Weekly Roundup: MAGA’s War on Education, Sanctuary, and DEI
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Dan goes solo to unpack a series of stories that reveal how the MAGA movement is working to operationalize a white Christian nationalist vision of America. From the Department of Education’s rollback of guidance meant to support English-language learners, to Trump-era attacks on sanctuary cities like Boston, to rhetoric targeting Native American sovereignty in Tulsa, Dan shows how each of these actions fits into a broader strategy of exclusion and racialized politics.
The episode also highlights how the dismantling of DEI programs on college campuses strips away resources that protected marginalized students, even as discrimination persists. Through historical context, cultural decoding, and contemporary examples, Dan demonstrates how seemingly disparate headlines connect to a single ideological project—and why resistance, vigilance, and collective action matter now more than ever.
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www.feyyaz.tv Hello and welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
I am Dan Miller, Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
This is the weekly roundup and I am flying solo.
Brad is traveling this week and doing some other things.
And so best wishes to him.
However, if you tune in, many of you will already know James Dobson passed this week.
And Brad posted sort of a short reflection on that.
That's been posted to the website.
Take a listen if you would like.
Brad, of course, has done a lot of work on James Dobson and specifically really great work highlighting.
the connections of James Dobson, who's, you know, a child psychologist and known for parenting books and so forth, but connecting that whole movement to Christian nationalism and everything that's going on in America now.
So invite you to take a listen to that if you need to hear Brad's voice this week, as we all do.
And also because he did a great job with that.
And I'm not going to talk about Dobson this week in this week's roundup.
So I want to begin, as always, by thanking all of you for listening, thanking the subscribers, all of you who do so much to keep us going.
We are, as you know, an indie program.
We do a lot of programming content three times a week.
It takes a lot of work and we can't do it without you.
Thank you so much.
I want to dive in here.
What I want to do this week is I want to focus on a few, I think, sort of smaller stories.
They're not, some of them got big news.
Some of them, I think, are big headlines.
Some of them, I think, were smaller.
But they're stories that I've come across this week that, for me, when we take them together, they paint a picture of the Wright's attempts to sort of operationalize a MAGA vision of America.
And I think it's worth seeing the ways that these work.
Everybody knows me.
If you listen to It's in the Code, you know that cultural decoding is part of what I like to do.
And you really can delve into the things that are said and the ways that are said.
the way that some of these policies are presented and the actions that are undertaken, the way that they're put forward, to really understand and get a fuller view of the kind of coded language that's used here and more importantly again the real effects of this.
So I wanted to start with this story, okay?
The U.S. Department of Education this week, and of course we know MAGA, you know, on one hand they're trying to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education.
On the other hand they want to weaponize it and this follows falls into that latter category.
This week they rescinded guidance for schools.
intended to tell them how to help students learning English as a second language.
And this was originally reported in the Washington Post.
I read it in some other places.
The Washington Post first reported this.
And a little bit of background on this, this guidance was first laid out in 2015, and it presented guidelines for how to identify students learning English, right?
To identify students for whom English was not their first language or maybe the language was spoken at home, and how to help them, on the one hand, learn English, become proficient English learners, proficient English speakers, and I think at least as important in an educational context, English readers as well.
And also how to learn class content.
In other words, how do you support students who are in schools where the content is not presented in their native language, is presented in English, and they're not fluent in English yet?
How do you help them with that content?
So it was guidance intended to provide schools with information on how to do this.
And it's worth noting that federal law requires that schools help students learn English and understand academic content.
And this was based on a SCOTUS decision from 1974 called Lau v.
Nichols.
So on the one hand, just on the surface of it, we see the sort of ongoing lawless nature of the Trump administration of essentially saying that they will not enforce this federal law.
law that requires this and they're showing this by rescinding this guidance.
I have a lot to say about this, but I want to start by thinking a little bit about white racial discourse in the U.S. and to see how this fits into it.
Okay.
And I want to start, I'm going to put on my Brad Onishi hat.
I'm going to go back in time here, right?
I'm going to do some history stuff.
If you go back to the 18th century and really especially the 19th century and practices like European colonialism, slavery, especially in the antebellum Southern American states and so forth, one of the dominant ideologies underpinning all of those kinds of social phenomena and political and nationalist projects was what is known as scientific racism.
Okay.
And I know a lot of you will have some sense of what this is.
What that sought to do was to draw on emerging scientific discourses like Darwinism.
So you started thinking social Darwinism, that particular races were more suited for survival and advancement and other, the sort of survival of the fittest model.
You also had a lot of what we now recognize as pseudoscience, like, you know, phrenology, measurements of head shape and size and and notions that the physical stature or things like skin color or different things like this told us something inherent about different kind of racial capabilities and also tied in with this moral capabilities.
There was this notion that morality or one's moral ability was also determined by physiological traits.
