DEI, even going back to when the approved acronym was DIE (yes, it was that not so long ago), has always been a scam.
By that, I don’t mean that it was a well-meaning policy intended to accomplish one goal that unintentionally spawned a scam, like Affirmative Action. Affirmative action was a misconceived solution to a genuine problem for which there was no good solution other than time.
No, DEI was always a scam intended to create high-paying jobs for otherwise worthlessly over-educated and under-motivated academics and consultants–a way to soak up money and the extreme excess of people with degrees that have no value in the economy.
And for many, it was a get-rich-quick scheme married to a get-prominent and admired scheme. Wealth, power, and prestige were distributed based on how many victim points one could acquire.
As the corporate DEI craze peaked, founder Kennedy, the CEO, and the CFO decided to pay themselves $3M in undocumented “back pay.”
When the board tried to stop it, Kennedy quit, took its domain names & created a fake group w/ the same name (in pic) to siphon money, it said. pic.twitter.com/Egec2oJqmq
— Luke Rosiak (@lukerosiak) March 27, 2025
So it should surprise nobody that one of the more enterprising scammers went all scammy and decided to grab just a bit more wealth and prestige than the system could tolerate? If scamming the hoi polloi is OK, why not scam the other scammers.
He claimed to be working 75 hours a week between the two nonprofits in 2021. Simultaneously, he was running a sprawling for-profit business called Diversity & Leadership, and tricked people into paying it while thinking they were supporting the charity, the board said in a suit. pic.twitter.com/p9Olx1owDW
— Luke Rosiak (@lukerosiak) March 27, 2025
Think of it as an ESG version of The Sting. Everybody loves a rogue, at least until the rogue does to you what seemed entertaining when done to everybody else.
Here are some of the DEI mills with identical websites, all purporting to be membership groups but apparently selling paid consulting or certifications through his for-profit. pic.twitter.com/gbrDpgDzH9
— Luke Rosiak (@lukerosiak) March 27, 2025
Or perhaps a variation on the Lincoln Project scam, where the founders collect money from gullible donors to pay themselves consulting fees through their not-so-hidden consulting firms.
The nonprofit National Diversity Council said its founder moved its assets into his own name & used it as a front for his for-profit consultancy, while paying himself a “grossly excessive salary” until it was bankrupt.
The saga is worth reading in full: https://t.co/JyMPfz3bvS
— Luke Rosiak (@lukerosiak) March 27, 2025
LOOK! WE ARE HELPING THE CAUSE! Give us money and we can help you keep the USAID money flowing into your pockets! A Biden or Harris administration will keep the gravy train going, so kick back some of your own ill-gotten gains to us to help keep the grift alive!
Corporations pay up as a form of protection money–do you think all that money was donated to BLM because corporate CEOs thought that BLM was a righteous cause? Fool. They saw the riots and the looting and wanted immunity, so they kicked in a hundred billion or so to protect their interests.
Same with DEI, and as the grift collapses, the grifters need to steal from each other.
If you can get past your disgust, this is actually kinda funny. Hoist on their own petard.
