Tuesday, August 12, 2025

FASCIST AMERICA 2025: The Hegemonic/Central Role That Censorship, Erasing and Rewriting History, Pathological Lies, and Disappearing Of Independent and Alternative Points of View in Public Cultural, Social, and Academic Institutions Sponsored and Enacted by A National Fascist Regime Administered and Defined by Trump and His Endless Lackeys, Syncophants, Acolytes, and Enablers. The Massive Systemic and Ideological Destruction Of American Civil Society Infrastructure and Its Ethical and Moral Integrity In the Arts, Sciences, and Pedagogical Venues Has Already Been Enormous and Is Having A Horrifying and Deeply Corrupt Impact On American Culture, Society, and Political Economy in General With No End in Sight After Only Eight Months in Power

The Smithsonian Changes Its Description of Trump’s Role on January 6

The National Museum of American History removed some details of the charges President Trump faced when it replaced a display about his two impeachments.


PHOTO: The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History updated a display that mentioned President Trump’s two impeachments. Credit: Valerie Plesch for The New York Times


by Graham Bowley
August 8, 2025
New York Times

The Smithsonian put up new text on Friday that changed its description of President Trump’s impeachment following the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

The new text removed previous references to Mr. Trump’s incitement charge being based on “repeated ‘false statements’ challenging the 2020 election results” and giving a speech that “encouraged — and foreseeably resulted in — imminent lawless action at the Capitol.”

The new label reads: “On Jan. 13, 2021, Donald Trump became the first president to be impeached twice. The charge was incitement of insurrection based on his challenge of the 2020 election results and on his speech on Jan. 6. Because Trump’s term ended on Jan. 20, he became the first former president tried by the Senate. He was acquitted on Feb. 13, 2021.”

The change came after the National Museum of American History in Washington last month took down a temporary addition to an exhibition about the American presidency that referred to President Trump’s two impeachments to update it as part of what museum officials described as a review of the institution’s content for bias.

PHOTO: The display changes its description of the charge Mr. Trump faced in his second impeachment. Credit: Valerie Plesch for The New York Times

The new labeling that went up on Friday also changed the description of President Trump’s first impeachment, in 2019, adding the word “alleged” to a line that now reads: “The charges focused on the president’s alleged solicitation of foreign interference in the 2020 presidential election and defiance of Congressional subpoenas.”
 
The Museums Special Section


More on Museums: 
 
Artists and institutions are adapting to changing times.

The Smithsonian said in a statement Friday that “at the heart of the Smithsonian’s work is a steadfast commitment to scholarship, rigorous research, and the accurate, factual presentation of history.”

“Adhering to principles foundational to our role as the nation’s museum, we take great care to ensure that what we present to the public reflects both intellectual integrity and thoughtful design,” the Smithsonian said.

It noted that the placard it had replaced had been put up as a temporary exhibit in 2021, and that it had blocked some of the other items in the display case. “We removed it to make way for a more permanent update to the content inside the case,” the Smithsonian said.

Samuel J. Redman, a history professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, said that while historians were bound to continually revise their takes on history, he found some of the changes “troubling.”

“The resulting chilling effect seems clear,” he said. “The Smithsonian curators and museum specialists are walking a tightrope, attempting to stick to factual interpretations about the recent past while experiencing pressure to minimize any bad information about the Trump administration.”

The new labeling is accompanied by new artifacts: admission tickets to the Senate gallery after Mr. Trump’s first impeachment. The updated display also includes a rewrite of the main exhibit panel to more fully explain the mechanics of impeachment, the Smithsonian said.


PHOTO: Museum officials said that they replaced the old temporary exhibit, shown here, in part because the placard blocked the view of some of the items in the case. Credit: via Smithsonian

The removal of the original text in July came after the Smithsonian’s Board of Regents, which governs the institution, had committed to reviewing its content after pressure from the Trump administration. Mr. Trump has called for what he has described as a more positive framing of the country’s history in Smithsonian museums. After the president announced this spring that he had fired the director of another museum, the National Portrait Gallery, the Smithsonian asserted that it holds the power over personnel. But the director then resigned.

The temporary removal of the label about Mr. Trump’s impeachment became national news, and some critics accused the Smithsonian of bowing to pressure from the White House to rewrite history. The Smithsonian said it had received no presidential instruction to take it down, and that it made the changes because the temporary display did not meet its usual presentational standards.

