With Donald Trump, it is perpetually difficult to gauge what matters and what doesn’t — where does the bluster end and the change begin, and how seriously should we take him at all? Will Hillary actually get locked up? Will Greenland get conquered? He has been signing endless executive orders to show he means business, but some of them, like his attempt to end birthright citizenship, seem destined to die in the courts.

Where Trump has gotten aggressive is around dismantling the many diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives that Democrats like Joe Biden have long supported. Trump will eliminate DEI from the Pentagon and has empowered his acolytes in the federal government to ferret out anything that has the scent of social justice. Working from the rubric established by Christopher Rufo, a prominent conservative activist who has warred against critical race theory and other diversity policies nationwide, Trump is rapidly rolling back the identity-based trainings and curricula that have been proliferating in the government for the past four years. Corporate America is already onboard, with companies increasingly abandoning their DEI commitments and channeling their inner Mark Zuckerberg, who recently peacocked for Joe Rogan and promised more “masculine” energy from Meta, whatever that may mean. The state of play was best summed up by an anonymous banker in the Financial Times: “We can say ‘retard’ and ‘pussy’ without the fear of getting cancelled … it’s a new dawn.”

A new dawn, indeed. Two realities can simultaneously be true: The social-justice, or “woke,” left was needlessly insular and language........

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