Trump 2.0 Is Using Blackmail To Wipe Out DEI
And as usual, there's a snake who's been lying in wait to help carry out the plan
What if I told you that the same Christo-Nationalists who are behind the tortured ending of DEI at Columbia University and the firing of Harvard University’s president are from the same mob who helped kill the Fairness Doctrine under Reagan, and have been attacking DEI and Affirmative Action ever since?
The latest snake unleashed by the mob is a man named Christopher Rufo. Rufo is to equality and justice what Phyllis Schlafly was to women’s rights; both tenaciously dedicating their lives to making people miserable.
It’s almost as if Schlafly’s demonic soul split away from her cadaver after she finally died and merged with Rufo’s while cackling, “Women’s bodily autonomy is dead. Let’s move on to another set of human rights Americans take for granted.”
More on Rufo a few more minutes into this report. First, let’s sum up some of the current awfulness around DEI. As with all things Trump 2.0, there’s no way to capture it all in a post of less than about six hours of reading time, so I’ll have to leave out reams of data to make my point.
The regime’s attack on DEI
DEI, aka Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, is under siege in America by the current Christo-Nationalist regime.
You probably know that universities,1 major corporations,2 3 almost every branch of government4 including the military,5 law firms(!),6 and even Major League Baseball7 are falling over themselves to eliminate diversity initiatives.
And, again, as usual, each day that creeps by is another day where progressives lose another American citizen to the propaganda war. Each day, a few more Americans decide DEI is an over-the-top trick by liberals to stink up America’s academic halls and hand Blacks and other people of color a free ride.
Americans have already bought into the lies about immigration. DEI is the next obvious target.
The military is one of the latest to bend over and wait for that gentle touch of Christo-nationalism. Eager to bow to the regime’s abject racism, the Pentagon removed references to Jackie Robinson from its websites until the cacophony of protest forced its spineless generals to claim it was all just a big mistake and reinstate it.
It’s not just the military and almost every federal agency you can think of that is bending over. The aforementioned Columbia University has also surrendered in advance to the Christo-Nationalist regime.8 We can expect more universities to fall in line, too.
Just like you’d expect from a group led by a convicted criminal, the regime blackmailed Columbia University into changing its DEI policy by withholding $400 million from federal grant money until it gave in to a set of specific demands.9
We can argue forever about the principles behind those specifics, but it’s safe to say that if the aforementioned Christopher Rufo is beating his chest about the terms of the blackmail, the terms are unfavorable toward anyone with skin darker than a beige Pantone®.
Rufo said this:10
"Columbia is folding and the other universities will follow suit.
"They must restore the pursuit of truth, rather than ideological activism, as their highest mission."
"This is only the beginning."
Who is Christopher Rufo?
Hold on, it’s coming, I promise (hint: Think Stephen Miller11 with a bigger diploma).
Regime Blackmail is everywhere
This kind of behavior is happening all across the land as the regime focuses on wiping out Black history and Black culture, or the impact of pretty much any group of people darker than a Pantone® eggwhite color, all in the name of the Great Replacement Theory, a loony concept that now guides the American Christo-nationalist government in everything it does.12
Another example of blackmail: The FCC has threatened to kill mergers when companies don’t follow the Fox News philosophy of white supremacy13 promoted by the troll-like Rupert Murdoch, whose much younger girlfriends routinely offer a painful counterbalance to women’s rights every time they tug at his old, ankle-scraping groin parts.
The FCC now wants every company to think like Murdoch or face consequences. These aren’t just consequences of online chastisement like we saw during Trump 1.0. These are the types of consequences that permanently close doors.
The government, as a whole, has become a squalid, blackmailing octopus14 with tentacles that reach into every part of American life and demand every entity that receives federal funds service the needs of the Great Orange Puffalo.
Those needs change frequently, but in this case, it means wiping out DEI, which the current regime defines as “Discriminatory Equity Ideology” and that Pentagon Press Secretary John Ullyot, in a masterclass of Orwellian racism, declared to the world is:
a form of woke cultural Marxism that has no place in the military.”
