DEI is Going Underground - What to Watch

Hi, and welcome back to Inconvenient Truths with Kenny Shoe.

I'm your host, Kenny Shoe, and today we are going to go into some of the bread and butter,

right, about why DEI and CRT exists.

Now most of this podcast, this is just an intro.

Most of the podcast is actually recorded conversation that I did with the news site Restoration of America,

which is a publication that I also write for.

They had a chance to interview me over Zoom, and you can find the entire Zoom conversation on their website,

but the audio only they graciously allowed me to retract it back to my own podcast,

because I think that the information that I revealed there is valuable.

This Restoration of America interview with me is all about America Post Students for Fair Admissions.

America and DEI and CRT is DEI and CRT really in retreat.

What can we expect from the education system, and why did DEI and CRT come about in the first place,

meaning that if we can track how those ideologies came about in the education system in the first place,

we can then learn what the next tactic of open society liberals are.

And this interview, I think, will help to guide you to reveal a little bit more of my thinking,

historically, how I came to the positions that I came to, and what I believe about where DEI and CRT are.

I think that it was a very effective ideology to trap certain minorities in the false narrative that America is a racist country.

That narrative was then used to divide America into liberal factions that enabled New York Jewish elites to gain power in the system.

And so I've revealed a little bit more additional evidence there to support those conclusions in the Restoration of America interview.

And I elucidate that thesis a little bit better, but I hope you enjoy this interview that I had with Restoration of America. Here it is.

Hey guys, if you could do me a favor before I move on, I'd like you to rate this podcast, five stars, and review it, give it a review.

I haven't really advertised this podcast super much, but your encouragement means a great deal to me to keep going and to continue to push the issues as far as it would go.

You know that my style of analysis is mathematical. It's logical. It's philosophical. I just gave you some really scathing definitions of conservatism and liberalism.

And what it means in the modern age and how it's changing, if this content, if this podcast is valuable to you, yeah, give it a like rate at five stars.

It means a big deal. Thanks so much. And now back to the show.

I'm Hayden Ludwig. The left is discovering that racializing everything carries a price. After decades of dividing the nation into victim groups, Americans are uniting around a theme of anti-anti-races.

No more victim groups, no more diversity mandates, and no more anti-white hatred. And by bit, the country is freeing itself from the wokeocracy that's ruled us since Barack Obama with the biggest fights centered on higher education.

My guest today is Kenny Xu, a young warrior for merit who leads Colorous United, one of the leading organizations battling against woke discrimination.

Kenny, thank you for joining the show. Hey Hayden, how are you? Glad you could join us today. So let's hit the table here.

DEI isn't what it used to be and thank God for that. The Supreme Court overturned affirmative action in schools in 2023, as you know.

But universities such as University of North Carolina are banning DEI and hiring decisions, which means they're going far beyond the Supreme Court.

You were part of both of those victories, and there are many more, of course, that we could list here.

So Kenny, as we start off, give us the big picture on where the war on woke stands in 2026.

You know, I think it's at a little bit of a holding pattern. I think people are not totally exactly sure what the next leftist iteration of woke was.

So this iteration of woke just to give you a background during the students for fair admissions case, which I helped to fight with my writing and advocacy and some of which you can find on restoration of America.

DEI was very plain and very obvious. DEI was very much white people are racist. You need to apologize for your right for your whiteness. Also math standards are racist.

And also we have the right to discriminate against you as long as it's against white people and Asian people and not for them.

And so these were a melding of logically emotionally contradictory messages mixed with a kind of tutting and patronizing attitude that made woke very unsatisfying for the majority of Americans.

And so I and a lot of other activists and writers were able to take advantage of that obvious this.

And I think that the left understands why we won that iteration of the war, why universities are now saying we don't practice DEI, why Harvard, actually the whole Harvard things a different situation.

But basically why DEI is in a bit of a retreat right now, but that doesn't mean it's going away because there are true believers that are in the university system, which took 50, 60 years to populate with ideological leftists.

