Restoring single-sex education at VMI and beyond



Sex-specific education is essential to preserve America’s self-governing republic. Though many are only now rediscovering single-sex public schooling, there is still space for it to exist within the framework established by the Supreme Court’s 1996 United States v. Virginia decision, as I argue in a just-released “Provocation” for the Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life. In that decision, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg ruled for the 7-1 majority that the Virginia Military Institute, a public school, must admit women.

The Bush administration sued VMI in the early 1990s, alleging that Virginia’s single-sex military school violated the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. The Clinton administration continued the case, and Virginia had to tailor its defense to the reigning civil rights framework. Since VMI’s discriminatory practices faced “intermediate scrutiny” from the courts, Virginia had to prove that its admissions policies supported practices that served important but gender-neutral educational goals.

VMI’s once-famous standards have been eroded, its core values replaced with bureaucratic boilerplate, and its culture hobbled by the artificial imposition of modern sensitivities.

Virginia asserted that men especially benefit from and are attracted to VMI's distinctives, including its Marine-style, in-your-face “adversative” training methods, its lack of privacy, its egalitarian grooming and uniform standards, and its rigorous, stoical honor code.

After proving that its admissions policy matched its practices, Virginia had to prove that the purposes served by the adversative method were legitimate. Under our reigning civil rights ideology, however, VMI had to fight with its strongest hand tied behind its back.

VMI’s defenders could discuss only gender-neutral goals, such as increasing test scores, educational excellence, or maintaining institutional diversity. They could not mention the real reason VMI existed: to point men to a special destiny grounded in manly honor, martial valor, and public-spirited ambition.

Still, VMI prevailed in the lower courts, as the school fostered the diversity of educational offerings in Virginia and elevated the test scores of the men who attended. VMI would, as lower courts held, be “significantly different upon the admission of women,” and the school “would eventually find it necessary to drop the adversative system altogether.”

The Clinton administration appealed the case to the Supreme Court and won.

Ginsburg’s decision, from which only Justice Antonin Scalia dissented (Justice Clarence Thomas recused himself, as his son was enrolled at VMI at the time), now sets the boundaries for sex discrimination cases generally and for single-sex schooling in particular. According to Ginsburg, keeping women away from VMI’s distinctive education could be justified only by outmoded stereotypes about how women are demure, uncompetitive, and domestic.

The notion that admission of women would … destroy the adversative system and, with it, even the school, is a judgment hardly proved, a prediction hardly different from other ‘self-fulfilling prophec[ies]’ once routinely used to deny rights or opportunities. … Women’s successful entry into the military academies, their participation in the Nation’s military forces, indicate that Virginia’s fears for the future of VMI may not be solidly grounded.

All the expert testimony in the world would not shake Ginsburg’s belief that sex differences were culturally contrived, so policies based on claims about sex differences are, on this view, simply stereotypes. Surely American women would adopt the fierce attitudes of Viking shield-maidens (as they appear on television, at least) if given the chance.

“Virginia’s fears for the future of VMI” were indeed very well grounded. Using only publicly available information, my report charts how VMI is no longer what it once was. The school’s once-famous standards have been eroded, its core values replaced with bureaucratic boilerplate, its connections to tradition and the past broken, and its culture hobbled by the artificial imposition of modern sensitivities.

Excellence over equity

In principle, the Virginia Military Institute could keep the same admission standards and adversative training methods while admitting only women — perhaps just a few each year — who can meet them.

Josiah Bunting III, VMI’s president during U.S. v. Virginia, said, “Female cadets will be treated precisely as we treat male cadets. I believe fully qualified women would themselves feel demeaned by any relaxation in the standards the VMI system imposes on young men.”

Every cadet would get the same buzz cut. Every cadet would have to meet the same mile time. Every cadet would be treated the same — like dirt.

In reality, though, the logic of civil rights law would never allow VMI to admit only a tiny minority of women. Instead, future litigation would likely take low female admission rates as evidence that the standards themselves were forms of covert discrimination.

Predictably, VMI changed to pre-empt future legal action.

