Giroux, Henry
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</font></div><div><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large;">aha-let best defense from fascism, note henry is systemic</span></div><div><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large;">
</span></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">an ah 12 22</font></div><div><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The MAGA movement suffered a long list of disappointments in the 2022 midterms, which found Donald Trump-backed candidates losing statewide gubernatorial or U.S. Senate races in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Georgia and other swing states. But one MAGA candidate who performed extremely well in the midterms was Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and he did it without Trump campaigning for him.</p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">DeSantis ran a far-right reelection campaign, defeating Democratic nominee Charlie Crist (a former Republican and ex-Florida governor) by 19 percent. Florida, in fact, is the one place where Republicans really did enjoy a major red wave in the <a href="https://www.alternet.org/2022/11/where-woke-goes-to-die" target="self" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">2022 midterms</a>. And some right-wing pundits, including <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/right-wing-pundit-ann-coulter-dismisses-rino-trump-says-hes-so-done-1762543?utm_source=push_notification&utm_source=pushnami&utm_medium=Push_Notifications&utm_campaign=fullauto&utm=1669630740027" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">author Ann Coulter</a>, are urging the GOP to nominate DeSantis, not Trump, in the 2024 presidential election — assuming that DeSantis decides to run.</p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">DeSantis doesn’t pretend to be moderate; being a far-right culture warrior is his brand. Journalist/author and scholar Henry A. Giroux analyzes DeSantis’ appeal in a <a href="https://truthout.org/articles/ron-desantis-is-a-case-study-in-the-threat-of-fascism-in-the-us/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">scathing article published by Truthout</a> on December 16, and he doesn’t sugarcoat anything. DeSantis, Giroux warns, is “fueling the emergence of fascist politics in the United States.”</span></p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">READ MORE: <a href="https://www.alternet.org/2022/11/donald-trump-is-so-done" target="self" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">'He is so done': Ann Coulter doubles down on Republicans to abandon Donald Trump</a></p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">“While some pundits have connected DeSantis’ politics to an emerging authoritarianism,” Giroux explains, “they still fail both to name the ongoing development of fascism in the U.S. and to recognize that it takes different forms in different societies and historical formations. They dismiss any talk of fascism by suggesting that its unique historical attributes, such as the genocidal use of concentration camps, have to be repeated precisely in order to assign the term fascism to present events. Fascism is never entirely interred in the past; it is a dangerous ideology that may go into remission but never disappears.”</span></p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>Giroux continues, “Fascism is a recurrent and infinitely translatable phenomenon and often takes on the cultural and political attributes of the societies in which it appears</b>.</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> The refusal to acknowledge that fascism can appear in many forms, often lying dormant in a society until the emergence of certain forces unleash it, reinforces the willingness of many to retreat into silence or ignore the seriousness of the emerging fascist threat. Expressing ourselves in words, learning from history and making connections among disparate events all matter in the age of fascism.”</span></p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Giroux stresses that when one is analyzing fascism, it’s important to recognize patterns and understand how individual events fit into the big picture — events like DeSantis sending migrants to Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts or Trump having dinner with white nationalist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes at Mar-a-Lago.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">“Fascist politics saturate U.S. society,” Giroux warns. “Ultranationalism, the calls for racial purity, voter suppression, hyper-militarism, required loyalty oaths from higher education faculty, <b>rampant censorship, a ubiquitous anti-intellectualism, and a full-fledged attack on social provisions and public goods make clear that democracy is in crisis. Yet, in too many cases, the larger significance of these incendiary calamities is missed because they are treated as separate from each other</b>…. DeSantis’ publicity stunt of using migrants as political pawns was also disconnected in the mainstream and liberal media from his attempt to erase the history of the Jim Crow era as part of his larger project of a politics of disposability.”