Today, Explained - The man who helped kill DEI

Episode Date: March 13, 2025

Policy in the second Trump administration is being driven by a small group of thinkers from the online right. We talk to one of them about how he got DEI dismantled. This episode was produced by Miles Bryan with help from Carla Javier, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Andrea Kristinsdottir and Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Noel King. Further reading: The deeply online origins of MAGA 2.0 by Andrew Prokop. The Origins of Woke by Richard Hanania. Richard Hanania, Rising Right-Wing Star, Wrote For White Supremacist Sites Under Pseudonym. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast Support Today, Explained by becoming a Vox Member today: http://www.vox.com/members Photo courtesy of Richard Hanania. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For more than half a century, the U.S. had a rule that said anyone that does business with the federal government, from Boeing to FedEx and Pfizer to Johns Hopkins, had to take affirmative action toward hiring people regardless of race, color or creed. On day one of his presidency, Donald Trump ended that rule. We've ended the tyranny of so-called diversity, equity and inclusion policies all across the entire federal government and indeed the private sector and our military. And our country will be woke no longer. As the U.S. exploded following the murder of George Floyd in the summer of 2020, a loose

coalition of highly online commentators, sub stackers and Twitter shit posters set their sights on eviscerating DEI policies. Then they won. Coming up on Today Explained, one of them speaks. Listen, we all love a good hustle. We all love a rise and grind mentality. But let's be real, you could do all that and still be super comfy, right? Right.

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This is the Moonshot Podcast. Out now wherever you listen. You're listening to Today Explained. I'm Andrew Prokop, senior correspondent, Vox, covering politics. You recently wrote for Vox that the Trump administration is making policy, making policy decisions based on ideas that took hold on Twitter. Say more about what you mean. So one thing that's become very clear in the new Trump administration that is different

from the first one is that the people calling the shots are very, very online. That includes, of course, Elon Musk. It includes Vice President J.D. Vance. It includes Stephen Miller. It includes a whole host of officials whose names we don't even know, but whose online-ness is evident in the policies that are being rolled out by this administration. What are those policies? There are all sorts of things, really kind of too many to name.

A kind of silly one that just recently happened is that Attorney General Pam Bondi announced that she was going to unveil the Epstein files. What you're going to see, hopefully tomorrow, is a lot of flight logs, a lot of names, a lot of information. It's pretty sick what that man did. This is something that had spread among the kind of conspiratorial online right that the government was sitting on, all these files that will prove that Jeffrey Epstein, the sex trafficker who died in 2019, had blackmail material on prominent Democrats and celebrities. And she ended up trying to make a big

splash out of this and handing material on Epstein to online right influencers. The Epstein files are about to drop and it's going to be insane. I'm here at the White House. I just met with Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI director Cash Patel, and the president and the vice president of the United States, Donald Trump and J.D. Vance. Today has been absolutely surreal. This is the power of new media. And it turned out there was absolutely nothing new in

those documents and it ended up being a total embarrassment. Today the Matt Walsh show, the long-awaited release of the Epstein files was a massive disastrous flop. What happened? To the new FBI director, if you want to gain respect right out the gate, release it all! Don't play games! But there's also many more serious policies and issues that reflect this influence. I'd say that one through line, uniting a lot of what the new Trump administration has done, is this unified effort to kind of attack what they see as the power centers of progressivism in an effort to roll back wokeness and what they see as progressive cultural dominance.

So you see that in things like funding cutoffs to universities, limits on their research dollars and you see it in policies aimed at threatening investigations of nonprofits and corporations and colleges that use affirmative action or DEI policies that the administration doesn't like. It's basically a whole set of different issues. These are folks who use the word woke and don't define it, which makes it tricky to pin down what they're attacking exactly. But you just ran through a list of things, including universities, including certain

sectors of the government. And the attack aimed at these places is what exactly? These guys say, you're doing what wrong? So I view the online right as essentially an alliance of posters with varying different interests and policy priorities, but they were kind of united in what they saw as combat against the woke. This shared resentment of what these online right people saw as progressive cultural dominance. In Trump's first term, the online right was kind of disreputable. They were viewed as sort of weirdos. They weren't in the halls of power in the Republican Party. But there was a real shift that happened after Trump lost the 2020 election and under the

Biden administration, when more people who had some misgivings, some qualms about progressive cultural issues, about the Great Awakening, felt freed up to focus on that more and became more open about being resentful about this. This includes Elon Musk. He stayed out of politics for the most part in Trump's first term, but under Biden, he became increasingly radicalized and vocal online about wanting to stop what he called the work mind virus. And lots of other prominent figures in Silicon Valley were also part of this trend.

