Colonial Nostalgia and Aryan Reliability

BY JUAN COLE

Under President Donald J. Trump, the United States has now become an engine for the promulgation of White nationalism. Not since the 1930s has such an ideology, which exalts those ethnic groups it codes as “White,” while denigrating all others, underpinned the domestic and foreign policies of a major world power. Typically (for our moment), Trump’s recent National Security Strategy (NSS) depicted Europe as in distinct “civilizational decline” because of the European Union’s commitment to multiracial democracy and international humanitarian law. These days, thanks to its racial policies, the Trump team even finds a way to inject racial hatred into dry economic statistics, complaining that “Continental Europe has been losing share of global GDP [gross domestic product] — down from 25 percent in 1990 to 14 percent today.”

A Mayor Named Khan

As it happens, though, on a per-person basis, Europeans are more than twice as wealthy today in real terms as they were 36 years ago. The dictum once cited by Mark Twain that there are “lies, damned lies, and statistics” is exemplified in Trump’s National Security Strategy. In 1991, just two years before the European Union (EU) was first formed, the per-capita GDP there was $15,470 (in today’s dollars). In 2024, that figure was $43,305. What changed since then wasn’t that Europe began decaying, but that the well-being of the people in the global South, in what Trump dismisses as “shithole countries,” has actually also improved significantly, whether he likes it or not, changing Europe’s share of global GDP.

In his National Security Strategy, Trump admits, however, that Europe’s supposed economic degradation doesn’t bother him nearly as much as another issue: “This economic decline is eclipsed by the real and more stark prospect of civilizational erasure,” thanks to Europe’s migration policies. In short, Trump’s government has now adopted a modernized version of the Nazi Great Replacement ideology, slamming “migration policies that are transforming the [European] continent and creating strife,” along with “cratering birthrates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence.”

Trump claims that he’s no longer sure Europeans will even remain European. He supposedly worries that, two decades from now, the continent will be unrecognizable and EU countries no longer capable of being Washington’s “reliable allies.” That barb is, of course, clearly aimed at Muslim immigrants to Europe, even though they are a distinct minority of those arriving there. In an interview about his NSS, Trump snidely remarked, “If you take a look at London, you have a mayor named Khan.” And he then went on to exclaim in horror that immigrants aren’t just coming from the Middle East, “they’re coming in from the Congo, tremendous numbers of people coming from the Congo.” In other words, the only thing that outstrips Trump’s Islamophobia is his horror of Black people.

Of course, he’s completely misinformed about immigration to Europe, which means his NSS is as well. As a start, the largest influx of people into the EU in recent few years has been 4.3 million Ukrainians. The major sources of immigration to Germany in 2024 were Ukraine, Romania, Turkey, Syria, and India. For Spain, it was Colombia, Morocco, Venezuela, Peru, and Argentina. As for Europe’s future reliability, Trump has already said that he “can’t trust” Denmark, no matter that its population is solidly Lutheran and predominantly blond, because that country won’t give him Greenland. And since the president has expressed a willingness to break up the NATO alliance, if necessary, to add 57,000 Greenlanders to his feudal domains, his doubting of European dependability should be considered richly ironic.

Aryan Reliability

The underpinnings of Trump’s reasoning can (or at least should) be described as Nazi in style. After all, he’s assuming that the immigrants he loathes are inherently incapable of becoming Europeans and will make those countries intrinsically untrustworthy as allies of the United States. Of the EU countries, he recently asserted that “they’ll change their ideology, obviously, because the people coming in have a totally different ideology.” Yet British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, born in Southampton to an immigrant Indian-East African family of Hindu faith, was widely viewed as having restored British-U.S. diplomatic relations after years of strain.

In reality, studies show that socio-economic status, not national origin, best predicts how immigrants will vote. In Germany, the better-off Russian-Germans, who far outnumber largely working-class Turkish-Germans, tend to vote for right-of-center parties. Both groups, however, seem happy to participate in European politics in accordance with local norms. If, for Trump, the term “immigrants” in this context is a dog whistle for Muslims, it might be noted that nine of the 22 countries, including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan, that have been formally designated by Trump as “major non-NATO allies” are Muslim-majority.

His foreign policy reasoning in that NSS eerily mirrors the crackpot logic of Adolf Hitler, who saw France as an enemy of Germany’s because it had allegedly fallen irretrievably under non-Aryan Jewish influence, and who held out hope in the 1920s and early 1930s that Aryan elements would prevail over Jewish ones in Britain, a country he preferred as a strategic partner because of the Germanic ancestry of part of its population. In Trump’s NSS, immigrant Europeans from Africa and the Middle East play the role that Jews did in Hitler’s thinking — that is, non-Aryan underminers of national integrity. Hitler’s conspiratorial racism was, of course, all too grimly insane, and so, too, is that of Trump’s NSS.

“Mongols and Negroes”

Central to the NSS is the Great Replacement. The idea, though not the phrase, goes back to 1900 when the French nationalist parliamentarian and novelist Maurice Barrès wrote, “Today, new French have slipped in among us… who want to impose on us their ways of feeling.” He warned of Jewish, Italian, and other immigrants. “The name of France might well survive,” he commented, but “the special character of our country would nevertheless be destroyed.” Amid a political crisis over the wrongful conviction of Captain Alfred Dreyfus (of Jewish and Alsatian heritage) for supposed espionage for the German embassy, Barrès denounced the famed French novelist Émile Zola, a supporter of Dreyfus, as “not French” but a rootless cosmopolitan from a Venetian background.