By the early 2000s, standards had been relaxed across the board to make physical benchmarks more accessible for women to achieve. Male cadets now must perform a minimum of five pull-ups, while one is sufficient for females. Male cadets must run 1.5 miles in 12 minutes, 30 seconds, while females get almost an additional two minutes. In 2001, female cadets were allowed to eschew buzz cuts for more feminine hairstyles. Current hair standards permit females to wear their hair down to their shoulder blades.

VMI’s experience after integration raises a deeper question: Is separation of the sexes healthy only when sanitized, or can it serve the natural differences between men and women?

Most illuminating is the change in VMI’s “Code of a Gentleman,” which was replaced by the “Code of a Cadet” in the early 2000s. In 2022, the school implemented an even more “inclusive” code.

The old code was stoical, demanded silence on private matters (finances, girlfriends), taught sturdy independence within a hierarchy (a gentleman “does not lick the books of those above” nor “kick the face of those below him”), and instilled self-control in matters relating to drink, gambling, and other vices.

VMI contributed to a military tradition dating back centuries, eschewing fads and embracing the Western and Christian traditions. A VMI gentleman was “the descendant of the knight, the crusader … the defender of the defenseless and the champion of justice.”

In contrast, under the new code, a cadet aspired to be a social worker, standing “against intolerance, prejudice, discrimination, hate, and oppression.” Nothing situates the cadet in the Western tradition, nor is anything said about justice or any intimation of self-sacrifice or courage. Instead, the new code ends with vague platitudes about ill-defined trendy terms.

A VMI cadet is a well-mannered, respectful, and properly presented individual who holds themself and others accountable for their actions and words as a valued member of the Corps. VMI standards are high for a meaningful purpose — to produce leaders of character. A cadet wears the VMI uniform with pride, always remembering and demonstrating what it means to be a VMI cadet.

The old ethos was republican. The new one is managerial. Students wrote the old code and handed it down by tradition, but it was not formalized or blessed by the administration. Officially, no one had to memorize it. Peers enforced the rules through mentoring and discipline.

Meanwhile, the Code of the Cadet is formal (written by the administration), and cadets must memorize it. The commandant’s office oversees training in the code and punishes violations in consultation with the school’s Diversity and Inclusion Office.

What was once in the hands of the cadets is now in the hands of the administration and managers. Informal oversight has disappeared in favor of formal, legalistic, and administrative demands since the student culture, allegedly a product of racism and sexism, cannot be trusted to take the lead. The diversity, equity, and inclusion revolution of the past 15 years, along with the post-George Floyd fever, has brought further changes.

Even a cursory survey of VMI’s history after U.S. v. Virginia puts the lie to Justice Ginsburg’s blithe insistence that the institution could remain substantially unchanged after the admission of women.

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Photo by Daniel Grill via Getty Images

Seizing the opportunity

Ginsburg left escape hatches for single-sex education, which she thought must not be based on outmoded stereotypes about how men and women are different or their various social destinies. Single-sex must be completely voluntary. The institutions must also be genuinely equal, yet sex-specific.

The experience of VMI after sexual integration raises a deeper question that is obscured by our reigning civil rights ideology: Is the separation of the sexes healthy only when it serves some inoffensive gender-neutral purpose? Or can it be wholesome per se, serving the innate differences between men and women and their somewhat different social destinies?

In order to test U.S. v. Virginia and force the courts to answer this question, a state should establish a VMI-type academy. Under those circumstances, the case against U.S. v. Virginia should not only reassert the record of sex differences since the original case was decided, but also show how the idea of manly honor has been deconstructed at VMI since its sexual integration, defend the public utility of manly honor specifically, and argue (within reason) for distinct sex roles as a positive good.

In its heyday, the Virginia Military Institute stood within a broader social order of single-sex schools and clubs that trained young men and women for distinct but complementary roles. As public approval for such differences waned and policy flattened them into sameness, the institutions that once shaped boys into men and girls into women faded away.

That private system once thrived — and it served the nation’s men and women well. It could do so again.

Today, it would be a radical departure from our co-ed present to create a voluntary track within the public school system for serious sex-specific education. School choice movements make such an option possible, and the declining state of boys and the immiseration of American girls make it more and more necessary.

Editor’s note: A version of this article was published originally at the American Mind.

Hegseth Is Right — We Need To Rethink Women’s Role In The Military

Recruiting and retaining women in our military does not increase the number of sleepless nights for our foes.

