Tuesday, April 8, 2025

Part I

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The Morality Tale of Corporate DEI: Businesses in the U.S. are Backing Off DEI – What Changed?

Well, the DEI issue continues to make headlines and deservedly so. And as you look over the course of the last, say, decade or so, the DEI movement, that’s diversity and equity and inclusion, that agenda began to be forced on many and worked through so many different levels of society. And it is very interesting to see that there has been a pushback to this and for very good reason, because the DEI policies are often based on a very toxic brew of leftist ideologies and identity politics. And you’re also looking at the fact that there is a backlash that tells us a lot about the situation, and then there’s a backlash to the backlash, and then there’ll be another backlash to that.

So let’s try to figure out what’s going on here. If you go back to some of the big controversies in, say, the second decade of the 21st century, you go back to the George Floyd incident, so many others, there was the suggestion drilled through the society and it became not only a suggestion, but a constant message and a barrage, and then a demand, that these kind of DEI policies and perspectives, even thought training experiments, needed to be put into place in American corporations and government, on college campuses and even just driven through the school systems. But that did lead to a greater divisiveness, it can be argued, and it certainly didn’t solve the problems. And furthermore, it’s based in this very crucial idea at the center of identity politics, and at the intersection of identity politics and leftist ideologies, and in particular critical theory, all the rest of it, just put into a giant program that came with ideological force and often with absolute demand. Absolute demand.

“If you’re going to be a student here, you have to take this class. If you’re going to be an employee here, you have to buy into this ideology. If you are going to be a public official, then you’re going to have to agree to these programs.” Even if you don’t agree, you’re going to have to go to the programs, you’re going to have to sit through the seminars, and the DEI issue is trumpeted all the way through corporate life. And then the backlash came. Now, as I say, there’s a backlash to the backlash, but let’s look at the backlash first, it was a conservative opposition that came back and said, “Look, this is just another form of racial discrimination. This is just another form of identity politics. And furthermore, it is coercive. It shuts down free speech. It is also not real.” And that’s to say, not that the ideologies aren’t real, that the critical theory wasn’t real. It is to say that so much of what was celebrated as this giant achievement of DEI, it was an empty bag.

It was threatening. It was acidic in terms of dissolving a lot of human relationships. It did raise a whole host of issues, but it didn’t really put anything back together again. And furthermore, it often set employee versus employee, corporation versus corporation, student versus student. And then the backlash came and the backlash was really in some ways named Donald Trump. So Donald Trump ran not only in 2024, he ran back in 2016 against, in basic terms, what was identity politics, later the DEI policies. But the difference between the years of the Trump administration one and the Trump administration two, you have really seen a lot of these programs crash, and there has been a recalibration. President Trump, in the second term, has pushed that reset or recalibration. He has brought actions against school systems, and campuses, and government agencies, and colleges and universities that have tied themselves to this DEI agenda. And he has done so with a good deal of energy, and so the pushback from the conservative side was this is a toxic brew. It is very divisive. It is unfair.

It’s another form of discrimination, frankly, as was much that went under the label of affirmative action. In some ways, it’s just an updated, relabeled version of that. But now there’s a pushback or there’s a blowback to the initial reaction, and this is people from the Left saying, “No, we’re not pulling back on those policies. We’re going to dig in on those policies.” So let’s look at it for a moment. For example, let’s take one big American employer. That would be the investment bank, Morgan Stanley. How big is Morgan Stanley? It is active in 41 countries. How many workers? 90,000 employees. So that’s like a small state. Let’s just say 90,000 people, 41 different countries, this is massive. The headline that recently ran in The Wall Street Journal is this, “Morgan Stanley Went Big on DEI, No One’s Happy.” The subhead in the article, “Black and White staff say efforts now being softened and added to divisive culture.”

Now, in the main, this is exactly what conservatives have been charging. It’s divisive. It’s discriminatory, it just changes what is alleged to be the pattern of discrimination. It is unfair. It doesn’t treat individuals as individuals. Identity politics becomes a part of the toxicity. But this article’s really interesting because it tells us that the blowback against the DEI policies at Morgan Stanley came from the left and the right. It came from the opponents of identity politics, it came from the supporters of identity politics. At the end of the day, the recalibration, the reevaluation of DEI, The Wall Street Journal tells us that at a company as influential, and as big and as wealthy as Morgan Stanley, the criticism has come from both sides.

