DEI Is Eating Its Own: A Soviet Echo in Wisconsin
David Manney1/2
A System That Devours Itself
Magic wands waved by President Ronald Reagan, Pope Saint John Paul II, and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher didn't cause the collapse of the Soviet Union. When countries insist that there's abundant scarcity and teach that freedom is slavery, and people chant slogans they don't believe anymore, those countries cannot survive.When contradictions grow too heavy, the edifice cracks.
In today's Wisconsin, a different ideology is experiencing identical signs.
The gospel of modern academia: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, or DEI, has become the salad bar in Wisconsin's supper clubs; it has started to eat its own disciples.
Need proof?
The University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire reached a settlement worth $265,000 with aDEI staffer who committed the ultimate sin of being a person of the wrong color: white.
The echoes of the Soviet Union don't just whisper in Eau Claire; they roar.
The Wisconsin Case
The perp who took on the role of interim director of Multicultural Student Services at UW-Eau Claire was Rochelle Hoffman,who was given the task of being the shepherd of DEI and leading by sharing inclusion slogans. Before long, she was bluntly told: You don't belong, not because of her skills, or a lack of compassion, but because she's white.
"You hired a White woman as the interim director?" one student allegedly said, according to a federal complaint against the university.
According to the complaint, a different student asked, "Do you personally feel White staff can do as effective a job as a person of color, within a space for people of color?"
Hoffman said she felt she had to resign after eight months of intense hostility and staff questioning her "legitimacy" after being promoted to interim director of the campus's Multicultural Student Services office, the complaint states.
She weathered the cultural storm for eight months, then walked away and filed a lawsuit against the university.The school didn't admit guilt, but with hopes that the story would disappear, it paid Hoffman $265,000 to settle.
Unfortunately for the university, the story revealed something about DEI that some conservatives have turned into evidence that it is a machine that eats its managers, devouring the very people who run it.
Equity Without Equality
As with most social movements, DEI's rhetoric sounded noble.
• Diversity should mean difference.
• Equity should mean fairness.
• Inclusion should mean welcome.
However, like most plans, regardless of application, they share the same concept of being good on paper; however, in reality, each term flipped on itself.
• Diversity becomes quotas.
• Equity becomes punishment.
• Inclusion becomes exclusion.
This case pulled back the curtain, exposing the sin of hiring a DEI leader who is the wrong color. With irony that bloody well bothers the hell out of me—and most of us with a semblance of common sense—a program that exists to end discrimination paid for discriminatory acts.
If equity justifies discrimination, then the entire doctrine of DEI collapses, because it's designed to police fairness,but it turns out to be guilty of practicing the opposite.
No ideology exists when it eats its own.
Division as Survival
For a relatively recent example,consider Prohibition; its goal was to uplift society. Instead, it generated crime, speakeasies, and mobsters (and also became the source of so many books and movies).Prohibition thrived on the vice it claimed to eliminate, until it ultimately collapsed under its own absurdity.
DEI works similarly: unable to coexist in harmony, conflict becomes necessary. Division keeps it relevant; once the obsession over identity stops, funding for the DEI office disappears. It's for this reason that we find manufactured grievances, suspicion rewarded, and resentment that transforms into the engine of its survival.
We're not witnessing inclusion; we see cannibalism.
https://pjmedia.com/david-manney/2025/08/23/dei-is-eating-its-own-a-soviet-echo-in-wisconsin-n4942970