</span></p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">READ MORE: <a href="https://www.alternet.org/2022/11/florida-judge-blocks-censorship-law" target="self" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">'This is positively dystopian': Florida judge strikes down<b> censorship law championed by Ron DeSantis</b></a></p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Giroux continues, “For instance, little was said connecting this racist policy to DeSantis’ passing laws banning books about Black history and racial narratives from schools and libraries, along with limiting what teachers can teach about racism — a policy that clearly indicates how DeSantis is following in the footsteps of the Nazification of education in Hitler’s Germany.”</p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, a far-right authoritarian, has drawn a great deal of <a href="https://www.alternet.org/2022/08/cpac-semi-fascist-viktor-orban" target="self" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">admiration among MAGA Republicans</a> — including Fox News’ Tucker Carlson.<b> And Giroux outlines some parallels between DeSantis and Orbán.</b></span></p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">“Following in the footsteps of Viktor Orbán, the authoritarian leader who has turned Hungary into a fascist country, DeSantis has waged a war on immigrants, targeted gay and transgender youth, purged voters, banned books in Florida schools, limited what teachers can say about racism and other critical elements of American history, and used state power to punish businesses, evident in his ruthless and vindictive attack on Disney,” Giroux observes. “He has also used policing to punish Black voters who disagree with his policies, courted Christian nationalists, supported a white nationalist agenda and waged a war on higher education. There is little doubt that DeSantis has turned Florida into a laboratory of fascist politics.”</span></p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">READ MORE: <a href="https://www.alternet.org/2022/11/ron-desantis-real-strange-oddball" target="self" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">'A strange no-eye-contact oddball': Who is the real Ron DeSantis?</a></p></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">=
</font><div><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/you-cannot-expect-anything-but-fascism-pedagogy-theorist-explains-how-trump-legitimated-a-culture-of-lying-cruelty-and-a-collapse-of-social-responsibility/"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/you-cannot-expect-anything-but-fascism-pedagogy-theorist-explains-how-trump-legitimated-a-culture-of-lying-cruelty-and-a-collapse-of-social-responsibility/</font></a></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">no lnx</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>‘You cannot expect anything but fascism’: Pedagogy theorist on how Trump ‘legitimated a culture of lying, cruelty and a collapse of social responsibility’</b></font></div><div>
</div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Written by Henry A. Giroux / Salon January 19, 2020</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The impeachment of Donald Trump appears to be a crisis without a history, at least a history that illuminates, not just comparisons with other presidential impeachments, but a history that provides historical lessons regarding its relationship to a previous age of tyranny that ushered in horrors associated with a fascist politics in the 1930s. In the age of Trump, history is now used to divert and elude the most serious questions to be raised about the impeachment crisis. The legacy of earlier presidential impeachments, which include Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton, provide a comparative historical context for analysis and criticism. And while Trump’s impeachment is often defined as a more serious constitutional crisis given his attempt to use the power of the presidency to advance his personal political agenda, it is a crisis that willfully ignores the conditions that gave rise to Trump’s presidency along with its recurring pattern of authoritarian behavior, policies, and practices. One result is that the impeachment process with its abundance of political theater and insipid media coverage treats Trump’s crimes as the endpoint of an abuse of power and an illegal act, rather than as a political action that is symptomatic of a long legacy of conditions that have led to the United States’ slide into the abyss of authoritarianism.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">What is often ignored in the mainstream media is that Trump’s impeachment battle is part of the wider historical and global struggle taking place over democracy and can be seen, as Larry Diamond points out, in Trump’s attack on “the independence of the courts, the business community, the media, civil society, universities and sensitive state institutions like the civil service, the intelligence agencies and the police.” Trump’s crimes far exceed what is stated in the impeachment documents and include not only endless lies, threats and flirtation with extralegal violence but also his attack on the press as the “enemy of the people.” In addition, there is his use of Twitter to spew out verbal grenades that explode in an array of racial hatred and panics aimed at his critics and those groups who do not fit into his white nationalist view of citizenship and who should inhabit the public sphere. As the bully-in chief, he weaponizes language into a tool of hatred and in doing so transforms politics into a spectacularized theater of bigotry, humiliations, and violence. R<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">alph Nader argues that Trump’s most distinguishing impeachable offenses reside in his “abuses of the public trust” which range from his “obsessive pathological lying and falsifications” (over 15,000 since January 21, 2017) to his “endless racism and bigotry in words and deeds,” his support for voter suppression, and his “incitement of violence on more than one occasion.”