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.

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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

From the New Deal to Narcissism: How Individualism, Libertarianism, and Trumpism Gutted the Public University

The New Deal rested on a foundational belief: that the federal government could be a force for collective uplift. In the shadow of economic collapse and mass unemployment, the Roosevelt administration mobilized state resources to create jobs, reform capitalism, and restore public confidence. Public education—including the university—was part of that vision.

The Higher Education Act of 1965, influenced by the New Deal ethos, vastly expanded federal support for public colleges and student aid. By the early 1970s, nearly 75 percent of college students attended public institutions, with tuition at flagship universities often below $1,000 per year (roughly $7,000 in today’s dollars). Pell Grants could cover most, if not all, of a low-income student’s tuition, room, and board. The GI Bill had already lifted millions into the middle class. State legislatures invested heavily in public universities, seeing them as engines of democratic growth and regional development.

But this consensus began to unravel with the rise of neoliberalism and libertarian ideology in the 1970s and 1980s. Thinkers like Milton Friedman and organizations like the Cato Institute and Heritage Foundation argued that the state was inherently inefficient, that markets should govern most aspects of life, and that individuals—not governments—were responsible for their outcomes. Reagan declared that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,” and higher education funding soon became a target.

State appropriations for public colleges as a share of university revenue declined dramatically. In 1980, public funding made up about 75 percent of the operating costs of state universities. By 2020, it had fallen below 25 percent. Students and their families made up the difference, mostly through debt. Between 1995 and 2023, average tuition at public four-year colleges tripled, even after adjusting for inflation. Total student loan debt exploded, surpassing $1.7 trillion by 2024, burdening more than 45 million Americans. The average debt per borrower was more than $38,000.

This wasn’t merely an economic shift—it was an ideological one. Higher education was no longer understood as a public good but as a private investment. Students were told to “shop” for degrees like they would consumer goods, choosing programs based not on curiosity or civic purpose but on return on investment. The university was transformed from a site of public inquiry to a marketplace. Faculty governance was weakened. Shared governance gave way to corporate-style management. Instruction was outsourced to contingent faculty, 70 percent of whom now teach off the tenure track. Adjunct professors, often paid less than $3,500 per course, frequently live below the poverty line and qualify for public assistance.

Trumpism emerged from this late-capitalist malaise but redirected its anger. Instead of questioning the privatization of education, it turned public resentment against institutions of learning themselves. Universities were portrayed as hostile, elitist, and corrupt—agents of indoctrination rather than enlightenment. The Trump administration’s policies followed this rhetoric. Betsy DeVos, a billionaire with no experience in public education, oversaw aggressive deregulation of for-profit colleges, attempted to eliminate gainful employment rules, and delayed or blocked borrower defense claims from defrauded students.

Even after Trump left office, his political movement sustained an aggressive campaign against public education. Under Project 2025, a policy blueprint promoted by the Heritage Foundation and embraced by Trump’s allies, universities are targeted for ideological control. The plan calls for defunding departments deemed “woke,” ending diversity and inclusion programs, and purging federal agencies—including the Department of Education—of those who challenge the political orthodoxy.

In Florida, under Governor Ron DeSantis, this agenda was made real. The New College of Florida, once a respected liberal arts institution, was taken over by political appointees who dismantled its academic programs, removed professors, and imposed a conservative curriculum. Across red states, tenure is under attack, academic freedom is shrinking, and LGBTQ+ students and faculty are being driven out or silenced.

The ideology driving this assault is not consistent libertarianism—it’s an incoherent blend of market fundamentalism, Christian nationalism, and authoritarian populism. It pretends to value freedom but enforces conformity. It invokes personal responsibility while shielding the powerful from consequence. It lauds meritocracy even as it strips away the conditions for anyone outside the elite to succeed.

Underlying all of this is a distorted form of individualism. The student is no longer part of a learning community—they are a solitary debtor. Faculty are no longer public servants—they are expendable contractors. The public university is no longer a site of shared knowledge or democratic imagination—it is a hollowed-out brand, increasingly indistinguishable from the for-profit sector.

Even the language of crisis has lost its power. We no longer speak of austerity or retrenchment—we have normalized decline. College closures are expected. Student defaults are routine. A generation of graduates has never known a university that wasn’t precarious, transactional, and shaped by fear.

