Nonviolent Resistance in the Trump Era: Why Satire, Journalism, and Marches Are Not Enough

In moments of democratic crisis, societies often turn to familiar tools: satire, journalism, and public demonstrations. Today—amid intensifying authoritarian rhetoric, rising political violence, and fraying institutions—forms of dissent like South Park, The New York Times, and the No Kings marches reflect a country struggling to assert democratic values.

These efforts matter. But they are not enough.

If democracy is to endure, millions—not just artists, reporters, or marchers—must engage in coordinated, creative, nonviolent resistance. And they must do so in solidarity.

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Satire as Resistance: When South Park Breaks the Spell

For decades, South Park has peeled back the layers of American political absurdity. In the Trump era, its depictions of autocratic posturing and the cult of personality have helped audiences see through the spectacle.

But satire remains commentary, not coordination. It can spark awareness, but it cannot restrain authoritarian power on its own.

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Journalistic Resistance: The New York Times and the Weight of Truth

The New York Times has played a crucial role in exposing corruption, extremism, disinformation networks, and democratic backsliding. Its reporters have often faced harassment and threats simply for revealing the truth.

Yet journalism cannot mobilize the public by itself. Facts require action—and action requires organization.

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Street Resistance: The No Kings Marches and Public Defiance

The No Kings marches—an umbrella for decentralized, anti-authoritarian street demonstrations—represent a powerful expression of nonviolent public resistance. Emerging across cities and campuses, these marches assert a simple moral principle: no leader, party, or faction is entitled to unchecked power.

Their message is clear:

• Democracy requires constraints.

• Political leaders are not royalty.

• The people, not a single figure, hold ultimate sovereignty.

The No Kings marches reclaim public space from fear and resignation. They remind communities that resistance does not require weapons—only bodies, voices, and courage.

But marches alone cannot build the long-term structures needed to protect democracy. They ignite momentum; they do not sustain it without broader collective support.

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Universities Have Failed to Defend Democratic Dissent

Historically, universities were vital sites of moral courage and mass mobilization. Today, however, university presidents have aggressively squelched campus protests—through police intervention, restrictive rules, suspensions, and pressure from wealthy donors.

This chilling effect has not recovered. Student activism remains suppressed at the very moment when democratic engagement is most essential.

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The Growing Possibility of a General Strike

As institutional stability deteriorates, Americans increasingly discuss the possibility of a General Strike—a nationwide, multi-sector refusal to work until political abuses are addressed. General strikes have played decisive roles in democratic movements around the world.

A U.S. General Strike could:

• Halt the economic machinery that enables authoritarian governance

• Force political leaders to negotiate rather than intimidate

• Demonstrate the nonviolent power of ordinary workers

The concept is no longer fringe. It is a rational response to a political system in crisis.

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Another Government Shutdown: A Flashpoint for Resistance

The threat of another federal government shutdown exposes a political class willing to damage the public in pursuit of ideological power. Shutdowns harm millions of workers, families, and communities.

But they also clarify a crucial truth:
the government depends entirely on ordinary people showing up.

If a shutdown occurs, it could accelerate conversations about coordinated nonviolent resistance—boycotts, demonstrations, strikes—and push more Americans to see the system’s fragility and their own collective power.

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Nonviolent Resistance Must Be Mass-Based and Rooted in Solidarity

Satire, journalism, and street marches each contribute to political consciousness. But democratic survival requires:

• Coordinated labor action, including sector-wide strikes

• Mass protests, sit-ins, and civil disobedience

• Boycotts and divestment aimed at authoritarian enablers

• Digital resistance against disinformation

• Local mutual aid networks and coalition-building

• Cross-racial, cross-class, and interfaith solidarity

Democracy is not self-sustaining. It requires collective, creative noncooperation with authoritarian drift.

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Solidarity Is the Strategy

Authoritarianism thrives on isolation and fear.
Nonviolent movements thrive on courage and connection.

Satire can puncture illusions.
Journalism can expose wrongdoing.
The No Kings marches can reclaim public space.
Students can still spark moral clarity—if administrators allow it.
Workers can stop the machine entirely.

But only mass, sustained, nonviolent solidarity can protect democracy now.

And the moment to act is now.

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Sources on Nonviolent Movements and Civil Resistance

Books & Academic Works

• Gene Sharp, The Politics of Nonviolent Action

• Erica Chenoweth & Maria J. Stephan, Why Civil Resistance Works

• Jonathan Pinckney, From Dissent to Democracy

• Jamila Raqib & Gene Sharp, Self-Liberation

• Srdja Popović, Blueprint for Revolution

• Peter Ackerman & Jack DuVall, A Force More Powerful

Research Centers & Reports

• International Center on Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC)

• Albert Einstein Institution

• U.S. Institute of Peace publications on civil resistance

• Freedom House reports on democratic erosion

Historical Case Studies

• U.S. Civil Rights Movement

• Solidarity Movement (Poland)

• People Power Revolution (Philippines)

• Anti-Apartheid Struggle (South Africa)

• Selected Arab Spring movements

A Century of American Exploitation: Oil, Crypto, and the Struggle for Latin America’s Universities

Latin America—a region of thirty-three countries stretching from Mexico through Central and South America and across the Caribbean—has spent more than a century fighting against foreign exploitation. Its universities, which should anchor local prosperity, cultural autonomy, and democratic life, have instead been repeatedly reshaped by foreign corporations, U.S. government interests, global lenders, and now crypto speculators. Yet the region’s history is also defined by persistent, courageous resistance, led overwhelmingly by students, faculty, and Indigenous communities.

Understanding today’s educational crisis in Latin America requires tracing this long arc of exploitation—and the struggle to build systems rooted in equity rather than extraction.