The labeling was part of an exhibit on the American presidency that opened at the Museum of American History in 2000. The exhibit also includes information about the impeachments of former Presidents Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton, and notes that former President Richard M. Nixon was facing possible impeachment when he resigned from office.

A label referencing Mr. Trump’s two impeachments was added in 2021. Mr. Trump is the only American president to have been impeached twice, in 2019 and again in 2021. He was acquitted both times after facing trials in the Senate.

The Smithsonian has been closely scrutinized by Mr. Trump, who issued an executive order in March asserting that the country had “witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our nation’s history” by the institution. He argued that the Smithsonian had “come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology.”

In the order, he called on Vice President JD Vance, a member of the Smithsonian’s board, to work with Congress to prohibit expenditures on exhibitions or programs that “degrade shared American values, divide Americans by race or promote ideologies inconsistent with federal law.”


ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Graham Bowley is an investigative reporter covering the world of culture for The Times.

See more on: Donald Trump, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution


https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/11/us/politics/trump-gop-policy-bill-rich-poor.html
 
Richest Gain Most and Poorest Face Steepest Cuts Under G.O.P. Law, Analysis Finds

Millions of people could lose access to federal food aid or Medicaid, according to the Congressional Budget Office’s latest analysis of President Trump’s marquee legislation.

Listen to this article · 4:21 minutes

Learn more


PHOTO: The Congressional Budget Office estimated that stricter work requirements would reduce participation in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program by roughly 2.4 million people in an average month over the next decade. Credit: Levine-Roberts/Sipa USA, via Reuters Connect

by Madeleine Ngo and Margot Sanger-Katz
August 11, 2025
New York Times

The Republicans’ domestic policy legislation will most likely raise after-tax incomes of the richest Americans while its cuts to social spending will leave the poorest at a substantial disadvantage, according to an analysis released on Monday by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

The report also estimated that millions of low-income Americans could lose access to federal food assistance or Medicaid under the sweeping bill that President Trump signed into law last month.

This highly regressive pattern — both cutting the safety net for the poor and reducing taxes for the rich — has no precedent among large budget bills passed in the last 40 years.

Trump’s Big Bill Would Be More Regressive Than Any Major Law in Decades

The budget office’s report was an update to an earlier analysis it had issued in June. It looked at how the bill’s long list of policies would affect Americans at every level of income, estimating that the incomes for the highest 10 percent of earners would rise by an average of 2.7 percent by 2034, mainly driven by tax cuts, while those of the lowest 10 percent would fall by 3.1 percent, mostly because of cuts to programs such as Medicaid and food aid.

The gains for the top 10 percent of earners would be higher than for any other income group, relative to their income, and the bottom 10 percent would face the biggest relative losses, the analysis suggested.

The budget office also released updated estimates on the number of people who could lose benefits provided by the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, once known as food stamps. The office estimated that stricter work requirements would reduce participation in the program by roughly 2.4 million people in an average month over the next decade.

The policy bill made several changes to the program, which provides food assistance to roughly 42 million people each month. The law imposes more stringent work requirements on SNAP recipients, applying them to able-bodied adults through age 64 and parents with children 14 and older. Previously, adults up to age 54 had to comply and people with dependents were exempt.

The law also makes it more challenging for areas with higher unemployment rates to qualify for work requirement waivers, and it eliminates work requirement exemptions for veterans, homeless people and certain former foster youths.

States will also have to pay a portion of SNAP benefits for the first time unless they maintain lower payment error rates. The budget office said it expected that states would respond in various ways. Some would maintain current benefits and eligibility, while others would modify benefits or “leave the program altogether.”

Some states, including Pennsylvania, have questioned whether they can continue operating SNAP if they cannot cover the extra costs of providing benefits.

The budget office estimated that the cost share change would reduce or eliminate SNAP benefits for about 300,000 people in an average month.

The budget office also updated detailed estimates about how the bill will affect the number of Americans with health insurance. Under the law, 10 million more people are expected to become uninsured by 2034. The office had published that number before, but Monday’s report included more detail about which policies would have the largest impacts.