To move forward, we must confront not just the political project of Trumpism but the longer neoliberal arc that made it possible. That means rejecting the lie that education is only valuable when it is profitable. It means refusing the narrative that students in debt deserve their suffering. And it means restoring the idea that knowledge—and the institutions that sustain it—are worth defending not just for individuals, but for the society we want to live in.

The public university was never perfect, but it was once animated by a different moral vision. Reclaiming that vision is not nostalgic—it is necessary. If we fail, we consign ourselves to a future of narcissistic consumerism, epistemic decay, and civic disintegration.

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Sources and Data

• U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics (NCES): College Tuition Trends

• Congressional Budget Office (CBO): Student Loan Debt Projections, 2024

• The Century Foundation: “The State of Adjunct Faculty,” 2022

• National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO): “State Funding vs. Tuition Revenue, 1980–2020”

• Project on Predatory Student Lending: Legal challenges to Trump-era ED policies

• Heritage Foundation, “Mandate for Leadership: Project 2025”

• Florida Department of Education and New College public records, 2023–2024

• Inside Higher Ed, “Contingent Faculty and the Collapse of Tenure,” March 2024

• The New Deal and Higher Education, John R. Thelin, A History of American Higher Education

• Barkan, Joanne. Merchants of Debt: How the Student Loan Industry Became a Power Broker

The Chicago School of Economics: A Political Takeover Masquerading as Science

For decades, the Chicago School of Economics has been held up by its adherents as the intellectual engine behind “free market” policies—its faculty lionized, its ideology exported, its disciples placed in positions of power across the globe. But beneath the polished veneer of economic modeling and Nobel prizes lies something far more insidious: not a neutral scientific project, but a political takeover cloaked in the language of rationality.

The Chicago School—rooted in the University of Chicago’s Department of Economics and typified by figures like Milton Friedman, George Stigler, and Gary Becker—has long promoted the idea that markets are efficient, individuals are rational actors, and government interference should be minimal. Its tools are equations; its products are policies. But the effects of those policies—deregulation, privatization, austerity, and corporate tax cuts—reveal a consistent political orientation: upward wealth redistribution and consolidation of power among the elite.

This isn’t science. It’s sophistry.

A “Science” That Can’t Predict

Unlike the physical sciences, economics—particularly the Chicago School strain—has failed spectacularly at prediction. It didn’t anticipate the global financial crash of 2008. It didn’t predict the collapse of neoliberal development models in Latin America, Russia, or post-invasion Iraq. What it has done, instead, is offer intellectual cover for policies that have made the global economy less stable and more unequal.

If this were biology or engineering, the repeated failures would warrant rethinking the entire theoretical framework. But Chicago-style economics survives because it is not held accountable by the standards of real science. It is propped up by billionaire-funded think tanks, right-wing political operatives, and a compliant media machine that prizes certainty over complexity.

Crisis as a Feature, Not a Bug

The most telling feature of the Chicago School is its acceptance—even embrace—of financial collapse. To these economists, crises are inevitable market “corrections,” moments of creative destruction that supposedly cleanse inefficiencies. But these corrections always seem to fall hardest on workers, the poor, and the public sector.

When the crashes come, the Chicago School has a solution: public bailouts for private failure. In 2008, the banks that tanked the economy were rescued with taxpayer money. Airlines, oil companies, and private equity firms have enjoyed the same perks during subsequent downturns. Risk is privatized during booms and socialized during busts. This is not market discipline. It’s a revolving door between state and capital, justified by the rhetorical sleight-of-hand of “market efficiency.”

Disciples Without Scrutiny

Graduates of the Chicago School populate central banks, finance ministries, and international institutions like the IMF and World Bank. In countries from Chile under Pinochet to post-Soviet Russia, these “experts” imposed shock therapy on fragile societies—cutting public services, smashing unions, and opening markets to foreign capital. The human cost has been immense: hunger, homelessness, reduced life expectancy, and lost sovereignty.

And yet, because the ideology is couched in the technocratic language of “growth” and “efficiency,” it is rarely scrutinized in mainstream discourse. As the sociologist Philip Mirowski has argued, neoliberal economists effectively launder ideology through the language of science. They wear lab coats, but they serve oligarchs.

Higher Education as a Host

Higher education didn’t just incubate this ideology; it exported it. Endowed chairs, corporate-funded centers, and prestigious lecture circuits have made Chicago School economists wealthy and powerful. Institutions like the Hoover Institution, the Cato Institute, and the American Enterprise Institute have amplified their ideas while silencing dissent. Critical perspectives—Marxist, feminist, ecological—have been marginalized or defunded in economics departments across the U.S. and much of the Global North.

