Corey Robin

Tag: segregation

Trump is your worst HR Officer

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This afternoon, a federal judge in DC issued a temporary restraining order to stop Trump’s firing thousands of employees at USAID. The judge was appointed by…Trump. I’ve already written about the very real possibility that Trump’s judges may rule against Trump; they did this, after all, repeatedly during his first term. And they’re doing it again, in his second term. But I want to address here a different, more troubling, issue. In their lawsuit against Trump’s gutting of USAID, the unions that brought suit claimed that Trump had exceeded his legal and constitutional authority by firing thousands of employees. “Not a single one of defendants’ actions to dismantle U.S.A.I.D. were taken pursuant to congressional authorization,” the unions claimed. “And pursuant […]

What Made Evangelical Christians Come Out of the Closet?

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In The Reactionary Mind, I briefly argued that much of the energy behind the Christian Right came not from its opposition to abortion or school prayer but its defense of segregation. Based on early research by historians Joseph Crespino and Matthew Lassiter, I wrote: Evangelical Christians were ideal recruits to the [conservative] cause, deftly playing the victim card as a way of rejuvenating the power of whites. “It’s time for God’s people to come out of the closet,” declared a Texas televangelist in 1980. But it wasn’t religion that made evangelicals queer; it was religion combined with racism. One of the main catalysts of the Christian right was the defense of Southern private schools that were created in response to […]