Last Friday, the Trump administration called for a swift end to workplace anti-racism training for federal employees.

“It has come to the President’s attention that Executive Branch agencies have spent millions of taxpayer dollars to date ‘training’ government workers to believe divisive, anti-American propaganda,” a White House memo read. According to the statement, a number of federal agencies’ anti-racism seminars for employees had included discussions of white privilege, systemic racism, and other tenets of which the Trump administration ominously identified as “critical race theory.” Such rhetoric, the memo insisted, was un-American and had to be rooted out from government bureaus.

The edict — which came shortly after a Tucker Carlson segment on the menace of anti-racism training — was plainly an attempt to add new fuel to an ongoing culture war over racism in the United States. And liberals responded accordingly by leaping to defend the seminars Trump was seeking to quash.