I did my annual DEI certification at work the other day. It’s the same one I’ve done here since 2022. The training video is produced by a company called KnowBe4, which specializes in workplace risk reduction: “15+ years of behavior data, 70,000 global customers, 12-in-production security awareness agents…1 of 3 full time US workers has been trained by us.” Not a fly-by-night operation, and not unrepresentative of corporate DEI training. Just the reverse. The norm.

The training took all of 15 minutes. What did I learn? Six woke lessons.

1. Though human diversity is widely seen as a liability in business, it’s just as often an asset. When suitably subordinated to corporate aims, diversity enhances the whole.

Woke jail for sale, Elizabeth, New Jersey

2. There is visible and invisible diversity. Visible diversity includes perceptible things like race and gender. Invisible diversity includes imperceptible things like diversity of thought, and diversity of background, e.g., military veteran status. Visible diversity constitutes 20% of the diversity in the world, invisible diversity constitutes 80%. Obviously, invisible diversity is the more important consideration, and should take precedence to its invisible counterpart: cognitive diversity beats ethnic diversity; military veteran status beats gender. (No attempt was made to explain how these figures were calculated, or where they came from.)

3. Adherence to the norms of DEI leads to higher productivity, hence higher profitability. Since profitability is our corporate raison d’etre, diversity is our corporate sine qua non.

Woke law enforcement officers, Newark, New Jersey

4. The “equity” component of DEI denotes fairness, not strict equality. Strict equality is absurdly inappropriate to corporate life, and probably to life as such. Hence fairness, not equality, is the value that governs the workplace.

5. Equity is reasonably applied to questions of employee compensation. That said, equity demands that employees make improved use of the company benefits package already available to them rather than make demands for, say, increased pay.

Woke conversationalists, Newark, New Jersey

6. When DEI-related problems inevitably arise on the job, it’s largely the responsibility of rank-and-file employees to solve them by “micro-actions,” rather than relying on the “macro-actions” of the company as such. “Micro-action” is a synonym for self-generated action. “Macro-action” is a synonym for action undertaken by the company in a corporate capacity.

Woke concentration camp, Newark, New Jersey

These six lessons were then applied to four concrete cases, as follows.

Case 1. Three stereotypical corporate white guys sit around a table, wondering how to hire staff for a bilingual IT help desk. None of the white guys are bilingual, none seems to know anyone bilingual, and none, obviously, has ever felt the need to make use of a bilingual IT help desk. Lessons (1) and (2) above ride to their rescue. The upshot: perhaps they should ask someone bilingual for advice.

Woke medical outcome, Newark, New Jersey

Case 2. The company has moved to a new four day schedule. Employees work the same total hours, but do so on four days rather than five, so that their day begins earlier and ends later than before. Most of the employees discussing the idea love it, except for one who rides the bus to work. It turns out that the last bus leaves before the end of the new work day, so that under the new arrangement, she has no way of getting home. It looks like she has, alas, been excluded by company policy.

Obviously, company policy can’t be changed for a reason as trivial as this (nor can the company be expected to have thought of this ahead of time), so lesson (6) applies: the bus rider’s co-workers (not the company) will have to think of some way of helping her, presumably by driving her home themselves. There is some vague suggestion that the co-workers might ask the company for a shuttle or a paid ride service, but there is also the suggestion in the same conversation that no such shuttle or ride service is feasible or forthcoming, and that asking is inappropriate. Upshot: ultimately, the employees are on their own.

Woke public service announcement, Central New Jersey

Case 3.  A company meeting or outing is scheduled not for the office but at an attractive beachside park in the form of a picnic. (The picnic is implied; no food or beverages are visible.) Yet the manager who had arranged the meeting had somehow forgotten that Frank, one of the employees he manages, is physically disabled and unable easily to access the meeting. Once again, lesson (6) becomes salient. Upshot: having the meeting at a distant, inaccessible location was a mistake and should not happen again.

Woke aircraft carrier, Norfolk, Virginia

Case 4. An employee residing in a faraway time zone is hired. This employee lives so far away that when it’s daytime there, it’s night-time here, and vice versa. A meeting is scheduled for 1 pm here, except that 1 pm here is 4 am there. Should the faraway employee be expected to attend the meeting at 4 am? No. That wouldn’t be inclusive or equitable. Should the larger group be obliged to re-schedule the meeting for 4 am their time? No; that, too, would be exclusive and inequitable. Once again, lesson (6) leaves its mark. Action item: clearly, a different solution must be sought.

Pretty subversive stuff. This is the form that DEI characteristically takes in corporate life around the country. Fifteen minutes of a 115,200 minute work year—0.00013% of the total–are spent inculcating the cliches and nostrums of capitalist life, re-packaged in the lexicon of “the Woke Left.” Once inculcated, the cliches and nostrums are upheld and acted on without question, every day, eight hours a day for the entire year, and every year after that; meanwhile, the leftist jargon is either forgotten or becomes a laugh line. Nobody has the time for anything else.

Woke military recruiting station, Times Square, New York

The re-description of this situation into a “woke” leftist plot to seize the means of production and establish socialism in America has got to be one of the most spectacular frauds—and mass delusions–of the last thirty years. Only con artists, ideologues and fools could believe in the reality of such a thing. Apparently, there’s no shortage of such people to go around.

