Republican congressional candidate Marty O’Donnell said that diversity, equity, and inclusion programs are a product of Marxism and are not “deeply held beliefs” by the executives that push them.
O’Donnell is a former member of the board of directors at Bungie, a video game studio, but is now running for Congress in Nevada’s 3rd Congressional District.
He told Blaze News that during his time in the gaming industry, representation and inclusion were not points that were considered.
“Were diversity, equity, inclusion, or representation of certain sexualities or races ever something that you thought about?” O’Donnell was asked.
“No, it wasn’t,” he answered. “The current ‘go woke, go broke,’ we just keep seeing that over and over again. DEI is not DEI. It is not diversity, equity, and inclusion. It is code word for, essentially, a Marxist worldview of power structures,” he continued.
“There’s so many catchwords that are being injected into the conversation: colonization, decolonization. It is so far from — especially in the entertainment business — what people are worried about. Are you going to tell a good story? Are you going to make a good game?”
“That’s what creators should be concerned about,” he added.
O’Donnell said the actual faces of DEI programs aren’t what fans take issue with; it’s the obvious method through which they are wedged into entertainment that doesn’t make sense.
“The fans don’t necessarily reject the movies or games because diversity or equity or inclusion things are forced into their face,” he explained. “Certainly they don’t like being preached to, but basically these are not good products. At the end of the day it’s not fun to play. It’s not interesting. These characters don’t sound real.”
‘I honestly think a lot of these people are empty suits; I don’t think they have core values.’
There is a lot of “fear” at the executive level, the Halo game composer continued, drawing on his experience in dealing with Bungie’s former parent company, Microsoft.
“Fear that you are going to essentially get on the wrong side of some special interest groups who can be very loud and very annoying, so let’s placate those people.”
O’Donnell doesn’t believe that progressive ideologies like DEI are sincere beliefs of those pushing them from the top down. He equated such an elite class to “empty suits.”
“I don’t think, in my experience, that these are deeply held beliefs, especially in the big companies, the C-Suite and the executives, all they’re doing is looking at the bottom line. I honestly think a lot of these people are empty suits; I don’t think they have core values. They adopt the core values of the moment to make sure they’re on the right side, so they don’t get any sort of backlash.”
“True believers” are few and far between, O’Donnell said, adding that no one who has made it to the top of these companies has ever actually created anything. He claimed that despite having a degree or making their way through the production side, their experience has only been in “overseeing.”
The Republican added that he has rarely found people with “strong moral character” running big companies and that they tend to go with wherever the wind blows.
“I don’t trust their judgement,” he plainly stated.
It’s going to take a while for elites and executives to catch on, O’Donnell concluded. He noted that it’s hard for people in those positions to switch gears unless something has particularly affected their profit.
“It’s going to take them a little while to realize this is actually not helping their bottom lines.”
Read more about O’Donnell’s political viewpoints here.
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