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Editor’s note: The following column was first published in the City Gazetteer.
last week, Mark Zuckerbergthe CEO of Meta, formerly of Facebook, made a startling announcement. He ended the company’s DEI programs and severed its relationship with fact-checking organizations, which he admitted had become a form of “censorship.” The left-wing media immediately attacked that decision, accused him of accepting MAGA’s agenda and predicted a dangerous increase in the so-called disinformation.
Zuckerberg’s move was carefully calculated and impeccably timed. The November election, he said, felt like a “cultural tipping point toward re-prioritizing speech.” DEI’s initiatives, especially those related to immigration and gender, have become “out of the mainstream”—and unsustainable.
This is no small turnpike. Just four years ago, Zuckerberg spent hundreds of millions of dollars funding left-wing electoral programs; conservatives resented him a lot for his role. And Meta was at the forefront of every identity or left-wing ideological goal.
META POLICY HEAD SAYS DECISION TO ABOLISH DEI INSURANCE COMPANY HIRES ‘MOST TALENTED PEOPLE’
No longer. As part of the announcement for the announcement, Zuckerberg released a video and appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast, which now functions as a confessional for American elites who no longer believe in leftist orthodoxies. In the podcast, Zuckerberg sounded less like a California progressive than a right-winger, arguing that the culture needs a better balance of “masculine” and “feminine” energies.
Managers at Meta quickly implemented the new policy, issuing pink slips to DEI employees and moving the company’s content moderation team from California to Texas to, according to Zuckerberg, “help alleviate concerns that biased employees are over-censoring content.”
Zuckerberg wasn’t the first tech CEO to make such an announcement, but he may be the most significant. Facebook is one of the largest companies in Silicon Valley and, since Zuckerberg has set a precedent, many smaller companies are likely to follow suit.
However, the most important signal emanating from this decision is not about a specific change in policy, but about a general change in culture. Zuckerberg was never really an ideologue. He seems more interested in building his company and staying in the good graces of elite society. But like many self-respecting successful people, he is also independent and clearly resents the cultural constraints DEI has placed on his company. So he seized the moment, correctly sensing that the impending inauguration of Donald Trump reduced the risk and increased the profitability of such a change.
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Zuckerberg is certainly not a brave truth teller. He agreed to DEI over the last decade because it was where elite status signals pointed. Now those signals have reversed, like a barometer suddenly dropping, and he’s reversing course with them and trying to shift the blame to the outgoing Biden administration, which, he told Rogan, pressured him to introduce censorship — a convenient excuse in even and a more convenient moment.
But the good news is that, regardless of the post hoc rationalizations that executives would use, DEI and its cultural assumptions suddenly ran into serious resistance. We may be entering a pivotal period where people feel confident enough to express their true beliefs about DEI, which is the opposite of excellence, and stop pretending to believe in the cult ideology of “systemic racism” and racial guilt.
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DEI remains deeply embedded in public institutions, of course, but private institutions and corporations have more flexibility and can ship such programs with the stroke of a pen.
Zuckerberg revealed what it could look like in one of the largest companies. Conservatives can praise him for his decision, but remain cautious. “Trust but verify”, like Ronald Reagan used to say, good politics is everywhere.
