Author Christopher Rufo believes diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs use welcoming terms to masquerade a corporate bureaucracy that is stripping America’s principles of freedom and equality.
"It's really important to understand exactly what people mean when they say ‘diversity, equity and inclusion or DEI. It sounds great. These are very soft, friendly, kind of simple words that seem to be unanimously supported," Rufo told Fox News Digital.
"Everyone wants a diversity of opinions, experiences, relationships. Equity sounds much like the American principle of equality, treating people equally as individuals. And inclusion is something that everyone strives for. No one wants to feel excluded," Rufo said. "But, you have to actually dig down and see that these words are manipulative on the surface and have a deeper, more subversive meaning beneath them."
Rufo's new book, "America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything," details how far-left activists have infiltrated the nation's institutions. The author feels that "diversity doesn't mean a diversity of people and experiences and ideas" in the context of the D in DEI.
"What it means in practice is that a bureaucracy separates people into racial categories, rewards people and punishes some people, and punishes other people on the basis of their group identity. So, this is a kind of racial-spoil system that you see, for example, in affirmative action in college admissions, where Asian-American students are harshly punished because of their ancestry, and Latino and African-American students are generously rewarded because of their ancestry," Rufo said. "This isn't a merit-based system. It's a race-based redistribution system."
Equity follows the same line of principle, according to Rufo, who is also a Manhattan Institute senior fellow.
"It sounds like equality, but what equity means is trying to equalize those group outcomes. So, using affirmative action, diversity policies and redistribution or reparations in order to come up with not equal outcomes, meaning you're treated equally as an individual, but equitable outcomes, meaning you're treated as an avatar of group identity," he said.
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"And the point of policy is to equalize those group outcomes until everyone has the same, whether it's college admissions, income, housing, etc. everyone is supposed to have the same," Rufo continued. "It's the old Marxist idea of treating people unequally in order to equalize their outcomes."
As for "inclusion," Rufo believes the term is "the most manipulative" of all the terms.
"Inclusion, again, sounds great. You want to include people in whatever you're doing, an institution, for example. But in practice, inclusion means the ruthless suppression of any opinion or behavior that contradicts the orthodoxy of DEI bureaucracy," he said.
Rufo said his book exposes the pitfalls of DEI corporate training programs at America’s top companies.
"They're relentlessly policing language, policing behavior and ruthlessly excluding suppressing or even ejecting people who are deemed un-inclusive or who traffic in so-called hate speech, which can be something anodyne like addressing someone in singular pronouns when they want to be addressed by plural pronouns," Rufo said.
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"Taken as a whole, DEI is not a vehicle for greater tolerance, inclusion and equality. It's a vehicle for taking left wing orthodoxy from neo-Marxist intellectuals on the outside, injecting them into our bureaucracies in schools, corporations, even some churches now, and then using the power of the administration or the bureaucracy to manipulate human behavior to achieve left wing ideological objectives," he added. "What I try to show in the book… is that a government based on diversity, equity and inclusion is fundamentally incompatible with government based on the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness."
Rufo called this a "key inflection point" in our nation’s history, noting that the representative "Of the People, By the People, For the People" government America was built on or continue to pivot to a government controlled by "DEI bureaucrats that impose their will" on others.
"What I wanted to do in the book was really give readers a deep sense of the difference between these two governing principles, so that they… can actually have a well-reasoned, deeply researched point of view to say, ‘You know what, DEI sounds good, but I oppose it for these reasons,’ and that's exactly what we need in order to start reorienting our institutions back towards those American principles of freedom and equality," Rufo said.
