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This is an astonishingly self-unaware article. The Left has long advocated for and implemented segregation to this very day:
- Exclusion of Jews from campus
- Black-only housing
- Women-only colleges
- Gay-only campus safe zones
- Exclusion of unapproved points of view
The author decries the actions Trump is taking to dismantle the Office of Civil Rights, but he tacitly admits it has been engaging in reverse discrimination by favoring disadvantaged races in order to undo the historic damage done by racism. It's very nearly laughable that the author is concerned about the danger Trump might pose when the Left has already been doing this very thing for decades.
We have deemed this phenomena Mountain Man's Law, which is the Left's propensity to accuse its opponents of doing what it has been actually doing.
We should also note that the author actually doesn't care about segregation. The plight of blacks does not concern him. The author isn't intending to inform, explain, or increase understanding. His sole purpose to to disseminate The Message. The Message is the daily talking points provided by Central Command. These slogans are repeated day after day by talking heads and media pundits regardless of truth or accuracy.
The objective is to facilitate The Agenda. The Agenda is the dismantling of The System. The Left wants revolution. It wants the Proletariat to rise up against the Bourgeois. It wants to convince people that they aren't getting their fair share, that the rich whites are keeping the poor down, that billionaires are getting rich by stealing from the poor.
The system itself is guilty. Systemic racism, sexism, and repression means the System must be replaced. That is the goal of these revolutionaries. They have been persistent in incremental change, being satisfied with slowly infiltrating our institutions, traditions, government positions, and corporate boardrooms. Though preferring to execute a bloodless coup, they are more and more willing to spill a little blood for the sake of The Agenda.
The reader would do well to keep this in mind as he reads the below article.
It starts with vouchers and the destruction of the Office for Civil Rights.
Not so long ago, the days of racial segregation were thought to be long past. Jim Crow apartheid was firmly part of America’s shameful past—and few episodes were more despicable than bestial white adults throwing objects and screaming death threats at a six-year-old Ruby Bridges for attending a previously whites-only school.
But there have always been enemies to school integration, and they are making moves to bring it back. At least for now, the tactics are quieter, using tools like school vouchers and selective destruction of federal law enforcement. Donald Trump is making Jim Crow great again by pushing “school choice” and gutting the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights.
The Office for Civil Rights (OCR) functions as the Department of Education’s civil rights watchdog. Advocates, students, or parents can file complaints to the office, which then investigates to determine if a complainant’s civil rights (based on race, color, national origin, sex, disability, or age) were violated.
At its best, OCR is a transformative institution, providing long-overdue justice and helping schools protect their students—and not just from racist abuse. In 2014, the Obama OCR played a critical role in reforming the sexual assault prevention policies at Princeton University. It found, after a four-year probe, that the school “failed to provide a prompt and equitable response” to three students who had filed sexual harassment or assault complaints, and violated students’ rights by using a standard of proof higher than the federal recommended standard for sexual harassment or sexual assault. The university had to pay fines and reimburse the tuition of some of the survivors of the assaults. More recently, in 2024, OCR found the Owasso School District in Oklahoma was in violation of Title IX when a trans student’s assault at the hands of two students resulted in their tragic suicide.
OCR, like any agency, has its flaws—its process is quite slow, for instance. But on balance, it is a safeguard for all students on campus, and especially women and minority groups. And that is precisely why it has been targeted by the Trump administration.
Last year, the far-right Heritage Foundation’s white nationalist blueprint to reshape America—also known as Project 2025—outlined a troubling plan for OCR in which it would be moved to the Department of Justice and transformed into a weapon to “punish schools for teaching critical race theory” and “transgender insanity.” Sadly, as with much of Project 2025, this vision is coming to pass. In addition to cutting half of OCR’s staff (who are now set to be reinstated after some court battles), from March 11 to June 27 of this year Education Secretary Linda McMahon and Donald Trump dismissed over 3,400 discrimination complaints with either settlements or claims the evidence was insufficient.
Instead of spending time on those complaints, McMahon and her team are now targeting schools whose diversity, equity, and inclusion programs are allegedly violating civil rights law—specifically, the alleged civil rights of white students who didn’t get into a given selective school in favor of students of color, who are assumed to be less deserving by definition. All of this comes out of the 2023 Supreme Court case Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which effectively found race-based affirmative action programs in higher education unconstitutional. That decision’s logic—that attempting to rectify historic injustices and account for the effects of centuries of discrimination is the real civil rights issue—is the pretext for much of McMahon’s assault. Thus do laws meant to rectify the lasting legacies of racism become tools of legal bigotry.
There is no better person to shepherd the end of OCR, and more broadly, the end of the Department of Education, than Linda McMahon. The two-time Senate election loser and mega-Republican donor has not only been a major ally to Trump, but also ran a pro-Trump think tank called the America First Policy Institute. AFPI contends that school choice—in other words, vouchers—enables parents to make the optimal choice for their children’s individual needs. The organization has pushed research alleging a “new era of school choice,” and has even supported states like Florida and Arizona with their universal school choice efforts.
