Trump’s War on Memory and
Education
Fascism does not only occupy institutions; it occupies
memory and views education as a battleground. It dictates what is remembered
and what is silenced, ensuring that alternative visions of history and
democracy cannot take root. What must be
grasped, if fascism is to be resisted, is that it is not merely a political
order but as Ergin
Yildizoglu notes is a pedagogical regime, a machinery of teaching and
unlearning, of shaping consciousness itself through aesthetics, media, and the
algorithmic reach of artificial intelligence. Its pedagogy is one of
domination: it scripts emotions, dictates values, and implants narratives that
define who must be hated, who must be forgotten, and who must remain invisible.
Fascism does more than capture the state; it colonizes
language, memory, and identity. It erases the past by silencing historical
memory, narrows the horizons of imagination, and drains public life of critical
vitality. It produces subjects who are loyal not to truth but to power,
obedient not to conscience but to command. This is the ultimate aim of
pedagogical terrorism: not only to militarize the state, knowledge, and values,
but to also militarize the mind. By narrowing what can be said, remembered, or imagined,
it criminalizes dissent and turns language itself into an arsenal of cruelty.
Under Trump, fascism is not only a militarized spectacle, it is a model of war.
If fascism is not only a government, a form of gangster capitalism, but also a
culture, the fight against it must not only be economic, ideological, but also
pedagogical space where education becomes central to politics and culture
speaks to individuals in a language in which they can both recognize themselves
and organize into a mass movement.
As Antonio
Gramsci, in the Prison Notebooks, reminded us, “all politics is
pedagogical.” If fascism teaches fear, cruelty, and obedience, then resistance
must teach solidarity, critical memory, and the courage to imagine a different
future. Against fascism’s pedagogy of dispossession, we must cultivate a
pedagogy of liberation—one that expands the field of the possible, restores the
dignity of memory, and reclaims language as a weapon for democracy rather than
domination.
Democracy cannot survive without
memory or it runs the risk of turning itself into an authoritarian state. It
requires citizens to confront injustice, to learn from the crimes of the past,
and to imagine futures that do not repeat them. William
Faulkner’s warning still resonates: “The past is never dead. It’s not even
past.” In America today, history
itself has become a battleground. The ghosts of slavery, Jim Crow, and white
supremacy remain with us, shaping institutions and social life. As Angela
Davis reminds us, we live with these ghosts every day. The real question is
whether we choose to acknowledge them, or to erase them. For when a society
turns away from its own horrors and promotes forms of historical amnesia, what
kind of culture is normalized? What political order emerges from the silence of
forgetting? Under Trump, we have already been given a terrifying answer: a
society organized around violence: against immigrants, Black people, youth,
students, dissidents, women, the unhoused, and all those who fail the regime’s
loyalty test to white Christian nationalism.
As sociologist Zygmunt
Bauman observed, our times are not marked simply by the fading of collective
memory, but by “the aggressive assault on whatever memory remains.” That
assault takes the form of book bans, censorship, intimidation of educators, and
the replacement of critical history with patriotic myth. Kimberlé
Crenshaw has noted that the panic over “critical race theory” was never
about pedagogy, it was an attempt to whitewash slavery and racism from the
national narrative. The suppression of historical memory produces not only
ignorance but moral paralysis. As Robert Jay Lifton
warned, erasure of the past creates a psychic numbing, a diminished capacity to
feel and act against injustice. Forgetting is never neutral. It is a political
strategy. Under the Trump regime it has become a central element in a war
against democracy, informed citizens, the truth, and rationality. Put bluntly,
it has become a central tool in the weaponization against literacy, knowledge,
consciousness, and critical agency.
This is domestic terrorism,
rooted not only in incendiary words but in their violent translation into state
policy. It is the organized weaponization of fear, the calculated deployment of
intimidation and cruelty to hollow out democratic life and silence dissent. It
is a deliberate assault on citizens, on institutions, and on every idea that
refuses to bow before authoritarian power. As John Ganz
observes, under Trump, citizenship ceases to be an inalienable right; it
becomes a conditional prize, a privilege dispensed at will. In Trump’s hands,
it is both gift and bludgeon, “a transferable and revocable commodity,”
bestowed on the loyal and withheld or revoked from the condemned. Wielded as a
threat, it enables the regime to deport, to banish, to resurrect the ancient
horror of statelessness, expelling individuals not only from the nation but
from humanity itself. In this sense, Ganz is right: Trump’s assault on
citizenship is not merely reactionary; it bears the unmistakable mark of
fascism, the totalitarian logic that decides who counts as human and who may be
erased.
