EO EO uhhhh
By the time you’re reading this, the storm of information, headlines, events, announcements, etc., may have moved on, but the other night I read Trump’s executive orders called Ending Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling and Additional Measures to Combat Anti-semitism line by line, and thuoght I’d send along some stuff you might not have caught and an overall read on the situation. It goes without saying I think this is all very bad, but it’s important to read it carefully and see what worlds it creates and destroys.
Generally speaking, the orders feel like weird hot air—but also maps to certain possible action. The discourse in the orders is stunningly ideological in its doctrinal committments, disconcerting in the extreme, and outright violent to queer and trans comrades. At the same time, it’s unclear what the power of the discourse is going to be exactly. With Trump there’s always a spectacle and a reality, which tend to be at odds, amid a larger-scale incoherence.
One thing that immediately happens, or at least could happen, is that tendencies and forces around the ideas in these orders feel empowered to continue their work as their ideologies get hypernormalized (the circus and flood of information flows in the fractured media apparatus and sets things into place as reality gets redefined).
Meanwhile, moderates without a taste for partisanship and direct confrontation, working at the hyper-local, local, regional, and state levels may cower in the face of words from documents published by the executive branch of the federal government. Will they stand up against these energies, or will they remain quiet to maintain some sense of pleasant peace—permitting the ideas to gain momentum? Or perhaps, will the best way to fight them be ignoring them? It’s not clear.
Okay, let’s get into some specifics from the executive order.
The order o K-12 indoctrination does a few things. One of them is conceptual-ideological, framing certain hot button issues around race, gender, curriculum, and distribution using a particular imagination and backing that imagination with the force of law. Another thing the order does is logistical, calling for programs, actions, and events to take place on specific timelines.
Ideologically, the order imagines that every person is only an individual, dehistoricized, separated from anything social. These individuals have merit or not, succeed or not, based only on their individual decisions. It’s Thatcher reborn: there’s no such thing as society.
Oppression, inequality, privilege are concepts associated with “discriminatory equity ideology” because they discriminate against anyone who might be on the dominant side of a critique of oppression. An racial oppressor, for instance, in fact faces racial discrimination themselves when they are said to be racially oppressing. There’s no such thing as racial oppression therefore, except in the case that one calls it out, which oppresses the ‘oppressor’. Why? Because it makes the target of such accusations feel anguish, guilt, or other negative emotions.
But this concept of “discriminatory equity ideology” ranges over a host of categories, including race, color, national origin, and others. Any time an imbalance is pointed out along such categories, and responsibility for that imbalance is placed on one party, thus requiring action by that one part to rectify the imbalance, one—according to the order—is engaging in discriminatory equity ideology. Such activities violate civil rights legislation and therefore break the law.
Furthermore, these individuals are born with one of two sexes, male or female, a physiology that must correspond to their gender. Any action or attempt to break this rigid connection between physiological sex and gender, or question the binary, is deemed “gender ideology.” The word “mutilation” is repeated twice, for instance, in references to physically alter one’s sex determined at birth. Calling someone a gendered pronoun that’s out of sync with birth sex/gender is an instance of “social transition” and thus “gender ideology.” These activities break various privacy laws, like FERPA.
Finally, in the conceptual-ideological realm, the order says that education about the United States, civic education—social studies, history, etc.—must portray the country in a positive light, always striving and acheiving its noble ideals, and never faltering from those ideals. Education must be positive, unifying, and prideful. Education must therefore be “patriotic education,” and anything else violates certain stipulations in statutes making mention of civics education. (For instance, saying that the year of the country’s founding is 1619 rather than 1776 might be a paradigm case of unpatriotic education.)
The order says that the Department of Education will be directed to withhold any funds from educational entities in the country that are found to be engaging in discriminatory equity ideology or gender ideology, or providing an anti-patriotic education. It cites all kinds of laws to give this a repressive force, and I have to look into those citations—I’m sure someone is—to make sure they’re not just an AI hallucination.
Logistically, the order calls for two big processes to begin. The first is an Ending Indoctrination Strategy process, which calls for an official report to be presented to the president within 90 days by the Sec of Education, Defense, and Health and Human Services, via the Deputy for Domestic Policy, summarizing how to enforce the things above. Stephen Miller will get Hegseth, RFK, and McMahon together and talk about how to do all this, combing through agencies, institutions, and other parts of the educational apparatus that engage in these activities, and find way to cut funding to them. They’ll consult with the Attourney General on how to enforce all this.
The next thing is the 1776 Commission, which, among some other things, is going to be (along with a group called Task Force 250) in charge of celebrating the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution in 2026. It’ll be a festival of patriotic education with lectures, events, etc. This commission will have 20 people on it serving for two years. They won’t be paid, but they’ll get “per diem in lieu of subsistence.” This commission is going to give out an award to a student who demonstrates knowledge about the founders (“presidential 1776 award”) and coordinate bi-weekly lectures on history.
A couple thoughts on the way out here. First, it could be funny to submit satirical submissions to the presidential 1776 award. Let’s think about that.
Second, a major presumption in this order is that the Dept of Education is very active. It’s going to be part of the Deputy’s strategy discussions. It’ll fund the 1776 commission. That active approach to the Department is pretty at odds with the “Return Education to the States Act,” and Project 2025’s chapter on education, which call for the abolition of the department itself and the zeroing out of various grants. So which is it? Do they want to get rid of the department or use it for this shit?
One could imagine that these things aren’t mutually exclusive. If the Strategy process finds that X number of districts violate the laws, and they remove funding, then they can effectively zero out appropriations for Title 1 programs. It could be a way of justifying the larger-scale vision. But it might also be an incoherent mess.
I’m nervous that moderates will comply in advance with all this and just starting following it at most, or at least not stand up to it.
At the very end of the order is says “This order is not intended to, and does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by any party against the United States, its departments, agencies, or entities, its officers, employees, or agents, or any other person.” What does that mean? Does that mean it’s not serious enough to really mean anything? Like, no one can say this does anything enough to rise to the level of a lawsuit?
The order on additional measures against anti-semitism targets higher education more explicitly. It’s simpler and maybe more unnerving. The thing to note about this order is that it weaponizes civil rights legislation and a zionist concept of anti-semitism towards pressuring institutions to take repressive action against employees or students that are found to have said or done things to critique zionism or advocate for Palestinian rights.
Since Israel is a country of national origin, and critiquing Israel is seen as a kind of threat against a religion/ethnicity, the Department of Education, with someone like Christopher Rufo operating within it, could threaten to discipline any university that’s found to harbor faculty, staff, or students who have critiqued Israel.
The order calls for a report to be delivered by certain secretaries on all the existing civil rights cases against individuals or institutions on anti-semitic grounds, with recommendations for actions against them, through the deputy for domestic policy. The order extends the purview of this purge-search to K-12 schools through Title VI of the ESEA. That’s within 60 days of the order, so in a couple months. It ends with this passage, saying the authors of the report should
include in their reports recommendations for familiarizing institutions of higher education with the grounds for inadmissibility under 8 U.S.C. 1182(a)(3) so that such institutions may monitor for and report activities by alien students and staff relevant to those grounds and for ensuring that such reports about aliens lead, as appropriate and consistent with applicable law, to investigations and, if warranted, actions to remove such aliens.
The language around monitoring for and reporting language is disturbing, since, if we think about what institutions will do to comply in advance, they’ll start looking for activities that might qualify and then report them in advance. Very authoritarian/stasi. I’m not feeling great about any of it.