Elon Musk in a recent post on X responding to the handling of the Los Angeles wildfires this January by former LA Fire Chief Kristin Crowley, the first female and LGBTQ fire chief in the city’s history. Musk’s post was just one of many recent right-wing attacks that have leveraged tragic events to criticize a system they have personal issues with.

This hateful rhetoric surrounding diversity, equity and inclusion policies has recently spread heavily among the Republican Party. In his address to a joint session of Congress earlier this month, President Donald Trump referred to the policies as tyrannical and boasted about its removal in the federal government under his administration.

Since Trump took office, companies from Google to Goldman Sachs have rolled back any DEI programs they had previously implemented. The consensus among the far-right is that these DEI policies are destroying the fundamental idea that jobs should be based on merit and qualifications. However, this sentiment is misleading because DEI hiring actually creates more merit-based opportunities in the workforce.

Far-right conservatives need to understand that DEI hiring is not an attempt to steal their jobs. Equity, the “E” in the acronym, is the creation of a level playing field, where everyone starts at the same level rather than some being presented with inherent advantages. Through this, any job listing is most likely to go to the most skilled applicant.

David Glasgow, executive director of the Meltzer Center for Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging at the New York University School of Law, told usatoday.com, “We know from decades of extensive research that, in the absence of DEI efforts, humans do not make perfectly merit-based decisions,” and that “[instead of] being opposed to merit, DEI supports merit-based decision making.”

Glasgow’s statement paints a telling picture of why DEI is needed. Without it, the most qualified people for a job would not be given a second look due to biases ingrained in American society, specifically with hiring.

DEI hiring has also been proven to benefit a company’s success as a whole. In a conversation about DEI with The New York Times, Massachusetts Governor Maura Healy said, “Talk to any CEO of a major Fortune 500 company. They’ll tell you that their bottom line, dollar wise, does better when there’s more diversity in the room.”

Having greater diversity in executive positions has also produced results for the highest achieving companies. According to usatoday.com, the number of Black executives in S&P Top 100 companies rose by 27 percent between 2020 and 2022, which was a period where the worth of the stocks almost doubled.

These policies have not only proven effective, but are also backed by the majority of workers. A 2023 Pew Research Center poll of 4,744 workers revealed that 56 percent of workers supported focusing on DEI inclusion at work, 28 percent were neutral on the topic and only 16 percent viewed it negatively. This shows that it is not workers who are protesting DEI in fear of losing their jobs; in actuality, it is a small minority who believe that they are sticking up for the working class.

Nevertheless, the far-right has continued to peddle the rhetoric and the narrative that DEI hiring is bad for workers, the economy and even public safety. Attacks on qualified and respected first responders like Crowley is not only an insult to their sacrifice in protecting U.S. citizens, it puts the American public in danger by stopping the most qualified people from doing the job.

If the far-right really cares about making America as equitable and safe as possible, then they should realize that DEI is the most meritocratic system available to us.