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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Teachers’ unions are in Gov. Ron DeSantis’s crosshairs because they present the strongest threat to his fascist agenda.

by Derek Seidman 
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Monday, August 11, 2025

FASCIST AMERICA 2025: New York Times Journalist, Cultural Historian, Editor, and Social Critic David Firestone On how the Fascist Trump Regime is Ruthlessly Attacking, Censoring, and Trying To Dismantle and Eliminate All Art Institutions, Artists, Intellectuals, Curators and Activists Who Are Exercising Their Free Speech Rights To Critically and Creatively Confront, Question, and Oppose State Sanctioned Attempts To Undermine, Assault, and Destroy Them and All Others Who Seek To Maintain Their Freedom, Independence, and Dignity in the Face of Cultural, Social, and Political Terrorism by the State Just as People Tried To do in Nazi Germany and Other Fascist Societies and Cultures During the Rise Of the Third Reich.


Trump’s Cultural Revolution Is Just Getting Started
 

Credit: Jared Soares for The New York Times


by David Firestone
August 11, 2025
New York Times

[Mr. Firestone is a former member of the editorial board of The New York Times and was the executive editor for digital at NBC News.]

This article has been updated to reflect news developments.

Label by label, on paintings, monuments and historical treasures, the Trump administration is trying to impose a new portrait of America that is without flaw and without internal debate. It’s happening at the Liberty Bell and the giant redwoods of Muir Woods, and especially in the halls of the Smithsonian Institution, the nation’s semiofficial collection of museums, which is allowing Trumpian history to supersede the accuracy of scholarship.

Last month a label that mentioned that President Trump had been impeached twice disappeared from an exhibit on the presidency at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. The impeachments of Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton are still included, but an important part of modern political history was neatly redacted from the version millions of visitors to Washington would see. After an outcry, the museum said on Friday that it had restored the label (minus a few details about the role Mr. Trump’s Jan. 6, 2021, speech played in the ensuing riot at the Capitol) and it insisted that the Trump administration never asked for its removal.

The White House has already established a pattern of trying to intimidate the Smithsonian and other institutions into altering their cultural content to match its ideology. The Trump administration, in fact, has made an aggressive effort to rewrite not only its own history but also that of the United States, especially as it is documented in its official museums and cultural artifacts. In this new narrative, there can be no arguments about oppression by race or gender or ethnicity or sexuality or economic class, the administration implies, because no such oppression will be acknowledged in the official history, which can only be uplifting. For Mr. Trump, denying entire chapters of American history is as easy as denying last month’s jobs numbers, and it is no less dangerous to the nation’s understanding of itself.

Frustrated that he cannot control it directly, Mr. Trump has become fixated on the Smithsonian, knowing that it plays an outsize role as the nation’s government-funded storyteller. In March he signed an executive order accusing the institution of coming under the influence of a “divisive, race-centered ideology” that portrays American values as harmful and oppressive. The order specifically criticized an exhibit at the Smithsonian American Art Museum that included an unimpeachable statement that race has been used “to establish and maintain systems of power, privilege and disenfranchisement.” In June he managed to pressure Kim Sajet, the director of the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, into stepping down after criticizing her support for racial and gender equality.

The Smithsonian said the references to the Trump impeachments had been removed as part of a review of the institution’s content for bias, and The Washington Post reported this review began after Mr. Trump claimed he fired Ms. Sajet. It’s not clear yet how widespread this review will be, but already one prominent artist has refused to exhibit her works at the Portrait Gallery after it balked at showing one of her paintings. Amy Sherald, who painted the widely popular official portrait of Michelle Obama in 2018, said last month she was withdrawing her solo show from the Portrait Gallery because the museum was considering excluding her painting of a transgender Statue of Liberty to avoid offending Mr. Trump.

Lindsey Halligan, a special assistant to the president whose portfolio includes the Smithsonian, accused the artist of trying “to reinterpret one of our nation’s most sacred symbols through a divisive and ideological lens.” (Did we really need another sign that the administration never understood the true message of the Statue of Liberty?)

