Well, that was interesting.

Some quick thoughts below the cut.



So I’ve recently become much more aware of the Discourse about air conditioning that is common to much of northern Europe.  There’s a lot of weirdness generally, but there are certain strains that pop up regularly.

One is Left / green concern about emissions.  Unlike a lot of Left / green concerns, this one doesn’t stop at hand-wringing.  It tends to go straight to moral condemnation and direct action.  A surprising lot of northern European greens view aircon as somewhere between “acceptable only in the direst of needs” and “just inherently very wicked”.

Another is a strain of what I can only call machismo.   Find an online discussion about aircon, and within a few comments you’ll find the guy — it’s always a guy — who wants you to know that he was with British Forces Arabian Penninsula at Aden back in the day, and nobody had ever heard of this aircon nonsense, and they were just fine, damn your eyes.  Or the guy — it’s always a guy — who is living in a house his great-grandfather built with his own two hands, insulated proper-like and with real brass fittings, warm in winter and cool in summer, add a ceiling fan and that’s all a man should ever need. 

Related to that last one is Anything But Aircon.  You see, if you just install a geothermal heat pump, and get better insulation, and plant trees around the house and ivy on outer walls, and add awnings and external shading, and paint your roof white, and get double- glazed windows with louvers, and a ceiling fan in every room, and fill your living spaces with large house plants, and also sleep with a mattress topper and 100% breathable linen or high-thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets, then you should be completely fine.

Yet another is, not exactly anti-Americanism, but defining-us-against-Americanism.  Those huge malls — icy cold, I needed a sweater!  Have you heard they have stadiums that are air-conditioned?  And ice in their beer!

Apropos of that last point.  Here’s a temporal heat map of London:

and one for New York City:


— But NYC has a relatively mild climate by North American standards.  Here’s Kansas City:



In Kansas City, nature is actively trying to kill you quite a lot of the time.  There’s literally no place in Europe, from Cornwall to the Urals, that has a climate as extreme as Kansas City.

And these are the temperate parts of the USA — the bits where average temperatures are comparable to much of Europe.  I’m not even going to bother with maps from Houston or New Orleans or Los Angeles.  

Do Americans overuse aircon?  Oh yes, we absolutely do.  But do we need aircon?  Also yes.  Most of us do, at least some of the time.   There are a couple of corners of the country where it rarely gets that warm — upper New England, a strip along the Pacific coast, the airier bits of the mountain West.  But around 80 percent of the US population lives in places where summers without aircon are not just unpleasant, but actively bad for mental and physical health.   99% of homes in Houston have aircon.  And if you’ve ever spent a summer in Houston, that statistic will leave you wondering how there can possibly be 1% that don’t.

On the positive side, the US has built about all the aircon it’s going to.   

This is very much not the case around the world! Here’s a projection of the growth of aircon worldwide.

It’s not just about Graham Platner or even Donald Trump. It’s about the millions and millions of men who are just like them. I have personally known far too many of them. They are men who for some reason I have never completely understood believe that they can do anything they want with a woman simply because she is a woman.

It started in high school. I heard guys brag about clocking the movements of a girl who almost always didn’t have siblings to get in the way and was not part of the “in” crowd the guy was in. The guy telling the story had never talked to the girl in the halls at school or asked her on a date. He would figure out when her parents weren’t home, and he would show up on her doorstep and “get some.” I went to three different high schools in three different towns in three states, and I heard guys tell this story in every single one of them. They even used the same phrase, “get some.”

Guys like that turned into Donald Trump and Graham Platner. I heard them talk about what they did in teen clubs, at wrestling and track practice, in barracks at West Point and in the Army, in fast food joints and bars and restaurants, in cars, and even once on an airplane. I could not figure out when I was a boy, and I could not figure out as a young man, and I still do not really understand what made guys like them do what they did and then brag about it.

