There's no straightforward answer to this question. For one, it's not like they make us swear a historical equivalent of the hippocratic oath when we become historians - what we consider to be our duty is shaped more by our own moral compass (and, realistically, the structure of the job if we're talking academic history). In other words, what I consider to be my duty as a historian is going to be a bit different to the next person, and my ability to speak is potentially constrained by my professional context.

This hints at the next problem, which is that historians rarely speak with one voice on any given issue. Historians are neither politically neutral, nor politically homogenous - while many of us might be profoundly disturbed by current events, others might be less so - and some of the historians with the most access to the public are those who the rest of the profession hold in the lowest regard (looking at you, Niall Ferguson). This means that no matter how many historians agree on something like "hey, fascism is bad", there are always going to be some loud voices disagreeing. This reflects the reality that historical parallels are rarely cut and dried - for instance, say a country today wants to attack another country. Do you point to the lessons of the outbreak of the First World War - that poor calculation and insufficient desire to preserve peace led to a giant, wasteful slaughter? Or do we instead look to the Second World War, where trying to appease enemies through diplomacy and concessions just emboldened them and made the war worse when it came? In reality, neither is going to be a perfect parallel, but simplified "lessons" of history can still be used to support either option. In other words, history is complicated, and never repeats exactly (despite certain popular sayings). This is scarier than it sounds - if we expect democracy to fail in the present, we can't rely on a comparison with Germany in the 1930s, because the failure of democracy will look different in different times and places. This is a common criticism of efforts to prevent genocide after the Second World War - the fixation on the Holocaust as being what genocide 'looks like' meant that recognising - and getting people to agree on - other instances of genocide was very difficult until it was too late.

All these caveats aside, many historians do try and use their expertise to inform current debate and discussion, including here. For instance, this sub takes a particularly strong position on Holocaust denialism and how best to combat it, which has led to some engagement with the media, as well as naturally in the content of the sub itself. While there is a rule against discussing current events on the sub, some of us (myself included, particularly when answering questions about anti-fascism) occasionally push those boundaries a bit in at least suggesting the possibility of contemporary lessons. Beyond this particular community, many historians do try and speak out when they can. The Washington Post's 'Made by History' initiative is a good example of a bespoke platform, but prominent historians are frequently in the public eye, though depending on your own context, this might be less often than would be ideal (usually because of access to a platform rather than historians' unwillingness). A really good example of a historian who works proactively against the misuse of history is Kevin M. Kruse, who is on a one-man mission to demolish the work of some particularly dubious practitioners on social media. I'm personally of the view that historians should be doing more rather than less to reach audiences in this way - one of the reasons I contribute to this site! - but the lack of historians in the news is generally not because we're shut up in an ivory tower and humming with fingers in our ears.

I'm gonna try and back up u/crrpit in the great points they made by giving some examples from Australia.

Historians and anthropologists have been heavily involved in discourse around Australian history, identity and the rights and needs of Indigenous Australia since at least the 1930s, when anthropologists like Elkin and Stanner began to advise humanitarian societies and government officials on what was best for Indigenous Australia. This included ending social Darwinist myths like the inevitable extinction of Aboriginal Australia, which was disproved by showing that Indigenous Australia had high population growth, and that Indigenous Australians were naturally unintelligent, as well as exposing atrocities on the frontiers of regional Australia and lobbying when 'tribal' Aboriginal Australians were given death sentences. There were also dark sides to this early advocacy however, which is generally how it is remembered today - anthropologists of the time believed in the preservation of tribal culture and society through segregation, arguing for land rights and sovereignty for northern traditional societies, but they also advocated for racial and cultural assimilation of so-called 'fringe-dweller' mixed-ancestry populations which had been exposed to generations of settler abuse. Never-the-less, the advocacy of these experts led to the idea that Aboriginal Australia had a future, and that waiting for them to die out would need to be replaced with a means of improving their lives.

