LEMIRE: “Really strong points there. And rev, to what Symone was saying. It’s another way of, like, for opponents of DEI to label an other, and that other is getting a hand up and I’m not. But we talk a lot — we’ve had to talk a lot about on the show in the last week or so that Donald Trump is fulfilling the promises, he’s doing what he said he would. And this is, yet again, what he said he would. It was night after night. He railed against wokeism, but also DEI on the campaign trail. He made a promise to his voters that he would do that, and that is what a plurality of American voters chose.”
SHARPTON: “Donald Trump raised it and he said what he was going to do. But I don’t think people understand the need the DEI or affirmative action filled. First of all, affirmative action was authored by a black Republican named Arthur Fletcher under Richard Nixon’s administration, and it was in no way radical at the time, because what they were trying to do is correct with inclusion, the fact that by law, many blacks and others were excluded. So you can’t say you want a merit system when we were excluded from bringing our merit to the table. So you were trying to repair that damage. So when you see corporations now that are saying, ‘We’ll stop DEI,’ they’re not even defining what that is because many of them never had blacks, never had women, never had gays there. And that’s why some of us are saying we need to then not — you don’t want diversity, then you shouldn’t have diversity in your consumers. We’ll boycott, but we’ll support others. We lead a group, I’m going to Costco tomorrow, bring 100 of my members to shop with those that understand, because we need to be able to say to Trump, ‘This is not up to you. You can’t tell us where we spend our money.’ And Donald Trump. I used to go and meet with Donald Trump, try to argue back and forth different cases. I’ve never seen diversity in Trump Towers. Show me where his top black executive is. Nobody even got subpoenaed in four of his trials that were black. So for him to be talking about diversity is like me talking about being a Rockette next Christmas season.”