Project 2025 Co-Author Lays Out “Radical Agenda” for Next Trump Term in Undercover Video

By Lawrence Carter, Amy Goodman 

August 19, 2024

Source: Democracy Now

As Donald Trump tries to distance his campaign from Project 2025, those behind the right-wing policy blueprint to remake the U.S. government continue to brag in private about their close ties to the Republican presidential nominee and how they intend to push a radical right-wing agenda in a second Trump administration. In July, Project 2025 co-author Russell Vought met with two people he believed to be relatives of a wealthy conservative donor interested in funding the effort. In fact, he was meeting with two reporters with the U.K.-based Centre for Climate Reporting as part of an undercover sting captured on video. Over the course of two hours, Vought described Trump’s disavowal of Project 2025 as mere theater and laid out plans for mass deportations, restricting abortion, gutting independent government bureaucracies, using the military against racial justice protesters and more. The secret plans are “designed to ensure that this kind of radical agenda that the conservative movement has in the U.S. can be implemented from day one,” says Lawrence Carter, founder and director of the Centre for Climate Reporting and one of the reporters who spoke with Vought. “They want to make sure that the mistakes from the first Trump administration, as they see them, where not much got done, are avoided this time around.”

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: We begin today’s show with a new undercover video that shows the co-author of Project 2025 bragging about his ties to Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump — even as Trump is trying to distance himself from the right-wing blueprint for his potential second term.

The video features Russell Vought, who was director of the Trump White House Office of Management and Budget. It shows Vought meeting in a five-star Washington, D.C., hotel with two men he thought were relatives of a wealthy conservative donor. But Vought was actually talking to two undercover reporters with the Centre for Climate Reporting, an independent British news outlet. They were secretly recording him.

In a minute one of those reporters will join us. But first, this is the video report accompanying their new investigation. It’s called “Undercover in Project 2025: The secretive ‘second phase’ and the radical policies set for rollout on day one.”

NARRATOR: Two undercover reporters, posing as donors, are about to meet one of the key architects of Project 2025, the radical plan for Trump’s second term, in a hotel suite rigged with hidden cameras.

UNDERCOVER REPORTER: Nice to meet you. Would you like a coffee or something?

RUSSELL VOUGHT: I’d love coffee, yeah.

NARRATOR: Meet Russ Vought.

NEWS ANCHOR: Russell Vought, the former director of the Office of Management and Budget.

NARRATOR: He’s been called “the most dangerous MAGA diehard you’ve never heard of.”

RUSSELL VOUGHT: I am opposed to the Department of Education because I think it’s the Department of Critical Race Theory.

STEVE BANNON: The Russ Vought. … We’re comrades in arms.

NARRATOR: Formerly a Cabinet member and chief lieutenant in the first Trump admin.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I want to thank Russ for doing an incredible job.

NARRATOR: He now runs a group called Center for Renewing America.

RUSSELL VOUGHT: An organization that I helped turn into the Death Star that is accomplishing all the debates that you are reading about. … I think you have to rehabilitate Christian nationalism. … You have the largest deportation in history. … Block funding for Planned Parenthood. … I want to be the person that crushes the deep state.

NARRATOR: Vought is one of the key authors of the blueprint for a second Trump administration.

WEIJIA JIANG: Project 2025.

ALI VELSHI: It’s an ambitious 920-page blueprint.

SARA HAINES: Like eliminating the Department of Education.

ABBY PHILLIP: The mass firings of civil servants.

JONATHAN KARL: Banning access to the abortion pill and further restricting abortion rights.

NARRATOR: In recent weeks the plans have become so controversial that Trump has been forced to distance himself.

DONALD TRUMP: They’re sort of the opposite of the radical left, OK? You have the radical left, and you have the radical right. And they come up with this plan. I don’t know what the hell it is. It’s Project ’25. … Are you ready? I know nothing about Project ’25. I haven’t seen the document. I don’t intend to really see the document.

NARRATOR: But behind closed doors, Vought tells us not to take Trump’s disavowal seriously.

RUSSELL VOUGHT: I expect to hear 10 more times from the rally the president, you know, distancing himself from the left’s bogeyman of Project 2025.

UNDERCOVER REPORTER: Yeah. And you’re not worried about that?

RUSSELL VOUGHT: I’m not worried about it.

UNDERCOVER REPORTER: OK.

RUSSELL VOUGHT: He’s running against the brand. He is not running against any people.

UNDERCOVER REPORTER: OK.

RUSSELL VOUGHT: He is not running against any institutions. It’s interesting. He is in fact not even opposing himself to a particular policy. He’s been at our organization. He’s raised money for our organization. He’s blessed it from the — you know, I remember walking into our last day in office and told him what I was going to do. So, he’s very supportive of what we do.

NARRATOR: Our investigation into Project 2025 began two weeks before the meeting with Vought at a conference for religious nationalists in D.C.

SEN. JOSH HAWLEY: The truth is, Christian nationalism is not a threat to American democracy. Christian nationalism founded American democracy.

NARRATOR: Journalists from the Centre for Climate Reporting have come posing as potential donors looking to meet those involved in Project 2025. They’re not hard to find. The Heritage Foundation, the group running the project, are here. So is Vought’s think tank. We make the acquaintance of Micah Meadowcroft, an author on Project 2025 and a close aide to Vought. He tells us that Vought is running the secretive second phase of Project 2025.

MICAH MEADOWCROFT: And the second phase, after the book came out, was to break down like actual sort of policy packets and executive orders and agenda items and things like that. And that’s been supervised largely by Russ.

NARRATOR: The first phase of Project 2025 was a 922-page policy book published openly. The second phase is “a comprehensive, concrete transition plan for each federal agency.” These much more detailed plans are confidential.

