The Air War Is Over
The Door-to-Door Campaign to Dismantle DEI Has Officially Begun—and History Suggests It Will Fail
When the Trump administration announced it would not pursue its appeal of the federal court ruling blocking its anti-DEI funding threats to education institutions two weeks ago, I was genuinely shocked. For an ever so brief moment, I tried to will myself into a state of relief. On paper, this was what many of us had hoped for. The guidance was unlawful. The threat had been checked. The appeal was dropped.
But relief just wouldn’t take. It instead curdled into suspicion, which then gave way to another thought that crept in like a cat through a cracked door: maybe the objective that mattered had already been secured.
Over the past year, institutions across higher education didn’t wait for clarity. They heard 47’s threats and bent early and often. Offices shuttered. Programs gutted themselves. Administrators axed staff or quietly reassigned them into obscurity. Budgets were rerouted into safer line items. The choreography became scripture: emergency meeting, law-firm guidance, risk assessment framed as prudence. Values were put on ice. Avoiding exposure became the new strategy.
My alma mater, Rutgers University, was among the first to fall in line, canceling an HBCU event at the eleventh hour to comply with the new administration’s DEI directives. The rationale it offered at the time was that the event was being paid for with federal funds. Forget that it was already a virtual conference, meaning it couldn’t have cost much to produce in the first place—maybe some speaker fees and some production costs. The school didn’t bother making an emergency appeal to alumni to chip in—heck, I might have finally donated for the first time. Forget ponying up the money from its own budget as a show of solidarity, especially in light of the reported half-billion dollars our middling sports program has flushed down the toilet since joining the Big Ten in 2014. Nope. We just caved.
The stain of that decision, like so many others, will endure. But even more than the reputational damage that schools would rather we all just overlook, the material destruction is largely complete. An imperfect chapter of our imperfect country’s civil-rights story has sunset.
And a year later, we can see that it didn’t even require force—just financial threat. Just the specter of litigation. The administration had to know its case was weak and stood a real chance of defeat. Which tells me the objective was never enforcement.
So what, then, was it?
I can think of three candidates, and none of them precludes the possibility of the others also being true.
The first is the most obvious: the total obliteration of ideas that the administration finds intolerable to its agenda. Higher education is where frameworks like critical race theory, feminist theory, and queer theory are developed, debated, refined, taught, and transmitted into the broader culture. Universities shape the language we use to name power, inequality, identity, and harm. They train the lawyers who argue cases, the journalists who frame stories, the policymakers who draft legislation, the organizers who build movements, and the professionals who carry those frameworks into medicine, education, philanthropy, and corporate life. If you want to narrow what is thinkable, you start at the source.
Universities also happen to be uniquely vulnerable. Their prestige masks their fragility. We learned last year that in addition to accreditation bodies, donor confidence, bond ratings, and reputational standing, even the most elite universities depend on federal funding streams. Threaten any one of those and the pressure cascades quickly. Risk aversion is built into the institution. Governance structures reward caution, not confrontation. The result is rarely principled resistance. It is internal discipline.
Which is why the second objective was never persuasion or even pre-emptive compliance. It was to teach higher education that survival requires submission. The administration’s celebration of “robust debate,” embodied in Charlie Kirk, coexists with a governing practice that does not tolerate it.
The final objective took longer to come into focus for me because it is not about ideas or institutional compliance. The word that finally clarified the pattern for me is entanglement.
Entanglement is not about winning on the merits. It is about draining time, money, attention, and morale. It targets those who do understand power and for whom symbolic compliance is ineffective. Entanglement forces organizations into a defensive posture where survival becomes the overriding concern. Even when cases are weak, the process itself becomes the punishment.
The National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers fit squarely into this category. They are the organizations that filed the lawsuit that ultimately led to the dismissal of the guidance. These are labor unions filled with people trained in—or at least exposed to—movement history and power-building. People steeped in the politics of struggle, not just the pocketbook abstractions that have led so many into the arms of a sham artist. They understood immediately what was being attempted and why it mattered to fight back.
They also had nine-figure budgets, seven-digit memberships, legal infrastructure, and political relationships. They could absorb a hit without folding at the first sign of pressure—and thank goodness they did. But even with that capacity, the cost was real. I can only imagine the enormous sums they spent on lawyers, staff time, internal coordination, and external messaging just to hold the line.