And the White House is just getting started. It has begun to regularly savage any exhibit that it considers too woke or too critical of American culture, as it did last month to an exhibit on popular entertainment at the National Museum of American History that dared to add historical context to familiar objects. A display about Dorothy’s ruby slippers from “The Wizard of Oz” mentioned the Great Depression and the coming world war; a label on two “Star Wars” droids noted the nation needed “new hope” after the Vietnam War and Watergate; another on Mickey Mouse noted his original blackface appearance. That was all apparently triggering for the White House. As Ms. Halligan told Fox News: “Framing American culture as inherently violent, imperialist or racist does not reflect the greatness of our nation or the millions of Americans who have contributed to its progress.”

Mr. Trump also ordered the Interior Department to remove any descriptions from national monuments or parks that “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living (including persons living in colonial times), and instead focus on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people.” Already, dutiful Park Service employees have flagged signs at the Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia depicting the abuse of fugitive slaves. The Park Service is restoring a statue of a Confederate general in Washington that was torn down and burned during the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020. And unsurprisingly, the administration removed references to transgender people from the Park Service’s website for the Stonewall National Monument in Greenwich Village. It feels like only a matter of time until the government’s Wite-Out is applied nationwide.

For the president and the right-wing culture warriors who are pushing these revisions, the real offense of these museums is that they finally tell the truth about American history — who benefited and who suffered — in an unsparing way.

The Portrait Gallery now has labels on many of its paintings of prominent early Americans that show how many people they enslaved. The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture presents a harrowing history of American slavery and the bloody oppression of the Jim Crow era. Much of its collection, in fact, is a rebuke to the notion of American exceptionalism, explaining that the United States became a global economic power by enslaving Africans.

There is simply no way to rewrite or disguise this story. It’s impossible to leave its magnificent building on the National Mall without feeling shamed and haunted. And there is no harm in accepting that shame. More of it might help new generations confront the reality of their past and prevent further injustices.

American shame is precisely what the government is trying to prevent, particularly over racial issues, even if the cost of that erasure is future generations of ignorance. In its desire to remake the Smithsonian into a “symbol of inspiration,” dedicated to “instilling pride in the hearts of all Americans,” the White House is trying to impose a government-mandated whitewashing of art and history. Nothing painful will be depicted, described or taught; no human suffering will be acknowledged; no heroes will be reduced in their grandeur by moral failings. It would no doubt impress the Soviet commissars who imposed socialist realism on generations of artists.

For now, the White House has no direct leverage over private museums. Two in New York are presenting exhibitions that repudiate the Trumpian notion that art must uphold an officially approved narrative. “Blacklisted: An American Story” at the New York Historical is a sharp reminder of the cost to society when the government decides to crack down on a disfavored ideology and winds up undermining the freedom to speak, as it did during the Red Scare beginning in 1947. What’s depressingly familiar about the exhibit is its documentation of how important institutions, including most Hollywood studios and television networks, complied with the demands of the Red baiters and refused to push back, just as the Smithsonian appears to be doing now.

Across Manhattan, the Jewish Museum has mounted a vital exhibition called “Ben Shahn, on Nonconformity,” showing why authoritarians are so often afraid of artists who use their canvases to speak against social and political injustice. Shahn, a Jewish immigrant from what is now Lithuania, who died in 1969, used his paintings and photographs to cry out against government persecution of workers and radicals, supporting unions and programs like Social Security. But some of the most memorable works in the collection are acidic portraits of politicians he despised. One political poster from 1948 shows Gov. Thomas Dewey perched on top of a piano while Harry Truman plays “Little White Lies.” Both are wearing sinister, toothy grins.

By resisting outside pressure, artists like Shahn and Ms. Sherald have demonstrated what resistance to an authoritarian culture looks like. But can only private institutions let artists speak their minds? For most of its existence, the Smithsonian largely presented a polished, authorized version of cultural history; only in recent years did a new generation of historians and curators allow contrasting views to emerge. As Shahn knew, art can only be effective at illuminating and healing if it is unconstrained by authority.

“Nonconformity is the basic precondition of art, as it is the precondition of good thinking and therefore of growth and greatness in a people,” he wrote, in a book excerpt that is posted at the gateway to the Jewish Museum’s show.

“The degree of nonconformity present — and tolerated — in a society might be looked upon as a symptom of its state of health.”



ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
 

David Firestone is a former member of the editorial board of The New York Times and was the executive editor for digital at NBC News.


