The Verge – [unpaywalled] “Violent metaphors abound for what’s happening in Washington: Elon Musk and his allies have taken a “slash-and-burn” approach to the government and a “sledgehammer” to government institutions, doing away with supposed waste and excess while leaving the fundamental structure intact. All of this is being done with the stated goal of ridding the federal workforce of the scourge of wokeness and “DEI” — diversity, equity, and inclusion, a term that has become a catchall for anything Musk and other MAGA insiders don’t like. USAID is DEI. The National Institutes of Health is DEI. The National Endowment for the Arts? Obviously DEI. We can probably all agree that the woke word cloud at the FBI Academy in Quantico is DEI. Major broadcasters are pushing DEI on their viewers; public school teachers are using it to indoctrinate impressionable young students. The only solution to this is, of course, to defund and dismantle everything. The war on DEI is a smoke screen; it’s an opportunity to unite various conservative factions under a single rallying cry, giving them a common enemy on which to blame their myriad concerns. It unites recent converts to the cause, like Musk, with more mainstream conservatives whose criticisms of federal overspending look quaint in hindsight. Musk’s success is part tactics, part branding. His Department of Government Efficiency has indeed been efficient, tearing through the federal workforce in a manner critics say is clearly illegal. Under normal circumstances, dissolving the US Agency for International Development would require an act of Congress. Instead of doing that, Musk ordered his army of cracked zoomer coders to block funding, while the White House alleged that the agency was using taxpayer money to push a woke agenda overseas. Musk benefits from the nebulousness of “DEI,” a term that has come to encompass everything from corporate diversity trainings and hollow brand PR statements to teaching children about the horrors of slavery…”