Trump’s Education by Indoctrination Must Be Fought with Social Justice Unionism

From the outset of his second term, President Donald Trump has fed the Constitution through a paper shredder. Legal scholars have stopped using euphemisms — they now call this a full-blown constitutional crisis. But we must go further to understand the gravity of the moment: These aren’t just signs of constitutional breakdown — these are blaring sirens warning us that fascism is unfolding in real time.

Trump’s assault on children, educators, and schools has become a wedge to pry open the door to fascism. Transgender students have been singled out for erasure — banned from sports, stripped from curricula, and targeted by policies that force teachers to out them, putting their lives at risk. From banning the teaching of race, gender, and colonialism, to threatening to defund any school that includes lessons on systemic oppression, to targeting diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, Trump has made it clear: Education must serve his personal white supremacist agenda — not the pursuit of truth.

Fascism is sustained not only by violence but by the suppression of truth and the control of knowledge. Philosopher Jason Stanley explains it plainly in Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future:

[F]ascist education works by strategically erasing accounts of history and current events that include a diversity of perspectives, narrowing the scope of what can be taught until students are presented with a single viewpoint, which is formulated specifically to justify and perpetuate a hierarchy of value between groups.

Stanley warns that this narrowing is “inconsistent with multiracial democracy, antithetical to egalitarianism, and carries the possibility of conjuring mass violence.”

Trump’s education agenda is doing exactly what fascist regimes have always done: narrowing curriculum to a single, state-approved version of history — one where submission is called freedom and dissent is called extremism.

Democrats’ Failure to Defend Education from Fascism

As Trump escalates his assault on public education and civil liberties, the Democratic Party resembles a pilot watching the warning lights flash as the plane takes a nosedive but refuses to touch the controls.

Imagine, for example, if the Democratic Party establishment had used its vast resources to support the annual National Day of Action to Teach Truth — a grassroots campaign started in 2021 and led by educators and students to defend the right to teach honest history. Book bans are deeply unpopular across party lines. If Democratic leaders had supported the #TeachTruth movement, they could have brought millions to the streets in defense of anti-racist education.

But they didn’t.

Why? Because, like the GOP, the Democratic Party relies heavily on funding from billionaires and corporate donors — those who are deeply invested in keeping young people ignorant of the realities of racism, capitalism, and oppression. These donors don’t want students learning how power works — they want students trained to serve it. 

Understanding that the Democratic Party is largely controlled by billionaires is important because it allows us to stop pleading for corporate politicians to save us and instead look for alternative sources of power that can organize struggles for education and social justice.

A Strategy to Defeat Fascism: Social Justice Unionism

It can be scary to recognize no one is coming to save us — but it is also clarifying. When we stop expecting political elites to fix our problems and instead look to the collective organizing of working people, we will find a power greater than the billionaires’ hoarded gold.

Margaret “Lady Labor Slugger” Haley knew this. At the turn of the 20th century, Haley, a groundbreaking leader of the Chicago Teachers Federation, embodied an early model of social justice unionism. Haley understood that education could not be separated from the political and economic structures shaping it. She organized teachers not only for higher wages, but to confront the corrupt tax systems that drained public schools of funding. In the famed “Teachers’ Tax Crusade,” she exposed millions in unpaid taxes owed by Chicago’s business elite and forced local authorities to redirect those funds into the public school system.

But Haley’s vision extended beyond economic justice: She also denounced what she called the “factoryizing” of education. In a landmark 1901 speech to the National Education Association, she warned that:

Two ideals are struggling for supremacy in American life today: one the industrial ideal, dominating through the supremacy of commercialism, which subordinates the worker to the product and the machine; the other, the ideal of democracy, the ideal of the educators, which places humanity above all machines, and demands that all activity shall be the expression of life.

Her strategy — building coalitions between working-class teachers and the women’s suffrage movement — proved instrumental in securing school funding and helping win women’s suffrage in Illinois. Haley showed that when educators are organized around a collective vision of justice, they can help transform not only schools, but the society around them.