How gay ‘marriage’ made today’s gender madness possible



Gay marriage was not just a step down the slippery slope toward today’s transgender dystopia. It was the first manifestation of it. Now that a broad reawakening has exposed the harms of gender ideology and the denial of natural law, Republicans must press beyond protecting women’s sports and opposing child castration. They must return to the root of the problem: the redefinition of marriage itself.

Marriage is the foundation of human civilization, not a mere “social construct.” While many forms of loving relationships exist, only the lifelong bond of one man and one woman procreates, raises, and nurtures the next generation. That bond anchors family, faith, and culture. When the Supreme Court decreed that two men or two women living together could constitute a marriage, it blurred the difference between man and woman, mother and father. That was, in essence, the normalization of transgenderism.

To restore truth, Republicans must confront Obergefell and undo the lie that two men or two women can ever stand in for a husband and wife.

The rot spread quickly. Following the 2015 Obergefell decision, courts and legislatures treated same-sex households as identical to mother-father families, even in adoption. Thousands of children were placed into homes where the distinction between mother and father was obliterated. In 2017, the Supreme Court forced states to falsify birth certificates, treating lesbian partners as if one were the biological father.

In Pavan v. Smith, the court required Arkansas to list both lesbian partners as biological parents when one conceived through artificial insemination. The state already recognized same-sex couples under Obergefell and recorded non-biological parents accordingly.

But the plaintiffs demanded more: that their arrangement be treated as biologically identical to a natural family. Justice Neil Gorsuch, in dissent, noted that states had every interest in preserving the integrity of birth records for public health, citizenship, and genetic history. Yet the court pressed forward in defiance of nature, reason, and common sense.

Republicans must not flinch

Despite this, some Republicans now claim we can separate the fight against transgenderism from the fight against gay marriage. They are wrong. Even if one tolerates homosexuality in a secular society, that does not justify redefining marriage and giving gay couples adoption rights. Doing so enshrines the very gender-bending myth conservatives claim to oppose — the idea that man and woman, mother and father, are interchangeable.

The Kim Davis case, potentially headed to the Supreme Court next term, offers an opportunity to revisit this question. Conservatives should prepare the ground now. Republican elected officials must file amicus briefs signaling to wavering justices that this is a political priority. After Dobbs, which affirmed the Glucksberg standard that a right must be “deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and tradition,” Obergefell looks even weaker than Roe v. Wade. The court will need political momentum to act consistently with its own reasoning.

But legal strategy is not enough. Conservatives must also build political support in the states to sustain any reversal. That means pushing back against gay adoptions and re-establishing natural marriage as the baseline. You cannot ridicule transgenderism while placing a child in a household with two men and pretending the child has a mother.

Last year’s Republican National Convention stripped support for natural marriage from the party platform. Now Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has promised a presidential-style GOP convention before the midterms. That convention should be the place where Republicans right the ship, restore clarity, and rally around one of the most self-evident truths in human history.

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Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

The path forward

The fight against transgender ideology will collapse if conservatives refuse to confront its root: the redefinition of marriage. To pretend the two issues can be separated is to accept the very logic we claim to reject.

Republicans cannot stop at banning surgeries on minors or protecting girls’ sports. Those are necessary but not sufficient. To restore truth, they must confront Obergefell and undo the lie that two men or two women can ever stand in for a husband and wife.

Marriage is not a slogan or a lifestyle choice. It is the union that anchors family, culture, and civilization itself. To defend that truth is to defend reality. To surrender it is to let the entire edifice fall.

The vindication of Booker T. Washington



Christopher Wolfe’s thoughtful essay at the American Mind on Booker T. Washington, leisure, and work stirred some fond memories from years ago of making a friend by reading a book.

He was an old black man, and I was an old white man. We were both native Angelenos and had been just about old enough to drive when the Watts riots broke out in 1965. But that was half a century and a lifetime ago, and we hadn’t known each another.

If you read ‘Up from Slavery,’ you will be reading an American classic and will be getting to know a man who ranks among the greatest Americans of all time.

Los Angeles is a big place, a home to many worlds. Now we were white-haired professors, reading a book together, and we became friends. His name was Kimasi, and he has since gone to a better world.