Meanwhile, public universities struggling for funding have adopted Chicago-style managerial logic: metrics over mission, ROI over learning, adjuncts over tenure. The logic of the market has colonized the classroom.

The Ideology of the Empire

Chicago School economics has become the lingua franca of empire. It rationalizes austerity, justifies tax havens, normalizes poverty, and sanctifies inequality. It tells working people that if they’re poor, they must be irrational. It tells governments to balance budgets, not lives. It tells universities to behave like hedge funds.

The project is not just intellectual—it is political. And its time is up.

In a world facing climate collapse, runaway inequality, and democratic backsliding, we must recognize Chicago economics for what it is: not a neutral science but a strategic takeover. A theology of markets with no god but capital, no law but competition, and no justice but profit.

It cannot predict. It does not prevent. And it refuses to be held accountable.

Let us end the charade.

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Sources:

• Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste (2013)

• Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine (2007)

• Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (2018)

• Robert Kuttner, Debtors’ Prison (2013)

• David Graeber, Debt: The First 5000 Years (2011)

For more critical investigations into political economy and higher education, visit Higher Education Inquirer.

"Crooks, Pigs, and Cockroaches": A Raw Exchange on the Resurgence of the For-Profit Grift

It started with a grim but familiar warning from a longtime borrower—someone who’s watched the student loan system implode in slow motion and seen the worst actors escape accountability:

“Well this isn't good.
New accrediting agency for colleges run and operated by for-profit college goons....
I’m sure we will see scammy colleges take off again!”

The warning was in response to recent developments in higher ed accreditation: the rise of a new accreditor with leadership tied to the same for-profit institutions that helped build a trillion-dollar debt crisis. The borrower’s tone was weary, but not surprised.

I responded, because this wasn’t news to me either:

“Thanks. That’s how neoliberalism works. It never ends. So we have to continue fighting until we can’t fight anymore.”

But I didn’t stop there. I wrote what I’ve long felt—what I’ve heard from whistleblowers, from insiders, and from people still bound by NDAs that keep the truth buried:

“Yes, crooks and pigs and cockroaches have been around forever, and they all smell money.
Even people who claim to be on our side are not really on our side. That’s why so little good happens.
I have an NDA so I can't tell you everything.

Like so many others who’ve tried to expose the rot, I’ve spoken with whistleblowers across multiple campuses. I’ve seen clear cases of fraud swept under the rug.

“Should have buried the University of Phoenix with this one,” I wrote, referencing an investigation into schools using fake enrollment paperwork to defraud taxpayers.
“And someone should have taken this story,” I added, pointing to our own work at The Higher Education Inquirer:
What the Pentagon Doesn’t Want You to See: For-Profit Colleges in the Military-Industrial-Education Complex.
“More than 30 years of grift and eight years of coverups.”

That article, like so many others exposing corruption in higher ed, was met mostly with silence. Whistleblowers risk everything, and still the stories too often disappear into the noise.

I used to have a trusted contact inside the U.S. Department of Education. But that channel dried up when the Trump administration came in and the revolving door between industry and government started spinning even faster.

So where does that leave us?

“What I’d like to see,” I wrote, “is for us to send a mole to work at AidVantage or one of the other student loan servicers.”

It’s not fantasy—it’s necessity. When the system protects grifters, when accreditors are captured, and when servicers lose records, miscalculate forgiveness, and dodge accountability, we need more than hope. We need infiltration. We need whistleblowers. We need truth.

The scam isn’t over. It’s reloading.

And we at The Higher Education Inquirer will keep exposing the crooks, pigs, and cockroaches—until we can’t fight anymore.

Sources:

• The Daily Caller: “Massive College Scams Taxpayers Out Of Student Loans With Fake Enrollment Paperwork, Whistleblowers Say”

• The Higher Education Inquirer: “What the Pentagon Doesn’t Want You to See: For-Profit Colleges in the Military-Industrial-Education Complex”

• Private correspondence with a longtime borrower, July 2025

HEI and the Backstage of Higher Education

The Higher Education Inquirer (HEI) exists not to flatter the ivory tower, but to peer behind its stage curtains—into the backstage of higher education, where the hidden scripts are written and the illusions maintained.

For decades, mainstream media and college marketing machines have focused their attention on the front stage of higher education: gleaming campuses, smiling students, glowing success stories, and elite rankings. This curated image serves the interests of university administrators, politicians, media conglomerates, and Wall Street investors. But what lies behind the scenes is far more complex—and far more consequential for working families, indebted students, adjunct instructors, and the public at large.

