The two-year campaign for colorblind equality notches its biggest win yet.

Yesterday, President Trump signed an executive order abolishing the “diversity, equity, and inclusion” bureaucracy in the federal government.

The move marks a stunning reversal of fortune from just four years ago, when Black Lives Matter, critical race theory, and DEI seemed unstoppable. Following the death of George Floyd, left-wing race activists made a blitz through America’s institutions, rewriting school curricula, altering government policy, and establishing DEI offices in major universities, big-city school districts, and Fortune 100 companies. The Biden administration immediately followed suit, mandating a “whole-of-government equity agenda” that entrenched DEI in the federal government.

No more. President Trump has rescinded the Biden executive order and instructed his Cabinet to “terminate, to the maximum extent allowed by law, all DEI, DEIA, and ‘environmental justice’ offices and positions,” and “all ‘equity action plans,’ ‘equity’ actions, initiatives, or programs.” In other words, President Trump has signed the death warrant for DEI within the federal government.

How did we get here? Through patiently building a movement and winning the public debate. At the beginning of 2023, I worked with Florida governor Ron DeSantis to launch the “abolish DEI” campaign. We began by terminating the DEI bureaucracy at New College of Florida, a small public university in Sarasota, where I serve as a trustee. The reaction from the racialist Left was intense. Protesters descended on the campus and the left-wing media published hundreds of articles condemning the move. But we held firm and made the case that public institutions should judge individuals based on their accomplishments, rather than their ancestry.

The argument began to take hold. The polling data indicated that Americans supported a “colorblind society” over a “race-conscious society” by large margins. Even the New York Times, one of the largest boosters of left-wing racialism, started publishing pieces that criticized DEI. At the same time, the Black Lives Matter movement was ensnared in scandals and the leading intellectual voices of DEI, such as Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo, faced sustained public scrutiny and seemed to disappear from the spotlight.

We pushed onward. Governor DeSantis led the way, signing legislation abolishing the DEI bureaucracy in all of Florida’s public universities. A dozen other red states followed, restricting DEI programs and banning DEI-style discrimination in their public institutions. The process became a virtuous cycle: each state that passed an anti-DEI bill reduced the risk of the next state doing the same. The campaign moved from the realm of debate to the realm of policy.

Trump’s victory over Kamala Harris on November 5 sealed DEI’s fate. Corporate America, including companies such as Walmart, and Meta, interpreted the event as an incentive to change, voluntarily terminating their DEI programs before Trump took office. Mark Zuckerberg made it explicit, arguing that the country had reached a “cultural tipping point,” which convinced him to stop DEI programs. And Zuckerberg, along with numerous other tech titans, were prominently seated at the inauguration yesterday.

In one way, Trump’s executive order yesterday was priced in—people knew it was coming. Still, it is a crowning achievement for those who have built this campaign from the ground up. There will be many fights ahead—the bureaucracy will attempt to evade the order, and more needs doing on civil rights reform in general—but, for the moment, we should celebrate. The forces of left-wing racialism are on the defensive, and the forces of colorblind equality are on the move.

None of it was inevitable—and nothing will be going forward, either. It has taken courage, hard work, and more than a little luck. But this is undoubtedly a moment to feel optimistic. America’s institutions are not beyond correction, as many feared. The American people were wise enough to realize that their country might not have survived four or eight more years of government by DEI. The spoke on November 5, and now President Trump is acting accordingly.

Christopher F. Rufo is a Senior Fellow of the Manhattan Institute, Contributing Editor of City Journal, Distinguished Fellow of Hillsdale College, and founder of American Studio, a nonprofit organization dedicated to creating new work about the American experience.

The hub for all of my work on critical race theory, gender ideology, institutional capture, and social decay.

From the Fraser Institute

By Ross McKitrick

Canadian federal politicians are floundering in their responses to Donald Trump’s tariff and annexation threats. Unfortunately, they’re stuck in a 2016 mindset, still thinking Trump is a temporary aberration who should be disdained and ignored by the global community. But a lot has changed. Anyone wanting to understand Trump’s current priorities should spend less time looking at trade statistics and more time understanding the details of the lawfare campaigns against him. Canadian officials who had to look up who Kash Patel is, or who don’t know why Nathan Wade’s girlfriend finds herself in legal jeopardy, will find the next four years bewildering.

