Joe Scarborough’s latest sermon on Morning Joe could have been plucked straight from a DEI consultant’s PowerPoint deck — and just as misleading. In defending diversity, equity, and inclusion, Scarborough didn’t just spin; he flat-out rewrote definitions and cherry-picked Reagan to cover the holes in his argument.
First, Scarborough claimed that the “E” in DEI stands for equality. It doesn’t, and he knows it. It stands for equity — a word carefully chosen by activists because it is not equality.
Equality means equal opportunity, the American promise enshrined in the Declaration of Independence: the right to pursue happiness. Equity means equal outcomes, regardless of merit or effort. It is government acting as the happiness provider for favored groups, doling out benefits and privileges until everyone is forced into the same outcome.
Scarborough blurred the difference because even he knows “equity” doesn’t sell outside MSNBC’s studio bubble.
Then there’s Scarborough’s invocation of E Pluribus Unum — out of many, one. He argued that DEI reflects this ideal, that diversity itself is America’s strength. But here’s the bait-and-switch: DEI does not preach unity. It celebrates permanent separation into identity groups. It’s not “out of many, one,” it’s “out of many, many.” Multiculturalism over assimilation. Group grievance over national identity. Scarborough’s version of “diversity” sounds patriotic, but the DEI model splinters America into tribes competing for spoils.
Scarborough even tried to enlist Ronald Reagan as a DEI spokesman, citing his January 1989 address praising America’s immigrant heritage. But Reagan wasn’t talking about “diversity” in the leftist sense of box-checking and quotas. He was celebrating immigrants who believed in the American dream, who assimilated and renewed pride in the United States as the “last, best hope of man on Earth.”
Today’s DEI activists, and too many politicians like Ilhan Omar, don’t see America that way. They see a nation to be criticized, deconstructed, and rebuilt into their ideological utopia. That’s not Reagan’s vision — it’s the opposite.
Scarborough closed with a laugh line: “Inclusion! Who’s against inclusion?” As if the word itself settled the argument. But Americans know what DEI “inclusion” means in practice: box-checking over merit, boys in girls’ sports, drag queens in libraries, and conservatives told they don’t belong.
Inclusion, as defined by DEI bureaucrats, isn’t about welcoming everyone. It’s about excluding anyone who won’t bow to progressive orthodoxy.
