REMEMBER AYN RAND? WELL, WELCOME TO HER WORLD

I’ve been boning up on writer and philosopher Ayn Rand. For even tentative, play-it-by-ear intellectuals of my generation—and I consider myself part of that demographic—her name is very familiar. We’ve been hearing quotes by Rand since we were in junior high. She was a popular author during the Red Scare era in which we were growing up, when the government saw Commies behind every lamp post. During that era, she was an icon of the American right, somebody who had been-there-done-that, since she was born and reared in Russia, and lived the 1917 Revolution and its aftermath in her most formative childhood years.

That experience, and its devastating effects on her family, instilled in Rand a deep hatred of the State and of State control. Her entire philosophy as a writer would turn on an axis comprised of the individual. It is ironic, then, that the place where she first formed the intellectual tools to generate that philosophy was in the Russian State university system, which, under the Czar, prior to the Russian Revolution, was closed to women.

So why my renewed interest? Well, while Rand’s name may have faded from popular view during the post-McCarthyite Protest Era, when liberal thought and critical reasoning were on the rise, it has made a comeback since the advent of Silicon Valley and its self-styled billionaire “tech-libertarians”, who, in the current era of MAGA-fueled oligarchy, are fast becoming tech-fascists.

Born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum into a Jewish bourgeois family in the imperial Russian capital of St. Petersburg, twelve years prior to the Russian Revolution, she would, as an adult, start going by her pen name, Ayn Rand.  From age twelve through her formative teen years, Rand would live through the disruption of her family’s way of life as a result of the 1917 October Revolution and the overthrow of the czarist Russian Empire.

Ayn Rand as a schoolgirl

Rand’s father was a successful St. Petersburg pharmacist and the family had enjoyed a comfortable life under the Russian Empire. But following the Revolution, the Bolsheviks would take over her father’s business and turn it into a State drugstore, plunging the Rosenbaums into financial crisis. They would take refuge in Crimea, which, initially, remained under anti-Communist White Russian control. But after Crimea fell to the Bolsheviks in 1920, Rand’s family returned to St. Petersburg, which the Soviets had renamed Petrograd, in 1921, and Rand graduated from high school there. In Petrograd, her family lived a precarious life of relative poverty

These formative years left Rand with a deep loathing for not only Soviet domination, but also for any sort of State control or oversight. These were the sentiments that would germinate during her intellectual development and eventually lead her to be a radical icon of conservative laissez-faire capitalism, her very specific version of which came to be known as “Objectivism”.

Among the first to enroll when the Russian Revolution opened higher education to women, Rand started attending Petrograd State University at sixteen, majoring in history. She would again find reason to loath the Communist government when she and other young women from the former middle class were removed from the university rolls shortly before graduation in a Bolshevik purge of the bourgeoisie. But complaints regarding the purge filed by a group of foreign scientists later visiting the university led to her reinstatement, and she graduated in 1924 from the now once again renamed Leningrad State University.

After graduation, Rand did postgrad studies in Screen Arts at the State Technicum in Leningrad. It was there that she wrote  a monograph on Polish actress Pola Negri. That monograph was destined to become Rand’s first published literary work. It was from that time that she started going by her pseudonym, Ayn Rand.

At the end of 1925, Rand was granted a US visa to visit relatives in Chicago. Despite having a visitor’s visa, she decided to stay on, and in February of 1926, she relocated to New York City. But her dream at the time was to become a screenwriter, so she only stayed with relatives in New York for a few months—long enough to improve her English—before striking out for Hollywood.

Cecil B. DeMille

Rand’s wasn’t the sad story of the failed writer who follows her dreams to Hollywood, only to be dashed against the rocky cliffs of the Pacific that bathes the shores of LA. It wasn’t, in other words, a tragic story written by Day of the Locust author Nathaniel West.  No, this was the Immigrant Girl Makes Good tale. While trying to break into the Tinsel Town in-crowd, Rand had a chance meeting with blockbuster director Cecil B. DeMille, who, at the time, was working on his King of Kings project. DeMille invited Rand to be an extra in the picture, and that led to her landing a subsequent job as a junior screenwriter. While working on the King of Kings set, Rand met Frank O’Connor, a young actor, and they decided to marry in 1929. Now the wife of an American citizen, Rand was granted a Permanent American Resident visa. And by March of 1931, she had become a naturalized American citizen.

Already the following year, Rand chalked up her first literary success, selling a screenplay entitled Red Pawn to Universal Studios. Despite this early coup, the film project was shelved and the movie was never produced. But in 1934, Rand’s courtroom drama, Night of January 16^th, was staged in a Hollywood theater, and opened on Broadway the following year. It was a unique work in which, at each night’s performance, a jury was chosen from the audience, and, according to its decision, one of two different endings for the play would be performed. It was successful enough that Rand and O’Connor moved from the West Coast back to New York.

Frank O'Connor

Her next big project was a novel entitled We The Living. Set in Soviet Russia, it was quasi-autobiographical. But the main philosophical thrust of the book was what was to become Rand’s recurrent theme, the individual versus the State. Book sales in the US did not do well. The publisher allowed the novel to run out of print. Undaunted, Rand wrote a stage play version for Broadway, but it was an utter flop. It could be argued that the story was ahead of its time. In the post-World War II days of McCarthyism and the Red Scare, anything that poked its finger in the eye of Soviet Russia had a good chance for success.  Rand refloated an edition of We The Living in 1959, which ended up selling more than three million copies.