Even JD Vance, he was kind of politically neutral in 2020 and fell more and more into this online world in the 2020s. Broadly, what are these beliefs of theirs that they're trying to protect or that they feel are under attack? Well, you know, it's different for different people. But you know, there's a segment of the online right that is kind of just open racists. They want to stand up for white predominance in America. This is sort of, you know, the alt right.

They're very willing to say racist, offensive, politically incorrect things. This kind of blurs over to other people who say such things, but then they argue that they're just saying them ironically. This is kind of something that we saw in the new administration with related to a young engineer on Elon Musk's team, Marco Elez. It turned out that just a few months before joining Doge, this guy had made various racist posts online under a pseudonym, including, I was racist before it was cool and,

normalize Indian hate. You know, in the old Trump administration, that would probably have gotten him fired. And it did, eventually, at first, in the new Trump administration. But then, he became a kind of cause celebra among the online right. JD Vance stuck up for him and said, I obviously disagree with some of Eleza's posts, but I don't think stupid social media activity

should ruin a kid's life. We shouldn't reward journalists who try to destroy people, ever. The idea that, you know, people who make racist posts online are on your team, is, that's part of the online right culture. Like, they want to be allowed to say offensive, racist things. They think that woke censoriousness and groupthink went so far. You used to be able to say all kinds of things,

and now you can't anymore. You gotta watch what you say. You might get canceled. And who are the people that are imposing this oppressive censorship? It's the media. It's progressives. They are the enemy. They are the enemy. And as you can see in what Van said,

you know, siding with the media is worse than trying to fire a racist from your government. You write that these ideas have led to policies, actual policy that governs how you and me and every other American lives our lives. What policies would you point to here, Andrew? I think probably one of the clearest examples of this influence of the online right was an executive order that Trump released in his first week, which was anti-DEI and anti-affirmative action. And the specifics of this order are noteworthy because it rolled back an executive order from all the way back in 1965 issued by President Lyndon B. Johnson that has stood since then, that what it essentially did was it required that federal contractors make efforts to employ more women and people of color, that they practice affirmative action.

Every previous Republican president has let this stand, but in recent years, as the online right has been exploring various theories about wokeness, about how they could fight back against it, one of their theories was about this specific executive order on affirmative action. They said, this needs to be reversed. That has been the obsession of one particular writer on the online right for several years now. He's been hammering this drum again and again. His name is Richard Hanania. He argued that the roots of wokeness

were in federal civil rights law and specifically in this affirmative action executive order. And that instead of just rolling it back, it should be replaced with a new government policy saying that basically you can't have an affirmative action program. That such programs were illegal because they discriminated based on race, that they violated the Civil Rights Act. So when that executive order came out from Trump, I immediately thought,

these are people who have been reading the Richard Hananias, the online right posters, who have had their own obsessions and who have been driving these ideas. And the people in power are really listening to them and trying to impose their ideas to reshape this country. to impose their ideas to reshape this country. That was Vox's Andrew Prokop coming up next. But it sounds like based on what you're saying that you are able to take credit for killing DEI. Is that how you see it? Well, that would be a very nice thing to claim.

Who knows about the impact of any one person? But I know that nobody was talking about Executive Order 11246, for example, before I talked to Vivek about it. Then he started talking about it all the time. And then... Support for today's plane comes from Hydro. Perhaps you too have had the near universal experience of planning to go to the gym only to get lost in work, childcare, or simply surfing the internet. Oh, there's nothing simple about it.

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Listening to NPR in the morning. It is a huge part of my life and has been for as long as I've been an adult. I don't think I'd be reading you this ad if it weren't for MPR. Although I am not reading this ad. I'm just speaking from the heart. Up first, get to the news in a easy to digest way. I'm sure you've heard of this show and if you haven't you should go check it out. It's like the program Morning Edition that plays on the radio, but in a nice tight podcast package.

If you're looking for more news and less noise, and who isn't these days, you can listen to the Up First podcast from NPR today. This is Today Explained. Richard Hanania is a substacker and author of the book, The Origins of Woke, Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics. All right, so Richard, in the summer of 2023, you were a public intellectual. You'd been writing op-eds for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic. And then that August, the Huffington Post reported that years earlier, you'd written

racist misogynist posts on right-wing websites. I'm going to read a couple of those here. For the white gene pool to be created, millions had to die. Race mixing is like destroying a unique species or a piece of art. It's shameful. Hispanic people don't have the requisite IQ to be a productive part of a first world nation. You said Muslims can't assimilate because of genetic and IQ differences between them and native Europeans, and you suggested that people with low IQs might be sterilized. Were those sincere beliefs that you held? 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 of the Huffington Post, it was about 12, 13 years later. But yeah, I had some views that I now consider repugnant and I was actually writing against before that August, 2023 exposition in the in the Huffington Post. So yes, I can't deny that I did have views like that at the time. What led to you holding those views?

