“WELL I DON’T LIKE IT WHEN THEY WON’T HIRE WHITE PEOPLE WHO ARE MORE QUALIFIED”

The whole premise of equity is that there is a desired demography of people in a given position, and that positive action should be taken to approach or maintain the desired demography and that qualification, ability and merit are secondary to that. Meaning it doesn't matter who is better, so long as someone is good enough and the right race or sex they should have preference. Don't hire the best person, hire the best black person or woman or whatever the desired demographic is (sometimes these will be the same person either way, but not always).

Most of the people who are angry about "DEI" would be fine with things like blind hiring that exclude race/sex from the process entirely but whether or not blind hiring is a valid DEI approach depends on the result - for example a public works department in Australia tried blind hiring to eliminate gender imbalance and killed that project because they found that not knowing the sex of applicants actually reduced the number of women hired which was opposed to the goal (because the goal wasn't to remove discrimination but rather to hire more women).

They genuinely believe that white men are at a significant disadvantage in the workforce because DEI hires.

https://academic.oup.com/esr/article/38/3/337/6412759?login=false

We first note that out of 36 possible outcomes, 23 favour females, as indicated by callback gender ratios > 1. This is interesting, but due to the small sample for each occupation within each country, most of these outcomes are not significant by conventional standards (see right-hand column). In Germany, we find statistically significant hiring discrimination against male applicants for receptionist and store assistant jobs, with callback ratios of 1.4 and 1.9, respectively. In the Netherlands, we find evidence of hiring discrimination against male applicants for store assistant jobs, with a callback ratio of 2.2. In Spain, we find clear evidence of hiring discrimination of males in two occupations, with callback ratios of 1.9 (payroll clerk) and 4.5 (receptionist). In the United Kingdom, we find strong evidence of hiring discrimination against males in payroll clerk jobs (callback ratio of 4.8, the highest of all). Interestingly, in the data, we find no evidence of gender discrimination in hiring in Norway or the United States. Thus, the evidence shows hiring discrimination against male, not female, job applicants in 1–3 occupations within four of the six countries.

Based on country-specific regression models, Figure 1 (and Supplementary Table S2) shows the probability of receiving a callback separately for each country. According to these estimates, we find evidence of hiring discrimination against male applicants in United Kingdom, Spain, Germany, and the Netherlands. The gender differences range from 0 per cent in the US to 9 percentage points in Germany. Thus, we observe gender discrimination in hiring against men in four out of six countries.