Is It Too Late?

No. But We Must Better Understand the Nature of the Battle

Today we are facing the greatest hostility to the Fourteenth Amendment since the post-Reconstruction period. Indeed, we are now in a period of full-blown hostility to the project of multiracial democracy.

- Sherrilyn Ifill, Reviving the Promise of the 14^th Amendment¹

Last week the Supreme Court allowed Texas to move forward with a racially gerrymandered congressional district map for the 2026 congressional election. The re-redistricted map was demanded by President Trump and “his” Justice Department to avert the prospect of Democrats taking the House of Representatives next November. In another “shadow docket” decision - made without oral argument and presented with only a brief explanation - the Court stayed the action of the federal district court which found that Texas’ new map constituted a racial gerrymander in violation of the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution and enjoined its use for the 2026 elections. The Supreme Court granted Texas’ request for stay of the district court’s preliminary injunction, allowing the election to proceed under the new Trump-demanded map.

The Court also announced last week that it will review on the merits Trump v. Barbara, the case challenging President Trump’s plainly unconstitutional effort to overturn the constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship by Executive Order - a presidential claim of authority negated by the very language of the 14th Amendment, and by Supreme Court precedent going back over 120 years.

Also last week, while sitting in the Oval Office with business leaders, President Trump unleashed a grotesque racist screed against Somali Americans, against the country of Somalia, and against a sitting United States Representative, Ilhan Omar, who is Somali American.

We have heard Trump’s racism before and repeatedly. But something about the intensity of his ugly remarks in the Oval Office that day - the hate, the actual hate we could hear in his voice seemed newly sinister. The hideous sneer when he called Somali Americans “garbage.” The momentum that seemed to seize him when, having used the word “garbage,” he used it repeatedly - to describe Rep. Omar, and then also to describe “her friends.” The casualness with which he insisted that they “shouldn’t be allowed to be in this country,” or to serve in Congress, and his petulant insistance that, “we don’t want them here,”, sounding like the Twilight Zone’s soulless 6 year-old, Anthony Fremont who, when confronted by people he didn’t like simply “wished them into the cornfield.”

To top it off, the Administration announced that the National Parks Service will end free admission on Martin Luther King Day and Juneteenth. Instead June 14th, President Trump’s birthday (and Flag Day) will now be a free admission day at national parks.

It was a week. We have long since crossed the rubicon of constitutional and democratic crisis, and still last week seemed remarkable and uniquely chilling. We must not become numb to it.

The actions of both the SCOTUS and President Trump, especially taken together with Justice Kavanaugh’s mid-summer gratuitous concurring opinion approving of racial-profiling by ICE in the case brought by Latino U.S. citizens challenging ICE raids in Los Angeles, seemed to take the swift unraveling of democracy on an even more aggressive spiral. Each action seemed to drive home the plan to recreate a tier of second class, impermanent citizens, whose legitimacy and status is subject to the whims of the President.

The birthright citizenship provision of the 14th Amendment, and the entire project of Reconstruction was specifically designed to guard against the creation of such a racial caste system. The clear words of the 14th Amendment are that “all persons” are guaranteed equal protection. Trump clearly does not believe that, and the Supreme Court’s recent decisions have disabled many of the tools we need to protect that promise of equality.

We are in the midst of a full-blown effort to execute an anti-democracy project that seeks to nullify the legal, social, economic and educational apparatus designed to undergird the foundation of a multiracial democracy.

The assault on the 14th Amendment has not generated the kind of moral panic that politicians, journalists, and tech bros successfully created over their claims of First Amendment abuses several years ago. They claimed that the scorn, disparagement, and condemnation they received for posting sexist, racist, and even fascist commentary or for making fascist gestures in public resulted in “cancellation.” Obviously the First Amendment doesn’t protect against people deciding that you are an odious person for publicly posting opinions that embrace eugenicist or misogynistic views, but their outrage was enough to put universities, media platforms, and corporations back on their heels. It was a nasty bit of political manipulation to be sure, but it was effective.

