The State Department’s DEI Reckoning Exposes the Global Reach of Wokeness

The menace of the “woke era,” which I’d argue we are still suffering through despite the current counterrevolution, was about far more than just cultural vibes and overheated rhetoric.

It was about creating a larger, global cultural revolution and ensuring that every institution from the most elite on down enforced its evolving ideology and mandates, whether it be racialized diversity, equity, and inclusion, or the untruths peddled by the transgender movement.

A report released by the State Department on Thursday is a good reminder of how DEI and other forms of leftist cultural dogma became intrinsically wedded to all domestic and international policy in this country.

The constellation of organizations and institutions looking to further their cause weren’t pleased merely to enforce the new cultural conformity at home.

They were obsessed with spreading it abroad too.

The State Department explained in a press release how, after an internal review, it was putting an end to DEI in the foreign service, which had apparently lingered in training materials and personnel instructions.

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A lot of the nonsense they uncovered was stuff that became quite familiar to many Americans in the last five years. The resources included “How to Be Anti-Racist in [Humanitarian] Aid,” Robin DiAngelo’s “White Fragility and the Rules of Engagement,” and “From White Racist to White Anti-Racist,” among other equally ridiculous and downright enraging materials.

“Foreign Service Officers were also asked to read materials including ‘Where are you in your understanding of your whiteness?’; ‘Tools for interrupting microaggressions’; ‘Anti-Racism for Kids 101’; and ‘In Defense of Looting,’” my colleague Elizabeth Troutman Mitchell reported for the Daily Signal. “The last document describes looting by groups like the Black Panthers as ‘one of the most righteous anti-white supremacist tactics available throughout American history.’”

This is what the Biden administration thought was essential to teach State Department employees working abroad. And they weren’t content with just indoctrinating their own employees. They insisted that these lessons were internalized and then evangelized abroad.

“Guidance on how Foreign Service Officers could fulfill a DEI promotion metric urged diplomats to discuss DEI issues with high-level foreign government counterparts, demonstrate ‘allyship,’ and ‘acquire more DEIA knowledge on your own’ instead of depending on “others from historically marginalized groups to teach you,” the State Department memo read.

Under the Biden administration, DEI became essentially a secular state religion in America, one as expansive and ultimately totalitarian in its aims as the worst ideologies of the 20th century.

The Trump administration has now spent nearly two years attempting to untangle this nest from the top.

Creating a strict wall of separation between DEI and our government is the best way to ensure that its ruthless, contradictory, absurd, and in many cases, unpopular ideas are allowed to wither on the vine.

This latest move from the State Department shows that this remains a long and still incomplete process. It takes a long time to extract the most poisonous ideas from our national institutions.

State Department spokesperson Tommy Pigott said in an interview with the Daily Signal that under the current administration the department is committed to focusing on “statecraft” in its training of foreign service personnel.

That’s great. What a novel idea, right?

President Donald Trump and his administration deserve a lot of credit for taking DEI and its pervasive influence seriously. Its promoters are deadly serious in ensuring that their brand of nouveau racism and gender insanity are accepted, or else.

The administration has demonstrated a willingness to take dramatic and necessary measures to counteract this movement beyond just declaring that the era of woke is over. That means shattering the larger movement’s networks, severing its global tendrils, and defunding them so they can’t continue operating with impunity.

This is why, for instance, the State Department disbanded the U.S. Agency for International Development, an organization that long ago ceased fulfilling its function of promoting American values abroad while blocking the tide of communism.

It was instead creating anti-Americanism abroad, while occasionally infuriating allies, playing right into the hands of our serious international rivals, like Communist China.

The media squawked about it and the bureaucrats howled, but the benefits of shuttering it have already paid off beyond the small amount of money saved.

Our government is no longer being used as a financial engine to promote global leftism.

But the problem goes beyond just one agency.

Unfortunately, woke lunacy under different names has plagued the State Department and our federal government much longer than four years. It’s just that under Biden it became blatantly and expressly elevated above all other priorities.

A lot of eyes were opened in those years.

If the woke revolution continued, the United States would be wholly changed and the world along with it. Americans broadly realized that and elected Trump.

That doesn’t mean the threat is gone.

Just look around at other Western countries still under left-wing governments. They haven’t broken the woke spell. Just the opposite. They’ve continued as if it remains perpetually 2020. DEI is as strong as ever, and ruthless crackdowns on free speech and dissenters have, if anything, escalated.

But now the West has a greater chance of breaking its fever. America may yet remain America. Hopefully our friends can now follow our lead and break free of the madness.