God, What a Farce.
“In [King’s] honor, we will strive together to make his dream a reality.” — DJT
This wasn’t the piece I was planning on writing today. I’ve actually been working on collecting my thoughts about two very interesting papers by Thorstein Veblen and connecting them to other bits and pieces of economic theory I’ve read.
And then Elon Musk posted that he’ll be rehiring Marko Elez, with the explicit encouragement of Vice President Vance.
For the unaware, Elez was one of two “DOGE” employees with read-and-write access to the Treasury’s payment system, according to stellar reporting by both Wired and Nathan Tankus.
And he was also spewing racist hatred on X under the nom de plume “nullllptr” recently enough that you might still have food in your freezer1 you bought while he was typing out that we should “normalize Indian hate.” Or that he was “racist before it was cool.” Or that he wants a “eugenic immigration policy.” Or that Congress should repeal the Civil Rights Act. You get the idea.
After Elez’s racist posts were discovered by Katherine Long of the Wall Street Journal, hardly a bulwark of liberal muckraking, he resigned on Thursday. Less than twenty four hours later, Musk was crowing on X about how “forgiving” Elez for being an vociferous bigot is “divine.”
The vice president of the United States of America was posting about how “stupid social media activity [shouldn’t] ruin a kid’s life” (Elez is twenty-five years old, three years older than I am) and he should just be let go after he’s rehired if he’s “a bad dude.” I guess thinking everyone who doesn’t have white skin is inherently worse than those who do doesn’t make you a bad dude in Vance’s book.
As I’ve quipped before, the affirmative action program for white men you would cross the street to avoid talking to is still ongoing.
But this whole fiasco alone isn’t really what sent me into a furious rage. Plenty of racists are working in the Trump White House. The guy who is apparently acting undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs, Darren Beattie, spent his time during the Biden administration posting about how “white men must be in charge” and Black people need to be offered Air Jordans so they’ll get sterilized. And he too was fired for being a racist before accepting this latest promotion, albeit during the first Trump administration.
What really kills me, what grinds my gears, is how conservatives still claim that they are the true guardians of Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy. During Trump’s second inaugural address, a speech I already pooh-poohed in a previous post, he took some time to boast that his new administration will be carrying on King’s work:
“Today is Martin Luther King Day. And his honor — this will be a great honor. But in his honor, we will strive together to make his dream a reality. We will make his dream come true.”
And during the benediction that day, the crypto-hawking scam artist they introduced as a pastor essentially delivered a funhouse mirror version of the “I Have a Dream” speech.
Josh Moon, a columnist/newshound for my frequent employer the Alabama Political Reporter, made a pretty forceful case against Republican misappropriation of King’s legacy last month, in a piece published the morning before Trump would deliver those lines. New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie wrote about King’s real beliefs back in 2023, and there’s about five hundred articles in Jacobin explaining that King was a socialist.
But listen to Republicans and they’ll tell you with a smile on their face that the ongoing lawfare campaign against pro-diversity programs in the public and private sector2 is in service of King’s dream. And, as Moon wrote, “you know the quote” they’ll regurgitate at you if you disagree.
If you refuse to believe these obvious lies and just look at what the Trump White House has been doing, and what Congressional Republicans have been abetting, you’ll see a wholesale assault on the political order that the Civil Rights movement painstakingly won and on the popular consensus that we should try to avoid discriminating against people on the basis of their race.
One of the first official acts of Trump’s second term was repealing executive order 11246, which forbade discrimination by federal contractors and was issued by LBJ shortly after he’d signed the Civil Rights Act. The Trump White House brazenly boasted that this nullification was “the most important federal civil rights measure in decades.” (Perhaps even the most important measure since LBJ signed the EO they’d targeted.)
It’s been ~lost in the deluge of horrific news from D.C., but following one of Trump’s “anti-DEI” EOs, various federal agencies issued orders telling their employees not to celebrate things like Black History Month, Juneteenth, and, yes, Martin Luther King Jr. Day.3 In a decision that was (mostly) walked back after public outcry, videos about the Tuskegee Airmen were wiped from Air Force training courses.