The law’s new strict work requirement for Medicaid will have the largest impact of any other health care policy change, causing an estimated 5.3 million more Americans to become uninsured. Overall, the bill’s Medicaid policies will cause around 7.5 million Americans to lose health insurance.

In addition, its changes to Affordable Care Act marketplaces will cause around 2.1 million to lose coverage, and the elimination of Medicare coverage for certain legal immigrants who have contributed to the program for at least 15 years will cause 100,000 such people to become uninsured, according to the report. An additional 300,000 people are estimated to lose insurance because of interactions between the policies.

Madeleine Ngo covers U.S. economic policy and how it affects people across the country.

Margot Sanger-Katz is a reporter covering health care policy and public health for the Upshot section of The Times.

See more on: Congressional Budget Office, U.S. Politics, Donald Trump, U.S. Senate, U.S. House of Representatives, Republican Party


More on the Domestic Policy Bill:

Vance Tries to Sell the Megabill: In a visit to Pennsylvania, Vice President JD Vance stressed tax cuts and savings accounts for newborns, with no mention of trims to Medicaid and nutritional assistance programs many Trump voters rely on.

‘Trump Accounts’: American babies born this year through 2028 are eligible to receive $1,000 from the government for a new type of account that is aimed at helping families get their children off to a strong economic start.

Feud With Musk: Elon Musk’s effort to create a new political party — a monumental task — comes amid a ramped-up feud with the president over his new domestic policy law. At the same time, Tesla stock plunged.

Re-engineering the Tax Code: The product of years of Republican effort, the American tax code now blends traditional supply-side economics with President Trump’s populist 2024 campaign promises.

Questions About the Megabill, Answered: Who benefits, and who gets hurt? How much does it really add to the debt? And what’s the deal with Alaska?

Reshaping America’s Energy Landscape: The policy bill is poised to remake the country’s energy landscape by slashing tax breaks for wind and solar power and electric cars while maintaining some federal support for sources like nuclear reactors and geothermal plants. 
What if Dred Scott Had Been Decided Correctly?


Credit: Will Matsuda for The New York Times

by Jamelle Bouie
August 9, 2025
New York Times

[You’re reading the Jamelle Bouie newsletter, for Times subscribers only. Historical context for present-day events. Get it in your inbox.]

A few weeks ago, I wrote a column that included a brief discussion of the Supreme Court’s decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford, the 1857 case that both invalidated the Missouri Compromise and closed the door to Black citizenship in the United States — until it was effectively overturned by the outcome of the Civil War and officially overturned by the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.

To write about Dred Scott meant I had to read — that is, reread — Chief Justice Roger Taney’s infamous opinion for the court, in which he tried to root his anti-Black constitutional vision in the nation’s history. And while I did not write about it in the column, I also read the major dissent in the case, written by Justice Benjamin Curtis.

Curtis had a tumultuous time on the court. Nominated by President Millard Fillmore in 1851 to replace Levi Woodbury, the 41-year-old Curtis was the first and only Whig appointee to the court. A Boston-based litigator and one-time state legislator, Curtis came to Washington with a stamp of approval from none other than Daniel Webster.

Curtis made an immediate mark on the court with his majority opinion in Cooley v. Board of Wardens, in which he charted a middle course between two opposing views of the Commerce Clause. The case, which concerned a Pennsylvania law that levied a fine on vessels entering the Philadelphia harbor without a local pilot, asked whether the Commerce Clause gave Congress exclusive authority over interstate commerce — precluding any state action whatsoever — or whether states could pass laws affecting interstate commerce as long as they did not conflict with existing federal statutes.

Curtis’s solution was to split the difference. “Whatever subjects of this power are in their nature national, or admit only of one uniform system or plan of regulation, may justly be said to be of such a nature as to require exclusive legislation by Congress,” he wrote. But when the subject is “local and not national” regulation, it “should be left to the legislation of the states” until “Congress should find it necessary to exert its power.”

Although, as the legal scholar Alison LaCroix notes in “The Interbellum Constitution,” it would prove difficult to draw the line between the local and the national on questions of commerce, Curtis’s opinion would stand with John Marshall’s in Gibbons v. Ogden (1824) as one of the defining Commerce Clause decisions of the 19th century.