Fifty years later, the French Nazi René Binet (1913-1957) coined the phrase “Great Replacement.” An ex-Communist, he had served as a Nazi collaborator during World War II in the Waffen Grenadier Brigade of the Charlemagne paramilitary Protection Squadron (Schutzstaffel or SS). After the war, in his 1950 book Theory of Racism, he wrote in dismay about how Western Europe had been invaded by “Mongols and Negroes” — that is, by the Soviets and the Americans. He lamented that Jewish-dominated capital also supposedly controlled Europe (it didn’t, of course) and falsely alleged that Jewish CEOs were bringing in immigrants in a deliberate attempt to replace civilized White Europeans.

Sadly enough, Binet’s ideas have been revived in this century by French thinkers and politicians. Renaud Camus published his twenty-first century version of the theory in 2010, entitling his book The Great Replacement. Such falsehoods were echoed in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, when American Nazis chanted “Jews will not replace us” (and President Trump called the assembled protestors, as well as those who opposed them, “very fine people”). Camus came around to supporting like-minded politicians in the far-right French National Rally (formerly the National Front) party, led by Marine Le Pen, who also became a Trump ally. When a French court convicted her of embezzlement in 2025 and excluded her from politics for five years, Trump denounced the verdict and launched the slogan, “Free Marine Le Pen.” Holding Le Pen, a far-right racist politician, accountable to the rule of law is part of what Trump was complaining about in his NSS when he cited European “censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition.”

Marine Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, had been a paratrooper in the ruthless Algerian War (1954-1962) that killed between half a million and a million Algerians in a bid to keep that country under French colonial domination. The elder Le Pen came to lead the newly founded National Front in 1972 and was surrounded by far-right figures who had collaborated with the Nazis. While the party reinvented itself under Marine Le Pen in 2017 as the National Rally and has moved slightly toward the center, many of its supporters harbor neo-Nazi ideas about racial purity, now typically aimed at Arab and Amazigh Muslims.

Forget 1776 and All That

The central concerns of that National Security Strategy now animate the Trump administration’s foreign policy. At the annual Munich Security Conference in early February, for instance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio took up what the Victorian jingoist writer Rudyard Kipling once termed the White Man’s Burden, crowing that “for five centuries, before the end of the Second World War, the West had been expanding.” He neglected to mention all the massacres, destruction, and looting that European colonialists perpetrated over those centuries. Belgium’s King Leopold II alone, for instance, instituted policies in the Congo from 1885 to 1908 that may have killed as many as 10 million people. That bloody episode inspired Joseph Conrad’s novel The Heart of Darkness, in the final sentence of which the protagonist utters, “The horror! The horror!“

After the end of World War II in 1945, Rubio lamented, a Europe in ruins contracted. “Half of it,” he added, “lived behind an Iron Curtain and the rest looked like it would soon follow.” He mourned that “the great Western empires had entered into terminal decline, accelerated by godless communist revolutions and by anti-colonial uprisings that would transform the world and drape the red hammer and sickle across vast swaths of the map in the years to come.”

He also displayed a striking mixture of White nationalism and colonial nostalgia — and with it, an ignorance of the history of decolonization, which neither occurred only after 1945, nor was in the main Communist-led. After all, the United States launched its anti-colonial struggle in 1776. Most of Latin America was liberated from the Spanish Empire in the early nineteenth century by Simón Bolívar and other fighters who would have been characterized at the time as liberals. As for the post-World War II liberation movements, most leaders of former colonialized countries, including India, Kenya, Malaysia, Morocco, Pakistan, Senegal, and Sudan, among other places, tilted either to capitalism or to social democracy.

Marco Rubio’s mixing of White nationalism and colonial nostalgia is, of course, nothing new. A return of German colonies in Africa, lost in World War I to Britain and France, was among the Nazi regime’s most insistent demands in the late 1930s, and dreams of a new version of German imperialism in Africa were part of what was meant by the Third Reich.

Rubio has depicted decolonization as a failure of the European will to power. Most historians, on the other hand, point to the way their colonies mobilized for independence. Political scientists point to two crucial kinds of mobilization. The first was “social mobilization,” which involved urbanization, industrialization, and increased literacy. By 1945, ever more Asians and Africans were no longer illiterates living in small, disconnected villages. As for political mobilization, parties, chambers of commerce, and labor unions put millions of the previously colonized in the streets. New social classes of entrepreneurs, professionals, and workers demanded the right to control their own destinies.

And in the wake of World War II, attitudes were changing even among the colonial powers. The British public, for instance, could no longer be persuaded to spend money in an attempt to quell an India where the Congress Party of Mahatma Gandhi  and Jawaharlal Nehru had brought millions into the streets demanding independence. And while the Netherlands did fight viciously to roll back Indonesia’s declaration of independence in 1945 (despite having itself been occupied by Germany during World War II), after four years of massacres, it was forced out.  The impoverished French had no choice but to give up most of their African possessions, but in a sanguinary failure attempted to keep their colonies in Algeria and Vietnam by military force. American President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a wiser man than Rubio, twisted French President Charles De Gaulle’s arm to get him out of Algeria lest the revolutionaries there turn to Moscow and Communism.

