Such an attitude toward the past seemed perfectly encapsulated by the now-infamous phrase that Kellyanne Conway used to characterize Trump’s lies about his inaugural crowd size: “alternative facts.” This warped historiography flourished on (what was then known as) Twitter, due both to Trump’s penchant for the platform and to its algorithm’s elevation of reactionary takes. The former president and his followers placed even the most prescriptive, seemingly bipartisan-approved historical consensus into total disarray.

Outraged at Trump’s platforming of inaccurate right-wing portrayals of U.S. history, and concerned for the seemingly existential threat Trump posed to American democracy, several professional historians attempted to recapture the attention economy from Trump and his coterie of conservative grifters. Some scholars might have exhibited the profession’s characteristic wariness for political and public entanglement, particularly in forums unmediated by the university or the news media. Yet, in the first Trump era, certain historians took it upon themselves to directly engage with and publicly corrected the torrential historical falsehoods that the President and his lackeys spewed online.

Many fought back on Twitter with the weapons at hand: quote tweets and viral threads. One of the genre’s tastemakers, 20th-century American historian Kevin Kruse, penned lengthy threads that refuted lies and added context reframing and deflating right-wing claims. Notably, in 2018, he published a thread taking apart conservative troll Dinesh D’Souza’s ahistorical commentary on the Democratic Party’s realignment on civil rights in the 1960s. The thread received tens of thousands of likes and retweets.

Whenever conservative ideologues disseminated new falsehoods, the online historians—“Twitterstorians,” was the neologism of the moment—were hot on their tail, providing primary sources and commentary that challenged and disproved their reactionary drivel. Nineteenth-century American historian Heather Cox Richardson penned a thread contextualizing the Brett Kavanaugh nomination within a long history of the GOP. Kevin Gannon corrected Mississippi State Republican Senator Chris McDaniel’s post contending that Robert E. Lee was the “most decorated soldier in the U.S. Army” who had “opposed both secession and slavery.” Their rebuttals were so common that other users eventually demanded that fast-fingered historians weigh in when they saw a conservative spouting nonsense.

The sheer amount of historically inaccurate and dangerous claims emerging during the Trump years would even inspire historian Edward T. O’Donnell to host an annual “Weemsy Awards” for the “biggest history fails of the year.” Named for Mason Locke Weems, author of an 1800 biography of George Washington that introduced core myths about the first President, the 2023 awards were given to one-time Q-Anon supporter Representative Marjorie Taylor Green, the DeSantis-appointed Florida Education Board, and Senator Ted Cruz, among other prevaricators.

These social media interventions were indeed useful in disrupting the surge of right-wing disinformation that first permeated the platform during the Trump years. As one early 20th-century American historian observed, the trend allowed them to “inject evidence into the universe.” Most knew they would not change the minds of their deranged conservative interlocutors. But they aimed to publicly “go on the record,” as Gannon put it. Ideally, these counternarratives would offer people better tools for confronting, in the words of Emma Pettit writing for The Chronicle of Higher Education, “their uncle at Thanksgiving” or “their co-worker in the breakroom.” As Kruse told Pettit, “People are hungry for context … We think that because we know it [a historical subject], because we’ve proven it, and because we’ve written it down in a book and put it on a shelf somewhere, that everyone knows it. And they don’t.”

Disproving right-wing bigots may seem frivolous, but doing so in the online agora offered an immediate and easily accessible public intellectualism that could shut down the harmful historical misinformation legitimating conservative narratives. At least, this was the argument of the online counterprogrammers. Moreover, though not all high-profile Twitterstorians are white men, both Gannon and Kruse have suggested that their identities as tenured, white, cisgender men have enabled them to get into the fray with literal bigots while avoiding the harshest forms of potential career or personal blowback. As Gannon told Kruse in an interview between the two at Public Books, “I can use that in ways that maybe some of my other colleagues might not be able to. So, I see it as incumbent on me to do exactly that.”