That is precisely the point. Entanglement does not require universal capitulation to succeed. It only requires that resistance be expensive—to materially wound the opponent.
Going House to House
Despite sensing that the objective was never to win this particular legal fight, something wouldn’t fully resolve. This administration doesn’t simply walk away. It doesn’t absorb losses and move on. It metabolizes them. It finds a way to spin success out of shit. No one wants to come to the Kennedy Center? Fine. We’ll save face and close it for two years for “renovations.”
So even though I knew the pressure wouldn’t lift, I couldn’t yet see where the machinery would turn once institutions had been disciplined and the terrain softened.
Then The New York Times published a reported piece by Anemona Hartocollis that finally gave metaphor to the moment. The article—“Should Any Programs Help Minority Groups? In Lawsuits, Conservatives Say No.”—laid out the civil-litigation landscape that has taken shape since the Supreme Court’s decision ending affirmative action in college admissions. Hartocollis mapped dozens of lawsuits fanning out across corporations, law firms, health-care systems, arts organizations, scholarship funds, and nonprofits. The reporting made clear that this was not about a single sector or a handful of bad actors, but about method.
Some of these cases exploit genuinely ham-handed inclusion efforts—sloppy language, poorly designed programs, initiatives that confuse symbolism for substance. They really and truly could have used some better guidance. Others go after careful, necessary work aimed at addressing real and persistent exclusion. The distinction barely matters. What matters is leverage. Each filing imposes a cost. Each threat forces calculation. Each demand presents the same choice: fight and bleed, or fold and survive.
Many, as the story illuminates, fold quickly because they understand the math. The mere existence of a lawsuit—even a weak one—can be enough to unravel a program built over years long before judgment ever arrives.
And then, in the middle of the piece, came the quote that made everything snap into focus.
Every good reported story has that line that doesn’t just explain the facts, but exposes the worldview animating them. You can almost feel the moment the reporter hears it and knows that no matter what, this has to stay. I’ve been there—felt my ears heat up, my spine straighten, my jaw tighten.
“My boss says the air war has been won,” a conservative legal strategist said, “and now we have to do the dirty work of going house to house and taking out these programs one at a time.”
It’s an astonishingly candid metaphor. Militarized. Unabashed. Cocky in the way conservatives have become under their cult leader. It’s a revealing window into how these aggrieved crusaders understand themselves as combatants carrying out a campaign. It explains why an off-Broadway theater company trying, however clumsily, to do something decent becomes a legitimate target. It explains why “small potatoes” cases are worth pursuing.
Once you see it that way, or at least once I did, the administration’s decision to walk away from the DEI appeal stops being confusing. The air war—broad, blunt, legally flimsy—had already done its work. Institutions scattered. Programs closed. Resistance was drained. There was no need to risk a public loss in court in an election year. No reason to risk exposing the sham guidance for the ransom note that it is and emboldening others with potentially damaging precedent. The strategy had shifted. It was now entering its door-to-door phase.
And that’s precisely how Don Lemon ends up in handcuffs.
At first glance, the arrest looked absurd. The alleged offense was unserious, certainly not the kind of thing that would normally warrant federal attention. But judging it on the merits misses the point, just as it did with the DEI guidance itself.
Several summers ago, Don Lemon and I shared the same literary agent and had Black Lives era books out at roughly the same time. Our agent insisted on connecting us. We would get along, he told me. After being introduced over text, we had a good conversation one night before he went on air and later exchanged a few texts of our own. That was it. But from that point on, I began watching his work differently.
Night after night, Lemon went after Trump. This was the summer after January 6, when the former president’s excesses finally seemed poised to catch up with him. Lemon never let up. He pressed, corrected, and refused the amnesia that so much of elite media was already rehearsing. Eventually, he was pushed off CNN. There is no serious account of his firing that regards it as merely contractual.
Lemon did not retreat. He did not seek the protection of another institutional perch. He built something outside the familiar structures of access, insulation, and deference that govern elite media. That kind of independence cannot be easily managed. It does not respond to quiet pressure. It does not rely on permission. And it does not disappear when a gate closes.
Seen through that lens—he couldn’t be discredited or made to submit out of fear; therefore, the only other tool the government had (short of violence) was entanglement.
