Trump: Civil Rights Laws Only Apply to Straight White Men

If one listens to the Felon, straight white men are the most discriminated group in America.  Any situation where white men do not hold the vast majority of jobs, positions, or college students is claimed to be proof that white straight males face insidious discrimination.  This mindset comes straight of Project 2025, a white "Christian" nationalist agenda that seeks to take America back to the 1950's and return open supremacy to white men, particularly those who identify as "conservative Christians." and Never mind that men of all races make up slightly less than 50% of the overall population and white men make up roughly 30% of the total U.S. population.  The result of this hostility towards diversity and any sense of equity is that rather than protecting all citizens from discrimination, the Felon's regime is (i) rescinding non-discrimination protections, and (ii) using the civil rights laws to investigate and prosecute institutions and businesses that actually seek to provide opportunities to all and not just straight white males.    This discriminatory alternate universe agenda is a case of up being down and black being white. A piece in the New York Times looks at this disturbing perversion of the civil rights laws:

In his drive to purge diversity efforts in the federal government and beyond, President Trump has expressed outright hostility to civil rights protections.  He ordered federal agencies to abandon some of the core tenets of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, on the basis that they represented a “pernicious” attempt to make decisions based on diversity rather than merit.

But in recent weeks, Mr. Trump has turned to those same measures — not to help groups that have historically been discriminated against, but to remedy what he sees as the disenfranchisement of white men.

The pattern fits into a broader trend in the administration, as Trump officials pick and choose which civil rights protections they want to enforce, and for whom. Across the government, agencies that have historically worked to fight discrimination against Black people, women and other groups have pivoted to investigating institutions accused of favoring them.

“The plain message that they are conveying is: If you even think about, talk about or claim to be in favor of diversity, of equity, of inclusion, of accessibility, you will be targeted,” said Maya Wiley, the president and chief executive of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.

“They’re conveying that white men are the most discriminated against people in American society,” she added, “and therefore entitled to affirmative action.”

He has made a major push to root out programs that promote diversity, which he has suggested lead to the hiring of incompetent people.  In recent weeks, agencies have launched investigations that signal the administration’s shift in its civil rights enforcement.

On Monday, the administration said it had opened a civil rights investigation into the city of Chicago to see if its mayor or others had engaged in a pattern of discrimination by hiring a number of Black people to senior positions.

The Office for Civil Rights at the Education Department is investigating whether Chicago’s public school system is violating the Civil Rights Act with its “Black Students Success Plan,” alleging that it favors one group of academically underperforming students over others.

And last month, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission launched an investigation at Harvard University, alleging that the school had engaged in discriminatory hiring because it showed a significant increase in the percentage of minority, female and nonbinary faculty earning tenure over the past decade while the rates for white men declined.

While she wrote that other groups could have been discriminated against, including Asians, men, or straight people who applied for jobs or student training programs, her justification was focused almost exclusively on the outcomes of white men.

In her letter, Ms. Lucas cited now-deleted statistics retrieved from the university’s archives that showed that the percentage of tenured white male faculty dropped from 64 percent in 2013 to 56 percent in 2023.

The E.E.O.C. investigation, which was first reported by the conservative news site The Washington Free Beacon, is one of several the administration has launched in its battle to get the nation’s oldest university to bend to the president’s agenda.

The E.E.O.C., the nation’s primary litigator of workplace discrimination, has become a powerful tool for the Trump administration as it tries to pressure institutions that do not align with the president’s agenda.

Last month, it began questioning the hiring practices of 20 of the country’s biggest law firms, claiming that their efforts to recruit Black and Hispanic lawyers and create a more diverse work force may have discriminated against white candidates.

“Aspiring to promote diversity is not the same at all as considering race and gender in an individual hiring decision,” Ms. Yang said. “They’re essentially doing what they falsely disparaged disparate impact of doing.”

But civil rights experts said the administration’s goals are clear.

Catherine E. Lhamon, who previously served as the head of the Office for Civil Rights at the Education Department, said the investigations showed a pattern of “performative misapplication of federal civil rights law.”

“The Trump administration’s transparently vendetta-driven investigations categorically do not focus on fulfilling Congress’s guarantee that federal nondiscrimination protections apply equally,” Ms. Lhamon said. “Civil rights, properly understood, do not pit one group against another but protect all of us.”