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history
Trump’s War on History Is Another Slouch Toward Authoritarianism
One of the hallmarks of fascist rule is the indoctrination of the public to believe in the “glorification of the nation.”
Mar 25, 2025
Significant attention and concern have been generated by U.S. President Donald Trump’s early Executive Orders and actions. There has been extensive coverage of the president’s: empowering of Elon Musk’s orders to gut the federal workforce; shuttering USAID; plans to deport massive numbers of migrants and refugees, including those seeking asylum; on-again, off-again imposition of tariffs; flaunting the will of Congress by withholding appropriated funding; banning “diversity, equity, and inclusion” programs; restrictions on treatment of transgender young people; and defying court-ordered injunctions by claiming that the powers of the presidency can’t be restrained by the judiciary.
Buried in the flurry of President Trump’s Executive Orders is one that has been largely ignored, despite being potentially the most far-reaching of these presidential acts. Titled “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling,” this diktat lays bare Trump’s intention to roll back the gains that have been made over the last half century by historians working to present a more accurate portrait of American and world history. Trump calls these efforts “anti-American, subversive, harmful, and false,” and demands instead that schools devote themselves to “patriotic education” that will “instill a patriotic admiration for our incredible Nation”—in other words, to teach the kind of history we learned three generations ago.
As late as the early 1960s when American schools taught “World History,” it was Eurocentric. It started with Stone Age man (in Europe), then passed onto the Greek and Roman Empires, the Holy Roman Empire, the “Dark Ages,” the emergence of the nation states of Europe, the discovery of the New World, the birth pangs that accompanied the first centuries of the United States (i.e., “fighting Indians” and a civil war over “states’ rights”), the Industrial Revolution, the two World Wars that sandwiched the Great Depression, and the challenges posed by the Soviet Union and the Cold War.
The celebrated American author Sinclair Lewis once predicted that “fascism would come to America wrapped in a flag, carrying a cross.” With these cautionary words in mind, attention must be paid to President Trump’s Executive Order.
In this narrative, the U.S. was depicted as the fulfillment of history, the conveyor of the values of freedom and democracy, and, as former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was fond of saying, “the indispensable nation.”
There was no mention of African history or Islamic civilization. There were just four paragraphs devoted to China, which we were told was “opened up to the West” by Marco Polo. And the only mention of Arabs was in a short section on the ways nomadic peoples were forced to adapt to living under harsh conditions, including a few paragraphs each on the Arab bedouin of the desert and the Laplanders of the frozen tundra of Northern Europe.
American history was distorted and romanticized. Slavery was given short shrift as was the genocide and land theft committed against the Indigenous peoples of North America. This is what we were taught.
Things changed in the 1960s as a result of the cultural revolution in America that was prompted by the civil rights and then anti-Vietnam War movements. In their wake, there was the blossoming of other social and political movements, including women’s liberation and concern for the environment. The expanding consciousness inspired by this period of challenge and change led to a reexamination of American history and our place in the world. And with this came a focus on Black history, Native American history, women’s history, and an expansion of the writing and teaching of world history to include the perspectives and stories of peoples who had previously been ignored. This was not an effort to create multiple separate histories, but to ensure that future generations would benefit from learning a more complete and integrated human history.
Of course, there was pushback by conservatives who wanted to restore the mythologies of the past. It will be recalled that President Trump fired his opening salvo in this war on history during his first term when he denounced The New York Times’ stunning “1619 Project.” That massive undertaking put in focus the role of the conquering European settlers in America as they committed crimes of genocide against the Indigenous peoples they encountered and then introduced the massive and enormously destructive enterprise of slavery in the New World and its enduring legacy. Trump countered this effort with his “1776 Project” that sought to do nothing more than to restate the myth of America, shorn of its dark underside.
Trump’s new Executive Order is the latest iteration of this war on history. After decrying the “radical, anti-Americanism” that he claims teaches that the United States is “fundamentally racist, sexist, or otherwise discriminatory,” he calls for “an accurate, honest, unifying, and ennobling characterization of America’s founding” and “a celebration of America’s greatness and history.”
