Great review Ruth.. Interesting that in Italy during the fascist regime one had to join the Party to advance careers.. I’m going out on a limb here but will a membership in MAGA be a requirement to get a job or advance in your career? Best to all.
“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. That’s the universities.”
The trashing of books at New College and the "banning" of "diversity equity and inclusion or critical race theory rhetoric" is bad enough. but the training videos put out by Project 2025 talk about the "eradication" of such words. That's exterminist language, and one might well paraphrase the German poet Heinrich Heine: "Where words are eradicated, eventually they will eradicate people.."
So, we now have a Supreme Court in which the majority subscribes to an ideology that precludes societal change, and the reactionaries now want an educational system that does the same.
Ruth, you and other scholars who are actively opposing this trend are doing the most vital work imaginable.
I doubt I will be awake to listen to your interview with Jason Stanley, but will try to wake up for it. I am glad that you have these interviews though, and can look forward to your videos, if I am not able to wake up for them. I have been spending my weekend reading Project 2025 Chapter 5. Department of Homeland Security for my Democrats Abroad book club discussion this week, and planning various election activities with my DA local and regional chapters. We are in crunch time to get more people who live abroad signed up to vote and informed on how to vote from abroad. One of the things I was doing was looking at Lincoln Project videos which talk about Project 2025, and at the same time states that are already implementing them. Here is this newer one called State Line. https://youtu.be/3FGIyxhGkvo?si=qs2zxTv7yCexUugg
I had noticed that Education is going the route of fascism. I need to give a short speech at a rally we are holding for democracy this month on Project 2025, and I was thinking about the effects on college students because of the lack of funding. Still from the cradle the the grave, Project 2025 has something to harm everyone be it no child care, no federal funding of public education, no government backed college loans, no grants for states that protect immigrant or abortion rights, no medicare, no medicaid, no veterans benefits, no health insurance if you have pre-existing conditions, no birth control or IVF, or government jobs without loyalty oaths, no ........
Pro-family not supporting IVF to create families and forcing women to carry pregnancies that will kill them, so their other children will be motherless. I'm thinking that if a woman can't have babies, the idea would be that her husband should find a new wife, and then there would be even more cat ladies… Clearly love is not in their vocabulary or experience. Definitely complete BS.
Actually, if you read the Health and Human Services section which I mention above, it is very inhumane to dads too. If they mess up, with the rules, they are out, which belies their claims that dads are important in children's lives. If that were the case, they would get more chances to do right.
My head is spinning. Actually, this afternoon I listened to what Ali Velshi had to say about the chapter on HUD, and I'm actually thinking about trying to read it.
Yes. So far, of all of the chapters we have read and discussed so far, which is about 1/3 of them, I think that HHS is one that is very all encompassing and explains a lot of the reproductive health plans as well as health plans. All of them will effect everyone, but perhaps if you are retired and your family is super wealthy you might not think the education chapter effects you, though it certainly does, because that is just one of the ways in which we get turned into a third world country, but the HHS is another one of those. The more you read of them the more you notice themes. However, while other chapters have discussed undoing all that Biden has done, some also include Obama, and the chapter on HHS goes back as far as Roosevelt to undo programs that help Americans to live better lives and to have more of a safety net. Once you download the document, you can just look at the index on the side an click on the chapter you want to read. This week we will be discussing Homeland Security, which I finished reading and taking notes on yesterday.
Linda, I downloaded it a long time ago, and appreciate that the index is actually clickable. Even though I don't always get very far in my reading, the theme I've noticed very clearly throughout, is take from the poor so the rich can have more. That shows up early on in the HUD chapter. I will also try to check out HHS.
I meant to include in what I said that even though I am long retired, I do understand how important education is. I am married to a retired high school math and physics teacher (who was also a girls soccer coach), and I have seen a lot of times when former students were really happy to see him. I am also one who has remained interested in learning, so I appreciate both books, and people who contribute to my education. Any country does better when people are educated - that's what allows a country to move forward, instead of collapsing back into the past.
Also, for fathers, whom they claim are so important. If absent, they will be forced into fathering classes the content of which is not explained. There is some unclearly explained plan to force them to pay for their children from some automatic app they will be forced to have on their phones. If they do not live up to the father code expected of them, they will lose all rights to their children. In fact, there is not a lot of reason for men or women to know how to parent given their plans. They seem to want to turn the Department of Health and Human Services into the Department of Life, or something like that. I have renamed that section The Department of Unhealthiness and Inhumanity.
Project 2025: screwing you from cradle to grave. Would make a great meme, thank you.