</span></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">According to Nader, not only has Trump shredded and violated the Constitution, undermined its critical separation of power, and “illegally ordered his staff or ex-staff to ignore Congressional subpoenas to testify and provide documents, he has also ignored Congress’ right to declare war by inciting an unlawful crisis with Iran. There is a lesson to be learned here regarding how history is reproduced in the present. Trump’s killing of a high-ranking Iranian general “based on thin evidence with an eye towards domestic politics” mimics, if not recalls, an older period in history when Hitler, following the crisis produced by the Reichstag fire, seized upon the ensuing fear, terror, and war fever to further consolidate his power. For Trump, pushing the United States to the edge of war through a military strike not only draws attention away from the impeachment process and his ongoing crimes and misdeeds, but suggests, as Elizabeth Warren points out, that he will do “whatever he can to advance the interests of Donald Trump.” Trump’s haphazard decision to threaten a war with Iran also puts Americans at risk of terrorist attacks and undermines previous efforts to roll back Iran’s nuclear program. Moreover, Trump’s war fever is also a self-serving fascistic affirmation of his toxic hyper-masculinity and his admiration for military power and authoritarian displays generally associated with demagogues who use such displays as a tool to produce respect among their followers.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The politics of invisibility and the language of violence</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Undoubtedly there have been serious political debates regarding the impeachment of Trump, but they have not gone far enough. The debates have focused mostly on issues such as the inadequacy of the Democrats’ efforts to impeach, arguments regarding whether the impeachment charges go far enough, and the more favorable view that the impeachment process, however limited, is necessary to stop Trump from using the resources of the government to influence other governments to interfere in American elections for his own personal and political gains.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">There are also more extreme views largely coming from Trump and his supporters. Some have argued that the impeachment process is pure theater — a staged theatrical hoax; Others such as Sens. Lindsey Graham and Mitch McConnell have claimed that the process is rigged, and is an attempt on the part of the Democrats to win favor in the 2020 elections. Trump himself has angrily dismissed the impeachment process as corrupt, and claimed, among other things, that he is the victim of a socialist plot. It gets worse as Trump continues to produce a well-worn pattern of threats against his critics. He and his allies frequently respond to congressional Democrats involved in the hearing by weaponizing language, turning it into a vehicle of threats and intimidation. For instance, he has stated that House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff “should be arrested for treason.” In addition, Trump suggested that Schiff should “be violently punished” in a manner of justice displayed by dictatorships such as Guatemala. Jean Spanbauer, a Trump supporter, mused on line that “Shifty Shiff (sp) needs to be hung.” There is more at work here than the indiscriminate insult or infantile mocking. Language in this instance operates in the interest of violence, functioning so as to divert and punish. According to Victor Klemperer, an expert on Nazi Germany, this type of language has a precedent in the Third Reich in which it operated “as part of a linguistic malignant disease designed to spread the poison of mass seduction [and] destroy the intellect which defies it.”As Ishaan Tharoor observes, “the use of such volatile and dehumanizing language in the current moment is not innocent and often leads to violence. He writes:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>There are immediate consequences to such demagoguery, not least in the form of far-right terrorist attacks and violence carried out by people inflamed by this sort of rhetoric.</b> <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">But there’s also a long-term toll, one that’s more imperceptible, yet no less corrosive, to the body politic. It’s the kind of erosion on display in places such as Hungary, Poland and Turkey, where majoritarian, nationalist politicians have steadily undermined democratic institutions and the liberal norms they’re supposed to uphold.