Culture Friday: The demise of DEI

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s Friday the 29nd of November, 2024.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Myrna Brown.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

It’s time for Culture Friday, and joining us now is John Stonestreet, president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast.

Good morning!

JOHN STONESTREET: Good morning.

EICHER: I hope you had a great Thanksgiving. What were you thankful for?

STONESTREET: Oh man, you know, you know I supposed to do that going into it being retroactively thankful. That's a really difficult thing to do, especially in a culture that, you know, immediately goes from giving thanks to trampling security guards for the latest flat screen TVs, although I'm grateful that Black Friday is not what it used to be, it's just digitally more than it used to be.

But what a just an incredible juxtaposition of our culture, Thanksgiving turns you outward, and should turn you upward, right?, where you're actually looking outside of yourself. It's just a way of approaching life in the world that's fundamentally different than "get while the getting's good," you know, quote, sort of approach that we've done.

Now, of course, gift giving is a good thing. And I once had this conversation with none other than Dennis Prager on stage, who just argued that Black Friday was actually a good thing, because, you know, people giving gifts is a good thing. And I said, "Well—" this was back in the heyday where we all waited for the videos of the tramplings that would come through, you know, of, you know, Circuit City. Remember that store opening at like, 4 a.m.? And I was just like, "I don't think all those guys are, you know, trampling security guards out of the goodness of their heart in order to bless other people." I just, I didn't think that that was the motivation. But there is an incredible juxtaposition, you know, this week that we experience culturally, I think.

BROWN: Yeah, I like the outward, upward focus … and getting away from the internal, which is how modern culture turns us. It’s Thanks-giving … not Thanks-feeling, right? It’s a thing we do!

STONESTREET: It's a choice! No, it's but, you know, that's what Christianity does. It turns us away from just our feelings determining reality, and saying, Well, what is actually true and what is actually real? It's the same thing with repentance. If you, you know, look at it. I know this isn't a Lenten time broadcast, but it is something worth mentioning, that these are things that, at the end of the day, have to precede our choices. You know, we ought not, for example, wait to repent when we feel like it, because we may never feel like it. But you repent so that you'll feel like it. And maybe the same thing is true with thanks. You give thanks, not if you feel like it, but because you should feel like it, even if you don't.

EICHER: You know it’s often said and not without evidence that President-elect Trump tends not to admit when he’s wrong, but instead tends to double down. Here’s an instance where he’s pretty clearly admitting wrong: remember, his top two go-to guys on COVID in his first term were Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Francis Collins. Collins was head of NIH, National Institutes of Health … and Fauci was inside NIH … in one of the Institutes … and had been in government almost 40 years. Both of those men specifically worked to discredit Jay Bhattacharya and Marty Makary … both of them renowned physicians who were critics of our COVID policy. Well guess what, Trump appointed Dr. Bhattacharya … again, a target of Collins and Fauci … to take the job Collins had … to head NIH. And then Dr. Makary, he’s been appointed to FDA.

So, I think this is a case of not just admitting wrong, but appointing the people who said so.

STONESTREET: It is something to behold, and those two really in particular. I mean, at one level, it goes with the trend of the president appointing people to head agencies with whom all of these people have had direct conflict. You know, it's, I mean, a lot of us are ordering popcorn and are going to watch this thing kind of play itself out. But there is just an incredible level of mistrust when it comes to medicine in America. And it is not because I don't think, you know, people mistrust the individual people that are their providers. You know, I think most of us have found doctors or health care professionals that we rely on. But on a societal level, on a structural level, COVID did a lot of damage on this. And mainly because we were told to follow the science and found out later that the science wasn't followed.

Now look, trust isn't built by just perpetual skepticism, either. In other words, pointing out a lie is not always the same as pointing out the truth. Both of these individuals, I think, in these positions, both of whom have incredibly complicated names to pronounce out loud, so I'll leave that to you, but they have really incredible track records and a level of courage of saying the right thing when the right thing needs to be said. And there were many cases where both of these individuals paid a price for that courage. And so, you know, I do think when it comes to where America is with health care, whether we're talking about food, whether we're talking about Big Pharma, whether we're talking about vaccines, whatever we're talking about, I mean, I think there's a kind of a reckoning, so to speak, that's happening, and these seem-to-be appointees that are part of that story.

