MAGA’s War on Knowledge

Welcome back Black Death and Flat Earth. We really missed you!

Christian Nationalist Trump supporters at U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021

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We are now experiencing the start of the most significant and intentional destruction of the accumulated knowledge of humanity in world history, at least in America. This is perhaps a more significant and longer lasting event than the fire that destroyed the ancient library in Alexandria, Egypt, initially in the first century BCE and again in the fourth century CE. Why? Simply because there is more knowledge to erase now than there was in ancient times.

Here is a quote from a recent piece in The Atlantic by Adam Serwer:

“The warlords who sacked Rome did not intend to doom Western Europe to centuries of ignorance. It was not a foreseeable consequence of their actions. The same cannot be said of the sweeping attack on human knowledge and progress that the Trump administration is now undertaking—a deliberate destruction of education, science, and history, conducted with a fanaticism that recalls the Dark Ages that followed Rome’s fall.”

And the Trump administration under the guidance of the Heritage Foundation and Project 2025 is succeeding, and probably succeeding beyond their wildest dreams. However, this descent into the utter stupidity of the American masses started long before Trump 2.0 and Project 2025. One could argue that the GOP has been trying to get their base to stop trusting the government and its “radical left-wing” institutions for many decades, and that would be true. But the hyper intense activity and evangelical zeal that has been unleashed to attack previously accepted science-based knowledge and destroy essential government institutions since January 20, 2025, has no precedent in American history. None. The current war on knowledge being conducted by MAGA feels like the equivalent of the Library of Alexandria being burned down every week and taking enormous amounts of our accumulated and hard-earned record of achievements, history, and culture with it.

Our very identity as a nation is being erased. The Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE, the allegedly official government agency invented by Elon Musk (but in reality a ludicrous and unconstitutional private entity run by a racist and mentally unstable madman from South Africa) even started the practice of deleting hundreds of thousands (or perhaps millions) of pages of digital archives from official government websites. These actions erase essential facts about our national history, both good and bad, and rewrites it however MAGA sees fit. It’s a practice used by all dictators and authoritarian regimes throughout history that has simply been updated to fit the digital age. Once these archival records are deleted, unless there are paper copies to back them up, the information will be permanently lost to history, which is exactly what MAGA wants. All the incredible, but sometimes uncomfortable progress we have made as a nation for 248 years is quickly being disappeared like digital “enemies of the people.” Those uncomfortable, but essential truths are being eliminated so they don’t conflict with the warped, racist, and undemocratic Christian Nationalist/MAGA version of America.

War and truth (and history generally) is always told through the eyes of the victors, the winners. Thus far in the war against knowledge in America, MAGA, Christian Nationalism, and Trump seem to be winning without even a whimper.