Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Public Relations DEI Chat …
Over recent years, disturbing trends have vastly shifted many citizens’ original goodwill toward DEI as a good-faith movement.
When Diversity / Equity / Inclusion (DEI) conversations in the public relations industry escalated intensely in 2020, many of us – myself included – thought that the entire purpose of this movement focused on non-discrimination against human beings.
It seemed a worthy cause, one that all reasonable people – myself included – could support without hesitation.
And support it, I did.
I wrote columns, hosted podcasts, gave monetary donations to non-profit efforts, and took part in public-facing social media chats in order to share ideas (but mostly to learn from others’ experiences), in support of nondiscrimination. I also tried to amplify other people’s voices who had experienced discriminatory practices and retaliation. As a woman, I’ve been no stranger to facing discrimination and harassment myself throughout my own career, so I know how it feels.
But then, soon after this seismic movement began, it seemed the PR industry’s messages and modes of DEI shifted, consistently revealing a very different agenda.
This agenda has been led and facilitated in large part by the PR association sphere, which is dominated by PR firms, including the powerful multinational conglomerates. (I’ll come back to that $ignificance, in a minute.)
In years since, the PR industry’s widespread DEI stance has now revealed itself to be something else entirely different from how I perceived it started – which has nothing (or precious little) to do with preventing unlawful discrimination.
Instead, it’s achieving the opposite: flagrantly discriminating against people on partisan grounds, including censorship as well as more veiled reputational attacks.
If you’ve attended most any PR industry DEI chat or discussion forum in 2024-25, then you’ve heard the familiar drumbeats:
“Nothing has changed since the George Floyd tragedy! We’re not making the progress we were promised!”
And that’s mostly coming from industry folks and PR trade media who make it obvious they’re aligned with the left wing.
So clearly, the left claims to be unhappy with its own DEI progress, even though it’s the left wing that’s largely controlling the PR industry itself, judging by how the PR member associations are speaking, advocating, and behaving. Nonetheless, the industry keeps operating like a broken record, akin to Einstein’s famous maxim defining “insanity”:
Meanwhile, those of us on the centrist-to-conservative side of the political spectrum – representing some 50% of the larger population (at least if you’re in the U.S.) – are being consistently and systemically excluded purposely from all conversations and policy-making tables where DEI decisions are made and dialogues are positioned.
Don’t believe me?
Well.
Let’s all take a pause and try GARM on for size (the unethical front group that — prior its abrupt shut-down last year — operated as the so-called “Global Alliance for Responsible Media,” which was anything but “responsible” or acting in good faith with U.S. antitrust law).
Everyone who’s anyone in the industry knows the shenanigans alleged (and essentially / arguably proven) about Omnicom, IPG, Publicis, and other multinational PR / ad agency mega-conglomerates’ vast left-wing conspiracy to shut down advertising funding to news and digital media aligned with the centrist-to-conservative political right, in favor of funneling billions of corporate advertising media-buy dollars only to left-wing news / digital media outlets.
GARM was launched under allegedly false and contrived auspices of ensuring “online safety” of children and digital-protection measures.
How nice.
Of course, that false “purpose” is precisely what made GARM a front group. What they promoted as their purpose had nothing to do with their actual purpose, of censoring and suppressing conservative voices.
It’s these very same actors (Omnicom in particular in chairing the U.S.-based and PRSA-funded Diversity Action Alliance, the DAA) that have operated a veritable PR Industrial For-Profit DEI Complex.
This DEI Complex is focused on stoking racial / gender animus, anger, stereotyping, finger-pointing, and societal / inner-corporate tensions, all for the apparent purpose of feeding culprits’ own PR consulting practices that cater to billing big bucks as fee-for-service to “strategically manage” resulting said animus, anger, and tensions on “PR” grounds.
All the while, the DAA claims it brokers a “bringing together” of “different experiences and perspectives.” What they fail to mention is that none of those “perspectives” include Republicans and conservative voters who compose some 50% of the U.S. population / electorate.
What a racket.