Later in life, I had relationships with women that were serious enough that we would open up and share secrets with one another. Too many of them – in fact, all but one or two – had been raped or abused when they were very young girls or teenagers or young women. I’m just one guy, and for a long time I believed that it was just happenstance that I became involved with women who had been sexually abused or raped. I don’t believe that anymore. I believe most of the women on this planet have experienced the evil of men.

The Graham Platners and Donald Trumps of the world are everywhere. I am not doing anything more than stating the obvious to say that there are far too many of them, certainly far more than we talk about publicly. In the world as it exists in the United States, it takes a man running for office, or perhaps becoming famous as an actor or musician or sports figure, for the world to find out what is in his past. Trump was certainly known in some circles in New York City for his abusive behavior with women, but it wasn’t public knowledge because it had not been widely shared in the press. Platner was apparently known previously for his abusive behavior with women. One woman put up a Facebook post in 2024 warning other women “not to date this guy,” according to reports. In a story in today’s New York Times, Bret Stephens reported, “Lyndsey Fifield, a former girlfriend of Platner’s, told The Times earlier this year that he had ‘twisted her arm behind her back, shoved her into a bedroom and held the door closed from the other side so that she couldn’t get out,’ while also describing him as ‘the most toxic literally abusive man on earth.’” That story alone should have ended Platner’s campaign.

The Times story was a colloquy between Stephens and long-time Times reporter and opinion writer Frank Bruni about the political implications of they called the “pathetic, ugly last chapter” of Platner’s “demise.” They talked about what primary voters knew and when they knew it. They compared Platner with Trump, talking about the “fan-boying and fan-girling” around Platner by progressives and around Trump by his fawning MAGA base. They even talked about how Karl Marx had posited that “History repeats itself: first as musical tragedy, second as moral farce.”

But let me be blunt and say that they didn’t spend enough time talking about Platner’s sexual behavior with women or the alleged rape that was revealed earlier this week. I want you to listen to this from Stephens as he compares MAGA Republicans and their willingness to “to overlook just about any flaw on its own side in order to win” in comparison to Democrats coming out of the Platner debacle with a better chance to win than they would have had with Platner. Here is the line that got to me: “The silver lining here is that the rape allegation really did destroy Platner’s candidacy.”

Silver lining? There is a victim in this story who is not mentioned even once, as the two New York Times political experts go on to analyze how “this rape allegation” finally tipped the balance in the Senate race in Maine. Then they discuss how support from AIPAC for one candidate might affect a Senate race in Michigan. It’s all politics.

A woman was raped. I guess I’ve got to say “allegedly,” but you know what I mean. In this New York Times story, and in another lengthy story published today that amounts to a kind of autopsy for the Platner campaign, the fact that Platner is accused of violently raping a woman is just another factor in figuring out what happened to a political race in Maine. In the second Times story, three reporters say that they interviewed 30 people in the course of figuring out how Platner so easily dispatched former Governor Janet Mills, who cancelled her campaign and pulled out of the primary despite running “tough” political ads against Platner “featuring his comments about women and rape.”

The campaign analysis story, titled “A slow rolling disaster: Inside the Implosion of the Platner Campaign,” spends hundreds of words as it explores “Questions about the professionalism of the campaign’s senior leadership.”

Here’s what I’ve got to say about that: It’s not about who “recruited” Platner as a candidate, which they cover in detail. It’s not about how he was not properly “vetted” because Democrats seemed to be swooning over his “working class” credentials that turned out to be not so working class at all. It’s not about his campaign staff or how much money they raised.

It’s about Platner. He is a man who during his lifetime has used women, has been abusive to women, violent with women (twisting a woman’s hand behind her back and essentially locking her in a bedroom), was ugly and dismissive of women (the sexting “scandal”), and ultimately stands accused of raping a woman.

It’s about the man, and it happens far, far too many times. Remember Eliot Spitzer, the New York governor who was ousted because of his involvement with a high-end criminal prostitution ring? Remember Congressman Anthony Weiner sending photographs of his private parts to young women who were, to put it mildly, not his wife?