Its purpose was, in effect, to argue “for white Americans’ permanent innocence,” as Slate senior editor Rebecca Onion wrote. Though Biden dissolved the commission upon taking office in 2021, the right-wing effort still had deleterious effects: a number of states drew inspiration from the 1776 Report in their broader campaigns to ban “divisive” topics like slavery, race, gender, sexuality, and inequality in school curriculums. As Kruse perceptively tweeted in 2021, “The 1776 Report has the stamp of approval of the White House and will directly or indirectly influence the teaching of American history in large parts of the nation. Historians can’t ignore it, just because the commission is gone.”

The Twitterstorians’ political mission may have had a certain nobility to it, a fidelity to the pursuit of Truth—but at the same time, it could also be rather lucrative for the righteous. Online skirmishes yielded higher profiles. Rhae Lynn Barnes, a historian of Blackface, described how her posts generated interest from agents and speaking engagements and helped her sell her book project. Heather Cox Richardson earned multiple CNN appearances. Kruse was offered an MSNBC column and a book deal that resulted in Myth America, an anthology edited with Julian Zelizer as a response to a contemporary “crisis of bad history.”

The latter has clear origins in historians’ foray into online discourse during the Trump years and features a number of high-follower-count historians who might be considered a part of the Twitterstorian metier. As Kruse and Zelizer write in their introduction, the volume aims to amplify “historians who have been actively engaging the general public” through live fact-checking the “lies and legends” that “stem from a deliberate campaign of disinformation from the political Right.”¹

It soon became clear, in other words, that historians’ adroitness with primary source-laden, #Resistance-style Twitter clapbacks had found a mass market audience: unnerved liberals terrified by Trump’s emboldening of right-wing authoritarianism. Posting had launched more than a few into a rarified—and profitable—sphere of public intellectualism, able to reach far wider audiences in a social media age.

But after the election of Biden in 2020, these historians found themselves in a new position. Having helped vanquish their enemy, many of these figures were welcomed into the Democratic Party and Biden administration fold. Perhaps the most vocal of Biden’s boosters, Heather Cox Richardson, has done not one, but two interviews with Biden (one in 2022 and one in 2024, found on her YouTube channel), during which she peppered him with softball, undoubtedly pre-approved questions that positioned him as a heroic defender of American democracy both domestically and abroad.

In another boon for the Twitterstorian clique, in early January 2024 Biden hosted a group of scholars, with many of Twitter’s shiniest historian-stars among them. His stated aim was to “get their viewpoints on ongoing threats to democracy—at home and around the world.” Such friendly appearances with Biden, and their general willingness to withhold public criticism of his administration, proved useful for an administration desperate to deemphasize Biden’s accumulating blunders and distract from his electorally unpopular policies, most pressingly Biden’s staunch defense of Israel’s genocidal aggression in Gaza. (One notable exception was historian Eddie S. Glaude, who tweeted critically in May about Biden’s “risk[ing] American democracy for the likes of Benjamin Netanyahu” and has expressed horror and disapproval of Israel’s war on Gaza.)

Though less directly connected to any clear DNC directive, these historians’ devotion to the Democratic Party line is glaringly transparent in their public writing. Kevin Kruse’s “Campaign Trails” Substack, which has nearly 28,000 subscribers, featured five posts on the Democratic National Convention that painted a glowing portrait of Biden’s pro-union politics, the DNC’s theme of “freedom” (“the focus isn’t on them, it’s on us,” he writes—whatever that means), and Kamala Harris’s “pretty damn impressive campaign,” which “did pretty much everything right from the start.” Unmentioned entirely is the DNC’s refusal to allow the “bare minimum” demand that a Palestinian-American speak on the main stage, leading to delegates with the Uncommitted National Movement to stage a sit-in.

More notably, the only time Kruse appears to mention Gaza or Palestine at all in his newsletter was in July 2024, when he felt called to scold “(alleged) leftists,” as he puts it, who declared their refusal to vote for Biden over his unwavering support for Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza. “Boycotting an election doesn’t work,” Kruse asserted, advocating instead for people to follow Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s tactic of “staking out important positions inside the party.” (It might be pointed out that the thousands of Gazans being bombed, starved, and tortured did not exactly have the luxury of playing “the long game” of U.S. electoral politics).

