- The Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) movement emerged in the aftermath of the 2020 George Floyd protests, initially as a well-intentioned effort to address systemic inequalities. However, it quickly transformed into a bureaucratic initiative aimed at embedding social justice programs into the fabric of universities and corporations.
- Fueled by psychological manipulation, ideological extremism and the threat of violence, DEI programs spread across institutions. This led to the creation of a bloated bureaucracy that enforced ideological conformity and promoted divisive rhetoric, often pitting individuals against each other based on identity markers.
- By 2024, the flaws in DEI became evident, with major corporations like Ford, Walmart and John Deere rolling back their DEI commitments due to legal and political pressures. A growing number of employees and students criticized DEI for fostering division and mediocrity, leading to a widespread backlash against the movement.
- As DEI retreats, proponents are rebranding their ideology with terms like “inclusive excellence” and “belonging.” However, critics argue that the underlying ideology remains unchanged, and the movement’s advocates are likely to adapt and continue promoting their agenda under new labels.
- The collapse of DEI has prompted a shift towards merit-driven frameworks that emphasize objective criteria and measurable outcomes. This includes structured hiring practices, transparent promotion policies and collaborative decision-making processes, which are seen as more effective and less divisive than the top-down mandates of DEI.
(Natural News)—The Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) movement, once heralded as a moral and business imperative, has been exposed as one of the most elaborate cons of the 21st century. What began as a well-intentioned effort to address systemic inequalities quickly devolved into a bureaucratic hustle, enriching thousands of ideological hustlers while sowing division and mediocrity across academia and corporate America. Now, as DEI collapses under the weight of its own contradictions, it’s time to reflect on how this con took root—and why its demise is a victory for common sense and meritocracy.
The rise of the DEI con
The DEI movement gained traction in the wake of the 2020 George Floyd protests, which sparked a national conversation about race and inequality. But as Stanley K. Ridgley, author of DEI Exposed: How the Biggest Con of the Century Almost Toppled Higher Education, explains, DEI was never about genuine diversity or inclusion. Instead, it was a “bureaucratic initiative designed to anchor a new raft of social justice programs as an inescapable presence on the campus.”
Ridgley recounts how DEI metastasized across universities and corporations, fueled by a combination of psychological manipulation, ideological extremism and the threat of violence. “It was violence and the threat of violence that opened the door for this effervescence of DEI,” he writes. College administrations, fearing the chaos of 2020’s summer riots, capitulated to the demands of activists, allowing DEI to embed itself deeply into institutional structures.
The result? A bloated bureaucracy of “apparatchiks and supernumeraries” who peddled racialist pseudoscience and enforced ideological conformity. DEI training sessions became notorious for their divisive rhetoric, pitting employees and students against one another based on race, gender and other identity markers. As Ridgley bluntly puts it, “It was weird and alien and hateful at its core.”
The backlash begins
By 2024, the cracks in the DEI façade were impossible to ignore. Major corporations like Ford, Walmart and John Deere began rolling back their DEI commitments, citing mounting legal and political pressures. A Fox News poll conducted in early 2025 found that 45% of voters believed it was “extremely” or “very” important for President Donald Trump to focus on ending DEI programs.
The backlash wasn’t just political—it was personal. Employees and students who had long endured the mediocrity and divisiveness of DEI initiatives finally began speaking out. Psychotherapist Jonathan Alpert, who has seen the harmful effects of DEI in his practice, told Fox Business, “The trend over the last few years has been to make DEI programs into political commissars, to go after people who have different viewpoints, and they end up, in many ways, sowing more division in the institution that they’re supposed to help.”
Even DEI advocates like Naomi Wheeless acknowledged the role of political pressure in the movement’s decline. “It is that [Trump] is a president with a well-documented history of vindictiveness,” she said. “He creates a sense of fear and the feeling that whether we want to or not, we better fall in line.”
The con story lives on
As DEI retreats, its proponents are already scrambling to rebrand. Terms like “inclusive excellence” and “belonging” are emerging as replacements for the now-toxic DEI acronym. But as Ridgley warns, the underlying ideology remains the same. “The Con Story will morph and adapt,” he writes. “Buzzwords will change, new slogans will be coined, but the underlying ideology will remain the same as it always has.”
This isn’t the first time America has fallen for a con story. From the pseudoscience of Karl Marx to the utopian promises of radical activists, history is littered with examples of ideologies that duped the credulous. Ridgley draws a chilling parallel between the DEI movement and the case of Luigi Mangione, a 26-year-old who murdered a man in New York City in 2024, driven by extremist ideology. “Persons who cheer the killer Luigi Mangione for his assassination of Brian Thompson also fully support DEI’s personnel, programs, policies and enforcement mechanisms on the college campuses,” Ridgley asserts.
A return to meritocracy
The collapse of DEI is a reminder that meritocracy and fairness are not just ideals—they are essential to a functioning society. As corporations and universities abandon DEI, many are turning to evidence-based, merit-driven frameworks that emphasize objective criteria and measurable outcomes. Structured hiring practices, transparent promotion policies and collaborative decision-making processes are proving to be more effective—and less divisive—than the top-down mandates of DEI.
The death of DEI is a victory for common sense, but the fight is far from over. As Ridgley warns, the con artists behind DEI will not go quietly. They will rebrand, relabel and repackage their ideology in an attempt to deceive a new generation of marks. But for now, America can breathe a sigh of relief that one of the biggest cons of the century has finally been exposed.
The lesson is clear: Ideological extremism and bureaucratic bloat have no place in our institutions. It’s time to return to the principles that made America great—individual merit, equal opportunity and the pursuit of excellence. DEI may be over, but the work of rebuilding trust and integrity in our institutions has only just begun.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
