--:-- Noel King: For more than half a century, the U.S. had a rule that said anyone that does business with the federal government, from Boeing to FedEx and Pfizer to Johns Hopkins, had to take affirmative action toward hiring people regardless of race, color or creed.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: On day one of his presidency, Donald Trump ended that rule. We've ended the tyranny of so-called diversity, equity and inclusion policies all across the entire federal government and indeed the private sector and our military. And our country will be woke no longer.
--:-- Noel King: As the U.S. exploded following the murder of George Floyd in the summer of 2020, a loose coalition of highly online commentators, sub-stackers, and Twitter shitposters set their sights on eviscerating DEI policies. Then they won.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Coming up on Today Explained, one of them speaks.
--:-- Noel King: Support for Today Explained comes from Adio. Adio is an AI-native customer relationship management platform that Adio says is built for the next era of companies. A powerful data structure adapts to your business model, syncs in all your contacts in minutes, and enriches your business with actionable data. Adio says it also allows you to create those email sequences, those real-time reports, those powerful automations, which they claim can help you build what matters most, your company. You can go to addio.com slash todayexplained to get 15% off your first year. That's A-T-T-I-O dot com slash todayexplained.
--:-- Noel King: Support for this show comes from Macy's. Layering is an art form. All it takes is a bit of intention, style, and of course, the perfect cold weather staples. So find the perfect look for you with the help of Macy's Fall Fashion Guide, your one-stop shop for fall's latest trends and must-haves, curated by their experts. From leather to denim to cozy knits, find everything you need to piece together your new fall look. Explore the Macy's Fall Guide for yourself and shop in-store or online at Macy's.com.
--:-- Noel King: You're listening to Today Explained. I'm Andrew Prokop, senior correspondent, Vox, covering politics.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: You recently wrote for Vox that the Trump administration is making policy, making policy decisions based on ideas that took hold on Twitter. Say more about what you mean.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: So one thing that's become very clear in the new Trump administration that is different from the first one is that the people calling the shots are very, very online. That includes, of course, Elon Musk. It includes Vice President J.D. Vance. It includes Stephen Miller. It includes a whole host of officials whose names we don't even know, but whose onlineness is evident in the policies that are being rolled out by this administration.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: What are those policies? There are all sorts of things, really kind of too many to name. A kind of silly one that just recently happened is that Attorney General Pam Bondi announced that she was going to unveil the Epstein files. What you're going to see hopefully tomorrow is a lot of flight logs, a lot of names, a lot of information. It's pretty sick what that man did.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: This is something that had spread among the kind of conspiratorial online right that the government was sitting on all these files that will prove that Jeffrey Epstein, the sex trafficker who died in 2019, had blackmail material on prominent Democrats and celebrities. And she ended up trying to make a big splash out of this and handing material on Epstein to online right influencers. The Epstein files are about to drop, and it's going to be insane.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: I'm here at the White House. I just met with Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel, and the President and the Vice President of the United States, Donald Trump, and J.D. Vance. Today has been absolutely surreal. This is the power of new media.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And it turned out there was absolutely nothing new in those documents, and it ended up being a total embarrassment. Today on the Matt Wall Show, the long-awaited release of the Epstein files was a massive, disastrous flop.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And to the new FBI director, if you want to gain respect right out the gate, release it all. Don't play games. But there's also many more serious policies and issues that reflect this influence.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: I'd say that one through line uniting a lot of what the new Trump administration has done is this unified effort to kind of attack what they see as the power centers of progressivism in an effort to roll back wokeness and what they see as progressive cultural dominance.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: So you see that in things like funding cutoffs to universities, limits on their research dollars. And you see it in policies aimed at threatening investigations of nonprofits and corporations and colleges that use affirmative action or DEI policies that the administration doesn't like.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: It's basically a whole set of different issues. These are folks who use the word woke and don't define it, which makes it tricky to pin down what they're attacking exactly.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: But you just ran through a list of things, including universities, including certain sectors of the government. And the attack aimed at these places is what exactly? These guys say you're doing what wrong?
