Chloé Simone – The Dark Side of Identity

February 20, 2026·34 min·3 clips

Chloé Simone reveals her three principles for human connection that challenge today's identity politics.

The conversation opens carefully. After the listener-support preface, the host corrects himself around Chloe Simone's name and asks what happened to Valdory before moving into her public work. That correction gives the exchange its mood. Identity is not waved away or softened into sentiment. It is tied to enterprise, reputation, and speech. Theory of Enchantment is the first pressure point. Simone says she founded it in 2018 to promote inclusion and belonging with integrity, explicitly against the Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi approach. The host pushes the label. Is this DEI? Would calling it DEI slander what she is doing? Simone does not settle it neatly. In the excerpt, she treats the work as an open question, shaped by civil-rights aspiration and by the problem of integrity inside inclusion work. Then the subject widens to Israel and Gaza. The host cites a recent Mearsheimer conversation and a Pierce Morgan formulation about ethnic cleansing. The question is loaded on purpose. A co-question asks her to connect Gaza to the Theory of Enchantment idea that legalistic language can become a contest both sides know how to play. Simone does not answer like someone trying to win. She says she wrote a Substack piece called The G Word and describes wrestling with whether what happened in Gaza was genocide. Her uncertainty matters. She admits a historic partiality toward Israel, then worries that the partiality may have made it harder to see and name suffering in Gaza. Music gives her the language. Because she hears concepts as sound, Zionism is not only a position. It is a resonance that once felt protective and now no longer settles the same way. The host interrupts gently. When she says she has been mourning for a year and a half, he asks what exactly she is mourning, keeping the exchange personal without letting it get blurry. The close is warm. Rob calls the conversation a pleasure, the host says Simone enriches, challenges, and inspires the discourse, and both leave room for her to return.

As heard by us

Simone on DEI's dismantling -- and the Gaza question she still can't close.

Chloe Simone built Theory of Enchantment in 2018 as a civil-rights-grounded DEI alternative to the DiAngelo-Kendi frameworks, then watched the Trump administration's anti-DEI sweep take a sledgehammer to it without distinguishing careful from careless.

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Why you'd press play

She chose King over DiAngelo, and the government took a sledgehammer to her business anyway.

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