After the Second World War, under greater scrutiny by a world experiencing decolonisation, the blossoming of universal human rights under the UN and the horrors of the Holocaust and apartheid, Australian governments slowly began to give Aboriginal Australia greater rights and freedoms, and quietly ended the racial discrimination of the White Australia immigration policy. In 1968, a year after the referendum that symbolically implied white Australia's support for Indigenous Australian equality, Stanner made a now famous speech criticising 'the Great Australian Silence', wherein Aboriginal people were footnotes to the triumphant nationalist narrative of a productive and heroic colonial British race. In the coming decades, historians began to focus on frontier histories, challenging narratives that suggested that Australia was the only country in history born without bloodshed, or that Aboriginal Australia was a weak race that failed to defend a land it inhabited but did not own (as well as writing about other neglected minorities like women, LGBT and the labour movement). This accompanied a general spirit of change and reform, headed by the left-wing Labor Party in its Whitlam, Hawke and Keating governments, generally opposed by the conservative Liberal party, with the most relevant ideas concerning Indigenous Australian rights and reconciliation, Australian identity and multicultural immigration policy. Paul Keating was and continues to be a particularly loud and strong voice for a change in Australia's sense of identity.

One historian, Manning Clark, was closely associated with the Labor Party and was publicly highly critical of the conservative Liberal Party's views - his pupil, Don Watson, later became a speech writer for Paul Keating, co-authoring his famous Redfern Speech which admitted to Australia's colonial wrongs. Another historian, Henry Reynolds, was inspired to write about colonial race relations by what he saw teaching in North Queensland, and through a friendship with his university's gardner, Eddy Mabo, helped set off the court case that (with Keating's full support) ended in the recognition of native title in 1992. Australia in the early 90s appeared to be heading in an entirely new direction - republican, with full reconciliation with Aboriginal Australia and a rejection of a primarily British identity for a more left-wing and multi-ethnic 'native' one.

This of course met strong opposition. In an interview in 1993, prominent conservative historian Geoffrey Blainey famously stated that he and many others had been raised on 'the Three Cheers' school of Australian history, where Australia was seen as a perfect example of a peaceful democratic British society, in many ways a 'Better Britain'. He criticised what he called the 'Black Arm-band' historians of the previous two decades who had focused on racism, sexism, colonialism and 'other isms', saying that the pendulum had swung too far back, in the sense that Australia had far more to celebrate than the Black-armbanders would admit - Reynolds later quipped that "it is better to wear a black arm-band than a white blindfold". Blainey also stoked controversy by then going on to criticise multi-racial immigration, especially from Asia, saying that Australia was losing its cohesiveness and building itself up to fall apart to ethnic infighting.

This is something that the leader of the Liberal Party, John Howard, strongly agreed with and had been publicly rebuked for in the 80s - when he won the 1996 election, he followed this line of thinking more subtly than in the past. Opposed to a multicultural Australian identity (despite encouraging mass immigration from Asia), he gave subtle endorsements to the rising alt-right politician Pauline Hanson, whose One Nation Party is the most openly xenophobic in Australia, and ramped up dogwhistling on Muslim refugees, exploiting rising public fear for political gain to cover for his whole-hearted support for George W. Bush and the US-led invasion of the Middle-East (which was deeply unpopular in Australia). To reinforce 'traditional' white Australian identity and support for the war, he pumped millions of dollars into nationalistic celebrations/commemorations like Australia Day and Anzac Day (which had until this point been falling into cultural irrelevance), really playing on the romanticism of Australia's involvement in both World Wars and subsequent ANZUS treaty conflicts like Korea and Vietnam. He encouraged traditional white Australian history in schools, did his utmost to sabotage the 1999 republic referendum, sabotaged native title (making it nearly impossible to claim) and defunded/disbanded many Aboriginal political institutions, instituted a military-led intervention into child-abuse in the Northern Territory (seen as neo-colonial), refused to lead an apology for the Stolen Generations, refused to admit to genocide and frontier warfare, and so much more.

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