And they continue to push their agenda in more subtle ways, not just in more subtle ways, but in ways that I think we're going to discuss in this podcast.

In fact, academia in in a sort of in a sort of way that the average American can't really spot.

And so it's sort of my job as a writer to kind of spot those trends and react against it so that the average American can.

Yeah, so let's just to kind of backtrack a little bit the students for fair admissions case before the Supreme Court in 2023 that you were part of overturned affirmative action in universities. Is that correct?

Yeah, so in 2023 the Supreme Court decided in the case students for fair admissions versus Harvard and I was a board member of students for fair admissions at the time.

They decided that race based preferences in admissions are unconstitutional.

And the reason why they did it was because a group of Asian Americans sued Harvard University, the leading university in the entire United States for racial discrimination in admissions and they had the evidence because the evidence showed based on Harvard's own 10,000 pages of admissions filing data.

That SAT scores grades, if you're an Asian American, you were not getting admitted, even though if you were a black American or a list Hispanic American, if you had the same ones or even lower grades, you were getting admitted.

So in Asian at the top 10% of his academic profile, only a 5 to 10% chance of admission, whereas the black Hispanic at the top 10% of his academic profile, you had a 25, 30, even 50% chance of admission, depending on the year.

Yeah, so this is this is a sort of a radical reintroduction of the elimination of meritocracy from admissions. And so that's why we fought back and ultimately won and prevailed in the Supreme Court.

Yeah, and so DEI in a lot of respects what you just laid out there is just an update or rebranding of 1960s affirmative actions. So it's a it's a bigger victory because this really goes back to the civil rights era excesses of the 1960s that have been overturned in the last few years here.

And I think it's interesting because you're talking about how the fight for DEI is basically, you know, the left's on their back heels here. It's going back to the universities that actually birthed a lot of the anti white racist ideas, diversity equity inclusion, critical race theory, they don't come out and know where they come out of sociology departments and feminist study departments.

And we can talk about Harvard, for instance, Claudine Gay, you know, is the famously under qualified former Harvard president, right, as you well know. Yeah, one of the things you've you've floated as a solution to defeating these guys is taxing their endowments. I think that's brilliant. Tell us about that.

Yeah, so I've written a number of articles for you guys for restoration America. And I've been around the block talking as one of one of my ideas.

The idea of the endowment tax, right. And the endowment tax is something that was being floated through Congress for a little while.

And I'll tell you what happens to the result of this bill, but it actually was introduced in Congress by several Republican members of Congress that basically said they're going to levy a tax on endowments that are above $2 million per student.

So let's say Harvard or any university has 10,000 students, it's $2 million per, you know, that would be a $20 billion if they have an endowment higher than $20 billion are going to be taxed on that excess.

Sure.

And Harvard has less than that and they have a $50 billion, $60 billion endowment. So of course they would face a lot of that tax.

And the reason why, right, the reason why we want to do this is because we want to encourage universities to just not sit on their money and to actually innovate.

Right. If you want a more equitable society, then you have to actually lead yourself, you know, you need to actually make your calls more than just glorified hedge funds for the small elite.

You know, so you can shout from the rooftops about equity all you want, but guess what, practice what you preach.

And of course the universities, which are famously left wing in speech now suddenly become these right wingers where they say, we don't want to be taxed.

No, don't don't don't tax our endowments. Let us fade off in the sunset with this big pile of money.

And so I think that that would have been a great solution to help them practice what they preach would have been a little bit of a tongue in cheek solution.

But ultimately, you know, they the Harvard people were able to bring their lobbyists in the last minute in the situation influencing Republican senators like Senator Tom Tillis in North Carolina to actually vote against that iteration of the bill.

And what, what resulted, unfortunately, was a much, in my opinion, a much weaker endowment tax instead of an endowment tax that was 5% of endowment, it was less than 0.1% of endowments and really would not be a significant hits universities.

