For a couple of years now I have listening to a series of podcasts from Scene on Radio out of Duke University. It is developed by John Biewen. I found them very interesting. One of my favorite podcast series

In 2025 that series included a fascinating episode  on Making Ignorance Sacred Again.  That title came from a piece written by James Baldwin, a fount of wisdom in my opinion, in 1959 when he wrote that stunning line: “Americans suffer from an ignorance that is not only colossal, but sacred.” To me that summed up Donald Trump and his movement. That is what they want to do. They want to destroy truth, knowledge, and wisdom. They like dumb. They find dumb congenial. Or as Carl Sagan said, they celebrate ignorance.

This also calls to mind a statement by another brilliant writer, Milan Kundera, from his book, from The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, where he said “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting,” .

If you want to be an autocrat you must control not only the future but the past. You have to wreck history. As John Biewen said,

“It seems if you’re trying for an autocratic takeover, you want to control just about everything. You want power over the administrative state and everyone in it, including agencies that are meant to be independent. You’ll try to neuter or commandeer the legislature, the courts, the big law firms. You’ll seek to control the news media and the universities. If you can, you’re going to take charge of the immigration system so you can decide who is a citizen, who stays in the country or gets whisked away to a foreign gulag, who is or isn’t a person deserving of human and legal rights. You’ll want possession of private information on everybody so you can use that data to attack your enemies.

You want all this power so you can shape the future, but you’ll also want to seize control of the past.”

 

Anyone who has ever watched or listened to Donald Trump knows that his go-to line of attack is to charge  any accuser with precisely the accusation against him.   The accusation of ‘Fake News’ was early brought against Trump and he took it up against his accusers and used it so thoroughly that people forgot where it came from. Currently he is doing the same thing on the infamous Epstein files which has been an epic conspiracy theory of the far right, including particularly, the Trumpsters, and now he repeatedly calls it the Democratic conspiracy or the Liberal conspiracy. Now  it is true that the Democrats have taken it up when they saw his own base finding disappointment in their leader, but it has been a right -wing conspiracy theory for much longer than that. Soon most people and all of his base will forget that the Democrats did not start this conspiracy. Trump is very effective at this technique.

Another good example was when Trump shortly after taking office issued an executive order advancing what he called “patriotic education.” That was followed by a second called “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling,” which sought to end instruction about transgender issues, White privilege, and unconscious bias. He did that because he hated talk about transgender issues and the like because they are, in his language, “woke.” If anyone cries out against injustice Trump is opposed, as can be seen by his innumerable executive  orders that try hard to stamp out all justice. Like a creature out of Orwell’s book 1984 war is peace and slavery is freedom. Orwell was the first, to my knowledge, to describe this phenomenon of attacking the attacker. But Trump has perfected it.