By then, however, Rand was already a successful author. At the end of 1935 she began writing what was to become her first highly acclaimed book, The Fountainhead. It was what would become a trademark Rand story, the main lessons of which focused on Rand’s belief that independent thought and personal integrity are the ultimate sources of human progress. That personal integrity trumps conformity—true creators need to remain authentic and true to themselves in the face of society’s demand for collective approval and, thus, for mediocrity. And that the true creator will always be faced with the disapproval of a society bent on the conformity of the masses and that resents individual greatness.

But midway through the writing of The Fountainhead, Rand put the project aside to write a novella called Anthem. This dystopian book too depicted a grim future in which totalitarian collectivism reigned. So fundamentalist was this world that the personal pronoun “I” was banned from use, and was completely replaced by “we”. However, the main characters in this story eventually make their escape from the collectivist world and, in the new world that they found, rediscover “I”, and, as such, the power of individualism.

Rand couldn’t get a single publisher in the US to touch that book with a ten-foot pole. But she was able to sell it in England. In Britain it would remain in print. And, as in the case of We The Living, the story would come into its own in the US in the mid-1940s, when a revised version was finally printed and ended up selling three-and-a-half million copies.

But before that, in 1943, The Fountainhead handed Rand her first really smashing success.  The novel was about Howard Roark, a fictional architect with an uncompromising attitude toward creativity. He struggles against “second-handers”, the name he gives to those who steal ideas, attempting to live through the creativity of others while placing themselves and their interests above those of the true creators.

In the book, the protagonist fails to succeed because he won’t conform. He prefers poverty and obscurity to mediocrity, refusing to change his unique architectural style or to compromise his integrity. He ends up being expelled from the school of architecture for refusing to adopt traditional rules of design. He eventually takes up a one-man crusade against his critics and the professional establishment who insist on conformity.

The Fountainhead reaches a climax when Roark dynamites a housing project that he was hired to design because the construction firm introduces alterations that he never approved. The dramatic trial that ensues is where Rand is able to expand on her radically individualistic stance regarding what she viewed as the sacred heroism of the individual and the pernicious effects of societies bent on conformity.

 A dozen publishers rejected the book project before it was finally accepted by Bobbs-Merrill Company, thanks to respected editor Archibald Ogden, who read the advance on the manuscript, fell in love with it, and told management that if they didn’t publish it, he would resign.  The deadline that the publisher imposed, however, was so brutal that Rand started taking benzedrine in order to work the long hours necessary to finish and turn in the book on deadline. She would remain hooked on benzos for the rest of her life.

The book was an instant success and an eventual bestseller. The same year that it was published, Warner Bros. picked up the film rights and made the movie version starring Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal. The sale of the book to Hollywood also landed Rand regular work as a screenwriter.

Gary Cooper in a scene from
The Fountainhead

In Hollywood, she became heavily involved in politics and the infamous investigations into alleged communist activities in the movie business. She formed part of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, an anti-communist organization—in which John Wayne, Ronald Reagan and Hedda Hopper were also prominent members—that worked in tandem with the McCarthyite US House Committee on Un-American Activities, which was conducting an anti-Red witch-hunt throughout the country but with particularly zealous focus on the movie industry. She would testify as a “friendly witness” against the film entitled Song of Russia, which she depicted as soft on Soviet communism and as portraying life as much better in Russia than it really was.

In her contribution to the committee’s hearings, she also lashed out at the popular picture The Best Years of Our Lives, which she accused of painting an unflattering portrait of American business, but, in the end, the committee refused to allow her arguments regarding the film to enter into the official record. Clearly, her stance against leftist ideals was even more radical than that of the nefariously paranoid House committee.

And this is where the Silicon Valley billionaires embrace the ideas of Ayn Rand—in her ardent defense of business and her skepticism regarding democratic rule. For Rand, business was where all progress lay, and as such, she felt government should get out of the way and let business lead the world.  In her day, it would have been a lot harder to predict where that sort of “leadership” might lead, but ultimately, those who opposed her views had a much more prudent read of the future, and could foresee exactly what we are witnessing today: a world in which a felonious, psychopathic narcissist like Donald Trump is president of the United States, in which the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, is starving the world’s poorest children, in which empathy is considered a fatal weakness, and in which the upper one percent of the population has accumulated fifty percent of the world’s wealth and is hell bent on continuing to further impoverish the common people.

The success of The Fountainhead suddenly made Rand part of the New York right’s intelligentsia. She was swamped with reader correspondence telling her how much the book had influenced their thinking. Some of these admirers were right-wing influencers in their own spheres. In the early fifties many of them gathered on the weekends at Rand’s New York apartment.

Rand with Alan Greenspan during
 the Gerald Ford administration

Among bright young minds who were regulars for those weekend philosophical and political discussions was a thirty-plus Alan Greenspan. Greenspan, up to that time, had been a successful jazz musician, who had studied at Julliard and would later play sax and clarinet with the swing band of jazz great Stan Getz. But he had lately begun following in his economist father’s footsteps and delved into serious university studies of economic sciences. Greenspan would eventually be known as a leading conservative American economist and would serve as the highly influential chairman of the Fed, America’s central bank. 

