Lucid
It’s no accident that the transformation of the GOP into an autocratic entity during Donald Trump’s presidency accelerated the Republican war on education. All of the fronts of this ongoing war draw on authoritarian history: the book bans, the censorship of curriculums, the surveillance of syllabi and lesson plans, the demonization of professors, teachers, and librarians as perverts and radical leftist indoctrination machines, the assertion of “parents’ rights” as a cover for right-wing activism, and the establishment of pathways for a culture of informing to take hold. Above: Marcello (Jean-Louis Trintignant) the informer in Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist (1970), which is set in Fascist Italy.