On another note, thank you for your work for Democrats Abroad. This past Friday, Joyce Vance interviewed Democrats Abroad (for paying Substack members only), who stated that of the 6.5 million American citizens of voting age living abroad, only 1.25 million are registered.
If you are a US citizen living abroad that has not yet registered for November you can get information at VoteFromAbroad.org and FVAP.gov.
Hi Ellen, I thought Joyce Vance did a great job of laying things out and shared it with my regional chapter. Apparently Jessica Craven's Substack also carried news about us, and she will be one of the hosts of an online call for Harris-Walz for Democrats Abroad that has celebrities and political speakers this Wednesday. https://www.democratsabroad.org/americansabroad-for-harris-walz
Thank you for all the work you do, Linda. I'm impressed that you and your book club are continuing with Project 2025. I've read enough to know that I can't deal with trying to read any more of it. That takes more energy than I have.
Another thing that's been on my mind in this regard has to do with the need to mythologize history. If you are not permitted to explore the systemic nature of racism (for example, why median Black family wealth is 1/7 that of Whites), in the end the only place left to go is to find Blacks somehow inferior. And then to build a mythologized case for that.
I translated a really awful history book for use in Nazi Austria that was nothing but a justification of Aryan superiority and history as mythology culminating in the great Fuehrer. We're nowhere near that yet, but if a country cannot look at itself honestly and seeks scapegoats, that is a conceivable endpoint.
That picture is so distressing. It represents so many lost pleasures and unfulfilled dreams. How can anyone be so short sighted and selfish. These people are in the minority and holding these gross actions over the majority. Very sad and makes me emotional.
Destroying libraries is awful. I don't remember the libraries at my junior high or high school, but I remember the elementary school library pretty well, even though it was more than 65 years ago. I got to choose what I wanted to read and remember enjoying biographies of George Washington Carver and Booker T. Washington among others. That library was a happy place for me, and I would like to see libraries remain that way for other students.
You are welcome, MaryBeth. I didn't say this in my comment, but I will always have a soft heart for librarians, because the librarian in my elementary school was the only person I met as a child who clearly saw me as a human being. IMO librarians are very important people.
Education is the bane of MAGAts and other fascists and fanatics. Ignorance and propaganda are the coins of the realm. Informed citizens pose a threat to demagogues of any color, especially orange.
This reader is very much looking forward to Jason Stanley's new book, "Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future" (Sept. 10), and Timothy Snyder's latest, "On Freedom" (Sept. 17). Curiously, neither The New York Times nor The Washington Post included them in their currently published lists of what's best to read this fall in general or September in particular. Glaring omissions.
At least one thing is for sure: Americans who most need the knowledge contained in "Erasing History" and "On Freedom" won't be seeking it. They'll be too busy attending Trump rallies, intimidating school boards, attempting to ban books and, in other ways large and small, seeking to end our democracy.
The suppression of education and the burning of books indeed is a support for autocracy, but it is also a celebration of ignorance and cruelty. Such autorcracies have limited political shelf lives due to their problem of maintaining legitimacy with both rule and succession during inevitable infighting and paranoia when in power, and coping with a typically stubborn and wary civil society that keeps coming up with opposing ideas and new ways of thinking, the pillar of which is our educational system.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat: All those orphans in the dipsey-dumpster, those beautiful books. I feel like climbing in and rescuing them all: Tossing them in the bed of a pickup truck, nestling each book, giving it a home, and reading and marking it, particularly noting passages that brought fear to the fluttering heart of the obscurantist, Rick De Santis.
Trump tariffs are a very regressive hidden tax impacting most heavily those least able to pay & his proposed tariffs could lead to the worst global trade war since the Great Depression.
Trump’s planned tax cut would provide far more benefit to the affluent than to everyone else. Those in the top 1 percent would get a $70,350 reduction in their tax burdens and those in the top 0.1 percent would get $278,240. Those with income in lowest 4 quintiles are net losers under Trump which explains why Trump considers his blue collar supporters basement dwellers & losers.
Brad DeLong an economist at Berkeley: Trump tariffs and mass deportation taken together would be the largest adverse supply shock ever inflicted on the American economy. They would in all likelihood generate a combination of inflation and depression America has never before seen. Our macroeconomic troubles would dwarf anything we saw in the 1970s or at any other time.
If Trump carries through his promise to cut off funding to schools that keep their vaccine mandates. The consequences? “Dead children & contagious classrooms” Theda Skocpol, a professor of government and sociology at Harvard, wrote.