Now, what does that break down as? Why would the conservative criticism be alleged against the policies? Well, that’s because of the conservative concerns about DEI, cancel culture, identity, politics, leftist ideologies, all the rest. But why would there be blowback from the left? Well, here’s what’s interesting. You had many of the groups identified by identity politics who said, “DEI is just window dressing. It is just an official set of policies. It doesn’t actually change anything. We need a revolution. DEI is not a revolution, it’s just another corporate strategy.” So here is an interesting situation in which critics on the left and critics on the right, looking at the same thing, can at least say, “Well, there is a bit to that argument from both sides.” DEI failed according to the left because it did not go far enough, it was just window dressing. DEI failed according to the right, because it is a leftist ideology that is divisive rather than unitive.

Both sides in one sense are probably right. What do I mean by that? Speaking from a conservative perspective, the danger of the ideological stew and mixed with identity politics, it’s absolutely toxic. It’s unfair, it’s discriminatory. It just replaces one set of discriminatory policies with another set of discriminatory policies and declares that to be fair. I think the conservative argument is the right argument. But the Left, we can also say, is right in this respect. They are right that corporate America tried to use these policies just to act like they were doing things they weren’t. And thus, we need to come back and say, “That’s exactly how this kind of thing works.” You get a big cultural agenda, an ideological agenda like DEI, you get an ideological concept put into, let’s just say, cultural combat like DEI, here’s the bottom line: you’re going to get people who say, along with conservatives, “This goes too far.” And then you’re going to hear from the left, “This doesn’t go far enough.” 

But then the very same newspaper, The Wall Street Journal’s so influential, especially in the business community, ran an article with the headline, “European Companies Keep DEI at Home, Not in US.” Ben Dummett and Joe Wallace are the reporters on the story, and here’s what they tell us, “Companies with operations on both sides of the Atlantic have a new formula when it comes to DEI, and it depends on the location.” So they’re all against it in some places, they’re all for it in other places. How’s that for corporate consistency? Here’s what the article tells us. It tells us that companies like the international grocery store chain, Aldi, along with investor services and international banks, “are among the businesses that recently recalibrated their diversity, equity, and inclusion policies to vary by region.”

“In some cases, companies are excluding the US from what were once global commitments, in others, they are scrubbing buzzwords and acronyms such as LGBTQ from American websites and annual reports while still promoting DEI goals elsewhere.” Oh, what a morality tale we face here. In a fallen world, what should you expect? You should expect, in a fallen world, that you will have patterns like this that will show up in which some companies say one thing, in one company with great moral urgency. They move to another country, another market, and with the same moral urgency, they say the opposite thing. The blatantly political nature of all of this is made very clear when the reporters tell us that all of this is, “to avoid unwanted attention from the Trump administration,” which has ordered an end DEI programs across federal agencies and threatened to investigate, “the most egregious and discriminatory corporate practitioners.” 

So here’s how the world works. You have companies who are saying, “We’re against DEI,” or at least, “We are not for DEI in America now,” which were all for it just a matter of a few months ago under a different administration. And in other parts of the world, even as they’re telling Americans we’re against it, they are for it. And that also tells you that you have different moral cultures around the world. You have a conflict of moral cultures around the world. You’re looking at some nations in Europe that are still insistent upon DEI policies, and then you have the current American government saying it is opposed to DEI policies. I think that’s the right policy, but the point is, you’ve got some companies that are trying to straddle the globe with one policy, one place, another policy, another place. But here’s the point I want to make. These are moral statements. These aren’t just policies like the workday will be from 9:00 to 5:00 or from 8:00 to 4:00. No, these are not just policies.

These are moral statements, and here’s what’s really interesting. How can you have companies that make one moral statement in one place and another moral statement somewhere else? Again, just looking at this with worldview in view, it tells you what a complicated world we live in when it comes to an awful lot of what is presented as moral judgment. And maybe in moral terms, you want to ask the leadership of these companies, how can you have this policy here and that policy there when both of them are making moral statements? So you’re saying two completely contrary things in moral terms, and I think the companies would come back and say, “Hey, we’re in business for business. If this is the rule of doing business in the United States, we’re following those rules. This is the rule for doing business in Sweden, we’re following in Sweden, those rules.” In other words, there is no fixed or objective morality to which the company is held. It just operates strategically and tactically given local operant conditions, as they are called.