I could go on. And on. And on. What do these sex scandals have in common? Misbehavior involving sex, some of it criminal in nature, by men. What defines Donald Trump? His lying? His thievery? His authoritarian behavior? Yes, but what should define him is his sexual assault of E. Jean Carroll and the rest of his sexual assaults and harassment of some 25 other women. His statement that because he was famous, he could “grab them by the pussy.”

That is it, right there, in a nutshell, as the cliché goes. One statement by Donald Trump explains the boys I knew in high school bragging about “getting some” from girls they barely knew. It explains the politicians, the rock stars, the sports figures – it explains all of them, because millions and millions of men have that same instinct or belief or whatever it is in their soulless hearts and minds.

I don’t know what is to be done about it. The “answer,” at least politically, is not better vetting and more professional senior campaign aides. I have read that somehow the culture is to blame, that pornography plays a major role, that boys and violent video games are involved. Many so-called “conservatives” believe that “removing God from the classroom” was to blame. I’ve read all kinds of stuff that seeks to explain the unexplainable. But the boys I heard in high school bragging about their conquests were students in schools when God was still in the classroom, and they did not play video games, and the worst pornography they were probably exposed to was naked from the waist up women in magazines like Playboy.

This is what I have come to believe. It has to do with how boys are raised and what they learn from their parents and other close family members such as brothers and uncles and cousins and even from their friends about how they should treat girls and women.

I will tell a story to illustrate this. It’s one I have told before, but it bears re-telling here. When I lived in the deep South, I was invited along on a duck hunt with a bunch of men, several of whom brought their teenage sons along. I had never hunted ducks. I had never gone to what they call a “duck camp.” I was curious, so I agreed to go along.

The duck camp turned out to be a barge containing cots and a kitchen floating in the swamps of southern Louisiana in Cajun country. Next to the barge, on land, was a wooden building on stilts that turned out to be a bar. The first night, when the bar opened, the whole group, including the boys, went to the bar. I watched three men take their sons and treat them to blow jobs from women at the bar who turned out to be prostitutes who were there just for the purpose of providing sex to the men and boys. The fathers would pay one of the prostitutes, and this is the phrase I heard fathers use speaking to their own sons: “Go get you a piece of ass, boy.” I saw at least one father go with the same woman he had paid to go with his son. Where did they go with the prostitutes? It’s even worse than you think: into the woods behind the bar.

Later, the fathers would chortle with each other about teaching their sons how to be a man. They did this openly, and spoke in front of me, because they thought, wrongfully, I had gone through the same rituals when I was a boy. One of the men offered to “treat” me to one of the women. When I declined, all the men avoided me afterwards. I was never invited on another hunting trip by any of these men again.

The way boys are raised ends up affecting their entire lives. Even though what I witnessed happened in the deep South, I am telling you that the same sort of thing in a different context happens all over the country in suburbs and cities. It may not be duck camps and prostitutes, but it is everywhere.

Some men pass along to boys an inherent disrespect of women as things rather than human beings. Something similar was probably experienced by Donald Trump and Graham Platner. You are not born believing the way they do. Trump is a pig. Platner is a pig. Too many men are pigs.

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Digital rights and data management have found themselves embroiled in a contentious global discussion regarding virtual private networks (VPNs). Governments across the globe have begun to enact legislation against these tools, with some states completely prohibiting them.

They cite security reasons for these prohibitions. But in many cases, banning such tools limits online users’ ability to protect their personal information, maintain privacy, and hold others accountable.

The Regulatory Argument vs. The True Value of Encryption

Those advocating for regulations against the use of VPNs often cite concerns with cybersecurity due to encryption. Since encryption is used by VPNs to hide information, regulatory agencies find it difficult to control activity within their borders.

Companies have resisted VPN regulation because restricting encryption would weaken the entire internet . It is not only about malicious actors but also about ordinary citizens, who are even more at risk.

Nevertheless, an overzealous attempt to regulate encryption ultimately ends up taking away much-needed security from regular internet users.

