Adam Serwer, writing in The Atlantic, has an alarming story about how this administration is promoting a racist, misogynistic agenda to destroy civil rights in this country.

In August, speaking with someone he believed to be a sympathetic donor, one of the Project 2025 architects, Russell Vought, said that a goal of the next Trump administration would be to “get us off of multiculturalism” in America. Now Vought is running Donald Trump’s Office of Management and Budget, and the plan to end multiculturalism is proceeding apace. Much of the chaos, lawlessness, and destruction of the past few weeks can be understood as part of the administration’s central ideological project: restoring America’s traditional hierarchies of race and gender. Call it the “Great Resegregation.”

Since taking office, Trump has rescinded decades-old orders ensuring equal opportunity in government contracts and vowed to purge DEI from the federal government, intending to lay off any federal worker whose job they associate with DEI. Yesterday evening, Trump fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Charles Q Brown, and replaced him with a lower ranking white official, a retired three-star Air Force officer named Dan Caine. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had previously attacked Brown as an unqualified diversity hire based on the fact that he is Black. Trump’s Department of Justice has implied that it will prosecute or sue companies that engage in diversity outreach. Elon Musk’s DOGE is attempting to purge federal workers “that protect employees’ civil rights and others that investigate complaints of employment discrimination in the federal workplace,” the Washington Post reported. Colleges and universities are being threatened with defunding for any programming related to DEI, which the free-speech organization PEN America has noted could include “everything from a panel on the Civil Rights Movement to a Lunar New Year celebration.”

Trump has also signed executive orders that threaten government funding for scientific research on inequality or on health issues that disproportionately affect nonwhite ethnic groups, and has imposed censorious gag orders that could block discussion of race or sex discrimination in American classrooms. During her confirmation hearing, Trump’s education-secretary nominee, Linda McMahon, said she did not know if schools could lose funding for teaching Black-history classes under the order. The legality of the order over K–12 curricula is unclear, but the chilling effects are real nonetheless.

Under the Trump administration, schools within the Department of Defense system that serve military families—American service members are disproportionately Black and Hispanic—have torn down pictures of Black historical figures and removed books from their libraries on subjects such as race and gender. This record, within a school system entirely under the administration’s control, offers an alarming preview—one in which a historical figure like Harriet Tubman is no longer a welcome subject in educational settings because she was a Black woman.

An OMB memo ordering a federal-funding freeze illustrates the ideological vision behind these decisions. The memo states that the administration seeks to prevent the use of “federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies,” Acting Director Matthew Vaeth wrote. Equal opportunity in employment is described here as “Marxist,” because it affirms what the desegregators see as an unnatural principle: that nonwhite people are equal to white people, that women are equal to men, and that LGBTQ people deserve the same rights as everyone else.

If the Great Resegregation proves successful, it will restore an America past where racial and ethnic minorities were the occasional token presence in an otherwise white-dominated landscape. It would repeal the gains of the civil-rights era in their entirety. What its advocates want is not a restoration of explicit Jim Crow segregation—that would shatter the illusion that their own achievements are based in a color-blind meritocracy. They want an arrangement that perpetuates racial inequality indefinitely while retaining some plausible deniability, a rigged system that maintains a mirage of equal opportunity while maintaining an unofficial racial hierarchy. Like elections in authoritarian countries where the autocrat is always reelected in a landslide, they want a system in which they never risk losing but can still pretend they won fairly.

These people are racists and misogynists. They absolutely want to reverse the civil rights movement. Like Critical Race Theory or Wokeness before it, DEI has become conservatives’ go-to cover for their discriminatory actions.

The term DEI, frequently invoked by the Trump administration, functions as a smoke screen. It allows people to think that the Trump administration’s anti-DEI purge is about removing pointless corporate symbolism or sensitivity trainings. Although it is easy to find examples of DEI efforts that are ill-conceived or ill-applied, some conservatives have leveraged those criticisms to pursue a much broader agenda that is really about tearing anti-discrimination laws out at the roots, so that businesses and governments are free to extend or deny opportunities based on race, gender, and sexual orientation if they so choose.

Pay attention.