Amanpour & Co., airing on PBS and CNN International, bashed President Trump's color-blind government policies by dishonestly conflating equality and DEI-style “equity” in Friday’s interview with Equal Justice Initiative founder Bryan Stevenson.
The show opener from Trump-loathing host Christiane Amanpour commenced the sleight of hand: “As Trump and company wage war on DEI inside America -- elevating those who first fought for equality. Civil rights leader Bryan Stevenson tells me about the legacy of Montgomery in the 1950s.”
But DEI doesn’t stand for equality, as Amanpour implied. It’s an abbreviation for “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion,” a more radical and far-reaching concept. While striving for equality means providing each individual equal opportunities to achieve a desired outcome, an “equity” system allocates more opportunity to certain groups, engineering unequal treatment based on group identity in a doomed attempt to achieve equal outcomes for all.
HOST CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: We turn now to the culture war raging in America. Since taking office, President Trump and his cabinet have had DEIs squarely in their sights, attacking equal rights protections at home and bullying other countries to do the same as the price of doing business with the United States.
As a civil rights lawyer and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, Bryan Stevenson has been fighting back. In Montgomery, Alabama in 2018, he opened a national memorial dedicated to victims of lynching. Now, he's been telling me about his fourth project, focused on Montgomery's 1955-65 decade, when black residents launched the historic bus boycott and with it a movement to help transform the country….
So, let's just recap a little bit. President Trump signed an executive order called Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History and basically ordering a purge of what he called divisive race-centered ideology from a lot of American public spaces, parks, historic sites and museums. And right in the middle of this, you're opening a new, I might say, challenge to that ideology and putting the legacy of racism and civil rights right front and center....
BRYAN STEVENSON, FOUNDER AND EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, EQUAL JUSTICE: Yes. Well, we are deeply committed to pushing our country to recognize and address the harms of our history in a more honest way. We've never really created cultural institutions in this country that deal honestly with the harms and legacy of slavery. We haven't dealt with the challenges created by a hundred years of lynching and terror violence….
Again, the host mischaracterized what DEI really means -- it's more radical than what people mean by "leveling the playing field."
AMANPOUR: ….I mean, you've got prominent white administration people hitting back at decades of trying to level the playing field. You know, Trump, his administration, as I said, their attacks on DEI. You've got Hegseth, the current secretary of defense. Basically, he's like obsessed by it....
Christiane Amanpour on her eponymous show, airing on PBS: ...President Trump and his cabinet have had DEIs squarely in their sights, attacking equal rights protections at home and bullying other countries to do the same as the price of doing business with the United States." pic.twitter.com/rJ06jBA7mG
— Clay Waters (@claywaters44) April 12, 2026
Then Amanpour ran a clip of Hegseth promising President Trump a "colorblind and merit-based" military and assuring him he "The era of DEI is gone at the Defense Department." The host reacted to Hegseth’s statement about colorblind standards with accusations of racism.
AMANPOUR: I mean, honestly, you know, for you and me to hear that, you as a black man, me as a woman, you know, to see that he did that, the first firing was the highly decorated General C.Q. Brown, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and then many female officers as well, purging records of a Medal of Honor winner with a Hispanic-sounding surname. I mean, honestly. And that's now.
Making promotions at least somewhat contingent on race and gender will tempt some to game that ethnic and gender-based spoils system.
STEVENSON: The administration has basically restored a presumption of incompetence, a presumption of unworthiness, a presumption of incompetence, a presumption of incompetence, a presumption and they've applied it to black and brown people….
Presuming incompetence…isn’t that what affirmative action-type systems like DEI actually do?
Amanpour, the purported journalist host, concluded the interview with a radicalized hippie moment, quoting the previously referenced civil rights legend, John Lewis.
AMANPOUR: As the great John Lewis said, make "good trouble."