This redefinition was revealed when ESPN sportswriter Jeff Passan broke a story about the Pentagon’s removal of Jackie Robinson’s military service:
This is the kind of bullshit we are all up against. If you think this won’t affect you because you aren’t Black, I recommend you peek into the history books beginning at about 193315 or so.
But before you do, ask yourself this: What in the name of all the bone spurs in hell does Marxism have to do with DEI, no matter how you define it? Where the hell even IS Marxism in the 21st century? It has about as much relevance in modern American society as Mr. Ed.
The first solid death knell for DEI was a court case
Before you can understand the war against DEI, you’ll need to go back in time with me to June 2023, when the Supreme Court killed Affirmative Action in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College.
Supreme Court Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., writing for the 6–3 conservative supermajority, said that collegiate affirmative action programs violate the constitution because they “unavoidably employ race in a negative manner” and “involve racial stereotyping.”
This is where I check my notes.
Ah, yes, here’s what I found: Affirmative Action was always about race. It was supposed to be. That was the whole idea.
So began the death of affirmative action, and by extension, the death of the concept of reparations.
And the death of reparations, my friends, was always the larger aim. The conservatives in America didn’t hide their glee when Roberts blew apart a key relief mechanism originally intended to make up for 400 years of oppression without consequence.
A brief review of right-wing broadcasts in the wake of the decision demonstrated open warfare against Black America. They celebrated the ruling as if they were Southerners who had just won the Civil War (checks notes again — they kinda did).
The Supreme Court walked back forty years of progress. And right-wing media couldn’t have been happier. Even worse, Americans ate it up because they unwittingly slurp up right-wing propaganda like it’s a new can’t-miss Starbucks sugary frappuccino.
Affirmative action was originally designed to take baby steps toward correcting the wrongs of slavery, Jim Crow, redlining, and a host of other crimes against our Black brothers and sisters. It was designed with one race in mind: Blacks who suffered under centuries of slavery. It eventually became an extension of the rights of other minorities, but its original intent was to offer a lifeboat to descendants of slaves.
It was the first token effort at reparations. Unlike many other theoretical types of reparations, it wasn’t a handout.16 It required effort on the part of the beneficiaries.
By overturning affirmative action, the Roberts Court, again, went rogue (in Joe Biden’s words), wiping out a precedent that most of us took for granted.17
I expected more of this, and said so loudly in various online rants before my Substack days. Big surprise. I was right.
The majority of Americans were not convinced during the 2024 presidential election that there was a difference between the Republican and Democratic Parties. Now that their ignorance has morphed into a sadistic regime, more awful Supreme Court decisions are inevitable, and more awful Supreme Court justices will join the court because Americans apparently can’t understand that Republican presidents nominate judges who are owned by The Federalist Society.18
Independent and younger voters often believe there is no difference between the two parties.19 And here we are.
The impacts of affirmative action were seen before the Supreme Court case was resolved
According to the New Yorker’s Jelani Cobb20:
In 1998, after the University of California system stripped away race, gender, and ethnicity as a factor in admissions, the number of Black and Latino students enrolled at its most selective schools, Berkeley and U.C.L.A., dropped by some forty per cent.
The Association of American Medical Colleges and the American Medical Association wrote in a brief that was ignored by the court’s majority after it was submitted to the case files:
States that have banned race-conscious admissions have seen the number of minority medical-school students drop by roughly 37 percent.21
This, in turn, has affected the number of Black and Hispanic doctors.
Instead, the brief SCOTUS paid attention to was an article by Christopher Rufo, which is cited in the case decision summary by Chief Justice Roberts.
Who is Christopher Rufo?
I realize this is frustrating, but bear with me, it’s coming, I promise.
The impacts of the affirmative action case are real
According to the New York Times,22 the effects of nine states that have already banned race-based college admissions have already altered the shape of the student population in those states:
After Michigan banned race-conscious admissions in 2006, Black undergraduate enrollment declined at the University of Michigan, the state’s flagship school. The share of Black students fell to 4 percent in 2021, from 7 percent in 2006.