The Advantages of VPNs

The use of a VPN provides several important advantages to average internet users:

• Protecting Everyday Privacy:  VPNs shield citizens, journalists, and activists from intrusive data tracking by internet service providers and hackers.
• Securing Remote Work:  Digital workforce today is quickly growing. For them, having a VPN to encrypt their data while connecting to corporate servers is essential. Not only for their digital safety, but also for the company’s.
• Promoting Digital Freedom: With the global knowledge expanding, everyone needs access to it. VPN lets users bypass the virtual digital borders in a secure way.

Is There a Need to Restrict Data?

What really drives VPN bans isn’t primarily about protection or digital safety. Many regulatory groups aim to control what people can say, do, and access online. Keeping information restricted is important for those in power.

VPNs break down those barriers, allowing people to access independent news, document what’s really happening, and express their views without the fear of being monitored.

When a government targets VPNs, it creates a digital wall that isolates people from the outside world. Locals stop receiving news from international sources. For journalists and whistleblowers, VPNs are not just useful; they are essential. They encrypt everything, making data unreadable to anyone who might want to misuse it.

Do Virtual Private Networks Aid Companies?

Blocking VPNs impacts not only individual privacy but also how businesses operate around the globe. Encryption is critical to modern corporate infrastructures ; therefore, it plays an important role in protecting the company’s intellectual property, financial, and other internal confidential communications. Global businesses face many challenges without these methods.

If those who work in the company cannot securely connect to external servers through encrypted tunnels, much of the sensitive corporate data is left exposed to both surveillance and localized cyber threats.

Giving Everyone Access to Digital Safety Tools

The value of reliable and accessible digital safety tools becomes obvious as the push to regulate them increases. Everyone who goes online, especially on public networks, and understands the dangers of it wants to keep their data safe and their communications secured. They are proactively searching for trusted tools and try different trials, like a Windows VPN free trial to test things out. Relying on a VPN trial allows you to check what the software offers and make sure your connection is safe before having to make an investment.

How Will Digital Autonomy Look in the Future?

Ultimately, the reason why governments are pushing against VPNs is to gain more control over the flow of information and how people use the internet. This just highlights the role that tools like VPNs have in defending individual data sovereignty.

They are part of the puzzle that potentially enables a more secure and open internet world.

Photo: Kevin Paster via Pexels

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The post Why Are Some Countries Considering Banning VPNs? appeared first on DCReport.org.

I’m speculating here, but there must have come a day in the life of Donald Trump when he figured out that doing actual real work for a living was hard, and he should do less of it. He began his campaign for the presidency in 2015 when he descended the golden escalator in Trump Tower, where he lived and did actual work at Trump Organization, which he wholly owned and still owns.

Trump was a real estate guy. He built and owned skyscrapers in New York and Chicago and Las Vegas. Building skyscrapers is hard work. You have to go around and get people to loan you the money to build the things. That’s hard work, meeting after meeting, to convince banks and insurance companies who loaned you money before and then lost it when you went bankrupt several times, that you’re a whole new Donald Trump, and you’re worth investing money with again.

Then comes the hard work of building skyscrapers. Many, many, many meetings with architects and general contractors and subcontractors by the dozen – choosing the thug-managed company you’re going to buy your concrete from, who’s going to be in charge of slipping undocumented workers through the maze of immigration laws and systems to work cheap for you…stuff like that. And of course, if you’re the builder, you make the design decisions -- many, many choices of what color marble to put here, what kind of stupid columns to put there, what kind of gold-plated nonsense to plaster all over the lobbies, even down to which ceiling light fixtures you’re going to install and which hideous carpet you’re going to cover the floors of the halls with.

See what I mean? Lots of yelling, lots of stealing from contractors, lots of getting your lawyers to stiff them by filing delay after delay against their lawsuits.

