This has really made the rounds this morning…

This is the Trump-endorsed Senate candidate in Louisiana challenging Sen. Cassidy.

Yikes pic.twitter.com/oKblMgDzj5

— Cameron Cawthorne (@Cam_Cawthorne) April 1, 2026

It’s a video of Julia Letlow, during her interviews to become the president of the University of Louisiana at Monroe back in 2020, parroting the stock catechisms around the “need” to create a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion office at ULM and promising to do so if she got the job. Per Fox News…

Rep. Julia Letlow, R-La., a Trump-endorsed Senate candidate in Louisiana, is saying that she will ensure diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies will be rooted out of schools in her state if she wins.

However, Letlow’s past remarks and actions as a university faculty member, such as promises to open a DEI office if hired as a university president, and her past praise for DEI nationwide, have thrown these promises into question.

In a 2020 video from Letlow’s hiring process, when interviewing to be the president of the University of Louisiana Monroe, Letlow called the school’s record on faculty gender diversity “shameful,” praised DEI efforts around the country, said she wanted to open the school’s first DEI division and suggested that, if hired, she would want “a person around the table that is cognizant and fighting for diversity, equity and inclusion before any decision is made for the university.”

In January, The Daily Caller first reported that, prior to serving Louisiana’s 5th Congressional District, Letlow was in a communications position at UL Monroe, where she helped push DEI initiatives aimed at “diversifying marketing and comms teams” and “establish[ing] diverse content.” She also signed a statement embracing diversity as one of UL Monroe’s “core values” shortly after the death of George Floyd.

“I was able to go to eight different universities and see some amazing work that other universities have already started – and you don’t even have to keep it to Louisiana, you can go nationwide to see the amazing effort people have been doing for years to address these issues,” Letlow told a panel interviewing her for the UL—Monroe presidency in 2020, in response to a question concerning the percentage of tenured female faculty. “So, one of the first things I would do – I believe we need a division on this campus, a division of diversity, equity and inclusion, with leadership that goes all the way to the top with a full staff because our issues are so great.”

During Letlow’s hiring process to potentially be the next president of UL—Monroe, she also spoke in a video meant to introduce herself to students, during which Letlow called herself a “strong and progressive leader” as the result of many years in higher ed.

The GOP primary race in Louisiana for the state’s open U.S. Senate seat, between Letlow and incumbent Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., has become a battle over who is more pro-Trump – and DEI has been a major proving point.

“While Liberal Letlow was pushing DEI policies at ULM, calling herself a ‘strong and progressive leader,’ Senator Cassidy was working with President Trump and others to secure billions of dollars for the state and bring conservative policies to Louisiana,” said a spokesperson for Cassidy’s campaign. “From no boys in girls sports, to co-sponsoring the Save America Act, the HALT Fentanyl Act, and the Working Families Tax Cuts.”

It’s pretty rich that Cassidy is pushing this – it’s not like he took much of a stand against DEI either…

Meanwhile, in comments to Fox News Digital, Letlow’s campaign representatives said that “President Trump endorsed [Letlow] because he knows exactly where she stands.”

“While Letlow was fighting DEI in Congress, Bill Cassidy was working with Joe Biden to pass major federal legislation that funded DEI programs, imposed equity mandates, and embedded gender-identity language into federal policy,” the spokesperson continued, referring to the bipartisan Infrastructure and Jobs Act passed in 2021. “Cassidy authored and voted for a $1.2 trillion spending bill loaded with DEI provisions, voted for the CHIPS Act’s DEI research requirements, and negotiated a gun bill whose grant programs the Trump administration later canceled for being DEI vehicles.”

So what should you believe about this?

Is Julia Letlow woke? Is she a “liberal” wolf in sheep’s clothing?

The answer to that is she wouldn’t have married Luke Letlow, who was one of the better conservatives Louisiana politics has ever seen, if she was truly on the Left. In case you haven’t noticed, most leftist women are far too strident about politics to bridge the political divide.

What’s a lot more likely, and it isn’t particularly exonerating, is that Letlow was saying what she thought she needed to say in order to get a job running a university.

