Robert Reich’s first post today echoes my topic yesterday. But let’s ask again: is this only about federal control and civil rights? Answer: No, it’s something deeper, a step in a familiar playbook…
Robert Reich, 10 Mar 2025: The universities are next
He begins by reminding us of the current state of things.
Friends,
Trump is following Putin’s, Xi’s, and Orban’s playbook. First, take over military and intelligence operations by purging career officers and substituting ones personally loyal to you.
Next, subdue the courts by ignoring or threatening to ignore court rulings you disagree with.
Intimidate legislators by warning that if they don’t bend to your wishes, you’ll run loyalists against them. (Make sure they also worry about what your violent supporters could do to them and their families.)
Then focus on independent sources of information: the media and the universities. Sue media that publish critical stories and block their access to news conferences and interviews.
Then go after the universities.
Then follow details about Trump’s cancelling grants with Columbia University, and some example complaints about universities from several Trump officials — Stefanik, Hawley, and Vance — while noting their academic credentials (Harvard, Stanford, Yale) — implying their hypocrisy.
But of all Trump’s and Republicans’ moves against higher education, the most destructive is the cancelation of research grants and contracts. The destruction is hardly confined to Columbia and other suspected left-wing bastions.
And so we get to the core reason for attacks on education. It’s not really any surprise.
Trump’s moves are consistent with the tyrant’s playbook, but they’re also jeopardizing America’s national security and competitiveness.
Trump speaks of putting America First, but his attack on the nation’s great research universities is ensuring that the U.S. comes in second — to China.
Although America has long been the global leader in scientific output, China is now surging ahead. Even before Trump’s cuts in research funding, China was projected to match U.S. research spending within five years.
China has already surpassed the U.S. as the top producer of highly cited papers and international patent applications. It now awards more science and engineering Ph.D.s than the U.S.
Tyrants close universities. Fascists burn books. Trump is destroying America’s most important asset — its innovative mind.
The first reader comment, from one Michael Miller, spells this out more bluntly.
Critical thinking and brilliant minds are the enemies of dictators. It’s easier to control a population of gullible, uneducated and misinformed people who have been convinced that “woke” is the end of civilization.
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Again about this. Was it deliberate? An accident of simplistic use of search engines? Or another example of wreck things first and fix things later?
Salon, Amanda Marcotte, 10 Mar 2025: Banning “Enola Gay”: Pete Hegseth’s DEI paranoia knows no limits, subtitled “Trump’s defense secretary ends a 1965 policy barring racial segregation from contract facilities”
Note the invocation of false witness, as I have often noticed.
During his confirmation hearing, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth repeatedly insisted he is not a racist nor a misogynist, but wants “a Pentagon laser focused on warfighting, lethality, meritocracy, standards, and readiness.” Despite his bellicose Christianity, however, Donald Trump’s appointee had no problem violating the biblical commandment against bearing false witness. As soon as he was sworn in, Hegseth did exactly the opposite of what was promised. He and Trump have devalued merit, expunging experienced and dedicated military leaders for no real reason other than they are not white men. Hegseth demanded budget cuts. He backed Trump’s refusal to send older weapons to Ukrainian fighting forces, allowing the U.S. military to update its stockpile. He’s gone along with Trump’s war on intelligence-gathering on Russia, which puts American troops at higher risk. He’s supported Elon Musk’s war on veterans, as well, which includes firing them from federal jobs and slashing 80,000 employees from Veterans Affairs.
And about it being about anybody who is not a straight white Christian man, as I have often noticed.
Instead, Hegseth’s priority — the better word is “obsession” — since taking office has been pushing the racism, misogyny, and queerphobia he denied during his confirmation hearing. Under the guise of eliminating “DEI” (short for “diversity, equity and inclusion,” but used as a slur word by the right), Hegseth has waged all-out war on any evidence that people who aren’t straight white Christian men can be effective soldiers. On top of purges of military leadership, Hegseth has canceled all military observances of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Pride Month, Holocaust Days of Remembrance and any other occasion acknowledging the contributions of people who aren’t straight white Christian men. He’s also been on a rampage against military bases that dropped the names of Confederate leaders. Being pro-slavery is enough to exonerate literal treachery in Hegseth’s view.
And it’s about Christian apologetics for slavery.
It’s also ideological for him, however. As I’ve documented at Salon, Hegseth belongs to a far-right Christian church that teaches slavery was the pinnacle of race relations in the U.S. and that women should not work outside the home or even have the right to vote. These can’t be written off as “private” religious views. The church is openly Christian nationalist, which means the leaders advocate for using the government to force their religious beliefs on the nation — basically, theocracy. Hegseth himself has declared a need for an “army” that could remake the U.S. into the far-right Christian society they desire.
And so:
It’s not hard to see, therefore, what’s going on here: Hegseth sees the U.S. military as a venue for his Christian nationalist social experiment. He’s trying to remake the military into his fantasy of a country where straight white Christian men hold all the power and everyone else is marginalized, often to the point of exploitation.
But… does Amanda actually say that this was deliberate, or an accident that might be corrected? No. Yet the incident still reveals underlying motivations, as she concludes:
But it’s also an extension of a larger far-right effort to rewrite history to romanticize white supremacy and create a false story to justify Christian theocracy. Hegseth is deep in that world, and not just because he wants to recast Confederate generals as heroes instead of villains. The leader of his church has published quite a bit of misleading history, including two books defending chattel slavery in the American South, replete with false claims that slavery was a benevolent institution that served enslaved people’s best interests. It’s hard to imagine Hegseth is really focused on “warfighting, lethality, meritocracy, standards, and readiness.” Instead, his energies seem mainly aimed at creating this fantasy world where straight white Christian men are the only ones who matter, and everyone else barely rates mention, unless they’re recast as villains in this MAGA delusion.
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Once again, there are broad historical forces at play here in the 21st century. The ultimate question: will the human race survive? My provisional answer: not as long as the short-term thinking folks are in charge.
