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It’s not news that the government is using withheld federal funds, the threat of blocked mergers and other strong-arm tactics to exploit pressure points and impose President Donald Trump’s version of diversity on the country.
It is new that the efforts are yielding results.
In higher education: The Department of Justice has transformed its Civil Rights Division into a strike team against what it views as unwarranted and illegal diversity efforts in higher education.
In private enterprise: The Federal Communications Commission approved a $6 billion merger between Paramount and Skydance only after in-writing promises to dismantle diversity initiatives.
In the media: That Paramount merger also hinged on commitments that CBS News’ “reporting will be fair, unbiased, and fact-based.” Given the furor raised by Trump and others over “60 Minutes,” the implication is that there will be changes. Read CNN’s full report.
Just as its parent company was agreeing to a diversity of opinions in programming, CBS also, coincidentally, cited financial losses to cancel “The Late Show” with Trump critic Stephen Colbert, who called Paramount’s settling of a lawsuit with Trump related to “60 Minutes” a “big fat bribe.”
In sports: There’s no evidence yet that Trump is willing to follow through on his threat to hold up a new stadium for Washington’s football team, now called the Commanders, unless owners revert to calling it the Redskins. The team has rejected the idea. Then again, pre-season camps are just now underway and Trump has been out of the country.
But promoting religion is encouraged. At the same time it is clamping down on racial and gender diversity efforts, the administration is changing policy to allow and even encourage federal workers to share their religious views with colleagues and even proselytize at work, as long as it’s not harassment. Read CNN’s report.
The Trump administration’s efforts to change higher education have used billions in federal funding for research and more — money on which universities, their faculties and the scientific community rely — to extract policy concessions.
Columbia University agreed to pay $200 million over three years in exchange for the reinstatement of federal funding. But it also agreed, among many other things, to end diversity initiatives, crack down on mask-wearing protesters, and much more, including the hiring of specific new faculty in the Jewish studies department.
Harvard, according to a New York Times report, is also open to a settlement, but could fork over up to $500 million to avoid its current court battle with the Trump administration. The Times did not report on specific terms of the potential deal and whether it could include diversity initiatives, but the government’s complaint against Harvard was brought under the Civil Rights Act.
It’s possible the administration sees a template here. Most colleges in the country are not in compliance with the Supreme Court’s decision banning affirmative action, according to Harmeet Dhillon, who leads the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division.
“There’s 6,000 institutions of higher education in the United States and I have reason to believe that most of them are out of compliance with students for fair admissions,” she told CNN’s Jake Tapper last month.
DOJ civil rights chief reacts to UVA president’s resignation
Dhillon appeared on the show to talk about the pressure campaign from the Justice Department over admission policies that led to the resignation of University of Virginia President Jim Ryan.
Dhillon welcomed his departure because, she said, Ryan built his career around building diversity when DEI was “the academic vogue… now it isn’t.”
“To me, the promise of America is equal opportunity for every individual, not groups or group think,” she told Tapper.
Since then, her division has opened investigations into the University of California and George Mason University, a public university in Virginia.
The FCC, the organization that wrought concessions for the Skydance and Paramount merger, has also launched investigations into the DEI practices of other companies with news divisions, including Comcast, which owns NBC, and Disney, which owns ABC, specifically looking at their diversity policies.
When Trump targeted federal funding for NPR and PBS, he accused them of “woke propaganda.” He signed legislation pushed by Republicans on Capitol Hill to claw back previously appropriated funds for public broadcasting, but the cuts are likely to hit local stations in rural areas hardest.
Trump has been reluctant to pursue any sort of regulation for AI, but he did issue an executive action that aims to make sure the federal government only interacts with AI models that scrub DEI, which is ironic since a major problem identified in AI is that it relies on inputs from humans and has been shown, at times, to be racist and antisemitic.
Oklahoma Schools Superintendent Ryan Walters, a Republican, has said he’ll give teachers moving to Oklahoma from other states a test to guarantee they won’t push ideology he disagrees with.
“You’re not going to come in here and teach that there’s 27 genders. There’s boys and girls. That’s in our science standards,” Walters told state school board members, according to The Oklahoman. “You’re going to come in, and you’re not going to undermine American exceptionalism by teaching anti-American, anti-Semitic hate.”
The test is being developed in collaboration with PragerU, which makes conservative education videos and which was also behind a recent set of videos released by the White House in which Founding Fathers are made to speak via CGI.
(Walters, meanwhile, is facing questions and an investigation into why images of naked women were seen on his office television during a board meeting.)
Amy Sherald, the artist behind a stunning portrait of Michelle Obama in the National Portrait Gallery canceled her planned solo show at the National Portrait Gallery, according to the New York Times, when she was told her painting of a transgender Statue of Liberty might run afoul of Trump’s skepticism of anything trans-related.
Put that in the same category as Trump’s takeover of the board that oversees the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. Republicans want to rename the opera house after first lady Melania Trump.
While the pressure is real and widespread, it has not snuffed out criticism of Trump himself. South Park, whose parent company falls under the Paramount-Skydance merger, ran its delayed Season 27 premiere, according to CNN’s report, “around the ending of ‘wokeness’” and a Trump character suing residents of South Park for $5 billion after they protest Jesus appearing in local schools.”