Pulling Back the Curtain

HEI’s mission is to expose what Erving Goffman might call the “backstage” of academia: the place where the elite performance of higher education is rehearsed and maintained through opaque deals, digital enclosures, and predatory practices. It’s where the real business of higher education unfolds—often at odds with the public good.

We investigate the corporatization of the university, the abuse of contingent labor, the unpayable debts foisted on students, and the machinations of political operatives and private equity barons who have colonized education as a commodity. We speak with whistleblowers, student debtors, low-wage academic workers, and those abandoned by a system that promises mobility but too often delivers exploitation.

The Business of the Dream

In the backstage world of higher education, dreams are monetized. Institutions like the University of Phoenix, Grand Canyon University, and even respected nonprofits have built empires on financial aid schemes and manipulated metrics. Behind them are financiers, hedge funds, and lobbying firms whose interests are rarely aligned with students or educators.

The same institutions that publicly tout diversity and access often quietly outsource instruction to underpaid adjuncts, collaborate with surveillance edtech companies, and silence internal dissent. Meanwhile, media organizations that once held universities accountable have cut education reporters or become entangled with the very institutions they should be questioning.

The Hidden Curriculum

The Higher Education Inquirer operates as a counterforce to this manufactured consensus. We are not neutral. We are critical, investigative, and guided by a commitment to social justice, transparency, and truth-telling. We report not only what universities and policymakers say, but what they do—and whom their decisions harm.

Our coverage includes:

• Student debt and loan forgiveness, including the struggles of Corinthian Colleges alumni and the unfinished business of accountability.

• Adjunct labor and the two-tier academic caste system.

• Edtech’s empty promises, from learning analytics to AI hype.

• The political economy of elite universities, including their ties to hedge funds, Silicon Valley, and state power.

• Federal regulatory theater, where revolving doors between government and for-profit colleges remain a threat to the public interest.

From the Margins to the Archive

HEI serves a different audience—those who have been ignored or exploited by higher education's front-facing PR. We amplify stories from below and archive the struggles that mainstream outlets won’t touch.

We also aim to document history as it happens—before it’s rewritten by university presidents or erased by marketing teams. We provide a long memory in a system increasingly shaped by ahistorical metrics and technocratic solutions.

A Public Good Reclaimed

We don’t pretend to be objective bystanders. Our journalism is part of a larger struggle to reclaim education as a public good, not a private privilege. We call for solidarity with students, educators, and workers. We demand that institutions serve the people who make them run, not just the ones who profit from their prestige.

The backstage of higher education is messy, fraught, and at times devastating. But by pulling back the curtain, we believe there’s still a possibility of building something better.

Sources

• The Higher Education Inquirer archives

• Whistleblower accounts

• U.S. Department of Education public data and FOIA requests

• Interviews with contingent faculty and student debtors

• Academic research on neoliberalism, debt peonage, and credential capitalism

Release All the Epstein Files

More than five years after Jeffrey Epstein’s suspicious death in federal custody, the full truth about his vast network of sexual abuse, elite privilege, and systemic protection remains locked behind closed doors. Despite high-profile arrests, mainstream media coverage, and multiple court battles, the U.S. government and key institutions—including major universities—have still not released the complete set of Epstein-related documents. The Higher Education Inquirer joins growing public calls: release all the Epstein files now.

This is not just about one man or even a circle of powerful friends. It is an indictment of a broader system—a grotesque synergy of patriarchy and neoliberalism—that enables elite impunity while systematically devaluing the lives of the vulnerable.

The Web of Secrecy

The known facts are damning enough. Jeffrey Epstein, a convicted sex offender with deep ties to academia, finance, royalty, and intelligence services, was allowed to operate with virtual impunity for decades. He funded elite universities like Harvard and MIT. He gained legitimacy through connections to figures like Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, Prince Andrew, and tech moguls. He was gifted a sweetheart plea deal in Florida in 2008, allowing him to avoid serious jail time despite credible allegations from dozens of underage survivors.

Even after his re-arrest in 2019, the system again failed: Epstein died in custody under circumstances that have never been credibly explained. Key surveillance footage went missing. Guards fell asleep. No high-ranking accomplices were charged—only Ghislaine Maxwell, who remains silent behind bars.

