HENRY GIROUX.    AUGUST 29, 2025.

The Trump administration’s race toward fascism is unfolding at breakneck speed and on multiple fronts. At the heart of this transformation lies the emergence of the United States as a warfare state, a captive state that merges the interests of the military-industrial-academic complex with the toxic ideologies of white nationalism and white supremacy. What makes this moment especially dangerous is that warfare no longer refers solely to foreign conquest; it has become a central organizing principle of governance at home. The state itself has been weaponized, turning inward against its own population, normalizing domestic terrorism as a tool of rule.

The scourge of militarization as the driving force of American politics, which has its contemporary roots in the terror state created by Bush and Cheney after 9/11, is even more intensified as a domestic and foreign policy mode of governance. The long legacy of armed intervention abroad by the U.S. now appears on the streets of Los Angeles, Washington, D.C. as well as in universities, courthouses, and even sports fields. As Melissa Gira Grant notes, “federal agents are the new proud boys.”  Perpetual war is now waged against Americans, legitimated as a normal condition of politics. 

This is domestic terrorism, the transformation of inflammatory, fear-mongering, and dehumanizing rhetoric into acts of state violence.  It is a form of necropolitics wedded to the notion of death worlds and the ascendence of a corpse-like order. As Achille Mbembe argues,  “death worlds” mark regimes in which “new and unique forms of social existence [emerge] in which vast populations are subjected to living conditions conferring on them the status of the living dead.” Trump’s regime of domestic terrorism, especially his war on immigrants and naturalized citizens is driven by a death drive that constitutes an orgy of annihilation wedded to the dictates of capital accumulation, the dynamics of class and racial hierarchies, and bold embrace and displays of racist histories and neo-Nazi symbols. Under Trump’s notion of gangster capitalism and politics of vengeance, there is no room in the U.S. except for white Christian nationalist and supine loyalists. 

There is no pretense of democracy here, only the workings of gangster capitalism masquerading as the future. When a government deploys violence and coercion to intimidate its own population, driven by nativism, racism and political extremism, it meets the definition of domestic terrorism. Its policies and language are designed to cultivate fear, intimidate, and amass power in the hands of the rich. Dehumanizing speech does not simply wound; it punishes, it draws blood, and it prepares the ground for expulsions, detention centers, and a culture saturated with hate. Words like “invaders,” “vermin,” and “criminals” are weaponized against immigrants to mark them as disposable. Policies of family separation, mass deportation, and indefinite detention are constructed not only to punish but to terrorize. Confronted with this dehumanizing rhetoric and violence-soaked policies, Trump, chillingly and without irony, declares, “A lot of people are saying maybe we’d like a dictator.” 

Trump’s authoritarian obsession with violence and punishment is evident in his relentless drive to criminalize dissent and weaponize the state against what he calls “enemies of the people.” He has demanded draconian penalties, including prison time, for those who burn the American flag, an act of protest protected under the Constitution. Stephen Prager argues in Common Dreams that Trump has issued an executive order that puts in place portals and legal mechanisms that may permit “‘random fascist vigilantes’ to help him crack down on protests across the country, according to one prominent civil rights lawyer.” In addition, he has called for the reinstatement of the death penalty for murder cases in the nation’s capital,deploying the ultimate form of state violence as both spectacle and warning. These are not isolated authoritarian postures but militarized acts of domestic terrorism, designed to fuse punishment, repression, and vengeance into the very core of political life. 

What we are witnessing in the United States is not simply the corrosion of democratic norms but the rise of an aggressive fascist politics, one that weaponizes the threat of punishment to enforce Trump’s whims and vanities. As Ruth Ben-Ghiat rightly observes, Trump seeks to transform the Department of Defense into the Department of War, a blunt instrument of his personal authority. He boasts of sending armed troops into Democratic-run cities he despises, embracing the military as his private army. Journalist and historian Garrett Graff underscores the gravity of this descent, arguing that “America has finally tipped over into fascism.” While he does not explicitly invoke the term domestic terrorism, his depiction leaves little doubt that the necropolitics of state terror have taken root under Trump’s regime. Graff writes: 

“America has become a country where armed officers of the state shout “Papers please!” on the street at men and women heading home from work, a vision we associate with the Gestapo in Nazi Germany or the KGB in Soviet Russia, and where masked men wrestle to the ground and abduct people without due process into unmarked vehicles, disappearing them into an opaque system where their family members beg for information.”

