The Right’s Push to Whitewash History Is a Precursor to Fascism

Part of the Series

The Public Intellectual

As the 2023-2024 academic year ended in June, far right attacks by politicians and university administrators foreshadowed the troubling challenges that students and faculty will face as public and higher education resume this year. It is hard to forget that with the end of the academic year, the usual focus on commencement speeches and joyful graduation ceremonies gave way to what Michael Gould-Wartofsky calls the “American Homeland Security Campus.”

Amid widespread campus protests against Israel’s brutal war on Gaza, snipers were stationed on campus rooftops, peaceful student protesters and faculty were beaten, police and National Guard units manned college checkpoints, and the familiar smell of cut grass and freshly planted flowers was replaced by the “scent of gunpowder.” In short, higher education was transformed into a police precinct.

Beneath this sweeping repression aimed at silencing dissent, free speech and critical inquiry lies a series of right-wing policies that threaten to undermine education’s role as a democratic public sphere and its commitment to fostering critical thinking. In this environment, we can expect a sustained assault on critical pedagogy, historical understanding, informed judgment, faculty job security, critical literacy, civic awareness, and any effort to connect learning with civic engagement and democratic values.

For instance, far right legislators in states like Florida, Tennessee and Idaho are banning books and prohibiting the teaching of concepts related to race, LGBTQ+ issues and social justice. Public and higher education institutions are being defunded, particularly if they address diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. Many public school libraries are being stripped of resources, with some being transformed into detention centers. Students are bankrupting their future because of high tuition costs and staggering student debt.

Under the influence of white Christian nationalists, states such as Oklahoma have seen officials mandate the incorporation of the Bible into school lessons, further intensifying the cultural battle over religion in the classroom.

The suppression of academic freedom, free speech, and the rights of faculty and students is not just a political maneuver — it is an act of violence.

Higher education is also under siege. In states like Wisconsin and Florida, tenure has been either significantly weakened or effectively eliminated. In many states governed by right-wing officials, attacks on academic freedom have become widespread, particularly targeting faculty who critically address Israel’s dehumanizing war on Gaza. These attacks include monitoring and restricting what faculty can teach. For instance, Florida has instructed the leaders of its 12 public universities to screen certain courses for “antisemitism or anti-Israeli bias.” The Intercept points to S.B. 1287, which if enacted by the California legislature, “would stifle free speech on public university and college campuses, specifically around protests against Israel’s war in Gaza and its occupation of Palestine, according to civil rights advocates.” According to The Intercept, Constance Penley, president of the Council of UC Faculty Associations, stated that, “The bill mirrors a larger trend within the University of California school system and among lawmakers to suppress protests that are in support of Palestine and are critical of Israel’s war in Gaza.”

These policies do more than undermine independent voices of dissent; they are part of a longstanding right-wing strategy to transform public and higher education into either corporate adjuncts or white Christian indoctrination centers. The suppression of academic freedom, free speech, and the rights of faculty and students is not just a political maneuver — it is an act of violence. Historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat aptly warns that students returning to campus this fall will face relentless attacks by authoritarians who “are happy to engineer the intellectual, social, and financial impoverishment of the educational sector to get rid of anyone who stands in the way of their dreams of national and ideological purity.”

We live in an age where the unimaginable becomes imaginable. George Orwell’s cautionary tale 1984, about the dangerous use of propaganda, lies, manufactured ignorance and the suppression of memory to control people no longer reads like fiction. Orwell’s concept of the memory hole, which acts as an incinerator of historical conscience and remembrance, has become a crucial weapon in the politics of disappearance. Truth has succumbed to the collapse of reason and the pathology of official lies. Thinking has become dangerous, as history collapses under the weight of misrepresentation and indoctrination. In a culture dominated by images, history is ignored in favor of immediacy and short-term profits. Memory is treated like a virus in the age of gangster capitalism, opening the door to the criminalization of politics and the shrinking of the political horizon.

History is now shrouded in darkness, imposed by censorship, spectacle and a vocabulary steeped in bigotry, extermination and nativism. Race-baiting has become normalized within the GOP, which embraces both the language of the Confederacy and a fascist discourse that openly calls for a “unified Reich.” The vivid rhetoric of invasions and claims that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of Americans” reinforce the language of hatred and mass violence as legitimate political tools. Fascist groups march in the streets of Massachusetts, Florida (even outside of Disney World), Tennessee, and other states, yet these events are barely reported in the press and are increasingly normalized. All of these issues are either severed from their historical roots or reduced by corporate-controlled media to mere stenography — reported without critical analysis.

The teaching of history has been criminalized, and the truth of history has succumbed to the scourge of white supremacist falsehoods.

