Do You Still Belong? The Quiet Erasure of DEI and the Rewriting of American Citizenship
In the spring of 2025, Americans woke up to find not just policies changed, but entire frameworks of belonging vanishing from federal life. From press briefings to agency portals, mentions of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) disappeared almost overnight. But what appeared to be administrative pruning was something far more dangerous: a coordinated erasure of memory, meaning, and civil rights.
This wasn’t a bureaucratic shift. It was a cultural rupture.
The dismantling of DEI is not isolated. It’s part of a larger strategy, a systemic campaign to redefine what it means to be American, who is allowed to belong, and which stories are sanctioned in our public life. And at the heart of that strategy is the Trump administration’s deliberate implementation of Project 2025, a 900-page playbook from the Heritage Foundation and its collaborators designed to remake the federal government from the inside out.
But there’s more.
While Project 2025’s public recommendations have made headlines, what remains largely underreported is the existence of a hidden set of implementation materials: prewritten executive orders, a confidential 180-day federal agency “playbook,” and strategies to bypass the Constitution’s separation of powers, all set to go into effect without congressional oversight or public review.
The Strategy Behind the Silence
These covert planning documents, confirmed in a secretly recorded July 2024 interview with Micah Meadowcroft of the Conservative Research Alliance — outline a transition scheme designed to fly under the radar. As Meadowcroft said plainly, the documents were meant to be “distributed in a way that would never be made public.”
At the center of this effort is a set of policies designed to replace rights with loyalty, including the reinstatement of Schedule F to purge career civil servants, the deployment of unvetted “acting” agency heads to bypass Senate confirmation, and the coordinated elimination of DEI offices and programming across the federal government.
It is not a coincidence. It is a quiet coup of democratic norms.
Erasing the Narrative
This assault is not only structural. It is symbolic.
History curricula are being rewritten. Civil rights figures are being removed from commemorative calendars. Agency mission statements are stripped of language affirming gender equity or racial justice. Even data transparency is under siege: 12 federal agencies have already halted public data releases, including the CDC and EPA.
This is not just anti-DEI. This is anti-memory. And it is chillingly effective.
The Redefinition of Citizenship
The most dangerous shift underway isn’t what’s being removed — it’s what’s being redefined. Under the logic of Project 2025, citizenship is no longer about shared rights, protections, or civic participation. It is increasingly cast as a function of allegiance to a singular ideology, a Christian nationalist worldview that subordinates pluralism to power and democracy to dominance.
As one civil liberties attorney warned, “If this framework succeeds, DEI won’t just be absent, it will be rebranded as a threat to the nation.”
We’re already seeing this shift in real time. Executive Order 14101, signed by President Trump in February 2025, explicitly eliminates DEI mandates and labels them as “divisive concepts.” The new Office of Public Integrity — formed within the Department of Justice, is tasked with prosecuting information leaks, including those involving dissent from within the government.
This is not theoretical. It is happening.
What Comes Next
More than 17 contributors to Project 2025 are now embedded in federal leadership roles. Internal coordination between the Heritage Foundation and Trump’s transition team has been confirmed via leaked emails. And as of April 2025, nearly 94% of the administration’s first 100 executive actions directly reflect the Project 2025 playbook.
Despite denials from White House officials, the strategy is unfolding as designed — fast, quiet, and deliberate.
This exposé is a warning, but it’s also a beginning.
We are not powerless, but we are running out of time to recognize what’s being taken from us while we’re told nothing is happening at all.
Tags:
DEI, civil rights, investigative journalism, democracy, Christian nationalism
