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.

---

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.

SEPTEMBER 26, 2025

HENRY GIROUX

---

Historically, the most terrible things war, genocide, and slavery have resulted not from disobedience, but from obedience.

– Howard Zinn

The irony is unbearable. Trump has saturated public life in lies, turned immigrants and Black citizens into targets of contempt, and made corruption and violence the grammar of governance. He pledges loyalty to dictators, surrounds himself with sycophants and thugs, and uses state power to abduct foreign students, persecute immigrants, and declare war on the so-called left, grotesquely blaming them for Charlie Kirk’s death, even before a suspect was arrested. What should be a moment of grief over Charlie Kirk’s death has been twisted into a weaponized spectacle, with Trump and his allies rushing to frame the assassination as proof of leftist extremism.

As Jeffrey St. Clair observed, “Leaders of the Right didn’t waste much time counseling their ranks to restrict themselves to ‘thoughts and prayers’ over the murder of Charlie Kirk. Even before the assassin had been identified or a motive uncovered, they blamed the ‘violent rhetoric’ of the Left for Kirk’s death.” This is not mourning, it is the oldest trick in the authoritarian playbook: accuse first, investigate never, weaponize tragedy to consolidate power.

In this poisonous narrative, the real “enemies within” are not the racists, insurrectionists, corrupt corporations, and right-wing extremists who stormed the Capitol, but the critics of authoritarian power as well as groups designated as “other.” Against them, Trump and his allies wage war on the First Amendment, turning freedom of speech from a cornerstone of democracy into its target. In their framing, freedom of speech is recast not as a bulwark of democracy but as its enemy. 

From comedians and journalists to students, educators, and independent groups, every dissenting voice is branded a conspirator in imagined crimes–their real offense nothing more than speaking against cruelty when silence was demanded. Or committing the crime of not being loyal enough to Donald Trump. As Hannah Arendt once warned, under totalitarianism thinking itself becomes dangerous. Authoritarianism in its many forms arises in part from the failure to think—a prescient warning in the age of manufactured ignorance. The normalization of ignorance, thoughtlessness, and moral blindness in the age of Trump is foundational to creating fascist subjects who cannot tell right from wrong, truth from lies, or justice from evil.

This warning is even more urgent today, for there is a horrifying ignorance in Trump that unleashes predatory passions, stretching from his embrace of war criminals and historical amnesia to the fatal strikes he ordered on three alleged drug-smuggling vessels. For Trump, the legality of such acts is irrelevant.  Violence coupled with criminalizing dissent is central to the logic of annihilation at the core of fascist politics.

This is fascism’s signature maneuver. Hitler did it in 1933 after the Reichstag fire, blaming communists and invoking emergency powers to suspend civil liberties. Mussolini did it in 1925 after the assassination of Giacomo Matteotti, turning a moment of crisis into a justification for outlawing opposition and silencing presses.  Orbán has perfected the tactic in Hungary, scapegoating “Soros-funded leftists” to dismantle universities, criminalize protest, and eviscerate the press.

Trump is no exception. He exploits Kirk’s death not to grieve but to consolidate power. His message is blunt: dissent is violence, criticism is terrorism, disloyalty is a crime, and free speech itself is a threat to Trump’s ideological panopticon. The vicious amplification of this line of toxic thinking is evident in Elon Musk declaring “The Left is the party of murder,” and Trump’s consigliere Laura Loomer demanding the state “shut down, defund, and prosecute every single Leftist organization…The Left is a national security threat.” It reaches hysterical heights in the anti-communist rhetoric of Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, who has likened the left to a “vast domestic terrorist network,” which he vowed to uproot and dismantle. The rhetoric is chilling not only for its cruelty but for its naked embrace of repression and the threat of violence as policy.

The consequences of Trump’s assault on dissent flare like a blazing neon sign in Times Square, impossible to ignore. Under his lawless reign, even satire is recast as treason, branded a ‘hate crime,’ as though laughter itself had become treason. Academic institutions that keep alive the memory of history and the struggles for freedom are stalked with mob-like threats, extortion masquerading as patriotism, intimidation parading as loyalty.  Canadian citizens are being threatened with visa revocation simply for making what Marco Rubio, Stephen Miller, Pam Bondi, and others defined as critical comments about Kirk’s death. This sends a chilling message: Trump’s authoritarian reach now crosses borders, extending its silencing power beyond U.S. soil. In this twisted logic, simply making a critical remark about Kirk is branded as a ‘celebration’– a perverse distortion far removed from reality. Kirk’s death should be mourned, but that is distinct from condemning his far-right ideological beliefs.

These acts of silencing are never isolated. They are instruments of power that legitimate broader forms of state violence. Censorship, propaganda, and the glorification of cruelty converge to normalize repression as both necessary and inevitable. Corporations and universities bow in fear and greed, sacrificing every shred of public responsibility to feed an unending hunger for power and capital. Nowhere is this surrender more shameful than in higher education, where universities crush dissent and betray their own students by handing over the names of those protesting genocide to the Trump administration. tragically repeating the cowardice of fascist-era campuses. Even worse, Ken Klippenstein reports that the Trump administration is preparing to designate transgender people as ‘violent extremists’ in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder and are considering compiling a watchlist of Trans people. 

These acts of silencing are never isolated. They are instruments of power that legitimate broader forms of state violence. Censorship, propaganda, and the glorification of cruelty converge to normalize repression as both necessary and inevitable. Corporations and universities bow in fear and greed, sacrificing every shred of public responsibility to feed an unending hunger for power and capital. Nowhere is this surrender more shameful than in higher education, where universities crush dissent and betray their own students by handing over the names of those protesting genocide to the Trump administration. tragically repeating the cowardice of fascist-era campuses. Even worse, Ken Klippenstein reports that “the Trump administration is preparing to designate transgender people as ‘violent extremists’ in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder and are considering compiling a watchlist of Trans people. 

It is a chilling echo of fascist-era complicities, a moral collapse disguised as institutional neutrality. The echo is haunting and has given rise to a new McCarthyism of campus informants, a reprise of the shameful complicities of fascist-era universities. As journalist David French argued on MSNBC’s All In with Chris Hayes show, the current attacks on free speech and dissidents critical of Trump are worse than McCarthyism, because it is “larger and broader in scope. It is more aggressive. It stretches across all  aspects of American society.” This is not merely an institutional failure but a moral collapse, a repudiation of knowledge, conscience, and the very democratic commitments that should define the purpose of the academy. What we are witnessing is McCarthyism reborn with a vengeance–surveillance, informants, blacklists.  Higher education has long unsettled the right, especially since the democratizing struggles of the sixties. Today that fear has hardened into something darker: not merely efforts to weaken its critical role, but the imposition of pedagogical tyranny that turns universities into laboratories of indoctrination.

Trump, Rubio, Miller, Bondi, and their cohort of democracy-haters now threaten to strip dissenting Americans of their passports, revoke citizenship, and criminalize free speech. They howl in outrage at being compared to fascists, even as their actions mirror the same grim playbook: militarizing society, crushing dissent, concentrating power in the hands of a cult leader, and reanimating the legacy of white supremacy and racial cleansing.

Trump hails Netanyahu, a war criminal, as a war hero. With grotesque irony, he denounces the left as the true perpetrators of violence. At home, his vindictiveness is just as corrosive: boasting of pressuring ABC to fire Jimmy Kimmel. This petty act of vengeance amounts to his own assault on the First Amendment and is a chilling reminder of how fragile free speech becomes under authoritarian whim. Yet no alarm is sounded when Fox News host Brian Kilmeade casually suggests exterminating the homeless through “involuntary lethal injections.” Nor does outrage rise in the Trump administration, or much of the mainstream press, over the United States’ complicity in Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, where, as the Quds News Network reports, “At least 19,424 children have been killed in Israeli attacks over 700 days of genocide in Gaza, the equivalent of one child every 52 minutes. Among the victims are 1,000 infants under the age of one.”

Silence here is not neutrality; it is complicity in barbarism.

When the conduct of comedians is criminalized, it is not simply a matter of taste, decorum, or even misplaced moral outrage, it is a direct assault on the principle of free speech. Comedy has always served as a space where hypocrisy is unmasked, abuses of power are ridiculed, and the absurdities of authoritarian politics are laid bare. In fact, when Vladimir Putin first came to power in 2000, one of the early targets of his cultural crackdown was the satirical television show “Kukly” (Куклы, meaning dolls), a puppet show produced by the independent channel NTV. Apparently being called the little Tsar puppet was too much for him to tolerate. This ruthless act of censorship was widely seen as a watershed moment in Putin’s consolidation of power. Of course, the real issue here is that to police or punish comedians for doing what they do is to signal that the state now seeks to control even the spaces of laughter and irony.

This criminalization is more than censorship; it is a canary in the coal mine for gauging the advance of fascism. When jokes are reclassified as crimes, the warning could not be clearer: what begins with comedians will not end with them. It marks the testing of boundaries, the normalization of repression, and the silencing of one of the oldest and most effective forms of dissent. The move reveals the fragility of regimes that cannot tolerate critique, no matter how playful or irreverent, and it signifies a broader project to narrow public space until only official voices remain.

In this sense, the attack on comedy should not be dismissed as a trivial or secondary issue. It is a symbolic and practical escalation of authoritarian politics, one that exposes the contempt fascist movements hold for humor, irony, and dissenting speech. If laughter is made a crime, then resistance itself is already under indictment. Repressing dissent has a long history in the U.S extending from the Red Scare of the 1920s to the domestic repression that followed Bush’s war on terrorism. Today’s attacks on dissent are more widespread, damaging, and unchecked than much of what we have seen in the past. To borrow a phrase from Terry Eagleton, Trump and his MAGA stooges are drunk “on fantasies of omnipotence” and revel in acts of violence, destruction, and the exercise of boundless state power.

The parallels with fascist history could not be more ominous. The Reichstag fire decree suspended civil liberties and imprisoned communists; today, Trump declares dissent worthy of censorship and if Pam Bondi is to be taken at face value will be labeled as hate speech and subject to state repression. Benito Mussolini used  Giacomo Matteotti’s assassination to further consolidate his own power; today, Trump uses Kirk’s death to silence students, educators, and journalists. Orbán dismantled Hungary’s free press and universities by conjuring enemies; today, Trump and Miller invoke “the radical left” as an existential threat. 

Violence in America’s militarized streets now fuses with what John Ganz calls a “sanctimonious hue and cry … over the martyred dead, hysteria is whipped up about terrorism and public disorder [and] the power of the state is brought to bear against public figures who oppose and criticize the regime.” Fear has become the regime’s preferred weapon, wielded alongside a politics of erasure, historical amnesia, and ruthless denial.

Jeffrey St. Clair noted with grim precision that Kirk’s killing is “awful, disgusting and about as American as it gets”, but the hypocrisy lies in Trump’s silence after earlier acts of MAGA violence:

“When two Democratic legislators and their spouses were assassinated by a Trump supporter in Minnesota a few weeks ago, Trump said nothing. Nada. Zilch.”

Violence committed by the Right elicits no outrage, but a single death weaponized against the Left becomes the justification for a war on dissent. As St. Clair recounts, the ledger of right-wing violence between 2018 and 2025 reads like a requiem: the assault on CDC headquarters, the murder of Officer David Rose, the plot to seize Governor Gretchen Whitmer, the massacre of 23 souls in an El Paso Walmart, and the slaughter of 11 worshippers at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue. Every act carried the rhythm of cruelty; every atrocity struck like a warning written in fire and blood.

In spite of the nefarious claims by Trump, Miller, Bondi, and other officials that the left bears responsibility for Charlie Kirk’s death, the facts tell a different story. NBC News reports that –

“the federal investigation into the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk has yet to find a link between the alleged shooter, 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, and left-wing groups on which President Donald Trump and his administration have pledged to crack down.”

The Trump regime refuses to acknowledge this, erasing evidence and fabricating a narrative designed to demonize its critics. This distortion follows a familiar historical pattern, yet what the Trump administration refuses to admit and desperately hide is that, according to the Anti-Defamation League, “since 2002, right-wing ideologies have fueled more than 70% of all extremist attacks and domestic terrorism plots in the United States.”

This is not simply denial but calculated deceit. By inverting reality, blaming dissenters for the violence overwhelmingly fueled by their own ideological allies, the Trump administration wages war on truth itself, weaponizing lies to justify repression. This is the oldest tool of authoritarianism; a script lifted from the fascist playbook in which regimes fabricate internal enemies to mask their own violence.