But it is a foot in the door. It does leave open the possibility of we're watching you, you know, we could come back and do this again.

I've one of the funniest, most cleverest ruthless solutions that I've seen if you really want to divide the left.

Tax the endowments and then take all of that and tax them aggressively and take all that money and pay it out to black Americans as slavery reparations.

I mean, think about what that would do. I mean, it would split the entire coalition of the progressive left from its legion of, you know, I pay you to vote Democrat.

I think it's a brilliant idea, frankly.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I was I was steeped in the American university system for a long time. I mean, look, I mean, I grew up with Asian parents.

I mean, I think I was just trying to get me into university, the best university all kinds. And I got the scores and I got a chance to see what it has become.

And I didn't just come into university thinking, oh, this is going to be my crusade against universities like I experienced that excess. I experienced this e logic inside the university system myself and organically grew to come and oppose it.

I mean, universities are in need of a major rethinking of their core focus. You're not a playground for adults. You're not designed to provide jobs for administrators as I wrote brown universities, you know, had over two thirds of their jobs is basically excess jobs.

So you're not going to provide an elite academic education. And that's the first purpose of a university. And if you're not getting there, then, then you really need to downsize on it.

Yeah, that makes sense. America's universities are one of the best weapons we have when it comes to geopolitics, you know, creating the attraction of the bite, the brightest minds in the world.

And they haven't been used that way effectively. There's this, this rot, this corrosion that's come in and effectively it's become a weapon for the left because the left, you know, as we know, progressives don't have children, they take your children.

And this is one of the ways that we pay them to take our young minds away from us. And we're not producing the best and brightest anymore if indoctrination is the outcome here. So I completely agree with you.

You know, one of the themes of your work, Kenny has been free speech. Let's talk a little bit about the, you know, there's been some personal cost to you there for being a champion of free speech, hasn't there?

Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think in, I think in various ways, I definitely am a free speech maximalist. So for example, I support kids right to protests, they can protest, you know, whatever government they want, whether it's the government of Israel or China, you know, or any, you know, what they're doing to the Uyghurs.

But yeah, I think that there have been these university, I think at Columbia, for example, in Brown, some of the presidents over there gotten to a lot of trouble when they sort of allowed.

When, when protesters were sort of in Columbia and Harvard and those kind of MIT and they were protesting for the Palestine state and some of them were pro-Hamas and then some of the donors, the Jewish donors at Columbia and those things, they got mad at them and they threatened to cut their funding and then these universities are kind of like in a bind these universities, what are they going to do?

But my solution is, look, just, just enforce the principle, like if you at UNC Chapel Hill, if you're a university administrator, what they did was no property damage, you can't come in, you can't take classes away from students, other than that, you have the right to free speech and I think things went better at UNC.

When protesters were overwhelming in Columbia based on that and got violent, they should definitely crack down upon it, but they shouldn't send these messages like, okay, we're going to protect, we're just going to stamp out on your free speech rights, just because, you know, you face, you face a position that our donors don't like, that's not what the purpose of university is.

Yeah, I agree with that. I wonder how you balance free speech maximalism on a university campus while also being really open-eyed about how the Marxists left since at least the 1960s, probably before, has seen these as institutions to conquer, you know, bastions of, there's a reason why there are fewer conservative professors now in the university system than there were decades ago, right, even when we were small.

So how do we balance the tension there of, you know, we want these to be places where you can go and express ideas, of course, that should be one of the purposes of university.

While also recognizing, you know, the Marxists left wants to dominate them, they already do, but if you're fighting the kind of culture where that you are, where it's about overturning affirmative action, overturning DEI in hiring practices and in student admissions, you are going for, you know, the very heart of the woke culture.

Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah, I think that the, here's the problem, so I considered, even in high school, when I was applying to colleges, I considered taking the go along to get along approach, you know, I grew up as a Christian, and I actually wrote a pretty evangelical essay in my application to Princeton University.