Court documents have trickled out—most recently in January 2024, when hundreds of pages from a defamation suit involving Virginia Giuffre were unsealed. But these documents were heavily redacted and incomplete. Names were obscured. The network remains only partially visible. The Department of Justice, the FBI, and several universities still withhold key information under claims of “privacy” and “national security.”

Whose privacy? Whose security? Certainly not that of the survivors.

An Indictment of Patriarchy

At its core, this is a story about the exploitation of women and girls, enabled by a patriarchal power structure that routinely protects the powerful at the expense of the powerless. Epstein's crimes were not hidden in a shadowy underworld—they were committed in mansions, on private islands, in Ivy League offices, and aboard private jets.

Many of his victims were teenage girls from economically precarious families. Some were Black, Latina, or Eastern European. They were groomed, trafficked, silenced, and disbelieved. Their trauma was commodified while their abuser was shielded by lawyers, donors, and university administrators.

To treat this merely as a “sex scandal” is to ignore the structural forces at work. Epstein's operation was not a fluke; it was a feature of a society that commodifies women's bodies, deifies the ultra-wealthy, and demands obedience from institutions that should serve the public interest.

A Neoliberal Failure

Epstein’s reach into higher education and finance is a symptom of neoliberalism’s rot: where ethics are subordinated to endowments, where philanthropy buys silence, and where universities compete for the favor of billionaires rather than serve truth or justice.

How did a man with no college degree and no scientific credentials end up with offices at Harvard and deep ties to MIT’s Media Lab? Why did major figures—Bill Gates, Alan Dershowitz, Larry Summers, Marvin Minsky, and others—accept meetings, flights, and funding without asking harder questions? And why have most of these institutions still not released full internal reviews?

Neoliberal higher education sold its soul for prestige and funding. By chasing Epstein’s money, it became complicit.

This is also true of elite media and political networks. Many journalists, editors, and executives knew about Epstein years before 2019. ABC News reportedly squashed a story in 2015. Powerful names pressured platforms and prosecutors. A “free press” operating under corporate control often becomes an accomplice to coverup.

What’s at Stake

By continuing to withhold the Epstein files, U.S. institutions deepen public distrust and prolong injustice. Survivors deserve full accountability. The public deserves to know who participated, who enabled, and who covered it up.

This is not about voyeurism or scandal-chasing. It is about transparency, justice, and systemic reform. We cannot begin to dismantle the structures that enabled Epstein without exposing them fully.

There is no legitimate reason for the government, law enforcement, or publicly funded universities to sit on thousands of sealed documents—especially when they may implicate individuals who still hold influence over public policy, education, and media.

Release Everything

We call for:

• The Department of Justice to release all non-classified documents related to Epstein, including client lists, flight logs, financial records, and communications.

• Universities like Harvard, MIT, and Arizona State to disclose all funding sources, correspondence, and internal reviews involving Epstein and his associates.

• All sealed court filings involving Epstein and Maxwell—unless doing so would endanger survivors—to be made public.

• An independent, survivor-led truth and reconciliation commission to oversee disclosure and redress.

The Fight Is Bigger Than Epstein

Jeffrey Epstein is dead, but the system that protected him is very much alive. It is a system built on patriarchal control, neoliberal corruption, and elite impunity. Releasing the files is a first step toward dismantling that system.

Until then, every redaction is an act of complicity. Every delay is a betrayal of justice.

Release all the Epstein files. Now.

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If you are a survivor of sexual violence or abuse and need support, call the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 800.656.HOPE (4673). Confidential help is available 24/7.

Neoliberalism, Accreditation, and the Endless Reinvention of Higher Ed Scams

Fraudsters are like cockroaches: persistent, hard to eliminate, and always scurrying just beneath the surface. And like cockroaches, when you see one, you can assume many more are hidden from view. In the sprawling, trillion-dollar ecosystem of American higher education—built on trust, hope, and credentials—fraud has been a constant companion. And under neoliberalism, it doesn’t just survive. It adapts, multiplies, and thrives.

The case of Anthony Bieda and the newly formed National Association for Academic Excellence (NAAE) is a vivid reminder of how this ecosystem protects and even rewards those who have failed the public. Bieda, a former executive at the disgraced Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools (ACICS), is now fronting a fresh accreditation startup, backed by conservative donors and political forces aligned with Donald Trump’s vision for higher ed deregulation.

NAAE’s mission is to provide a “holistic,” “anti-woke” alternative to traditional accreditors, evaluating colleges not on outcomes like graduation rates or job placement, but on how they shape the “human person.” It's vague, ideological, and intentionally opaque. Even Bieda admits the metrics are a secret—soon to be intellectual property.