It was with this success to his name that Curtis leaped into the dispute over Dred Scott’s status as a free man and citizen. He was one of two justices, along with John McLean of Ohio, who wanted to resolve the case in favor of Scott’s claim to citizenship and in support of the idea that Congress had the power to regulate slavery in the territories. The majority of the court joined Taney’s opinion rejecting Scott’s claim to freedom, writing Black Americans out of the national community and invalidating the Missouri Compromise of 1820 because of its attempt to limit the introduction of slavery to the territories.

But Curtis’s dissent was not some stray afterthought. Just the opposite: It was a comprehensive attack on Taney’s theory of the case, and it moved the public debate in the wake of its publication. Both the Republican Party and the antislavery press seized on Curtis’s opinion in its attacks on Taney, and Abraham Lincoln, in a speech that summer in Springfield, Ill., relied on the dissent to rebuff Stephen Douglas’s view that the Declaration of Independence “referred to the white race alone.”

Curtis begins by taking aim at Taney’s decision to rule on Scott’s claim to citizenship and the question of the Missouri Compromise. Neither issue, he argued, was “legitimately” before the court and neither was “within the scope of the judicial power of the majority of the court” to decide. In Curtis’s view, the sole judgment of the court was that “the case is to be dismissed for want of jurisdiction” because Scott was not a citizen of Missouri. Everything beyond this was not relevant to the case itself and, in Curtis’s view, not binding law.

You’ll note that other political actors picked up on this move. Lincoln, for instance, insisted that the court had not actually settled the question. “We think the Dred Scott decision is erroneous,” he said in Springfield. “We know the court that made it has often overruled its own decisions, and we shall do what we can to have it to overrule this.”

Having criticized Taney and the majority’s decision to decide extraneous questions of constitutional law, Curtis makes the most important argument of his dissent: that Taney is wrong on the facts of citizenship. Asking “whether any person of African descent, whose ancestors were sold as slaves in the United States, can be a citizen of the United States,” Curtis answered in the affirmative. He pointed out that five states — New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey and North Carolina — recognized free Black Americans as citizens under the Articles of Confederation. He noted that these states also permitted free Blacks to vote, which he viewed as “decisive evidence of citizenship.”

Curtis then asks whether the federal Constitution, which superseded the Articles, deprived either those free Blacks or their descendants of citizenship. He notes that the language, “a citizen of the United States at the time of the adoption of the Constitution,” would appear to be inclusive of free Blacks. And so, he concludes,

I can find nothing in the Constitution which, proprio vigore [on its own], deprives of their citizenship any class of persons who were citizens of the United States at the time of its adoption, or who should be native-born citizens of any State after its adoption, nor any power enabling Congress to disfranchise persons born on the soil of any State, and entitled to citizenship of such State by its Constitution and laws. And my opinion is that, under the Constitution of the United States, every free person born on the soil of a State, who is a citizen of that State by force of its Constitution or laws, is also a citizen of the United States.

The idea that the Constitution was somehow made “exclusively for the white race,” Curtis writes, was “not only an assumption not warranted by anything in the Constitution, but contradicted by its opening declaration, that it was ordained and established by the people of the United States, for themselves and their posterity.” As for Taney’s claim that the founders did not mean to include Black Americans in the Declaration of Independence, Curtis thought this was wrong as well.

My own opinion is that a calm comparison of these assertions of universal abstract truths, and of their own individual opinions and acts, would not leave these men under any reproach of inconsistency; that the great truths they asserted on that solemn occasion, they were ready and anxious to make effectual, wherever a necessary regard to circumstances, which no statesman can disregard without producing more evil than good, would allow; and that it would not be just to them, nor true in itself, to allege that they intended to say that the Creator of all men had endowed the white race, exclusively, with the great natural rights which the Declaration of Independence asserts.

Now, Curtis did not hold the expansive view of American citizenship that Republicans would codify into the Constitution after the Civil War with the 14th Amendment. He did not think that birth automatically made one a citizen of the United States; like many jurists of his generation, he thought that state citizenship governed national citizenship. It was his view that “it is left to each State to determine what free persons, born within its limits, shall be citizens of such State, and thereby be citizens of the United States.”

States could deny citizenship to whomever they liked, Curtis argued. States could also determine what rights a person had within their borders. In his view, the only thing the Constitution required, with its “privileges and immunities” clause, was that states treat the citizens of other states no worse than their own.