It was during this period that Rand wrote and published her seminal work, Atlas Shrugged. Riding on the wave of The Fountainhead, this new book, though brutally panned by literary critics and intellectuals alike, would also become an international bestseller. The negative reaction of intellectuals discouraged Rand, who never wrote another work of fiction and devoted her time to her philosophical school of Objectivism. She was aided in this task by her erstwhile lover and right-wing intellectual Nathaniel Branden. Branden created the Nathiel Branden Institute (NBI) basically to espouse Rand’s Objectivism, and NBI became an outlet for many of Rand’s articles and studies.

As with the radical laissez-faire trend of today’s Silicon Valley tech-billionaires, traditional intellectuals found Rand’s Objectivism lacking in rigor and objectivity and they saw NBI as a narrowly-focused organization with an excessive reverence for Rand. They saw it more as a cult than a thinktank, with Rand as its goddess. But despite Rand’s mixed feelings regarding her rejection by much of the New York intelligentsia, and her decision to give up her successful career as a novelist, Atlas Shrugged basically and succinctly encompassed the tenets of her Objectivist philosophy.

Elon Musk

The book posits that rational thought is man's sole survival tool. It promotes the need to comprehend objective reality, and it rejects mysticism, emotion and religious faith. A philosophy that has, sadly, come of age in the Trump/Silicon Valley era, it also champions “rational self-interest” (read: egoism), meaning that people should pursue their own personal interests, and that individuals should never live to serve others. This clearly aligns with the ideas and actions of tech-billionaires like Peter Thiel and—particularly—Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, who says that empathy is the "fundamental weakness of Western civilization," and who, as the head of Donald Trump’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)—the main purpose of which was to strip funds from the State in order to fund billionaire tax cuts—gutted USAID, which had for decades saved lives worldwide through the provision of food, medical supplies and coverage of other human needs to millions of the world’s poorest people—a move that basically condemned hundreds of thousands of, especially, women and children to certain death.

Atlas Shrugged also celebrates “the virtue of productivity” and portrays industrialists and innovators (a posthumous shout-out to the tech-bros of Silicon Valley) as “heroic producers” who drive human progress and thus create both material and “spiritual” value. The book rejects altruism, positing that self-sacrifice is a destructive force that employs guilt as a means of penalizing competent achievement. As such, it proposed that the ideal society should be built on laissez-faire capitalism, in which voluntary trade transpires with no government coercion, taxation or regulation. This is precisely the argument of tech-billionaires and their lackeys (like House Speaker Mike Johnson) in Congress who believe Silicon Valley tech-bros should self-regulate the development of artificial intelligence (AI), even as credible AI experts warn that this advanced technology could kill everyone on earth by the end of the decade if urgent safeguards are not introduced.

Finally, Atlas Shrugged breaks society down into "makers" (creators of wealth) versus "moochers and looters" (those who rely on force or government mandates to confiscate wealth). Taken to today’s dystopian, but very real extremes, this plays to the argument of the upper one percent which is convinced that it deserves to accumulate the vast bulk of the world’s wealth with no obligation to return anything at all to society. And as AI continues to destroy jobs and to render labor increasingly obsolete, the tacit message is that only the wealthy deserve to survive, while the irrelevant poor are condemned to perish in a rich elite’s world.

Although Rand has long endured as an icon of the right—she was known as the “novelist laureate” of the Reagan White House—the    most consequential legacy she has bequeathed may not be to conventional conservative politics, but to the “techno-fascists” of Silicon Valley. That said, it would be completely unfair to call Ayn Rand the mother of techno-fascism. But at the same time, Rand has supplied Silicon Valley “libertarians” with a pseudo-ethical and, indeed, an heroic mythology that they have twisted into a scenario in which billionaire technology founders are “entitled” to operate above democratic constraint.

It is easy to understand, then, why there has been such renewed interest since the turn of the century in Rand’s work. Not, clearly, among the serious intellectuals of the American intelligentsia, but definitely among the tech-cultists of Silicon Valley extraction. By all accounts, the Rand revival has been formidable over the course of the past twenty years, even despite political science heavyweight Alan Wolfe’s having expressed what is seen as "the traditional academic view" of Rand, by declaring her a "nonperson among academics.”

Rand’s popularity among techno-authoritarian billionaires is due to her having posthumously provided them with something far more powerful than economic theory. What she has bequeathed them is her portrayal of “the morality of the exceptional individual.” In both The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, the “great creator” is portrayed as an heroic individual whose genius is continually obstructed by mediocre bureaucrats, collectivists and a society that demands that the exceptional serve the ordinary. Atlas Shrugged takes this idea to its extreme, since in that book, productive industrialists withdraw completely from society, leaving the collectivist system to collapse without them.

What is different about the techno-fascist billionaires of today is that they are not withdrawing in order to test the theory of whether democratic society will collapse without them. Instead, they have gone on the offensive, and with the help of their shill, Donald Trump, they are infiltrating the State and, indeed, the democratic society of the United States with the aim of destroying it from within. Not standing back and allowing democracy to collapse, as in Rand’s book, but rather, taking over in what is basically a techno-fascist coup, and forcing the system to collapse.

