“In 2024, 13.4% of faculty job ads required a dedicated DEI statement. By 2025, that figure had fallen to just 2.5%.”
I told you it all came down to civil rights law.
Nathan Cofnas responds:
Where’s the graph showing all the non-wokesters who were actually hired? Oh wait, it doesn’t exist.
Forcing universities to tone down DEI rhetoric at gunpoint didn’t change anyone’s ideology.
The “vibe shift” exists only in the minds of rightists who live in an X bubble. According to a survey that ran from Aug 2025-Feb 2026, young American men age 18-29 are more liberal than ever (39% lib vs 25% con).
Kamala “stay woke” Harris won voters with advanced degrees by 21 points. If anything, elites are now even more committed to wokism, having seen that the alternative is DEI for hillbillies, economic illiteracy, and defunding cancer research.
The only elite community that is permanently de-wokified are the tech bros, because they are hereditarians. Everyone else is quietly seething and plotting their revenge, which they will probably exact in 2028.
Cofnas and Hanania agree more than Cofnas admits. Hanania’s claim is narrow: civil rights law drove the DEI statement requirement, and when the legal exposure shifted, the requirement collapsed. That says nothing about faculty ideology. Cofnas treats the tweet as a claim about vibe shift and elite conversion, then refutes something Hanania did not assert.
The coalition point cuts against Cofnas, not for him. Academic hiring committees dropped DEI statements because the cost of including them rose faster than the cost of dropping them. Behavior under coalition pressure is the phenomenon. Private belief runs downstream, often invented to rationalize the behavior after it shifts. A collapse from 13.4 to 2.5 percent in one year shows how thin the commitment ran.
Cofnas wants to locate the variable in private belief. He then measures that variable by survey answers and voting behavior, which are themselves coalition signals. Young men calling themselves liberal on a 2026 survey tells you which answer feels safe to give, not what they think when no one watches. Harris winning advanced-degree voters by 21 points tells you credentialed professionals share a coalition, which no one disputes.
Two claims in the tweet sit badly together. Elites are more committed to wokism than before. Also, elites are seething and plotting revenge for 2028. Pick one. If the second claim holds, the first is wrong, and the DEI collapse is an early indicator. If the first holds, no revenge is coming.
The “tech bros are hereditarians” line flatters Cofnas’s coalition. Most tech workers care about shipping code and stock prices. The hereditarian subculture is loud on X and small everywhere else. Treating tech as a unified hereditarian bloc confuses a vocal subset for the industry.
“At gunpoint” is inflated. No one went to prison over a DEI statement. Civil rights law shifted the cost structure of hiring, and the market responded. That story covers a lot of institutional behavior, and it does not require anyone to change what he thinks at the kitchen table.
The strongest version of Cofnas’s argument runs like this. Coalition signals retract faster than coalition commitments change, so we should not mistake the retraction for conversion. Hanania would grant that. But Cofnas then concludes nothing has changed, which does not follow. Coalitions held together by cheap public signaling fracture when the signaling gets expensive, even if individual members keep their private views. The question worth asking is whether the DEI coalition can reconstitute around a different signal or whether the retreat cascades. Cofnas waves that question away by predicting revenge in 2028, which is prediction as coalition prayer.
