Proponents of diversity, equity, and inclusion have not yet gotten off the mat to which President Donald Trump knocked them with a flurry of executive orders that made the practices illegal. But we’re starting to see what an attempt to get up might look like.

DEI is as American as apple pie! Indeed, it upholds meritocracy, one country under God, and the American way of life!

No, I am not making this up. This is almost, word for word, what the Minority Leader of the House of Representatives, Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), said at a press conference.

It is demonstrably false. In fact, it is the opposite of the truth. But liberals and journalists began to amplify it right away. 

An activist with MeidasTouch News, with more than half a million followers on X, posted what Jeffries said and soon got more than a million views. I did an interview on the anti-DEI executive orders on C-SPAN, and host Pedro Echevarria asked me about it. Pedro is both respected and courteous, so the fact that he raised the issue means Jeffries is being taken seriously.

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First, let’s look at the entirety of Jeffries’s statement. Looking at the gaggle of journalists straight in the eye, the former corporate lawyer from Brooklyn said:

“Diversity, equity, and inclusion are American values. Perhaps I can explain. The motto of the United States of America is e pluribus unum. Out of many, one. That’s diversity. The 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution—one of the most influential important amendments in our country—provides equal protection under the law. That’s equity. In this country, we pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America. A flag that we just presented to the new President and Vice President. And in that pledge, we promise one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. A-L-L. That’s inclusion. Not complicated. Diversity, equity, and inclusion are American values. It’s about economic opportunity. It’s about merit for everyone, based on what you know, not who you know.”

Now, Jeffries must have known that none of what he was saying was true, which would make his statement a lie. But lacking a godlike ability to divine what was in his heart when he spoke these words, the only recourse is to explain to him and others why none of this is true.

First, DEI represents anti-American values. It helps to think of DEI as the operating system for its ideological base, critical race theory, in the sense that DEI’s trainings, activities, writings, analyses, etc., implement the value system of CRT. 

The DEI trainings remind so many of us of Mao Zedong’s struggle sessions of the 1960s and 1970s because both seek to indoctrinate—or rather brainwash—the trainees into loathing the present system and seeking to replace it with something else.

CRT—and by inference DEI—postulates that American society is systemically racist, oppressive, animated by white supremacy, or any of many other ills attributed to America, its founding, and its culture. And so, DEI does not promote diversity, etc., to which few people would object. It seeks to dismantle our entire society and recast it. 

According to both the theorists and practitioners of DEI, academics such as Kimberle Crenshaw, Derrick Bell, and Lani Guinier in the first group, and hucksters such as Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo in the second, both capitalism and representative democracy—twin columns supporting the American system, are schemes to keep the rich and powerful rich and powerful.

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The second point is baffling. DEI believes and promotes group dynamics through identity politics, the opposite of E Pluribus Unum.

And Jeffries’s description of the words “diversity, equity, and inclusion” is preposterous. As defined by DEI practitioners, diversity means racial quotas, which are unconstitutional. Equity has come to mean the functional opposite of equality, demanding that Americans be treated differently because of their race. And inclusion means language codes. A mall cop can throw someone out of a mall for wearing a T-Shirt that says “Jesus Saves.”

And, no, Mr. Jeffries, DEI was never intended to be about merit. Meritocracy “is not only wrong; it’s bad,” wrote Clifton Mark.

DEI has always been about upending all the things that Jeffries now says it defends.

“Diversity without changing the structure, without calling for structural formation, simply brings those who were previously excluded into a process that continues to be as racist, as misogynist as it was before,” the communist leader Angela Davis told a University of Virginia audience in 2017.

Jeffries questioned why Trump has done so much to dismantle DEI. “It’s not my understanding based on anything that I’ve seen,” he said, that support for reversing DEI “had anything to do with the results in November.”

They were, in his telling, “the high cost of living in the United States of America, and that should be everyone’s takeaway, along with the importance of working together to secure the border.” But there is a reason Trump is knocking out DEI—he’s sensed all this. 

Let anyone who thinks they can use Jeffries’s arguments to defend DEI know that we have the receipts.