Life to sociopathic parasites like tRump is nothing more than a game of dominance and submission. It's animal world cruelty of predator and prey. Everything he does is based on this concept, including tariffs and taxes.
Fascists are fascinated with the monarchies of the past because it suits their distorted view of society. They want to dredge up this ancient thinking and use it in our modern era.
Thank you very much for this, Ruth. It's a very insightful, informative piece.
My husband and I went on a Danube cruise in May with UCLA alumni and a Smithsonian group. We had history professors on board who provided wonderful lectures. The UCLA professor, Dr. Teofilo Ruiz, was with us. He's a wonderful man and is so knowledgeable.
When we were in Budapest and other parts of Hungary, we learned that people there are discouraged from learning English. Also, there is so much misinformation happening. A Hungarian tour guide told one of our UCLA alumni travelers named Joe that the US had nuclear weapons in Poland that they were about to use in Hungary. She also thought Putin was the good guy and Zelynsky was the bad guy. Joe had a respectful conversation with her and pointed out her misconceptions. However, she didn't believe what he was saying. It was very sad.
The best propaganda replaces reality with a new reality, one that few can escape, even with corrective information (the backfire effect). Strangely, this effect dominates those on the right but few on the left.
All this brouhaha over parents deciding school curricula - especially book banning - it is important to remember that the authors of the Bible were predominantly Jews and people of color … and that the hero of the New Testament defied Jewish tradition (and Talmudic law) by never marrying.
As for Florida and its repressive laws, I have to wonder how many colleges outside the state, are willing to matriculate students lacking even a basic education?
Thank you for once again outlining the progression of authoritarian policies in our educational systems. How to counteract these trends? Is politically organized opposition to authoritarian leaders our first step?
I'm so happy to hear your interview with Jason Stanley tonight!
I congratulate all those in Florida who would struggle against the authoritarian influences there.
Great review Ruth.. Interesting that in Italy during the fascist regime one had to join the Party to advance careers.. I’m going out on a limb here but will a membership in MAGA be a requirement to get a job or advance in your career? Best to all.
That’s a legit question, not really going out on a limb at all.
It will.
that's being floated for civil servants already in Project 2025
What repression of dissent in the universities does is render society brittle because it becomes unable to change. There is an interesting quote from JD Vance at the end of a Guardian article (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/aug/31/jd-vance-podcast-feminism-immigration):
“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. That’s the universities.”
The trashing of books at New College and the "banning" of "diversity equity and inclusion or critical race theory rhetoric" is bad enough. but the training videos put out by Project 2025 talk about the "eradication" of such words. That's exterminist language, and one might well paraphrase the German poet Heinrich Heine: "Where words are eradicated, eventually they will eradicate people.."
So, we now have a Supreme Court in which the majority subscribes to an ideology that precludes societal change, and the reactionaries now want an educational system that does the same.
Ruth, you and other scholars who are actively opposing this trend are doing the most vital work imaginable.
Thanks!
At least they were kind/clueless enough to put in multiple links to your books so that more people can read your wonderful writing.
Any decent person would read Ruth's profile as a list of worthy accomplishments. These people are nuts.
haha I know
I doubt I will be awake to listen to your interview with Jason Stanley, but will try to wake up for it. I am glad that you have these interviews though, and can look forward to your videos, if I am not able to wake up for them. I have been spending my weekend reading Project 2025 Chapter 5. Department of Homeland Security for my Democrats Abroad book club discussion this week, and planning various election activities with my DA local and regional chapters. We are in crunch time to get more people who live abroad signed up to vote and informed on how to vote from abroad. One of the things I was doing was looking at Lincoln Project videos which talk about Project 2025, and at the same time states that are already implementing them. Here is this newer one called State Line. https://youtu.be/3FGIyxhGkvo?si=qs2zxTv7yCexUugg
I had noticed that Education is going the route of fascism. I need to give a short speech at a rally we are holding for democracy this month on Project 2025, and I was thinking about the effects on college students because of the lack of funding. Still from the cradle the the grave, Project 2025 has something to harm everyone be it no child care, no federal funding of public education, no government backed college loans, no grants for states that protect immigrant or abortion rights, no medicare, no medicaid, no veterans benefits, no health insurance if you have pre-existing conditions, no birth control or IVF, or government jobs without loyalty oaths, no ........
Pro-family without supporting families. So complete BS.
Pro-family not supporting IVF to create families and forcing women to carry pregnancies that will kill them, so their other children will be motherless. I'm thinking that if a woman can't have babies, the idea would be that her husband should find a new wife, and then there would be even more cat ladies… Clearly love is not in their vocabulary or experience. Definitely complete BS.
