HENRY GIROUX
JANUARY 30, 2026

The United States is under siege, not by a foreign enemy, but by the Trump administration, which has transformed governance itself into a form of domestic terrorism in the service of a white supremacist state. By domestic terrorism, I mean the use of state-sanctioned intimidation, disappearance, and violence against civilian populations in order to discipline dissent, enforce racial hierarchy, and normalize fear as a mode of governance. Masked agents in unmarked vehicles, dressed in battlefield gear and operating beyond any recognizable legal authority, now stalk the streets, abducting, brutalizing, and in some cases killing people. Citizens and non-citizens alike are rendered disposable. Reason and the rule of law have collapsed, replaced by the naked exercise of state violence in defense of an apartheid politics.

This is a regime that has turned against its own people. It governs through disappearance, terror, and the routinization of cruelty. Harm, misery, violence, and murder are no longer deviations from democratic norms; they are the norms. In the Minneapolis area alone, federal agents have now been involved in multiple fatal shootings in recent weeks, including the January 7th state murder of 37-year-old mother Renée Nicole Good, a U.S. citizen shot and killed by an ICE agent during federal enforcement operations. The killing has sparked widespread protests and outrage across the Twin Cities and the nation as communities demanded accountability and justice. The Trump administration attempted to justify the killing by labeling Good a ‘domestic terrorist,’ weaponizing the term to deflect accountability and invert the meaning of state violence.

 Soon after Good’s death, federal agents were again captured on video in Minneapolis using lethal force that amounted to an execution in plain sight. The footage shows a man overwhelmed by a swarm of officers, pushed to the ground, and shot multiple times even as he lay motionless before them. Local officials confirm that the incident resulted in the death of 37-year-old ICU nurse Alex Jeffrey Pretti, who dedicated his life to caring for veterans. This marked the third shooting by federal immigration agents in the city in just a few weeks, deepening public outrage over what critics call unchecked violence by federal agents. Once again, despite multiple videos documenting the murder, including one showing a Border Patrol agent taking Pretti’s gun before he was killed, the Trump regime nevertheless claimed an agent shot him in self-defense, “a narrative Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz called ‘nonsense’ and ‘lies’.”

Within minutes of the killing, senior Trump administration officials moved swiftly to control the narrative. Trump’s deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, joined others in seizing on unverified claims to label Pretti a “domestic terrorist” and a “would-be assassin,” while accusing Democrats of “fanning the flames of insurrection” for crass political gain. These assertions were not merely reckless; they were strategic fabrications designed to invert victim and perpetrator, delegitimize dissent, and preemptively justify state violence. They also backfired on the administration, as an avalanche of videos stripped away the official lies and revealed the real assailants, federal agents who beat and killed not as rogue actors, but as executors of state-sanctioned terror. To understand these killings as anything other than isolated crimes is to confront the deeper historical system of violence from which they emerge.

State violence must be remembered and confronted not only in its most spectacular eruptions, such as the deployment of armed federal forces into America’s cities, but as a systemic condition rooted in a long history of imperial conquest, genocide, and racial domination. From the extermination wars against Indigenous peoples to slavery, lynching, and mass incarceration, violence has never been incidental to the American project; it has been one of its organizing principles. This history is embodied in the evolution of the carceral state, a political culture wedded to racist terror, and a punishing gangster form of capitalism that plunders labor, concentrates wealth, and thrives on mass inequality, impoverishment, and social misery. The machinery of death is thus both historical and existential, sustained by a culture of manufactured ignorance and permanent class and racial war. Such a system cannot be reformed without reproducing the very relations of domination on which it depends. It must be dismantled. Trump and his army of enforcers, in the streets and in the White House, are not a rupture from this history but its culmination, the moment when a long-standing regime of violence sheds its democratic disguise and rules openly through fear. The assassinations of Good and Pretti, however morally and politically repulsive, mark more than the tragic and shocking loss of two lives; they signal the death of American democracy, the unraveling of its civic culture, the collapse of its legal and cultural institutions, and the emergence of an upgraded form of fascism, a convergence that grimly fulfills the long history of violence through which America must now recognize itself.

That long history does not remain abstract; it is actively mobilized in the present through spectacle, coercion, and the strategic deployment of state power. Such claims echo across the upper reaches of the Trump administration and function as ideological weapons. They sanctify state terror, erase visual evidence of brutality, and flood the public sphere with a fascist politics of fear in which dissent is criminalized, truth rendered disposable, and violence recoded as both necessary and virtuous. Their purpose is unmistakable: to create the conditions for invoking the Insurrection Act by normalizing the spectacle of unarmed civilians being shot in cold blood.

