You know me; I am a glutton for punishment. I once again dove into corporate media’s septic tank to find the submerged good news. On Thursday, the Washington Post ran a ridiculously long news piece (allegedly) headlined,
“Trump fired him. The ‘DEI Watchlist’ shamed him. Then came 500 job rejections.” The website estimated the 7,400+ words as a “31-minute” read. Ugh.
The story is one of the best (worst) examples of journalistic malpractice we’ve seen this year. Written in an omniscient authorial voice, it constantly described Dia Harris’ inner voice, his thoughts, and his feelings. Not “Harris reported thinking...” It tells readers, “Harris
thought …” It tells us about his Keurig coffee maker, his preferred brand of granola, and dwells lovingly on his “maroon polo.”
Here’s the story WaPo desperately
wanted to tell. Mr. Harris was a diligent federal employee chasing his lifelong dream of helping poor black children get free breakfast at public school. His job: “the first chief equity officer for the Administration for Children and Families.” (The
first. It was a made-up job.)
But then, mean President Trump fired him
for no reason. A conservative website (correctly) included him on a “DEI Watchlist” of 93 senior Biden-era DEI officials. This, WaPo said, made him unemployable. He’s been rejected by over 500 employers. Since getting fired in August 2025, the scrappy 53-year-old Penn grad has worked as a bartender, a bagger at Harris Teeter grocery, and is now trying to land a gig as a $16/hr food service worker. His mom has had to keep her part-time job at a Hallmark store to “help with the bills.”
Sad!
Only the most diligent WaPo readers who bravely persisted to the last few thousand words learned a little
more context about Mr. Harris. His extensive federal career —
his life ambition, cut short by the biased Trump Administration— spanned the heroic period of seventeen months. That’s it. Then he got eight months of paid leave with full benefits— nearly half his entire federal service, which WaPo described as “he got no severance.”
Right before Trump was inaugurated, Harris conspired with his boss to retitle his position as “senior advisor,” hoping nobody in the new Administration would notice he was a DEI manager. Resistance! After he was fired anyway, he got a lawyer and filed a complaint against the government for racism (he lost) and threatened to sue.
Before his year-and-a-half career in the federal workforce, Harris had a 30-year career in HR at Johnson & Johnson, Boeing, Northrop, and Amazon. One wonders where all his contacts went. He ‘designed’ a custom two-story home in a “wealthy Maryland suburb,” and his mortgage is $4,000 a month. His last private-sector job paid more than his federal one. His 71-year-old mother lives with him, and the story conspicuously omits any mention of a wife or kids.
He proudly wears an Alpha Phi Alpha wristband. That’s a black fraternity whose members included MLK, Thurgood Marshall, and Andrew Young. Call it a signal that he is intentionally leading with.
He also scrubbed all his social media— another red flag for new employers. WaPo described that as a normal reaction to finding out he was on the “DEI Watchlist,” but between the lines we see he was suddenly concerned about what his social media held. The watchlist included a clip of Harris’s 2024 webinar called the “National Call to Action on Equity.” In it, he called himself “unapologetically a Black man” and vowed to “embed equity into
every aspect of our lives.”
Yikes. That sounds like a
threat.
The Post blamed the watchlist for 500 rejections (including the ACLU). But picture the résumé from the other side of the desk: fired after a short term of employment, suing the last employer, social media wiped, racial activism, unmarried, and so on. Dia Harris, of all people, knows exactly how that screening looks. He ran it for Boeing.
“Since President Donald Trump returned to office,” WaPo sadly intoned, “nearly 426,000 of the nation’s 2.2 million civilian federal employees have left the government.” That terrific news earns a mention on my Trump Accomplishments list. I’m just a lawyer, not a mathematician, but that sounds like a savings of around $65 billion a year with benefits.
Most of those who left took a generous voluntary separation deal— 85%, according to the story. But Harris didn’t. He waited and made them fire him, which explains how the reporter characterized it as “no severance.”
“Trump campaigned on trimming federal bureaucracy, which he declared was bloated with wasteful, lazy and incompetent workers,” the article complained. Then came DOGE. “Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service slashed across the government, cutting spending and eliminating jobs,” the article explained, as if that were a bad thing rather than President Trump delivering on his promises.
“The mass embrace of DEI programs felt to Harris like the capstone of his professional life,” WaPo explained. In other words, Harris
was a victim, of sorts. He was the victim of
the DEI movement. He was sold a bill of goods, a trendy, race-baited career with a short expiration date. Trump’s anti-DEI executive order, it said, “triggered a rapid retreat from DEI policies throughout government and the corporate world — and, Harris feared, devastating the field in which he built his career.”
If that thesis is correct, then WaPo just admitted that President Trump and DOGE single-handedly dismantled DEI across the federal workforce
and corporate America in one fell blow. The prestige paper considers that a crime. But this is an astonishing accomplishment that would have defied any rational prediction.
Nobody expected DEI to collapse like a house of race cards.
The story WaPo wanted to tell came out exactly backwards. It hoped readers would pine for Mr. Harris, languishing in his custom Maryland home waiting for word from his lawyers. It wanted us to be outraged by some conservative website’s blacklist (sorry), which makes it impossible for Mr. Harris to fully erase all his racist rants on social media.
Instead, it came out as a historic success story. Not even WaPo, in its thousands of words of omniscient prose,
tried to defend DEI. Nowhere in nearly 8,000 words did the Post ever argue that DEI worked, helped anyone, or was worth having. It quoted critics calling DEI “reverse racism” that “undermines merit”— and let that stand unanswered.
The funniest lines came from the guy who set up the DEI Watchlist website, who happily agreed to be interviewed. Tom Jones, president of the American Accountability Foundation, the group that runs the watchlist, did not try to hide, like Ilhan Omar or Dan S. Sullivan. He promptly emailed the WaPo a statement and answered its reporter’s questions. Here’s Tom’s initial, hilarious,
unapologetic response:
The reporter emailed back, trying to trap Jones by asking why he thought black workers on the watchlist are struggling to find new employment more than white ones. “Sounds like hiring managers are racist, that’s very disappointing,” Jones shot back.
It was pure jiu-jitsu. Tom turned it right back around on them. If it’s absurd when Tom Jones says it, it was absurd when the DEI officers said it too.
That’s how far DEI has fallen. Nobody fears it anymore. The sting of the “r” word (Portlanders:
racist) has become a laugh-provoking tickle, the setup for an easy punchline.
Must be racism!
Honestly, it baffles me how black pillers keep crying about how “nothing has changed.” What on Earth are they babbling about? Everything has changed. And fast— in less than two years. This silly WaPo story just proved it beyond argument.
WaPo's DEI tearjerker turns into a Trump victory lap; Poland's president flies home to stop a court takeover; missiles at Mar-a-Lago, freezer hacks, poo bags(!), and Democrats' 150 contingency plans.