Actually, if you read the Health and Human Services section which I mention above, it is very inhumane to dads too. If they mess up, with the rules, they are out, which belies their claims that dads are important in children's lives. If that were the case, they would get more chances to do right.
My head is spinning. Actually, this afternoon I listened to what Ali Velshi had to say about the chapter on HUD, and I'm actually thinking about trying to read it.
Yes. So far, of all of the chapters we have read and discussed so far, which is about 1/3 of them, I think that HHS is one that is very all encompassing and explains a lot of the reproductive health plans as well as health plans. All of them will effect everyone, but perhaps if you are retired and your family is super wealthy you might not think the education chapter effects you, though it certainly does, because that is just one of the ways in which we get turned into a third world country, but the HHS is another one of those. The more you read of them the more you notice themes. However, while other chapters have discussed undoing all that Biden has done, some also include Obama, and the chapter on HHS goes back as far as Roosevelt to undo programs that help Americans to live better lives and to have more of a safety net. Once you download the document, you can just look at the index on the side an click on the chapter you want to read. This week we will be discussing Homeland Security, which I finished reading and taking notes on yesterday.
Linda, I downloaded it a long time ago, and appreciate that the index is actually clickable. Even though I don't always get very far in my reading, the theme I've noticed very clearly throughout, is take from the poor so the rich can have more. That shows up early on in the HUD chapter. I will also try to check out HHS.
I meant to include in what I said that even though I am long retired, I do understand how important education is. I am married to a retired high school math and physics teacher (who was also a girls soccer coach), and I have seen a lot of times when former students were really happy to see him. I am also one who has remained interested in learning, so I appreciate both books, and people who contribute to my education. Any country does better when people are educated - that's what allows a country to move forward, instead of collapsing back into the past.
Also, for fathers, whom they claim are so important. If absent, they will be forced into fathering classes the content of which is not explained. There is some unclearly explained plan to force them to pay for their children from some automatic app they will be forced to have on their phones. If they do not live up to the father code expected of them, they will lose all rights to their children. In fact, there is not a lot of reason for men or women to know how to parent given their plans. They seem to want to turn the Department of Health and Human Services into the Department of Life, or something like that. I have renamed that section The Department of Unhealthiness and Inhumanity.
Linda, this is some crazy stuff!
Project 2025: screwing you from cradle to grave. Would make a great meme, thank you.
On another note, thank you for your work for Democrats Abroad. This past Friday, Joyce Vance interviewed Democrats Abroad (for paying Substack members only), who stated that of the 6.5 million American citizens of voting age living abroad, only 1.25 million are registered.
If you are a US citizen living abroad that has not yet registered for November you can get information at VoteFromAbroad.org and FVAP.gov.
Hi Ellen, I thought Joyce Vance did a great job of laying things out and shared it with my regional chapter. Apparently Jessica Craven's Substack also carried news about us, and she will be one of the hosts of an online call for Harris-Walz for Democrats Abroad that has celebrities and political speakers this Wednesday. https://www.democratsabroad.org/americansabroad-for-harris-walz
Thank you for all the work you do, Linda. I'm impressed that you and your book club are continuing with Project 2025. I've read enough to know that I can't deal with trying to read any more of it. That takes more energy than I have.
Another thing that's been on my mind in this regard has to do with the need to mythologize history. If you are not permitted to explore the systemic nature of racism (for example, why median Black family wealth is 1/7 that of Whites), in the end the only place left to go is to find Blacks somehow inferior. And then to build a mythologized case for that.
I translated a really awful history book for use in Nazi Austria that was nothing but a justification of Aryan superiority and history as mythology culminating in the great Fuehrer. We're nowhere near that yet, but if a country cannot look at itself honestly and seeks scapegoats, that is a conceivable endpoint.
Federico Finchelstein's book on Fascist Lies is about that
DeSantis is a tinpot dictator. I hope someone rescued those books. Save the dumpster for Gov. Go Go Boots.😂😂
That picture is so distressing. It represents so many lost pleasures and unfulfilled dreams. How can anyone be so short sighted and selfish. These people are in the minority and holding these gross actions over the majority. Very sad and makes me emotional.
Destroying libraries is awful. I don't remember the libraries at my junior high or high school, but I remember the elementary school library pretty well, even though it was more than 65 years ago. I got to choose what I wanted to read and remember enjoying biographies of George Washington Carver and Booker T. Washington among others. That library was a happy place for me, and I would like to see libraries remain that way for other students.