We were spending a week with a dozen other academics reading Booker T. Washington’s autobiography, “Up from Slavery.” Washington was born a slave in Franklin County, Virginia, just a few years before the Civil War began. He gained his freedom through Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and the Union victory in the war. With heroic determination, he got himself an education and went on to found the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in Alabama, where he remained principal for the rest of his life.

After Frederick Douglass died in 1895, Washington became, without comparison, the most well-known and influential black American living. By the beginning of the 20th century, as John Hope Franklin would write, he was “one of the most powerful men in the United States.” “Up from Slavery,” published in 1901, sold 100,000 copies before Washington died in 1915.

It is a great American book. Modern Library ranks it third on its list of the best nonfiction books in the English language of the 20th century. But there was a reason why Kimasi and I were reading this great book when we were old men rather than when we were young men back in the riotous 1960s.

Even before Washington died, and while he was still the most famous and influential black man in America, other black leaders began to discredit him and question his way of dealing with the plight and aspirations of black Americans. These critics, whom Washington sometimes called “the intellectuals,” were led by W.E.B. Du Bois, the first black American to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard and one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

So successful was this criticism that by the time Kimasi and I were in high school or heading off to college, the most fashionable opinion among intellectuals — black or white — was that Booker T. Washington was the worst of things for a black man. He was an “Uncle Tom.” (How “Uncle Tom” became a term of derision rather than the name of a heroic character is a story for another time.) And so, if Washington’s great book was mentioned at all to young Kimasi or me, it was mentioned in this negative light.

But fashions change, and, as Washington himself taught, merit is hard to resist. Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and his Second Inaugural Address were dismissed and scoffed at by some “intellectuals” in his day; they are now generally recognized by informed and intelligent people around the world as the great speeches they are.

“Huckleberry Finn” scandalized polite opinion when it came out, because it was about an illiterate vagrant and other lowlifes and contained a lot of ungrammatical talk and bad spelling. A couple of generations later, Ernest Hemingway himself declared that “all modern American literature comes from one book” — Huckleberry Finn.

A couple of generations later still, in our own times, skittish librarians started removing the book from their shelves because it used language too dangerous for children.

The study of the past should shed light on what deserves praise, what deserves blame, and the grounds on which such judgments should be made. Americans being as fallible as the rest of mankind, as long as we are free to air opinions, there will be different opinions among us. Some of them may actually be true. And they will change from time to time, sometimes for good reasons, sometimes for no reason at all.

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In recent years, several scholars have helped bring back to light the greatness and goodness of Booker T. Washington. Even fashionable opinion is capable of justice, and no one wants to be deceived about what is truly good and great, so I hazard to predict that it will sometime become fashionable again to recognize Booker T. Washington as one of the greatest Americans ever.

Washington never held political office. But his life and work demonstrated that you don’t have to hold political office to be a statesman and that the noblest work of the statesman is to teach. The soul of what Washington sought to teach was that we, too, can rise up from slavery. It is an eternal possibility.

This was the central purpose of Booker T. Washington’s life and work: to liberate souls from enslavement to ignorance, prejudice, and degrading passions, the kind of slavery that makes us tyrants to those around us in the world we live in.

Washington saw that this freedom of the soul cannot be given to us by others. Good teachers and good parents and friends, through precept and example, can help us see this freedom and understand it, but we have to achieve it for ourselves. When we do, our souls are liberated to rule themselves by reflection and choice, with malice toward none, with charity for all.

If you read “Up from Slavery,” you will be reading an American classic. You will be getting to know a man who, in the quality of his mind and character, and in the significance of what he did in and with his life, ranks among the greatest Americans of all time — even with the man whose name he chose for himself. When we read this great book together in the ripeness of our years, Kimasi, who always winningly wore his heart on his sleeve, wept frequently and repeated, shaking his head, “I lived a life not knowing this man.”

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published at the American Mind.

One declaration sparked a nation. The other sparks confusion.



This week, my university emailed a Fourth of July reflection that caught my attention. It claimed the “backbone of our independence” is entrepreneurship and praised secular universities as the seedbed of innovation — and, by extension, democracy itself.

I’m all for business. Enterprise, creativity, and free markets foster prosperity and reward initiative. But business doesn’t create liberty. It depends on liberty. Markets flourish only when justice, rights, and human dignity already exist. In other words, business is a fruit of independence, not its root.

