Digital Social Hour
The Truth About DEI & Why It’s Failing in America | Matt Dearden DSH #1214
Sun, 02 Mar 2025
🔥 Matt Dearden on DEI, History, and Debunking Internet Lies 🚀 In this thought-provoking episode, we sit down with Matt Dearden, a historian, constitutional law expert, and viral TikTok creator, to discuss DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion), modern education, political biases, and the misinformation spreading online. Topics Covered: ✅ The evolution of DEI & its impact on education and hiring ✅ How history is often misrepresented on social media ✅ The Founding Fathers, U.S. Constitution, and presentism ✅ Debunking common political and historical misconceptions ✅ Why critical thinking is more important than ever This insightful conversation will challenge the way you think about history, education, and media narratives! 📲 Follow Matt Dearden & Learn More: 🔗 TikTok: @MattDearden49 🔗 Instagram: @MattDeardenShow ⏱ CHAPTERS ⏳ 00:00 – The Truth About DEI & Its Origins ⏳ 03:15 – How TikTok Misinforms People About History ⏳ 07:30 – The Founding Fathers & Why Presentism Is Dangerous ⏳ 12:10 – Political Bias in Public Schools & College Education ⏳ 17:40 – How Misinformation Spreads & The Role of Social Media ⏳ 23:50 – Why Matt Dearden Started Debunking Viral Videos ⏳ 30:25 – The Problem With Mainstream News & Political Narratives ⏳ 36:10 – The Power of Critical Thinking in Today’s Society ⏳ 42:00 – Why History Is Taught Poorly in Public Schools ⏳ 50:15 – Is America Being Undermined From Within? ⏳ 55:30 – Final Thoughts & Where to Follow Matt Dearden 🎙 Sponsored by Lumati Red Boost your health, energy, and recovery with Lumati Red – the ultimate turmeric formula for pain relief and inflammation support. No pills, no hassle – just powerful, fast-acting results! 💪 Get yours now at Lumati.com and feel the difference! 🚀 🔥 Apply to Be on the Podcast & Business Inquiries: 🎙 APPLY TO BE ON THE PODCAST: https://www.digitalsocialhour.com/application 📩 BUSINESS INQUIRIES/SPONSORS: [email protected]
Chapter 1: What is the controversy surrounding DEI in America?
The civil rights movement said, hey, look at these people that have been marginalized in our country and their ancestors have been enslaved in the country. So we should...
make some pathways to bring them to the table okay but that's very different than what dei has become in a lot of places which is to say we need to reserve these 10 spots yeah that i'm not a fan of regardless of what they think regardless of like these 10 spots are reserved for people just because of their skin color right and i don't think that's bad i think that's very very damaging and i think it leads to people saying hey the only reason that person got their position was because of their skin color right and that's bad yeah like that's bad for everyone
All right, guys, Matt Dearden here today, someone I found on TikTok, believe it or not. Thanks for coming on, man.
Chapter 2: How did Matt Dearden become popular on TikTok?
Yeah, I'm with all the young people on there. Yeah.
What made you want to get on that platform?
I think for me, it was I've been toying with it for a while, but then it got to the summer of this this past year in 2024. And I noticed that there was just really bad history and con law content on there. So no one knew what they were talking about. And so I come from kind of the academic world originally. I teach history and some constitutional law.
And I noticed that that level of discussion is probably too much for TikTok as far as like the academia side. But then what was being presented on TikTok was so surface level and often just completely off that I decided I feel like there's a middle ground here where we could talk about some really interesting things, but not make it too much, almost like public facing good history.
I love your debunking videos. Those are hilarious, the way you edit those.
Yeah, I feel bad on those, honestly, because I like to think of myself as a pretty empathetic guy. So when I debunk a 21-year-old, I feel like I'm being mean, but then I'm like, well, they posted this publicly, so clearly they wanted people to interact with it, and I'm just interacting with it.
Yeah, they put themselves out there. Whenever you debunk Destiny, I love those.
Yeah, so me... I really want to have a conversation with Destiny, seriously. I think we'd actually agree on more than people would think. Really? Because they think that Destiny is super progressive, which he is. He labels himself that. But I think he's a really interesting thinker. I won't comment on his private life, because I know that's been the topic of some debate and discussion.
But he's a really interesting guy, really interesting thinker. And I think a lot of his criticisms of the right are very fair. And so I align with a lot of that.
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Chapter 3: Why is understanding the Founding Fathers important?
Yeah. Do you stay pretty much out of politics?
On TikTok? Yeah. No, I go into politics. You do? But I like to think that my point of launch to go into politics is always based in more hard history or hard con law. I don't like the accounts that all they ever do is just respond and do political hacky sack back and forth. I just don't think that that's very interesting.