Now, the reason I’m raising all of this, there’re really multiple reasons. For one thing, I just want to call out something like this when it is seen. You have companies, and it’s not just companies, people, individuals, organizations sometimes pose making moral statements that they don’t really believe in, and you find out they don’t really believe in it because they’ll show up somewhere else and make a contrary moral statement. Now, if that’s an individual, you say, “That’s a huge moral problem.” There’s some people who would say, “But, you know, in corporate life, if you’re in a multinational bank, you’ve already decided to be involved in several different moral cultures all at once.”

But let me just point out something here that simply has to be said, and that is that the church of the Lord Jesus Christ has no such room for theological or moral negotiation.

Part II

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DEI is Just Being Renamed: The Infectious Ideology Behind DEI Will Need More Than a Cultural Revolution to Uproot Its Influence Throughout Society

Now, another arena in which this is seen is in shareholder meetings. This is something that a lot of conservatives have really neglected as a responsibility, and thankfully you’ve got some leaders now who are trying to say, “Look, this is what we need to do. We are involved in these companies. We have the right to threaten shareholder action. We have the right to show up at an annual meeting and make a moral point to oppose bad policies and to seek to have the company adopt good policies.”

Disney’s an interesting corporation in this regard. Just a couple weeks ago, a headline that came in USA Today, “Disney Shareholders Reject Anti-DEI Investor Proposal.” And so the article is about exactly that. Disney turned down or turned back an anti-DEI investor proposal. But then the article tells us that the conservative group that brought the attempted shareholder action, that’s the National Center for Public Policy Research, said that they were directing their attention to, “Disney’s perfect score in the annual Corporate Equality Index survey from LGBTQ advocacy group, the Human Rights Campaign,” which the conservative group said was due to, “a partisan, divisive, and increasingly radical agenda.”

Now, the company had to respond to this, and so the company’s response was, “We do not believe this proposal would provide additional value to shareholders.” So you understand the defensive language there, and that is corporate speak for, we’re not going to do this and we’re going to claim we’re not doing this out of service to our shareholders. And that’s where we need more conservative shareholders to show up and not only make noise, but work towards effective changes. The changes and the policies held by these companies could have a massive impact in the larger culture. And it’s at least important for Christians to understand that there may well be leverage here many Christians have not recognized. But bringing our thoughts here about DEI to a conclusion, I want to underline the fact that the great danger is that the pushback against DEI will lead to artificial results. So you’re going to have a lot of companies that act like they’re changing their policies, they’re not really changing their policies.

I think even more likely, you’re going to have a lot of educational institutions just lie and say, “We’re not doing this anymore,” when they just relabeled it. It’s not DEI, it’s something else in an alphabet stew down the hall. It’s the same ideas, the same ideology. And the reason I say that is because, number one, this is the way the world works so often, but secondly, when it comes to DEI, I think these ideologies are so deeply driven through so much of our society that I think that lot of people are going to be trying to figure out how to just repackage it and push it, perhaps even in stronger, more toxic varieties. 

This is why the editorial board at The Spectator in London recently released a piece entitled, “Why Abolishing DEI is Only a Partial Revolution.” They go on to cite others as also agreeing, saying, “DEI isn’t just going to vanish because conservatives and anti-woke liberals say it’s gone. Over the coming months, many ambitious federal government officials who were working in the field of DEI are going to be searching for new employment, and it isn’t hard to guess where they will be seeking to build new empires in state governments.” The next statement, “These officials will inevitably be welcomed with open arms by states which want to distance themselves from the Trump administration and make a statement of how they intend to do things differently.” “They are likely to be driven to dream up initiatives on race, gender, and sexual orientation, which would never have been conceived of had they stayed in Washington.”

I just want to tell you, that’s exactly right. Not only is it exactly right, this is happening faster than you could imagine, and so much of the action is going to shift from the federal government to the state governments. Very recent article that just came out in The New York Times, just over the weekend, headline, “New York Defies Trump on School DEI Order.” So there you got it. How fast did it take for this to become apparent? Just a matter of hours. You have many states, progressive liberal states, blue states like New York, saying, “Not only are we not stopping DEI, not only are we not going to be threatened,” they say, “by the Trump administration when it comes to federal funding for schools and all the rest, if we don’t give up DEI, not only are we going to keep DEI, we’re going to make it a bigger D, a bigger E and a bigger I. Take that.”

