HENRY GIROUX
AUGUST 7, 2026

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“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

– James Baldwin

“You cannot understand the twentieth century without Hiroshima.”

– Robert J. Lifton and Greg Mitchell

Every day we scroll past photographs of burned children, bombed-out neighborhoods, families clawing through rubble with their bare hands, and parents carrying the bodies of sons and daughters killed beneath collapsing concrete. Such images seldom unsettle our conscience, provoke outrage, and awaken a demand for justice. Increasingly, they do none of these things. They register briefly before dissolving into another statistic, another headline, another passing image in the endless digital stream. Violence has become familiar, suffering routine, and genocide itself is in danger of becoming just another image consumed and forgotten..

This is not merely a political development; it is one of the great moral and cultural disasters of our age. We have not simply become accustomed to living amid unprecedented violence, we have been educated to accommodate it. Cruelty no longer confronts us as an ethical rupture demanding judgment and action. It has been absorbed into the rhythms of everyday life, stripped of its capacity to shock, and transformed into yet another spectacle competing for our distracted attention.

Under such conditions, the dehumanization of others is inseparable from the transformation of the machinery of death into a spectacle consumed with fascination rather than horror. The deepest victory of authoritarian politics in the twenty-first century lies not only in its capacity to produce immense suffering, pain, and death, but in its ability to cultivate moral indifference while making violence appear seductive, entertaining, or inevitable. When people cease to feel the pain of others, violence no longer requires widespread consent; it needs only widespread indifference.

As the anniversaries of Hiroshima and Nagasaki return once again, they do so largely eclipsed by the Trump administration’s transformation of the nation’s two hundred and fiftieth anniversary into a spectacle of militarized patriotism, historical mythmaking, and American triumphalism. The pageantry celebrates a narrative of national innocence while eclipsing one of the twentieth century’s greatest atrocities committed in its name. The more urgent question, therefore, is not simply what happened in August 1945. It is what has become of a society whose formative institutions increasingly educate people to accommodate violence rather than resist it.

The answer lies in more than what Gore Vidal once described as America’s cultivated historical amnesia. Under gangster capitalism, forgetting has become a governing principle of power. We inhabit a regime of organized forgettingthat erases bodies from public consciousness even as it erases historical memory itself. It teaches us to look without seeing, to witness without feeling, and to consume the suffering of others as another spectacle in an endless cycle of distraction, entertainment, and forgetting. Such regimes are not abstractions. They become visible whenever policies capable of producing immense human suffering disappear beneath the noise of political spectacle—as in the Trump administration’s dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development, a policy that recent analyses estimate has already contributed to “an estimated 700,000 deaths worldwide.”

How else are we to understand a world in which more than sixty-four thousand Palestinian children have been killed or injured in Gaza since October 2023 while their suffering disappears almost as quickly as the headlines that briefly acknowledge it? How else do we explain the reported deaths of more than one hundred children in the bombing of a girls’ school in Iran, an event that barely registered before it was displaced by the next manufactured spectacle? These are not isolated tragedies. They reveal a broader cultural condition in which atrocity is consumed, circulated, and forgotten with astonishing speed.

This is the deepest wound inflicted by authoritarian culture. It does not merely normalize violence; it reorganizes consciousness. It severs suffering from compassion, history from responsibility, and death from mourning. When the victims disappear from memory almost as quickly as they disappear from life, power secures one of its greatest triumphs: it destroys not only bodies but the public capacity to recognize their loss. In that moment, forgetting becomes the final act of violence, completing in consciousness what bombs, prisons, armies, and occupations begin in history. This cultural condition has been analyzed most powerfully by Robert Jay Lifton.

Robert Jay Lifton gave this condition a name: psychic numbing. He used the phrase to describe the diminished capacity to feel in the face of overwhelming violence. What begins as a psychological defense against unbearable suffering can become a cultural and political condition. Entire societies learn to look without seeing, to witness without feeling, and eventually to forget. This condition is not merely an individual affliction, or type of “impaired mourning”; it is a form of public pedagogy. It is cultivated by schools emptied of critical thought, historical consciousness, and civic purpose; it is produced by media cultures organized around spectacle, digital platforms that reward distraction, a culture of immediacy, and political narratives that teach us to accommodate cruelty rather than confront it. Against this pedagogy of forgetting stands the difficult and necessarily troubling work of historical memory.

These questions matter because remembrance is not the same as historical memory. Official rituals of remembrance often console us by confining catastrophe safely to the past. As Eddie S. Glaude Jr. notes in America, U.S.A., historical memory performs a very different task. It returns us to unfinished histories whose consequences continue to inhabit the present. It unsettles rather than reassures. It refuses the comfort of distance and insists that the past is never truly past when the conditions that produced it survive in altered forms. Historical memory does not ask us simply to remember what happened. It demands that we recognize how the logics that made catastrophe possible continue to shape the present.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki belong to precisely this kind of historical memory because they remind us that atrocities begin long before the first bomb falls. They begin when language is removed from moral responsibility, when history is erased or rewritten through the vocabulary of conquest and colonization, and when entire populations are rendered disposable before they are destroyed. Every genocide is first a crisis of language, memory, and moral imagination. By the time the machinery of death is set in motion, the deeper work has already been done: compassion has been weakened, historical consciousness has been dismantled, and violence has been normalized as common sense. Hiroshima and Nagasaki stand not only as symbols of unprecedented destruction but also as warnings about the political culture that makes such destruction imaginable. Few have expressed this truth more forcefully than the late Howard Zinn:

“What means could be more horrible than the burning, mutilation, blinding, irradiation of hundreds of thousands of Japanese men, women, children? And yet it is absolutely essential for our political leaders to defend the bombing because if Americans can be induced to accept that, then they can accept any war, any means, so long as the warmakers can supply a reason. And there are always plausible reasons delivered from on high as from Moses on the Mount.”

The atomic bombings were not merely military events that concluded the Second World War. They inaugurated a new historical formation in which scientific achievement became inseparable from industrialized killing, technological rationality overwhelmed ethical judgment, and civilian annihilation could be justified through the sanitized language of military necessity, national security, and historical inevitability. Long before the bombs incinerated cities, another devastation had already taken place. Human beings had been transformed into abstractions, dehumanized through racist slurs, strategic calculations, and collateral damage.

The bomb exploded first in consciousness. As Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o reminds us, “Language as culture is the collective memory bank of a people’s experience in history.”  When language is colonized, memory itself becomes vulnerable to conquest—capturing consciousness long before it captures territory. Long before Hiroshima and Nagasaki were reduced to ash, language had already been emptied of moral responsibility, memory had been rewritten in the service of empire, and entire populations had been rendered disposable.

That moral rupture did not disappear with the mushroom clouds rising over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It became embedded in institutions, policies, cultural narratives, and educational practices that normalized militarism while celebrating technological mastery divorced from ethical restraint. The bomb was transformed into a symbol of national virtue rather than a warning about the abyss into which modern civilization had descended. As Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell observed, American political culture constructed an official narrative that sought not to confront the moral catastrophe of Hiroshima but to redeem it, converting an act of unprecedented destruction into a story of national innocence and salvation. That narrative did more than justify the bomb. It reorganized moral consciousness.

Lifton argued that Hiroshima did not wound only its victims; it also left a profound mark on the American imagination, fostering a culture of denial, moral justification, and emotional numbing. Yet he never regarded Hiroshima solely as a source of despair. He insisted that confronting its moral legacy honestly could foster resilience, renewal, and what he called “survivor wisdom,” restoring the historical memory and moral imagination necessary to resist future catastrophes. That insight is even more urgent today because the habits of denial and indifference he identified have escaped the nuclear age and become defining features of contemporary political culture.

Among survivors of Hiroshima, this diminished capacity to feel initially functioned as a tragic form of psychological survival. Faced with scenes too horrific to absorb, many found themselves emotionally paralyzed, temporarily incapable of responding to the landscape of death surrounding them. But Lifton extended the concept much further. He argued that the same condition also characterized those who designed the bomb, authorized its use, justified its necessity, and later defended its moral legitimacy. What began as an emergency psychological defense gradually became a cultural condition.

This insight reaches far beyond Hiroshima. What begins as a defense against unbearable suffering can evolve into a political culture organized around indifference. A society that learns not to feel one atrocity gradually acquires the capacity to ignore others. Lifton warned that once Americans constructed what he called a “cordon sanitaire” around Hiroshima—a barrier protecting them from confronting its moral implications—that habit of avoidance spread to other forms of collective suffering. The numbing did not stop with Hiroshima. It became a way of inhabiting the world.

Nothing could better describe our present historical moment. We inhabit societies saturated with images of catastrophe. Yet rather than enlarging our ethical imagination, this relentless exposure often produces exhaustion, indifference, and resignation.

Even more troubling, it feeds a resurgent war culture that glorifies domination, celebrates militarized masculinity, and equates physical strength with moral worth. As Susan Sontag argued in her classic essay on fascist aesthetics, authoritarian culture does more than justify violence; it aestheticizes it. Domination becomes seductive, hierarchy beautiful, submission desirable, and the spectacle of power detached from the suffering it produces. Violence no longer appears as a moral catastrophe but as an exhilarating display of strength, discipline, virility, and national renewal. U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s celebration of militarized masculinity is not simply a political posture; it is the contemporary expression of this fascist aesthetic. It transforms domination into virtue, physical force into moral authority, misogyny into masculine authenticity, and violence into the highest expression of citizenship. In doing so, it redefines citizenship itself, replacing democratic responsibility with militarized obedience, civic courage with warrior masculinity, and public life with a theater of force.

In such a culture, violence becomes another genre of entertainment, another spectacle in the economy of distraction. The constant circulation of suffering no longer enlarges compassion; it erodes it, teaching people not simply to witness violence but increasingly to admire, consume, and normalize it.

Lifton anticipated this transformation with extraordinary clarity. As this moral desensitization spreads, he argued, people require ever greater spectacles of violence simply to feel anything at all. Disaster becomes normalized, and ordinary suffering loses its capacity to disturb us.

Here the legacy of Hiroshima converges with the digital culture of the twenty-first century.

Algorithms reward outrage while discouraging reflection. Social media platforms monetize fear, resentment, and humiliation. Corporate news reduces war to spectacle, compressing unbearable histories into disposable images. Artificial intelligence accelerates the circulation of propaganda, conspiracy, and racial mythology while diminishing the time necessary for thoughtful judgment. We increasingly encounter suffering not as fellow human beings but as data, content, or scrolling images. Distance becomes permanent. Responsibility evaporates.

This is not simply a technological crisis. It is a pedagogical one.

Every culture teaches people how to see, what to value, whose lives matter, and whose deaths may be ignored. The most powerful educational institutions today are no longer schools alone. They are digital platforms, corporate media, entertainment industries, and algorithmic systems that organize attention itself. These institutions do more than distribute information. They shape consciousness, organize attention, and cultivate habits of feeling. They manufacture forms of identification while teaching indifference toward others.

Under such conditions, fascism no longer requires spectacular rallies or uniforms to reproduce itself. It works more quietly and, for that reason, often more effectively. It reshapes perception, colonizes language, erodes historical memory, and teaches people to regard entire populations as invaders, parasites, criminals, terrorists, or demographic threats rather than as fellow human beings. By the time the machinery of violence is set in motion, its deepest victory has already been won: the democratic imagination has been hollowed out, compassion has yielded to fear, and disposability has become common sense.

Today this pedagogy of dehumanization is once again becoming normalized. Calls for mass deportation, fantasies of ethnic purification disguised as “remigration,” attacks on immigrants, racial conspiracy theories, and genocidal rhetoric directed at Palestinians all depend upon a prior educational achievement: teaching people to regard certain lives as disposable.

That is why figures such as Elon Musk matter. They matter not because they are uniquely evil but because they occupy commanding positions within the cultural apparatuses that now educate hundreds of millions of people. When racist conspiracies, demographic panic, and authoritarian fantasies are amplified through platforms reaching much of the globe, white supremacist propaganda is transformed into common sense. Hatred becomes normalized precisely because it is repeated, circulated, rewarded, and stripped of its historical genealogy.

As Jamelle Bouie has argued, Musk’s rhetoric is no longer confined to coded insinuations or internet provocation. It increasingly echoes themes drawn from the contemporary white nationalist imagination: affirming slogans such as “First the traitors, then the invaders”; declaring that “anyone who opposes remigration is a traitor”; amplifying demographic panic over declining white birthrates; and normalizing the language of racial replacement and ethnic cleansing. Bouie also notes the disturbing resonance between this rhetoric and the political imaginary of The Turner Diaries, where “traitors” who defend a multiracial democracy are marked for elimination before the campaign against supposed “invaders” begins. This should not be dismissed merely as inflammatory rhetoric.  Language of this kind does not simply describe the world; it prepares people to inhabit one in which exclusion, racial purification, and political violence appear not only legitimate but necessary.

Yet we should resist the temptation to describe figures such as Elon Musk, Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu, or Stephen Miller simply as monsters. As Jorge Gonzalez Arocha observes, the language of monstrosity may satisfy our moral outrage, but it ultimately obscures the deeper workings of power. Monsters exist outside history. They are imagined as aberrations, exceptions to ordinary life. Fascism is neither. It is produced within history, cultivated through institutions, sustained by bureaucracies, legitimized by law, amplified by media, and normalized through the everyday pedagogies of schools, digital platforms, entertainment industries, and political culture. When we imagine authoritarianism as the work of monsters, we mistake symptoms for causes, overlooking the social relations, institutional arrangements, and cultural forces that make such politics possible.

The enduring lesson of Hiroshima is not that monsters occasionally seize power. It is that educated people, respected institutions, celebrated scientists, compliant journalists, and ordinary citizens can become participants in systems that separate technical intelligence from moral responsibility. The bureaucrats who planned Hiroshima were not monsters. The scientists who perfected the bomb were not monsters. The journalists who celebrated it were not monsters. They were products of institutions that transformed mass death into administrative necessity and moral obligation. The greatest crimes of modernity are rarely committed outside civilization; they are committed in its name.

The political danger of the language of monstrosity is that it individualizes what is fundamentally systemic. It encourages us to search for evil personalities rather than authoritarian cultures, for pathological leaders rather than the pedagogical apparatuses that educate people into accepting cruelty, disposability, and organized forgetting. Remove one authoritarian leader and another will take his place so long as the institutions, economic interests, media ecosystems, and educational forces that manufacture authoritarian consciousness remain intact. That is the enduring lesson of Hiroshima, and it remains the central political lesson of our own time.