Anti-Communism Fanaticism and the Ghost of Roy Cohn.

It is precisely out of this obsession with punishment and terror that Trump revives another of fascism’s oldest weapons: the anti-communist smear. At the core of this politics of fear, dissenters are not engaged but denounced, not debated but branded as traitors. In the McCarthy era it was used to silence dissent, dismantle unions, and destroy lives—think especially of “the Hollywood Ten.” 

Under Trump, anti-communist smears are wielded once again, not as an argument but as a weapon, meant to mark whole movements, cities, and communities as enemies of the state. A chilling illustration of this came in a rant by white nationalist Stephen Miller, the White House Deputy Chief of Staff. Speaking at Washington, D.C.’s Union Station on August 20, 2025, during a stop at Shake Shack with Vice President J.D. Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, while visiting National Guard troops. Referring to protesters shouting at Miller in Union Station, he stated:

“They’re the ones who have been advocating for the one percent. They’re criminals, killers, rapists, and drug dealers. And I’m glad they’re here today because me, Pete, and the vice president [are] going to leave here and, inspired by them, we’re going to add thousands more resources to this city to get the criminals and the gang members out. We’re going to disable those networks, and we’re going to prove that the city can serve law-abiding citizens. We are not going to let the Communists destroy a great American city, let alone the nation’s capital… So we’re going to ignore these stupid white hippies, who all need to go home and take a nap because they’re all over 90 years old, and get back to protecting the American people and the citizens of Washington, D.C.”

Here the slur “Communists” does not name an ideology, it operates as an epithet, a scarlet letter of treason designed to criminalize protest and erase dissent itself. As Thom Hartmann reminds us, fascism rarely marches into being with tanks rolling down the avenues; it seeps into everyday life through language that glorifies violence, legitimizes cruelty, and sanctifies authoritarian power. By branding critics as “Communists” and ridiculing protesters as “criminals” and “stupid hippies,” Miller’s rant exposes how hate-saturated speech fuses with state repression to cultivate a culture where fear and violence appear natural, even necessary. He surely knows the lineage he is invoking. Anti-communist rhetoric, in the hands of George Wallace and Richard Nixon, functioned in the 1960s as a weapon to justify brutality against “domestic enemies”: liberals, civil rights activists, student radicals, leftists of every stripe. The irony is unmistakable: Miller resurrects the anti-communist hysteria of Roy Cohn, Trump’s mentor and enabler during the darkest days of McCarthyism, channeling a script of fear and denunciation that once destroyed lives and now returns as a blueprint for authoritarian rule. History leaves little doubt: the anti-communist vocabulary revived today by Trump, MAGA, and their sycophants is far from rhetorical excess, it is a deliberate strategy, a time-tested script, to sanctify authoritarian rule, legitimate state-sanctioned violence and silence democratic resistance.

Infamous for his rabid attacks on immigrants, Miller has long been the ideological architect of Trump’s fascism. His racism and nativism fuel three central pillars of this project.

First, Miller insists that all immigrants are criminals, fit only to be expelled or incarcerated.

Second, he casts the assault on immigration as the cornerstone for erecting a police state, eroding justice, truth, morality, and freedom itself.

Third, he has become a leading force in the war on public and higher education, branding them as “cancerous, communist, woke culture” that is “destroying the country.”

Such language, echoing Trump’s lexicon, is code for dismantling the critical, inclusive, and democratic possibilities of education: the chance for diverse students to learn, to question, and to act as informed agents of a democratic society.

For Miller, schools must not cultivate critical consciousness but instead drill children in patriotism, uncritical reverence for America, and hostility toward “communist ideology.” The details of this pedagogical assault are chillingly familiar: banning books, whitewashing history into a racist mythology, abolishing critical pedagogy, and hollowing out the capacity for informed and ethical thinking. What emerges is a pedagogy of repression, one that seeks to erase historical memory, extinguish democratic values, and turn education into a factory of indoctrination.

