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Stephen Miller's legal group wants to make colleges whiter again [1]
['Daily Kos Staff']
Date: 2025-07-18
The Trump administration is doing an outstanding job of obliterating every last shred of affirmative action and diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. But they can’t do it alone.
Enter America First, the legal group founded by current White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, here to lend a helping hand. So, the group just filed a complaint with the Department of Justice demanding an “immediate investigation and enforcement action” into Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.
You can pretty much guess what the letter says, because it’s just the same ghoulish racist rhetoric that Miller has been engaging in since he was a teenager. Per America First, Johns Hopkins is discriminating on the basis of race, sex, ethnicity, national origin, and “other impermissible immutable characteristics.”
“Trump’s New Whip” by Tim Campbell.
The complaint pretends that the real concern of the professional racists over at America First is the safety of Americans. Yes, they are just looking out for you, because if medical schools admit anyone but white dudes, basically, they are going to become subpar physicians, and that “endangers public trust in the medical system itself.”
But the eroding of public trust is already happening. The administration is currently letting Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. trash public health efforts, instead pushing his anti-vaccine quackery. Cuts at the National Institutes of Health are endangering cancer research, because everyone knows that fighting cancer is woke, or something.
Normally, it wouldn’t be logical or fair to attribute those actions of the administration to a private legal group like America First. But America First is nothing but an extension of Miller’s work in the administration. So the private law firm founded by Miller can tee up complaints so that the administration can “investigate” those complaints. Indeed, the group’s complaint is essentially the same as the administration's announcement back in March—that it was investigating Johns Hopkins over DEI.
Procedurally, it’s glaringly obvious that the complaint was filed as a fig leaf to give the DOJ another tool to attack Johns Hopkins. The administration has been targeting the school for months, sending the Federal Task Force to Combat Antisemitism to Johns Hopkins and nine other schools.
America First could have filed a lawsuit against Johns Hopkins and made the same demands, but then they wouldn’t have had the option to tee up a sweetheart settlement of their complaint, allowing the DOJ to run roughshod over Johns Hopkins. America First would also have needed a plaintiff to file a lawsuit, but they don’t need one to file a complaint.
That’s not just cynical speculation. It’s basically what the administration already did by filing a sham lawsuit against the state of Texas over its law granting in-state tuition to undocumented students. The state settled with the DOJ the same day the suit was filed, with Texas declaring its own law unconstitutional.
Related | Texas throws immigrants under the bus as it caves to DOJ
It isn’t clear if America First quite intended to say the quiet part out loud, but their racist screed takes a step that was inevitable, but is still disgusting. The argument is that if Johns Hopkins considers socioeconomic status in admissions, that’s actually still affirmative action because “wealth and income gaps vary significantly between racial groups, with Black and Hispanic households possessing a fraction of the wealth held by White and Asian households. By leveraging these disparities, Johns Hopkins masks racial preferences behind income thresholds.”
Yes, that’s an argument Johns Hopkins is doing forbidden DEI by admitting students with lower incomes, because the poors are all Black or Hispanic. To grant America First’s demands here, Johns Hopkins would have to stop admitting students from lower-income families. Well, unless they’re white, of course.
This is in keeping with the overall thrust of the Trump administration to make it harder for anyone except rich white people to obtain advanced degrees. The “One Big, Beautiful Bill” capped student loans at an amount that makes it impossible for a lower- or average-income student to go to medical school. Johns Hopkins, for example, costs about $72,000 per year, or $288,000 total, but graduate student loans are capped at $100,000 total. The administration is also functionally killing Public Service Loan Forgiveness, so anyone who chooses a lower-paying public service job will be absolutely hobbled by their loans forever.
Just like the administration, America First pretends that if you simply eradicate all efforts to attract anyone except white, straight, moneyed men, then you will get people chosen on pure merit. Except in this administration, “merit” means people like Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, objectively unqualified people who got their jobs because Trump watches a lot of Fox News. A medical school filled with dudes like that is the real danger.
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[1] Url:
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