A Conservative Group Is Publicly Targeting DEI Workers

By Riley Simone Brown

Riley Simone Brown - AI image — Riley Simone Brown

Emboldened by Donald Trump’s second at bat for the presidency, conservative groups are being less stealth and more openly racist in their attempts to destroy Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI). Not only are they targeting public and private sector DEI initiatives, but they’re also targeting public sector employees who work in the field. This is a dangerous and potentially deadly practice that is going unchecked.

A conservative group known as the American Accountability Foundation (AAF) has created a website called “DEI Watchlist”, which includes the names, photos, employment history, work activities, and even LinkedIn profiles for federal employees engaged in DEI work. The group bills itself as “a non-profit government oversight and research organization that uses investigative tools to educate the public on issues related to personnel, policy, and spending.”

AAF has a history of spending thousands of dollars on billboards, newspaper ads, and digital advertising to discredit democratic leaders. It did so in 2021, when President Joe Biden nominated to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Gigi Sohn, an American lawyer and public advocate known for her work in telecommunications, media, and technology policy. AAF spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in billboards, newspaper ads, and digital advertising to “educate the American public” on how wrong Sohn was for the post for which she was nominated. AAF’s campaign to discredit her is publicly claimed on their website as a win because it ended in Sohn eventually withdrawing her nomination. The website says, “Gigi Sohn was just the most recent of multiple Biden Administration nominees that AAF has successfully denounced.”

Mostly Black Career Civil Servants Are Heavily Targeted

The DEI Watch List details a wealth of information about federal civil servants. This information, in the hands of extreme radicals within the Republican party, can expose these officials to public harassment and place them in life-threatening danger. It’s the stuff that conspiracy theorists and extreme right wing activists leverage to doxx public officials, publishing not only their photos and employment location, but their address and other pertinent details.

From the visible display of one official’s LinkedIn profile, you learn that she is with the National Institutes of Health and she is in the Washington, DC, area.

What is to stop any citizen from looking for publicly available information on this young woman and using that information to harass and target her since she appears on this watch list? Absolutely nothing.

As a lay person with no legal background but a good solid footing on how to research such matters, the very placement of these employees on a watch list may violate the First Amendment or Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.

Placement of predominantly Black federal civil servants on any discriminatory Watch List because they work in DEI is the basis for a Civil Rights discrimination claim, one would think.

Ahhh, but there’s a catch.

Donald Trump’s new Department of Justice leadership has halted all civil rights cases, which may leave these employees with few legal options to pursue.

Diabolical and Potentially Deadly

In their zeal to scream the quiet part out loud (the quiet part being that we’re openly racist), Republican operatives are not simply content with voicing opposition to equal rights, equal protections, and equal treatment under the law for women, minorities, LGBTQIA populations, and disabled people, they’re increasingly taking matters into their own hands to right the perceived political wrongs they see in this country.

The diabolical and potentially deadly exposures of public officials and their work to a radicalized base can have disastrous consequences. In orchestrating the complete control of each branch of the federal government, which the Republican party literally worked on for decades, it has now virtually guaranteed that these employees have limited options for recourse or to get their names removed from the DEI Watch List website.

What’s worse? While Musk said identifying six young men working for his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is illegal, Republicans are outing any federal employees working in DEI and encouraging federal employees to do the same. The website has a tipline banner at the top so federal workers can send detailed information on other federal workers engaged in DEI. It’s more than mean-spirited and wrong, it’s the rebirth of McCarthyism and will further lead to political repression of any opposition to the Republican Party.

We must fight back against this with every ounce of strength that we can muster.