Lemon is no longer buffered by a major media institution. He has to be the one to divert time, money, and attention to defending himself. So do the colleagues arrested alongside him. The process becomes the punishment. The case may ultimately collapse. But collapse, as I have already suggested, is beside the point. Neutralizing that kind of voice—especially in an election year—means the work will already have been done by the time he frees himself from its web.
Civil Rights, Stripped of Context
A few days after Lemon’s arrest, a friend sent me a breaking news alert that signaled another door being kicked in. This time it wasn’t a captured FBI pursuing a journalist across state lines over a petty offense. A captured Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was going after Nike.
I clicked through and read the agency press release carefully, before trying to make sense of it. The document announced that the EEOC had opened a Commissioner’s charge against Nike and was demanding extensive records related to its employment practices. The scope was sweeping. It included hiring, promotions, compensation, performance evaluations, terminations. Internal communications. They were subpoenaing policies and procedures. Organizational charts. Data going back as far as eight years. The agency cited complaints from former employees and framed the inquiry as an investigation into potential race-based discrimination against white people.
Nike is, of course, a Fortune 500 company with a global workforce and a long, very public history of supporting Black athletes and Black political expression, including Colin Kaepernick at the height of the backlash against Black Lives Matter. Whatever one thinks of corporate activism, Nike did not run from that moment. This was their unforgivable sin.
What stopped me cold was the allegation—particularly the language. The company was being accused of “a pattern or practice of disparate treatment against white employees, applicants and training program participants in hiring, promotion, demotion, or separation decisions, including selection for layoffs; internship programs; and mentoring, leadership development and other career development programs.”
Pattern-and-practice authority exists because discrimination is rarely visible in a single decision or a single memo, and people are conditioned to deny the existence of discriminatory conduct. It allows the government—in this case—but also defense attorneys in criminal litigation to look across systems and time to determine whether unlawful conduct is occurring at scale. Historically, it has been one of the few tools capable of addressing systemic harm precisely because it does not depend on a lone whistleblower or a smoking gun.
Reading the press release, I understood this as the opening of another theater. Corporate America. Culture.
What I did not yet do was connect this investigation to the broader legal shift underway. I was still sitting with the scale of the request, the breadth of the inquiry, and the unmistakable sense that this was less about resolution than about entanglement.
Then I remembered something.
Last spring, among the flurry of nauseating executive orders, Trump signed Executive Order 14281, “Restoring Equality of Opportunity and Meritocracy.” The order directs federal agencies to stop, review, or reverse actions, regulations, and lawsuits that rely on disparate impact, which penalizes policies with disproportionate adverse effects on protected groups even without evidence of intent to discriminate. The order frames disparate impact as an illegitimate framework—an affront to “meritocracy.” The message was unmistakable: outcomes do not matter; only intent does.
Like the pattern-and-practice jurisprudence, disparate impact doctrine exists because proving discriminatory intent in a country where colorblindness is a creed is extraordinarily difficult. It emerged precisely because discrimination is rarely announced, rarely confessed, and rarely clean. It hides behind custom, discretion, and “neutral” rules that predictably reproduce exclusion. The doctrine was a hard-won acknowledgment that systems can discriminate without a single bad actor twirling a mustache.
To reject disparate impact is to insist on a world that does not exist. And yet, here we are.
What is revealing—almost too revealing—is how the government is proceeding in the Nike matter. The EEOC has framed its inquiry as an investigation into “disparate treatment.” In plain terms, that means the agency is demanding nearly a decade of internal records in order to hunt for evidence of intentional discrimination against white employees and applicants. This is not incidental. Under the administration’s own executive order, reliance on disparate impact analysis has been explicitly disallowed. Outcomes, on their own, are no longer sufficient. Intent must be shown.
That is an extraordinarily high bar, and they know it. Which is precisely why the inquiry takes the form it does. When you cannot rely on impact, you search endlessly for motive. When you are unlikely to find motive, you demand everything: time, documents, attention, money. You widen the scope until the process itself becomes the pressure point. This is entanglement.
And this is what makes the co-optation of hard-won civil rights and criminal justice frameworks so repugnant.
Pattern-and-practice law was developed because discrimination was so widespread and entrenched that only systemic proof could expose it. It was used by the Department of Justice to investigate police departments where people were being beaten, unlawfully detained, and killed. It has been central to consent decrees that forced structural reform where individual lawsuits could never reach. Now it is being weaponized to vindicate garden-variety white grievance.