Foreign policy is just as bad, even without focusing directly on the millions that may die as a result of Musk et al.’s assault on USAID.4 Secretary of state Marco Rubio is refusing to attend the G20 summit in South Africa on the spurious grounds that the theme, “solidarity, equality, & sustainability,” is woke and anti-American.
And yesterday, Trump signed an executive order citing a law passed by South Africa’s centrist coalition meant to address longstanding inequality in land ownership. The EO orders various agencies to “prioritize humanitarian relief” for members of the white Afrikaner ethnic group and “promote the resettlement of Afrikaner refugees.” At the same time, Tom Homan is preparing to deport the Venezuelan refugees who escaped Maduro’s regime en masse.
Whether you look at the Trump admin’s staffing decisions, their choosing to hire and rehire unrepentant racists like Elez and Beattie, or their policy decisions, they have formed a unified front against the progress America had seemingly made in the ‘60s and ‘70s.
Like Elez tweeted, Richard Hanania spewed forth in his recent book, and Charlie Kirk openly admits, they want to come after the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and the consensus that white people aren’t better than everyone else by dint of their skin. White backlash is in the White House.
I will leave you with this excerpt from King’s fourth and final book:
“The white backlash is an expression of the same vacillations, the same search for rationalizations, the same lack of commitment that have always characterized white America on the question of race.
What is the source of this perennial indecision and vacillation? It lies in the ‘congenital deformity’ of racism that has crippled the nation from its inception. The roots of racism are very deep in America. Historically it was so acceptable in the national life that today it still only lightly burdens the conscience. No one surveying the moral landscape of our nation can overlook the hideous and pathetic wreckage of commitment twisted and turned to a thousand shapes under the stress of prejudice and irrationality.
This does not imply that all white Americans are racists— far from it. Many white people have, through a deep moral compulsion, fought long and hard for racial justice. Nor does it mean that America has made no progress in her attempt to cure the body politic of the disease of racism, or that the dogma of racism has not been considerably modified in recent years. However, for the good of America, it is necessary to refute the idea that the dominant ideology in our country even today is freedom and equality while racism is just an occasional departure from the norm on the part of a few bigoted extremists.”
And if you aren’t too depressed now to do anything except stare at the wall, here are some good articles from around the web:
A host of reporters on Musk’s coup attempt for the New York Times
Nathan Tankus’ ongoing coverage of the Treasury disaster for his site Notes on the Crises
Jael Holzman on DOE contracts getting canned for Heatmap News
And Michael Kinnucan on the illegality of political parties in the US for J.W. Mason’s blog
And a couple articles I’ve written recently:
A piece about an Alabama bill that would make it harder to collect unemployment insurance
And an article about the possibility the legislature will allow the Alabama overtime tax exemption to expire
And not those vegetables with mild freezer burn you keep deciding not to use just yet. Think ice cream or frozen Trader Joe’s meals. Some of these tweets are from September of last year, and there are almost certainly more that just weren’t archived from as recently as December, when the account was deleted.
Hours after she was confirmed, now-AG Pam Bondi told DOJ lawyers to start going after private companies in order to “end illegal DEI and DEIA discrimination and preferences and to comply with all federal civil-rights laws.”
I’ll baselessly speculate that federal employees in Alabama and Mississippi, where Robert E. Lee Day is celebrated alongside Martin Luther King Jr. Day on the third Monday in January, should feel free to celebrate the former, just not the latter.
See my earlier post about PEPFAR for more about this. While funding for the program has nominally resumed, USAID employees, all now placed on indefinite leave, are responsible for administering and delivering HIV/AIDS medicine around the world.
Vance is doing his absolute darndest to get his wife to leave him -- as if his relentless campaign of dehumanizing women wasn't enough, now he celebrates someone who wants to "normalize Indian hate." Just pure spinelessness.