And yet, even with its highly limited vision of citizenship — one that still allowed for a great deal of exclusion and disenfranchisement — Curtis’s dissent still stood out for his strong and explicit repudiation of both racial qualifications for citizenship and racial distinctions in citizenship. “Color,” he wrote, “is not a necessary qualification for citizenship under the Constitution of the United States.”

I mentioned earlier that Curtis had a tumultuous time on the Supreme Court, and it had everything to do with this dissent. Soon after the court announced its decision according to one source, Curtis sent a copy of his dissent to a Boston newspaper, where it was read and published before the release of the other opinions, including Taney’s. The chief justice was infuriated by this and went on to revise his opinion in response to Curtis’s dissent. This also began a period of bitter antagonism between the two men, which led to Curtis’s leaving the court later that year, in September.

Benjamin Curtis was neither an abolitionist nor a great egalitarian. He was, in most respects, a man of his time, which makes it all the more striking that he could see a truth that some Americans, in our time, are eager to deny: Our Constitution and our political community include nothing less than the whole people.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Jamelle Bouie became a New York Times Opinion columnist in 2019. Before that he was the chief political correspondent for Slate magazine. He is based in Charlottesville, Va.
 
What I Wrote

I haven’t sent a newsletter in a few weeks, so here are my two most recent columns.

I closed out July with a piece on the antebellum echoes of Vice President JD Vance’s vision of American citizenship and American identity:

Vance sees the egalitarian ideals of our founding documents but says, as Taney did, that we must look elsewhere for our vision of American citizenship. And that elsewhere is your heritage — your connection to the soil and to the dead.

And this week, I wrote about the importance of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, whether or not it survives the machinations of this Supreme Court.

If by American democracy we mean a pluralistic, multiracial society of political and social equals, then American democracy as we know it began with the signing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, 60 years ago today.

I also joined my colleagues on a few podcast episodes of The Opinions: one with Michelle Cottle and Michelle Goldberg, as well as one with Cottle and Steven Rattner.
 
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M.Z. Adnan on Sakir Khader’s photos of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank for The New Yorker.

Jackson Lears on the legacy of the war on terror for The London Review of Books.

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DEFEAT FASCISM BEFORE FASCISM DEFEATS YOU

“What’s Past is Prologue…"

Op-Ed
Education & Youth

US Fascism Is Spreading Under the Guise of “Patriotic Education”

Republicans are rallying behind racist pedagogy as an organizing principle.

by Henry A. Giroux
April 10, 2023 
Truthout


PHOTO: Great Oak High School students leave campus in protest of the district's ban on "critical race theory" curriculum at Patricia H. Birdsall Sports Park in Temecula, California, on December 16, 2022. Watchara Phomicinda / The Press-Enterprise via Getty Images

The relentless state-based attacks on Black people in the U.S. and the war being waged against public and higher education are not unrelated.

In the present political and ideological climate, far right political leaders, such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) have declared a war on institutions of public and higher education, which they’ve identified as centers of “unpatriotic education.” Most far right Republicans fear higher education as a bulwark against their authoritarianism and hence see students as a threat to their propaganda machines and fascist politics. As a result, the right wing has kicked into overdrive in an attempt to target educational institutions as a site for policing dissent, eliminating unions, indoctrinating faculty and students, and for normalizing white Christian nationalism, white supremacy and pedagogies of repression.

We have seen this in Ron DeSantis’s efforts to take over the progressive New College of Florida and turn it into a haven for white Christian education. DeSantis wants to remodel New College after the reactionary Hillsdale College, a private Christian liberal arts college that Kathryn Joyce states has played a “far-reaching role in shaping and disseminating the ideas and strategies that power the right.”

It’s clear that the far right GOP has deemed education to be the most powerful tool for creating a public that is neither informed nor willing to struggle to keep a democracy alive. This is particularly evident in the right-wing war on education, which aims at replacing public education with charter schools, fashioning public and higher education into centers of far right indoctrination, and destroying higher education as a democratic public good. Central to such an attack is a war on critical thinking, troubling knowledge, historical memory and any form of education that address social problems. Extremists in the GOP fully embrace both white nationalism and white supremacy while simultaneously supporting a culture and society in which the distinction between lies and the truth disappear. What they would also like to see disappear in their reign of domestic terrorism are the educators, institutions, and other public spaces that resist this ongoing tsunami of authoritarian ideas, acts of repression, and war on critical intellectuals, dissidents and educators.