More on Trump, art and history:

Opinion | Jamelle Bouie
Now the President Is an Art Critic
June 4, 2025


Opinion | John McWhorter
The Future of Black History Lives on Donald Trump’s Front Lawn
May 17, 2025


Opinion | David W. Blight
Trump Cannot Win His War on History
March 31, 2025
Posted by at

FASCIST AMERICA 2025: The Pathological Hatred and Self Hatred That Is The Primary Animating Force in the Fascist Regime Destroying The United Hates and The Malevolently Ruthless Figures Behind It All. Toni Morrison Among Many Other Black Public Intellectuals, Critics, Activists, and Artists Throughout American History Warned Us About This Recurring Psychosis Among Deluded Immigrants In Their Twisted Quest to Win the Approval and Support of White Supremacists and Their Deadly Doctrines and Practices

“...I feel personally sorrowful about black-white relations a lot of the time because black people have always been used as a buffer in this country between powers to prevent class war, to prevent other kinds of real conflagrations.

If there were no black people here in this country, it would have been Balkanized. The immigrants would have torn each other’s throats out, as they have done everywhere else. But in becoming an American, from Europe, what one has in common with that other immigrant is contempt for me — it’s nothing else but color. Wherever they were from, they would stand together. They could all say, “I am not that.” So in that sense, becoming an American is based on an attitude: an exclusion of me.

It wasn’t negative to them — it was unifying. When they got off the boat, the second word they learned was “nigger.” Ask them — I grew up with them. I remember in the fifth grade a smart little boy who had just arrived and didn’t speak any English. He sat next to me. I read well, and I taught him to read just by doing it. I remember the moment he found out that I was black — a nigger. It took him six months; he was told. And that’s the moment when he belonged, that was his entrance. Every immigrant knew he would not come as the very bottom. He had to come above at least one group — and that was us…I’m always annoyed about why black people have to bear the brunt of everybody else’s contempt. If we are not totally understanding and smiling, suddenly we’re demons…”

–Toni Morrison, “The Pain Of Being Black”--Interview of Ms. Morrison by Bonnie Angelo, TIME magazine, May 22, 1989

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/11/us/politics/harvard-trump-may-mailman.html


“...Born in the South, raised in the Midwest, and educated on the East Coast, Ms. Mailman has spent much of her life collecting ideas from disparate places and weaving them together.

Her father, Dr. Duncan Davis, was administering vaccines to children in South Korea in the 1980s when he met her mother, Kyungae Davis, who was teaching in one of the schools he visited. They moved to the United States, married and gave birth to their first child, Sylvia May Davis, in 1988.

The family eventually settled in Kansas, first in Goodland and then in Clay Center, both small, predominantly white towns. In both, less than 1 percent of residents were Asian, like Ms. Mailman’s mother, or two or more races, like Ms. Mailman.

Ms. Mailman said her dark features stood out, and made her an easy target for schoolyard taunts, but she learned to parry by using her wits. She has a blunt and candid conversational style, and an easy proficiency with profanity.

At Clay Center’s high school, Ms. Mailman is pictured in nearly every activity in the yearbook…”

Ms. Mailman wrote the executive orders Mr. Trump signed on his first day in office that redefined the federal government’s stance on sex to acknowledge only two genders and dismantled policies aimed at promoting diversity, equity and inclusion. By June, these changes had forced the University of Pennsylvania to align its athletic policies with the administration’s view that transgender girls and women should be banned from participating in women’s sports.

She had a direct hand in the effort to prevent Harvard from enrolling international students, which unnerved the university’s leadership and student body and which a court has temporarily halted. And last month, Ms. Mailman closed a $221 million deal with Columbia University, the administration’s largest settlement to date.

To understand the scope of Ms. Mailman’s influence, The Times reviewed emails and other government records surfaced in court cases targeting the Trump administration, mined her interviews on conservative podcasts and other media appearances and interviewed more than a dozen current and former colleagues.

Ms. Mailman has worked closely with Stephen Miller, now the deputy chief of staff, during both Trump administrations. Ms. Mailman also agreed to the interview in her West Wing office, located directly next to the office of Mr. Miller, just before she stepped down from her position as a White House senior policy strategist, pregnant with her third child. She has continued to take the lead in vexing — and negotiating with — universities as a senior adviser for special projects.

