’s name works better than using a pronoun. In the “Book of the Dead,” the dead Egyptian would recite the names of the 42 gods, such as Breaker of Bones and Eater of Shadows, to be accepted into the underworld. Political power is sought by means of bait and switch. When the political label is exposed and named, to reduce the threat to its power, it switches and baits.
It’s time for the US Military to go down to the Mexican border and put a permanent end to the foreign invasion of newcomers.
Really insightful article. Name and Expose them for the harms they cause and their deceit.