A similar drop took place at the University of California’s most selective schools after a 1996 referendum, Proposition 209, banned race-conscious admissions. That year, Black students at the University of California, Los Angeles, made up 7 percent of the student body. By 1998, the percentage of Black students had fallen to 3.43 percent. In 2022, it was up to 5 percent — but still well below what it had been more than a quarter-century earlier.
At highly selective liberal arts colleges, officials expect that the number of Black students could return to levels not seen since the 1960s.
Worst of all, another report says that in recent polls the “majority of Americans said race should not be a factor in college admissions.”23
Except, umm, it is, and will continue to be until Blacks have gained full equal rights in America. We’re not there yet. We’re not even close.24
And even if we were close, Blacks deserve the reparations that affirmative action indirectly gave a few of them.
Republicans have convinced a majority of white people that affirmative action is reverse racism.
Now, they’re going after history itself. They are trying to erase the history of slavery in this country, and trying to pretend that the United States somehow became an empire without committing genocide and ethnic cleansing against First Settlers and torturing Black people as a matter of public policy.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor said in her strongly worded dissent that affirmative action is about race, and intentionally so.25 She added that there is nothing unconstitutional about it:
“The Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment enshrines a guarantee of racial equality. The court long ago concluded that this guarantee can be enforced through race-conscious means in a society that is not, and has never been, colorblind.”
Meanwhile, millions of white families on the East Coast and the South who made their original money on the backs of slavery send their kids to elite colleges through legacy admissions,26 which, as Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez has said, is affirmative action for the white elite.
Millions of families are living off inherited wealth gained through slavery. Maybe it’s time we ask them to give it back to the descendants of those who were worked to death in the prison camps of America’s empire.
Affirmative action was always about race. That was the point. So was ending it.
Dammit, Charles, who the hell is Christopher Rufo?
I’m glad you finally asked.
Remember the Harvard president, Claudine Gay, who was ousted for plagiarism? Well, it turns out that fiasco was part of a Reichstag Fire type of media manipulation27 on the part of yet another Christo-nationalist who has quietly slithered around us for what seems like a hundred years.
Christopher Rufo has been working behind the scenes championing the death of DEI for many years. One of his propaganda pieces was cited by thirsty Supreme Court justices in the Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College affirmative action case.28
When Gay was forced out, Rufo wrote a screed for the Wall Street Journal titled "How We Squeezed Harvard to Push Claudine Gay Out"29:
The left has spent decades consolidating power across the institutions of American academic life. The crowning achievement of that effort was the diversity, equity and inclusion bureaucracy…
Rufo goes on to racist-splain the reasonings of the radical right’s attacks on Dr. Gay, and then gives us a glimpse into their battle plans by explaining how they took her down.
If you're inclined to think that I’m engaging in hyperbole, Rufo makes it clear that I am not. He says it quite plainly when he mentions in the article that the radical right is engaged in "a grueling form of trench warfare."
When Politico asked Rufo, “How much credit do you think you deserve for Gay’s resignation?” he giddily answered:30
I’ve learned that it never hurts to take the credit because sometimes people don’t give it to you. But this really was a team effort that involved three primary points of leverage. First was the narrative leverage, and this was done primarily by me, Christopher Brunet and Aaron Sibarium. Second was the financial leverage, which was led by Bill Ackman and other Harvard donors. And finally, there was the political leverage which was really led by Congresswoman Elise Stefanik’s masterful performance with Claudine Gay at her hearings.
(Checks notes yet again: Bill Ackman deserves an entire Substack dedicated to uncovering all the harm one man can do to a country, but that’s for another writer to tackle)
Gay was forced out of her position for the crime of minor omissions and mistakes involving footnotes in scholarly works, but they were the kind of generally acceptable “mistakes” that people with lighter Pantone® colors in their skin make all the time without retribution.
It all started when Gay was accused of supporting Hamas by not coming down hard enough on students who protested Benjamin Netanyahu’s slaughter of tens of thousands of Gaza citizens on the kill floor known as the Gaza Strip.
This turned her into a rabid supporter of Hamas (she is not) and an anti-semite (she is not), according to the successful propaganda campaign initiated by conservatives.
