Many of us wake up every day with the same blunt, burning question: how can any reasonable, freedom-loving person support what Trump and his MAGA movement are doing to this country? The policies are cruel, the rhetoric is dishonest, and the aims are openly authoritarian. At times it feels less like political disagreement and more like living in an alternate reality. As someone recently put it, we are no longer dealing with Bush or Reagan Republicans—we are dealing with committed authoritarians flirting openly with fascism.
If progressive, liberal, and democratic values feel embattled—or even on the defensive—it is because we are losing the ideological war of words and ideas. And make no mistake: this is not a side show. Power is not exercised only through elections, courts, and police forces. It is exercised through language, through narratives, through the stories people are taught to believe about who deserves what and why. Right now, the MAGA right is winning too many of those battles.
Marches and boycotts matter. Protest matters. Pressure matters. But none of it is sufficient without an aggressive, confident ideological campaign. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. did not merely organize marches; he insisted that America’s soul needed redemption because racism strangled whatever moral credibility the nation claimed to have. Malcolm X did not merely criticize; he declared that Black people had the right to secure their freedom “by any means necessary.” Ida B. Wells did not merely document injustice; she exposed the lies of lynching and forced the country to confront the truth about racist terror. They understood something we seem to have forgotten: you do not win political struggles without fighting for the public’s mind.
We can see the consequences of our hesitation in how the far right has framed the debate since Trump returned to power. Consider Executive Order 14173, dressed up as a defense of “merit” and a crackdown on “illegal discrimination.” It is not a serious policy document. It is an ideological weapon. It accuses major institutions of promoting “dangerous, demeaning, and immoral” race- and sex-based preferences under the banner of diversity, equity, and inclusion.
To accept this framing, one must swallow a stack of lies: that diversity programs are criminal, that they are harmful, and that they have filled workplaces with unqualified minorities and women who displaced more “deserving” white men. This is not analysis. It is propaganda. Its real purpose is to shift responsibility for racism away from those who benefited from it and onto those who have borne its costs. And it does so while ignoring an obvious, stubborn fact: minorities in this country still face deep and persistent discrimination in jobs, education, health, and income.
So what should cities, states, universities, and private institutions have done? First, they should have said—loudly and without apology—what these programs have actually done: strengthened communities, expanded opportunity, and improved performance. Any serious business knows it succeeds best when it reflects and serves the community it is part of. Further, democracy demands that governments that have discriminated in the past against large percentages of its residents—as most governments have in the U.S—owe them a generous dose of restitution.
Second, public and institutions should have stood their grounds instead of retreating. Scrubbing “diversity, equity, and inclusion” from websites, firing diversity officers, and hiding behind euphemisms like “belonging” or “talent culture” is not strategy—it is surrender. It signals weakness. Worse, it concedes the central lie of the MAGA argument: that the problem is language, not injustice; that the issue is “wokeness,” not racism. If you refuse to fight on the real terrain of the argument, you guarantee your own defeat.
Finally, the private sector should have put real resources behind resistance—legal, political, and moral. Cities and states are being blackmailed with their own tax dollars, threatened with the loss of federal funds unless they comply with a right-wing agenda that includes harassing immigrants and dismantling programs that support minority- and women-owned businesses. That is not governance. That is coercion. And it demands a collective, unapologetic response.
The ideological battle we must win is not optional. It is unavoidable. And it must be fought in the name of truth and humanity. Hundreds of years of slavery, decades of Jim Crow and apartheid-like segregation, and today’s quieter but no less destructive institutional racism require repair—not denial, not erasure, and not cowardice. The Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts moved this country forward, but they did not finish the job. Not even close.
When university leaders abandon diversity programs or sanitize curricula to appease political bullies, they are not being pragmatic—they are helping to rewrite reality. They are not just losing policy fights; they are forfeiting the moral argument. Defending these programs is not only about winning in court. It is about refusing to let lies become normalized. It is about refusing to let injustice be rebranded as “merit.” And it is about finally remembering that if we do not fight for the country’s conscience, someone else will—and they already are.
Jabari Simama Speaks 