When Trump decided to run for president, campaigning wasn’t real work. Trump used other people’s money in the form of campaign donations, because of course he did, to fly around on his private plane and give one rally speech after another to adoring crowds of people who would become his MAGA faithful. He loved it. He still loves it. Standing in front of people who adore you and telling them any lie that pops into your head and listening to their applause and cheers isn’t working, it’s therapy.

When he got in the White House the first time, Trump did a phony divestment of his interest in the Trump Organization and said his sons would run the firm. Opportunities around the world immediately opened up for new Trump deals without Trump being formally involved, but I mean, if you are in a place like Kazakhstan, and you make a deal with the Trump Organization, who do you think you’re dealing with?

Trump himself flew around “solving” disputes between countries that would be lucrative to himself and his family. There was the famous “deal” he made between Saudi Arabia and Qatar, that ended $5 billion in lawsuits and allowed each country to fly over the other’s airspace. Remember that video of Trump in Saudi Arabia putting his hands on the glowing globe with members of the Saudi royal family and then dancing with them? Out of sight of the cameras, he was making his deals.

They paid off. In 2021, after Trump left office, the Saudi sovereign wealth fund “invested” $2 billion with some kind of scammy “private equity” fund run by Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, who allegedly worked in the White House during Trump’s first term as an unpaid somethingoranother, but what he was really doing was running around gathering lucre for daddy-in-law. Shortly after Trump re-took the White House, Qatar, the other half of the Trump-struck deal between the two Gulf states, “donated” a $400 billion gold-plated Boeing 747 for Trump to use as Air Force One and take with him for his “library” in downtown Miami when he leaves office.

Pretty good for doing no work at all, right? But do you think that satisfied him? Not on your life. This time he became president, Trump was protected by a shiny new Supreme Court decision that immunized him from being prosecuted for doing practically anything as president, so he just decided he would let it rip and gobble up all the money he could while he’s in office. The man who as late as 2024 was calling crypto “a scam” and telling interviewers he was “not a fan” of crypto, turned his sons loose to start up a Trump crypto pump-and-dump boiler room scam called World Liberty Financial.

Trump’s latest mandatory federal financial disclosure form, which ran to 927 pages, revealed that he has made about $2 billion since taking office last year, at least $1.4 billion of which came from “the crypto currency industry,” according to a report last week in the New York Times. $1.4 billion is a lot of money. The question is, what kind of work was done to cause that money to end up in Trump’s pocket and be reported to the federal government as “income?”

The short answer is, no work at all. The long answer is no work at all, too. This is because you do not have to do real work in order to fleece suckers out of their cash when you’re running what amounts to a Ponzi scheme.

The Times reports that Trump made a whopping $636 million from sales and trades of a memecoin called $TRUMP. That’s just perfect, isn’t it? Trump put his name on an utterly useless and worthless piece of imaginary money and sold it to his followers as an “investment.” Over a million people, almost certainly every one of them a MAGA Trump supporter, lost $3.8 billion “investing” in Trump’s scam, which in classic pump-and-dump fashion, ran the price up from a few dollars to $70, at which point the “insiders,” Trump and his family and cronies sold out and left the “outsiders” holding their worthless or nearly worthless memecoins, which naturally have Trump’s face on them.

A Ponzi scheme, like the one famously operated by Bernie Madoff, runs like this: people give the guy running the Ponzi scheme money as an alleged “investment.” The Ponzi scheme guy takes their money and gives them something worthless in return. Bernie Madoff took billions of dollars from suckers and gave them reports of false stock trades in return. Listen to this. Madoff’s Ponzi firm had three floors of the famous “lipstick building” on Third Avenue. On one floor was an actual legitimate business Madoff ran for years as a third party market maker in stocks. Market makers hold specific stocks that are ready to sell and make their profit from a percentage of the “spread” between the price asked for the stock and the price it sells at. It’s complicated, but it is legitimate, and the market makers are a key element in keeping things going by providing liquidity in the market.