Fraud in American higher education didn’t start with Trump University or Corinthian Colleges. It dates back to the 19th century, when diploma mills sold degrees like snake oil. In the early 20th century, accreditation systems emerged to clean up the mess—but fraud simply evolved. As the federal government opened the spigot of student aid after World War II, for-profit colleges and shady operators followed the money.

By the 2000s, the con had been professionalized. Publicly traded companies like Corinthian and ITT Tech learned how to game the system, using slick advertising, inflated job placement rates, and predatory recruiting to rake in billions in Title IV funds. The students—often low-income, Black, Latino, veterans, or single mothers—were left with broken promises and ballooning debt.

The watchdogs failed them. And some, like ACICS, weren’t just negligent—they were complicit.

In theory, accreditors are gatekeepers. In practice, they’ve too often been enablers. Accreditation bodies are funded by the very institutions they review, leading to deep structural conflicts of interest. ACICS became notorious for accrediting schools that federal and state regulators had flagged as predatory. After years of scrutiny, it was finally shut down in 2022.

Yet here we are, three years later, with ACICS’s former leader launching a new accrediting agency, this time cloaked in the language of "freedom of thought" and "anti-wokeness." Backed by the American Academy of Sciences and Letters (AASL), which insists it’s apolitical despite pushing overt culture war themes, NAAE is asking to be trusted with federal gatekeeping power.

It’s neoliberalism in action: dismantle public systems, defang oversight, and recycle failed leaders with fresh branding. The logic isn’t about protecting students—it’s about deregulating markets under the guise of reform.

The digital age has only made things worse. Online colleges with low academic standards, limited faculty oversight, and profit-driven motives are booming. AI will soon be used not just in instruction and grading, but in accreditation assessments themselves. NAAE promises to use AI to detect inconsistencies and enforce its vague standards. But when the standards themselves are ideological and untested, automation becomes a smokescreen.

Meanwhile, shady consultants, student loan relief scammers, and credentialing platforms are multiplying. It's not just about bad schools anymore—it’s an entire financialized ecosystem that treats students as data points and debtors.

Occasionally, the public sees the fraud for what it is. Corinthian and ITT collapsed. Whistleblowers have emerged. Borrower defense lawsuits have won relief. But like cockroaches, fraudsters scatter and reassemble elsewhere. They form new schools, new agencies, new lobbies. They rebrand and wait for the political winds to shift.

And with Trump pushing to dismantle the Department of Education and rewrite accreditation rules by executive order, the roaches are back in the kitchen.

At the Higher Education Inquirer, we believe fraud is not just a byproduct of capitalism—it’s a feature of an underregulated, investor-driven model of education. The solution is not to invent new accreditors with old ideas, but to demand radical transparency and public accountability.

That means open data on outcomes, default rates, and executive pay. It means public audits of accreditor decisions. It requires whistleblower protections for staff and students. And it must include criminal and financial penalties for institutional fraud.

Because fraudsters are like cockroaches. You may never eliminate them all—but you can turn on the lights, close the cracks, and make it a lot harder for them to scurry back into power.

Sources
Theo Scheer, “He Helped Lead a Disgraced College Accreditor. Under Trump, He Might Have Another Shot.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, July 21, 2025
U.S. Department of Education actions on ACICS (2016–2022)
Higher Education Inquirer reporting on for-profit colleges, accreditation failures, and Trump-era education policy
Interviews with whistleblowers and former students of collapsed institutions

How Neoliberalism Haunts Our Lives: 24/7/365

Neoliberalism isn’t just an economic theory or a dry policy framework. It’s a lived reality that operates around the clock, shaping our lives in ways many people don’t fully see. Neoliberalism tells us that markets solve everything, that individual responsibility trumps social solidarity, and that human worth is best measured by productivity, consumption, and credentialing. Its presence is constant—at work, in education, in healthcare, in housing, even in our relationships.

This is not a new critique. But as the 21st century drags on and late capitalism becomes more extractive, predatory, and digitally surveilled, the impacts of neoliberal ideology have intensified. For the working class, for students, for adjuncts, for debtors, for renters, and for the chronically ill, neoliberalism is not an abstraction—it is a system of permanent exhaustion.

