Higher Education Inquirer : Search results for Henry Giroux

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Monday, August 25, 2025

HEI Resources Fall 2025

[Editor's Note: Please let us know of any additions or corrections.]

Books

Alexander, Bryan (2020). Academia Next: The Futures of Higher Education. Johns Hopkins Press.
Alexander, Bryan (2023). Universities on Fire. Johns Hopkins Press.
Angulo, A. (2016). Diploma Mills: How For-profit Colleges Stiffed Students, Taxpayers, and the American Dream. Johns Hopkins University Press.
Apthekar, Bettina (1966) Big Business and the American University. New Outlook Publishers.
Apthekar, Bettina (1969). Higher education and the student rebellion in the United States, 1960-1969 : a bibliography.
Archibald, R. and Feldman, D. (2017). The Road Ahead for America's Colleges & Universities. Oxford University Press.
Armstrong, E. and Hamilton, L. (2015). Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality. Harvard University Press.
Arum, R. and Roksa, J. (2011). Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses. University of Chicago Press.
Baldwin, Davarian (2021). In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities Are Plundering Our Cities. Bold Type Books.
Bennett, W. and Wilezol, D. (2013). Is College Worth It?: A Former United States Secretary of Education and a Liberal Arts Graduate Expose the Broken Promise of Higher Education. Thomas Nelson.
Berg, I. (1970). "The Great Training Robbery: Education and Jobs." Praeger.
Berman, Elizabeth P. (2012). Creating the Market University. Princeton University Press.
Berry, J. (2005). Reclaiming the Ivory Tower: Organizing Adjuncts to Change Higher Education. Monthly Review Press.
Best, J. and Best, E. (2014) The Student Loan Mess: How Good Intentions Created a Trillion-Dollar Problem. Atkinson Family Foundation.

Bledstein, Burton J. (1976). The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America. Norton.

Bogue, E. Grady and Aper, Jeffrey. (2000). Exploring the Heritage of American Higher Education: The Evolution of Philosophy and Policy.
Bok, D. (2003). Universities in the Marketplace : The Commercialization of Higher Education. Princeton University Press.
Bousquet, M. (2008). How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low Wage Nation. NYU Press.
Brennan, J & Magness, P. (2019). Cracks in the Ivory Tower. Oxford University Press.
Brint, S., & Karabel, J. The Diverted Dream: Community colleges and the promise of educational opportunity in America, 1900–1985. Oxford University Press. (1989).
Cabrera, Nolan L. (2024) Whiteness in the Ivory Tower: Why Don't We Notice the White Students Sitting Together in the Quad? Teachers College Press.
Cabrera, Nolan L. (2018). White Guys on Campus: Racism, White Immunity, and the Myth of "Post-Racial" Higher Education. Rutgers University Press.
Caplan, B. (2018). The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money. Princeton University Press.
Cappelli, P. (2015). Will College Pay Off?: A Guide to the Most Important Financial Decision You'll Ever Make. Public Affairs.
Cassuto, Leonard (2015). The Graduate School Mess. Harvard University Press.
Caterine, Christopher (2020). Leaving Academia. Princeton Press.
Carney, Cary Michael (1999). Native American Higher Education in the United States. Transaction.
Childress, H. (2019). The Adjunct Underclass: How America's Colleges Betrayed Their Faculty, Their Students, and Their Mission University of Chicago Press.
Cohen, Arthur M. (1998). The Shaping of American Higher Education: Emergence and Growth of the Contemporary System. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Collins, Randall. (1979/2019) The Credential Society. Academic Press. Columbia University Press.
Cottom, T. (2016). Lower Ed: How For-profit Colleges Deepen Inequality in America
Domhoff, G. William (2021). Who Rules America? 8th Edition. Routledge.
Donoghue, F. (2008). The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities.
Dorn, Charles. (2017) For the Common Good: A New History of Higher Education in America Cornell University Press.
Eaton, Charlie. (2022) Bankers in the Ivory Tower: The Troubling Rise of Financiers in US Higher Education. University of Chicago Press.
Eisenmann, Linda. (2006) Higher Education for Women in Postwar America, 1945–1965. Johns Hopkins U. Press.
Espenshade, T., Walton Radford, A.(2009). No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal: Race and Class in Elite College Admission and Campus Life. Princeton University Press.
Faragher, John Mack and Howe, Florence, ed. (1988). Women and Higher Education in American History. Norton.
Farber, Jerry (1972). The University of Tomorrowland. Pocket Books.
Freeman, Richard B. (1976). The Overeducated American. Academic Press.
Gaston, P. (2014). Higher Education Accreditation. Stylus.
Ginsberg, B. (2013). The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All Administrative University and Why It Matters
Giroux, Henry (1983). Theory and Resistance in Education. Bergin and Garvey Press

Giroux, Henry (2022). Pedagogy of Resistance: Against Manufactured Ignorance. Bloomsbury Academic

Gleason, Philip (1995). Contending with Modernity: Catholic Higher Education in the Twentieth Century. Oxford U.
Golden, D. (2006). The Price of Admission: How America's Ruling Class Buys its Way into Elite Colleges — and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates.
Goldrick-Rab, S. (2016). Paying the Price: College Costs, Financial Aid, and the Betrayal of the American Dream.
Graeber, David (2018) Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. Simon and Schuster.

Groeger, Cristina Viviana (2021). The Education Trap: Schools and the Remaking of Inequality in Boston. Harvard Press.

Hamilton, Laura T. and Kelly Nielson (2021) Broke: The Racial Consequences of Underfunding Public Universities
Johnson, B. et al. (2003). Steal This University: The Rise of the Corporate University and the Academic Labor Movement
Keats, John (1965) The Sheepskin Psychosis. Lippincott.
Kelchen, Robert. (2018). Higher Education Accountability. Johns Hopkins University Press.
Kezar, A., DePaola, T, and Scott, D. The Gig Academy: Mapping Labor in the Neoliberal University. Johns Hopkins Press.
Kinser, K. (2006). From Main Street to Wall Street: The Transformation of For-profit Higher Education
Kozol, Jonathan (2006). The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America. Crown.
Kozol, Jonathan (1992). Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools. Harper Perennial.
Labaree, David F. (2017). A Perfect Mess: The Unlikely Ascendancy of American Higher Education. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Labaree, David (1997) How to Succeed in School without Really Learning: The Credentials Race in American Education, Yale University Press.
Lafer, Gordon (2004). The Job Training Charade. Cornell University Press.
Loehen, James (1995). Lies My Teacher Told Me. The New Press.
Lohse, Andrew (2014). Confessions of an Ivy League Frat Boy: A Memoir. Thomas Dunne Books.
Lucas, C.J. American higher education: A history. (1994).
Lukianoff, Greg and Jonathan Haidt (2018). The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure. Penguin Press.
Maire, Quentin (2021). Credential Market. Springer.
Mandery, Evan (2022) . Poison Ivy: How Elite Colleges Divide Us. New Press.
Marti, Eduardo (2016). America's Broken Promise: Bridging the Community College Achievement Gap. Excelsior College Press.
Mettler, Suzanne 'Degrees of Inequality: How the Politics of Higher Education Sabotaged the American Dream. Basic Books. (2014)