That model of organizing has even had the power to bring down oppressive governments. In South Africa, it was the fusion of student protests and labor organizing that was instrumental in overthrowing the apartheid regime.

On June 16, 1976, thousands of Black students in Soweto walked out of their classrooms to protest the South African government’s mandate to teach in Afrikaans. Met with brutal police violence, their uprising sparked nationwide resistance. Some teachers supported the students — refusing to stop the walkouts or shielding youth from retaliation — while others were inspired to join the growing movement.

That student-led rebellion laid the groundwork for deeper solidarity. In 1985, militant unions united to form the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), which played a leading role in organizing mass strikes that paralyzed industries and challenged the legitimacy of the regime. COSATU didn’t fight only for better wages — it supported student boycotts, community uprisings, and the broader struggle for freedom. This alignment of labor and social movements (what they called social movement unionism) was crucial in making apartheid ungovernable.

That same model of resistance is possible here.

In 2018 and 2019, a wave of teacher uprisings swept across the United States — beginning in West Virginia, where educators in one of the most conservative, union-hostile states in the country launched a wildcat strike that shut down every public school for nine days. Without collective bargaining rights and without formal union backing at first, they organized through Facebook groups, church basements, and parking lot rallies — building a movement from below.

The spark from West Virginia quickly spread across state lines. Teachers in Oklahoma, Arizona, Kentucky, North Carolina, and Colorado walked out in mass actions that came to be known collectively as the Red State Revolt. In each case, educators connected the fight for school funding to deeper structural issues: corporate tax cuts, privatization, crumbling public infrastructure, and systemic racial and economic inequality. This class struggle approach proved effective — forcing Republican governors to raise wages and increase education funding. 

These strikes didn’t just expose the austerity agenda of right-wing lawmakers — they revealed the dormant power of educators as organizers, strategists, and movement leaders. As Michelle Randolph, a 4th-grade teacher in Jefferson County, Kentucky, told me in the wake of this revolt:

I think that the strikes that happened were because people felt empowered. People were starting to feel like maybe we can really do this. Maybe, if we work together, we can stop these injustices. There’s no good reason for having one school receive only $2,000 to spend per student, but in the same county, $8,000 is spent on each student in another school.

The recent contract victory of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) offers crucial lessons about the power of organized educators today. CTU fought for more than raises — they won contract provisions that protect educators’ right to teach the truth about race, gender, and sexuality. They secured investments in mental health resources for students, won protections for immigrant families, and even advanced a climate justice agenda that includes installing solar panels and launching composting programs in schools. (See “The Chicago Teachers Union Is Showing Us How to Fight Trump” on p. 12.) 

This is social justice unionism in action: bargaining not just for better pay, but for the common good. 

This kind of union organizing is critical in the fight against rising fascism. Significantly, the United Auto Workers and Chicago Teachers Union are helping to lead national conversations — and planning efforts — toward a potential general strike in 2028. These efforts aim to unite labor across sectors to challenge not just economic inequality, but the authoritarian drift of U.S. politics, attacks on public education, and the erosion of democratic rights. If successful, it could be the largest coordinated labor action in modern U.S. history — an act of collective defiance rooted in the legacy of Haley, COSATU, the Red State Revolt, and every educator who has ever taught truth in defiance of power.

Organizing for a Free Future

All of us must work to build social movements that use the power of protest to disrupt narratives that dehumanize — and we must also use the power of labor to shut down the institutions and industries that criminalize truth, profit from oppression, and legislate hate.

There is no major political party coming to save us. With migrant children separated from their parents, thousands of students threatened with deportation, and honest education banned from the classroom, it’s time for our unions — not only educators, but auto workers, baristas, fulfillment center workers, dock workers, and more — to build escalating campaigns with political demands for justice. If those demands aren’t met, our unions must prepare to use the economic power of the strike.

We can’t allow fascism to disguise itself as “local control,” “parental rights,” or “curriculum transparency.” It’s time to teach — and organize — like freedom depends on it.

Because it does.