Woke Senator Goes on MSNBC to Demand Government Employees Defy Trump on DEI

On the Wednesday, January 22 broadcast of MSNBC’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports,” Senate Minority Whip Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) told Mitchell that those on the left who support promote diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives “should continue to encourage” government agencies to continue promoting those DEI policies despite the executive order from President Donald Trump that demands quite the opposite.

As background, President Donald Trump released an executive order that, quite in contrast to what has existed since President Lyndon B. Johnson, requires that those federal agencies using DEI, characterized by many on the right to be discrimination on the basis of race against white people, stop doing so and end their DEI programs immediately.

It was about that order from the new president that Andrea Mitchell asked. She said, “I want to ask you about the DEI decision, because that affects, it seems like everyone in government, and, by implication, the way it’s worded, it seems like it’s also a directive to universities, to corporations, to others around the country.”

Responding, Durbin noted that the order appears designed to hammer efforts to force diversity on companies and government agencies, though he declined to note the force aspect of it or that, in the past, such efforts generally meant using discrimination to push unqualified candidates on companies and agencies.

Making that point in predictably pearl-clutching terms, the woke Democratic senator from Illinois told Mitchell that agency and corporate diversity will be suppressed, saying, “Well, there’s no doubt about it. It’s designed to discourage efforts to have diversity in the leadership of companies, as well as agencies of government.”

Continuing, Senator Durbin then claimed that “diversity is America’s strength,” providing no evidence whatsoever for that point, one that an increasingly large segment of the American population disagrees with, at least when “diversity” takes the form of discriminatory DEI mandates. He said, “I happen to think that diversity is America’s strength. Obviously, the Trump administration sees it just the opposite.”

Sen. Durbin then got to his point about encouraging resistance from within the Trump Administration, something that ground its gears to a halt in the first administration, saying, “We should continue to encourage individuals and agencies and corporations to do the right thing anyway.”

Trump’s DEI Executive Order provides, “Longstanding Federal civil-rights laws protect individual Americans from discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. These civil-rights protections serve as a bedrock supporting equality of opportunity for all Americans. As President, I have a solemn duty to ensure that these laws are enforced for the benefit of all Americans.”

It continues, “Yet today, roughly 60 years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, critical and influential institutions of American society, including the Federal Government, major corporations, financial institutions, the medical industry, large commercial airlines, law enforcement agencies, and institutions of higher education have adopted and actively use dangerous, demeaning, and immoral race- and sex-based preferences under the guise of so-called “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) or “diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility” (DEIA) that can violate the civil-rights laws of this Nation.”