This is the machinery of fascism: scapegoating, historical amnesia, and the fabrication of a “threat within” to mobilize fear and erase accountability. To remain silent in the face of such lies is to allow history’s darkest patterns to repeat. The ominous rattling of boxcars is no longer mere metaphor; it is rehearsal. The same trains that once ferried enemies of the state, Jews, communists, Roma, and others- to concentration camps echo in today’s discourse of surveillance, detention, and deportation. These echoes abroad make the danger at home impossible to ignore. The first targets are always the vulnerable, immigrants, refugees, students, and the homeless. But the machinery of repression, once primed, sweeps wider. What begins at the margins always moves to the center.

First the masked thugs of state-sponsored terror descended on immigrants, then on student protesters; they occupied neighborhoods, turned cities into militarized staging grounds, and normalized violence as the language of lawless rule. Now the machinery of repression is tightening its grip, moving ever closer to ordinary citizens. A shadow from an authoritarian past has fallen across the republic, and unless it is confronted, the future will echo the grim theaters of repression already unfolding in Hungary, India, and Argentina. 

In all these countries including the United States, leaders of the new fascism speak with vomit in their mouths and blood on their hands. They share a language that Toni Morrison calls “a dead language” .  It is an “oppressive language that does more than represent violence; it is violence”.  Trump and his minions traffic in a repressive language infused with power, censored and censoring. Ruthless in its policing duties, it has no desire or purpose other than maintaining the free range of its own narcotic narcissism, its own exclusivity and dominance. It offers mass spectacles, a moral somnambulance, and a psychotic infatuation for those who seek refuge in unchecked power. It forges a community built on greed, corruption, and hate, steeped in a scandal of hollow fulfillment.

 In the current historical moment ripe with a politics wedded to revenge, systemic racism, and the building of a police state, language is weaponized, functioning as a powerful force for manufactured ignorance. The Trump administration turns grief into a rallying cry for repression. The radical imagination is now doused in conspiracy theories and civic ignorance. A hollow politics of cruelty now finds its match in the ruthlessness of state terrorism. At home, Trump and his political hacks imagine themselves as victims while they spread violence, misery, cruelty, and moral decay both at home and abroad. The stakes could not be clearer: silence is complicity, and to speak, to talk back, and to engage in non-violent action is now the most urgent precondition for building powerful modes of collective resistance. The lights are going out fast, but there is still time to make justice, equality, and freedom the foundation for a radical democracy.  Resistance is no longer optional but the urgent political and moral task of our time. 

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,

 

Edward Said’s Pedagogy of Wakefulness in an Age of Educational Repression

HENRY GIROUX
JUNE 27, 2025

---

The War at Home—State Terrorism on Full Display.

Across the globe, we are living in a moment of profound crisis where the very essence of education as a democratic institution is under attack. In the United States, the assault on higher education is part of a broader war waged by authoritarian forces aiming to dismantle the pillars of not only academic freedom, dissent, and human rights, but also the essential foundations of democracy itself. Universities are no longer seen as spaces of intellectual freedom and critical inquiry but as battlegrounds for ideological control. Campus protests are met with police brutality; students are abducted for their political views, and those who dare to speak out against the prevailing orthodoxy face expulsion, censorship, and criminalization. Trump’s administration has fueled this campaign, not only targeting academic freedom but also pushing policies that criminalize dissent, especially when it comes to movements like those advocating for Palestinian liberation. The erosion of civil liberties extends to international students protesting in solidarity with Gaza, with threats of deportation looming over them. The chilling message is clear: higher education is no longer a sanctuary for free thought; it is a field of repression where the rule of authoritarianism dominates.

State terrorism at home targets those who dare to engage in the dangerous practice of critical thinking and the courageous act of holding power accountable. It is a violent apparatus that imposes terror on all who are deemed “other”—immigrants, Black people, trans people, brown people, campus protesters, and anyone who refuses to conform to the narrow, racist vision articulated by Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff. He is notorious for his white nationalist views, has become a central figure in shaping the Trump administration’s policies. At a Trump rally in Madison Square Garden, he boldly declared that “America is for Americans and Americans only,” a mantra that echoed the Nazi slogan, “Germany for Germans only.”  As Robert Tait reports in The Guardian, Tara Setmayer, a former Republican communications director on Capitol Hill, warns that his rise is a direct threat, as he now wields the power of the federal government to impose his fascist worldview.

Setmayer, who now leads the women-led political action committee Seneca Project, explains that his vision has been fully embraced as a core political strategy under Trump. “That view has now been transformed into the main political policy and aim of Donald Trump’s presidency,” she states. The demagoguery surrounding immigration has always been at the heart of Trump’s political ascent. With Miller’s goal to make America whiter and less diverse now backed by the unchecked power of the presidency, Setmayerwarns that this combination is not just dangerous, it poses a grave threat to American values and the rule of law itself.

Under the Trump rule, state terrorism is not confined to domestic borders; it extends its reach through reckless, international aggression. Trump’s administration is waging war not just within the U.S., but abroad, with flagrant violations of international law. His unprovoked aggression against Iran, coupled with his unwavering support for Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza and its unthinkable war on children, exemplifies the regime’s disregard for global norms and human rights. Beyond the Middle East, Trump’s regime seeks to impose its will through threats, tariffs, and naked displays of power. His brutal crackdown on immigration, the transformation of I.C.E. into a Gestapo-like force, and the relentless narrowing of who is permitted entry into the U.S. expose his deeper authoritarian impulses. In this vision, the international community becomes little more than a pawn in his relentless pursuit of geopolitical dominance.

Trump’s disdain for allies and international cooperation reached alarming heights, exemplified by his call to attack Panama, annex Canada, and seize Greenland. These wild, imperialistic notions reflect  a deeply rooted belief that America’s might should dominate the global stage, with little regard for diplomacy or the sovereignty of other nations. In Trump’s worldview, global relations are defined by the logic of conquest and dominance, where the violence of state terror is justified by the expansion of America’s influence and control. This is a regime that knows no limits, expanding its machinery of  fear and violence, both at home and across the globe, in a sustained assault on humanity, justice, and the most basic principles of international law.

The Scourge of Neoliberalism.

The ongoing assaults on democracy, both domestically and globally, are not isolated events but part of the groundwork laid by gangster capitalism for the rise of fascism in American society. Central to this process is the transformation of the university from a public good to a privatized institution, where students are seen as human capital, courses are dictated by consumer demand, and more recently the curricula is whitewashed and filled with far-right propaganda, often  under the cover of implementing patriotic education, cleansed of antisemitism. Under the market-driven logic of neoliberalism, universities have become spaces that prioritize economic outputs over intellectual autonomy, turning critical thought and democratic engagement into commodities. This shift has undermined the university’s role as a crucible for challenging the status quo, replacing it with a system of training rather than fostering a culture of critical learning, dialogue, and informed judgment.

As neoliberal policies encourage privatization, restrict access, and force institutions into service to corporate interests, the university is no longer seen as a public trust. It has become a tool for ideological indoctrination, training citizens to uphold the status quo rather than challenge it. This transformation, in part, is a direct response to the democratization of the university that reached its peak in the 1960s, with intellectuals, campus protesters, and marginalized communities seeking to broaden the educational mission. The assault on higher education as a site of critique and democratization has intensified over the last four decades with the rise of the far-right, with broader implications that include intellectuals, minority students, and critical formative cultures essential to the foundation of a substantive democracy.

As the South African Nobel Prize winner in literature, JM Coetzee,  points out in a different  context, the reactionary hedge-fund billionaires “reconceive of themselves as managers of national economies” who want to turn  universities into training schools equipping young people with the skills required by a modern economy.”  Coetzee’s words are even more relevant today, given that  this attack on higher education, which is both ideological and increasingly dependent on the militaristic arm of the state, reflects a broader attempt to eliminate the university’s critical function. Rather than serving the public good, the university is increasingly framed as a private investment, or an arm of state repression, where its governance mirrors  the merging of the exploitative practices of corporate models, such as Walmart’s labor relations and the governing principles of fascism. In the spirit of this concern, Coetzee advocates for the defense of education as an institution dedicated to cultivating intellectual insight, civic responsibility, social justice, and critical thinking.

The questions we must ask at this crucial moment in American history are not about how the university can serve market interests or the authoritarian ideologies of the Trump regime, but how it can reclaim its role as a democratic public sphere. How might we redefine the university to safeguard the interests of young people amidst rising violence, war, anti-intellectualism, authoritarianism, and environmental collapse? As Zygmunt Bauman and Leonidas Donskis astutely point out, “How will we form the next generation of intellectuals and politicians if young people will never have an opportunity to experience what a non-vulgar, non-pragmatic, non-instrumentalized university is like?” In this spirit, we must recognize how larger economic, social, and cultural forces threaten the very idea of education, especially higher education, at a time when defending it as a space for critique, democracy, and justice has never been more urgent. Moreover any defense of the university as a public good demands an alliance of diverse groups willing to recognize that the fight for higher education cannot be separated from the wider struggle for a socialist democracy. The threats being waged against higher education are also a threat to the nation, a culture of informed citizens, and how we think about agency and its fundamental obligations to democracy itself.

At the same time, as neoliberalism faces a profound legitimacy crisis, failing to deliver on its promises of prosperity and social mobility, it increasingly resorts to fascist rhetoric. This rhetoric scapegoats Black communities, immigrants, and dissenting students, blaming them for the deepening crises plaguing America. In doing so, neoliberalism shifts blame while reinforcing a narrative that justifies authoritarian measures, further marginalizing those already oppressed. As this rhetoric spreads, the very institutions meant to foster critical engagement—like the university—are further corrupted, their original role of challenging the status quo replaced with one of reinforcing the existing power structures.

Edward Said’s Pedagogy of Wakefulness -Dreaming the Impossible.

It is within this oppressive context that Edward Said’s work gains renewed relevance, offering the crucial pedagogical framework for resisting authoritarianism and reclaiming higher education as a site of resistance. In opposition to the debased view of educational engagement promoted by the neoliberal agenda and far-right politicians, Said championed what I label as the “pedagogy of wakefulness.” This pedagogy emphasizes the need for intellectuals to remain vigilant, awake to the realities of power, work with an array of social movement, and actively engaged in resisting systems of oppression. Said’s pedagogy demands that education be used as a vehicle for social change, not simply as a means of economic productivity or ideological conformity. Moreover, he argued that cultural workers and all manners of engaged intellectuals work in a variety of sites and on different platforms in  order to address the public in a language that was rigorous, accessible, and comprehensive in its ability to connect a variety  of issues.

In defining Said’s pedagogy of wakefulness, I am reminded of a deeply personal passage from his memoir, Out of Place, where he reflects on the final months of his mother’s life in a New York hospital. Struggling with the ravaging effects of cancer, his mother asked him, “Help me to sleep, Edward.” This poignant moment becomes a gateway for Said’s meditation on sleep and consciousness, which he links to his broader philosophy of intellectual engagement. Said’s meditation moves between the existential and the insurgent, between private pain and worldly commitment, between the seductions of a “solid self” and the reality of a contradictory, questioning, restless, and at times, uneasy sense of identity. The beauty and poignancy of his moving commentary is worth quoting at length:

‘Help me to sleep, Edward,’ she once said to me with a piteous trembling in her voice that I can still hear as I write. But then the disease spread into her brain—and for the last six weeks she slept all the time—my own inability to sleep may be her last legacy to me, a counter to her struggle for sleep. For me sleep is something to be gotten over as quickly as possible. I can only go to bed very late, but I am literally up at dawn. Like her I don’t possess the secret of long sleep, though unlike her I have reached the point where I do not want it. For me, sleep is death, as is any diminishment in awareness. ..Sleeplessness for me is a cherished state to be desired at almost any cost; there is nothing for me as invigorating as immediately shedding the shadowy half-consciousness of a night’s loss than the early morning, reacquainting myself with or resuming what I might have lost completely a few hours earlier….A form of freedom, I like to think, even if I am far from being totally convinced that it is. That skepticism too is one of the themes I particularly want to hold on to. With so many dissonances in my life I have learned actually to prefer being not quite right and out of place.”

Said’s reflection here is more than a personal meditation; This passage becomes a powerful metaphor for Said’s pedagogy of wakefulness. It is a call to remain in constant motion—intellectually, politically, and socially. The metaphor of sleeplessness, for Said, embodies a refusal to succumb to the seductions of conformity or passive consumption. This state of “wakefulness” requires intellectual vigilance, a refusal to settle for easy answers or unchallenged ideologies. It speaks to the necessity of embracing discomfort, of being “not quite right and out of place,” as Said himself puts it. In this intellectual space of uncertainty, a new, critical sense of identity can emerge—one that is always questioning, always in motion.