History never repeats itself mechanically. Gaza is not Hiroshima. Nagasaki is not Gaza. Their histories are different, their contexts distinct.  But they reveal a recurring political logic: civilian populations rendered disposable, overwhelming violence justified as necessity, bureaucratic language replacing ethical judgment, and technological superiority mistaken for moral legitimacy. Whenever human beings become abstractions rather than persons, the conditions for atrocity are already present.

This is why remembering Nagasaki matters. Historical comparison is valuable not because it erases difference but because it reveals recurring political logics.

Historical memory breaks the spell of moral indifference. It restores the connection between feeling and judgment, conscience and politics. It reminds us that every genocide begins not with the machinery of death but with the pedagogy of dehumanization. Long before bodies are destroyed, language is corrupted, history is erased, compassion is ridiculed, and entire populations are taught to disappear morally before they disappear physically.

Lifton believed that confronting Hiroshima could become a source of renewal because it enabled us to recover our moral imagination, relearn how to feel, and reconnect ourselves to the broader human project. That may be the most important lesson Nagasaki offers today.

The struggle against fascism begins not only by resisting authoritarian institutions but by refusing the moral indifference upon which they depend. Against organized forgetting and manufacture illiteracy and amnesia, we must recover historical memory. Against the politics of disposability, we must insist upon the irreducible dignity of every human life. Against the seductive myths of technological omnipotence and permanent war, we must reclaim a language capable of naming both truth and justice.

The authoritarian abyss is no longer a distant possibility. It has entered the present. It appears wherever democracy yields to militarism, wherever cruelty is celebrated as strength, wherever historical memory is erased, and wherever entire peoples are stripped of their humanity in the name of security, racial purity, or national destiny. The forces that produced Hiroshima and Nagasaki have not disappeared; they have assumed new languages, new technologies, and new justifications.

The question is no longer whether we remember Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The question is whether we can recover the moral urgency necessary to prevent their logic from becoming the defining political grammar of the twenty-first century. Historical memory is no longer simply an act of remembrance; it has become a condition of survival. To remember is to resist. But memory cannot remain a sanctuary for conscience; it must become a catalyst for collective struggle. Its highest purpose is not simply to preserve the past but to interrupt/rupture/transform the present. Only when remembrance gives rise to solidarity, organized resistance, and the struggle to create a more just world does it honor those whose lives history has tried to erase.

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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 Counterpunch.org.

Shared via Creative Commons.

MICHAEL ALBERT
AUGUST 5 2026

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So much going on. Existential crises. Fundamental needs. Short and long term agendas. Sounds heard all around the world. Much to think about. Much to do. But does the following also deserve some notice? I think maybe it does.

Truth is under accelerating assault. Trust is dying. Trump lies at every opportunity. Familiar generalized market duplicity persists. Mainstream media pervasively manipulates. But something related somehow simultaneously smaller and larger now grows steadily stronger to also pervert our lives. Something ridiculously trivial yet also savagely scary threatens to turn us all into liars or into people who deem lies by others inevitable. Something that makes us assume fraud is everywhere until we become people who inexorably logically and defensively distrust and reflexively dismiss all other people. We become people who hate people.

Here is a personal example. A few weeks ago I had a new book appear on Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Within a few hours of its appearance, I received a solicitation about it. The fancy email displayed knowledge of the substance of my book and of my own history. It offered help. In two days I got ten more such solicitations. What did it mean?

In my case such solicitations were elaborate emails that admired and praised the targeted book and author and that offered to help the book reach its audience for the social good it could do. Eleven such email solicitations in two days. Each with a signature I didn’t know but by people who were seemingly from well known institutions.This was new for me. Well, it was almost new. Such solicitations had actually started to arrive in my email a few weeks earlier, not for the new book—it was not yet out—but for earlier books.

Some solicitations were pretty ridiculous…one early one was signed by Oprah Winfrey who wrote me to say she was choosing No Bosses for her book club selection because of its brilliant and profound message about what to seek beyond capitalism. An early overshoot. But before long more sophisticated solicitations with more accurate information about the new book, more believable writing, and plausible promotion ideas began to arrive.

Amazingly, in subsequent weeks solicitations kept coming and also got steadily harder to easily brand as the scams they were. They had steadily more detailed, accurate, and “professionally” presented information about the book and about me as its author, and their careful, personalized and elaborate promotional plans got steadily more astute.

At first I would read the emails and consider some of the proposals plausible—but not being a total dupe, I would also test them. But it got steadily harder to easily tell or even to discover that they were scams and before long the effort to test and expose each new solicitation, really any such solicitation, took so much time and effort that the best policy became to simply assume every such invitation was a lie that would eventually seek payment or access. So I went from trusting all emails I got, which had been my default stance since email first surfaced, to now routinely not trusting emails.

So what caused this cottage industry of fraudsters to suddenly appear and grow? AI did. AI is used to incredibly quickly find target books and authors, to research both, to write letters and in some cases to field replies and write again and again.

My concern about this trend escalates when I extrapolate from book scams to all kinds of scams that I can’t even dream of. Selling stuff. Offering stuff. Needing stuff. I got an email earlier today, still book related, but offering to translate the new one. Was it real or AI scamming? Then somehow another approach was tried, and I started to receive letters from radio stations and station-related clubs offering visibility. No fee required, I just had to donate. Maybe one or another solicitation/invitation among dozens was real, but maybe not, and molded to now reflexively distrust, I will never know.

The book scams seek payments to deliver promotional aid that then doesn’t get done. Phishing scams look for information to access accounts. What’s new is proliferation and verisimilitude. I received an email two days ago wanting me to enter information to prevent expiration of an actual subscription I have. Two more the next day. Scam inflation.

All of this, again, is fueled by AI which the scammer uses to find targets, to research the target’s needs, to figure out plausible audience for the chosen books or whatever else the scammer proposes, to write solicitation letters with elaborate promotional proposals, to answer replies from the scamee, and so on. Give this cottage industry some more time and it will be making phone call entreaties. Then FaceTime calls. Whooops. Wait. It already does that.

Estimates now claim there are upwards of 2,500 identified scam operations just regarding books and their authors. I suspect there are more or else how could I get so many invites. And that’s just books.

Sometimes the scammer seeks hundreds or maybe a few thousand dollars to be paid upfront for some service or product. Other times they seek critical information so as to clean out bank accounts. I got one about an hour ago saying my Amazon Prime account was being cancelled unless I clicked a provided link to enter new information. Shortly later I got essentially the same approach, but for another account. I was urged to go in and fix the information and of course the email provided a link for the purpose.

The harm that scammers do to their victims is real, very serious, and accelerating, but it is not the harm I am mainly worrying about in this short piece. The personal damage every time a scam succeeds is bad enough, but I have in mind a wider social effect. As scams proliferate so do the domains of life where it becomes wise to distrust communications. So not only lying but also distrust spreads.

The former aspect, to fraudulently steal, is rational for the person who wants to make a buck and sometimes a really big buck—supposing the person has the moral attributes of a weasel. Such scammers have elaborate web sites. They may have phone numbers that when the victim calls connect the victim elsewhere than what the number implies. Such scams are already hard to discern. Imagine a year or two from now.

The latter aspect, to reflexively distrust, is rational to avoid being ripped off. We dismiss all requests, offers, and entreaties. If this continues to proliferate and accelerate the social effects will grow as well. We aren’t what we eat but we do tend to become what we do. And so we slip slide into a world in which truth and trust are each assassinated. But who benefits if we each believe everyone else is a liar? You may think no one does, but no, the best liars benefit, and also all elites benefit because solidarity requires trust which takes a killing blow.

So I think that alongside war, repression, escalating misogyny, racism, and political obfuscation and manipulation, as if all that wasn’t enough, we now have a slowly but steadily growing epidemic of deception that causes good, caring people to assume that everyone else is an exploitative deceiver.

At exactly the moment when we need to grow solidarity we instead turn inward. It turns out that there may be a method to lots of what looks like madness. The state prosecutes immigrants, the poor, and dissenters with great vigor. It searches, labels, and rounds up “its enemies.” Meanwhile fraud-fueled corruption runs free. The state ignores our enemies or even abets them. Regarding scams, don’t punish the perps, but instead protect them all the way from Trump down. Make mistrust “sensible” at every level.

I hate to write anything pointing out ills without suggesting possible paths to win better, but I have to admit I am unsure how to positively react to the observations offered above. To tell people to be smart, to not get fooled, okay—but when that takes the form of don’t believe anyone who seems nice, anyone who seems supportive, anyone who offers you something positive, because fraud is everywhere—then the advice seems likely to aggravate our social trajectory of distrust and atomization. It seems to build in us an inclination to suspect and dismiss at precisely the moment when we most need caring solidarity.

So I am unsure what to suggest. How can we warn people about the growing “quality” of scammers and yet urge people to collectively care about one another and work together? It is clear how a movement can constructively oppose proliferating AI data centers. How does a movement constructively address proliferating AI truth and trust assassins? Soon, of course, some scammers will offer to protect us against other scammers.

Maybe how to deal with truth and trust decay needs a little thought along with what tactics, what organizational choices, and what strategies we should use to stop Trump, stop fascism, stop ecological collapse, stop impoverishment, stop misogyny, stop racism and then to replace the oppressive institutions that give rise to all that?

And P.S. it really is all one fight. Fascism thrives on lies and mistrust. Indeed, fascism can’t live without them. And our American brand of Trumpian Fascism seems to not even believe or have its adherents believe that there is any actual truth at all. How else can we explain that Trump says the things he does despite that so much of what he says is so transparently false?

The Covid vaccine didn’t work. Vaccines cause autism, but hydroxychloroquine worked, and so did ivermectin.

Prescription drug prices are down by 2,000 percent.

Foreign countries pay our tariffs.

Fauci killed millions of people.

Climate change is a hoax.

Wind power caused a massive TV blackout during the Trump-Biden debate.

Solar power is useless because the sun doesn’t shine at night, and batteries don’t exist.

I invaded Los Angeles and now California’s water is flowing.

Portland is on fire, it needs my help.

Every drug boat in the Caribbean ‘kills 25,000 Americans’

Obama, Biden and Comey made up the Epstein files.

Smoke blanketed North America because Canada didn’t rake its 2 million square miles of forest.

Climate change is a Chinese hoax.

We’ve destroyed Iran’s military, and the Iranian regime is begging for a deal.

The economy is in a “golden age.” Prices are down.

I, Trump have a 59 percent approval rating.

I won the 2020 election.

The US is ‘the only country in the world’ with mail-in voting.

I, Trump am a stable genius.

And lately, “my dad was born in Germany” which would be fine except that Trump’s dad was actually born in New York City.

And so on.

Truth becomes whatever Trump or whoever proclaims it to be. Does Trump believe his dad was born in Germany when he says so, and that he was born in NYC when he says that? Truth is apparently whatever the biggest boss says it is.

Duck and cover. Alone. Dismiss everyone. Or what?

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Michael Albert is the co-founder of ZNet and Z Magazine.

From a post by Michael Albert on Counterpunch.org.

Shared via Creative Commons.

HENRY GIROUX
JULY 31, 2026

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“What if all the cockroaches come together?”

– Abhijeet Dipk

Marx and Engels issued the historic call: “Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!” Today, that summons returns with renewed urgency and takes a new form: Young people of the world unite and resist. Youth today possess the courage, imagination, anger, and numbers to change the course of history. They have grown up in societies paralyzed by cynicism, loneliness, desperation, and hatred, conditions that isolate people from one another and teach them to regard cruelty as inevitable. Yet even amid this desolation, a radical possibility remains: the recovery of solidarity as a passion for justice and love as a public and collective force. This militant love begins with the recognition that our lives are profoundly interconnected, that freedom cannot be reduced to individual escape, and that none of us can be secure while others are rendered vulnerable and disposable. It creates bonds strong enough to break through isolation, connect private suffering to public responsibility, and transform compassion into organized resistance. As James Baldwin and Malcolm X understood in different ways, learning to live requires learning to love, not as sentimentality or a retreat into private life, but as a refusal of hatred, racism, and the machinery of disposability.

Militant love takes the side of justice. It finds expression in solidarity, shared struggle, and the willingness to assume responsibility for lives beyond our immediate experience. It transforms loneliness into connection, despair into collective courage, and anger into a disciplined struggle for a world in which no human being is considered expendable. With catastrophe no longer on the horizon but at their doorstep, young people must build a worldwide movement of resistance that neither propaganda nor repression can silence. It is time to bring to a halt the machinery of death sustained by governments and their military-industrial-academic institutions, all stained by the suffering of children, women, the elderly, and those condemned as disposable.

But solidarity becomes a radical force only when moral conviction takes the form of organized struggle. Student-led protests in India have demonstrated how culture can become both a pedagogical weapon and a vehicle of collective resistance. After Chief Justice of India Surya Kant contemptuously referred to unemployed young people as “cockroaches,” Abhijeet Dipke  answered with a provocative challenge on Instagram: “What if all cockroaches come together?” The question spread rapidly, transforming an insult meant to humiliate into a rallying cry of defiance. Confronting the corrupt and increasingly authoritarian Modi government, students, unemployed young people, and their supporters used memes, satire, and Instagram reels to expose corruption, puncture the mythology of power, and mobilize mass protest. Met with tear gas, police violence, and detention, they refused to abandon the streets. Their resistance revealed that domination is sustained through more than force. It also depends on images, narratives, and a manufactured common sense that teaches people what to fear, accept, and obey. By turning culture against power, the protesters entered the very terrain where identities are formed, anger finds a language, and private suffering becomes public outrage and collective action.

The youth-led Cockroach Janta Party converted this defiance into a rapidly expanding movement.  With more than 20 million followers on Instagram, it built an alternative public sphere beyond the government’s propaganda machine.Young people turned digital ridicule into political solidarity and carried it from the screen into the streets.  Images of police repression widened public outrage, while the movement’s growing power forced the resignation of India’s education minister and placed educational reform and public accountability on the national agenda. As Arundhati Roy notes, “the student protesters who have swarmed Delhi are showing us a different future for India.”

What began as an insult became a symbol. What began as a meme became a movement. What began online became a material force capable of making an authoritarian government retreat. This was more than a new style of protest. It was a restructuring of politics from below, one that seized the cultural technologies of domination and turned them against the systems of power that produce censorship and dispossession. It showed that culture is not an ornament to politics; it is one of the decisive sites where power is challenged, solidarity is created, and collective agency is born.