MICAH MEADOWCROFT: Because, obviously, you want as little of it to be FOIA-able, if you’re familiar with the FOIA process, as possible. Freedom of Information Act, yeah.

UNDERCOVER REPORTER: Freedom of Information Act, yeah.

NARRATOR: The Freedom of Information Act allows the public to request government communications. But Meadowcroft reveals they plan to avoid these rules.

MICAH MEADOWCROFT: Yeah, the goal is to familiarize all the transition team people with these plans.

UNDERCOVER REPORTER: Yeah.

MICAH MEADOWCROFT: But you don’t actually, like, send them to their work emails, because then, you know…

UNDERCOVER REPORTER: Right.

MICAH MEADOWCROFT: You know, you could just give the handbooks to everyone, be like, “This is the game plan for the admin.”

UNDERCOVER REPORTER: Yeah.

MICAH MEADOWCROFT: If the press knows that that’s what you’re doing, then they’re going to immediately just say, like, “I request all of your emails from Heritage.”

UNDERCOVER REPORTER: OK.

MICAH MEADOWCROFT: Yeah, you government worker.

UNDERCOVER REPORTER: I see.

MICAH MEADOWCROFT: So, we’ll see how that goes.

UNDERCOVER REPORTER: How interesting.

NARRATOR: Meadowcroft offers to set up a meeting with his boss, Russ Vought.

UNDERCOVER REPORTER: You could, like, put me in touch with somebody who looks after his diary or whatever?

MICAH MEADOWCROFT: Yes, I can put you in touch with his scheduler, yeah.

UNDERCOVER REPORTER: Amazing.

MICAH MEADOWCROFT: So, yeah.

UNDERCOVER REPORTER: Great.

MICAH MEADOWCROFT: Yeah, so just tell me when to do that.

NARRATOR: We want to meet the man writing the game plan for Trump’s second administration. Vought believes that in his first term Trump’s agenda was frustrated by what he calls the “deep state.” So Vought is planning a radical centralization of government power under the president, firing civil servants and ending the independence of agencies like the FBI and DOJ.

RUSSELL VOUGHT: Eighty percent of my time is working on the plans of what’s necessary to take control of these bureaucracies. And we are working doggedly on that, whether it’s destroying their — an agency’s notion of independence, that they’re independent from the president.

NARRATOR: Vought has also been preparing documents based on fringe legal theories, arguing the president has the power to use the military against protesters.

RUSSELL VOUGHT: You know, George Floyd obviously was not about race. It was about destabilizing the Trump administration.

UNDERCOVER REPORTER: Right.

RUSSELL VOUGHT: We put out, for instance, a 50-page paper designed for lawyers to know that the president has, you know, the ability both along the border and elsewhere to maintain law and order with the military. And that’s something that, you know, it’s going to be important for him to remember and his lawyers to affirm. But we’ve given them the case for that.

NARRATOR: With loyalists installed in key government agencies and armed with his playbook, Vought believes a radical Christian nationalist agenda can be realized under a second Trump presidency. For example, on abortion.

RUSSELL VOUGHT: So, I think the president has actually come up with a strategy that works, so long as you are giving people like me in the government the ability to block funding for Planned Parenthood, block funding for fetal tissue research. So, what I’ve told people is, he had the most pro-life record ever. I’ve never seen him take — to stand in the way of a pro-life initiative that actually was real politically and with momentum.

NARRATOR: And for Vought, Trump’s pick for vice president shows he’s serious about pushing this ideological agenda when in power.

RUSSELL VOUGHT: So I am very happy with the JD pick. I think it’s transformative, for sure. And he’s — you know, think of him as a member version of what we do.

UNDERCOVER REPORTER: Yeah.

RUSSELL VOUGHT: So, there’s no think tank, no policy organization, no battle plan creator other than us for the worldview that I think Donald Trump has and that JD has.

NARRATOR: But as public backlash against these plans builds, the Trump campaign has been scrambling to distance themselves from Project 2025’s authors.

CHRIS LACIVITA: It’s complete and utter bull [bleep] for any reporter to write that this is the way it is. … The president has made it clear, these people do not speak for him, they do not speak for the campaign.

NARRATOR: But Vought tells us that behind the scenes, things are much friendlier. The Trump campaign recently picked him to write the Republicans’ policy platform, making him essentially Project 2025’s man on the inside.

RUSSELL VOUGHT: I think the best example is like the campaign selecting me to be the platform because of their views on my policy ideas, and they’re not running from all the negativity that I get from the press.

UNDERCOVER REPORTER: I see. So they haven’t been spooked on you as a person, you don’t think?

RUSSELL VOUGHT: No. I mean, no. I don’t think I’m going to be their transition pick, because then they have all these kinds of stories.

UNDERCOVER REPORTER: Yeah.

RUSSELL VOUGHT: But, no, the relationship is great.

NARRATOR: The head of the Trump transition team has not yet been appointed, but Vought says that no matter who is named, he’ll be able to hand over his Project 2025 battle plans directly.

RUSSELL VOUGHT: If it’s someone like Stephen Miller or Bob Lighthizer, then all this stuff gets plugged right in. If it’s not, we’ll figure it out.

UNDERCOVER REPORTER: OK.

RUSSELL VOUGHT: But all of it will be designed for a theory of the case that president — if a battle plan is out there that will do what he wants, there are the people like me that have his trust that will be able to get it to him in whatever position we’re at. Or, I could be at Center for Renewing America, but the relationships will be there, the trust level will be there.

NARRATOR: Project 2025’s radical phase one policy book turned into a PR disaster.

KAITLAN COLLINS: The director of Project 2025 has stepped down after facing criticism from both Democrats and the Trump campaign.

NARRATOR: But Vought’s phase two battle plans, top secret and handed directly to the transition team, remain unburdened by the brand.

UNDERCOVER REPORTER: And are you going to, like, rebrand that second phase at all?