</span></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Political theater in the age of relentless lies</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Within the current crop of competing discourses analyzing the impeachment, the Democrats present themselves as the “last line of defense between constitutional democracy and tyranny” while Republicans repeat conspiracy theories and accuse the Democrats of producing a show trial whose purpose is the ultimate reversal of Trump’s 2016 election to the presidency. The Republicans have been particularly egregious and have used the hearings to badger witnesses, and showcase their “emotive hand-wringing, faux exasperation and yelling,” all the while making outlandish claims that turn the hearings into a “propaganda circus.” In some cases, more insightful commentary has been produced, such as comments from legendary journalist Bill Moyers, who views the impeachment hearings as a potential site for a lesson in civic education. For Moyers, the value of the impeachment proceedings lie in that making visible “things you would never know otherwise.” Bringing the concept of civic education to understanding the impeachment process is crucial, but what people learn from such events is limited by what is actually revealed both within and outside of the hearings. In this case, Trump’s impeachment process in the House was reduced to a political spectacle and served to undermine reason and informed judgment while promoting a steady stream of the performative diversions produced through a regimen of ignorance, self-serving lies and the triumph of illusion.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>
</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Unfortunately, the mainstream 24/7 news cycle, with its relentless torrid of dramatic sound bites, did its best to turn the House impeachment hearings into political theater by largely focusing on the political risks Democrats faced by conducting the hearings.</b> In addition, they mostly adhered to the empty tactic of providing balance while avoiding any attempt to tell the truth about a present that has collapsed into a disdain for human rights, enacts cruelty as an act of patriotism, justifies oppression in the name of national security, views undocumented immigrants as disposable, allows elections to be bought by the highest bidder, demonizes and threatens critics and regards the truth as a liability.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Beyond the two-party system</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>What is missing from mainstream and conservative discussions regarding Trump’s impeachment is that both Democrats and Republicans share an unwillingness to address a range of social and political issues that brought Trump to power.</b> These include illegal wars, state sanctioned torture, the creation of black sites, economic policies that promote massive inequality and mass incarceration, an attack on public goods, and racist policies that undermine the very democracy. Both parties in different ways claim they are protecting the Constitution, whether in the service of defending Trump or attempting to remove him from office. As Andrew Bacevich argues, it must be remembered that it was the “Democratic members of the Senate and House [who] over the past decade and more [gave] presidents a free hand to wage war however they saw fit [and]cannot be described as anything but cowardly. It was after all, President Obama who pioneered the role of assassin-in-chief to which Trump has now laid claim.” Both parties have aided and abetted in different degrees elements associated with a totalitarian state — these include political corruption, unwarranted state surveillance, support for a bloated military machine, the rise of white nationalism, the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a ruling elite, increased support for policies that promote the concentration of the media in few hands and a willingness to corroborate with a government that is controlled by narrow financial interests. All of these issues are largely absent from the questions and issues raised around the impeachment process and the conditions that made it necessary. Democracy may be in crisis, but there is little or no indication from the media, ruling elite or established politicians that the impeachment crisis is more than a free-standing event and should be analyzed within a more comprehensive politics that flushes out the mobilizing passions of a fascist politics that has led to the Trump presidency and its reign of corruption, lawlessness and abuse of power.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">What must be rejected is the notion that the impeachment process signals a crisis rooted in a power struggle between the two established political parties, one of whom is at the forefront of the resistance to the growing authoritarianism accelerated by the Trump regime. While there are significant political and ideological differences between both parties, especially given the fact that the Republican Party has been taken over by ideological extremists, these differences neither criticize nor condemn the ideological and economic foundations of a toxic neoliberal capitalism that has become increasingly more dangerous at home and abroad. For instance, both parties share in defending existing power structures and the most basic rudiments of the corporate and surveillance state.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Vichy Republicans without apology</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">While the Republican and Democratic Party share a fundamental commitment to the ideology and institutional structures of neoliberal capitalism, the Republican Party is far more extreme in its critique of the American press, judiciary, dissent and labor unions, and its support for reversing environmental protection laws. Moreover, as Paul Krugman has argued, the Republican Party under Trump has become “a party of sycophants” that turns a blind eye to Trump’s use of his office for personal gain; and who with their cult like following compare their leader to Jesus Christ.