Judge rules that anti-woke is just racism

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Earlier this week, a federal judge in Boston explicitly called out the Trump administration for its “palpably clear” discrimination against racial minorities and LGBTQ+ Americans in a case involving canceled grants from the National Institutes of Health.

“Have we no shame?” Judge William Young asked, in an unmistakeable echo of attorney Jack Welch, who famously punctured Joe McCarthy’s popularity with his simple plea for decency.

Seventy-five years ago, McCarthy and his sidekick Roy Cohn hunted Communists. Now, Donald Trump, who was mentored by Cohn, hunts a different kind of subversive. In executive orders signed during his first weeks in office, he targeted “Illegal DEI and DEIA policies,” claiming that they violate civil rights laws. He declared that “it is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female,” and branded “efforts to eradicate the biological reality of sex” as discriminatory against women and girls.

This is a radical misstatement of the law. No court in the land has ever held that DEI — whatever that means — constitutes racial discrimination, or that allowing trans people to participate in society amounts to gender discrimination. It also defies the medical and scientific consensus about sex, gender, and biology. But no matter! The president redefined reality by executive fiat, and then instructed his minions to carry out a purge consistent with his edict.

Trump demands states obey law he just announced via tweet Liz Dye · Apr 30 Read full story

And purge, they did! The administration immediately moved to kick trans service members out of the military, reorient the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to focus on “DEI-related discrimination at work,” and pulled down websites on everything from baseball icon Jackie Robinson to transgender health care.

But while the government was busy deleting pronouns from civil servants’ signature lines, it also slashed thousands of federal grants because some DOGE bro (or possibly an AI) decided that the recipient was vaguely “woke” — whatever that means. At NIH, more than a $1 billion of funding was cut because of its supposed association with “woke” ideologies.

Blanket termination letters informed recipients that their funding was being cut, often in the middle of a multi-year grant, for vague thought crimes:

Research programs based primarily on artificial and non-scientific categories, including amorphous equity objectives, are antithetical to the scientific inquiry, do nothing to expand our knowledge of living systems, provide low returns on investment, and ultimately do not enhance health, lengthen life, or reduce illness. Worse, so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion (“DEI”) studies are often used to support unlawful discrimination on the basis of race and other protected characteristics, which harms the health of Americans. Therefore, it is the policy of NIH not to prioritize such research programs.

How one would study, say, sickle cell anemia without discussing race is an exercise left for the reader. (Or not, since the government would probably pull a book on disease which primarily afflicts Black people off the shelves for being “DEI.”)

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A coalition of 16 blue states sued, and the case was joined with a similar one filed by several public health and labor groups. They argued that NIH “adopted a series of directives that blacklist certain topics — e.g., ‘DEI,’ ‘gender,’ or ‘vaccine hesitancy’ — that the Administration disfavors.”

All the impoundment cases, which involve money appropriate by Congress which the Trump administration simply refuses to disburse, recite a now-familiar set of legal claims. And indeed the plaintiffs here, too, argue that the president is violating the Spending Clause and the separation of powers — essentially that he is stealing Congress’s power over the federal budget. They also call the grant terminations “arbitrary and capricious,” in violation of the Administrative Procedures Act.

But here the plaintiffs make another argument in defense of their “woke” priorities. They note that statutes passed by Congress mandate that NIH fund research that supports racial equity and better health outcomes for gender and racial minorities.

“The Challenged Directives purport to restrict research on subjects that Congress has expressly required NIH to support,” they write. “In declaring research relat