FOOTNOTE NO. 1:
I was alerted this month (early June 2025) by Dr. Rochelle Ford — CEO of Page (Arthur Page Society) — that Page is now no longer part of the DAA Board as of March 2025 and gives no money to the DAA, which marks a significant departure from the January 2025 DAA news release (above). It’s also an about-face to the fact that Page served as host organization to the DAA in recent years, resulting in an absolute bloodbath of red ink on Page’s own financials:
Despite PR trade publication PRWeek itself reporting in December 2023 about how much money DAA was then on track to lose under the sage management of Carmella Glover, PRWeek still found a way to honor Ms. Glover as a “40 Under 40” award recipient less than a year later.
As a presumed bunch of dumb PR people, we’re also expected to believe that if Ms. Glover was a white Republican inflicting the same grotesque financial mismanagement for any other organization that she would still be thus honored such a “coveted place.”
Sheesh. Welcome to Sham City (and the PR trade press is in on it, obvs… How GARM-y!):
FOOTNOTE NO. 2:
When I asked Dr. Rochelle Ford why Page had not formally announced its departure from the DAA, I gathered that Page was waiting for the DAA to make its own announcement, which clearly, the DAA has failed to do.
This selective omission on the DAA’s part and conscious choice not to correct the record therefore misleads the PR industry to believe that Page is still intimately engaged in DAA governance and financially supportive of the DAA, which — for all intents and purposes — now appears patently false.
Dr. Ford also disclosed to me that PRSA also has completely abandoned its prior financial sponsorship of the DAA as of this year and now also has no involvement, despite PRSA’s “doubling down on DEI” rhetoric and posturing in February 2025 and every month since.
Meanwhile, Omnicom has been and apparently continues to front untold thousands of dollars to prop up and promote the DAA.
This activity apparently buys for Omnicom the DAA chairmanship slot by Omnicom Chief Diversity Officer Soon Mee Kim, with all powers of agenda-setting and message-propagation such sponsorship confers:
For her part, Omnicom’s Chief Diversity Officer and Chair of the Diversity Action Alliance (DAA) in the U.S., Soon Mee Kim, has taken it upon herself to post online incendiary rhetoric, essentially claiming that anyone who dares challenge DEI as an increasingly faulty, failing, non-transparent, and purposely divisive boondoggle is engaged in “racist narratives.”
Ms. Kim’s and her likeminded DAA colleagues’ messaging tactic clearly intends to kneecap reasonable and valid concerns about how DEI has evolved quite negatively to censor debate and demonize colleagues who disagree with PR’s DEI Cartel:
As per the video clip above, Ms. Kim’s partisan remarks about DEI during DAA panel forums cannot be ignored, nor can her other absurdities about re-naming on “diversity” grounds everything from dining room furniture to “baked goods.”
(I’m not making this up… just watch the above clip.)
I was also especially amused (in a not-so-funny way), when Biden-Harris Administration alumnus and DAA board member, Troy Blackwell, actually sat right beside Omnicom’s Ms. Kim as a co-panelist during this seminar in early 2025, entitled “Bending the Arc of History to Social Justice.”
In his videotaped remarks, Mr. Blackwell had the audacity to accuse REPUBLICANS — with Mr. Blackwell calling out by name “the GOP under President Trump” and “conservative billionaires,” he said — of manipulating “the media buying space” and “investing in a media ecosystem”… when it was and still is Ms. Kim’s own employer, Omnicom, under current U.S. Federal Trade Commission investigation for doing PRECISELY that, relative to Omnicom’s handiwork within GARM:
The DAA’s and its figureheads’ disinformation of this ilk clearly knows no bounds — or ethics.
After all, the DAA’s entire purpose — other than spreading anti-conservative propaganda — is to bully and pressure the entire PR agency sector into signing up as a DAA “signatory” and to “commit” to reporting the gender, race, and ethnicity of their entire departmental or agency management team at the granular, individual-employee level, whether or not individual employees wish to have their named identities and race / ethnicity / gender profile documented and circulated in this manner for industry perusal by the likes of Ms. Kim and her Omnicom buddies:
Still don’t believe that the PR industry’s DEI scheme is off-the-rails?
When is the last time you attended a PR industry DEI committee meeting, social media chat, or major industry conference session about DEI in which at least 40% of the policy-makers and/or panelists were known conservatives – to reflect at least some parity of including ideological diversity in alignment with the larger population?