The Rise of the Police State and the Attack on Citizenship.

This is not an isolated campaign. The broader discourse of racism, white nationalism, and state repression is now flaunted by Trump and his cadre of shock troops in mainstream media, not with shame but with fanatical glee, and rarely interrogated as the lifeblood of fascist ideology. The legitimating force of this repression is what gives state violence its sheen of inevitability.

One stark example makes this clear. Christopher Rufo, one of the most influential propagandists of the MAGA movement, recently declared in a Substack post that agencies like ICE should “dispatch unmarked vans to follow key agitators and snatch them from the streets while the media are not looking.” The essence of fascism is always in such details. Trump and his allies know that secret abductions, forced disappearances, and the proliferation of masked federal agents who refuse to identify themselves, and who act with impunity, are not aberrations. They are the hallmarks of authoritarian regimes. And let’s be clear, Trump’s domestic terrorism and war on immigrants are not only a mask for creating a police state, it also provides grotesque opportunities for private prison companies to profit from Trump’s feverish attempt to imprison thousands of immigrants, dissenters, and anyone else opposed to his dictatorial delusions.

The erosion of due process, equal justice, and above all citizenship is the most chilling marker of this new warfare state. As John Ganz argues, the essence of Trump’s movement is an assault on the very concept of American citizenship, stretching from birtherism and the stolen election lie to attempts to revoke birthright citizenship and expand denaturalization. In Trump’s world, citizenship no longer exists as an inalienable right; it is stripped of its universality and recast as a privilege. In his hands, it is both gift and cudgel, “a transferable and revocable commodity,” wielded to divide, discipline, and destroy. This is the state’s cold choreography of fear, where terror, abduction, violence, and disappearance become the grammar of governance and the language through which power is spoken.

Trump’s attack on citizenship cannot be separated from the ongoing militarization of America. As Greg Grandin notes in The New York Times, at its core this attack is a “fight over the meaning of America” and reveals both  the white racism driving MAGA nationalism, and the pernicious claim by the Trump regime that they will decide “who gets to call themselves American in Mr. Trump’s America?” He adds:

“Mr. Trump and operatives like Mr. Miller are waging a war not only on migrants but also on the concept of citizenship. According to one report, Immigration and Customs Enforcement expelled as many as 66 citizens during Mr. Trump’s first term, and now he has issued an executive order ending birthright citizenship. His government is exiling children who were born in the United States, including a 4-year-old boy with late-stage cancer. The Justice Department says it is “prioritizing denaturalization,” establishing a framework to revoke citizenship from naturalized citizens the White House deems undesirable.”

To dismantle citizenship is to resurrect one of history’s darkest horrors: the rendering of people stateless, expelled not only from a nation but from the very category of the human—denied memory, voice, and existence itself. Deportation, detention, and denaturalization are not bureaucratic measures but weapons of political cleansing. This is domestic terrorism, not a metaphor, not an exaggeration, but the systematic transformation of incendiary rhetoric into instruments of state violence. Ganz is right: Trump’s attack on citizenship carries the unmistakable signature of fascism, the logic of totalitarianism reborn, the totalitarian machinery of erasure turned against the present, made into a spectacle suitable for instant viewing and the rush cruelty provides as a pleasure quotient.

Rachel Maddow captures the full weight of this authoritarian consolidation. The United States, she warns, is no longer on the brink but already living under a consolidating dictatorship. Secret police snatch people off streets, immigrants are scapegoated as the perpetual enemy, and even “homegrown” citizens are threatened with loss of citizenship. Whole swaths of U.S. territory have been reclassified as military zones, with armed, active-duty troops now exercising arrest powers. Massive detention centers are being built on military bases. Universities, the press, and courts are being militarized, coerced or dismantled. Like the state, spaces once reserved for asserting one’s rights, protection, and care are now held captive by agents, masked, and armed in tactical gear. As Mark Peterson points out in The New Yorker, spaces, such as court hallways, are now captive as  sites of intimidation, fear, and disappearances  The rhetoric of a captive state and space are not metaphors, they have become the normalized tactics of fascism in real time.