For Said, intellectuals–those who are alive to thinking critically and acting bravely–must engage critically with the world, confronting its injustices and inequalities, and using their positions to challenge power. His pedagogy insists that education is not merely about transmitting knowledge but about awakening students to the complexities of the world. It demands that we lift complex ideas into public discourse, recognizing human suffering and injustice both inside and outside the academy, and using theory as a tool for critique and change.

This pedagogy is particularly urgent in the context of the current Trump regime, where the state has weaponized ignorance and repression, seeking to silence dissent and erase marginalized histories. Said’s pedagogy of wakefulness provides a framework for resisting this intellectual and cultural erasure; what Marina Warner in a different context called “the new brutalism in academia.” By embracing Said’s vision, educators can transform their classrooms into spaces of radical engagement—spaces where students are encouraged not only to critique but to act, to connect their private struggles to the larger social issues that shape their world. This is particularly relevant in the fight for Palestinian liberation, where Said’s work has long offered a framework for resisting colonial violence and challenging the narratives that justify oppression.

In a time of rising civic cowardice in the mainstream media, elite education institutions, and cravenly law firms, hiding behind appeals to balance and objectivity makes it difficult for educators, journalists, public servants, and media pundits to recognize that being committed to something does not cancel out what C. Wright Mills once called hard thinking. More specifically, Mills argued “that  social analysis could be probing, tough-minded, critical, relevant and scholarly, that ideas need not be handled as undertakers handle bodies, with care but without passion, that commitment need not be dogmatic, and that radicalism need not be a substitute for hard thinking.”  Building on Said’s pedagogy of wakefulness “hard thinking” points to a pedagogy that needs to be rigorous, self-reflective, and committed not to the dead zone of instrumental rationality or the abyss of indoctrination, but what  Gayatri Spivak calls “the practice of freedom,” to a critical sensibility capable of advancing the parameters of knowledge, addressing crucial social issues, and connecting private troubles and public issues.

The Role of Culture in Pedagogy: A Call for Resistance.

 In my own work, I have long argued that culture plays a crucial role in shaping the civic consciousness necessary for resistance. Culture is not merely a passive reflection of society; it is a dynamic force that shapes our understanding of the world and our place within it. In an era where neoliberalism and fascism are increasingly intertwined, culture becomes a vital space for alternative narratives to take root. It is crucial to acknowledge that culture has become a tool for authoritarian regimes to control public consciousness, suppress dissent, and maintain the status quo. However, it remains one of the few spaces where resistance can also flourish.

Said’s pedagogy of wakefulness offers a critical lens through which to view the role of culture in education. It calls on educators to resist the commodification and militarization of culture and instead cultivate a pedagogy that is engaged, critical, and rooted in the politics of resistance. This is not simply an intellectual exercise in critical thinking or a new found attentiveness about the rise of fascist politics,  but a call to arms—an invitation to create a culture of resistance within the university and other cultural apparatuses, that equips students and the broader public with the tools to challenge the growing tide of authoritarianism.

This cultural resistance must be grounded in the belief that education is a public good, a space where the radical potential for social change can be realized, anti-capitalist values can be challenged, and the groundwork can be laid for mass resistance to an America marked by what the late Mike Davis, cited in Capitalist Realism, called “an era in which there is a super saturation of corruption, cruelty, and violence…. fails any longer to outrage or even interest.” Universities must reject the neoliberal redefinition of education as a commodity and instead embrace the idea that education is a moral and political practice, one that is central to the health of democracy. As Said argued, intellectuals and educators have a responsibility to bear witness to human suffering, to challenge power, and to use their positions to promote justice. In doing so, they can help reclaim education as a space for imagination, resistance, and liberation.

Conclusion.

The current assault on higher education is not just an attack on academic institutions but on the very idea of humanity, thinking, and democracy itself. As universities become increasingly corporatized and ideologically colonized, we must resist the neoliberal and fascist forces that seek to transform education into a tool of indoctrination. Edward Said’s pedagogy of wakefulness provides a vital framework for this resistance, offering a vision of education that is both critical and politically engaged. By embracing this pedagogy, educators can help transform the university from a site of ideological compliance into a space where students are empowered to resist, imagine, and fight for a more just and democratic world. The struggle to reclaim education as a democratic force will determine not only the future of the university but the future of democracy itself.

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.

HENRY GIROUX
APRIL 11, 2025

We live in an age when disappearance is no longer a metaphor. It is both a threat and a governing principle. Under the Trump regime, language is no longer a prelude to violence—it is its echo, its announcement, its choreography. The rhetoric of erasure has been sharpened into policy, and policy has become the staging ground for an unfolding theater of cruelty. Immigrants, dissidents, students, institutions, and even sovereign nations are now targets of an authoritarian imagination that seeks not merely to silence but to unmake. What once lived in the realm of the unspeakable now materializes in the architecture of state violence, abduction, deportation, and political terror.

Dissent, once the lifeblood of democracy, is now branded as terrorism. The protester is no longer a citizen with a voice but a suspect under surveillance, a body to be silenced, imprisoned, or vanished—sometimes in distant nations where autocrats echo Trump’s contempt for law and human rights. Under the creeping shadow of authoritarianism, a student with a green card becomes a threat, a journalist is branded a traitor, entire immigrant populations of color are  viewed as a threat to national security and rendered disposable. Atrocities—such as the relentless bombardment and starvation of Palestinian women and children—vanish from mainstream coverage, their suffering lost in the machinery of genocide and indifference. In a culture fragmented into a thousand soundbites, social responsibility holds no market value; it evaporates in the toxic air of manufactured ignorance, hate, and despair. The moral compass of American society spins wildly, as cruelty becomes normalized, and conscience is silenced in the name of security, profit, and power.

When Stephen Miller stood before a cheering crowd at Madison Square Garden on October 27, 2024, and declared that “America is for Americans and Americans only,” he was not merely indulging in a grotesque strain of ultra-nationalism—he was resurrecting the death-scented language of racial purity. His words, echoing the rhetoric of Hitler, did more than exclude immigrants; they targeted the very idea of shared humanity. The message was clear: not only Black and Latino immigrants, but anyone who defends their dignity and rights, belongs outside the nation’s moral and political borders. The crowd roared in approval as Miller gave voice to Trump’s own warning—that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country”—signaling the full return of a fascist logic in which citizenship is no longer a democratic right but a racialized weapon. In this worldview, those who do not conform—by birth, by belief, or by the color of their skin—are marked for removal, erasure, or expulsion.

We are now living through a globalized necropolitics in which the meaning of “citizen,” once tethered to democratic representation and civic belonging, has been hollowed out. What remains is a brutal calculus of disposability, a politics of unbeing. Entire populations are thrust into a liminal space, a state of enforced invisibility. As Achille Mbembe warns, “vast populations are subject to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead”—ghosts in plain sight, denied recognition until they disrupt, at which point they are declared pathological or dangerous, and swiftly cast out. In a corporate-controlled media landscape saturated with spectacle, education has been hollowed out and repurposed as a pedagogy of unreason—a toxic bullhorn for glorifying war, normalizing cruelty, and disseminating the lies, racial fantasies, and authoritarian dreams that sustain fascist ideology.

This assault on critical consciousness doesn’t just distort reality—it dismembers the very frameworks of belonging, paving the way for what Zygmunt Bauman calls “social homelessness”—a condition in which people are not simply unhoused but stripped of the very social and political structures that confer existence. This is the logic of neoliberal fascism, where the free market is sacrosanct, but the poor, the sick, the elderly, and the racialized are disposable. In this wasteland of abandonment, exclusion is terminal. Protection is denied, rights are withdrawn, and existence itself is rendered conditional.

But what is most chilling is that it is not just bodies that disappear. What vanishes in this discourse is memory, truth, solidarity, and the possibility of justice. Trump’s authoritarian grammar of erasure now extends even to entire nations. His fantastical threats to annex Greenland, Canada, or Panama are not the ravings of a deluded mind—they are ideological gestures toward empire, conquest, and the disappearance of sovereignty itself. What begins as ideological erasure—of history, borders, and human worth—inevitably manifests in real-world violence, where bodies are seized, visas are revoked, and lives discarded with bureaucratic precision.

The abductions of Mahmoud Khalil and Rumeysa Ozturk by plainclothes agents of the state mark a terrifying threshold in the unfolding drama of American authoritarianism. These acts were not isolated law enforcement errors but political kidnappings, signaling that fascism in the United States is no longer a creeping threat—it is a reality. These young scholars, legal U.S. residents, were seized, denied due process, and imprisoned in remote detention centers for nothing more than their dissent against the Israeli-American genocide in Gaza. And many more were to follow. This is the new state terror: bureaucratically sanitized, legally justified, and ideologically ruthless.

To call these abductions “acts of state terror” is to recognize the intent behind them—not just the physical violence or legal abuses, but the psychological and political message they send. As in fascist regimes of the past, the disappearances are not meant solely to silence the individuals targeted. They are warnings to the rest of us: dissent will be punished, protest will be surveilled, and critique will be criminalized. The invocation of “support for terrorism” without evidence, and the convenient deployment of national security rhetoric, is eerily reminiscent of the Nazi regime’s use of “protective custody” and “public order” to justify mass arrests and detentions.

What allows this to happen—especially in elite spaces like Columbia University—is not simply external pressure from the state, but the internal corrosion of governance within higher education itself. Universities, once regarded as citadels of critical thought, have increasingly capitulated to political expediency, financial pressures, and market logics. They have surrendered to the seductions and rewards of neoliberalism and now function as craven adjuncts of a state captured by billionaires and ideological extremists. Institutions like Columbia and Harvard, by prioritizing corporate donations, federal contracts, and their own reputational security over academic freedom and human rights, have chosen cowardice over conscience. In refusing to defend Mahmoud Khalil, Columbia did not simply fail a student—it failed the very democratic ideals it claims to uphold.

The lessons of history make clear where this road leads. In 1933, as part of a national effort to align German institutions with Nazi ideology—a process known as Gleichschaltung—the regime targeted universities as key sites for ideological control. At Goethe University Frankfurt, Jewish professors were summarily dismissed, and Jewish students expelled. Many faculty members, rather than resisting, colluded—choosing the security of their positions and the continuation of their research over solidarity with colleagues and the defense of institutional autonomy. The same pattern unfolded at Heidelberg University, Munich, and others, where universities traded academic freedom for ideological conformity.

This history is not a relic; it is a warning. Today, when institutions like the University of Pennsylvania suspend students for political speech, or when MIT distances itself from scholars who criticize U.S. foreign policy, we are witnessing a similar erosion of moral courage and intellectual independence. Then as now, universities become accomplices in repression not only through what they do—but through what they refuse to defend. As Michael Roth bravely argues, it is time to challenge this institutional cowardice. Universities are not compelled to roll over in the face of political pressure; they have both the moral responsibility and the democratic obligation to support student activism and uphold the principles of free speech and modes of critical education that make such activism possible. Yet, As Samuel Karlin  in Left Curve notes, it is crucial  to   that academics join with both their unions and worker’s unions “take a stand and use the power of their labor to disrupt business as usual at universities, especially since so many administrators are caving to the Far Right.”

The broader institutional landscape mirrors this complicity. As Jason Stanley, the prominent philosopher of fascism, has made clear in his decision to leave Yale for a university in Ontario, there is now a systemic failure across U.S. academic and civic institutions to stand up to the fascist turn. His departure is not only a personal choice; it is a public indictment of a nation drifting—or rather, plunging—into authoritarianism.

In the face of Trump’s three-pronged assault—on the Palestinian movement, on immigrants, and on the autonomy of universities—the mainstream media offers only minimal resistance, and even that fails to connect these intersecting attacks as core elements of a fascist politics. Meanwhile, universities capitulate. Law firms once proud to defend civil rights now retreat. Together, these failures mark the collapse of civic imagination and moral courage. History teaches us that tyrants always move first against legal experts, educators, and other so-called “enemies of the state.” Strip away the defenders of law, and the victims of repression stand alone. When universities yield to fascist pressure, they don’t just betray their mission—they embolden further attacks on free thought. The assault on First Amendment rights is no anomaly; it’s a well-worn tactic of authoritarian rule. As G.S. Hans writes in Balls and Strikes:

“By targeting lawyers and law firms for their advocacy, the White House mimics authoritarian regimes abroad, where despots intimidate or even kill lawyers who resist. In the Philippines, over sixty lawyers were murdered under Duterte. In China, human rights attorneys were jailed for defending dissidents. Without meaningful legal representation, activists either fall silent—or face brutal reprisal.”