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ken Burns, the acclaimed filmmaker, columnist George Will and Krugman, among others, have labeled Trump’s loyal party followers “Vichy Republicans,” referring to the war-era collaborationist Vichy government of France — run by cowardly French sympathizers and appeasers who gave their faithful loyalty to their Nazi occupiers. In similar fashion, Trump’s Republican Party has bought into the script of ultra-nationalism, turned a blind eye to Trump’s racism, unchecked fantasies of power and his sanctioning of state violence at home and abroad.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This is a party that has chosen to look away in the face of Trump’s lies, crimes and repeated acts of corruption. Not only have they refused to take an impartial look at the impeachment inquiry, they have pledged to support Trump at all costs and have done everything possible to muddle the public discourse by floating conspiracy theories, calling the proceedings a hoax, and attacking the character of witnesses. This is a party that has been more than willing to engage in a Faustian bargain with incipient authoritarianism.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">If the Republican Party once stood for basic principles such as small government, family values, fiscal soundness and national security, that is no longer true. Instead its most paranoid and racist elements now control the party. The Republican Party’s move to the right intensified in the 1990s under the influence of Newt Gingrich and Karl Rove, and later with the rise of Sarah Palin and the defeat of the centrist Mitt Romney in 2012.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Today, the Republican Party almost unilaterally has become a party of white supremacists, blood-and-soil nationalists and political corruption who activate white panic, voter suppression, and define citizenship in racial terms. Moreover, they support through either fear or blind loyalty Trump’s ideological policies, race baiting and dangerous foreign policy strategies, regardless of the excesses and ongoing assault on the country’s democratic institutions. This includes race baiting, a racist campaign strategy, caging children, savage attacks on undocumented immigrants, devaluing critics by calling them treasonous, slashing of social provisions such as food stamps, serial lying, and a reckless assassination made on impulse that brought the U.S. and Iran to the brink of war.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Theodor W. Adorno argued in “The Meaning of Working Through the Past” that “the past that one would like to evade is still very much alive.”</b> This is particularly evident in the debilitating pronouncements of William Barr, Trump’s attorney general, regarding his defense of unchecked executive authority, which he believes should be unburdened by any sense of political and moral accountability. Tamsin Shaw is right in suggesting that Barr bears a close resemblance to Carl Schmitt, “the notorious … ‘crown jurist’ of the Third Reich.” Barr places the president above the law, defined as a kind of unitary sovereign. In addition, he appears to relish in his role as a craven defender of Trump, all the while justifying a notion of blind executive authority in the face of Trump’s endless lies, racist policies and lawlessness that echo the dark era of the 1920s and ’30s.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Barr’s attacks on the FBI and the Justice Department’s inspector general, and his threat to remove police protection from black communities who are not loyal to Trump, are at odds with any viable notion of defending the truth and “the most basic tenets of equality and justice.”</span> Moreover, Barr provides legal and ideological cover for Trump’s dangerous lackeys, such as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Sen. Lindsey Graham. McConnell publicly denounces the impeachment process and as an unabashed defender of Trump states that he will work hand in hand with the Trump administration on the impeachment process. In addition, Graham has stated that he has already made up his mind about Trump committing a criminal conspiracy, which he dismisses, and will do everything he can to make impeachment “die quickly” in the Senate.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Acquiescence to Trump has become a defining feature of the Republican Party in spite of his celebration of demagogues such as Kim Jong-un, whom he called a “real leader” and overtly fascist leaders such as Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines. Paul Krugman goes so far as to claim that modern conservatives live inside a cult and are “turning into government by the worst and dumbest.”</span> At the same time, he makes it clear that there is more than a massive degree of stupidity at work in the Trump administration, there are also the dark clouds of authoritarianism which extend far beyond the political career of Donald Trump. Krugman writes: “For whatever may happen to Donald Trump, his party has turned its back on democracy. And that should terrify you. The fact is that the G.O.P., as currently constituted, is willing to do whatever it takes to seize and hold power.” The impeachment hearings further reinforce an image of a party that in the face of egregious crimes by the president either remain mute or overtly support him in a show of ideological certainty or what Robert Jay Lifton calls an act of “absolute purification” and a cult-like totalizing vision that reproduces a politics of “malignant normality.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Goldman Sachs Democrats</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>