The lesson extends far beyond India. It must not be lost on young people in the United States or elsewhere, especially as the genocidal assault on Gaza is accompanied by an accelerating campaign of state and settler violence in the occupied West Bank. The catastrophe in Palestine is not confined to Gaza. It is part of a broader colonial project of dispossession, forced displacement, territorial theft, and the destruction of Palestinian life, a logic of domination increasingly visible across the globe. It is also a warning of what awaits the rest of the world as emerging fascist states answer economic crisis with racist paranoia, militarism, and fantasies of purification. This violence involves more than the crushing of dissent. A gangster form of neoliberal capitalism is merging with colonial violence and authoritarian rule, producing a criminogenic order in which law serves power, cruelty becomes policy, and entire populations are abandoned to injury, exile, and death.  Azeezah Kanji is right to insist:

“We speak often of the “Palestine exception”: the extreme repression of Palestinian and Palestine solidarity speech and activism. We ought also to speak of the Palestine example: understanding Palestine not simply as an exception, but as an emblem of the colonial modern condition.”

The assault on the village of Tell, southwest of Nablus, gives concrete meaning to this “Palestine example”: colonial power operating through the combined forces of the military, the state, and armed settlers to dispossess a people and destroy the conditions necessary for collective life. Following a deadly confrontation involving Palestinians, armed settlers, and Israeli forces, the Israeli government imposed collective punishment. Four Palestinians were killed, dozens were detained, homes were raided, and military operations spread across neighboring communities. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered a wider military campaign, while members of his far-right government demanded further settlement expansion and the depopulation of Palestinian villages. UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese described the combined army-settler attacks as pogroms against defenseless civilians.

What is unfolding across Gaza and the West Bank is a crime against humanity made possible by weapons, diplomatic protection, media indifference, and the shameful complicity of powerful Western governments, especially the United States. Universities invest in and collaborate with the institutions that sustain the war machine. Corporate media turn mass suffering into background noise. Political leaders empty the language of human rights of all meaning by applying it selectively. Under these conditions, silence is not neutrality. It is a form of collaboration, and the normalization of genocide becomes a rehearsal for further crimes.

The young people of India have shown what becomes possible when a generation refuses the future imposed upon it.They are not alone. The resistance emerging among young people across the world offers a language for confronting this global regime of violence. Although sparked by specific grievances, these revolts are rooted in widening inequality, unemployment, economic insecurity, corruption, censorship, and the shameless nepotism of political elites.

What is often missed in the mainstream press is that young protesters are revolting against a global form of gangster capitalism that has denied them a meaningful place in the present and robbed them of a future. Commenting on the Cockroach uprising, Vijay Prashad identifies the deeper economic forces driving this revolt:

“The young protesters are not in revolt because they possess shorter attention spans or a special cultural aversion to authority. They are in revolt because capitalism cannot integrate them into dignified economic life. They have been told to study, acquire degrees, learn new skills, remain competitive, and become ‘entrepreneurs.’ Their families have borrowed money, sold land, postponed medical treatment, and reduced household consumption to pay for education and coaching. At the end of this punishing journey, many discover that the promised job does not exist. Others find only temporary contracts, unpaid internships, platform work, or jobs whose wages bear no relation to their qualifications.”

This crisis is not confined to India. In Bangladesh, student protests brought an end to Sheikh Hasina’s fifteen-year rule. In Nepal, resistance to corruption and digital censorship forced the prime minister’s resignation. In Madagascar,protests that began over water and power cuts grew into demands for “a complete overhaul of the political system” and drove President Andry Rajoelina from the country. In Kenya, a decentralized youth movement compelled the government to withdraw a punishing finance bill and continues to challenge state power and shape the country’s politics.

Largely leaderless and digitally connected, these movements have transformed social media into a counter-public sphere and translated online networks into political power in the streets. Different in their histories, demands, and results, they share a crucial lesson: when young people refuse silence, organize across differences, and connect their courage to a broader public outrage, governments can be forced to retreat and seemingly immovable structures of power can begin to crack.

The challenge now is to turn these scattered revolts into a common struggle. Young people everywhere must transform these lessons into an international movement capable of bringing millions into the streets and interrupting the institutions that make mass violence possible. They must organize peaceful demonstrations across borders, build student-worker alliances, occupy public spaces, radicalize the social imagination, and expose the systems of propaganda that sustain it. They must demand an immediate end to the slaughter, an arms embargo, international sanctions, and freedom and justice for the Palestinian people. Moral outrage must become organized power.

Such a movement must be joined by educators, artists, cultural workers, trade unionists, journalists, faith communities, and public intellectuals. Resistance cannot remain fragmented by national borders or confined to isolated campuses and cities. Demonstrations must become global, coordinated, sustained, and impossible for governments to ignore. Boycotts, divestment campaigns, labor actions, teach-ins, and mass civil disobedience must converge into a broad democratic front capable of imposing a political cost on complicity. The capitalist and reactionary nationalist  institutions that sustain oppression must be confronted wherever they operate: in government ministries, corporations, universities, media systems, financial networks, and the arms industry.

The Indian youth movement thus offers a lesson that is both cultural and political.  Images, algorithms, digital platforms, and political spectacles are expressions of power, but they can also be seized as instruments of resistance. Cultural critique must move beyond exposing how consent is manufactured and desire is organized.  The cultural realm can be reclaimed from below and transformed into a public pedagogy of resistance, collective courage, and radical democratic possibility. But digital resistance reaches its limit unless it enters the streets, builds durable organizations, joins workers and communities, and converts visibility into lasting political power.

The power of young people lies not in youth alone, but in their capacity to awaken the rest of society from the paralysis of cynicism, fear, and manufactured helplessness. They can expose the lie that nothing can change, connect struggles that power works to keep apart, and give global solidarity an organized and material form. Yet youthful rebellion cannot be sustained by the rush of collective energy and the explosive reach of digital culture alone. As Vijay Prashad rightly warns, “spontaneity and digital reach alone cannot overcome entrenched power.” If the Cockroach movement is to become a lasting political force, it must link examination reform to what Prashad calls “broader struggles for employment, public education, labour rights, and economic redistribution.” The question, then, is no longer whether young people possess the power to ignite change, but whether people across generations will join them in building a movement capable of sustaining it.

The burden of resistance does not rest solely with the young. Their movements provide a map, not an alibi for the inaction of others. They have revealed the language, imagination, courage, and forms of struggle required of everyone who refuses a future organized around genocide, colonialism, and permanent war. Gaza is being destroyed. The West Bank is being emptied village by village. The politics of genocidal violence is spreading across the globe. The time for isolated gestures and ceremonial outrage has passed. What is needed now is a worldwide uprising of conscience transformed into disciplined, sustained, nonviolent mass resistance. Young people of the world must unite with workers, educators, artists, and all those who refuse a world ruled by cruelty, dispossession, and war. They must organize to shut down the institutions that feed the war machine, making complicity impossible and solidarity unavoidable. At stake is whether the future will belong to the merchants of death or to those with the courage to stop them. Neutrality is no longer an option. Resistance is an imperative.

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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 Counterpunch.org.

Shared via Creative Commons.

The Trump administration is laying the groundwork for blacklisting and criminalizing all left-wing, progressive, anti-war and anti-imperialist dissent.

CHRIS HEDGES
JUL 22, 2026

The State Department’s 100-page report on Cuba’s “campaign of subversion against the United States,” along with Donald Trump’s assertion that “Americans were blatantly lied to about the security of our election infrastructure,” lays the groundwork for dictatorship.

Elections will be sabotaged in the name of “national security.” Left-wing dissent will be criminalized in the name of “combating terrorism.” Democracy will be snuffed out in the name of protecting “freedom.”

Trump, who has lately taken to issuing warnings about a communist plot to take over America, posits that an island of 9.6 million people — nearly 90 percent of whom live in extreme poverty amid extended blackouts due to decades of U.S. economic warfare — is an existential threat.

These accusations are not meant to be rational. They, like the charge that our elections are manipulated, are transparent excuses to go after institutions and individuals that are seen as threatening Trump and the Republican Party’s absolute grip on power. While Cuba has supposedly “carried out one of the most durable and damaging foreign intelligence penetrations in American history” Russia, China, Iran and North Korea, as well as non-state groups, “have the capability to compromise U.S. election infrastructure.”

Under the heading “Front Groups and Fellow Travelers,” the report assembles a disparate collection of organizations belonging to Cuba’s“ideological network.”

For example, the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization (IFCO), founded as an ecumenical social justice organization by the Presbyterian Church, is described as part of a Cuba “solidarity network” which “facilitates radical agitation within the United States.”

I am an ordained Presbyterian minister. I can assure you the Presbyterian Church is not facilitating “radical agitation.”

The report lists a wide variety of organizations on whose behalf IFCO has acted as an intermediary — perfectly legally — facilitating tax-exempt donations and handling grant management, compliance and reporting. These include The Jericho Movement, Equality for Flatbush, Claudia Jones School, Haitian Women for Haitian Refugees, changingFrequencies, Viva Palestina US, and The People’s Forum, which the report describes as “a major activist group in Cuba’s U.S. ideological network.”

The National Lawyers Guild (NLG) and Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) are castigated in the same chapter. The NLG “is one of the most persistently relevant — and insidious — organizations in Cuba’s U.S. network.”

The report continues:

“The association of extreme-left lawyers and radical street activists has played a key role in a disproportionate share of the far-left terror and violence that has plagued the United States from the 1960s up to today. Throughout its history, it has maintained intimate ties to Cuba and other communist regimes and has explicitly sought to advance the causes of the international far left, including by working to defend and facilitate terrorism and extremist violence — from the Weather Underground of the 1970s to the violent BLM militants and Antifa terror cells of today.”

The NLG is labeled a foreign influence operation because it provides assistance to activists, whose right to legal representation is constitutionally enshrined.

In 2025, the Trump administration conditioned federal funding to Harvard University on defunding and dissolving the law school’s chapter of the National Lawyers Guild (HLS NLG), which provided legal assistance to individuals and student groups that opposed the genocide.

A subsection in the report is dedicated to the anti-war activists at CODEPINK and their co-founders Medea Benjamin and Jodie Evans. It notes Evans’ marriage to the wealthy software entrepreneur Neville Roy Singham was attended by a “Who’s Who’ of progressivism” including co-host of Democracy Now! Amy Goodman; Ben & Jerry’s co-founder Ben Cohen and the playwright V (formerly known as Eve Ensler) who wrote “The Vagina Monologues.”

Naming guests at a wedding is one of the more bizarre passages.

The report grossly exaggerates the influence of Singham’s support for left-wing organizations — described as “far-left” — while ignoring the massive sums supplied by U.S. corporations, millionaires and billionaires, as well as the Israel lobby, to both major political parties, super PACs, think tanks and advocacy networks.

Israel has a far more insidious influence on U.S. politics and foreign policy than Cuba, Russia and China combined.

The State Department attacks the co-founders of The People’s Forum, Manolo De Los Santos and Claudia De la Cruz.

It draws on documents that are often decades old and infused with Cold War paranoia. These include a 1966 Senate report claiming there is “overwhelming evidence that the machinery of the Cuban Government has been progressively organized over the years, to carry out its number one task — the export of Communist subversion.”

It ignores more thoughtful assessments, including a 1981 CIA estimate that acknowledged “[m]uch of the turmoil around the world is rooted in regional and local disputes of a political, social, or religious nature and has nothing to do with Communism.”

In a chapter titled “Revolutionary Tourism,” the Venceremos (“We Shall Overcome”) Brigade is characterized as one of the most “extensive and dangerous infiltration operations ever undertaken by a foreign power against the United States.” This assertion libels thousands of individuals and organizations as Cuban assets, offering nothing more than innuendo.

It lists “the founder of Mother Jones,” — although there were four founders —– along with “several other [unnamed] notable magazine editors, leaders of powerful labor unions and advocacy groups, think tank executives, and a suite of professors at top U.S. universities” as Brigade “alumni.”

Transporting humanitarian goods to Cuba is not a crime. Although the Justice Department’s extradition request from Spain of philanthropist Fergie Chambers, who provided funds to humanitarian organizations in Gaza, may see the criminalization of any person or any group that assists those suffering under sanctions and a blockade.

The report attacks members of the March 2026 “Nuestra América Convoy” which transported goods to Cuba “in defiance of U.S. sanctions.” It notes that 120 organizations “from across 33 countries joined the caravan” with “a suite of influential progressives,” including Isra Hirsi — daughter of U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, video game live streamer and commentator Hasan Piker — with whom I discussed my book “A Genocide Foretold” last year — former U.K. Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn and “several other current and former members of European Parliament.” Even the Gaza flotilla activist Thiago Avila — who I interviewed last month after he was tortured by Israeli soldiers — gets a mention.

Those listed in the report did not become “radicals” because of Cuban indoctrination. Their politics are homegrown, formed in opposition to racism, genocide, police violence, the terrorizing and killing of immigrants and U.S. citizens by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) thugs and neoliberalism, along with the crimes of U.S. imperialism and militarism.

The report makes passing reference to a wide range of people on grounds so tenuous that it has to be read to be believed.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is mentioned for refusing “to denounce” a “tribute to [Assata] Shakur,” who was almost certainly framed for murder and who fled to Cuba after escaping from a U.S. prison in 1979.

It dedicates two paragraphs to Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass for her “friendliness towards the communist regime.” The evidence provided is her participation in a congressional delegation that joined then President Barack Obama on a visit to the island.

Cuban agents, it charges, “maintain a foothold in hundreds of front groups, activist organizations, solidarity centers, and ideological NGO and nonprofit networks. These groups collectively represent one of the single largest, most sophisticated and dangerous vectors for hostile foreign influence in modern American history.” Cuba has allegedly “infiltrated the highest reaches of the U.S. government, recruited and cultivated generations of American activists [and] backed an unprecedented wave of leftwing terrorism [my emphasis] on American soil.”

Note the word terrorism. Note that it makes these individuals and organizations terrorists. Note that it makes them subject to draconian terrorism laws. And note that the Trump administration has committed itself to hunting down and rooting out the “radical left.”