I think it gets some views because obviously you're working the algorithm based on whatever's important that day. But I think that overall, it's just a bad conversation.
That's how Pierce Morgan built his brand.
You think so?
I mean, look at all his recent podcasts. It's just four people, two on one side, two on another. They just yell at each other.
Yeah, but a lot of those people that he has on, and I don't follow him every day, but a lot of people, I don't think they even know what they're talking about. So it's like they can touch upon like a centimeter deep of the political space and have some interesting sound bites, but they don't have any formal training.
They don't have any ability to actually deconstruct an issue or provide even framework for the particular issue.
Yeah, you have that lawyer point of view, right? I think so, yeah. Yeah, because you get down to the actual laws, and you're not hypothetical with it.
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Chapter 4: How is history misrepresented in modern education?
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Yeah, so sometimes they do a response video to my response video. I'd say that's like the rarest. They don't usually do that. The one of two things that they do do is they typically either reach out to me directly, in which case it's always been a positive interaction. It's never been negative. Or they just ignore it, which is totally fine too. That's their prerogative.
No one needs to respond. I guess, yeah, some people take it personally and then they block you or they ignore it or whatever. Right, right, right. But your videos are actually productive. You're not attacking their personal lives.
I try not to. I've probably thrown some barbs from time to time where people have gotten a little bit frustrated, but I feel like they've brought it upon themselves a little bit.
I feel that. What was your first viral video? What was it about?
Man, so I think it was a video this past summer, honestly, related to the Founding Fathers and people saying, there's a couple of them I did where there was this whole thing where why are we listening to the Founding Fathers in America today? They were just a bunch of 21-year-old kids who didn't know what they were doing.
And so it's such a poor understanding of who the Founding Fathers were that I felt like I had to debunk it. And I only had a few thousand followers at the time. But a couple of those videos got to a couple million or whatever.
I just watched Hamilton, and I have newfound respect for our founding fathers. I'm not going to lie.
Yeah. They were a really, really interesting group of people. And I think that as much credit as a lot of people in America give them, we actually don't even give them enough credit. If you think about it, so pretend you are a subject in the British Empire in the 1770s or whatever, 1760s, 1770s. The British Empire is the most powerful empire to ever exist in the world.
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Chapter 5: What are the implications of the gold reserve in Fort Knox?
I see that. It's like, why are we getting involved with so many other countries? Shouldn't we fix ourselves first? I see that argument all the time, right? What do you think about that?
I mean, that's tough to unpack. Yeah, I think it's case by case. It's case by case, yeah. So obviously a lot of the heat has been coming from this Ukraine situation. And I'm not an international politics expert. So I do get the... this idea of prioritization. Like, we do need to prioritize what we are spending our resources on, and theoretically, the prioritization should be on American citizens.
I get that aspect of it. But I do not go as far as, like, people at The Daily Wire go, or, like, Matt Walsh, who will say, hey, we should never be giving foreign aid to anybody, including Israel. Like, that's dumb. We're in an international world. We are in a very global economy. So things that go awry one place will definitely affect the United States one way or the other.
And so a lot of these things, we have to be involved. We have to be present. We have to be engaging with other countries. I think conservatism has gone off the rails a little bit there. You think so? I do. Wow. Because they've become too isolationist. Right. I think that's a temptation for Trump in his second term.
Yeah, he's making a lot of moves, man. Yeah. Signed, what, like 50 executive orders already?
Yeah, I think more. Jeez.
How do you even keep up with that? That's crazy.
I can't keep up with all of it.
I don't even know if Trump can keep up with all of it. I mean, that's why Elon's kind of there to help out.
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Chapter 6: How do tariffs affect global economics?
Yeah, so I think that's a weird dichotomy, honestly. And it's because of Trump's support for tariffs that they've become a left-right issue. But traditionally, they weren't a left-right issue at all. Right. The discussion about tariffs on social media right now is so elementary. It's so mind-numbingly dumb half the time that it drives me insane. So right now, this is a discussion.
If you're on the left, you're like, ah, gotcha. Tariffs are paid by the company that's in the United States that imports the products. And then those are passed along to consumers. And the answer to that is like, Well, obvious. That's elementary tariffs. That's tariffs 101. That's what they teach you in an economics class or a global business class, right? That's obvious.
Most of the time, the cost is passed along to the consumer. So the left is thinking they've played a gotcha game by explaining literally just how tariffs work. We understand that. But then the right, who've also never studied or heard about tariffs many times, they're like, oh, all of Trump's tariffs are great. They're awesome. They're going to replace the income tax, which is also awful.
