Walmart has announced it is phasing out its “diversity, equity and inclusion” programmes. It’s a further sign that the woke DEI agenda is in retreat across the private sector and, with the election of Donald Trump, in Government, says Kate Andrews in the Telegraph. Here’s an excerpt.
The company is not undertaking tweaks to those policies, but a complete overhaul. It is pulling certain products from its shelves, including ‘chest-binders’ and trans books marketed to children. Rather than injecting another $100 million into the Center for Racial Equity – a non-profit set up in 2020 to give a boost to minority-owned companies – the fund will be wound down. Internally, there will be change, too: the phrase DEI is to be removed from company materials.
“We are willing to change alongside our associates and customers who represent all of America,” a Walmart spokesperson told the Wall Street Journal. “We’ve been on a journey and know we aren’t perfect.” It appears that company bosses have clocked that seemingly innocuous words like ‘diversity’ have taken on a far deeper, more politicised, meaning. While Walmart insists that it remains committed to these ideas in their genuine form, it is clearly rejecting what the phrase DEI has come to represent: a radical version of identity politics that Americans just rejected at the polls.
The statement from Walmart doesn’t leave much room for doubt that its decision is linked to changing political tides. The largest employer in America – the federal Government – is also about to experience a radical shake-up when Trump gets back into the Oval Office and instructs his new Department of Government Efficiency – run by Elon Musk – to slash every DEI initiative it can unearth. It’s no real surprise, then, that America’s largest private employer – Walmart – might follow suit.
But is Trump really shifting the direction of the wind? Or was he blown into office once again by voters who had already made up their mind that DEI had gone too far?
Walmart may be making changes after the election, but plenty did so beforehand. Harley Davidson ditched some of its DEI programmes this spring, making clear that it had no hiring quotas and would remove “socially motivated content” from staff training. Just before election day, meanwhile, it was revealed that Boeing had also scrapped its DEI policy. It had come under fire after several deadly aircraft accidents had left people – including Musk – asking questions about the company’s priorities.
These changes came after the big tech companies, including Meta and Google, scaled back their DEI hires in 2023, despite commitments made only a few years previous to expand these roles and departments.
It seems that the trendsetter here isn’t Walmart – or even Donald Trump. Change within the country’s biggest institutions and corporations reflects, rather than dictates, where the country has been moving for some time.
Worth reading in full.
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As usual, I don’t really know what to make of this. I know something about a state called fear, though. That’s something which helps humans to survive in a dangerous world by putting them into a state of higher mental alertness for possible dangers. Thus, the modus operandi of someone in a state of fear is to look for such dangers and use one’s imagination to try to detect them before they get acutely dangerous. This includes coming up with all kinds of hypothetical scenarios how everyday occurences could turn catastrophical and some mental discipline is required to break this off before it becomes overwhelming, ie, to force oneself to realize that the preexisting state of fear is the cause behind one’s catastrophical projections and not the other way round.
Humans are reportedly afraid of death (I don’t quite understand why because to me, it looks very much like No more problems to worry about) and this fear is said to become more pronounced with age as aging is usually interpreted as getting closer to death. Humans are thus knowingly hurtling towards their own death and this scares them, ie, gets them into a state of fear. And then, they start to discover all kinds of potential catastrophes because they’re already in fear. Like climate change. Or COVID.
Well, as often with your posts, it’s quite interesting but doesn’t have much to do with the article it follows. The article itself is very interesting – that’s what I make of it! Once upon a time, people weren’t obsessed with time, because a belief in transcendence helped them get over their fears. Today, transcendence is hard to come by, so people focus, fatally, on their own (short) lives. In a feeble attempt to give themselves some kind of control over things (rather than lying back and letting God take the strain), they’ve invented climate hysteria and, as you say, Covid. I’m not a believer (in God) – but I know that a rebirth of belief in the transcendent is necessary for human survival.
Journos and politicians do not understand the difference between acceleration and velocity any more than they understand the difference between income and wealth or aggregate and per capital GDP. I doubt they have ever asked what is in GDP either.
A thought-provoking article which throws an interesting light on the current climate change hysteria. It makes me more grateful than ever for my Christian faith.
“All of them suffer from long acceleration anxiety.” Excellent.
Interesting and thought-provoking article, especially here:
It may well turn out that thinking about God, about eternity, about truth, is a far safer way of holding onto good order than accelerating into anxiety. If so, we should never have exchanged the certainties of the Bible, Bede and Bunyan for the ephemera of the Times, the BBC and so on. Yet the Father is gone, the Son is forgotten, and we only have the Spirit, not Holy but devilishly dynamic: a colour-changing, shape-shifting spirit (a rainbow-striped Pied Piper paid by our masters to save us). It may be that we have done all this to ourselves by reading newspapers, watching television and, latterly, by existing in the stream of consciousness found on Twitter and other feeds. Locked into a permanent fix or feed of ephemera, I’d say that it is no wonder that we all imagine ourselves to be hurtling through a demoralised, disenchanted torrent-flux of Burkean sublime to the end of an empty world. No wonder our politicians are so much the prey of humourless scientists with grand models and even more humourless moralists suffering from secular apocalyptic disorders of various sorts.
However, things aren’t as hopeless as all that! God the Father has certainly not gone, Jesus the Son of God is not forgotten and the Holy Spirit is a very real Comforter for those who turn in repentance and faith to God. These, ‘our’, times are only survivable with God’s help.
We are all the same age ———-Just not at the same time. ——–I recall speaking to an old lady who said “I am 86 you know son”—-I said “Can I ask how it feels to be 86? She replied “It has gone in very quick”.