Newfound alliance with and proximity to the presidency has, then, transformed some Resistance scholars into unofficial court historians for Biden and the Democratic Party. Once militant “attack dogs” of right-wing historical revisionism who labored to expose how politicians like Trump corrupted American history in service of a reactionary racial capitalist class, some Resistance historians have suddenly become loyal foot soldiers of power, working to countenance an administration just as entangled, if differently, in the legitimating ideology work of revisionist history.

This work has not entirely escaped criticism; in fact, it was Kevin Kruse who noted in an academic review that her 2014 To Make Men Free, a book chronicling the “lifespan of the Republican Party,” strangely sidesteps engagement with “race, religion, and regionalism” and has “interpretations that are odds with recent historiography.” (He specifically cites her ahistorical suggestion that Dwight D. Eisenhower was a “ardent integrationist” as an example.)²

Yale historian Beverly Gage, one of the historians who joined Richardson in visiting with Biden in January 2024, similarly suggested in The Washington Post that Richardson’s book “sometimes overstates her case,” landing the author “in the partisan trap, blaming Republicans—albeit only the conservative ones—for ruining the economy, fomenting racism, damaging American democracy, and betraying their progressive roots.”

Nevertheless, Richardson remains an authoritative figure in the field, speaking regularly at conference plenaries and, of course, amassing a following on Twitter. (Along with many other Resistance historians, Richardson recently absconded to Bluesky in protest of Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, now X, though she continues to retweet on the platform.)

Still, it was towards the end of the Trump presidency that her star may have reached its apex. After writing a lengthy 2019 Facebook post about Democratic House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff’s letter to then-acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire about a whistleblower complaint regarding Trump’s dealings with Ukraine (which would become the basis of House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry), friends suggested she start a newsletter. She began her Substack, Letters from an American, soon after. In 2020, Letters from an American became the largest publication and highest-earning newsletter on the platform, making her, in the words of Ben Smith writing for The New York Times, a “breakout star.”

In an age of Trumpian “alternative facts,” tech-backed disinformation campaigns, and social media spiraling, Richardson’s application of “a historian’s confident context to the day’s mundane politics” appeared to quench a sizable number of Americans’ thirst for lucidity, professionalism, and common sense. She expanded to a YouTube channel, frequently appeared as a guest on cable news, and, more recently, hosted a Vox Media podcast with fellow Resistance historian (and Hamilton consultant) Joanne Freeman. In 2022, she was named USA Today’s “Woman of the Year.” Though other Resistance historians garnered media attention and undoubtedly profited from their visibility, none parlayed their public presence into such a far-ranging–and jaw-droppingly lucrative–project.

Richardson’s goal for Letters from an American is relatively straightforward. Publishing on a near-daily basis, she aims to draw on history to make sense of the vexed present in a format that is accessible but rigorous. The newsletter gives the appearance of hovering above internecine partisan squabbles — as a view from, if not nowhere, at least from somewhere above the political fray. Her description on her Substack’s About page implicitly confers her, by virtue of her expertise as “a professor of American history,” with a degree of objectivity on “America’s Constitution, and laws, and the economy, and social customs.” It is, among other things, rife with cliché: to understand “how we got here,” we must grasp, with her help, how history “rhymes” with our present.

Though spurred into action by the Trump administration and, as Smith wrote in his New York Times profile of Richardson, “his attacks on America’s institutions,” she has claimed in the past not to align with a particular political party. For many, her letters serve as a clarifying, nonpartisan balm for the frenzied, panic-inducing discourse on social media and the bought-and-sold media landscape that monetizes such rancor and paranoia. Still, she does insist that Americans must combat the threats to democracy that Donald Trump and the Republican Party represent. Her combination of ostensibly non-ideological scholarly wisdom and her patriotic commitment to preserving America’s liberal institutions and ideals elevated Richardson into a kind of guru for a particular sort of adrift, politically centrist, professional-managerial reader.

Richardson’s professorial patina of non-partisanship belies a thinly veiled, arguably conservative position. Across her public historical oeuvre, her (bordering on obsessive) dissection of Trump and the right is paired with uncritical apologia for Biden, the Democratic Party, and liberalism. She hasn’t exactly made her support for Biden and his administration a secret. In addition to interviewing him twice, she has gone on the record supporting his presidency, telling The Guardian that he was “one of the very few people who could have met this moment.”

