Biden Nationalizes the DEI Bureaucracy
Christopher F. Rufo 2/23/2023
https://rufo.substack.com/p/biden-creates-a-national-dei-bureaucracyHow the president's recent executive order threatens to subvert the principles of liberty and equality.Last week, President Joseph Biden quietly signed an executive order that promises to create a national DEI bureaucracy and embed the principles of left-wing racialism throughout the federal government.
The order, titled “Further Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government,” relies on three key strategies: creating internal cadres and power centers through the deployment of “Agency Equity Teams”; funding third-party political activism through grants to “community[-based] organizations”; and weaponizing civil rights law by requiring federal agencies to use artificial intelligence “in a manner that advances equity.”
In this video, I explain how Biden’s executive order manipulates language and statistics in order to nationalize the DEI movement, suppress dissent from the new racial orthodoxy, and subvert the Constitution’s promise of equal treatment under the law.
TranscriptPresident Joe Biden is overhauling the entire federal government along the principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion, and it seems like nobody has noticed. Last week, he signed another executive order promoting DEI called “Further Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government.” There was very little news coverage about this, but I think that it is an extremely important development. It has ramifications for almost everything that we’ve been talking about the last few years, and I’d like to go into this in detail to really understand how this DEI ideology works, how it embeds itself in the bureaucracy, and what it means for our country, what it means for our constitution, and what it means for our government.
If you look at this document, there are really three key strategies that it pursues. First, he’s creating internal cadres of DEI officers. This is really important for shaping the culture, the personnel, and the budgeting process in the federal government, which controls trillions of dollars of public resources. Second, he’s using this initiative to justify funding third party political activists under the guise of so-called underserved communities or faith and community organizations. And third, he’s doubling down on the weaponization of civil rights law, this time with some very interesting and very modern twists. He’s pushing left wing ideology, even regulating things like the use of artificial intelligence, and this entire package is justified through this really intricate but unfortunately widespread statistical and linguistic manipulation, which I’ll get into at the end.
Creating Internal CadresSo let’s begin. First and foremost—this is what I think is really the heart of DEI—is creating internal cadres.
In previous times, for example, in the Soviet Union, you’d have political commissars. These were political officers that were attached to everything from army units to bureaucracies to units of the higher administration, and they would work to maintain ideological conformity. They would push the political or ideological orthodoxy within the institution, and then monitor all of their colleagues for compliance, and then if you disagreed, straight to the gulag. This, of course, is different. It’s done in an American context. It’s not so dramatic, but it’s really the same kind of idea. If you want to have administrative power in the government, you need to have people that are loyal to your ideology that will advance it through the apparatus.
And so, in this executive order, signed on February 16, 2023, the Biden Administration is requiring all federal departments to do an annual “Equity Action Plan” and build “Agency Equity Teams” to push training, programming, reports, data, statistical evidence with the goal of “embedding equity into government-wide processes.” So this sounds very nice, right? Everyone likes “equity,” everyone likes “equality.” But when you actually dig into what’s happening—and I’ve done a lot of reporting on this previously during the Trump administration—this is pure left wing racialist ideology, using the linguistic frame of “equity,” which is a near-homonym to the principle of “equality.”
And when you actually dig into the specifics, you understand that the Agency Equity Teams, the Equity Action Plans are not anything that is sanctioned or mandated by Congress, but is an internal executive mandate to say: We want to push this ideology through every facet of the federal government. We want to have all of our policies, and programs, and funding filtered through the ideology of DEI and enforced by DEI bureaucrats.
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