Trump goes further by calling for “Reestablishing the President’s Advisory 1776 Commission and Promoting Patriotic Education” that will be charged with sponsoring programs to encourage patriotic learning and glorification of America’s battles and war heroes. The order further requires that all educational institutions receiving federal funds must hold specific patriotic educational programs, and that “relevant agencies of government” shall monitor compliance with this requirement. In other words, do what we demand or lose your funding.
None of this is benign. One of the hallmarks of fascist authoritarian rule is the indoctrination of the public to believe in the “glorification of the nation.” The celebrated American author Sinclair Lewis once predicted that “fascism would come to America wrapped in a flag, carrying a cross.” With these cautionary words in mind, attention must be paid to President Trump’s Executive Order. It is a worrisome step down this dangerous path.
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What Trump Means When He Calls Anyone Who Disagrees With Him Palestinian
This is the real warning in Trump’s attack: You don’t have to be Palestinian to be punished like one. You don’t have to be Arab or Muslim. You only have to step out of line.
Mar 23, 2025
“He’s not Jewish anymore. He’s a Palestinian.”
With these words, U.S. President Donald Trump did not merely insult Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.)—he exposed something far more insidious. In Trump’s world, Palestinian is not just a nationality. It is an accusation, a sentence of exile, a mark of delegitimization.
Schumer’s crime was questioning Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s increasingly authoritarian government. Schumer, a staunch Zionist who has long positioned himself as one of Israel’s most unwavering defenders, dared to suggest that Netanyahu’s extremism was harming Israel’s future.
A new McCarthyism is taking hold in America, and this time, it is not communists in its crosshairs. It is anyone who refuses to fall in line with Israel’s agenda.
That alone was enough for Trump to strip him of his Jewishness, to brand him as something else—something meant to be demeaning.
This is not the first time Trump has wielded the word “Palestinian” as a slur. He has used it against former President Joe Biden, against Schumer previously, and indeed against anyone who dares to question Israel’s policies.
The message is clear: To be called Palestinian is to be cast out. Your voice no longer counts. Your legitimacy is revoked, your rights erased.
Had Schumer not been Jewish, Trump would have called him antisemitic. But even that category is losing its meaning. This is not about identity. It is about obedience.
Because in this new political order, anyone can become Palestinian.
Erased From History
To be Palestinian in Trump’s world is to be without rights. A Palestinian can be starved, bombed, and expelled. A Palestinian can be erased from history—just as Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, did when they engineered the Abraham Accords, bypassing Palestinians as though they did not exist.
A Palestinian can be stripped of legal protections, even if they hold U.S. residency and have committed no crime. Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University student, is facing deportation for nothing more than expressing his political views.
A Palestinian can be arrested for protesting, fired for speaking, or blacklisted for dissenting. And now, anyone can be treated as one.
This is the real warning in Trump’s attack. You don’t have to be Palestinian to be punished like one. You don’t have to be Arab or Muslim. You only have to step out of line.
Even Jewishness is no longer protection. Your identity has become conditional, your history disposable. You can be declared a traitor, an enemy within, someone who has forfeited their place.
The moment you question Israel, you become Palestinian—not by birth, but by decree. Because in this world, a Palestinian has no rights, nor does anyone who defends them.
A new McCarthyism is taking hold in America, and this time, it is not communists in its crosshairs. It is anyone who refuses to fall in line with Israel’s agenda.
Historical Purge
In the 1950s, repression was justified as a crusade against subversion, a purge of those deemed enemies of the state. Today, the same machinery of silencing is at work under the guise of combating antisemitism. But this is not about protecting Jewish people from hate; it is about criminalizing criticism of Israel.
It is about silencing students, journalists, academics, activists—anyone who speaks out against occupation, apartheid, and ethnic cleansing.
And the hypocrisy could not be more glaring.
A system meant to safeguard the marginalized is now being repurposed to shield a foreign government from criticism.
Trump and his allies have built their brand on railing against political correctness. They claim to be defenders of free speech, warriors against censorship. Just a few weeks ago, Trump’s vice president, JD Vance, stood at the Munich Security Conference and scolded European leaders for restricting expression. He lamented the West’s supposed retreat from free debate.
And yet, in the U.S. under Trump and those who champion his ideology, free speech does not apply if the topic is Israel.
Pro-Palestinian students are arrested, expelled, and stripped of their degrees. Professors who challenge Israeli policies are pushed out. Journalists who report on Israeli war crimes are blacklisted, harassed, and silenced. Films documenting Palestinian suffering are cancelled. Human rights organizations are smeared as terrorist sympathizers.