Khalil’s case, as I wrote recently, is about the fate of democracy itself. When legal residents with green cards are abducted and deported for expressing solidarity with Palestinians, we are no longer operating within a democratic framework. We are witnessing a perversion of law, where legality is weaponized to uphold injustice, and due process becomes an optional formality.

Donald Trump’s declaration that he wants to be “dictator for a day,” his chilling assertion that “he who saves the country does not violate the law,” and his claim that he intends to run for a third term—despite constitutional limits—are not rhetorical slips. They are the ideological scaffolding of fascism. We are now living in what I have called “authoritarianism with fascist overtones,” where the state no longer hides its contempt for democracy, but broadcasts it as a badge of strength. The machinery of repression today is draped in the language of legality, national security, and patriotism. But its core purpose remains: to suppress opposition, erase memory, and consolidate power.

Trump and his movement have already dehumanized vast swaths of the population—migrants, Muslims, people of color, and now students and educators. They are cast not as citizens but as threats. As Judith Butler has noted, such dehumanization is not incidental; it is foundational to fascist politics, which requires scapegoats to function.

Trump’s politics of perpetual turmoil—his ceaseless crises, dog whistles, and vendettas—serve a strategic purpose. They exhaust democratic response, disorient the public, and allow authoritarian measures to be passed under the cover of chaos. These are choreographed spectacles of trauma, animated by the energies of the dead, designed not only to terrorize but to numb—to make violence feel ordinary, to render dissent unimaginable. The true danger lies not only in what the state enacts, but in what the public comes to accept as normal, even necessary. What is at stake is more than a culture of silence or the routine cruelty of a politics of disappearance—it is the slow, methodical construction of a fascist subject. This is a subjectivity shaped by fear, seduced by obedience, and ultimately stripped of the capacity to recognize—or reject—the very forces that dominate it. It is not merely that people surrender to authoritarianism, but that they are fashioned by it, habituated to its violence, until resistance feels futile and complicity feels natural.

Yet, even amid this darkness, resistance is growing. The nationwide protests on April 5 signaled a new wave of opposition: tens of thousands in New York and Washington, thousands more in small towns, all rising to say that the line has been crossed. The creativity and moral clarity of these demonstrations offer a glimpse of what is possible. The question is not whether resistance will emerge—it has. The question is whether it will be sustained, deepened, and radicalized.

From here, we must push toward a broad-based front of democratic refusal. Universities must become sanctuaries for truth, not outposts of surveillance. Artists, journalists, educators, and students must converge to defend critical spaces, reclaim memory, and affirm a radical imagination. Law firms must unite against the fascist threats of the Trump administration. Moreover, they must all acknowledge that what they have in common is the need to resist together against the plague of fascism in its updated forms. As Robin D.G. Kelley insists, this moment demands more than protest—it requires organized, collective nonviolent direct action. Kelley calls for a resurgent solidarity among workers, unions, students, young people, educators, and higher education institutions. This is not merely a call for resistance, but for disruption—for coordinated actions that prevent this authoritarian regime from functioning. From strikes and walkouts to divestment campaigns and sanctuary networks, the goal is not to plead with power but to undermine its capacity to rule without legitimacy.

As Kelley reminds us in “Notes on Fighting Fascism,” “If we are going to ever defeat Trumpism, modern fascism, and wage a viable challenge to gendered racial capitalism, we must revive the old IWW slogan, ‘An injury to one is an injury to all.’” This means thinking with an energizing and informed class consciousness, organizing across identities, and reviving a politics rooted in justice, collective power, and radical imagination. Building on Robin Kelley’s call for resistance, Samuel Karlin insists that any meaningful struggle must break free from illusions about capitalist institutions. Resistance, he argues, cannot be rooted in the very structures that sustain exploitation and domination. As Karlin writes:

“As the Trump administration increases its authoritarian measures against Palestine activists, immigrants, universities, and more, it is essential that all those fighting these attacks rely on ourselves, not the institutions of capitalists. We need to start organizing spaces that can bring our movements together to debate and decide on how to fight these attacks. It will require broad democratic campaigns that mobilize masses across the country. And it is essential that unions, especially academic workers’ unions, take a stand and use the power of their labor to disrupt business as usual at universities, especially since so many administrators are caving to the Far Right.”

History is not merely warning us. It is demanding that we act. The fascist capture of America is not inevitable, but its consolidation becomes more likely with every act of silence, complicity, and moral retreat. Democracy cannot survive if people look away, lapse into complicity, or speak out yet refuse to collectively organize against and tear down a gangster capitalism that now proudly displays its fascist mobilizing passions.  Democracy as a radical idea and practice will survive if—and only if—people rise with courage, defiance, and militant hope. It is time to pay attention, learn from history, connect the dots in order to recognize the totality of this authoritarian system, and make resistance a necessity rather than an afterthought. This is not merely about one administration or a single demagogue. It is about the fate of public memory, the survival of political agency, and the right to speak and act without fear. The United States is not approaching a crisis—it is already engulfed in a four-alarm fire. And the only antidote to this rising tide of authoritarianism is a resistance that is collective, courageous, and unrelenting.

We are not standing at the edge of fascism—we are living through its rehearsal, its staging ground, its opening act. The question is no longer whether we see it, but whether we have the will to stop it before the final curtain falls. Resistance offers no guarantees. But without it—if it falters, if it remains timid or fragmented—what dies is not only democracy as we know it, but the very possibility of imagining it anew.

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.

HENRY GIROUX

APRIL 4, 2025

We live in perilous times. The mobilizing passions of fascism are no longer a distant echo of history—they are here, surging through the United States like an electric current. We are in a  period of social, ideological, and racial cleansing.

First, the notion of government as a democratizing public good and institution of social responsibility—that once held power to account, protected the vulnerable, and nurtured the ideals of justice and collective responsibility—is being methodically destroyed. The common good, once seen as the essence of democratic life, has become the enemy of the neoliberal fascist state. It is not merely being neglected—it is being assaulted, stripped bare, and left to rot in the shadows of privatization, greed, and brutality—the main features of gangster capitalism. Public institutions are hollowed out, courts are under siege, regulatory bodies are politicized and disempowered, and the mechanisms of governance now serve only the most ruthless forms of concentrated financial and political power.

Second, we are witnessing a form of ideological cleansing—a scorched-earth assault on critical consciousness. Education, both public and higher, is under siege, stripped of its democratic mission to cultivate informed judgment, critical thinking, and the capacity to make corrupt power visible. What once served as a space for reflection, dissent, and civic engagement is being transformed into a battlefield of ideological control, where questioning authority is replaced by obedience, and pedagogy is reduced to training, conformity, and propaganda. Education is explicitly no longer on the side of empowerment for the many. It has become an ideological tool of massive repression, indoctrination, surveillance, and an adjunct of the billionaire elite and the walking dead with blood in their mouths.

Books that illuminate injustice, affirm histories of resistance, and introduce critical ideas are being banned. Entire fields of knowledge—gender studies, critical race theory, decolonial thought—are outlawed. Professors are fired, blacklisted, or harassed for daring to speak the truth, especially those who denounce the genocidal violence being waged by Israel, which has now taken the lives of over 50,000 Palestinians, many of them children. Journalists are doxxed, detained, or demonized.

Cultural institutions are defunded or coerced into silence. The arts are no longer sacred; they are now suspect. Social media platforms and news outlets are intimidated, policed, and purged. Elite law firms are targeted,  intimidated, silenced or forced into complicity by the Trump administration. Scott Cummings rightly argues President Donald Trump’s recent speech to the Department of Justice was meant as a declaration of war against lawyers. Some prestigious law firms and attorneys—once alleged guardians of justice—now grovel before authoritarianism in acts of staggering complicity. The public sphere is shrinking under the weight of repression.

Third—and perhaps most alarming—is the escalating campaign of racial cleansing—a war against the most vulnerable, on bodies, on the flesh, and on visceral forms of agency. This is not hyperbole. Immigrants are caged in squalid detention centers, separated from their families, deported without due process to detention centers in Louisiana or to Guantanamo, or simply disappeared. Muslims are vilified, surveilled, and targeted with impunity. Black and brown communities are over-policed and under-protected, sacrificed to the machinery of carceral violence. State terrorism is normalized.  The state is actively criminalizing existence itself for all those who do not fit the white Christian nationalist fantasy of purity, obedience, and subjugation.

This is a war not only against people, but against memory, imagination, and the very capacity to think, make connections, and to dream a different future. The unimaginable has become policy. The unthinkable now passes for normal.

Consider just a glimpse of the horror now unfolding:

• Venezuelan migrants are being disappeared into a notorious maximum-security torture dungeon  in El Salvador run by Nayib Bukele, a ruthless dictator, punished not for crimes, but for the ink on their skin.
• A legendary British punk band, the UK Subs, denied entry for voicing dissent against Trump’s authoritarian policies.
• A French scientist barred at the border for criticizing Trump, who with sneering smile, tears up the Constitution with performative contempt.
• Trump violates court orders with impunity. Student visas are revoked in the dead of night. Their dorm rooms raided, their wrists bound in handcuffs, they are forced into unmarked cars by agents of a system that is both cruel and clandestine.
• Young people—Mahmoud Khalil, Rumeysa Ozturk, Ranjani Srinivasan, Yunseo Chung—are disappeared, imprisoned in Louisiana, and await deportation under a regime of malignant legalities. cloaked in legalese. These are not arrests—they are abductions. Not justice—but the slow machinery of fear made flesh.
• Dissent is now branded as terrorism, and those who challenge Trump’s authoritarian grip vanish into the void—arrested, erased, rendered disposable.

Trump’s totalitarian machine is waging a relentless war on colleges and universities. As Chris Hedges observes, the administration has threatened to strip federal funding from more than 60 elite higher education institutions under the guise of protecting Jewish students—while already pulling $500 million from Columbia University, an action that has nothing to do with combating antisemitism. The charge is a smokescreen, a cynical pretext to silence protest and crush dissent—especially in support of Palestinian freedom. As Rashid Khalidi observes, “It was never about eliminating antisemitism. It was always about silencing Palestine. That is what the gagging of protesting students, and now the gagging of faculty, was always meant to lead to.”

Elite universities once proud of their intellectual autonomy are being transformed into fortified zones of surveillance and submission.  Columbia among the most glaring, where the campus now resembles a police precinct more than a place of progressive ideas and democratic values. Only now, as the darkness thickens, are a handful of journalists and liberal commentators awakening to the authoritarian siege on higher education—a siege some of us have been naming for decades.

Americans are not witnessing a slow drift toward authoritarianism. They are living through the violent, coordinated seizure of democratic life by fascist forces emboldened by indifference,  cruelty, and the architecture of unaccountable power.

Under such circumstances, it is crucial for people to pay attention to the political crisis that is unfolding. This means being attentive,  learning from history, analyzing the mobilizing passions of fascism as a system—one directly related to the forces of gangster capitalism and the force of white supremacy and white Christian nationalism. Language matters, and those willing to fight against the fascist tide must rethink the meaning of education, resistance, bearing witness, and solidarity. And action is imperative: build alliances, flood the streets, defend critical education, amplify resistance, and refuse to be silent.

In the face of this rising tide, resistance must no longer be fragmented, polite, or confined to isolated corners of dissent. As Sherilyn Ifill notes, “it is not  enough to fight. You have to meet the moment.” Cultural critics, educators, artists, journalists, social workers, and others must wield their craft like weapons—telling prohibited stories, defying censorship, reigniting the radical imagination. Educators must refuse complicity, defending classrooms as sanctuaries of truth and critical inquiry, even when the risks are great. Students must organize, disrupt, and reclaim their campuses—not as consumers of credentialing, but as insurgents of liberation.

Academics, including faculty and administrators, must form a common front to stop the insidious assault on higher education.  Journalists must break the silence, not by chasing access or neutrality, but by naming injustice with moral clarity. Organizers, activists, and everyday people must converge—across race, class, gender, and nation—into a broad front of democratic refusal. This is a moment not just for outrage, but for audacity—for reclaiming hope as a political act, and courage as a shared ethic. Fascism feeds on fear and isolation. As Robin D. G. Kelley brilliantly argues, it must be met with solidarity, imagination, and relentless struggle, based on a revived class politics. In a culture of immediacy, cruelty, and staggering inequality, power must be named for its actions, and the language of critique and hope must give way to mass collective action.  History is not watching—it is demanding. The only question is whether anti-fascist forces will rise to meet it.