Retired University librarian thanks you! ☺
You are welcome, MaryBeth. I didn't say this in my comment, but I will always have a soft heart for librarians, because the librarian in my elementary school was the only person I met as a child who clearly saw me as a human being. IMO librarians are very important people.
Education is the bane of MAGAts and other fascists and fanatics. Ignorance and propaganda are the coins of the realm. Informed citizens pose a threat to demagogues of any color, especially orange.
This reader is very much looking forward to Jason Stanley's new book, "Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future" (Sept. 10), and Timothy Snyder's latest, "On Freedom" (Sept. 17). Curiously, neither The New York Times nor The Washington Post included them in their currently published lists of what's best to read this fall in general or September in particular. Glaring omissions.
At least one thing is for sure: Americans who most need the knowledge contained in "Erasing History" and "On Freedom" won't be seeking it. They'll be too busy attending Trump rallies, intimidating school boards, attempting to ban books and, in other ways large and small, seeking to end our democracy.
I noted that too. But the NYT included Strongmen on the list and then gave it a horrible review!
The suppression of education and the burning of books indeed is a support for autocracy, but it is also a celebration of ignorance and cruelty. Such autorcracies have limited political shelf lives due to their problem of maintaining legitimacy with both rule and succession during inevitable infighting and paranoia when in power, and coping with a typically stubborn and wary civil society that keeps coming up with opposing ideas and new ways of thinking, the pillar of which is our educational system.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat: All those orphans in the dipsey-dumpster, those beautiful books. I feel like climbing in and rescuing them all: Tossing them in the bed of a pickup truck, nestling each book, giving it a home, and reading and marking it, particularly noting passages that brought fear to the fluttering heart of the obscurantist, Rick De Santis.
You want Trump's policies?
Trump tariffs are a very regressive hidden tax impacting most heavily those least able to pay & his proposed tariffs could lead to the worst global trade war since the Great Depression.
Trump’s planned tax cut would provide far more benefit to the affluent than to everyone else. Those in the top 1 percent would get a $70,350 reduction in their tax burdens and those in the top 0.1 percent would get $278,240. Those with income in lowest 4 quintiles are net losers under Trump which explains why Trump considers his blue collar supporters basement dwellers & losers.
Brad DeLong an economist at Berkeley: Trump tariffs and mass deportation taken together would be the largest adverse supply shock ever inflicted on the American economy. They would in all likelihood generate a combination of inflation and depression America has never before seen. Our macroeconomic troubles would dwarf anything we saw in the 1970s or at any other time.
If Trump carries through his promise to cut off funding to schools that keep their vaccine mandates. The consequences? “Dead children & contagious classrooms” Theda Skocpol, a professor of government and sociology at Harvard, wrote.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7dKhkWfsUs MAGA wants to ban what?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7dKhkWfsUs&t=817s
Life to sociopathic parasites like tRump is nothing more than a game of dominance and submission. It's animal world cruelty of predator and prey. Everything he does is based on this concept, including tariffs and taxes.
Fascists are fascinated with the monarchies of the past because it suits their distorted view of society. They want to dredge up this ancient thinking and use it in our modern era.
Thank you very much for this, Ruth. It's a very insightful, informative piece.
My husband and I went on a Danube cruise in May with UCLA alumni and a Smithsonian group. We had history professors on board who provided wonderful lectures. The UCLA professor, Dr. Teofilo Ruiz, was with us. He's a wonderful man and is so knowledgeable.
When we were in Budapest and other parts of Hungary, we learned that people there are discouraged from learning English. Also, there is so much misinformation happening. A Hungarian tour guide told one of our UCLA alumni travelers named Joe that the US had nuclear weapons in Poland that they were about to use in Hungary. She also thought Putin was the good guy and Zelynsky was the bad guy. Joe had a respectful conversation with her and pointed out her misconceptions. However, she didn't believe what he was saying. It was very sad.
"However, she didn't believe what he was saying."
The best propaganda replaces reality with a new reality, one that few can escape, even with corrective information (the backfire effect). Strangely, this effect dominates those on the right but few on the left.
All this brouhaha over parents deciding school curricula - especially book banning - it is important to remember that the authors of the Bible were predominantly Jews and people of color … and that the hero of the New Testament defied Jewish tradition (and Talmudic law) by never marrying.
As for Florida and its repressive laws, I have to wonder how many colleges outside the state, are willing to matriculate students lacking even a basic education?
Thank you for once again outlining the progression of authoritarian policies in our educational systems. How to counteract these trends? Is politically organized opposition to authoritarian leaders our first step?