From Upton Sinclair's 'Goose Step' to the Neoliberal University:

Newfeld, C. (2011). Unmaking the Public University.
Newfeld, C. (2016). The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them.
Paulsen, M. and J.C. Smart (2001). The Finance of Higher Education: Theory, Research, Policy & Practice. Agathon Press.
Rosen, A.S. (2011). Change.edu. Kaplan Publishing.
Reynolds, G. (2012). The Higher Education Bubble. Encounter Books.
Roth, G. (2019) The Educated Underclass: Students and the Promise of Social Mobility. Pluto Press
Ruben, Julie. The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual Transformation and the Marginalization of Morality. University Of Chicago Press. (1996).
Rudolph, F. (1991) The American College and University: A History.
Rushdoony, R. (1972). The Messianic Character of American Education. The Craig Press.
Selingo, J. (2013). College Unbound: The Future of Higher Education and What It Means for Students.
Shelton, Jon (2023). The Education Myth: How Human Capital Trumped Social Democracy. Cornell University Press.
Simpson, Christopher (1999). Universities and Empire: Money and Politics in the Social Sciences During the Cold War. New Press.
Sinclair, U. (1923). The Goose-Step: A Study of American Education.
Stein, Sharon (2022). Unsettling the University: Confronting the Colonial Foundations of US Higher Education, Johns Hopkins Press.
Stevens, Mitchell L. (2009). Creating a Class: College Admissions and the Education of Elites. Harvard University Press.
Stodghill, R. (2015). Where Everybody Looks Like Me: At the Crossroads of America's Black Colleges and Culture.
Tamanaha, B. (2012). Failing Law Schools. The University of Chicago Press.
Tatum, Beverly (1997). Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria. Basic Books
Taylor, Barret J. and Brendan Cantwell (2019). Unequal Higher Education: Wealth, Status and Student Opportunity. Rutgers University Press.
Thelin, John R. (2019) A History of American Higher Education. Johns Hopkins U. Press.
Tolley, K. (2018). Professors in the Gig Economy: Unionizing Adjunct Faculty in America. Johns Hopkins University Press.
Twitchell, James B. (2005). Branded Nation: The Marketing of Megachurch, College Inc., and Museumworld. Simon and Schuster.
Vedder, R. (2004). Going Broke By Degree: Why College Costs Too Much.
Veysey Lawrence R. (1965).The emergence of the American university.
Washburn, J. (2006). University Inc.: The Corporate Corruption of Higher Education
Washington, Harriet A. (2008). Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present. Anchor.
Whitman, David (2021). The Profits of Failure: For-Profit Colleges and the Closing of the Conservative Mind. Cypress House.
Wilder, C.D. (2013). Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America's Universities.
Winks, Robin (1996). Cloak and Gown:Scholars in the Secret War, 1939-1961. Yale University Press.
Woodson, Carter D. (1933). The Mis-Education of the Negro.
Zaloom, Caitlin (2019). Indebted: How Families Make College Work at Any Cost. Princeton University Press.
Zemsky, Robert, Susan Shaman, and Susan Campbell Baldridge (2020). The College Stress Test:Tracking Institutional Futures across a Crowded Market. Johns Hopkins University Press.

Activists, Coalitions, Innovators, and Alternative Voices

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Sunday, August 24, 2025

The Death of Education Is the Death of Democracy (Henry A. Giroux)

Trump’s War on Memory and Education

Fascism does not only occupy institutions; it occupies memory and views education as a battleground. It dictates what is remembered and what is silenced, ensuring that alternative visions of history and democracy cannot take root. 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.

Democracy cannot survive without memory or it runs the risk of turning itself into an authoritarian state. It requires citizens to confront injustice, to learn from the crimes of the past, and to imagine futures that do not repeat them. William Faulkner’s warning still resonates: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” In America today, history itself has become a battleground. The ghosts of slavery, Jim Crow, and white supremacy remain with us, shaping institutions and social life. As Angela Davis reminds us, we live with these ghosts every day. The real question is whether we choose to acknowledge them, or to erase them. For when a society turns away from its own horrors and promotes forms of historical amnesia, what kind of culture is normalized? What political order emerges from the silence of forgetting? Under Trump, we have already been given a terrifying answer: a society organized around violence: against immigrants, Black people, youth, students, dissidents, women, the unhoused, and all those who fail the regime’s loyalty test to white Christian nationalism.

As sociologist Zygmunt Bauman observed, our times are not marked simply by the fading of collective memory, but by “the aggressive assault on whatever memory remains.” That assault takes the form of book bans, censorship, intimidation of educators, and the replacement of critical history with patriotic myth. Kimberlé Crenshaw has noted that the panic over “critical race theory” was never about pedagogy, it was an attempt to whitewash slavery and racism from the national narrative. The suppression of historical memory produces not only ignorance but moral paralysis. As Robert Jay Lifton warned, erasure of the past creates a psychic numbing, a diminished capacity to feel and act against injustice. Forgetting is never neutral. It is a political strategy. Under the Trump regime it has become a central element in a war against democracy, informed citizens, the truth, and rationality. Put bluntly, it has become a central tool in the weaponization against literacy, knowledge, consciousness, and critical agency.

This is domestic terrorism, rooted not only in incendiary words but in their violent translation into state policy. It is the organized weaponization of fear, the calculated deployment of intimidation and cruelty to hollow out democratic life and silence dissent. It is a deliberate assault on citizens, on institutions, and on every idea that refuses to bow before authoritarian power. As John Ganz observes, under Trump, citizenship ceases to be an inalienable right; it becomes a conditional prize, a privilege dispensed at will. In Trump’s hands, it is both gift and bludgeon, “a transferable and revocable commodity,” bestowed on the loyal and withheld or revoked from the condemned. Wielded as a threat, it enables the regime to deport, to banish, to resurrect the ancient horror of statelessness, expelling individuals not only from the nation but from humanity itself. In this sense, Ganz is right: Trump’s assault on citizenship is not merely reactionary; it bears the unmistakable mark of fascism, the totalitarian logic that decides who counts as human and who may be erased.

