At the height of the fateful year of 2020, while Black Lives Matter activists roamed the streets of our cities, setting fire to buildings and shocking much of the country into weirdly accepting provable lies, I warned that America faced mass hysteria akin to the Salem witch trials. “Sizable portions of the country appear to walk around in a trance,” I wrote in my book BLM: The Making of a New Marxist Revolution, “repeating axiomatically that the freest, most prosperous society in history is a ‘systemically, structurally and institutionally racist’ hell, one where ‘people are hurting.’” But now, finally, America seems to be breaking out of its DEI trance.

It turned out that the trance lasted for almost half a decade. For many of us, it was a nightmare to watch a small minority of the population—which has been imperfectly but serviceably labeled “woke”—bully, harass, torment, and cancel those who expressed any dissent, all in the pursuit of a barely hidden political project, and many Americans of goodwill supinely submit and enter into a hypnotic state.

But the regime of these latter-day woke Jacobins may now be coming to a screeching halt. History has not been fully written yet, to be sure, but it looks like America is breaking out of the collective spell. This is at least what can be discerned from the action-packed first few days of the new Trump administration. Trump campaigned successfully in opposition to woke, and the flurry of Executive Orders that have come in the first several weeks of his presidency made it clear that one of his top priorities is ending the race- and sex-based preferences regime that the Left imposed in 2020 and that his predecessor Joe Biden embraced during his presidency.

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Things are going so fast, that it is hard to keep one’s finger on the nation’s moment-to-moment pulse. So perhaps more important than evaluating what is transpiring from day to day is assessing how the freest people on earth came to fall into this trance. As we emerge from the hypnotic interlude, blinking timorously at the new light, we should ask the age-old question: How did we get here? Deconstructing how the trance took hold is not an empty exercise, but one that could help us not to repeat this enormous mistake again.

We can start by answering two related questions: The first is, what convinced Biden, a politician who for most of his long career was the opposite of woke, to embrace this progressive ideology, one that George Will observed was like a “foreign language” to him? The race and sex hysteria predated Biden’s presidency, but he enthusiastically translated it into policy, starting with his very first EO, which saturated the federal bureaucracy with DEI action plans, trainings, and new sub-departments.

The second and related question: why did so many good Americans willingly walk into the trance? How could any of this have happened in the Land of the Free? Why did so many librarians, second-grade teachers, museum directors and curators, professional sports league commissioners, filmmakers, journalists, directors of opera houses—all enjoying a degree of freedom hitherto unknown to man—suddenly decide to walk around zombie-like repeating incantations about “systemic racism,” “white supremacy,” or “societal oppression”?

It’s Not Mom and Apple Pie

Part of the reason, but only part, is that supporters of DEI describe it as a benign, even wholesome endeavor to “increase access to and remove barriers from things like higher education and jobs for those from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds, races, and genders,” in the words of Time magazine, or as “efforts to push the private sector to ensure its workforce is diverse and inclusive too,” as the AP, which is supposed to give straightforward news, described DEI in an article that quoted me as a critic of it.

But as I and others—notably the truly indispensable Chris Rufo, the brainy James Lindsey, and many, many others—have spent years explaining, DEI is not mom and apple pie. It is nothing less than the operating system of an ideology devised to scorch the American Way of Life.

This ideology has many dimensions; it can take the form of gender theory or racial theory, but all have in common important Marxist attributes, first and foremost the Marxist belief that the human experience boils down to a struggle between the oppressed and their oppressors. The writings, teachings, and trainings of DEI seek to sow doubt and erode support for the American system of individual rights, free-market economics, and parental control of children’s moral upbringing, not to mention America’s culture and history.

Capitalism rewards the wrong criteria, argue critical theorists and DEI retailers, while parliamentary democracy fails multiracial representation. According to DEI’s blinkered view, both therefore end up buttressing America’s oppressive status quo.

The upshot is that DEI ends up seeking to replace the Western mindset with an orthodoxy that is at its nature collectivist, tyrannical, and immoral. The structure of DEI, especially the trainings conducted in schools and offices, factory floors, and even the halls of Congress, aims at reprogramming individuals into loathing the Western status quo and accepting the dictums of cultural Marxism. It was, indeed, this operating system that the woke Jacobins employed to intimidate individuals not already shocked into compliance by the violence of 2020 to buy into the view that America is oppressive, in the throes of “white supremacy,” and “systemically racist.” When something is systemically hateful, the only response is to smash the system. As Trump said in his first-day EO, “That ends today.”

How Did This Happen?