More recently, and in a stunningly tone-deaf move, she sat down with Secretary of State Anthony Blinken to discuss how Biden’s administration “set[s] out to protect democracy both at home and abroad through a new foreign policy.” When discussing Gaza and the broader possibility for a regional war in the Middle East, Richardson lets Blinken peddle the Biden camp’s fiercely pro-Israel talking points and does not interrupt or follow up after he articulates a breathtakingly ahistorical account of Israel’s origins and the Palestinian liberation movement. All told, the interview set up Blinken to justify Israel’s eliminationist war (claiming that “Israel just wants to get along with its neighbors”) while masking Biden’s active role in enabling Palestinian slaughter. All the while, Blinken repeated preposterous assertions of the State Department’s good-faith humanitarianism in Gaza. It was a spectacular display of liberal self-exoneration and pro-Israel apologia.

Just as insidious is Richardson’s use of her significant platform to build a specifically historical justification for Biden and liberalism writ large. In her analysis of current events, she often makes her case for both, via tactical omission rather than outright endorsement. As anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot argues, what goes unsaid is just as pivotal to history as what is formally declared. Whether they are due to lacunae in the archive or are the product of compromised reconstructions, historical silences reinforce unjust political arrangements and suppress radicalism, demarcating the limits of what is and is not possible, while constructing notions of blameworthiness for present indignities. “The ultimate mark of power,” Trouillot writes, “may be its invisibility.”³ Richardson dutifully reports on Trump and the right wing for their deceitful reactionary sophistry and autocratic ambitions. But choosing not to critique the political hazards of other structures of power also articulates a politics.

The roots of these ideals extend to the Republican Party during the Civil War, when Lincoln asserted that “all men are equal upon principle,” and to the golden age of liberalism during the New Deal, World War II, and the postwar period, when politicians like FDR “use[d] the government to promote equality.”⁶ She does concede that some liberal initiatives were exclusionary, noting that New Deal programs “often excluded Black and Brown Americans,” as she writes in her latest book, Democracy Awakening. But she insists that generally, liberal Democrats bend toward equality and insist that “Black Americans, people of color and women should have a say in their government and its benefits.”⁷

In her account, Trump and the Republicans embrace racial hate and seek to impose oligarchical rule, while Biden and the Democrats promote equality and redistributionary policies. As she writes in Democracy Awakening, when Trump described Charlottesville’s alt-right Nazis as “very fine people,” Joe Biden reacted in horror that a president would make a “moral equivalence between those spreading hate and those with the courage to stand against it,” vowing to run against the man he “believed threatened our democracy.”⁸

Like Richardson’s recent pop-historical books, Letters from an American beats this same partisan drum. She portrays Trump’s policies as wholly unprecedented and abnormal within American governance. A post from this past May, marking the 70th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, is instructive. In ruling school segregation unconstitutional and enforcing the Fourteenth Amendment’s promise of equal protection, the “landmark decision,” she writes, was a “turning point in American history.” But it also “sparked a backlash,” in which southern segregationist legislatures fought to “block or postpone desegregation.” Flagrantly white supremacist figures like South Carolina Democrat Strom Thurmond deemed desegregation “unconstitutional,” Southern state lawmakers funneled state tax money to private segregation academies, and conservative movement figures like William F. Buckley Jr. and Barry Goldwater merged segregationist fervor with the conservative movement’s pro-business, anti-government regulation sentiment.

From there, Richardson suggests, we can trace a direct line to the reactionary politics of Donald Trump, where Republicans continued to appeal to various constituencies’ “racist and traditionalist dislike of equal rights” to win the votes they needed to implement conservative, business-friendly economic policies.