And that's where if you want to read Sherlock Holmes stories, Arthur Connan Doyle writing in this period, Sherlock Holmes often appeals to some of these social science, or excuse me, pseudo-scientific principles to identify criminals.
Or if you ever talk about somebody, you know, having beady little eyes, the notion that like actually the actual shape and position of their eyes could tell us something about their moral character, physiological types telling us about the cognitive capacities of different groups and so on.
on, what you got was the application of, we could say the misapplication of scientific principles and the application of pseudoscientific, that is not really scientific principles, that created a hierarchy of human races.
And we put races in quotes here.
Every time you hear the word race here, you should put it in quotes, okay?
A hierarchy of human races that was supposed to be scientifically based, right?
So in other words, you're creating a hierarchy of human races that is supposedly based on science and observation, objective fact and so forth.
And of course, of course, of course, white Christian Europeans were always at the top of this hierarchy.
And we could expand this story.
You could talk about the notion of religion that this plays in this.
And, you know, Christianity is the most advanced or evolved religion.
So white Christian Europeans were not only the highest race, but they had the highest religion and so forth.
Why does all that matter?
It matters because this scientific racism gave a rationale or a legitimation for colonialism and slavery.
and subjugation of different groups and so forth.
And it was given in the claim that these different races, because they were based on, the races, the racial types were based on biology, they were defined by immutable natural differences, differences that could not change, differences that could not be adapted for, and so forth.
And this ranges from everything from viewing certain races as inherently dangerous and therefore they need to be subjugated to the kind of benevolent colonial sort of model that we're going to go in as the white caretakers and help the childlike races to develop because they're not capable of doing this on their own and so forth.
The end result was the same.
The use of this racist discourse to support and legitimize white supremacy.
That's the long and short of it.
Now, in the 20th century, scientific racism becomes widely discredited for lots of reasons.
One is the discovery of modern genetics.
It turns out that when you're looking for, you know, biological races, when you get into the genetic code, there's just no evidence for it.
People within one group that would have been defined as a race can have greater genetic diversity than people who are like squirrels.
There's just no genetic basis.
So scientific discoveries undermine this.
The recognition of pseudoscience as pseudoscience undermine this and so forth.
But also events like the Holocaust and other genocidal attempts discredited this.
People saw what this kind of discourse could do.
But of course, racism persists.
We still have racism with us, but it's often not couched.
It's typically not couched in scientific terms.
In fact, this is why you can have contemporary white supremacist groups who will insist that they're not racist because they're not appealing to biology.
Because they'll say, well, of course, there aren't distinct human breeds.
or species.
That's not what race is.
And so they'll say that racism doesn't exist and so forth.
But here's what happens in the 20th century.
Those arguments about biology.ogy are shifted to a cultural register.
So what differentiates groups now is not biology or survival of the fittest and so forth.
It becomes cultural traits.
And within that frame, we get into discourses that we're familiar with.
We get into discourses that say, you know, in the U.S., of course we affirm immigration.
Of course we affirm minorities, but they have to assimilate.
They have to be able to modify themselves and their lives and their perceptions and their cultures and so forth to fit into quote unquote American culture, whatever the hell American culture is supposed to have been, they need to assimilate.
So immigration or in older discourses, pardon the language, quote unquote mix racing, or excuse me, race mixing, it's all right as long as non-whites could assimilate to white culture.
And that sounds simple enough, but then what happens is you define some cultural traits as immutable and unchangeable.
So now you just say, well, people from some cultural and religious backgrounds, their cultural traits are so ingrained and so define who they are as a people that they cannot change.
You just move the immutability from something biological to something cultural.
And then those groups are defined as unassimilable.
And one of the classic examples in the American context is Muslims or quote unquote Middle Eastern people, anybody identified with Islam.
The idea is that Islam is such an uncompromising, doctrinaire sort of cultural form that it's simply, Muslims simply cannot assimilate.
to a liberal democratic society and so forth.
And that unassimilability becomes the argument that says they cannot assimilate, therefore they represent a threat to our cultural identity and or a threat to the people who are here.
Some of these cultures are positioned as inherently violent and so forth.
And so we have a legitimation and a reason for keeping them out.
Okay.
That's how contemporary racist discourse operates.
And we've talked about that before.
So if you're sitting here and say, okay, Dan, like, thanks for the lesson.
You've talked about all of this before.
Like, where are we going with this?
Here's why that to me matters in this story because in this story, this story about the Department of Education rescinding this guidance for non-English speakers, we see how racially undesirable minorities, right?
And we know when they say non-English speakers, they're primarily talking about people from south of the American border.
Those are the primary groups that are in view here, right?
People who are not viewed by majority white society as white, people who speak typically Spanish, other languages as well.
That's what's viewed.