Universities and colleges—once bastions of free inquiry—are under siege, with the Trump administration threatening to strip their federal funding if they do not suppress pro-Palestinian activism. The same institutions that once championed open debate are now being forced into policing thought.
The consequences extend beyond campuses. The U.S. Department of Education, which is supposed to protect students facing discrimination, has been ordered to prioritize antisemitism cases—some of which are politically motivated—over the needs of vulnerable children.
Parents of students with disabilities are struggling to access the support to which they are legally entitled, because civil rights resources have been diverted to police speech on Israel. A system meant to safeguard the marginalized is now being repurposed to shield a foreign government from criticism.
Witch Hunt
Another federal agency, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), has also been redirected—not to combat human trafficking or drug smuggling, but to hunt down students who express solidarity with Palestine. ICE has reportedly paused key investigations so that its agents can monitor social media, tracking and flagging pro-Palestinian students for their posts and likes. This is not law enforcement. This is a witch hunt.
And now, the next step: legal oppression turning into outright state violence.
Trump is prepared to invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, a wartime measure that allows the president to detain and deport non-citizens without due process.
Under this law, green-card holders, students, spouses of U.S. citizens—anyone without citizenship—can be rounded up and expelled at the president’s discretion. It was designed for times of war, for use against citizens of enemy nations. But Trump is repurposing it, transforming immigration status into a weapon of political control.
And this process has already begun. Trump just deported Rasha Alawieh, a Lebanese transplant specialist and professor at Brown Medicine, a legal resident on a valid H-1B work visa. There was no alleged crime, no hearing, and no due process. A respected doctor was expelled at the stroke of a pen because she fits the regime’s profile of the unwanted.
This is not a legal system. This is ethnic and political cleansing disguised as immigration enforcement.
Who will be targeted? We already know: Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims. Those who have protested, who have spoken out, whose very existence is now treated as subversive. The crackdown is escalating. First slander, then blacklists—now the threat of deportation without trial.
This is how rights are destroyed—not all at once, but in stages, each step paving the way for the next. It begins with one group, then it spreads. Soon, dissent itself is an act of defiance punishable by exile.
Crisis for Democracy
History has already shown us how this unfolds.
McCarthyism began with communists, but it did not stop there. It spread to journalists, academics, labor organizers, civil rights activists—anyone deemed subversive. Lives were destroyed, reputations ruined, entire fields purged of independent thinkers.
The same pattern is unfolding now. It starts with Palestinians, then students, then professors, then journalists, then public figures, then anyone who refuses to pledge unquestioning loyalty to the state of Israel.
Today, it is Palestinians who are denied their humanity. Tomorrow, it is anyone who dares to dissent.
This is not just a crisis for Palestinians. It is a crisis for democracy itself.
Israel and the U.S. were not content with trampling on international law to wage their genocidal war on Gaza. Now they are trampling on hard-won rights and freedoms at home to silence criticism of their war crimes, erode democracy, and criminalize opposition.
They are dismantling free speech in the name of combating antisemitism—when, in reality, they are weaponizing it, reducing it to a political tool. And in doing so, they fuel the very antisemitism they claim to fight, conflating such repression with Israel and Jewishness itself.
The moment we accept that criticism of Israel is a crime, we open the door to something even darker. Today, it is Palestinians who are denied their humanity. Tomorrow, it is anyone who dares to dissent.
Because in a world where the mere act of speaking out is enough to strip you of your rights, your identity, your place in society—then anyone can become Palestinian.
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Remembering Rev. Nelson Johnson and the Historical Record
His clarifying insistence on truth telling will be sorely missed during a time when people are being threatened, demonized, and fired for telling American history’s multiple truths.
Mar 02, 2025
On Saturday, February 22, one of America’s great civil rights and labor activists was laid to rest in Greensboro, North Carolina. It’s possible you haven’t heard of Reverend Nelson Johnson, though Reverend Dr. William Barber II, the dynamic founder of Repairers of the Breach, the “co-anchor” of the new Poor People’s Campaign, and professor of the practice of public theology and public policy, places him (and his wife Joyce Johnson) in the rank of “Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass, Mother Jones and Martin Luther King Jr.” It’s salient in this moment, too, that the social, racial, and economic rifts that sparked the 1979 Greensboro Massacre and claimed the lives of five of Reverend Johnson’s fellow activists—scarring him for life—continue to divide our country today.
