There was a peculiar story that made the news last week: A gay Ford executive attacked an older man in an airport because the man was watching Fox News and used a wheelchair when he got off the plane. The man, he said, should be grateful for DEI! Huh?

When you read a little further into this simultaneously abusive and self-righteous tweet, you discover that the executive was labeling as DEI the accommodations America has made for 35 years under the Americans with Disabilities Act (“ADA”). It turns out that the executive is not the only one trying to rebrand DEI, a discriminatory practice based upon race and LGBTQ+ sexual identity, as nothing more than compassion for pregnant women and handicapped people.

The ADA’s purpose is twofold: (1) to prevent discrimination against people with disabilities and (2) to implement what could be called infrastructure changes to accommodate them. The latter includes wheelchair ramps everywhere (which also happen to be awesome for moms with strollers), beeping crosswalk signals for the visually impaired, braille at ATMs, a certain number of kneeling buses, etc.

These accommodations have been part of American society for so long that we really don’t think about them much. And mostly, they’ve fit in seamlessly, although they’ve been subject to abuse, especially as the definition of what constitutes a “disability” keeps expanding. For example, two decades ago, I worked on a case where a man said that his claustrophobia amounted to a disability entitling him to one of the corner offices at a large firm. (He lost, but it was expensive.)

In addition to ADA, over the decades, both the federal government and various state legislatures have enacted specific laws to protect pregnant women. At the federal level, the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act (first proposed in 2012 and passed in 2022) requires businesses with 15 or more employees to make myriad accommodations for pregnant women. At the state level, most states have long had laws preventing employers from firing or refusing to hire pregnant women and, in general, making reasonable accommodations for their temporary condition.

And then there’s DEI, which has been playing out over the past few years. Its obsessive focus has been on race, sexuality, and gender identity, without much regard for people in wheelchairs or with hearing aids, because those were taken care of a long time ago by the ADA. Nor has it been about pregnancy.

Instead, DEI has actually been corporate, government, and academic programs obsessively demeaning men and white people, attacking America, and pushing alternate sexualities. New York’s Department of Education exemplifies racialist DEI:

A Freedom Center Investigates review found that the state’s Department of Education’s DEI booklet is packed with racially discriminatory materials like the claim that “for people of color, internalized oppression can involve believing in negative messages about oneself or one’s racial group. For Whites, internalized privilege can involve feeling a sense of superiority and entitlement or holding negative beliefs about people of color.”

White people can only be privileged. Only minorities are oppressed. What message does that send to white students and teachers trapped in a systematically racist school system?

The booklet even links to an article about students taking part in a “weekly ‘deconstructing whiteness’ program” and a poster asking “why do I have to feel guilty about being white?”

It’s against this backdrop that Barrett Evans, who is believed to be Ford’s “Chief Learning Officer,” dropped a smug tweet about abusing an old man, a tweet that includes the line “Love to see you supporting DEI.”

Many people patiently explained on X and in posts that DEI has nothing to do with ADA. But some wondered, as I did, why a Chief Learning Officer—which means Evans works in Human Resources at the front line of all these initiatives—would make that mistake. The answer is that this is not a mistake. Given that Americans oppose pushing racial divisions and are done with the LGBTQ+ agenda, this is a deliberate attempt to redefine a malevolent, divisive, and often illegal practice into something anodyne and long accepted.

On Facebook, an LGBTQ+ activist organization called “Equality Diversity Humanity,” with 161,000 followers, made the same claim a month before Evans did, namely, that DEI is just caring for handicapped and pregnant people. I know about this because it suddenly showed up on the pages of all my leftist friends:

The purveyors of DEI have no intention of letting this go. This is a hill they are going to die on. And just as corporations and other institutions are sneakily re-naming their DEI departments and workers, their foot soldiers on the internet are trying to sell people on a new definition that has nothing to do with DEI’s goal of balkanizing America.

The perfect DEI/ADA fusion, made using AI.