They don’t call it Roe or Bakke “heresy” out loud. They use cleaner words now—“egregiously wrong,” “lacking historical foundation,” “unmoored from the Constitution.” But everyone who’s paying attention can feel the shift. Dobbs gutted abortion rights. The Harvard affirmative action case carved out racial classifications with surgical precision. And in the shadows of those victories, the real target is already being whispered about in donor retreats and Federalist-style salons: Brown v. Board of Education.

The new theology is simple: if a right isn’t spelled out in the Constitution, the Court has no business inventing it. Call it apostasy doctrine for the 21st century. Where the text is silent, the justices say there must be “judicial humility.” That sounds harmless—until you remember what “humility” meant for most of American history: presumption of constitutionality. When the Constitution doesn’t give you a clear answer, you defer to the legislature. That was Holmes’s gospel: if reasonable people can disagree and the text doesn’t decide it, the majority rules. Full stop. No matter who gets crushed underneath.

Caroline Products tried to carve out a tiny escape hatch in footnote four—just a footnote, not even part of the holding. It suggested that maybe, in rare cases, courts should look harder when “discrete and insular minorities” are targeted. That fragile exception is all that kept the presumption of constitutionality from solidifying into a permanent caste system. But in the new order, that footnote is being treated like a scribble in the margins, something to be “clarified,” “limited,” or quietly buried under a pile of “text, history, and tradition.”

Now place Brown in that framework. The Court openly admits in 1954 that history doesn’t give a clear answer on integrated schools. There is no neat originalist narrative that says, “Yes, the Fourteenth Amendment obviously bans segregated public education.” Under their own presumption logic, that should have been the end of it. No clear right to integrated schools? Then deference to the states. Let the legislatures decide. Let Jim Crow stand. Instead, the Warren Court commits the ultimate modern heresy: it abandons history and looks at facts—sociological data, doll studies, psychological harm. It says segregation breeds a sense of inferiority in Black children, that those feelings bleed into lower achievement and unequal opportunity. It declares, in a single blasphemous line, that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.”

In the new narrative being funded and written right now, that is the crime. Brown is being reframed not as the necessary correction of Plessy, but as the original sin of “living constitutionalism.” Behind the academic language—“Brown as sociological precedent,” “Brown’s methodological instability”—is a simple agenda: if Brown can be recast as a mistake, everything built on it becomes vulnerable. The same playbook that dismantled Roe—decades of scholarship, symposia, model opinions, donor-funded fellowships—is now being quietly repurposed for education and equal protection.

So the questions you see floating around about Howard University, women’s colleges like Radcliffe or Mary Baldwin—they’re not random hypotheticals. They’re test balloons. If separate educational facilities are “inherently unequal,” why are historically Black colleges allowed? Why do women’s universities exist? The point isn’t to protect them. The point is to build the intellectual scaffolding to say: See? Sometimes “separate” is fine. Maybe Brown overreached. Once that wedge is accepted, the door opens to a new formula: the state can’t say “Black here, white there” on the face of the statute, but anything short of that—funding disparities, district lines, admissions pipelines—becomes “policy,” not a constitutional problem.

Modern equal protection doctrine is already halfway there. The Court says: write a law that literally sorts people by race? Unconstitutional. But if the law is facially neutral and the impact falls along racial lines, suddenly the Court becomes “humble” again. It demands proof of intentional discrimination, a smoking gun, an email that says “Let’s hurt this race.” Without that, the presumption of constitutionality roars back to life. Legislatures get deference. History and tradition become shields, not weapons. Integration is reduced from a constitutional command to a political preference.

That’s the final twist in this conspiracy: when they say “the people” always win against the courts, they don’t mean the children packed into underfunded, majority-Black schools with crumbling roofs. They mean a different kind of people—the ones who bankroll test cases, endow chairs, and ghostwrite law review articles. The “people” whose foundations funded Dobbs-style attacks on unenumerated rights, then poured money into dismantling affirmative action, are now circling Brown’s methodological throat. If Brown falls—not necessarily by a headline-grabbing “overrule,” but by being hollowed out, distinguished to death, limited to its facts—segregation won’t come back with “whites only” signs. It will return as data-driven “choice,” algorithmic zoning, and funding formulas that just happen, mysteriously, to leave certain children behind.

Brown was the moment the Court refused to hide behind silence. It rejected the lazy comfort of “no clear answer, so we defer.” It said: the structure of our Constitution cannot coexist with a school system that brands Black children inferior. The dark project of our time is to reverse that act of courage without ever saying out loud what’s being done. Not with burning crosses, but with citations. Not with mobs, but with majority opinions. And if no one calls it what it is until it’s too late, the presumption of constitutionality will finish what Plessy started—this time wrapped in the language of humility, history, and “the will of the people.”