These killings are not random excesses or rogue acts. They are calculated performances of power, intended simultaneously to shock the public into paralysis and to provoke mass resistance that can then be cited as justification for escalating repression. The regime’s logic is brutally circular: protest is met with violence, violence generates outrage, outrage is labeled insurrection, and insurrection becomes the pretext for extinguishing democracy at gunpoint. State-sanctioned violence is thus framed as the only means of restoring “order,” even as it becomes the mechanism through which democratic life is suffocated.

Here, Václav Havel’s warning in The Power of the Powerless takes on renewed urgency. Havel argued that authoritarian systems depend not only on repression but on the forced participation of citizens in a lie, a lie sustained through fear, ritualized obedience, and manufactured consent. What we are witnessing is precisely such a moment: an attempt to compel the public to accept an inverted moral universe in which state murder is called security and resistance is branded terrorism. The real danger lies not only in the violence itself but in whether society is coerced into living within its logic. Havel also insisted that dominant power must never be allowed the final word, and that the downtrodden and oppressed always carry within themselves the capacity to overcome their own powerlessness. It is precisely this insight that haunts the Trump regime and its band of executioners, for it reveals that their authority is neither total nor secure. Embedded within their displays of force are the very seeds of their undoing, taking root in the growing courage, solidarity, and resistance of those who refuse to live within the lie.

As Carole Cadwalladr has rightly observed, what taking place on the streets of Minneapolis is a test case. The city has become a political laboratory, a petri dish in which the administration is probing the limits of its power and measuring the resilience of democratic resistance. As she reported, drawing on an interview with conservative historian Robert Kagan, the strategy is deliberate: provoke street violence, manufacture chaos, and then invoke the Insurrection Act as a means of consolidating authoritarian rule. Minneapolis is not an aberration. It is a warning; it is a glimpse of a dark future.

The brutal, state-sanctioned assassinations of Good and Pretti, captured on cell phone videos, expose a cruelty that tears through history’s thin membrane and returns us to its darkest rituals. This malignant lawlessness summons an earlier terror, when the lynching of Black bodies was staged as public spectacle, when murder became entertainment and cruelty was recoded as a political theater of fear in the service of the Trump administration. These killings and the unceasing violence unleashed by ICE summon the memory of Kristallnacht, that moment in Nazi Germany when sanctioned brutality spread like a moral plague, destroying reason, annihilating decency, and choking off the very possibility of civic life. What we are witnessing is not an aberration but a warning, violence unbound from law or conscience, rehearsing the old lessons of hatred with new tools and new victims. The horror is not only unthinkable, it is historically familiar, and that familiarity should chill us to the bone. History in this case should not be a weapon of state terror, but a repository of dangerous memories, a resource for radical change.

This history of sanctioned brutality is not confined to memory or metaphor; it is institutionalized in the everyday operations of the contemporary carceral state. These deaths, and the escalation of federal deadly force within U.S. cities, are not isolated tragedies. They are part of a broader pattern, a rupture in the social contract and due process. ICE, in expanding its sprawling system of detention fortresses that critics have likened to creating its own gulags, oversaw at least 32 deaths in custody last year and additional deaths tied to recent enforcement actions, a carceral network where cruelty is built into the very architecture of state governance rather than treated as an aberration. This pattern of horror behind ICE’s prison walls should serve as a stark warning that violence, brutality, and cruelty now define the DNA of a democracy in retreat.

Trump’s delusional embrace of violence is no longer a matter of abstract rhetoric. It is evident in his racist and dehumanizing language, the expansion of the so-called war on terror, and his unapologetic support for imperial power, all of which work to make state-sanctioned violence thinkable, defensible, and increasingly legitimate. This violence is not deferred or symbolic; it is unfolding in real time, in spaces that should be protected from state power rather than violated by it. The regime of terror now operates simultaneously at home and abroad, the latter visible in the bombing of Iran and Yemen and in the invasion of Venezuela. What is unfolding domestically mirrors a violence long rehearsed beyond U.S. borders.

As Chris Hedges has observed, what we are witnessing is the return of violence long perfected abroad to our own streets, the “imperial boomerang” in action, where the tactics of occupation and repression once deployed in Fallujah or Helmand province are now repurposed against civilians here at home. Before we became the victims of such state terror, Hedges reminds us, we were often its accomplices.