The biggest prize for Mr. Trump, and Ms. Mailman, remains Harvard…Ms. Mailman said she learned to use her wits to parry schoolyard taunts in her small Kansas hometown. She was also becoming increasingly curious about Republican politics…she was recruited by Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, and Mr. Miller because of her various roles in the White House during Mr. Trump’s first term. For the second term, she would help with the transition, write Mr. Trump’s deluge of initial executive orders and help set up a process for turning his campaign promises into policy. She had always planned to depart after six months, she said.

In that time, Ms. Mailman became a crucial component of one of the White House’s most divisive endeavors — a sprawling political and legal bid to root out perceived liberal bias from colleges and deter the use of race in admissions.

The gender-based executive orders she wrote prompted opposition from human rights advocates who argued the directives perpetuate discrimination. Student and faculty groups have accused the administration of trampling on the First Amendment in trying to dictate who schools can hire, what students they can admit and which subjects they can teach…In 2024, Ms. Mailman was named the director of the Independent Women’s Law Center. The center is a project of the Independent Women’s Forum, a Virginia-based nonprofit created by a coalition of women who supported Justice Clarence Thomas during his contentious nomination hearings in the early 1990s…“May has been one of the most indispensable, gifted and dedicated staffers and lawyers in the Trump administration since Day 1,” Mr. Miller said in a statement…”
--Michael C. Bender, “The Harvard-Trained Lawyer Behind Trump’s Fight Against Top Universities”, New York Times, August 11, 2025

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/11/us/politics/harvard-trump-may-mailman.html
 
The Harvard-Trained Lawyer Behind Trump’s Fight Against Top Universities

May Mailman is credited as an animating force behind a strategy that has intimidated independent institutions and undercut years of medical and scientific research.
 

The policies that May Mailman has helped devise have sent shock waves through higher education, dividing faculty and alarming some students who see an effort to silence dissent. Credit:  Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times

by Michael C. Bender
August 11, 2025
New York Times 

Michael C. Bender has been covering the Trump administration’s attacks on Harvard and its efforts to upend higher education.

Aug. 11, 2025Updated 7:12 a.m. ET

When President Trump wants to rattle academia, he turns to his deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller. And then Mr. Miller turns to May Mailman.

Ms. Mailman, a 37-year-old Harvard-trained lawyer, is the most important, least-known person behind the administration’s relentless pursuit of the nation’s premier universities. The extraordinary effort has found seemingly endless ways to pressure schools into submission, including federal funding, student visas and civil rights investigations.

Her hand in deploying these levers of power was evident from the beginning of Mr. Trump’s second term. As his ambitions around reshaping higher education expanded, so did her remit. She is credited as an animating force behind a strategy that has intimidated independent institutions and undercut years of medical and scientific research.

The policies Ms. Mailman helped devise — and is now leveraging as she leads the White House’s negotiations with colleges — have sent shock waves through higher education, dividing faculty and alarming some students who see an effort to silence dissent. The aggressive tactics could have far-reaching implications for the future of academic freedom, the admissions practices at the most competitive colleges and the global reputations for some of the crown jewels of the nation’s university system.


So far, only Harvard has been willing to fight back in court, a sign of the strength of the federal government’s negotiating position.

“There are a lot of good ideas floating around this building, but somebody has to capture those ideas, make sure that the right people are involved and that there is a process to put them into action,” Ms. Mailman said in a recent interview at the White House. “So I’m the catcher of floating ideas.”

She glanced up from her hands, folded in her lap.

“Although,” she added, “I try to have some good ideas of my own every once in a while.”


So far, Harvard is the only school that has chosen to fight back against the Trump administration in court, a sign of the strength of the government’s negotiating position. Credit: Sophie Park for The New York Times

Ms. Mailman wrote the executive orders Mr. Trump signed on his first day in office that redefined the federal government’s stance on sex to acknowledge only two genders and dismantled policies aimed at promoting diversity, equity and inclusion. By June, these changes had forced the University of Pennsylvania to align its athletic policies with the administration’s view that transgender girls and women should be banned from participating in women’s sports.