1900s–1930s: Bananas, Oil, and the Rise of the “Banana Republics”

Early in the 20th century, American corporations established vast profit-making empires in Latin America. United Fruit Company—today’s Chiquita Banana—dominated land, labor, and politics across Guatemala, Honduras, and Costa Rica. Standard Oil and Texaco secured petroleum concessions in Venezuela and Ecuador, laying foundations for decades of foreign control that extracted immense wealth while leaving behind environmental devastation, as seen in Texaco’s toxic legacy in the Ecuadorian Amazon between 1964 and 1992.

Universities were bent toward these foreign interests. Agricultural programs were geared toward serving plantation economies, not local farmers. Engineering and geological research aligned with extractive industries, not community development.

Resistance did emerge. Student groups in Guatemala and Costa Rica formed part of early anti-oligarchic movements, linking national sovereignty to university reform. Their demands echoed global currents of democratization. Evidence of these early student-led struggles appears in archival materials and Latin American scholarship on university reform, and culminates in the influential 1918 Córdoba Manifesto in Argentina—a radical declaration that attacked oligarchic, colonial universities and demanded autonomy, co-governance, and public responsibility.

1940s–1980s: Coups, Cold War Interventions, and the Deepening of U.S. Oil Interests

During the Cold War, exploitation intensified. In Guatemala, the CIA-backed overthrow of democratically elected President Jacobo Árbenz in 1954 protected United Fruit’s land holdings. Universities were purged or militarized, and critical scholars were exiled or killed.

In Chile, the 1973 overthrow of Salvador Allende—supported by American corporate giants such as ITT and Anaconda Copper—ushered in a brutal dictatorship. Under Augusto Pinochet, thousands were murdered, tortured, or disappeared, while the Chicago Boys imported radical neoliberal reforms that privatized everything, including the higher education system.

Throughout the region, oil deals disproportionately favored American companies. Mexico and Venezuela saw petroleum wealth siphoned off through arrangements that benefited foreign investors while leaving universities underfunded and politically surveilled. Scholarship critical of foreign intervention was marginalized, while programs feeding engineers and economists to multinational firms were expanded.

Student resistance reached historic proportions. Chilean students and faculty formed the core of the anti-dictatorship movement. Mexico’s students rose in 1968, demanding democracy and university autonomy before being massacred in Tlatelolco. CIA declassified documents reveal that student uprisings across Latin America in the early 1970s were so widespread that U.S. intelligence considered them a regional threat.

1990s–2000s: Neoliberalism, Privatization, and the Americanization of Higher Education

In the 1990s, neoliberalism swept the region under pressure from Washington, the IMF, and the World Bank. After NAFTA, Mexico’s universities became increasingly aligned with corporate labor pipelines. In Brazil, Petrobras’ partnerships with American firms helped reshape engineering curricula. Private universities and for-profit models proliferated across the region, echoing U.S. higher ed corporatization.

Hugo Chávez captured the broader sentiment of resistance when he declared that public services—including education—cannot be privatized without violating fundamental rights.

Students fought back across Latin America. In Argentina and Brazil they contested tuition hikes and privatization. In Venezuela, the debate shifted toward whether oil revenue should fund tuition-free universities.

Indigenous Exclusion, Racism, and the Colonial Foundations of Inequality

One of the greatest challenges in understanding Latin American education is acknowledging the deep racial and ethnic stratification that predates U.S. exploitation but has been exacerbated by it. Countries like Ecuador, Bolivia, Peru, Mexico, Brazil, and Guatemala have large Indigenous populations that, to this day, receive the worst education—much like Native American communities relegated to underfunded reservation schools in the United States.

Racism remains powerful. Whiter populations enjoy greater economic and educational access. University admission is shaped by class and color. These divisions are not accidental; they are a machinery of control.

There have been important exceptions. Under President Rafael Correa, Ecuador built hundreds of new schools, including Siglo XXI and Millennium Schools, and expanded public education access. In Mexico, the 2019 constitutional reform strengthened Indigenous rights, including commitments to culturally relevant education. Bolivia—whose population is majority Indigenous—has promoted Indigenous languages, judicial systems, and education structures.

But progress is fragile. Austerity, IMF conditionalities, and elite resistance have led to cutbacks, school closures, and renewed privatization across the region. The study you provided on Ecuador documents Indigenous ambivalence, even hostility, toward Correa’s universal education plan—revealing how colonial wounds, cultural erasure, and distrust of state power complicate reform and provide openings for divide-and-conquer strategies long exploited by ruling classes.

These contradictions deepen when Indigenous movements—rightfully demanding no mining, no oil extraction, and protection of ancestral lands—collide with leftist governments reliant on resource extraction to fund public services. This tension is especially acute in Ecuador and Bolivia.

2010s–Present: Crypto Colonialism and a New Frontier of Exploitation

Cryptocurrency has opened a new chapter in Latin America’s long history of foreign-driven experimentation. El Salvador’s adoption of Bitcoin in 2021, promoted by President Nayib Bukele, transformed the country into a speculative test lab. Bukele has now spent more than $660 million in U.S. dollars on crypto, according to investigative reporting from InSight Crime. Universities rushed to create blockchain programs that primarily serve international investors rather than Salvadoran students.

In Venezuela, crypto became a survival tool amid hyperinflation and economic collapse. Yet foreign speculators profited while universities starved. Student groups warned that crypto research was being weaponized to normalize economic chaos and distract from public-sector deterioration.

Resistance has grown. Salvadoran students have protested the Bitcoin law, demanding that public resources focus on infrastructure, health, and education. Venezuelan students call for rebuilding social programs rather than chasing speculative financial technologies.

Contemporary Student Resistance: 2010s–2020s

Across the region, student movements remain powerful. The Chilean Winter of 2011–2013 demanded free, quality public education and challenged Pinochet’s neoliberal legacy. The movement culminated in the 2019 uprising, where education reform was central.

