D.E.I. Looks About Ready to D.I.E.

In 2020, they destroyed their enemies’ livelihoods. In 2026, they’re deleting their tweets and hiding. The moral authority of the left is dying, despite the courts and the media.

On February 28, Axios declared “Trump says he ‘ended DEI.’ Courts disagree.” The story explains how Trump’s executive orders targeting diversity, equity, and inclusion programs have been blocked and stalled in federal courts. Conservatives are worried, we’re told, while the left is celebrating.

Not so fast.

The Pattern of Retreat

While the media focuses on court battles in Washington, look at New York City. Democratic socialist mayor Zohran Mamdani just appointed Cea Weaver to run the Office to Protect Tenants. Weaver has publicly called homeownership “a weapon of white supremacy.” When these statements went viral, Mamdani stood by her—but his Chief Equity Officer, Afua Atta-Mensah, deleted all her social media before her own appointment was announced.

Trump’s orders are blocked. Mamdani is hiring more equity officers. On the surface, DEI is winning. But look closer. Atta-Mensah deleted her social media before the announcement. Weaver’s “white supremacy” quote spread everywhere within hours. In 2020, those views would have launched speaking tours and keynote invitations. By 2026, even New York’s radical mayor watches his appointees scramble to hide what they believe. The ideology is in retreat, desperately shoring up its last defensible position.

How We Got Here

In the summer of 2020, the American people were subjected to an unprecedented campaign of orchestrated pressure following George Floyd’s death. Within weeks, virtually every major organization issued statements denouncing systemic racism and pledging support for Black Lives Matter. Companies committed billions to DEI initiatives. Universities created administrative empires overnight. The goal: hire administrators to mandate and implement DEI in every American workplace and school.

In my book The Political Vise, I describe how the progressive left operates: crisis creates pressure, pressure forces compliance, compliance becomes institutionalization. By the time Donald Trump took office in January 2025, DEI wasn’t just a set of aspirational slogans. It was embedded in the personnel, budgets, and organizational charts of virtually every major institution in America. Thousands of people had built lucrative new careers around DEI ideology, and billions had already been spent creating an entire professional class whose livelihood required the ideology not just to survive but to expand.

The Quiet Scrubbing Begins

When Donald Trump signed executive orders targeting DEI programs across federal agencies and contractors, he created direct counter-pressure against an ideology that had operated with complete impunity for five years. Federal courts blocked parts of his orders. But despite the Axios framing, that’s not the real story. The real story is what happened at the nation’s most prestigious institutions, the ones that occupy the commanding heights of American culture. They started scrubbing DEI language from websites. Even in liberal Los Angeles, the University of Southern California shut down its inclusion office website entirely. Institutions began self-censoring to avoid federal scrutiny.

In 2020, institutions competed to prove their commitment to racial equity. Six years later, New York’s Chief Equity Officer deleted her social media before the announcement. When you’re hiding, you’ve already lost.

New York City is a “blue” stronghold where federal courts can rarely limit a mayor’s choices. If DEI still commanded unshakeable consensus, Weaver’s “white supremacy” quote would have been cheered. Instead, it exploded as a scandal within hours. As even liberal New Yorkers balked, President Trump’s Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights announced the DOJ was “paying very close attention.”

Ask yourself: could the Trump Administration have publicly challenged a major city’s equity programs in 2020 and been taken seriously? Of course not. For years, merely to question DEI meant revealing yourself as a white supremacist, subject to swift cancellation. The Vise worked to crush dissent because elite consensus was complete, with media, corporations, and universities all in lockstep.

That consensus is broken now. The Office of Civil Rights can investigate the Mamdani Administration on civil rights grounds. The courts are split on President Trump’s orders. The same major corporations that got squeezed by the Vise in 2020 (the NFL, Target, Disney, and dozens of others) are quietly retreating in 2026. Some eliminate DEI positions outright, others rebrand—but fewer and fewer defend what they created not so long ago. The unified pressure that forced compliance no longer exists. Jennifer Sey was fired from Levi’s in 2022 for opposing pandemic-era school closures; she now runs XX-XY Athletics and calls out corporate DEI programs on national media. Fortune 100 companies are following her lead. Sey was once a casualty of the DEI regime. She survived the crush of the progressive Vise and now leads the resistance.

Why Axios Sounds Defensive

The left understands this, which is why the Axios piece is more defensive than triumphant. They know the moral authority that made DEI mandatory in 2020 is gone. What they have now is institutional inertia, embedded personnel, and (in some jurisdictions), friendly activist judges. That can sustain programs in blue cities for years. But it can’t create the sweeping national transformation the left achieved in 2020.

The clearest sign of retreat is how extreme DEI programs have become in the left’s last redoubts. When Mamdani appoints someone who calls private property white supremacy, he isn’t expanding. He’s holding deep blue New York and pushing as hard as he can because DEI is retreating everywhere else. The progressive Vise still functions there because local elites remain complicit or cowed. But even in its stronghold, Weaver’s views became a scandal. Even there, the Justice Department is watching.

Even as DEI remains entrenched in blue cities, the moral authority that made DEI mandatory everywhere is cracking. And without that authority, the Vise can’t squeeze.

Cea Weaver still has her job. But everyone knows what she said about homeownership now. Afua Atta-Mensah runs New York’s Office of Equity. But she had to delete her social media first. In 2020, calling homeownership “white supremacy” would have been applauded at corporate conferences. In 2026, it’s a scandal—even in New York City.

The shift is the win. There are more wins to come.