KOLUMN Magazine
The first thing you noticed, if you arrived in Washington that winter, was how quickly the city learned a new tone—less the roar of a revolution than the steady, institutional hum of an audit. It wasn’t “march” or “uprising.” It was “compliance.” It was “investigation.” It was “rectification.” The language belonged to policy shops and lawyers, to agencies that had always preferred memos to megaphones. And yet the crowds outside the buildings—those crowds wore crosses on lanyards, waved flags that blended Scripture with the Constitution, and called themselves patriots with the weary confidence of people who believed history owed them a reimbursement.
They were Christian nationalists by self-description, and in the telling they preferred, they were also the newest civil rights constituency: citizens “unconstitutionally disadvantaged,” victims of a civic disenfranchisement that had—so they claimed—been smuggled into the republic by Reconstruction, by the civil rights era, by the courts, by universities, by HR departments, by any institution that ever used the word equity without flinching. Their argument ran like a hymn you could not unhear once you’d heard it: America had corrected itself too far. The correction had become a punishment.
In the movement’s most polished version, the grievance sounded clinical. “The law was meant to prohibit discrimination,” a young counsel told me, tapping a binder marked TITLE VII as if it were Scripture. “It wasn’t meant to create it.” He quoted the chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Andrea Lucas, who had publicly asked: “Are you a white male who has experienced discrimination at work based on your race or sex?”—and then invited those men to file claims, promising remedies under federal civil rights law.
In the movement’s rawer version, the grievance sounded like a family story told at the kitchen table—anger made intimate. A father in an airport hotel lobby said his son “did everything right” and still didn’t get into his first-choice school. A woman who led prayer circles outside a courthouse said she’d been passed over twice for promotion “because the company needed a look.” They spoke of “disenfranchisement” the way earlier Americans spoke of taxes or land: as something taken.
Then, on January 12, the President—Donald Trump, returned to office and returned, too, to the ancient political craft of naming a victim—gave the movement its cleanest sentence yet. In an interview reported by multiple outlets, he said: “White people were very badly treated, where they did extremely well and they were not invited to go into a university or college.”
A sentence like that is not merely a remark. It is a key. It opens doors inside bureaucracies. It tells agencies what to prioritize, tells legislators what to draft, tells activists what to chant. And in this imagined America—one only half a step away from the real one—the sentence became a governing theory: a new Reconstruction, built not for the formerly enslaved, but for the newly aggrieved.
What follows is a fictional field report—an analysis framed as a novel of policy—about how such a movement, drawing on a throughline that runs straight from the Southern Strategy of the 1960s and 1970s to the present, might attempt to remake the federal government around three long-running legal targets: Reconstruction and civil rights laws, school integration after Brown, and affirmative action after Grutter. The story is imagined. The vocabulary, the case law, and much of the political scaffolding are not.
I. A familiar playbook, updated fonts: the Southern Strategy as software
The Southern Strategy, in its classic description, was a Republican campaign approach that sought to consolidate white Southern support in the wake of civil rights by speaking in codes—“states’ rights,” “law and order,” “forced busing”—that communicated racial meaning without always naming race.
In this fictional present, the strategy survives less as a region-specific tactic than as political software: an adaptable program that runs on grievance, updates its language, and never admits its own version number. It no longer needs to say “segregation.” It can say “parental rights.” It doesn’t need to say “white supremacy.” It can say “anti-white discrimination.” It does not even need to say “Christian nation” explicitly; it can say “religious liberty” and let the audience supply the rest.
Where the Southern Strategy once relied on the distance between what was said and what was understood, Christian nationalist politics—at least in this imagined scenario—attempts something more ambitious: to close the distance. To make the implication explicit and then wrap it in the credibility of federal process.
That is why the movement loved agencies. Not in the abstract. In the specific. The EEOC becomes not merely an enforcer of workplace rights but a collector of grievances for a redefined constituency. Reuters and the Associated Press have described the agency’s intensified scrutiny of corporate DEI programs and the public solicitation of claims from white men as part of a broader shift in civil-rights enforcement priorities.
In the movement’s internal seminars—held, in our fictional telling, in hotel ballrooms with industrial carpeting and Christian rock as intermission music—PowerPoints track the evolution of coded language. Slide one: “From States’ Rights to Individual Rights.” Slide two: “From Forced Busing to Education Freedom.” Slide three: “From Welfare Queens to DEI Bureaucrats.” The audience nods not because the history is new, but because the continuity feels like vindication.
A strategist named Carver (fictional) explained it with a cold elegance. “The old Southern Strategy,” he said, “was persuasion. This is adjudication. We’re not winning hearts. We’re winning forms.”
He didn’t mean ballots. He meant complaints, investigations, enforcement letters—the paperwork of a government convinced it is correcting itself.