Kinder, Küche, Kirche

Given that history, the advice of President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio to the European Union to adopt a White nationalist domestic and foreign policy and attempt to initiate a new round of European colonialism in the global South is monstrous indeed, both morally and in practical terms. Without immigration today, Europe would soon face Japan’s dilemma of rapid population loss, along with the loss of international economic and political power.

Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez had it right when he said that Spain faces a choice between “being an open and prosperous country or a closed and poor one.” As for the White nationalist pronatalist dream of keeping women barefoot and pregnant in accordance with the old German slogan, Kinder, Küche, Kirche (children, kitchen, church), it’s a chimera given the electoral power of women in today’s Europe (and the United States).

Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s cruel, heavily ICED anti-immigrant campaign has already hurt the American economy and Europeans would be deeply unwise to emulate it in any way, including colonially. The neoconservative project of rehabilitating American colonialism crashed and burned in this country’s disastrous twenty-first-century wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (and won’t be aided by the present assault on Iran either) for reasons similar to those that made European colonialism impossible in the post-World War II period.

In reality, the European Union’s project of multicultural democracy has yielded enormous prosperity, while expanding and deepening human rights. Trump’s White nationalism, on the other hand, is a formula for division, poverty, and mass violence, as was demonstrated in the 1930s and 1940s when a form of that ideology was last tried in Europe.

And count on this: Trump and crew are going to give the phrase “the White man’s burden” a grim new meaning.

Copyright 2026 Juan Cole

First published on TomDispatch.com.

Shared vai Creative Commons.

HENRY GIROUX
FEBRUARY 13, 2026

Spectacles of State Violence and the Culture of Cruelty

The United States is not merely awash in brutalizing and murderous acts of state-sanctioned violence. It is being restructured by them. The killings of Rachel Good and Alex Pretti are not aberrations or tragic mistakes; they belong to a longer and darker history that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People once named with chilling precision. In earlier periods of American turmoil, such killings were called lynchings, acts “carried out by lawless mobs, although police officers did participate, under the pretext of justice.” Today, this violence extends well beyond the bullet and the baton. It takes form in the expansion of prison camps, what Thom Hartmann rightly calls concentration camps, the war on immigrants, and the routine assault on Black and brown lives made disposable through policy, indifference, and neglect. At the same time, the country is saturated with a culture steeped in fascist spectacle and authoritarian display. Under the Trump administration, aesthetics itself becomes a battleground, a weaponized field where power works on desire, memory, bodies, and pleasure to consolidate domination.

As Toni Morrison warned in her Nobel Prize lecture, oppressive language does not merely describe violence; it doesviolence, narrowing thought, erasing responsibility, and preparing the ground for cruelty. For Morrison, this is dead language “that drinks blood, laps vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots under crinolines of respectability and patriotism as it moves relentlessly toward the bottom line and the bottomed-out mind… 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.” In his monumental The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin chillingly grasped this danger with prophetic clarity, insisting that the connective tissue between state violence and the colonization of public consciousness lies in the corporate-controlled pedagogical apparatuses of print culture, screen culture, and social media. In a hyper-mediated society, as the historian Richard J. Evans argues, fascism does not rely solely on force or decree. It aestheticizes politics itself, converting violence into pleasure, domination into entertainment, and obedience into desire. That insight quietly underwrites much of what follows. This fusion of language, image, and power forms the theoretical groundwork for understanding how fascist aesthetics now operate in the United States.

Fascism Educates Before It Governs

We live in an age in which fascist aesthetics has become a powerful tool of authoritarian pedagogy, functioning, in part, to mobilize myth, emotion, ritual, and spectacle in order to celebrate fascist sentiments including white nationalism, racial and ethnic hierarchies, state terrorism, and the performative cruelty of the powerful, but also to crush dissent and prevent the redistribution of power.

Fascism educates before it rules, working through spectacle, cruelty, myth, facile beauty, and erasure long before it consolidates power through formal political institutions. In the Trump era, this spectacle-driven authoritarianism illuminates the aestheticization of power by offering pageantry and the pleasure of submission as beautifying practices that celebrate war, hierarchy, a survival-of-the-fittest ethos, regressive individualism, and the militarization of everyday life. Fascism aestheticizes politics to render domination pleasurable, converting power into spectacle and obedience into desire, and this logic is now unmistakably visible in the visual culture that saturates Trump-era authoritarianism. Politics, in this sense, follows culture because political agency itself is culturally produced, not merely through policy or ideas but through affect, image, and embodiment.

Aestheticizing Power: Trumpism and the Visual Grammar of Fascism

The visual grammar of fascism is on full display in government-produced videos of immigrants filmed in chains and marched onto deportation planes, which transform state violence into spectacle, staging cruelty as administrative order and teaching the public who belongs and who is disposable. Trump’s grotesque, AI-generated fantasy of Gaza, recast as a luxury playground, extends this aesthetic logic outward, laundering colonial devastation through the visual grammar of real estate branding, imperial leisure, and technological fantasy. Violence is not denied in these images; it is aestheticized, stripped of history and consequence, and re-presented as progress itself. Cruelty, deportations, and ICE assaults on immigrants and people of color are recast as reality-TV entertainment through a steady stream of slick propaganda videos produced by the Department of Homeland Security.

