Right wingers keep up their attacks on reason and its uses. One recent example is the Florida Senate bill that would make the teaching of critical race theory an offense and could have it sued by bounty-hunters. See Paul Krugman’s column on the topic. A proper history of the US would become impossible, since students “should not be made to feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race.” Republicans are covering this attack on rational discourse by using two widely accepted masks. First, they adopt something that has become somewhat common in the culture. They invoke a feeling of discomfort as sufficient excuse for refraining from inquiry, just as some students want to be excused from reading the story of Dinah’s rape in Genesis because it is too disturbing to them. Secondly, the Republicans turn everything around by pretending that this feeling of discomfort is commensurate with the denial or minimization of the Holocaust. False dichotomy: The long-standing overt and covert racism of US society should not be analyzed, but the history of the Shoah or at least its mention are to be kept up as a subject of inquiry. And why shouldn’t the discomfort experienced when seeing pictures or stories of the horrors of WWII also excuse students from pursuing that topic? The phrasing of this new bill makes clear that both totalitarianism and racism are joined at the hip. It is more crucial than ever to study both critically and include this draft of a bill as evidence.