RUSSELL VOUGHT: For what I do, the brand is not important.

UNDERCOVER REPORTER: And you’re not worried that if it has Project 2025 on, he’s going to go, like…

RUSSELL VOUGHT: No.

UNDERCOVER REPORTER: And you’re not going to publish those?

RUSSELL VOUGHT: No, no.

UNDERCOVER REPORTER: They go straight to…

RUSSELL VOUGHT: Yeah, they’re very, very close hold.

UNDERCOVER REPORTER: OK.

UNDERCOVER REPORTER: Brilliant. Brilliant. It’s been an education.

RUSSELL VOUGHT: Appreciate it. Thank you for your time.

UNDERCOVER REPORTER: Yeah, thank you so much.

RUSSELL VOUGHT: Anytime.

UNDERCOVER REPORTER: Thank you very much. You can show yourself out, I guess.

RUSSELL VOUGHT: OK.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s the full video report that accompanies a major new investigation by the Centre for Climate Reporting. It’s called “Undercover in Project 2025: The secretive ‘second phase’ and the radical policies set for rollout on day one.”

For more, we’re joined by Lawrence Carter, founder and director of the Centre for Climate Reporting. He is joining us via audio only from the West Midlands in the U.K. because he’s an undercover journalist and needs to remain anonymous for his work.

Welcome to Democracy Now!, Lawrence. If you can start off by talking about the significance of what you found and more on who Vought is and their response?

LAWRENCE CARTER: Hi, Amy, and thanks for having me.

Yeah, I think, for us, the investigation really crystallized around the time that you started to see these big disavowals from the Trump campaign on Project 2025. Previously, it kind of seemed like an unspoken kind of collaboration almost, where Trump went to the Heritage Foundation in the month that they launched Project 2025 and seemed to sort of give it his blessing. Obviously, then it became this huge political issue, very unpopular proposals in the big policy book that they produced. And recently you’ve seen Trump’s campaign managers really, as you saw in the film, really aggressively attacking Project 2025. But our kind of hypothesis was that that was kind of window dressing and actually the relationships are there.

And so, we went undercover, and, you know, that was borne out by our investigation, that there’s this secretive second phase of Project 2025 that Russ Vought is overseeing as a pipeline of 350 detailed blueprints, that’s executive orders, secretarial memos, all designed to ensure that this kind of radical agenda that the conservative movement has in the U.S. can be implemented from day one. They want to make sure that the mistakes from the first Trump administration, as they see them, where not much got done, are avoided this time around, and they’re really able to sort of upend the way in which the United States is governed.

There are some, like, specifically shocking findings of the investigation in terms of the policy proposals that are put forward. And these are kind of things that are in the book, but which, when you kind of speak about them in detail, become kind of all the more important from a kind of public interest perspective. And that’s largely around the way in which he talked about the mass deportations that they want to carry out, and which is actually in the GOP platform, which the Trump campaign actually asked Mr. Vought to oversee. So, the largest deportation in history, as he calls it, has kind of come from the conservative movement via Project 2025. It’s also a key campaign promise of the Trump campaign. And he talked about the deportations, which are these mass — like, millions of people being deported, as a way in which to achieve a goal, which is to end multiculturalism in the United States. We asked him, you know, “What’s going to happen when there’s protests against that?” And he said, “Well, we’ve been preparing kind of legal arguments for bringing in the military to quell protest by U.S. citizens.”

So, those are a few of the findings that we thought were most important. But, obviously, overall, you’ve got this kind of quite radical agenda, and then you’ve got a man who’s very much on the inside of Trump world who is kind of very adept at getting things done and kind of said he can get these plans directly into the hands of Donald Trump.

AMY GOODMAN: And why you, a British news organization, the Centre for Climate Reporting, why you’re so interested in Project 2025, and why you felt, your team felt it was essential to be undercover, as you continue to, even you, as head of the organization, not wanting to show your face?

LAWRENCE CARTER: So, yeah, we’re a global organization. Like, we’re registered in the U.K., but we’ve got reporters in New York, Berlin and London. And this really was part of a project that we’ve started a few months ago looking at populist movements around the world. And this investigation actually started by looking at the populist movements in Europe. There’s just been some big European elections, and the populist parties in Europe have really kind of come to power and have kind of gotten much more influence in the European Union at the moment. And so our investigation actually started there. But these are international movements. There’s huge transatlantic links. And so, the leads that we were following from Europe actually led to Washington, D.C., and Project 2025. And it’s at that point that it became — the project has become more focused on Project 2025.

Now, in terms of the undercover aspect, you know, undercover has got a very long and respected history, actually, including in the U.S. You know, you can go back to the Golden Age of investigative journalism with Nellie Bly, who went undercover in a New York sanatorium to expose the brutal conditions there. More recently, Shane Bauer from Mother Jones went undercover a max-security prison to expose the conditions there. You know, even CNN has done undercover reporting in recent years, a brilliant report on people smuggling in Nigeria. Sometimes it’s the only way to get the story.

And that was the case here. You know, they’re going to great lengths to keep this aspect of Project 2025 secret. You know, you could see from Micah Meadowcroft’s comments that they don’t want the American public to see what they’re doing. That’s why they’re trying to — they’re avoiding work emails, for example, in how they intend to distribute these plans. And so, sometimes, you know, you could get a whistleblower maybe. But kind of in this case, we felt that going undercover was the only way in which we were going to get this story. And so, we weighted out the kind of — the public interest arguments in favor of doing so with the kind of — you know, the reasonable expectation of privacy that an individual has. And in this case, we felt that there was an overwhelming public interest in going undercover and kind of revealing the way in which a kind of largely dark money-funded network of organizations, with kind of quite radical plans that are unpopular, if you poll them, are seeking to end that into the agenda.