II. “Disenfranchisement” as inversion: remaking Reconstruction into a grievance narrative
A warning label belongs here, because the movement’s rhetoric performs a deliberate historical misfit: it collapses a century of law into one injury. The Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868, not the 1970s. The Reconstruction Acts were enacted in 1867. The Civil Rights Act of 1866 is, as the name suggests, from 1866. Yet the movement speaks of them in one breath—what they call “the long civil-rights era”—as if time were irrelevant and only outcome mattered.
This is not ignorance so much as technique. If a voter can be persuaded that the constitutional order was hijacked by a continuous project called “Reconstruction,” then any modern equality policy can be framed as an extension of that hijack.
In our fictional reporting, Christian nationalist leaders brand this package as “The Correction.” They argue that America’s original constitutional design was neutral, that neutrality was replaced by “group preference,” and that group preference evolved into a form of civic disenfranchisement for the majority.
They hold “teach-ins” where they cite the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 not as protections against discrimination but as the founding documents of “reverse discrimination.” They speak of Title VII—whose baseline prohibition is straightforward: employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, and national origin is unlawful—as if it were a weapon used exclusively against them.
They bring up Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act—the preclearance regime partially disabled by the Supreme Court in Shelby County v. Holder—as evidence that the federal government once treated certain states like probationers and that the “probation” never ended psychologically, even when the legal mechanism weakened.
In their narrative, “disenfranchisement” is not the taking away of the vote. It is the taking away of the guarantee that the vote will preserve a certain social order.
That definition matters, because it points toward the federal policy program they would pursue.
Imagined federal policies, Part A: “Equal Protection for the Majority” as a governing doctrine
In this fictional United States, Christian nationalist lawmakers advance a slate of bills and executive actions that look technocratic but behave like ideology:
A federal “Colorblind Enforcement Act.”
The act directs civil-rights agencies to treat any program that considers race—even for remedial purposes—as presumptively unlawful. It elevates the rhetoric of “no such thing as reverse discrimination” into a rigid enforcement posture, converting a formal equality principle into an anti-remediation weapon. The movement points to public statements from officials emphasizing that discrimination is unlawful regardless of which group is harmed.
A statutory assault on “disparate impact.”
The movement pushes to limit or eliminate disparate-impact theories across federal enforcement—arguing that only intentional discrimination should count. Politico has reported on a real-world rollback of disparate-impact regulations by DOJ in late 2025; in our fictional extension, Congress attempts to lock that rollback into statute, making it harder for future administrations to reverse.
A “Civic Integrity” voting package.
It pairs strict voter ID requirements with aggressive voter-roll purges, framed as anti-fraud measures. The movement’s innovation is rhetorical: they describe the package as re-enfranchisement—a restoration of the “value” of lawful votes—rather than a restriction. The effect, critics argue inside the story, is predictable: heightened barriers for groups historically targeted by such measures.
A “Federal Neutrality in Grants” rule.
It conditions federal funding on the elimination of DEI offices and the removal of race-conscious benchmarks. If a university or state agency tracks disparities, the movement claims it is “engineering outcomes.”
These proposals are not framed as punitive. They are framed as constitutional hygiene.
That framing is the Southern Strategy’s descendant: not the wink, but the white paper.
III. Brown as original sin: The long afterlife of school integration as grievance
If Reconstruction is the movement’s mythic beginning, Brown v. Board of Education is its emotional center. Not because they defend segregation openly—most do not—but because Brown symbolizes the moment federal authority entered the most intimate civic space: the local school.
In the constitutional canon, Brown held that “separate but equal” public-school systems are inherently unequal and violate the Equal Protection Clause. In the Christian nationalist canon, Brown becomes the first domino in a chain of “forced” social change: busing, desegregation orders, cultural pluralism, multicultural curricula, and—eventually—the presence of queer families in picture books. Everything is “downstream from Brown,” one pastor says in our fictional narrative, as though the case were less a legal ruling than a spell.
The movement’s rhetorical move is to replace the moral clarity of Brown with an administrative critique: yes, discrimination was wrong, they concede, but the remedy “broke the compact” between citizen and local control. That concession—discrimination wrong, remedy worse—is precisely the kind of half-acceptance that made the Southern Strategy viable: appearing reasonable while preserving the power to resist.
A fictional school-board meeting in Cobb County, Georgia—filmed vertically and clipped into outrage—features a mother quoting not the case, but the feeling: “My child shouldn’t pay for history.” The phrase spreads because it is perfect: it turns the nation’s collective debt into an unfair invoice delivered to the present.
Imagined federal policies, Part B: building a “parental rights” state that functions as re-segregation without the word
In this fictional world, Christian nationalist federal policy does not re-legalize segregation. It does not need to. It instead creates conditions under which separation thrives:
National voucher expansion with minimal civil-rights guardrails.
