They don’t want to teach your children the truth.

They want to train them to obey authoritarian orders.

Schools will now be teaching children classes filled with extremist right-wing propaganda.
Lessons designed to indoctrinate kids into MAGA ideology.
Led by Turning Point USA, Moms for Liberty, the Heritage Foundation, and more.

The Department of Education has announced partnerships with more than 40 extremist conservative groups to design civics programming for the nation’s 250th anniversary. Civics. The class that is supposed to teach the truth about our democracy, about how power works, about why accountability matters. Handed over to the very groups that have banned books, attacked teachers, and rewritten history.

Turning Point USA is known for putting teachers on “watchlists” and intimidating college professors who dare to challenge conservative talking points. Moms for Liberty has stormed school board meetings across the country, demanding the removal of books about race, gender, and LGBTQ kids, even targeting classics like The Bluest Eye and To Kill a Mockingbird. The Heritage Foundation, architect of Project 2025, has written a plan for consolidating power in the executive branch and stripping away protections for minorities, women, and workers.

They are not defenders of democracy.
They are its dismantlers.
And now they will shape how America’s children are taught to understand their country.

This is not education.
This is propaganda.
It is obedience training dressed up as patriotism.
It is authoritarianism in the making.

And we know where that road leads. Authoritarian regimes throughout history have started with schools. In Nazi Germany, children were taught to chant slogans and memorize the “virtues” of the Reich. In Stalin’s Soviet Union, students were trained to glorify the Party and report on their parents’ dissent. The strategy is simple: reshape the story, and you reshape the people. Replace history with myth, and truth itself dissolves.

The Food and Drug Administration added its own absurd headline this week. It proudly announced it was banning Orange B, a synthetic dye once used in hot dogs and sausage casings. The problem? Orange B has not been used in American food since 1978. Nearly fifty years ago. Not one batch has been certified since.

So why ban it now?

Because it makes for a press release.
It looks like action.
It sounds like safety.
But it is theater.
Theater instead of governance.
Illusion instead of action.

Meanwhile, we learned this week that credit scores are dropping and debt is climbing. American families are hurting while the president continues to play games with our livelihood.

This is not just a joke. It is a tactic. Dictators and strongmen have long relied on spectacle to distract from collapse. Fake agricultural triumphs under Stalin while millions starved. Announcements of “victories” that never existed. Each a way to pacify the people while the foundations rotted.

Much like how Trump continues to pretend to have solved wars.
“We solved seven wars... wars that were unsolvable. Wars that couldn’t be negotiated or done,” Trump said at a news conference on September 18th.

But he hasn’t solved any. Not one. He knows his MAGA cult followers don’t care about the truth, so he just keeps pushing propaganda.

And that is the real danger. It is not just ridiculous. It is corrosive. When government pretends at action instead of solving real problems, trust erodes. And eroded trust is the soil in which authoritarianism grows. Because when people stop believing government can work for them, they stop defending it. They stop caring who tears it down.

At that same press conference, the president continued his own act at the circus. He rambled that the war in Ukraine should have been “easy to solve.” He complained that Vladimir Putin had “let him down.”

Think about that. The president of the United States speaking of a murderous dictator as if he were a disappointing business partner. Not condemning the slaughter of civilians. Not mourning lives lost. Simply lamenting that his strongman ally failed to make him look good.

He bragged that if he had been in power, the war never would have started.

It was incoherent.
It was embarrassing.
It was dangerous.

Because this is not how serious leaders speak about war. Ukraine has been fighting for survival since 2014, when Russia first invaded and annexed Crimea. In 2022, Russia escalated into a full-scale invasion, bombing cities, killing civilians, and leaving mass graves in its wake. Ukraine’s resistance is about more than borders. It is about democracy standing up to tyranny.

To call it “easy to solve” is to dismiss history itself.
Not strategy.
Not diplomacy.
Not even basic decency.
Just ego on display.

And while he rambled, adversaries circled.

Foreign disinformation networks in Russia and China are exploiting the assassination of Charlie Kirk, pushing conspiracy theories across social media. They use bots and fake accounts to amplify lies. They flood feeds with conflicting stories until no one knows what is true.

We have seen this before. Russia ran disinformation campaigns during the 2016 election. They amplified lies about COVID during the pandemic. They spread chaos around January 6th. Their goal is not victory in the old sense of war. Their goal is collapse. And they know America is especially vulnerable with Trump in command.

What makes it worse is that the lies do not stay foreign. They are repeated on American airwaves. They are echoed in MAGA speeches and filtered through right-wing media until they become part of the domestic chorus. The foreign disinformation and the homegrown propaganda feed each other until you cannot tell which came first. And that is the point. A hall of mirrors where truth dies.

This is not politics.
This is not leadership.
This is performance.
This is abuse of power.

I come from the once-free United States of America.
And because I come from that place, I know what freedom is supposed to feel like.
I know what accountability is supposed to mean.
And I can see what is on the horizon if we do not stop this.

In 2019, I walked into the Dohány Street Synagogue in Budapest. The largest synagogue in Europe. A building that stood in the center of a ghetto wall that once trapped tens of thousands of Jewish families. Many starved. Many died of disease. Many more were deported to concentration camps.

The silence inside was alive.
It was not emptiness.
It was responsibility.

That synagogue did not let me pretend history was finished. It reminded me that history waits. It reminded me that if you look away, it repeats.

A week later I stood in Berlin. By chance, it was the single day of the year when the Reichstag opens fully to the public. We showed our passports. We climbed the spiral walkway into the glass dome. At the top, party volunteers handed out pretzels and pamphlets. We laughed nervously, wondering if we had just taken bread from Germany’s far right. But the pretzels were not the lesson.

The lesson was in the walls.
The Reichstag was the building the Nazis set on fire in 1933.
Its ashes were their excuse to suspend democracy and seize full control.

When it was rebuilt decades later, the architects made a choice. They covered the chamber in glass. From the dome, the people look down on their lawmakers.

Never again was not just a slogan.
It was built into the walls.
Into the glass.
Into the way people look down on power.

That is what accountability looks like.

Here in America, we have the opposite. Leaders who know they are being watched but do not care. We call them out on social media. We shout in town halls. We march. We vote.

They see it all.
But they no longer feel accountable.
They feel invincible.

That is what happens when power is abused.

The FDA’s fake ban is not governance. It is distraction. The Department of Education’s handoff to extremists is not civics. It is indoctrination. The president’s incoherent rambling about Ukraine is not foreign policy. It is theater. The foreign campaigns seeding lies about Charlie Kirk’s death are not news. They are weapons aimed at our fractures.

Each piece by itself might seem small. But together they form a pattern.

Fake bans.
Classroom propaganda.
Incoherent speeches dressed up as leadership.
Foreign lies treated as truth.

Power used for performance.
Power used for control.
Power used to consolidate at the top.

That is how democracy erodes.
Not all at once.
Not with one law or one election.
But with a thousand little abuses until freedom itself is a memory.

I have seen what forgetting looks like. I saw it in the synagogue in Budapest. I saw it in the Reichstag dome in Berlin. Those places whisper warnings carved into stone and glass.

When I stood in Budapest, the synagogue whispered: remember me.
When I walked the Reichstag dome, the building demanded: watch them.

Those lessons belong here, too.

Remember.
Watch.
Act.

Because if we do not, abuse will harden into dictatorship.
And dictatorships always end the same way.

I’ll see you tomorrow,
Heather