After they succeeded in tarnishing Dr. Gay’s name, conservatives embarked on an obsessive research campaign and found that Dr. Gay did some sloppy scholastic writing that involved a failure to provide attribution on a few isolated, obscure paragraphs within a large body of work that most conservatives aren’t capable of producing even with the most capable AI helper. Or a team of unpaid interns, for that matter.
Sadly, she was then asked to resign by the university. Let’s let Dr. Gay handle her reaction to all this, as published in her opinion piece in the New York Times:31
I believe all scholars deserve full and appropriate credit for their work. When I learned of these errors, I promptly requested corrections from the journals in which the flagged articles were published, consistent with how I have seen similar faculty cases handled at Harvard.
I have never misrepresented my research findings, nor have I ever claimed credit for the research of others. Moreover, the citation errors should not obscure a fundamental truth: I proudly stand by my work and its impact on the field.
Despite the obsessive scrutiny of my peer-reviewed writings, few have commented on the substance of my scholarship, which focuses on the significance of minority office holding in American politics. My research marshaled concrete evidence to show that when historically marginalized communities gain a meaningful voice in the halls of power, it signals an open door where before many saw only barriers. And that, in turn, strengthens our democracy.
Her voice was never heard if headlines by corporate news organizations are measures of this weather. For example, one of ABC’s headlines about her was: “A timeline of Harvard President Claudine Gay’s short, scandal-plagued tenure.”32
Scandal-plagued? The first Black president in Harvard’s s 387-year history didn’t have enough time in office (one year) to be scandal-plagued.
Thanks, mainstream media, for coming through like a champ again.
I’ve written before about the effectiveness of the conservative propaganda machine, so I’m not going to rehash that other than to say that just because you don’t watch Fox News doesn’t mean its tropes don’t weasel their way into the mainstream media’s core library of headlines.
This is a classic example. ABC is, typically, a little more left than right in its reporting. But there it is, anyway: Dr. Gay’s scandal-plagued tenure.
Dr. Gay got a little sloppy with citations, but now she’s a plagiarist? The truth is that if you scrutinize every university president, you’ll find flawed scholarship like this. It’s not uncommon to screw up a citation.
A fairly quick perusal of comments on the interwebs from people who work in the “industry,” in other words, editors and former editors of scholarly journals, reveals that it is quite likely that none of Dr. Gay’s citation omissions were deliberate.
Her mistakes were minor, almost clerical-level goofs, such as incorrect citations (the citations were correct, but they pointed to the wrong page), and citing entire paragraphs instead of each sentence. She also mishandled some quotes by paraphrasing actual quotes and included quotes where she shouldn’t have.
These errors are so common in peer-reviewed scholarly articles that journal editors shrug them off. A scrutiny of white university presidents will produce reams of examples if you’re hungry to find some.
Perhaps it’s best to look at Dr. Gay’s qualifications from the perspective of her peers, over 700 of whom signed a plea33 to the Harvard Corporation, the entity responsible for her hiring and firing.
In their letter, they said:
We, the undersigned faculty, urge you in the strongest possible terms to defend the independence of the university and to resist political pressures that are at odds with Harvard’s commitment to academic freedom, including calls for the removal of President Claudine Gay.
This was followed by more than seven hundred signatures:
1. Melani Cammett, Clarence Dillon Professor of International Affairs
2. Diana Eck, Ph.D. ’76, Professor of Comparative Religion and Indian Studies, Frederic Wertham Professor of Law and Psychiatry in Society
3. Ryan Enos, Professor of Government
4. Alison Frank Johnson, Ph.D. ’01, Professor of History and of Germanic Languages and Literatures
5. Ned Hall, Norman E. Vuilleumier Professor of Philosophy
And on and on they go. More than seven hundred Harvard faculty members saying, “Yeah, we know about the citation errors,” and shrugging their collective shoulders because they know damn well that they’ve probably done the same thing a half dozen times.
But the right-wing media machine so successfully branded her a plagiarist that even the libs, showing they really are owned, repeated the exaggerations of her errors.