Appropriating Achille Mbembe’s
notion of necropolitics, domestic
terrorism is where political power thrives by reducing human life to
disposable, expendable objects. Under the Trump regime, this takes the form of
a violent, racialized project that merges capital accumulation with the
subjugation of marginalized groups. His policies—driven by a toxic mix of
racial hierarchy, xenophobia, and the celebration of violent histories—create a
society where certain lives are deemed unworthy of protection or consideration.
This regime operates on a death drive, relentlessly attempting to eliminate
both the lives and futures of those who resist or defy its vision. In this
environment, the space for dissent shrinks, historical amnesia thrives, leaving
only room for those willing to submit to the dominance of a fascist,
authoritarian regime.
This war on memory is not just
theoretical; it takes concrete form in the attacks on institutions that hold
our collective history. Under Donald Trump and the MAGA movement, memory, let
alone history itself, is under siege. What we face is not neglect but an
orchestrated assault fueled by a systemic violence
of forgetting, and the whitewashing of the past that echoes the darkest
traditions of fascism. For Trump, any reckoning with slavery, Jim Crow, or the
long arc of racial violence is treated as an unforgivable stain on America’s
story. Equally intolerable are the histories of resistance, by workers, Black
communities, women, immigrants, and LGBTQ people, all of which he and his
allies disparage as “woke” ideology. As
journalist Dean Blundell recently observed, “In recent days, he has
attacked the Smithsonian Institution as ‘out of control,’ insisting its museums
focus too much on ‘how bad slavery was.’ His administration has ordered a
120-day review of eight Smithsonian museums and hinted that funding could be
used as leverage to ‘get the woke out.’ The message lands with the subtlety of
a hammer: make the story brighter, or else. This is not a debate about one
label or a curatorial tone. It’s an attempt to police memory.” The policing of
history is not incidental; it is central to Trump’s
authoritarian project and nowhere is this clearer than in his attack on the
Smithsonian.
Censoring the Smithsonian
In March 2025, Trump signed an executive
order targeting the Smithsonian Institution, declaring its exhibits were
corrupted by “improper ideology.” Trump argued that the “Smithsonian museums
were ‘out
of control’ and “painted the country in a negative light, including about
slavery.” The language of the order feigned neutrality, but the intent was
unmistakably authoritarian: to sanitize the nation’s cultural memory. For
Trump, As the White House “focused on seven museums for their exhibits and
messaging,” the chilling effect was immediate. References to Trump’s two
impeachments quietly vanished from an exhibit on the “Limits of Presidential
Power.” What had been a straightforward record of checks on executive abuse was
erased in real time, as though history itself could be made to serve the whims
of power.
This was no isolated act of
censorship. Trump has repeatedly sought to bend the past to his will, recasting
the violent January 6th insurrectionists as “hostages,” stripping diversity and
equity programs of content that celebrated Black history, and encouraging
allies to push bills that would defund schools for teaching that the nation’s
founding documents were entangled with slavery. The thread binding these
assaults together is clear: the authoritarian logic of erasure. Memory is to be
disciplined, history domesticated, truth is subordinated to the spectacle of Trump’s political theater.
What is at stake is not simply the content of museum exhibits or school
curricula, it is whether democracy itself can survive without an honest
reckoning with its past. As history warns us, fascist regimes--from Hitler’s
book burnings to Franco’s cultural purges--have always begun their reign of
terror by waging war on memory. The thread uniting these efforts is the logic
of erasure: history must serve power, never truth.
From Nazi Germany to Trump’s
America
The Trump
era’s assault on memory recalls, in chilling ways, the memory politics of Nazi
Germany. In 1933, Nazi officials staged massive book burnings, consigning
to the flames the works of Jewish authors, feminists, Marxists, and anyone
deemed “un-German.” These were not just acts of censorship, they were
spectacles of purification. Fire was the ritual through which dissent was
eradicated and mythic unity forged. Schools and universities were purged of
Jewish and oppositional voices, textbooks rewritten, and history recast as
propaganda for the racial state.
The United States has not
replicated those bonfires, but the spirit is unmistakable. Books by Toni
Morrison, James Baldwin, and Margaret Atwood are being pulled from libraries.
Governors stage press events around banned books, turning censorship into
political theater. Viral videos of parents denouncing “divisive concepts” in
classrooms circulate widely, feeding the illusion that banning history is an
act of protection.
