Madiba K. Dennie, writing in Balls and Strikes about the backlash against Justice Amy Coney Barrett for daring to dissent, even briefly, from the conservative orthodoxy:

Barrett’s fellow travelers on the right felt betrayed, and voiced that betrayal with the kind of vitriol they normally reserve for minorities and poor people. Often, when a marginalized person ventures outside of the box conservatives try to put them in, Republicans attack their credentials and character, painting them as undeserving and ungracious. Barrett, a lifelong conservative less than three years removed from casting the deciding vote to overturn Roe v. Wade, got to experience a version of that this week. Republicans have from time to time been disappointed in the Republican men on the Court too, of course, but they aren’t telling Roberts that he’s unqualified, that he has kids at home, or that he should go back to Indiana and smile on his way out. Barrett is a dutiful foot soldier of the patriarchy, but she’s still a woman.

In this circle, “DEI,” of course, means “not a white man,” and “conservatism” is all about following the white male playbook. Failure to do so will be punished, regardless of how much in the tank for their cause you otherwise are.

This New York Times piece, from Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman, purportedly about serious disagreement inside Trump’s Cabinet over which of his sycophants are in charge, reads more like a Television Without Pity recap of an episode of The Apprentice, only with less clever writing.

It’s filled with weird quotes-that-aren’t (reading like a lightly altered transcript of a surreptitious recording), and contains some truly awful New York Times-isms, like this one:

Cabinet officials almost uniformly like the concept of what Mr. Musk set out to do — reducing waste, fraud and abuse in government — but have been frustrated by the chain saw approach to upending the government and the lack of consistent coordination.

One: There is zero reason to believe this “concept” is Musk’s goal (and plenty of evidence to believe otherwise). It’s unadulterated mendacity.

Two: It admits these cabinet officials want to bring about the destruction the US government and the pain it inflicts on the American people, just slower and with more meetings.

It’s an infuriating passage—a demonstrably false premise, paired with a disingenuous conclusion—and sanitized through the antiseptic language of propriety.

This exchange really struck me, though:

At another point, Mr. Musk insisted that people hired under diversity, equity and inclusion programs were working in control towers. Mr. Duffy pushed back and Mr. Musk did not add details […].

The exchange ended with Mr. Trump telling Mr. Duffy that he had to hire people from M.I.T. as air traffic controllers. These air traffic controllers need to be “geniuses,” he said.

Many of us have known about Musk’s racism for almost a decade, and about Trump’s for far longer, so we understand that when they say “diversity, equity and inclusion” they mean “not white men.”

The additional “tell” is the suggestion to hire from MIT, because in Trump’s mind, “geniuses” = “MIT” = “white”.

Just 7.6% of MIT’s student population is Black.

Brandi Buchman breaks this story for HuffPost: 

Commemorative bronze duplicates of the Congressional Gold Medal awarded to Jan. 6 police officers who defended the U.S. Capitol appear to have been removed for sale from the U.S. Mint’s website.

There’s also this apparently independent report from NBC News where the author, Ryan J. Reilly, describes the removal as:

another instance of President Donald Trump’s administration moving to take down material related to the violent episode stemming from his falsehoods about the 2020 presidential election results.

I saw this just days after I questioned if some US Mint coins this administration might deem “woke DEI” would even get minted today, so I was immediately outraged, but held off on linking to it. As tempting as it was to unleash righteous indignation on Trump for this, I didn't want my confirmation bias leading me to the wrong conclusion about a change that could have a perfectly innocuous and reasonable explanation. After all, there was only the HuffPost report (and later, the NBC one), with no indication of why or when this medal was removed. 

The why remains uncertain, but the when has a smidge more clarity: The Internet Archive’s January 9, 2025 snapshot of the US Mint’s Medals page shows an entry for “Those Who Protected the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.” I presume it’s the medal in question. That page has a “last updated on” date of November 26, 2024.

(The Medals page lists all medals available from the US Mint.)

A February 22, 2025 snapshot—with a “last updated on” date of February 5, 2025—does not list the medal.

I can therefore say with some confidence that this entry—and, I presume, the medal—was removed sometime between November 26, 2024 and February 5, 2025. That’s a pretty broad window, spanning the last months of the Biden administration and the first weeks of Trump’s.

I can also say with confidence that the only change to the page was, in fact, the removal of that one medal entry.

This is not dispositive. It’s possible the Biden administration or the US Mint decided—for completely practical, pragmatic, and uncontroversial reasons—to remove this medal from the site.

The alternative is to suggest that Donald Trump—who denied the insurrection, pardoned 1,500 rioters, purged Department of Justice prosecutors and FBI agents who worked the Jan. 6 cases, scrubbed the DOJ’s “comprehensive website cataloguing the largest criminal investigation in modern department history,” and has lied, repeatedly about Jan. 6—directed the US Mint to remove a commemorative medal “Honoring the service and sacrifice of those who protected the U.S. Capitol” on Jan. 6.