Here’s something you probably haven’t thought about: for all the sales pitches about DEI that it was going to help out with ending racism and getting black folks the hand up they’ve needed, when President Trump took office and immediately started scrubbing all the DEI stuff out of the federal government there was a shocking dearth of real outrage in the black community about that.

The Joy Reids of the world threw a fit, but nobody cared about that. Nobody was in the streets about DEI going away.

Why?

It turns out that the people who benefited from DEI were… white women.

Something like 55 percent of the diversity officers in major organizations across the country, per a study done last year, were white women. DEI was an absolute bonanza for white chicks with college degrees and minimal useful skills; every corporation or university or non-profit or some other organization with money to burn and PR issues to solve rushed to DEI because it was a way to hire a bunch of people fitting various demographic profiles which might have been underrepresented in their core business practices. For example, if you’re an oil company, the people who do all the things an oil company actually does and make the money an oil company makes are going to be almost all men. But you can’t be a major corporation with a 90 percent male workforce; they’ll hound you to the ends of the earth for that.

So you hire women every chance you get. And if you can hire a whole bunch of them in your HR department, great – now you’re “diverse.” And when the universities start pumping out morons who say you have to regurgitate these various leftist catechisms, you can either fight that and have a giant mess on your hands, or you can set up a DEI office in your HR department, tell them you’ve checked that box, and try to ignore these people now demanding your roughnecks and engineers sit through Chinese Cultural Revolution-style struggle sessions about “whiteness.”

Everybody knows it’s bullshit. Everybody knows it’s make-work. But they play along, because the alternative is worse.

And that’s in Corporate America. What do you think it’s like at a university?

Julia Letlow was trying to get the job running that place, and she knew she had zero chance of landing it – especially in 2020, when John Bel Edwards had just gotten re-elected as Louisiana’s governor and was pushing insane DEI mandates in every public institution in the state – unless she paid lip service to this stupidity. Knowing that if ULM took a big plunge into DEI, it was going to mostly benefit a constituency within that university that would already be friendly to the idea of somebody like Julia Letlow running the place.

And maybe Julia Letlow would be in a better position to moderate DEI idiocy at ULM than somebody else who got hired. Let’s not forget that at LSU not too long earlier, a guy got hired as the school president who’d built a career off academic writings to the tune that math was racist. Give them a taste of that new-fangled religion and maybe they’ll bite on it and give you the job, and then you can run the place how you want.

Like I said, this is not exonerating. What it tells you about Letlow isn’t really that she’s woke but that instead she’s going to go along to get along. And at ULM in 2020, that meant she was going to give ’em the “yessir, yessir, three bags full” answer on DEI.

It means she isn’t going to buck her party in Congress, and she doesn’t. Letlow has built a brand of voting with the crowd pretty much every time so far in the House. There is no reason to think she won’t be the same way in the Senate.

You as a Republican primary voter in Louisiana might be looking for somebody with more personal conviction than this, and you’re not unreasonable in voting that way. It might be that John Fleming, for whatever faults he might have, fits that bill better. Letlow’s people will tell you that Cassidy will ultimately beat Fleming, though, because he doesn’t have any money and Cassidy will bury him in negative ads  during the runoff. They could well be right about that.

The point here, though, is not to trash Letlow. It’s to point out that this is much more of a cultural problem than a political one. Thankfully, the culture has begun turning away from DEI – though at places like ULM it doesn’t look like that battle has been completely won.

Of course, the culture of the Senate needs change, and to get that you need change agents. You need people willing to make the establishment upset by doing things differently to get stuff done. The Senate can’t even fund TSA in the middle of a war against the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism (though maybe we don’t actually need TSA in the first place; we can certainly have that discussion), so the answer would seem to be that we want somebody with more fortitude than Bill Cassidy, who’s done little more than follow the crowd since he got to Washington.

And that’s going to be Letlow’s challenge. She’s going to have to show that she has the ability to do more than just follow the crowd. Especially with this video of her shilling for DEI now in circulation.