Mexico’s UNAM students continue to resist corruption, tuition hikes, gender violence, and the encroachment of corporate and foreign interests. The 1999–2000 UNAM strike remains one of the longest in modern higher education.

Colombian students have forced governments to negotiate and invest billions in public universities, framing their struggle as resistance to neoliberal austerity shaped by U.S. policy.

Argentina continues to face massive austerity-driven cuts, sparking protests in 2024–2025 reminiscent of earlier waves of resistance. Uruguay’s Tupamaros movement—largely student-led—remains a historical touchstone.

Every country in Latin America has experienced student uprisings. They reflect a truth that Paulo Freire, exiled from Brazil for teaching critical pedagogy, understood deeply: education can either liberate or oppress. Authoritarians, privatizers, and foreign capital prefer the latter, and they act accordingly.

Today’s Regional Education Crisis

The COVID-19 pandemic pushed the system into further crisis. Children in Latin America and the Caribbean lost one out of every two in-person school days between 2020 and 2022. Learning poverty now exceeds 50 percent. Entire generations risk permanent economic loss and civic disenfranchisement.

Infrastructure is collapsing. Rural and Indigenous communities suffer the worst conditions. Public investment is chronically insufficient because governments are trapped in cycles of debt repayment to international lenders. Ecuador has not seen a major public-investment program in a decade, as austerity and IMF repayments dominate national budgets.

The result is a system starved of resources and increasingly vulnerable to privatization schemes—including U.S.-style online coursework, ideological “instruction kits,” and for-profit degree mills.

Latin American Universities as Battlegrounds for Sovereignty

Latin America’s universities are shaped by the same forces that have dominated the region’s history: oil extraction, agribusiness, foreign capital, neoliberalism, structural racism, debt, and now crypto speculation. Yet universities have also been homes to transformation, rebellion, cultural resurgence, and hope.

Across more than a century, students—Indigenous, Afro-descendant, mestizo, working-class—have been the region’s fiercest defenders of public education and national sovereignty. Their resistance continues today, from Quito to Buenos Aires, from Mexico City to Santiago.

For readers of the Higher Education Inquirer, the lesson is clear: the struggle for higher education in Latin America is inseparable from the struggle for democracy, racial justice, Indigenous autonomy, and freedom from foreign domination. The region’s ruling elites and international lenders understand that an educated public is dangerous, which is why they starve, privatize, and discipline public schools. Students understand the opposite: that education is power, and that power must be reclaimed.

The next chapter—especially in countries like Ecuador—will depend on whether students, teachers, and communities can defend public education against the dual forces that have undermined it for more than a century: privatizers and fascists.

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Sources (Selection)

National Security Archive, CIA Declassified Documents (1971)
InSight Crime reporting on El Salvador Bitcoin expenditures
Luciani, Laura. “Latin American Student Movements in the 1960s.” Historia y Memoria (2019)
The Córdoba Manifesto (1918)
UNESCO, World Bank data on learning poverty (2024)
Latin American studies on United Fruit, Standard Oil, Texaco/Chevron in Ecuador
LASA Forum: Analysis of Indigenous responses to Correa’s education reforms
Periodico UNAL: “The Student Rebellion: Córdoba and Latin America”
Multiple regional news sources on Argentina’s 2024–2025 education protests

A Syllabus of Resistance

Higher education today demands that we strip away illusions. The university is no longer a sanctuary of truth but a contested battleground of austerity, automation, and alienation. Students, adjuncts, and staff are caught in a cycle of debt, precarity, and surveillance. To resist, we need not another glossy strategic plan but a syllabus — a curriculum of solidarity, transparency, and rehumanization.

Debt defines the student experience. Student loan balances now exceed $1.77 trillion, and repayment programs like PSLF and income-driven repayment offer only partial relief. In 2024, as federal student loan payments resumed after a pandemic pause, millions of borrowers simply refused to pay, transforming individual debt into collective action. The Debt Collective has organized strikes and campaigns to cancel student debt, reframing borrowing as a political issue rather than a private burden. This movement challenges whether the entire financing model of higher education can survive.

Faculty labor is equally precarious. More than seventy percent of instructors are contingent, often earning poverty wages without benefits. At Harrisburg Area Community College, over 200 faculty went on strike in November 2025 after years of stalled negotiations, exemplifying a growing national labor movement against stagnant pay and weakened job security. Adjunct faculty unions at Rutgers and elsewhere continue to push back against layoffs and austerity measures. The crisis of contingent labor has moved from quiet exploitation to open confrontation.

Climate crisis compounds the meltdown. Universities expand globally in a frenzy of collegemania, while ignoring ecological collapse. Student activists demand divestment from fossil fuels, but boards often resist. At Princeton, campaigners uncovered that the university owns a controlling stake in PetroTiger, a fossil fuel company, profiting directly from extraction. Edge Hill University in the UK recently committed to divest from both fossil fuels and border security companies after sustained student pressure. The University of Illinois, despite pledging to divest years ago, still faces protests demanding action. These campaigns show that climate justice is inseparable from educational justice.

Surveillance intensifies alienation. Universities increasingly deploy corporate partnerships and AI tools to monitor student dissent. At the University of Houston, administrators contracted with Dataminr to scrape students’ social media activity during Palestine solidarity protests. Amnesty International has warned that tools like Palantir and Babel Street pose surveillance threats to student activists. Truthout reports that campuses have become laboratories for military-grade surveillance technology, punishing dissent and eroding trust. Education becomes transactional and disciplinary, leaving students reporting higher levels of stress and disconnection.

Resistance must also be moral. University governance remains hierarchical and opaque, resembling corporate boards more than democratic institutions. Calls for transparency and veritas are drowned out by branding campaigns and political capture. A pedagogy of resistance must be rooted in temperance, nonviolence, and solidarity. Rehumanization is the antidote to robostudents, roboworkers, and robocolleges. It is the refusal to be bots, debtors, or disposable labor, and the insistence on reclaiming education as a public good.

