Trump’s total war on decency, constitutional law, and Western civilization is bad enough. Almost as galling are the billionaires, academics, columnists, and political hacks who so demonized D.E.I. that they helped rationalize voting for Donald Trump: the useful idiots of the MAGA movement.
Niall Ferguson, the columnist and historian, isn’t the only anti-woke warrior who argued that Kamala Harris was a greater threat than her Republican rival, but he stood out. After years of denouncing D.E.I. as Stalinism and “the path to hell” (in 2021, he even co-founded an anti-woke university in Austin), Ferguson was gleeful in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s victory. “This election,” he wrote, “was a crushing defeat for political lawfare, critical race theory, woke campuses, biological males in women’s sports, genital mutilation of teenagers, the Ivy League, the legacy media, and Hollywood.” He signed off with “Hail to the Chief” and meant it.
