Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) will not go gently into the night. The DEI apparatchiks within private corporations are untouched by Trump’s executive orders — and because the corrosive ideology is cloaked by so many misleading terms, the U.S. government will continue to pour taxpayer monies into DEI brainwashing.
But just as in the Pentagon schools, Florida’s “Resiliency Education” is simply DEI indoctrination by another name.
The Pentagon’s school system, for example, is trying to outmaneuver Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth by renaming DEI. “Resilience [emphasis added] is the name of the game in terms of how we can talk about what we used to say,” communications director Will Griffin can be heard saying in leaked DoD audio.
DEI adherents have indeed co-opted the word “resilience,” but Trump officials were not the original target.
The sleight of hand began more than a decade ago in the Alpine resort town of Davos. Each year, the World Economic Forum (WEF) — an elite club of globalist political leaders, diplomats, and CEOs — convenes there to bend government and industry agendas toward its vision of an improved world. Their discussions center around the world’s most significant risks, as set forth in the WEF’s annual Global Risks report. “Resilience” was the theme for the 2013 edition. The word (“resilience” or “resilient”) appeared 215 times in the seventy-three-page report, including reference to a new globalist construct called “social resilience.”
Just one year earlier, the WEF had first introduced “misinformation” as a concern in its Global Risks 2012 report. Most people assume that government or industry resilience-building efforts entail fortifying infrastructure against war or natural disasters, but the WEF’s threat assessments revealed an intent to fortify people against language.
Not surprisingly, the business leaders expressed concern about rumors adversely affecting financial markets — but they also decried the existence of “bubbles” of people whose worldview makes them “resistant to attempts to correct it.” On the eternal question of who determines Truth or Falsehood, the group deferred to “technical solutions.”
It is possible to imagine the development of more broad and sophisticated automated flags for disputed information, which could become as ubiquitous as programmes that protect Internet users against spam and malware. — Global Risks 2013 World Economic Forum
Thus began the worldwide push for resilience against misinformation.
Key figures on the political Right have been taken in. In March of 2023, Florida’s First Lady Casey DeSantis held a roundtable outlining the state’s effort to shift the focus of required mental health instruction to “Resiliency Education.” New state standards incorporate “resiliency skills,” including perseverance, gratitude, and empathy. The move was even applauded by conservative activists who had begun to cry foul on what author Abigail Shrier describes as unlicensed, nonconsensual, school-based mental health meddling.
DEI by Another Name
But just as in the Pentagon schools, Florida’s “Resiliency Education” is simply DEI indoctrination by another name. Officials in Hillsborough County, Florida, for example, renamed their existing mental health programming “resiliency, character, and life skills education.” The district chief of staff was quoted as saying, “We simply changed the language to be in better alignment with the state board language around mental health and wellness.”
“Resilience” was insinuated into schools via the harmless sounding “Social Emotional Learning” (SEL). It is a typical edu-speak acronym seemingly designed to lull non-educators into deep, complacent sleep. As such, parents are largely unaware that their children are being psychologically manipulated by the now ubiquitous SEL programs in schools.
The SEL agenda was engineered by an entity called the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL). For over 30 years, psychologists at CASEL have worked to weave SEL into every aspect of schooling, to astonishing effect: Today, subjective concepts like “self-awareness” and “resilience” are measured and tracked by schools, alongside proficiency in science, reading, and math.
SEL claims to develop children’s “emotional intelligence,” but SEL software — often purchased using federal grants to feed education databases — monitors students’ progress along social and emotional dimensions. The platforms survey students to assess so-called “SEL skills” such as “social awareness” or “empathy,” as well as institutional measures like “school climate.” Schools not using SEL-specific programs likely use e-learning platforms from the major publishers, which incorporate SEL into core academic subjects.
Cloud-based (SEL) software is a versatile and infinitely scalable delivery mechanism for DEI and other social justice ideologies. Ambiguous terms for targeted outcomes allow ample room for creative interpretation. Who decides which skills are “Life Skills?” What is more, key definitions underlying the programs can change. In 2020, CASEL updated the definition of SEL itself to “affirm identities” and emphasize “collective goals.”
Former CASEL CEO Karen Niemi described a more explicit focus on equity, inclusion, and “cultivating change agents” — in other words, SEL should be used as a tool to create activists and agitators.
An online demo of one such SEL platform offers a glimpse of how teachers are meant to use the tool. A colorful data dashboard displays students’ progress in four categories: Academics, Attendance, Behavior, and SEL. One student’s SEL score turns red, signaling a drop below the targeted level. The teacher clicks a drop-down menu of intervention options, including “mindfulness,” “bear belly breathing,” “empathy exercise,” and “home visit.”
If psychological counseling seems to lie outside the purview of a classroom teacher, that’s because it is. Unfortunately, SEL is the tip of an iceberg of related education acronyms such as CASEL, NSCC, RTI, MTSS, PBIS, UDL, P21, SPARK, 4Rs, and WSCC. Each represents a “learning framework” that defines a set of targeted outcomes. CASEL’s Program Guide lists 99 different SEL programs available to schools — each riddled with psychometric assessment.