That was on the 19^th floor along with Madoff’s office. The firm’s entrance and conference room was on the 18^th floor. On the 17^th floor, a skeleton staff of only a few employees faked the stock reports that were sent to the investors in Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. They would watch the stock prices as they appeared on the NY Stock Exchange or the NASDAQ or the Standard & Poor’s listings, they would pick a stock that had gone up, and they would fake a purchase order and a sell order and they would list the profit from the sale or another fake investment into options contracts, and they would list it all and make it look official, and send the paper report to the investor with “evidence” of all the money they had made. Madoff made no real investments, achieved no real profits, and pocketed some of the money and used the rest of it to pay some “profits” to selected and favored clients of his scheme, so they would spread the word and bring in new investors and new money…and on it went.

You will notice that the only real “work” that took place was three people generating fake reports on the 17^th floor.

Trump’s crypto scheme is even better. He blabbers on Truth Social every day, he has people and reporters into the Oval Office and between naps he says outrageous stuff. All of this is reported every day, giving evidence that he is, in fact, President of the United States and his name is Donald Trump. In return, his MAGA faithful “invest” in his schemes, which include another cryptocurrency, a so-called “stablecoin” called $WLFI issued by World Liberty Financial, and Trump takes his cut all the way along the money river. Through World Liberty Financial, he got 75 percent of all sales of $WLFI. He got money by selling his own pieces of cryptocurrency when they were at their highest value. He got money through the crypto firm. Here is a list of what he has made since he took office last year, taken from the Substack report of Aaron Parnas.

Do you see any work being done there? Any meetings with contractors? Even any meetings with his investors, the suckers who gave Trump their money and lost $3.8 billion in the process? Madoff’s investors lost about $18 billion, of which $7.5 billion was recovered and returned to them. Do you think even a dime of the $3.8 billion in losses racked up by Trump’s fans will be recovered and returned?

Trump and his sons and Melania – she sold $6 million in fake Melania cryptocurrency – just sat there and churned money and took profits from trades, profits from fools who invested in their firm, profits from sales of fake memecoins they generated out of thin air, profits from another of the Gulf states, the UAE, which “invested” millions in what the Times called “a stake in the company,” World Liberty Financial.

Crypto is a license to print money. The Supreme Court decision immunizing Trump while he’s president is a license to print money. Putting Jared and Don Jr. and Eric on jets and sending them around the world making deals with countries that want to be on Trump’s good side is another license to print money.

The whole thing is a gigantic scam that lines the pockets of Donald Trump and his family, including Jared and Ivanka. Donald Trump is the first president in the history of this country to take the presidency itself and sell shares in it. If he could have charged an admission fee to the suckers on the Mall who slogged through thunderstorms and punishing heat to listen to his blather and get their lungs filled with the smoke of exploding gunpowder and whatever paper shit they use for fireworks – and who knows, because most of it comes from China – he would have.

P.T. Barnum said there’s a sucker born every minute. Trump birthed 78 million of them, and he is doing his level best to empty as many of their pockets as he can. They deserve every painful loss they suffer, bar none.

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When Anastasia was in second grade, I chaperoned a field trip with her class to the Smithsonian Museum of American History in DC. This was not the first field trip I had chaperoned, and I had learned that, for most teachers, museum field trips are not an ideal place to teach a lesson. Too many kids, too many strangers wandering around, not enough time, and it’s really hard to get the kids to focus.

I, on the other hand, am a huge history nerd, and I’m very good at getting children to listen to me. Years of retail taught me to project my voice like a drill instructor. Also, children love Ogres.

Two years previously, I had chaperoned Jordan’s class. I had given a really detailed tour of the museum and several fun lectures along the way to a small group consisting of Jordan and about four kids. This time, I had the entire class listening and delivered a lesson about racism in America while we were all standing around the 1960 Woolworth’s counter made famous in Greensboro, North Carolina, when a bunch of Black activists sat down at the “White’s Only” section and asked to be served.