This darkness is not without precedent, nor is it without models of resistance.  During the rise of fascism in Europe, teachers and intellectuals in Nazi-occupied France joined the underground, distributing banned literature and teaching forbidden truths in secret classrooms. In apartheid South Africa, students in Soweto sparked a nationwide uprising, defying bullets with the cry that liberation begins with education. In the American South, Black freedom fighters risked their lives to build freedom schools, challenge police terror, and reimagine democracy in the face of white supremacy. The Zapatistas in Chiapas created autonomous zones rooted in dignity, justice, and Indigenous knowledge. Palestinian writers, youth, freedom fighters, and teachers continue to create under siege powerful examples of resistance, insisting through every poem, every painting, every lesson, that their people will not be erased, their memories will survive, and settler-colonialism will not only be relentlessly resisted but will be defeated. There is no other choice.

Today, movements like Black Lives Matter, Abolitionist Futures, Extinction Rebellion, Sunrise Movement, March for Our Lives and Indigenous Rights Movements are keeping alive the traditions of collective struggle. Courageous campus coalitions, in spite of the shameful crackdowns by the government and in some cases universities themselves, are resisting militarized policing and corporate capture of higher education. Migrant justice organizations are building sanctuary networks to protect those the state seeks to expel. These are not just moments of protest—they are blueprints for democratic rebirth. The task now is to connect these diverse movements in a mass movement with the power to wage strikes, engage in direct action, teach-ins, and use any viable non-violent form of resistance to overcome the fascist nightmare spreading across the globe.

The stakes could not be higher. This is a time to reimagine justice, to reclaim the promise of a radical democracy yet to be realized. Fascism feeds on despair, cynicism, and silence—but history teaches otherwise. Again and again, it is when ordinary people refuse to be silent, when they teach, create, march, strike, and speak with fierce clarity, that the foundations of tyranny begin to crack. Fascism has returned from the shadows of history to once more dismantle justice, equality, and freedom. But its resurgence must not be mistaken for fate. It is not the final script of a defeated democratic future—it is a warning. And with that warning comes a call to breathe life into a vision of democracy rooted in solidarity and imagination, to turn resistance into a hammer that shatters the machinery of cruelty, the policies of disposability, and the totalitarian and oligarchic opportunists who feed on fear. As we stand before the terrifying rise of authoritarianism, it becomes undeniable: the fire we face is not some distant, abstract peril, but a fierce and immediate struggle — the fire this time is the fascist capture of America. This is the moment to make education central to politics, to shape history with intention, to summon a collective courage rooted in the demands of freedom, equality, and justice—to act together with a militant hope that does not yield. Fascism will not prevail—unless we let it. In times like these, resistance is not a choice; it is the condition of survival.

First published on CountetPunch.org

Shared via Creative Commons.

Liberal institutions, including universities, traditionally surrender without a fight to the dictates of autocrats. Ours are no exception.

Chris Hedges
March 24 2025

---

I was not surprised when Columbia University’s interim president Katrina Armstrong caved to the demands of the Trump administration. She agreed to ban face masks or face coverings, prohibit protests in academic buildings and create an internal security force of 36 New York City Police officers empowered to “remove individuals from campus and/or arrest them when appropriate.” She has also surrendered the autonomy of academic departments, as demanded by the Trump administration, by appointing a new senior vice provost to “review” the university’s department of Middle East, South Asian and African Studies and the Center for Palestine Studies.

Elite universities such as Harvard, Princeton, Columbia or Yale, were created to train and perpetuate the plutocracy. They are not and never have been centers of cutting-edge intellectual thought or hospitable to dissidents and radicals. They cloak themselves in the veneer of moral probity and intellectualism but cravenly serve political and economic power. This is their nature. Don’t expect it to change, even as we fall headlong into authoritarianism.

Armstrong, like most of the heads of our universities, is fruitlessly humiliating herself. She would, I expect, happily make space on her office wall to hang an oversized portrait of the president. But what she does not know, and what history has taught us, is that no appeasement is sufficient with autocrats. She, and the rest of the liberal elites, groveling abjectly in an attempt to accommodate their new masters, will be steadily replaced or dominated by buffoonish goons such as those seeded throughout the Trump administration.

The Department of Education has warned 60 colleges and universities that they could face “potential enforcement actions,” if they do not comply with federal civil rights law that protects students from discrimination based on race or nationality, which includes antisemitism. Columbia, stripped of $400 million in federal grants, is desperately trying to restore the funding. I doubt it will work. Those mounting these assaults against universities intend to turn them into indoctrination machines. The so-called campaign against antisemitism is simply a cynical tool being used to achieve that end.

The warning follows an open letter signed by 200 faculty members on Feb. 3 urging Columbia University implement measures to “protect Jewish students.” Amongst their demands are the removal of Professor Joseph Massad who teaches Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at the university and beginning a Title VI investigation against him, that the university adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism, which conflates criticism of Israel with racism against Jews, and the university hire tenured pro-Israel faculty.

These institutions of privilege — I attended Harvard and have taught at Columbia and Princeton — have always been complicit in the crimes of their times. They did not, until the world around them changed, speak out against the slaughter of Native Americans, the enslavement of Africans, the crushing of labor and socialist organizations at the turn of the twentieth century and the purging of institutions, including the academy, during the Red Scare in the 1920s and 1930s, and later the witch hunts under McCarthyism. They turnedon their students protesting the war in Vietnam in the 1960s as viciously as they are turning on them now.

Many of the dregs of the Trump administration are products of these elite academic institutions. I can assure you their children will also attend these schools despite their public denunciations. Rep. Elise Stefanik, who humiliated in congressional hearings the presidents of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, graduated from Harvard. Vice President JD Vance graduated from Yale Law School. Trump graduated from the University of Pennsylvania. Defense Secretary Peter Hegseth went to Princeton University and Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — who has ordered a review of grants to universities from his agency over allegations of antisemitism — graduated from Harvard.

Professor Katherine Franke, who taught at Columbia Law School for 25 years, recently lost her position at the university for defending Columbia students’ right to protest in favor of a ceasefire of the Israeli slaughter in Gaza and for Columbia University to divest from Israel. She also condemned the spraying of pro-Palestinian protesters on the campus with a toxic chemical that left students hospitalized.

“Part of why I think Colombia was such an easy target — and it’s not just Columbia, I think this is true for Harvard, for Yale, for the elite universities — is that the boards of trustees are no longer made up of people who are involved in education — committed to the educational mission, in some way professionally or otherwise — see themselves as custodians of the special role that the academy plays in a democracy,” she told me.

“Instead, they are hedge fund managers, venture capitalists, corporate lawyers and in our case, arms manufacturers as well.” She went on:

“And they see that responsibility is to protect only the endowment. I often describe Columbia — which is the largest residential landlord in New York City — as a real estate holding operation that has a side hustle of teaching classes. It has evolved over time into just a business that enjoys nonprofit status. And so when the pressure started here, there were no voices on the boards of trustees to say, ‘Hey, wait a minute, we have to be the front line of resistance.’ Or at a minimum, we have to defend our academic mission.’ When I was sitting in my living room watching [former] president Minouche Shafik testify before that House committee…I was upset because they mentioned me, but more importantly, the fact that president Shafik did not even begin to defend Columbia, its faculty, its students, our project, our history of being one of the premier universities in the world. Instead, she groveled before a bully. And we all know that when you grovel before a bully, it encourages the bully. And that’s exactly what’s happened here up until today, where they’re still negotiating with the Trump administration on terms that the administration has set. And this university, I think, will never be the same if it survives at all.”

You can see my interview with Professor Franke here.

Universities and colleges across the country have shut down free speech and squandered their academic integrity. They have brutalized, arrested, suspended and expelled faculty, administrators and students that decry the genocide. They have called police to their campuses — in the case of Columbia three times — to arrest students, often charging them with trespassing. Following the lead of their authoritarian masters they subjected students to internal surveillance. Columbia University, out front on the repression of its students, banned Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace a month after Israel’s genocide in Gaza had begun in November 2023, when both organizations called for a ceasefire, long before the protests and encampments began.

Columbia’s violent suppression of protests and decision to lock down its campus, which is now surrounded by security checkpoints, paved the way for the abduction of Mahmoud Khalil, who was a graduate student at the School of International Public Affairs. He is a legal permanent resident. He did not commit a crime. But the university administration had already demonized and criminalized Khalil and the other students, many of whom are Jewish, who dared to protest the mass slaughter in Gaza.

The video — shot by his wife on March 8 — of Khalil being taken away by plainclothes federal agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) who did not identify themselves, is a chilling reminder of the secret police abductions I witnessed on the streets of Santiago during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.

The law in authoritarian states protects the criminality of the powerful. It revokes due process, basic freedoms and the rights of citizenship. It is an instrument of repression. It is a very small step from the stripping of rights from a legal resident holding a green card to the stripping of rights of any citizen. This is what is coming.

Khalil was ostensibly arrested under the Immigration Nationality Act of 1952, also known as the McCarran-Walter Act. It gives the Secretary of State the power to deport foreign nationals if he has “reasonable ground[s] to believe” their presence or activities in the U.S. “would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences.” It was used to deny entry to the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, the Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Márquez and the British author Doris Lessing. It was also used to deport the poet and essayist Margaret Randall and civil rights activist and journalist Claudia Jones. Senator Patrick McCarran, an open admirer of the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco and a rabid antisemite, formulated the act to target not only dissidents and communists, but also Jews. When the law was enacted, it was used to ban Eastern European Jewish Holocaust survivors from entering the U.S. due to their alleged sympathies with the Soviet Union.

“The irony of that is not lost on any of us, that these are laws that are at their core, deeply antisemitic, that are now being deployed in the name of protecting Jewish citizens or our foreign policy goals with the state of Israel,” Franke said. “And that’s the cynicism of this administration. They don’t give a darn that there’s that history. They’re looking for every piece of power that they can get, every law, no matter how ugly that law may be. Even the laws that interned Japanese people during World War Two. I’m sure they would be more than happy to use those at some point.”

James Luther Adams, my mentor at Harvard Divinity School, was in Germany in 1935 and 1936 until he was arrested and deported by the Gestapo. He worked with the underground anti-Nazi church, known as the Confessing Church, led by dissident clergy such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Adams saw how swiftly and cravenly German universities, which like ours were considered some of the best in the world, surrendered to the dictates of fascism and self-destructed.

The theologian and philosopher Paul Tillich, a close friend of Adams, was fired from his teaching post and blacklisted ten weeks after the Nazis came to power in January 1933. Tillich’s book “The Socialist Decision” was immediately banned by the Nazis. Tillich, a Lutheran pastor, along with the sociologist Karl Mannheim and the philosopher Max Horkheimer, who wrote “Eclipse of Reason” which examines the rise of authoritarianism, were branded as “enemies of the Reich,” blacklisted and forced into exile. The 1933 “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service” saw all Jewish professors dismissed. The vast majority of academics cowered in fear or, as with the case of the philosopher Martin Heidegger, joined the Nazi Party, which saw him appointed as the Rector of Freiburg University.

Adams saw in the Christian Right disturbing similarities with the German Christian Church, which was pro-Nazi. He was the first person I heard refer to the Christian Right as “Christian fascists.” He also warned us about universities and academics which, if the country fell into authoritarianism, would debase themselves to protect their status and privileges. Few would speak out or defy authority.

“If the Nazis took over America, 60 percent of the Harvard faculty would happily begin their lectures with the Nazi salute,” he quipped.

And this is where we are. None of the liberal institutions, including the universities, the commercial media and the Democratic Party, will defend us. They will remain supine, hypocritically betray their supposed principles and commitment to democracy or willingly transform themselves into apologists for the regime. The purges and silencing of our most courageous and accomplished intellectuals, writers, artists and journalists — begun before Trump’s return to the White House — is being expedited.

Resistance will be left to us. Enemies of the state.

First published on The Chris Hedges Report.

Shared via Creative Commons.

BERNIE SANDERS
FEBRUARY 12, 2025

We we are living in an extremely dangerous time. Future generations will look back at this moment – what we do right now – and remember whether we had the courage to defend our democracy against the growing threats of oligarchy and authoritarianism. They will remember whether we stood with President Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg who in 1863, looking out at a battlefield where thousands died in the struggle against slavery and stated that; “this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that a government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.”

