In February 2026, the MAGA controlled New Hampshire House passed House Bill 1792, formally titled the “Countering Hate and Revolutionary Leftist Indoctrination in Education Act,” or the “CHARLIE Act.” The name is in reference to the American far-right activist Charlie Kirk, whose political campaigns against so-called “leftist indoctrination” functioned as part of a broader effort to defend racial, class, and gender hierarchies in American society. This bill does precisely the same by attempting to use state power to police how reality itself may be analyzed.
Among other things, the bill explicitly targets the use of dialectical analysis to interpret history or contemporary events as conflicts rooted in class, race, or identity. In plain terms, the law attempts to outlaw one of the most fundamental methods of modern social analysis. To appreciate the audacity of this move, it is necessary to understand what dialectical thinking actually is. Dialectics is not a doctrine that promotes hatred or division; it is a method of inquiry that examines ideas and social conditions through the analysis of opposing forces, contradictions, and their resolution. Dialectics allows us to examine struggles between groups with unequal power and resources and to analyze how these tensions shape social structures and generate social change. Brecht offered an especially clear defense of the method. “In reality,” he wrote, “dialectic is a method of thinking, or, rather, an interconnected sequence of intellectual methods which permit one to dissolve certain fixed ideas and reassert praxis against ruling ideologies.”[1] Dialectical thinking does not command people what to believe. It teaches them how to examine the world critically, how to question assumptions that are presented as natural or inevitable, and how to understand the social forces that shape social realities.
It is comical that the bill frames itself as a defense against “indoctrination.” Sociology has long demonstrated that US schools function as institutions of socialization. Education systems transmit norms, values, and assumptions about the social order. The question is never whether schools influence how students understand society. They always do. The real question is what worldview can be transmitted. When the authors of this law denounce indoctrination, what they really mean is that indoctrination is acceptable only so long as it is their indoctrination which reinforces the worldview they prefer—the worldview that preserves the existing social order and its many hierarchies and undeserved privileges that go along with it. Instead of allowing for a pluralist approach to education, they demand absolute conformity and use the state as a mechanism of coercion to ensure that conformity.
Seen in this light, the bill’s true purpose becomes unmistakable. It is not about preventing division; it is about preventing recognition of division. Dialectical analysis does not create inequality, conflict, or tension within society. Those realities already exist. What dialectics does is make them visible. It reveals the contradictions between wealth and poverty, power and exclusion, ideals and empirical reality. It exposes the fragility of an ideological system that depends on presenting social hierarchies as natural, timeless, or morally justified. By outlawing this mode of analysis, the MAGA extremists, wielding the state as a weapon of control and domination, are attempting to deny people intellectual tools to understand how power and inequality actually operate. The law’s authors claim to be protecting students from indoctrination. In reality, they are attempting to enforce it—by ensuring that certain questions can no longer be asked, certain facts cannot be known, and certain forms of understanding can no longer be taught.
This fits squarely within a broader pattern in MAGA politics in which critical inquiry itself is treated as a threat. Rather than confronting inequality, this movement increasingly attempts to regulate the language and analytical frameworks through which inequality is discussed. Laws targeting so-called “divisive concepts,” critical race theory, or dialectical analysis follow the same basic logic: suppress the tools of critique and the contradictions they reveal become easier to ignore. The objective is not intellectual neutrality. The objective is the preservation of ideological hegemony and existing systems of social domination. At its core, this project seeks to protect a hierarchical social order rooted in misogyny, racism, class privilege, and heteronormative dominance.
MAGA’s attempt to prohibit dialectical analysis is not without historical precedent. Authoritarian regimes have often recognized that critical frameworks capable of exposing social contradictions pose a threat to ideological control. In Nazi Germany, Marxist theory and dialectical materialism were explicitly suppressed through legal prohibitions, censorship, and the persecution of intellectuals. Following in the footsteps of their ideological predecessors, MAGA-fascism is a political project that seeks to preserve and strengthen existing hierarchies by weaponizing state power against critical thought itself. Rather than defending free inquiry, MAGA-fascists increasingly attempt to criminalize it. They present themselves as opponents of indoctrination while simultaneously dictating which analytical frameworks educators may use, which interpretations of history are acceptable, and which questions may be asked.
These attempts to ban dialectical analysis are fundamentally anti-democratic. So too are those who support them. Democratic societies depend on citizens who are capable of examining contradictions, questioning authority, and critically analyzing the structures that shape their lives. A movement that uses state power to prohibit the intellectual tools used for such analysis is not protecting democracy. They are undermining it. Efforts to outlaw dialectical thinking reveal a profound fear of precisely the capacities that democratic citizenship requires. Seen in the broader context of recent MAGA campaigns against public education—attacks on critical race theory, restrictions on teaching about inequality, book bans, and political pressure on universities—the pattern becomes unmistakable. These efforts are not about improving education. They are about weakening it. A population that is not given the tools to question power, analyze social contradictions, recognize structures of domination is far easier to manipulate and control. The MAGA goal here is quite clear. It is to narrow the boundaries of permissible thought so that myths, superstition, and outright lies can flourish unchallenged and illegitimate and immoral systems of power can operate without scrutiny. In short, the goal is to let ignorance reign so those on top can stay on top.
This issue should be of particular concern to academics and artists, including members of the International Brecht Society. Brecht’s work is deeply rooted in dialectical thinking and in the use of art as a tool for exposing social contradictions. Bills like the CHARLIE Act do not merely target abstract philosophical concepts; they strike directly at the intellectual foundations of critical scholarship and politically engaged art. If dialectical analysis is legally prohibited in the classroom and research, then much of the theoretical framework through which Brecht’s work is studied, taught, and staged will also be deemed illegal. For scholars, educators, and artists alike, this represents a direct threat to academic freedom and artistic inquiry.
Nevertheless, there is bright spot to be found amongst all this right-wing authoritarian darkness. The very attempt to outlaw such methods is revealing. Movements that are confident in the legitimacy and intellectually robustness of their position do not need to ban ideas. They debate them. When a political movement turns instead to censorship, coercion, and the machinery of the state to silence critique, it signals something very significant: a recognition that the critique is powerful and that the contradictions it exposes cannot easily be dismissed. If fascists feel compelled to silence dialectical analysis, it only confirms that it is doing exactly what it is supposed to do—exposing the fault lines of the system.
Anthony Squiers, PhD, Habil. is a faculty member at AMDA College of the Performing Arts and co-editor of E-CIBS. He is the author of An Introduction to the Social and Political Philosophy of Bertolt Brecht and Bertolt Brecht’s Adaptations and Anti-capitalist Aesthetics Today.
[1] Bertolt Brecht, “Dialectics,” in Brecht on Art and Politics, ed. Tom Kuhn and Steve Giles, trans. Laura Bradley, Steve Giles, and Tom Kuhn (London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2003), p. 104.
Cover art by Alina Kolyuka.
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