It is ironic that Rand had nothing but disdain for libertarians of any stripe, given that the techno-authoritarians continue to depict themselves as techno-libertarians—even though they long ago crossed the line from libertarianism to a new form of fascism. Rand dismissed libertarians as “the hippies of the right” and accused them of “anarchism”. Still, Rand’s industrial-creator-hero  mythology has been a veritable aphrodisiac for the Silicon Valley elite.

And so too has her narrative as a whole. In Rand’s tech-elitist world, the “logic” goes like this:

“I am a creator and an innovator. Government is inefficient. Democratic majorities do not understand innovation. Regulation constrains genius. I am exceptionally productive. Therefore, interference with me is interference with human progress itself.”

Atlas Shrugged depicted businessmen as “heroic, productive thinkers.” And it defined laissez-faire capitalism as the only moral economic system. Rand regarded even unlimited democracy as a form of “statism” incompatible with the independent rational individual. Her philosophy was clearly elitist and almost Darwinian in its concept. And this is what has appealed to tech-billionaires. But while in the philosophy of Rand the idea is that government should get out of the way of creators and allow them free rein to innovate, techno-fascists have reinterpreted this to mean “government has no moral or legal authority over me.” And that is the message being transmitted to the public by techno-shill Donald Trump, who has repeatedly violated laws and the rules of business first, and then let his opponents get tied up in the courts seeking to sue him.

Ayn Rand’s novels and philosophy were much more naïve and theoretical than the way in which they are being interpreted today. Just as each individual or segment of society has their own interpretation of philosophical works like the Bible, the Torah or the Koran, the techno-cultists of the far-right have pressed Rand’s writings into the service of their cause and interpreted them without nuance to suit their own radically anti-democratic take.

Classical libertarianism argues for limited government and individual freedom. There is nothing fascist about that idea, and true libertarians have a long history of anti-authoritarian traditions. But something much darker takes place when that philosophy is fused with extraordinary concentrations of private wealth, technological power and political influence.

In this case, the question ceases to be, “How much power should government have?” It becomes, instead, “Why should anyone or anything have the power to restrain me?”

And that question turns highly elitist and, hence, fascist when it goes still further and asks, “Why should democratic government have authority over people who are smarter, richer and more technologically capable than the government itself?”

This is where the rubber meets the road between simple techno-libertarianism and tech-fascism. And there is ever-increasing evidence that this is no longer a merely academic concern. This is real, and it is a clear and present threat to democracy, not only in the US, but worldwide as well. It is as if an arguably tentative and experimental idea has turned to cancer and metastasized throughout society, in the form of a rogue, lawless government, generously backed by equally rogue and lawless tech-billionaires.

Peter Thiel

Vice-President JD Vance’s mentor Peter Thiel is the clearest example. A major Silicon Valley investor, early Facebook investor, and one of the most influential figures in the tech-libertarian movement, he has openly rejected democracy. And his political philosophy has helped inspire a generation of techno-entrepreneurs and high-rolling investors. Le Monde has described Thiel as a libertarian billionaire whose skepticism toward democracy and hostility toward the state have helped make him an important bridge between Silicon Valley and Trumpism. But considering himself too restricted by government even in Trump’s Washington, Thiel recently took his billions elsewhere, setting up shop in Argentina, where Trump lapdog and president Javier Milei is likely to be even more forgiving, and indeed supportive, of his lawless power.

Herein lies another contradiction to Rand’s theories. While techno-fascists claim to represent libertarianism and to despise government, they actively seek to impose enormous influence on the State—as in the near co-presidency that Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, exercised during the early days of Trump’s second term, and which he only gave up when it started affecting his bottom line at Tesla. Nor did he give it up completely, still acting today as an ideological Rasputin behind the scenes.

None of this is unintentional or spontaneous. It is a techno-authoritarian strategy. If you can weaken democratic institutions by backing Trojan horses like the Trump regime, privatize functions traditionally performed by the state, make governments dependent on your technology, and accumulate enough wealth to influence elections and public policy, you don't have to abolish government. You simply have to make government increasingly dependent on you, which is a completely different proposition from that of traditional libertarians. And so it is that Rand’s mythology surrounding the lone-wolf genius morphs into a false justification for the accumulation of unprecedented power and wealth. 

Suffice it to say that Elon Musk’s nearly one trillion-dollar net worth is greater than the GDPs of any of 174 countries worldwide, since there are only 25 nations on the planet whose GDPs get anywhere close to a trillion dollars. Musk could literally buy and sell any of a large number of countries like properties on a monopoly board. That includes his own native South Africa, which, as the largest economy on the African continent, has a GDP of less than half a trillion dollars.  

The creative titans of industry that Rand celebrated in her works were the so-called “robber barons” of the 19^th century—the Rockefellers, the Carnegies and the Vanderbilts, as well as innovators like Henry Ford, Walter Chrysler and Howard Hughes. Greedy and aggressive though they may have been, and ruthless in their quest for money and power, these were all tycoons who believed in improving the society in which they did their business, and who, through their foundations, reinvested part of the money they accumulated in that society. They supported the arts, built schools and hospitals, funded scholarships and became deeply involved in international relief efforts.

These were not today’s tech-billionaires who subscribe fully to the school of egoism and to the Simon Legree mentality of the ruthless plantation owner whose cruelty and moral emptiness define him as the ultimate antagonist in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom's Cabin.