Developing a Democratic Syllabus of Resistance

This syllabus is not a catalog of courses but a call to action. Debt strikes, adjunct unionization, climate divestment campaigns, and surveillance pushback are fragments of a larger curriculum of resistance. But this syllabus is incomplete without you. Readers are invited to join in creating it — to add new units, case studies, and strategies that reflect the lived realities of students, workers, and communities.

For inspiration, see the Higher Education Inquirer’s earlier piece on Methods of Student Nonviolent Resistance, which documents the long history of campus activism and the evolving tactics of protest, persuasion, and noncooperation. That archive reminds us that resistance is not only possible but essential.

The classroom is everywhere, and the time is now.

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.

University Presidents Called to Action

Elite universities, long considered the pinnacle of higher education, have become increasingly entwined in a broader conversation about privilege, access, and power. From their controversial legacy admissions practices to their outsized political influence, these institutions are not merely places of learning—they are gatekeepers of social and economic power, shaping the future through both exclusion and influence. Beyond their academic roles, these universities have extended their reach into local communities, using their enormous wealth and influence to take control of land, shape urban landscapes, and solidify their power within regional politics.

The legacy admissions system, which provides preferential treatment to the children and grandchildren of alumni, is a glaring example of how these universities perpetuate privilege. Institutions such as Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford—universities that consistently rank among the top in the nation—have long utilized this practice to ensure that the doors to elite education remain open to those already within the circles of power. By admitting students with lesser academic qualifications solely because of their family connections, these schools continue a long tradition of insularity, effectively reserving spaces for the wealthy and well-connected. Despite growing opposition, including recent moves by California’s private colleges to ban legacy admissions, the practice remains a powerful force, locking out more qualified, diverse applicants and ensuring that the privileged maintain access to elite institutions.

In addition to these admissions practices, elite universities exert considerable influence on the political landscape. The recent revelations about their political spending—millions funneled into federal campaigns, overwhelmingly favoring Democratic candidates—highlight a disturbing trend. Universities like Harvard, Stanford, and Johns Hopkins are not neutral players in the policy arena; they are active participants in shaping the very policies that benefit their interests. Whether it’s lobbying for federal funding, securing advantageous tax policies, or influencing regulations related to higher education, these universities use their wealth to protect and expand their power. These schools are not just centers of academic pursuit—they are political players in their own right, using their financial clout to shape the policies that govern education, tax law, and more.

Beyond their influence in academia and politics, elite universities increasingly exert power over the very land on which they sit. In many cities, top-tier universities like Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, and the University of Chicago are not just educational institutions—they are economic and political powerhouses. With multi-billion-dollar endowments, these institutions often wield more financial clout than entire cities. They routinely expand their campuses, purchasing properties, and in some cases, entire neighborhoods, often displacing long-standing communities in the process. This process, commonly known as "university-led gentrification," transforms urban spaces, driving up property values and rents while pushing out lower-income residents.

Universities often justify their land acquisitions as part of their mission to expand their campuses, build new research centers, and offer more housing for students and faculty. However, the impact on local communities can be severe. In many cases, universities use their tax-exempt status to avoid paying property taxes on the land they acquire, depriving local governments of revenue while also claiming a disproportionate share of urban space. This allows them to grow their influence without contributing fully to the neighborhoods in which they are embedded.

This land-grabbing behavior has sparked resistance in cities across the country. In Boston, for example, Harvard and MIT have been critiqued for taking over large swaths of land in the Allston and Kendall Square neighborhoods, displacing low-income residents and local businesses. In New York, Columbia’s expansion into Harlem sparked protests from community members who felt their homes and livelihoods were being sacrificed to the university’s growth. In many cases, these universities lobby local governments to secure favorable zoning laws, tax breaks, and exemptions that allow them to build at will and maintain their growing empire.

Both legacy admissions and political donations underscore a fundamental truth: elite universities are not just educational institutions—they are institutions of power. They maintain an oligarchic structure that privileges those already in positions of wealth and influence, while shaping local economies and political systems to ensure their continued dominance. By hoarding access to elite education, they perpetuate a system in which the children of the wealthy have a head start in both education and society, while simultaneously lobbying for policies that further cement their own influence. Through their land acquisitions, gentrification, political donations, and admissions practices, these universities continue to consolidate their power, reinforcing an elitist status quo that leaves many outside looking in.

In all of this, university presidents have increasingly positioned themselves as moral arbiters, asserting their institutions’ commitment to social justice, inclusion, and equality. Yet this moral high ground becomes precarious when their administrations take extreme measures to suppress resistance. Protests against their policies—whether regarding gentrification, climate change, or labor rights—are often met with heavy-handed tactics. University leaders, eager to preserve their public image, have been known to deploy security forces, call in the police, or even collaborate with local governments to disband protests. In some cases, these universities have resorted to legal action against student and faculty activists, silencing dissent through threats of discipline, expulsion, or other punitive measures.

This duplicity becomes even more apparent when considering the moral stands many university leaders take in public, promoting inclusivity, diversity, and progressive values, while simultaneously suppressing those who challenge their institution’s power dynamics. In the face of mounting resistance from marginalized communities or student groups, these leaders prefer to maintain control over their campuses and public narratives, often using administrative power to quash any movements that may disrupt the status quo.

Yet, history has shown that even the most entrenched systems can change, and university presidents are not beyond the possibility of transformation. Just as some figures in the Bible experienced profound revelations that led them to change course and right their wrongs, university leaders, too, can have moments of reckoning. Consider the example of King David, whose heart was changed after his confrontation with the prophet Nathan over his sin (2 Samuel 12). David, once blinded by his own power, repented and chose a path of humility and righteousness. In the same way, university presidents, confronted by the voices of resistance, public outcry, or moral awakening, could choose to lead their institutions toward a more just and equitable future. In the New Testament, Saul’s conversion on the road to Damascus (Acts 9) serves as another powerful reminder that no one is beyond redemption. Saul, who once persecuted early Christians, was transformed into Paul, one of the most influential apostles in Christian history. Similarly, a university president could choose to recognize the harm their institution has caused and decide to enact transformative policies that benefit marginalized communities and dismantle the systems of privilege they have helped sustain.