The Spectacle as Opiate and Cover.

The spectacle operates both as distraction and as pedagogy. By dramatizing state violence as entertainment, whether through militarized parades, campaign rallies, or sensationalist media coverage, the Trump regime trains the public to see authoritarian repression as normal, even desirable. The spectacle is a form of civic illiteracy: it numbs historical memory, erodes critical thought, and recodes brutality as patriotism.

The spectacle is more than distraction; it is a smokescreen for systemic violence. Behind the theatrics lie black-site detention centers, the militarization of U.S. cities, and surveillance technologies that monitor everyday life. The media’s complicity, obsessed with immediacy and balance, enables this process by masking the deeper truth: the rise of an authoritarian warfare state at home.

What emerges is not merely a culture of distraction, but the weaponization of spectacle itself. Under Trump, the media’s hunger for shock and drama has transformed authoritarian repression into mass entertainment, flooding the public sphere with images of violence, erasure, and conquest, all while consolidating executive power.

Guy Debord’s notion of the Society of the Spectacle has returned with a vengeance in the abyss of American fascist politics. What the media too often dismiss as “Trump’s diversions” or “stunts” are in fact ritualized performances of state violence, acts of political theater that function as pedagogy. These spectacles do not simply distract—they indoctrinate. They whisper that cruelty is virtue, that repression is order, that vengeance is justice, that fear itself is the normalized rhythm of everyday existence.

Consider the arming of the National Guard in Washington, D.C., staged as patriotic pageantry rather than as a militarization of civic life. The raid on the home of John Bolton, once a close adviser, later a critic, was choreographed as a national morality play in which betrayal is punished publicly. Trump’s retaliatory campaigns against adversaries like New York Attorney General Letitia James, Adam Schiff, and other so-called “enemies of the state” transform into grotesque spectacles of retribution, political theater driven by an unyielding demand for loyalty. These acts unfold as a public, performative display of power, relentlessly signaling that dissent will not only be silenced but criminalized. The bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities is framed as a display of strength, not reckless escalation, while ICE raids and masked agents abducting immigrants become national security dramas. These scenes, endlessly replayed across media, merge terror with pedagogy, cruelty with consent, both as performance and an unmistakable threat. But beneath this spectacle lies a deeper truth: a wannabe dictator using state power against, not for, the people and the principles of democracy. Today, state violence targets ICE victims, students, protesters, dissidents, and anyone on Trump’s retribution list—but in the end, no one will be safe from his fascist regime. 

This celebration of cruelty and state violence is not limited to highlighting Trump’s political enemies; it extends via a slick promotional ventures used by his political lackeys. For instance, Secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, a MAGA-aligned official. shamelessly staged a promotional video  against the bleak backdrop of shirtless, caged prisoners in El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT. In her performance, a brutalizing system of incarceration was transfigured into an aesthetic of power and punishment, a stage set for political ambition.  Noem’s spectacle reveals how authoritarian pageantry circulates transnationally: the prison state of El Salvador becomes a visual script for U.S. politicians eager to display toughness, exporting the grammar of fascist performance across borders. In this spectacularized culture, politics dissolves into the aesthetics of cruelty, where lawlessness and repression are repackaged as civic virtue and photo ops for what Wilhelm Reich, in Mass Psychology of Fascism, called “the libidinally deranged.”

Here the spectacle does not conceal fascism but embodies it. Each act dramatizes the message that Trump alone decides who is safe, who is punished, who is disposable. Reich’s insight into the fascist “perversion of pleasure” is central: the staging of cruelty is not only meant to terrify; it is meant to gratify. Citizens are invited to experience the humiliation of the weak as a form of release, to find satisfaction in the punishment of the vulnerable. Theodor Adorno’s warnings about the authoritarian personalitycome into sharp relief here: the blending of obedience and enjoyment, submission and aggression, produces subjects who come to desire domination as if it were freedom.