Now, with the Education Department under her control, McMahon is wielding her perverse interpretation of anti-discrimination law against even Trump’s putative allies. So far, the department has alleged the incredibly conservative George Mason University violated federal civil rights laws for “factoring in race in their hiring practices.” The other side of the enforcement ledger looks just as bad. In addition to targeting universities for wanting to combat the ills of racism and slavery, the Trump-McMahon OCR has abandoned investigations into book burnings, targeted the Maine Department of Education over allowing its trans athletes to compete in sports, ended the collection of data for trans and nonbinary students (going so far as to strike data that would involve rape), and further harmed the agency’s enforcement capacity by shuttering the regional offices in Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, Dallas, San Francisco, Boston, and Cleveland.
The Trump administration’s assault on OCR can be read as part of a plan to resegregate schools. A 2014 column inSlate by current New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie points out that immediately after the landmark decision of Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, Virginia’s segregationist governor Thomas Stanley asked the legislature to shut down public schools and provide parents with vouchers to allow their children to attend private schools. Stanley was putting into practice an idea that neoliberal economists like Milton Friedman and James Buchanan had developed in theory: using market mechanisms to recreate the overt, legally enforced segregation that the Supreme Court had banned.
The conservative effort to make segregated schools acceptable again took another big step forward in the Reagan administration with a report entitled A Nation at Risk, one of the greatest lies ever told in American politics. Ronald Reagan convened a number of officials in his administration to cook up a report that propagated a false narrative of educational failure. The goal was to indicate that public schools were an enormous problem for American educational achievement. He had already begun his presidential campaign attacking the Office for Civil Rights and trying to direct money away from public schools. Four decades later, President Trump signed an executive order that redirected public dollars to voucher programs. Then, Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill created a tax credit for vouchers.
School choice may seem like an innocent way to give parents more control over their children’s education, but it is far more insidious. Virginia Tech pointed out in a 2022 study that unchecked school choice ultimately leads to more school segregation, even if parents do not intend for the racial makeup of a school to be part of their decision. Using a computer simulation of a hypothetical school district with seven schools and 4,000 students, the VT researchers tested how 1,000 different sets of Black and white parents would rate schools based on performance, teacher experience, poverty, the commute, and racial demographics. The results? The parents’ choices still led to increased school segregation. Trump’s voucher credits are effectively subsidizing whites-only schools.
The Washington Post reported that the Department of Education will be moving multiple offices to other federal agencies, and OCR is listed as one of them. In a statement, McMahon said, “The shutdown proved an argument that conservatives have been making for 45 years: The U.S. Department of Education is mostly a pass-through for funds that are best managed by the states.” If nothing else, McMahon’s brazen admission of how she feels about the department that she was tapped and confirmed to lead is most likely a sign that much of the speculation around these offices will inevitably come to pass.
OCR is a small cog in the Trump-McMahon machine to ensure that schools can be effectively resegregated. By taking away public dollars from cash-strapped schools, wealthy (white) parents can put their children in religious charter schools. OCR would still exist, but hampering its enforcement capacity will allow parents the choice to put their children in nearly all-white schools that have the power to reject poorer minority students. Advocates can still file complaints, but with the office’s power diminished, students who are of protected classes will be left to languish in schools that will barely be able to keep the lights on. With this potential makeover, the Trump administration will finalize the Project 2025 mission to completely reverse the purpose of the agency.
Not so long ago, the days of racial segregation were thought to be long past. Jim Crow apartheid was firmly part of America’s shameful past—and few episodes were more despicable than bestial white adults throwing objects and screaming death threats at a six-year-old Ruby Bridges for attending a previously whites-only school.
But there have always been enemies to school integration, and they are making moves to bring it back. At least for now, the tactics are quieter, using tools like school vouchers and selective destruction of federal law enforcement. Donald Trump is making Jim Crow great again by pushing “school choice” and gutting the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights.
The Office for Civil Rights (OCR) functions as the Department of Education’s civil rights watchdog. Advocates, students, or parents can file complaints to the office, which then investigates to determine if a complainant’s civil rights (based on race, color, national origin, sex, disability, or age) were violated.
At its best, OCR is a transformative institution, providing long-overdue justice and helping schools protect their students—and not just from racist abuse. In 2014, the Obama OCR played a critical role in reforming the sexual assault prevention policies at Princeton University. It found, after a four-year probe, that the school “failed to provide a prompt and equitable response” to three students who had filed sexual harassment or assault complaints, and violated students’ rights by using a standard of proof higher than the federal recommended standard for sexual harassment or sexual assault. The university had to pay fines and reimburse the tuition of some of the survivors of the assaults. More recently, in 2024, OCR found the Owasso School District in Oklahoma was in violation of Title IX when a trans student’s assault at the hands of two students resulted in their tragic suicide.
OCR, like any agency, has its flaws—its process is quite slow, for instance. But on balance, it is a safeguard for all students on campus, and especially women and minority groups. And that is precisely why it has been targeted by the Trump administration.