And what we see is how racially undesirable minorities are actually rendered unassimilable.
So what you do is you start with this idea that there are some groups who just culturally, they can't be assimilated to American society.
They can never really be Americans.
Even if you give them citizenship, it doesn't make them real Americans.
And so we're justified in removing them from the country or keeping them from coming in.
But what you see here is that that unassimilability, what you do is you put policies in place that then make it impossible for a group to assimilate.
And then you point to that lack of assimilation that you brought about as your rationale for targeting that group.
And that's what we have.
In schools, we are now going to prevent them from learning English.
Hard to assimilate into lots of parts of American culture if you can't speak English.
So we're going to make that harder.
We're going to make it harder for them to learn English.
And we're also going to ensure with that that they're not effectively educated.
We're not only going to put them in schools where the language is English that they don't understand, but it also means all the curricular content that they're not going to be following along.
And if you're a native English speaker, whatever language you speak, just imagine sitting through, I don't know, basic math.
or social studies or learning algebra from somebody who doesn't speak the same language as you when you can't ask questions to clarify what a term means or the nomenclature doesn't make sense or you just you literally can't understand.
I have a child who goes to a Chinese immersion school and for years he brings home math assignments that I can't help him with.
When it's basic math and it's numbers and equations, cool, but like a story problem, it's all in Chinese.
I can't read or speak Chinese.
The instructions will be in Chinese.
I can't, if he doesn't understand what he's being asked to do, I can't help him because I can't read it.
I can't understand it.
That's what we're talking about.
So we're going to make it the Department of Education now.
Again, I talk about Orwellian themes a lot with this administration, but here is one.
The Department of Education is going to ensure that people can't speak English and that they can't be educated.
What's that going to mean?
Well, it means that then when they can't effectively assimilate into dominant white culture, when their test scores are low, when they can't fill out a job application, when they can't file a tax return, when they can't communicate, they can't.
write in English.
They can't effectively communicate with others.
We're going to point at them and say, see, we told you that just they won't assimilate.
They won't they only be speaking?
We don't know what they're actually thinking.
They could be thinking anything.
They could be plotting anything.
And it maps onto this discourse about how they're an inherent danger to society because they can't assimilate.
And then what does that do?
That turns into the basis for exclusion.
That turns into the argument for why they need to be removed.
They just won't assimilate and they're a threat.
and why we need strict border controls and so forth to make sure that they don't come here in the first place.
We render a group, we render it impossible for a group.
to assimilate.
And then when they can't assimilate, which is exactly what we intended, we use that lack of assimilation as the basis to support the ideology that we use to keep them from assimilating in the first place.
And that, my friends, is how MAGA seeks, in this instance, to operationalize a white supremacist agenda and to make sure that America stays white.
that we don't become a majority minority nation is by rendering it impossible for people to assimilate and using that lack of assimilation as the basis and argument for their removal from this country.
And we could map that on to so many other things.
We could map it on to ICE showing up at schools and other places and arguing in court that they should be able to use just the use of a language other than English as a basis for detaining somebody.
So what do you do?
Well, we're going to take those immigrant kids or children of immigrant parents.
And we're going to make sure that they can't speak English.
And then ICE can find them.
Makes them easier to spot, makes them easier to target.
It maps on to so many things.
This is one of the ways in which the Trump administration is seeking to fully operationalize and put into concrete practice the white supremacist ideology that is at the heart of the MAGA movement.
I want to move on from this to a couple other stories, still related to issues of immigration, or at least the first one is, but also getting into the rhetoric of sanctuary, right?
And we've heard the Trump administration and MAGA attack so-called sanctuary cities.
and sanctuary jurisdictions since the first Trump administration, since the before the first Trump administration.
And it works on the same logic.
If you listen to it's in the code where I've been going through Alibeth Stuckey's book.
It's the same thing that talked about this week in this week's episode in her discussion of immigration.
It works on the logic that all immigrants are presented as inherently threatening and dangerous.
And again, we can tie this in with the last topic.
They're unassimilable.
They can't really properly become American.
They are a threat.
They are a danger.
All the rhetoric about violent crime, all of this.
So we paint with a very broad brush.
We say all these immigrants are a potential threat.
They're a potential danger.
So cities providing quote unquote sanctuary are presented as shielding violent, dangerous criminals.
That's how the discourse works.
You've seen it time and again.
We've talked about it.
So cities, predominantly in blue states, predominantly large.
cities that have so-called sanctuary laws are presented as shielding criminals and violent offenders and so forth.
And this is exactly, to reference the other work that I'm doing on the podcast, this is exactly what somebody like Alibeth Stuckey argues in her book.
And this is what you will hear.
This is what you'll hear from Uncle Ron.
This is what you'll hear from your brother-in-law.
This is what you'll hear from your pastor.