Or how about inclusion of even just one conservative?
<…Pause for crickets, tumbleweeds, and forlorn train whistles in the distance…>
When I think of the PR-related association and PR diversity boards here in the States, I can think of not a single one that reflects ideological diversity.
This PR Industry DEI Racket “Inclusion for Me but Not for Thee” modus operandi manages to shoot the industry’s own credibility in the foot. The rules of “inclusion” seem to apply to everyone except the PR industry’s elitist agenda-setters, starting with many of those controlling the PR member-association world.
Consequently, six characteristics typify DEI’s so-called “Belonging” discourse, as I’ve experienced it:
- Gaslighting:
- You will be dictated assertions that clearly and provably are not true (“DEI is the clear path to profitability! The evidence is irrefutable!”), all the while, we know that DEI “double-downer” PRSA has been in financial decline or crisis for years, and organizations like the Diversity Action Alliance have operated awash in red ink since practically the get-go… so much so, that Page finally divested of the DAA as its host organization. Or, my favorite false claim: “We’re nonpartisan!”).
- Politicizing:
- You will be force-fed a near non-stop stream of pro-left-wing political messaging and marching orders.
- Monolith-ing:
- If you are female, gay or “BIPOC,” you will be automatically presumed and categorized by default as a political liberal (Democrat in the U.S.; Labour in the U.K.; reasonable facsimile if living in a different country). This stereotyped presumption violates every “diversity” notion that individual human beings can and should think for themselves on any and all issues, irrespective of gender and race — and not be demonized or blacklisted for it by a veiled, partisan industry cartel.
- Scapegoating:
- You will be publicly insulted as a racist, sexist, fascist, or other “-ist” if you dare push back with valid, evidence-based rationales on the prevailing PR industry DEI-gaslighting political rhetoric. (And believe me, I have more receipts on this one than anyone can imagine!)
- Fearmongering:
- You will be virtually badged with the “Enemy of the PR Industry” scarlet letter, and have your very career jeopardized, if you fail to click your heels to sworn public allegiance to prevailing left-wing PR industry DEI dogma.
- Profiteering:
- Look closely enough, and you will clearly identify who’s cashing in on the “DEI Consulting / PR Profit Center” gravy train – which explains the degree of desperation exhibited by many (not all, but many) PR industry figureheads in stoking up DEI pants-on-fire warnings of the sky falling down.
I’m reminded of this toxicity that placed itself on full display only several years ago, during a Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) DEI webinar — later posted to YouTube, which is where I obtained the clip below.
A white female PRSA National Chair who works for a large PR firm in her day job described how she (heroically!) called out and critiqued a Black male VP-level executive working for her own client.
This woman regaled — while broadcasting from this client’s own offices that she was “borrowing” to sit in during this webinar, I might add — how she essentially chastised this client VP as not being “inclusive” enough to suit her own consultative tastes. Her DEI grandstanding rose to the level of Babylon Bee parody.
Take a listen:
Needless to say, we conservatives and slight-right centrists working in today’s version of the public relations industry are living in trying times.
On the one hand, many of us – like myself – have invested years / decades of our careers trying to convince the world that true PR professionals always strive to be ethical, truthful, transparent and respectful of others in balance to the public good.
But then, on the other hand, we’re smacked in the face with each passing social media scroll by other self-acclaimed PR / DEI “experts,” who appear to be trying their darnedest to prove everything we’ve just proclaimed about the higher virtues of PR to be an abject lie.
The reason I say this is that certain partisan political forces in PR have taken a strangle-hold of the DEI conversation for the past decade and morphed it into the very antithesis of what it purports most to be, related to “inclusivity.”
As such, DEI conversations – specifically those in the PR industry – may be the most NON-“inclusive” experiences you’ll ever happen upon.
In short, it’s Left Wing Echo-Chamber Central.
Everyone I personally know in PR who is politically conservative (and yes!… we do exist!) appears to agree with me on the following points, as I’ve gathered anecdotally:
It matters not one whit to us what a colleague looks like, what their skin color is, what country or neighborhood they’re from, how they speak, with whom or what gender they crawl into bed at night, how much money they have, what their mommy or daddy do or did for a living, how or if they worship, where or precisely how they were educated, blah-blah-blah-blah-freakin’-blah.