--:-- Andrew Prokop: So I view the online right as essentially an alliance of posters with varying different interests and policy priorities, but they were kind of united in what they saw as combat against the woke. This shared resentment of what these online right people saw as progressive cultural dominance.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: In Trump's first term, the online right was kind of disreputable. They were viewed as sort of weirdos. They weren't in the halls of power in the Republican Party.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: But there was a real shift that happened after Trump lost the 2020 election and under the Biden administration. When more people who had, you know, some misgiving, some qualms about progressive cultural issues, about the Great Awakening, felt freed up to focus on that more and became more open about being resentful about this.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: This includes Elon Musk. He stayed out of politics for the most part in Trump's first term. But under Biden, he became increasingly radicalized and vocal online about wanting to stop what he called the work-wide virus.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And lots of other prominent figures in Silicon Valley were also part of this trend. Even J.D. Vance, he was kind of politically neutral in 2020 and fell more and more into this online world in the 2020s.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Broadly, what are these beliefs of theirs that they're trying to protect or that they feel are under attack?
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Well, you know, it's different for different people. But you know there a segment of the online right that is kind of just open racists. They want to stand up for white predominance in America. This is sort of you know the alt-right. They very willing to say racist, offensive, politically incorrect things.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: This kind of blurs over to other people who say such things, but then they argue that they're just saying them ironically. This is kind of something that we saw in the new administration related to a young engineer on Elon Musk's team, Marco Elez.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: It turned out that just a few months before joining Doge, this guy had made various racist posts online under a pseudonym, including, I was racist before it was cool and normalize Indian hate.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: You know, in the old Trump administration, that would probably have gotten him fired. And it did eventually at first in the new Trump administration. But then he became a kind of cause celebre among the online right.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: J.D. Vance stuck up for him and said, I obviously disagree with some of Elez's posts, but I don't think stupid social media activity should ruin a kid's life. We shouldn't reward journalists who try to destroy people ever.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: The idea that, you know, people who make racist posts online are on your team. That's part of the online right culture. Like they want to be allowed to say offensive, racist things. They think that woke censoriousness and groupthink went so far.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: You used to be able to say all kinds of things and now you can't anymore. You got to watch what you say. You might get canceled. And who are the people that are imposing this oppressive censorship. It's the media. It's progressives. They are the enemy.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: They are the enemy. And as you can see in what Vance said, you know, siding with the media is worse than trying to fire a racist from your government.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: You write that these ideas have led to policies, actual policy that governs how you and me and every other American lives our lives. What policies would you point to here, Andrew?
--:-- Andrew Prokop: I think probably one of the clearest examples of this influence of the online right was an executive order that Trump released in his first week, which was anti-DEI and anti-affirmative action.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And the specifics of this order are noteworthy because it rolled back an executive order from all the way back in 1965 issued by President Lyndon B. Johnson that has stood since then, that what it essentially did was it required that federal contractors make efforts to employ more women and people of color, that they practice affirmative action.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And, you know, every previous Republican president has let this stand. But in recent years, as the online right has been exploring various theories about about wokeness, about how they could fight back against it. One of their theories was about this specific executive order on affirmative action.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: They said this needs to be reversed. That has been the obsession of one particular writer on the online right for several years now. He's been hammering this drum again and again. His name is Richard Hanania.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: He argued that the roots of wokeness were in federal civil rights law and specifically in this affirmative action executive order. And that instead of just rolling it back, it should be replaced with a new government policy saying that basically you can't have an affirmative action program.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: That such programs were illegal because they discriminated based on race, that they violated the Civil Rights Act. So, you know, when that executive order came out from Trump, I immediately thought these are people who have been reading the Richard Hananias, the online right posters who have had their own obsessions and who have been driving these ideas.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And the people in power are really listening to them and trying to impose their ideas to reshape this country.
--:-- Noel King: That was Vox's Andrew Prokop. Coming up next.
