{"id":14306,"date":"2025-10-27T08:00:50","date_gmt":"2025-10-27T12:00:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/?p=14306"},"modified":"2025-11-04T00:58:53","modified_gmt":"2025-11-04T05:58:53","slug":"loyalty-to-truth-and-solidarity-not-to-the-authoritarian-state","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/2025\/10\/loyalty-to-truth-and-solidarity-not-to-the-authoritarian-state\/","title":{"rendered":"Loyalty to truth and solidarity\u2014not to the authoritarian state"},"content":{"rendered":"

I<\/span>t\u2019s an honor to stand among those who still understand that silence in the face of injustice is a form of violence.<\/p>\n

We are gathering at a dangerous hour\u2014when 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\u2014or whether it will be rounded up like a human being in the street, facing an ICE agent, and deported from public life.<\/p>\n

Everyone is welcome here.<\/h4>\n

I want to begin with the story of an Idaho teacher named Sarah Inama<\/a>.<\/p>\n

She taught sixth-grade world civilizations and hung a small sign above her classroom door that read, \u201cEveryone Is Welcome Here.\u201d Ten raised hands in different skin tones\u2014a simple declaration of humanity.<\/p>\n

Her district ordered her to take it down, calling it \u201cnot content-neutral.\u201d She complied at first, but the silence haunted her. One student had once asked, \u201cDoes that mean everyone isn\u2019t welcome anymore?\u201d<\/p>\n

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?<\/p>\n

Or\u2014in our classrooms, on our campuses, in our unions, in our streets\u2014will we raise a new sign over this country that says, without apology or exception, \u201cEveryone is welcome here.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s loyalty oath<\/h4>\n

Sarah\u2019s act of courage revealed something enormous\u2014that the attack on truth always begins in the classroom. What they practiced on her, they now aim to enforce on all of us.<\/p>\n

And now, on a national scale, the Trump administration is attempting the same control with loyalty oath compacts.<\/p>\n

Under these agreements, universities receiving federal funds would have to pledge allegiance not to scientific integrity or academic freedom, but to the administration\u2019s MAGA ideology.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s McCarthyism reborn\u2014replacing scholarship with political obedience, demanding that every institution of learning bow before power.<\/p>\n

Policing ourselves<\/h4>\n

This is how fascism grows\u2014not first through soldiers in the streets, but through silence in the schools: by teaching fear instead of freedom, by replacing critical thought with compliance.<\/p>\n