What DOES matter about our colleagues to me and to those of similar like mind:
- Are they competent in our field of work by exercising good and fair judgment based on valid data and realistic facts of the human condition?
- Are they ethical and transparent in how they conduct their work in balance to honoring the needs and wants of the public good (things like public safety, health, wellness, fair dealing, economic opportunity, etc.)?
- Are they diligent workers willing to invest the necessary sweat-equity to deliver outcomes as required by employers and clients?
That’s pretty much it, folks.
Period-end-of-story.
This stuff is not difficult to understand.
No need for secret-decoder rings or curated tastings of intersectionality stew.
Sadly, however, the PR industry’s modern-day DEI dogma seeks to make it difficult by overlaying and interjecting every hotly politicized element and consideration and coulda-shoulda-woulda into judging people’s human worthiness on every false metric, wholly NOT inclusive of the competence / ethics / diligence rubric I just described.
In recent weeks, three things happened to me in three separate instances – the likes of which always seem to happen whenever a Republican / Tory / conservative tries to engage in good faith in a DEI conversation:
- I got gaslit: I was told by a PR association social media handle that their DEI chat wasn’t “political,” when clearly, their panelists’ recurring Trump-bashing during the chat made it irrefutably so.
- I was insulted by being called a “KKK” (Ku Klux Klan) enthusiast on a LinkedIn exchange by a liberal Brit hellbent on insulting anyone who doesn’t agree with his politics (and who was so ignorant of U.S. history as to not know that slavery abolitionist Abraham Lincoln was, like me, a Republican).
- I got called “mean,” “nasty,” and “hateful” on Facebook by a gay man who has never met me, when I civilly challenged his public column on a PRSA blog, which had instructed all PRSA members to be good and faithful “allies” of the LGBTQIA community by urging local public school principals to host “Drag Queen Story Hours” in their local taxpayer-funded elementary schools, despite throngs of reports that many such past events in the U.S. have included explicitly sexualized displays in front of little children too young to read, and often without parental knowledge until after-the-fact.
This report by a faith-based media outlet documented a “Drag Queen Story Hour” in which Mr. Drag Queen was caught on video rolling around the floor with little kids on top of him.
Yet this wildly inappropriate behavior is what PR people are being told on PRSA’s blog they should “advocate” in order to be a responsible “ally.”
What started as “DEI” many years ago with highly worthwhile conversations about promoting non-discrimination and creating welcoming cultures – all valid and good points – has now twisted its way into full-on manifestations of the very toxicities within organizations that DEI now falsely claims to combat.
For example, people whose religious faith is more conservative about matters of sexuality and how their children are taught certain values and restraint tied to intimate, sexual relationships are often kicked to the curb by many DEI advocates.
There is no room whatsoever allowed in the PR DEI Industrial Complex for these viewpoints, it seems. If you call out the Drag Queen Story Hour “allyship” agenda promoted on the PRSA blog, for instance, you’re branded a “hater” in a kneejerk fashion:
As such, today’s DEI “brand,” as it were, is all too often overwhelmingly fixated and obsessed and compulsory about epidermis pigmentations, sex / gender how-you-like-to-do-it-and-with-whom proclamations in the workplace and in the elementary-school classroom, and – most of all – partisan demonization of entire voting blocks in the workforce, irrespective of political considerations that have nothing to do with DEI.
I’m reminded of Hillary Clinton’s ill-fated stump speech invoking her class-warfare remarks about America’s “basket of deplorables.”
Clinton riffed that half of Trump supporters are every “-ist” and “-phobic” in the book, with it implied that Clinton’s own supporters were pure as the driven snow on even any hint of undue biases.
That speech arguably cost Clinton the election.
And President Biden’s shameful saga these recent years speaks for itself.
In America, voters of all demographics and backgrounds have taken note of this craziness, especially as too many in the news media gaslight the public themselves by refusing to cover the left side of the political aisle with any journalistic integrity even approaching objective newsgathering:
Over the past five years, many troubling factors have vastly shifted many citizens’ original goodwill toward DEI as a good-faith movement.
