Georgia GOP gubernatorial hopeful vows to 'ban DEI' in state but his own nonprofit urged CEOs to invest in it

Jackson, the billionaire healthcare founder of Jackson Healthcare and its network of smaller companies, including Jackson Physician Search and Jackson Therapy Partners, has said he would be President Donald Trump's "favorite governor," modeled his campaign launch after the president's and said he has never met a Trump policy he doesn't like. Trump, meanwhile, has made ending DEI in the United States a key part of his second term, issuing an executive order shortly after he was inaugurated to remove it from public services, universities and beyond. His administration has also taken an aggressive stance against DEI in the courts.

Among those experts was then-Jackson Healthcare DEI executive Matthew Harrison, who, in the DEI initiative's videos, touted how the share of "people of color" hired into new roles at Jackson Healthcare rose from 9% to 25% after the company implemented the diversity measures discussed in the initiative's instructional videos.

"We need to ban every bit of idiotic DEI insanity and criminalize reverse discrimination," he recently posted on social media.

Fox News Digital reached out to Jackson's campaign, Jackson Healthcare and goBeyondProfit for comment, including questions about whether Jackson was aware of the "Race in Mind" initiative, whether he approved of the DEI materials at the time and how he squared the nonprofit's past race-focused workplace efforts with his current anti-DEI campaign platform.

"Rick hires like the Georgia Bulldogs: only the best players hit the field, and he will prohibit reverse discrimination as governor," a Jackson campaign spokesperson said in response to Fox News Digital's questions. 

The campaign added that "many of Georgia's most successful and conservative business leaders" have been "program ambassadors or members" at goBeyondProfit, citing Chick-fil-A's involvement and the involvement of Home Depot founder Bernie Marcus until his death.

In one video, Harrison described implementing a "Rooney Rule" hiring policy at Jackson Healthcare after he took over talent acquisition in 2019, saying the company increased the share of "people of color" hired into new roles from 9% to 25% within a year.

"Personally here at Jackson Healthcare, I took over leading talent acquisition here in June of 2019 and put that in place, and within a year, we saw our increase in the number of people of color that we hired into new roles. It went from 9% to 25% and that's the only thing we changed," Harrison says.

A separate speaker from the DEI video series discusses the importance of tying DEI metrics to employee evaluations, encourages "taking those proactive steps and being anti-racist" as discussed in Kendi's book that CEOs were encouraged to read, implored "employers do periodic pay equity reviews for their employees," and urged executives to financially invest in DEI work, saying companies needed to "put your money where your mouth is" on DEI efforts. 

That same speaker framed workplace race issues through slavery and Jim Crow, saying slavery was "America's first race-based economic system" and arguing that the "vestiges of slavery" still live on "even in the American workplace."

"Oddly, the American workplace is the one place where we should be having more of these conversations, but ironically, it's the one place where we're least likely to do," Harrison adds in one of the videos. Meanwhile, at another point in one of the videos, Harrison described how Jackson Healthcare started a "race series" using an outside vendor in order to prevent it from being viewed as "this HR mandate" by employees.

A related goBeyondProfit blog post authored by Harrison and the other DEI expert from the video series encouraged executives to take an Implicit Association Test to measure subconscious biases and create a "Bias Breaker" list cataloguing their known biases, including those involving "gender, sexual orientation, race or skin color, weight, age, and the list goes on."

This revelation about the DEI past of Jackson's companies is not the first time the issue has come to haunt his campaign. Fox News Digital reported in March that Harrison, who wrote his thesis on "Colorism," said during a 2020 podcast interview that Jackson Healthcare and its leaders "get and see the importance of diversity, equity and inclusion in our workforce." He even credited Jackson for inspiring "a learning experience about race during the interview. Meanwhile, Fox News Digital also reported last month that one of Jackson's companies focused on healthcare staffing produced numerous materials ridiculing Republicans' One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

The unearthed DEI efforts come as a brutal Georgia GOP gubernatorial primary nears its conclusion, with the election slated for next Tuesday, followed by the general election in November.

Jackson has blasted Jones as part of the political establishment, while likening Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, another one of his main primary opponents, to the Biblical character "Judas" for being disloyal to Trump during his efforts to contest the 2020 election.