Hello and welcome to the political orphanage, a home for plucky misfits and problem solvers.

I'm your host, Andrew Heaton.

Recently, Donald Trump and Elon Musk have come after DEI programs in the federal government,

and my initial thoughts on that development have been good, probably good.

But then I remembered a conversation I had about a year ago where a friend of mine and I argued about

DEI for an hour, for a whole hour,

and by the end of that, it occurred to me that we were actually arguing about different things.

I was arguing against racial quotas, and she was arguing in favor of workplace sensitivity. Maybe we would have clashed

on both fronts if we'd nail down our lingo, it's possible. But I think we might have

actually agreed on some stuff too. So here's what I want to do on this episode. I want to

crack DEI open and see what gunk is inside.

Specifically, I want to do two things. First,

the skeptical bit. You can call it whatever you want,

but there was some kind of great awakening over the last 10 years,

and it felt to me like a nascent leftist theocracy. I did not care for whatever that was or is.

Again, you use different words to describe it, but there's a there there. And I think it's

disingenuous when my friends tell me, woke doesn't really exist. Nobody says that. We're making it up.

Nobody believes it.

That, I have learned, is called gaslighting, a term that I learned over the last 10 years from the

exact people that I am describing. No, I definitely encountered this. It's not being made up. I

encountered a lot of people who think that America is fundamentally bigoted,

that the country was founded in 1619 because that's when slavery was introduced, that we should

...