DEI’s “brand promise” as a larger concept has simply lost the trust of fair-minded people / voters who, years ago, by and large, supported a diversity agenda if it meant not unfairly judging and discriminating against people. As it turned out, they were misled to believe DEI was simply devoted to equal-opportunity and to eliminating nonsensical and unfair discrimination.
But that’s not what we’re saddled with, thanks to today’s increasingly radicalized version of “DEI.”
Looking at U.S. data, the metrics clearly show that too many employees’ actual experiences these recent years with workplace DEI programming, training, and other interactions have harmed workforce harmony and basic functioning, not helped it.
Consider this data from Pew Research, gathered shortly before the November 2024 U.S. Presidential election:
Gallup also released polling data in August 2024 clearly showing that Americans want corporations to can it with the politicized “social issues” corporate spokesmanship.
And pro-DEI liberals should note the demographics of those Americans clearly most “Over It!” with the rabid “brands-taking-stands” nonsense:
Meanwhile, PR firms and associations (like PRSA) have been churning out “insights” claiming the contrary — that brands need to ‘double down” on DEI and simply change (veil) the language of DEI machinations, so as to avoid detection by compliance officials:
And why? It’s good for their PR consulting rationales and fee-for-service agendas.
Never mind that it’s ethically wrong to mislead your client or employer with false data or selfishly contrived reasonings for mere profit motive.
Never mind the fact that there is little to no plausible rationale for this course of action, at least not in the States, where the Democrats are so under water and arguably on-the-wrong-side-of-every-issue with extremist positions, that they’re soon to face challenges in keeping the lights on at DNC Headquarters:
Fact of the matter is, the PR industry decided years ago to start making money off DEI.
The “D” in DEI now stands for “Divisiveness,” and in PR, the D is big, bodacious business.
Ka-ching, ka-ching.
Any PR person who insists on staring doe-eyed into the industry ether as if the PR agency and consulting realm has not become corrupted by DEI profit-motive is either profiting themselves (but desperately doesn’t want anyone to know about it) or is so egregiously naïve as to be — quite deservedly — an industry laughing stock.
Do you know precisely how many multinational PR firms today have large-scale DEI practices and departments and profit centers and chief-whatever-officers – all of which / whom are universally tasked with stoking up animus while never finding a solution to any “DEI challenge,” because finding a solution means working their way out of future business?
Of course you don’t know how many there are.
That’s because the PR industry doesn’t WANT you to know. It’s arguably their most closely held trade secret.
After all, actually fixing whatever ails society via DEI is not good for business in PR’s for-profit DEI industrial complex.
It’s why the PR industry association world is attacking Donald Trump at every turn. When he effectively shut down the spigot of taxpayer-funded federal dollars for DEI-this-and-that via his January 2025 Executive Order, he put a major crimp in many a PR agency conglomerate’s profitability model to feed their big, bodacious, billable-hour beasts.
After all, they have number$ to make and investor$ to satisfy and Federal Trade Commission investigation$ to overcome before their big mega-merger$ to fund top executive-level golden parachute$.
But darn it! President Trump is forcing the PR conglomerates to go back to the drawing board, because Divisiveness, Incorporated, just isn’t cutting it anymore on the client side.
Cynical? Yep.
But truthful? Double-Yep.
I’ll have more to say on this topic in the future, but for now, I’ll leave the PR industry with this question to ponder:
How many political conservatives are on your board or management team?
Applying the same logic that PR’s DEI enthusiasts have applied to race / ethnicity / gender metrics for years now:
Does your board’s or management team’s partisan political ideology match the larger community or nation or marketplace that your organization serves?
Because if your answer ranges anywhere between, “I don’t know any conservatives on my board / management team,” to “Are you CRAZY?! We don’t allow conservatives to have access anywhere near policy-making or discussion!“… then you arguably have the worst and most self-inflicted “inclusion” problem of them all:
Overt, partisan bias. And it will not serve you well in the long-run, as it disconnects you with far too large a faction of the general public.
Mary Beth West is a Tennessean and a 30-year PR industry veteran based in the U.S. She can be followed on X at @marybethwest.