Often subtle, often simply taken for granted, but that sanctuary cities are these places where predators and violent criminals go to hide and to be protected.
With that in view, there were two stories this week that highlighted how this logic works on the one hand and how it can be extended to shape society further to Mauga's liking on the other.
So the first story comes out of Boston.
It's caught my eye because, of course, I live in Massachusetts.
So Boston was in the news this week because it has a sanctuary status within the Trump administration.
It's been identified as a sanctuary city.
And I think it's important to be clear about what Boston's quote unquote sanctuary policy is.
I really don't like the word sanctuary now because it's another one that has become sort of so co-opted.
by the right that I think it has become freighted.
I think it's become a problem for those who oppose the Trump administration, but I don't have a better word.
So in 2014, the city enacted the Boston Trust Act, which is really intended to improve the relationship between the immigrant communities and the police.
And this was further amended in 2019.
Okay.
So here's what it does.
On the one hand, like other so-called sanctuary cities, and this is pretty typical of what these laws actually say, police in Boston are prohibited from aiding ICE in the enforcement of civil penalties and the enforcement of federal immigration law.
In other words, ICE, which is a federal agency enforcing federal immigration law, cannot demand that the police department, which is not..
tasked with enforcing federal law and is not a federal agency use its resources and its personnel to enforce federal immigration policy nor and this is important they cannot hinder ice in its work of enforcing federal immigration policy and we've seen this in play around the country we've seen these places where ICE agents show up to do something and there's a bunch of local police and why are they there?
They're there because they have to keep protesters away from the ICE agents.
They have to keep people from actively preventing ICE from doing what they're doing and so forth.
They're not there enforcing immigration law.
They're in, they're playing a role that they have to play as local police.
So this is what the law sort of prohibits.
However, it allows, and this is really important because again, this is not going to be unique to Boston, folks.
It allows the Boston Police Department to collaborate with ICE on issues of, quote, significant public safety.
What does that mean?
It means they can aid ICE in criminal matters.
Things like child and human trafficking.
child exploitation, drug and weapons trafficking.
I think cyber security is part of this.
In other words, if somebody from ICE is there to enforce a criminal penalty to stop something criminal, something terrible, human trafficking, child exploitation, these kinds of things.
The police department can aid them in that.
And also, this is another point that's important, obviously, the Boston Police Department or the San Francisco Police Department or the police department in any other so-called sanctuary jurisdiction, they're also going to enforce local laws about violent crime.
They're going to arrest and prosecute people for violent crime.
They're not going to let that happen.
So in other words, the notion of a sanctuary city as emerges has nothing to do with shielding criminals, violent criminals.
It has nothing to do with not enforcing laws against violent crime, including federal laws about violent crime.
It just says you're not going to use our local police to enforce federal immigration law.
If ICE, if you want to do that, you are immigration and customs enforcement, you can do your job and you can come enforce immigration law, federal immigration law.
We're not going to do it for you.
That's what it says.
Okay.
Why do I highlight that?
Because the language of sanctuary has become a weapon on the right.
And last week, the Department of Justice sent letters to 35 sanctuary jurisdictions demanding the end of such practices and protections, as they would call them, protection.
So I'm reading here from NBC News a sort of summary of this.
The Justice Department sent letters again to 35 sanctuary jurisdictions.
The Department of Justice ordered the jurisdictions to submit plans by early this week.
That's the week that I'm recording.
to show that they are taking steps to ditch the policies, threatening to cut off federal funding and prosecute officials if the cities didn't comply.
So the standard Trump thing, we're going to cut off federal funding.
This has been challenged in court.
It's still being challenged in court and so forth.
Prosecuting officials, as far as I understand and every analysis I have ever read of this says local and city officials are under no obligation to enforce federal immigration policy.
They don't have to aid in that.
It's just it's not their jurisdiction.
Okay, but this was the letter that was put forward.
It was signed by Attorney General Pam Bondi.
Here's part of what it said.
Quote, you are hereby notified that your jurisdiction has been identified as one that engages in sanctuary policies and practices that thwart federal immigration enforcement to the detriment of the interests of the United States.
This ends now.
End quote.
And said that they had to take steps to eradicate this and these policies and so forth.
And I want us to listen to the language here.
The first thing is that these policies thwart federal immigration enforcement.
They don't.
They do not thwart federal immigration enforcement.
And this is what is key to know.
It is not in the purview of local or state police officers to enforce federal immigration law.
It's a federal law.
They are not federal officers.
They're not thwarting anything by not doing something that isn't their job.
It is the job of federal agencies like ICE.
Number one, and number two, to reiterate, they are not allowed to obstruct ICE and other federal agencies from enforcing federal immigration law.
And this is part of what people on the left really don't like.
They actually want, oftentimes, those jurisdictions to actively push back on this, and that's not something that they can do either.