The movement pushes federal funding toward private and religious schools, emphasizing “family sovereignty.” The practical effect, opponents argue, is stratification: schools that can select students by culture and cost, and public schools left with the greatest needs and least political sympathy.
A “Neighborhood Schools Restoration Act.”
It penalizes districts that use assignment plans to promote integration, calling such plans “race engineering.” District lines—already shaped by housing inequality—become destiny.
Curriculum restrictions framed as anti-discrimination.
The movement asserts that teaching systemic racism constitutes “racial hostility” toward white students. The federal government threatens funding cuts if districts are found to “induce racial shame.” The irony is the point: anti-racism is reframed as racism.
A Department of Education “Civil Rights Rebalancing” unit.
Its mandate is to investigate claims of “anti-Christian bias” and “anti-white discrimination” in public schools, turning the agency’s historical mission toward a new protected narrative.
This is how Brown is inverted in the movement’s story: the case that broke legalized segregation becomes, in their telling, the case that legalized federal coercion.
And once coercion is the villain, any separation can be cast as freedom.
IV. Grutter and the bureaucracy of resentment: Affirmative action as the movement’s proof text
If Brown is emotional, Grutter v. Bollinger is managerial. It is where grievance becomes spreadsheet-ready.
In Grutter (2003), the Supreme Court held that a university could consider race as one factor among many to achieve the educational benefits of student-body diversity, recognizing diversity as a compelling interest under strict scrutiny. To Christian nationalists in our fictional account, Grutter functions as the receipt. Here, they say, is the legal document that proves the government permitted “preference.”
The movement’s leaders are careful: they do not always attack diversity as such. They attack its mechanism. “Merit,” they insist, has been replaced by an ideology of “managed outcomes.” They speak with reverence about test scores and with contempt about “holistic review,” as if character were a loophole.
They do not need to explain the full doctrine of strict scrutiny. They only need one word: “compelling.” They say it like a curse.
In this fictional telling, the quote attributed to Charlie Kirk—“We made a huge mistake when we passed the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s”—circulates as a radical honesty moment, a sentence that previously lived on the edges of polite politics and now moves closer to the center. It has been documented in congressional materials and fact-checking discussions about his remarks.
The movement uses the quote not to argue for repeal in one stroke—too politically costly—but to justify a slow-motion redefinition: civil-rights law should protect individuals only from intentional discrimination, and any attempt to remedy systemic disparities should be treated as discrimination itself.
Imagined federal policies, Part C: the “anti-affirmative action” state goes federal
A national ban on race-conscious admissions and scholarships—explicitly tied to federal funding.
The movement argues that any entity receiving federal dollars must be “colorblind.” Enforcement is outsourced to a complaint-driven system: citizens file, agencies investigate, universities settle.
Mandatory disclosure regimes.
Universities must report admissions, scholarships, and hiring outcomes in granular detail—presented as transparency, used as ammunition. (A Reuters report in 2025 described Trump signing a memorandum requiring universities to disclose admissions data by race; in this fictional extension, such measures expand and harden.)
A federal cause of action for “education discrimination.”
Applicants denied admission can sue on a theory that DEI constituted unlawful bias; institutions must prove the negative—that race played no role.
Accreditation leverage.
Accreditors that require DEI commitments are threatened with federal decertification; universities scramble, not from conviction but from fear.
In the novelistic structure of this policy world, Grutter becomes the bridge from cultural resentment to federal mechanism.
V. Employment discrimination: The EEOC as confessional booth
The movement’s most potent innovation is to recast the enforcement of civil-rights law as a weapon against the original civil-rights constituency. Where earlier decades centered discrimination against minorities as a persistent fact of American labor markets, the movement emphasizes the possibility—sometimes the presumption—of discrimination against white men via DEI programs.
The chair of the EEOC, Andrea Lucas, publicly solicited claims from white men and has described more aggressive scrutiny of corporate DEI in interviews reported by Reuters and others. In our fictional account, this becomes a template across government: “call-outs” inviting a specific demographic to see itself as a protected class in need of rapid remedy.
In a church-basement workshop outside Columbus, Ohio (fictional), a lawyer tells a room of electricians and mid-level managers that they may have been “illegally excluded.” He walks them through how to document a complaint: save emails about mentorship programs, screenshot diversity dashboards, request job postings that mention “representation goals.” The room is quiet, not because they are uncertain, but because they are recognizing a new identity: claimant.
A man named Rick (fictional) says he used to think discrimination was “real, but not for people like me.” Now he believes it is real precisely because people like him are talking about it. He is moved, almost grateful, by the government’s invitation to narrate his disappointment as injury.
This is the emotional logic the Southern Strategy perfected: convert status anxiety into moral claim. In earlier eras, the claim was cultural. In this imagined era, it becomes legal.