--:-- Noel King: But it sounds like based on what you're saying that you are able to take credit for killing DEI. Is that how you see it?
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Well, that would be very nice. Nice thing to claim. Who knows about the impact of any one person? But I know that nobody was talking about Executive Order 11246, for example, before I talked to Vivek about it.
--:-- Noel King: Support for Today Explained comes from Built Rewards. These days, it seems like everybody has a rewards program. You swipe your card and you get one cent on the hundred dollars. But with your rent, frequently, you just pay month after month. You never get anything from it other than that roof over your head. Not anymore, says Built Rewards.
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--:-- Andrew Prokop: The unfortunate fact is that a huge number of people can't say yes to that. Far too many of us are stuck in a job we've outgrown, or one we never wanted in the first place.
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--:-- Noel King: Support for Today Explained comes from Upwork. If you run a business, you know that scaling your business requires the right expertise at the right time.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: I sometimes wonder how many of you are running businesses out there. Please email me, noelle at king.com.
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--:-- Noel King: This is Today Explained.
--:-- Noel King: Richard Hanania is a substacker and author of the book The Origins of Woke, Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics.
--:-- Richard Hanania: All right, so Richard, in the summer of 2023, you were a public intellectual. You'd been writing op-eds for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic. And then that August, The Huffington Post reported that years earlier, you'd written racist, misogynist posts on right-wing websites.
--:-- Noel King: I'm going to read a couple of those here. For the white gene pool to be created, millions had to die. Race mixing is like destroying a unique species or a piece of art. It's shameful.
--:-- Richard Hanania: Yes, I can't lie to you and tell you that those weren't sincere beliefs. Some of the ways I phrased it was sometimes getting a rise out of people, but I can't deny that I did hold those views.
--:-- Richard Hanania: This, I should note, was around 2010, 2011. So by the time it came out of the Huffington Post, it was about 12, 13 years later. But yeah, I had some views that I now consider repugnant.
--:-- Noel King: And I was actually writing against before that August 2023 exposition in the Huffington Post. So yes, I can't deny that I did have views like that at the time.
--:-- Richard Hanania: What led to you holding those views?
--:-- Richard Hanania: I think I was just young and angry. I saw these ideas that you couldn't talk about certain things like male-female differences, the idea that America was a racist country, which I didn't believe at the time and I don't believe now, or at least racist enough to explain disparities between groups of people.
--:-- Richard Hanania: I didn't like censorship. I didn't like a lot of the things that conservatives in later years would turn against DEI, which was kind of at an early stage right there. And so I was angry. I was looking for people who, you know, were angry like me.
--:-- Richard Hanania: By about, you know, 2012, 2013, I had sort of grown out of it, which I think often happens.
--:-- Noel King: In November of 2023, so this is after the Huffington Post exposed you, you tweeted, people complain about Jews running America. Do they actually believe it should be run by the voters of Baltimore or Appalachia? Doesn't seem that anti-Semites have thought this through.
--:-- Richard Hanania: So that was years after, you know, that's years after you were young. It's after the Huffington Post has drawn attention to the really disgusting stuff that you tweeted. Well, I would make a distinction between that and the earlier stuff.
--:-- Richard Hanania: I mean, there's a long intellectual tradition of people not believing in that kind of naive sort of form of direct democracy going back to the American founders to today, even before the American founders going back to the ancient Greeks.
--:-- Richard Hanania: And, you know, I said Appalachians and inner city Baltimore, I was saying generally poor communities, which are on average, you know, less informed about politics and have views that, you know, might not be the most coherent about making policy.
--:-- Richard Hanania: Bringing up the Jews in that context was defending, you know, Jews saying, accepting your premise. If Jews do control America, what's the alternative? Jews could quote unquote control America in your views, the views of the anti-Semites, because they are disproportionately a smart, educated group of people.
--:-- Richard Hanania: And I say smart, educated people having disproportionate power in society is a good thing. So I don't see that as as racist or hateful or anything like that.
