Ex-MSNBC host Joy Reid claims Roman Empire fell because of no diversity, warns US will be next
Former MSNBC host Joy Reid blamed a lack of diversity for the fall of the Roman Empire and claimed the United States could go the same way if they don't embrace DEI.
The former "ReidOut" host, along with left-wing political commentator Wajahat Ali, criticized corporations like Walmart and Target on Thursday for scaling back diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) during the Trump administration.
Reid claimed that business and countries need diversity to not only thrive but survive as a nation, comparing it to the Roman Empire and Europe.
"If you take that away and try to distill us just down to White folks, we'll be like Europe, an aging, slowly dying former empire," Reid said during a live Substack video. "The Roman Empire didn't survive because it didn't have enough strength in its diversity. It suppressed its diversity, and it died. If the U.S. wants to be the Roman Empire, keep voting the way you voting, y'all."
Earlier in the podcast, Reid argued corporations appealing to White populations would essentially be targeting customers aged 60 and up, calling them a "finite quantity" that are "going to die."
"If you're under the age of 20 right now, your generational group, the Gen Alpha group, are already majority non-White," Reid said. "So it's fait accompli. In 2045, the United States will be a country that no longer has a White majority."
She continued, "We are essentially a Latin American country, and we're going to look more like Latin American countries, which we kind of are, right? We're going to look more like our region where most people will be brown, and the majority will not be White. Texas is already there. California is already there. The whole country is going in that direction."
Prior to being let go from MSNBC, Reid frequently attacked White people as a voting bloc on her show and on the network, blaming White women for then-Vice President Kamala Harris losing the election in 2024.
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But the aggressive style born under Obama and plied with steroids by Trump is excessive. It serves fringe zealots eager to destroy academia's independence better than majorities who hope to improve higher education. If anything good comes from this moment, perhaps it will be that the left learns to recognize the need for new limits on the administrative state. To enact such a reform, lots of Republicans will need to go back to their former position on limiting bureaucratic coercion. The current era of aggressive civil-rights enforcement began in 2011. At the time, many progressives thought that colleges did not know how to handle sexual violence on campus and that they were responding to complaints in a way that was calculated to protect their image rather than students' safety. Title IX was seen as a solution. The 1972 law states that no person shall, 'on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity.' On April 4, 2011, the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights published a 'Dear Colleague' letter meant to clarify colleges' legal obligations under Title IX. The letter said that every college receiving federal funds had to appoint a Title IX coordinator. And most had to restructure how they treated allegations of sexual violence: College administrators were told to conduct independent investigations of sexual-assault allegations rather than relying on local police; to limit accused students' ability to cross-examine their accusers; to use a 'clear and convincing evidence' standard to find accused students responsible, rather than the higher 'preponderance of the evidence' burden of proof; to eschew mediation; and more. The Department of Education's 'Dear Colleague' letters are supposed to be nonbinding guidance on what existing law requires, not new policy making. Yet the Obama administration was claiming that, to comply with the law, every institution had to adopt new policies that no institution had previously thought were required. The administration went on to investigate dozens of schools for departing from its novel interpretation of Title IX. Behind each probe was a threat: Comply or lose federal funding. The pressure tactic worked. Colleges throughout the United States hired new administrators and lawyers. Many of those expanded campus bureaucracies went on to engage in illiberal excesses. A punitive apparatus 'was being built, expanded, and deployed' to regulate conduct 'further and further from the core cases of sexual assault than most people imagined,' the Harvard law professors Jeannie Suk Gersen and Jacob E. Gersen later wrote in a law-review article. 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At the Department of Justice, the civil-rights attorney Leo Terrell is leading a Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism; at the end of February, he announced visits to 10 campuses, and on March 7, the administration announced that Columbia would lose at least $400 million in federal grants 'due to the school's continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.' According to The New York Times, the Justice Department also recently demanded that the University of Virginia push out its president to 'help resolve a Justice Department investigation into the school's diversity, equity and inclusion efforts'; the president resigned on Friday. As a critic of DEI and anti-Semitism, I understand the impulse to crack down on both, much as I understood the impulse to crack down on sexual violence. But the administration's approach guarantees the same bureaucratic