Our freedoms — legal, political, scientific, and economic — grow best in soil nourished by the belief in human dignity grounded in something greater than man.

As we celebrate Independence Day, it’s worth remembering the true foundation of American freedom. The Declaration of Independence doesn’t just announce our break with Britain — it explains why that break was just. “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” it says, “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.”

That single sentence tells us where rights come from: not from governments or markets, but from God. Human equality doesn’t rest on ability, wealth, or status — qualities that always vary. It rests on the shared reality that each of us bears the image of the same Creator.

This truth isn’t just historical. It remains the cornerstone of liberty. Without it, terms like “human rights” or “justice” collapse into slogans. If rights don’t come from God, where do they come from? Who gives them? And who can take them away?

Contrast our Declaration with the United Nations’ 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. That document says people “have” rights — but doesn’t explain why or where they come from or why rights matter. It invokes no Creator, no image of God, no natural law, no self-evident truth or moral source beyond political consensus. Rights, it suggests, are whatever the international community agrees they are.

That’s a dangerous idea. If rights come from consensus, consensus can erase them. If governments or global committees grant rights, they can redefine or revoke them when convenient. There is no firm ground, only shifting sands.

Many Americans now prefer this softer, godless version of human dignity. They invoke justice but reject the Judge. They want rights without a Creator, happiness without truth, liberty without responsibility. But rights without God offer no security — and happiness without God dissolves into fantasy. It’s a mirage.

This project of cutting freedom off from its source cannot last. Our freedoms — legal, political, scientific, and economic — grow best in soil nourished by the belief in human dignity grounded in something greater than man.

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We live in God’s world. That distinction matters. A society built on contracts negotiates rights. A society built on covenants honors obligations to the truth. The difference isn’t just theological — it’s civilizational.

By rejecting the Creator, we don’t advance progress. We erase the foundation that made progress possible. C.S. Lewis put it this way: “You cannot go on 'explaining away' forever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away.”

Explain away God, and you explain away the reason rights exist.

So this Independence Day, remember what liberty really means — and what sustains it. We’re not free because we said so. We’re free because we answer to a law higher than any court or committee. We are created equal because we are created — period.

Entrepreneurship has its place. But the American experiment wasn’t born from a business plan. It began with a declaration that acknowledged God. If we want that experiment to endure, we must not forget what made it possible in the first place.

Blowing Up Barriers: Trump Cements Legacy as Champion of Women's Empowerment

President Donald Trump launched one of the greatest and most epically named military strikes in American history over the weekend, when seven B-2 bombers dropped an ungodly amount of bunker-busting ordnance on Iranian nuclear facilities. Operation Midnight Hammer was an unparalleled success on many fronts. Iran's nuclear facilities were "completely and totally obliterated," Trump said. […]

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Stop trying to segregate the American founding



Race relations in the United States have unraveled in recent years, not only because of genuine disagreement, but because many Americans now grow up believing the nation is fundamentally unjust — racist to the core, perhaps even irredeemable.

This idea, once fringe, now enjoys institutional backing. Critical race theory and DEI ideology assert that the U.S. was founded on slavery and white supremacy. And they dominate schools, corporations, and government agencies alike.

Don’t displace the Fourth of July. Don’t divide what should unite us.

As a result, America has seen a quiet comeback of sanctioned segregation. Colleges increasingly host race-based graduation ceremonies. Society encourages people to define themselves first by racial identity, not shared citizenship. That should alarm anyone who once marched for equal rights in the 1950s and ’60s.

When Americans stop thinking of each other as fellow citizens, the glue that holds the republic together dissolves.

Juneteenth and the new segregation

Consider one example of this trend: the push for a separate “independence day” for black Americans.

On June 17, 2021, Joe Biden signed Senate Bill 475 into law, establishing a new federal holiday: “Juneteenth National Independence Day.” The bill commemorates June 19, 1865, when Union Gen. Gordon Granger arrived in Texas and issued General Order No. 3, announcing that slaves in the state had been freed by the Emancipation Proclamation — two years after it was signed.

Former slaves in Texas celebrated, and in the years that followed, Juneteenth spread across the South. But it never held central importance in the broader civil rights movement.

