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Last week, in response to the Baltimore bridge collapse that claimed the life of six construction workers and shocked the nation, some Republicans claimed the blame lay squarely on “DEI” officials—referencing an acronym for “diversity, equity and inclusion” which has become the latest buzzword in America’s ever-expanding culture war.

On The New Abnormal this week, Dr. Kaila Story, an associate professor in the departments of Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies and Pan-African Studies, and the Audre Lorde Endowed Chair in Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Louisville, says she believes Republicans across the nation now “recognize the empowerment that comes to marginalized communities when they are presented with robust and three-dimensional scopes of history and our country and education.”

It’s why, she says, the GOP is weaponizing the acronym.

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She told co-host Danielle Moodie: “They see the power and empowerment in it. They see this new generation of Black and and trans young people as really against these old-fashioned agendas when it comes to conceptions of humanity and rights and equal justice.

“I think they clearly understand that our kind of purview and our ideology as a nation has been switching to a more progressive and inclusive country.”

Plus! Editor of The National Interest, Jacob Heilbrunn, joins the program to talk about his new book, America Last: The Right's Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators, which traces a hundred-plus years of the conservative movement’s love and admiration for right-wing authoritarians, and its distrust of, if not disdain, for democracy. Heilbrunn explains how “all the themes that we hear Donald Trump enunciate today were formulated originally in the 1920s and ’30s.”

Listen to this full episode of The New Abnormal on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon and Stitcher.