His clarifying insistence on truth telling will be sorely missed during a time when people are being threatened, demonized, and fired for telling American history’s multiple truths. Given this, it’s imperative to correct the historical errors and omissions in a recent New York Times obituary for Reverend Johnson.
The obituary reports that when, just prior to the November 3, 1979 murders, a caravan of Ku Klux Klansmen and American Nazis arrived at the start of a march Nelson Johnson and his fellow communists were mounting against racism, the police were “standing nearby.” This isn’t true. The police were, by official order, absent and out of sight and therefore unable to stop the approaching violence. What makes this particularly alarming is that at least three law enforcement agencies—the Greensboro Police Department, the FBI, and the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms—had elicited enough information from informants and infiltrators to stop the white supremacist attack before it happened. Every serious investigation of the November 3, 1979 events over the last quarter century acknowledges this.
When the facts of the Greensboro Massacre are presented clearly, it’s easy to see how the white power politics, law enforcement bias, and political opportunism that led to that tragedy illuminate the time we are in.
Klansmen and Nazis inflicting violence on African Americans, Jews, Catholics, Latinos, Native Americans and left activists is a horrific though unsurprising fact of American history. However, we must not omit from this history the responsibility of the public officials charged with protecting and serving all our citizens. The very foundation of our democratic system rests on the implicit and explicit trust we place in state officials and institutions to protect us in situations like the one that led to the Greensboro Massacre.
The Greensboro Massacre reminds us, as we are being reminded again today, that the only way to preserve that trust is to hold officials accountable when they betray it and commit crimes. Sadly, our justice system did not find the vigilante white supremacists or complicit officers of the law criminally responsible for the November 3, 1979 murders. Only a federal civil suit brought a sliver of justice to the tragedy. The New York Times obituary notes the civil judgement that found eight defendants liable for death but does not tell readers who they were: Five were Klansmen and Nazis, one was a police informant (and former FBI informant), and two were Greensboro police officers. This judgement reminds us that we must continuously resist the influence of reactionary white supremacist politics in our law enforcement agencies and justice system.
The obituary concludes with the installation of the 2015 North Carolina state historical marker commemorating the massacre. Left unreported, however, is the tenacious and hopeful work, not only by Reverend Johnson, but by Greensboro’s civil society, to set their history right. Thanks to these groundbreaking efforts, which included a two-year Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the City of Greensboro offered two apologies for the massacre: one in 2017, following the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, and another in 2020, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. This second apology explicitly acknowledged that the Greensboro Police Department could have prevented the violence on November 3, 1979. Movingly, the city established a scholarship fund in the names of the five slain activists.
When the facts of the Greensboro Massacre are presented clearly, it’s easy to see how the white power politics, law enforcement bias, and political opportunism that led to that tragedy illuminate the time we are in.
It’s also important to remember, however, that Reverend Johnson’s historical significance is far greater than the trauma of November 3, 1979. His 60 years of racial and economic justice activism may be seen as an essential bridge, spanning from the revolutionary visions of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X to Dr. William Barber’s current mobilizations on behalf of our nation’s poor. Like both these leaders, Johnson saw race and economics as inextricably linked. And like them, he never stopped trying to fix the root causes of inequality in America for all people suffering predatory capitalism. He came to consider demonizing others, even one’s enemies, as a mistake. That revelation would lead him away from communism to liberation theology and the idea of revolutionary, Christian love. This philosophical shift, however, didn’t transform Johnson from radical to reformer; he never stopped believing that true equality and justice in the United States will only come with fundamental changes to our values, our institutions, and our economy.
Reverend Johnson’s community-based work has inspired labor and racial justice leaders all around the country. Though his name might not, until now, have been known widely, his work with unions and churches and social justice organizations has been buttressing grassroots democracy for decades.
The life of this big-hearted farm kid from the Airlie, North Carolina expands the geography, timeline, and scope of the conventional civil rights story. Getting his story right broadens our understanding of American history’s lessons, affirms a powerful faith in equal justice and democracy, embraces the power of community, and rejects the repression of our country’s truths.
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