Seemingly within minutes of Maryland’s Francis Scott Key bridge collapsing overnight, the internet was awash with baseless conspiracy theories and wild allegations. It was a cyberattack. It had something to do with COVID lockdowns. Israel did it. Pretty soon, though, another theory started gaining traction and continued throughout the day to come. It’s an idea that has lately become evermore popular: The culprit is DEI.
Whether it’s because the Black mayor of Baltimore is “DEI”, the U.S. secretary of transportation supposedly qualifies, or the company managing the massive cargo ship involved in the crash simply has a DEI page on its website, a legion of gimlet-eyed keyboard sleuths all arrived at the same conclusion—that diversity initiatives are to blame for the crash. (One even quickly posted an AI-generated image of DEI causing the accident.) It’s just the latest symptom of an alarming trend, where DEI serves as an all-purpose scapegoat for anything that goes wrong in America. It’s such a common refrain, in fact, it has now become utterly predictable in every tragedy or near-disaster—and it seems to be arriving faster and faster.
The increasing attacks against DEI are an outgrowth of the so-called war on “woke.” When a conservative commentator was unable to define that word in a viral moment during an interview last March—while promoting a book on “woke indoctrination,” no less—the war began to lose some momentum. How could conservatives continue constantly railing against the same word, after all, once Donald Trump distanced himself from it?
A new, more specific emblem of liberal ideology needed to take the place of wokeness in their crosshairs. It ended up being DEI.
A backlash to diversity initiatives had been brewing for years; suddenly, it exploded. During the same month as that viral clip, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis pinned the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank on something other than his faithful hobbyhorse, wokeness. “This bank, they’re so concerned with DEI and politics and all kinds of stuff,” he said. “I think that really diverted from them focusing on their core mission.” Fellow Republican politicians including Arizona Senator Andy Biggs concurred over just what had caused SVB to fail, helping to set a tone for the year ahead.
Around that same time, Georgia representative Mike Collins surveyed a March 2023 train derailment and found diversity somewhere in the wreckage. “After seeing another Norfolk Southern train derailed this weekend, I was reminded of the fact that the company wrote to shareholders stating it is focused on DEI,” he claimed on the House floor. “This administration’s focus on DEI is forcing private companies to rethink their goals, and one has to wonder, was Norfolk Southern’s DEI policies directing resources away from the important things like greasing wheel bearings? This insanity must stop!”
The insanity was just beginning, though.
As diversity in workplaces, schools, and VC funding became challenged in the courts, critics armed themselves with a new blueprint for how to attack whatever is ailing the U.S. at any given time, DEI started cropping up more and more often. It was supposedly responsible for broad, sweeping issues like the ongoing decline in structural integrity among Boeing aircraft. “Do you want to fly in an airplane where they prioritized DEI hiring over your safety?” Musk wrote on X, after the infamous Alaska Airlines flight from January where one of the plane’s panels blew out, linking the incident with Boeing’s recent DEI practices. Several politicians and members of the donor class also blamed DEI last winter for antisemitism on college campuses. More commonly, though, it has become the go-to suspect behind any given day’s negative news story—on Twitter, on Fox News, and often on both.
The deadly wildfires in Maui last fall were due to “the DEI agenda,” former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy tweeted a week after the fires claimed 110 lives. On the day after a drone attack killed three U.S. soldiers in Jordan this January, Maria Bartiromo suggested on Fox Business News that DEI was responsible. DEI apparently also caused a vicious fight between teenage girls in a Missouri high school earlier this month, according to the state’s attorney general, and some random posters on X blamed it for a recent outage at AT&T.
Even past events, like the October 2021 shooting of Halyna Hutchins on the set of the film Rust, could be blamed on DEI—not to mention fictional things that happened in a galaxy far, far away.
Despite all these precedents, however, the speed with which X became bloated with aggrieved paranoiacs blaming the bridge collapse on their latest bogeyman was head-spinning. Rather than wait until the facts came out, or explore potential contributing factors like the environment or infrastructure, the DEI-obsessed commentariat plunged in immediately.
At least there’s some thematic consistency there. Leave it to the people most suspicious of diversity to reach a uniform conclusion, around the same time, over and over again.
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