And why is a climate organization doing all this? Well, you know, the fossil fuel industry is kind of, obviously, a major focus of investigative organizations like mine that work on climate. But if you look at, actually, the sort of key threats to much-needed kind of action on climate change, the rise of the populist right around the world is just as important, in our view. And so, that kind of was the genesis of this project, where we start kind of looking at those movements and the threat that they pose.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to get your response to the statement issued Thursday by Russell Vought’s nonprofit, the Center for Renewing America, which downplayed your undercover video and said it didn’t reveal anything new. Spokesperson Rachel Cauley said, quote, “It would have been easier to just do a google search to ‘uncover’ what is already on our website and said in countless national media interviews. But thank you for airing our perfect conversation emphasizing our policy work is totally separate from the Trump campaign, as we have been saying,” she said. Your response, Lawrence Carter?

LAWRENCE CARTER: Yeah, they would say that, wouldn’t they? It’s clear from the recordings that they are actively seeking to keep this stuff secret. So, again, going back to the comments from their research director, Micah Meadowcroft, they don’t want people to know what’s in these plans. They don’t want them to know what they’re working on.

And so, what we found was, A, that, you know, that they’re seeking to keep it secret from the American public ahead of the election. They don’t want people to see this before they vote. But, crucially, the actual details of how they’re going to go about doing these things, you know, we now know that there’s 350 documents. Micah Meadowcroft said there’s a big stack of them waiting to be handed into transition teams.

The other crucial thing that we’ve kind of established, which is kind of very much not what they’re saying publicly, is that there’s this very strong relationship with both the Trump campaign and Donald Trump himself. You know, Project 2025 has insisted it’s separate from the Trump operation. The Trump campaign has disavowed Project 2025. But here we have Russell Vought. He oversaw the GOP platform. He’s a former Trump Cabinet member. He told us he speaks with Trump regularly. He’s writing the party platform for this year’s election whilst at the same time overseeing this kind of pipeline of documents, blueprints for the next administration as part of Project 2025. And that’s certainly not something that they would talk about in public. So, yeah —

AMY GOODMAN: Very interesting that —

LAWRENCE CARTER: — my kind of response — yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — Kevin Roberts, the head of the Heritage Foundation, has this new book coming out, Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America, with a foreword by none other than President Trump’s vice-presidential running mate, JD Vance. Politico writes, JD Vance, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, has written the foreword to the forthcoming book. In March, Roberts told Politico Senator Vance was, quote, “absolutely going to be one of the leaders — if not the leader — of our movement.” After Vance was named as Trump’s running mate, Roberts said the Heritage Foundation had been privately, quote, “really rooting” for him to be the pick, even though Trump’s campaign, of course, has disavowed any connection to Project 2025. Lawrence?

LAWRENCE CARTER: Yeah, I mean, that was kind of also borne out by our conversations with Russell Vought and Micah Meadowcroft. You know, they’re very excited about the JD Vance pick, and it’s because they see him as one of them. And so, yeah, they’ve got — like, Vought’s got a very good relationship with Trump. He’s got a great relationship with the Trump campaign. You know, he’s been actively collaborating with the Trump campaign on — and media heads, for example, which the Trump campaign sought — in which the Trump campaign sought to convey what a second Trump term would look like. They had Russell Vought speak to the media for them to articulate that. And he spoke to Time magazine, for example, about his work on Project 2025. So, the fact that those Trump relationships are already there, but then you have, you know, the JD Vance pick. He’s literally one of them, as far as they see it, and they’re excited about it.

AMY GOODMAN: And the views of Project 2025 when it comes to, and Vought’s views, on abortion, on marriage equality, Lawrence Carter?

LAWRENCE CARTER: Yeah, so, again, the findings were that, for example, on abortion, they saw that — their goal is ultimately a national ban. But they’re very — they’re pragmatic. Like, Russell Vought is a pragmatic member of Project 2025. And he sees that, in his words, that would mean electoral annihilation for Trump if he committed to that. So, actually, their strategy is to kind of go after abortion by kind of more executive powers, like, for example, if he was reappointed to the Office for Management and Budget, blocking funding for Planned Parenthood.

Again, like, he talked about marriage equality in terms of this is kind of a fight that we need to start having, but it’s one that they’re further behind in compared to abortion. But the goal, again, is to kind of end marriage equality. Similarly, kind of they’re pursuing various strategies to try and ban pornography.

So, yeah, it’s kind of — it’s quite a kind of radical agenda from their kind of social conservatism point of view, but Russell Vought is certainly on the end of the spectrum of kind of what is politically possible, rather than kind of, I guess, the more Heritage Foundation approach, which is kind of, you know, more absolutist.

AMY GOODMAN: Lawrence Carter, I want to thank you for being with us, founder and director of the Centre for Climate Reporting. We’ll link to your new investigation, “Undercover in Project 2025: The secretive ‘second phase’ and the radical policies set for rollout on day one.”

Next up, the World Health Organization declares mpox a global public health emergency as the first cases of mpox outside Africa are confirmed. We’ll get an update from Nigeria. Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: “You’re the Inspiration” by Chicago. Tune in all next week as Democracy Now! does a special two-hour daily broadcast August 19th to the 23rd from the convention, called “Breaking with Convention: War, Peace and the Presidency.”

The Right’s Push to Whitewash History Is a Precursor to Fascism

By Henry A. Giroux

August 19, 2024

Source: Truthout


The “En L’An 2000,” or “Life in Year 2000” by Jean-Marc Côté depicts the futuristic culturization of humanity. (Françoise Foliot , Wikimédia France, Paris, CC BY-SA 4.0)



As the 2023-2024 academic year ended in June, far right attacks by politicians and university administrators foreshadowed the troubling challenges that students and faculty will face as public and higher education resume this year. It is hard to forget that with the end of the academic year, the usual focus on commencement speeches and joyful graduation ceremonies gave way to what Michael Gould-Wartofsky calls the “American Homeland Security Campus.”