White Supremacy as Pedagogy: The Nation as a Biological Project

The same pedagogy of contempt animates the circulation of grotesque spectacles, including images that depict Trump defecating from an airplane onto protesters below, a scatological allegory that converts hatred of democratic dissent into visual pleasure and collective affirmation for his followers. This aesthetic does not merely signal oppression; it luxuriates in it, inviting audiences to take pleasure in humiliation itself. At its core lies an unabashed embrace of white supremacy. MAGA spectacles, racist imagery, and governing policies are organized around the presumption of a racial hierarchy with whiteness fixed at the apex. White supremacy is not incidental to Trump’s politics; it is their animating DNA. As the historian Robert O. Paxton argued in The Anatomy of Fascism, a defining feature of fascism is the redefinition of the nation as a biological rather than a civic entity. Crucially, this redefinition is not transmitted only through doctrine or law but also through a dense pedagogical field of images, rituals, performances, spectacles, and cultural apparatuses that teach audiences how to see the nation, how to recognize enemies, and how to feel righteous in their exclusion.

Under the Trump regime, citizenship is severed from even the fragile promise of shared democratic values and anchored in racial belonging, a violent recalibration that redraws the moral and political map of the nation, determining who counts, who is disposable, and who must be expelled. In this logic, the very claim to citizenship by nonwhite populations is treated as a criminal act, and their presence in the United States is recast as a crime scene. Exclusion is elevated into civic virtue, while assaults on racialized communities are not only permissible but necessary. Such reasoning does more than authorize cruelty; it normalizes the language and practice of racial cleansing and, at its most lethal extreme, summons the specter of genocide itself.

Once the nation is defined as a biological project, exclusion no longer appears as excess but as necessity. What follows is a cascade of policies, images, and performances that give administrative form to racial hierarchy and train the public to accept cruelty as governance. This logic surfaces in policies that welcome only white South Africans as refugees, in the systematic weakening of civil rights protections, and in claims that immigrants with “bad genes” are “poisoning the blood” of the nation. It appears in the deployment of armed federal agents into states with disproportionately nonwhite populations, creating what civil rights advocates have described as a new and terrifying reality for targeted communities. Trump’s racist rhetoric is evident in his disparagement of people from African nations and Haiti as coming from “shithole countries,” and in his dehumanization of Somalis as “garbage.”

Trump’s embrace of white supremacy is further revealed in his claim, in an interview with the New York Times that the civil rights movement and the policies it produced hurt white people who were “very badly treated.” He extended this logic on the global stage, asserting in a speech to the United Nations that Europe faced a civilizational crisis because of mass migration, which he cast as a threat to Western culture itself. This worldview reached its most unvarnished expression when Trump posted on Truth Social a blatantly racist, AI-generated video portraying Barack and Michelle Obama as apes, an image drawn directly from the archive of colonial and fascist racism. Such vile language and imagery would be at home in Ku Klux Klan pamphlets. As Susan Sontag observed, these authoritarian fantasies are inseparable from “the fetishization of dominance found in fascist aesthetics,” where cruelty becomes spectacle and racial hatred is staged as entertainment.

Cruelty as Spectacle: Rallies, Rituals, and Authoritarian Pleasure

Trump’s rallies intensify this toxic authoritarian aesthetic, transforming politics into a mass performance that fuses theatrical cruelty, racial grievance, white supremacy, and ritualized obedience. What emerges is a carnivalesque politics in which humiliation is rewarded, submission is celebrated, and dissent is disciplined through spectacle. This dynamic reaches a chilling apotheosis in the viral video of Kristi Noem posed like a plasticized Barbie doll before El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison, where mass incarceration and authoritarian punishment are aestheticized as moral clarity, strength, and order. In this grotesque aesthetic performance, state violence is stripped of its brutality and re-presented as virtue, resolve, and national renewal. The scene lays bare a central truth: fascist aesthetics do not vanish with history’s defeat of earlier regimes; they are endlessly reinvented, adapting to new contexts while preserving their core logic of domination, cruelty, and enforced submission.

Taken together, these spectacles form a continuous pedagogical landscape of power, binding cruelty, obedience, and excess into a single visual regime. The gaudy reinvention of Mar-a-Lago as a gilded monument resurrects the visual language of the Gilded Age, converting obscene affluence into political virtue and inequality into patriotic display. A similar aesthetic animates the Jeff Bezos–backed propaganda film Melania, which, as Xan Brooks observes, operates less as a documentary than as “an elaborate piece of designer taxidermy,” ice-cold, grotesquely and spectacularly unrevealing. Brooks likens it to a gilded trash remake of The Zone of Interest, a spectacle in which couture, gold baubles, vacant glamour and designer dresses function as distractions, carefully diverting attention while power consolidates in the background and democratic institutions are quietly dismantled.

Across these images, fascism does not persuade through argument or policy; it stages itself. Power becomes seductive through spectacle, cruelty, and fantasy, teaching audiences not how to think politically but how to feel obedience, admire domination, and mistake violence for destiny. In this sense, MAGA aesthetics functions, borrowing Frederick Exley’s phrase from Pages from a Cold Island, as “a great human fungus” that poisons the atmosphere of society, rendering the present image of the United States “homicidal and menacing.”