In Minnesota, ICE agents have escalated targeted raids and detentions across neighborhoods and in close proximity to schools, shattering any remaining pretense that children are off limits. School officials in a Minneapolis suburb report that ICE vehicles have entered school property, followed buses, circled playgrounds, and detained students, including multiple minors swept up in the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. As Columbia Heights Public Schools Superintendent Zena Stenvik stated publicly, ICE agents have been “roaming our neighborhoods, circling our schools, following our buses, coming into our parking lots and taking our children,” leaving a community that once regarded schools as sanctuaries with a sense of safety that has been deeply shattered.

The abduction of five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos by ICE marks a chilling pedagogical moment in the worst sense of the term. Innocence itself is weaponized. A child’s terror becomes a warning to the nation: no one is beyond reach, not even those who should be most protected. Childhood is no longer a sanctuary; it has become a frontline. Schools, once imagined as fragile democratic spaces of care, learning, and protection, are now treated as legitimate sites of surveillance and coercion. When armed agents stalk school grounds and detain children, the message is unmistakable: fear has replaced care as the governing logic of the state. Liam Conejo Ramos’s case, one of several involving children detained near schools or on their way to class, demonstrates that the agents meant to enforce ‘immigration law’ now operate in ways that fracture communities and transform schools from sites of refuge into spaces of dread, state violence, and terminal abandonment.

ICE has mutated into an apparatus of terror bearing unmistakable resemblance to the Nazi Brownshirts (SA). It has become a toxic and ugly institution that no longer seeks legitimacy through persuasion, spectacle, or even propaganda It has blood in its mouth, feeding openly on the spectacle and normalization of violence. The work of dehumanization is complete. Repression no longer needs a narrative. Violence now speaks directly, efficiently, and publicly. The photograph of five-year-old preschooler Liam Conejo Ramos trembling in fear is not incidental; it is visual proof of a war on children that is already underway, a war that treats young lives as collateral damage in the consolidation of authoritarian power.

But this moment is not only one of terror; it is also a moment of profound pedagogical consequence. The Trump regime does not rely solely on repression, surveillance, and brute force; it depends on the continual production of fascist subjects willing to embrace its reign of terror as common sense, security, and patriotism. Fascism operates not only through the machinery of domination but through the colonization of consciousness, educating people to normalize cruelty, internalize fear, and confuse obedience with moral virtue. It educates by attacking public and higher education, stripping history of dangerous memories, ideas, and critical knowledge. It also works relentlessly to shape desires, loyalties, and perceptions, making violence appear necessary and dissent appear dangerous. Against this pedagogy of fear, resistance becomes an alternative form of education, one that awakens critical consciousness and restores the capacity to imagine justice. The assault on children, youth, independent media, organized resistance, and the future itself exposes the moral bankruptcy of the regime and clarifies the stakes of the struggle. Young people are learning, in real time, what power looks like when stripped of ethics and accountability, and they are also learning that democracy cannot survive without courage, solidarity, and collective action.

The United States is not on the brink of fascism; it is living inside it. Yet history teaches us that authoritarianism is never defeated by silence or compliance. It is challenged when people refuse to unlearn their capacity for outrage, when education becomes a practice of freedom rather than domination, and when youth transform fear into political consciousness. The mass resistance now unfolding in Minneapolis and spreading across the country is not a fleeting protest but a giant stirring, a force gathering its strength in the face of terror. What is required now is a shared awakening, a collective refusal to normalize terror or accept fear as the horizon of political life. It calls for a renewed commitment to a pedagogy of resistance, one that names injustice without hesitation, connects private suffering to public responsibility, and affirms, even in dark times, that another future not only remains possible but is already struggling to be born.

That future, however, depends on organized, nonviolent mass action led by workers, artists, intellectuals, cultural workers, youth, educators,  unions, community organizers, and mass democratic organizations that  understand that teaching, cultural production, and political struggle are inseparable practices. The tools required to confront authoritarianism are not new; they are part of a democratic inheritance forged through abolitionist movements, labor struggles, anti-colonial resistance, and the Black freedom struggle, this country’s most enduring and transformative force for democracy. Again and again, these traditions have shown that disciplined, mass-based collective movements can dismantle regimes of terror once deemed invincible. Under such circumstances, education should become central to politics and the struggle over identity, agency, and subjectivity, functioning as a fundamental force in social change. To reclaim democracy today is to recover this historical lineage, embrace the struggle over agency, reactivate its lessons in the present, and recognize that social hope is not an abstract retreat but a collective practice, one built through solidarity, historical memory, sustained resistance, and the refusal to surrender the future to fear.

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.