The report charges that Cuba and its allies are mounting “a revolution against western civilization itself — waged, in part, via the novel and insidious method of persuading the children of the West to turn against their own inheritance.” It accuses Havana of “gleeful support of the George Floyd uprisings.” It asserts that “the rise of antifa” and “the explosion of pro-terrorist activism on American college campuses,” can be “linked, in some way, shape, or form, to Cuban influence.”

It characterizes the DSA as serving “as a particularly potent illustration of the ideological victory of Cuba’s effort to position itself as the spiritual capital of Third Worldist radicalism.” It claims the organization maintains a “fierce, almost religious commitment to the cause of the Cuban regime.” It alleges Cuba has built a “sprawling revolutionary network” that has “shaped America’s most famous and influential extremist movements” including the Black Panthers, the Weather Underground and Antifa. These networks include “powerful leftist nonprofits, anti-ICE collectives, socialist groups, and Marxist militant organizations” in the U.S.

Cuba, the report concludes, “has sought to undermine, degrade and destabilize America with spies and soldiers, but also with students and intellectuals; with terrorist cells, but also with solidarity committees and nonprofit networks with intelligence officers operating under diplomatic cover.”

The broadside is chilling. It is worse than McCarthyism. It presages a savage purging of American society.

Those named in the report are condemned without evidence. They are denied due process. That the assertions in the report are distorted at best, and often fictitious, is irrelevant. Fascist propaganda is not rooted in truth. It is rooted in a hatred for liberal values, democracy and the left. It is rooted in the belief that once those condemned as human contaminants are removed, there will be a moral, spiritual and economic renaissance.

We have seen this fascist dance before. We know what comes next. It is not good.

First published on The Chris Hedges Report.

Shared via Creative Commons.

CHRIS HEDGES
JUL 20, 2026

The road to fascism, as Ece Temelkuran writes in “Nation of Strangers,” was constructed over the last six decades of neoliberal assault. We have arrived at the terminus.

We are becoming strangers. Strangers in our own countries. Strangers in the world. The values we cherish, the liberties we once took for granted, and the possibility of a democratic future are vanishing. The communities where we found meaning and purpose are being demolished. The iron grip of fascism is being consolidated. The decades long assault on democratic institutions in the name of neoliberalism, better understood by its less sanitized name, cutthroat capitalism, is reaping its grim harvest.

Ece Temelkuran in “Nation of Strangers: Rebuilding Home in the 21st Century” draws on her exile from Turkey, as she did in her previous book, “How to Lose a Country: The 7 Steps from Democracy to Dictatorship,” to prepare us for a future we do not want but will be forced to endure.

“Nation of Strangers” is written as a series of forty letters beginning in June 2022 and ending in April 2025. Each letter is addressed “Dear Stranger,” which slowly drives home the point that we will soon become, like her, a stranger. First in our own land, then, for some of us, in exile.

She scoffs at our mania for hope, the naïve belief that our hollowed out and corrupted institutions can roll back the fascist tide.

“I don’t believe in hope,” she writes, “but in determination, having faith and doing what you can to survive when there is no hope.”

Temelkuran was a prominent Turkish novelist essayist, and journalist. She wrote a widely read column and had a show on national television. She was also the bête noire of the government of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, especially after the publication of her 2016 book “Turkey: The Insane and the Melancholy.”

She left Turkey after being relentlessly smeared and attacked by government-run media, her colleagues started to be imprisoned, the death threats became “too regular to ignore,” and she lost her job.

Temelkuran called her mother on November 6, 2016, from Zagreb, Croatia: “Mom, I am not coming back home.”

“It was a one-minute phone call,” she explains. “Half of it was silence. But that’s all it took for me, in the autumn of 2016, to become homeless.”

She was 43.

You can see my interview with Temelkuran here.

“The neoliberal system’s reality — extreme inequality — cancels out the fundamental promise of democracy — equality — and that is why the idea of protecting democracy means less and less to people,” she writes.

We are rendered homeless not only because of those who hold power, whether it be Vladimir Putin, Narendra Modi, Benjamin Netanyahu, Donald Trump, or Erdoğan, but because of a bankrupt liberalism, a faux opposition enslaved to the same corporate and oligarchic masters.

“Since our political outrage is considered irrelevant by the conventional homes of realpolitik, the old political parties, we find ourselves politically homeless, too,” Temelkuran notes.

“We no longer know through which political medium we can unite our voices to be heard by the rulers. Like refugees, we stay in temporary places: protest tents, makeshift occupy-movement tents or strike marquees. In the cold or under the sun, we imagine and reimagine a new political home — like an exile who knows that the old home is impossible to return to but still misses a home.”

Fascism’s lifeblood is the demonization of the other, of the stranger.

By 2050, over 1 billion people will find themselves “at threat of being displaced” due to “environmental change, conflict and civil unrest.” By 2070, between 1 and 3 billion people may find themselves “left outside the climate conditions that have served humanity well over the past 6,000 [years].”

She warns that the genocide in Gaza is a template for what will come, an exercise by the global ruling class to see how much carnage it can inflict with impunity.

Temelkuran describes Gaza as “a long bleeding, thick scar on the world map,” that is “widening to become a fatal gangrene, swallowing up the entire body of humanity.” She cautions that the “new standards of brutality will be set,” that “too many will become homeless by the end of this story, and it will not only be those whose houses are bombed. And it will all begin with the loss of one word.”

“There will be no explicit agreement needed,” she goes on, “but gradually, people will avoid that one word that is deemed ‘problematic’. It is the word genocide in Germany today; in other countries, it will be other words.”

The void left by the lost word ..

“will soon be filled with harmless words kindly suggested by the power-approved words, such as war, even though the other side is primarily civilians. ‘Let’s not call it a genocide but ‘atrocities.’ Eventually, it will become impossible to join the public conversation without uttering only those approved words. They will operate as signal flares to show that you are not using the criminalized word. This is how fascism works. It not only silences people but also forces them to speak in a certain way.”

Temelkuran chronicles the indignities of surmounting bureaucratic obstacles to apply for residency and visa permits in “soul-sucking waiting rooms.” She wonders, along with the other strangers, if, when the permit expires, it will be renewed or if she will be forced to find another refuge. She is hardened by exile. Humor is dark. She watches as refugees from the war in Ukraine arrive in Germany, clueless about what awaits them.

“The Ukrainians do not know this yet,” Temelkuran contends.

“They don’t doubt that the promise made to them by the Western world will be kept. They still believe that they’ll be welcomed in a civilized manner and taken in gracefully, dignity intact. A very dark, very broken place in me wants to laugh that repugnant laugh. You wish, baby! They never take you in without crushing you first. You will despise yourself, hate everything, give up, turn numb, and only then will everything start happening. You will be welcomed only when you surrender.”

Her experience as an exile mocks the West’s conception of itself.

“Westerners still like to think of Europe as the safe haven for the oppressed intellectuals of the Global South, but that is giving too much credit to Europa when thousands are pushed back into the sea to die,” she insists.

“Putting the spotlight on ‘the exile’ to divert from ‘the refugee’ operates as a crisis management tool, if not a branding strategy for Europe’s self-image.”

The persecution by the regime that drives the stranger into exile is not, ironically, the most difficult to digest.

“What the Westerners haven’t realized yet is that many of us do not leave our homes for fear of a dictator,” she writes.

“They still make the distinction in their heads between the ‘goodies’ and the ‘baddies.’ But what truly severs your ties to a country is to see so many people, ordinary people, supporting the regime even after witnessing its evil — to see so many choosing to be evil. That is when your faith in humanity shakes. That is what ostracizes us and makes us homeless even when we are at home — the sense of being under siege from inhumanity, madness and brutality.”

The final blow, Temelkuran says, the one that “actually breaks you,” does not come from “the other side.” Rather, it..

“comes from those whom you think of as your people, your side. When the sense of defeat takes over the side you belong to, the anger or self-disgust of being on the losing side turns to self-hatred. The hatred turns people against each other, and then — as I did once before, permanently leaving the country — you find yourself under attack, more viciously than the other side can manage. They say you are not enough. No cut is deeper than that. That is the precise moment when you become a total stranger in your home, when not the dictator but your fellow people sever your ties to your country.”

Home for “the abyss of the unhomed self” is no longer a place. It is not “a thing of the past or a destination to be arrived at in the future.” It is found in “these moments of being fully in myself, an intermittent sense of wholeness, a rare but precious feeling of normal people, and it will only be in the here and now.”

While the home we leave behind may be gone, there are “new homes in the making that yield moments of peace when you least expect them.”

That, perhaps, is a kind of hope, but one accompanied by eternal mourning and estrangement.

Firt published on The Chris Hedges Report.

Shared via Creative Commons.

ROB URIE
JULY 17, 2026

When American politicians state that terrorism is a threat, what they need is a mirror and an introductory economics textbook to understand that there are many different ways to destroy a nation. From NAFTA to financialization to crypto grifts, the US has been led from one economic catastrophe to another by people claiming to know what they are doing.While you and I know that AI isn’t going to cause 50% – 60% of the jobs in the US to disappear, what astonishes is that this is considered an acceptable outcome by Donald Trump and the US Congress.

For context, the US unemployment rate at the worst point in the Great Depression was 25%. This led to mass protests, a dramatic rise in the fortunes of organized labor, the White House being surrounded by former soldiers wanting to be paid, and WWII. Most governments begin worry about political instability when unemployment rises to 10%. That Trump and Congress heard the 50% – 60% unemployment projection and still thought AI a brilliant idea is testament to an absence of political accountability. There is something deeply broken in US politics.

Fifty percent unemployment would instantly overwhelm state unemployment insurance systems. These systems divide their perpetually underfunded pools between the number of people eligible to collect, meaning that no one would receive enough in insurance payouts to survive. Every town, city and state affected would be in full-on economic collapse within a few months. Car loans, student loans and mortgages would no longer be paid. The US would be in full-scale economic collapse within six months.

The political effect of this should in theory be analogous to handing someone an empty gun, telling them that it is loaded, and then forcing them to shoot their spouse. The spouse will live because the gun is empty. But the relationship will have ended the second that the trigger is pulled. Trust will have been permanently broken. With the predicted job destroying impact of AI, Donald Trump and the US Congress pulled the trigger. They are fine with the nation disappearing in a puff of smoke as long as their stock portfolios keep rising. If this reads like ‘America first,’ please chime in.

No government would withstand 50% employment without massive social upheaval. This implies that the current US leadership has no stake in the US beyond what can be extracted through looting. Should this read as harsh, you probably aren’t paying attention. The productivity math rigs the capital versus labor game. Through what are called hedonic adjustments, the value produced by capital (e.g. AI) is systematically overstated. The largest possible value is taken away from labor and assigned to capital.

While Trump has long claimed that he opposed NAFTA, the question now is why? 50% unemployment from AI would be far more socially destructive than NAFTA has thus far been. The ‘capital investment’ theory whereby AI represents an investment in the broader economy falls apart above 8% unemployment. The math has it that at 50% unemployment, a 200% increase in productivity would be needed to avoid an economic decline from AI. Last year, with AI in the mix, this value was 3%. This is not going to happen.

Moreover, the gains from AI (if there ever are any) would be directed to capital while the costs would be borne by the newly unemployed. This is Class Warfare 101. Trump and the ‘communists’ (his term) in Congress see their fortunes being bolstered by destroying the US. But they have the math all wrong. They imagine that the stock market would rise in the midst of 50% unemployment. What they should be imagining is every major city in the US being burnt to the ground by newly immiserated citizens. As the saying goes, three days without food and no government will stand.

The reason why the US is in this mess is because American leaders misread the unique position that the US was in at the end of WWII as evidence that capitalism actually works. What gave the US its economic prowess was geography, history and luck. By the end of WWII, industrial infrastructure abroad lay in ruins. Because the US was far away, lies between two oceans, and joined the war late, its industrial infrastructure was in better condition after the war ended than before it. To confuse this with grace, intelligence or hard work is a category error.

By the 1980s, the choice for the US was between manufacturing and asset stripping. The leadership at the time (Reagan) chose asset stripping (finance capitalism). With crypto grifts now having reached their natural limit, the US rediscovered war as a business plan— but without the manufacturing base needed to turn military production back into a business. When the political leadership represented the interests of the nation, the New Deal, public schools and a functioning healthcare system were possible. With crypto grifts, only more crypto grifts are possible.

That American capitalism has been redefined as using asymmetrical power to arrange circumstances such that guaranteed gains go to the few while the hollowed-out shell of a looted economy is left for the rest of us, is to empty the term of descriptive value. That this is a result of American imperialism turned inward brings to the fore the source of the social logic of looting. Having been educated in neoclassical economics, almost none of what is today called capitalism fits the theories of academic capitalism. In that version, a large and intrusive state is required to keep capitalism ‘capitalist.’

Monopoly power has long been the economic proxy for the political power of capitalism. In neoclassical theory, a powerful and intrusive state is needed to prevent concentrated wealth from closing the door on new competitors. Neoliberalism thus holds the paradoxical view that 1) economic power doesn’t exist but that 2) the purpose of the state is to support the interests of the economically powerful. The result is that economic ‘freedom’ now means the freedom to loot (e.g. crypto grifts) without legal consequences.

Readers may recall the ‘Great Powers’ framing of the contest for power when the US went to war against Russia in 2022. While the frame makes limited sense with respect to China and Russia, it misses that the US no longer ‘does’ the national interest. The evidence: the few dozen oligarchs whose interests Donald Trump represents are willing to see half of the US population be unemployed through the implementation of AI as long as their fortunes are intact. That they are set up to benefit while the rest of us are set up to lose illustrates the predatory nature of this willingness.

In fact, the oligarchs’ interests are antithetical to those of the US. Trump wants to permanently levitate the stock market because it is the source of the oligarch’s fungible wealth. Bartering a coal mine for goods and services is complicated and cumbersome. But selling shares in the coal mine to the public and then cashing in through stock options is easy, quick and rewarded with tax incentives (discounted capital gains tax rate). The richest 1% owns half of the stock market and the richest 10% owns about 90%. The stock market is central to continuing oligarch control.

To date, the promise of AI has been prospective, that if A, B and C happen, AI will produce a social benefit. Maybe. Maybe not. But the people who haven’t yet demonstrated a social benefit are already billionaires. The heads of AI company Anthropic have $15 billion apiece following a recent fundraising round. Do they have a profitable business? No. AI commenter Ed Zitron argues that Anthropic’s margins scale linearly. In other words, costs rise 1:1 with revenues. Implied is that the current trajectory provides no path to profitability. So, in capitalist terms, why are these people rich?

