In Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future, American Author Jason Stanley exposes how education, textbooks, and public memory are hijacked to control society. Today, this isn’t theory. Initiatives like Project 2025 lay out detailed plans to reshape education, dismantle public institutions, and hardwire far-right ideology into the nation’s future. It’s a call to arms: understand how education is corrupted, or watch your history, your community, and your freedom get stolen.
Fear the People? Ban the Books!
Let’s get real. The attacks on schools aren’t about “neutrality” or “academic standards.” They are a full-on power play. When far-right politicians scream about “gender ideology” or call universities “factories of leftist indoctrination,” they’re not worried about facts. They’re worried about control. They want men to feel their dominance threatened, women to stop reaching, queer people to stay invisible, and students to stop thinking for themselves. As the book points out, “fascist movements today foment fear among many citizens that if their children learn about critiques of gender normativity… those children will not only empathize but also identify with them.” Empathy? Independent thinking? That’s a threat.
It is not a coincidence that officials like Ron DeSantis pack boards of governors with political loyalists, or that Betsy DeVos and her network push to dismantle public education. The AAUP report on Florida universities makes it clear: these “leaders” care about loyalty to a governor, not the well being of students. And the DeVos family’s libertarian crusade is all about making public systems weak so families and “traditional values” can pick up the pieces, reinforcing old hierarchies under the guise of choice. This is not random that Project 2025 openly outlines a strategy to gut the Department of Education, centralize control, and funnel public dollars into private religious schools, ensuring only one version of history survives. It is the long game: weaken public systems, then rewrite what generations learn.
This is why the first attack is always the books. Knowledge is power. Critical thinking is power. Education that teaches empathy, history, and liberation is dangerous to the authoritarian regime. The moment students start understanding oppression, seeing themselves in history, questioning “natural” hierarchies, that is the moment authoritarianism shakes.
If we do not push back, they will keep rewriting history the way they want, and we will be left out at best and vilified at worst.
Tales of the Tyrant
This fight isn’t just about books. It’s about who gets to be fully human.
“While working to marginalize and devalue queer life,” far right movements use “gender ideology” as a reliable spark to stoke grievance, especially in men, and keep their base enraged. But this is not unique to gender. It is part of a broader authoritarian playbook. These movements lean on racism, xenophobia, antisemitism, Islamophobia, and other manufactured hierarchies to build a clear line between “us” and “them.” They glorify an imagined past where power was absolute and difference was erased. At the same time, they paint equality as chaos, freedom as danger, and justice as a threat. It’s a story designed to turn progress into something to fear.
They tell white people that diversity is a threat. They tell straight men that equality is emasculation. They tell Christians that secularism is persecution. They tell citizens that immigrants are invaders. Each of these narratives is designed to turn fear into loyalty and insecurity into rage. It is not about morality or protecting “values.” By twisting shared power into a threat, they disguise control as protection and domination as stability. It is about control over our culture, bodies, memory, and our future together.
This is why authoritarianism requires defining who belongs and who does not. Once the line is drawn, every policy, textbook, and broadcast reinforces it.
Look at Florida. Ron DeSantis didn’t just ban books. He hijacked universities. “The entire governing structure of the university system was dominated not just by Republicans, but by Republicans loyal to DeSantis.” One faculty member put it clearly: “University presidents are not supposed to be puppets, but this is Florida, and it’s a new time for academia in our state.”
This is authoritarianism in motion. Capture the institutions. Silence the resistance. Rewrite the story.
Indoctrinators, Not Educators
This is nothing new. Carter G. Woodson called it The Mis Education of the Negro in 1933. Nikole Hannah Jones picked up the torch with The 1619 Project. Every time truth is taught, the backlash snaps harder. Because, as scholars remind us, “All education presupposes values, even substantive moral and political ones.” Neutrality has never existed. Pretending otherwise is how oppression hides in plain sight, smiling from behind the podium.
“Like fascist propaganda, it prepares citizens for violence in defense of a leader, an ethnic group, or a religion.” That is the point. It is not just about what they teach. It is about who they want people to become.
Then there is anti education, a quieter but equally violent tactic. “The goal of anti education is not only to render a population ignorant of the surrounding history and problems but also to fracture those citizens into a multitude of different groups with no possibility of communal understanding.” Where fascist education mobilizes people to serve the state or a leader, libertarian inspired anti education dismantles public schools, leaving citizens without the tools to understand, connect, or resist.
Project 2025 is not only about cutting programs. It is about creating an education system designed to fracture democratic solidarity. It imagines schools stripped of critical race theory, gender studies, and even basic historical honesty, replaced with sanitized nationalist narratives that keep people docile, divided, and obedient.
If people cannot imagine a shared world, they cannot organize for one. Divide and rule. A playbook as old as empire. Fascists want to own the house; libertarians want to burn it. Different methods, same target: a public that cannot fight back.
In short, the classroom is a government sanctioned war zone.
They Rewrite. We Remember.
The battle over education is a battle over memory.
Du Bois reminded us: “It was not the Abolitionist alone who freed the slaves.” Enslaved people forced freedom through strikes, escapes, uprisings, and collective power. That truth threatens white innocence. It always has.
That’s why history gets sanded down, rewritten, and repackaged. In 2015, Texas textbooks called enslaved Black Americans “workers.” In 2023, Florida required that students be taught that slavery gave people “skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.” This isn’t bad wording. It’s calculated. A cover up wrapped in a lesson plan.
Unity is a Trap. Compassion is a Weapon.
Unity has been weaponized to demand silence. To make us docile. To tell us that we should all just “get along” while the system erases us. That’s not liberation.
As one scholar puts it, “Compassion is more concrete and a more reasonable expectation to have of people.” Not unity. Not solidarity. Compassion, on the other hand, is active. It requires seeing the world through another’s eyes, feeling their struggle, and refusing to let injustice slide.
“Democracy is an ideal. It is an ideal in which every citizen has political equality rooted in the recognition of all people’s full humanity.”
Weaponized reading isn’t just resistance. It’s survival. It’s a refusal to hand over the story.
If Fascism Starts in the Classroom, so Can the Revolution.
Choose compassion, ditch conformity, and read like your freedom depends on it because it is.
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