Trump turns civil rights upside down in ‘biggest rollback’ since Reconstruction

The Department of Justice division created by the landmark 1957 Civil Rights Act to defend American’s rights has a new mission: rooting out anti-Christian bias, antisemitism and “woke ideology,” the head of the division, Harmeet Dhillon, recently told conservative commentator Glenn Beck.

A majority of the lawyers at the Civil Rights division – people who got jobs there to ensure equal access to the ballot box, perhaps – are expected to resign with pay until September.

At a White House Cabinet meeting Wednesday, secretaries repeatedly sought praise from Trump for purging diversity efforts from the government.

“We’re not organizing money based on the color of skin,” said Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, referring to contracts cancelled at USDA.

“If you’re having DEI policies, we’re not going to fund your projects,” said Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, bragging about how the administration will use taxpayer dollars to kill diversity efforts in states.

Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought told Trump the administration had forgiven money a Chicago lender paid as part of a discrimination settlement.

“We’ve ripped wokeness out of the military, sir, DEI, trans. And it’s Fort Benning and Fort Bragg again at the DOD,” said Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, referring to bases that again share names with Confederate generals.

The administration is also working to strong-arm elite universities into dropping DEI programs by threatening billions in funding, including for scientific research. Harvard, so far, has decided to fight back.

But there are other examples, such as the fact that while the US has stopped accepting refugees for the most part, it is accepting White South Africans who claim they are the victims of racism in their country.

It’s a much larger pivot than simply changing hiring practices and stopping so-called DEI efforts.

“This is certainly the biggest rollback of civil rights since Reconstruction,” according to Mark Updegrove, a presidential historian and CEO of the LBJ Foundation.

Trump’s policies and the way he’s orienting his government combine as an assault on the Great Society legislation Johnson pushed through in the 1960s, including the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.

Comparing Trump’s effort to purge the country of diversity efforts and deconstruct the Great Society legislation, Updegrove drew a parallel between now and the period beginning during Reconstruction when post-Civil War advances like the 13th Amendment were hurt by the rise of White Supremacy and Jim Crow.

“We’re seeing something very similar now, rolling back the advances of the 1960s,” he said. While those Great Society laws were meant to be temporary measures to create a more equal society, Updegrove said the US is not yet there. “So called anti-wokeism,” he argued, is “essentially permission to accept racism.”

“If you ultimately look at what Trump is doing, it is aimed at taking down the laws of the Great Society, which are effectively, in my view, the foundation of modern America and the path to a plural democracy for the first time in our history.”

[quote] “This White House exploits faith for power, following a Christian nationalist playbook.”

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