We Don’t Need No Education
MAGA’s assault on “the heart of the beast”
Teacher, leave them kids alone. Hey! teacher! Leave them kids alone. - Pink Floyd
It’s time to pack your Pepe the Frog lunchbox and hoist the upside-down flag backpack. School, what a waste! Oh, you’d rather read a book than watch a UFC match or reruns of NCIS? Well, you think you’re pretty smart, doncha?
Media Matters has unearthed another JD Vance Weird Podcast Rant (tm). In 2021, the then newly minted Senator from Ohio unleashed the potpourri of batshit crazy we’ve come to expect. He called his fellow female college graduates and professional women miserable, claimed that American boys are “suppressed” in their masculinity, but predicted those boys that “fight monsters” on video games will save us when the Chinese invade.
Buried in that firehose of crazy, Yale Law grad Vance took aim at the American academics that enabled his rise into the elite conservative networks where he is now the pet spewer of what used to be the quiet part:
“There is no way for a conservative to accomplish our vision of society unless we’re willing to strike at the heart of the beast,” he said. “That’s the universities.”
Assaults on education are hallmarks of autocracy. Restricting freedom of thought and treating intellectuals and scientists as dangerous enemies of the power structure are at least as old as Galileo being tried for heresy in the 17th Century by the Catholic Church for the offense of discovering the earth revolves around the sun.
It is an ominous milestone in modern world history too. In the spring of 1933, for example, the Nazis purged one fifth of the academic staff at German universities. Some of them went into exile and continued their careers, others were later murdered or committed suicide. In the 1970s, Chilean dictator Pinochet claimed that universities were hotbeds of Marxism and targeted them for "cleansing," historian Ruth Ben Ghiat wrote recently. “By 1975, 24,000 students, faculty, and staff had been dismissed (and thousands sent to prison), and philosophy and social science departments had been disbanded.”
Hungary’s Viktor Orban, darling of the MAGAverse, besides kicking out the pro-democracy Central European University (CEU left Budapest for Vienna in 2020), is using the law and the state purse to manipulate what Hungarian educators teach.
This trend is not isolated. In June, I participated in a conference of Scholars at Risk, a collaboration of university administrators and educators in the U.S. and Europe who provide jobs and safe haven for academics and researchers in danger of being arrested, jailed or worse by their governments. I met exiled scholars from Afghanistan, Gaza, Russia, Iran, and countries in South America and Africa. The conference was held in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, on the small campus of the European Humanities University. EHU is in exile from its original home as a state university in neighboring Belarus, having been kicked out by the Putin-aligned Aleksandr Lukashenko two decades ago for its democracy-friendly liberal bent.
Scholars at Risk is headquartered at New York University. At the conference, we joked that institutions in the free-er American states might soon have to provide haven to scholars in the MAGAfied regions of our own nation.
If you think it can’t happen here, think again. It is happening now and will ratchet up in Trump II. Vance’s threat is not hollow.
Project 2025 promises that a second Trump administration will abolish the Department of Education, to “get government out of schools” code for letting radically religious or radically racist or radically stupid American parents raise their kids according to whatever they think is true and necessary knowledge. The far-right plan was published by the once country-club conservative, now fully MAGA-fied Heritage Foundation with the assistance of dozens of right wing foundations.
Don the Con may be trying to distance himself from it, but Project 2025’s proposals are clearly Trump 2.0. The foreword opens with a promise to nullify civil service protections, fire 50,000 federal employees and replace them with a list of vetted right wing applicants, tens of thousands of whom have already filled out the required forms. The book-burning troglodytes of the MAGAverse will be just getting started when they fire the civil servants. As Vance promised on the podcast, professors would be next.
Trump laid the groundwork for this game on his way out in 2020. With his unerring instinct for divisiveness, just before Americans voted him out of office, he seized on the pandemic school closing,mask discord, and George Floyd BLM protests to rile up conservative parents.
Months before he lost the election, he formed a “1776 Commission” in response to the New York Times’ 1619 Project — a reading of history which puts slavery as the central, foundational element of the United States. Mainstream historians found some flaws in the Times’ project, but the Trump administration’s 1776 Commission raced to produce an advisory document that went in the other direction, aligned with white Christian nationalist narrative, downplaying the white founders’ abhorrent attitudes toward indigenous, Black and female Americans.
In a terrific article published this weekend, the Washington Post journalist Laurie Meckler investigated how Trump “helped spark a culture war,” with the 1776 Commission. The Commission produced a report on the fly, with the help of radical right wingers brought on board in the very last months of the administration, that advocated using federal power “to define how America’s history is taught,” she wrote. The last-minute sprint to get a document out would have no bearing on the actual Department of Education policies, as it was released a day or two before Biden’s inauguration. Biden shuttered the Commission immediately. But it could and would be used - strategically, deliberately - to inflame culture wars going into the new decade, playing the race card Trump has so deftly deployed.
The document came under immediate and withering attack from mainstream historians, including the American Historical Association, an association of around 11,000 professional historians. A statement co-signed by 47 other history and academic organizations said the report elevated “ignorance about the past to a civic virtue.” It called the discussion of the nation’s founders, for one, “a simplistic interpretation that relies on falsehoods, inaccuracies, omissions, and misleading statements.” Sean Wilentz, a historian at Princeton University who was publicly critical of the 1619 Project, called the 1776 Commission report “a political text,” with elements that are “totally bogus.”