The full-on hijacking of the 14th Amendment has not been challenged with commensurate concerted outrage and political clarity. That is because far too many white Americans associate the 14th Amendment’s guarantees of birthright citizenship and equality, as provisions that only protect Black people, migrants, Latino people, and other marginalized groups, rather than as core democracy infrastructure of our Constitution.

Everyone should be on full alert. The 14th Amendment protects the citizenship and equality rights of every American. Nothing says “cancellation” quite like threats to your citizenship status at the whim of the President simply because he doesn’t want you here.

And if the Supreme Court gives the President license to tamper with the explicit protections of the 14th Amendment, what other constitutional protections will be picked over by this or the next President, with the sanction of the conservatives on the Court?

What makes this moment particularly dangerous is that all of the stars have aligned. The white supremacist, anti-14th Amendment, post-Brown movement has the complicity or active engagement of all three branches of government as it works to undo the constitutional infrastructure of Reconstruction and the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement.

And so here we are. The agenda has been laid bare for any sentient person to see. It is a the literal hijacking of our democracy. The truth of this project and its danger have been the clanging bells that could easily have been heard by those best-positioned to derail it. But it so happens that those most positioned to have headed off this moment of Constitution-defying, democracy-defying, collapse have refused to believe it.

I confess this bothers me. Because we are late. Perhaps too late. Far too many leaders (including those in law, journalism, and business) have wasted precious time - pretending that this or that justice is an “institutionalist.” Insisting that support for Trump was stoked by “economic anxiety,” that it’s “class,” rather than white supremacist panic and moral collapse. Pretending that Trump was a “disrupter” rather than a destroyer of norms, of decency, of law. Indulging the fantasy of bipartisan solutions with a political party that has fully submitted itself to authoritarianism. Hoping that the MAGA fever will “break” in time. Counting on the business community to “wake-up” once the economy tanks, or the effects of the tariffs kick in. Refusing to see what is right before our eyes.

This is an oligarchic and authoritarian takeover of our democracy, yes. But it is fueled by white supremacist ideology. That is the seductive messaging through which so many have been lured into participating in this national betrayal. We can continue cutting off the many heads of the hydra. Or we can get to the source.

The work I spend much of my time doing is creating a blueprint to help us do that deep and necessary work. I admit that it is a long-term project.

But right now, there is urgent work to do. Because if the momentum of this anti-democratic takeover is not slowed, it is hard to imagine what will be left to build on a year from now. And frankly we may not be able to overcome Trump’s state gerrymanders next November - especially now that the Supreme Court has all but given the green light to this.

Our expert pundits are slow learners, refusing to accept that the world of politics, law, and elite institutions that they mastered has been taken over, and that white supremacist ideology, unfettered greed, and cowardice, are what is driving Republican Party policy. Most continue to use a social media platform that has become a Nazi cesspool because, they contend, we must “talk with people who disagree with us.” They continue to try and find the angles, to give the benefit of the doubt to voters who have thrown in their lot with authoritarianism. Leading politicians tell Democrats to talk to “real Americans,” and not to talk so much about “identity” in the face of an opposition that talks about identity every day. Many of those with the biggest platforms know very little about race, so they protect their status as experts by insisting that race is not the issue.

But you cannot claim to analyze the threat to our democracy and refuse to confront the single greatest force that has threatened democracy in this country since its founding. So we must expanding the voices in the conversation.

AI scientists like Timnit Gebru and Emil Torres warned years ago about how tech leaders in Silicon Valley had become captured by the “religion” of longtermism, and how closely aligned longtermism is with traditional Anglo-American eugenics. They were treated as extremists and conspiracy theorists Today the white supremacist views of many of the wealthiest and politically ambitious tech billionaires is on display almost daily. The recent release of some of the Epstein emails and files has confirmed the explicit nature of some of these connections.