There is some truth to the narrative—but it’s ultimately partial, as this account of desegregation willfully omits the significant bipartisan support for segregation. As historian Matthew Lassiter notes in his history of the postwar south, The Silent Majority, many white suburban liberals and moderates, including those who considered themselves supporters of civil rights, blocked meaningful school desegregation. Similarly, Lily Geismer writes in her history of late 20th-century suburban liberalism, Don’t Blame Us, many of these liberal constituents only endorsed piecemeal programs that demanded no financial or personal sacrifice from white families. And as historian Brett Gadsden has argued, in the 1970s, none other than freshman senator Joe Biden vigorously fought against desegregating Delaware’s public school system.

These events—among many, many other realities of the time—undermine Richardson’s portrayals of the postwar liberal social order as the fulfillment of equity and “the promise of democracy.” Moreover, their omission frames racist resistance to Civil Rights as the purview of Southern conservative extremists alone, obscuring the complicity of postwar liberal policy and politics in subverting the meaningful implementation of Brown. As Naomi Murakawa writes of this tendency in her history of the bipartisan support for mass incarceration, “with eyes fixed on the incendiary sins of conservative law-and-order, liberal agendas become contrast background, glossed quickly and presumed virtuous.”⁹ Or, as W.E.B Du Bois put it in his criticism of a different libelous strand of Lost Cause historiography, presuming virtue is “fine romance, but it is not science. It may be inspiring, but it is certainly not the truth. And beyond this it is dangerous.”¹⁰

Richard’s dichotomization of Democrats and Republicans—a stance that only viable if one willfully excludes reams of easily accessible historical evidence—is intellectually dishonest at best. While there is certainly truth to her depictions of Republican depravity and of Democratic opposition to flagrant conservative bigotry and exploitation, she underplays the fact that the latter opposition was often nominal at best. Moreover, along innumerable other valences of injustice as well—perhaps especially in the realms of foreign policy and criminal justice—liberals have been wholly complicit in sanctioning the violent power and the exploitations of capital, a historical reality that self-serving partisan triumphalist accounts necessarily obfuscate.

Indeed, historians have long held that assessing the content and material effects of U.S. policymaking through a “red-blue binary,” as Lassiter writes in Shaped by the State, produces dangerous “historical distortions.”¹¹ Chiefly, it masks more consequential bipartisan alignments, including the shared ideological preconceptions of racial capitalism—a pernicious “common sense”—that consigns millions to various forms of premature death by social murder. A raft of scholarship has shown that both liberals and conservatives cheered on racialized law and order, celebrated settler colonial plunder, slashed and privatized social welfare benefits, passed policies that widened the wealth gap, cozied up to corporate elites, toughened border patrol and immigration restrictions, and sanctioned murderous imperial interventions.

This mountain of evidence belies Richardson’s party polarization thesis and points up its fundamental incoherence. Questions arise about whom this discourse ultimately serves: in truth, it’s an ideological outgrowth of a self-interested two-party system and pundit class eager to distract from shared investments in exploitation, dispossession, and criminalization. Even more troubling, Richardson’s project absolves liberals for their participation in defending ideologies and structures that in many ways enabled the Trumpian project they now fear. Trump is not merely a symptom of aberrant Republican derangement: he is fundamentally the creation of the warped prerogatives of capital. At their worst, Richardson’s histories are not liberatory guides for speaking truth to power. Rather, they function as propaganda for an imperial hegemon whose institutions and policies immiserate and kill millions across the globe—regardless of the party in office.

But still, she argues that the foundational idea that “individuals must have control over their own destiny, succeeding or failing according to their skills and effort” is the “genius” of America.¹³ She also claims that marginalized groups of people throughout American history have insisted that this “genius” fosters rather than hinders liberation. As she writes in Democracy Awakening, America’s “real history” is that of “the constant struggle of all Americans, from all races, ethnicities, genders, and abilities to make the belief that we are all created equal and that we have a right to have a say in our democracy come true” and to live up to the “language of human self-determination embodied in the Declaration of Independence.”¹⁴ She uses this historiographical vision to rally her readers into action—which amounts largely to voting for Democrats. “After more than thirty years studying our country’s history,” she writes in Letters from an American before the 2020 presidential election, “I have come to believe in American democracy with an almost religious faith.” That much seems clear.

