Breaking news: John McGuire likes DEI!
At least when he’s face-to-face with people who could benefit from it.
It’s easy to attack an idea like DEI when it’s just an idea. It’s a lot harder when that idea has a face and a name, as John McGuire inadvertently demonstrated this month.
Here’s the congressman on March 7, praising the UVa board’s decision to abandon the school’s efforts to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion:
Now fast-forward two weeks, to March 21. After visiting a Danville nonprofit called the Arc of Southside, which helps people with intellectual and developmental disabilities and their families, he wrote:
I wasn’t familiar with the Arc, so I poked around on their site. It sounds like they do fantastic work. Check out two of their stated values:
Equity. The Arc believes that people with intellectual and developmental disabilities are entitled to the respect, dignity, equality, safety, and security accorded to other members of society, and are equal before the law.…
Diversity. The Arc believes that society in general and The Arc in particular benefit from the contributions of people with diverse personal characteristics (including but not limited to race, ethnicity, religion, age, geographic location, sexual orientation, gender and type of disability).
Admittedly I don’t know what the Arc team makes of DEI efforts, or what they told the congressman. But I’d say those two paragraphs do a fair job of summing up what most pro-DEI folks mean by the words equity and diversity. And they’re perfectly reasonable! Nothing about requiring equality of outcome.
Yet those paragraphs contain at least half a dozen words that would get flagged in any review by the Trump administration’s anti-DEI campaign, and they’d no doubt raise John McGuire’s ire.
But the contradiction runs deeper than just a couple of words related to DEI. Project 2025, which McGuire hasn’t repudiated, advocates for a range of policies that would make things dramatically worse for people with disabilities. Among other things, the GOP’s blueprint would make it harder to protect disabled students, cut health programs they rely on, and hamstring the government’s ability to enforce the Americans with Disabilities Act. McGuire probably did not highlight these ideas during his visit to the Arc.
Look, it’s easy to mock hypocrisy. (It’s also profitable—a sharp eye for self-contradiction and a nice haircut will land you a nightly show on MSNBC.) But there’s a larger point here.
It’s hard to imagine John McGuire telling anyone at the Arc that their belief in equity and inclusion constitutes illegal discrimination. Or that they’re using it as a tool to bully others into submission. Or that they Didn’t Earn It. Or that the federal government shouldn’t be helping them.
Not only would he never say it, I bet he didn’t even think it. Because these were real people who want a fair shot, not a right-winger’s fever dream of Marxist radicals out to take down the country.
I’d like to believe that our congressman will connect the policies he champions—like cutting Medicaid, lifesaving foreign aid, and federal funds for low-income students— with the people whose lives are affected by them. So far, unfortunately, he’s given us no reason to think he’s interested in doing so.
Update: The Town Hall Timer
Time elapsed since Congressman McGuire’s last town hall: 28 days.
My kid gives me grief over Sunday dinner
“You’re not really the Night Watchman. You don’t watch anything at night, except TV. You’re more like the Night Sleepman.” Point taken. But I’m keeping the name.
He also apparently thinks hungry kids should be fed. He helped pack backpacks of food at Backpacks of Love (bottom of March 14 newsletter). I’d like to see his actions in congress reflecting his apparent values.
It seems that "DEI" is a term that has become disconnected -- for some users of the term at least -- from the words of which the acronym is created. Most people, including even Republicans, would say that they have no problem with "diversity," per se, or to "equity," per se, or to "inclusion," per se. But when these become "DEI" they come to stand for a policy that these folks mysteriously find offensive. The term DEI has become loosely analogous to other politically divisive terms such as "Woke," for example. The result becomes a form of "cognitive dissonance" in which people such as McGuire take actions that are consistent with practices espoused by DEI and Woke thinking (e.g., packing backpacks of food), while at the same time spouting anti-DEI/Woke verbiage. Another way to think about this might be to call it by its old-fashioned name: "hypocrisy."