Okay, so they're not thwarting immigration enforcement.
And then there's the whole, you know, to the detriment of the interest of the United States, this brings us to the fact that, you know, it's just a fundamental ideological kind of worldview issue about whether or not you think that undocumented immigrants are inherently a detriment to the interests of the United States.
I do not.
People like Uncle Ron, people like Donald Trump, people like Pam Bondi, people like Alibeth Stuckey, they believe that they are an inherent detriment to the United States.
I don't.
And I certainly don't think that kids who are born here, who are U.S. citizens, whose families are going to be destroyed.
by the policies that are aimed at this, I don't think that they're a detriment either.
Okay?
So that's the language.
And what I want to highlight there then is the inflammatory language that is used and attached to the concept of sanctuary.
You are thwarting immigration policy and you are damaging American society.
That's the first piece.
That's the language.
It's how the language of sanctuary is used on the right.
But if that's not enough, the inflammatory language from the Attorney General isn't enough.
We also had Todd Lyons.
Now, who is Todd Lyons?
Todd Lyons is the acting ICE director who appeared on the Howie Carr show.
If you don't know the Howie Carr show, it's a conservative radio program.
This is not him appearing in like even a Fox News interview or something.
There's no sort of veneer here of legitimacy.
It's just a right-wing radio show.
And he went on the show following Boston Mayor Michelle Wu saying in a news conference that Boston would quote, not back down, end quote, to federal pressure.
So the mayor of Boston and the mayor of other cities have done this too, says, we're not going to do this.
She says, you know, you're wrong on the law.
You're wrong on policy.
We're, you know, we're not going to cave to this pressure.
So he goes on the Howie Carr show.
And here's what he had to say.
He said that sanctuary policies like Boston's are what?
A detriment to safety.
Notice that.
Again, it's.
civil enforcement that so-called sanctuary laws prohibit police from engaging in.
Civil enforcement, not criminal enforcement, and not violent crimes.
And yet he says it's a detriment to safety.
And then he says this.
This is a quote.
We're definitely going to, as you've heard the saying, flood the zone, especially in sanctuary jurisdictions.
Obviously, Boston and Massachusetts decided that they wanted to stay sanctuary.
So 100%, you're going to see more ICE presence.
End quote.
Folks, to me, the language matters.
Here's what he doesn't say.
He doesn't say, you know, it's really important to enforce federal immigration policy.
And if the local police aren't going to help us, we're going to have to do it ourselves, which means we'll have to have more ICE agents there.
No, it's phrased in the language of, you know, as he says, flooding the zone.
It's phrased in the language of occupation.
It is phrased, in my view, as a kind of punishment.
They decided they wanted to stay sanctuary.
I guess that's the t-shirt we need right now.
Stay sanctuary.
They want to stay sanctuary, so you're going to get more more ICE presence.
It's presented as an invasion of the city.
We're going to flood you with ICE agents.
We're going to punish you, right?
And this is how immigration policy works on the right.
It is punitive.
It is about punishment.
It is about vengeance.
It is about enacting all the fears of white Americans of a country that's not white enough anymore and trying to reverse that.
And all of this is there.
And all on the ground, of course.
that policies like this are, as he says, detrimental to safety.
And of course, we know, we talk about this all the time.
We know that there's no data to back this up.
Same article says that in recent years, crime has continued to drop steadily in Boston with homicides reaching a historic low by the end of 2024.
That's December, this past December, a historic low.
Robberies, aggravated assaults, and motor vehicle thefts and fraud-related offenses have also dropped across Massachusetts, according to data released by the state.
Violent crime is down.
You map that on to all the data that shows that undocumented immigrants are less likely to commit violent crime.
Why?
If you're in a country and you are undocumented and you need people to not know that because of agencies like ICE, you don't commit violent crime.
No better way to get on the radar and get caught and be deported than to commit crimes.
Okay.
It's not about data.
So when Lyons says it's a threat to safety, a detriment to safety, there's no data for that.
It's not about data.
It's about feelings.
And we have seen this.
If somebody says, well, that sounds extremist, this idea that they're talking about invading.
Folks, this maps onto what we've seen elsewhere.
We've already seen Trump federalize the police in D.C. We've heard the explicit threat that he's going to do that in New York City.
ICE is for Trump, because it's a federal police force, it is essentially for him.
For him, this personal force of enacting his vendettas against blue states, against immigrants, against anybody who stands in their way, it is essentially the sort of not so secret police force that can appear anywhere with hidden faces and unmarked vehicles and without identifying themselves and all the things that we have seen.
That's what ICE is.
So this is the language that comes from sanctuary.
And so I want us to hold on to that idea.
Because within the right, sanctuary is code for danger.
It is code for threat.
