"'DEI' is not about the words it uses as camouflage. DEI is about arrogating power."

"Twenty years ago ... I started writing about a then-nameless, niche ideology that seemed to contradict everything I had been taught since I was a child.
    "It is possible I would not have perceived the nature of this ideology—or rather, I would have been able to avoid seeing its true nature—had I not been a Jew. But I was. I am. And in noticing the way I had been written out of the equation, I started to notice that it wasn’t just me, but that the whole system rested on an illusion.
    "What I saw was a worldview that replaced basic ideas of good and evil with a new rubric: the powerless (good) and the powerful (bad). It replaced lots of things. Colorblindness with race-obsession. Ideas with identity. Debate with denunciation. Persuasion with public shaming. The rule of law with the fury of the mob.
    "People were to be given authority in this new order not in recognition of their gifts, hard work, accomplishments, or contributions to society, but in inverse proportion to the disadvantages their group had suffered, as defined by radical ideologues. According to them, as Jamie Kirchick concisely put it in these pages: “Muslim > Gay, Black > Female, and Everybody > the Jews. ...
    "Some call it wokeness or anti-racism or progressivism or safetyism or critical social justice or identity-Marxism. But whatever term you use, what’s clear is that it has gained power in a conceptual instrument called 'diversity, equity and inclusion,' or DEI. ...
    "[T]hese words are now metaphors for an ideological movement bent on recategorising every American not as an individual, but as an avatar of an identity group, his or her behaviour prejudged accordingly, setting all of us up in a kind of zero-sum game.
    "We have been seeing for several years now the damage this ideology has done ... [Because] 'DEI' is not about the words it uses as camouflage. DEI is about arrogating power....
    "It is time to end DEI for good."

~ Bari Weiss, from her column 'End DEI'