Another way of putting this is that this controversy over DEI at the national level is likely just to make the differences between the more liberal states and the more conservative states all the more apparent. We’re going to have bluer blue and redder red, just because of DEI. But as Christians understand, DEI is part of a larger complex of cultural assumptions, and policies, and ideologies, moral judgments, and so there’s a reason why you can look at a map right now and pretty much predict where most states are going to fall.

Part III

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San Francisco Rethinks Free Drug Program: One of the Most Liberal Cities in the U.S. Realizes Encouraging Drug Addiction was a Bad Idea – Go Figure

But speaking about differences in culture, in morality, that are represented even on a map, on a geographical layout of the United States, as I often point out, it’s just helpful to remember that progressivism, more secular, more liberal worldviews, tend to be organized around cities, and around coastlines, and on campuses. There’s three C’s to remind you of there. And speaking of coastlines and the more secular, more liberal, progressive culture, all you need to think of is the northern coast of California and the city, or indeed the entire region associated with San Francisco.

Okay, when you’re talking about liberal places in the United States, hard to come up with anything more stereotypically liberal than San Francisco and its surrounding counties. Well, how about this for a headline over the weekend, “We’ve Lost Our Way: San Francisco Rethinks Handouts of Drug Gear.” Oh, this is going to be interesting. What could go wrong? Heather Knight, reporter for The New York Times tells us from San Francisco, “Plastic straws are banned in San Francisco, at least if you want to drink a soda or lemonade. Those smoking fentanyl, however, have been able to get them for free at taxpayers expense.” There was also the time, five years ago, when the city helped pay for a billboard that showed smiling, glittery partygoers, “Do it with friends,” the public service message said, urging drug users to consume with others so that they could treat a potential overdose.

Stating the obvious, The New York Times tells us, remember, this is The New York Times reporting on San Francisco, and if The New York Times is shocked at the liberalism of San Francisco, that tells you something. Okay, here’s the sentence, “For decades, San Francisco has been a liberal city where those using drugs found easy access to their substance of choice, and a government generally willing to tolerate addiction. City leaders emphasize a harm reduction approach, believing that more lives would be saved by helping users to consume safely than by punishing them.” Oh, boy. Here you have the moral impact of the nanny state, but guess what? There’s a new sheriff in town, or in this case a new mayor.

Daniel Lurie is the new mayor of San Francisco, and he is identified as a moderate Democrat. Put that into perspective. He’s a moderate Democrat. He replaced the outgoing mayor. He defeated her actually in the election at San Francisco, London Breed. And Daniel Lurie is saying, “I think we need to walk back this policy. I think maybe giving drug users equipment to use illegal drugs might not be the best idea.” The article then tells us, “Mr. Lurie’s rollback was the latest sign that San Francisco was moving away from the far left ideology that had made it a target of late night comedians and conservative politicians. In recent years, [we are told] voters have signaled a political shift by ousting a progressive district attorney and electing more moderate city leaders, including the new mayor and board of supervisors.” As the new mayor said, “We’ve lost our way.” 

Now I’m not going to go further into the issue. It basically is very quickly understandable. In the service of what the city called harm reduction, that’s a moral term, harm reduction, you certainly want to reduce harms, but in order to reduce harms, in the name of that, they said, “Let’s make illegal drug use safer.” Now, you need to understand how deeply that moral confusion is driven into our culture. The first time I think I saw it in a big way was during the initial years of the AIDS crisis, when you had many public health authorities come out and say the answer to this radically infectious disease spreading in the homosexual male community at that time was not “stop that,” but rather practice safe sex. It was, in moral terms, a very toxic terminology, but it also tells you how so many moral shifts in the culture had taken place. But this is a shift from what you would have as safe sex to safe, illegal drug use. And remember, you’re talking about extremely dangerous illegal substances here.

Okay, but don’t get too excited about a return to sanity here. In this case, moderate Democrat may be more, well, let’s just say, Democrat than moderate. Here is another statement later in the article, “The new mayor, that is Mr. Lurie, said this week that he would not end the distribution of smoking supplies outright, but that he wanted to put strict conditions on it.” Oh, he wants to replace safe sex with even safer sex. According to the report in The New York Times, as of the end of this month, all this kind of drug paraphernalia will be distributed only to those who are in some kind of structured treatment or counseling, or you got to love this part, or taking an action like, “accepting a free bus ticket out of the city.” Well, there you go. The fastest way to deal with this problem is a one way bus ticket somewhere else.

