Trump's war against wokeness has a long history

[marmar]

Trump’s war against wokeness has a long history
Only the acronyms have changed in the fight to purge the National Endowment for the Humanities and "woke" education

By Heather Digby Parton
Columnist
Published May 11, 2026 6:45AM (EDT)


(Salon) When Donald Trump took office for the second time he had a big agenda, although it’s never been entirely clear if he knew it. He wanted to enact his precious tariffs and get revenge on his perceived political enemies, but his commitment to anything else was always debatable. Certainly, at the time of his election, nobody knew they were actually voting for Elon Musk to gather a handful of young technology bros to rampage through every government agency and fire as many people as they could under spurious rationales.

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The conservative majority could also have to decide whether to similarly reverse U.S. District Court Judge Colleen McMahon’s May 7 ruling, which held that DOGE did not have the authority to cancel National Endowment for the Humanities grants. The judge found that DOGE violated the First Amendment and the equal protection component of the Fifth Amendment, calling the case “a textbook example of unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination” for the method and criteria they used to cancel grants.

According to depositions by two of the tech bros who did the work, their orders were to cut anything that could be considered as falling under diversity, equity and inclusion, or that might increase the debt. So they instructed ChatGPT to make those determinations — but they didn’t tell it how they defined the term.

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What we now call “woke” was “PC” — political correctness — back in the day. DEI was “affirmative action” and “multiculturalism.” ChatGPT didn’t exist then, but we did have two big know-it-alls by the names of Rush Limbaugh and Pat Buchanan who helped define all these terms for the right in ways that made it sound like Democrats were destroying the fabric of all Americans hold dear. ..................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2026/05/11/trumps-war-against-wokeness-has-a-long-history/