That said, then as now, the robber barons, like the tech-authoritarians, hoarded the lion’s share of society’s wealth. In that, nothing has changed. The upper one percent then and the upper one percent now have controlled more than half of all wealth. Nor did they pay their fair share in taxes—despite Rand’s lamenting of how put-upon they were. In fact, they paid next to nothing, just as do the tech-fascists of today. And that is why society is in the trouble it is. Not because of any “unfair treatment” of billionaires by the government.

What is clearly different is the scope of power between tycoons past and present. While a robber baron might arguably have dominated an industry or sector, the tech-fascists of today have far more diverse and invasive interests. While a robber baron might have had vast power in steel, oil or the railways, tech-billionaires have the potential and, indeed the means, to control social-media platforms, enormous information and entertainment networks, satellite communications, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, financial infrastructure, private aerospace technology, defense technology, massive databases, political advertising and information distribution, and the list goes on. They have the potential, in other words, to control practically everything.  

Gil Durán, author of the best-selling book The Nerd Reich, argues that Silicon Valley billionaires are actively seeking to replace democratic government with a corporate authoritarian order. That is not libertarianism. It is oligarchic fascism. It previews a post-Orwellian scenario in which it will not be a super-State Big Brother controlling everything, but rather, a society in which a handful of extraordinarily wealthy private individuals possess so much technological and economic power that they can intervene in every phase of society, and in which democratic government is utterly incapable of controlling them, and, as such, is rendered moot.

The one person, one vote ideal of democracy is anathema to the tech-billionaires, Already they have bastardized that tenet through laws like Citizens United that equate corporations with individuals and provide them with the “right” (as sanctified by a corrupt US Supreme Court) to donate “generously” to political campaigns. In point of fact, what laws like this have done is to permit techno-fascists to literally buy politicians and, indeed, entire administrations, as witnessed by the current one in the US.

This is, then, the point at which Ayn Rand's celebration of the “heroic individual” mutates into something she herself might well not have recognized: a veritable political theology in which technological wealth becomes evidence of superior merit, superior judgment and, ultimately, superior entitlement to rule.

The overriding idea here, then, is not that Ayn Rand fostered tech fascism. It is, instead, that Rand helped provide tech-fascism with an intellectual mythology to hang its hat on.

She supplied the “heroic entrepreneur” with self-righteous contempt for bureaucratic constraint, suspicion of democratic collectivism, the “moral” elevation of self-interest, and the conviction that society ultimately depends on its exceptional creators to the point that they are practically gods.

Silicon Valley, for its part, supplied the technology. Billionaires supplied the unprecedented wealth. And paid-off politicians supplied the opportunity for what amounts to a corporate coup d’etat. That isn't freedom. It is private sovereignty.

Put those three things together and the danger is no longer merely that technology will change democracy, but that it will massacre it, and make techno-fascism the force that will enslave rather than free the individual, and that will ultimately rule the world.

 

LET’S CALL IT WHAT IT IS – RACISM PURE AND SIMPLE

In the earliest days of Trump Regime 1.0, MAGA—a racist organization par excellence—tried to explain away Trump’s embracing of white nationalist organizations with facile arguments  about “reverse racism”. Reverse racism is, if we’re honest, a made-up term that racists employ to argue that they are not racist. Their argument is that they “have nothing against black and brown people,” but are simply trying to protect themselves and their loved ones against “discrimination”, not that they are seeking to discriminate against minorities, and especially not against blacks in America.

I hate to be the one to break it to everyone, but “reverse racism” is not a thing, and the cat is out of the bag: Trump heads a racist regime, supported by a persistent core of racist voters and donors. Period. These are people who, no matter how damaging the Trump regime has been to their own interests, continue to lean into his authoritarianism because it is based on hating and fearing the same people they hate and fear. And hate and fear are their key motivators.

Now, before you start stamping your feet, ringing your hands and ripping your garments, let me make my case, with facts, not “feelings”. First, I will propose the following: The Trump regime, from the very start, and much more so in its second iteration, has systematically targeted African Americans, and has deliberately dismantled major Civil Rights-Era protections against racial discrimination and segregation. Full Stop.

With his policy-backed support for white Christian nationalists and other white supremacists—amply represented in the congressional majority, and in the majority of the Supreme Court—Trump has sought to turn back the clock, not just to the immediate pre-Civil Rights Era, but to long before. All the way to World War I and Woodrow Wilson, whose administration was, perhaps—before Trump—the most racist in modern history. 

Despite its progressive rhetoric, Wilson’s administration actively reversed decades of federal workforce integration by re-segregating federal offices, restrooms, and workplaces in Washington, DC. In the most notorious of cases during his administration, one black official was forced to work behind screens so that his white colleagues “wouldn’t have to look at him.” Other African American federal workers were forced to work inside cages so that they couldn’t mingle with the rest of the staff. Wilson’s administration suggested that white female staffers felt uneasy in the presence of black male staffers. Restrooms and water fountains were segregated as Men, Women and Colored, and separate lunchrooms were established for whites and blacks.

Just as Trump spoke in his first term of white nationalist neo-Nazis marching in a violent 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, as “very fine people,” Wilson had no compunction about notoriously screening the highly controversial, pro-Ku Klux Klan film The Birth of a Nation at the White House—an indication that his administration embraced the violent anti-black, anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish philosophy of that segregationist cult. Trump has talked openly about predominately black or brown nations as “shithole countries”, and has wondered aloud why the US can’t have “better quality” immigration from “places like Norway.”