What emerges is an authoritarian economy of desire in which cruelty is transformed into theater. Images of militarized parades, mug shots of political enemies, or caged immigrants circulate across media platforms like advertisements for repression, producing both fear and illicit pleasure. The spectacle trains citizens to consume cruelty as entertainment, to eroticize domination, and to accept vengeance as the highest civic virtue. Watching becomes complicity; complicity becomes a source of satisfaction; satisfaction becomes a form of loyalty.

This authoritarian theater is not confined to U.S. borders; it reverberates globally, most visibly in Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza. Here the spectacle of state violence is magnified to a planetary scale: live-streamed bombings, images of flattened neighborhoods, and drone footage of entire families buried in rubble circulate as both military propaganda and cultural pedagogy. Just as Trump repackages cruelty as patriotic theater, Israel transforms mass death into a performance of deterrence, staging domination as necessity and erasure as security. Gaza becomes both a laboratory and a screen, where militarized cruelty is rehearsed, aestheticized, and then exported as a model for authoritarian regimes worldwide. The Iron Dome is celebrated as technological mastery, while beneath and beyond its arc lies a devastated landscape of disposability, an unending spectacle of suffering meant to teach not only Palestinians but the world that resistance will be met with extermination. In this sense, Gaza is not an exception but a mirror: a brutal stage on which the pedagogy of fascism is made global.

Under such circumstances, moral witnessing disappears, the burden of conscience on a global level is undermined, and older bonds of solidarity collapse as cultural and educational institutions devoted to the public good are gutted. The rise of the military–prison–carceral state becomes entertainment, a spectacle that fuses torture, the pornography of violence, and mass distraction into the central cultural grammar of politics. The spectacle numbs thought, erases memory, invents false villains, and produces a civic illiteracy that leaves the public disarmed before fear and manipulation. What disappears in this haze is the recognition that the United States is undergoing not a temporary aberration, but the consolidation of a new fascism, one that fuses militarized violence, pedagogical terrorism, and state-sanctioned domestic cruelty to construct a fascist subject fit for the twenty-first century. Fascism today is not simply a state-sponsored show of force; it is a pedagogical regime, an apparatus of cultural engineering that decides who counts as a citizen, whose lives matter, and whose may be discarded.

Domestic Terrorism as a Pedagogical Regime.

Under the Trump administration, culture is not simply a mirror of political power but the very ground upon which authoritarianism takes root, fashions its subjects, and legitimates the warfare state. Trump’s reliance on brute force, his addiction to state violence, and his expansion of the carceral state are undeniable, yet the most enduring battlefield of his domestic terrorism is consciousness itself. Here, the public is trained to forget, taught to mistake lies for truth, and subjected to the pedagogical violence of disimagination machines that wage war on literacy and the imagination. Trump’s regime turns cultural engineering into a weapon, deciding what is remembered and what is erased, which values are sanctified and which are discarded. The goal is not only to control politics but to colonize consciousness, producing a population that internalizes obedience, fear, and historical amnesia. This is the logic of pedagogical terrorism: a cultural and educational apparatus that normalizes coercion, erasure, and dehumanization by teaching people to accept such practices as common sense.

The attack on the Smithsonian, the banning of books, the silencing of universities, and the stigmatization of “woke” as a code word for racial justice and historical truth all make visible how white supremacy fuels the cleansing project of Trump’s authoritarianism. There is more at work here than Trump’s attempt to rewrite history, it is a project aimed at obliterating historical memory. Chauncey Devega, writing in Salon, points this out in illuminating detail. He writes:

“The president’s assault on the Smithsonian is serious. But his whitewashing campaign — or, more precisely, his White racial erasure project — does not exist in a vacuum. It extends far beyond the Smithsonian. We are witnessing a thought-crime regime that is taking control of the country’s intellectual history and collective memory, which have been deemed “woke.” This includes higher education, with a particular focus on elite colleges and universities; rewriting history textbooks and other educational materials; destroying public media such as PBS and NPR; restoring Confederate monuments; removing the historical context of public parks and other spaces and their connections to the color line; cutting federal funding for scientific and health research that benefits marginalized communities, including women; and ordering the Pentagon to purge officers and other leaders who are not white men, and remove the names and contributions of African-American and other nonwhite veterans — as well as women and LGBTQ Americans — from its libraries, website, reference materials, bases and ships.”

