Former Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams of Georgia asserted Vice President J.D. Vance was a “DEI graduate” during a Wednesday evening MSNBC appearance.
President Donald Trump issued an executive order within hours of taking office on Jan. 20 that mandated an end to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts in the federal government. After MSNBC host Joy Reid claimed that Trump was being “led” by authors of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which Trump distanced himself from during the 2024 campaign, Abrams went on a tangent about how Vance benefitted from DEI efforts.
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“I read it more broadly, because we have to recognize that while Donald Trump may be the avatar, he’s not an outlier. As long as the rest of the Republican Party suborn what is happening, whether it’s Stephen Miller at the podium or a U.S Senator, they are all agreeing to the premise of Project 2025, which is, they want to hoard opportunity and legalize discrimination,” Abrams claimed. “We have spent 248 years as a nation undoing our original sins, which include slavery, silencing women, denying Native Americans their citizenship, a whole host of challenges. But what we’ve done since then, we’ve passed the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, which, by the way, you can’t rescind with an executive order. We passed the 19th Amendment, but we also passed Title 1, which focuses on poor children having access to education.”
“So if you are a vice president who graduated from high school in the Appalachian Mountains and you went to a Title 1-funded school, you are a DEI graduate,” Abrams continued. “We know that across this country, service-disabled veterans who have access to resources do so because of the Americans With Disabilities Act, a DEI law. So let’s be clear. They may try to make this a racial issue, but they’re coming for everyone that they don’t believe is worthy of their very narrow-minded ideal of what it means to be an American. DEI’s foundational values — diversity, meaning all people; equity, meaning fair access to opportunity; and inclusion having a pathway to the American dream — they are trying to block it and they’re hoping we don’t notice.”
Vance grew up in Ohio, raised by a single mother who struggled with addiction, before joining the Marines and serving in Iraq and later attending Ohio State University, then Yale Law School under the GI Bill, according to his official biography.
The Supreme Court struck down admission policies at the University of North Carolina and Harvard that took race into account, with a 6-3 ruling in the case of North Carolina and a 6-2 ruling in the case of Harvard in June 2023.
The vice president’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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