AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

Election Day is now seven weeks away. On Monday, Republican vice-presidential nominee JD Vance lashed out at Democrats, saying liberal rhetoric is to blame for Sunday’s apparent assassination attempt on Donald Trump at his golf course in Florida. Vance made no mention that the man arrested was actually a former Trump supporter. Vance spoke on Monday at a Faith and Freedom Coalition event in Atlanta.

SEN. JD VANCE: Well, you know the big difference between conservatives and liberals is that we have — no one has tried to kill Kamala Harris in the last couple of months, and two people now have tried to kill Donald Trump in the last couple of months. I’d say that’s pretty strong evidence that the left needs to tone down their rhetoric and needs to cut this crap out.

AMY GOODMAN: On Monday, Trump ally Elon Musk posted a message on social media platform — his social media platform X that read, “And no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala” along with a thinking-face emoji. Musk deleted the message after widespread criticism. He’s now being investigated by the Secret Service. JD Vance’s remarks for Democrats to tone down their rhetoric came just days after Donald Trump repeatedly used inflammatory language to attack Vice President Kamala Harris during last week’s ABC News presidential debate.

DONALD TRUMP: She’s destroying this country. And if she becomes president, this country doesn’t have a chance of success. Not only success. We’ll end up being Venezuela on steroids. … Because they’re destroying the fabric of our country by what they’ve done. There’s never been anything done like this at all. They’ve destroyed the fabric of our country.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined right now by Jason Stanley, author and professor of philosophy at Yale University, his new book titled Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future. Professor Stanley is the son of Holocaust survivors.

This is your second book on fascism. Why are you writing it now? And the significance of its publication as this election, to say the least, heats up in its last weeks?

JASON STANLEY: Well, I faced a puzzle when writing this book: Why is it that authoritarians always target schools and universities? So, we see that all over the world. We see that with Viktor Orbán, who provides a kind of template for U.S. authoritarianism. He attacked Central European University for “gender ideology” and leftism and being pro-immigration. And so, we know about the courts, the authoritarians targeting the courts. But why do authoritarians always target voting — that’s clear — and schools and universities?

So, last year, when the anti-genocide, antiwar protests on campus were happening, I thought about the international context. I thought about what happened in India in 2019, when they passed the Citizenship Amendment Act, which made Muslims into second-class citizens. And there were nonviolent protests on campus, denounced as anti-Indian, so — and violent, militarized responses. So, this tactic of tarring school teachers, tarring university professors as Marxists and communists and ruining the country, and replacing this kind of education, replacing Black history, replacing LGBTQ perspectives by a kind of grandiosity of white Christian nationalism, as we’re seeing right now, this seemed to me a democratic emergency.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Republican vice-presidential nominee JD Vance speaking in 2021 at the National Conservatism Conference. At the time, he was a candidate for the U.S. Senate in Ohio.

JD VANCE: I think in this movement of national conservatism, what we need more than inspiration is we need wisdom. And there was a wisdom in what Richard Nixon said approximately 40, 50 years ago. He said — and I quote — “The professors are the enemy.”

AMY GOODMAN: So, that was JD Vance: “The professors are the enemy.” I also want to quote First Things magazine, a right-wing magazine, that says, “Universities should be places of sober analysis. But at Yale, philosophy professor Jason Stanley and history professor Timothy Snyder publish books of political propaganda that describe Trump as the second coming of Adolf Hitler. TV newscasters intone rants rather than report on events.” And, of course, JD Vance, your fellow Yale —

JASON STANLEY: Person.

AMY GOODMAN: — colleague.

JASON STANLEY: Yeah. So, that’s a strangeness about this moment, that all these people, the leaders of the movement to attack universities and schools, are all Ivy League grads. Ron DeSantis is a Yale and Harvard grad. Ted Cruz is a Princeton and Harvard grad. JD Vance is a Yale Law School grad. Tom Cotton is Harvard, Harvard. Elise Stefanik is Harvard. So, what’s going on? That’s a mystery. These guys are sending their kids to Harvard, Yale and Princeton. They’re not sending their kids to Hillsdale College. It’s Hillsdale College for the rest of us and Harvard, Yale and Princeton for their kids.

