Loyalty to truth and solidarity—not to the authoritarian state

It’s an honor to stand among those who still understand that silence in the face of injustice is a form of violence.

We are gathering at a dangerous hour—when those in power are not only rewriting history, but trying to outlaw honesty itself. The question before us is not a small one. It is whether that powerful, fragile, and defiantly stubborn thing we call truth will be allowed to enter our classrooms—or whether it will be rounded up like a human being in the street, facing an ICE agent, and deported from public life.

Everyone is welcome here.

I want to begin with the story of an Idaho teacher named Sarah Inama.

She taught sixth-grade world civilizations and hung a small sign above her classroom door that read, “Everyone Is Welcome Here.” Ten raised hands in different skin tones—a simple declaration of humanity.

Her district ordered her to take it down, calling it “not content-neutral.” She complied at first, but the silence haunted her. One student had once asked, “Does that mean everyone isn’t welcome anymore?”

Refusing the lie that silence is neutral, she went back and put the sign up again. And in that small act of defiance, she posed a question to all of us: Will we let that sign stay down?

Or—in our classrooms, on our campuses, in our unions, in our streets—will we raise a new sign over this country that says, without apology or exception, “Everyone is welcome here.”

Trump’s loyalty oath

Sarah’s act of courage revealed something enormous—that the attack on truth always begins in the classroom. What they practiced on her, they now aim to enforce on all of us.

And now, on a national scale, the Trump administration is attempting the same control with loyalty oath compacts.

Under these agreements, universities receiving federal funds would have to pledge allegiance not to scientific integrity or academic freedom, but to the administration’s MAGA ideology.

It’s McCarthyism reborn—replacing scholarship with political obedience, demanding that every institution of learning bow before power.

Policing ourselves

This is how fascism grows—not first through soldiers in the streets, but through silence in the schools: by teaching fear instead of freedom, by replacing critical thought with compliance.

As I write in my book Teach Truth, the powerful prefer that we police ourselves, to internalize obedience so deeply that we reproduce inequality willingly. Maintaining a world where the richest 1 percent have as much wealth as the bottom 95 percent of humanity requires massive investment in shaping how people think, especially through schools and the media.

As Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky showed in their book Manufacturing Consent, and as critical educators have long argued, those in power rule not just by controlling the economy, but by shaping consciousness—by defining what is normal, what is possible, and what must never be questioned.

That’s exactly what these loyalty compacts are designed to do: to train a new generation to mistake submission for education. We’ve seen this before. During the McCarthy era, educators were a primary target of anticommunist hysteria.

The lineage of resistance

But there is another lineage—the lineage of resistance.

Honest education has always scared those in power.

Our enslaved ancestors risked their lives to learn to read when literacy itself was a crime for Black people. After the Civil War, Black people built the public schools. During the Reconstruction era when the Ku Klux Klan burned Black schools to the ground, our people rebuilt them, again and again, because they believed there was no emancipation without education. And when the state tried once more to silence truth during Jim Crow, our elders opened Freedom Schools where students studied not for a test but for liberation.

From those movements to our own today, the struggle has been the same: to teach truth in a country that fears it.

Because when you make honesty a liability and obedience a job requirement, you build the infrastructure of fascism. But when teachers, students, and communities come together to defend truth, you build the foundations of freedom.

Freedom demands solidarity

Tonight, we celebrate the courage of the colleges that have already rejected Trump’s loyalty oath compacts. Their refusal is more than a policy decision—it’s a declaration that education will not kneel to power.

But their stand must not remain isolated.

If we’ve learned anything from our ancestors, it’s that freedom demands solidarity. The same spirit that led enslaved people to defy anti-literacy laws, that drove Black families to rebuild schools after the Klan burned them down, that inspired the Freedom Schools of the civil rights movement—that spirit must live again in this moment.

This administration’s fascist project cannot succeed without controlling the schools. But they cannot control the schools unless we let them.

That means the fight for truth in higher education cannot be separated from the struggle in K–12 classrooms. Professors and paraeducators, grad workers and kindergarten teachers, students and parents—we are one movement.

That’s the vision at the heart of the Teach Truth movement and the Zinn Education Project. Educators are organizing across the country to defend honest history, to teach about resistance and repair, and to remind the nation that teaching the truth has always been an act of moral courage. From rallies on Juneteenth to classrooms that refuse censorship, we are building a front line of truth-tellers who refuse to be silenced.

So I say tonight: I will not step aside and let fascist laws dictate what lessons enter the schools. I will not step aside and let fascist ICE agents enter the school. I will link arms with my colleagues in higher ed and K–12, with our unions, our students, and our communities, to defend our schools.

Education is the line in the sand. The classroom is our frontline. The truth is our curriculum. And we—teachers, students, and truth-tellers—will not yield.

So, I will take an oath, but it won’t be a loyalty oath to the state or to Donald Trump. Our real oath isn’t to a president or a party—it’s to our students, to one another, to our ancestors who laid the basis for our fight today, and to the truth.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”
Featured Image credit: Last Minute Linda; modified by Tempest.