#LeslieJones isn't joking.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/xsRUk0dMJu4

Secretary of '#Education' ', #LindaMcMahon, 'goofy motherfucker'

Update. Yesterday (May 12) #Harvard President #AlanGarber released his response to #LindaMcMahon and the #Trump admin.
https://www.harvard.edu/research-funding/wp-content/uploads/sites/16/2025/05/Letter-from-Harvard-President-Alan-M.-Garber-to-the-Honorable-Linda-E.-McMahon.pdf

#Academia #DefendResearch #Funding #Trump #TrumpVResearch #USPol #USPolitics
@academicchatter

Cratering in the polls, and losing left right and center in court, the Trump regime spent this week scrambling to install a permanent fascist order before the peasants show up on the National Mall with pitchforks; and we wrote about it all in this week's The Skinny.

https://www.ninaillingworth.com/2025/05/07/the-skinny-may-1st-7th/2/

The Skinny: Building A Patchwork Enabling Act

"I confess that on some level it’s probably amusing to picture Trump sitting in front of a TV and getting big mad when it tells him Black and trans people exist, he shouldn’t bully overweight people, and the abortion bans he facilitated are hurting American women. The reality here however is that in signaling what the president doesn’t want to see in publicly-funded media, he’s effectively articulating a Christian Nationalist agenda. As we’ve discussed numerous times on this blog, the regime is not just fighting a material war to install a fascist dictatorship in our society; they’re also fighting an authoritarian cultural war on our discourse, our history, and who is allowed to matter in our media entertainment complex. The ideological headcage Trump is trying to use state power to enforce here, is just as important to the Trumpenrich project to create a white ethnostate dictatorship under the Kelpto Kaiser, as its material expansion of the American fascist police state is."

The more I watch them in action, the more it becomes clear to me that the inversion of civil rights language and protections is a foundational aspect of the methodology the Trump regime is using to transform America into a fascist dictatorship with open nazi characteristics. While I think this write up in the Guardian could use a bit more blunt honesty about the white nationalist nature of the Trump administration's strategy here, but it still does a pretty good job of looking at all the ways the regime is purposing one (itself white nationalist) SCOTUS ruling to turn sixty years of civil rights legislation into a weapon against the very marginalized people it was written to protect.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/01/trump-administration-civil-rights-act

Trump administration exploits landmark civil rights act to fight schools’ diversity initiatives

"Linda McMahon, the education secretary, has described the investigation as part of the administration’s effort to “reorient civil rights enforcement to ensure all students are protected from illegal discrimination”. But civil rights advocates have denounced them as vague, likely unlawful and a betrayal of the spirit of the civil rights protections they purport to invoke.

“What we’re witnessing is an administration that is working very hard to turn civil rights laws against” the people trying to faithfully implement them, said Maya Wiley, the president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. “It’s really an effort to say, ‘If you don’t do what we tell you, we will turn our considerable power against you’.”

I think the facts here pretty much speak for themselves; weaponizing Title VI and IX of the 1964 Civil Rights act to fight bogus "anti-white discrimination," seize control over educational institutions to protect a US-backed genocide in Gaza, and persecute trans (primarily women) people is a gross, fascist perversion of the entire purpose of those laws and I have no doubt that doing so actively delights the cracker nazis running the Trump administration. Forcing a white nationalist framework onto American life through the very same mechanisms that were installed to fight rampant white supremacy in our society is the ultimate fascist troll job, and the "how's my ass taste" aspect of this initiative is probably just as important to the regime as its actual efforts to create a de facto white ethnostate through these methods.

Furthermore, I think it goes without saying that using one single SCOTUS decision striking down affirmative action in college admissions, to argue that the government has a legal responsibility to enforce white nationalist policy over every aspect of American life and education, is a ridiculous broad, crassly dishonest interpretation of the law that should in no way be given credibility by anyone who isn't a fascist. This isn't Simon Says, the clearly stated purpose of the Civil Rights Act matters here too, and going full "the card says Moops" in response to this objectively disingenuous nazi bullshit is a cowardly failure of civic responsibility by the media, education institutes, and every part of the American establishment that isn't directly fighting Trump's inversion perversion of the Civil Rights Act.

Finally I'd like to point out that this is yet another example of the way Trump's entire fascist agenda amounts of "governance by nazi conspiracy theory." The entire basis of the administration's argument that they can, and need to use Civil Rights law to protect white, straight, Christian men, is rooted in fascist conspiracy theories about "reverse racism," "gender ideology," and "white genocide" - none of which are real, or actually happening in our society. This is a consistent pattern now in how Trump rules; the regime states fascist conspiracy theories as fact, acts on those conspiracy theories as if they were actual crises-level emergencies, and then seeks reprisal against anyone who opposes their attempts to govern as if these fascist conspiracy theories are true.

This is an older article from February 2025, but I thought it might be worth sharing here in the wake of Trump's attempts to transform the civil rights section at the Department of Justice into a fascist attack dog that works only to further his authoritarian ideological goals. Within three weeks of Downmarket Mussolini's inauguration, the regime had already repurposed the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights towards prosecuting Trump's Christian Nationalist agenda, while actively sidelining investigations into racial abuse, disability access, and even sexual assault.

https://www.propublica.org/article/department-of-education-civil-rights-office-investigations

“We’ve Been Essentially Muzzled”: Department of Education Halts Thousands of Civil Rights Investigations Under Trump

"In the three-and-a-half weeks since Donald Trump returned to the presidency, investigations by the agency that handles allegations of civil rights violations in the nation’s schools and colleges have ground to a halt.

At the same time, there’s been a dramatic drop in the number of new cases opened by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights — and the few that attorneys have been directed to investigate reflect some of Trump’s priorities: getting rid of gender-neutral bathrooms, banning transgender athletes from participating in women’s sports and alleged antisemitism or discrimination against white students."

I don't really think it's a coincidence that Trump and his Education Secretary Linda McMahon (a woman extremely active in the cause to privatize education and promote religious voucher schools) immediately prioritized the same winger bullshit at the DOE as the regime is now trying to force the DoJ's civil rights division to pursue; namely discrimination against white people, alleged antisemitism, and women's rights - but only in the extremely narrow context of keeping trans women out of women's sports and bathrooms. This is a Christian Nationalist government, actively working to install a Christian Nationalist political and social order on the United States by whatever means legal, or extralegal, it requires to do so.

"Today's records request is the #Trump administration's first step to ensure #Harvard is not being manipulated by, or doing the bidding of, foreign entities," *#Education* Secy #LindaMcMahon said in a statement. The letter cited NO EVIDENCE to show that was happening.

Harvard said it has filed such reports for decades "as part of its ongoing compliance with the #law."

@RealJournalism

The Republicans abuse transgender women and girls by pretending the right, in any way, cares about women and girls.

In order to 'care' about women and girl athletes the right will abuse all trans and fem athletes with genital inspections or withhold funding.

This is the choice the Republicans demand of states.

#LindaMcMahon
Abuse of #TitleIX