It is code for if a city is a quote unquote sanctuary city, that means they allow violent offenders, they protect them, they won't arrest them, they won't prosecute them, they keep the federal government from coming after them.
None of those things are true.
But you talk to folks on the right, that is what sanctuary communicates.
So that's the first piece of this that i want to highlight it's just yet another appeal to sanctuary but we see it in this exchange around boston and the acting director of ice about how sank the the concept of sanctuary operates What I want to move on to now is another story because what it shows is that once you have weaponized a term like sanctuary,
once you have enough people in this country for whom sanctuary is code for danger and threat, you can then extend that term and use it to apply to other groups and other practices.
You can take it beyond the category of immigration to further solidify a MAGA social view and to further operationalize that.
So, shifting across the country now, in Oklahoma, far from Boston, very red state, all of that.
In Oklahoma, the city of Tulsa recently reached a settlement with the Muskogee Creek Nation, Native American Nation, regarding tribal jurisdiction.
So the city of Tulsa and the Muskogee Nation, Muskogee Creek Nation, rather, reached an agreement.
And essentially, it's an agreement that allows some cases, primarily traffic violations, to be handled in tribal courts instead of by Tulsa prosecutors.
Again, primarily traffic violations.
We could dig further into this.
I think we're going to find that these other things, these are small-scale offenses of different kinds.
Most of, maybe not most of you.
Many of you listening.
Many of us podcasting.
We might have traffic violations somewhere in our history.
Doesn't make us a criminal.
It's kind of one of those things that if you've driven for a long time, you probably got a traffic violation somewhere.
These are the kinds of offenses it's talking about.
Okay.
Well, Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt has asked the Oklahoma Supreme Court to block the settlement.
And the reason why is interesting.
Here's the statement that he released.
And I want us to listen to this because we are going to hear all the same rhetorical.
connections with sanctuary and safety that we just talked about.
But now this is not applied to immigrants.
This is not applied to non-citizens.
This is applied to Native Americans.
Here's what he says.
Quote, more than anything, this is a public safety issue.
No mayor has the authority to pick and choose which Oklahomans are subject to the laws of our state.
By entering into this agreement, Mayor Nichols has essentially made Tulsa a sanctuary city with two systems of justice.
One for those with tribal membership and one for everyone else.
This makes our state less safe.
You hear all of that?
So first, he says, by doing this, you can hear, this is how you turn up the volume on a topic.
This is how if you're on the right and you're Governor Stit of Oklahoma and people are like, who cares?
You get a speeding ticket and you go to like a tribal court instead of like the Tulsa court.
Like, who cares?
You still got to go to traffic court and that sucks.
Or you just pay your fine, which is what most people do and that sucks too.
Who cares?
Here's how you make them care on the right.
You call it sanctuary.
He says, this has made Tulsa a sanctuary city.
And what does sanctuary mean?
Sanctuary means threat.
And this is what he says.
He says, more than anything, this is a public safety issue.
Now, folks, I'd love to hear more about why it is less safe to have a traffic ticket adjudicated in a tribal court than in a Tulsa court.
I'd love to know why that is.
Is there any data for this?
Is there data?
I don't know.
Somehow if you had a speeding ticket or parking violations or you run a stop sign or I don't know, you get stopped for not using your phone hands free.
I'm assuming that's illegal in Oklahoma that you're going to get off scot-free if you're in the tribal court system.
Are they not going to enforce DUIs?
I don't know.
I think that sounds ridiculous, but I don't have any data.
They're not giving me any data for this.
They've just labeled it a sanctuary city.
said we've got two systems of justice.
Again, it's not everything.
It's mostly traffic violations, minor offenses, but saying it's made it less safe.
And then, of course, not just Tulsa, but this makes our state less safe.
He also says no mayor is the authority to pick and choose which Oklahomans are subject to the laws of our state.
Folks, I'm not an expert on this, but I've lived in a lot of parts of the country with with large Native American nations who are there.
They are sovereign nations.
And so issues of jurisdiction and legality, I think, are really, really complicated when it comes to that.
So sorry, Governor Stitt.
Like, my understanding is that it's not as simple as just saying all Oklahomans because.
because if you have members, people who are residents of Oklahoma who are also members of the Muskogee Creek Nation, that's complicated, more complicated than you make it sound.
But we can paint over all of that up for Governor Stitt by just calling it a sanctuary city.
So here you have two movements.
You have the linkage of sanctuary with threat.
with violence.
If you provide sanctuary, you are shielding criminals.
You are shielding violent offenders.
You are putting all of us in danger.
You create that equivalence, which has no basis in reality.
And then once you've effectively done that, you extend it.
So we're now not talking again about undocumented immigrants.
We're not talking about people who don't have citizenship.
We're not even talking about people who aren't residents of the state of Oklahoma.