Juneteenth did not abolish slavery. It merely marked the day slaves in one state learned they had been legally freed. The Emancipation Proclamation, issued in 1863, applied only to states in rebellion — excluding Union-supporting border states like Kentucky and Delaware, where slavery remained legal until the ratification of the 13th Amendment in December 1865.

A false independence narrative

Some activists now argue that Juneteenth should serve as “Black Independence Day.” That’s a mistake.

This view implies that African Americans have no rightful claim to the Fourth of July or to the principles of the Declaration of Independence. But those ideas belong to all Americans — not just the descendants of the signers.

It’s true that many historical figures sought to exclude black Americans from the promise of the Declaration. Chief Justice Roger Taney made that argument explicit in the Dred Scott decision. Confederates like Alexander Stephens and John C. Calhoun claimed that “all men are created equal” never applied to African Americans.

They were wrong.

What Frederick Douglass really believed

Some cite Frederick Douglass’ famous 1852 speech — “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” — to support the idea that black Americans should reject the founding. But they ignore the full context.

Douglass, speaking two years after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, condemned the hypocrisy of a country that declared liberty while tolerating bondage. “What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?” he asked. “A day that reveals to him ... the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.”

But unlike Taney, Stephens, and Calhoun, Douglass didn’t reject the Declaration. He upheld it.

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Douglass took hope from the principles it proclaimed and called on America to live up to them. He dismissed the Garrisonian claim that the Constitution was pro-slavery. “Interpreted as it ought to be interpreted,” he said, “the Constitution is a glorious liberty document.”

He believed America’s founding held the moral resources to defeat slavery — and it did.

The universal promise of 1776

America’s founders didn’t invent slavery; they merely inherited it. At the time of the Revolution, slavery was a global institution, practiced on every continent and defended by every empire. Slavery, including African slavery, was a manifestation of the argument of the Athenians at Melos as recounted by Thucydides in his history of the Peloponnesian War: “Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” Even Africans sold fellow Africans into slavery.

The Declaration of Independence marked a sharp break from that past. It asserted that all human beings possess natural rights — and that no one may rule another without consent.

Thomas Jefferson famously observed that humanity had long been divided into those born "booted and spurred” and those “born with saddles on their backs.” The founders rejected that model. They established a republic based on equality before the law, not the interests of the stronger over the weaker.

They also knew slavery contradicted those ideals. Many believed the institution would die out — an Enlightenment relic destined for extinction. Still, the political compromises they made to preserve the Union allowed slavery to persist, and it took a war to end it.

Why the founding still matters

The Civil War was not a rejection of the founding. It was a fulfillment of it.

As Harry Jaffa wrote, “It is not wonderful that a nation of slaveholders, upon achieving independence, failed to abolish slavery. What is wonderful ... is that a nation of slaveholders founded a new nation on the proposition that ‘all men are created equal,’ making the abolition of slavery a moral and political necessity.”

The Declaration of Independence lit the fuse that ultimately destroyed slavery.

So let Americans celebrate Juneteenth — gratefully, joyfully, and historically. Let the holiday recall the biblical jubilee it was meant to evoke.

But don’t displace the Fourth of July. Don’t segment America’s founding. Don’t divide what should unite us.

As Douglass said: “I would not even in words do violence to the grand events, and thrilling associations, that gloriously cluster around the birth of our national independence.”

He went on: “No people ever entered upon the pathway of nations, with higher and grander ideas of justice, liberty and humanity than ourselves.”

Douglass understood something too many have forgotten: The genius of the American founding lies not in who it excluded but in the promise that, one day, it would include everyone.

Trump reparations would be Dems’ biggest loss since the GOP took their slaves away



Donald Trump has a rare chance this Juneteenth to deliver Democrats their most painful political blow in 160 years.

The man hailed by supporters as a master dealmaker could throw the American system into upheaval by proposing a “MAGA-vellian” reparations plan — a bold mix of populist theater and strategic ruthlessness.

If Trump launched the MAGA Fund, he wouldn’t just rewrite political norms — he’d cement his place as the most disruptive figure in modern American history.

Call it the MAGA Democrat Slavery Compensation Fund.

This plan wouldn’t just shake up Washington. It would redraw the partisan map and deal a death blow to the race-peddling civil rights industry by exposing the fraud at the core of progressive politics. And coming from a president who has vowed to restore Confederate base names, the MAGA Fund would remind voters which party fought to keep slavery alive.