Amid widespread campus protests against Israel’s brutal war on Gaza, snipers were stationed on campus rooftops, peaceful student protesters and faculty were beaten, police and National Guard units manned college checkpoints, and the familiar smell of cut grass and freshly planted flowers was replaced by the “scent of gunpowder.” In short, higher education was transformed into a police precinct.

Beneath this sweeping repression aimed at silencing dissent, free speech and critical inquiry lies a series of right-wing policies that threaten to undermine education’s role as a democratic public sphere and its commitment to fostering critical thinking. In this environment, we can expect a sustained assault on critical pedagogy, historical understanding, informed judgment, faculty job security, critical literacy, civic awareness, and any effort to connect learning with civic engagement and democratic values.

For instance, far right legislators in states like Florida, Tennessee and Idaho are banning books and prohibiting the teaching of concepts related to race, LGBTQ+ issues and social justice. Public and higher education institutions are being defunded, particularly if they address diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. Many public school libraries are being stripped of resources, with some being transformed into detention centers. Students are bankrupting their future because of high tuition costs and staggering student debt.

Under the influence of white Christian nationalists, states such as Oklahoma have seen officials mandate the incorporation of the Bible into school lessons, further intensifying the cultural battle over religion in the classroom.


The suppression of academic freedom, free speech, and the rights of faculty and students is not just a political maneuver — it is an act of violence.

Higher education is also under siege. In states like Wisconsin and Florida, tenure has been either significantly weakened or effectively eliminated. In many states governed by right-wing officials, attacks on academic freedom have become widespread, particularly targeting faculty who critically address Israel’s dehumanizing war on Gaza. These attacks include monitoring and restricting what faculty can teach. For instance, Florida has instructed the leaders of its 12 public universities to screen certain courses for “antisemitism or anti-Israeli bias.” The Intercept points to S.B. 1287, which if enacted by the California legislature, “would stifle free speech on public university and college campuses, specifically around protests against Israel’s war in Gaza and its occupation of Palestine, according to civil rights advocates.” According to The Intercept, Constance Penley, president of the Council of UC Faculty Associations, stated that, “The bill mirrors a larger trend within the University of California school system and among lawmakers to suppress protests that are in support of Palestine and are critical of Israel’s war in Gaza.”

These policies do more than undermine independent voices of dissent; they are part of a longstanding right-wing strategy to transform public and higher education into either corporate adjuncts or white Christian indoctrination centers. The suppression of academic freedom, free speech, and the rights of faculty and students is not just a political maneuver — it is an act of violence. Historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat aptly warns that students returning to campus this fall will face relentless attacks by authoritarians who “are happy to engineer the intellectual, social, and financial impoverishment of the educational sector to get rid of anyone who stands in the way of their dreams of national and ideological purity.”

We live in an age where the unimaginable becomes imaginable. George Orwell’s cautionary tale 1984, about the dangerous use of propaganda, lies, manufactured ignorance and the suppression of memory to control people no longer reads like fiction. Orwell’s concept of the memory hole, which acts as an incinerator of historical conscience and remembrance, has become a crucial weapon in the politics of disappearance. Truth has succumbed to the collapse of reason and the pathology of official lies. Thinking has become dangerous, as history collapses under the weight of misrepresentation and indoctrination. In a culture dominated by images, history is ignored in favor of immediacy and short-term profits. Memory is treated like a virus in the age of gangster capitalism, opening the door to the criminalization of politics and the shrinking of the political horizon.

History is now shrouded in darkness, imposed by censorship, spectacle and a vocabulary steeped in bigotry, extermination and nativism. Race-baiting has become normalized within the GOP, which embraces both the language of the Confederacy and a fascist discourse that openly calls for a “unified Reich.” The vivid rhetoric of invasions and claims that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of Americans” reinforce the language of hatred and mass violence as legitimate political tools. Fascist groups march in the streets of Massachusetts, Florida (even outside of Disney World), Tennessee, and other states, yet these events are barely reported in the press and are increasingly normalized. All of these issues are either severed from their historical roots or reduced by corporate-controlled media to mere stenography — reported without critical analysis.


The teaching of history has been criminalized, and the truth of history has succumbed to the scourge of white supremacist falsehoods.

History no longer serves as a warning of what the end of humanity looks like; instead, it is whitewashed, ignored and barricaded behind the language of “racial purity.” Too often, it becomes a legitimizing force through censorship and silence, erasing the genocidal atrocities of the past. This is most evident recently in the U.S. government’s, corporate media’s and politicians’ support of Israel’s brutal killing of thousands of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. Spaces where students once not only learned from history but also challenged the resurgence of totalitarianism — particularly on college campuses — have been transformed into sites of militarized repression. Learning critically from history has now become a cautionary tale, one that invites state terrorism. What is lost here is Primo Levi’s crucial insight that, “Every age has its own fascism, and we see the warning signs wherever the concentration of power denies citizens the possibility and the means of expressing and acting on their own free will.”

The military horrors of the past — including the wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, among others — have disappeared from history and public memory. Mass shootings can dominate the 24/7 news cycle, while the legacy of state violence against Native Americans, Black people, women and young people is recycled into the memory hole of organized forgetting. Universities are now under siege for their critical functions, young people protesting Israel’s war on Gaza are criminalized, and the discourse of white supremacy is detached from its long legacy of violence in the U.S. As Adam Federman observes, these repressive university policies suggest that, “Colleges are coming to look more like a police state than institutions of higher learning.” Simultaneously, history is invoked by Donald Trump and his followers as something to be reclaimed in order to prevent immigrants from “poisoning the blood” of Americans. This is the language of racial cleansing that was used by Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf and it correlates well with those MAGA followers who believe that only white Christian nationalists qualify as citizens. This is more than nostalgia or being on the wrong side of history; it is what the Frankfurt School theorist Walter Benjamin warned against — the falsification of history “flashing up as a moment of danger on the historical subject.”