Richardson’s work encourages her readers to admire and protect America’s liberal-democratic institutions. But the same scholarship that Richardson draws from a historian of the nineteenth century (as well as what she tellingly chooses to omit) suggests these foundations are troubled at best. Histories of slavery and its afterlives, settler colonialism and imperialism, and more suggest that these institutions were and are produced for a violent and extractive system of safeguarding private property. It is true that oppressed groups seeking to win meaningful protections from discrimination or violence have strategically cited America’s stated commitments to equality and meritocracy to make a case for their inclusion and equal treatment. But the historical origins of the United States’s founding principles—and their emphasis on natural rights, the equality of man, and the social contract—derived from a European Enlightenment humanism that viewed settler-colonial Herrenvolk democracy as desirable and entirely compatible with such ideals.

As the late Charles Mills has persuasively argued, “non-white racial exclusion from personhood was the actual norm” of the United States’s founding principles, a “required” component that more broadly enabled the “European appropriation of the world.” He continues: “standard contractarian discussions are fundamentally misleading, because they have things backward to begin with: what usually has been taken as the racist ‘exception’ has really been the rule; what has been taken as the ‘rule,’ the ideal norm, has really been the exception.”¹⁵ Yet Richardson’s historical project assumes the converse: that oppression is the exception to what she calls the “great paradox” of America, and equality is the rule.

Once considered fringe or provocative, arguments that American founding principles guarantee exploitation have since become central to United States political historiography. Probably the most preeminent historian of the colonial United States, Alan Taylor, won the Pulitzer Prize for a book (The Internal Enemy) that details how Virginian Patriots like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Patrick Henry built their wealth through slave labor and considered enslaved populations an “internal enemy” outside of their seemingly radical conceptions of equal rights. And Taylor is far from the only voice demonstrating the originary role of slavery and colonial conquest in the U.S.’s founding. One could fill entire volumes with similar claims dating back to the 19th century and earlier.

Yet Richardson insists otherwise. In Democracy Awakening, she writes, “because the white men who drafted the Declaration saw it primarily as an assertion of their own right to be equal to other white men in England, they did not immediately take on the larger implications of their principled stand.”¹⁶ Here and elsewhere, Richardson argues that anti-Blackness, white settler expansionism, and the illiberal belief in the subhumanity of nonwhite people is incidental to the nation’s history, or is externalizable only to contemptible figures and political parties within it. Such a claim borders on historical malpractice. But allowing that the intellectual and material foundation of the United States is drenched in blood, of course, would undermine Richardson’s function of containing the problem of fascism into the narrow figure of Trump. Undoubtedly, this simplification—soothing and flattering to her liberal readership—makes her more legible to publishers and media outlets eager to heed her expert analysis and pay her handily for it.

For her part, Heather Cox Richardson essentially came to serve as a mouthpiece for the Democratic Party and Biden during the latter’s moribund Presidency. This was perhaps no more apparent than when she attempted to contort historical analysis into an argument for Biden’s continued presence as the Democratic Party presidential nominee, despite a disastrous debate performance and fast-dropping polls (though she eventually got with the program for Kamala Harris). More broadly, over the last year, in Letters from an American, she has assumed a stenographic role, uncritically parroting the administration’s most flattering talking points, endorsing an ADL-style conflation of anti-Israel politics with antisemitism, leaving a weighty silence on the U.S.-backed horrors in Gaza, and not-so-subtly dismissing pro-Palestinian (and largely anti-Biden) campus protestors.

In truth, many of her posts amount to little more than regurgitations of Biden administration talking points, presented in her retelling as indisputable and trustworthy reportage. Others predictably focus solely on Republican maliciousness and the far-right’s vocally fascistic rhetoric, even as Democrats and/or Biden pushed forward policies that carry out many their objectives. For someone who forthrightly critiqued the Trump administration’s cruel policy of keeping children in cages and separating them from their parents on Twitter, the carte blache that Richardson has granted to the Biden administration, which has not only failed to end those traumatic family separations along the Southern border, but also actually increased deportations over Trump’s first term and made seeking asylum more difficult, is particularly revealing.

