John Jefferson
I joined Boston Consulting Group (BCG) as a 22-year-old college graduate with the ambition to work for change. Unfortunately, along with many of my peers, I fell for the allure of well-tailored slogans and glittering credentials, which obscured the unambitious conformity and moral bankruptcy of the safe management-consulting path.
Every fall on elite campuses, students compete for selective consulting roles at McKinsey, BCG, and Bain—the “Big Three.” These firms offer high compensation, rapid career progression, and the promise of intellectually stimulating work. As a senior at Vanderbilt University, I found this pitch compelling and prepared rigorously for the interview process. My efforts paid off when I received an offer from BCG.
In my first days on the job, I traveled to Atlanta for training and found myself at a dinner table full of polished young people. A Yale undergraduate gushed about her desire to decarbonize the American economy (she flew over 500 miles to the training). I liked her. But across the table, a Wharton MBA kept interrupting, purring with quasi-religious fervor about the racial equity initiatives he worked on during his BCG internship last summer. We all adopted serious expressions and nodded fervently, acknowledging the importance of this critical work.
In truth, the conversations were boring. There may have been some true believers, but many, myself included, were playing a cynical roleplaying game—carefully choosing our words and positioning ourselves for social approval so we could be showered with credentials and economic opportunity. We were a group of selfish conformists who chose to stay on the hyper-tracked path to management positions in powerful American institutions.
Later, I was staffed on my first project, which boiled down to facilitating mass migration into the United States of America. We spent months helping migrant shelters and other clients accelerate migrant services and streamline the distribution of free benefits, among other efforts. And my team was not alone.
I rapidly learned about BCG’s other public-sector work partnering with governments and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to facilitate mass migration into host countries, which BCG conducts in parallel with private-sector projects intended to help global business leaders capitalize on migrant labor. The firm’s “Innovation without Borders” series highlights the supposed benefits of global migration, which BCG’s website calls “a humanitarian and business imperative.”
At recruiting events for undergraduates and MBAs, I observed BCG representatives emphasize opportunities for new hires to join social impact cases. Our partnerships with NGOs and government agencies on migration, “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI) and “environmental, social, and governance” investing principles were framed as key reasons for talented young people to choose BCG over McKinsey and Bain. At these events, BCG reps presented the firm as the social-justice hero, partnering with USAID and other left-wing organizations while McKinsey, which briefly partnered with ICE, was portrayed as the Machiavellian, capitalist villain.
The ideological distortions continued as BCG senior leadership assured us that special consideration would be given to the distribution of hiring, bonus, and promotion outcomes across racial and gender identities. These early career experiences, among others, led me down a path of reevaluating the role that BCG plays in American society. I am now convinced that the interests of BCG and the transnational professional-managerial class are at odds with the values and welfare of the American people.
The rise of McKinsey, BCG, and Bain in the post-war era epitomizes the triumph of technocratic managerialism over the old economic model responsible for America’s original greatness—a model built on ownership, entrepreneurship, individual judgment, and civic virtue. Management consultants are the foot soldiers of managerialism. Critics might see them as interchangeable NPCs (non-player characters) hovering over “key performance indicators” on laptop screens, quietly managing—and facilitating—civilizational decline (for a fee). The terminus of managerialism, as implemented by major consulting firms, is the bureaucratic optimization of opioid sales, mass migration, off-shoring, and DEI, which have collectively devastated the American people.
While my own work at BCG focused, at least at first, on migration, the firm is better known for promoting DEI. It offers an entire suite of consulting services geared to helping organizational clients embed DEI into operations including “customer journey, product development, innovation agenda, and supply chain.” In recent years, BCG has completed hundreds of DEI projects, some of which are comical, including “Propelling Gender Diversity and Inclusion in the Mining Industry.”
BCG’s DEI work has been as wide-reaching as it is destructive. The firm has completed 180 racial equity projects since 2020, which often included “Diversity & Inclusion Assessments for Leadership,” codifying DEI into the DNA of American companies. BCG recently identified 29 DEI interventions for a major retail client with over 200,000 employees, assigning racial and gender representation targets to each business unit and codifying policies to hold senior leaders accountable for achieving these targets.