To be clear, the issue isn’t envy over fat wallets. It is concern over the aggregating impact of the mis-allocation of social resources. If the greed-heads want a sixth yacht, who would care except for the social power that their wealth gives them to force their self-serving decisions onto the rest of us. Automation AI and a wee bit of enterprise AI likely represent our shared future. So do the coming financial crash and its economic fallout from AI funny money (circular) financing. The problem with circular financing is that it sets off a game of musical chairs once one or more or the participating parties begins to take money out.

The relevant question is what it is that the American political leadership imagines that the US will do for a living in coming decades. The fantasy that has been sold is that ‘markets’ decide this. In the 1990s, outsourcing was claimed to be the product of nature (wage competition) when it was in fact the result of specific policies promoted by specific interests. American industrialists imagined that they could rid the US of organized labor by ridding it of jobs that pay. Now, with crypto grifts being what it is that Americans ‘do,’ the solution from above is political repression.

This political repression would have different social meaning if the sense was that those imposing it had the people’s interests at heart. But they don’t. We, the people. are viewed as annoying complainers who interfere with stock market gains and persistently rank the people running the place lower than venereal disease and serial killers. And the sense that one of America’s political parties will save us has been replaced with the understanding that nothing in the current political mix is going to do so. We are on our own.

Deindustrialization is a form of looting through Wall Street’s role in asset stripping and pirate finance. Financialization is looting through those closest to the money creation machine (banking) taking the money so created for themselves (e.g. crypto grifts). AI is looting through companies that haven’t turned a profit and plausibly never will receiving trillions in realized and prospective ‘investment’ without having produced a public benefit (like toilet paper or toothbrushes). The common theme here is fortunes made through uncreative destruction. US ‘leaders’ are destroyers, not creators

Since the plan for what Americans will do for a living going forward at least theoretically involves firing half of the US workforce, how precisely is this supposed to work? The claim is that AI will replace enterprise (call centers, accounting firms, law firms) workers. Nonsense. These companies are creating tiered service where the customers who don’t matter (like yours truly, apparently) hang up and forget that there is a problem because there is no way to fix it except by ceasing to do business with the offending vendor.

AI is tiering precisely this way. Industrial automation and enterprise AI are already quasi-commodity businesses. The AI finance folks (e.g. Ed Zitron) argue that these businesses will never be profitable because their costs (‘compute’) rise with revenues, leaving margins flat. (With flat margins, a $1 rise in revenues means a $1 rise in costs and a $2 rise in revenues means a $2 rise in costs. With these companies currently losing money, rising revenues mean rising losses. The imagined solution is to cut costs, which finds OpenAI cutting prices on its products to stay competitive. But AI is a growth business?

This leaves only the models being sold as ‘thinking machines’ to produce the return on what will soon be several trillion dollars of investment. Are these thinking machines? It doesn’t help that the CEOs of the two main competitors in the thinking machine space, OpenAI and Anthropic, are philosophically ignorant fabulists who don’t appear to understand how the products that they are selling actually work. Anthropic’s Dario Amodei argues that finer gearing for the AI automaton will cause a conversion from dumb machine to human like consciousness. Are cookies set out on Christmas eve for Santa Claus as well?

But little of what these people believe actually matters. The trillions in financing are premised in all of these AI types earning huge profits for their developers. With the enterprise AI sales people backing off of the claim that AI will replace workers wholesale, it is difficult to see where the value proposition that would support fat margins will come from. Having worked for large corporations, it is guaranteed that the only reason that the AI sales people are getting meetings is on the promise that large numbers of workers will be permanently replaced with AI.

While the gearing in ‘thinking machine’ AI can be ever better refined, the product will always and in every case be a better automaton (mechanical robot), not a thinking machine. An analogy is to build a bridge 90% of the way without having a clear understanding of how the remaining 10% will be built. Continental philosophers explained a century ago both how and why building the final 10% (inanimate to animate) of the bridge is impossible. American AI companies built 90% of the bridge with no way to get to the other side. Brilliant?

Again, the reason why this matters is because the US has put all of its hopes for future economic growth into the AI basket. Capital expenditures of one trillion dollars to date, with another two trillion in theory coming behind it, put the wider economy at risk for what at present looks like a stupid gamble. Further, Chinese AI company DeepSeek has partially solved the cost problem, giving it a large pricing advantage over its competitors. As I understand it, DeepSeek’s architectural advantage over US competitors is across the board in automation, enterprise and generative AI.

What DeepSeek did process-wise was to turn a pig in a python into a mouse in a python until the pig hits the digestive tract, at which point it is turned back into a pig. This allows it to move through the python (AI model) with a low expenditure of effort to be revitalized when it is time for dinner (to produce the query response). Because compute is the major cost of the ‘thinking machine’ AI, this gives DeepSeek a cost advantage that US AI companies probably cannot match in the time needed to do so.

The DeepSeek solution is mathematically clever and likely points the way forward for the US AI companies that survive the next few years. But again, the finance people aren’t going to be in a position to care what happens after loans default and equity values go to zero. The time to pledge, borrow, and cross-collateralize US based AI was after the business case has been demonstrated. FOMO (fear of missing out) is a financial bubble ethos. As Will Rogers put it, once the bubble bursts, people stop worrying about the return on their money to focus on the return of their money.

Where does this leave the US? With 1) an implausible public – private industrial policy that will cause major economic dislocations over the next few years, 2) a commodity AI business that was sold as a high growth (high margin) business, 3) an all new group of entitled billionaires who have never created a product that earned a profit but who now get to tell the rest of us what to do and 4) with a Chinese competitor that built a superior product at lower cost than US firms. As with BYD and the $10,000 EV, who needs a Tesla when you can buy a car that works better for 15% of the cost.

For those imagining that the US is re-industrializing, think again. Manufacturing employment in the US has fallen under Trump, not risen. Readers who search will find a body of literature from mainstream economists claiming that the US moved up the value chain in recent decades and that US manufacturing is flourishing. This is (Mitt) Romneyesque fantasy. See my recent Substack articles on the ‘China Shock’ for details. The claim about manufacturing is based on hedonic (qualitative) adjustments made to computer chips. Economists confused a dubious financial statistic (hedonic adjustments made to computer chips) with wider productivity growth.

The math has it that valuing the hedonic adjustment at 100% of the increased functionality while users only use 15% of it overstates the increase in the productivity of capital on its own terms. When applied to AI, assuming that the full theoretical change in the value of capital is 100% of the hedonic adjustment, and therefore allocating 100% of productivity gains to AI, is to overstate the change in productivity from AI (15%) and to understate the change in productivity of labor (85%) in the production process. This same point applies to all technology shocks. The game is rigged for capital.

The fall in US GDP growth from 4% in 1948 to 2% today (graph above) is why the US is saber rattling against China, Russia and BRICS. The punchline is that China, Russia and BRICS didn’t deindustrialize the US. The American ruling class did. China, Russia and BRICS didn’t financialize the US. The American ruling class did. China, Russia and BRICS didn’t force the crypto grift economy onto the US. The American ruling class did. And it is the American AI developers who made generative AI a tool for top-down social control. China is using AI to automate factories. Which nation is authoritarian?

To tie this together, AI seems a weak foundation upon which to build a future economy. In the first place, unlike computers, telephones and the internal combustion engine, AI won’t be transformative. What it does well is digital automation. What is does less well and even then, only in particular industries, is enterprise automation. The executives who imagine that AI will replace workers know absolutely nothing about what ‘their’ workers actually do. The US is to the point where class stratification is making the nation unworkable.

Looking forward, expect and prepare for an AI related financial calamity within the next year or two. This will be the result of AI financing, not AI per se. The catalyst could be the economic consequences of the re-shutting of the Strait of Hormuz. Or it could be the implosion of AI financing in the presence of shrinking promises about what AI can do. Either way, the US has been placed very, very far out on the limb of a dying tree. Trump the destroyer is the product of the American turn toward internal predation. My American neighborhood resembles DRC through economic extraction by external forces.

What are the solutions? The re-localization of agriculture. Rationalizing the consumer economy to match social and environmental constraints. A Federal guarantee that all who are willing to work be provided jobs that pay doing the work that the US needs to be done. Public schools from pre-K – PhD that educate the public in the broad attributes of human civilization. A healthcare system that raises life expectancy instead of lowering it. And a Department of Peace with the authority and purpose of ending US military adventurism abroad. Murder is the business of the mafia. It’s time to get the gangsters out of government.

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Rob Urie is an artist and political economist. His book Zen Economics is published by CounterPunch Books.

First published on Counterpunch.org.

Shared via Creative Commons.

Ellen Brown
JULY 16, 2026

Discussions of artificial intelligence typically begin with the question, What happens when the machines take our jobs? For thousands of years, work has been the means by which we fed our families, earned our place in society, and gave structure to our lives. We have come to equate paid employment with identity.

That presumption may soon be obsolete.

When Elon Musk proposed replacing Universal Basic Income with what he calls a Universal High Income—a level of income sufficient for everyone to live comfortably while intelligent machines produce much of the goods and services society requires—critics warned that people would become lazy. They would stop pursuing college degrees, stop starting businesses, stop inventing, stop contributing. Without jobs, it was argued, life itself would lose meaning and purpose.

Interestingly, humanity’s oldest written history begins with the premise that the purpose of humans is to work. The earliest known writing was impressed into clay tablets in ancient Sumer more than five thousand years ago. The Sumerian Atrahasis tablets tell of sky-deities called Annunaki, cast in modern “ancient architect” scenarios as extraterrestrial engineers. The heavy labor required to maintain life on earth was delegated to junior gods called Igigi, who finally grew weary of the arduous work, laid down their tools and rebelled.

The remedy was to create a new being to carry their burden. This was done by genetic manipulation to upgrade the highest life form found here, creating the human species. Whether we read that as history, allegory, or mythology, its underlying message is that humanity was conceived as a labor force – and human civilization begins with a control system to manage the laborers.

The first writing was not poetry or philosophy. It was accounting: grain tallies, labor quotas, rations, obligations. Most of the original cuneiform tablets were administrative records. What began as an exchange system evolved into a money system to control work and the workers performing it. For nearly six thousand years, human worth has been measured by our productivity. We deserve food and shelter because we worked for it.

In many respects, life is still organized around compulsory labor. Writing was devised to organize it. Accounting on clay tablets predated the use of coins, managed by temple priests as intermediaries for the gods. The temple evolved into private banks, with bankers intermediating commerce.

In the 1930s, British economist and philosopher John Maynard Keynes predicted that by the end of the twentieth century, technological advancement would reduce the work-week to just fifteen hours. So why is the forty-hour work week still the norm? It has been argued that our current economic structure uses “busyness” as a form of social containment. By tethering survival to forty hours of corporate or administrative labor, the system ensures that the majority of human creative power is spent serving institutional interests rather than personal or community liberation.

That may be why modern life feels increasingly saturated with what anthropologist David Graeber termed Bullshit Jobs in a book of that name—pointless administrative tasks that serve little social purpose, but that keep people too exhausted to pursue their own interests. He argued that the rise of “fake” work is a political device to keep people from having the free time to organize or rebel. But if artificial intelligence takes over the majority of production, that changes the meaning of work.

From Scarcity to Abundance.

For centuries, scarcity shaped human behavior. Scarcity taught people to guard, to compete, to fear loss. But abundance changes the emotional landscape. What happens if we are simply handed what we need to survive? Skeptics say people will stop working and learning, that society will collapse into idleness, that life will lose meaning without jobs. But pilot studies of Universal Basic Income (UBI) programs involving unconditional cash transfers to recipients show otherwise.

UBI studies from around the world have shown positive results from UBI payments, including higher employment, lower crime, better mental health, higher graduation rates, and little evidence of a retreat from productive activity. Relieved of the constant anxiety of maintaining survival, participants typically pursue education, care for family members, search for better jobs, or start businesses they would not have dared to take on if failure meant destitution. It seems that necessity is not the only mother of invention.

Granted, the payout in most U.S. studies was a marginal $500 or $600 per month, only enough to provide a safety net for basic food and shelter. Plenty of motivation was left to add income for the finer things in life. Studies of the effects of a Universal High Income of $50,000 or more per year have not been done. But many people who are no longer working for pay, either because they are retired or because they have an inheritance or investments to live on, volunteer their time for socially beneficial causes.

Parents devote extraordinary energy to raising children without receiving a paycheck. Volunteers spend countless hours building community organizations. Amateur musicians practice difficult instruments for years with little expectation of financial reward. Scientists have pursued questions that fascinated them long before the result was likely to be commercially valuable. Thousands of programmers worked without pay to develop Linux open source software, and editors work for free to produce Wikipedia, just for reputation, community and the satisfaction of solving hard problems. These activities are not work for wages, but they are work that is quite meaningful to the people engaged in them.

The Enlightenment: Largely the Legacy of the Leisure Class.

The intellectual triumphs of the European Enlightenment—the era that birthed modern science, political liberty, and the social contract—were primarily the domain of a wealthy leisure class, or of talent that was financially backed by institutional support (church, courts, universities) or personal patronage.

Sociologist Thorstein Veblen laid out this thesis in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899). He argued that scholarly pursuit functioned as a form of “conspicuous leisure”—a way to demonstrate financial strength by engaging in activities that were “unproductive” in the immediate economic sense. To spend decades debating the nature of sovereignty or the movement of the stars required a measure of “unearned increment” or rent extraction. Examples included:

Francis Bacon (1561–1626): As Lord Chancellor and a member of the high nobility, Bacon’s scientific methodology was fueled by the resources of the state and inherited status.

Robert Boyle (1627–1691): The father of modern chemistry was the son of the “Great Earl of Cork,” then the wealthiest man in the British Isles. His work was conducted as a “gentleman scientist” with no need for professional employment.

Antoine Lavoisier (1743–1794): Lavoisier funded the world’s most advanced chemical laboratory through his role as a “Tax Farmer” for the French crown—a position of pure financial extraction.

For those not born into the elite, intellectual survival usually required “aristocratic patronage.” John Locke’s influential work was made possible by his residency and support from the Earl of Shaftesbury, while Thomas Hobbes was a lifelong dependent of the Cavendish family. This system ensured that even “revolutionary” ideas were filtered through the lens of those who benefited most from the existing social hierarchy.