I work for a big multinational corporation, funded by private equity, in the shadow of other multinational corporations, in a place called Metropark, New Jersey. There are no woke socialists out here, DEI or not. The C Suite may fly the Pride flag. It may give lip service to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Every now and then someone complains about discrimination, and more often than not is fired shortly thereafter and never heard from again.

Woke summer camp for 7-13 year olds, including flight simulations in a B-52 bomber, intended to inculcate the virtues of saturation bombing, West Orange, New Jersey

In five years of working at this company, I have not encountered a single person anywhere who sincerely upholds the norms of wokeness or cares about them in any way at all—not the CEO, not the VPs, not the directors, not the managers, not the rank and file, not our clients, not our adversaries in the insurance industry, not a single clinician, not even the corporate proletariat: not the package delivery people, the maintenance staff, the cafeteria workers, or the janitors. No one. It’s wall-to-wall capitalism out here as far as the eye can see. We’re here for revenue. We’re here to make money. We’re here to “grow” the company until there’s no room for it to get any bigger than it is. There’s no time for woke politics.

Woke Intersex Inclusive Pride flag flying at the corporate offices of a company whose predecessor developed the Zyklon B gas used in the gas chambers of the Holocaust, BASF Building, Metropark, New Jersey

The only guy with any time on his hands–the guy who staffs the front desk in the lobby of our building–spends the day watching Fox News. They fired our IT Director (and never replaced him), but that’s what he spent the day doing, too. Every now and then, our programmers and developers go out to lunch. Four out of five them voted for Trump. Two of the four are “people of color”; a third is Ukrainian. (Not making that up.) They spent their last lunch making fun of Zohran Mamdani. The closest thing I’ve heard to a woke thought at work is a comment from the denials rep down the hall who said she regretted voting for Trump because her cousin was denied TPS. That’s what passes for wokeness in corporate America.

Woke weapons transport company, Edison, New Jersey

It should be a matter of amazement that DEI has become the divisive issue it is in this country, trumping warfare, immigration, affordability, health care, transportation, and even the rule of law for attention. How did something so ephemeral and silly come to acquire the overriding significance it’s come to have? How did people turn anodyne corporate cliches into a leftist plot? How did so many people miss the corporate capitalist funding behind this supposedly left-wing plot, and how did they miss the painfully obvious fact that the plot never materialized or even seemed to want to materialize in any concretely left-wing product?  The answer, I think, is that they didn’t really “miss” it. At some level, I think most people knew that there was nothing there beyond PR campaigns and corporate-image cosmetology, but were happy to pretend that there was.

Woke university, Princeton, New Jersey

The real conspiracy here is not a leftist plot, but the confabulation of one in broad daylight by people who adduced almost nothing by way of evidence for it but underwhelming anecdotes baked in overheated rhetoric. It’s because people bought a scam so transparent that we live in a fascist country. If woke leftism was the force people thought it was, it would have put up more of a fight against the Right to stay alive. It didn’t because it wasn’t. It didn’t because the whole thing was a right-wing fraud from the outset, a McCarthyite pretext for the seizure of power. It’s started fading from view because it’s achieved its object. The power has been seized. There’s no need for a pretext when there’s nothing left to conceal.

“DEI is an ideology of racial discrimination” (Christopher Rufo). “Wokeism is a new secular religion” (Vivek Ramaswamy). “DEI is pathological” (Jordan Peterson). “Wokeness is a cult” (James Lindsay). “Wokeness is a form of moral rot” (Ben Shapiro). DEI is “a revolutionary movement” (Victor Davis Hanson).

Woke campus speaker, Princeton University

It’s none of those things. It’s nothing. It’s only become something in the hands of ideological puppet masters like Rufo, Ramaswamy, and Peterson et al, all so in love with their creations ex nihilo that they’ve convinced themselves and others that they’ve succeeded at the metaphysically impossible. Like all creations ex nihilo, wokeness is more myth than reality. But as with all creations ex nihilo, that won’t stop its creators from being the objects of worship.

Woke downtown, Omaha, Nebraska

No matter how many anecdotes anyone thinks they can adduce to the contrary, how many woke horror stories they think they have, how much irritation they feel at the wokeness they think surrounds them, there’s no getting away from the following facts: the average American’s only actual contact with wokeness takes  the form of the sort of DEI training I’ve just described; this training is obviously a sub-marginal part of their lives; and a look at the political state of the country demonstrates beyond any reasonable doubt how paper-thin the entire exercise was.

Woke voting patterns, Omaha, Nebraska

No actual institution in this country is “woke.” Anti-woke forces control the government, the military, higher education, the media, and corporate life. This is true today, it was true a year ago, it was true five years ago, it was true five years before that, and will be true five years from now. There is no such thing as a “woke” country that detains 10,000 people a week in order to deport them, that starts wars at the drop of a hat, that lacks abortion rights, and that dictates policy at gunpoint to educational institutions from kindergarten to the post-doctoral level.

Woke workplace messaging, Metropark, New Jersey

Wokeness is and always was a distraction for those willing to be distracted by it–ultimately, a pretext for totalitarian terror of the kind we’ve now come to normalize. The question is not what to do about the supposed problem it represents, but what to do about the fact that people think it is one. Ironically, the answer is that something has to be done to wake people up. Good luck doing that after putting so much effort into putting them to sleep.