From the outset of his second term, President Donald Trump has fed the Constitution through a paper shredder. He has sought to strip away birthright citizenship — a constitutionally guaranteed right under the 14th Amendment — and declared, chillingly, “He who saves his country does not violate any law.” He defied a federal judge’s order to halt a deportation flight, sending immigrants to a notorious prison in El Salvador. His administration is increasingly using federal power to punish political speech, especially in academic spaces. The message being sent is clear: Academic dissent — especially from Muslim and international students — now carries the risk of what one protester called “state-sanctioned political kidnapping.”
Legal scholars have stopped using euphemisms — they now call this a full-blown constitutional crisis. But we must go further to understand the gravity of the moment: These aren’t just signs of constitutional breakdown — they are blaring sirens warning us that fascism is unfolding in real time.
Trump knows the fastest route to authoritarian rule runs through the classroom — that’s why his assault on children, educators and schools has become the wedge he has used to pry open the door of fascism. Transgender students have been singled out for erasure — banned from sports, stripped from curricula, and targeted by policies that force teachers to out them, putting lives at risk. From banning the teaching of race, gender, and colonialism, to threatening to defund any school that includes lessons on systemic oppression, to targeting diversity, equity and inclusion programs, Trump has made it clear: Education must serve the state — not the pursuit of truth.
These aren’t just signs of constitutional breakdown — they are blaring sirens warning us that fascism is unfolding in real time.
In other words, Elon Musk’s gesture at Trump’s inauguration was a chilling statement of the Trump administration’s policy agenda for education and society.
Irony is lost on Trump. He issued an executive order to abolish the Department of Education — a move that would have the effect of eliminating federal civil rights protections for vulnerable students — insisting he wanted to “move education back to the states”; and yet his administration has imposed sweeping top-down censorship, banning entire subjects and demanding loyalty to a federally approved version of history. He has moved to punish universities like Columbia for tolerating pro-Palestinian protests, stripped funding from research institutions, and used executive orders to rewrite curricula. Trump’s assault on education isn’t a distraction — it’s the strategy: the leading edge of enforcing fascism today, and an attempt to indoctrinate the next generation to accept it as normal.
Trump’s assault on education isn’t a distraction — it’s the strategy: the leading edge of enforcing fascism today, and an attempt to indoctrinate the next generation to accept it as normal.
Fascism is sustained not only by violence, but also by the suppression of truth and the control of knowledge. That’s why what I call Trump’s “truthcrime” laws — policies that punish honest teaching about race, gender and history — are foundational to his authoritarian strategy. Philosopher Jason Stanley explains it plainly in Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future: “[F]ascist education works by strategically erasing accounts of history and current events that include a diversity of perspectives, narrowing the scope of what can be taught until students are presented with a single viewpoint, which is formulated specifically to justify and perpetuate a hierarchy of value between groups.” Stanley warns that this narrowing is “inconsistent with multi-racial democracy, antithetical to egalitarianism, and carries the possibility of conjuring mass violence.”
Trump’s education agenda is doing exactly what fascist regimes have always done: narrowing curriculum to a single, state-approved version of history — one where submission is called freedom and dissent is called extremism.
U.S. Education as a Model for Fascism
Long before Trump’s crackdown on honest education, the United States implemented racist schooling policies that helped inspire fascist regimes abroad. In the early 20th century, eugenics — a pseudoscience rooted in white supremacy — was taught in universities and schools and embedded in public policy. It barred reproduction among those labeled “inferior” — specifically Black, Indigenous, disabled, and poor people. More than 20,000 people were forcibly sterilized in California alone. American scientists advised Nazi officials, and Adolf Hitler explicitly cited U.S. eugenics programs as a model for Germany’s racist and antisemitic laws.
Jim Crow schooling was also a fascistic system in practice. It enforced racial hierarchy through segregation, indoctrinated white students with myths of superiority, and denied Black students equal resources and truthful history — all maintained through the law, violence and surveillance.
During World War II, while fighting fascism abroad, the U.S. enacted it at home: 120,000 Japanese Americans were incarcerated in concentration camps where schools worked to erase their cultural identity and enforce patriotic obedience.
After the war, the McCarthy era brought mass firings of educators for suspected leftist ties, while the Lavender Scare targeted LGBTQ+ teachers. These purges mirrored tactics used in Nazi Germany, replacing dissenters with state-aligned loyalists — and the ones being revived by Trump.
Today, almost half of all students in the U.S. go to a school where their teacher is required to lie to them about U.S. history, systemic racism, transgender identity, and oppression.
The threat we face under Trump isn’t a carbon copy of Nazi Germany; we should be wary of simplistic one-to-one comparisons. But we must also reject the false comfort of thinking “it can’t happen here” simply because it doesn’t look identical.
Democrats’ Failure to Defend Education From Fascism
As Trump escalates his assault on public education and civil liberties, the Democratic Party too often resembles a pilot watching the warning lights flash as the plane takes a nosedive but refuses to touch the controls.
Imagine, for example, if the Democratic Party establishment had used its vast resources to support the annual National Day of Action to Teach Truth — a grassroots campaign started in 2021 and led by educators and students to defend the right to teach honest history. Book bans are deeply unpopular across party lines. If Democratic leaders had supported the #TeachTruth movement, they could have brought millions to the streets in defense of antiracist education.
But they didn’t.
