In one sentence
Thiel’s central claim is that diversity rhetoric is not merely mistaken or hypocritical; it operates as a diversion. By making identity and inclusion the dominant public concern, institutions avoid harder questions about whether universities produce knowledge, what drives inequality, how wokeness relates to Christianity, and how authoritarian ideologies shape political life.
Overview
The essay is an edited version of remarks delivered at The New Criterion’s April 27, 2023 gala. Thiel begins by revisiting The Diversity Myth, the 1995 book he co-authored with David O. Sacks about Stanford’s abandonment of its Western Culture curriculum. He admits that documenting absurd campus policies and curricular changes did not change the broader agenda. The newer argument is therefore diagnostic: the problem is not only that diversity may be fake, but that it commands attention and displaces more consequential questions. He applies this “diversion” theory to universities and science, economic inequality and real estate, religion, and political correctness. The conclusion reframes DEI as a distraction from the geopolitical and ideological challenge posed by communist China.
Core ideas
Two meanings of “The Diversity Myth”
The title works in two ways. “Diversity” may be fictional when institutions substitute demographic representation for genuine diversity of thought, culture, or judgment. “Myth” may also mean a sacred but vague object of social reverence: diversity becomes a value invoked without clear definition or scrutiny.
Diversion is more important than hypocrisy
Thiel’s stronger accusation is not simply that multicultural programs are inconsistent or anti-Western. Their silliness can itself be functional: public attention gets absorbed by symbolic disputes while deeper failures remain unexamined. Diversity becomes a divertissement—a distraction from what matters.
The university’s strongest vulnerability may be science
Critics often target humanities departments because their ideological excesses are easy to ridicule. Thiel argues that the more decisive question concerns scientific research: Is science genuinely advancing, or has it become incremental, conformist, grant-driven, and governed by unchallenged dogmas? Attacking the humanities may win a tactical argument while leaving the institution’s strongest claim untouched.
Follow incentives and beneficiaries
Thiel briefly applies a Marxist-style “who benefits?” analysis. Identity politics may divide workers while inequality grows. Universities may be understood partly through real estate, housing, student-life administration, and debt rather than education alone. Corporate submission to DEI may represent not conviction but a relatively cheap institutional tax.
Wokeness as a Christian distortion
Thiel sees woke politics as adjacent to Christianity because both center victims and moral reversals. He calls wokeness a specifically Christian temptation: it retains Christian moral structures while detaching them from Christian theology. This creates a religious movement whose categories can invert traditional judgments about guilt, forgiveness, and justice.
Political correctness and totalitarianism
The history of “political correctness,” as Thiel presents it, connects the term to conformity and obedience associated with communism. His warning is that even legitimate concern for diversity—especially diversity of thought—must not obscure the danger of systems that demand ideological submission.
The concluding geopolitical reframing
Thiel argues that debates over identity can eclipse questions about communist China, technological influence, surveillance, and social polarization. His deliberately compressed conclusion is that encountering DEI should prompt attention to the Chinese Communist Party—not because every diversity initiative is directly controlled by China, but because ideological fixation may prevent serious geopolitical analysis.
Practical takeaways
- When an issue dominates institutional discussion, ask what other questions its prominence makes harder to raise.
- Distinguish demographic variety from intellectual, cultural, and viewpoint diversity.
- Evaluate universities by outputs—knowledge, discovery, and learning—not only by their language of inclusion.
- Use an incentive analysis: identify who gains financially, administratively, or politically from a prevailing ideology.
- When criticizing an institution, examine its strongest public claim rather than only its easiest-to-mock failures.
- Separate the author’s hypotheses from established conclusions: the links among DEI, real estate, scientific stagnation, inequality, and China are proposed questions, not demonstrated in this essay.
Caveats and counterpoints
- The piece is a short, polemical speech rather than a systematic investigation. It raises large causal claims without supplying data, comparisons, or detailed evidence.
- Thiel’s examples are selected to support a strongly critical view of multiculturalism and DEI; the essay does not seriously consider cases where diversity programs improve access, reduce exclusion, or broaden inquiry.
- The economic argument relies on suggestive correlations—such as the growth of inequality and student debt—without establishing that diversity ideology caused them.
- The treatment of wokeness and Christianity is interpretive and theological, not a neutral history of either tradition.
- The final DEI-to-CCP association is rhetorically forceful but analytically underdeveloped; readers should not treat it as proof of coordination or direct causation.
Questions worth revisiting
- Which forms of diversity actually produce better reasoning or discovery, and how could they be measured?
- Can an institution pursue equal opportunity without turning diversity into an unquestionable moral absolute?
- Is scientific stagnation primarily caused by conformity, funding structures, technical difficulty, or something else?
- What evidence would distinguish corporate ideological commitment from pragmatic compliance with DEI expectations?
- When does attention to identity correct a neglected injustice, and when does it become a substitute for addressing material problems?
- What would a serious, non-symbolic response to Chinese technological and political influence look like?
Return to this when…
Return to this essay when evaluating culture-war controversies, university reform, institutional incentives, or claims that a highly visible public issue may be displacing a more consequential one. Its most reusable tool is the diversion test: what important reality is being made less visible?