Moses is another figure whose story exemplifies the power of divine revelation to shift course. As a prince of Egypt, Moses had everything at his disposal, yet he chose to stand up to Pharaoh when he recognized the injustice of the Hebrew people’s oppression. His moment of conviction led him to free his people from slavery, even though it required courage to defy a powerful ruler (Exodus 3-4). In the same way, a university president must stand up to the powerful trustees and donors who expect to maintain the status quo. To act in the face of such resistance requires profound moral courage—a willingness to lead against entrenched interests that protect wealth and privilege.

Another key figure in the Old Testament is Esther, who displayed extraordinary courage in a moment of great moral clarity. She risked her life by standing up to King Xerxes to save the Jewish people from annihilation (Esther 4). As the queen, she was in a powerful position, but it was only when she realized the enormity of the injustice at hand that she chose to act. Similarly, university presidents with the power to challenge the status quo can, like Esther, use their positions to advocate for justice and equality, even if it means confronting powerful forces that wish to preserve an unjust order.

As university presidents come face to face with the overwhelming issues of racism, injustice, and climate chaos, there exists the possibility of moral revelation—a turning point where they confront the gravity of their actions and their institutions’ role in perpetuating harm. The growing calls for racial justice, fueled by movements like Black Lives Matter, demand an acknowledgment of the systemic racism embedded in these universities. Whether through the disproportionate representation of wealthy white students or the stark inequities in faculty and leadership diversity, these institutions must reckon with their participation in racial oppression. Similarly, as the climate crisis deepens, universities’ investments in fossil fuels and their ongoing complicity in the destruction of the environment have become focal points for student activists and global environmental movements. Universities, often perceived as beacons of progress, have a responsibility to divest from industries contributing to ecological collapse and instead use their vast resources for environmental justice.

And yet, one of the greatest challenges these university leaders will face lies not only in the resistance of external forces like protestors, activists, and the general public, but also in the powerful trustees and donors who hold significant sway over the institutions’ direction. Many universities are closely tied to wealthy benefactors and influential trustees whose interests often align with maintaining the status quo—whether through preserving investment strategies, political stances, or traditional admissions processes. These figures are not simply investors in the university's future; they are powerful stakeholders with the resources to shape institutional policies and procedures, often with little regard for social justice or environmental responsibility.

For a university president to truly lead with courage and integrity, they must be willing to go against these powerful forces. This would require challenging the entrenched interests of those who have long benefited from an elite, exclusionary system and are reluctant to embrace the radical changes needed to address systemic injustice. It takes immense fortitude to stand up to trustees and donors who view universities as tools for preserving their wealth and influence, rather than forces for good in the world.

But university presidents who choose to go against these forces can become true moral leaders. They can take inspiration from figures like Moses, who boldly defied Pharaoh’s power to liberate the oppressed, or Esther, whose bravery in standing up to the king saved her people (Esther 4). In doing so, they would not only transform their institutions but also serve as examples of ethical leadership in a time when such leadership is sorely needed.

The courage to defy powerful donors and trustees would mark a dramatic shift in how elite universities operate. Presidents could, if they choose, champion a new vision—one where social justice, racial equality, and environmental sustainability are at the forefront of institutional priorities. Just as Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt toward a promised land of freedom, so too could university presidents lead their institutions out of the grip of elitism and corporate influence, steering them toward a more equitable and just future.

Both legacy admissions, political donations, land control, and the suppression of protest point to a deeper issue: elite universities have built themselves into institutions of unparalleled power. These universities operate not only as educational establishments but also as political and economic entities, constantly reinforcing a structure of privilege, wealth, and exclusion. The dissonance between their public declarations of moral authority and their actions to protect entrenched power reveals the true nature of these institutions. They are not the bastions of free inquiry and social good they often claim to be—they are powerful, self-interested players in a system that serves to preserve the very inequalities they profess to challenge.

However, the possibility remains that these institutions—guided by transformative leadership—could embrace a new path. University presidents could heed the call for justice, as many leaders in history have, and change the trajectory of their institutions, opting to lead in ways that promote true equity, racial justice, and environmental stewardship. These universities—once seen as places of learning and opportunity—could become what they claim to be: inclusive, just, and truly committed to the betterment of society. They are the architects of the future they seek to create: one where the privileged no longer remain firmly entrenched at the top, and where political, economic, and educational structures are reshaped for the common good. Whether through legacy admissions, political spending, land control, or suppressing protest, these institutions continue to consolidate their power, but with the right leadership, they can still pivot toward a more just future—one that embodies the values they espouse.

[Editor's note: This essay, written for elite university presidents, is intended as a rhetorical device rather than a statement of facts. We find that everyone has their own "mythology" or set of mythologies they follow. As with all our work, we value your feedback.]

Campus Protests, Campus Safety, and the Student Imagination

According to the LA Times, students at Cal Berkeley, San Jose State, San Francisco State, and the University of San Francisco plan to hold coordinated protests on their campuses tomorrow. These actions are a continuation of this year's earlier protests against Israel's atrocities against Palestinians in Gaza--which have been backed by the United States, through arms deals and federal funding.

With the US-backed genocide expanding to the West Bank and Southern Lebanon, there will certainly be student resistance despite administrative and police efforts to make campus occupations and other forms of protest (even free speech and freedom of assembly) difficult.

The greatest threat so far from these protests has been to the reputations of elite universities and their endowments, rather than to campus safety. And the greatest perceived threat to administrators is that students and their allies have the imagination to resist in novel ways--without violence.   