The irony is that the very thinkers who theorized about “universal human rights” and “liberty” did so from a position of security provided by the systems of land-rent and debt-extraction they were analyzing. To create truly universal “liberty” requires a secure income for all.

Non-compulsory Education.

For over a century, schools have functioned as labor factories, designed to produce compliant workers for industrial economies. If labor is no longer the center of life, education must change as well. AI already performs memorization and standardized tasks better than humans, relieving us of the need to perfect those skills ourselves. But that does not mean there is nothing left to learn. Studies of “Self-Directed Education” or “Unschooling” suggest that children are biologically wired to learn, and that removing the coercion of traditional schooling leads not to ignorance but to highly motivated, specialized learners. Self-directed education produces young adults who retain their curiosity and creativity, develop emotional intelligence, and pursue mastery for its own sake.

A 2013/2014 survey of 75 unschooled adults conducted by educational psychologists Peter Gray and Gina Riley found that 83% went on to some form of higher education. Despite not having a high school diploma, they reported little trouble getting into college, often using portfolios, interviews, or community college credits to bridge the gap. A high percentage of unschoolers pursued careers in the creative arts or became entrepreneurs. The researchers reported that unschooling helped them develop the self-reliance and out-of-the-box thinking required for these fields.

A South African study found that while “unschooled” students may have followed non-traditional paths, they often achieved high levels of professional success, particularly in creative and entrepreneurial fields. Intrinsic curiosity replaced extrinsic rewards (grades or job requirements) as the primary driver for learning.

Research on children who learn to read through unschooling shows wide variance in when they start (anywhere from age 4 to 14), but once they decide they want to read, they often reach grade-level proficiency in a matter of months rather than years because they are personally invested. Proponents argue that traditional schooling actually stifles learning by making it a chore.

The Sudbury Valley School model (founded in 1968) is a radical form of democratic education based on the belief that children are naturally curious and capable of managing their own learning. In a Sudbury school, there are no grades or required classes. Instead, students of all ages (5–18) mix freely and decide for themselves how to spend their time. Long-term studies of graduates show that they overwhelmingly transition successfully into higher education and careers, often citing the school’s emphasis on responsibility, self-direction, and democratic participation as the primary drivers of their adult success.

Self-directed learning doesn’t require an independent income, but the point is that the drive to learn and to apply that education to useful pursuits is an inherent human trait, in both children and adults. It’s something we want to do and will do, whether or not an employer requires it.

Self-actualization and Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

American psychologist Abraham Maslow conceptualized the needs or goals that motivate human behavior in a clinical review in 1943. He argued that once physiological and safety needs are met, humans naturally move toward “Self-actualization” – the realization of personal potential and pursuit of creative activities. In his later years, Maslow added a level above self-actualization called “Self-transcendence”, where people focus on goals outside themselves (altruism, community and caregiving).

That natural evolution can be applied not just to individuals but to civilizations. As AI and robotics free us from the self-centered needs of survival, we can awaken to our larger purposes of collective actualization and harmonious progress.

Escaping the Welfare Trap.

That’s the promise of AI – that it can free up our time so that we can escape the meaningless “busyness” of paid labor and pursue goals more meaningful to ourselves. But the same digital tools have a darker side. Catherine Austin Fitts and other critics warn that AI could become the ultimate “digital panopticon”—a weapon of entrapment by which programmable money and algorithmic surveillance create a modern “golden cage” in which the right to receive “welfare” is tied to political compliance. The UBI thus becomes a tool of coercion.

The same technology, however, offers tools to avoid that trap. Decentralized, neutral identity systems and zero-knowledge proofs allow people to establish that they are unique humans without revealing personal data. Zero-knowledge proofs are a cryptographic method by which one party can prove to another that a statement is true without revealing any additional information. A neutral protocol is one in which the rules are transparent, fixed, and cannot discriminate against specific users. By using “Smart Contracts” on a blockchain, the distribution of UHI becomes automated. The code only checks if the user has a valid, unique identity proof. It cannot check the user’s political party, criminal record or social behavior (unless explicitly part of the code). A government-issued digital currency could also be generated using the privacy-protected, peer-to-peer models of Project Hamilton and the ECASH bill, as detailed in Part 3 of this series.

Those are political decisions, dependent on a democratic system governed by and for the people. Mandating that these tools be incorporated into any government payments system can ensure that UHI remains a right of existence rather than a reward for obedience.

If AI can handle production, it removes the original justification for compulsory labor. The choice is whether we use AI to automate our enslavement or to finally automate our exit from the Sumerian story, transforming ourselves from a managed labor force into a self-directed, creative civilization.

Rewriting the Human Story.

For six thousand years, humanity has lived inside the Sumerian story: we were created to work for external masters. But AI has brought us to the point where labor no longer must be our master. AI abundance is not the end of work but the beginning of choice, and choice is the beginning of meaning.

Our first choice must be to insist on a democratic government run in the public interest, and a financial system that supports independent endeavor. Freeing humanity from compulsory labor can then provide the freedom for us to develop more fully as human beings.

Some people will create art. Some will teach. Some will explore science, history, biology, or engineering. Some will build communities. Families may simply become more present with each other. For the first time in history, large numbers of people may have the time and stability to ask the deeper questions about the meaning of life and the unique purpose of their own lives.

In the new story that emerges, we can see ourselves not as laborers but as musicians. We can make beautiful music together, but we need the other instruments. An orchestra is beautiful because each instrument contributes its unique voice to a larger harmony. The promise of AI is to free us from compulsory labor so that we can explore our own unique gifts and discover the music only we can play.

Be sure to check Ellen Brown’s earlier posts here on the AI Abundance Paradigm.

Originally published on Scheerpost.com.

Shared via Creative Commons.

HENRY GIROUX
JULY 10, 2026

The United States has always been divided against itself. From its founding, the promise of democracy has existed alongside the violence of settler colonialism, slavery, racial capitalism, and white supremacy. The nation’s greatest democratic advances have emerged not from the fulfillment of its founding ideals but from generations of struggle against racial domination, economic exploitation, and political exclusion. American history is therefore not a story of inevitable democratic progress. It is an ongoing struggle over whose histories are remembered, whose humanity is recognized, and whose freedom counts, a struggle measured against the gulf between the nation’s claims to freedom and justice and the reality of systemic cruelty and racialized terror. Today, that struggle has entered a new and dangerous phase. The assault on birthright citizenship is not simply another dispute over immigration or constitutional interpretation. It is an attempt to decide once again who counts, who qualifies as a citizen, and who possesses the right to have rights.  At stake is nothing less than whether the United States becomes a multiracial democratic socialist society or completes its transformation into a fascist white republic.

The attack on birthright citizenship forces the nation to confront a question every democracy must answer: Who belongs, and whose lives are valued? As Judith Butler argues, politics is organized around distinctions between lives regarded as grievable and those rendered ungrievable, between those recognized as fully human and those denied that status. Every authoritarian movement answers that question by transforming citizenship from a universal right into a racial, nationalist, and class privilege. Once citizenship becomes conditional, every other right becomes conditional as well. The Trump-Miller campaign against birthright citizenship is therefore not simply an attack on immigration policy. It is an attempt to transform the United States from an imperfect democracy into a racial state. In doing so, it revives a political tradition that never disappeared, one rooted in the racial nationalism of the Johnson–Reed Immigration Act of 1924, the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan, and the recurring fantasy of preserving the United States as a white republic.

The assault on birthright citizenship is an attempt to steal one of Reconstruction’s greatest democratic achievements. As constitutional scholar Sherrilyn Ifill reminds us, the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment undertook a “race-conscious project” designed to dismantle racial caste and establish birthright citizenship as the legal foundation of a multiracial democracy.  As Martha S. Jones demonstrates in Birthright Citizens, birthright citizenship was not bestowed from above. It was forged through generations of Black struggle against slavery, racial caste, and white supremacy. The Trump administration seeks to reverse that democratic achievement by redefining citizenship as a privilege of ancestry, bloodline, and racial hierarchy rather than a constitutional guarantee of democratic equality. As Eddie S. Glaude Jr. observes, “These people are the inheritors of that legacy. They believe the country should be white.”

Nor did this assault emerge suddenly. Trump’s “birther” campaign against Barack Obama was the opening act in a broader effort to reopen the very question Reconstruction sought to settle: Who can legitimately claim to be an American? The issue was never where Obama was born. It was whether a Black man could legitimately embody the nation itself. Birtherism transformed citizenship into a weapon of racial warfare, preparing the ideological ground for today’s assault on birthright citizenship. The current campaign extends that poisonous logic from one symbolic target to millions of others, rendering citizenship increasingly contingent, revocable, and politically expendable.

This is why the struggle over birthright citizenship is fundamentally a struggle over the legal foundations of democracy itself. Citizenship is the constitutional basis of every democratic right. Once that foundation is transformed from a universal guarantee into a privilege granted by political authority, democracy itself begins to disappear. Rights cease to belong equally to all; they become favors distributed by a state that defines belonging through race, nationalism, and ideological conformity.

John Ganz captures the magnitude of this transformation with unusual clarity:

“It’s long been my contention that the attack on citizenship is the most serious and frightful aspect of the Trump phenomenon and the one that makes it most deserving of the epithet fascist or totalitarian…. If they successfully destroy American citizenship as enshrined in the Constitution they will have destroyed the country. We will be, all of a sudden, somewhere else.”

The ideological stakes of this struggle become especially visible as the United States marks the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of its founding. Official celebrations largely substitute patriotic spectacle for historical reckoning, presenting the nation’s past as an unbroken story of liberty, unity, and democratic progress. Such mythology erases the central role of Indigenous dispossession, slavery, racial capitalism, and generations of democratic struggle in shaping American history, obscuring the crucial truth that democracy has advanced not because the nation faithfully realized its founding ideals but because ordinary people repeatedly forced the nation to confront the violence, exclusions, and contradictions built into those ideals. The assault on birthright citizenship is simultaneously constitutional in its aims and pedagogical in its methods, seeking to reshape how Americans understand democracy, belonging, and political identity.

Ganz’s warning points beyond legal rights to the wider struggle over democratic identity, public values, civic consciousness, and the distribution of political and economic power. The attack on citizenship cannot be separated from the rise of gangster capitalism and the oligarchy that increasingly dominates American society. As wealth and power become concentrated in the hands of a tiny corporate and financial elite, democratic institutions are emptied of any substance, public goods are dismantled, and the media are increasingly captured by concentrated private interests. In addition, staggering class divisions, entrenched racial injustice, and a politics of disposability become normalized. The attack on citizenship is one mechanism through which this emerging social order redraws the boundaries of political membership, legitimates exclusion, and diverts public anger away from the structures of exploitation that produce widespread misery.

This is neoliberal fascism intensified by oligarchic power and racial capitalism. As Harvey J. Kaye reminds us, what often disappears in discussions of authoritarianism is the class war from above that has laid the groundwork for its emergence. For decades, corporate elites, their political allies, and neoliberal policymakers have waged a relentless assault on workers, public goods, democratic institutions, and the social state, producing staggering inequalities of wealth and power while intensifying racial and social injustice. This class war has not only deepened economic insecurity; it has generated the resentments, abandonment, and civic despair upon which authoritarian movements flourish. The attack on citizenship is inseparable from this broader class project.

What is unfolding today is not merely the return of fascist rhetoric but the deliberate construction of a political order in which democracy is hollowed out from within by the convergence of oligarchic power, white supremacy, and authoritarian rule. Constitutional protections are eroded, dissent is criminalized, cruelty is celebrated as civic virtue, and entire populations are rendered disposable.

Every fascist politics begins by deciding who is recognized as part of the political community. It ends by deciding whose rights, lives, and futures no longer matter. Its endpoint is the normalization of lawless abductions, state terror, militarized policing, detention camps, and a social order in which violence becomes the governing principle of politics. This is not simply the story of a democracy in decline. It is the story of a society devouring its own democratic foundations as imperial ambitions, white nationalism, militarized governance, and institutional decay converge in the service of authoritarian power.

Citizenship and the Pedagogy of Fascism.

Political struggles are never won by coercion alone. They are won in the institutions and cultural spaces where people learn to understand themselves, others, and the society they inhabit. Schools, journalism, digital platforms, religious institutions, entertainment, and state policy function as powerful pedagogical forces. They teach people whom to fear, whose lives matter, which histories deserve remembrance, and who belongs to the democratic polity. As Stuart Hall observed, “cultural change is constitutive of political change.” Every political order educates its citizens. The decisive question is what kind of citizens it produces.

Trumpism answers that question by cultivating a new authoritarian subject. Through media spectacles, digital platforms, and state power, it normalizes white supremacy, Christian nationalism, militarism, and the language of exclusion. Figures such as Stephen Miller, J.D. Vance, Marco Rubio, Pete Hegseth, Tom Homan, Russell Vought, and others function as the principal anti-public pedagogues of this emerging fascist culture. Their rhetoric legitimates policies whose consequences are inscribed in broken lives, shattered families, public spectacles of humiliation and terror, the destruction of due process, the erosion of democratic freedoms, the killing of children, and, increasingly, blood. They teach that compassion is weakness, violence is virtue, unquestioning loyalty is patriotism, hypermasculinity is the measure of manhood, and domination, cloaked in the language of God, nation, and destiny, is the defining virtue of public life. For Trump and his acolytes, courage no longer signifies moral conviction or civic responsibility. It has been stripped of its ethical content and absorbed into the language of militarized nationalism, where cruelty masquerades as strength, intimidation becomes a badge of honor, and public life is reduced to a theater of aggression. Such a culture thrives on spectacles of violence, celebrates humiliation as entertainment, glorifies brutality as a public virtue, and normalizes the historical amnesia, racial hatred, militarism, and organized abandonment upon which fascist politics flourishes.

The assault on birthright citizenship is a pedagogical project aimed at remaking public consciousness. Its purpose is to persuade Americans that racial exclusion is common sense, hierarchy is natural, and white nationalism is compatible with democracy. The objective is not simply to change immigration law but to redefine citizenship itself, replacing equal membership with a racialized conception of national identity rooted in blood, ancestry, and cultural purity. As Antonio Gramsci argued, political transformation is inseparable from cultural transformation because power secures its deepest victories by shaping how people think, remember, identify, and imagine the world.