Do we stand with Lincoln’s vision of America or do we allow this country to move to a government of the billionaires, by the billionaires and for the billionaires?

But it’s not just oligarchy that we should be concerned about, and the reality that the three richest people in America now own more wealth than the bottom half of our society – 170 million people. It’s not just that the gap between the very rich and everyone else is growing wider, and that we have more income and wealth inequality today than we’ve ever had.

It is also that we are looking at a rapid movement, under President Trump, toward authoritarianism. More and more power resting in fewer and fewer hands.

Right now, Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, is attempting to dismantle major agencies of the federal government which are designed to protect the needs of working families and the disadvantaged. These agencies were created by the U.S. Congress and it is Congress’ responsibility to maintain them, reform them or end them. It is not Mr. Musk’s responsibility. What Mr. Musk is doing is patently illegal and unconstitutional – and must be stopped.

Two weeks ago, President Trump attempted to suspend all federal grants and loans – an outrageous and clearly unconstitutional act. As I hope every 6th grader in America knows, under the Constitution and our form of government the president can recommend legislation, he can support legislation, he can veto legislation, but he does not have the power to unilaterally terminate funding passed by Congress. It is Congress, the House and the Senate, who control the purse strings.

But it’s not just Congress that’s under attack. It’s our judiciary.

This weekend, the Vice President, a graduate of Yale Law School, who clerked for a Supreme Court Justice, said that: “judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.” Really? I thought that one of the major functions of the federal courts is to interpret our Constitution and, when appropriate, serve as a check on unconstitutional executive power.

Mr. Musk, meanwhile, has proposed that “the worst 1% of appointed judges be fired every year,” and demanded the impeachment of judges that have blocked him from accessing sensitive Treasury Department files. No doubt, under Mr. Musk’s rule, it will be him and his billionaire friends who determine who the “worst” judges are. And no, Mr. Musk, you don’t impeach judges who rule against you. You may or may not know this, but under the U.S. Constitution, we have a separation of powers, brilliantly crafted by the founding fathers of this country in the 1770s.

So, we are seeing an organized attack on Congress and the courts.

But Trump and his friends aren’t just trying to undermine two of the three pillars of our constitutional government – Congress and the courts. They are also going after the media in a way that we have never seen in the modern history of this country.

Every member of Congress will tell you that people in the media, and media organizations, are not perfect. They, like everyone else, make mistakes every day. But I hope that every member of Congress understands that you cannot have a functioning democracy without an independent press – non-intimidated journalists who can write it and say it the way they see it. And in that regard, I want to remind my colleagues what this president has done in recent months.

President Trump has sued ABC and received a $15 million settlement. He has sued Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, and received a $25 million settlement. He has sued CBS, and its parent company Paramount, is apparently in negotiations over a settlement. He has sued the Des Moines Register, and his FCC is now threatening to investigate PBS and NPR.

In other words, we have a President of the United States who is using his power to go after media in this country who are saying and doing things he doesn’t like. How are we going to have an independent media if journalists are looking over their shoulders, fearful that their reporting will trigger a lawsuit from the most powerful man in the world?

Now is the time to ask a very simple question. What do Mr. Musk, Mr. Trump and their fellow billionaires really want? What is their endgame?

And in my view, the answer is not complicated. It is not novel. It is not new. It is what ruling classes throughout history have always wanted and have always believed is theirs by right: more power, more control and more wealth. And they are determined to not allow democracy and the rule of law to get in their way.

For Mr. Musk and his fellow oligarchs, the needs, the concerns, the ideas, the dreams of ordinary people are simply an impediment to what they, the oligarchs, are entitled to. That is what they really believe.

This is not the first time we’ve seen this in our country’s history.

In pre-revolutionary America, before the 1770s, the ruling class of that time governed through a doctrine called the “divine right of kings,” the belief that the King of England was an agent of God, God appointed him, and he was not to be questioned by mere mortals.

In modern times we no longer have the “divine right of kings.” What we NOW have is an ideology being pushed by the oligarchs which says that as very, very wealthy people – often self-made, often the masters of revolutionary new technology and as “high-IQ individuals,” it is THEIR absolute right to rule. In other words, the oligarchs of today are our modern-day kings.

And it is not just power that they want. Despite the incredible wealth they have they want more, and more and more. Their greed has no end. Today, Mr. Musk is worth $402 billion, Mr. Zuckerberg is worth $252 billion and Mr. Bezos is worth $249 billion. With combined wealth of $903 billion, these 3 people own more wealth than the bottom half of American society — 170 million people.

Not surprisingly, since Trump was elected, their wealth has soared. Elon Musk has become $138 billion richer, Zuckerberg has become $49 billion richer and Bezos has become $28 billion richer – since Election Day.

Meanwhile, while the very rich become much richer, 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, 85 million are uninsured or under-insured, 25% of seniors are trying to survive on $15,000 or less, 800,000 are homeless and we have the highest rate of childhood poverty of almost any major country on earth. And real, inflation adjusted wages for the average American worker have been stagnant for 50 years.

Do you think the oligarchs give a damn about these people? Trust me, they don’t. Musk’s decision to dismember U.S. AID means that tens of thousands of the poorest people around the world will go hungry or die of preventable diseases.

But it’s not just abroad. Here in the United States they’ll soon be going after the healthcare, nutrition, housing, and educational programs that protect the most vulnerable people in our country – all so that Congress can provide huge tax breaks for them and their fellow billionaires. As modern-day kings, who believe they have the absolute right to rule, they will sacrifice, without hesitation, the well-being of working people to protect their privilege.

Further, they will use the enormous media operations they own to deflect attention away from the impact of their policies while they “entertain us to death.” Mr. Musk owns twitter. Mr. Zuckerberg owns Meta – which includes Facebook and Instagram – and Mr. Bezos owns the Washington Post. Further, they and their fellow oligarchs, will continue to spend huge amounts of money to buy politicians in both major political parties.

Bottom line: The oligarchs, with their enormous resources, are waging a war on the working class of this country, and it is a war they are intent on winning.

Now, I am not going to kid you — the problems this country faces right now are serious and they are not easy to solve. The economy is rigged, our campaign finance system is corrupt and we are struggling to control climate change — among many other important issues.

But this is what I do know:

The worst fear that the ruling class in this country has is that Americans — Black, White, Latino, urban and rural, gay and straight, young and old — come together to demand a government that represents all of us, not just the wealthy few.

Their oligarch’s nightmare is that we will not allow ourselves to be divided up by race, religion, sexual orientation or country of origin and will, together, have the courage to take them on.

Will this struggle be easy? Absolutely not.

And one of the reasons that it will not be easy is that the ruling class of this country will constantly remind you that THEY have all the power. They control the government, they own the media.

But our job right now, in these difficult times, is to not forget the great struggles and sacrifices that millions of people have waged over the several centuries to create a more democratic, just and humane society. Think about what people THEN were saying.

• Overthrowing the King of England to create a new nation and self-rule. Impossible.
• Establishing universal suffrage. Impossible.
• Ending slavery and segregation. Impossible.
• Granting workers the right to form unions and ending child labor. Impossible
• Giving women control over their own bodies. Impossible.
• Passing legislation to establish Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, a minimum wage, clean air and water standards. Impossible.

In other words, as Nelson Mandela told us, everything is impossible until it is done.

First Published on CounterPunch.org.

Shared via Creative Commons.

BY HENRY GIROUX
MARCH 13, 2024

---

“And therefore think him as a serpent’s egg
Which hatch’d, would as his kind grow mischievous;
And kill him in the shell”

— Brutus in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.

The brilliant scholar, Paul Gilroy, once stated that we live at a time when the “horrors of the past are much closer to us than we like to imagine.” [1] Gilroy’s words are more resonant today than they were when first written. At every level of domestic and foreign policy, the ghosts of fascism are evident, offering a glimpse of what horrors await us as the twenty-first century unfolds. At the level of foreign policy, blood gushes from the bombs, artillery, and tanks of rogue states in Gaza and Ukraine. Biden tells us that bringing diplomatic solutions to the dreadful warfare in Ukraine and the Middle East are less important than the profits and jobs created by death machines that constitute the defense industries feeding both wars. War culture and the language of hate fill the airwaves legitimating violence as a form of political opportunism. The cruel language and practices of human degradation and destructiveness now feed a growing fascist politics in the U.S.  Fascist demagogues now boast about their racial fantasies, unchecked adoration of violence, and their aggressive lawlessness.  What Ingmar Bergman once called “The Serpent’s Egg,” a metaphor for the birth of fascism is about to hatch.

In a world shaped increasingly by emerging authoritarianism, it has become increasingly difficult to remember what a purposeful and substantive democracy looks like, or for that matter, what the idea of democracy might suggest. Democracy as an ideal, promise, and working practice is under assault, just as a number of far-right educational, market, military, and religious fundamentalisms are gaining ascendancy in American society. Increasingly, it becomes more challenging to inhabit those public spheres where politics thrives—where thinking, speaking, and acting subjects engage and critically address the major forces and problems bearing down on their lives. In this new moment in history, which too often resembles the nightmares of a fascist past with its banning of books, erasing of history, attack on trans people, and support of white nationalism and supremacy, the question of how society should imagine itself or what its future might hold has become more demanding given the eradication of social formations that place an emphasis on truth, social justice, freedom, equality, and compassion.

Historical and social amnesia have become the organizing principles of U.S. society. Lies morph into the celebration of violence and language become part of the machinery of social death, relegated to the sphere of consumer culture, and devoid of an ethical grammar that is banished to zones of political and social abandonment.

Subjectivity, identity formation, and the longing for community have become powerful elements of a politics of aggression. An ocular—image-based culture celebrates human misery, turns monsters into political celebrities who preach a language that accelerates the death of the unwanted, powerless, and what Judith Butler calls the ungrievable. The mainstream media normalizes alleged leaders in the fields of politics, entertainment, and education who thrive on the energies of the dead, weak, and disposable. Yet, what is often missed is the spread of fascist ideology, fear, rhetoric, symbols, and demonstrations that circulate in lesser political circles and at the level of everyday life in the United States. All of which speaks to how deeply embedded authoritarianism, violence, and the mobilizing passions of fascism are in American society and culture. Three recent examples speak to the dark current of fascist politics in the United States.

First, I want to highlight the words of right-wing activist Jack Posobiec who in “his welcome speech at this year’s conference of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC,) stated: “Welcome to the end of democracy. We are here to overthrow it completely. We didn’t get all the way there on January 6, but we will endeavor to get rid of it and replace it with this right here.” He then held up a cross necklace and continued: “After we burn that swamp to the ground, we will establish the new American republic on its ashes, and our first order of business will be righteous retribution for those who betrayed America.”[2] This is fascism on steroids and yet it got little media coverage and when it did it was dismissed as a kind of rogue extremism. In actuality, it simply echoes a central ideology of MAGA Republicans.

Another example of how the embers of fascist politics have turned into a firestorm of authoritarian rhetoric and is downplayed or ignored in the mainstream media is visible in the ongoing rhetoric of the ignorant buffoon Mark Robinson who is running for the governorship of North Carolina. In the mainstream media, despite his extremist rhetoric, he is treated as a normal candidate even though he has referred to transgender and homosexual people as maggots and filth, stating that they “are equivalent to what the cows leave behind”[3] After a mass shooter in 2016 murdered 49 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, Robinson posted on Facebook “I would pray for the souls of all those killed…However, homosexuality is STILL an abominable sin and I WILL NOT join in celebrating gay pride.”  He has stated that he wished for the days when women could not vote and called mass shootings “karma” for abortion. He has said that Christians must take control of public schools because children are being abused by teachers who are telling children “about transgenderism, homosexuality, and any of that  filth.”[4] Robinson’s remarks make clear that willful ignorance is a precondition for fascist politics, and that a culture of cruelty and hate has become a normalized tool of political opportunism.