History no longer serves as a warning of what the end of humanity looks like; instead, it is whitewashed, ignored and barricaded behind the language of “racial purity.” Too often, it becomes a legitimizing force through censorship and silence, erasing the genocidal atrocities of the past. This is most evident recently in the U.S. government’s, corporate media’s and politicians’ support of Israel’s brutal killing of thousands of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. Spaces where students once not only learned from history but also challenged the resurgence of totalitarianism — particularly on college campuses — have been transformed into sites of militarized repression. Learning critically from history has now become a cautionary tale, one that invites state terrorism. What is lost here is Primo Levi’s crucial insight that, “Every age has its own fascism, and we see the warning signs wherever the concentration of power denies citizens the possibility and the means of expressing and acting on their own free will.”

The military horrors of the past — including the wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, among others — have disappeared from history and public memory. Mass shootings can dominate the 24/7 news cycle, while the legacy of state violence against Native Americans, Black people, women and young people is recycled into the memory hole of organized forgetting. Universities are now under siege for their critical functions, young people protesting Israel’s war on Gaza are criminalized, and the discourse of white supremacy is detached from its long legacy of violence in the U.S. As Adam Federman observes, these repressive university policies suggest that, “Colleges are coming to look more like a police state than institutions of higher learning.” Simultaneously, history is invoked by Donald Trump and his followers as something to be reclaimed in order to prevent immigrants from “poisoning the blood” of Americans. This is the language of racial cleansing that was used by Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf and it correlates well with those MAGA followers who believe that only white Christian nationalists qualify as citizens. This is more than nostalgia or being on the wrong side of history; it is what the Frankfurt School theorist Walter Benjamin warned against — the falsification of history “flashing up as a moment of danger on the historical subject.”

In our current era, historical truth is increasingly dismissed under the guise of “protecting” students and the larger public from what right-wing politicians label psychological discomfort. What they miss, of course, is that confronting the truth is more important than feeling uncomfortable. Moreover, when Black students hear about the lynchings, the beatings, the rape of Black women and the rise of a racial carceral state, should they not feel uncomfortable, as well as informed?

This is an era of organized forgetting, manufactured ignorance, and a dangerous assault not just on history and remembrance, but on education itself — much of which in the U.S. is financed by “right-wing think tanks, including the Heritage Foundation, the Manhattan Institute, and Citizens for Renewing America,” as Isaac Kamola points out. The teaching of history has been criminalized, and the truth of history has succumbed to the scourge of white supremacist falsehoods. History has been weaponized in the spirit of Trump’s claims to “Make America Great Again” and as such, has become a vital tool in the effort to reject historical memory and education as a source of public good. The suppression of history is a form of engineered thoughtlessness which condemns people to misery, takes away their sense of agency, undermines any sense of responsibility, eliminates plurality and an ability to think in the space of others. Organized forgetting is a crime against any sense of responsibility, if not the future itself, and creates what Naomi Klein calls “armies of locked-out people, whose services are no longer needed, whose lifestyles are written off as ‘backward,’ whose basic needs go unmet.”

The past now haunts us as a vehicle to reproduce state-sponsored violence. In the U.S., Hungary, India, China and Russia, the repressive methods that prevent students from invoking history, thinking critically and holding dictators accountable are the building bricks of fascism and authoritarianism.

The repressive methods that prevent students from invoking history, thinking critically and holding dictators accountable are the building bricks of fascism and authoritarianism.

Yet, the true power of history lies in its ability to challenge the powerful and provoke critical reflection. A rejection of history as a critical form of historical consciousness was starkly evident in the Trump administration’s 1776 Project, which aimed to downplay the central role of slavery in U.S. history. Today, similar tactics are employed as states ban books, censor critical ideas and erase the long struggles for justice by Black people and other marginalized groups. In these cases, history and memory are reduced to mere therapeutic exercises, cloaked in repressive, anti-intellectual language.

This repression extends beyond the U.S., as seen in Canada’s reluctance to confront the horrors of separating Indigenous children from their families and suppressing their heritage, culture and languages. Educators find themselves increasingly constrained, unable to discuss crucial social issues such as slavery, critical race theory, sexism, ethnic cleansing and colonialism. These subjects are deemed “too uncomfortable,” leading to the censorship of books, attacks on libraries, the silencing of free speech, and the criminalizing of discussions on systemic racism and reproductive rights. In some U.S. states, educators can even face jail time for addressing these topics. In the age of fascist assaults on historical consciousness as a critical faculty, what becomes clear is that authoritarians fear that social responsibility takes place when students develop the historical and critical capacities to reflect on what they are doing. Trump and his sycophantic apostles of ignorance embrace rather than reject James Baldwin’s claim that “ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.”

What the champions of indoctrination know too well is that critical thought (if not thinking itself) is dangerous and often produces a new language, a sense of critical agency and mass resistance. This is one of the reasons that many campuses were turned into essentially police precincts, sites of brutal repression of students protesting Israel’s war on Gaza. Both critical pedagogy and historical consciousness are replaced by acts of violence and repression. History that matters is not just about learning from the past; it is also a lesson in what has to be unlearned. It provides a script in the best sense of daring to think of a future in which history offers clues regarding how to fight, resist and expose injustice while embracing a civic courage that translates into individual and collective action.