This article honestly is heartbreaking. It’s so revealing, I felt like we had to talk about it. It just tells you that when you look at the insidious nature of sin, one of the ways that it’s so insidious is that it continually gets reformulated and relabeled as something else. And the next thing you know, you’re taking a very clearly immoral behavior and trying to dress it up as if it’s merely a public health problem. And then of course, when it doesn’t work, you just try to trot out another, perhaps even milder, public health response. In this case, no, you got to be in the right program if you’re going to get the free drug paraphernalia, let me repeat this, from the city at taxpayer expense. And of course, this wasn’t intended to entice people into drug use, it wasn’t intended to corrupt the young, but in one of the scariest sentences in this article, we have one authority running a recovery program who said, “He is certain people as young as 16 have received free smoking supplies.” That is in fentanyl smoking, dangerous, toxic drug abuse, 16 year olds.

Oh, by the way, you can see the moral threat in this, which just points out that when you lose moral control as a culture, when you forfeit moral control as a civilization, when you have an absolute moral anarchy, one bad thing just leads to another bad thing. And at least one of the points I want to make is that trying to come up with a halfway solution just makes you look stupid. And so later in the article, we are told that some of the persons who are receiving the free drug supplies and paraphernalia from the city say that if that supply is shut off, they’re going to respond to it by simply shoplifting. Shoplifting, by the way, has been such a problem in downtown San Francisco, also in some suburban areas, but in downtown San Francisco, some of the most iconic retailers in town have simply decided to close their doors, like Nordstrom.

They just can’t afford to operate down there anymore. And if you’ve been to San Francisco, downtown at certain points, even in recent years, you will notice that you don’t have to have a lot of perception to read the pathology going on here. I guess another way of looking at this as Christians, it’s all about the response to sin, and if you don’t name sin as sin, you don’t even have the moral clarity to say, “This is just absolutely wrong,” you lose the ability to say, “Don’t do that.” Instead, you try to say something ludicrous, like, “Do that more safely.” And then when that doesn’t work, well, you can’t go back to saying, “Just doing that is wrong.” Instead, you have to medicalize the problem again. And so they’re just saying that the problem is long-term addiction.

Is the problem long-term addiction? Yeah, I’m sure it is but if it’s not wrong to start, it’s really hard to argue that it’s wrong to get into an addictive behavior pattern. But if you can’t just say, “Something’s wrong,” you really have a pretty weak basis for coming back and saying, “Well, the addiction to it is actually what is wrong.” No, it’s wrong. It’s morally wrong. If you don’t have the courage to say that, you’re going to be doing a clean-up operation for the rest of your life. The problem is that it’s one thing to have to do a clean-up operation when it comes to a lot of effects. It’s another thing to have to do a clean-up operation when it comes to the cost of human lives. We’re not talking here just about hypothetical policy, we’re talking about matters of life and death. That’s the whole point.

Part IV

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Sportsmanship and Statesmanship: Wayne Gretzky Shows Up to Celebrate the Breaking of His NHL Goal Record

Finally, I think we need to note sometimes, when you see an outstanding example of sportsmanship or statesmanship, it just reminds us of the morality of human life, even of the human life that gets just channeled through the endeavor called sports. And one example of that was what happened just in recent days when Alex Ovechkin broke the NHL record for goals scored, and he did so by scoring his 895th, and that is his 895th score. Even though his team lost to the New York Islanders, his team is the Washington Capitals, it was an historic, historic match, precisely because of the breaking of that record. But as interesting as that is, just add that up, that it’s 895 goals over more than 20 years playing on the ice. That’s just pretty remarkable. He is a lot older than most of the players out there with him. But what interests me about this is who was watching this, that’s Wayne Gretzky, the man who held the record before Alex Ovechkin broke it.

He was there when he tied it, and he was back days later when Ovechkin broke it, and he celebrated it. Of course, Ovechkin returned this by referring to Gretzky’s greatness. It is an illustration of sportsmanship when someone as famous as Wayne Gretzky shows up to see his record broken and celebrates it. That’s at least a moment we need to savor, and let me just say, we need to savor those moments, whether they are here in the NHL context or on the little league field. Either way, this is what we should look for, and when we see it, we should note it.