> It's mostly ideological posturing about something that sounds scary to them. I think it's fair to be frustrated that a lot of political discourse is driven by appealing to fear rather than discussing facts in goodwill but I'm not sure that's isolated to only one particular party. I do think we tend to notice when people we don't like are not operating in good faith and tend to look the other way when people we do like are not operating in good faith so to someone firmly on one side of the spectrum it can definitely look like the opposition is particularly slimy.

> people who are being hired to teach in a classroom that will include a diverse group of students

I don't remotely understand how this is relevant to whether a particular instructor should be hired or not. If I need to learn math, then I want my instructor to be knowledgeable, personable, patient, good at explanations, and dedicated to their work. I don't care what equipment they have between their legs, what color it is, or who they want to use it with. We can take a look at example diversity statements online https://physicalsciences.ucsd.edu/_files/examples-submitted-... and we will notice people feel empowered to talk about their sexuality, race, gender etc but they never proudly mentioned things like "I am a white heterosexual man from the US" but if you swap words to a new value in the relevant categories i.e. "I am a Latinx queer woman from Mexico" this suddenly becomes relevant to the exercise. If changing the color, sexuality, gender, or place of origin for an applicant is relevant to the outcome then this seems like a discriminatory process (https://www.justice.gov/crt/nondiscrimination-basis-race-col...).

I do think it's perfectly ok for people to disagree with me here and I expect that if their representatives get in power we will see funding and priorities shift back towards more required diversity statements while also shifting to allow admissions processes to take into account things like race, sexuality, and gender etc which is just the reality of living in a democracy.