One of the reasons I have no problem characterizing the Trump regime as an openly Christian Nationalist government, is the administration's stated attempts to turn roughly seventy years worth of civil rights laws on their head to instead fight against made up fascist moral panics like "reverse discrimination," "the assault on religious liberty," and "gender ideology turning our kids trans." This plan, which the fascists have articulated in the open multiple times, revolves around repurposing the language of social justice to argue that actually, the state should be punishing folks who infringe on the "liberty" of the *real* victims in our society; rich straight white fundamentalist men. Conceptually, the arguments for all this are absurd, but these ideas have been widely adopted (for cynical reasons) on the American right, and the promise to use the government to go after the enemies of an increasingly fundamentalist white American volk is absolutely one of the reasons seventy-five million or so fascists voted for the Trump regime last fall.

Now we're getting a clearer understanding of how this fascist unreality is going to work in real time. New mission statements for the Department of Justice's civil rights division have been leaked to The Guardian, and they make it pretty clear that the Trump regime is going to weaponize the Department of Justice to subvert the civil rights of non-white, LGBTQ, and otherwise marginalized Americans to re-entrench white supremacy as official state policy, and the dominant ideological position in our legal discourse.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/18/justice-department-civil-rights-division-trump

Trump ally pushes DoJ unit to shift civil rights focus, new messages show

"The justice department’s civil rights division is shifting its focus away from its longstanding work protecting the rights of marginalized groups and will instead pivot towards Donald Trump’s priorities including hunting for noncitizen voters and protecting white people from discrimination, according to new internal mission statements seen by the Guardian.

The new priorities were sent to several sections of the civil rights division this week by Harmeet Dhillon, a Trump ally who was confirmed a little more than two weeks ago to lead the division. Several of them give only glancing mention to the statutes and kinds of discrimination that have long been the focus of the division, which dates back to the Civil Rights Act of 1957. Several of the mission statements point to Trump’s executive orders as priorities for the section."

Speaking frankly, I find this article's "will he or won't he" tone pretty disturbing, but if you actually read through what the Trump regime is proposing it's pretty much entirely nightmare fascist shit. For example, they're repurposing the voting section away from protecting the enfranchisement of marginalized people, to rooting out non-existent voter fraud. The regime also wants to stop enforcing the 1968 Fair Housing Act; presumably to make it easier for rich crackers to refuse to rent to nonwhite or otherwise marginalized tenants. The entire sections on women's rights, educational rights, and disability rights are about persecuting trans people now. Finally the regime wants to reassign the Housing and Civil Enforcement section to focus on protecting the rights of members of the military, and religious land use; so you can expect fundamentalist Mega Churches to start petitioning the DoJ to make it illegal to stop them from spreading their hateful ideology anywhere they like, while simultaneously kissing consumer and lending protections for anyone who isn't a straight white dude who thinks Trump was sent by Jesus to save us from planetary-crisis levels of DEI and "wokeness," goodbye.

Unsurprisingly, many of the Very Serious PeopleTM who have been minimizing how dangerous the Trump regime's "reforms" are already, are once again treating this like "Trump being Trump" and noting that it's unclear how far the Trumpenreich will be able to progress its Christian Nationalist plans in the face of what will no doubt be some opposition from career civil servants in the Department of Justice. Given however that the Trump regime is also moving forward with plans to purge the US government of ideological opposition through Schedule F, and secured almost a billion dollars of pro-bono work from cowardly DC law firms for causes Trump supports, I think this attitude is woefully shortsighted. This is all very real, and very dangerous. The regime has already been quite successful installing fascist unreality based on its reactionary conspiracy theories, and until proven otherwise, I don't see any reason to believe they will be less successful in a Department of Justice being run by a Trump-humping nazi bootlicker like Pam Bondi.

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