DEI’s critics are missing the point. The real story is how companies have been quietly backsliding on diversity and gender equity

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While the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) was a case of a company setting a rickety structure to enable breakneck expansion, this corporate disaster is serving as fodder for the ongoing narrative that diversity is an agenda propagated by mushy-brained liberals bent on weakening American business. 

In the wake of the collapse, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, a likely presidential candidate, told Fox News viewers that the bank’s concern “with diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and politics and all kinds of stuff… really diverted from them focusing on their core mission.” The echo chamber of Fox News hosts and guests followed this lead, with Tucker Carlson pontificating that DEI is why big banks are “increasingly incompetent,” and Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley tweeting “SVB=too woke to fail.”