“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” said the American philosopher, George Santanya, a quote that Speaker Mike Johnson should heed, but can’t, because the world he occupies expunges history as a matter of ideological necessity.

What ideology is that?

The ideology of Donald Trump idolatry, which is what remains of the once great Republican Party, formerly of Abe Lincoln. In an interview on TODAY, Johnson even drew a parallel between Lincoln and Trump. For this version of the Republican Party, Lincoln as an historical figure doesn’t exist except insofar as he facilitates the iconography of Trump.

“There’s no figure in American history, at least in the modern era, maybe since Lincoln, who’s been so vilified and really persecuted by the media, Hollywood elites, political figures, you know, even the legal system,” Johnson said. Then the speaker about people who cite the return of former President Donald Trump as a threat to democracy.

“I mean it, it heats up the environment,” the Republican speaker said on TODAY.

It heats up the environment.

Listen, Johnson, let me key you into some history.

On January 6th, 2021, Trump incited a mob to march to the U.S. Capitol to disrupt the certification of the 2020 presidential election. That mob got into an altercation with a cop, who later died after suffering a stroke. Trump tried to use an angry group of impassioned followers to short-circuit his own vice president from ratifying the will of the American people. He tried to bully the Georgia Secretary of State into “finding votes” after Joe Biden won the election in Georgia.

Those of us who warn about convicted felon Trump threatening our democracy have the recent historical record as proof. This is not rhetoric, or hyperbole, or – to use a term perhaps more to Johnson’s fancy – idol worship, that organizing principle of his party. I understand. In Johnson’s world, if we expunge the record, and do away with history – indeed, if history itself is a hoax – we don’t need it in order to more justly maintain our republic. It gets in the way. It encumbers and impedes. It confuses and disrupts the greater good imparted by our collective acquiescence to a myth. The history of our republic, indeed western history, certainly going as far back as the enlightenment but probably farther, to ancient Greece, has no place within the ritualistic grip of the Trump-era GOP.

I know you can’t understand, and so I’m trying to get hip, Johnson, to you and your ilk. I was looking at a painting of Piltdown Man the other day, and I got a little choked up, seeing him depicted running across the tundra in defense of a food source. Even the most primitive passages of our pre-history can inspire if we merely lower the bar and expunge history. Robert Williams, one of America’s greatest artists, who painted the images you see here, also shows our hero Piltdown wrestling a mastodon into submission, in the process demonstrating his great physical strength. It’s heady stuff, and no less moving really (or maybe more so, Johnson), without history, when one considers that Piltdown Man was a fraud, not the elusive missing link between ape and man, as originally purported, but an assemblage of bone parts, including orangutan teeth, somebody’s disposable mandible, and scraps of a cranium.

There’s a lesson there, Johnson, as you try to “lower the heat and turn down the temperature” when his critics say the former president represents a threat to democracy. Yes, he does, of course, and to civilization as we know it, as that fine thread of intellect prized by Galileo to supplant with fact the pure power wallow of myth. We can do this. We’re prepared for this. Those of us old enough still remember Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” and that profound moment when an ancestor of ours discovers a weapon in the form of a jawbone. There it begins and ends, for without history, Johnson, yes, so true, we still have our humanity, after all, or anyway the put-together bone parts of pre-history, the adamantly unhistorical version of it, the un-history of it anyway – like Piltdown Man – which without the facts, doesn’t have to remain merely a total hoax.