The Trump administration has been steadily stripping the American public of access to important information, one weapon in a war on thought itself. They aim to turn people’s minds away from crumbling and unaffordable healthcare and housing, exploitative class relations, a warming and ever more dangerous planet, and deep inequities, substituting an ideological barrage dominated by the rulers and right-wing media.

HUNGER GAMES

Last month the Department of Agriculture (USDA) abruptly cancelled the 2025 Hunger in America survey. Researchers who worked on the report were told to turn in their laptops and conduct no more government business. A furious response from central Colorado’s Ark Valley Voice captured how many thought and felt:

How convenient, and perhaps predictable.

First, the Trump administration makes massive cuts to the nation’s food program for the poor.

Now, in an “out of sight, out of mind” move: President Donald Trump’s administration is ending the federal government’s annual report on hunger in America….

If you don’t care enough to ensure that the nation’s poor can eat, perhaps it makes sense that you don’t want to be reminded that people across this country are hungry.

What used to be called food stamps, now it is known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). It’s been two and a half months since Trump … applied massive cuts to SNAP food aid to the poor.

The result: …the tax and spending cuts bill that Republicans pushed through Congress in July means an estimated three million people would not qualify for food stamps.

It might come as a surprise to some, but the fact that this nation has hungry children and families isn’t a political fact; it’s simply a reality.

Jesus himself stressed charity, and caring for one’s neighbors in need, a fact that has apparently skipped right by the MAGA Christian nationalism base.

The USDA put out a press release [that] includes an obviously politicized reasoning and completely false claims:

“The questions used to collect the data are entirely subjective …’’ the USDA said. “The data is rife with inaccuracies slanted to create a narrative that is not representative of what is actually happening in the countryside as we are currently experiencing lower poverty rates, increasing wages, and job growth under the Trump Administration.’’

This [makes] it harder to measure hunger or the impacts of the SNAP cuts. It follows the playbook of many non-democracies that cancel or manipulate reports that would otherwise show less-than-perfect news.

Karen Perry Stillerman, Deputy Director of the Union of Concerned Scientists, blogged: “The move by the USDA to cancel its food insecurity survey comes as efforts to suppress inconvenient science are intensifying across the federal government. At the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and other agencies, scientists, economists, and statisticians are being muzzled and their findings buried.

“A food industry analyst interviewed by CBS News named three drivers of high food prices: tariffs on imported food items, climate change, and a shortage of agricultural and food workers… the president and his allies in Congress are exacerbating these problems rather than solving them.”

THE ‘GOOD OLD DAYS’: MEASLES, DIPHTHERIA, SMALLPOX?

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Trump repeatedly distorted and falsified scientific facts and mocked respected medical experts while claiming credit for Operation Warp Speed. He led the public away from a concept of public health centered on community needs to insisting only individual freedom matters, which was threatened by social distancing and mask mandates! The frenzy to push back against public health ignored how vaccines eliminated deadly diseases like smallpox (30% death rate), diphtheria (20-25%) and measles (20-30%).

Even Operation Warp Speed could only develop a COVID-19 vaccine “quickly” because it built on a decade of excellent prior research which addressed every aspect of vaccine effectiveness: dosage, timing and safety. But decades of weakness in U.S. science education left many people unable to understand or trust the results of that research.

Meanwhile, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Trump invoke scary images of tiny newborns, 12 hours old, assaulted with giant syringes of Hepatitis B vaccine. Data shows 50% of infected mothers transmit the Hepatitis B virus to their babies, but 99% control over the disease has been achieved by immediate vaccination. Nevertheless, the new Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), comprised of RFK’s vaccine skeptics, wants to delay the timing for at least a month, if not to age 12! Hepatitis B leads to liver disease and liver cancer and is transmitted by contact, including sexual contact.

Worse, despite recently rising cases of Hepatitis B, Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph A. Ladapo announced plans to lift all vaccine mandates for Florida children, some within 90 days. Ladapo has compared vaccine mandates to “slavery” and has made a number of other bizarre statements.

DEMONS! BROWN, BLACK, ANTI-GENOCIDE, ETC.

Trump has been calling Latinx immigrants “rapists and criminals” for years. Using the military—illegally—to police majority Black and Brown cities increases fear, among and against urban residents; fear heightened by Trump’s repeated speeches and posts falsely portraying horror-movie urban scenarios. The administration, pressured by the powerful Israel lobby, uses distorted stereotypes, designating all those who support Palestinian liberation as terrorists, and destroys careers and livelihoods with firings and deportations. “Antisemitism” is distorted to mean any and all criticism of Israel and used against Jews who say “not in our name.” Every few days new groups—“Radical Left,” “anti-capitalist,” “Antifa”—are gifted with similar demonization.

Hannah Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism:

The preparation [for totalitarianism] has succeeded when people have lost contact with their fellow-men as well as the reality around them; for together with these contacts, men lose the capacity of both experience and thought. The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.

Horrifyingly, a perfect description of 21st century capitalist alienation.

EVERYWHERE, WE FIGHT BACK

Every MAGA strategy to attack information and thought has generated new resistance. We are learning that one individual cannot fight everywhere, but everywhere people are fighting.

• The Palestine solidarity movement has grown worldwide, forcing more open denunciation of Israel’s genocidal war, supported by U.S. arms and money.
  
• Artificial Intelligence (AI) with all its potential, can, and is, easily being turned against independent thought by substituting for it. Since United Healthcare, Humana, and CVS adopted AI tools to replace physicians’ judgement, denials increased by anywhere from 54% to 108%. Inequality Media Civic Action is hosting a “tell Congress” letter-writing campaign through Action Network.
  
• Right from Trump’s first term, workers at the Environmental Protection Agency were told to delete words like “climate change” from all documents. They immediately began archiving documents. They are not alone.
  
• National Parks have been told to remove all signage with any whiff of Black history, slavery, heroic works by women or people of color. There is a call for people to photograph any sign they think will come under the guillotine.

Raya Dunayevskaya wrote in Philosophy and Revolution (1972):

the masses not only cannot be brainwashed, but they think their own thoughts. The production process, the military might, all the means of communication, may be in the hands of the state, but the heads belong to the same bodies that are being exploited; and when the masses burst out in such sweeping actions as to shake up the whole totalitarian structure, the proletariat is not only ‘instinctively’ but theoretically creative.