bloat and illiberal excesses that characterized Title IX enforcement. Two of the administration's primary targets have already been subjected to treatment that wildly exceeds reasonable and lawful oversight. In a March 25 letter to Columbia, the Trump administration demanded not only that the university 'complete disciplinary proceedings' related to campus encampments, but that it impose a minimum penalty of expulsion or multiyear suspensions. But what if, in a given case, a one-year suspension is most just? The administration told Columbia to 'centralize all disciplinary processes under the Office of the President.' What statute empowers it to dictate how administrators and faculty divide power? It demanded that the institution 'formalize, adopt, and promulgate' a definition of anti-Semitism, as if institutional neutrality about that topic of debate is somehow at odds with Title VI. Most strikingly, it ordered Columbia to begin 'placing the Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies department under academic receivership' for five years, a flagrant intrusion on faculty governance and academic freedom. In an April 11 letter to Harvard, the Trump administration made at least one legitimate demand––that the university comply with the Supreme Court's 2023 ruling that its admissions office cannot discriminate on the basis of race. But the administration also made demands that ought to be beyond the state's purview. Harvard was ordered to reduce 'the power held by students and untenured faculty' in its governance. It was told to pay for an external anti-Semitism audit that would list faculty members who discriminate against Jews so that they can be punished. Yet the next paragraph of the letter demanded that Harvard shut down all DEI initiatives. The letter even seeks to micromanage student groups; funding decisions 'must be made exclusively by a body of University faculty,' it states. Harvard has rejected these demands in court filings, and it is suing the administration to stop it from enforcing the letter's terms. Still, the overall effect of the administration's enforcement is aptly summed up by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. In an amicus brief supporting Harvard's lawsuit, the organization declared that the state's 'coercion of Harvard violates longstanding First Amendment principles and will destroy universities nationwide if left unchecked.' An aggressive regime of civil-rights enforcement is easy to defend in theory. Without bureaucrats focused on the obligations that colleges have under Title IX and Title VI, institutions can neglect the statutory rights of students. Federally dictated policies and procedures can enhance consistency and impartiality. Investment in the Office of Civil Rights and campus-compliance structures can reduce sexual assaults and bigoted harassment. And penalties can be meted out justly to particularly bad actors. But that isn't how the civil-rights regime that arose in 2011 has worked in practice. [Listen: Why Trump wants to control universities] The new Title IX bureaucracy cost colleges hundreds of millions of dollars to implement, from 2011 to 2016. And for all the bureaucracy's illiberal excesses, colleges ultimately reported an overall increase in forcible sex offenses during the same period. Meanwhile, policy making through the bureaucracy rather than Congress sowed dysfunction, with appointees of different presidents imposing wildly different, sometimes contradictory, accounts of what the law required, such that satisfying one administration got you in trouble with the next. Similarly dismal results are likely as the Trump administration applies the Title IX playbook to Title VI. There is no reason to assume that Jewish students will be better off if colleges comply with every Trump-administration dictate. As Republican administrations used to understand, intense bureaucratic attention to a problem doesn't automatically improve it. And often, state coercion can invite state abuses, yield unintended consequences (see the Israeli students who will have to leave Harvard if Trump succeeds in banning foreign students), and crowd out better solutions. Returning to pre-2011 norms would be better than the status quo. But at this point, an act of Congress might be the only way to stop what one attorney has called the 'regulation by intimidation' that threatens higher education. Congress could clarify what Title IX and Title VI require of colleges, in particular establishing that colleges can never be punished by the administrative state for allowing speech protected by the First Amendment or extending due-process rights to accused students that they would enjoy in a court of law. It could raise the bar for launching an investigation. It could afford colleges more due process before penalties are imposed. And it could silo penalties, so that violations in one part of a university, such as the law school, do not threaten another part, such as a cancer-research center. Many kinds of reform are possible. It is, in any case, unsustainable for colleges to be micromanaged by rival factions of coercive ideologues. Yet many Trump critics are still focusing on his administration's glaring procedural violations, rather than the enforcement model that underlies them. Even if Trump's team were as procedurally diligent as its predecessors (a low bar), the overly aggressive approach to civil-rights enforcement that began in 2011 and persists today would serve academia ill. Civil-rights enforcement on campuses has mutated into something with costs that outweigh its benefits. Article originally published at The Atlantic