Within BCG’s own four walls, DEI is a top priority. BCG rigorously tracks and optimizes gender and racial characteristics. Here I refer to BCG’s 2024 DEI Report, which lists such achievements as:
· Investing $89 Million into DEI initiatives
· Donating $1M to DEI nonprofits
· Putting 100 percent of its U.S. leaders through an annual DEI review process
· Reducing the number of white hires from 51 percent to 45 percent from 2021 to 2023
· Redirecting internal supply chains to minority-owned businesses
Perhaps the most humorous turn in BCG’s DEI journey is their leadership training. As a part of their broader $89 million investment into DEI initiatives, over 800 of BCG’s senior leaders have participated in a “1.5-day Groundwater Immersive Experience” to learn more about systemic racism. This program is highly reminiscent of the antics seen in Matt Walsh’s recent Am I Racist? documentary film where Walsh’s character encourages white participants in a DEI seminar to self-flagellate, with actual whips, for the sins of their ancestors. In BCG’s version of this charade, certified DEI experts begin preaching short homilies on “Structural Racial Arrangement” and the “History and Construction of Race” broken up by somber moments of silent reflection. It’s a grift, which BCG actively propagates across critical American institutions.
Most recently, McKinsey, BCG, and Bain have been driving the emerging storyline on how return-to-work policies are creating inequities across racial and gender groups. These firms use this narrative as a “burning platform” to sell additional work to “close the equity gap.”
Given how bureaucratic these consulting firms have become, I re confident that there is minimal individual malice involved in BCG’s heavy-handed contributions to the DEI-Industrial Complex, but the results are no less damaging. Amid the obvious absurdity of this left-wing ideological project, it can be easy to forget the tangible downstream consequences that these activities have, for example, on blue-collar Appalachians who are now subject to racial and gender quotas that have nothing to do with their values or way of life. DEI persists as one of the most toxic forces pillaging American communities.
We find ourselves in a time where legacy consulting firms, much like modern universities, deform young talent into timid cogs, keeping them fed and comfortable as they drift into moral cowardice and corresponding intellectual dullness, with the ultimate result of lessening the dynamism of our business landscape and decelerating the possibilities for our future.
To my fellow young people on the safe management consulting path, what could be less ambitious than continuing to tinker with contract dashboards on behalf of mega-corporations that undermine your country? You claim to be ambitious, but you draft DEI statements for Johnson & Johnson.
The solution appears obvious: pressure BCG to stop implementing DEI policies. BCG won’t take that step on its own, however unpopular such policies may become, because DEI is not incidental to managerialism. Rather, it is the beating heart, the mechanism that gives meaning to what would otherwise be a brutal way of organizing society. As Harvard Law Professor Adrian Vermeule argues, “man is a sacramental animal who cannot deny his nature […] if ritual is rejected in theory, it will be aped in reality as a kind of compulsion.” Thus, within the otherwise secular frame of modern managerial society, DEI emerges as a fundamentally religious compulsion that provides a functional eschatology, central sacrament, and accompanying liturgy for the fanatical liberal to faithfully practice.
Today, the U.S. government spends over a billion dollars annually on consulting services from BCG, McKinsey, and Bain, companies that advance corrosive globalist ideologies. However, the American people voted decisively in November 2024 to advance a different vision for America’s future. As we build America’s new Golden Age, the Trump Administration should aggressively regulate and fully divest from these anti-American consulting firms.
But cutting ties with these damaging firms will not be sufficient. We need new leaders to emerge who will advance a successor model to the managerial regime— a model that prioritizes ownership and civic virtue. Young Americans must lead this effort, finding within themselves sufficient disdain for the triviality of the rotting legacy institutions and sufficient courage to align with new institutions building an alternative future.
Now that President Trump has been inaugurated, our nation stands at a fork in the road: will we stagnate under the thumb of the transnational professional-managerial class? Or will we build a new economy that unlocks American potential and revitalizes our way of life?
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