At the state level, this project takes grotesque forms, as with Oklahoma’s Ryan Walters requiring applicants from “liberal states” to pass an anti-woke test before teaching. These assaults are not isolated. They are part of a systematic effort to weaponize education, culture, and memory to manufacture a fascist subject, passive, obedient, and stripped of critical thought.

Militarizing Society and The Spectacle of State Terror.

These attacks are not simply about dismantling DEI or critical race theory. They are attacks on the values and institutions that make democracy possible. The merging of militarization with cultural engineering signals that authoritarianism now functions as a dual form of colonization that includes institutions and cultural pedagogical apparatuses shaping consciousness itself. ICE terror, secret abductions by masked paramilitary forces, the criminalization of dissent in universities, and the surveillance of public space are matched by the colonization of language, identity, and memory.

Trump’s rhetoric of crime, corruption, and invasion functions not only as political theater but as a spectacle of state terror. It is worth repeating that his repeated rants about “the enemy within”, Marxists, communists, fascists, and others he brands as “sick” and “evil”, are not mere insults but part of a fascist script of alleged internal enemies. Such rhetoric, as Greg Sargent notes, maps directly onto historical fascist traditions where opponents are dehumanized as existential threats, legitimizing violence against them.

This language has already been paired with force. Trump has unleashed the National Guard in Washington, D.C., rolling tanks into the capital for a military parade while signaling the city’s residents, largely Black and Democratic, that they live under the shadow of armed force. More recently, he federalized 2,000 members of the California National Guard without the governor’s consent to crack down on protests in Los Angeles, the first such move in 60 years. ICE agents hurled flash-bang grenades and fired “non-lethal” bullets into crowds, while Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth threatened to mobilize Marines if the unrest continued. Trump cast Los Angeles as “occupied by illegal aliens and criminals,” vowing to “liberate” the city. According to Trump, this act of military occupation will soon take place in Chicago and Baltimore, if not all the major Democratic controlled cities in America.

At a press conference, Kristi Noem declared, with a fevered logic, that federal troops must occupy Los Angeles and other largely Black, Democratic cities, claiming such militarization is needed to “save them from the socialists.” These actions exemplify domestic terrorism: the use of military and police power to intimidate civilian populations, criminalize dissent, and declare  Democratic cities and multicultural strongholds as enemy zones in need of military occupation. Such actions are the domestic equivalent of martial law. In historical terms, they echo Bull Connor’s police dogs in Birmingham, the National Guard’s bullets at Kent State in 1970, and Pinochet’s use of tanks and soldiers to terrorize Santiago. The pattern is clear: state violence deployed against citizens to secure authoritarian rule, all of which feeds into Trump’s authoritarian fantasies. As Jackson Lears observes, the Trump regime is “drunk on exceptionalist fantasies and committed to conquering populations they deem inferior.”   

Few places reveal the politics of state terror more starkly than Trump’s fantasy of a “Golden Dome” over the United States. Borrowed from Israel’s Iron Dome, it presents itself as defense but functions as a fantasy of total control: a canopy to shield authoritarian power while legitimating its violence. The real lesson of Israel’s Dome is that security for some is purchased through annihilation for others. Inside its arc, protection is mythologized; outside, destruction reigns. The destruction and genocidal annihilation of Gaza shows how defense becomes the alibi for genocide. Trump’s “Golden Dome” would perform the same trick, translating perpetual war and militarized repression into the language of protection.

Like all authoritarian myths, it is pedagogical: it trains citizens to equate safety with obedience, and it redefines dissent as a threat to national survival. Walter Benjamin’s warning that fascism aestheticizes politics finds fresh resonance here, the Dome becomes not only a technology of war, but a political fantasy of beauty and order built on violence and erasure. 

Militarizing Public Space: The Fascist Aesthetic Reborn.