You would never want tariffs to generate revenue like they did 100 years ago. And we've tried extensive tariffs many times in our nation's history. Most recently was during the Great Depression, when the tariffs exacerbated the Great Depression and made it much worse. Oh, wow. So we don't want to do that again. But here's the thing.
Tariffs are a super important part of a country's economic policy. They need to be there. In an ideal world, there would be no tariffs. Every country in the world would export the things that they're really good at, whether that's labor, whether that's steel, whatever it is, they would export. And then they'd import the things that they can't produce or they aren't very good at.
But countries in a global economy don't want to grow at a slow rate. They want to grow as fast as possible. So what they do is they start tariffs, and they use those as a domestic protectionism measure for their own internal industries or manufacturers. And so when one country does that, particularly if they're a power player, other countries have to respond globally in order to stay in the game.
So again, there's this ideal world where everyone's engaging in free trade, which is not reality. So countries have to tariff. And everyone knows this in politics. Let me tell you this. People don't talk about this. So Trump's first term, he instituted a good number of tariffs, most notably on China, but also on some other countries. He did that while other Western countries were also doing that.
The European Union, for example, was also instituting tariffs on China during Trump's first term. During Biden's first term, so Trump was an officer four years during Biden's first term, he kept almost every single tariff in place and in many cases increased tariffs on China. So let me tell you this.
The revenue that the Biden administration during Biden's four years brought in from tariffs was double what Trump's first term brought in for tariffs. Wow. No one talks about that. No, I never heard that. And so you might as well say, well, the Biden administration supported tariffs more than Trump did.
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Chapter 7: Is Donald Trump truly a conservative leader?
Like, the Civil Rights Movement said, hey, look at these people that have been marginalized in our country, and their ancestors have been enslaved in the country, so we should... make some pathways to bring them to the table, okay? But that's very different than what DEI has become in a lot of places, which is to say, we need to reserve these 10 spots.
Yeah, that I'm not a fan of.
Regardless of what they think, regardless of, like, these 10 spots are reserved for people just because of their skin color. Right. And I don't think that's bad. I think that's very, very damaging. And I think it leads to people saying, hey, the only reason that person got their position was because of their skin color. Right. And that's bad.
Yeah, it is.
Like, that's bad for everyone. And so I think the push is probably good, but I think they need to be very careful not to go too far in the other direction and say, like, diversity is inherently bad. Yeah. Because it's obviously not.
For me, it worked against me because I'm Asian. So when I was applying to colleges, you know how they make you. Well, there was the big Supreme Court case on that. Oh, there was? I didn't know that.
Yeah. So I think it's like students versus students. It's the SAFE group. I forget the acronym. But it was Asian students at Harvard. or Asian students who didn't get into Harvard, I should say, who basically said Harvard's affirmative action program discriminated against Asians and whites.
I think it did.
And well, I mean, there's actually really good evidence that's the case. Because what they do is they look at test scores and GPAs for different races as they apply to Harvard. And Asians had to have such a high test score to get into Harvard. They had to have a perfect score. They're not getting in. Yeah, which is like there's something going on there.
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Chapter 8: What's the impact of DEI programs on college admissions?
What about you? Yeah, no, that's always the million-dollar question. People want to know. Yeah, no, so people accuse me of being far left at times and far right. Really? Now, I'd say 65%, 70% of my followers are more conservative just because of the videos that have blown up. Same with mine, yeah. Yeah, so I did vote for Trump in 2024, very hesitantly, because I don't see myself as MAGA.
I think that Trump was a better option than Kamala Harris in this past election, particularly because Kamala Harris, no one voted for her. She was just, like, fausted upon by the American people, right? As president, I should say. Yeah. But... I think people call me a centrist, and I call myself that just to kind of use common vernacular.
But there's two different ways, two different things you can mean when you say centrist, right? One thing is you just take the center position on every issue. So like abortion, you might say like, oh, yeah, women should have the right to choose, but it should be safe and rare. We shouldn't have that many abortions, right? And so that might be the central position to take.
That's not what I mean when I say centrist. I don't just take the center position on every issue. I actually have very extreme views on certain issues. What I mean when I say centrist is I just take every issue and every candidate and every election individually. And I come to a... a decision on each issue as they come.
And so that means some of my issues would place me in a right camp, some in a far right camp. Some of my issues would place me in a left camp. And so it's like a mixed bag. Now, if you were to line up all of my views on every issue, I probably would lean conservative because I just have more on that side.
But it's not because I started with that and said, let me grab this meeting and put him in this bag. It was because I was like, OK, let's figure out what I actually believe. I like that. That's the starting point.
I think more people should view it that way. I'm not a fan of the two-party system, to be honest.
No, absolutely not.
I think it's unproductive. I think it's such a low-level IQ argument.
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