You
should not honour men more than truth.
Plato
We live
in perilous times.
The mobilizing
passions of fascism are no longer a distant echo of
history—they are here, surging through the United
States like an electric current. We are in a period
of social, ideological, and racial cleansing.
First, the
notion of government as a democratizing public good
and institution of social responsibility—that
once held power to account, protected the vulnerable,
and nurtured the ideals of justice and collective responsibility—is
being methodically destroyed. The common good, once
seen as the essence of democratic life, has become the
enemy of the neoliberal fascist state. It is not merely
being neglected—it is being assaulted, stripped
bare, and left to rot in the shadows of privatization,
greed, and brutality—the main features of gangster
capitalism. Public institutions are hollowed out, courts
are under siege, regulatory bodies are politicized and
disempowered, and the mechanisms of governance now serve
only the most ruthless forms of concentrated financial
and political power.
Second,
we are witnessing a form of ideological cleansing—a
scorched-earth assault on critical consciousness. Education,
both public and higher, is under siege, stripped of
its democratic mission to cultivate informed judgment,
critical thinking, and the capacity to make corrupt
power visible. What once served as a space for reflection,
dissent, and civic engagement is being transformed into
a battlefield of ideological control, where questioning
authority is replaced by obedience, and pedagogy is
reduced to training, conformity, and propaganda. Education
is explicitly no longer on the side of empowerment for
the many. It has become an ideological tool of massive
repression, indoctrination, surveillance, and an adjunct
of the billionaire elite and the walking dead with blood
in their mouths.
Books that
illuminate injustice, affirm histories of resistance,
and introduce critical ideas are being banned. Entire
fields of knowledge—gender studies, critical race
theory, decolonial thought—are outlawed. Professors
are fired, blacklisted, or harassed for daring to speak
the truth, especially those who denounce the genocidal
violence being waged by Israel, which has now taken
the lives of over 50,000 Palestinians, many of them
children. Journalists are doxxed, detained, or demonized.
Cultural
institutions are defunded or coerced into silence. The
arts are no longer sacred; they are now suspect. Social
media platforms and news outlets are intimidated, policed,
and purged. Elite law firms are targeted, intimidated,
silenced or forced into complicity by the Trump administration.
Scott Cummings rightly argues President Donald Trump’s
recent speech to the Department of Justice was meant
as a declaration of war against lawyers. Some prestigious
law firms and attorneys—once alleged guardians
of justice—now grovel before authoritarianism
in acts of staggering complicity. The public sphere
is shrinking under the weight of repression.
Third—and
perhaps most alarming—is the escalating campaign
of racial cleansing—a war against the most vulnerable,
on bodies, on the flesh, and on visceral forms of agency.
This is not hyperbole. Immigrants are caged in squalid
detention centers, separated from their families, deported
without due process to detention centers in Louisiana
or to Guantanamo, or simply disappeared. Muslims are
vilified, surveilled, and targeted with impunity. Black
and brown communities are over-policed and under-protected,
sacrificed to the machinery of carceral violence. State
terrorism is normalized. The state is actively criminalizing
existence itself for all those who do not fit the white
Christian nationalist fantasy of purity, obedience,
and subjugation.
This is
a war not only against people, but against memory, imagination,
and the very capacity to think, make connections, and
to dream a different future. The unimaginable has become
policy. The unthinkable now passes for normal.
Consider
just a glimpse of the horror now unfolding:
Venezuelan
migrants are being disappeared into a notorious maximum-security
torture dungeon in El Salvador run by Nayib Bukele,
a ruthless dictator, punished not for crimes, but for
the ink on their skin. A legendary British punk band,
the UK Subs, denied entry for voicing dissent against
Trump’s authoritarian policies. A French scientist
barred at the border for criticizing Trump, who with
sneering smile, tears up the Constitution with performative
contempt. Trump violates court orders with impunity.
Student visas are revoked in the dead of night. Their
dorm rooms raided, their wrists bound in handcuffs,
they are forced into unmarked cars by agents of a system
that is both cruel and clandestine. Young people—Mahmoud
Khalil, Rumeysa Ozturk, Ranjani Srinivasan, Yunseo Chung—are
disappeared, imprisoned in Louisiana, and await deportation
under a regime of malignant legalities. cloaked in legalese.