Public space is now militarized, transformed into a stage where the technologies of surveillance and the omnipresence of armed police are the opening act in the script of spectacularized domestic terrorism. Under the Trump regime, theatricalized state videos merge the pornography of fear with the visual grammar of high-fashion editorials, an aesthetic in which the Homeland Secretary, Kristi Noem, appears like a frozen model of repression, posed against the cold geometry of prison walls, razor wire, and armored convoys. This is not mere propaganda; it is the fascist aesthetic reborn, where violence is stylized, repression is choreographed, and the machinery of state terror is rendered seductive.

In this theatre of domination, public space is no longer simply occupied, it is choreographed into a tableau in which fear becomes both commodity and spectacle. As with all pedagogies of tyranny, such images do not merely display power; they teach the public how to desire it, naturalizing the presence of militarized authority as both inevitable and aspirational. The primitive tribalism of a toxic masculinity is now wedded to what Ariella Aïsha Azoulay calls “imperial technologies” that “militarize American politics and politicize the American military.” 

At the heart of this authoritarian spectacularized system lies the fusion of punishment and erasure into a closed pedagogical loop, one that weaponizes culture as both a tool of domination and a means of shaping subjectivity. Punishment operates not only through the criminalization of dissent and the disciplining of communities by militarized policing, but also through the normalization of coercion. ICE raids, public abductions, and the omnipresence of surveillance function as public lessons, training people to internalize fear and accept repression as part of everyday life. Erasure complements this pedagogy of fear by cleansing the crimes of power from historical memory and cultural consciousness. This takes the form of censorship, the banning of books, the silencing of universities as democratic public spheres, and the disappearance of inconvenient truths from the social imagination. Together, punishment and erasure create a culture of pedagogical terrorism in which repression is naturalized and historical amnesia becomes the foundation for an upgraded form of fascist politics, one that not only controls bodies and institutions but also remakes culture itself as an apparatus of authoritarian rule.

Colonizing Memory and the Militarization of Consciousness.

Fascism does not only occupy institutions; it occupies memory. It dictates what is remembered and what is silenced, ensuring that alternative visions of history and democracy cannot take root. Hannah Arendt warned that the destruction of citizenship and the rendering of people stateless amounts to an “expulsion from humanity itself.” Today’s authoritarianism similarly expels dissenting voices from public life by erasing their histories. Central to this process of erasure is the elimination of public space, the militarization of the institutions that produce informed citizens, and the transformation of cultural apparatuses or what Adorno called ‘the culture industry,’ transforming it into pedagogical mechanisms of silencing and propaganda. Central to this spectacle of militarization is not just the creation of an authoritarian subject, but also what is being erased—democratic values, critical education, public goods, communities of solidarity, basic human needs, the welfare state, the rule of law, the promise of economic equality,  and a democratic vision of the future.

To resist authoritarianism requires not just political action but a reclaiming of memory as a democratic act. This means refusing the state’s monopoly over historical narratives, preserving the memory of solidarity and struggle, and cultivating new visions of justice. Memory becomes the terrain of democratic resistance, the counter-pedagogy to fascism’s culture of amnesia.

The most insidious aspect of the warfare state is that it does not simply control institutions, it colonizes thought by weaponizing knowledge as a form of power.  It recasts war as a permanent condition, teaches cruelty and fear as civic virtues, and portrays empathy as weakness. Adorno’s work on The Authoritarian Personality illuminates this process: authoritarian regimes cultivate not just obedience but a psychological disposition that equates domination with strength and compassion with treason. What must be grasped, if fascism is to be resisted, is that it is not merely a political order but as Ergin Yildizoglu notes, is a pedagogical regime, a machinery of teaching and unlearning, of shaping consciousness itself through aesthetics, media, and the algorithmic reach of artificial intelligence. Its pedagogy is one of domination: it scripts emotions, dictates values, and implants narratives that define who must be hated, who must be forgotten, and who must remain invisible.

Fascism does more than capture the state; it colonizes language, memory, and identity. It erases the past by silencing historical memory, narrows the horizons of imagination, and drains public life of critical vitality. It produces subjects who are loyal not to truth but to power, obedient not to conscience but to command. This is the ultimate aim of pedagogical terrorism: not only to militarize the state, knowledge, and values, but to also militarize the mind. By narrowing what can be said, remembered, or imagined, it criminalizes dissent and turns language itself into an arsenal of cruelty. Under Trump, fascism is not only a militarized spectacle, it is a model of war. If fascism is not only a government, a form of gangster capitalism, but also a culture, the fight against it must not only be economic, ideological, but also pedagogical space where education becomes central to politics and culture speaks to individuals in a language in which they can both recognize themselves and organize into a mass movement.

