Billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman is facing scrutiny from conservatives for his plan to support the 2024 presidential campaign of Rep. Dean Phillips (D-MN), who has prioritized sweeping diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.
Ackman, an investor who runs the New York City-based Pershing Square Capital Management, has come under the spotlight in recent months for his opposition to academia and corporations relying on DEI, which the hedge fund manager and Republicans have described as discriminatory due to the framework’s promotion of race-based curricula and hiring practices. Still, Ackman’s anti-DEI crusade didn’t stop the billionaire from announcing Saturday that he will pour $1 million into a super PAC boosting Phillips, the long shot President Joe Biden challenger who has campaigned on DEI and pushed legislation in Congress that would expand DEI across the United States, records show.
“If we are to dismantle DEI — and we must because western civilization cannot coexist with it — we must oppose any candidate or organization that advances the DEI agenda,” Ryan Williams, president of the Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank, told the Washington Examiner. “Bill Ackman has diagnosed the problem of DEI admirably and with courage and public spirit. Going forward, I would hope that he directs his philanthropic and political giving towards candidates and organizations that share his alarm at DEI.”
“Dean Phillips is not one of those candidates,” Williams said.
The 2024 Phillips campaign and the lawmaker’s congressional office did not return a request for comment.
The tension between conservatives and Ackman over his Phillips-allied PAC contribution announcement comes after the Right celebrated the investor on social media for taking aim at Harvard University over its championing of DEI. Ackman said in January that DEI was “the root cause of antisemitism” at the school and was “helping to generate anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hate speech and harassment” after the Oct. 7 Hamas-led terrorist attacks against Israel. He notably joined the likes of conservative activist Christopher Rufo in pressuring Harvard to oust President Claudine Gay, who resigned this month after several reports revealing that she engaged in academic plagiarism.
Ackman, who has donated in the past to Democrats and Republicans, asserted in January that “DEI is racist because reverse racism is racism, even if it is against white people.” At the same time, his plan to back Phillips is earning the ire of conservatives, who have pointed to various examples of Phillips being aligned with other Democrats when it comes to DEI policies.
Shortly after Ackman announced the donation plan, the Phillips presidential campaign quietly scrubbed a section on its website that said DEI was a key issue on which the lawmaker is running, according to a Washington Examiner review. The section, as of publication time, still states that Phillips “understands that in a country where all are created equal, disparities can only exist because our policies, systems, or structures have — intentionally or otherwise — propagated them.”
In response to the Phillips campaign’s DEI website section drawing attention on social media, Ackman defended the Democratic candidate.
“I believe @deanbphillips didn’t understand what DEI was when that was made part of his website. I made the same mistake. He is getting educated as we speak,” Ackman posted on X. “Let’s listen to what he has to say after he gets educated. That’s the danger of the DEI movement. It comes inside a Trojan horse of constructed of beneficent sounding words.”
Phillips, who FiveThirtyEight tracked as having voted with Biden 100% of the time in Congress, notably introduced a bill in 2020 called the New Business Preservation Act, which would “authorize the Treasury Department to partner with states to make equity investments in new businesses alongside private venture capital companies, with special consideration given to women and minority-owned enterprises,” according to a press release on the lawmaker’s congressional website.
Moreover, the press release said “Phillips plans to strengthen the mission of diversity and inclusion” by adding provisions to the bill that, for instance, “require annual reporting on diversity representation within the state’s venture capital industry.”
To Jon Schweppe, policy director for the conservative American Principles Project, Ackman is “doing some really great work,” but “the Phillips contribution seems a little crazy.”
“He’s a standard liberal who obviously now feels a little bit out of place in the Democratic Party,” Schweppe told the Washington Examiner. “I think it’s important we encourage him in his evolution of understanding about just how nefarious the woke movement is. But it’s going to take some time.”
Conservatives have also pointed to Phillips’s voting record on DEI issues.
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Hamilton Lincoln Law Institute Director Ted Frank slammed Ackman on Sunday for the donation plan, sharing a link on social media showing how Phillips voted against an anti-DEI amendment offered by Republicans. Nate Hochman, an ex-presidential campaign staffer for Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), shared links to other anti-DEI amendments that the House member opposed.
Pershing Square Capital Management did not return a request for comment.
