MAGA influencers erupted after Gov. Abigail Spanberger (D-VA) shared a photo of cabinet members, with several arguing it had too many Black people to be called “diverse.”
Spanberger posted the photo on X Thursday, writing that she was proud to have “the most talented, hardest-working cabinet in Virginia’s history” and “the most diverse cabinet Virginia has ever seen.”
The picture was taken nine days earlier at the Black History Museum and Cultural Center of Virginia in Richmond, during a session that Style Weekly said marked “the largest appointment of Black cabinet officials in the history of the Commonwealth.”
That milestone is why Black officials fill most of the frame. The cabinet’s six Black members gathered at the museum with Spanberger for a photo shoot meant to document the moment, according to a Richmond Times-Dispatch column.
“If we don’t document, we make it easy to erase us too,” Chief Diversity Officer Sesha Joi Moon told the Times-Dispatch.
Within about two hours of the post, at least nine conservatives had shared it on X to attack the governor’s claims.
“This post is currently burning up Twitter as basically every right-wing influencer argues it includes too many Black people,” Talking Points Memo editor Josh Marshall wrote on Bluesky.
“30% of Virginia residents are White men,” conservative podcaster Katie Miller, a former Trump administration official married to White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, complained on X. “Zero represented here.”
“88% Black,” the pseudonymous MAGA influencer Geiger Capital wrote on X. “Virginia is 20% black. … Friendly reminder when these people say ‘diversity’, they just mean anti-White.”
“Not sure if libs are aware of this, but when six out of your seven Cabinet members have the same skin color, that’s not particularly ‘diverse’ at all,” right-wing influencer Greg Price wrote.
But those counts described the people in the photo, not the full cabinet. The cabinet also includes Finance Secretary Mark Sickles and Transportation Secretary Nick Donohue. Neither is among the eight people the Times-Dispatch identified in the photo.
“‘Diverse,’ as always, means ‘white men need not apply,’” Will Chamberlain, senior counsel at the pro-Trump Article III Project, wrote.
“Diverse just means anti-White and anti-male,” MAGA commentator Jack Posobiec posted.
“‘Diversity’ just means ‘no white men,’” conservative influencer Kangmin Lee wrote.
“Hi, black guy here!” conservative activist CJ Pearson wrote. “This is actually the literal opposite of diversity.”
Others targeted the lines Spanberger wrote to defend her picks, that every secretary was chosen as “the best of the best” and that the group was the state’s “most talented” cabinet.
Juanita Broaddrick, who has accused former President Bill Clinton of rape, an allegation he has long denied, asked on X why the governor had to “qualify that they are the ‘most talented and hard-working.’”
“You are such a corrupt moron!!” Broaddrick added.
“Whenever anyone brags about ‘diversity’, they always throw in a line about how they’re the most qualified,” conservative radio host Jesse Kelly wrote. “That’s because they are most definitely NOT the most qualified.”
Kelly’s charge targeted the quality Spanberger had already named before the post went up as her answer to the Trump administration. She told the Times-Dispatch, “The way that you rebuke the notion of what’s being pushed by the Trump administration is by doubling down on competence.”
“Whether it’s members of our cabinet, whether it’s our chief of staff, or whether it’s me, we’ll be judged in a particular way,” Spanberger said. “You have to endeavor to be the best every single day.”