As Antonio Gramsci, in the Prison Notebooks, reminded us, “all politics is pedagogical.” If fascism teaches fear, cruelty, and obedience, then resistance must teach solidarity, critical memory, and the courage to imagine a different future. Against fascism’s pedagogy of dispossession, we must cultivate a pedagogy of liberation—one that expands the field of the possible, restores the dignity of memory, and reclaims language as a weapon for democracy rather than domination.

Conclusion: Resisting the Warfare State.

The United States is now living under a warfare state that fuses domestic terrorism with pedagogical terrorism. Its purpose is not only to dominate bodies but to colonize minds, erase memory, and manufacture a culture of passivity, obedience, and brutality. Resistance, then, cannot be reduced to exposing corruption, police violence, or opposing policy, however important; it must reclaim culture, language, and memory as the lifeblood of critique and democratic possibility. Only through this reclamation can we grasp how the darkest impulses of the past have been resurrected in the present, and how new media platforms and disimagination machines work tirelessly to normalize fear, ignorance, state violence, domestic terrorism, and the making of militarized subjects.

With respect to the making of militarized subjects, Sable Elyse Smith reminds us, ignorance is not simply the absence of knowledge, it is a form of violence. It is woven into the fabric of everyday life by disimagination machines that train us not only to consume pain but to take pleasure in it, to elevate cruelty into entertainment. Trump has sanctioned and expanded this spectacularized culture of abandonment, legitimating a politics where justice is disposable and civic institutions are hollowed out. He is less an aberration than the distilled emblem of gangster capitalism–a postmodern Frankenstein monster, theatrical and self-absorbed, who embodies decades of greed, savagery, and cruelty reaching their poisonous endpoint in American authoritarianism.

The spectacle of fascist politics is not a sideshow; it is the main event. Trump, as T.J. Clark observes, instinctively understands its power to “scent out the reaction of a virtual audience.” Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor remind us that the Trumpian spectacle, with its apocalyptic narratives, signals an ideology that has abandoned not only democracy but the very livability of our shared world. What emerges is a war culture, an authoritarian pedagogy in which cruelty is naturalized, memory is obliterated, and fear becomes the grammar of everyday life.

Against this militarized pedagogy of dispossession, every element of spectacularized fascism must be exposed: its cruelty illuminated, its lies unmasked, and its machinery of terror dismantled. Education should become an axe that breaks through the manufactured “common sense” of authoritarianism, a language that speaks to the deepest needs of the public, rekindles memory, and makes visible both suffering and the capacity to resist. If fascism teaches fear and obedience, then democracy must embrace the power of critique, hope, solidarity, and mass resistance.

The task before us is not only to defend the remnants of democratic institutions but to cultivate a cultural and educational imagination capable of shattering the grip of authoritarianism. To resist is to reclaim the future: to forge a pedagogy of liberation that restores dignity to memory, possibility to politics, and justice to the social fabric. Only then can we dismantle the machinery of terror and reclaim the possibility of a socialist democracy as a living, breathing project of freedom, equality, and justice.

Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and is the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. His most recent books include: The Terror of the Unforeseen (Los Angeles Review of books, 2019), On Critical Pedagogy, 2nd edition (Bloomsbury, 2020); Race, Politics, and Pandemic Pedagogy: Education in a Time of Crisis (Bloomsbury 2021); Pedagogy of Resistance: Against Manufactured Ignorance (Bloomsbury 2022) and Insurrections: Education in the Age of Counter-Revolutionary Politics (Bloomsbury, 2023), and coauthored with Anthony DiMaggio, Fascism on Trial: Education and the Possibility of Democracy (Bloomsbury, 2025). Giroux is also a member of Truthout’s board of directors.

First published on CountertPunch.org.

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