The third example draws upon the current authoritarian assault on higher education which is far worse than anything that could have been imagined with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. In light of this assault, how could the media largely ignore New College in Florida hiring Bruce Gilley, who has authored a book called The Case for Colonialism. Beyond the racist affirmation in book form supporting the genocidal legacy of colonialism, he has also stated publicly that “the transgender flag [is] a symbol of narcissistic sexual reductionism and the mutilation of children,” and that “virtually every indigenous leader in Canada is an identity fraud.” [5]  Without any critical understanding of history, he has endorsed a video by the Blackwater mercenary company founder Erik Prince calling for putting “the imperial hat back on” to govern “pretty much all of Africa.”[6] There is more at work here than the hiring of a far-right colonialist parading as a professor, there is a clarion call alerting to how higher education is being transformed into indoctrination centers and rabid disimagination machines.  James Baldwin was certainly right in issuing the stern warning in No Name in the Street that “Ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.”[7]

These events closely resemble Bergman’s notion of “The Serpent’s Egg,” an instructive metaphor for illuminating the conditions that gave rise to fascism. As Bergman noted in a previous era, the abyss of fascism “looms menacingly.” Bergman’s words resonate with a fascist politics that now draws on the culture of everyday life and in doing so spreads its ideologies, values, social relations, and culture of cruelty in institutions, practices, policies, and experiences of domination that take on the hue of being commonplace, wrapped in the discourse of freedom, victimhood, gated mentalities and gated borders.

For the playwright and poet, Bertolt Brecht, “the serpent’s egg” suggests that beneath seemingly democratic societies lie dark, dangerous and volatile forces waiting to be unleashed by the dynamics of capitalism. For Brecht, no one can tell the truth about fascism without speaking out against the horrors of capitalism. The horrors of fascism lurk in the shadows of everyday life, and as Brecht observes “If anyone wishes to describe Fascism and war, great disasters which are not natural catastrophes, he must do so in terms of a practical truth. He must…  write the truth about evil conditions, one must write it so that its avertible causes can be identified. If the preventable causes can be identified, the evil conditions can be fought.”[8]

Writing about the truth must begin by recognizing how the snake of fascism lays its eggs—the serpent’s eggs, which are often hatched in the limelight of the spectacularized image of ocular politics where their impending danger is overlooked.  The challenge is to acknowledge how the seeds of fascism emerge in the shadows of everyday speech, practices, and social relations. The microaggressions of fascism are too often treated as if they reside solely in the theatricality of the overly dramatic, the exaggerated spectacle, or in the realm of self-serving attention-gripping mass hysteria. What is overlooked is the power of everyday practices in their overly stylized and calculating shock value, which slowly become normalized and accelerated, legitimized and expanded making  the efficacy of the unspeakable a core element of everyday life.

What is often dismissed as a minor public spectacle morphs into the horror of absolute evil in a world led by barbarians. In the current historical period, the eggs of the serpent are about to hatch keeping alive both its threat to end democracy, renew the legacy of colonialism, and once again let loose the politics of disposability, elimination, and death.  Susan Sontag was right in her insistence on the need “to detect fascist longings in our midst.”  Fascism now mobilizes people’s feelings in order to win them over either to the arena of hate and bigotry or to depoliticize them. Once we lose sight of how the dynamics of power hide in the language of the everyday. Fascism will arrive not with a thunderous bang but with the waving of the flag and the stench of death. The serpent’s egg will have hatched, and the lights will go out.

---

Notes:

[1] Paul Gilroy, “The 2019 Holberg Lecture, by Laureate Paul Gilroy: Never Again: refusing race and salvaging the human,” Holbergprisen, [November 11, 2019].   Online: https://holbergprisen.no/en/news/holberg-prize/2019-holberg-lecture-laureate-paul-gilroy

[2] Ben Goggin, “Calls to ‘fight’ and echoes of Jan. 6 embraced by CPAC attendees,” NBC News (February 23, 2024). Online: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/jack-posobiec-jan-6-2024-cpac-rcna140225

[3] Kira Lerner, “Hitler-quoting candidate wins North Carolina Republican gubernatorial primary,” The Guardian (March 6, 2024). Online: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/mar/05/mark-robinson-north-carolina

[4] See: Pic.twitter.com/aXjCPFKTs0

[5] Ryan Quinn, “New College of Florida Hires Professor Who Champions Colonialism,” Inside Higher Education (March 8, 2024). https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty-issues/academic-freedom/2024/03/08/new-college-florida-hires-scholar-who-defends

[6] Ibid. Ryan Quinn.

[7] Toni Morrison, ed. James Baldwin, Collected Essays: No Name in the Street(New York: Library of America, 1998), p. 437.

[8] Bertol Brecht, “Writing the Truth-Five difficulties,” Revolutionary Socialism.com (March 2015, 1935). Online: https://revolutionary-socialism.com/en/writing-the-truth-five-difficulties/

---

First published on CounterPunch.

Shared via Creative Commons.

---

What makes fascism more dangerous than authoritarianism?

By Henry A. Giroux
October 14, 2022

---

Violence in the United States surpasses the unthinkable and increasingly resides in the space of apocalyptic rage, manufactured ignorance, and the normalization of a pervasive culture of ritualized barbarism. As civic culture collapses and truth succumbs to conspiracy theories, censorship, and the white washing of history, politics is emptied of democratic values, shared responsibilities, and a viable moral compass. Lawlessness is fueled by a diminishing lack of accountability in the political realm leading to an upsurge in racism, domestic terrorism, mass shootings and increasing threats of violence. Acts of violence erupt in even the most protected and secure spaces extending from schools to supermarkets, engulfing every facet of American life. We now live in a time marked by a politics of displacement, disappearance, erasure, patriotic frenzy, and political repression. Human suffering has been turned into a spectacle of racist aggression.

Violence, once hidden or proclaimed to be on the fringe of American society, is now at the center of power and everyday life and has become normalized. Violent threats are now repeatedly lodged against election officials, public health workers, teachers, librarians, as well as almost any politician who refuses to accept the lie that the presidential election was stolen. The threats of violence by a political movement of white supremist and election denying extremists has reached an all time high as has its insane accusations, threats, and hate mongering. For example, influential [peddlers] of hate, particularly QAnon members, now claim that the Democratic Party is filled with blood sucking satanists who abduct and sexualize young children. The fallout from these kind of threats is too extensive to document here one example, as reported by The Daily Beast, captures the vicious lies mainstreamed by such groups and how they incentivize violence among their followers:

“On August 11, Libs of TikTok falsely claimed Boston’s Children’s Hospital was performing hysterectomies on children. On August 15, Matt Walsh falsely said the hospital was putting “every toddler…on a path to sterilization and butchery before they can even talk.” Unsurprisingly, the hospital has since faced a deluge of threats, hate mail, and harassment ever since.“

The threat of violence not only functions as political performance in the interests of political opportunism and the stoking mass violence, it also is used by MAGA Republicans to conquer major critical institutions of society that extend from public schools and libraries to the courts. Dark money now drives such extremism and the repressive laws aimed at women’s reproductive rights, the banning of books, the weakening of voting rights, and assaults on the rights of trans-gender people, among other attacks. Many of these attacks are  driven by the modern Republican Party’s central fear of living with difference.

Across the globe, violence is being marketed to further white supremacy, racial purity, and the notion that some groups do not deserve citizenship and as “non-citizens [are] therefore not human.”  Politicians such as Orbán in Hungary talk openly about the dangers of “race mixing” in Europe echoing the discourse of white supremacy that now dominates the modern Republican Party. National memory is now corrupted in the name of fascist politics. As G. M. Tamas observes this narrowing of citizenship “is a form of civic death, often followed by “violent death.” As civic culture is undermined, it becomes easier for the GOP  to market violence at a time when far right extremists groups such as the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and QAnon are “rapidly mutating,” particularly in the United States. The threat of violence has become a standard GOP response to almost any issue. Such violence is aimed increasingly at women fighting for reproductive rights, trans gender youth, those who support gun restrictions, and educators and librarians who oppose banning books.

Right wing language reduces politics to theater and spectacle, while using a neo-fascist echo chamber to spread a fascist logic of neoliberal cruelty, a racist politics of disposability, and a celebration of white, male Christian nationalism and supremacy. Echoes of an earlier fascist past combine the language of  cruelty and dehumanization with policies designed to eliminate, repress, and kill those considered marginal—that is, those considered a contaminating and contemptible force in the script of hardcore fundamentalisms. Cruelty has now become ingrained in the DNA of the Republican Party, and much of it is aimed at children.

Right-wing politicians attack poor youth by sinking a child tax credit, plunging millions of kids into poverty. The war on youth continues in other ways. In spite of the fact that firearm related injuries are the leading cause of death among youth, Republicans call for the elimination of even the most sanguine of gun restrictions. Republicans too often depict Black youth as part of a criminal culture and support sentencing children to life without parole—a position reinforced by a reactionary Supreme Court. It should be noted that the U.S. incarcerates more of its youth than any other country in the world. Republicans do not simply fail children they wage a war on them. Idaho and other state Republicans have moved to make gender affirming care for transgender children a crime, even for the parents of such children.

Republican governors in Texas, Florida, and Arizona inflict immeasurable pain on defenceless migrants by often lying to them and bussing them, often illegally, to other states. In red states, politicians have enacted draconian antiabortion policies and are seeking to outlaw access to health services in states that have not banned women’s reproductive rights. A number of Republicans have voted against a federal disaster relief package that is crucial to aiding people caught in the path of ecological disasters, except when such disasters hit their own states.

Former President Trump now provides cover  for domestic terrorists such as the Proud Boys and radical conspiracy groups such as QAnon. Governor Abbott of Texas rejects Biden’s pardon of untold numbers of people convicted of simple marijuana charges, condemning thousands of people in his states’ prisons to the further injustices of a race-based malignant policy of incarceration. Liberal and mainstream language with its embrace of Biden’s notion of “semi-fascism” both obliterates the long history of fascist politics, genocide, and mass violence in the United States as well as the full-fledged fascist politics now driving the current nightmarish moment both in the U.S. and globally. And these examples barely touch the cruelties inflicted on those Americans considered unfit to claim the mantle of human dignity and universal political, economic and social rights.

Fascism is not a marginal force; it is a mass political movement that now occupies the centers of power and employs the willingness and complicity of millions who indulge its cultish and racist fantasies such as the sinister belief that Jews are bringing in millions of migrants to displace and dis-empower whites.  When Donald Trump once claimed the U.S. should have more people immigrating from Norway, he was mainstreaming the fascist discourse of racial purity that historically led to the death of millions not considered racially pure enough to be a part of previous fascist societies. As Ruth Ben-Ghiat has argued white replacement theory has a long fascist pedigree that has surfaced once again without apology as was evident when neo-Nazis shouted “Jews will not replace us” while marching in 2017 in Charlottesville, Virginia at the notoriously violent “unite the right rally. It has also become a central theme at right-wing rallies and in the far-right ecosystem. Writing for the Foreign Policy Research Institute, Colin P. Clarke and Tim Wilson observe that far right celebrities such as Tucker Carlson now play a prominent role in mainstreaming white supremacy through their relentless endorsement of the Great Replacement theory. They write:

“Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox News, which draws approximately 4.5 million viewers each night, has mentioned elements of the Great Replacement theory in more than 400 episodes. The Great Replacement theory suggests that “global elites” are replacing white Christians (“legacy Americans”) with immigrants. To prevent this phenomenon from playing out, far-right extremists call for the use of political violence.”

Replacement theory is not only spread by pundits such as Tucker Carlson, it has also been promoted by fringe Republican politicians such as Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar. Moreover, it has also been endorsed and spread by Rep. Elise Stefanik, the third highest ranking leader in the GOP. As reported in The Daily Beast, she not only promoted ads on Facebook endorsing white replacement theory, but she did so knowing that “it radicalized Robert Bowers, the terrorist who killed 11 people at the Tree of Life Synagogue because he wanted to punish Jews for helping the “invaders” [and] “radicalized Brenton Tarrant, the Christchurch terrorist who killed more than 50 Muslims, and who served as the direct inspiration for the Buffalo terrorist?”

The language of violence and white supremacy does more that invoke insidious meanings and racist stereotypes, it also incites threats that lead to violence, mass shootings, and untold deaths. The language of hate and bigotry embodies death-dealing threats that present enormous cause for alarm in society in which fascism is becoming an habitualized part of the culture. Such threats are now endemic to a Republican Party that hates equality, difference, and democracy itself. The language of violence, cruelty, and disposability are the political currency of a Nazi past and have emerged in what can be called the current Nazification of the present.