Last year, the far-right Heritage Foundation’s white nationalist blueprint to reshape America—also known as Project 2025—outlined a troubling plan for OCR in which it would be moved to the Department of Justice and transformed into a weapon to “punish schools for teaching critical race theory” and “transgender insanity.” Sadly, as with much of Project 2025, this vision is coming to pass. In addition to cutting half of OCR’s staff (who are now set to be reinstated after some court battles), from March 11 to June 27 of this year Education Secretary Linda McMahon and Donald Trump dismissed over 3,400 discrimination complaints with either settlements or claims the evidence was insufficient.
Instead of spending time on those complaints, McMahon and her team are now targeting schools whose diversity, equity, and inclusion programs are allegedly violating civil rights law—specifically, the alleged civil rights of white students who didn’t get into a given selective school in favor of students of color, who are assumed to be less deserving by definition. All of this comes out of the 2023 Supreme Court case Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which effectively found race-based affirmative action programs in higher education unconstitutional. That decision’s logic—that attempting to rectify historic injustices and account for the effects of centuries of discrimination is the real civil rights issue—is the pretext for much of McMahon’s assault. Thus do laws meant to rectify the lasting legacies of racism become tools of legal bigotry.
There is no better person to shepherd the end of OCR, and more broadly, the end of the Department of Education, than Linda McMahon. The two-time Senate election loser and mega-Republican donor has not only been a major ally to Trump, but also ran a pro-Trump think tank called the America First Policy Institute. AFPI contends that school choice—in other words, vouchers—enables parents to make the optimal choice for their children’s individual needs. The organization has pushed research alleging a “new era of school choice,” and has even supported states like Florida and Arizona with their universal school choice efforts.
Now, with the Education Department under her control, McMahon is wielding her perverse interpretation of anti-discrimination law against even Trump’s putative allies. So far, the department has alleged the incredibly conservative George Mason University violated federal civil rights laws for “factoring in race in their hiring practices.” The other side of the enforcement ledger looks just as bad. In addition to targeting universities for wanting to combat the ills of racism and slavery, the Trump-McMahon OCR has abandoned investigations into book burnings, targeted the Maine Department of Education over allowing its trans athletes to compete in sports, ended the collection of data for trans and nonbinary students (going so far as to strike data that would involve rape), and further harmed the agency’s enforcement capacity by shuttering the regional offices in Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, Dallas, San Francisco, Boston, and Cleveland.
The Trump administration’s assault on OCR can be read as part of a plan to resegregate schools. A 2014 column inSlate by current New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie points out that immediately after the landmark decision of Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, Virginia’s segregationist governor Thomas Stanley asked the legislature to shut down public schools and provide parents with vouchers to allow their children to attend private schools. Stanley was putting into practice an idea that neoliberal economists like Milton Friedman and James Buchanan had developed in theory: using market mechanisms to recreate the overt, legally enforced segregation that the Supreme Court had banned.
The conservative effort to make segregated schools acceptable again took another big step forward in the Reagan administration with a report entitled A Nation at Risk, one of the greatest lies ever told in American politics. Ronald Reagan convened a number of officials in his administration to cook up a report that propagated a false narrative of educational failure. The goal was to indicate that public schools were an enormous problem for American educational achievement. He had already begun his presidential campaign attacking the Office for Civil Rights and trying to direct money away from public schools. Four decades later, President Trump signed an executive order that redirected public dollars to voucher programs. Then, Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill created a tax credit for vouchers.
School choice may seem like an innocent way to give parents more control over their children’s education, but it is far more insidious. Virginia Tech pointed out in a 2022 study that unchecked school choice ultimately leads to more school segregation, even if parents do not intend for the racial makeup of a school to be part of their decision. Using a computer simulation of a hypothetical school district with seven schools and 4,000 students, the VT researchers tested how 1,000 different sets of Black and white parents would rate schools based on performance, teacher experience, poverty, the commute, and racial demographics. The results? The parents’ choices still led to increased school segregation. Trump’s voucher credits are effectively subsidizing whites-only schools.
The Washington Post reported that the Department of Education will be moving multiple offices to other federal agencies, and OCR is listed as one of them. In a statement, McMahon said, “The shutdown proved an argument that conservatives have been making for 45 years: The U.S. Department of Education is mostly a pass-through for funds that are best managed by the states.” If nothing else, McMahon’s brazen admission of how she feels about the department that she was tapped and confirmed to lead is most likely a sign that much of the speculation around these offices will inevitably come to pass.
OCR is a small cog in the Trump-McMahon machine to ensure that schools can be effectively resegregated. By taking away public dollars from cash-strapped schools, wealthy (white) parents can put their children in religious charter schools. OCR would still exist, but hampering its enforcement capacity will allow parents the choice to put their children in nearly all-white schools that have the power to reject poorer minority students. Advocates can still file complaints, but with the office’s power diminished, students who are of protected classes will be left to languish in schools that will barely be able to keep the lights on. With this potential makeover, the Trump administration will finalize the Project 2025 mission to completely reverse the purpose of the agency.
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