What begins as a visual strategy does not remain confined to isolated images. MAGA aesthetics is not an isolated cultural phenomenon or a series of incidental excesses. It derives its power, and increasingly its legitimacy, from a dense ecosystem of authoritarian rituals, images, and performances that circulate across multiple sites and institutions.Nazi salutes by prominent figures such as Elon Musk and Steve Bannon, white nationalist songs embedded in Department of Homeland Security’s official recruitment efforts, fascist slogans and symbols normalized through online subcultures, and slick videos aestheticizing ICE assaults on migrants and protesters all function as mutually reinforcing scenes in a larger authoritarian drama. Amplified by the affective machinery of right-wing media, these rituals do more than communicate ideology, they habituate the public to force, fear, and racialized cruelty as ordinary instruments of governance. What emerges is not mere propaganda but a sprawling pedagogical racist juggernaut, one that saturates the senses, disciplines political imagination, and educates subjects to mistake repression for order and domination for strength. It is through this cumulative cultural/pedagogical conditioning, rather than through law alone, that fascism first secures its foothold.

Fascism does not announce itself only through emergency decrees, mass arrests, or the suspension of rights. It arrives first through images, styles, rituals, and pleasures that train people to experience power as desirable and domination as normal. Long before it rules, fascism educates. It works through spectacle and affect, through pageantry and performance, transforming violence into beauty and obedience into common sense. Sontag’s warning that fascism is the aestheticization of politics remains chillingly relevant because it names not merely a propaganda strategy, but a cultural logic through which social catastrophe is converted into spectacle and collective suffering into fascination.

MAGA Aesthetics and the Authoritarian Body

The resurgence of authoritarian politics in the United States has not occurred only through policy proposals, court rulings, or executive power grabs. It has advanced just as forcefully through images, bodies, performances, and styles that acclimate people to domination before they are invited, if ever, to think critically about it. As Umberto Eco argued in his reflections on Ur-Fascism, authoritarianism often takes hold first as an aesthetic project. Writing about Benito Mussolini’s regime, Eco noted that Italian fascism was “the first to establish a military liturgy, a folklore, even a way of dressing—far more influential, with its black shirts, than Armani, Benetton, or Versace would ever be.” Fascism, in this sense, educates through appearances before it governs through law, habituating subjects to hierarchy, discipline, and submission as matters of taste, identity, and belonging. What Eco identified under Mussolini has not disappeared but migrated, reemerging in contemporary authoritarian movements that similarly treat style, spectacle, and affect as primary instruments of political formation.

Nowhere is this dynamic more visible than in the MAGA aesthetic, a contemporary cultural regime defined by studied ugliness, theatrical cruelty, and the normalization of domination as spectacle. Hyper-stylized faces overwritten with fillers and plastic surgery, square jaws, militarized postures, rigid masculinist displays, and pornographic performances of punishment and control have become central to the visual grammar of Trumpism. These aesthetics do not merely signal political allegiance; they operate pedagogically, shaping desire, disciplining bodies, and rehearsing violence as common sense itself. Long before authoritarianism demanded obedience through policy, it secured consent through culture.

MAGA aesthetics operates as an embodied politics, a way of teaching power through posture, gaze, and gesture rather than argument. It fuses cruelty with glamour, punishment with pleasure, and grievance with entitlement. Bodies are trained to feel dominant, armored against empathy, and hostile to vulnerability. This is not simply bad taste or vulgar display. It is an aesthetic formation that prepares subjects for authoritarian rule by making domination feel natural and resistance feel weak. MAGA aesthetics, in this sense, is violence before the blow, pedagogy before policy.

This cultural logic has a long intellectual genealogy. The MAGA aesthetic is not accidental. Fascist movements have always understood aesthetics as pedagogy, as a way of training people to feel power before they are allowed to think about it. Walter Benjamin warned that fascism aestheticizes politics to mobilize the masses without granting them rights, replacing democratic participation with spectacle, ritual, and submission. Susan Sontag likewise observed that fascist aesthetics glorify obedience, hierarchy, and the eroticization of force, transforming domination into visual pleasure and cruelty into style. As Sontag later argued, this aestheticization of power does not merely depict authority; it trains desire itself. In Sontag’s terms, the spectacle does not merely depict power, it trains the eye to desire it. The MAGA look follows this script precisely. It abandons democracy’s appeal to reasoned judgment, ethical responsibility, and public accountability, substituting civic persuasion with spectacle, visual aggression, and emotional coercion. Its ugliness mirrors its politics with chilling precision: cruel, nostalgic, obsessed with hierarchy, and openly hostile to pluralism. What we see here is not bad taste but a deliberate visual language of authoritarianism, an aesthetic designed to normalize exclusion, glorify force, strip joy and imagination from public life, and prepare the ground for repression.

This contemporary spectacle at work in the Trump regime offers a crucial point of entry into a much older and more dangerous cultural logic. Fascist movements have always understood that power must first be felt before it can be obeyed. Long before authoritarian regimes consolidated themselves through law and force, they worked through culture, mobilizing images, rituals, and pleasures that transform domination into beauty and submission into belonging. It is this deeper aesthetic logic that Walter Benjamin named when he warned that fascism resolves social crises not by redistributing power, but by aestheticizing politics itself.