BROWN: John, big news this week with the nation’s largest retailer changing course and walking back its DEI policies.

Of course, I’m talking about Walmart announcing for instance, it will no longer consider race and gender as a litmus test to improve diversity when offering contracts to suppliers.

The company will no longer participate in the Human Rights Campaign Index and it’s going to pay closer attention to its merchandise … staying away from products aimed at minors, like chest binders.

Now, many theories as to what’s behind this “about face.” I’d like to hear why you think they backed off.

STONESTREET: Well, look, I think it's one of the under-told stories of 2024 and every major corporation was spending an incredible amount of money to align both HR and PR—both internal and external realities around it. And there was a group of people who rose up and said, "You know what? We can do something here. We can influence at the leadership and shareholder level. We can bring this back to neutral." And they have been incredibly successful. Of course, Robbie Starbuck is the front and center figure on this. There's some organizations that have been really working on this, and some of them are not always comfortable being identified. So I'm just going to say, "shout out across the airwaves," because what they have done is not try to shame people.

One of the things I appreciated about it is that the DEI thing really advanced through shaming people. The DEI reversal was not going through shaming people. You know the Walmart story, for example. During pride month, we talked about how a lot of companies got a lot quieter than they were the year before, in June. But then there was Walmart. What an exception, right? They started announcing chest binders and some weird things. And you're like, "Walmart, are you kidding?" And now what happened was some private work that was done where basically Walmart was called on the carpet and said, you know, here's what you need to do. And they did it.

And also a big part of the story is the number of newly minted vice presidents of DEI that aren't having renewed contracts next year. And I don't think we've heard all those stories, but there's a lot of them we have heard because basically it turned DEI into a criteria of success. It also became a standard of qualification for someone to have an executive-level job. Neither of those things proved true, and that's because DEI is not legitimate. It's not a legitimate way of thinking about either credibility, qualification, or progress, but it was made that way. You look at this lineup: this is Walmart, but of course, we're talking Tractor Supply. We're talking Harley Davidson and John Deere, you know, read the room, kids. It just was misaligned with reality from the beginning. And it's good to see this stuff really push back. And I think the momentum of Walmart here at the end of 2024 is a significant story heading into 2025.

EICHER: John, along these same lines … there was a new study … it’s from an outfit called the Network Contagion Research Institute … pretty involved study that found many DEI programs, workplace training programs wound up increasing racial suspicion … it found no measurable improvement in empathy or warmth among the ethnic groups. Did you see this?

STONESTREET: Well, look, at the same time that this story came out, was a study showing that these kind of anti racist books and anti racist training programs and the philosophy of anti racism when applied in some sort of teaching or pressure situation—which obviously a lot of times that was the same thing, teaching and pressure—it actually ended up making things worse, not better. It was purported to be some sort of pathway to reconciliation, some sort of pathway to racial relationships improving. But what ended up happening is, is it proved to be opposite. I think it's because of a couple things. Number one is, in many cases, it, you know, made people guilty by who they are, not how they behaved, and people don't like that. You know, people, we live in a world where God has created us in a way that we try to strive to be better. We try to strive to earn our stripes and to somehow give us moral credit or moral culpability based on no decision that we actually made or no actions that we actually took or didn't take. It just didn't sit well.

But you know, the thing is, I know this is shocking, but apparently, if you make everything about race, it tends to make everything about race. And if you say that the fundamental problem with the world in every situation is racial division, then people start seeing the world as being racially divided. Shouldn't maybe surprise us that the more you talk about race, the more you talk about race, and the less you move forward. And, look, we need to talk about race as Christians. There is a division, and there are examples of racism that exist. But this was a theory of everything. This was supposed to be the lens by which everything was supposed to be explained, all injustices, everything else. And it didn't work out that way, and it left people further apart, not closer together.

BROWN: John Stonestreet is president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast. Thank you John!

STONESTREET: Thank you both!

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