"Very fine people..."

Granted, racism is the only thing Wilson and Trump have in common. Wilson was, otherwise, a reform-minded progressive Democrat, who, during his two terms as the twenty-eighth President of the United States, championed a “New Freedom” platform. His policies focused on progressive economic reforms like lowering tariffs, breaking up corporate monopolies, and establishing the Federal Reserve. Trump, instead, has used tariffs as a foreign policy bludgeon, championed the monopolies of his billionaire cronies, and done everything he could to undermine the independence of the Fed.

There is clear and compelling evidence that the Trump regime has intentionally and materially undermined years of hard-fought and harder-won advancement in dismantling systemic racial discrimination in the US. But although Trump himself and members of his Cabinet have arguably said some really stupid, infuriating and hurtful things about diversity, equity and inclusion, the regime’s anti-civil rights stance cannot be fully encompassed in a specific policy speech or even controversial remark. This is a case of actions speaking louder than words, since the regime’s discriminatory bent can be observed in a cumulative pattern of policy changes.

Measured by that standard, the Trump administration has engaged in the most significant rollback of the Civil Rights Era revolution since the nineteen-fifties.

My argument doesn’t require me to prove racial animus inside the minds of policymakers. I don’t presume to see into their minds and  observe the racism there—although, truth be told, it is there, and quite often seeps out in public like vile green pus. But all I need to do is point to how the regime has consistently and provenly weakened the legal, institutional, and administrative safeguards created during and after the great Civil Rights Era to combat discrimination, expand equal opportunity, and enforce constitutional rights. And Trump’s record demonstrates precisely that.

The Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s were never intended to simply outlaw explicit segregation. Congress—which actually functioned back then—also created an enforcement system. Among other things, these congressional actions included aggressive Department of Justice investigations, affirmative federal oversight, disparate-impact regulations, and strict voting-rights enforcement, fair-housing enforcement, and equal-employment enforcement.

It is clear that, across each of these areas, the Trump regime has reduced or eliminated enforcement, or at least attempted to eliminate it. Trump’s government has even rescinded some of the most basic of social norms. While racial discrimination remains illegal under federal law, Trump has weakened many of the tools for enforcing compliance. For instance, the Trump regime has revoked the Johnson Era Executive Order 11246 that prohibited federal contractors and subcontractors from discriminating on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.

Trump’s regime has also done away with the “Segregated Facilities Clause” that forbade federal contractors from maintaining “segregated facilities” such as waiting rooms, work areas and water fountains for whites and racial minorities. Indeed, under Trump, the General Services Administration (GSA) specifically directed federal agencies to drop this very explicit clause. 

Of even greater concern, Trump’s Department of (in)Justice has also actively worked with state officials in formerly Confederate states—most notably in Louisianna—to end decades-old “school desegregation consent decrees”. These were court-ordered agreements arising from litigation during the Civil Rights Era. They were aimed at forcing an end to racial discrimination in public schools. The Trump regime’s excuse for aiding and abetting the re-segregation of Southern schools is that the court-ordered agreements “imposed an unnecessary burden on local school systems.”

Trump’s Catch-22 argument for all of these basically unlawful and  discriminatory policies is that “the Constitution is color-blind” and that he is in no way discriminating. On the contrary, he is avoiding racial discrimination (the understood elliptical phrase here being “against whites”). Rather than expanding civil-rights protections, the Trump regime has consistently argued that many of these mechanisms constitute unlawful racial “preferences.” The practical result is that federal agencies investigate discrimination less aggressively than ever before under previous administrations.

One of the regime's defining domestic priorities in its 2.0 phase has been the elimination of initiatives that promote Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) throughout the federal government. In doing so, the regime has actively sought to make these once positive and progressive terms into dirty words to be eliminated from the official and popular lexicon. Instead of accepting the positive significance of these terms—who but a bigot could argue that diversity, equity and inclusion could be anything but affirmative values?—the regime argues that DEI, in and of itself, constitutes discrimination.

Truth be told, DEI programs emerged precisely because traditional anti-discrimination laws proved insufficient to overcome decades of deeply entrenched racial inequality. The great Civil Rights icon Dr. Martin Luther King once wrote, “A society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for him.” Simple but clear in its concept, this dictum has been the basis for anti-discrimination rules and regulations throughout the more than half-century of the post-Civil Rights era. In short, making a sweeping law that says, “from now on blacks and whites are equal” clearly isn’t enough. Complimentary norms must be forcibly imposed to ensure that this erstwhile federal policy is applied in practical terms across the board.

The Trump regime has not only not done this, but has also actively assaulted DEI. Among other things, it has abolished numerous federal DEI-related offices, prohibited federal diversity training programs, threatened to suspend agreements with federal contractors that support DEI policies, and fostered investigations into universities and corporations that have maintained race-conscious programs despite the regime’s obsession with eliminating them. In effect, this has reversed decades of federal equal-opportunity programs first developed following the ground-breaking Civil Rights Act of 1964.

NAACP President Derrick Johnson has described attacks on diversity initiatives as, “An attempt to erase the history of discrimination while preserving its effects.”