She had a direct hand in the effort to prevent Harvard from enrolling international students, which unnerved the university’s leadership and student body and which a court has temporarily halted. And last month, Ms. Mailman closed a $221 million deal with Columbia University, the administration’s largest settlement to date.

To understand the scope of Ms. Mailman’s influence, The Times reviewed emails and other government records surfaced in court cases targeting the Trump administration, mined her interviews on conservative podcasts and other media appearances and interviewed more than a dozen current and former colleagues.


Ms. Mailman has worked closely with Stephen Miller, now the deputy chief of staff, during both Trump administrations. Credit: Pete Marovich for The New York Times

Ms. Mailman also agreed to the interview in her West Wing office, located directly next to the office of Mr. Miller, just before she stepped down from her position as a White House senior policy strategist, pregnant with her third child. She has continued to take the lead in vexing — and negotiating with — universities as a senior adviser for special projects.

The biggest prize for Mr. Trump, and Ms. Mailman, remains Harvard.

Talks appeared to be moving forward, with the university signaling it was open to spending $500 million to reach a resolution. Still, on Friday, the administration dialed up the pressure once more, with a new investigation involving patents that the university derided as “yet another retaliatory effort targeting Harvard for defending its rights and freedom.”
A Bush admirer heads to Trump’s White House.

Ms. Mailman said she did not join the second Trump administration to take down Harvard, where she mostly enjoyed her time as a graduate student.

Instead, she was recruited by Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, and Mr. Miller because of her various roles in the White House during Mr. Trump’s first term. For the second term, she would help with the transition, write Mr. Trump’s deluge of initial executive orders and help set up a process for turning his campaign promises into policy. She had always planned to depart after six months, she said.

In that time, Ms. Mailman became a crucial component of one of the White House’s most divisive endeavors — a sprawling political and legal bid to root out perceived liberal bias from colleges and deter the use of race in admissions.

The gender-based executive orders she wrote prompted opposition from human rights advocates who argued the directives perpetuate discrimination. Student and faculty groups have accused the administration of trampling on the First Amendment in trying to dictate who schools can hire, what students they can admit and which subjects they can teach.

“If you normalize the use of federal power like this, then academic freedom is just a memory and universities become political footballs and no longer useful instruments in the search for truth,” said Adam Goldstein, the vice president of strategic initiatives at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a free speech group.


A protest at Columbia University earlier this year. The school reached a $221 million settlement with the Trump administration last month. Credit: Graham Dickie/The New York Times

Inside the White House, Ms. Mailman’s ruthless efficiency and engaging personality has earned her praise from superiors and loyalty from junior staff members. Despite her fearsome role in dragging university lawyers to the negotiating table, some who have made deals with the government have privately complimented her pragmatism in balancing competing interests within the administration with the universities’ needs.

“May has been one of the most indispensable, gifted and dedicated staffers and lawyers in the Trump administration since Day 1,” Mr. Miller said in a statement.

Born in the South, raised in the Midwest, and educated on the East Coast, Ms. Mailman has spent much of her life collecting ideas from disparate places and weaving them together.

Her father, Dr. Duncan Davis, was administering vaccines to children in South Korea in the 1980s when he met her mother, Kyungae Davis, who was teaching in one of the schools he visited. They moved to the United States, married and gave birth to their first child, Sylvia May Davis, in 1988.

The family eventually settled in Kansas, first in Goodland and then in Clay Center, both small, predominantly white towns. In both, less than 1 percent of residents were Asian, like Ms. Mailman’s mother, or two or more races, like Ms. Mailman.

Ms. Mailman said her dark features stood out, and made her an easy target for schoolyard taunts, but she learned to parry by using her wits. She has a blunt and candid conversational style, and an easy proficiency with profanity.

At Clay Center’s high school, Ms. Mailman is pictured in nearly every activity in the yearbook.

Ms. Mailman said she learned to use her wits to parry schoolyard taunts in her small Kansas hometown. Credit: Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times

She was also becoming increasingly curious about Republican politics.

At the University of Kansas, where she majored in journalism, Ms. Mailman joined the college Republicans. She recalled the surprising inspiration she felt attending a campaign event for President George W. Bush while living in Lawrence, Kan.