Imagined federal policies, Part D: reorienting civil-rights enforcement toward “reverse discrimination” as primary threat
Complaint prioritization rules.
The EEOC and DOJ civil-rights units prioritize claims involving DEI programs, deprioritize systemic discrimination cases framed around race disparities, and focus on easily litigable “explicit factor” incidents.
Corporate consent decrees targeting DEI infrastructure.
Settlements require companies to dismantle DEI offices, end affinity groups, and remove race-conscious leadership programs, even when those programs were designed as inclusive rather than exclusionary.
Expanded religious exemptions.
The movement insists that Christian employers must be protected from “secular orthodoxy,” widening the scope of permissible workplace policies grounded in asserted faith.
“Anti-Christian bias” framing as civil-rights enforcement.
The EEOC itself has referenced an executive order on “Eradicating Anti-Christian Bias” and related religious-freedom initiatives in public materials. In our fictional telling, these initiatives fuse with anti-DEI enforcement into a single moral agenda.
In this world, civil-rights law becomes less a shield for vulnerable workers than a spear against institutions that attempt remediation.
VI. The Trump sentence as doctrine: When grievance becomes policy’s north star
Trump’s “very badly treated” line matters not because it is unprecedented—American politics has long flirted with narratives of “reverse discrimination”—but because it arrives with executive capacity. Reported accounts describe it as a blunt indication that “reverse discrimination” is driving aggressive efforts against diversity policies.
In our fictional narrative, the line is printed on mugs at CPAC-adjacent events. But more importantly, it is cited in memoranda.
A senior aide (fictional) tells me: “It’s not a slogan. It’s an interpretive principle.” Agencies interpret ambiguous mandates in the direction of the sentence. Courts are staffed with jurists sympathetic to it. Legislators draft as though it were a finding of fact.
This is where the Southern Strategy’s throughline becomes clearest. The old strategy required plausible deniability; its power lived in implication. This new dispensation relies on plausible legality; its power lives in procedure. It seeks to do, through regulation and enforcement, what earlier generations could only do through rhetoric: establish whiteness and Christian identity not merely as cultural norms, but as protected interests.
And yet, even in this imagined America, resistance persists—not merely from activists, but from the friction of reality. Schools still reflect demographic change. Companies still operate globally. Courts still carry precedents that do not bend easily. The movement responds by intensifying the narrative: any obstacle becomes proof that the system is rigged.
VII. A counter-chorus inside the fiction: What the movement’s program costs
A credible journalist, even in a fictional frame, owes the reader the other side of the ledger.
In this imagined United States, civil-rights advocates argue that the movement’s policies do not create neutrality; they create amnesia. They do not protect equality; they weaponize it by flattening historical context into a single rule: no one may notice race, therefore no one may remedy racism.
They point to the continuing reality that voting rights protections have been contested and, in parts, weakened; that inequities in schooling persist through housing and funding; that employment discrimination cases remain a significant enforcement domain under Title VII.
They argue that attacking disparate impact does not eliminate discrimination; it makes it harder to prove. And they warn that when the state defines anti-racism as racism, it creates a perverse incentive: institutions become afraid to measure problems, lest measurement be treated as guilt.
In a closing scene (fictional), I return to Carver, the strategist, and ask whether he worries about backlash—whether rewriting civil rights into grievance politics risks delegitimizing civil rights altogether. He smiles, almost kindly.
“Civil rights,” he says, “is the brand. We’re just changing the customer.”
VIII. Coda: The long strategy’s endpoint
In the textbooks, the Southern Strategy is often described as a successful political realignment, a transformation of party coalitions in the wake of civil rights. In this fictional present, it becomes something more: not merely a strategy to win elections, but a strategy to win governance—turning grievance into the operating system of federal power.
Reconstruction becomes not the nation’s unfinished promise but the nation’s alleged original theft. Brown becomes not a moral correction but an authoritarian intrusion. Grutter becomes not a narrow compromise but a symbol of preference. Employment law becomes less a remedy for historic exclusion and more a courtroom for status loss. The movement’s genius—if the word can be used for a project with such consequences—is its ability to convert the language of equality into the mechanics of hierarchy without ever naming hierarchy at all.
In the imagined America of this story, Christian nationalism does not abolish the Constitution. It claims to rescue it. It does not denounce civil rights. It repurposes them. It does not announce segregation. It funds “choice.” It does not declare disenfranchisement. It redefines it.
And that is how a sentence becomes a regime: not by force first, but by filing.
Section II (“The Correction”) traces the first institutional turn, revealing how Christian nationalist grievance is translated into federal authority—how Reconstruction and civil-rights law are reinterpreted as constitutional overreach, and how the machinery of government is repurposed to enforce a new definition of equality.