CHRISTOPHER RUFO: Why might Meta’s decision to scrap DEI be a turning point?
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Editor’s note: The following column was first published City magazine.
last week, Mark ZuckerbergThe CEO of Meta, formerly Facebook, made a surprising announcement. He was canceling the company’s DEI programs and cutting ties with fact-checking organizations, which he admitted amounted to a form of “censorship.” Left-wing media immediately attacked the decision, accusing it of adopting the MAGA agenda and predicting a dangerous rise in so-called disinformation.
Zuckerberg’s move was carefully calculated and perfectly timed. According to him, the November elections felt like a “cultural turning point towards prioritizing speech again”. DEI initiatives, especially those related to immigration and gender, have become “detached from the mainstream conversation” and indefensible.
This is not a small face. Just four years ago, Zuckerberg spent hundreds of millions of dollars to fund left-wing election programs; his role was met with great displeasure by conservatives. Meta was at the forefront of any ideological cause based on identity or left.
META POLICY CHIEF SAYS DECISION TO END DEI ENSURES COMPANY HIRE ‘MOST TALENTED PEOPLE’
Not anymore. As part of the promotion for the announcement, Zuckerberg released a video and appeared on the Joe Rogan podcast that served as a confessional for American elites who no longer believe in leftist orthodoxy. In the podcast, Zuckerberg sounded more like a progressive Californian than a right-winger, arguing that the culture needs a better balance of “masculine” and “feminine” energies.
Executives of Meta DEI quickly implemented the new policy, giving employees pink slips and moving the company’s content-moderation team from California to Texas to “help reduce concerns that biased employees are over-censoring content,” in Zuckerberg’s words.
Zuckerberg wasn’t the first tech executive to make such a statement, but he’s perhaps the most significant. Facebook is one of the largest firms in Silicon Valley, and with Zuckerberg setting a precedent, many smaller companies will follow suit.
The most important signal from this decision is not a specific change in politics, but a general change in culture. Zuckerberg has never been an ideologue. He seems more interested in building his own company and staying in the good graces of elite society. But like many successful, self-respecting men, he is independent-minded and clearly resents the cultural constraints DEI has placed on his company. So he seized the moment, correctly sensing that the impending inauguration of Donald Trump reduced the risk and increased the outcome of such a change.
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Zuckerberg is certainly not a bold truth teller. He acquiesced to DEI for the past decade because elite status signals pointed him there. Now, those signals have suddenly reversed, like a falling barometer, and he’s changing course with them and trying to shift the blame to the outgoing Biden administration, which Rogan says pressured him to impose censorship — even a convenient excuse at a more convenient moment.
But the good news is that, whatever post hoc rationalizations executives might employ, DEI and its cultural assumptions suddenly faced serious resistance. We may be entering an important period when people feel confident enough to express their true beliefs about the anti-perfectionist DEI and stop pretending to believe in the cult ideology of “systemic racism” and race-based guilt.
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DEI remains deeply entrenched in public institutions, of course, but private institutions and corporations have more flexibility and can send such programs with the stroke of a pen.
Zuckerberg revealed what this might look like at one of the biggest companies. Conservatives, though cautious, may praise him for his decision. Like “trust but verify”. Ronald Reagan they would say, it is good politics everywhere.
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