“George Bush’s image in the news when I was in college was someone you might get a beer with, but also sleepy and dimwitted,” Ms. Mailman said. “But then, in person, he felt energetic and warm, and there was an enthusiasm in the crowd. I’m sure it’s what people feel going to their first Trump rally. And I started volunteering after that.”

In 2012, she enrolled at Harvard Law School, where she was remembered as fun and outspoken by some classmates, and outrageous or over-the-top by others.

After graduating in 2015, she moved to Denver to join a midsize law firm. A former Harvard classmate, William Payne, texted her 15 months later asking if she would like to work in the “center of the universe.”

She had no desire, Ms. Mailman told him, to move to New York.

Mr. Payne said he meant the White House.

During her four years with the first Trump administration, she gained unique access to the president and his aides, including Mr. Miller, frequently traveling with Mr. Trump and his core advisers.

She left the White House in the days after the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, took a job as deputy solicitor general of Ohio and married David Mailman, a former baseball player with a corporate job in Cleveland. They moved to Houston, had their first child in 2022 and a second in 2024.

But she was not done with Washington, or Mr. Trump.
‘The issue picked me.’

In 2024, Ms. Mailman was named the director of the Independent Women’s Law Center. The center is a project of the Independent Women’s Forum, a Virginia-based nonprofit created by a coalition of women who supported Justice Clarence Thomas during his contentious nomination hearings in the early 1990s.



PHOTO: Ms. Mailman, as director of the Independent Women’s Law Center, outside the federal appeals court in Denver last year. Credit: David Zalubowski/Associated Press

At the law center, Ms. Mailman quickly immersed herself in issues that animated Mr. Trump’s campaign and would deeply inform the domestic agenda in his second term, such as rolling back protections for transgender people. She fought against Biden administration policies that had extended discrimination protections to transgender students. And she focused on the University of Pennsylvania, where Lia Thomas, a transgender swimmer, had broken records on the women’s team in 2022. Ms. Mailman also represented Allie Coghan, who sued her University of Wyoming sorority in 2023 for allowing a transgender woman into their chapter.

Ms. Mailman’s work with the group, where she is returning after leaving the White House, landed her on the “hate and extremism” section of the website for GLAAD, one of the country’s leading L.G.B.T.Q. advocacy groups.

Ms. Mailman said her views on gender aligned with the philosophical underpinnings of her politics, which she described as a kind of libertarianism that abhors political correctness.

“The issue picked me,” she said.

In recent weeks, a combination of funding cuts and civil rights investigations resulted in settlements with Columbia and Brown University. Ms. Mailman is in active negotiations with other elite schools, Cornell University and Northwestern University, along with Harvard.

She said that whether Harvard was willing to go beyond existing requirements to show how race factored into its admissions process would largely determine whether the government would sign off on an agreement.

“If Harvard wants this deal, then I think the same way that UPenn needed to focus on gender ideology is the same way Harvard needs to focus on racial admissions,” Ms. Mailman said.

“We don’t want to run these universities,” Ms. Mailman added. “We want some sweeping changes that set things in the right trajectory.”

Alain Delaquérière contributed research.

Michael C. Bender is a Times correspondent in Washington.

See more on: U.S. Politics, Brown University, Harvard University, Donald Trump, Stephen Miller
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Sunday, August 10, 2025

IMPORTANT NEW BOOKS

Toni At Random: The Iconic Writer’s Legendary Editorship
by Dana A. Williams
Amistad, 2025

NPR SPRING PICK

An insightful exploration that unveils the lesser-known dimensions of this legendary writer and her legacy, revealing the cultural icon’s profound impact as a visionary editor who helped define an important period in American publishing and literature.

A multifaceted genius, Toni Morrison transcended her role as an author, helping to shape an important period in American publishing and literature as an editor at one of the nation’s most prestigious publishing houses. While Toni Morrison's literary achievements are widely celebrated, her editorial work is little known. Drawing on extensive research and firsthand accounts, this comprehensive study discusses Morrison's remarkable journey from her early days at Random House to her emergence as one of its most important editors. During her tenure in editorial, Morrison refashioned the literary landscape, working with important authors, including Toni Cade Bambara, Leon Forrest, and Lucille Clifton, and empowering cultural icons such as Angela Davis and Muhammad Ali to tell their stories on their own terms.