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The Day Begins: Sleep-Deprived and Algorithmically Watched

The neoliberal day begins before the alarm rings. If you’re poor, you may be sleeping in your car or waking up in a crowded home. If you’re middle-class, the first thing you see is likely your phone, already feeding you metrics about your body (sleep scores, heart rate, missed messages). Neoliberal logic tells us our time must be optimized, even our rest must be productive.

Gig workers check their apps to see if they’ll get enough rides or orders to survive. Others log into remote jobs monitored by keystroke trackers, digital timesheets, or AI productivity tools. Control is constant, and surveillance is internalized: we discipline ourselves with planners, metrics, reminders, shame.

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Education: Credentials Over Knowledge

For students, neoliberal education is a high-cost simulation of opportunity. Degrees are sold as investments in "human capital," with ever-rising tuition and debt. Public funding is replaced by predatory loans, branding consultants, and privatized ed-tech platforms. The curriculum is shaped by market demand, not civic responsibility. Liberal arts are gutted, and adjuncts are paid poverty wages while administrators balloon in number.

The university, once imagined as a space for critical thinking and collective inquiry, is now a debt-fueled credential mill—an HR pipeline for corporations, a subscription model of social mobility that rarely delivers.

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Healthcare: A Business of Despair

Neoliberalism doesn’t take a break when you get sick. In fact, your illness becomes a profit center. In the U.S., the healthcare system is a financial trap. Insurance is often tied to employment; losing your job means losing your access to care. Big Pharma, hospital chains, and insurance conglomerates operate under the logic of maximizing shareholder value—not public health.

Even mental health is commodified. Wellness apps, “self-care” products, and Instagram therapy push the idea that individual solutions will fix systemic problems. Suffering is reframed as personal failure.

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Housing: A Market, Not a Human Right

Housing insecurity is one of neoliberalism’s clearest failures. Real estate speculation, gentrification, and the financialization of housing have made shelter a luxury good. Renters face skyrocketing costs and eviction threats, while homes sit vacant as investment vehicles.

Public housing is stigmatized and underfunded. Homelessness becomes a criminal issue instead of a humanitarian one. You’re told to “pull yourself up” while the ladder is systematically removed.

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Work and Labor: You're Always On

The 9-to-5 is no longer the norm. Neoliberal work is either hyper-precarious or all-consuming. The gig economy pretends to offer flexibility, but in practice it strips away rights, benefits, and security. Professional workers face unpaid overtime, side hustles, and an expectation of constant availability. Labor laws lag decades behind. Union-busting is normalized.

At the same time, those without work are treated with suspicion. Unemployment, disability, and even retirement are framed as moral failings or burdens on the system.

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Nightfall: No Rest for the Weary

At night, the apps don’t sleep. Your data is still harvested. Your bank is still charging fees. Your landlord’s algorithm is still adjusting rent. Your student loan is still accruing interest. Your body, overstressed and under-cared-for, begins to break down.

Even dreams aren’t free: entertainment has been colonized by neoliberal culture, feeding you aspirational lifestyles and endless content to dull your exhaustion. Everything is monetized. Everything is a subscription.

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Resistance in the Cracks

Despite its pervasiveness, neoliberalism is not invincible. People are resisting in small and large ways—through union organizing, mutual aid, alternative media, degrowth activism, and radical pedagogy. These aren’t just political choices; they are survival strategies.

But for resistance to grow, we must name the problem clearly. Neoliberalism is not just a phase of capitalism—it’s an ideology embedded in every institution and mediated by every platform. It isolates us, overworks us, and extracts from us while pretending to offer freedom and choice.

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The 24/7/365 Trap

We live in neoliberalism’s world, but we don’t have to live by its rules. That starts with refusing its myths: that poverty is personal failure, that education is a private good, that health must be earned, that the market is sacred.

As long as neoliberalism governs our lives without challenge, inequality will deepen and democracy will continue to erode. The question isn’t whether we can afford to abandon neoliberalism—the question is whether we can survive if we don’t.

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Sources:

• Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos

• David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism

• Sarah Jaffe, Work Won’t Love You Back

• Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy, “Seeing Like a Market”

• Astra Taylor, The Age of Insecurity

• Michael Hudson, The Destiny of Civilization

• Maurizio Lazzarato, The Making of the Indebted Man

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
Read More

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

“You Don’t Need a Tariff. You Need a Revolution”: A Viral Wake-Up Call—Or CCP Propaganda?

