The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative – Mark Zuckerberg’s multibillion-dollar philanthropy charity – has scrapped its diversity team and cancelled funding for projects promoting inclusivity as the Great Unwokening gains pace. The Telegraph has the story.
The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), which handles the philanthropic efforts of Mr Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, told staff it would abandon a series of programmes aimed at diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI).
The for-profit charity will drop its internal DEI initiatives and stop all “social advocacy funding”, including work focused on immigration and countering racism.
In an email to employees seen by the Guardian, Marc Malandro, CZI’s Chief Operating Officer, said: “We will no longer have a diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility team at CZI.”
The organisation has dropped its so-called diverse slate practice, an inclusive hiring policy, and told applicants for $1.1m (£870,000) of grant funding for a programme celebrating diversity in science that the award had been cancelled. The charity also scrubbed mentions of diversity from its website, including a statement that the foundation focused its work through “a diversity, equity and inclusion lens”.
The charity would instead focus on “biology and AI” funding and will lay off staff within its community team, which had worked on promoting “economic inclusion”.
The decision comes weeks after staff at the CZI were reassured that sweeping cuts to diversity programmes at Mr Zuckerberg’s Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, would not impact the charitable organisation.
Worth reading in full.
The Telegraph has compiled a list of the some of the key developments in the Great Unwokening so far:
- McDonald’s, January 2025: McDonald’s says it will abandon targets for achieving diverse representation in senior roles and change the name of its diversity team to become the Global Inclusion Team [a.k.a. the GIT?!]
- Meta, January 2025: Meta is ending “equity and inclusion programs and changing hiring and supplier diversity practices”.
- Amazon, December 2024: Amazon says it is “winding down outdated programs and materials” as part of a broader review of hundreds of initiatives.
- Walmart, November 2024: Walmart says it will phase out terms such as “DEI” in company materials.
- Toyota, October 2024: Toyota says it will no longer participate in DEI events such as cultural festivals and parades.
- Ford, August 2024: Ford states that it would no longer be participating in the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index.
- John Deere, July 2024: John Deere says it will no longer sponsor “social or cultural awareness” events.
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Wow! This is astonishing news! Thanks to Will Jones and the DS for summarising the Telegraph article, including all the other amazing signs of “The Great Unwokening”, as it’s so aptly been named. Just think of all the funding that will be released for sensible projects now, so long wasted on DEI rubbish! Leftists will be aghast. And British Farmers will be glad to hear that their John Deere tractors have now been set free from diversity, equality and inclusion.
And what a nice photo of Zuckerberg and his wife to illustrate this cheerful news. They are a good team.
Hm. Glad they’re scrapping it all but let’s be under no illusions – the political winds are now blowing from a different direction and CZI are just bending accordingly.
Whatever their reasons, it’s all good.
I agree, motivation be damned, it’s the outcome we measure. Just hard to enjoy it too much once one has seen the waterfall of strange green characters behind everything…
I agree M A k. After what has been forced on us these last few years this provides for slight optimism but that’s about it and the wokeraty are hardly going to scurry away in tears just yet.
And Jaguar? Oh dear!
Excellent news.
Astonishing. Whatever next? I’m waiting for the moment when they admit that men and women are different!
I think the good sense of the decision means little when you consider the grubby opportunism that gives rise to it. Who cares what someone does if they do it because it suits their interests. If you are happy with that sort of behaviour then you are essentially giving licence to anyone to betray you whenever it suits them. You demean yourself if your expectations of human conduct are so diminished that you applaud a correct decision made for reasons of self-aggrandisement.
The pendulum is swinging back. Simple harmonic motion is doing its work. To every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.
In science, we might even go back 60 years to unsettled science, questions without answers and taking nobody’s word for it.
You can’t fool most of the people most of the time and expect to get away with it in perpetuity. Sooner or later, Hubris generally gets rumbled by Nemesis.
I wish there was some equal and opposite action to the mass invasion of Europe.
Britain, at least, has advantage of being an island. Royal Navy patrols of the Channel, withdraw from ECHR and send back to country of origin.
Turn them back at Britain’s sea border 12 Nautical Miles from shore.
DEI is the preferred weapon of third-wave postmodernism, deployed solely to deconstruct Western societies. Its Critical Theory and Intersectionality roots expose DEIs limitations, irrationality and false assumptions that, ironically, hurts the very people it purports to help i.e marginalised groups.
The theory that any observed disparities are caused by discrimination is too simplistic, illogical and cynical. Thus, DEI was never going to work, unless the systematic deconstruction of Western civilisation was the main endpoint.
“DEI was never going to work, unless the systematic deconstruction of Western civilisation was the main endpoint.”
That is precisely what it is as I have stated here on DS many times.
Amazon are now in charge of the Bond films which does not bode well. They bought the MGM studios from under Eon with its contract to produce the films which is why nothing has happened. I hope they don’t go all Woke Disney on the series.
Encouraging news if it’s actually happening.
Call me a sceptic but is this really a dismantling of DIE or will in continue in a different guise?
Good news; the new sheriff is certainly bringing order to “the town.”
Thanks for a great article, Will. Hope to God it’ll fizzle out here in the UK as well. I’m so sick of it being pushed in my area of counselling and psychotherapy.