Appropriating Achille Mbembe’s notion of necropolitics, domestic terrorism is where political power thrives by reducing human life to disposable, expendable objects. Under the Trump regime, this takes the form of a violent, racialized project that merges capital accumulation with the subjugation of marginalized groups. His policies—driven by a toxic mix of racial hierarchy, xenophobia, and the celebration of violent histories—create a society where certain lives are deemed unworthy of protection or consideration. This regime operates on a death drive, relentlessly attempting to eliminate both the lives and futures of those who resist or defy its vision. In this environment, the space for dissent shrinks, historical amnesia thrives, leaving only room for those willing to submit to the dominance of a fascist, authoritarian regime.

This war on memory is not just theoretical; it takes concrete form in the attacks on institutions that hold our collective history. Under Donald Trump and the MAGA movement, memory, let alone history itself, is under siege. What we face is not neglect but an orchestrated assault fueled by a systemic violence of forgetting, and the whitewashing of the past that echoes the darkest traditions of fascism. For Trump, any reckoning with slavery, Jim Crow, or the long arc of racial violence is treated as an unforgivable stain on America’s story. Equally intolerable are the histories of resistance, by workers, Black communities, women, immigrants, and LGBTQ people, all of which he and his allies disparage as “woke” ideology. As journalist Dean Blundell recently observed, “In recent days, he has attacked the Smithsonian Institution as ‘out of control,’ insisting its museums focus too much on ‘how bad slavery was.’ His administration has ordered a 120-day review of eight Smithsonian museums and hinted that funding could be used as leverage to ‘get the woke out.’ The message lands with the subtlety of a hammer: make the story brighter, or else. This is not a debate about one label or a curatorial tone. It’s an attempt to police memory.” The policing of history is not incidental; it is central to Trump’s authoritarian project and nowhere is this clearer than in his attack on the Smithsonian.

Censoring the Smithsonian

In March 2025, Trump signed an executive order targeting the Smithsonian Institution, declaring its exhibits were corrupted by “improper ideology.” Trump argued that the “Smithsonian museums were ‘out of control’ and “painted the country in a negative light, including about slavery.” The language of the order feigned neutrality, but the intent was unmistakably authoritarian: to sanitize the nation’s cultural memory. For Trump, As the White House “focused on seven museums for their exhibits and messaging,” the chilling effect was immediate. References to Trump’s two impeachments quietly vanished from an exhibit on the “Limits of Presidential Power.” What had been a straightforward record of checks on executive abuse was erased in real time, as though history itself could be made to serve the whims of power.

This was no isolated act of censorship. Trump has repeatedly sought to bend the past to his will, recasting the violent January 6th insurrectionists as “hostages,” stripping diversity and equity programs of content that celebrated Black history, and encouraging allies to push bills that would defund schools for teaching that the nation’s founding documents were entangled with slavery. The thread binding these assaults together is clear: the authoritarian logic of erasure. Memory is to be disciplined, history domesticated, truth is subordinated to the spectacle of Trump’s political theater. What is at stake is not simply the content of museum exhibits or school curricula, it is whether democracy itself can survive without an honest reckoning with its past. As history warns us, fascist regimes--from Hitler’s book burnings to Franco’s cultural purges--have always begun their reign of terror by waging war on memory. The thread uniting these efforts is the logic of erasure: history must serve power, never truth.

From Nazi Germany to Trump’s America

The Trump era’s assault on memory recalls, in chilling ways, the memory politics of Nazi Germany. In 1933, Nazi officials staged massive book burnings, consigning to the flames the works of Jewish authors, feminists, Marxists, and anyone deemed “un-German.” These were not just acts of censorship, they were spectacles of purification. Fire was the ritual through which dissent was eradicated and mythic unity forged. Schools and universities were purged of Jewish and oppositional voices, textbooks rewritten, and history recast as propaganda for the racial state.

The United States has not replicated those bonfires, but the spirit is unmistakable. Books by Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, and Margaret Atwood are being pulled from libraries. Governors stage press events around banned books, turning censorship into political theater. Viral videos of parents denouncing “divisive concepts” in classrooms circulate widely, feeding the illusion that banning history is an act of protection.

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 authoritarianism. The assault on memory and historical consciousness connects strongly with a wider pedagogy of repression and the attempts on the part of MAGA ideologues to turn public and higher education into crude laboratories of indoctrination. In one particular instance, this project takes a particularly grotesque form, as with Oklahoma’s Ryan Walters requiring applicants from “liberal states” to pass an anti-woke test before teaching. These assaults on memory are also an assault on critical thinking, critical pedagogy, and civic literacy. It is crucial to view them as anything but 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. Primo Levi warned that “wherever you begin by denying the fundamental liberties of mankind and equality among people, you move towards the concentration camp system.” Forgetting, he argued, is the first step toward barbarism. The lesson of Nazi Germany is that erasing memory is not collateral to authoritarianism, it is central to it.

Conclusion: The burden of memory and the centrality of education to politics

At the heart of Trump’s war on memory lies an act of pedagogical terror, a poisoning of history and the transformation of culture into a blunt instrument of indoctrination. To resist this death of memory is to recognize that the fight for democracy cannot be separated from the fight over history, over culture, and over the economic forces that shackle both under gangster capitalism. To defend truth is to defend freedom; to erase history is to pave the road to authoritarianism. Trump’s censorship of the Smithsonian, his bans on books, and his whitewashing of slavery are not mere cultural disputes. They are weapons aimed at the very life of democracy. Culture is never simply a mirror of society; it is a battlefield that shapes how we imagine the world and our place within it. In a time when neoliberalism and fascism bleed into each other, culture becomes the decisive ground where narratives of domination collide with possibilities of resistance. Authoritarians seek to turn it into a machinery of obedience, silencing dissent and numbing consciousness. Yet culture also holds the fragile, indispensable power to ignite memory, nourish critical thought, and keep alive the hope of resistance.

At the heart of this project lies a war over culture and consciousness. Antonio Gramsci, in the Prison Notebooks, warned that every political struggle is also a struggle over pedagogy, over who shapes the common sense of a society. Paulo Freire reminded us that education is never neutral--it either nurtures liberation or reinforces domination. Trump’s pedagogy of repression seeks nothing less than a populace severed from memory, stripped of critical thought, and rendered compliant to authoritarian power. What is at stake is not simply the narcotic of censorship and erasure, but the calculated use of state terrorism to fashion a fascist subject, anti-intellectual, morally hollow, obedient to authority, and emptied of democratic agency. The United States has become a warfare state, where the instruments of militarization and the machinery of control no longer remain at the edges of empire but are turned inward, disciplining culture, stifling memory, and colonizing everyday life under the banner of “law and order.” What once was unleashed abroad in the name of empire now circulates within, producing citizens as enemies and culture itself as a battlefield. War should be a warning; under Trump it has become theater, a grotesque spectacle where cruelty parades as civic virtue.