Students have already gained partial victories with a handful of universities which have offered to review investment strategies complicit with genocide. These progressive schools include Brown University and San Francisco State. At the University of Michigan, pro-Palestinian students organized as the Shut it Down Party have won student elections.       

Coordinated and Secret Crackdowns

The crackdown measures that schools have already made to reduce free speech and other freedoms, and to stoke fear, are too numerous to list. Some of these measures, like increased surveillance are not even known by students, faculty, staff, and community folks. Just understanding that secret mass surveillance is possible helps administrators who want to quell good trouble. 

What are the real threats to campus safety? 

We hope these protests (and any other actions) will be nonviolent and have published a list of nonviolent methods for resistance as a starting point for discussion. Violence is not a good excuse even in crackdowns of this type, and it's a losing strategy for all sides--other than the right wing--who want chaos and hope to bait others. It takes great planning, discipline, and strategy not to take the bait. At the same time, we hope campus administrators will take the problems of sexual assault, hate crimes and other forms of violence, as well as the threats of mass shootings, more seriously than they have.

Related links: 

Democratic Protests on Campus: Modeling the Better World We Seek (Annelise Orleck)

Methods of Student Nonviolent Resistance

Wikipedia Community Documents Pro-Palestinian Protests on University and College Campuses

Dangerous Spaces: Sexual Assault and Other Forms of Violence On and Off Campus

One Fascism or Two?: The Reemergence of "Fascism(s)" in US Higher Education

A People's History of Higher Education in the US?

Letter to an incoming freshman

“The Obsolete Man”: A Twilight Zone Warning for the Trump Era and the Age of AI

Rod Serling’s classic 1961 episode of The Twilight Zone, “The Obsolete Man,” offers a timeless meditation on authoritarianism, conformity, and the erasure of humanity. In it, a quiet librarian, Romney Wordsworth (played by Burgess Meredith), is deemed “obsolete” by a dystopian state for believing in books and God—symbols of individual thought and spiritual meaning. Condemned by a totalitarian chancellor and scheduled for execution, Wordsworth calmly exposes the cruelty and contradictions of the regime, ultimately reclaiming his dignity by refusing to bow to tyranny.

Over 60 years later, “The Obsolete Man” feels less like fiction and more like a documentary. The Trump era, supercharged by the rise of artificial intelligence and a war on truth, has brought Serling’s chilling parable into sharper focus.

The Authoritarian Impulse

President Donald Trump’s presidency—and his ongoing influence—has been marked by a deep antagonism toward democratic institutions, intellectual life, and perceived “elites.” Journalists were labeled “enemies of the people.” Scientists and educators were dismissed or silenced. Books were banned in schools and libraries, and curricula were stripped of “controversial” topics like systemic racism or gender identity.

Like the chancellor in The Obsolete Man, Trump and his allies seek not just to discredit dissenters but to erase their very legitimacy. In this worldview, librarians, teachers, and independent thinkers are expendable. What matters is loyalty to the regime, conformity to its ideology, and performance of power.

Wordsworth’s crime—being a librarian and a believer—is mirrored in real-life purges of professionals deemed out of step with a hardline political agenda. Public educators and college faculty who challenge reactionary narratives have been targeted by state legislatures, right-wing activists, and billionaire-backed think tanks. In higher education, departments of the humanities are being defunded or eliminated entirely. Faculty governance is undermined. The university, once a space for critical inquiry, is increasingly treated as an instrument for ideological control—or as a business to be stripped for parts.

The Age of AI and the Erasure of the Human

While authoritarianism silences the human spirit, artificial intelligence threatens to replace it. AI tools, now embedded in everything from hiring algorithms to classroom assessments, are reshaping how knowledge is produced, disseminated, and controlled. In the rush to adopt these technologies, questions about ethics, bias, and human purpose are often sidelined.

AI systems do not “believe” in anything. They do not feel awe, doubt, or moral anguish. They calculate, replicate, and optimize. In the hands of authoritarian regimes or profit-driven institutions, AI becomes a tool not of liberation, but of surveillance, censorship, and disposability. Workers are replaced. Students are reduced to data points. Librarians—like Wordsworth—are no longer needed in a world where books are digitized and curated by opaque algorithms.

This is not merely a future problem. It's here. Algorithms already determine who gets hired, who receives financial aid, and which students are flagged as “at risk.” Predictive policing, automated grading, and AI-generated textbooks are not the stuff of science fiction. They are reality. And those who question their fairness or legitimacy risk being labeled as backwards, inefficient—obsolete.

A Culture of Disposability

At the heart of “The Obsolete Man” is a question about value: Who decides what is worth keeping? In Trump’s America and in the AI-driven economy, people are judged by their utility to the system. If you're not producing profit, performing loyalty, or conforming to power, you can be cast aside.

This is especially true for the working class, contingent academics, and the so-called “educated underclass”—a growing population of debt-laden degree holders trapped in precarious jobs or no jobs at all. Their degrees are now questioned, their labor devalued, and their futures uncertain. They are told that if they can’t “pivot” or “reskill” for the next technological shift, they too may be obsolete.

The echoes of The Twilight Zone are deafening.

Resistance and Redemption

Yet, as Wordsworth demonstrates in his final moments, resistance is possible. Dignity lies in refusing to surrender the soul to the machine—or the regime. In his quiet defiance, Wordsworth forces the chancellor to confront his own cowardice, exposing the hollow cruelty of the system.

In our time, that resistance takes many forms: educators who continue to teach truth despite political pressure; librarians who fight book bans; whistleblowers who challenge surveillance technologies; and students who organize for justice. These acts of courage and conscience remind us that obsolescence is not a matter of utility—it’s a judgment imposed by those in power, and it can be rejected.

Rod Serling ended his episode with a reminder: “Any state, any entity, any ideology that fails to recognize the worth, the dignity, the rights of man—that state is obsolete.”