At the time, I was not aware of all of these national political situations, I was like a 17 and 18 year old, and maybe I should have been more aware, but I didn't realize that that kind of essay would land me in trouble with the admission staff.

And I didn't get in, you know, and there are people in my university, people in my high school who got in with lower qualifications, but I think that the essay might have hurt me, you know, in that admissions process, and that's a personal thing, because as a kid, you blame yourself.

And I realized in that moment, eventually I came in terms with it by realizing this, you know, either I'm going to compromise my faith,

and I'm just never going to speak ever, and I'm just going to try to conform, or I'm actually going to, you know, try and do something about the system that actually will ignore and denigrate people like me.

So, eventually that realization came to, if I do nothing, the system is just going to be allowed to stand anyways.

It's just going to continue to discriminate against Christian applicants, against people who speak out about their Christian faith, against people who want to, you know, do well at these subjects, but maybe I'm a little more introverted.

It's going to just attack these people anyway, so eventually I decided it's going to come at a cost to me, and it certainly has, but I am going to speak out, and I'm glad that those words that I did during that time caught fire, and I just, I'm not saying it hasn't come without consequences to me, it certainly has, but I accept it.

I have one life, I'm going to use it to make a difference.

Did the assassination of Charlie Kirk in September make you rethink any of that? I mean, how did that rock your world at all?

My parents became scared, you know, they became scared of what I write, what I post, what I go on podcasts and talk about, you know, they, of course, they have every right to be right, because they come from a country where really, like if you speak out from the government too much, like you are going to get

negative consequences from the government, and as of yet, the government hasn't come after me or anything like that, but there's always that thing in the back of my mind, but at the same time, because I'm a man of faith, because I'm a man who chose this path at the age of 19 years old, you know, starting a conservative club at my university, Davidson College at 19, 20 years old.

I just realized that what Charlie Kirk live for and what he ultimately died for is powerful and dangerous in it of itself.

And so the best thing that I can do for myself, for the world, for Christ, is to continue that mission. So just call me another loyal foot soldier in the work that Charlie Kirk continues to do on this earth.

I love that great, great answer. You know, you and I are about the same age. Do you sense what do you think is the is the current lay of the land with free speech among, you know, Gen Z and millennials, you know, is it coming back to people see this because in the wake of Charlie's death, you know, it really showed how many people in their 20s realize, oh my God, if we don't have the ability to speak our minds in politics.

Let alone anything else. We don't have a country. We don't have a future.

Yeah, Charlie was 32 when he died, and I'm 28 years old. So I am barely one graduation cycle from Charlie Kirk. And what he was able to create was something that even people like me at 23 was jealous about.

You know, I was, I was jealous about it a little bit. And I had attained a little bit of that as well. But then, you know, when he died, it just made me realize, oh my goodness, like this is not about, you know, me and my legacy and his legacy.

And there's no reason to be selfish in this. There is a very insidious thing that's going on in American soil, a cultural thing, and everybody's got to contribute.

Everybody's got a rally to that charge to save education because who is he assassinated by? He was assassinated by basically someone that you could substitute in any, you know, local

leftist to four, you know, he was a trans rights guy and a person who, you know, really pushed that agenda in front of his friends and everybody knows one of these people from college and university.

And he himself just got radicalized and he took out a gun and he shot him, you know, and somebody did the same to try to do the same President Trump.

Like these people are not, are using this as a weapon of intimidation, but they could be anyone. And so for me, I can embody that part of the personality and just be like, I'm, I'm, I'm anyone, I'm anyone and I just got to stand up and do my part.

So what's next on the agenda for this battle against DEI? You know, is it, does it remain in the universities? What is President Trump engaged in? You know, what are you trying to get the conservative movement to see that is currently on your radar?

Yeah, yeah.

Um, I guess everything that I post on my, on my ex fee.

The end, you know, he just closed it right there. Yeah.

Just follow Penny's shoe.

Yeah, just following on Kenny's shoe, you'll see exactly what I'm concerned about.