If democracy is to endure, memory must be defended with the same ferocity as freedom itself. Yet remembrance alone is not enough. What is required is a critical culture that binds past and present, a pedagogy that transforms historical consciousness into collective action. The ghosts of Auschwitz, of Jim Crow, of January 6th, remain with us, not as abstractions but as urgent reminders of the abyss that awaits when memory is erased. Our responsibility is to teach, to narrate, and to reimagine, so that memory itself becomes an act of resistance. Only by turning remembrance into struggle can we block the return of barbarism and reclaim democracy as a living, unfinished experiment in freedom. Only through mass movements of organized resistance can we dismantle the machinery of ignorance, disposability, and death that now threatens the remnants of American democracy.

In the end, culture remains the decisive ground where radical democracy either withers under authoritarian rule or is reborn as the terrain of resistance and hope. What is clear is that the Trump regime does not merely flirt with fascism, it embodies it, hurling the United States over the abyss. And that abyss stretches far beyond American borders. Trump arms Netanyahu, an indicted war criminal who wages genocide against the Palestinian people with impunity; he aligns himself with dictators like Russia’s Vladimir Putin, India’s Narendra Modi, Argentina’s Javier Gerardo Milei, El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, and others who traffic in repression, violence, and cruelty. The warfare state is drenched in blood. Resistance is no longer a choice; it is a necessity that sears the conscience, demanding action.

Charlotte Delbo, an Auschwitz survivor, pleaded in A Prayer to the Living to Forgive Them for Being Alive: “You who are passing by, I beg you, do something…to justify your existence…because it would be too senseless after all for so many to have died while you live doing nothing with your life.” Her words reverberate through time, transcending the horrors of a specific moment in history, and call us to a moral reckoning we cannot ignore. The choice before us is unambiguous: silence or resistance, complicity or memory, barbarism or democracy. The weight of this decision cannot be overstated. The time to act is now, for what is at stake is not just our collective humanity, but the very survival of democracy itself.

Wednesday, August 13, 2025

Trumpism, Neoliberalism, and the Abandoned Majority

In the ongoing battle between Trumpism and neoliberalism, much of the mainstream narrative paints these forces as diametrically opposed. In reality, while they clash on culture-war rhetoric and political branding, both camps operate in ways that protect entrenched wealth and power—especially within higher education.

Trumpism, with its populist veneer, frames itself as a rebellion against “the establishment.” Yet Donald Trump’s policies in office—including massive corporate tax cuts, deregulation favoring billionaires, and the rollback of labor protections—aligned closely with neoliberal orthodoxy. His administration stacked the Department of Education with for-profit college lobbyists and dismantled borrower protections, leaving indebted students vulnerable to predatory lending.

Neoliberalism, as embodied by centrist Democrats and much of the university establishment, champions “meritocracy” and global competitiveness, but often functions as a machine for upward wealth transfer. University leaders such as Princeton’s Christopher Eisgruber, Northwestern’s Michael Schill, Harvard’s Claudine Gay, Stanford’s Marc Tessier-Lavigne, Texas A&M’s M. Katherine Banks, and reformist chancellors Andrew Martin of Washington University in St. Louis and Daniel Diermeier of Vanderbilt oversee institutions that cut faculty jobs, outsource labor, and raise tuition, all while securing lucrative corporate and donor partnerships. These leaders, regardless of political branding, manage universities as if they were hedge funds with classrooms attached.

In both cases, the non-elite—students burdened by soaring debt, adjunct professors lacking job security, and underpaid university workers—remain locked in systems of extraction. Trumpist politicians rail against “liberal elites” while quietly protecting billionaire donors and for-profit education interests. Neoliberal university leaders publicly oppose Trumpism but maintain donor networks tied to Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and global finance, reinforcing the same structural inequality.

This false binary obscures the shared economic agenda of privatization, commodification, and concentration of wealth and power within elite institutions. For the working class and the educated underclass, there is no true champion—only differing marketing strategies for the same system of exploitation.

Sources

Henry A. Giroux, Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education (Haymarket Books, 2014)
David Dayen, “Trump’s Fake Populism,” The American Prospect
Jon Marcus, “The New College Presidents and Their Corporate Mindset,” The Hechinger Report
U.S. Department of Education, Office of Federal Student Aid, “Borrower Defense to Repayment Reports”
New York Times coverage of Claudine Gay, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, Michael Schill, and M. Katherine Banks’ administrative records

Tuesday, July 22, 2025

Higher Education Inquirer Nears One Million Views: Investigative Journalism Drives Unprecedented Growth

The Higher Education Inquirer (HEI) is approaching a significant milestone: nearly one million total views expected by September 2025. This achievement underscores the growing demand for investigative journalism that holds higher education institutions accountable.

HEI's traffic growth has been steady for more than a year with an explosive rise over the last few months. In the first quarter of 2025, the site recorded about 132,000 views, showing increased interest. By June, monthly views passed 160,000. The highest single-day traffic came yesterday, July 21, 2025, with 10,391 views, breaking previous records. This peak coincided with the release of several articles on economic and social issues facing students, student loan debtors, and young workers.

Key articles included Bryan Alexander’s examination of whether higher education still makes financial sense for students. Our staff contributed reports on young workers’ declining confidence in the job market and the expanding role of fintech companies like SoFi in student loans.

HEI also covers broader social and political topics. An article on June 25 about Gaza’s humanitarian crisis and campus dissent drew hundreds of views, showing the publication’s interest in global issues related to academic freedom and student activism.

One of the most significant examples of HEI’s investigative reporting has been its ongoing coverage of corruption and scandal in the Los Angeles Community College District (LACCD). In May and June 2025, HEI published detailed exposés documenting alleged fraud, retaliation against whistleblowers, grade manipulation, wage theft, and falsification of faculty credentials. These stories brought to light longstanding issues within LACCD, including actions by administrators such as Annie G. Reed, whose conduct has repeatedly raised serious concerns since at least 2016.

The impact of HEI’s coverage extended beyond readership numbers. After critical articles published by allied independent media outlets were removed from online platforms, HEI stood firm in reporting these issues, highlighting the challenges faced by whistleblowers and the vital role of independent journalism in holding institutions accountable.

In July 2025, HEI published an in-depth investigation revealing the Pentagon's longstanding relationship with for-profit colleges, particularly through the Council of College and Military Educators (CCME). The investigation uncovered how these institutions have exploited military-connected students, veterans, and their families, benefiting from federal programs like the Post-9/11 GI Bill and Department of Defense Tuition Assistance. Despite multiple Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, the Department of Defense has withheld critical documents, raising questions about transparency and accountability in military education partnerships.

