Dear Progressive Reader,

There is no shortage of material with which to begin this newsletter. In less than twenty-one days, Donald Trump and his key assistant, the unelected, unconfirmed adviser Elon Musk, have succeeded in upending countless agencies and programs of the federal government and jeopardizing the health and wellbeing of people around the globe. A number of elements of the Trump-Musk overreach have been temporarily paused by a series of court cases, but much of the damage remains. Government employees and contractors, as well as state agencies and nonprofits that depend on federal funding are in a state of confusion, uncertainty, and fear.

Terms like “firehose,” “shock and awe,” and “flood the zone” are a regular part of daily media reporting on Trump’s actions. But all of this should have been anticipated. One year ago, in the pages of The Progressive, I noted: “Trump is proposing a simultaneous onslaught against education, the courts, key initiatives of the Biden Administration, and the very institutions of government itself.” There is little surprise, since Trump made his intentions clear throughout his campaign, and the playbooks known as Project 2025 and Trump’s own Agenda 47 outline many of the goals and objectives being pursued now.

An early warning of the tactics being used came in an interview that former Trump adviser and global champion of the authoritarian right Steve Bannon gave to the PBS program Frontline in March 2019. Bannon said at the time, “I said, all we have to do is flood the zone. Every day we hit them with three things. They’ll bite on one, and we’ll get all of our stuff done, bang, bang, bang. These guys will never—will never be able to recover. But we’ve got to start with muzzle velocity. So it’s got to start, and it’s got to hammer.” And hammer it has.

One of the least publicized, but perhaps most frightening, actions underway is the rewriting (or eliminating) of history and information. Changing the history of January 6, 2021, was the first step, followed by the halting of meetings by the National Institutes of Health, the removal of climate data from government websites, along with public health data and all mentions of the phrase climate change.

My thoughts first turned to the “memory hole” depicted in George Orwell’s 1949 novel Ninteen Eighty-Four (also published as 1984), where protagonist Winston Smith is required, in his job at the Ministry of Truth, to erase inconvenient pieces of history by incinerating them. However, when epidemiologist Nancy Krieger told NPR’s All Things Considered on Wednesday that what is taking place could be called “a digital book burning,” and thoughts immediately went to the book burnings of 1930s Germany. In January 2020, I visit the site where, on May 6, 1933, thousands of books from a sexuality research institute where confiscated and burned in the street. This was followed on May 10 by the burning of other books on philosophy, politics, science, and more.

Eventually some 25,000 “un-German” books would be incinerated, launching more than a decade of state censorship. Today, scientists and activists are racing to preserve the data from these federal websites before it is lost forever, and I can’t help but remember the famous line attributed to Galileo Galilei after his scientific books were banned and he was tried for heresy in 1633 (for claiming that the Earth moved around the Sun), “Eppur si muove [And yet it moves].”

This week on our website, Kathy Kelly addresses outrage over Trump’s plans to take over Gaza for real estate development; Stephen Zunes looks at how the new Trump Administration might impact the Palestine solidarity movement; Arvind Dilawar reports on the closure of a Japanese-owned factory in Israel which is being hailed as a victory by the BDS movement; and Mike Ervin writes on how people with disabilities were left behind during the fires in Los Angeles. “In a culture where everyone’s life is truly valued and equally considered to be worthy of saving,” he notes, “situations like that would never occur.”

Also this week, Laura Wagner describes the situation of Haitians in the United States under Trump; Paul Von Blum reviews the new book Sin Padres, Ni Papeles about young undocumented immigrants; Michaela Brandt reports on how Trump’s deportation agenda is impacting students and teachers in public schools; and Alexa Alvarado pens an op-ed on how the fear created by Trump’s immigration agenda affects all people. Plus, Amanda C. Leiter opines on the ways diversity in hiring benefits all people; and Joe George reviews the new film One of Them Days that he says, “brings class-conscious comedy back to its roots.”

Please keep reading, and we will keep bringing you important articles on these and other issues of our time.

Sincerely,

Norman Stockwell
Publisher

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