So yeah, the, I say on a larger purview, one, the fact that, you know, kids are, are the teachers are spending more time teaching kids to, you know, be social indoctrination at activists, rather than to, you know, learn hard sciences, hard math, and even just that way of thinking, because that way of thinking is very logical.

Um, and it leads to bridges being built. It leads to things being built. It leads to bonds being forged and it leads to true leadership, leadership traits.

So I want to try to do my part to push it for a better education system at the K 12 level and the higher education level to free speech.

Um, you know, I was the, um, it is, it is so important to me that people have not just the right, but are really encouraged to speak from the heart to speak things as they see it.

You know, um, these, these people, these protesters and these activists, these universities, they've been funded.

And they've been basically weaponized for 50 and 60 years by millionaires and, and billionaires, um, who are in the orbit of the Epstein cycle.

Epstein's circle, who are contributing six million, seven million to Harvard right now, a hundred million, you know, to get their kid in.

And, um, and who come from these deeply secular Marxist ideologies stem from the Frankfurt school.

Uh, I don't think that, I think that what I just said is about probably the, the most summative of what I believe about how these universities got this way.

And it's a little controversial, but it's true. It's historical. It's a historical fact. And it's, uh, born out right now in, in the funding arrangements of these universities.

And so to push back against that and to stand up for free speech and, um, excellence in these universities is a very American thing.

Well, you're, yeah, you're actually, you're putting your, your finger right on it. The Frankfurt school is a great example of this, um, kind of the cultural Marxism that we're battling.

There's a whole lot of words and phrases we could use to describe this, but describe the Frankfurt school and give us a little bit of the overview here.

Yeah, and I've gone into more detail about it on my book School of Woke. It's my most recently released book and it needs to sell more copies because everybody who's read it has just come out and been excited by it.

Yeah, so the Frankfurt school is, um, is a, uh, is this, is a school of like intellectual and political thought that started.

It bears its name from the Frankfurt, Germany, a lot of German Jewish exiles came to the United States. Um, and basically just started to get into the university system, which was very open to people like this at the time, because of taking in Holocaust and migraines and, you know, and, and diversity and inclusion tolerance, right.

Tolerance. And that's, you know, so they got into these universities. Marcusa is one of them, Horkheimer is another, is another one of them, but they are Marxists at their core.

And, um, they created these theories of repressive tolerance, AKA, um, Marcusa said, um, tolerance for me, not for the, okay, you extend me tolerance. Well, I'm not going to tolerate your capitalist rightist ideas.

Tolerance is only good when it benefits the tolerant open society. Um, and, and so that's just, I mean, that's just one example of Frankfurt school thinking where they bend these ideas, the ideas that actually make America a tolerant and inquire in place, and then they weaponize it to really just be anti anything that is American.

And, um, there critical theory was born critical theory states and critical race theory when you mix it in with race basically says, sure, people can be racist against you, the minoritized population, but I can't be racist against you, Hayden.

You're a white man, right, Madrid, so it's this, uh, this relentlessly dichotomous, Marxian impulse that came in from this era of time. And I think that that's really what I feel called to battle right now.

Yeah, you know, one of the most prominent examples I can think of coming out of the October 7th, 2023 terror attacks that, you know, everybody's aware of. So it's, it's very prominent in our minds right now is the strange way that to a harbor Marcusa influenced critical race theory influenced leftist in America today,

Jews are a minority in America, so therefore they can't be racist against the majority, but Jews in Israel are the majority, they have the power, therefore they're the oppressor.

And the Palestinian Arabs can't be racist against them. It makes no sense until you follow the bizarre internal logic of that kind of critical thinking.

And it does have an internal logic, you can come to certain conclusions that only makes sense if you start with the lens that they have.

And one of the things I think it's important for people to understand is, what's Marxist about it? It's not talking about the proletariat and private property. No, but it's a dichotomy, as you said, between the haves and the have-nots, the good guys and the bad guys.