These are not arrests—they are abductions. Not
justice—but the slow machinery of fear made flesh.
Dissent is now branded as terrorism, and those who challenge
Trump’s authoritarian grip vanish into the void—arrested,
erased, rendered disposable.
Trump’s
totalitarian machine is waging a relentless war on colleges
and universities. As Chris Hedges observes, the administration
has threatened to strip federal funding from more than
60 elite higher education institutions under the guise
of protecting Jewish students—while already pulling
$500 million from Columbia University, an action that
has nothing to do with combating antisemitism. The charge
is a smokescreen, a cynical pretext to silence protest
and crush dissent—especially in support of Palestinian
freedom. As Rashid Khalidi observes, “It was never
about eliminating antisemitism. It was always about
silencing Palestine. That is what the gagging of protesting
students, and now the gagging of faculty, was always
meant to lead to.”
Elite universities
once proud of their intellectual autonomy are being
transformed into fortified zones of surveillance and
submission. Columbia among the most glaring, where the
campus now resembles a police precinct more than a place
of progressive ideas and democratic values. Only now,
as the darkness thickens, are a handful of journalists
and liberal commentators awakening to the authoritarian
siege on higher education—a siege some of us have
been naming for decades.
Americans
are not witnessing a slow drift toward authoritarianism.
They are living through the violent, coordinated seizure
of democratic life by fascist forces emboldened by indifference,
cruelty, and the architecture of unaccountable power.
Under such
circumstances, it is crucial for people to pay attention
to the political crisis that is unfolding. This means
being attentive, learning from history, analyzing the
mobilizing passions of fascism as a system—one
directly related to the forces of gangster capitalism
and the force of white supremacy and white Christian
nationalism. Language matters, and those willing to
fight against the fascist tide must rethink the meaning
of education, resistance, bearing witness, and solidarity.
And action is imperative: build alliances, flood the
streets, defend critical education, amplify resistance,
and refuse to be silent.
In the face
of this rising tide, resistance must no longer be fragmented,
polite, or confined to isolated corners of dissent.
As Sherilyn Ifill notes, “it is not enough to
fight. You have to meet the moment.” Cultural
critics, educators, artists, journalists, social workers,
and others must wield their craft like weapons—telling
prohibited stories, defying censorship, reigniting the
radical imagination. Educators must refuse complicity,
defending classrooms as sanctuaries of truth and critical
inquiry, even when the risks are great. Students must
organize, disrupt, and reclaim their campuses—not
as consumers of credentialing, but as insurgents of
liberation.
Academics,
including faculty and administrators, must form a common
front to stop the insidious assault on higher education.
Journalists must break the silence, not by chasing access
or neutrality, but by naming injustice with moral clarity.
Organizers, activists, and everyday people must converge—across
race, class, gender, and nation—into a broad front
of democratic refusal. This is a moment not just for
outrage, but for audacity—for reclaiming hope
as a political act, and courage as a shared ethic. Fascism
feeds on fear and isolation. As Robin D. G. Kelley brilliantly
argues, it must be met with solidarity, imagination,
and relentless struggle, based on a revived class politics.
In a culture of immediacy, cruelty, and staggering inequality,
power must be named for its actions, and the language
of critique and hope must give way to mass collective
action. History is not watching—it is demanding.
The only question is whether anti-fascist forces will
rise to meet it.
This darkness
is not without precedent, nor is it without models of
resistance. During the rise of fascism in Europe, teachers
and intellectuals in Nazi-occupied France joined the
underground, distributing banned literature and teaching
forbidden truths in secret classrooms. In apartheid
South Africa, students in Soweto sparked a nationwide
uprising, defying bullets with the cry that liberation
begins with education. In the American South, Black
freedom fighters risked their lives to build freedom
schools, challenge police terror, and reimagine democracy
in the face of white supremacy. The Zapatistas in Chiapas
created autonomous zones rooted in dignity, justice,
and Indigenous knowledge. Palestinian writers, youth,
freedom fighters, and teachers continue to create under
siege powerful examples of resistance, insisting through
every poem, every painting, every lesson, that their
people will not be erased, their memories will survive,
and settler-colonialism will not only be relentlessly
resisted but will be defeated. There is no other choice.