In my own work—including in the reporting and litigation architecture of my podcast, Crying Wolf—pattern-and-practice evidence has freed people. It has saved lives. Watching that same legal machinery be redeployed to hunt for hypothetical intent against companies that attempted—however imperfectly—to address racial exclusion is infuriating.
What boils my blood is not simply that the law is being used aggressively. It is that it is being used without context, stripped of history, severed from the conditions that made it necessary in the first place. The Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment that the legal hacks suing anyone they believe is favoring people of color was not written because white people couldn’t get internships. It was written because Black people were being terrorized, dispossessed, and murdered with state sanction. Disparate impact doctrine did not emerge because of bruised feelings in competitive labor markets. It emerged because formal equality failed in the face of structural injustice.
That history means nothing to these bastards.
They are willing to equate inconvenience with oppression, disappointment with discrimination, and competition with harm. They flatten moral distinctions that once mattered because flattening them is useful. It allows them to mimic the language of civil rights while dismantling its substance.
This is where the door-to-door strategy reveals its rot. The government knows it must show that institutions and companies set out to discriminate, rather than attempting—clumsily or carefully—to correct for exclusion they could plainly see. They know how high the bar is because they set it. And yet here we are.
Nike can pay whatever fine it must pay. Even if the EEOC were to find them guilty, no one is going to stop buying Nike (though it may be nationalized). No one will give a shit. Thus, this whole EEOC fiasco is about one thing and one thing only: entanglement.
The Degenerate Lineage
While writing this essay, I happened to be re-reading The Brothers, a history of John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles—the siblings who, at the height of the Cold War, ran the State Department and the CIA and helped steer the United States into one of its darkest, most paranoid chapters. One brother was the nation’s chief diplomat. The other was its spymaster. Together, they wielded extraordinary power over the postwar world.
What has always struck me about the Dulles brothers is not simply the destruction they helped unleash, but the logic that animated it. They could not fathom that people in the developing world genuinely wanted independence on their own terms. Any refusal to submit to an American-led capitalist order had to be evidence of Soviet manipulation. It was inconceivable to them that people—especially Black and brown people, and those from the Islamic world—could arrive at their own political conclusions, let alone be willing to fight and die for them.
That failure of imagination had consequences. Democratically elected governments were overthrown. Liberation movements were crushed. Entire regions were destabilized for generations. And all of it was justified as rational, necessary, even benevolent. Once domination is framed as reason, exploitation becomes policy. Once exploitation is normalized, it hardens into belief. Wickedness does not announce itself as such; it presents as prudence.
That lineage has not disappeared. But what has changed—and what should alarm us—is how thoroughly it has degenerated.
Over the past year, we’ve been given brief, accidental windows into how contemporary power talks to itself. First through the Signalgate—the warmongering group chat among Trump’s highest-ranking minions that surfaced last year. Then through reporting on young Republican operatives exchanging openly racist jokes, slurs, and knowing winks in private threads. In both cases, what stood out was not only the prejudice, but the posture: flippant, jokey, smug. Men (mostly) with proximity to power treating the world—and the harm they are inflicting on it—as material for banter.
This is not the cold, self-serious arrogance of the Dulles era. Those men believed—wrongly and catastrophically—that they were shaping history. Today’s actors are more unserious than that. They do not carry the burden of consequence. They do not wrestle with moral cost. They deploy irony and cleverness as armor, wise-ass humor as insulation. Law becomes a tool for pranks. Policy becomes a game. Other people’s lives become expendable pieces on a board they never have to clean up.
This is the posture that makes the current door-to-door campaign possible. When harm is treated as a joke, it no longer registers as harm. When institutions are destabilized with a wink, responsibility dissolves. When history is stripped of context, its safeguards can be repurposed without shame.
This is what makes the present moment more dangerous than mere arrogance. Arrogance at least believes in something. What we are confronting now is domination without conviction, power exercised without seriousness, and the cynical reuse of hard-won legal frameworks by people who neither understand nor respect the struggles that produced them.
This is the degenerate lineage of American postwar power.