Three years ago, Trump was on the ropes. His first term had been derailed by phony accusations of Russian collusion and a Ukrainian quid pro quo. After 2020, the Biden Justice Department and numerous Democrat prosecutors devised implausible legal theories to launch multiple criminal cases against him and people who worked in his administration. In summer 2022, the FBI raided Mar-a-Lago and leaked to the press rumours of stolen nuclear codes and theft of government secrets. After Trump announced his candidacy in 2022, he was hit by wave after wave of indictments and civil suits strategically filed in deep blue districts. His legal bills soared while his lawyers past and present battled well-funded disbarment campaigns aimed at making it impossible for him to obtain counsel. He was assessed hundreds of millions of dollars in civil penalties and faced life in prison if convicted.

This would have broken many men. But when he was mug-shotted in Georgia on Aug. 24, 2023, his scowl signalled he was not giving in. In the 11 months from that day to his fist pump in Butler, Pennsylvania, Trump managed to defeat and discredit the lawfare attacks, assemble and lead a highly effective campaign team, knock Joe Biden off the Democratic ticket, run a series of near daily (and sometimes twice daily) rallies, win over top business leaders in Silicon Valley, open up a commanding lead in the polls and not only survive an assassination attempt but turn it into an image of triumph. On election day, he won the popular vote and carried the White House and both Houses of Congress.

It’s Trump’s world now, and Canadians should understand two things about it. First, he feels no loyalty to domestic and multilateral institutions that have governed the world for the past half century. Most of them opposed him last time and many were actively weaponized against him. In his mind, and in the thinking of his supporters, he didn’t just defeat the Democrats, he defeated the Republican establishment, most of Washington including the intelligence agencies, the entire corporate media, the courts, woke corporations, the United Nations and its derivatives, universities and academic authorities, and any foreign governments in league with the World Economic Forum. And it isn’t paranoia; they all had some role in trying to bring him down. Gaining credibility with the new Trump team will require showing how you have also fought against at least some of these groups.

Second, Trump has earned the right to govern in his own style, including saying whatever he wants. He’s a negotiator who likes trash-talking, so get used to it and learn to decode his messages.

When Trump first threatened tariffs, he linked it to two demands: stop the fentanyl going into the United States from Canada and meet our NATO spending targets. We should have done both long ago. In response, Trudeau should have launched an immediate national action plan on military readiness, border security and crackdowns on fentanyl labs. His failure to do so invited escalation. Which, luckily, only consisted of taunts about annexation. Rather than getting whiny and defensive, the best response (in addition to dealing with the border and defence issues) would have been to troll back by saying that Canada would fight any attempt to bring our people under the jurisdiction of the corrupt U.S. Department of Justice, and we will never form a union with a country that refuses to require every state to mandate photo I.D. to vote and has so many election problems as a result.

As to Trump’s complaints about the U.S. trade deficit with Canada, this is a made-in-Washington problem. The U.S. currently imports $4 trillion in goods and services from the rest of the world but only sells $3 trillion back in exports. Trump looks at that and says we’re ripping them off. But that trillion-dollar difference shows up in the U.S. National Income and Product Accounts as the capital account balance. The rest of the world buys that much in U.S. financial instruments each year, including treasury bills that keep Washington functioning. The U.S. savings rate is not high enough to cover the federal government deficit and all the other domestic borrowing needs. So the Americans look to other countries to cover the difference. Canada’s persistent trade surplus with the U.S. ($108 billion in 2023) partly funds that need. Money that goes to buying financial instruments can’t be spent on goods and services.

So the other response to the annexation taunts should be to remind Trump that all the tariffs in the world won’t shrink the trade deficit as long as Congress needs to borrow so much money each year. Eliminate the budget deficit and the trade deficit will disappear, too. And then there will be less money in D.C. to fund lawfare and corruption. Win-win.

Ross McKitrick

Professor of Economics, University of Guelph