Judge deals another blow to the Trump admin

President Donald Trump’s attempt to cancel more than $100 million in humanities grants was just overturned in court.

U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon in Manhattan sided with The Authors Guild over the government in determining that Trump and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) engaged in “viewpoint discrimination” when they targeted those institutions, according to the Associated Press. By targeting a number of arts and humanities programs on the grounds that they promoted “DEI,” McMahon ruled that they behaved illegally.

As a result, McMahon permanently prohibited the administration from terminating their grants and criticized DOGE for using artificial intelligence to decide who should be defunded.

“Government lawyers had argued that the cuts of more than 1,400 grants of congressionally approved funds were legal moves to implement President Donald Trump's directives, eliminate grants associated with diversion, equity and inclusion and reduce discretionary spending under the administration's priorities,” the Associated Press said. McMahon said that these actions violated the targeted groups’ First and Fifth Amendment rights to free speech and equal protection. Furthermore, she argued that DOGE — which was managed by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and a Trump booster — lacked the legal authority to cancel grants.

“The public interest favors permanent relief,” McMahon ruled. “The public has a strong interest in ensuring that federal officials act within the bounds set by Congress and the Constitution.”

While Trump and Musk have characterized their cuts as necessary to eliminate supposedly insidious ideologies, digital media strategist Elizabeth Spiers recently wrote in The Nation that the Silicon Valley oligarchs who back Trump — including Musk, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Palantir chairman Peter Thiel, former Netscape CEO Marc Andreessen and former Zenefits CEO David Sacks — harbor a deliberate anti-intellectual agenda.

“As the historian Richard Hofstadter noted, a fierce anti-intellectual spirit has long animated American culture, but it has typically targeted the knowledge elite from below,” wrote Spiers, a digital media strategist. “What’s striking about today’s brand of anti-intellectualism is that it infuses the American knowledge elite; it stems from the bedrock conviction among tech oligarchs that they have mastered everything and have nothing left to learn.”

Spiers added, “In this cloistered vision of tech-driven learning, they believe that deep intellectual work—the kind you do when you author a complex piece of music, for example — has little or no inherent value.”

“Their disdain for it has fueled their attacks on higher education, the humanities, and learning for its own sake, which they believe has no purpose beyond its inevitable digitization and monetization.” This is why, in addition to calling to defund the arts and humanities, these oligarchs take on other causes such as “Peter Thiel’s crusade against college attendance and his program that subsidizes high school students who want to forgo it” and Palintir CEO Alex Karp’s joyful statement “that AI will hurt educated women the most.” She concluded that “as ardent monopolists, they’ve managed to believe they’ve cornered the market on critical thinking. Everyone else needn’t be troubled by the rigors of learning, since they exist solely to serve as drones in the tech regimes of the future.”

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