Award-winning professor Stanley K. Ridgley, author of Brutal Minds: The Dark World of Left-Wing Brainwashing in Our Universities, has published another book, DEI Exposed: How the Biggest Con of the Century Almost Toppled Higher Education. Since Ridgley works in academia and has seen DEI in action firsthand, he explained the nuts and bolts behind the scenes, providing a horrifying inside look revealing how the movement made so much progress since 2020 — and why it’s now failing.
DEI emerged after the death of George Floyd in 2020. “It was from this singular incident and its monthslong violent aftermath that a grandiose epic of nationwide systemic oppression was spun — the myth of ‘white racist America,” he said. “No college administration wanted the summer violence of 2020 overflowing onto the campuses. And so they opened the university to barbarian ideas rather than the barbarians themselves.”
Floyd’s death had nothing to do with universities but was used as a catalyst anyway. “When a drugged-up, 6-4,300-pound thief is killed while attacking a police officer, it’s time to shake down corporate America to the tune of millions of dollars because police killed an unarmed Black teen,” Ridgley said it’s no coincidence that the same people who cheered assassin Luigi Mangione are the same people who cheer DEI. “His ideology told him the villain to target, and he acted.”
“Leftists have always been divorced from notions of personal responsibility and tend to evaluate individual people and their actions based on a hazy notion of world history, making tenuous connections between individual actions and the grandiosity of historical movements,” Ridgley observed. Many prominent leftists praised Mangione after he murdered Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare.
In upper academia, “DEI grifters create the problem in the university, and then they offer to solve the problem.” Sadly, “the crowning achievement of Western civilization — the modern university — tottered under the debilitating assault of mediocrity, racialism, and pseudoscience.” He went on, “They actually run their own fake college-within-a-college, pretending to be professors and teaching fake courses in what they call the ‘co-curriculum.’”
His book is full of wonderful insights that help us decimate the DEI evil. He described it as “the Big Con of DEI, the most elaborate, sensational con game of the 21st century.” He compared it to grifting, “The DEI Con has enriched thousands of hustlers nationwide.” He lamented, “[I]t continues to attack the average person for the most dubious of ideologically motivated reasons in ‘training’ sessions, both on the campuses and in corporate America.”
“You can’t spell deceit without DEI,” it’s a “delusional belief system grounded in a shared conspiracy.” One of the chapters is titled “Training People Into Mental Illness,” where he explains how the propaganda “does real damage to those innocent students, faculty, and staff caught up in the web of paranoia, suspicion, and anger.”
Ridgley breaks down the brainwashing. “Recognize that when someone charges you with a ‘micro-aggression’ or, worse, a ‘racial micro-aggression,’ that this is a fake charge imagined by the accuser. It arises out of a particular persecutory mindset that approaches or is already consumed with paranoia.” Unfortunately, “the confected ‘racial micro-aggression’ is one way to inflate numbers of bias incidents and to advertise a negative racial climate.”
He recommended in response, “You can countercharge your accuser with making a false accusation, and I encourage you to do so.” The accusers have taken it to another level beyond that, coming up with hate crime hoaxes, which he devoted an entire chapter to.
Ridgley said DEI is just a retreading of the same old discredited far-left Marxist theories. “It’s been refurbished to accommodate a new conceptual scapegoat to replace the bourgeoisie, the kulaks, and the capitalist roaders.”
“Today, DEI is a multi-faceted business, overfunded and overstaffed, and with no discernible mission save to provide cover for administrations to say, ‘We’re doing the work of antiracism,’” he said. “We don’t know how or why, but ‘diversity is our strength.’”
Ridgley said it boils down to a typical con game consisting of five parts. First, find a suitable victim; second, gain the victim’s trust; third, persuade the victim to commit to a scheme that will benefit him or her; fourth, get money from the victim; and fifth, placate the victim to quell any uneasy feelings about the situation. He went on, “Although the details may vary, all flimflam games rely on their basic ability to make a lie look like the truth. … This con is so effective because it’s the proven dynamic of all totalitarian ruling systems.”
Sadly, “a majority of Americans know that it’s a con and yet play along with it. They do this,” he said, “because to not play along can mean trouble, lots of it.” The difference with the DEI con is that “they train as many persons as possible to accept villain status, and diversity hustlers are lavishly compensated for this.”
A significant portion of the book goes over the grifters behind DEI. He said, “Grifters are motivated by gain, of course, and their personalities often show signs of the Dark Triad of psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism.” The “Gurus of Grift” chapter lists some of the worst grifters who exploit DEI. “They are motivated by outsized egos and overblown theory and unparalleled self-righteousness. Their ideas of history are what happens to them, regardless of how mundane or commonplace.”
He explained how the DEI con works. “DEI doctrine declares that somewhere, someone of the same ethnic caste as you has been wronged. Maybe. … You do know that your job, your responsibility, is to take umbrage.”
In addition to training on campus, DEI encompasses snitch lines, bias response teams, and “involvement in crafting policies to restrict academic freedom.”
Although DEI is now in retreat thanks to the Trump administration, Ridgley warns that it is being disguised by renaming it to phrases such as “inclusive excellence.” Fortunately, DEI is finally failing “because of its internal contradictions that render it laughable — the doctrine is profoundly unserious and rooted in pseudoscience and prejudice.”