The Truth About the Big Lie
I finished the first draft of this essay the night I returned from leading a board retreat in Manhattan, inside a glass-and-steel skyscraper occupied by Fortune 500 companies. The entire session—hours of it—was devoted to anti-racism. Governance. Strategy. Accountability. How to deepen and embed the work. How to move it forward despite the headwinds. How to have the organization’s back. They made progress as a board, but more than that, there was candor—in a racially and economically diverse room—working seriously, together. At one point, a board member—a white woman—suggested they all undergo training to sharpen their lens and align with the staff. Everyone in the room nodded in agreement. The whole thing would have made someone at the EEOC throw up.
This is also what makes their door-to-door campaign such a miscalculation.
They cannot stop this work. It is too deep, too distributed, and too well understood as necessary by too many people. They can knock on doors. They can kick them in. They can threaten, subpoena, investigate, and entangle. None of it will make the big lie true. And they know it won’t. That is why the strategy relies on exhaustion rather than persuasion, fear rather than argument.
Their only hope is to frighten enough people into silence.
But there will always be those who do not fold. Who do not retreat. Who understand the risk and choose to proceed anyway. That has always been true. It is true right now.
I see it in Minneapolis. I see it at rallies, in boardrooms, in union halls, at all-hands, and in workplaces where people are refusing to pretend they don’t understand what’s happening. I see it when white employees speak up rather than hide behind proximity or plausible deniability. I see it when they refuse to let their grievances be weaponized against democracy itself.
And we are going to need that clarity.
Because this phase of the campaign depends on convincing people—especially white people—that they are the true victims here, that they are merely correcting excess, restoring balance, defending fairness. It depends on using you.
So let me say this plainly: understand the game being played. Independent people who won’t be silenced are going to be harassed and entangled. They are going to need our help. Companies that tried—imperfectly, unevenly—to honor a multiracial democracy are going to be targeted not because they failed, but because they dared to try, and they are going to need us not to cooperate with a corrupt administration’s treachery.
The door-to-door strategy being deployed against DEI, against institutions, and now against individuals rests on the belief that exhaustion produces submission. That pressure collapses principle. That people will break before they adapt.
History suggests otherwise.
In Iran, the Dulles brothers orchestrated the 1953 coup that overthrew a democratically elected government to protect Western oil interests—installing an autocratic regime whose brutality helped radicalize opposition movements and set the stage for decades of regional instability, anti-American resentment, and global blowback that has never really stopped. At the time, it was treated as a clean, elegant solution. In retrospect, it was a catastrophic act of short-sightedness whose costs we are still paying.
What this theory of power consistently misses—what it has always missed—is people: adaptive, relational, meaning-making beings. People who recalibrate under pressure. Who move work out of sanctioned spaces. Who build informal infrastructure precisely because formal ones have been stripped away. Who remember who folded and who held.
Which is why connecting the dots matters so much to me. Why documenting each lawsuit or arrest in isolation is not enough. These cannot be treated as separate scenes. We must, in our own humble ways, make the strategy visible—help people understand that what they are experiencing is not random, not personal, not evidence of weakness, but design.
That is the work I am trying to do here. To see the story, not just the scenes. To name the pattern so people do not mistake attrition for inevitability.
I’m not going to lie. Watching all of this unfold regularly forces me to reckon more honestly with my own position. I am not an institution. I don’t have a legal department, a crisis team, or a balance sheet that can absorb prolonged entanglement. Like many people who work independently—who think, speak, and write outside proscribed channels—I operate without insulation.
And I know, as anyone who does this kind of work knows, that independence is a risk. Every time you choose to speak plainly, you accept the possibility that you will be pulled into something you cannot easily get out of. That you will be made to spend time, money, attention—life—defending the right to keep going.
I imagine many people reading this have already made that calculation quietly. They have decided where their own line is. I respect that. I don’t judge it.
For myself, I don’t know another way to live. Writing, thinking, sharing—this is how I make sense of the world and how I stay in it. To be forced to stop would feel like a different kind of ending altogether.
They are banking on breaking people because they believe people like us were already broken. I believe they are wrong. Maybe the air war is over. Certainly the door-to-door phase is underway.
But what comes next will not look like victory or defeat in the way the strategists who have inverted our institutions expect. It will look like people doing what they have always done when they are underestimated: pivoting, finding one another, and refusing—quietly, stubbornly—to disappear.