In a clip that’s rapidly gone viral among both left-leaning critics of neoliberalism and right-wing populists, a young Chinese TikTok influencer delivers a searing indictment of American economic decline. Fluent in English and confident in tone, the speaker lays bare what many struggling Americans already feel: that they’ve been conned by their own elites.

“They robbed you blind and you thank them for it. That’s a tragedy. That’s a scam,” the young man declares, addressing the American people directly.

The video, played and discussed on Judging Freedom with Judge Andrew Napolitano and Professor John Mearsheimer, has sparked praise—and suspicion. While the message resonates with a growing number of Americans disillusioned by the bipartisan political establishment, some are asking: Who is behind this message?

 
A Sharp Critique of American Oligarchy

In his 90-second monologue, the influencer claims U.S. oligarchs offshored manufacturing to China for profit—not diplomacy—gutting the middle class, crashing the working class, and leaving Americans with stagnating wages, unaffordable healthcare, mass addiction, and what he calls “flag-waving poverty made in China.” Meanwhile, he says, China reinvested its profits into its people, raising living standards and building infrastructure.

“What did your oligarchs do? They bought yachts, private jets, and mansions… You get stagnated wages, crippling healthcare costs, cheap dopamine, debt, and flag-waving poverty made in China.”

He ends with a provocative call: “You don’t need another tariff. You need to wake up… You need a revolution.”

It’s a blistering populist critique—and one that finds unexpected agreement from Mearsheimer, who said on the show, “I basically agree with him. I think he’s correct.”
A Message That Cuts Across Party Lines

The critique echoes themes found in Donald Trump’s early campaign rhetoric, as well as long-standing leftist arguments about neoliberal betrayal, corporate offshoring, and elite impunity. It’s the kind of message that unites the American underclass in its many forms—service workers, laid-off factory employees, disillusioned veterans, and student debtors alike.

Mearsheimer went on to argue that the U.S. national security establishment itself was compromised—that its consultants and former officials had deep financial ties to China, making them unwilling to confront the geopolitical risks of China’s rise. According to him, elites were more invested in their own gain than in the national interest.

But that raises an even more complicated question.

 
Is This an Authentic Voice—or a CCP Production?

The most provocative—and potentially overlooked—aspect of this story is the medium itself: TikTok, which is owned by ByteDance, a company under heavy scrutiny for its ties to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Could this slick, emotionally resonant video be part of a broader soft-power campaign?

The Chinese government has invested heavily in media operations that shape global narratives. While the content of the message may be factually accurate or emotionally true for many Americans, it’s not hard to imagine the CCP welcoming—if not engineering—videos that sow further division and distrust within the United States.

The video’s flawless production, powerful rhetoric, and clever framing—presenting China as the responsible partner and the U.S. as self-destructive—align closely with Beijing’s global messaging. Add to this the timing, with U.S.-China tensions running high over tariffs, Taiwan, and global power shifts, and the question becomes unavoidable:

Is this sincere grassroots criticism… or a polished psychological operation?

The answer may be both. It’s entirely possible that the young man believes everything he’s saying. But it’s also likely that content like this is algorithmically favored—or even quietly encouraged—by a platform closely tied to a government with every incentive to highlight American decline.
Weaponized Truth?

This is not a new tactic. During the Cold War, both the U.S. and the USSR employed truth-tellers and defectors to criticize their adversaries. But in today's digital landscape, the boundaries between propaganda, whistleblowing, and legitimate dissent are more porous than ever.

The Higher Education Inquirer has reported extensively on how American elites—across both political parties—have betrayed working people, including within the halls of higher education. That doesn’t mean we should ignore where a message comes from, or what strategic purpose it might serve.

The danger is not just foreign interference. The greater danger may be that such foreign-origin messages ring so true for so many Americans.
A Closing Thought: Listen Carefully, Then Ask Why

The influencer says:

“You let the oligarchs feed your lies while they made you fat, poor, and addicted… I don’t think you need another tariff. You need to wake up.”

He’s not wrong to say Americans have been exploited. But if the message is being boosted by a rival authoritarian state, it’s worth asking why.

America’s problems are real. Its discontent is justified. But as in all revolutions, the question is not only what we’re overthrowing—but what might take its place.

Sources:

Judging Freedom – Judge Andrew Napolitano and Professor John Mearsheimer

TikTok (ByteDance) ownership and CCP ties – Reuters, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal

The Higher Education Inquirer archives on student debt, adjunct labor, and corporate-academic complicity

Pew Research Center – Views of China, U.S. Public Opinion

Congressional hearings on TikTok and national security, 2023–2024