--:-- Noel King: While those quotes you write at the beginning, I will grant you that those are things that nobody that I wouldn't stand by and nobody else should.
--:-- Richard Hanania: By the summer of 2023, you had built a broad audience in both mainstream media and also on Twitter and Substack. What was the thrust of your main argument?
--:-- Richard Hanania: I had an article which eventually turned into my book, The Origins of Vogue, which argued that a lot of the cultural issues that conservatives were mad about, a lot of the ideas about disparate impact, a lot of the ideas that you couldn't be hard on crime because it has an impact on one group of people more than the other group of people, or you couldn't have standardized tests and so forth.
--:-- Richard Hanania: A lot of that was kind of baked into civil rights law, not necessarily the text of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, but a lot of judicial interpretation and executive action that came in the years and decades that followed.
--:-- Richard Hanania: So I was arguing that conservatives were upset about this thing they called DEI or wokeness, and they were seeing it as mainly a cultural issue. Oh, look at Target, look at the State Department, look at what they're all doing.
--:-- Richard Hanania: And my argument was like, there is a policy agenda here that you can focus on. When did it become clear to you that this argument that you were making was resonating?
--:-- Richard Hanania: So it was right away, it was something that conservatives were already interested in. And they just wanted to, they needed to understand there was a kind of, you know, a policy solution to the problems they were concerned about.
--:-- Noel King: So the goal of ending Executive Order 11246 was part of a broader project to take government out of the idea of that it should be taking consideration of race and sex or enforcing such considerations onto the private sector in terms of hiring in terms of promotion.
--:-- Richard Hanania: There's perhaps a role for the government to play in terms of ensuring non-discrimination as discrimination was understood, the concept was understood in 1964 when the Civil Rights Act was passed.
--:-- Richard Hanania: But a lot of the sort of cultural changes within institutions were kind of adopted as a defense against potential lawsuits and against potential loss of government contracts and these other ways that governments sort of put some on the scale to shift the culture for corporate America and educational establishments culturally towards the left on identity issues.
--:-- Richard Hanania: So I wanted less race, sex-based governance and less of a kind of government kind of encouraging institutions to take positions that a lot of Americans don't agree with.
--:-- Noel King: Richard, was corporate America actually complaining? Because it seems like if you run a big American corporation, I don't know, I would look at the idea of diversity and I would say, oh, this is a good thing because I want to sell things to American people.
--:-- Noel King: And therefore, having people within the company at a very high level who understand how to sell things to American people is a great thing. Good if they come from all kinds of backgrounds. Like, I just wonder, whose part were you taking here?
--:-- Richard Hanania: Well, that's true. I would respect business decisions on these things. I mean, if they want to have a kind of program, that's one thing. I mean, these were but these were mandates coming from the government and also the subjects of of lawsuits.
--:-- Richard Hanania: And sure, there's one thing you can you could say, well, I want to do market research on Hispanics or maybe have someone in the room who knows something about women's products or things like that.
--:-- Richard Hanania: I don't think that there's necessarily a strong correlation between that and, say, demographic balancing based on census categories. and I go into how the census categories were determined, it's kind of arbitrary, right? I mean, it's like, you know, the government cares that you have a certain number of blacks or Hispanics.
--:-- Richard Hanania: They don't care if they are immigrants who just came here yesterday, or they are people who are culturally completely assimilated into the mainstream, as long as they have a Hispanic name. So there are like good corporate reasons to sometimes take into account race, sex, cultural background.
--:-- Richard Hanania: I don't deny that. I don't think that that's necessarily what civil rights law has been forcing on companies. So the day President Trump puts an end to DEI, the day he puts an end to the executive order, what was your reaction?
--:-- Richard Hanania: I was happy. I mean, it felt good that I had written about a topic, that I had this kind of idea in my head. I wasn't anybody special. I didn't have any reason to think anyone would listen to me. And eventually I saw the outcome that I wanted. So I was elated at the time.