One of the least appreciated achievements of the Civil Rights Era was recognition that discrimination does not always require explicit racist intent. This is truly significant and also patently applicable to the Trump regime. Many modern civil-rights laws prohibit practices that disproportionately disadvantage minorities even when ostensibly neutral. This doctrine is known as “disparate impact”, and it has been a gold standard for housing discrimination cases, employment discrimination, equal education, equal bank-lending, and policing for decades.

But Trump officials have repeatedly attempted to narrow or eliminate disparate-impact enforcement completely. This is important, because, in the absence of  disparate-impact standards, anyone bringing a civil rights suit must frequently prove intentional racism—which sets a significantly more challenging legal burden for the plaintiff. Many civil-rights scholars argue that such a change renders modern discrimination law toothless and  substantially less effective.

Perhaps the most visible and significant rollback—I mean, if we don’t count the fact that Pete Hegseth’s Department of Defense, for example, has not only summarily removed from their posts a list of general officers, including the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for no reason other than the color of their skin, but has also demonstrated similar discrimination on the basis of gender by removing women from the upper ranks in the Armed Forces—has come in the suppression of black voting rights.

Rather than seeking restoration of Voting Rights Act protections, the regime has consistently supported stricter voting rules, designed to make it harder and harder for minorities to vote and to get a fair shake. Trump’s voter repression actions have included expansion of voter-ID requirements, active gerrymandering, reduced federal oversight at elections in areas where there is a high concentration of minority voters, opposition to expanded early voting, opposition to broader mail-in voting, reduction of polling places in areas of high minority concentration, and support for litigation that narrows federal voting protections. Civil-rights organizations argue that all of these measures disproportionately burden black voters because of long-standing socio-economic disparities.

It is easy to disingenuously argue that these consequences are not intentional. But whether they are or aren’t is neither here nor there, since the practical consequence is reduced minority electoral participation and clout.

The Trump regime’s other pet peeve has been “affirmative action”, and Trump has consistently argued against and sought to dismantle this and other race-conscious remedies. Here again Trump has gotten a hand from his hijacked Supreme Court whose decision has effectively ended race-conscious university admissions. The Court has thus upheld the Trump regime’s skewed and spurious argument of “colorblindness”.

Again, this is based on the false claim that the Trump government is seeking to avoid, rather than encourage discrimination. But, in practice, a so-called “colorblind” system operating atop centuries of unequal racial and ethnic treatment simply preserves historical inequalities. Former Justice Thurgood Marshall warned of exactly this outcome: “The position we seek to defend is not preferential treatment but equal opportunity.” The racist Trump regime self-servingly rejects that clear comprehension of cause and effect.

And then there is the question of housing. It’s worthwhile pointing out that Trump, best known as a real estate developer, has several times run afoul of federal non-discrimination laws in seeking to keep blacks out of his luxury living projects. So there is clearly racist self-interest involved in this case.

The Fair Housing Act was enacted following the assassination of Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. Again, this was federal legislation that went far beyond prohibiting overt discrimination. It also sought to dismantle implicit residential segregation.

The Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule, introduced during the Obama Era, required any local government receiving federal funds to both identify and address patterns of segregation. Trump has unilaterally rescinded the rule. The regime argues that zoning decisions belong to local communities, not to the federal government. But civil-rights advocates counter that removing affirmative obligations effectively guts one of the federal government's main tools for reducing racial segregation in housing.

In education, the Trump regime has not only dismantled that department of government entirely, but has also, mostly through its corrupt DOJ, opposed race-consciou
s admissions to colleges and universities, race-conscious scholarships, DEI programming and diversity-promoting offices, as well as race-based mentoring initiatives.

Trump has fundamentally reversed sixty years of federal action to ensure an equal playing field for minorities and particularly for African Americans. Increasingly under Trump, the focus of federal investigations into universities has ceased to be discrimination against black students, and instead is being placed on punishing institutions for even considering race in admissions or programming.

This is a direct reversal of the historical purpose of federal civil-rights enforcement. And it is based on another false white-supremacist supposition, the gist of which is that young people in inner-city black and Latino neighborhoods are already afforded exactly the same advantages as suburban whites. This is a lie on the face of it, and multiple government studies in the past have made it clear just how false it is. Without federal civil rights protection, minorities are condemned to languish. Remedying that is precisely what the social upheaval of the Civil Rights Era was all about. 

In racially-focused criminal justice action, the passage during Trump’s first term of the bipartisan First Step Act provided his government with the opportunity to point to successful justice reform on his watch. But since then, in practical terms, the regime’s rhetoric and policies have focused on more aggressive and far less accountable policing, the restructuring of ICE as a paramilitary that answers to Trump—not to the Constitution or to the taxpayers—vastly expanded prosecutorial powers, reduction or suspension of federal oversight on police departments in accordance with the Constitution and federal law, and the severe limiting of consent decrees, originally negotiated to prevent racially discriminatory practices by local police.   

  The Department of Justice has substantially reduced or eliminated the use of pattern-or-practice investigations into police departments accused of systemic racial or ethnic discrimination. This has substantially weakened accountability mechanisms developed after repeated findings of unconstitutional policing procedures in local police forces.

Clearly civil-rights progress depends not only on statutes passed into law, but also on the integrity of leadership. Presidents from John F. Kennedy through Joe Biden have generally framed racial equality as a priority national objective.