Anastasia’s class, almost all of whom were minorities of one kind or another, was fascinated by the story I told of how some people didn’t want kids that looked like them to sit and eat lunch with kids that looked like my lily-white daughter. And how a group of people refused to allow that to keep happening.

Afterwards, Anastaisa’s teacher, Mrs. Hall, told me that several people had stopped to listen to me talking to the group of seven-year-olds. She was very pleased that the kids got a full history lesson, and I was just as pleased to deliver it.

Fast forward a decade, and the mediocre racist white men of the Trump regime would like to ensure that never happens again. That the only history children learn is white nationalist propaganda.

This is why, in the middle of an economy on the brink and a disastrous mess in the Gulf still unresolved, the regime is going to war against the very same Museum of American History I gave my lectures in:

In a broadside posted to its website just as fireworks celebrating America’s 250th birthday were lighting up skies on Saturday, the White House condemned the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History for what it said was a failure to celebrate the nation’s heritage, arguing it had become a political tool intent on denigrating the American story.

The 162-page report, by the White House’s Domestic Policy Council, represents a sweeping attack on the museum’s presentation of American history. It is the latest step in the Trump administration’s campaign to pressure the Smithsonian into conforming to what President Trump has described as “patriotic” history.

What, exactly, is the regime whining about? White people are being oppressed! American history that teaches about racism is racist! Against white people! Because, of course, that’s the (completely fabricated) problem:

Titled “Saving America’s Story: How Ideological Capture at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History Erases Our Heritage,” the report accuses the museum of anti-white bias and of minimizing and distorting the nation’s founding. Those actions, the report asserts, have shifted the museum’s mission “from straightforward historical education and scholarship toward an extreme political activism that seeks to transform our country.”

The museum, it says, “no longer treats the American story as a shared national inheritance to be taught or celebrated but as a political instrument to divide, dispirit and discourage our citizens.”

Fascists are not subtle. When they say our history is no longer a “shared national inheritance,” what they mean is that we are no longer telling history from the mediocre, racist white man’s point of view.

The right has long resented the fact that American education has been slowly telling the whole story of America. The pace has been glacial, but we’ve moved away from “Happy Slaves” to a more accurate depiction of who we are as a nation and how we can be better. This has terrified the right for decades. A history that isn’t whitewashed is a history that does not produce racists.

This, more than anything, is the driving force behind the right’s all-out war on public education. They’re not subtle about the racism driving them, either:

The demographics race we’re losing badly. We’re not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term. - Sen. Lindsay Graham

Not too long ago, Moms for Liberty, a fascist organization that tried to seize control of public education before being crushed by the voters, said the quiet part out loud:

The Hamilton County chapter of Moms for Liberty quoted Hitler’s remarks at a 1935 rally on the front page of its new newsletter on Wednesday. The quote, placed directly below the masthead, read: “He alone, who OWNS the youth, GAINS the future.”

There are a million different quotes that convey the same message. But they liked the Hitler version the most. Why? Because Hitler is their fucking guy, and returning to a whitewashed version of American history serves the singular purpose of generating more mediocre racist voters who will support the party of white nationalism. They’re telling us, out in the open, why they hate an honest accounting of America.

The right does not want history. They want anti-minority and anti-woman propaganda taught as the truth to children. Children who will internalize the lies and grow up to be mediocre racists who will view actual history as lies meant to make them feel bad. This is how you mass-produce Republican voters.

When the regime falls, a top priority for the Democratic president is to purge the right-wing propaganda from our schools and museums and other public spaces. Because while teaching white nationalist propaganda produces fascists, teaching the real history produces Americans. Americans who see this country not just for what it is but, more importantly, what it can become. The potential has always been there, and mediocre racist white men have been trying to snuff it out since our founding 250 years ago.

It took decades to get rid of the “Happy Slave” lie in schools. We can erase the right’s toxic white nationalist propaganda in a fraction of the time, and we must. We cannot afford an entire generation of children being poisoned by the fascist right. We will not go back, no matter how much the racists scream and stamp their feet.