Why? Because, like the GOP, the Democratic Party relies heavily on funding from billionaires and corporate donors who are deeply invested in keeping young people ignorant of the realities of racism, capitalism and oppression. These donors don’t want students learning about how power works — they want students trained to serve it. As Diane Ravitch, the renowned education historian and former U.S. assistant secretary of education, has pointed out, the loudest liberal oligarchs lost their voices when public education came under attack:
Other prominent absentees from the [critical race theory (CRT)]-censorship-book banning controversy were the billionaires who usually are verbose about what schools and teachers should be doing.
Where was Bill Gates? Although rightwing wing-nuts attacked Bill Gates for spreading CRT, Gates said nothing to defend schools and teachers against the attacks on them. He is not known for shyness. He uses his platform to declaim his views on every manner of subject. Why the silence about teaching the nation’s history with adherence to the truth? Why no support for courageous teachers who stand up for honesty in the curriculum?
Many Democrats have been complicit in the very truthcrime laws they claim to oppose. Some have remained silent while these laws passed. Others weakened opposition or even voted to support curriculum bans.
“I get frustrated with the Democrats’ lack of movement, to be quite transparent,” Revida Rahman, a Brentwood, Tennessee, mother of two and cofounder of the racial equity group One WillCo, told The Washington Post. “I think the other side has an engine that is always moving. They have a playbook. They’re playing chess, and we’re playing Go Fish or something.”
A Strategy to Defeat Fascism: Social Justice Unionism
We must be clear about what we’re up against. Trump’s so-called director of government efficiency Musk recently reposted a message saying, “Hitler didn’t murder millions of people. Public sector employees did,” and he’s not just trolling. He’s broadcasting the authoritarian worldview of this administration: that public workers and teachers are the enemy, that the state must be purged of dissent, and that history must be rewritten to serve the powerful.
But we are not powerless. In Washington, D.C., when federal agents recently attempted to detain a health care worker at H.D. Cooke Elementary School during morning arrival, school staff intervened. They followed legal guidance, demanded a warrant, and refused to let the agents proceed unchecked. The agents ultimately left without making an arrest. In a moment of rising authoritarianism, educators and school workers modeled exactly what resistance can look like: collective and principled defiance of unjust authority.
Rising fascism has always been connected to attacks on education — and these attacks were only reversed when people collectively built resistance.
Rising fascism has always been connected to attacks on education — and these attacks were only reversed when people collectively built resistance. For example, it wasn’t powerful people or elite institutions that broke McCarthy-era repression — it was the civil rights movement. Through grassroots organizing, people realized they weren’t alone and found the courage to defy repressive laws. When Black communities and their allies lost their fear of being labeled “communist,” they became willing to fill the jails to win their freedom and ultimately toppled Jim Crow.
Today, the idea of a new mass rebellion against injustice can feel distant. But history reminds us not to mistake relative calm for consent. Just months before igniting one of the most consequential movements in U.S. history, Rosa Parks told fellow organizers at the Highlander Folk School she didn’t believe anything big would happen in Montgomery, Alabama. Parks worried her city was too “complacent,” that Black residents “wouldn’t stand together.” Still, she returned home committed to doing what she could: working with young people, encouraging them to join the NAACP, and reminding them of their right to freedom. Thankfully, Parks continued her freedom work even when change seemed unlikely — and in doing so, helped spark a movement that changed the world.
The conditions may feel bleak today, but there is power hidden in our ranks — and precedent on our side.
The good news? Education is the most unionized sector of labor in the country— and when educators unite with social movements, they can become the earthquake that shakes the pillars of this brittle empire. The Red State Revolt showed what’s possible: Teachers in GOP-controlled states walked out of classrooms, shut down school systems, and forced Republican governors to raise wages and increase education funding. That same model of social justice unionism — grassroots, bottom-up and unapologetically bold — is exactly what’s needed now.
All of us must work to build social movements that use the power of protest to disrupt narratives that dehumanize people — and we must also work to use the power of labor to shut down any institution or corporation that profits from oppression or imposes silence where there should be truth.
There is no major political party coming to save us. With migrant children illegally being separated from the parents, hundreds of students being threatened with deportation, and honest education being banned from the classroom, it’s time for our unions to build escalating campaigns with political demands for justice. If those demands aren’t met, our unions — those representing educators but also auto workers, baristas, fulfillment center workers, dock workers, and more — must prepare to use the economic power of the strike to challenge those who criminalize truth, punish solidarity and legislate hate.
We can’t allow fascism to disguise itself as “local control,” “parental rights,” or “curriculum transparency.” It’s time to organize — and teach — like freedom depends on it, because it does.
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We’ve borne witness to a chaotic first few months in Trump’s presidency.
Over the last months, each executive order has delivered shock and bewilderment — a core part of a strategy to make the right-wing turn feel inevitable and overwhelming. But, as organizer Sandra Avalos implored us to remember in Truthout last November, “Together, we are more powerful than Trump.”
Indeed, the Trump administration is pushing through executive orders, but — as we’ve reported at Truthout — many are in legal limbo and face court challenges from unions and civil rights groups. Efforts to quash anti-racist teaching and DEI programs are stalled by education faculty, staff, and students refusing to comply. And communities across the country are coming together to raise the alarm on ICE raids, inform neighbors of their civil rights, and protect each other in moving shows of solidarity.
It will be a long fight ahead. And as nonprofit movement media, Truthout plans to be there documenting and uplifting resistance.
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