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By Kate Plummer
Senior US News Reporter
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Vice President JD Vance and Donald Trump Jr. have offered their support for the view that diversity equity and inclusion policies (DEI) discriminate against white men.
Posting on X, Vance shared an article about DEI and said: "A lot of people think 'DEI' is lame diversity seminars or racial slogans at NFL games. In reality, it was a deliberate program of discrimination primarily against white men. This is an incredible piece that describes the evil of DEI and its consequences."
Trump Jr., reposted the X post with a series of emojis, indicating his support for Vance's sentiment.
Read More on Politics
Newsweek reached out to representatives for Vance and Trump Jr. by email to comment on this story outside of normal business hours.
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Why It Matters
Since taking office again, Trump has made major changes to DEI including an executive order to remove officials overseeing DEI initiatives and a decision to scrap Biden-era coins that highlighted themes like civil rights and the abolition of slavery.
While some support these initiative, these policies have also caused fierce debate with former federal employees filing a legal challenge against the elimination of DEI programs.
What To Know
The article Vance shared, "The Lost Generation," was written by Jacob Savage for Compact magazine.
Savage wrote that DEI policies damage career prospects for white male millennials in newsrooms, academia and other industries. He interviewed men who felt that their careers had been impacted by DEI.
"Over the past two years I’ve spoken with dozens of white male millennials, excavating hopes and dreams, disappointments and resentments," he wrote. "To a man, they insisted on anonymity. There were frenzied pre-publication negotiations over what personal details I could include, back-and-forths over words and phrases, requests to change pseudonyms to sound even less like real names. Standing behind it was a fear: that they would end up being that guy."
Vance added in a series of other X posts: "This is why the Trump administration has so dedicated itself to eradicating racist discrimination. We've eliminated funding for DEI, required government grantees to certify that they're not engaged in DEI, fired a number of DEI employees, and asked the great Harmeet Dhillon [the assistant attorney general for civil rights at the Department of Justice] to aggressively prosecute all forms of racial discrimination. For too many Democrat leaders, racial discrimination was bad unless it targeted white men. This was an injustice, plain and simple. The above essay explains why."
"So much of this was generational," he added. "Older white men created a system whereby they'd be fine, but millennials and GenZ would get screwed. Cowardice and evil are a deadly combination."
Scott Lucas, a professor of international politics at University College Dublin called Vance's post "bulls***" and said he was "gaslighting to justify the attempt by him and those around him to try to seize more power and to do so by pursuing policies which are regressive and repressive" toward people with different genders, colors and religions.
"It is an attempt to go back to an era of discrimination," he told Newsweek.
What People Are Saying
Jacob Savage, writing in Compact magazine, said: "For white male millennials, DEI wasn’t a gentle rebalancing—it was a profound shift in how power and prestige were distributed."
What Happens Next
As his presidency continues, Trump will likely unveil more policies on DEI.
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