In 2018 after the release of the Mueller report, I wrote in the Washington Post that racism is a national security vulnerability. Even Russia understood that manipulating racism on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter would be effective in shifting some pockets of the electorate towards Donald Trump. Their manipulation was successful in 2016 and still going strong in 2020. And yet so many Americans with influence and power in journalism, law, business and politics, continue to demand that we look away from this truth, even as the Russians are likely continuing to sow election disinformation and racial manipulation.

Adam Serwer warned us that “the cruelty is the point” in 2018, but we are warned to today by influential podcasters that it is more important to show explicit racists that we “like” them in the hopes of winning their votes, rather than to defend the dignity and safety of the base of Americans who fuel Democratic victories, and whose communities sacrificed to the point of death to strengthen democracy in this country in the Civil Rights Movement.

Black people warned of the dangers of law enforcement impunity, taking to the streets regularly between 2014 and 2020, relentlessly fighting for real change in policing. We were joined in 2020 by millions of young white people who marched with us. We warned of the dangers of militarized law enforcement in communities. But politicians weaponized calls to “defund the police” (police budgets actually increased in most places) to cow Democrats into abandoning police accountability as a critical issue.

Now the scourge of unaccountable, brutal and racist law enforcement, armed for war, has metastasized into the creation of a militarized presidential police force that roams our cities targeting peaceful, hardworking residents at will.

Every inhumane and infuriating excess we see on videos today committed by ICE and border patrol agents, is mirrored in the hundreds of videos of police officers engaging in similar racial profiling, violent attacks, and unwarranted detention of Black people over the past 20 years.

I recount this not to press sour grapes. I raise all of this to warn us against the kind of thinking and discourse that has too often slowed us down, and that has diverted ordinary, democracy-committed Americans from fully understanding the nature of the danger our republic has long faced.

Is it too late? I don’t believe so. There are serious cracks in the Trump firmament. But I do know that we cannot waste any more time refusing to listen to the voices of those who understand the nature of what we are facing at a deep, existential, and historical level. History is not a distraction. It is a critical source of information. The patterns revealed in our historical experiences can help us face the truth of what we are confronting. History urges us to move quickly, and to resist with greater intensity.

There are extraordinary scholars, activists and journalists getting to the heart of the matter and writing thoughtfully about complex issues. Be sure your information diet includes them. Rebecca Traister, Sarah Kendzior, Rashad Robinson, Rev. William Barber, LaTosha Brown, Joy-Ann Reid, Kim Crenshaw, Adam Serwer, the law professors on the Strict Scrutiny Podcast, Dr. Renita Weems, and many more.

We need to heighten the level of consciousness of those who want to live in a democracy. That means we need our leaders to unapologetically stand against the threat to our core constitutional values. There is no shortage of defenders who publicly fight for the First Amendment. And the Second Amendment. Where are the 14th Amendment fighters?

Every Democratic member of the House should have been on the steps of the Capitol affirming support for their colleague Ilhan Omar and for the Somali-American community after the President’s Oval Office attack, and when Rep. Adelita Grijalva was pepper-sprayed last week, and when Latino Senator Padilla was attacked and wrestled to the floor for asking a question of Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem at DHS press conference. Solidarity is critical during this period - especially when the Trump Administration launches targeted attacks.

The silence of corporate leaders, who have no trouble accepting the benefits of “personhood” under the 14th Amendment, but remained mute and complicit in the face of President Trump’s disgraceful attacks on the very principles that the 14th Amendment advances in the Oval Office, was shameful and unacceptable. Worse, in dismantling their DEI commitments (an action that is not compelled by the Supreme Court’s decision in the SSFA v. Harvard case, by the way), far too many corporate leaders have cast their lots with the anti-democratic forces that seek to dismantle the protections of the 14th Amendment.

We must demand more and better. It really is that serious. And we’re running out of time.

1. https://howard-law-journal.scholasticahq.com/article/153982-reviving-the-promise-of-the-14th-amendment