This attack is nothing new
The attack on Dr. Gay, and universities in general, is part of a systemic attack on the pillars of American progress. Many thought that these pillars had been firmly established in the 1970s. But the pillars have always been on sandy soil.
When conservatives killed the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, which in turn gave us Fox News, their victory dance was eerily similar to Rufo’s incendiary WSJ article.
In 1999, Craig R. Smith, of the American Enterprise Institute, beat his chest in a much quieter forum than Rufo’s Wall Street Journal barficle when he wrote an article for the obscure publication, Rhetoric and Public Affairs titled, “The Campaign to Repeal the Fairness Doctrine.”34
There, he described a long, detailed, and successful plan to disable the Fairness Doctrine.
Most of us think it just happened — that the Fairness Doctrine disappeared in the quiet of the night. But the Fairness Doctrine,35 which established that broadcast news organizations must present two sides of an argument, was scuttled after Smith’s dedicated campaign to end it.
In the 1980s, Smith worked with a right-winger, Senator Robert Packwood, a senator from Oregon who best exemplified the “family values” he and his kind promote by being asked to leave the stately halls of the Senate after a flurry of sexual assault charges by twenty women.36
But before Packwood bailed from the Senate with his busy little tail between his legs, he and Smith set up an organization called “The Freedom of Expression Foundation” to lobby for the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine.
When Ronald Reagan was elected, Packwood became the Chair of the Commerce Committee, where, as part of a broader effort to deregulate broadcasting, cable, and other telecommunications, he held hearings designed to lambaste the Fairness Doctrine.
While Packwood was working the government, Smith and his cohorts worked university journalism schools to reverse higher education’s traditional support of the Fairness Doctrine.
Sure enough, the Fairness Doctrine died so completely that most people under thirty years old have never heard of it.
Ever since the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine, the United States has seen a rightward surge in its politics that has torn up the welfare state and is now even beginning to threaten the basic norms of society.
Dr. Gay and the kindly old professors of Columbia University are the latest unwitting soldiers, but they won’t be the last.
The attack on Dr. Gay was made possible because she was simply not ready for the moment. She was blindsided, so she had to provide answers to Congress regarding protests in ways that university presidents traditionally never need to think about. She didn’t handle it with aplomb, but that’s not her job description. Besides, it’s not her job to police student opinion.
We can expect more of this because conservatives have gone on record warning us that we should.
Their attempts to dismantle Black history and such events as the Middle Passage (see Florida) is their newest phase.
Are you ready for another phase after this part of their project to destroy America is complete? Dr. Gay wasn’t. Columbia University wasn’t. That’s not their fault. She entered her job thinking she’d be an educator, not on the front lines of yet another assault from America’s burgeoning right wing.
Meanwhile, most of us yearn to just get back to work and live in peace again, without all the distractions thrown at us every day by a thirsty, angry regime of lunatics.
Notes
One final note:
Mainstream media is recently played up a May Harvard CAPS / Harris Poll question that asked if college admissions should be determined “on only qualifications and race should not be a factor.” Well duh. Of course, most people agree with that. It’s a grand ideal. 56% of Black voters and 54% of 18-to-34-year-old voters agreed with it.
But, according to Semafor:
An April NBC News poll on “affirmative action programs” found most voters thought they were still needed, and an AP/NORC poll in May found 63% of respondents opposed the Supreme Court banning consideration of race in college admissions.
The wording of poll questions matters. Especially when mainstream media gets its hands on them.
Footnotes
Pickering, Emily. 2025. “Columbia Alters DEI Statements on University Web Pages amid Trump Executive Orders.” Columbia Daily Spectator. 2025. https://www.columbiaspectator.com/news/2025/02/19/columbia-alters-dei-statements-on-university-web-pages-amid-trump-executive-orders/.
Cullen, Margie, Shelby Slade, and Katie Landeck. 2025. “More Economic Blackouts Planned: Nestlé Boycott Begins, Target Continues. What to Know.” The Providence Journal. March 22, 2025. https://www.providencejournal.com/story/business/2025/03/22/nestl-boycott-begins-target-continues-over-dei-what-to-know/82596588007/.