</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Neither political party offers a substantive challenge to the military-industrial complex, or views capitalism as the enemy of democracy if not the planet itself. </b>In different ways, both parties have hollowed out democratic institutions and cozied up to dictators. In addition, neither party historically used the impeachment process to indict George W. Bush for launching an illegal war in Iraq, or for that matter George H.W. Bush for illegally kidnapping, jailing, and torturing what he indiscriminately labeled as “enemy combatants.” Nor was Obama charged with a war crime when he “gave the executive branch of the government the right to act as judge, jury and executioner in assassinating U.S. citizens, starting with the radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, and, two weeks later, his 16-year-old son?” There is more at work here than acts of bad faith, there is also a thread of moral hypocrisy and a flight from social responsibility on the part of both parties.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">One indication of a collusion between both parties is obvious in the fact that as the Democrats were railing against Trump’s abuse of power, they approved the reauthorization of the USA Patriot Act and the National Defense Authorization Act, which are deeply reactionary laws that attack individual privacy and civil liberties, while criminalizing protest in the interest of national security. Moreover, they have given Trump $1.4 billion for his wall, and supported a $738 billion bloated military budget.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In the current moment, with a possible war with Iran still in the making, the ongoing anti-democratic actions of a deeply authoritarian Trump government, and the refusal of both political parties and the established press to address the deeper economic and political crisis facing the United States, it is crucial to analyze the current crisis of governance in a broader context that analyzes fascism as a possible wave of the future. The contemporary elements of tyranny at work in the United States point to not only a crisis of leadership and the rise of demagogues such as Trump on the domestic and global stages, but also the conditions and crisis that produce “the discontent of millions of people, facing economic instability, climate insecurity, mass migrations, technological change, cultural shifts around gender and race—people who in turn seem all too willing to embrace the politics of fear and blame.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The age of crisis and apocalyptic prophecies</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">We live in an age of relentless crisis — an age marked by the collapse of civic culture, ethical values and democratic institutions that serve the public good. Language now operates in the service of violence and ignorance has become a national ideal. Religious fundamentalism, white supremacy, and economic tyranny now inform each other giving rise to an updated recurrence of fascist politics. This is an age in which apocalyptic prophecies replace thoughtfulness and sustained acts of social responsibility. In this age of crisis, right-wing populist regimes fuel conspiracy theories, normalize lying as a way to degrade public discourse, elevate emotion over reason as a way to legitimate a culture of cruelty, and society experiences its own pleasure through the need for vengeance and the imposition of brutality and injury upon those minorities considered disposable.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The impeachment process speaks not only to Trump’s ongoing criminal behavior and pernicious policies, it also points to a mass crisis of civic literacy and the inability of the public to understand how society has broken apart, become more cruel and receded from the language of critique, hope and the social imagination. A culture of withdrawal, privatization and immediacy reinforces an indifference to public life, the suffering of others and what Hannah Arendt once called “the ruin of our categories of thought and standards of judgment.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The space of traditional politics and a media driven culture are marked by an ongoing culture of diversion and disappearance and no longer provide the language for understanding the totality of the crisis that has produced both Trump and the impeachment process. In the absence of a comprehensive politics capable of defining the related parts and threads that point to a society in crisis, violence, especially as related to the joining of a predatory neoliberalism and a fascist politics of white supremacy, becomes the regulative principle of everyday life.