President Trump said in an interview that he believed civil rights-era protections resulted in white people being “very badly treated,” his strongest indication that the concept of “reverse discrimination” is driving his aggressive crusade against diversity policies, the New York Times reports.

“In the United States of America you don’t have to apologize for being white anymore.”

— Vice President JD Vance, speaking at the Turning Point USA summit.

David Frum: “It’s long past time to stop saying ‘Anti-Semitic violence has no place in our society.’ Outrage upon outrage confirms that anti-Semitic violence has a large and expanding place in Western societies—that it is supported by many, that it is tolerated by many more, and that it is often appeased or even enabled by governments fearful of confronting large and militant factions within their populations.”

“Until a month or two ago, Nicholas J. Fuentes was regarded by right-wing influencers as a mosquito-like interloper whose lifeblood was attention. Ignore his openly racist and sexist rants, their thinking went, and Mr. Fuentes would eventually flitter off into oblivion,” the New York Times reports.

“But today an entirely different consensus has emerged on the right. The footprint of the oratorically proficient late-night streaming show host has not dwindled in the least, with his tens if not hundreds of thousands of alienated young male conservatives followers known as Groypers, a nickname derived from an alt-right meme. If anything, his anti-Israel, anti-immigrant, anti-transgender and anti-civil-rights views seem to have gained new currency during the second Trump administration.”

New York Times: “Applicants to the community are screened with an in-person interview, a criminal-background check, a questionnaire about ancestral heritage and sometimes even photographs of their relatives.”

“The community’s two architects — a classically trained French horn player who has livestreamed his own sex videos, and a former jazz pianist arrested but not charged for attempted murder in Ecuador — say they must personally confirm that applicants are white before they can be welcomed in.”

Adam Serwer: “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.”

Jerel Ezell: “The 2024 presidential election left the Democrats’ multiracial coalition in tatters. Nonwhite people voted in higher percentages for Trump in 2024 than they did in 2020, in some cases by double-digit increases.”

“Democrats are now in the thick of a come-to-Jesus reckoning over these losses, and it should begin with this obvious truth: There is no deep cultural, social, economic or political linkage between Black, Latino, Indigenous and Asian Americans — at least not one that can be leveraged by the party for votes.”

Jamelle Bouie: “Trump’s war on DEI is a war on the civil rights era itself, an attempt to turn back the clock on equal rights. Working under the guise of fairness and meritocracy, Trump and his allies want to restore a world where the first and most important qualification for any job of note was whether you were white and male, where merit is a product of your identity and not of your ability.”

“As is true in so many other areas, the right’s accusation that diversity means unfair preferences masks a confession of its own intentions.”

“At his annual Super Bowl news conference Monday, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell strongly supported the league’s policies designed to promote diversity at the club-employment level and said they would continue,” the New York Times reports.

“But during Super Bowl LIX, and with President Donald Trump apparently planning to attend on Sunday, the NFL might be making another kind of statement on the Caesars Superdome field itself. According to two league sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the discussions, league officials recently changed one of the slogans expected to be stenciled in the back of an end zone from ‘End Racism’ to ‘Choose Love.’”