We are talking about people who would be subject to tribal courts versus other courts.
And I don't know all the bases of sort of when that happens.
And it has to do with like sort of where the infraction occurred.
or if you're a member of the nation or what have you.
We don't know that.
He doesn't tell us any of that.
You just extend it.
And what does it communicate to me?
It communicates to me once again, hey., guess what?
You American Indian nations, other people of color in this country, you're not real Americans either.
You're seeking sanctuary.
You're violent.
You're a threat because that's what it is.
If you are saying that transferring some cases to tribal courts, is a public safety issue, that it makes the state less safe, you are saying that there is something inherently dangerous and violent about Native Americans.
To me, that's clear.
This is not limited to undocumented immigrants.
And we see this.
And we've said this.
Others have said this.
Others note this.
If you're not concerned about the MAGA vision of America yet, just wait because they will eventually come for you.
If you are not the straight, white American Christian who is their vision of a true American, they will eventually come for you.
And this, in a small scale way, is a vision of how they operationalize that and how they do that.
The final story I want to talk about this week, it actually comes from Lexi Lonas Cochrane, Riding for the Hill, a really nice piece that I came across this week.
Of course, you know, I'm an academic and my semester is about to start.
And so when I'm not doing this, I'm busy gearing up and trying to put together my syllabus and get ready for things.
And if you are a college student, this is the time of year when you're coming back to campus and you're settling back in.
If you have kids who are college students, this is there.
If you have kids who are about to start college, this sort of really seminal time of the year.
And there was a really great article just sort of pointing out the changed reality for students coming back to campus as it relates to what we might call the scrapping of DEI initiatives on college campuses.
Lexi notes that students coming back to colleges in something like 20 states are coming back to colleges where DEI, so-called, is no longer allowed.
They are coming to campuses where DEI programs and offices and centers have been shut down.
In many red states, this is a matter of state law.
but also big name colleges and universities that have been targeted by the Trump administration and threatened with funding and all this other stuff if they didn't scrap DEI.
So thousands and thousands and thousands of college students across the country.
Now we know.
that the scrapping of DEI initiatives and such offices and so forth is presented by MAGA World as an effort to combat the unfair treatment of white students or straight students or cis women or Jewish students by not allowing anybody to show sympathy for Palestine and so forth.
We know that that's how it's presented.
Okay.
We know that that's how it's presented.
But Sean Harper, who's a professor, says a professor of education, business, and public policy at the University of Southern California, in this article, hits the nail on the head of how this actually works.
And I think it's important for us to see this because we're going to begin seeinging the effects of this more pointedly than we have to date.
This is what Sean Harper has to say.
The students who make America's colleges and universities diverse will be returning to the same conditions, but a different reality.
They will return to campus climates that are still racist, homophobic, transphobic, sexist, ableist, and otherwise discriminatory.
End quote.
This is the part that MAGA doesn't want us to see.
They want to position it as if somehow American colleges and universities and American society as a whole has been a kind of shingra law, a magic land where everybody who is not white or who is queer identified or who is disabled has this slew of rights that other people don't,
where they experience extreme privilege and job preference and educational preference and everything else, that this is a utopia for them and it has become a dystopian space.
for anybody who's not queer or who is white or who's cisgender or what have you.
And of course, what Sean Harper points out is this is just simply not the case.
The reason why DEI initiatives and these agencies and organizations and student centers and so forth exist, the reason they exist is because of racism and homophobia and transphobia and sexism and ableism and all of these other things.
That's why they exist.
So he goes on to say, he says, again, they will return to campus climates that are the same.
where all of that discrimination against them still exists, where everybody who could be defined as a quote unquote minority or as adding diversity in some way now experiences discrimination.
That was still there, but he goes on to say this, quote, but they're going to be returning to places that no longer have the infrastructure to address those challenges.
So the challenges remain, but there will be fewer resources, fewer policies, and fewer people to protect students from those realities, end quote.
And he is exactly right.
And this, folks, is the aim of MAGA World.
It is not the case, in my view, that millions of Americans honestly believe and think that they are somehow endangered or threatened if If queer people can appear in public or if, I don't know, if trans women can use bathrooms of the gender with which they identify or what have you.
No, they feel displaced because that challenges their traditional privilege, their traditional social priority.
Because we maintain our sense of identity in many ways, our sense of social priority, our sense of social value.
by having rights and abilities that others don't.
And so this is what we see.
This is the aim.
And as we come into this academic year, I've spent my entire adult life structuring my year around the academic calendar it's always an exciting time starting the academic year as we come into this academic year it's going to be the first sort of full cycle of an academic year with these things in place and we're going to watch this because we are going to see the same forms of discrimination that have been there but without the resources to combat them without the resources to support those students and faculty and staff who relied on those resources
So we'll see where that goes.
We'll see what that looks like.