Toni Morrison herself had great enthusiasm about Dana Williams's work on this story, generously sharing memories and thoughts with the author over the years, even giving her the book's title. From the manuscripts she molded, the authors she nurtured, and the readers she inspired, Toni at Random demonstrates how Toni Morrison has influenced American culture beyond the individual titles or authors she published. Morrison’s contribution as an editor transformed the broader literary landscape and deepened the cultural conversation. With unparalleled insight and sensitivity, Toni at Random charts this editorial odyssey.

[Publication date: June 17, 2025]
 

REVIEWS:
 
"Toni Morrison is best known as one of the world’s most significant novelists, but in this meticulously researched work Dana Williams introduces us to Morrison the literary editor, who shaped American publishing by introducing a generation of new voices and topics to the reading public. Through Williams we come to see Morrison’s editorial work, along with her fiction, as part of a larger visionary project that was nothing short of transformative. Toni at Random is a major accomplishment.” — Farah Jasmine Griffin, William B. Ransford Professor of English & Comparative Literature and African American and African Diaspora Studies. Author of Read Until You Understand: The Profound Wisdom of Black Life and Literature (W.W. Norton Press, Fall 2021)

“The more we learn about Toni Morrison, the more in awe we are of her gifts and her incredible range as a writer, intellectual and now we meet her as a literary activist and editor. Dana A. Williams rises to the challenge of documenting the workings of a genius, by demonstrating a mighty brilliance of her own. We have in our hands a masterpiece— a scholarly page turner, dwelling at the intersection of meticulous research, abiding passion, and tremendous respect.” — Tayari Jones, author of American Marriage.

“In this essential work, Williams not only reveals the genius of Morrison as editor of some of the nation's most iconic writers, she provides an insider’s view of mainstream publishing during a golden age of Black authors and literature. Toni at Random is a cultural treasure.” — Paula J. Giddings, E.A.Woodson Professor emerita of Smith College and the author of IDA, A Sword Among Lions, Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching

“I flew through these pages. With a dazzling array of characters who become household authorial names and an editor who was as perceptive as she was assertive, 'Toni at Random' is an outstanding exaltation to the legend of the woman herself who birthed so many generations of Black artists alongside and after her.” — Morgan Jerkins, author of Zeal and This Will Be My Undoing

“Toni at Random stands as a towering accomplishment for Dana Williams. Readers, historians, and students of literature are now in Williams' debt... Toni Morrison was responsible for much of what we read as we matured, as our literature became mainstream. By offering Morrison's editorial history to stand beside her literary production, Dana Williams has proven, again, that Toni Morrison is and was indomitable. In Toni at Random, Dana Williams brings receipts.” — A.J. Verdelle, Author of Miss Chloe: A Memoir of a Literary Friendship with Toni Morrison

"This book can be seen as a handbook for editing during a rapidly changing cultural period, how to patiently, diplomatically, or even bluntly help a creative spirit discover his/her true vision in a work. It certainly and effectively presents another dimension to Morrison’s stature as an ever-important contributor to African American and therefore American culture." — John McCluskey,Jr. Professor Emeritus Dept. of African American and African Diaspora Studies

A well-researched biographical study. — Kirkus Reviews

A triumphant account of an underexplored aspect of Morrison’s influence on American literature. — Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“An insightful dive into the life, legacy and cultural literary contributions of one of the most prolific voices of the 20th century.”
— Ebony

"Drawing primarily from the author’s correspondence, Williams recounts in remarkable detail how Morrison, the first Black woman senior editor at Random House, forever transformed the publishing landscape by championing Black writers’ work and discovering new voices. This book gives a comprehensive account of Morrison’s work with Huey P. Newton, Boris Bittker, Muhammad Ali, Angela Davis, and more."
— Vulture

"Toni at Random is a deeply reported, insightful, and page-turning account of Morrison’s ground-breaking editorial work. Williams does an excellent job chronicling Morrison’s transformative impact not only on the individual authors she edited and championed, but also on the wider landscape of publishing."
— Literary Hub

“Deeply researched and illuminating” — The Atlantic

“Written with great knowledge, deep feeling and a sense of purpose.”
— Chicago Tribune