Additionally, HEI's reporting on the exploitation of veterans under the guise of service highlighted how politicians, government agencies, and nonprofits have failed to protect those who have served. The investigation revealed that instead of supporting veterans, these entities have perpetuated systems that prioritize self-interest over the well-being of veterans, leading to wasted benefits and poor educational outcomes.

Several factors explain HEI’s growth. The publication relies on original documents obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, legal filings, and insider accounts to reveal facts often missed by mainstream media. This research appeals to readers seeking solid information.

Contributions from scholars and activists like Bryan Alexander, Henry Giroux, David Halperin, and Michael Hainline add context that helps readers understand education trends and policies.

HEI focuses on long-term issues such as adjunct faculty exploitation, college closures, student debt, and the privatization of public education, rather than fleeting news. This approach builds a loyal audience interested in ongoing analysis.

The site offers free access without paywalls or advertising, encouraging sharing and reader interaction through comments, tips, and feedback. Its presence on social media and forums like Reddit helps reach more readers organically.

Central to HEI’s mission is a commitment to transparency, accountability, and value in higher education. The publication seeks not only to reveal problems but also to hold institutions and policymakers responsible. HEI stresses that higher education must deliver real financial, social, and intellectual value and that openness is key to achieving this.

The political and economic context has also contributed to HEI’s growth. Lasting effects of Trump-era policies—such as changes in Title IX enforcement, rollbacks of diversity efforts, and disputes over federal funding—have increased public interest. HEI’s clear, evidence-based coverage helps readers understand these complex changes.

Public concerns about rising student debt, now over $1.7 trillion nationwide, and doubts about the value of college degrees have also driven readers to HEI. At the same time, debates around campus culture and diversity heighten demand for balanced reporting.

As HEI nears its million-view goal, it plans to expand investigative work, grow its viewership base, and increase community engagement through interactive features and reader participation. The publication intends to continue monitoring higher education’s power structures and highlight factors affecting students, faculty, and institutions.

In a time of declining trust in mainstream media and widespread misinformation, HEI’s growth shows a strong need for journalism that is thorough, honest, and focused on those involved in higher education.

For readers seeking clear, direct insight on changes in colleges and universities, HEI offers an essential platform—living up to its motto, “Ahead of the Learned Herd.” Its rise marks a shift toward more accountable journalism in the field.

Saturday, July 19, 2025

Language in the Age of Fascist Politics (Henry Giroux)

In the age of expanding fascism, the power of language is not only fragile but increasingly threatened. As Toni Morrison has noted, “language is not only an instrument through which power is exercised,” it also shapes agency and functions as an act with consequences. These consequences ripple through the very fabric of our existence. For in the words we speak, meaning, truth, and our collective future are at risk. Each syllable, phrase, and sentence becomes a battleground where truth and power collide, where silence breeds complicity, and where justice hangs in the balance.

In response, we find ourselves in desperate need of a new vocabulary, one capable of naming the fascist tide and militarized language now engulfing the United States. This is not a matter of style or rhetorical flourish; it is a matter of survival. The language required to confront and resist this unfolding catastrophe will not come from the legacy press, which remains tethered to the very institutions it ought to expose. Nor can we turn to the right-wing media machines, led by Fox News, where fascist ideals are not just defended but paraded as patriotism.

In the face of this crisis, Toni Morrison’s insight drawn from her Nobel Lecture becomes all the more urgent and makes clear that the language of tyrants, embodied in the rhetoric, images, and modes of communication characteristic of the Trump regime, is a dead language. For her “a dead language is not simply one that is no longer spoken or written,” it is unyielding language “content to admire its own paralysis.” It is repressive language infused with power, censored and censoring. Ruthless in its policing duties and dehumanizing language, it has no desire or purpose other than maintaining the free range of its own narcotic narcissism, its own exclusivity and dominance. “Though moribund, it is not without effect” for it actively thwarts the intellect, stalls conscience, and “suppresses human potential.” Unreceptive to interrogation, it cannot form or tolerate new ideas, shape other thoughts, tell another story, or fill baffling silences. This is the language of official power whose purpose is to sanction ignorance and preserve.

Beneath its glittering spectacle and vulgar performance, lies a language that is "dumb, predatory, sentimental." It offers mass spectacles, a moral sleepwalking state of mind, and a psychotic infatuation for those who seek refuge in unchecked power. It forges a community built on greed, corruption, and hate, steeped in a scandal of hollow fulfillment. It is a language unadorned in its cruelty and addiction to creating an architecture of violence. It is evident in Trump’s discourse of occupation, his militarizing of American politics, and in his use of an army of trolls to turn hatred into a social media spectacle of swagger and cruelty.

Despite differing tones and political effects, the discourses of the far right and the liberal mainstream converge in their complicity: both traffic in mindless spectacle, absorb lies as currency, and elevate illusion over insight. The liberal mainstream drapes the machinery of cruelty in the language of civility, masking the brutality of the Trump regime and the predatory logic of gangster capitalism, while the far right revels in it, parading its violence as virtue and its hatred as patriotism. Language, once a powerful instrument against enforced silence and institutional cruelty, now too often serves power, undermining reason, normalizing violence, and replacing justice with vengeance.

In Trump’s oligarchic culture of authoritarianism, language becomes a spectacle of power, a theater of fear crafted, televised, and performed as a civic lesson in mass indoctrination. If language is the vessel of consciousness, then we must forge a new one--fierce, unflinching, and unafraid to rupture the fabric of falsehood that sustains domination, disposability, and terror. The late famed novelist, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, was right in stating that “language was a site of colonial control,” inducting people into what he called “colonies of the mind.”

The utopian visions that support the promise of a radical democracy and prevent the dystopian nightmare of a fascist politics are under siege in the United States. Increasingly produced, amplified and legitimated in a toxic language of hate, exclusion, and punishment, all aspects of the social and the democratic values central to a politics of solidarity are being targeted by right-wing extremists. In addition, the institutions that produce the formative cultures that nourishes the social imagination and democracy itself are now under attack. The signposts are on full display in a politics of racial and social cleansing that is being fed by a white nationalist and white supremacist ideology that is at the centre of power in the US—marked by fantasies of exclusion accompanied by a full-scale attack on morality, reason, and collective resistance rooted in democratic struggle.

As more people revolt against this dystopian project, neoliberal ideology and elements of a fascist politics merge to contain, distract and misdirect the anger that has materialised out of legitimate grievances against the government, controlling privileged elites and the hardships caused by neoliberal capitalism. The current crisis of agency, representation, values and language demands a discursive shift that can call into question and defeat the formative culture and ideological scaffolding through which a savage neoliberal capitalism reproduces itself. This warped use of language directly feeds into the policies of disposability that define Trump's regime.