In our current era, historical truth is increasingly dismissed under the guise of “protecting” students and the larger public from what right-wing politicians label psychological discomfort. What they miss, of course, is that confronting the truth is more important than feeling uncomfortable. Moreover, when Black students hear about the lynchings, the beatings, the rape of Black women and the rise of a racial carceral state, should they not feel uncomfortable, as well as informed?

This is an era of organized forgetting, manufactured ignorance, and a dangerous assault not just on history and remembrance, but on education itself — much of which in the U.S. is financed by “right-wing think tanks, including the Heritage Foundation, the Manhattan Institute, and Citizens for Renewing America,” as Isaac Kamola points out. The teaching of history has been criminalized, and the truth of history has succumbed to the scourge of white supremacist falsehoods. History has been weaponized in the spirit of Trump’s claims to “Make America Great Again” and as such, has become a vital tool in the effort to reject historical memory and education as a source of public good. The suppression of history is a form of engineered thoughtlessness which condemns people to misery, takes away their sense of agency, undermines any sense of responsibility, eliminates plurality and an ability to think in the space of others. Organized forgetting is a crime against any sense of responsibility, if not the future itself, and creates what Naomi Klein calls “armies of locked-out people, whose services are no longer needed, whose lifestyles are written off as ‘backward,’ whose basic needs go unmet.”

The past now haunts us as a vehicle to reproduce state-sponsored violence. In the U.S., Hungary, India, China and Russia, the repressive methods that prevent students from invoking history, thinking critically and holding dictators accountable are the building bricks of fascism and authoritarianism.


The repressive methods that prevent students from invoking history, thinking critically and holding dictators accountable are the building bricks of fascism and authoritarianism.

Yet, the true power of history lies in its ability to challenge the powerful and provoke critical reflection. A rejection of history as a critical form of historical consciousness was starkly evident in the Trump administration’s 1776 Project, which aimed to downplay the central role of slavery in U.S. history. Today, similar tactics are employed as states ban books, censor critical ideas and erase the long struggles for justice by Black people and other marginalized groups. In these cases, history and memory are reduced to mere therapeutic exercises, cloaked in repressive, anti-intellectual language.

This repression extends beyond the U.S., as seen in Canada’s reluctance to confront the horrors of separating Indigenous children from their families and suppressing their heritage, culture and languages. Educators find themselves increasingly constrained, unable to discuss crucial social issues such as slavery, critical race theory, sexism, ethnic cleansing and colonialism. These subjects are deemed “too uncomfortable,” leading to the censorship of books, attacks on libraries, the silencing of free speech, and the criminalizing of discussions on systemic racism and reproductive rights. In some U.S. states, educators can even face jail time for addressing these topics. In the age of fascist assaults on historical consciousness as a critical faculty, what becomes clear is that authoritarians fear that social responsibility takes place when students develop the historical and critical capacities to reflect on what they are doing. Trump and his sycophantic apostles of ignorance embrace rather than reject James Baldwin’s claim that “ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.”

What the champions of indoctrination know too well is that critical thought (if not thinking itself) is dangerous and often produces a new language, a sense of critical agency and mass resistance. This is one of the reasons that many campuses were turned into essentially police precincts, sites of brutal repression of students protesting Israel’s war on Gaza. Both critical pedagogy and historical consciousness are replaced by acts of violence and repression. History that matters is not just about learning from the past; it is also a lesson in what has to be unlearned. It provides a script in the best sense of daring to think of a future in which history offers clues regarding how to fight, resist and expose injustice while embracing a civic courage that translates into individual and collective action.

The weaponization of psychological discomfort serves to misremember, suppress and render invisible the suffering of innocent people, while shielding the powerful from accountability. This approach to memory work does more than attack history; it signals the death of historical consciousness, truth and critical thinking. The importance of learning from history transcends education, forming the foundation for historically informed and engaged citizens. Without such citizens, democracy cannot survive. Suppressing history leads to moral fatigue and the erosion of social responsibility, reinforced by a dangerous merger of ignorance and thoughtlessness. This is more than a threat to democracy; it is a powerful condition for authoritarianism.

The great philosopher Hannah Arendt reminds us that thoughtlessness and historical amnesia are preconditions for fascism. She writes that “to think always means to think critically. And to think critically is always to be hostile.” History, however disturbing, connects us to past worlds that we must not repeat while offering insights, hope and possibilities for the future. The truth of history and its lessons are essential for fostering individual liberty and freedom of expression. When history is suppressed, societies become vulnerable to manipulation, often resulting in unthinking mobs seeking community through hatred, repression, fear and violence. If this trend continues unchecked, it threatens to replace informed citizens with a populace easily swayed by demagogues, ultimately leading to the demise of democracy itself.

As we mark the 100th anniversary of the birth of the great novelist and activist James Baldwin, it is worth recalling his insistence that we need to grapple with the ghosts of history. Baldwin urged us to engage with history fully, making it instructive for those who often deny its truths and the ways it continues to shape the present. He argued throughout his life that history should always question, challenge the status quo, embrace unflinching truths, and reveal the “untold cruelty that hides in silence.” Baldwin was right in stating that history is more than a narrative of remembrance, it “is literally present in all we do.” For Baldwin, education and history itself were dangerous. He writes:


The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions, to say to himself this is black or this is white, to decide for himself whether there is a God in heaven or not. To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity. But no society is really anxious to have that kind of person around. What societies really, ideally, want is a citizenry which will simply obey the rules of society. If a society succeeds in this, that society is about to perish.

