"America's Homegrown Taliban"

This novel 1984, George Orwell warned, “Those who control the present control the past, and those who control the past control the future.” Today, Trump and the GOP have weaponized that prophecy, twisting it into the foundation of their crusade to Make America White Again.

What they are building is not a political movement but a parallel nation — a MAGAstan — where loyalty oaths replace truth, history is scrubbed clean of slavery and racism, and authoritarian obedience is demanded in the name of patriotism.

This is America’s homegrown Taliban, and they’re no longer pretending to hide their intentions.

When the Oklahoma Department of Education rolled out its new “America First” MAGA certification exam for teachers, designed with the help of a rightwing propaganda outlet, it wasn’t about improving education. It was about making sure that any teacher who dares to acknowledge the realities of race, gender, or American history is shut out of the profession.

Applicants from California or New York now must take a test that appears to demand perfect answers on questions about civics, chromosomes, religion, and so-called gender ideology. It’s not an exam, it’s a political loyalty test, and it fits neatly into the larger pattern we are seeing in Republican politics today. They aren’t hiding their racism or misogyny anymore. They’re reveling in it.

That reality was underscored by Donald Trump’s latest tantrum against the Smithsonian and other museums. On his Nazi-infested social media platform, Trump complained that our museums are “out of control” because they talk about “how bad slavery was,” racism, and the struggles of the downtrodden. He whined that there is “nothing about success, nothing about brightness, nothing about the future”

What he really means is that America should stop teaching about slavery, Jim Crow, redlining, and ongoing systemic racism and instead return to a whitewashed myth of national greatness that erases Black, Indigenous, and other marginalized voices.

His words are a plain translation of the GOP’s broader war on what they call “woke.” Being “anti-woke” is just a thinly veiled way of saying “we’re okay with racism and misogyny.”

And Trump is the perfect avatar for this reinvention of the Confederacy, as I detail in my newest book The Last American President: A Broken Man, a Corrupt Party, and a World on the Brink.

Trump’s and his GOP’s pro-racism neofascist purges go far beyond education and museums; they’ve also gone after the federal workforce with a vengeance. They canceled the government’s annual employee survey, gutted DEI programs across every agency, and are mass-firing federal workers, particularly in agencies that employ large numbers of Black women.

The so-called Department of Government Efficiency — run by a Nazi-saluting white South African immigrant — put more than a quarter of a million jobs on the chopping block, devastating communities where civil service has long been the pathway into the middle class.

Black Americans, particularly Black women, have disproportionately relied on those jobs for stability and upward mobility. Taking them away isn’t about saving taxpayer money: it’s a targeted attack, designed to roll back decades of progress.

At the same time, groups aligned with Trump are publishing watchlists of federal workers they call “subversives,” lists overwhelmingly filled with women and people of color. Those people are now being hounded, relocated, or forced out altogether.

Senior women and Black leaders in the military are being fired or pushed into retirement. Vice Adm. Shoshana Chatfield, NATO’s only woman on its military committee, was removed from her post. Army Lt. Gen. Telita Crosland, who had led military healthcare, was forced to resign after 32 years of service.

These purges are political, not professional. They’re designed to restore the military to a largely all-white, all-male leadership structure. And at the same time, Trump and his enablers are working to rename bases after Confederate generals and restore monuments dedicated to traitors who fought against democracy to preserve slavery.

And now Trump is claiming — against the statistics — that crime in Washington, DC is “out of control.” This is Nixon’s Southern Strategy — blame crime on Black people while turning the country into a police state — on steroids.

Racism is the thread that ties all of this together.

When five Republicans on the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder, Republicans wasted no time enacting voter suppression laws that disproportionately disenfranchised Black voters. When Republicans on the Court blessed partisan gerrymandering in Rucho v. Common Cause, Republican-controlled states immediately redrew maps to diminish the power of Black communities.

This is about keeping power in the hands of white conservatives, no matter the cost to democracy.

And the cruelty isn’t limited to our own citizens. The Trump administration has begun deporting Afghan translators who risked their lives working alongside American troops, even as they continue to apply for legal protection through Special Immigrant Visa programs. ICE agents recently detained one such interpreter — someone who had helped U.S. soldiers survive the war — because the new GOP priority is to get as many brown people out of the country as possible.

This is not patriotism. It’s ethnic cleansing by bureaucracy.

I used to believe that maybe 20 percent of white Americans were openly racist. That was based on my experience growing up and on the way racism was often hidden behind polite code.

But looking at today’s voting patterns, at the cheering crowds for Trump’s open bigotry, it seems more like 55 to 60 percent. When a majority of white voters willingly support a party that strips voting rights from Black citizens, erases slavery from classrooms and museums, fires Black leaders from government, and deports brown allies, that’s not a fringe problem. That’s a national crisis.

This kind of “othering” of racial and gender minorities is a classic hallmark of fascism. It’s what we saw in Germany in the 1930s and what Viktor Orbán and Vladimir Putin are doing in Hungary and Russia today. You dehumanize groups of people, define them as enemies of the state, and then strip away their rights until they no longer have the power to resist.

Trump and the GOP are running this playbook right out in the open. And far too many in the media are still treating “anti-woke” rhetoric as a culture-war issue instead of what it really is: a naked declaration of racism, misogyny, and authoritarian intent.

Democrats and people of good conscience cannot let this language go unchallenged. Every time Republicans sneer about “woke,” it should be called what it is: they’re defending racism and misogyny. They’re trying to drag us back into a world where straight white men hold all the power and everyone else is erased. This is not just an ideological disagreement. It is an attack on the very idea of equality and democracy.

Woke people must stop playing defense and start organizing. We need mass mobilizations — marches, protests, and direct action — to show that Americans will not tolerate a return to white supremacy dressed up as patriotism.

We need to pressure Democrats to go on offense, to stop using mealy-mouthed language and start telling the truth: the GOP is running on racism, period. And we need to demand that the media stop laundering Republican talking points and call out this agenda for what it is: a fascist project to make racism great again.

The stakes are nothing less than the future of American democracy. If we fail to rise to this challenge, they won’t just win the next election; they’ll win the power to define who counts as an American, whose stories matter, and who has a right to belong.

This is the GOP’s vision of MAGAstan: a land where truth is outlawed, history is erased, dissent is punished, and democracy is reduced to a hollow slogan.

It’s not conservatism. It’s not patriotism. It is the same naked pursuit of power through racism, misogyny, and authoritarian rule that we’ve seen in one country after another throughout history.

And here’s the brutal truth: they’re telling us exactly who they are and exactly what kind of dictatorship they want. The only question left is whether the rest of us will stand by in silence while America is dragged into its darkest chapter or whether we will rise up, speak out, and refuse to let our country become the authoritarian nightmare Trump and the GOP are building in plain sight.

-Thom Hartmann

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