State Terror and Trump’s Politics of Disposability

As Trump’s regime concentrates power, he invokes a chilling convergence of law, order, and violence, a cornerstone of his politics of disposability. His acts of cruelty and lawlessness, abducting and deporting innocent people, branding immigrants as “vermin,” claiming they are “poisoning the blood” of Americans, and even proposing the legalization of murder for twelve hours, make clear that his violent metaphors are not just rhetorical flourishes. They are policy blueprints. In Trump’s hands, rhetoric becomes a weaponized prelude to atrocity, a tool of statecraft. Threats, hatred, and cruelty are transformed into instruments of governance.

This is not careless talk, it is a brutal and calculated expression of power. Trump’s threats to arrest and deport critics such as Zohran Mamdani reveal his willingness to use the machinery of the state for political extermination. His targets are predictable: immigrants, Black people, educators, journalists, LGBTQ+ individuals, and anyone who dares to challenge his white Christian nationalist, neoliberal, and white supremacist vision. His language does not merely offend, it incites harm, enacts repression, and opens the gates to state-sanctioned violence. It extends the reign of terror across the United States by labeling protesters as terrorists and deploying the military to American cities, treating them as if they were “occupied territories.”

Trump is not alone. Many of his MAGA follower use these same hateful discourse. For instance, conservative pundit Ann Coulter wrote “in response to a speech by Melanie Yazzie, a Native artist and professor, about decolonization, “We didn’t Kill enough Indians.” This is not simply harsh rhetoric; nor is it a performative display of emboldened hatred and historical forgetting, it sets the stage for state-sanctioned repression and mass violence. What is at stake is more than civic respect. It is democracy itself. When language loses meaning and truth is blurred, tyranny thrives. Trump’s and too much of MAGA discourse is not about persuasion; it is about dehumanization and domination. It functions as statecraft, laying the groundwork for a society where suffering becomes spectacle and repression masquerades as law and order. Language is the canary in the coal mine, warning us that democracy dies without an informed citizenry.

As Eddie Glaude Jr. has powerfully argued, Americans must confront a brutal truth: the creation and expansion of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), now the largest federal law enforcement agency, is not merely a matter of policy, it is a cornerstone of white supremacy. It is a racist institution, entrenched in an immigration policy designed to uphold the values of white nationalism. In the face of shifting demographics, ICE is tasked with an urgent mission—to make America white again, a calculated attempt to turn back the clock on progress, to preserve an imagined past at the cost of justice and humanity.

We now live in a country where class and racial warfare both at home and abroad is on steroids, exposing the killing machine of gangster capitalism in its rawest, most punitive form. Trump supports the genocidal war waged by a state led by a war criminal. Children are being slaughtered in Gaza. Millions of Americans, including poor children, teeter on the edge of losing their healthcare. Funds for feeding hungry children are being slashed, sacrificed to feed the pockets of the ultra-rich. Thousands will die, not by accident, but by design. Terror, fear, and punishment have replaced the ideals of equality, freedom, and justice. Childcide is now normalized as the law of the land. The lights are dimming in America, and all that remains are the smug, ignorant smirks of fascist incompetence and bodies drained of empathy and solidarity.

Gangster Capitalism and the Death of Empathy

Gangster capitalism lays the foundation for Trump’s racist and fascist politics. As I have noted elsewhere, the United States has descended into a state of political, economic, cultural, and social psychosis, where cruel, neoliberal, democracy-hating policies have prevailed since the 1970s. At the core of this authoritarian shift lies a systemic war on workers, youth, Blacks, and immigrants, increasingly marked by mass violence and a punishing state both domestically and internationally. The U.S. has transformed into an empire dominated by a callous, greedy billionaire class that has dismantled any remnants of democracy, while embracing the fascistic ideology of white Christian nationalism and white supremacy. Fascism now parades not only beneath the flag but also under the Christian cross.

America has shifted from celebrating unchecked individualism, as depicted in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, to the glorification of greed championed by Gordon Gekko in Wall Street, and the psychotic avarice of Patrick Bateman in American Psycho. This descent into barbarity and psychotic infatuation with violence is further demonstrated by Justin Zhong, a right-wing preacher at Sure Foundation Baptist Church in Indianapolis, who called for the deaths of LGBTQ+ individuals during a sermon. Zhong defended his comments by citing biblical justifications and labeling LGBTQ+ people as "domestic terrorists."

It gets worse. During a Men’s Preaching Night at Sure Foundation Baptist Church, Zhong's associate, Stephen Falco, suggested that LGBTQ+ people should "blow yourself in the back of the head," and that Christians should "pray for their deaths." Another member, Wade Rawley, advocated for violence, stating LGBTQ+ individuals should be "beaten and stomped in the mud" before being shot in the head. Fascism in America, nourished by the toxic roots of homophobia, now cloaks itself not just in the poisonous banner of the Confederate flag, but also in the sacred guise of the Christian cross.

Welcome to Trump’s America, where empathy is now viewed as a weakness and the cold rule of the market is the template for judging all social relations. One noted example can be found in the words of Trump’s on-and-off billionaire ally, Elon Musk, who dismisses empathy as a naive and detrimental force that undermines the competitive, individualistic ethos he champions. Speaking to Joe Rogan on his podcast, Musk specifically stated that “The fundamental weakness of western civilization is empathy.” As Julia Carrie Wong observes in The Guardian, the stakes extend far beyond casting empathy as a "parasitic plague." Empathy's true danger lies in its role as an enabler—granting permission to dehumanize others and constricting the very “definition of who should be included in a democratic state.” This is a recipe for barbarism, one that allows both states and individuals to turn a blind eye to the genocidal violence unfolding in Gaza and beyond.

Naming the Deep Roots of the Police State

Ruth Ben-Ghiat has warned that “America has been set on a trajectory to become a police state,” pointing to the passage of the Brutal and Bellicose Bill (BBB), which handed ICE a budget larger than the militaries of Brazil, Israel, and Italy combined. But the roots of this state violence go deeper. The foundation was laid under Bush and Cheney, whose war on terror birthed Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, mass surveillance, and extraordinary rendition. What Trump has done is strip these earlier authoritarian practices of all pretenses, elevating them to the status of governing principles.

The police state did not begin with Trump; it evolved through him. Now, we see its terrifying maturity: racial cleansing disguised as immigration policy, hatred normalized as political speech, dissent criminalized, birthright citizenship threatened, and everyday life militarized. This is not politics as usual, it is fascism in real time.