And all of the violence, the intolerance, everything always has to channel one way, because I mean philosophically Marxism is just about revenge, dressed up as justice.

You know, I don't like something about what you have or what you've done or who you are, so I'm going to smash you or take whatever you have, and I'm going to say that's justice.

You've gotten what you deserve and I get whatever's yours.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that that's what it descends into, Hayden, if you really follow Frankfurt School thought, if you really follow this kind of thought, you basically get to, everybody is against me, always me, but once I get into power, I can do whatever I want.

And of course, that's not liberal, you know, that, that is not liberal, lowercase L.

Yeah, classical liberal, yeah. Classical liberal. It's a very, very totalitarian.

Yeah, you're absolutely right about that. I guess big question as we close out, Kenny, then, you know, is that gain, that kind of thinking that you just described, is that gaining traction among people our own age?

Or do you think people have seen enough and it's starting maybe to turn around?

It's hard to tell when we're in the thick of it, but where do you see the trajectory of the nation going on these issues?

I think I think I'll, to that, I'll respond by bringing up the first point that we had in the conversation, which is how subtle the new machinations are going to be.

They got a little bit too out of out of sorts, America reacted against it, that kind of thing.

But among people, my own age, I will say, in North Carolina, where I lived, I think people who are like in their late 30s, early 40s, I think that they're most prone to this kind of thing because I totally agree.

I don't know, yeah, I don't know, I don't know if you agree. Yeah, okay, I'm glad you agree.

I'm 33 and there's a big difference between people who are 35 and older and 35 and younger. There's a stark difference.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, because we got it all, we got the brun of it in our whole education system, but we got so much of it that it just became to be kind of passate us a little bit.

Yeah, and I think the even younger generation, the generation that I'm talking to now, who are in their early 20s and late teens and adjusting college.

I think that they're really seeing, oh my gosh, like we live in a liberal and a leftist hive mind in college and they're really, some of them are really, really good.

But yeah, like late 30s, early 40s, I mean, that's when, that's when these leftist ideas combined with all the thing, all of the liberal victories of that, of that age, you know, a burger fell a Roe v. Wade when

the sexual politics were at the forefront when you just looked like a racist and a sexist, whenever you said anything like that and they were just indoctrinated in that whole mindset and nobody built up any kind of resistance or snake skin to that too.

And so when I hear it from somebody of that age, you know, my heart just goes out to them, you know, my heart just goes out to them.

But you have to answer it with a lot, you have to answer it with a combination of logic and just being very, very, very bold and just being like, okay, you hear somebody say, oh my gosh, like look at all those racists in Georgia who are, you know, voting for Trump or whatever.

And I'm like, really?

And then they look at you and they look especially they look at me they're like, no, no.

And I'm like, not you.

I disagree with you.

I just flat out disagree with you.

And then they they they have this like look of like shock on their mind like, oh my gosh.

That doesn't guide you younger than me.

Disgrease with me.

And it just it totally in warp it, you know, it's like a huge realization bomb and actually sometimes they're nicer to you.

Because they're just been locked into that channel channel forever.

So I truly believe by the way that that's like the more Christian way of doing it.

A more evangelicalistic way of doing it.

Where you're not forcing it upon them, but you are providing that wooden block, that block of granite.

Maybe granite isn't the right word, but you know that block of stone.

Yeah, that that just halts them in their path and makes them sort of see the error of their own ways.

That's right.

Yes.

Stumbling block isn't a wall that they walk into.

It's something that makes them look down and go, wait, what did I just run into there?

I totally agree with you on that.

I think that's a really good way of putting it.

Well, clearly you are a man of faith and courage, Kenny Shoes.

So thank you for joining Restoration Spotlight today.

It's been a real pleasure.

And please keep up the courageous fight.

Okay, I will.

I'm Hayden Ludwig and this is Restoration Spotlight, a project of Restoration News.

Your source of headline smashing investigative journalism for the America First Movement.

Check us out at Restoration-News.com.

And until next time, stay brave and trust in God.