Bogus they are, but the ideas of the 1776 Commission have been disseminated throughout school districts by right wingers who seized control of school boards. Pennridge School Board, in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, for example, was until recently ground zero for Moms for Liberty in the Keystone State. In 2021, the Moms-controlled board hired a consultant linked to Hillsdale College, the Michigan Christian college that was influential in writing the Trump 1776 report. Areas schools soon started teaching the slavery apologetics at the heart of the 1776 Commission’s and secretly banned books.
But, in a sign that bodes well for 2024, Democrats in that largely Republican county mobilized and booted the Moms for Liberty board members last November.
I got a first hand look at what happens when rightists take aim at “the beast” of the universities at the University of Florida during the 22-23 school year. The DeSantis/Tallahassee Republican assault on “woke” campuses was already in full swing when I went to Gainesville to interview professors, administrators, and students. Professors were confused and nervous. Jeffrey Adler, a history professor who specializes in the history of racial violence, said he had considered revising his courses but realized doing so would make it impossible to accurately teach the material. “The notion that I would teach about lynching in ways that didn’t make people sitting there uncomfortable is absurd,” he said. “My job is to make people think about things they don’t want to think about. What’s a neutral attitude toward Hitler? I’ve heard from other professors that they were strongly discouraged from using the phrase ‘social justice’ in syllabi and classroom. This is not Marxist revolution, this is social justice!”
Interestingly, conservative students I met on the Gainesville campus didn’t feel terribly repressed. Before DeSantis’ anti-woke campaign, the campus was hardly unfriendly to the right. White nationalist Richard Spencer and Donald Trump Jr. had both spoken there. Spencer’s visit, soon after the deadly Charlottesville march, brought outrage and police. But Don Junior appeared in 2019 as an invited guest, funded by student fees. The university provided heavy security. Protesters showed up, but the speech went off without incident.
Trump has distanced himself from Project 2025. But his own “Agenda47” is not so very different from the notorious manifesto. “Trump’s Ten Principles for Great Schools leading to Great Jobs” will use federal power to push schools to remove gender discussion, put prayer and jingoism back in school and teach kids that “America is the most virtuous country in the world.”
Sleazewatch
Jarvanka has been laying low with the nannies and kids at the mansion in Miami throughout the campaign. My last sighting of the ‘vanka side of the couple was when she testified at Daddy’s fraud trial in Manhattan last fall. But investigative reporter Mark Hosenball has a story in The New Republic asking why Senate Democrats have still not opened an investigation into the couple’s financial windfalls during and after their time as advisors in the White House. The amount of money (several billion) and the brazen means of raking it in (Trump Hotel, loans from Qatar and nearly $2 billion investment from Gulf Arab leaders shortly after leaving Pennsylvania Avenue) dwarf whatever House Republicans alleged about Hunter Biden. Hosenball got some answers.
And: ever wonder where in Trumpworld gargantuan political donation windfalls like Miriam Adelson’s $100 million end up? One possible answer: Trump criminal and fraud case witnesses are getting paid off bigly, according to this report in Pro Publica
Free Stuff and Promos:
I will be reading from my book The Trump Women Part of the Deal on Tuesday, September 10, at KGB Bar on East 4th Street in New York, with Joe Conason (whose book on conservative con men I reviewed here), as part of their monthly nonfiction reading series. Free, if you’re in the city do drop in.
While I am in the process of recording an audio version of my novel Zero Visibility Possible, you can listen to my recent interview about it on WJFF, Radio Catskill, here.
Finally, as always, I will give a free subscription to The Freakshow to anyone who buys my novel, which is available in paperback or Kindle. Just email me the receipt.
Somehow, Trump figured out there are more willfully ignorant people in America than truth seekers, and taught them how to organize and vote for their own stupidity.
Nina, you’re a(nother) national treasure, like Joyce Vance and Heather Cox Richardson. I always enjoy your erudite scribblings (said very intentionally, as I have no idea how you can produce so much worthwhile and sometimes dense material in such short order).
I’m particularly interested in the intersection of attacks on (public, free, dare I say CLASSICALLY liberal) education and usurpation of the mainstream organized-religious institutions as foundational to autocratic movements. Not to oversimplify, but the NAZI Party in 1930’s Germany had the same goals both in education, as you describe here, and the Christian church. On the religious front, Hitler demanded a pledge of fealty from Protestant church leaders in the early 1930’s, and many of them complied. A few, however, dissented, including prominent scholars and theologians Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Karl Barth. Barth was the primary author, with Bonhoeffer’s support and co-authorship, of the Barmen Declaration in 1934 that rejected Hitler’s attempts to subsume German Protestantism. Barth was native Swiss, and was forced to leave Germany and went on to teach (and write prolifically) at the University of Basel up until his death in 1968. His co-author and friend Dietrich Bonhoeffer stayed in German and was arrested and then put to death by the Nazis.
Fast forward to 2024. Ninety years later, the Barmen Declaration is equally applicable to American religion and politics (for they are one and the same to many Americans) as it was to German in 1934. That is a rather sobering realization.
My father was an educator—university professor, then college administration culminating in University president—and studied with Karl Barth in Basel in 1956-7. I am my father’s son.
Yes, it most definitely can happen here. It’s up to us to make sure that doesn’t happen, just like Bonhoeffer and Barth did 90 years ago. We’ve been warned.