Penna Dexter

The troubled Boeing Company got a new CEO in August. Early on, Kelly Ortberg began winding down DEI at Boeing. DEI — diversity, equity and inclusion — has been around for decades. Diversity requires the elevation of immutable differences — like race, age, ethnicity, religion, gender, and sexual orientation. Equity —often mistaken for equal opportunity — emphasizes equal outcomes. In favor of achieving these, employee merit is necessarily de-emphasized and therein lies the seed of DEI’s failure.

After the death of George Floyd in 2020, Fortune 500 companies launched or beefed up their DEI initiatives. But, when companies that build things take their eye off the ball, quality suffers.

For Boeing, which designs, manufactures, and sells airplanes, 2024 brought massive problems, including the midair separation of a panel from an Alaska Airlines plane, difficulties accessing quality parts, flawed flight control software, a 7–week labor strike, and a severe cash crunch.

A Boeing insider told documentary filmmaker and writer, Christopher Rufo, “An organization can prioritize excellence or diversity, but not both simultaneously.” He said, “DEI is the drop in the bucket, and the whole bucket changes. It is anti-excellence, because it is ill-defined, but it became part of the culture.”

That’s why Kelly Ortberg quietly dismantled Boeing’s DEI department.

Another American corporate giant: the country’s number one employer, Walmart announced it is abandoning DEI.

The Washington Stand reports that when DEI warrior Robby Starbuck began investigating Walmart’s policies, company executives “reached out to him.”

The company has announced it will no longer participate in the Human Rights Campaign’s LGBT shakedown campaign: the Corporate Equality Index. It pledged to remove inappropriate sexual and/or transgender products, and to cancel racial equity initiatives.

Walmart joins a growing list of companies rejecting DEI. American businesses are realizing that the woke DEI agenda is polarizing and stifling for businesses. Some are choosing to return to simply running a business.

Chris Rufo affirms, “A reckoning is underway in corporate America.”