By Recently, viral TikTok videos and social media posts have stirred significant panic among the left, with many claiming that President Donald Trump has repealed federal anti-discrimination protections, effectively rolling back civil rights laws to the 1960s. Despite the widespread alarm these claims have caused, they are not based on factual information.
One TikTok influencer with a substantial following announced that discrimination based on race, gender, or sexuality is now legal when hiring, a claim that quickly spread across platforms. Left-leaning social media users reacted with outrage, with some prominent voices, such as YouTuber Brian Tyler Cohen, framing Trump’s actions as reversing decades of civil rights progress.
The Washington Examiner writes:
“You can now discriminate against people for being black … for being a woman … and for being gay when hiring them.”
That’s what one TikTok influencer with more than 1 million followers confidently informed his audience on Thursday morning. To the unsuspecting viewer, this warning made for compelling and alarming consumption. Not only has President Donald Trump rolled back identity-politics programs inside the federal government, also known as diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, but he is rolling back civil rights law to the 1960s!
Just ask the liberal YouTube star Brian Tyler Cohen, who posted an image of Trump juxtaposed with Martin Luther King Jr. and said the new president was “rolling back 60 years of progress on civil rights.”
There’s just one pesky thing about this narrative, promoted by too many left-wing social media influencers to count. It isn’t remotely true.
In fact, what they’re saying doesn’t even make sense, if you understand civics 101. A president cannot revoke a federal law passed by Congress with an executive order, and employment discrimination on the basis of race, gender, and sexuality is prohibited by the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Trump couldn’t roll back those protections even if he tried to, which, to be clear, he didn’t.
Kamala Harris famously, or infamously, paid social media “influencers” thousands of dollars to push her campaign on the internet.
Despite the truth, the narrative that federal contractors can now legally discriminate has spread like wildfire across liberal social media. One particularly emotional TikTok video, showing a woman condemning Trump voters, received over half a million likes, explained The Examiner. Posts like these have fueled fear and division, leading many to believe in a narrative that is demonstrably false.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964, a foundational law that prohibits discrimination in employment based on race, gender, religion, and other protected characteristics, remains fully intact. Federal laws like this cannot be overturned by an executive order. The confusion stems from Trump’s decision to rescind an older executive order issued by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965. Johnson’s order required federal contractors to adopt affirmative action policies to prevent discrimination in hiring. Trump’s executive order, while ending Johnson’s mandate, has been misconstrued as eliminating anti-discrimination protections entirely.
In fact, Trump’s order maintains that federal contractors must avoid discriminatory practices, emphasizing that their decisions should not violate civil rights laws by considering protected categories like race or gender. This provision ensures that the core protections established under federal law remain in force.
The White House said in a memo Wednesday that the order signed a day earlier “protects the civil rights of all Americans and expands individual opportunity by terminating radical DEI preferencing in federal contracting and directing federal agencies to relentlessly combat private sector discrimination.”
The president, noted NBC News, said in his order that the diversity efforts “violate the text and spirit of our longstanding Federal civil-rights laws” and “undermine our national unity, as they deny, discredit, and undermine the traditional American values of hard work, excellence, and individual achievement in favor of an unlawful, corrosive, and pernicious identity-based spoils system.”
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