The question now is whether we will heed the warning. In an age where authoritarianism and AI threaten to render us all obsolete, will we remember what it means to be human?

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The Higher Education Inquirer welcomes responses and reflections on how pop culture can illuminate our present crises. Contact us with your thoughts or your own essay proposals.

McDonald’s Faces National Boycott as Economic Justice Movement Builds Momentum

McDonald’s, the fast-food titan with global reach and billion-dollar profits, is the latest corporate target in an escalating campaign of economic resistance. Starting June 24, grassroots advocacy organization The People's Union USA has called for a weeklong boycott of the chain, citing the need for “corporate accountability, real justice for the working class, and economic fairness.”

Branded the Economic Blackout Tour, the campaign seeks to channel consumer power into political and structural change. According to The People’s Union USA, Americans are urged to avoid not only McDonald’s restaurants but also fast food in general during the June 24–30 protest window. Previous actions have focused on companies like Walmart, Amazon, and Target—corporate behemoths long criticized for their low wages, union-busting tactics, and monopolistic behavior.

John Schwarz, founder of The People’s Union USA, has emerged as a vocal critic of corporate greed. In a recent video statement, Schwarz accused McDonald’s and its peers of dodging taxes and lobbying against wage increases. “Economic resistance is working,” he declared. “They’re feeling it. They’re talking about it.”

The movement is tapping into deep and widespread frustration—fueled by stagnant wages, rising living costs, and mounting corporate profits. While many Americans struggle with student loan debt, inadequate healthcare, and job insecurity, companies like McDonald’s have been accused of shielding their profits offshore and benefiting from political influence in Washington.

This is not the first time McDonald’s has come under fire. The company has faced criticism from labor rights groups for paying low wages, offering unpredictable schedules, and relying heavily on part-time or precarious employment. More recently, pro-Palestinian activists have also launched boycotts, citing alleged ties between McDonald’s franchises and Israeli military actions in Gaza.

As part of the current boycott, The People's Union USA is pushing for a broader shift in spending—away from multinational corporations and toward local businesses and cooperatives. In line with previous actions, the group is also encouraging Americans to cut back on streaming, online shopping, and all fast-food purchases during the boycott period.

With Independence Day on the horizon, Schwarz and his allies are framing the protest as not just economic, but patriotic. “It’s time to demand fairness,” Schwarz said, “and to use our economic power as leverage to fight for real freedom—the kind that includes fair wages, democratic workplaces, and tax justice.”

While McDonald’s has not released an official response to the boycott, a 2019 letter from company lobbyist Genna Gent suggested the chain would not actively oppose federal minimum wage increases. For Schwarz and his supporters, such declarations ring hollow without meaningful action.

The July target for The People’s Union USA? Starbucks, Amazon, and Home Depot—three more corporate giants with long histories of labor disputes and political entanglements. The next wave of boycotts will extend throughout the entire month, further testing the staying power and impact of this new consumer-led resistance.

At a time when higher education, particularly the for-profit and online sectors, often channels students into low-wage service jobs with crushing debt, these campaigns raise larger questions about the role of universities in perpetuating corporate power and economic inequality.

The Higher Education Inquirer will continue to follow these developments, especially as they intersect with issues of labor, student debt, corporate influence, and the broader fight for economic justice in the United States.

Trump Youth Group Turning Point USA Continues 13-Year Effort to Incite Violence and Claim Victim Status

For almost a decade, the Higher Education Inquirer has covered Turning Point USA (TPUSA) on American campuses. Led by 31-year-old Charlie Kirk, this well-funded pro-Trump youth group has used a variety of tactics to target professors and incite violence in its attempt to gain right wing control over university campuses, while claiming to be victims of the Left. Our efforts to expose Kirk and his growing Turning Point empire have gained insufficient traction as the Trump administration continues its war on intellectuals and on social justice. And we are saddened to see well-meaning resistance groups take the bait. We implore university professors and university activists to educate students and their communities inside and outside the ivory tower walls about the many strategies of nonviolence resistance. The Right wing has already taken much of Left's playbook, which means new methods of resistance are required. And with President Trump in power again, the Right has even more power. Fighting fascism requires enormous skill, not masks and fists.   

 

The War on Thought: Higher Education and the Fight Against Authoritarianism (Henry Giroux)

According to the 2024 Democracy Index, approximately 45% of the world's population now resides in democracies, yet only 8% live in full democracies. The rise in authoritarian regimes is particularly alarming, with over 35% of the global population living under such systems. This backslide is attributed to factors such as authoritarian crackdowns, increasing political polarization, and geopolitical tensions. Regions like Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America have seen marked declines, while even historically stable democracies like the U.S. face concerns over institutional erosion and political divisiveness. The data calls for a reevaluation of global political trends, urging a commitment to reinforcing democratic principles in the face of rising authoritarianism and instability, a task made all the more challenging by far-right attacks on higher education in the U.S., Hungary, and India.

For those of us shaped in the revolutionary democratic spirit of the sixties, it is both painful and disheartening to witness the rise of fascism in the U.S. and the slow, tragic unraveling of democracy around the world. Decades of neoliberalism have relentlessly eroded higher education, with a few notable exceptions. The once-cherished notion that the university is a vital advocate for democracy and the public good now seems like a distant memory. What we face today is the collapse of education into mere training, an institution dominated by regressive instrumentalism, hedge-fund administrators, and the growing threat of transforming higher education into spaces of ideological conformity, pedagogical repression, and corporate servitude.

We have seen this before in other authoritarian regimes, where the outcome was the death not only of academic freedom but also of democracy itself.