To align history with who we are as socially responsible individuals and as a nation forever in search of democratic ideals, history must be taught and embraced in its fullness — not through the lens of censorship, book burning, indoctrination and manufactured ignorance. History shapes our identity and should be a force for understanding and critical thought, not repression. As historian Timothy Snyder aptly stated, “Everything worth knowing is discomfiting.… Trying to shield young people from guilt prevents them from seeing history for what it was and becoming the citizens they might be.”

History offers students the opportunity to excavate the past, bear witness and speak in defense of those who can no longer speak — the over 40,000 killed in Gaza, the thousands of refugees drowned at sea, the numerous victims of gun violence, the millions lost to unforgivable wars, the young people slandered for standing up for the truth. Classrooms should not reproduce injustices or conceal past betrayals and mass suffering under the guise of historical innocence. Instead, history should provide an unflinching examination of both the ruins and the ideals of a democracy on the march.

As the new school year begins, classrooms should be bastions where critical thinking thrives and ideas are explored freely. Yet, in the face of growing repression and efforts to silence dissent, undermine faculty rights, commodify students and strip education of its role as a democratic public sphere, it is imperative that students, educators, parents and concerned citizens unite in mass resistance.

Young people worldwide are joining movements that redefine education as a place of critical inquiry, academic freedom, and a space that both defends and fosters equality, social and economic justice, and democratic values. This resistance is more urgent than ever. Educators, parents, workers and all who oppose the rise of fascist politics and repressive forms of education at home and abroad, must champion the right to question, protest, challenge, engage in meaningful dialogue and hold authority accountable.


Trump and his sycophantic apostles embrace rather than reject James Baldwin’s claim that “ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.”

For instance, as reported by Inside Higher Education, over 75 chapters of the American Association of University Professors — alongside higher education unions, student groups and student debt organizers — are uniting in a nationwide movement. They’re confronting what they see as coordinated attacks on the integrity of higher education. In a powerful online statement titled, “The Future We Stand For,” they expose the numerous threats facing higher education that jeopardize its public and democratic mission. They write: “State legislatures from Florida to Indiana have targeted public universities in a broader assault on U.S. democracy. Meanwhile, at private universities, unelected trustees, billionaires, and administrators are increasingly wielding unchecked power to dictate policies and academic priorities.”

These assaults have become all too common and must be resisted. By fostering an environment where curiosity is celebrated, critical thinking is nurtured, protests protected and critical pedagogy enacted, we can push back against the forces that seek to stifle intellectual freedom, the radical imagination and the never-ending demand for justice. Let this be a call to action: Resist the narrowing of minds, fight against the censorship of ideas, fight against turning schools into far right indoctrination centers and protect the sanctity of education.

Together, we can ensure that our classrooms remain spaces of empowerment, where every voice has the opportunity to be heard and every mind the chance to grow. A space where education becomes central to politics, and informed citizens and critically engaged agents are viewed as crucial to a socialist democracy.

Henry A. Giroux
Henry Giroux (born 1943) is an internationally renowned writer and cultural critic, Professor Henry Giroux has authored, or co-authored over 65 books, written several hundred scholarly articles, delivered more than 250 public lectures, been a regular contributor to print, television, and radio news media outlets, and is one of the most cited Canadian academics working in any area of Humanities research. In 2002, he was named as one of the top fifty educational thinkers of the modern period in Fifty Modern Thinkers on Education: From Piaget to the Present as part of Routledge’s Key Guides Publication Series.

The Most Toxic Place in America

Review of Atomic Days: The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in America by Joshua Frank (Haymarket, 2022)

By Chris Green

August 18, 2024

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.



It may seem odd to say it during this Trumpian era of extreme political polarization, but there is one area where Republicans and Democrats share a remarkably similar policy perspective.That common ground is found in the fact that, at the national level, both Republicans and Democrats have worked diligently to refrain from seriously addressing the epic dangers related to the long inactive Hanford plutonium production facilities located in southeast Washington state.

A few details of this beneath-the-radar bipartisan unity are provided in Joshua Frank’s fine 2022 book Atomic Days: The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in America. The book illustrates how Republicans and Democrats have seriously downplayed or ignored evidence of the massive damage to the environment and public health caused by Hanford’s past plutonium production. Both have also downplayed or ignored the potentially apocalyptic ticking time bomb presented by the tens of millions of gallons of nuclear waste contained within leaky and aging tanks buried beneath the surface on Hanford’s grounds.

The Deep State Run Amok

Since its original construction during World War II as a site for plutonium production, the federal government has succeeded to a large extent in keeping Hanford’s operations shrouded in secrecy. The extremely modest transparency and accountability mechanisms that have been instituted over Hanford’s operations are due in large part to activism on the part of members of the Umatilla and Yakima tribal nations. These indigenous groups had their land brutally expropriated during World War II so Hanford could be built. The activism helped trigger a massive declassified Hanford-related document release by the federal government in 1986. The document release showed that–in prior decades–federal government officials had engaged in numerous coverups of radioactive leaks and other accidents at Hanford. It included insight about a secret December 1949 experiment at Hanford called the Green Run. The experiment, carried out over two days, saw a substantial release into the atmosphere of radioactive iodine. Frank writes that the purpose of the experiment was not completely clear but it was possibly for the purpose of testing nuclear detection equipment in case of a Soviet attack. He notes that the impact of the Green Run and similar tests was illustrated in a 1996 study which showed that women who “lived downwind from Hanford had a frighteningly high rate of hypothyroidism.” There have been few studies that even begin to approach a comprehensive look at the long term impact on human health and the natural environment caused by Hanford’s operations–probably because powerful people with the capacity to launch them have a vested interest in not doing so.