The stakes here are not merely a matter of scholarly rigor or a snobbish dismissal of historians who do “presentist” historical work, as the former president of the American Historical Association James Sweet recently contended in a clumsily argued and controversial blog post. The issue is that Richardson and those like her have built a platform that, under the guise of offering accessible, objective and supposedly evidence-based public historical guidance, miseducates masses of people about the content and function of American politics—people who, if provided with a truer sense of the bipartisan rot at the core of the American project, might be moved to envision more expansive visions of liberation. Despite professing anti-fascist alignment with progressive movements, Richardson’s project ultimately complements and legitimizes a longstanding, frequently metamorphizing “fascism without fascists” that exists right here at home.

For as numerous Black radical theorists have long articulated, in spite of liberal democracy’s apparently liberatory openings, what is fascism if not a state that authorizes dispossession, extraction, enslavement, elimination, control, and premature death along group-differentiated lines? That allows migrant children to work and die in factories, daily tortures a predominantly Black and non-white prisoner population (the most populous in the world), denies women access to abortions even when medically necessary, allows corporations to steal wages from their workers, and bankrolls the genocidal bombing of entire generations of innocent civilians — no matter which party is in power?

Artificially offloading the threat of fascism onto Trump and extremists who yearn overtly for a Third Reich ignores the fascistic features of liberal democracy and the racialized state violence it enables, documentation of which exists across both formal and informal archives. As famed Guyanese anticolonial radical and historian Walter Rodney wrote in 1972, “fascism was a monster born of capitalist parents.” It came, he continued, “as the end-product of centuries of capitalist bestiality, exploitation, domination and racism… it is highly significant that many settlers and colonial officials displayed a leaning towards fascism.”¹⁷ For all of Richardson and liberal Resistance historians’ avowed anti-fascism, their work ultimately serves to obscure and legitimize the mechanisms underlying the very problems they purport to solve.

At the latest AHA conference earlier this month, AHA members overwhelmingly voted to adopt a “Resolution to Oppose Scholasticide in Gaza,” which requires that AHA condemn the United States government’s pivotal role in funding Israel’s “intentional effort to comprehensively destroy the Palestinian education system” and demands a “permanent ceasefire to halt the scholasticide.”

While obviously not a direct referendum on the Resistance-historian phenomenon, the vote suggested that a majority of historians in the United States were not willing to serve as puppeteers for a Democratic Party hellbent on sustaining a genocidal status quo, no matter how harrowing the threat of a Trump regime. Even Kevin Kruse expressed that he was “glad to see” the resolution pass. (Though not without first having a minor tantrum at historian Tim Barker’s public call-out of the former’s silence on Gaza.)

Many other Resistance historians, including Richardson, appear to have made no comment about this momentous moment of moral clarity in our profession’s history. Their silence appears to have paid off—at least, for now. In a dramatic volte-face, AHA chose to undemocratically veto the resolution opposing scholasticide, with one of the council members  arguing, absurdly, that doing so “protect[s] the AHA’s reputation as an unbiased historical actor.” (What then, one wonders, were their statements on January 6th and the Russian invasion of Ukraine?)

The shameful decision, a transparent effort to defend a liberal Zionist status quo, suggests that the spineless, sycophantic establishment politics of Resistance history continues to reign supreme. It also unmasks its true reactionary function. No matter its gloss of moral righteousness and global humanitarianism, Resistance history ultimately polices the boundaries of the American political imagination, propping up rather than interrogating the rotting skeleton of U.S. racial capitalism and imperialism from which U.S. fascism emerges and metastasizes on both sides of the aisle.

After the vote, and before the depressing news of the council’s veto, Sherene Seikaly, a historian of Palestine and one of the writers of the AHA resolution, noted in her interview with Democracy Now! that, “the way forward [for historians] is not to be passive and obedient. The way forward is to be ethical and to stand for what is just and to stand against this Israeli genocide, which is, again, armed and abetted by the United States.” As a second Trump presidency has again created the conditions for Resistance historians to use their considerable platforms to deflect from liberal and Democratic Party violence, Seikaly’s call could not be more urgent. It’s beyond time to challenge the intellectual laziness and moral corruption of Resistance histories and their nefarious role in keeping the pillars of U.S. empire and racial fascism intact. ♦

The full list of sources cited in this article can be viewed here.