The weaponization of psychological discomfort serves to misremember, suppress and render invisible the suffering of innocent people, while shielding the powerful from accountability. This approach to memory work does more than attack history; it signals the death of historical consciousness, truth and critical thinking. The importance of learning from history transcends education, forming the foundation for historically informed and engaged citizens. Without such citizens, democracy cannot survive. Suppressing history leads to moral fatigue and the erosion of social responsibility, reinforced by a dangerous merger of ignorance and thoughtlessness. This is more than a threat to democracy; it is a powerful condition for authoritarianism.

The great philosopher Hannah Arendt reminds us that thoughtlessness and historical amnesia are preconditions for fascism. She writes that “to think always means to think critically. And to think critically is always to be hostile.” History, however disturbing, connects us to past worlds that we must not repeat while offering insights, hope and possibilities for the future. The truth of history and its lessons are essential for fostering individual liberty and freedom of expression. When history is suppressed, societies become vulnerable to manipulation, often resulting in unthinking mobs seeking community through hatred, repression, fear and violence. If this trend continues unchecked, it threatens to replace informed citizens with a populace easily swayed by demagogues, ultimately leading to the demise of democracy itself.

As we mark the 100th anniversary of the birth of the great novelist and activist James Baldwin, it is worth recalling his insistence that we need to grapple with the ghosts of history. Baldwin urged us to engage with history fully, making it instructive for those who often deny its truths and the ways it continues to shape the present. He argued throughout his life that history should always question, challenge the status quo, embrace unflinching truths, and reveal the “untold cruelty that hides in silence.” Baldwin was right in stating that history is more than a narrative of remembrance, it “is literally present in all we do.” For Baldwin, education and history itself were dangerous. He writes:

The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions, to say to himself this is black or this is white, to decide for himself whether there is a God in heaven or not. To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity. But no society is really anxious to have that kind of person around. What societies really, ideally, want is a citizenry which will simply obey the rules of society. If a society succeeds in this, that society is about to perish.

To align history with who we are as socially responsible individuals and as a nation forever in search of democratic ideals, history must be taught and embraced in its fullness — not through the lens of censorship, book burning, indoctrination and manufactured ignorance. History shapes our identity and should be a force for understanding and critical thought, not repression. As historian Timothy Snyder aptly stated, “Everything worth knowing is discomfiting.… Trying to shield young people from guilt prevents them from seeing history for what it was and becoming the citizens they might be.”

History offers students the opportunity to excavate the past, bear witness and speak in defense of those who can no longer speak — the over 40,000 killed in Gaza, the thousands of refugees drowned at sea, the numerous victims of gun violence, the millions lost to unforgivable wars, the young people slandered for standing up for the truth. Classrooms should not reproduce injustices or conceal past betrayals and mass suffering under the guise of historical innocence. Instead, history should provide an unflinching examination of both the ruins and the ideals of a democracy on the march.

As the new school year begins, classrooms should be bastions where critical thinking thrives and ideas are explored freely. Yet, in the face of growing repression and efforts to silence dissent, undermine faculty rights, commodify students and strip education of its role as a democratic public sphere, it is imperative that students, educators, parents and concerned citizens unite in mass resistance.

Young people worldwide are joining movements that redefine education as a place of critical inquiry, academic freedom, and a space that both defends and fosters equality, social and economic justice, and democratic values. This resistance is more urgent than ever. Educators, parents, workers and all who oppose the rise of fascist politics and repressive forms of education at home and abroad, must champion the right to question, protest, challenge, engage in meaningful dialogue and hold authority accountable.

Trump and his sycophantic apostles embrace rather than reject James Baldwin’s claim that “ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.”

For instance, as reported by Inside Higher Education, over 75 chapters of the American Association of University Professors — alongside higher education unions, student groups and student debt organizers — are uniting in a nationwide movement. They’re confronting what they see as coordinated attacks on the integrity of higher education. In a powerful online statement titled, “The Future We Stand For,” they expose the numerous threats facing higher education that jeopardize its public and democratic mission. They write: “State legislatures from Florida to Indiana have targeted public universities in a broader assault on U.S. democracy. Meanwhile, at private universities, unelected trustees, billionaires, and administrators are increasingly wielding unchecked power to dictate policies and academic priorities.”

These assaults have become all too common and must be resisted. By fostering an environment where curiosity is celebrated, critical thinking is nurtured, protests protected and critical pedagogy enacted, we can push back against the forces that seek to stifle intellectual freedom, the radical imagination and the never-ending demand for justice. Let this be a call to action: Resist the narrowing of minds, fight against the censorship of ideas, fight against turning schools into far right indoctrination centers and protect the sanctity of education.

Together, we can ensure that our classrooms remain spaces of empowerment, where every voice has the opportunity to be heard and every mind the chance to grow. A space where education becomes central to politics, and informed citizens and critically engaged agents are viewed as crucial to a socialist democracy.