With Republican Party fascism on the rise, the right-wing social media floods American society with the discourse and images of hate, white nationalism, nativism, and the disavowal of citizenship as a universal right. Christian nationalism, with spokespersons such as retired lieutenant general and former national security adviser Michael Flynn, is dedicated to building a movement in which Christianity defines the governing principles of American life and institutions, all the while destroying the social bonds that provide meaning, dignity, and security to Americans. For instance, Flynn argues that the United States is in the midst of a religious crusade. He willingly attends and speaks at right-wing conferences filled with endless speeches about the “Great Awakening” and reminders that Christians are in a “spiritual war [which] you can’t win without attacking.”  Like many GOP evangelicals Flynn “sees conspiracies in just about every corner of American life. According to Michelle R. Smith reporting for Frontline, his thinking fuels violence and is rooted a mix of lies and falsehoods. She writes:

“He’s repeated falsehoods about Black Lives Matter and said that so-called globalists created COVID-19. He tells the tens of thousands of people who have paid to see him speak that there are 75 members of the Socialist Party in Congress and has said the left and Democrats are trying to destroy the country. He asserts, above all else, that the United States was founded on Judeo-Christian values. The bedrock, he warns, is crumbling…. He says elementary schools are teaching “filth” and “pornography.” He continues to assert, ignoring all evidence to the contrary, that elections can’t be trusted. He says, over and over, that some of his fellow Americans are “evil.”

Once again, major GOP politicians now use the language of violence to condone egregious acts of lawlessness, a characteristic endemic to the fascist playbook. Sen. Lindsay Graham on Fox News stated that “If there is a prosecution of Donald Trump for mishandling classified information…there will be riots in the streets.” It is hard not to interpret Graham’s remarks as both a retaliatory threat of violence in the service of political opportunism and the veiled claim that Trump is above the law. This climate of menace was reinforced following Graham’s threat by former President Donald Trump who in a radio interview warned that if he were charged for mishandling classified documents there would be big “problems in this country the likes of which perhaps we’ve never seen before,” adding “I don’t think people of the United states would stand for it.” Robert Reich, a former Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration, noted that “Trump’s rhetoric is dangerous. We have already seen the consequences of what happens when Trump invites a mob to the streets.” Soon afterwards, Trump went as far as to use the language of violence against Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, who against Trump’s wishes, voted favorably for a bill to fund the federal government through mid-December. Combined with a racist reference to McConnell’s wife, Trump stated McConnell must have voted for the legislation “because he has a DEATH WISH.” No subtlety here.

In this age of growing fascism, language has become a central part of the microphysics of repression and everyday life. This is a language that celebrates white nationalism along with a regenerating cult of rage and aggression as a legitimate tool of political power. In this new era of violence, it is crucial to comprehend not only the political, institutional, and cultural conditions at work in turning politics into a form of civil war, but also to identify the sites, policies, and regimes of power that exploit the fears, anxieties, loneliness, and rage that have been produced by a society that has become synonymous with a culture of cruelty, greed, and aggression, and unbridled racism.

It is also crucial to address the rhetorical silences about the threat of fascism in the US. For example, the mainstream press uses coded language to divert from public view both the crisis of capitalism and its morphing into a form of neoliberal fascism. It deals with the authoritarian politics of abduction and disposability suffered by migrants by focusing on the personal narratives of its victims. It focuses on the lies of the GOP while saying nothing regarding what Chris Hedges calls the false claim that America is a functioning democracy. It calls insurrectionists such as a number of the Republican nominees for office in November election deniers rather than dangerous fascists. It condemns Trump’s claim to  pardon criminals and thugs who attacked the Capitol while treating it as an isolated event that disappears from the news within 24 hours. Trump’s mishandling of government documents is treated as a personal act of lawlessness rather than being symptomatic of how lawlessness is endemic to fascist regimes, whether in Nazi Germany, Pinochet’s Chile, or Orbán’s Hungary.

When the neo-fascist Giorgia Meloni was elected as prime minister of Italy, the mainstream press, as well as Hilary Clinton, “focused solely on her being Italy’s first woman prime minister.”  What is often forgotten in this depoliticized homage to gender is that women have played a prominent role the “pursuit of fascist goals.”  George Pendle, writing in Air Mail, wrote that Italy’s Meloni “is the most spectacular example of a recent trend in European politics in which charismatic women have taken the reins of far-right political parties and led them to increasing legitimacy. Just look at Marine Le Pen in France, Alice Weidel in Germany, Pia Kjaersgaard in Denmark or Siv Jensen in Norway.”

The crisis of language in the United States is symptomatic of the death of one order, liberal democracy, and the emergence of another, which I call neoliberal fascism. The GOP with its mix of neo-Nazis, conspiracy theorists, religious fanatics,  politically corrupt grifters and politicians, January 6^th insurrectionists, and right-wing extremists are not simply trying to remove Joe Biden from office, ban books, turn public and higher education into right-wing propaganda machines, eliminate women’s reproductive rights, and define historical, cultural and national memory through the lens white replacement theory and a nostalgic longing for the age of Jim Crow. They are ushering in an updated form of fascism that threatens global existence, not simply the last vestiges of democracy. They are engaged in a project that should be rightfully defined as a counter-revolutionary fascist takeover grounded in the death dealing logics of white supremacy, mass violence, and a politics of disposability, especially when it refers to migrants and trans people.

If Americans want a real debate about violence in the United States and globally, it is crucial to understand it as part of a larger neoliberal global order that enacts the abandonment of public goods, declares welfare as a reckless handout and sinful, views class and racial solidarity as dangerous, and replaces the idea of equality, justice, and freedom with notions of white nationalism, patriotic correctness, and racial cleansing. In addition, any serious discourse about violence has to address the growth of the military-industrial-academic complex, the militarization of everyday life, the militarizing of the police and its culture of racism, and the rise of the national security surveillance state. Americans need a vocabulary and language in which human beings are not considered expendable; profits are not viewed as more important than human needs; and systemic inequality is not viewed as more important than social justice, freedom, and a viable notion of individual agency and collective self-determination. Americans needs a vocabulary, as Robin D. G. Kelly repeatedly reminds us, that rejects liberalism’s defense of capitalism, the priority of the market, and a weak and deracinated notion of the public, social, and common good.

Liberals fear fascism but they fear the end of capitalism even more in spite of the fact that neoliberal capitalism’s endpoint in a time of crisis embraces the fundamental rudiments of fascist politics. Voting will not stop fascism and neoliberalism is not its antidote;  moreover, elections at a historical moment in which money drives politics offers a weak depoliticizing prop for avoiding the ideological and structural elements of capitalism that breed massive inequality, suffering, repression, a culture of immediacy, civic dysfunction, the logics of disposability, and ecological devastation. Neoliberalism with its war-against-all mentality mainstreams hatred for those considered other, subjects Black and Brown people to systemic violence, and punishes those who believe in long term investments designed to develop a radically democratic future.

Neoliberal capitalism does not simply embrace violence, it is fundamental to its how it legitimates and reproduces itself. Capitalism is not part of the laws of nature and is the product of an ongoing effort to subvert the public imagination, undermine critical thinking, and decouple economic activity from social costs. Its massive right-wing propaganda machines have militarized culture and the educational apparatuses of persuasion. For the modern Republican Party, the struggle over ideas has become an accelerated war to depoliticize, infantilize, and destroy any vestige of a mass consciousness that has a passion for a socialist democracy.

The hard fascism of the Republican Party now functions as a form of domestic terrorism with its embrace of a global fascist politics. The Democratic Party is the muted underside of fascist politics. It is wedded to a capitalist society that breeds the inequalities, misery, suffering, uncertainties, and precarity that, as Toni Morrison once said, supports a militarized and racist environment that allows fascism to grow while rejecting equality as a central principle of both human relations and democracy itself.  It hides its fascist impulses in the hypocritical discourse of a compassionate capitalism, an oxymoron whose ultimate purpose is to protect the financial elite and its ideological and repressive state apparatuses. Wedded to big money, its call for fair elections rings hollow given that “both rising right-wing movements, as well as corporate control of elections, are linked.”  They are two sides of the same coin.  This addiction to neoliberal capitalism represents a lethal connection between the two political parties. There is also the broader context of American foreign policy and its connection to a fascist politics. This larger context highlights the role that the Democratic Party along with GOP has and continue to play in supporting a range of fascist countries and their right-wing movements, all of whom are blithely defined as allies.

The threat of violence is now used by right-wing politicians and extremist groups to threaten dissent and those who advocate for public health, basic social provisions, democratic values and democracy itself. Language stripped of any regards for civic culture, informed judgment, and an inclusive notion of citizenship becomes spectacularized, emotive, and bereft of reason and any sense of justice. This is about more than a crisis of civic literacy, historical consciousness, moral witnessing,  manufactured ignorance, and a rampant anti-intellectualism. This is a language that embraces violence  as a means of bonding, offering its followers the muscular allure of a spectacularized authoritarianism mediated through and enlivened, once again, by the false claim that white masculinity is in crisis, aggrieved, and under assault by migrants and people of color. In addition, such violence is now inscribed in a language of commonsense, where it escapes rational analysis and is taken-for-granted.

As civic culture is undermined, thinking itself becomes an object of scorn, and politics is emptied of any ethical substance, reduced to theater, corruption, and a tsunami of lies, it is all the more crucial to reclaim a language that embraces the social contract, common good, and sustainable democratic notions of community. At the very least, such a language would critically analyze the historically and socially constructed categories of truth, politics, and ethics. It would offer a comprehensive notion of politics, one that illuminates the diverse connections that join institutions, power relations, and the habits of everyday life. This would be a politics which, as the late Susan Willis argued, would give people “a voice in collective decision making, not only in government, but at home, at work, at school.”

This should be a politics that would allow for the interrogation of  matters of class, inequality, iniquitous power relations, systemic racism, and a politics of commonsense. It should also offer a vocabulary for deepening the connections among diverse groups, social movements, and competing solidarities. It would make education central to politics and create the tools that enable individuals to connect their private troubles to wider, systemic concerns. It would offer a vocabulary for replacing a politics of disconnection and the individualization of the social with a politics of connection; that is, a  comprehensive politics that embraces the totality of a system and social order. Following Stanley Aronowitz,  Angela Davis, and Barbara Epstein, a viable notion of resistance needs a new language for rethinking theory, developing an anti-capitalist politics, and a mass movement aimed at  democratizing power. This notion of resistance would also include a discourse for relating education to social change, a theory of institutional structures, a developed notion of public intellectuals in the age of digital media and tyranny, and a politics of critique and possibility.

In the current post-Trump era, violent rhetoric has become an apocalyptic rage machine  as words are emptied of substantive meaning; reason is overtaken by lies, and the forces of irrationality; modern conscience collapses, overcome by doctrines of hate and the destruction of political and ethical standards. In this upgraded era of fascism and accelerated violence, new and oppressive modes of persuasion are developed in the cultural realm that extend from social media to numerous online platforms. These new regimes of indoctrination and propaganda take on an unparalleled significance in the production of knowledge, identities, agency, values and social relations. Under such circumstances, language no longer functions as simply a repository of meaning and facts, it has turned toxic and takes on a new pedagogical and communicative significance in its ability to shape values, social relations, and identities.

In this new era of violence, it is crucial to grasp not only the political, institutional, and cultural conditions at work in turning politics into a form of civil war, but also to identify the sites, policies, and regimes of power that exploit the fears, anxieties, loneliness, and rage that have been produced by a capitalist society that has become synonymous with a culture of cruelty, war, aggression, and systemic brutality.  Under neoliberalism, domination has become internalized, politics has collapsed into the personal, meaningful registers of the social and public sphere have largely disappeared. In this historical period of social atomization and loneliness, social problems are now defined through the regressive neoliberal language of excessive individualism in which all troubles are reduced to pejorative categories such as a lack of ambition, personal failings, individual deficits, laziness, and lack of resilience.

In many societies, violence is being elevated to an organizing principle of power, increasingly   valued as a form of political currency. The conditions for democracy are being obliterated by extremists globally who embrace repressive forms of power, lies, and white supremacy as tools of political opportunism. America has a full-fledged fascist problem that must be addressed if it is to think its way to a different politics and future. But America is not alone. Fascist governments are emerging in Sweden, Italy, Hungary, Chile, and the other countries. What these countries share is a hatred of difference, equality, and egalitarian policies and practices. Traditional political categories that often pit parties against each other seem irrelevant when it comes to addressing the emerging threats to global democracy itself. Liberal democracy is no longer on life-support in the United States, it is a corpse hidden behind the language of myth, misrepresentation, and social and historical amnesia. The process of Nazification has almost reached its endpoint and the planet hangs in the balance. Across the globe, the struggle over politics is less a rivalry between traditional political parties and movements than a struggle between an updated brand of fascism and the promise of a socialist democracy. As the ghost of fascism washes across the globe, maintaining hope and the need for massive collective resistance has become a revolutionary act with no other option.

First published on Counterpunch.

---

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License