Murray, Conor, and Molly Bohannon. 2025. “MLB Removes References to Diversity from Careers Website: Here Are All the Companies Rolling Back DEI Programs.” Forbes. March 22, 2025. https://www.forbes.com/sites/conormurray/2025/03/22/mlb-removes-references-to-diversity-from-careers-website-here-are-all-the-companies-rolling-back-dei-programs/.
Most notable here, is that many of these companies surrendered in advance before the regime’s blackmail; now they face consumer boycotts. One of the more disgusting comments came from Morgan Stanley’s CEO Jamie Dimon, who has long seen himself as a political influencer and who has happily leeched off the public dole for decades as one of the banking world’s thirstiest corporateers:
According to the Forbes article cited here:
Dimon said he “saw how we were spending money on some of this stupid s—-, and it really pissed me off,”
Hudspeth, Piper. 2025. “Federal Agencies Told to Move to Eliminate DEI Offices, Positions within 60 Days.” WDSU. January 25, 2025. https://www.wdsu.com/article/federal-agencies-told-to-move-to-eliminate-dei-offices-positions-within-60-days/63551892.
Chappell, Bill. 2025. “Military’s DEI Purge Seen Putting Its Future — and Its History — at Risk.” NPR. March 21, 2025. https://www.npr.org/2025/03/21/nx-s1-5333324/pentagon-military-dei-purge-recruiting.
Neumann, Sam. 2025. “MLB Quietly Removes Diversity Pipeline Program References from Website.” Awful Announcing. March 21, 2025. https://awfulannouncing.com/mlb/diversity-pipeline-program-scrubbed-craig-calcaterra.html.
ibid; Columbia Daily Spectator
The specific demands Columbia acquiesced to included:
The university has agreed to ban students from wearing masks at protests, hire 36 new campus security officers — who, unlike previous security officers, will have the ability to arrest students — and appoint a new senior vice provost to oversee the department of Middle East, South Asian and African Studies.
Columbia also committed to “greater institutional neutrality” and said it is “working with a faculty committee to establish an institution-wide policy implementing this stance.” The university added that it will review its admissions procedures to “ensure unbiased admission processes,” as the Trump administration requested.
Lavietes, Matt. 2025. “Columbia University Agrees to Trump Demands in Effort to Restore Federal Funding.” NBC News. March 21, 2025. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/columbia-university-trump-demands-funding-rcna197261.
TOI World Desk. 2025. “Columbia University’s Concession Sparks National Debate on Academic Freedom.” The Times of India. March 23, 2025. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/119366526.cms.
If you don’t know who Stephen Miller is, you’re in for a nasty surprise during the remainder of Trump 2.0.
Bastille, Charles. 2024. “Meet Stephen Miller — the Last Man Standing.” Ruminato.com. Ruminato. September 23, 2024. https://www.ruminato.com/p/meet-stephen-miller-the-last-man.
The Great Replacement Theory was once a fringe right-wing theory popularized by some French guy who I won’t honor by repeating his name. The idea is that evil hordes of darker-skinned people are replacing fair-skinned people like me. Perpetually drunk Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is a proponent of this theory and has the tattoos to prove it. It should be noted that I asked a Black friend here in Atlanta if he had plans to replace me, and he replied with a sly smile, “Yes. That’s the plan.” Dammit!
Primack, Dan. 2025. “FCC Threatens Blocking Media Mergers Based on DEI Policies.” Axios. March 24, 2025. https://www.axios.com/2025/03/24/fcc-dei-media-mergers-trump.
Apologies to the octopi community.
Contributors. 2003. “Arson Attack on the Reichstag Building in Berlin on 27 February 1933.” Wikipedia.org. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. April 8, 2003. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichstag_fire.
To be clear, the word “handout” is itself disingenuous, and I use it here to represent the kind of vocabulary racists use to stir up white voters.