Trump, meanwhile, has instead consistently portrayed anti-racism initiatives, Diversity Equity and Inclusion, affirmative action, critical race theory, and diversity policies in general as threats to American society—read: white American society. That characterization represents a profoundly racist rhetorical and practical departure from decades of bipartisan presidential language and actions.

No matter how nefarious the racist actions Trump and his Cabinet have imposed, or how pernicious the effect of dismantling each Civil Rights Era conquest that he has ripped out by the roots, the overall pattern tends to be more significant than any individual policy. One way that MAGA tries to take the focus off of the blatantly racist bent of the regime is by defending each policy separately, in terms disingenuously designed to make it appear that the measures are more egalitarian, not less—a tactic into which the white supremacist base can easily lean. Once again, this is the “colorblind” argument that, in any reasonable mind, doesn’t fly any higher than a penguin.

But systematic change is rarely effected by means of a single law, decree or gesture. It takes place on the strength of consistently coordinated actions. Through his essentially racist actions, in his five-and-a-half years as president, and MAGA’S decade of white supremacist support, Trump has managed to effectively weaken civil-rights enforcement, narrow or eliminate anti-discrimination doctrine, reduce federal diversity oversight, dismantle DEI infrastructure, oppose and disband race-conscious remedies, curtail ethnic voting-rights protections, weaken fair-housing initiatives, and reduce federal police oversight, while bolstering an extra-constitutional paramilitary force that answers directly to him and that is, at its core, flagrantly racist. Viewed collectively, these actions represent the most sweeping retreat from the majority Civil Rights consensus in more than sixty years.

Detractors will try to tell you that the Trump regime opposes discrimination against all races equally. But this is basically a racist argument. It is based on the white supremacist “replacement theory”, which essentially posits that there is some sort of conspiracy on the left, through support for black communities and through liberal immigration from brown and black nations, to replace white Americans as the nation’s dominant ethnicity. This is the fever-dream conspiracy theory of an Anglo-centric segment of the population that believes intrinsically and religiously (whether they realize it or not) in the philosophy of iconic white supremacist scholar Madison Grant, whose theory of eugenics proposed that whites were placed on earth to rule and that all other races and ethnicities were inferior and should be dominated by white power. Whites were, Grant proposed, the master race.

Legend has it that when Adolf Hitler was arrested following his failed beer hall putsch in Munich, as he was being led away to prison, he carried a thick book under his arm. When somebody asked what it was, he reportedly held it up and said,  “die Bibel” (“The Bible”). That book that he was carrying to read in prison was The Passing of the Great Race: Or, The Racial Basis of European History by American white supremacist Madison Grant—a work that fully encompassed Grant’s theory of eugenics and that posited that whites needed to re-embrace their “destiny” as the master race and as world rulers.

Truth be told, demographic changes are clearly trending toward a world in which whites will no longer be the predominant ethnicity in most places—including the United States. This is not some anti-white plot, but a fact of life in a world where, just in my own nearly eight decades of life, the world population has burgeoned out of control from two-and-a-half billion to more than eight billion. And as that enormous and exponentially growing population occupies all available space on earth, in spite of any and all political borders and attempts to stem the flow, the tendency will be toward ever more mixed and blended races and ethnicities, with anything like racial “purity” eventually being a thing of the past. And good riddance.

That said, this fact encompasses quite another problem: that of the population explosion, a concern that kept the most aware of my own generation up nights, and that led us to champion contraception and responsible abortion for women and vasectomies for young to middle-aged men, making having a family a choice, not an obligation. In the run-up to the nineties, in their song entitled The Miracle, Queen had an uplifting message for the world: “That time will come, one day you'll see / When we can all be friends.” Whether that message pans out, or whether Humankind continues to engage in xenophobia, racism, territorial isolationism, war and environmental destruction remains to be seen, and depends on future generations, since my own fast-fading demographic has become a lost cause. But one thing is certain. We as humans will either get out of this alive together, or we will perish as the only race there is: the human race.

The historic Civil Rights Movement did not simply outlaw segregation. It built an institutional architecture designed to prevent discrimination before it happened. The defining characteristic of the Trump regime, however, has been the systematic dismantling of that architecture. Whether viewed through the lens of voting rights, fair housing, education, employment, policing, or equal-opportunity enforcement, the direction of Trump’s regime has been remarkably consistent and intentionally racist.

Without a doubt, it is only logical to conclude that the Trump regime has formally undertaken, as an overarching policy, the most comprehensive rollback of Civil Rights-era protections in modern American history. And the practical effects of that rollback have fallen disproportionately on black and brown American communities.

In her dissent in the Supreme Court's anti-affirmative action decision (Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, 2023), Justice Sonia Sotomayor argued that the Court was dismantling tools developed in the post-Civil Rights Era to specifically address persistent discrimination. “Ignoring race,” she wrote, “will not equalize a society that is racially unequal.”

In that same Supreme Court case, in which the hijacked conservative majority once again chose to undermine six-decade-old protections for minority rights, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson argued that constitutional colorblindness cannot erase the continuing effects of centuries of discrimination. More to the point, she wrote: “Deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life.”

And that is precisely the crux of the issue. The Trump regime’s so-called “equality-based” measures are a farse, that ostensibly pretend one thing while championing another. Whatever the letter of these policies might seek to reflect, their end-effect is perniciously racist, and designed to feed and nurture a cult of white supremacy that lies at the very foundation of the entire MAGA movement.