At its core, MAGA aesthetics pays homage to the fascist subject, disembodied, cruel, racist, morally vacant, and rigidly militarized. It takes shape within a culture of images driven by corporate disimagination machines that dull moral sensibilities and anesthetize the injuries produced by gangster capitalism and its militarized techno-structures of domination and disposability. Within this visual regime, social change is not merely postponed but actively undone through the relentless circulation of images that normalize psychic numbness and political paralysis, training subjects to consume cruelty as spectacle. At the core of the MAGA aesthetic is a stylized performance of authoritarian masculinity that draws on the visual grammar of fascism to aestheticize command itself. It glorifies the body as militarized warrior, disciplined and armored, animated by what Sontag terms a “contempt for all that is reflective, critical, and pluralistic.”

Militarized Style and the Performance of Unaccountable Power

Hyper-controlled bodies, exaggerated rigidity, militarized dress, and resurrected authoritarian silhouettes work together to make domination appear natural, inevitable, and even desirable. Nowhere is this aesthetic more pronounced than in ICE, whose paramilitary uniforms project an image of communal power and solidarity forged through fear, coercion, and sanctioned lawlessness, rather than democratic consent. This logic was on full display in the costumed theatrics of Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino, whose long black trench coat functioned less as clothing than as a visual performance of unaccountable authority, staging power as spectacle and intimidation as legitimacy. As the Wall Street Journal observed, the coat appeared disturbingly reminiscent of the wardrobe of Hermann Göring, a comparison later sharpened when Gavin Newsom remarked that it was as if the outfit had been lifted from SS regalia. Here, authority is neither argued for nor justified; it is worn. In this aestheticized register, power bypasses reason and forecloses dissent. What emerges is not merely spectacle, but an authoritarian pedagogy that teaches submission through intimidation, trains desire to admire domination, and shapes subjects prepared to mistake force for legitimacy.

What is taking shape in the MAGA aesthetic belongs to a long and well-established tradition in which culture functions as a form of political education, shaping how power is felt, admired, and internalized before it is ever justified. Fascist movements have always understood that domination must first be made emotionally compelling. Images, rituals, styles, and pleasures do the work that arguments cannot, training people to experience hierarchy as natural, discipline as beautiful, and violence as redemptive. This is the cultural logic Susan Sontag identified in her analysis of fascist imagery, where obedience is glorified, force eroticized, and submission transformed into visual pleasure. The sections that follow trace this aesthetic logic across fascist spectacle, eroticized violence, and even oppositional cultures, revealing how domination is learned long before it is enforced.

This logic reached its most refined expression in the films of Leni Riefenstahl, whose choreographed masses, monumental architecture, and hypnotic rhythms did not simply depict Nazi power but actively trained audiences to desire it, binding aesthetic rapture to political submission. That same logic resurfaces in cinema decades later, most disturbingly in The Night Porter, a film I once critiqued in Cineaste, where fascism is wrenched from its historical and genocidal foundations and recast as an intimate, eroticized psychodrama. By privatizing terror and aestheticizing cruelty, the film drains violence of its political meaning, transforming domination into a matter of psychological fascination rather than naming it for what it is: a collective crime organized by the state and sustained through culture. Crucially, even cultures of resistance have proven vulnerable to this aesthetic capture, where dissent itself can be stripped of its political force and refashioned as style.

Yet the struggle over aesthetics does not end with fascist spectacle; it also unfolds within movements that seek to oppose it. Early punk aesthetics, particularly in the work of Vivienne Westwood, sought to desecrate authority through ugliness, sexual provocation, anti-nationalist rage, and a refusal of respectability. As Mika Nijhawan observes, Westwood was a pioneer in producing grass-roots designs during the formative stages of the punk movement. Her clothes did not merely reflect punk fashion; they “dressed the entire movement,” giving visual form to its anger, refusal, and insurgent politics. In its earliest formations, punk was not simply a style but a cultural intervention, an assault on the fascist romance of order, purity, discipline, and heroic masculinity. It rejected the monumental, the uniform, and the disciplined body in favor of fragmentation, irony, and desecration, orchestrating outrage as a counter-pedagogy aimed at making authority appear ridiculous rather than sublime. Yet as punk was absorbed into consumer culture, its oppositional force was hollowed out, preserved as style while its political content was neutralized and repurposed within the very systems it once sought to challenge. Together, these examples reveal how gangster capitalism operates most effectively at the level of feeling, colonizing desire, suspending ethical judgment, and teaching people how to relate emotionally to violence, authority, and belonging long before coercion becomes explicit, normalized, or legally enforced.

Fascist Aesthetics as Political Education

The work of Antonio Gramsci, Paulo Freire, Walter Benjamin, the Frankfurt School, Václav Havel, Stuart Hall, bell hooks, Angela Davis, and others in the cultural politics tradition remains indispensable because it shifts our attention away from fascism as a purely political formation and toward culture as its enabling condition. Fascism does not seek democratic participation or critical consent; it substitutes spectacle for deliberation and affect for reasoned judgment. Politics becomes ceremony, war becomes pageantry, and domination is rendered beautiful, inevitable, and emotionally satisfying. In this sense, aesthetics functions as a form of mass education, a pedagogy that trains people to accept hierarchy as natural, to experience obedience as belonging, and to view violence not as a moral rupture but as a necessary expression of order.