I think I was just young and angry. I saw these, 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 are 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 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. In November of 2023, so this is after the Huffington Post exposed you, you tweeted, people complain about Jews running America. Do they actually believe it should be run by the voters of Baltimore or Appalachia? Doesn't seem that anti-Semites have thought this through. So that was years after, you know, that's years after you were young, is after the Huffington

Post has drawn attention to the really disgusting stuff that you tweeted. 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 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. And, you know, I said Appalachians and inner-city Baltimore, I was saying generally poor communities, which are on average, 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? Jews could quote unquote control America in your views, the views of the anti-Semites, because they are disproportionately a smart, educated 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 as racist or hateful or anything like that. While those quotes you read at the beginning, I will grant you that those are things that I wouldn't stand by and nobody else should.

Hostie By the summer of 2023, you had built a broad audience in both mainstream media and also on Twitter and Substack. What was the thrust of your main argument? John Deist 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 know, 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. 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 DI or wokeness

and they were seeing it as mainly a cultural issue. Oh look at look at target look at you know 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. When did it become clear to you that this argument that you were making was resonating? 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 I wrote a book

called Woke Inc. 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 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. I appeared on his podcast. I mean, for me, I think the simplest thing to do would just be to rescind Executive Order 11246. I mean, it seems like a good day one item. Yeah, actually, I mean, it would probably be stronger to just clarify it and make it like the opposite. Like you can't have an affirmative action program because look, you know, that's, yeah, I kind of like that actually. Actually like that. Thank you. 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 I mentioned in my book that Johnson signed in 65. Trump actually gets into office and Trump does sign a repeal of executive order one, one, two, four, six. It does a lot of the other things that I recommended. So it was, it was quite a journey where I think I played a, some role in putting these ideas on the map. What was the goal of ending 11246? What did you want to happen?

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 and forcing 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 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 loss of government contracts and these other ways that government sort of put it 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.

Richard, was corporate America actually complaining? Because it seems like if you run a big American corporation, I don't know, I would look at the idea of diversity and I would say, oh, this is a good thing because I want to sell things to American people and therefore having people within the company at a very high level who understand how to sell things to American people is a great thing. Good if they come from all kinds of backgrounds. Like, I just wonder whose part were you taking here? 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. I mean, but these were mandates coming from the government and also the subjects of lawsuits. 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. It's kind of arbitrary, right? I mean, it's like you, you know, the government cares that you have a certain number of blacks or Hispanics. They don't care if they are 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. 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. So the day President Trump puts an end to DEI, the day he puts an end to the executive order, what was your reaction? 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. The Trump administration did what you wanted. It eliminated DEI. And then it put Pete Hegseth in charge of the Pentagon and Cash Patel in charge of the FBI and Dan Patel in charge of the FBI and Dan Bongino as the Deputy Director of the FBI. These gentlemen are not merit picks and these are obvious examples, but this is why Americans who are skeptical

of your argument will say, look, you're never really gonna get merit. If we eliminate DEI, we're gonna go back to, you know, the president picks a guy who he thinks looks handsome on TV. Do you put any stock in that argument? Absolutely, Noelle.

I think one reason 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 some of these picks are certainly not merit-based. They're not even, you know, 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 of DEI race-based kind of governance or people that Trump thinks looks good on TV. I think you could have a merit-based system that looks at people, takes them as individuals, takes to account their qualifications, takes into account what the president is trying to accomplish and that has more responsible people in positions of power. So members of your audience who are skeptical of the Trump administration and many of their hiring practices, I would concur with their judgment. You've clearly become disenchanted with MAGA. You wrote a piece this week that's making the rounds. It's called Liberals Only Censor Musk Seeks to Lobotomize. What happened, Richard?

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 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. At the same time, I don't just write about the, I write about a wide range of topics that I, you know 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 voices. But then Elon Musk buys Twitter. I'm happy. I say, okay, we're going to have free speech. And my goodness, it's become a sewer. 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. And I've felt the need to speak out about this. How do you feel about this movement that you are a part of descending into what we have today? 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. 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 Cash Matalya, you know, that's not true here. These are people who would only be chosen, appointed by Trump. And so, with 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 side of virtue and how 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 Richard Hanania, the book is the origins of woke. He's also on sub stack and he is still on Twitter

Dropping in our feed on Sunday Some of you called to ask whether DEI was ever anything more than Performance our new weekend show is gonna give you some answers miles Brian produced today's episode with an assist from Carla Javier Amina El Sadi is our editor Laura Bullard is our senior and Andrea Christen's daughter and Patrick Boyd are our engineers. I'm Noelle King. It's Today reported that 1 in 4 people experience sensory sensitivities, making everyday experiences like a trip to the dentist especially difficult. In fact, 26% of sensory-sensitive individuals

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