Nina Nickolson is packing up her office. The recently fired DEI consultant with a major American car manufacturer says it’s hard to condense four years of diversity, equity and inclusion into a box. And she is just one of the many DEI corporate consultants across the country who are losing their jobs in no small part thanks to the decisive anti-woke election win of Donald J. Trump.
The 36-year-old former Deputy Officer of DEI Policy tells GWU! she and her team of 28 ‘diverse’ employees were told on a company WhatsApp group that the entire department had been made redundant. The news came only hours after the historic November 5th win of Republican Donald Trump.
“I read the message and I was all like, ‘What!’ exclaims the now unemployed grifter. “We were doing such important work at our company! Improving equity and equality, like, literally in every division. Even in seatbelts!”
She goes on to tell GWU! that her DEI department spearheaded many important social justice initiatives that helped the company show they cared about diversity.
“Did you know that Black people don’t like wearing seatbelts? It’s a statistic. Like, science. We were making a real impact on getting BIPOCs to belt up with our idea for see through seatbelts. We called them ‘colorless straps’ to remove the stigma of control that traditional colonial seatbelts evoke to folxs of color.”
While Nickelson freely admits that the translucent seatbelts the manufacturer introduced were ultimately recalled due to people not knowing whether or not they’d put them on, the work was nonetheless ‘Super important.’
Corporate DEIing
Major American corporations including Harley-Davidson, Google, Meta, Lowe’s, John Deer, Anheuser-Busch and scores of other industry leading brands have publicly shifted away from, or totally dumped, DEI policies citing public backlash and lawsuits over discriminatory practices.
While many companies were quick to jump on the 2020 BLM bandwagon after drug dealer and convicted felon George Floyd died of a drug overdose, many, including Nickolson, initially doubted the authenticity of their commitment to change.
“I was fresh out of grad school and working at a non-profit women’s shelter in Portland for transwomen when I saw on Reddit that companies needed people like me. Independent thinkers who would shake up the established establishment. I wasn’t sure, but the chance to alter hearts and minds of bible thumping hillbillies really appealed to me. I guess it’s because I care. Plus they barely looked at my resume and offered me six figures to mostly work from home.”
The Left Can’t MEME or DOGE
It’s not just private companies that are wokewashing their workforce. The US federal government is already seeing an uptick in DEI employees jumping from the sinking ship they commandeered during the Biden/Harris era.
The writing on the wall in the federal bureaucracy that the cost savings team of Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy with their Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) cull useless programs such as DEI. Government officials have privately leaked that employees involved in DEI have been resigning en masse and their positions are not being replaced by managers fearful of the DOGE.
Crash Test DEI Dummies
Despite the current anti-woke market trends, one of Nickolsons former auto competitors is moving full speed ahead with DEI. Jaguar recently began a bizarre and divisive abstract new ad campaign. It features a diverse group of young people in bright outlandish outfits romping around posing with anvils in the desert without a car insight. The weird new rebranding of the 90-year-old vehicle maker has faced open mockery online with consumers wondering “if the company still sells cars?” with one user on X renaming the classic automobile “Fagular.”
Disillusioned by her companies about face on DEI, Nickolson says that she still believes in the important work she and her colleagues accomplished over the past four years.
“We formed so many valuable work-related connections with all the various ethnic groups in the organization to really get to know ‘the other.’ For example, I found out at our international potluck that burritos and tacos are too different things. Mexicans are so interesting!”
With a sigh and an eye roll, Nickolson picks up the small cardboard box on her desk. She turns to shut off the lights, one last time on the office she spent ‘several hours at every few weeks.’
“Maybe this was always going to happen, corporate America turning its back on the most vulnerable. Or maybe we should have done things slightly differently to not turn the MAGA chuds against us. Or maybe it’s the Transession, I don’t know, but the one thing I will never regret is the four paid months off I took to campaign for Kamala Harris working online from Puerto Vallarta.”