It’s quite the coin flip.

As I explored the American Innovation $1 Coin site for my aforelinked Steve Jobs piece, I came across several interesting—even inspiring—coins:

• Arkansas: Features “Raye Montague visualizing a United States Navy Oliver Hazard Perry-class frigate, a ship she designed by computer.”
• South Carolina: Features “Educator and activist Septima Poinsette Clark […] called the ‘Mother of the Civil Rights Movement’” with a design depicting her “with three African American students carrying books and an American flag, representing that education and literacy are necessary for empowerment and enjoyment of civil rights.”
• Pennsylvania: “Focuses on the extraordinary work of Dr. Jonas Salk and his team at the University of Pittsburgh in the discovery of the polio vaccine.”
• Massachusetts: Honors Alexander Graham Bell’s “tele-phone” and “depicts the dial of an early rotary dial telephone.”

A Black female naval engineer, a Black female Civil Rights leader, a Jewish scientist who developed vaccines, and an immigrant. How many of these innovators would be decried by this regime as “woke DEI”.

Would any of these coins be minted today?

A dozen years after John Scalzi wrote this, it continues to resonate—perhaps even more so now than then:

Dudes. Imagine life here in the US — or indeed, pretty much anywhere in the Western world — is a massive role playing game, like World of Warcraft except appallingly mundane, where most quests involve the acquisition of money, cell phones and donuts, although not always at the same time. Let’s call it The Real World. You have installed The Real World on your computer and are about to start playing, but first you go to the settings tab to bind your keys, fiddle with your defaults, and choose the difficulty setting for the game. Got it?

Okay: In the role playing game known as The Real World, “Straight White Male” is the lowest difficulty setting there is.

This means that the default behaviors for almost all the non-player characters in the game are easier on you than they would be otherwise. The default barriers for completions of quests are lower. Your leveling-up thresholds come more quickly. You automatically gain entry to some parts of the map that others have to work for. The game is easier to play, automatically, and when you need help, by default it’s easier to get.

I have been sharing this concept since I first read it in 2012. It’s instantly understood and makes for great fodder for… discussion. The strongest pushback I received (and I always received pushback) was invariably some form of “Not all straight, White Males”. Which, of course, was missing the point.

The follow-ups (first, second) are also important reads, but especially Ten Years On, where Scalzi reflects on the impact of his post, and adds the very important cis identifier to his description.

This crossed my mind again because so much of America’s problems can be traced directly to Cis, Straight, White Males complaining the game has gotten harder for them, and that “DEI” makes it harder still.

This was brought into stark relief by a Mastodon post from @susankayequinn, which included this (altered) Calvin and Hobbes image:

Or, I didn’t have to compete before, now I do, and I don’t like it.

Quinn added:

Thing is, the lower-qualified white people understand this, it’s why they’re Big Mad about white dudes losing their divine right to run everything with zero consequences.

Cis, Straight, White Males want to reset the game to when they had all of the advantages. It’s a driving motivator for the Trump regime, and a significant reason why they’re in power.

Mike Allen and Sara Fischer for Axios:

Mark Zuckerberg's Meta is terminating major DEI programs, effective immediately — including for hiring, training and picking suppliers, according to a new employee memo obtained by Axios. […]

From the memo itself (reportedly written by Janelle Gale, vice president of Human Resources):

The legal and policy landscape surrounding diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in the United States is changing. The Supreme Court of the United States has recently made decisions signaling a shift in how courts will approach DEI. It reaffirms longstanding principles that discrimination should not be tolerated or promoted on the basis of inherent characteristics. The term "DEI" has also become charged, in part because it is understood by some as a practice that suggests preferential treatment of some groups over others.

Every word of this is utter bullshit. It falsely equates “DEI” with “discrimination”, when DEI programs are about providing opportunity and ensuring equality. It uses a deeply conservative, far-right Supreme Court to buttress the company’s (and by that I mean Mark Zuckerberg’s) own believes about the value of these programs. You could win good money betting these folks also think Dred Scott v. Sanford and Plessy v. Ferguson were decided correctly.

Meta (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Threads, Meta Quest, Ray Ban Meta Glasses) is just the latest in a long list of companies which never really believed in these programs. As I wrote back in July when Microsoft announced their DEI dissolution,

It was always just lip service. Companies never really bought into the progressive ideals. They just wanted to shut up Black folk.

Last month, Costco strongly defended its DEI practices. They’re the only large company I’ve seen take a (semi-) public stance in favor of inclusion and diversity. Even Apple, which I (still) believe takes DEI seriously, has been quiet (while they seem to be hiring for I&D roles, they’ve quietly ended Apple Entrepreneur Camp). Will Apple ever make a public statement about the importance of inclusion and diversity?

These companies are merely using the Supreme Court and “changing landscapes” as convenient cover. The programs are being rolled back because the class of people most affected by a push for equality are those who’ve benefited from a lack of it. Once again, when you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.