We're going to see how it plays out.
Kind of a grab bag of topics today, but for me, they're linked and they're linked in this way because they really are all evidence, all examples and illustrations of how one goes about taking something like the MAGA ideology, a deeply felt, often amorphous sense of who or what the real Americans are, and putting it into practice.
Of taking a felt sense of what America should look like, of what it should be like, of who should.
have rights and authority and social power and prestige and all of that and putting it into practice.
And so what stood out to me this week are these sort of disparate stories.
Public education system of the Department of Education, sanctuary accusations against Boston and Tulsa, the dismantling of DEI initiatives on college campuses.
That's what links them.
Diverse ways that Team MAGA is putting their imprint on American society and seeking to make America into the white Christian nation that they believe it truly and rightfully is.
That's a lot, folks, and I realize that's a lot.
Let me come to my reason for hope.
And my reason for hope is a place that pushes back against this in just a couple ways.
The first, a couple reasasons for hope.
The first is that a federal judge ruled this week that Ron DeSantis and the Trump administration cannot bring new detainees to the so-called Alligator Alcatraz, this kind of detention center that has been created in Florida.
Ruled, I believe, just yesterday this ruling came down.
And also demanded that the state, the state of Florida, scale down operations within 60 days.
And this is interesting because as I understand the ruling, it didn't explicitly say you couldn't, you know, you have to disband it or whatever, but it did order the removal of all generators, gas, sewage, lighting, fencing, and other waste items from the facility.
Essentially, the facility literally has to be dismantled, which would render the site uninhabitable.
And the interesting thing here is that the injunction was based on a lawsuit filed by environmental groups and a Native American tribe in this case, and basically argued that corners had been cut in environmental policy and like public hearings and things like this.
And the judge found in their favor and basically said, this is an environmental threat.
And so all these things have to be removed.
Of course, this facility is a blight on our nation.
It's a humanitarian disaster.
It involves the denial of rights of detainees and so forth.
We've talked about it.
Lots of other people have talked about it.
So I took great hope in hearing that it will hopefully be dismantled and that there doesn't seem to be a final appeal and so forth.
But the DeSantis administration in Florida right now, they don't have an alternative facility to put these people into like this.
So I take great hope in that.
One more reason of hope to think about here.
The Trump administration has been in the news, has demonstrated, A federal judge ruled on Thursday, I'm reading this from CNN, a federal judge ruled on Thursday that President Donald Trump's former personal lawyer, Alina Haba, is not legally serving as the acting U.S. Attorney for New Jersey.
So, of course, Trump rewarded his personal lawyer by appointing her as acting U.S. Attorney for New Jersey.
A judge ruled that this was done improperly, that she, in fact, is not the acting U.S. Attorney for New Jersey.
This is what the judge wrote.
It says, face to the question whether Ms. Haba is lawfully performing the functions and dutings of the Office of the United States Attorney for the District of New Jersey, I conclude that she is not.
End quote.
Why is this significant?
It's significant because it lays the groundwork for challenging a lot of Now, of course, they're going to fight this.
They remain defiant and so forth.
She had this to say.
She said, we will win.
We always do.
It just takes time.
I am the pick of the president.
I am the pick of Pam Bondi, our attorney general, and I will serve this country like I have for the last several years in any capacity.
But it'll be challenged in court and so forth.
But it's a significant ruling with far-reaching consequences for this administration.
as they just continue to install people as judges who are in many cases unqualified.
In virtually every case, are there as a personal reward for loyalty to Donald Trump and so forth.
So another reason for hope.
One of the things that I see in both of these, and this is worth pointing out, is that I think as we continue to see this second Trump administration unfold, we see speed as both the strength and the Achilles heel of this administration.
We have seen the Trump administration sort of unleash a kind of blitzkrieg on American social policy and institutions and practices.
And you have the unified executive theory behind that and all of those kinds of things, slews of executive orders.
seeking to kind of bring shock and awe on American society and business and economics and in foreign policy and everywhere else.
And that's been hard to respond to.
And we've talked about this literally since Trump won the election.
You have the lag time of courts and opposition groups and so forth.
But it has also been the Achilles heel of the Trump administration because when the courts do catch up, because the administration hasn't gone through the trouble.
to follow policies or to safeguard things from procedural hurdles or to go through Congress or to go through environmental reviews or whatever it is, it means that many of these things may not be able, they may not be able to hold them in place the way that they need to.
In some cases, some of these may unravel even before we get to the midterms.
And I think that's the goal of the Trump administration, to put as many of these things in place as they can before the midterms.
So I find these two things as just signs of hope that, again, we begin to see real opposition to the Trump agenda and we begin to see the real shortcomings of the Trump administration and their efforts to remake America in their vision.
Thank you so much for listening.
Need to wind this down.
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