https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/11/us/politics/trump-interview-white-people-discrimination.html
Trump said it clean: civil-rights-era protections “very badly treated” white people, “reverse discrimination.” In other words: he’s recasting the Second Reconstruction as the mistake.
That phrase matters because it’s not an argument about a specific edge-case policy. It’s a moral inversion: civil-rights enforcement becomes the injury, and whiteness becomes the protected class. Once you buy that, the “fix” is never “tighten standards.” The fix is to re-aim the institutions that were built to enforce the Second Reconstruction (the mid-century push to dismantle Jim Crow and expand equal citizenship)#1288677, and call it “merit.”
You can see the pivot in motion:
• EEOC as megaphone: the EEOC chair put out a targeted call asking white men to come forward with DEI-related discrimination complaints.
• DOJ as backstop (or not): in a Dec. 9, 2025 sign-on letter, former DOJ Civil Rights Division staff say leadership inverted the Division’s mission — dropping core matters and treating DOJ like a loyalty shop instead of a constitutional one.#1374355
• The “protector” posture: the same reporting describes Trump casting himself as the “protector of white people…at home and abroad.”
Yes, Title VII protects everyone from discrimination, including whites. That’s not the issue. The issue is when “very badly treated” becomes a governing premise so civil-rights law gets repurposed from a backstop against exclusion into a tool for rollback.
Question: If the goal is merit and equal treatment, what evidence would show these agencies are enforcing neutral standards—rather than reallocating enforcement toward one political story?
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##Sources:
- https://thegrio.com/2026/01/12/trump-says-civil-rights-act-led-to-white-people-being-very-badly-treated/
— Accessible recap of the NYT interview: “very badly treated,” “reverse discrimination,” plus the “protector of white people…at home and abroad” framing. - https://x.com/andrealucasEEOC/status/2001439099907961012
— EEOC Chair Andrea Lucas video/post: “Are you a white male…?” call to file discrimination claims. - https://www.eeoc.gov/wysk/what-you-should-know-about-dei-related-discrimination-work
— EEOC’s official DEI-related discrimination FAQ/technical assistance (how Title VII is being applied to DEI). - https://www.thejusticeconnection.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Civil-Rights-Division-Sign-On-Letter.pdf
— Dec. 9, 2025 sign-on letter from former DOJ Civil Rights Division staff alleging mission inversion and “loyalty…not the Constitution.” - https://www.eeoc.gov/statutes/title-vii-civil-rights-act-1964
— Title VII statutory text (anchor for “Title VII protects everyone” concession).
Well if we measure everyone's test scores, it's going to be Asian, white, light hispanic, dark hispanic, black. That should be taken as evidence of a merit-based non-discriminating system, but the people on the lower range feel differently.
Merrill and Kemper understood this 60 years ago #1289513: if you only measure what the privileged can easily accumulate, you’ll keep selecting the privileged. ‘Race-neutral’ doesn’t discover merit. It stops looking for it.
https://clashreport.com/world/articles/pentagon-china-building-toward-1000-nuclear-warheads-as-it-prepares-for-national-total-war-tm39hjkd7ca
Xi Jinping is such a smarmy leftist. China's leftists are just as repulsive as Western leftists. Unironically pro-statism despite all the whining about historical injustices. Hysterical corona and climate change believers who saw no issues with a complete unilateral lockdown on the civilian economy for two years. It's all Marxism. Give the CCP another 20 years and they would turn China into the EU. Better to cut them off now.
Trump looks to be adopting increasingly authoritarian, autocratic, state capitalist approach.
How thin and flimsy the pretense of freedom and democracy, when imperialist hegemony is slipping from your grasp.
Death rates from Covid virus in New Zealand were extremely low while in the USA they were substantial.
USA 1,232,181 Dead
NZ 4,538 Dead
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_death_rates_by_country
Free markets do not protect the elderly and infirm.
Compassionate governments can.
The “very badly treated / reverse discrimination” line has a lineage.
In the 1920s–30s, Virginia segregationists were blunt about what they feared: equal citizenship would end “Caucasian ideals” and eventually produce a “mixbreed” President, Cox’s word, not mine. Earnest Sevier Cox was operating in the same Virginia “racial integrity” ecosystem tied to John Powell and Walter Plecker. That ecosystem didn’t just talk. It built a legal/cultural machine (Virginia’s Racial Integrity regime) and then fed the later Massive Resistance playbook: treat equal rights as an existential threat to “order” and “culture,” then call the pushback “defense.”
Then the strategy evolves. Historian Randall Balmer argues the modern Religious Right didn’t first cohere around abortion, but around the federal government threatening the tax-exempt status of segregationist Christian schools (Bob Jones University being the famous case). The genius move was rebranding: you don’t have to say “segregation". You say “religious liberty,” “parental rights,” “Christian education,” “freedom,” “government overreach.”
Whether you buy Balmer’s exact origin story or not, the pattern holds: rights expansion → white grievance → institutional mobilization. So when Trump says civil rights were “bad for whites,” it’s not a one-off. It’s a recycled argument: equal protection recast as oppression, and the rollback sold as “merit” and “freedom.”
These are emergency measures for specific short-term goals in response to communists. It's not the same as idolizing the command economy as a positive in itself.
The Cultural Revolution was an emergency measure too, in response to western imperialism.
Good luck with Trumps version- it does not look like a fun time for the USA.
What Trump is doing is crudely copying Chinas State Capitalism, Authoritarianism and Autocracy because neoliberalism has failed the USA.
How thin and flimsy the pretense of freedom and democracy, when imperialist hegemony is slipping from your grasp.
It's fun for the winning side.
What you call "neoliberalism" is just a brand of the same Jewish Marxist statist anti-nationalist slop that infected China.
No, what I call neoliberalism is where bankers and corporates (ie capital) captured the narrative and power of government in the west and turned it entirely to their short sighted profit maximisation objectives rather than what good government does- which is to protect and preserve the collective best interests of the entire nation.
Something your neoliberal infected mind probably cannot even conceptualise- you were probably bottle fed on the neoliberal rat poison...most of you Libertarians were.
Learn from history or repeat its tragedies...
Death rates from Covid virus in New Zealand were extremely low, while in the USA they were significantly larger.
Trumps neoliberal negligence-incompetence resulted in hundreds of thousands of avoidable deaths.
USA 1,232,181 Dead
NZ 4,538 Dead
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_death_rates_by_country
Free markets do not protect the elderly and infirm.
Compassionate governments can.
https://twiiit.com/andrealucasEEOC/status/2001439099907961012