Thank God for DEI

Thank God for DEI. For the record, I despise DEI and all of it derivatives, but when it comes to the 2024 Presidential race, I am very thankful that the Democrats fully embraced DEI. Going into this year’s election, Donald Trump was not a slam dunk victory candidate. He was a flawed and polarizing politician who would only be able to garner a certain amount of support on his own. He was the perfect candidate to run against because his path to victory would always be like drawing an inside straight. And maybe that is why in the two elections that he won, the Democrats had put up a DEI candidate. 

In 2016, they chose Hillary Clinton to shatter the Presidential glass ceiling, and she was rejected, not because America is sexist but because Hillary Clinton is a very unlikeable leftist who offers nothing more than vote for me because I am a woman. Most Americans require more than that. Contrary to what the left believes, most of America is not sexist. It is the Democrats who are the sexists. Most Americans do not vote for candidates based on their gender. It is the Democrats who do that, and they expect the rest of us to do so as well, or they will call us sexists. Americans want a President who can actually lead America on both the domestic and international fronts, not just to check a demographic box and claim to be “historic” because you’re the first person to be President who checked that box.

In this year’s election, after the power brokers in the Democrat party shoved Joe Biden under the bus, they could have chosen a qualified candidate, one with experience, intelligence, knowledge and ability to articulate a vision for the country, someone who could actually run competitively against the extremely vulnerable Trump, but they doubled down on DEI, and chose someone whose only qualification was solely that she is a “woman of color”. That was not surprising because that is how the Democrat party has recently chosen important positions like Vice President and Supreme Court Justice, so why would this be any different?

DEI is how Kamala Harris got the job of Vice President in the first place. Joe Biden explicitly said that he would only choose a “woman of color” for that position. Harris only had to beat out 6% of the population, not 100% to be selected. She got the job but failed miserably at it because she believed that the only thing that she had to do to be a successful Vice President was be a woman of color. That’s it. Why would she think otherwise? That’s how she got the job, and then they told her that she was a “historic Vice President” the moment she was sworn in, simply for being a woman of color. She thought she had to do nothing else, and that is why she failed so miserably. Her only responsibility as the Vice President for four years was being the “Border Czar” and she allowed our border to be overrun by 10 million foreign nationals. She failed monumentally at her only job as Vice President, yet she was delusional enough to think that she could be a legitimate Presidential candidate because she was a “woman of color” because everyone had already told her that she was an “historic Vice President” because she was a “woman of color”.

So as a Presidential candidate, she had nothing to run on that would convince people to vote for her other than her gender and race. Instead of defending her administration’s policies, setting a clear agenda for our country’s future, or pointing to her many accomplishments, her two main talking points were DEI driven – ‘vote for me or you are a racist misogynist’ and ‘Donald Trump is a fascist Hitler who hates women and people who don’t look like him’. That’s what you get with DEI hires, identity politics, and the whole of America is rejecting that. Look at what DEI and identity politics has done to the popular Star Wars franchise at Disney – it has crashed and burned. The American people don’t want it, and they won’t vote for it. You must give the American people more than that. The DEI people are the one’s living in the 1950’s, making decisions based on gender and race, not those who reject DEI. 

Trump won because the Democrats chose a candidate who was unlikeable, unqualified with very few accomplishments, but she was the right color and gender. Unlike Obama who was a great orator and could articulate a vision for the country, Harris spoke in word salads and cackled incessantly. Her word salads fall in line with her being a DEI candidate. Word salads are all surface. They sound like she is saying something smart and important, but they are really just a bunch of nothing. She does not have to be a strong, intelligent leader when she speaks, it just has to sound like she is. And that is what she was and what DEI candidates are – all surface. Vote for me because of my gender and my race, nothing else matters. Intelligence, experience, accomplishments, character mean nothing. All that is important is if I check the right DEI boxes.

You would think that women of color and all minorities would be against DEI because it makes them look bad. DEI ends up picking unqualified people for important positions, and they get exposed which reflects badly on that demographic group. Think about it. If Kamala Harris was the best women of color in the country and that is why she was selected to run for President, it’s not a good look for women of color. It leads people to conclude that that demographic group is not brimming with intelligent, talented, qualified people. But the Democrats will keep doing it, because they do not know any better.

Last week, Hollywood movie star Morgan Freeman made a case for Harris on Jimmy Kimmel’s show when he said that “it’s time we moved on from old white men running the country.” He did not lay out one of Harris’ great leadership qualities or one of her policy statements, his argument for voting for her was she is not an “old white man”. That’s it. On Wednesday, CNN’s Van Jones, tried to explain away Harris’ defeat and Trump’s victory by claiming that America is racist and sexist. That is all these people see – race and gender. They cannot look beyond that fact Harris was a woman and a minority, and see that she had nothing else to offer. They thought the Presidency should have just been handed to her because of her race and gender, but, in America, you must earn votes to win elections. Votes are not just given to you because of your skin color or gender. 

So, I am very thankful for DEI because in this instance, it produced the exact opposite of its intended result. The country did not choose the unqualified, unintelligent person based on her race and gender, we choose the more capable candidate, the better leader with a clearer vision for the country, despite his race and gender.

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Mr. Garrett is a graduate of Princeton University, and a former NFL player, coach, and executive. He has been a contributor to the website Real Clear Politics. He has recently published his first novel, No Wind.