patrick.net

Speaking with Erik Torenberg on the Moment of Zen podcast, billionaire investor and Trump adviser Marc Andreessen recently speculated how the incoming Trump Administration could be planning to rapidly drive a stake into the beating heart of corporate DEI and kill it for good.

The possibility arises because Trump appointed long-time California covid lawyer Harmeet Dhillon to head the DOJ’s civil rights division. "If you wanted to pick the most extreme possible attorney to put in charge of the Civil Rights division of the Justice Department to reverse DEI,” Marc noted on the podcast, “it would be this lawyer named Harmeet Dhillon.”

The instant I heard it, I realized Marc was one hundred percent right. For years, Harmeet has been suing over wokeness and jabs. She came up as a superlawyer in the authoritarian pressure cooker of California and its virtue-signaling corporate culture. Soon she will occupy one of the most influential legal jobs in the country. ..,

Marc correctly explained that “the Civil Rights division of the Justice Department is the federal government’s prosecutorial arm that basically enforces wokeness. They’re the ones who have made sure that, for the last decade, these companies have had all these crazy policies under the penalty of being investigated, subpoenaed, and ultimately prosecuted.”

The billionaire gave an example: “the Civil Rights division sued SpaceX for not hiring enough refugees—despite the fact that SpaceX is a military contractor and is not permitted to hire non-American citizens under a separate law.”

That kind of silliness should quickly stop. But as Marc correctly pointed out, given her background, Harmeet is likely to “do a 180” and “begin prosecuting companies for violations of civil rights laws in the form of reverse discrimination—discrimination against white people, Asians, Jews, and other unprotected classes.”

Woke DEI policies are legal low-hanging fruit for real civil rights prosecution. The policies are de facto discriminatory in just about every conceivable way: race, gender, religion, you name it.

Call it the Harmeet effect. Marc thinks many companies are already getting the message, just from the fact of Harmeet’s appointment. Thanks to anti-DEI activists like Robby Starbuck, woke corporate policies have been culturally suspect for most of 2024. Add the threat of a DOJ criminal investigation and things may start shifting rapidly back toward normal. ...

Maybe best of all —this is me, not Marc— it seems very likely Harmeet will also investigate and prosecute companies that most egregiously violated their employees’ religious liberties by denying jab exemption requests and making unjabbed employee’s lives miserable on purpose (Ascension Hospital Group and Morgan & Morgan, I’m looking at you).

I’ll be shocked if Harmeet didn’t go after the jab dictators.