This pedagogical power becomes most dangerous when fascist violence is severed from history and ethics and re-presented as intimate, seductive, or abstracted from collective responsibility. Fascist aesthetics does its most enduring work not through overt propaganda alone, but through cultural forms that dissolve political accountability into private feeling, fascination, and pleasure. As images circulate without context, repetition replaces judgment and affect displaces analysis. What emerges is not ignorance, but a trained indifference, a learned incapacity to connect spectacle to structure, desire to domination, or beauty to brutality.

What this history makes clear is that fascism is not imposed from above by force alone; it is learned, internalized, and normalized through culture. This insight lies at the heart of Gramsci’s insistence that “all politics is pedagogical.” Politics does not simply govern bodies; it shapes consciousness, habits, desires, and modes of identification. Education, universally understood, is the primary terrain on which this struggle unfolds. When schools, media, and cultural institutions discourage critical inquiry and reward conformity, they help produce the passivity and moral numbness on which authoritarianism depends.

Education therefore plays a decisive role in either reproducing or resisting fascist culture. When it challenges taken-for-granted assumptions, cultivates critical literacy, and nurtures solidarity rather than fear, it can disrupt the production of the fascist subject. But resistance to fascism cannot be confined to electoral politics or policy reform alone. Without a cultural foundation that sustains critical thought, collective responsibility, and democratic imagination, political action will remain fragile and easily undone. Fascist pedagogy works slowly, affectively, and persistently; countering it requires an equally sustained struggle over how people learn to see, feel, remember, and judge the world they inhabit.

Erotic Fascism and the Seductions of Cinema

Few cultural texts reveal this danger more clearly than The Night Porter. Often defended as a meditation on trauma, memory, or transgression, the film instead exemplifies how fascist violence can be transformed into a stylized erotic spectacle stripped of historical accountability. By recasting Nazism as an intimate psychosexual relationship between two consenting adults, the film evacuates fascism of its political, institutional, and genocidal realities. The concentration camp becomes a backdrop; the SS uniform, an erotic costume, and systemic terror is displaced by private obsession. Mass murder recedes, historical responsibility dissolves, and power is reduced to aestheticized desire.

This privatization of fascism is precisely what makes the film so dangerous. By aestheticizing domination and sexualizing submission, The Night Porter invites viewers to engage fascism at the level of fascination rather than judgment. Violence is no longer something to be confronted politically but something to be consumed affectively. In this sense, the film does not merely misrepresent fascism; it reenacts one of its central mechanisms, the conversion of terror into pleasure and history into style.

This danger was diagnosed with extraordinary clarity by Susan Sontag in “Fascinating Fascism.” Fascist aesthetics, she argues, eroticizes hierarchy, sanctifies discipline, and promises transcendence through submission. It glorifies the surrender of the self to power, offering ecstatic belonging in exchange for obedience. Fascination, in this account, is not a misunderstanding of fascism; it is one of its primary cultural instruments. When fascism is aestheticized, ethical judgment is suspended, historical memory erodes, and violence becomes thinkable precisely because it has been rendered beautiful.

Riefenstahl and the Architecture of Fascist Spectacle

The aesthetic logic that animates the classic film The Night Porter finds its most explicit historical expression in the films of Leni Riefenstahl. Works such as Triumph of the Will perfected the visual grammar of fascism: choreographed bodies, monumental architecture, rhythmic repetition, and the fusion of individual submission with collective exaltation. These films were not documentaries that happened to record Nazi power; they were propaganda machines that constructed reality to serve the image. As Sontag insisted, the Party rally existed in order to be filmed. The image did not reflect power; it produced it.

Riefenstahl’s films celebrate what Sontag identified as the fascist ideal: life as art, politics as beauty, and community forged through ecstatic self-control and obedience. Strength is eroticized, weakness despised, and critical reflection cast as contamination. The visual emphasis on purified bodies, synchronized movement, and reverent submission to the leader rehearses a political theology in which dissent appears as deformity and pluralism as decay.

The contemporary rehabilitation of Riefenstahl as a “pure artist,” detached from ideology, reproduces a profoundly dangerous fiction, the belief that aesthetics can be separated from politics. This refusal to judge fascist aesthetics politically is itself a political act. It allows authoritarian spectacle to survive as cultural form even when its explicit ideological content is disavowed, ensuring that fascist longings persist at the level of desire, style, and affect long after regimes fall.

Punk, Vivienne Westwood, and the Capture of Dissent

If fascist aesthetics secures power by making domination desirable, then resistance has often sought to disrupt that pedagogy at the level of style and sensation. Yet the now distant history of punk fashion reveals how vulnerable oppositional styles are to appropriation, commodification, and neutralization. Early punk, particularly in the work of the designer Vivienne Westwood, sought to desecrate authority through ugliness, sexual provocation, anti-nationalist rage, and a refusal of respectability. It attacked the fascist romance of order, purity, discipline, and heroic masculinity at its symbolic core by foregrounding disorder, deviance, and bodily excess. Westwood in both her politics and aesthetics embraced “the core of early punk [which] ‘was calculated anger’.”

In its earliest formations, punk was not simply a style but a cultural intervention, or as Malcolm McLaren observed, “It was never about having a Mohican haircut or wearing a ripped T-shirt. It was all about destruction, and the creative potential within that.” Punk rejected the monumental, the uniform, and the disciplined body in favor of fragmentation, irony, and desecration. It was an orchestration of outrage. It mocked nationalism, unsettled gender norms, and exposed the violence hidden beneath claims to moral order. Many punk bands such as The Clash and the Sex Pistols created art, music, and clothes as part of a social movement of which Westwood was a pioneering force in terms of her mix of aesthetics, fashion, and politics.  In this sense, punk represented a counter-pedagogy, an attempt to unlearn obedience by making authority appear ridiculous rather than sublime. It was the Sex Pistols and Britain’s major subcultures singing fuck you to bourgeois culture in spite of a bad ending.