Trump’s fascist politics grows even more dangerous when we recognize that his language of colonization and domination has helped transform American society into what Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o chillingly describes as a “war zone.” This war zone now spans the digital terrain—through the internet, podcasts, social media, and educational platforms—becoming a fertile breeding ground for fascist symbols, reactionary values, manufactured identities, and the toxic resurrection of colonial logics. In this battleground of meaning, the language of colonization does more than obscure the truth—it erodes critical thinking, silences historical memory, and disarms the very possibility of empowered agency. What remains in its wake is a nation scarred by suffering, haunted by loneliness, bound by shared fears, and anesthetized by the numbing rituals of a punishing state.

The transformation of America into a war zone finds its most visible expression in the rise of Trump’s omnipresent police state. This authoritarian machinery reveals itself through the mechanisms of state-sponsored terror, a heavily militarized ICE force operating like masked enforcers, and the rapid expansion of detention centers that will increasingly resemble a network of potential forced labor camps. As Fintan O’Toole warns, Trump’s deployment of troops onto the streets of Los Angeles is not merely symbolic—it is “a training exercise for the army, a form of reorientation.” In this reorientation, soldiers are no longer defenders of the Constitution but are being retrained as instruments of authoritarian power, bound not by democratic ideals but by obedience to a singular will.

Nevertheless, we resist or refuse to name the fascist threat and the ideological and economic architecture of its politics. Still, we recoil from calling the Trump regime what it is: a fascist state engaged in domestic terrorism. Still, we remain blind to the fact that economic inequality, global militarism, and the genocidal logics of empire are not peripheral issues, they are the center. Why is it so difficult to admit that we are living in an age of American fascism? Why do the crimes of the powerful, at home and abroad, so often pass without scrutiny, while the victims are blamed or erased?

The Collapse of Moral Imagination

What we face is not only a political crisis, partly in the collapse of conscience and civic courage-- a profound moral collapse. The war being waged at home by the Trump regime is not just against immigrants or the poor, it is a war on critical thought, on historical memory, on the courage to dissent. It is a war on every institution that upholds critical thinking, informed knowledge, and civic literacy. This is a genocidal war against the very possibility of a just future—a war not merely against, but for stupidity, for the death of morality, and for the annihilation of any robust notion of democracy. Viktor Klemperer, in his seminal work The Language of the Third Reich, offers a crucial lesson from history: "With great insistence and a high degree of precision right down to the last detail, Hitler’s Mein Kampf teaches not only that the masses are stupid, but that they need to be kept that way, intimidated into not thinking." Klemperer’s analysis reveals that Nazi politics did not arise in a vacuum; it was cultivated in a culture where language itself was the breeding ground of cruelty and control.

Trump’s rhetoric of fear, racial hatred does not emerge in a vacuum. It resonates because it taps into a long and violent history, a history soaked in blood, built on genocide, slavery, colonialism, and exclusion. His language recalls the genocidal campaigns against Indigenous peoples, Black Americans, Jews, and others deemed disposable by authoritarian regimes. It is a necrotic lexicon, resurrected in service of tyranny. It gives birth to politicians with blood in their mouths, who weaponize nostalgia and bigotry, cloaking brutality in the false promises of patriotism and “law and order.”

Language as War and the Return of Americanized Fascism

This is not merely a rhetoric of cruelty, it is a call to arms. Trump’s words do not simply shelter fascists; they summon them. They silence dissent, normalize torture, and echo the logic of death camps, internment camps, and mass incarceration. His discourse, laden with hatred and lies, is designed to turn neighbors into enemies, civic life into war, and politics into a death cult and zone of terminal exclusion. Undocumented immigrants, or those seeking to register for green cards or citizenship, are torn from their families and children, cast into prisons such as Alligator Alcatraz, a grotesque manifestation of the punishing state. As Melissa Gira Grant writes in The New Republic, it is "an American concentration camp…built to cage thousands of people rounded up by ICE," constructed in a chilling display of colonial disregard, and erected on traditional Miccosukee land without so much as consulting the Tribe.

This is the face of modern cruelty: language wielded as a tool to orchestrate a spectacle of violence, designed to degrade, divide, and erase. Culture is no longer a peripheral force in politics; it has become the central weapon in the rise of state terrorism. The language of war and complicity normalizes America’s transformation into a monstrous carceral state, a symbol of state-sponsored terror where due process is suspended, and suffering is not just an outcome but the point itself.

A culture of cruelty now merges with state sponsored racial terror, functioning as a badge of honor. One example is noted in Trump advisor Laura Loomer, who ominously remarked that "the wild animals surrounding President Donald Trump’s new immigration detention center… will have 'at least 65 million meals." Change.org, along with others such as Pod Save America co-host Tommy Vietor, noted that her comment “is not only racist, it is a direct emotional attack and veiled threat against Hispanic communities. This kind of speech dehumanizes people of color and normalizes genocidal language.” Her racist remark not only reveals the profound contempt for human life within Trump's inner circle but also highlights how cruelty and violence are strategically used as both a policy tool and a public spectacle. Loomer’s remark is not an aberration, it is a symptom of the fascist logic animating this administration, where death itself becomes a political message. Her blood-soaked discourse if symptomatic of the criminogenic politics fundamental to the working of the Trump regime.

The parallels to history are unmistakable. Loomer’s invocation of death as the outcome of detention recalls the Nazi designation of certain camps as Vernichtungslager, extermination camps, where as Holocaust survivor Primo Levi noted, imprisonment and execution were inseparable. Likewise, the U.S. internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, though often sanitized in public memory, operated under a similar logic of racial suspicion and collective punishment. The message in each case is clear, as Judith Butler has noted in her writing: some lives are rendered invisible, deemed unworthy of legal protection, of family, of dignity, of life itself. In fascist regimes, such spaces function not only as instruments of punishment but as symbolic theaters of power, meant to instill terror, enforce obedience, and declare which bodies the state has marked for erasure.

For Trump, J.D. Vance, and their ilk, fascism is not a specter to be feared but a banner to be waved. The spirit of the Confederacy and the corpse-like doctrines of white supremacy, militarism, and neoliberal authoritarianism have returned, this time supercharged by surveillance technologies, financial capital, and social media echo chambers. In the spirit of the Trump regime, the symbols of the Confederacy are normalized. Confederate flags are now waved by neo-Nazis in public squares and parades, while Trump renames US warships and 7 military bases after Confederate officers, reinforcing a dangerous nostalgia for a past rooted in racism and rebellion against the very ideals of unity and equality that this nation claims to uphold.

Higher Education and the Fight Against Authoritarianism
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It should not surprise us that the American public has grown numb with the constant echo chamber of state terrorism playing out in multiple sites of attack. Powerful disimagination machines, mainstream media, right-wing propaganda platforms, tech billionaires, have flooded public consciousness with conspiracy theories, historical amnesia, and spectacularized images of immigrants and others being deported to prisons, foreign Gulags, and modern day black holes. These are not simply entertainment outlets; they are pedagogical weapons of mass distraction, breeding civic illiteracy and moral paralysis. Under their influence, the American people have been placed in a moral and political coma.