So, they’re attacking the institutions, the universities, because the universities provide critical inquiry into the kind of myths that’s required for these kinds of politics. This kind of politics elevates the dominant group — in the case of the United States, white Christian men. It diminishes women, the agency of women. It represents history as the exploits, in the United States, of white Christian men, like in India history is represented as the exploits of Hindus. In Israel, it’s represented as the exploits of Jewish nationalists who founded the state.

This kind of erasure of history justifies — it doesn’t just justify wars and genocide. If you look at Russia, a case I look at extensively in the book, as well as Israel, in Russia, the erasure of Ukraine as an independent place, the complete erasure of Ukrainian history, justifies Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine, because it says it is sort of a fake identity, a fake country. It represents all Russian incursions as justified by supporting independence movements. Israel has erased the existence of the Palestinian people. It has erased the history, making the desert — Jews made the desert bloom. This kind of thing represents — erases Palestinians from the narrative of the country and of the area and paves the way for genocide.

This kind of erasing history paves the way for ethnic, racial and religious nationalism, which is the core of the message we’re hearing from MAGA Republicans today. When you represent — when you erase Black history, when you erase LGBTQ perspectives, when you erase social — history of social movements, then you represent history as just the exploits of great white men. You erase social movements, you make citizens feel like they have no agency, and so it’s an anti-democratic education. And then you justify great replacement theory, which is their core message, that the greatness of America comes from the exploits of great white men, and so we need to protect that identity.

AMY GOODMAN: Jason Stanley, you write in your book, Erasing History, the most visible current manifestation of the Black American tradition of reclaiming history is Nikole Hannah-Jones’ 1619 Project. She is, of course, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times Magazine, creator of the landmark 1619 Project, which reframes U.S. history by marking the year 1619, when the first enslaved Africans arrived on Virginia soil, as the country’s foundational date. This is then-President Donald Trump denouncing the project at a White House conference on American history in September 2020.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Critical race theory, The 1619 Project and the crusade against American history is toxic propaganda, ideological poison that, if not removed, will dissolve the civic bonds that tie us together, will destroy our country.

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Stanley, your response?

JASON STANLEY: This is an erasure of Black history. This is an erasure of Black perspectives. What we need to improve our democracy is we need knowledge of who has been denied equality and why. We need to know — democracy is a system where we all play a role in the formation of the policies that govern us, the laws that govern us. Without Black perspectives, without the Black perspective on history, we don’t know, we don’t understand their voices. We can’t — the grounds for eliminating and responding to stereotypes and prejudice have been robbed from us.

Without critical race theory, the study of structures that maintain racial hierarchy, the study of, say, mortgage redlining, you won’t — children won’t understand why there are poor Black neighborhoods and wealthy white neighborhoods in their cities protected by military police. Black children will be led to believe the stereotypes about themselves and, ironically, feel shame about their own identity. These divisive concept laws that are being passed all over the country that invite students at public universities and students at public schools to report on their own teachers and professors, these are purportedly justified as students — we shouldn’t have teaching that makes students feel shame about their race. Well, when you don’t allow professors and teachers to teach Black history, you’re making Black students feel ashamed about their race. When you don’t allow LGBT perspectives, when you declare them as obscene and pornographic, you make LGBT families feel ashamed about their identity.

People say, “OK, it’s not banning, because you can look at the web.” But what’s taught in schools, the perspectives that are taught in schools, affect us through our whole lives. They represent an authority, a state authority. And we’re being told by MAGA Republicans that that perspective is the perspective of Christian white men.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to ask you to stay with us. We’re going to do a post-show interview, a Part 2, and we’ll put it online at democracynow.org. Jason Stanley, author and professor of philosophy at Yale University, his new book titled Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future. He’s also author of How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them. He’s the son of Holocaust survivors.

Coming up, Borderland: The Line Within, a new film about the profitable business of criminalizing immigration, and its human cost. Back in 20 seconds.