Other activists exposing abuses at Hanford have included those who have suffered cancer and other severe medical problems as a result of employment at Hanford as well as Hanford scientists and engineers acting as whistleblowers. Frank conducted interviews with a number of these people for this book. The whistleblowers attempted to call attention to the cutting of corners and lack of safety protocols at Hanford on the part of the federal government’s Department of Energy (DOE) and its contractors Bechtel and URS. For speaking out, all faced coordinated campaigns of harassment and other forms of retaliation on the part of officials from DOE, Bechtel and URS. Frank’s account of their stories sometimes reads like a spy thriller novel, with courageous whistleblowers being targets for destruction by evil governmental and corporate bureaucrats. According to Frank and Tom Carpenter of the non-profit watchdog Hanford Challenge, circumstantial evidence suggests that the campaign against one whistleblower, Ed Bricker, may have even included an attempt to kill him during the 1980s. At the end of the day, the whistleblowers received financial compensation or other acknowledgement of victimhood from the courts and certain government agencies. However, in spite of the positive resolution of their cases, Frank reports that the whistleblowers often told him that their experiences were heavily traumatic. It was common for them to face daily hostility from coworkers who didn’t appreciate them rocking the boat. The retaliation against one whistleblower (Donna Busche)included sexually harassing comments from a male URS senior manager (who later apologized after Busche complained to HR).

During the George W. Bush and Obama years, Busche and fellow whistleblower Walter Tamosaitis worked on what has been an ongoing centerpiece of the effort to deal with Hanford’s nuclear waste, the site’s Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant (WTP). The project has been a massive boondoggle for Bechtel, the company under contract to construct it. According to Frank, the WTP, begun in 2002, was originally scheduled for completion in 2011. That target date was badly missed and by 2022 the earliest estimates placed the project’s finish in 2037. The cost was originally $12 billion; in recent years, according to the US Government Accountability Office (GAO), estimates place it at $41 billion.

In spite of its interminable series of delays and budget revisions on the WTP project, Bechtel has kept raking in the taxpayer dollars. Frank writes that its conduct in constructing the WTP has parallels with its actions during the Iraq War. In receiving many US government contracts for Iraq reconstruction, Bechtel engaged in destructive mismanagement and waste of taxpayer funds. In one instance, Bechtel’s work in constructing an Iraqi children’s cancer hospital was so mismanaged that the US government canceled the contract and awarded it to another contractor.

Bechtel has, for the most part, been able to avoid serious accountability for its colossal waste of taxpayer funds. It has spread its money among the campaign coffers of both Republicans and Democrats. Frank notes that in a 2021 interview conducted by Bechtel president Brendan Bechtel, Biden’s Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg assured the company that it would have more opportunities for government contracts with the administration’s forthcoming infrastructure legislation.

Hanford has almost totally shut down its involvement in generating nuclear power since 1990. All governmental work on the site since then has supposedly been targeted at dealing with the massive amount of nuclear waste buried beneath its surface as well as remediating the land, air and waterways (mainly the Columbia River) which have been ravaged over the decades by its radioactive and chemical pollution. The fact that this recovery work has made such a small headway over a long time period is not just because of the political influence of corrupt government contractors like Bechtel. It is also because the US political class–Republican and Democrat–regard nuclear weapons as a lynchpin of US global hegemony. They would not want to delegitimize the production of such weapons or the military-industrial complex in general in the eyes of the American public by mobilizing a serious and comprehensive governmental effort to address harms caused by Hanford.

Meanwhile, Frank observes, it is not out of the realm of possibility that the tens of millions of gallons of nuclear waste bubbling and bursting at the seams beneath Hanford’s surface in rapidly aging tanks–filled well beyond their originally prescribed capacity–could produce an unprecedentedly catastrophic nuclear accident in the not too distant future. In general, those storage tanks have been managed with the utmost carelessness and recklessness by the US federal government and its private contractors.

The Way Forward

Frank’s book is primarily about Hanford–but it places Hanford within the broader issue of nuclear power. For example he devotes a particularly compelling portion of the book’s last part to criticizing progressive commentators George Monbiot, the Guardian columnist, and Bhaskar Sunkara, the founder of Jacobin: both for their embrace of nuclear power as a solution to climate change and their severe downplaying of the catastrophic dangers of nuclear power plant meltdowns. Some nuclear power advocates claim that it is carbon neutral. In reality, Frank points out, when every stage of nuclear energy development is taken into account–”from plant and reactor construction, uranium mining, milling and fuel fabrication to the transport of waste”–nuclear power creates a larger carbon footprint than natural gas plants.

Indigenous activists seem to be the best hope for wrenching any further substantive change at Hanford from the powers-that-be. These activists too have had their struggles making headway on the issue. Federal and state officials have frequently made a show of consulting tribal groups about Hanford and have co-opted some of their concerns. But they have also sometimes visibly worked to keep the tribes at a distance when designing Hanford policies.

Frank spends some time in the book recounting the Hanford related activism of Russell Jim, Yakama Nation elder, who died from cancer at age eighty-two in 2018. Frank quotes extensively from an interview Jim once gave and it is obvious from his prose that he is personally moved by the steadfastness and dignity Jim showed throughout his struggle against Hanford. Frank places Hanford within the broader struggle of Jim’s people to fight the robbery and contamination of their land: for example he also references the fight against the dams on the Columbia River which, from the 1930’s onward, destroyed traditional indigenous fishing grounds.

The book is based on years of research exploring government documents and interviews conducted with participants in the struggle. Frank is an editor at Counterpunch magazine. I’ve always admired his work as well as that of his Counterpunch colleague, Jeffrey St. Clair.

Overall this book is not only useful in calling attention to an under-reported and potentially epically catastrophic environmental ticking time bomb in Hanford’s haphazardly stored nuclear waste. It also is an important story of corporate and governmental corruption–and shows how courageous ordinary people have resisted it.