What a perversion of not just the word freedom, but the very concept of freedom. I’m struck these days by how very much conservatives rail against true freedom and liberty for anybody who is not a cis straight white person.

I’ve got a little bit of news for them. Suppressing the teaching of actual history is not freedom. It’s authoritarianism. That’s what Stalin did in the Soviet Union when he turned the Russian empire into a totalitarian state where people were afraid to open their mouths and speak truth lest they be sent to prison or worse.

Republicans aren’t afraid to use tactics like that. I wrote recently about a Latino kid in Texas who was sent to a special disciplinary school because he wouldn’t get with the white program and wear his hair the way his white school district administrators insisted he had to wear it. Yet white Texans claim to be all about freedom. Listen up Texas conservatives: disciplinint a kid because he doesn’t subscribe to your white values is the opposite of freedom.

Speaking of Florida fighting against freedom, the Florida house recently approved a bill designed to prevent school teachers from talking about gay or trans people in class.

Freedom? How is that freedom? Gay people can be legally married and trans people are federally protected from employment discrimination, but Florida wants to make it illegal to talk about us in school.

Let’s just be clear about what that is. It’s totalitarianism. It’s Stalinesque.

Just exactly like how forbidding the teaching of the history of Black people is totalitarianism.

Calling it freedom is to take a page directly from Orwell.