DEI seems to have taken over from Woke as the all-purpose MAGA terms for “this is bad”. DEI stands for diversity, equity, and inclusion. As with Woke, which seems to an accusation of using rational thought, DEI seems like it would be difficult to interpret as bad. Saying that you strongly oppose diversity, equity, and inclusion is a pretty frank admission of your values.
This use of DEI seems to translate directly as “insufficiently racist”.
In 2025, they’re mad about DEI
In 2022, they were mad about woke.
In 2020, they were mad about BLM.
They keep changing terms. They keep saying the same thing.
Don’t use the acronyms when they use it. Ask them why the particular parts bother them so much. Call out the bigotry and make them express it without any safety of inventing a bad word that avoids an argument.
Hell, I bet have of the people against DEI don’t even know what it stands for.
Woke, trans, dei, critical race theory, and dozens if not hundreds more if you keep going backwards. It’s the same playbook, new boogie man to scare idiots into voting against their own interests.
The messaging used to be attempts to reframe the bullshit positions of the American Right as good: “Family values,” “rule of law.”
Now it’s reframing the positions of anyone else as bad. Rage bait works better.
“Fiscally conservative” is another. While having a history of economic disasters under Republicans.
“Small government,” which is, of course, anything but.
Insufficiently Nazi boot licker.
You’re not wrong.
It’s a vocabulary treadmill. The right vilify a term (turning it into an insult), the left reinvents a term to make it less insulting, the right vilify the new term, repeat.
It’s actually super annoying if you’re a centrist – the definitions keep changing and you get stuck in this linguistic tug-of-war.
well, centrists can fuck off anyway
One of my favourite authors wrote one of my favourite articles: “Am I a bad feminist?” By Margaret Atwood
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/am-i-a-bad-feminist/article37591823/ (view in incognito mode or similar to bypass paywall)
Quoting: “We are acceptable neither to Right nor to Left. In times of extremes, extremists win. Their ideology becomes a religion, anyone who doesn’t puppet their views is seen as an apostate, a heretic or a traitor, and moderates in the middle are annihilated.”
The topic of her essay is not relevant to this particular topic, but the quote resonates nevertheless.
they did not even use woke right. something isn’t woke you get woke to whats going on. They have no clue.