Today, movements
like Black Lives Matter, Abolitionist Futures, Extinction
Rebellion, Sunrise Movement, March for Our Lives and
Indigenous Rights Movements are keeping alive the traditions
of collective struggle. Courageous campus coalitions,
in spite of the shameful crackdowns by the government
and in some cases universities themselves, are resisting
militarized policing and corporate capture of higher
education. Migrant justice organizations are building
sanctuary networks to protect those the state seeks
to expel. These are not just moments of protest—they
are blueprints for democratic rebirth. The task now
is to connect these diverse movements in a mass movement
with the power to wage strikes, engage in direct action,
teach-ins, and use any viable non-violent form of resistance
to overcome the fascist nightmare spreading across the
globe.
The stakes
could not be higher. This is a time to reimagine justice,
to reclaim the promise of a radical democracy yet to
be realized. Fascism feeds on despair, cynicism, and
silence—but history teaches otherwise. Again and
again, it is when ordinary people refuse to be silent,
when they teach, create, march, strike, and speak with
fierce clarity, that the foundations of tyranny begin
to crack. Fascism has returned from the shadows of history
to once more dismantle justice, equality, and freedom.
But its resurgence must not be mistaken for fate. It
is not the final script of a defeated democratic future—it
is a warning. And with that warning comes a call to
breathe life into a vision of democracy rooted in solidarity
and imagination, to turn resistance into a hammer that
shatters the machinery of cruelty, the policies of disposability,
and the totalitarian and oligarchic opportunists who
feed on fear. As we stand before the terrifying rise
of authoritarianism, it becomes undeniable: the fire
we face is not some distant, abstract peril, but a fierce
and immediate struggle — the fire this time is
the fascist capture of America. This is the moment to
make education central to politics, to shape history
with intention, to summon a collective courage rooted
in the demands of freedom, equality, and justice—to
act together with a militant hope that does not yield.
Fascism will not prevail—unless we let it. In
times like these, resistance is not a choice; it is
the condition of survival.
By
Henry Giroux:
Education
in Dark Times
Childcide
in Fascist Theocracies
The Corporate Firewall Against Truth
Assassins of Memory
Not Joe's But Our Collective Memory Issues
The
Politics of Emergency Time
Hijacking
Freedoms
America
at the Crossroads
Gangster
Capitalism
Historical
Amnesia in Age of Capitalist Apocalypse
The
Inequality of Freedom
The
Nazification of Education
Killing
Fields in Age of Mass Shootings
The
Pedagogy of Resistance
The
Death of Ethics
Banning
Books
Homage
to Paulo Freire
Plague
of Manufactured Ignorance
Racial
Cleansing and Erasing History
Plague
of Historical Amnesia
Recovering
from Trumpism
Tribute
to Noam Chomsky
The
Ouster of Trump
White
Supremacy in the Offal Office
The
Plague of Inequity
Covid
and our Embattled Society
Trump
and the Corona Death Waltz
Neoliberal
Fascism
The
Terror Unforseen
Interview
of H.A.Giroux
The
Normalization of Fascism
The
Public Intellectual II
Bertrand
Russell: Public Intellectual
Thinking
Dangerously in Dark Times
Democracy
in Exile
Authoritarianism
in America
Violence:
US Favourite Pastime
Losing
in Trump's America
In
Dark Times Teachers Matter
The
Age of Civic Illiteracy
Exile
and Disruption in the Academy
What
Society Produces a Donald Trump
From
School to the Prison Pipeline
Orwell
& Huxely
American
Sniper and Hollywood Heroism
Selfie Culture
The
Age of Disposability
In
the Shadow of the Atomic Bomb
Killing
Machines and the Madness of the Military
The
Age of Neoliberal Cruelty
The
Politics of the Deep State
Challenging
Casino Capitalism
Crisis
in Democracy
America's
Descent into Madness