DEI’s “apple pie” messaging, however, brings us back to Joe Biden. Biden had gone most of his political career as a folksy, blue-collar guy from Scranton. How did that lead to a full embrace of the most extreme woke campus clichés? The lunch pail figure was of course, like most political personas, a calculated choice. And just as DEI activists presented their novel ideas as harmless attempts to remove barriers and increase opportunity, so Biden calculated that the ascendant DEI values could be palatably packaged in the homespun style that he had honed for so many years.

In my aforementioned book, I recount how a week after Donald Trump’s first inauguration in January 2017, the communist leader Angela Davis met with BLM founder Alicia Garza on the set of the television show Democracy Now! The two Marxists hugged and exchanged expressions of mutual admiration. At one point, Davis told Garza that she and the other BLM leaders had created a new reality in America, and averred that Hillary Clinton had lost to Trump because voters had not seen in her “the person they needed to give expression to this new consciousness.”

At the time, I wrote, “Angela Davis’s words on that January morning were prophetic. Fast forward four years and BLM’s demands were indeed on the agenda. Her harsh indictment of Hillary Clinton allows us to comprehend the alacrity with which Obama’s vice president, now sworn in as the forty-sixth president, obediently executes the dictates of BLM.” EO 13946, I wrote, “included several of the BLM demands.”

This, too, was prophetic. As my co-authors and I found when we wrote a Heritage paper on DEI “action items” that the Biden administration issued in April 2022, operatives at BLM itself were co-authors. Biden recognized the shift in the party, and saw the new consciousness as the ticket to staying in office. Ultimately, he lived and died by the BLM sword: running as the BLM candidate, he won at the peak of the group’s success, but it also proved his undoing once the American electorate soured on wokeness.

That’s Biden. As for good-natured Americans who willingly bought into the white supremacy and systemic racism lies, some did obviously do it for also cynical reasons. Many of the gatekeepers of our cultural institutions also put their finger in the air to see which way the wind was blowing, and threw in their lot with the ascendant racial orthodoxy, even if it was based on the same racism we fought in the 1960s. There were others who went along for more forgivable reasons. Most people would prefer to keep their jobs, and not be ostracized or called a racist, so they will endure penury, not giving a thought to how their surrender abets tyranny.

There were others, still, who became true believers. The main national hypnotizers, including Nikole Hannah-Jones of the 1619 Project, and BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors, were clear that they were using what they themselves called “white guilt” to achieve their political aims. In the end, BLM’s manipulation of George Floyd’s death and other tragedies was so adroit, and the ensuing street mayhem was so ferocious at times, that they shook the gatekeepers of cultural institutions into buying into the lies. The mass hypnosis worked on far too many people.

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But what we can’t forget—and this is the key here—is that the BLM founders had this planned all along. Domestic and foreign Marxists had given them instruction on Marxism-Leninism and Maoism, and trained them on organizing the streets. When Alicia Garza says that the organization she founded seeks to “chang[e] how we’ve organized this country. … I believe we all have work to do to keep dismantling the organizing principle of this society,” and her co-founder Patrisse Cullors says: “It is going to take complete transformation—at all branches of government—to change the fate of this country,” believe them.

They almost succeeded. By mid-2021, the entire country was having the new totalitarian ideology being imposed from all sides: the government, the schools, the libraries, human resources at work, the corporations, etc. Even leisure activities did not provide an escape, as the sports leagues, weathervanes that they are, also bought into the nonsense.

But as I started noticing as I traveled the country extensively starting in the spring of 2021, the American people soon started to resist the orthodoxy en masse. I actually started by speaking to a June rally in Virginia’s Loudoun County, where parents rose against Covid restrictions and the incessant obsession with sex and race in the classrooms—which turned out to be the birthplace of the anti-woke movement. As I traveled to speak to groups throughout the US—whether in Tucson, Salt Lake City, Denver, Madison, or Mishawaka, and I told people I had been to Loudoun County, they all called it “the epicenter” of the movement. So important was that Virginia locality about an hour from Washington, DC, that the Biden administration even initiated federal investigations of the parents protesting at school board meetings, often treating them as domestic terrorists. But the momentum was too strong. First, Virginians elected Glenn Youngkin as governor later that year, an early harbinger. Then the corporate world—Target, Meta/Facebook, Amazon, McDonald’s, Walmart, Ford, Lowe’s, Harley Davidson, John Deere, and Toyota, just to name a few—abandoned DEI with the same alacrity with which they had embraced it. The result of the 2024 election, and the subsequent federal takedown of DEI, was the culmination of this visceral national reaction against the extreme ideology.

DEI—and the threat of Marxism in general—is not gone, of course. We now will have to go into every nook and cranny of all aspects of life, especially the cultural institutions, and do a deep cleaning. But as we do that work, we should understand not just how this happened, but also how monumental the job is that we have before us.