What the far right GOP politicians fear about education is that it is the one site where young people learn the responsibilities of being critical and engaged citizens. As Moira Donegan argues, education at all levels “are foundational to democracy and this is the reason why DeSantis and the far right are attacking education.” She writes:

"Schools and universities are laboratories of aspiration, places where young people cultivate their own capacities, expose themselves to the experiences and worldviews of others, and learn what will be required of them to live responsible, tolerant lives in a pluralist society. It is in school where they learn that social hierarchies do not necessarily correspond to personal merit; it is in school where they discover the mistakes of the past, and where they gain the tools not to repeat them. No wonder the DeSantis right, with its fear of critique and devotion to regressive modes of domination, seems to hostile to letting kids learn: education is how kids grow up to be the kinds of adults they can’t control."

Authoritarian societies firmly embrace the notion that history is written by the victors. In doing so, they wage a war on historical memory as part of an effort to not only control historical knowledge particularly in relation to Black and Indigenous people, but also to disguise dominant power relations in acts and policies that produce a “diligent and continual silencing … required to maintain its claims on the present and future.” As whiteness is increasingly secured through voter suppression, border enforcement, gerrymandering and state violence, far right politicians and their allies have expanded their repressive pedagogical mechanisms of discipline and economic measures of control to include cultural apparatuses such as social media platforms, as well as public and higher education.

It is the attempt on the part of the GOP to control historical knowledge and extinguish democratic freedoms in the service of rampant white nationalism and white supremacy that fuels the attack on public and higher education and its dirty war against racialized populations. There is more at stake here than putting up barriers to the development of critical thinking and the fostering of a radical imagination among students. The fascist politics at work is more expansive and destructive, and has become the bedrock strategy to transforming public and higher education into citadels of repression and white supremacist disimagination machines.

It is an ongoing project designed to define whiteness as a totalizing tool of domination, which is used to enact pedagogical practices that prevent Black and Brown students from learning from the trajectory of history. As Angela Davis observes, it is an attempt to prevent all students from understanding the “nature of U.S. history and the role that racism and capitalism and heteropatriarchy have played in forging that history.” Teaching critically about race denotates a history that exposes dangerous memories, reveals acts of resistance that have been consigned to oblivion, and reveals the manifold wrongs of a society that allows for the domestication of the unimaginable.

The Mass Production of Manufactured Ignorance

The far right endeavors to mass produce historical and social amnesia and manufactured ignorance. A passive and depoliticized citizenry is now coupled with an accelerating struggle to destroy any public institution that would challenge such efforts. In addition to right-wing policies that disparage anti-racist pedagogy, silence cultures of questioning, and smother independent thinking by associating the latter with socialist ideals, there is also an attempt to remove the intellectual and institutional conditions in which historical memory, critical education, and civic literacy inform each other as part of the broader goal of creating informed and engaged citizens. Central to this repressive pedagogical project is an attempt to squelch memory and freeze history to domesticate thought and turn historical amnesia into a weapon of miseducation.

In this attack by the assassins of history, memory and truth, there is an erasure of the legacies of slavery, Jim Crow, systemic racism, the Black Power movement, Black Panthers, and the political and racist conditions that gave rise to the Black Lives Matter movement. There is more at work here than a right-wing push to rethink the legacies of slavery and anti-racist struggles; there is also a concerted effort to ban any attempts to teach Black children the truth about their history. As Marian Wright Edelman notes in her comments on Carter G. Woodson, the son of a formerly enslaved person, Woodson was clear about white people refusing to teach Black students about their rightful place in history, and about how the stakes in these debates involved “more than an academic discussion.”

She writes: “He saw the connection between erasing Black history and assaulting Black bodies and said the crusade to teach the truth about Black history was even ‘much more important than the anti-lynching movement, because there would be no lynching if it did not start in the schoolroom. Why not exploit, enslave, or exterminate a class that everybody is taught to regard as inferior?’”