Punk’s visual language was gradually detached from its political context and absorbed into consumer culture. What began as an assault on domination was transformed into a marketable aesthetic. Transgression became style, shock became branding, and resistance was preserved only as surface. As Sontag warned in her reflections on photography and spectacle, shock alone is never enough; it wears off, becomes familiar, and risks reinforcing the very structures it seeks to oppose. Punk’s absorption into fashion culture demonstrates a crucial lesson: fascism does not only impose its own aesthetics; it also colonizes those of dissent, draining them of political meaning while preserving their aesthetic form. In many ways, Westwood’s life offers a warning. Her radical merging of fashion and punk politics did not retain its political purity or even its integrity considering her eventual celebrity, status, business practices, and role in participating in consumer culture at the highest levels of elite participation. At the same time, her role in creating what might be called an anti-fascist aesthetic, her endless participation and support of the environmental movement, her support of sexual and gender freedom, and her support of Julian Assange makes clear that her role as a celebrity fashion designer and activist is no small tribute to her and offers a political and pedagogical example of the merging of the aesthetic, radical political beliefs, and activism.

Conclusion: The Making of the Fascist Subject

The rise of MAGA aesthetics cannot be separated from a longer history of cultural and social reproduction in the United States. Submission to authority, intolerance toward marginalized groups, ultra-nationalism, systemic racism, and rigid hierarchies of gender, race, and class have long been cultivated through schools, mainstream media, and a wide array of cultural institutions. Trump’s appeal to a mythic “better time,” coded as an era of racial dominance, patriarchal order, and unchallenged authority, draws directly from this authoritarian inheritance. Those who challenge these norms are routinely cast as threats to stability, tradition, and national identity, a dynamic that recalls Wilhelm Reich’s warning that fascism flourishes where individuality, sexuality, and dissent are systematically repressed.

The creation of the fascist subject must therefore be understood not as a purely psychological phenomenon, but as the outcome of sustained cultural indoctrination, a far-reaching apparatus of socialization and propaganda. The contemporary educational landscape too often fails to equip young people with the intellectual tools needed to question power, recognize manipulation, and resist domination. Trump’s language of “patriotism,” “traditional values,” and “law and order” feeds this hegemonic pedagogy by framing dissent as dangerous, deviant, or un-American. As Reich and Theodor Adorno recognized in different registers, mass education and mass media function as decisive instruments in producing subjects who come to accept hierarchy, exclusion, and cruelty as normal features of social life rather than as political choices demanding resistance.

MAGA aesthetics makes this process visible by rendering the pedagogy of domination immediate, affective, and embodied. Fascist movements have always understood that power must first be felt through culture. Fascism endures not because it persuades through reasoned argument, but because it seduces through spectacle, training people to experience domination as belonging and cruelty as strength. Images, performances, and styles perform this pedagogical labor long before policies are announced or laws are enforced. Aesthetics prepares the ground on which authoritarian rule becomes thinkable, even desirable, by shaping how people feel power before they are invited to think about it. As Lutz Koepnick argues in his essay “Aesthetic Politics Today: Walter Benjamin and Post-Fordist Culture,” “The fascist spectacle mobilizes people’s feelings primarily to neutralize their senses, massaging minds and emotions so that the individual succumbs to the charisma of vitalistic power” while consolidating state power.

If fascism aestheticizes politics to make injustice palatable, and domination attractive, then resistance must politicize aesthetics, reclaiming culture as a site of memory, ethical judgment, and democratic possibility. This means refusing the separation of beauty from responsibility, affect from history, and spectacle from power. The struggle against authoritarianism is therefore inseparable from the struggle over how power looks, feels, and is learned in everyday life.

The responsibility that falls to educators, cultural workers, and public intellectuals is thus profound. They are among the few agents capable of confronting the images and narratives that normalize authoritarianism while offering alternative visions of agency, justice, and democratic life. This work demands more than critique; it requires reclaiming education itself as a democratic practice rooted in historical consciousness, ethical responsibility, and collective imagination. Fascism triumphs not by persuading people to surrender their rights, but by schooling them, through culture and spectacle, to no longer recognize domination as injustice. Resistance, then, must begin where fascism does, in the struggle over culture itself. Only by reclaiming culture as a radical educational project capable of reshaping how people see, feel, and judge the world can we build a durable resistance, one able not only to confront fascism, but to prevent its endless return in ever more seductive forms.

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.    AUGUST 29, 2025.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anti-Communism Fanaticism and the Ghost of Roy Cohn.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Spectacle as Opiate and Cover.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Domestic Terrorism as a Pedagogical Regime.

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

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

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

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

Militarizing Society and The Spectacle of State Terror.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Militarizing Public Space: The Fascist Aesthetic Reborn.

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

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

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

Colonizing Memory and the Militarization of Consciousness.

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion: Resisting the Warfare State.

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

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

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

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

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

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

First published on CountertPunch.org.

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