I love living under an administration that straight up doesn’t care about the country’s actual problems. Sure we’ve got a cost of living crisis, an incoherent job market, and devastating climate events occurring more and more frequently, but at least we can rest easy knowing the Trump administration created a unit this week to tackle the biggest problem facing everyday, working class Americans: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives on college campuses.
We live in such a stupid timeline, y’all.
The Department of Justice (DOJ) announced the creation of the “Civil Rights Fraud Initiative” on Monday, Reuters reports. Despite having “Civil Rights” in the title, this initiative isn’t designed to protect vulnerable and underrepresented students from having their rights violated. Instead, it does quite the opposite by threatening to pull federal funding from schools that offer protections or considerations for non-white, non-straight, non-cis gender students.
“A university that accepts federal funds could violate the False Claims Act when it encourages antisemitism, refuses to protect Jewish students, allows men to intrude into women’s bathrooms or requires women to compete against men in athletic competitions,” Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche wrote in the memo announcing the initiative. Blanche added that all 93 of the U.S Attorneys’ offices are required to assign at least one prosecutor to help with the effort, because I’m sure they had nothing else better to do with their time.
The False Claims Act is a federal civil law that grants the government the ability to recover funds from people or organizations who have defrauded it. I’m no legal scholar, but I can’t for the life of me figure out how DEI initiatives equate to defrauding the government.
The DOJ has already taken action against Harvard, launching a False Claims Act investigation against the school last week to see if the school’s admissions standards adhere to the Supreme Court’s ruling that effectively ended affirmative action in college admissions. To Harvard’s credit, it’s not taking the attacks lying down.
From Reuters:
Harvard is currently suing the government, after the Trump administration canceled its federal grants in what the university alleges is a bid to “coerce and control” it.
In a statement on the False Claims Act inquiry, a Harvard spokesperson said the school is committed to following the law.
The investigation represents “yet another abusive and retaliatory action – the latest of many – that the administration has initiated against Harvard since the University was forced to defend itself from harmful overreach against higher education,” the university said.
This is just the latest of several steps the Trump administration has taken over the last four months to crack down on DEI initiatives and silence free speech on college campuses. The Department of Education has launched an investigation into 45 colleges whose DEI practices they deem as “race-exclusionary practices.” (For folks who say we have a victim mentality, white folks sure seem to love painting themselves as the victim.)
We’ve also seen schools like Columbia outright cancel courses that focus on race and the role it plays in our daily lives. This assault on DEI isn’t simply removing considerations for Black and brown students, but is also an outright attack on our history.
This crackdown has had wide-ranging consequences beyond canceled classes and DEI initiatives. Hundreds of millions of federal dollars meant to fund medical research at several universities are being withheld from schools whose DEI practices offend the Trump Administration. Research funding was even withheld from Ohio State University, Vice President J.D. Vance’s alma mater, despite the school completely shuttering its Office of Diversity and Inclusion as a result of the Trump administration’s crackdown.
I guess saving the lives of cancer patients is far less important than ensuring Black and brown students aren’t given the same opportunities as their white peers.
SEE ALSO:
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California Teen Spurs Outrage With Racist Promposal
Trump Administration Launches Civil Fraud Unit Targeting DEI Initiatives at Colleges
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