--:-- Noel King: The Trump administration did what you wanted. It eliminated DEI. And then it put Pete Hegseth in charge of the Pentagon and Kash Patel in charge of the FBI and Dan Bongino as the deputy director of the FBI.
--:-- Richard Hanania: These gentlemen are not merit picks. And these are obvious examples. But this is why Americans who are skeptical of your argument will say, look, you're never really going to get merit. If we eliminate DEI, we're going to go back to, you know, the president picks a guy who he thinks looks handsome on TV.
--:-- Noel King: Do you put any stock in that argument?
--:-- Richard Hanania: Absolutely, Noel. I think one reason I'm not even, you know, I've had some contacts with the Trump administration. I think one reason I've not been even closer to the Trump administration is that I've been highly critical of a lot of the non-DEI related actions that he's taken.
--:-- Richard Hanania: I agree with you. I think that some of these picks are certainly not merit based. They don't even rise to the level of kind of public decorum and ethics you often expect from someone who's going to be in the FBI director or the head of the Department of Defense.
--:-- Noel King: You've clearly become disenchanted with MAGA. You wrote a piece this week that's making the rounds. It's called Liberals Only Censor, Musk Seeks to Lobotomize.
--:-- Richard Hanania: Well, it's been actually a very long time. It's not like, you know, the last month or so. I've been this weird position where I am conservative and I do want to be constructive.
--:-- Richard Hanania: And when Trump looked like Trump was going to be the nominee and he might be president, I wanted my ideas to be listened to and I wanted them to do certain things. At the same time, I don't just write about DEI. I write about a wide range of topics, and I say what I believe on those topics.
--:-- Richard Hanania: I think there's a level of corruption here, a level of blatant sort of corruption to the way government is working. It's unprecedented, at least in our recent history.
--:-- Richard Hanania: I was always against social media censorship. I thought this was a way to suppress conservative voices. But then Elon Musk buys Twitter. I'm happy. I say, okay, we're going to have free speech. And my goodness, it's become a sewer.
--:-- Richard Hanania: You know, I think that honesty and virtue and politics matter. And what I've seen from the conservative movement or I've seen from MAGA and the conservative movement in general as it's become MAGA-fied has just horrified me.
--:-- Richard Hanania: And I've felt the need to speak out about this.
--:-- Noel King: How do you feel about this movement that you are a part of descending into what we have today?
--:-- Richard Hanania: Yeah, I'm unhappy.
--:-- Noel King: We all know Trump's flaws. The first administration, though, we saw him surround himself with mostly responsible people. And so you can have a distaste for Trump and say, look, he's still putting the same judges on the federal judiciary that DeSantis or, in many cases, Ted Cruz or Jeb Bush would have.
--:-- Richard Hanania: And so you could say, well, I don't like Trump. He's sort of distasteful. But the movement is more than just Trump. Now, you can't really say that anymore. I mean, he's picking people who nobody would have believed possible could have a high-level government position, like Robert F. Kennedy, like Kash Patel.
--:-- Richard Hanania: That's not true here. These are people who would only be chosen, appointed by Trump. And so the Trump administration, if you're just looking in terms of pure policy, there's a lot I like. There's no reason to kind of be too upset there.
--:-- Richard Hanania: But if you're looking at kind of where the movement is going, its level of virtue and how political movements and how people in power should behave and act and their relationship to truth and the relationship to the rest of society, I think it's gotten pretty bad.
--:-- Noel King: Richard Hanania. The book is The Origins of Woke. He's also on Substack and he is still on Twitter.
--:-- Noel King: Dropping in our feed on Sunday, some of you called to ask whether DEI was ever anything more than performance. Our new weekend show is going to give you some answers.
--:-- Noel King: Miles Bryan produced today's episode with an assist from Carla Javier. Amina El-Sadi is our editor. Laura Bullard is our senior researcher. And Andrea Kristen's daughter and Patrick Boyd are our engineers.
--:-- Noel King: I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained. Thank you.
