Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. DEI, the acronym for diversity, equity, and inclusion, is dying.

We had this conversation three years ago. It was in the ascendance. But when President Donald Trump came into power, by a series of executive orders, he tried to abolish it. And he could abolish it because entities that receive it and receive federal funds can be leveraged to drop it in order to retain their federal funding.

And why did Donald Trump not like it? Because he said the emperor has no clothes. It’s a racially biased program. It predicates hiring, retention, promotion, tenure on the color of your skin and not the content of your character, or your gender or your sexual orientation.

And so, it’s a winning issue for Donald Trump, when you look at the polls. It’s not just that 60% of so-called white people who often feel they’re victimized by DEI are opposed, but Hispanics and blacks also poll that they are against it. And that’s baffled people. But it’s kind of obvious when you think about it. It’s commonsensical.

One: They don’t wanna be stigmatized when they have achieved a job through meritocratic criteria—their own ability or intellect or hard work. They don’t wanna be called “a DEI hire.” And that would be a natural assumption, given that there’s a system that rewards people on the basis of their color rather than their skills. So, people who are very skilled, who happen to be non-white, don’t wanna be so stigmatized.

The other is a class situation. People in the black community and the Hispanic community, they say, “Wait a minute. The people who are wealthy, the people who were the children of orthodontists—the Obamas, the Eric Holders, the Joy Reids—these people don’t need any help. And yet, they’re given affirmative action in the name of us, the middle and lower classes that have no such avenues.”

So, it’s under assault within the communities who traditionally benefited from it.

But here’s why it’s going to implode and why Donald Trump is going to win this argument. There’s at least three criticisms of diversity, equity, inclusion that they cannot answer.

Remember, we started out in 1965 as an answer to the Jim Crow South and the legacy of slavery and what was called “systematic racism” with affirmative action. At that time, the country was basically 89% white and 11% African American. And people said that African Americans, per capita, are much poorer than whites, statistically. Not that there weren’t more poor whites than there were African Americans, there were, but statistically, per capita.

And so, therefore, it’s time to “affirm” them and give them a boost on the basis of their skin color, to give them entry, to make sure that the civil rights laws not only gave you an equality of opportunity but, let’s be honest, a quality of results. A quota system, so to speak. So, that was the idea behind it.

And the reason that it’s not working now is threefold. First of all, from 1965—if you think about it, we’re 35 years in the 20th century and 25 in the 21st. We’re 60 years behind that. We’ve had three generations who grew up without Jim Crow and no knowledge of systemic racism, essentially. Maybe they call it, I don’t know, “insidious,” “systematic.” But the point is, flagrant racial prejudice—three generations haven’t seen it. But they have seen bias predicated on race through DEI.

The second thing: We’re a multiracial society. So, we’re no longer 90%/10%. We have almost more Hispanics than we do blacks. We have Asians. We have people from the Arab world. But more importantly, we’re interracial. Many of these groups, 1 out of 3, marry someone not of their group.

So, when we see somebody, we don’t know who they are, and their background is nebulous. And yet, if you’re going to qualify for special preference, you can see what happens. It invites abuse of the system.

No more flagrantly was that shown than the New York Post headline—I think this week—when it said, “Elizabeth Warren meets Mamdani: Two liars who lied about who they were.”

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, remember—to get a coveted billet at Harvard Law School—said she was Native American. When called on it by Donald Trump, she had less than 0.001%. And Zohran Mamdani, who was a wealthy Indian American from Uganda, born in Uganda, claimed in his college application that he was an African American, with the obvious intention to suggest he was a black American, which he wasn’t.

I think the subtext of that cover story said, “Liars meet.”

The point is, whether you’re Ward Churchill or Elizabeth Warren or Mamdani, or all these people, you game the system and you try to suggest that you are a DEI person when you’re not.

But how do you know you’re not? Because the people who set up these things are so afraid of absolute standards: “One-sixteenth makes you black. One-sixteenth makes you a Native American. Oh, we’re just like the old Confederacy one-drop rule.” That’s what those racists in the South did before and after the war. They considered somebody non-white with one drop—and here we’re doing the same thing. Should we get DNA badges?

So, you can see it’s impossible to determine who is whom. You can’t. And the people who police DEI will not be honest—the admissions officer at Harvard, the admissions officer at Stanford, the HR department at Google—they will not tell you when and when not a person is a DEI because to do so would make them very eugenicist, wouldn’t they? They would have to talk about race in explicit and off-putting terms.

Finally, there’s one last reason. DEI was based on poverty and past documented racism. When Barack Obama came into power in 2009, he redefined affirmative action and said, “It’s not black/white binaries. It’s 30%. A huge number of Americans who are not white. They have claims against the majority. They are part of a Marxist binary of victimized and oppressed. And therefore, they need special consideration against the victimizers and the oppressors.” The problem with this was class did not enter.

So, Mr. Mamdani says he’s a minority and he is black, and he needs special preference. He also said he was gonna go after “white or affluent neighborhoods.” He’s Indian American. His family originally came from India. Indian Americans, according to our census, are the wealthiest, most privileged ethnic group in America.

So, what I’m getting at is your skin color no longer can be correlated, exactly, with your class. So you end up with a wealthy group—as I mentioned, a Joy Reid, an Eric Holder, a Barack Obama—getting special preferences for their children when maybe there’s a lot of poor, much poorer people in East Palestine that have no such recourse.

And finally, affirmative action was based on historical discrimination and a complaint against the majority.

What does Mr. Mamdani have when he comes into the United States? What does Rep. Ilhan Omar have? What do Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s parents have? What did “the squad” members have?

Does it mean that when you walk one inch into the United States from southern Mexico and Michoacán, suddenly you can say, “I’ve been treated terribly by America. I need affirmative action”? If you’re from a wealthy Indian family in South Africa and you come in the United States, when you get to the airport, you say, “I’m a victim. They did it to me. I want affirmative action because I don’t look as white as everybody else”?

So, to sum up, DEI is imploding because you can’t tell who qualifies in a multiracial society. Nor would you want to know. Two: You can’t cite historical oppression that would justify repertory action. And three: There’s no connection, necessarily, anymore between class, money, affluence, and skin color.

Add it all up and Donald Trump is going to win this war to abolish something that has turned nightmarish.

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