Montague, Zach, Troy Closson, Michael D Shear, Amy Harmon, Abbie VanSickle, Daniel Victor, Adam Liptak, et al. 2023. “Supreme Court Rejects Affirmative Action at U.S. Colleges.” The New York Times, June 29, 2023. https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/06/29/us/affirmative-action-supreme-court?smid=url-share#the-supreme-court-effectively-overruled-a-landmark-affirmative-action-precedent.
“Dark Money and the Courts: The Right Wing Takeover of the Judiciary | ACS.” 2019. American Constitution Society. May 21, 2019. https://www.acslaw.org/analysis/reports/dark-money/.
We can call Democrats corporatists, but in their defense, the Supreme Court created an inevitability in the Citizens United case when they announced to the world that dark money is acceptable in campaign financing and that corporations are people, too.
The only way you’ll ever see an independent or independent-minded party make waves is if some rich guy (or MacKenzie Scott) who doesn’t live for greed runs for president.
221, and 179. 2025. “Citizens United Explained.” Brennan Center for Justice. January 14, 2025. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/citizens-united-explained.
Cobb, Jelani. 2023. “The End of Affirmative Action.” The New Yorker. June 29, 2023. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/07/10/the-end-of-affirmative-action.
Saul, Stephanie. 2023. “Affirmative Action Ruling May Mean a Drop in Black and Latino Students.” The New York Times, June 29, 2023. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/29/us/politics/affirmative-action-college-students-black-latino.html?smid=url-share.
Igielnik, Ruth. 2023. “Here’s How Americans Feel about Affirmative Action, according to the Polls.” The New York Times, June 29, 2023. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/29/us/politics/affirmative-action-polls.html?unlocked_article_code=1.6U4.DmGd.i4CNVA4v_XBF&smid=url-share.
“The Color of Justice: Racial and Ethnic Disparity in State Prisons – the Sentencing Project.” 2021. The Sentencing Project. October 13, 2021. https://www.sentencingproject.org/reports/the-color-of-justice-racial-and-ethnic-disparity-in-state-prisons-the-sentencing-project/.
Supreme Court of the United States. 2023. “Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. V. President and Fellows of Harvard College.” Supreme Court of the United States. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/20-1199_hgdj.pdf.
Sforza, Lauren. 2023. “Tim Scott Calls on Universities to End Legacy Admissions.” The Hill. June 29, 2023. https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4074428-tim-scott-calls-on-universities-to-end-legacy-admissions/.
Ward, Ian. 2024. “How a Conservative Activist’s Crusade Led to Claudine Gay’s Resignation - POLITICO.” POLITICO. Politico. January 3, 2024. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/01/03/christopher-rufo-claudine-gay-harvard-resignation-00133618.
Frank, Theodore, and Anna Hamilton. n.d. Accessed March 24, 2025. https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/20/20-1199/222774/20220509124941553_SFFA%20v%20Harvard%20HLLI-Shapiro%20amicus.pdf.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-we-squeezed-harvard-claudine-gay-firing-dei-antisemitism-culture-war-a6843c4c?mod=hp_opin_pos_1 (behind a paywall, not worth the subscription price, left here only for reference)
ibid, Politico
Gay, Claudine. 2024. “Opinion | Former Harvard President Claudine Gay: This Is about More than My Mistakes.” The New York Times, January 3, 2024. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/03/opinion/claudine-gay-harvard-president.html?mwgrp=c-dbar&unlocked_article_code=1.LE0.7VEP.uh4xq3sGCoDE&smid=url-share.
Deliso, Meredith. 2024. “A Timeline of Harvard President Claudine Gay’s Short, Scandal-Plagued Tenure.” ABC News. January 3, 2024. https://abcnews.go.com/US/timeline-harvard-president-claudine-gay-tenure/story?id=106052515.
“As Harvard’s Governing Boards Meet, More than 700 Faculty Urge against Gay’s Removal, Citing University Independence | News | the Harvard Crimson.” 2025. Thecrimson.com. 2025. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2023/12/11/faculty-oppose-removal/.
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Whew! This was a great piece...super informative and a lot of your time and research went into it. Valuable stuff. Thanks Charles. (PS Christopher is a true asshole. 🤦♀️)