Forcing Culture War Bigotry on Private Enterprise
Trump’s compelling businesses, from football teams to AI companies, to go MAGA.
by David Atkins
As
racial minorities, women, and the LGBTQ+ Americans made social
advancements in the decades since World War II, the overt violence of
Jim Crow gave way to more hidden structural violence and malign
governmental neglect of marginalized communities. If private
organizations or foundations wanted to advance social justice, then so
be it, but conservatives in government would not help them.
However,
that is no longer true with MAGA and the second Donald Trump
administration. The president and his allies are using government
coercion to enforce culture-war bigotry even upon private enterprises.
The rhetoric coming from federal agencies and spokespeople echoes
19th-century white supremacist propaganda.
We’ve
become so numb to these displays of government power in service of
bigotry that they often escape our attention—especially when there is
overwhelming interest in the president’s ties to a notorious child sex abuser
and his outlandish accusations against Barack Obama. However, we should
still reflect on the lesser but equally alarming abuse of power.
It is astonishing, for instance, that an American president is threatening to use his power to scuttle a stadium deal
with a private National Football League franchise if it does not revert
to a long-rejected moniker. Back in 2022, the Washington Redskins
changed their name, after considerable pressure, eventually calling
themselves the Washington Commanders. Major League Baseball’s Cleveland
Indians did, similarly, renaming themselves the Cleveland Guardians.
There was little objection to this at the time. The only people who
would still
be upset about it are those inhabiting the ugliest corners of the
political spectrum. But this rump faction controls the White House’s
attention, with the president of the United States claiming that there
is a “big clamoring” for reverting the names when there is no such
outcry. Besides, owning the libs is as much a motivation as any.
Even if there was
a majoritarian desire for sports teams to restore their racially and
ethnically insensitive names, it is wildly inappropriate for the
government to threaten legal contracts and stadium deals, especially if
the government is in the hands of a party that once championed the Tenth
Amendment. If a progressive government forced an anti-racist name
change, conservatives would say it was Stalinism.
On
a more consequential note, advances in artificial intelligence may be
our era’s most significant development for the economy, America’s
position on the global stage, and the future of humanity itself. But
instead of figuring out the best course to protect jobs and copyrights,
prevent Chinese dominance, and responsibly advance a potential
technological bonanza, the Trump administration is hobbling the tech
sector with demands that AI align itself with bigoted ideological shackles.
Trump’s latest Executive Order demands that AI companies working with
the federal government treat obvious realities like unconscious bias as
part of a “harmful ideology” that must be excised. Not only is this
anti-scientific and morally wrong, but it also hampers AI development
itself. As Elon Musk is learning in his attempts to manipulate his own
company, xAI’s Grok, when you tell a Large Language Model (LLM) to
ignore data-based realities, it begins to break down the system, and the
AI itself goes haywire. Such destructive interference from a
progressive government would never be tolerated.
The
Trump administration’s abuse and coercion of universities and media
companies has settled into an alarming pattern. MAGA ideologues have
used funding threats to try to strongarm universities like Harvard and
Columbia into betraying core principles of academic freedom under the
guise of fighting antisemitism. The irony abounds since Trump is using
the Education Department as the tip of the spear as he tries to make
academia bend the knee just as he’s dismantling the 46-year-old
department. It has used the threat of FCC interference with mergers and
other business interests to extort major media companies into settling
lawsuits they would otherwise have easily won, in what many would say
effectively constitute protection racket payments to the government.
Stephen Colbert will be canceled; the Paramount merger is approved with a
promise from Skydance, its senior partner, that DEI will be scuttled at
the new company.
Meanwhile,
the Republican government’s actions and communications have been
dripping with racist contempt. Beyond the horrors being perpetrated by
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), there are other, smaller,
shocking abuses. The White House just rescinded
a $20 million grant to provide clean water to central California
farming communities where pesticides have so contaminated the
groundwater that residents cannot safely drink it. But because those
residents are majority Hispanic, the Trump administration clawed back
the money, labeling it a “wasteful DEI program.” On the same day, the
Department of Homeland Security was approvingly sending tweets
featuring 19th-century images of Manifest Destiny that have long been
used in school textbooks as exemplars of white supremacist ideology.
Trump
and his Republican allies are trafficking in the ugliest forms of
old-school racism and modern authoritarianism and delighting in it. They
are using government power not only to promote bigotry, but to
intimidate private institutions into doing the same. When they lose
power (as eventually they will), there must be a reckoning for this
barbarism.
David Atkins is a Washington Monthly contributing
writer, activist, and research professional living in Santa Barbara as
well as an elected DNC Member from California. He is president of The
Pollux Group, a qualitative research firm. |