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Evidence of the distinctive nature of today’s crisis on both a national and global level can be glimpsed in the political and cultural forces that shaped President Trump’s impeachment, the Brexit fiasco, and the rise of authoritarian demagogues in Brazil, Turkey and Hungary, among other countries. This is a general crisis whose roots lie in the rise of global neoliberalism with its embrace of finance capital, massive inequities in wealth and power, the rise of the racial punishing state, systemic state violence and the creation of an age of precarity and uncertainty. This is a crisis produced, in part, through a full-scale attack on the welfare state, labor and public goods. Under such circumstances, democracy has become thinner and the social sphere and social contract no longer occupy an important place in Trump’s America.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">As Nancy Fraser points out, “these forces have been grinding away at our social order for quite some time” and constitute not only a crisis of politics and economics, which is highly visible, but also a crisis of ideas which is not so visible. Put differently, the crisis of politics has not been matched by a crisis of ideas. Instead, as the global economy has unraveled, the backlash against the so-called political elites and established forms of liberal governance has produced movements for popular sovereignty that lack the crucial call for equal rights and social justice. The current historical crisis not only refigures the social sphere as a site of commercialism and infantilism, but also redefines matters of individual and social agency through the <b>mediation of images in which self-alienation is reinforced within a culture of immediacy, disappearance and a flight from any sense of social responsibility.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Hard and soft “disimagination machines”</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The crisis of politics is now matched by a mainstream and corporate controlled digital media and screen culture that produces political theater, heightens ignorance, fractured narratives and racial hysteria. At the same time, it authorizes and produces a culture of sensationalism designed to increase ratings and profits at the expense of truth, undermine a complex rendering of the related nature of social problems and suppress a culture of dissent and informed judgments.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">We live in an age in which theater and the spectacle of performance empty politics of any moral substance and contribute to the revival of an updated version of fascist politics. Politics is now leaden with bombast, words strung together to shock, numb the mind, and images overwrought with self-serving sense of riotousness and anger. What is distinct about this historical period, especially under the Trump regime, is what Susan Sontag has called a form of aesthetic fascism with its contempt of “all that is reflective, critical, and pluralistic.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>One distinctive element of the current moment is the rise of hard and soft disimagination machines. The hard disimagination machines, such as Fox News, conservative talk radio and Breitbart News, function as overt and unapologetic propaganda machines that trade in nativism, </b>misrepresentation and racist hysteria, all wrapped in the cloak of a regressive view of patriotism. As Joel Bleifuss points out, Fox News in particular, is “blatant in its contempt for the truth, and engages nightly in the “ritual of burying the truth in ‘memory holes’ and spinning a new version of reality [that keeps] the spirit of 1984… alive and well…. This, the most-watched cable news network, functions in its fealty to Trump like a real-world Ministry of Truth from George Orwell’s 1984, where bureaucrats “rectify” the historical record to conform to Big Brother’s decrees.”Trump’s fascist politics and fantasies of racial purity could not succeed without the disimagination machines, pedagogical apparatuses and the practitioners needed to make his “vision not just real by grotesquely normal.” What Trump makes clear is that the weaponization of language into a discourse of racism and hate is deeply indebted to a politics of forgetting and is a crucial tool in the battle to undermine historical consciousness and memory itself.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The soft disimagination machines or liberal mainstream media such as “NBC Nightly News,” MSNBC and the established press function largely to cater to Trump’s Twitter universe, celebrity culture, and the cutthroat ethos of the market, all the while isolating social issues, individualizing social problems, and making the workings of power superficially visible.</span> Politics as a spectacle saturates the senses with noise, cheap melodrama, lies and buffoonery. This is not to suggest that the spectacle that now shapes politics as pure theater is meant merely to entertain and distract. On the contrary, the current spectacle, most recently evident in the impeachment hearings in the Congress, function largely to separate the past from a politics that in its current form has turned deadly in its attack on the values and institutions crucial to a functioning democracy. In this instance, echoes of a fascist past remain hidden, invisible beneath the histrionic shouting and disinformation campaigns that rail against “fake news,” which is a euphemism for dissent, holding power accountable and an oppositional media. A flair for the overly dramatic eliminates the distinction between fact and fiction, lies and the truth.