Authoritarianism depends upon organized ignorance as much as organized repression. It flourishes when historical memory is replaced by myth produced by powerful disimagination machines, when fear overwhelms reason, and when civic responsibility gives way to tribal loyalty. In such circumstances, citizenship ceases to be a shared democratic practice and becomes a badge of racial and ideological identity, a transformation embodied in the politics of Stephen Miller and the architects of Trump’s white nationalist project. Democracy no longer rests upon constitutional principles but upon exclusionary myths about who constitutes the “real” nation.

The attack on citizenship cannot be removed from the wider war against the institutions that make democracy possible. Under Trumpism, journalists are vilified as enemies of the people and increasingly subjected to intimidation and violence; universities are threatened with political retaliation; schools are subjected to ideological censorship; books are removed from libraries; scientific expertise is dismissed as propaganda; and historical memory is rewritten to erase the histories of slavery, colonialism, racism, and democratic resistance. These are not isolated attacks. Together they constitute a coordinated war on the institutions that cultivate critical judgment, historical consciousness, and the civic capacities upon which democratic self-government depends.

These attacks are directed at education in its broadest sense. Public schools are stripped of their democratic mission and reduced to workforce training or ideological indoctrination. Universities are portrayed as centers of national betrayal. Independent journalism is recast as a political enemy rather than a public good. Culture itself becomes a battlefield in which cruelty is rewarded, ignorance celebrated, and critical thought equated with disloyalty. The objective is not simply to silence dissent but to destroy the moral, intellectual, and civic capacities that make democratic dissent, and democracy itself, possible.

This is why fascism should be understood both as a political regime and as a pedagogical one. It seeks to govern not only through laws, police powers, and executive authority but also through the production of consciousness itself. It wages war over memory, language, identity, and civic imagination because it understands that lasting domination depends upon shaping how people think before it controls how they act. Birthright citizenship is therefore one expression of a larger struggle over education, culture, memory, and civic imagination. Ultimately, the conflict is over what kind of people democracy requires and what kind of subjects fascism seeks to produce.

Manufacturing the Authoritarian Citizen.

Once democratic institutions have been weakened, authoritarian politics can turn to its central task: manufacturing the authoritarian citizen. The assault on birthright citizenship is only one front in this broader project. By dismantling the institutions that sustain democratic memory, critical judgment, and civic responsibility, Trumpism seeks to produce subjects who no longer question power, distinguish truth from propaganda, or imagine democracy as a shared public good. The goal is not simply to govern differently but to reshape the habits, identities, and desires upon which political life itself depends.

Trumpism has embraced this strategy with remarkable consistency. Under Trump’s second administration, the federal government has been weaponized against journalists who expose corruption and abuses of power. As The Guardian reported, federal agents raided the home of Washington Postreporter Hannah Natanson, confiscating her electronic devices in an extraordinary act of intimidation directed at investigative journalism. At the same time, the administration has dismantled longstanding protections for the press while deploying lawsuits and other legal mechanisms against major news organizations and investigative reporters whose work challenges executive power. The message is unmistakable: journalism that holds power accountable is no longer treated as a public service but as a political crime.

Trumpism has extended its assault on democratic culture into a systematic campaign against education. Public schools are increasingly prohibited from teaching the histories of slavery, colonialism, racial violence, and democratic struggle. Universities face political coercion, financial retaliation, and ideological surveillance if they refuse to conform to authoritarian demands. Faculty members are monitored, curricula rewritten, books removed from classrooms and libraries, and critical inquiry dismissed as indoctrination. Even leading universities such as Columbia, Northwestern, Harvard, and the University of California have too often capitulated to political intimidation. By yielding to threats from the Trump administration, they compromise their autonomy, erode academic freedom, and abandon their role as democratic public institutions. Such capitulations normalize authoritarian coercion while further weakening institutions that, despite their limits and exclusions, have historically cultivated critical thought, civic responsibility, and democratic agency.

These attacks are routinely justified as efforts to eliminate bias, restore patriotism, or protect children from ideas that challenge authoritarian myths, including honest accounts of Black freedom struggles, systemic racism, settler colonialism, and Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza. But such claims conceal a deeper political objective. Authoritarian regimes fear historical knowledge because history reveals that every system of domination has been challenged, resisted, and transformed. As Robin D. G. Kelley reminds us, history is not the unfolding of national myths but the record of unfinished struggles over freedom, equality, and belonging. Historical memory reminds us that democracy has always been won through collective struggle rather than bestowed from above. Rights are neither gifts nor privileges but political achievements that must continually be defended and expanded.

Culture itself has become one of the principal battlegrounds in this struggle. The digital platforms through which millions now encounter politics have become immense pedagogical machines. They do more than transmit information. They organize attention, shape emotional life, reward outrage, circulate conspiracy theories, amplify racial resentment, and normalize political  violence. As the Reuters Institute’s 2025 Digital News Reportdemonstrates, social media and video platforms have now surpassed television and traditional news organizations as the principal sources through which many people receive news. In these spaces, the struggle over democracy increasingly unfolds through algorithms that privilege spectacle over evidence, emotional manipulation over reasoned debate, and disinformation over informed judgment.

Taken together, these developments reveal a coherent political project aimed at remaking political common sense itself. It teaches people to admire cruelty as strength, celebrate ignorance as authenticity, dismiss historical memory as subversion, and accept constitutional rights as contingent upon race, loyalty, and political conformity. Before authoritarianism governs through repression, it educates people to desire the very forms of domination that will ultimately govern them.

The Constitutional Blueprint of the Fascist State.

History offers a sobering lesson. Fascist movements rarely begin by abolishing constitutions, suspending elections, or relying immediately on militarized repression. They often begin by redefining who belongs to the civic community and who does not. Before they eliminate rights, they first determine whose rights count. Citizenship becomes the decisive political threshold separating those entitled to legal protection from those who can be excluded, surveilled, detained, deported, or abandoned without moral consequence.

This is why the attack on birthright citizenship occupies such a central place in Trump’s political strategy. It establishes the governing principle upon which a new authoritarian order can be built. If citizenship is no longer guaranteed by the Constitution but becomes contingent upon ancestry, race, bloodline, or executive interpretation, then every democratic protection becomes vulnerable to political power. Rights no longer belong to citizens because they are constitutionally guaranteed; they belong only so long as the state decides that they do. In such a regime, rights cease to be universal constitutional protections and become political privileges dispensed by white supremacists, Christian nationalists, and ideological zealots who wield state power in the service of exclusion and domination.

Hannah Arendt argued that citizenship rests upon belonging to a political community—the indispensable condition for possessing rights at all. She famously described this as “the right to have rights” and “the right to belong to some kind of organized community.”  Reflecting on the catastrophe of European fascism, she warned that once individuals are stripped of political membership, they lose not merely legal protections but the public standing and institutional guarantees that make those protections meaningful. For Arendt, statelessness was more than the loss of nationality. It marked expulsion from the political community itself, reducing human beings to lives that could be managed, displaced, detained, or discarded with impunity.

Trumpism repackages this racist project in the language of legal restoration and border security. Its objective extends beyond border enforcement to the reconstruction of citizenship itself, transforming the Constitution from a guarantor of democratic equality into the machinery of racial domination. What is at stake is the replacement of democratic citizenship with an exclusionary conception of who counts as an American rooted in white supremacy, Christian nationalism, and an idealized myth of the nation’s past. Citizenship no longer embodies democratic equality; it becomes a weapon for sorting populations into those entitled to rights and those who can be surveilled, detained, deported, and abandoned. In Giorgio Agamben’s terms, this is the political logic that reduces human beings “to bare life,”  persons stripped of meaningful political standing and exposed to arbitrary state power. The historical record is unambiguous: such logic culminates in the camp, where law no longer restrains power but becomes the administrative machinery of exclusion, abandonment, and state terror.

This project cannot be separated from a broader politics of disposability. Once governments succeed in persuading citizens that some people do not truly belong, it becomes easier to normalize policies that would otherwise appear morally unthinkable. Families are separated. Refugees are labeled as enemies. Immigrants become invaders. Protesters become traitors. Journalists become enemies of the people. Political opponents become internal threats. Every expansion of exclusion widens the circle of those who can be denied protection while narrowing the meaning of democratic community itself.

History repeatedly demonstrates that authoritarian regimes consolidate power by transforming legal protections into political privileges. Equality before the law gives way to selective enforcement. Universal rights yield to arbitrary exceptions. Independent courts become instruments of executive power. Citizenship itself becomes contingent upon ideological loyalty and national conformity. The law no longer restrains power; it legitimates power by clothing repression in the language of legality. This is one of fascism’s enduring achievements: it seeks not simply to destroy law but to convert law into an apparatus of domination while preserving the appearance of constitutional order.

The constitutional stakes could not be higher. Every attack on birthright citizenship erodes the principle that all persons born under the Constitution possess equal standing before the law. Once that principle is abandoned, the Constitution no longer limits state power; it becomes a weapon through which authoritarian rule selectively distributes rights, recognition, and community. That is the constitutional logic of the fascist state.

Socialist Democracy or the Fascist State.

The assault on birthright citizenship reveals a truth that many defenders of democracy have been reluctant to confront. Trumpism is more than another conservative movement or an illiberal or authoritarian political formation. It is a fascist project that seeks to reconstruct the legal, cultural, and moral foundations of American society by redefining who counts as fully human, who counts as an American, and who possesses the full protections of democratic citizenship. The far-right offensive on citizenship is not peripheral to that project. It is its constitutional center.

Every fascist movement seeks to replace universal rights with selective privilege. It strips democracy of its egalitarian foundations while preserving the outward appearance of legality. Constitutions remain in place, elections continue to be held, courts still issue opinions, and legislatures still convene. Yet the substance of democracy disappears as executive power expands, dissent is criminalized, historical memory is erased, and citizenship itself becomes dependent upon race, nationalism, and political conformity. Democracy survives as political theater while authoritarian power increasingly governs everyday life through a mix of repression and a spectacularized culture of state violence.

This transformation does not occur through repression alone. It also depends upon a profound educational project. Authoritarianism must teach people to accept exclusion as virtue, cruelty as strength, inequality as natural, and obedience as patriotism. It wages war against history because history reminds us that no system of domination has ever been permanent. It wages war against education because critical thought threatens every regime that depends upon ignorance. And it wages war against citizenship because democratic citizenship embodies the radical principle that rights belong to persons by virtue of their humanity and constitutional equality rather than the whims of political rulers.

The struggle over birthright citizenship therefore reaches far beyond immigration policy or constitutional interpretation. It raises the defining political question of our time: Will democracy continue to rest upon the constitutional principle of universal citizenship, or will citizenship become a racial privilege administered by an authoritarian state? The answer to that question will determine not only who belongs to the nation but also whether the United States is becoming, or has already become, a neo-fascist society.

What is emerging under Trumpism is an authoritarian government that consolidates a fascist social order rooted in what I have elsewhere called gangster capitalism. It is a system in which unprecedented concentrations of wealth and power coexist with racialized disposability, patriarchal domination, ecological devastation, and the criminalization of democratic dissent. It is a machinery of organized misery built upon widening class divisions, racial and gender exclusions, permanent insecurity, and the concentration of economic and political power in the hands of a financial and corporate elite. State terrorism, unchecked executive power, the militarization of everyday life, endless wars abroad, and expanding forms of domestic repression are not accidental excesses of this system. They are among its governing principles.

The attack on birthright citizenship is one of the clearest expressions of this logic. It redraws the boundaries of belonging to determine who can be excluded, dispossessed, imprisoned, deported, silenced, or abandoned. Fascism has always understood that before it can govern through terror it must first educate people to accept terror as common sense, cruelty as civic virtue, and domination as the natural order of things. It wages war not only against democratic institutions but also against the ethical imagination, historical memory, and social solidarities that make resistance possible.

The greatest ideological triumph of neoliberalism has been persuading people that capitalism and democracy are synonymous. That fiction has become one of the principal obstacles to confronting contemporary fascism. A social order that celebrates billionaires while consigning millions to poverty, debt, racial violence, ecological catastrophe, permanent war, and the slow death of the social state cannot sustain democracy because it destroys the very conditions upon which democratic life depends.

Gangster capitalism does more than generate staggering concentrations of wealth and power. It produces the authoritarian desires, organized fears, racial resentments, and cultures of disposability upon which fascist politics thrives. We inhabit an increasingly delusional social order shaped by the pedagogical force of greed, dehumanization, precarity, corruption, and what the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen calls “the black hole of cruelty.” Cruelty is no longer an aberration or moral failure. It has become a governing principle of gangster capitalism—a political and economic system that turns human beings into disposable objects, rewards domination over solidarity, and transforms violence into spectacle and public policy. The assault on citizenship is one expression of this logic, carrying forward imperial fantasies and a long history of racial terror that remain embedded in the structures of American capitalism.

As Nguyen observes:

“…this is a legacy that extends ‘from the slaughter of Indians to the exploitation, murder, torture, and rape of Black African enslaved peoples… to the demonization of immigrants, the sickening rituals of hunting them down in the streets with masked government enforcers, the lurid punishments of inhuman detention that spur cheers and glee from a significant part of the American people, encouraged by the would-be American Nero and his fawning minions who take pleasure in their taunts and insults.”

The struggle over citizenship cannot be separated from this legacy or from the economic and cultural order that profits from it. To confront fascism, therefore, requires more than defending existing democratic institutions. It demands dismantling the gangster capitalism that breeds state coercion, legitimates disposability, and reduces democracy to a hollow spectacle. The struggle before us is to refuse a system that equates freedom with markets, citizenship with exclusion, and profit with the highest expression of human value. It means building a democratic socialist future rooted in equality, shared responsibility, public goods, ecological justice, and the radical conviction that every life matters.

Against the machinery of gangster capitalism, fascist terror, permanent war, and state violence, democracy must be reclaimed as a way of life grounded in justice, solidarity, and shared power. The choice before us could not be clearer: either we organize collectively to build a society founded on equality, freedom, and democratic responsibility, or we surrender to a social order defined by permanent war, organized abandonment, state terror, and oligarchic rule. Under such conditions, democracy survives only as spectacle while fascism becomes the organizing logic of everyday life. History remains unfinished. Whether it moves toward justice or descends further into barbarism depends upon our willingness to imagine otherwise, organize collectively, overthrow gangster capitalism, and build a democratic socialist society in which freedom, equality, justice, and human dignity become the measure of politics itself.

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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 CounterPunch.org.