“A well-told and successful story of Morrison’s editorship; exceedingly honest — prices of book advances, media squabbles and creative arguments in tow — and often illuminating. Williams is clearly a skilled biographer, and respect for Morrison is given time and space to grow in this far-reaching and informative work.” — Spectrum Culture

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Dana A. Williams is Professor of African American literature and Dean of the Graduate School at Howard University. She is former president of the College Language Association and the Modern Languages Association, and is the author of In the Light of Likeness—Transformed: The Literary Art of Leon Forrest. She is also the editor of several books. Her work has been published in prestigious journals, including PMLA, CLA Journal, African American Review, Early American Literature, American Literary History, and the Langston Hughes Review. Her research has been supported by the Ford Foundation, the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She co-directs the Center for Medical Humanities and Health Justice, a Mellon Foundation-funded collaboration between Howard and Georgetown universities. Williams lives in Maryland.
 
Oceans of Time: The Musical Autobiography of Billy Hart
by Billy Hart
Cymbal Press, 2025
[Publication date: June 18, 2025]
 
Oceans of Time Charts the Rhythmic Course of Jazz Master Billy Hart. Few drummers have traversed more stylistic terrain or logged more miles behind the world’s greatest jazz musicians than Billy Hart. From Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock to McCoy Tyner and Wes Montgomery, Hart has been the rhythmic heartbeat behind jazz legends for over five decades.

Now, in Oceans of Time: The Musical Autobiography of Billy Hart, the NEA Jazz Master opens up about his extraordinary life in music, in collaboration with pianist, critic, and longtime bandmate Ethan Iverson.

What makes this memoir unique?

You'll discover rare insight into the inner life of a drummer who has shaped the sound of modern jazz, spanning:
 
  • His early years in D.C.'s fertile postwar jazz scene
  • Historic gigs with Shirley Horn, Jimmy Smith, Stan Getz, and Wes Montgomery
  • Legendary sessions with Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, and McCoy Tyner
  • His evolution as a bandleader and educator
Inside, you'll find: Rich storytelling that reveals Hart's reflections on race, rhythm, mentorship, and meaning—alongside deep discussions of "the D.C. beat," the elusive quality of swing, and what it means to live a musical life. Oceans of Time offers musicians and aficionados rare insight into the inner life of a drummer who has shaped the sound of modern jazz.

Appendices include tributes from fellow drummers, discographical highlights, and a detailed look at Hart's signature drum setup.

As Iverson writes in the preface, "Billy Hart connects the glory years of jazz to the latest contemporary concerns." This book is the ultimate insider's guide to jazz drumming from a master who bridges jazz's past, present, and future.

"Want to know what jazz is really about? Listen to Billy Hart.”—Mark Stryker, The Detroit Free Press


ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
 

NEA Jazz Master Billy Hart is a musical legend whose career spans over 600 recordings and five decades of groundbreaking performances. Comfortable in diverse contexts ranging from straight-ahead to avant-garde to pop, Hart bore witness to many major changes in jazz during the transformative '60s and '70s while working in the bands of Shirley Horn, Jimmy Smith, Wes Montgomery, Pharaoh Sanders, Herbie Hancock, McCoy Tyner, and Stan Getz. He became the drummer of choice for countless jazz luminaries and has released a dozen albums as a leader. Beyond performing, Hart has mentored generations of musicians and continues to teach at prestigious institutions worldwide. In 2022 he was named a NEA Jazz Master, in 2023 he received the Living Legacy Jazz Award from Mid-Atlantic Arts, and in 2025 was part of the first group of musicians awarded the Jazz Legacies Fellowship from the Mellon Foundation and the Jazz Foundation of America.

Pianist and acclaimed jazz critic Ethan Iverson brings a unique perspective to this collaboration, having known Hart for three decades and performed in his quartet since 2003. Iverson was a founding member of the influential trio The Bad Plus; since leaving that group, he has released critically-acclaimed albums on ECM and Blue Note and maintains a long-standing relationship with modern dance choreographer Mark Morris. As a writer, his music criticism has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Nation, and JazzTimes, in addition to his widely-read Substack, Transitional Technology. This rare combination of deep musical partnership and journalistic insight makes Iverson the ideal collaborator to capture Hart's remarkable story.
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