Timing is everything.

Trump acknowledged Juneteenth in his first term and pledged to make it a federal holiday during the 2020 campaign. Biden signed it into law in 2021, but the effort quickly became partisan theater. Critics said Democrats only embraced the holiday after the George Floyd riots, hoping to appease Black Lives Matter activists.

Candace Owens called Juneteenth “sooo lame” and “ghetto.” Charlie Kirk dismissed it as a “CRT-inspired federal holiday” meant to compete with Independence Day.

But now that Trump’s back in the White House — more popular among black voters than any Republican since the 1960s — he’s well-positioned to pull off a maneuver that could rattle his ideological base and neutralize his fiercest critics.

The MAGA Fund would benefit only the descendants of American slaves — not black immigrants, not “people of color,” and not members of the ever-expanding LGBTQIA+ rainbow coalition. It would expose the cynical way Democrats — whose party symbol is a donkey — have used black Americans as political mules for every new “civil rights” cause since the 1960s.

Duke economist Sandy Darity estimates full reparations would cost $10 trillion. The MAGA Fund? Just $855 billion. It would draw from corporate donations — a logical move, since more than 1,000 companies pledged more than $200 billion to “racial justice” causes in 2020.

The MAGA Fund would also weaponize the left’s favorite buzzword: equity.

Progressives insist policies must favor the disadvantaged. Why not apply that within the black community? Under this plan, Oprah Winfrey and LeBron James wouldn’t get the same payout as a Mississippi man working three jobs or a single mom raising four kids in the inner city.

Here’s how it would work:

  • Black households earning over $100,000 (about 25% of the total) would receive a symbolic $345, referencing the 345 years between the arrival of African slaves in 1619 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
  • Households earning $50,000 to $100,000 (roughly 30%) would receive $34,500.
  • Families under $50,000 (about 45%) would receive $103,500.

The MAGA Fund would channel the populist energy dominating the right. It would highlight how Democrats, backed by elite institutions, claim to represent the oppressed while serving the powerful. It would force them to either support Trump’s plan or explain why the party of “equity” opposes targeted aid to poor black Americans.

RELATED: Like Black Lives Matter, DEI must die

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Even critics like Ann Coulter might back the idea. She’s blasted Democrats for extending black reparations programs to every new “oppressed” group. She’s also listed the conditions under which she’d support reparations.

Of course, Republicans would need to manage their white working-class base. Conservative pundits would rage. But behind closed doors, they could frame the plan as a final settlement — a way to declare the race debate closed. The race hustlers would need a new line of work after Trump stamped the national debt to black Americans “Paid in Full.”

And it wouldn’t just be symbolic.

Put nearly a trillion dollars into circulation and watch what happens. Dave Chappelle joked in a 2003 sketch that reparations would send gold prices soaring, phone bills plummeting, and “8,000 new record labels” starting within an hour. The skit played off stereotypes — but behind the comedy was economic truth.

Studies of universal basic income show recipients typically spend on essentials like food and transportation. A Washington, D.C., program gave low-income moms $10,800. One woman used $6,000 to take her kids and their father to Miami. You don’t need a PhD to know that pumping money into poor communities stimulates demand.

If Trump launched the MAGA Fund, he wouldn’t just rewrite political norms — he’d cement his place as the most disruptive figure in modern American history. Who else but a twice-divorced real estate mogul and ex-Democrat could overturn Roe, win over evangelicals, survive two impeachments and an assassin’s bullet — and then sign big, beautiful reparations checks with a smile?

Will it happen? Probably not.

Politics is too polarized. Corporations would recoil at helping Trump. Professional race merchants would denounce the plan as pandering. The left would lose its mind. The right might lose its nerve.

Still, if the last decade taught voters anything, it’s this: Never bet against the Teflon Don.

Christendom’s Mad Monk and His Mutineers

The German Peasants’ War of 1524-25 has been called an early "revolution of the common man" by its foremost German historian, Peter Blickle, and deemed a pioneering movement for equality by American historian Sean McMeekin, in his history of communism.

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There’s Another Gender Gap Nobody Is Talking About – And It Just Might Doom Democrats

One piece of advice for Democrats: You should smile more