In the face of the current attacks on higher education, especially in the U.S., it becomes more difficult for faculty to make thought matter, to encourage students to ask important questions, and to view thinking as a form of political engagement, to think the unthinkable in the service of justice and equality. Yet despite these overwhelming challenges, higher education remains one of the few remaining spaces where critical thought can still flourish, serving as a bulwark against authoritarianism. As scholars Heba Gowayed and Jessica Halliday Hardie have noted, despite the deep flaws of academic institutions, they remain vital spaces for critical thought and civic learning, making them prime targets for authoritarian attacks. They write:

While academic institutions are deeply flawed, they are also, in their ideal form, bastions for thought and pedagogy. They are where students can make mistakes and learn from one another. They are also crucial spaces of learning for the citizenry. This is why they are the longtime targets of rightwing attack.

As Hannah Arendt once said, “What really makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other kind of dictatorship to rule is that the people are not informed”. This lack of information and historical awareness is precisely what authoritarians seek to exploit. The need for intellectual autonomy and historical consciousness is paramount in resisting these threats. Arendt's work on the erosion of thinking under totalitarian regimes remains incredibly relevant. It was quite clear to her that a government that lies deprives people of their capacity to think, act, and judge. She writes: “If everyone always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but that no one believes anything at all anymore, and rightly so, because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, to be ‘re-lied,’ so to speak”.

Under the Trump regime, we are witnessing the erosion of critical thought, a deliberate rewriting of history, and the paralyzing of intellectual autonomy, each a direct manifestation of authoritarian tactics. We live in an authoritarian society where the truth itself is under attack, along with the institutions that allow citizens to differentiate between truth and lies, thereby holding power accountable. This is more than an act of irrationality; it is a fundamental element of fascism.  This is a signpost for revealing the damaged passions and delusions of invincibility that characterize a culture’s descent  into authoritarianism and the crime of what Arendt called “the deprivation of citizenship.” The erosion of intellectual autonomy inevitably leads to a denial of citizenship, as Arendt warns. In the face of this, higher education, traditionally a site of critical engagement, is now under siege.

Higher education, traditionally a space for critical thinking and civic engagement, however limited, is now under a savage assault by the global far-right. International students face detentions and deportations without cause, and professors are silenced for speaking out against injustice. The state, right-wing mobs, and even university administrations perpetuate this attack on the university, a situation reminiscent of McCarthy-era repression, though more deeply embedded in the system.

The emerging fascism across the globe underscores the need to educate young people, and the wider public, on the importance of critical thinking. Understanding the threat of authoritarianism is more crucial than ever. Ethics matters, civic education matters, and the humanities matter, especially today. Political consciousness, a crucial element of democracy, must be nurtured, it does not emerge automatically. In a culture that devalues public education, silences dissent, and commodifies expression, many youth feel abandoned. They are hyper-visible as threats but invisible as citizens.

The horror of fascist violence is back, though it is now draped in AI-guided bombs, ethnic cleansing, and white supremacists basking in their project of racial cleansing while destroying every vestige of decency, human rights, and democracy. As global fascism rises, youth have taken center stage in the resistance, challenging forces that threaten both democracy and justice. This emerging youth-led movement, from Indigenous land defenders to climate activists and campus protesters, is pivotal in shaping the future.

Against the rise of fascism globally and its attack on any institution that supports critical thinking and a crucial form of pedagogical citizenship, youth are leading resistance movements around the world. From Indigenous land defenders to climate activists and campus protesters, young people are naming the violences shaping their lives and imagining alternatives. This demands a broad, interconnected movement to unite struggles against ecological destruction, systemic racism, economic inequality, and the transformation of democracy into an authoritarian state.

Education must be central to these efforts, not just formal schooling, but a deeper political and ethical education that links knowledge to action. Authoritarian regimes fear such education, which is why they attack libraries, ban books, and silence educators. They understand what is often forgotten: education is the foundation for both defending and enabling democracy.

This is not a time for despair, but for militant hope, rooted in resistance, collective care, and the belief that youth are not disposable but vital to a democratic future. They are not the problem; they are the possibility. In a time when universities face racist, anti-intellectual assaults from demagogues like Trump, Stephen Miller, and Kristi Noem, epitomized by the recent attack on Harvard, it is crucial for educators, students, administrators, and those who believe in democracy to rise against the authoritarian forces threatening the U.S. and emerging democracies alike. It is absolutely essential to stand against genocidal warmongers, ethnic cleansing, and state-sanctioned violence, at home and abroad. It is fundamental to fight for civic courage, social responsibility, and dignity, values that sustain a thriving democracy.

We must learn from history, to prevent Trump and his merry crew of authoritarians from turning higher education into laboratories of dehumanization and indoctrination. To the students delivering graduation speeches in the name of justice and freedom, such as Logan Rozos, and being punished by university administrators for speaking out, such courage stands as a model of hope. These brave students, along with the student protesters fighting for Palestinian freedom, make clear that education is a crucial bulwark against what the conservative Spanish think tank, Foro de Sevilla, has called the "dark paths of neo-Nazism," which are with us once again. What must be fought in the realm of culture and on the streets at all costs is the silence surrounding the thousands of children killed in Gaza, the erasure of historical memory, and the war on youth in our own land, exemplified by a GOP budget soaked in blood.

Fascism is more than a distant moment in history; it is a breathing threat and wound that has emerged in different forms once again. And the endpoint of such savagery is always the same, racial and ethnic hatred that ends with broken and bloodied bodies in the camps, detention centers, and mass graves.

Any viable call to resistance must stand in stark contrast to the hollow platitudes of right-wing figures, compromised politicians, and celebrities who serve the status quo. Their words and policies echo a complicit silence in the face of government corruption, student abductions, and tax cuts for the wealthy funded by the poor. This is gangster capitalism at its worst.

Hopefully, in such dark times, there will emerge a language of critique and hope, the power of collective struggle, and an education rooted in justice and empowerment. One that fuels a call to mass action, civic courage, and the relentless pursuit of democracy through unity and defiance.