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NICK ESTES
JULY 7, 2026

Nothing encapsulates the decline of the American project quite like the optics of its 250th anniversary. While four hundred masked neo-fascists marched through the capitol in navy-blue button-downs and khakis chanting “Reclaim America!”—entirely unchallenged either by police or antifascists—the official Independence Day parade was canceled because of extreme heat. It’s a disturbing vignette for our era. The country is turning far to the right and becoming too hot to even celebrate its own founding myths, reaching temperatures that climate scientists said would have been “virtually impossible” before human-caused climate change.

So who’s to blame for this current mess? Predictably, the political class has no interest in examining the structural decay. In two back-to-back speeches this weekend, President Trump workshopped a new scapegoat: communism. The tone summoned the anger of his 2017 inauguration speech, “American Carnage,” when he blamed open borders and foreign nations for gutting the American Dream, carefully avoiding the corporations that plundered the working class and spoiled the land. But his second term is less focused on hardening borders and more focused on what he calls the “enemy within,” which has included immigrants and anyone potentially critical of U.S. foreign policy, especially the fanatical, bipartisan worship of genocidal Zionism.

Trump has met that “enemy” with violent and deadly force, using the Department of Homeland Security as the main instrument of terror in places like Minnesota. That definition of the enemy has expanded to include antifascism, which he has designated a “domestic terrorist organization,” paving the way for the targeting of any organization or individual supporting actions considered “antifascism,” such as immigrant defense or even the broad set of movements and beliefs under the rubric of “anti-capitalism.” In other words, we’re reaching a moment when it’s illegal to be antifascist.

This rhetorical escalation is no accident; it is a calculated electoral strategy. More and more, as an electoral left movement makes key wins in the lead-up to the November mid-terms, Trump will most likely ratchet up his anti-communist rhetoric, painting even the most rabid, establishment anticommunist Democrats as party to a nefarious communist plot. That has already included targeting more organized formations of the socialist and anti-imperialist left.

Viewed in this light, Trump’s speech last Friday at the so-called Shrine of Democracy was probably his most ironic. Under the shadow of Mount Rushmore, Trump went on a dark tirade naming the enemy as the “communist menace,” a movement made up of “illegal immigrants,” “criminals,” “radicals,” “thieves,” and “lunatics” who “come in and loot [and] pillage our nation.” This isn’t just typical rhetorical theater from one of the world’s greatest confidence men. It is the foundational myth-making required to justify a very real domestic police state.

There is no small irony in those accusations. The very ground beneath the president’s feet is stolen land, and the monument itself is a permanent testament to the exact kind of looting and pillaging he attributes to Marxist agitators.

If you possess even a baseline level of cognitive function and haven’t succumbed to total historical brain rot, Trump’s ultimatum should make you laugh and perhaps cry. He stood beneath the shadow of thieves and men who had looted and pillaged Indigenous land. The shrine had been built at the final destination for what was once known by the Lakotas as the “Thieves Road,” the trail Custer had illegally carved into the Black Hills in 1874 in search of gold. But don’t take my word for it. The Supreme Court declared the ground beneath Trump’s very feet stolen land—that is, pillaged and looted. In fact, it called the settlers and miners who had entered the lands known as He Sapa trespassers, ruling in 1980 that the starvation-driven coercion used to strip the Sioux of the Black Hills was a profound constitutional violation.

The irony is that the only thief present at Mount Rushmore that day was the very country holding the party. Trump’s warnings about a ‘communist menace’ threatening American heritage are just a projection trick—it’s an inversion of reality, where the oppressors have become the oppressed, and the invaders act in self-defense against the very people they have robbed and slaughtered. This projection and inversion is central to the very American identity Trump claims is under attack.

“You can be loyal to Karl Marx or you can be loyal to America,” he said. “You can be a communist or you can be a patriot. You cannot be both.” The ultimatums are spurious but appear to create a loyalty test, forcing a choice between standing with genocidaires and slavers, and their apologists, or with those who tried to overthrow those violent systems of oppression. (I think I know what side we’d all like to be on.)

Those supposedly loyal to the nineteenth-century German political economist spread “lies about our heritage” and “tell our children that we live on stolen land or that our heroes were oppressors.” But one has to wonder about the legacy of Marx as a European when he said of the historical reality of class revolution, “as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendency for the middle class, so the American Antislavery War will do for the working classes.” Or when he described just how the ascendancy of that bourgeoisie was achieved in the first volume of Das Kapital, where he dryly noted that the dawn of capitalist production was “[t]he discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population” of the Americas.

Understanding that modern capitalism required genocide and plunder is, apparently, quite scary. Trump has met rhetoric with action, and we should take note.

In his second term, Trump has waged an all-out assault on his political opponents, primarily those on the left. Specifically, that includes what he laid out in his National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), titled “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence” and signed on September 25, 2025. The directive fully recalibrates post-9/11 counterterrorism objectives to target domestic political speech, organizing, and funding. I wouldn’t say it is the darkest chapter in U.S. history, but we should take serious stock of how easily the post-9/11 security apparatus—originally built to hunt down and kill “terrorists”—has been seamlessly turned inward to criminalize domestic dissent, freeze the bank accounts of progressive non-profits, and treat local antifascist activists like insurgent cells. It has effectively implemented widespread counterinsurgency in the absence of an actual insurgency.

After all, fascism isn’t new to the United States, and it hasn’t historically had to don the mantle of fascism to operate. Whether it was the genocidal blood quantum laws of federal Indian policy or Jim Crow racial segregation, European fascists took much of their inspiration from the colonial and white supremacist legal regimes of their American counterparts when they drafted documents such as the Nuremberg Laws.

And climate crisis aside, it is worth making a controversial point: our present state of affairs is far from the most repressive or authoritarian era the United States has ever seen. I’m not saying it can’t get worse—it could. But it also could turn out another way, if people are willing to fight for an alternative. That’s not to minimize the real and terrible danger of the current moment and the necessity to confront it and build alternatives. Rather, it serves as a baseline for reality. As a student of history and a historical subject myself, it is humbling to read the stories of our ancestors—how they survived genocide through everything from everyday acts of defiance to organized resistance movements that undoubtedly staved off complete annihilation.

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This piece first appeared on Red Scare.

Nick Estes is a citizen of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe. He is a journalist, historian and co-host of the Red Nation Podcast. He is the author of Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance (Verso, 2019).

This version published on CounerPunch.org.

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The con of neoliberalism has gutted our democracy and paved the way for fascism.

CHRIS HEDGES
JUL 03, 2026

Neoliberalism, better understood by its less sanitized term cutthroat capitalism, is the poison that destroyed our democracy. It gave the billionaire class and corporations theideological cover to impoverish the working class, impose crippling austerity, hollow out democratic institutions, buy off our two ruling political parties and deform our courts into appendages of corporations and the rich.

Neoliberalism drove tens of millions of disenfranchised, desperate people into the arms of Christian fascists, who preyed on their despair and sold them the fantasy of magic Jesus. It drove them into the arms of conspiracy theorists and right-wing charlatans. It drove them down the self-destructive rabbit holes of alcoholism and opioid addiction, compulsive gambling, domestic and sexual violence. These were the inevitable consequences of personal stagnation, disempowerment and feelings of worthlessness, frustration and profound despair.

Neoliberalism ignores the cries of its victims. It dismisses their suffering and rage as irrational, ignorant and racist. It neuters liberal reforms, rendering them cosmetic and useless. Liberal apologists for neoliberalism, no longer concerned with economic justice, retreat into boutique activism. They mouth empty slogans about diversity and political correctness while pretending the relentless class war, unleashed globally since the 1970s, does not exist. The victims of neoliberal deindustrialization, 30 million of whom lost their jobs in the U.S. in mass layoffs, understand that the precarity of their existence does not concern their neoliberal masters.

Right-wing pundits and politicians, such as Donald Trump, who issue crude, vulgar and expletive-laden insults against the traditional neoliberal establishment are celebrated by the disenfranchised for exposing the political charade. These demagogues promise moral and economic renewal for the betrayed, albeit grounded in magical thinking.

Neoliberals peddle their own form of magical thinking. Neoliberalism is as absurd and infantile as the Christian Rapture and Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement. Trump lies like he breathes, but so did previous presidents including Joe Biden, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. Trump embraces fantasies, but so did they. Trump, like his Democratic predecessors, enriches himself and his family, although with far more ostentation and greed. He, like them, facilitates the ongoing pillage by the billionaire class. Trump is the fascist iteration of the neoliberal con.

Concentrating wealth in the hands of a global oligarchic elite — the twelve richest billionaires own more wealth than the poorest half of the world — is designed to create massive income inequality and monopoly power. It is the antithesis of democratic equality. It is designed to fuel political extremism and foster social and cultural divisions. It is designed to hollow out democratic institutions. Economic rationality is not the point. David Harvey calls neoliberalism “accumulation by dispossession.”

As a ruling ideology, neoliberalism is a brilliant success. Starting in the 1970s, its Keynesian mainstream critics were marginalized or pushed out of academia, state institutions and financial organizations such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. The same is true of the media. Compliant courtiers and intellectual poseurs such as Milton Friedman or New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman were given prominent platforms and lavish corporate funding. They slavishly disseminated the official mantra of fringe, discredited economic theories popularized by Friedrich Hayek and the third-rate writer Ayn Rand.

Once the country was forced to kneel before the dictates of the marketplace, once government regulations were abolished, once taxes on the rich were slashed, once money was permitted to flow across borders, once unions were crushed and once trade deals were signed that sent jobs to sweatshops in Mexico and China, the world, these poseurs assured us, would be happier, freer and wealthier. It was a scam. But it worked. And it fueled the rival con game of the demagogues and fascists who were vomited up out of the moral and political morass.

The media bears much of the blame. In the name of objectivity, better understood as neutrality, it absented itself from the class war. It did not investigate the mounting abuses of the rich, corporations or its bought-and-paid-for political class. It did not expose the absurdity of neoliberalism. It rendered the victims invisible. By shutting themselves out of the debate, the media, a vital pillar of any democracy, neutered itself. It too became despised.

Individual freedom, which neoliberalism holds up as the highest good, and social justice are not compatible. Social justice, Harvey writes in “A Brief History of Neoliberalism,” requires social solidarity and “a willingness to submerge individual wants, needs, and desires in the cause of some more general struggle for, say, social equality and environmental justice.” Neoliberal rhetoric is able to “split off libertarianism, identity politics, multiculturalism, and eventually narcissistic consumerism from the social forces ranged in pursuit of social justice through the conquest of state power.”

Neoliberalism, as Ece Temelkuran writes in “How to Lose a Country: The 7 Steps From Democracy to Fascism,” exiles morality from public life. It isolates it in the private space of the individual. It corrals it into “the holding pen of religion” while religion is “clipped and cropped into market-friendly ‘spiritualities.’” Justice and mercy are no longer shared concepts. Personal and public morality are severed. How, she asks, “can we convince people not to commit evil in those realms of public life from which law enforcement is absent?”

“Humans,” she writes, “are incapable of functioning and living together without a good story to bind them and keep a certain set of values intact. That’s why the lack of a story in neoliberalism, the lack of meaning and cause, can be unbearable for the human mind. Since humans are forced to live in a state of mild antipathy — an acceptable amount of antipathy that is crucial to the neoliberal system — they are forever in dire need of a cause, a central triangulation point that they can use to orient themselves in relation to what’s good and what’s bad. The ethical vacuum of neoliberalism, its dismissal of the fact that human nature needs meaning and desperately seeks reasons to live, creates fertile ground for the invention of causes, and sometimes the most groundless or shallowest ones.”

Karl Polanyi in “The Great Transformation” distinguishes between bad freedoms and good freedoms. Bad freedoms are sacrosanct under neoliberalism. They permit the powerful to exploit workers and the natural world until exhaustion or collapse. Pharmaceutical and health care corporations, for example, jeopardize the lives of those who cannot afford their exorbitant prices. The fossil fuel industry is driving us towards extinction.

Good freedoms — freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, freedom of meeting, freedom of association, freedom to choose one’s job — are snuffed out by bad freedoms. The freedom of the many is transformed into the freedom of the few. The result is fascism.

Fascism uses the blunt instruments of fear, intimidation and violence to curb the mounting disquiet. It divides the country into warring factions — the patriots vs. the enemies of the state. It obliterates shared values. It champions the cruelty of hypermasculinity. Those who dissent are branded domestic terrorists. Civil liberties are abolished in the name of national security.

The 30- to 100-year sentences meted out to eight anti-ICE protesters in Texas, who were portrayed in court as an “antifa terror cell,” are being normalized. A ninth defendant, David Rolando Sanchez Estrada, was not present at the protest, but was sentenced to 30 years after being convicted of concealing documents when he moved a box of political zines and other materials. A second group of defendants in the broader Prairieland case were sentenced on July 1. Six who accepted plea agreements received prison terms ranging from nearly two years to 15 years, while Ines Soto, who rejected a plea agreement and went to trial, received 50 years.

The equation of civil disobedience with terrorism is routine in countries such as Turkey, Russia and India. It is being cemented into place in Europe. A British judge, in a ruling that mirrors what took place in Texas, recently sentenced four members of Palestine Action as terrorists, sending them to prison for five to nine years, even though they were neither charged nor convicted of terrorism offenses.

It does not matter if Donald Trump, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Narendra Modi, Vladimir Putin or Nigel Farage disappear. The tens in of millions of people “fired up by their message will still be there, and will still be ready to act upon the orders of a similar figure,” Temelkuran writes. “And unfortunately, as we experienced in Turkey in a very destructive way, even if you are determined to stay away from the world of politics, the minions will find you, even in your own personal space, armed with their own set of values and ready to hunt down anybody who doesn’t resemble themselves.”

Our country, as we once knew it, no longer exists. It was methodically destroyed by neoliberal con artists. The institutions and legal protections that once shielded us from tyranny no longer function. Those who champion an open society are orphans, smeared as traitors, excoriated as the “radical left.” I mourn what we have lost. I mourn what we are about to lose. This social isolation will soon be physical isolation. We will be criminalized or driven into exile.

Trump and his fascistic cabal, epitomized by billionaires such as Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, are constructing a mafia state. A nation of gangsters and marks. A nation where they alone have unlimited freedom to pillage and exploit. A nation where the government is privatized. A nation where we are enslaved to corporate technology. A nation where we have no place.

We must name our enemies this Fourth of July. They are the fascists who have seized power. And they are those who, selling us the con of neoliberalism, put them there.

First published on The Chris Hedges Report.

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