What also disappears in this right-wing indoctrination project are elements of the long war on Black people waged by both Republicans and Democrats. These would include the rise of the Southern Strategy, Richard Nixon’s racially motivated war on drugs, Ronald Reagan’s disparaging of so-called welfare queens, Bill Clinton’s racist and punishing welfare and incarceration policies, and Donald Trump’s relentless demonization of migrants and Black people. Moreover, the myriad achievements, struggles, resistance and culture produced by Black people over 400 years is either erased or trivialized. How else to explain the current right-wing attempt to censor, disparage and ban the 1619 Project from being used in public schools? How else to explain right-wing attempts to ban books by and about Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., Ruby Bridges, Angela Davis, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Robin D.G. Kelley, and other prominent African Americans?


How else to explain the campaign by Governor DeSantis and attempts by Florida’s Department of Education to ban a new Advanced Placement African American Studies course because it included “woke education masquerading as education” and “lacks educational value”? DeSantis makes his case for disparaging the A.P. course by citing as propaganda the work of a range of notable African American writers, including bell hooks, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and others. Moreover, it is hard to take seriously DeSantis’s charge that the A.P. course lacks educational value when it includes work by the famed literary scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr., historian Nell Irvin Painter, and Black icons such as Frederick Douglass, James Baldwin and Bayard Rustin. As Janai Nelson notes in The New York Times, “This disturbing pattern of silencing Black voices and aggressive attempts to erase Black history is one of the most visible examples of performative white supremacy since the presidency of Donald Trump.” Jelani Cobb adds insightfully to this critique by insisting that DeSantis and the Florida education department want the public to believe “that the evils of the past are not nearly as dangerous now as the willingness to talk about them in the present.”


The Right Is Waging a State-Based White Supremacist Assault


The right wing in the U.S. is now waging a battle against the histories, memories and social institutions that make democracy possible. It is a war against the development of an educated public for the present and future, especially from the ranks of people of color. At the heart of this war is a project of indoctrination that views “dangerous” memories and critical thought as anti-American. Central to this dirty war is an attack on historical consciousness as the foundation of critical thinking, the civic imagination and empowered forms of political agency. Its core organizing idea is the suppression of Black history and the teaching of anti-racist practices. What is called anti-woke by right-wing politicians and pundits is nothing less than an attempt by white supremacists and nationalists, in the words of James Baldwin, to barricade themselves “inside their history.” This historical racism and attack on memory is a part of a larger political strategy the right-wing self-proclaimed “culture warriors” enthusiastically promote as their “culture wars.” The historian Jason Stanley, writing in The Guardian, argues that right-wing “cultural warriors” who conduct a “culture war” that whitewashes history, bans ideas and censors books is nothing less than naked fascism.


This initial “anti-woke” ideology was unapologetically articulated by former President Trump, who made his ongoing support for white supremacy clear when he claimed in March 2022 that keeping critical race studies “out of our schools … was a matter of national survival.” Trump is worth quoting given his merging of racism and McCarthyite, anti-communist rhetoric: “We have no choice. The fate of any nation ultimately depends on the willingness of its citizens to lay down and they must do this — lay down their very lives to defend their country. … If we allow the Marxists and commies and socialists to teach our children to hate America, there will be no one left to defend our flag or to protect our great country or its freedom.”


Since 2020, the white supremacist assault on Black history, anti-racist pedagogy and social justice issues have moved from the White House to a state-based strategy — most visible in the educational policies put into play in a number of GOP-controlled states. One striking (if not scandalous) example is evident in DeSantis’s aim to mold human agency by turning schools into dead zones of the imagination. DeSantis’s regressive policies extend far beyond preventing the A.P. course on African American history from being used in his state. As is well known, DeSantis’s war on critical education, anti-racist pedagogy, African American history, and curricula that include knowledge about trans people has been as aggressive as it is extensive — and always with a whiff of high-drama political theater, which makes clear that the discourses of racial hatred and white nationalism contain valuable political currency. DeSantis has brought selective elements of Jim Crow back without apology and in doing so, has focused on policies that erase history through the imposition of censorship and a form of apartheid pedagogy that constitutes a form of anti-memory that refuses to hold racial injustice to account. Under DeSantis, the politics of disappearance emerges as a set of take-no-prisoners policies that combine censorship, the demonization of educators and full-fledged attacks on public and higher education. It also entails the criminalization of teachers who engage matters of racial injustice, forcing professors to take loyalty oaths, and the enactment of politics of silencing aimed at erasing trans people from the historical record, books and curricular materials. DeSantis’s “Don’t Say Gay Bill” forces teachers to be silent about sexual orientation and gender identity issues while using his office to baselessly target and label people who oppose this bill as pedophiles. Meanwhile, in Texas, there are GOP calls to criminalize anyone who provides care for trans people.