The attack on the Smithsonian, the banning of books, the
silencing of universities, and the stigmatization of “woke” as a code word for
racial justice and historical truth all make visible how white supremacy fuels
the cleansing project of authoritarianism. The assault on memory and historical
consciousness connects strongly with a wider pedagogy of repression and the
attempts on the part of MAGA ideologues to turn public and higher education
into crude laboratories of indoctrination. In one particular instance, this project takes a particularly grotesque form, as with
Oklahoma’s Ryan
Walters requiring applicants from “liberal states” to pass an anti-woke
test before teaching. These assaults on memory are also an assault on critical
thinking, critical pedagogy, and civic literacy. It is crucial to view them as
anything but isolated. They are part of a systematic effort to weaponize
education, culture, and memory to manufacture a fascist subject, passive,
obedient, and stripped of critical thought. Primo
Levi warned that “wherever you begin by denying the fundamental liberties of
mankind and equality among people, you move towards the concentration camp
system.” Forgetting, he argued, is the first step toward barbarism. The
lesson of Nazi Germany is that erasing memory is not collateral to
authoritarianism, it is central to it.
Conclusion: The burden of memory and the centrality of
education to politics
At the
heart of Trump’s war on memory lies an act of pedagogical terror, a
poisoning of history and the transformation of culture into a blunt instrument
of indoctrination. To resist this death of memory is to recognize that the
fight for democracy cannot be separated from the fight over history, over
culture, and over the economic forces that shackle both under gangster
capitalism. To defend truth is to defend freedom; to erase history is to pave
the road to authoritarianism. Trump’s censorship of the Smithsonian, his bans
on books, and his whitewashing of slavery are not mere cultural disputes. They
are weapons aimed at the very life of democracy. Culture is never simply a
mirror of society; it is a battlefield that shapes how we imagine the world and
our place within it. In a time when neoliberalism and fascism bleed into each
other, culture becomes the decisive ground where narratives of domination
collide with possibilities of resistance. Authoritarians seek to turn it into a
machinery of obedience, silencing dissent and numbing consciousness. Yet
culture also holds the fragile, indispensable power to ignite memory, nourish
critical thought, and keep alive the hope of resistance.
At the heart of this project
lies a war over culture and consciousness. Antonio
Gramsci, in the Prison Notebooks, warned that every political struggle is
also a struggle over pedagogy, over who shapes the common sense of a society. Paulo
Freire reminded us that education is never neutral--it either nurtures
liberation or reinforces domination. Trump’s pedagogy of repression seeks
nothing less than a populace severed from memory, stripped of critical thought,
and rendered compliant to authoritarian power. What is at stake is not simply
the narcotic of censorship and erasure, but the calculated use of state
terrorism to fashion a fascist subject, anti-intellectual, morally hollow,
obedient to authority, and emptied of democratic agency. The United States has
become a warfare state, where the instruments of militarization and the
machinery of control no longer remain at the edges of empire but are turned
inward, disciplining culture, stifling memory, and colonizing everyday life
under the banner of “law and order.” What once was unleashed abroad in the name
of empire now circulates within, producing citizens as enemies and culture
itself as a battlefield. War should be a warning; under Trump it has become
theater, a grotesque spectacle where cruelty parades as civic virtue.
If democracy is to endure,
memory must be defended with the same ferocity as freedom itself. Yet
remembrance alone is not enough. What is required is a critical culture that
binds past and present, a pedagogy that transforms historical consciousness
into collective action. The ghosts of Auschwitz, of Jim Crow, of January 6th,
remain with us, not as abstractions but as urgent reminders of the abyss that
awaits when memory is erased. Our responsibility is to teach, to narrate, and
to reimagine, so that memory itself becomes an act of resistance. Only by
turning remembrance into struggle can we block the return of barbarism and
reclaim democracy as a living, unfinished experiment in freedom. Only through
mass movements of organized resistance can we dismantle the machinery of
ignorance, disposability, and death that now threatens the remnants of American
democracy.
In the end, culture remains the
decisive ground where radical democracy either withers under authoritarian rule
or is reborn as the terrain of resistance and hope. What is clear is that the
Trump regime does not merely flirt with fascism, it embodies it, hurling the
United States over the abyss. And that abyss stretches far beyond American
borders. Trump arms Netanyahu, an indicted war criminal who wages genocide
against the Palestinian people with impunity; he aligns himself with dictators
like Russia’s Vladimir Putin, India’s Narendra Modi, Argentina’s Javier Gerardo
Milei, El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, and others who traffic in repression,
violence, and cruelty. The warfare state is drenched in blood. Resistance is no
longer a choice; it is a necessity that sears the conscience, demanding action.
Charlotte Delbo, an Auschwitz
survivor, pleaded in A Prayer to the Living to Forgive Them for Being Alive:
“You who are passing by, I beg you, do something…to justify your
existence…because it would be too senseless after all for so many to have died
while you live doing nothing with your life.” Her words reverberate through
time, transcending the horrors of a specific moment in history, and call us to
a moral reckoning we cannot ignore. The choice before us is unambiguous:
silence or resistance, complicity or memory, barbarism or democracy. The weight
of this decision cannot be overstated. The time to act is now, for what is at
stake is not just our collective humanity, but the very survival of democracy
itself.
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