Diversity, equity and inclusion [DEI] [is] a set of values, policies and practices focused on establishing a group culture of equitable and inclusive treatment and on attracting and retaining a diverse group of participants, including people historically excluded or discriminated against, [e.g.,] female attorneys, people of colour, and members of the LGBTQ+ community …

[M]ost diversity programs aren’t increasing diversity. … Your organization will become less diverse, not more, if you require managers to [do] diversity training, try to regulate their hiring and promotion decisions, and put in a legalistic grievance system.

If this evidence is correct, we have fewer African-American physicians, scientists, engineers, professors and lawyers than we would have had using race-neutral policies.  Affirmative action has backfired

Trump Marks Black History Month Amid His War on Diversity. 

[The Trump] administration has [tried] to kill … diversity … inside the government.  They’ve turned DEI into a curse word and used it to justify the firings and end entire departments. The [new] education secretary questioned whether black history will continue to be taught in schools.  Agencies have completely erased “identity months,” including, you guessed it, Black History Month.  … [They have] spent so much time … denigrating diversity as even a concept. … Black History Month is banned at the Defense Department [DOD] and Transportation Department.  DOD schools are reportedly experiencing books being pulled off shelves if they deal with issues of diversity … [or] with issues of just people being different from one of the red hair, having freckles.

JULIE ROGINSKY, DEMOCRATIC STRATEGIST: If you are an African American in a high role anywhere in this government, MAGA thinks you’re there purely because of the color of your skin, … Consistently, you know you’ve heard that rhetoric privately.

T.W. ARRIGHI, VP, PUSH DIGITAL GROUP: I have not heard that rhetoric.

A critical thinking process needs transformation of an inchoate sense of perplexity into a clear question. Formulating a question well requires [eschewing] questionable assumptions, not prejudging the issue, and using language that in context is unambiguous and precise. 

The fallacy of equivocation occurs when a key term or phrase in an argument is used in an ambiguous way, with one meaning in one [place] and another meaning [elsewhere in] the argument.

[In Plato’s Euthydemus] we [go] back to a [pre-rational] time when … reasoning was largely verbal.  A pun or double-meaning might decide a serious discussion.  [That] sort of verbal trickery becomes extremely tiresome.

For intelligent people, the proper measure of listening to such arguments is a whole life.

Socrates: The unexamined life is not worth living.

The discussion on 2/20/25 Abby Phillip’s CNN NewsNight quickly degenerated, as usual, into unhelpful emotional, imprecise, exaggerated, inchoate claims and smears.   The subject, this time, was Trump’s efforts to eliminate DEI from government.  CNN’s summary opening description of the discussion, that Trump is conducting a “War on Diversity”, contains the most fundamental, although not the only, logical problem with the entire discussion. 

Let it be granted that Trump is conducting a “war” on DEI in government!  Even so, there is nothing whatsoever in Trump’s war on DEI that implies a war on diversity.  The point is mundane.   DEI is a program or policy.  The question whether DEI actually promotes real diversity in the workplace is a quite different empirical matter and there is empirical evidence that it does not actually do so.  CNN’s claim that since Trump is conducting a war on this policy is, therefore, conducting a war on actual real-world diversity, is a straightforward fallacy of equivocation.  Media presenters who make this assumption do not, literally, know what they are talking about.  They think they are talking about diversity but are really talking about a leftist policy that does not appear to work.

Second, it is not even clear what Abby’s claim that the “Trump administration has spent so much time “denigrating diversity” as “even a concept” means.   Nothing the Trump administration has said or done “denigrates” the concept of diversity.  What Abby presumably means is that the Trump administration “denigrates” (criticizes) DEI.  Is that forbidden now?  Or do leftist policies and programs drop from heaven (or from Harvard) already stamped with a divine seal of approval already that makes them immune to criticism?  The Left (Democrats and their media propagandists) appears to think so. 

Third, Abby’s complaint that under the Trump administration, “black history” may no longer “continue to be taught in schools,” rests on another equivocation.  For, in fact, even if black history is no longer taught in DEI programs, it may still be taught in other courses, namely, these things that used to be called “History courses” before the Left captured the universities and bent those courses to their self-serving agenda.  This slight-of-hand is employed to avoid the real question, namely, whether it is really appropriate to teach black history the way it is often taught, by political activists with an axe to grind, in special DEI programs insulated, by definition (and by department), from broader rational criticism. 

Roginsky’s claim that “You [all] know you’ve heard that rhetoric privately,” that “MAGA thinks black people [have succeeded] … purely because of the color of [their] skin.”  Actually, no.  As Arrighi replies, we have not all, despite Rognisky’s dictate, “privately” heard that Ben Carson, Condoleezza Rice, Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, Larry Elder, Walter Williams, John James, Allen West, Byron Donalds, George Washington Carver and so many more succeeded only because of their skin colour.  Quite the contrary, despite Roginsky’s standard leftist paranoia, many conservatives are happy to acknowledge that these great Americans faced greater challenges than many white Americans to achieve what they did.

One of the things leftists typically refuse to acknowledge is that there are different, and more or less good, ways to do things.  The fact is that many criticisms of Trump’s rejection of DEI are themselves the product of DEI “education”, making them “question begging” (i.e., assume what they purport to prove).  Carping and emoting are not rational argument.  If one wants to argue for DEI legitimately, one must do so from a neutral position.  One must learn how to define terms properly, formulate a precise and unambiguous thesis, argue rationally for or against it, avoiding fallacies, etc., without prejudging the issues.  This is precisely what the defenders of DEI refuse to do, reducing them to the tiresome cultish repetition of slogans and smears.  Indeed, they cannot do this, because DEI trains them precisely not to do it, not to examine their own lives critically. 

Reasoning properly is hard work, involving, not just years, but decades, indeed, a “whole life,” of disciplined self-critical (constantly “examined”) study of philosophy, logic, political theory, economics, psychology, sociology, history and much more.  Procuring a piece of paper from an ideologically one-sided school or “university” and living inside a “liberal” media bubble does not miraculously transform one’s inchoate grievances into expertise and exempt one from the necessity of disciplined rational criticism.  Unfortunately, that characterizes most of the mainstream media and the navel-gazing Left that, like Plato’s character, the Sophist Euthydemus, living in a pre-rational age, don’t even have the concept of a rational argument. 

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