There is more at work here than enforced ignorance; there is also a culture of cruelty that makes societal pariahs out of LGBTQ youth while doing irreparable harm to their parents, teachers and caregivers. This is unadulterated hatred hiding behind the fake respectability of the law. Will Bunch, the talented writer for The Philadelphia Inquirer, is right in stating that the “violent, expanding war on LBGTQ kids” by DeSantis and other Republican lawmakers “should make you think about 1930s Germany.”


DeSantis’s war on academic freedom, critical pedagogy, troubling knowledge and dangerous memories is also evident in his ludicrous “Stop Woke Act,” which restricts teachers from talking about racial inequality, systemic racism, civil rights struggles, slavery, and any other issue regarding racial justice that might make students uncomfortable, as if how they feel is the ultimate measure of teaching them to be informed and critical citizens. Paul Krugman, writing in The New York Times, is right in stating that in reality, it appears that DeSantis and his Republican allies want to ban anything “that makes right wingers uncomfortable.” DeSantis has banned math books he claims are politically offensive, passed a bill requiring that teachers remove or cover up books from classrooms that have not been approved by a state compliance censor, used public school funds to expand charter schools, attacked public schools as crucial civic institutions, and waged a full-scale war on democratic values and social relations.


Barbara Ransby is laser-sharp in arguing that DeSantis’s attack on critical education and his support for white nationalism and authoritarianism “stands in the tradition of practices we have seen in the fascist past that have remerged in the present.” She is worth quoting at length:


In this way, DeSantis and his allies uphold the kind of indoctrination he claims to oppose. He stands in the tradition of the Nazis who burned books for fear that their antisemitic lies would be challenged in print. He stands in the tradition of the 1976-1983 Argentinian dictatorship that jailed and exiled dissident professors and killed their students. He stands in the tradition of Turkey’s dictator Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who has purged, jailed or exiled over 100,000 educators and intellectuals because they wrote and taught ideas he saw as a political threat. DeSantis’s dangerous actions are textbook proto-fascist measures. His militant opposition to any teaching of the Black freedom struggle is also reminiscent of the South African apartheid regime’s book banning and curricular and speaker censorship, which limited the circulation of ideas that could undermine the legitimacy of an unjust system.


At the heart of the “Dirty War” being waged against marginalized groups in the U.S. is an attack on historical consciousness that not only connects the past to the present, but also provides in the memory work essential for understanding the repressive nature and structural forces at work in the war against Black people, women, LGBTQ people, and others relegated to the category of disposable. The right wing’s declared war on democracy is rooted in a politics of disappearance in which history is shredded and matters of truth, evidence and moral witnessing are erased. Subjectivity is the material of politics, and uncovering alternative histories is not simply a pedagogical task, but a crucial tool in creating political agents capable of remembering the horrors of a past that cannot be repeated.


When the racist history of the past disappears, and when educators who teach critical ideas are criminalized, structural racism becomes invisible and racist acts become individualized as a matter of attitude and faulty character. When racism is reduced to alleged self-inflicted behaviors, people blame themselves for their feelings of inadequacy, impoverishment and alleged deficits, making it all the more difficult to translate and understand individually experienced acts of racism as part of a larger system of racial capitalism.


The fascist plague that is now shaping public and higher education needs to be addressed with a new language that makes education central to politics and historical consciousness. Such a language needs to make the politics of remembering a crucial pedagogical tool in changing the way people connect events, rethink the present political conjuncture, and understand the history of the present.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR:


Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department in Toronto Canada and is the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. His most recent books include: American Nightmare: Facing the Challenge of Fascism (City Lights, 2018); The Terror of the Unforeseen (Los Angeles Review of books, 2019), On Critical Pedagogy, 2nd edition (Bloomsbury, 2020); Race, Politics, and Pandemic Pedagogy: Education in a Time of Crisis (Bloomsbury 2021); and Pedagogy of Resistance: Against Manufactured Ignorance (Bloomsbury 2022). Giroux is also a member of Truthout’s Board of Directors.


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