White Nationalism and Reproductive Control

Nowhere is this more evident than in the mainstream media’s failure to address the racial and ideological foundations of Trump’s agenda. His attacks on Haitian immigrants, the travel ban on seven African countries, the shutting down of refugee programs, and his open-door policy for white Afrikaners from South Africa are not merely racist; they are explicitly white nationalist. The same ideology drives attacks on women’s reproductive rights, revealing the deep racial and gender anxieties of a movement obsessed with white demographic decline. These are not isolated skirmishes, they are interconnected strategies of domination.

These converging assaults, white nationalism, white supremacy, patriarchal control, and militarized life, manifest most vividly in the war on reproductive freedom. White nationalists encourage white women to reproduce, to hold back demographic change, while punishing women of color, LGBTQ+ people, and the poor. It is a violent calculus, animated by fantasies of purity and control.

The Systemic Assault on Democracy

This is a full-spectrum assault on democracy. Every act of cruelty, every racist law, every violent metaphor chips away at the social contract. A culture of authoritarianism is now used to demean those considered other, both citizens and non-citizens, critics and immigrants, naturalized citizens and those seeking such status. They are labeled as unworthy of citizenship now defined by the Trump regime as a privilege rather than a right. Meanwhile, a media ecosystem built on clickbait and erasure renders both such fascists as legitimate while making invisible the roots of suffering mass suffering and fear, all the while, turning oppression into spectacle and silence into complicity.

In this fog, language itself is emptied of meaning. Truth and falsehood blur. As Paulo Freire warned, the tools of the oppressor are often adopted by the oppressed. We now see that the logic of fascism has seeped into the culture, eroding civic sensibility, destroying moral imagination, and rendering resistance almost unspeakable.

The Normalization of Tyranny

Trump’s authoritarian fantasies do not alienate his base, they galvanize it. What was once unthinkable is now policy. What was once fringe has become mainstream. Cruelty is not something to be deplored and avoided at all costs, it is a central feature of power, wielded with theatrical and spectacularized brutality. Under the current acting ICE Director, Todd Lyons, this punitive logic has intensified: Lyons oversees a $4.4 billion Enforcement and Removal Operations apparatus staffed by over 8,600 agents across 200 domestic locations, using militarized tactics, surprise raids, and aggressive targeting of immigrant communities to sustain a regime of fear. ICE’s presence is at the heart of Trump’s hyper-police state, and its funding has been greatly expanded to $170 billion under Trump’s new budget bill, creating what journalist Will Bunch calls Trump’s “own gulag archipelago of detention camps across a United States that’s becoming increasingly hard to recognize.”

Meanwhile, figures like Tom Homan, who led ICE under Trump’s first term, laid the groundwork with Gestapo-style operations, midnight raids, family separations, and public declarations that undocumented immigrants “should be afraid”. As the “border tzar” under Trump, Homan has initiated deportation policies that are even more aggressively violent and cruel that those that took place in Trump’s first term as president. As Bunch notes, take the case of “the 64-year-old New Orleans woman, Donna Kashanian, who fled a tumultuous Iran 47 years ago, volunteered to rebuild her battered Louisiana community after Hurricane Katrina, never missed a check-in with U.S. immigration officials , and was snatched by ICE agents in unmarked vehicles while she was out working in her garden and sent to a notorious detention center.” These horror stories now take place daily in cities extending from Los Angeles to Providence, Rhode Island.

A central player in this current regime of state terrorism, systemic racism, mass abductions, deportations, and the criminalization of dissent is Stephen Miller, Trump’s White House Deputy Chief of Staff. During Trump’s first term, Miller was the driving force behind the Muslim ban, the family separation policy, and assaults on birthright citizenship, all rooted in an unapologetic white supremacist and eugenicist worldview. In Trump’s second term, he has emerged as the architect of even more draconian measures, pushing for mass deportations, the abolition of birthright citizenship, and the revocation of naturalized citizenship for those who fall outside his white Christian vision of who deserves to be called American.

Far-right white nationalist such as Miller, Tom Homan and Todd Lyons, do not treat cruelty as a regrettable side effect. For them, cruelty is the currency of power. Suffering becomes a spectacle, and violence a ritual of statecraft. Tyranny is not inching forward in silence; it is advancing at full speed, cheered on by those who treat fear as a governing principle and pain as public policy. At stake here is what Timothy Snyder calls the practice of fascist dehumanization.

This is not a passing storm. It is the death throes of a system that has long glorified violence, commodified everything, and fed on division. Trump’s language is not a performance, it is preparation. His words are laying the foundation for a society without empathy, without justice, without democracy.

Reclaiming the Language of Resistance, Reclaiming Democracy

In a decent society, language is the lifeblood of democracy, a vessel of solidarity, truth, and hope. But in Trump’s America, language has become a weapon, dehumanizing, excluding, and dominating. His vision is not a warning; it is a blueprint. We must resist, or we risk losing everything. The stakes are nothing less than the survival of democracy, the retrieval of truth and the refusal to live in a world where cruelty is policy and silence is complicity.

What is needed now is not only a rupture in language but a rupture in consciousness, one that brings together the critical illumination of the present with a premonitory vision of what lies ahead if fascist dynamics remain unchecked. As Walter Benjamin insisted, we must cultivate a form of profane illumination, a language that disrupts the spectacle of lies and names the crisis in all its violent clarity. At the same time, as A.K. Thompson argues, we must grasp the future implicit in the present. His notion of premonitions urges us to read the events unfolding around us as urgent warnings, as signs of the catastrophe that awaits if we do not confront and reverse the political and cultural paths we are on. It demands that we see the connections that bind our suffering, rejecting the fragmented reality that neoliberalism forces upon us.

The time for complacency is past. The time for a new and more vibrant language, one of critique, resistance, and militant hope, is now. A language capable not only of indicting the present but of envisioning a future rooted in justice, memory, and collective struggle.

As Antonio Gramsci remarked in his Prison Notebooks, "The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear." What is clear is that these morbid symptoms have arrived. Yet, alongside the despair they breed, they also present new challenges and opportunities for revitalized struggles. This is where the power of language comes into play—this is the challenge and opportunity for those who believe in the transformative power of culture, language, and education to address not just the nature of the crisis but its deeper roots in politics, memory, agency, values, power, and democracy itself.

[This article first appeared in the LA Progressive.]

By Henry A. Giroux

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 latest book is The Burden of Conscience: Educating Beyond the Veil of Silence (Bloomsbury in 2025). He is LA Progressive's Associate Editor. His website is www.henryagiroux.com

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