Learning frameworks can serve as a shorthand for grant applicants to convey their intentions. For example, until Trump’s ban on DEI programs, a district applying for funds under the Elementary and Secondary Schools Act might’ve said that it would implement the MTSS (Multi-Tiered System of Supports) framework to make its schools more equitable and inclusive. SEL software is customizable to accommodate whichever learning framework is foisted upon a school district, making compliance reporting (for continued funding) a snap.
Increasingly, “resilience” is conflated with political resistance. This usage is widespread in education and mental health literature and spills over into activist rhetoric.
Pride 2020 is about Resilience, and we are Resilient Together. — ACLU’s Pride 2020 Zine Resilient Together
The resiliency and prevention resources will provide educators, caregivers and all trusted adults in young people’s lives with the ability to recognize exposure to harmful content and build resistance to it. — SPLC Learning for Justice Fall 2022 “Prevention and Resilience” 54.
The proliferation of so-called “Media Literacy” coursework in schools is related to the resilience push. Learning frameworks that don’t explicitly mention “resilience” often reference “21st Century” skills (or “literacies”) which include “media literacy.” It is shameless weaponization of universal parental instinct — What parent does not want their child to be literate? But SEL assessments of resilience and the new “literacies” often gauge acceptance of globalist-approved narratives. Copernicus would have scored zero percent in “science literacy.” He was a Science®-denier.
In 2023, UNESCO’s Media and Information Literacy Alliance teamed with Facebook (Meta Platforms, Inc.) to promote “resilience against the risks of harmful content.” CEO Mark Zuckerberg later testified that throughout the Covid pandemic, he was under direct pressure from government authorities to censor alleged “hate speech” and “disinformation.”
Last year, “misinformation” was up-ranked by the WEF to the top spot in short-term Global Risks 2024. Since the Trump administration pledged to eliminate DEI, social media “fact checkers” are quiet, and the Department of Education’s equity programs are being shuttered — but D.O.G.E. would do well to note that psychological “resilience” and “media literacy” efforts are incentivized by other government agencies.
Since 2018, the Department of Health & Human Services, through SAMHSA (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration), has doled out a whopping $680 million for Project AWARE, “Advancing Wellness and Resiliency in Education.” AWARE funding is granted to states, nonprofits, or health agencies only if they are partnered with a local educational agency.
HHS does not specify which “resilience activities” qualify for AWARE grants, but only that they be “evidence informed.” In a 2017 Cochrane review protocol for psychological resilience training, authors cited “little consensus about when to consider a [program] as ‘resilience training’ or what components are needed for effective [programs].” Approaches to resilience enhancement can include cognitive-behavioral therapy, mindfulness, controversial “trauma-informed” practices, and so-called “psychological inoculation.”
By the time Hurricane Helene wrought devastation in the mountains of North Carolina, the state had been granted over $14 million in AWARE funding. North Carolina’s HHS is part of an initiative called Resilient North Carolina, which offers resources for “building resilience, responding to and preventing trauma,” including the “Wheel of Power/Privilege” and “Cultural Norms of White Privilege | White Supremacy Culture.” Three months before Helene, a team at UNC Chapel Hill, supported by North Carolina’s HHS, produced Recommendations: Statewide Support Infrastructure for a Trauma-Informed and Resilient NC. The report outlines a “trauma-informed, resiliency-building ecosystem” that ensures “constant, dedicated commitment to equity, inclusion, diversity.”
The survivors of Helene showed remarkable resilience in the face of disaster, but it is doubtful that children in the affected areas derived strength from the taxpayer-funded, racist “resilience” programming provided in North Carolina schools. AWARE grants around the country cite needs ranging from “restorative justice training” in Saginaw to after-school “affinity groups” in Newark. Common to them all is increasing school-based psychological meddling in the form of “multi-tiered” support or “social-emotional” programming.
The “DEI” movement weaponized the words “diversity,” “equity,” and “inclusion” against dissent, but any number of concepts can be politicized in the same way. “Resilience” and “literacy” are prime examples. With infinite possible rebrandings and potentially billions of federal dollars behind them, DEI ideology will not be easily excised from education. Instead, it will metastasize into countless “competencies,” “outcomes,” and “skills.”
SEL is a weapon of societal subversion. Government spending on social-justice indoctrination — via SEL in all its forms and future incarnations — does not just deplete the financial wealth of generations; it squanders a cultural inheritance of true American resilience for the false promise of social justice.
READ MORE:
Universities Must End DEI and Implement DEI
The Companies Responding to DEI Backlash With Even More DEI
Priscilla West works for Peter Schweizer at the Government Accountability Institute (GAI), providing research and support for GAI’s cronyism and corruption investigations. Priscilla is Chair of Moms for Liberty – Leon County, FL. Follow Priscilla West on X.