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Under such circumstances, the spectacle functions as part of a culture of distraction, division and fragmentation, all the while refusing to pose the question of how the United States shares elements of a fascist politics that connects it to a number of other authoritarian countries such as Brazil, Turkey, Hungary and Poland, which have embraced a form of fascist aesthetics and politics that combines a cruel culture of neoliberal austerity with the discourses of hate, nativism and racism. Political theater in its current form, especially with respect to the impeachment process, embraces elements of a fascist past and in doing so creates a form of self-sabotage in which the public largely refuses to “pose the question why Hitler and Nazi Germany continue to exert such a grip on modern life.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Forgetting history and the legitimation of white supremacy</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Another lesson to be learned from the absence of history, or what it means to even have a history in the discourse surrounding the impeachment hearings, is not only how ignorance gets normalized but also how the absence of critical thought allows us to forget that we are moral subjects capable of changing the world around us. The impeachment of Donald Trump is a crisis in need of being fully confronted both historically and in terms of a comprehensive politics that allows us to learn from alarming signs coming from the Trump administration. Such a crisis contains elements of a past that suggest we cannot look away or give in to the current assault on the past as a measure of intellectual respectability.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">History offers a model to learn something from earlier turns towards authoritarianism making it more difficult to assume that fascism is merely a relic of the past. Memories of terror are not only present in the white supremacist parade of hate and bigotry that took place in Charlottesville in which violence was enacted in the name of “blood and soil” but also in the current white house which is home to white supremacists such as Stephen Miller, who is a high-level adviser to Trump and is viewed by many as the architect of his draconian immigration policies.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Recently, more than 900 of Miller’s emails were leaked by former Breitbart editor Katie McHugh. Among the trove of emails, Miller commented on and provided reference to white nationalist websites such as VDARE and celebrated the racist novel, “The Camp of the Saints.” He “also reportedly espoused conspiracy theories about immigration, backed racist immigration policies introduced by President Calvin Coolidge that were praised by Adolf Hitler, and deployed slang popular in white nationalist circles to reference immigration.” Judd Legum argues that Miller also “obsessed over the loss of Confederate symbols after Dylann Roof’s murderous rampage.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In spite of a barrage of calls from a number of politicians calling for Miller’s removal from the White House, Trump held firm, reinforcing the widely accepted notion that Trump is a white nationalist entirely comfortable with white supremacist ideology. This is not surprising, since Trump brought the language of white nationalism into the White House and mainstream politics. Of course, removing Miller would not change much. Miller is not the main white supremacist in the Trump administration. Nor can his presence hide the fact that white supremacy has been a staple of the Republican Party for decades, evident in the history of and contemporary presence of high-profile Republican politicians such as Strom Thurmond, Jeff Sessions, Steve King, Tom Tancredo and Dana Rohrabacher.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Moreover, the long legacy of white supremacy in the United States should not undercut the distinctiveness of Donald Trump’s white supremacist views, which he wears like a badge of honor while escalating and normalizing white supremacist sensibilities, practices and policies unlike any president in modern times. His scapegoating of minorities and demonization of politicians, athletes and other critics of color reflects more than a divide-and-rule strategy, it is an updated strategy for mainstreaming the death-haunted elements of fascism.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In addition, Trump has consistently waged war on the “lying media” and elevated the spurious notion of fake news to the level of a common-sense assumption. The latter derogatory term has a strong resemblance to Hitler’s demonization of Lügenpresse — the lying press. Rick Noack states that “The defamatory word was most frequently used in Nazi Germany. Today, it is a common slogan among those branded as representing the “ugly Germany”: members of xenophobic, right-wing groups. This Nazi slur has also been used by some of Trump’s followers.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Trump has legitimated a culture of lying, cruelty and a collapse of social responsibility. In doing so, he has furthered the process of making people superfluous and disposable all the while producing a fog of ignorance which gives contemporary credence to Hannah Arendt’s claim in “The Origins of Totalitarianism” that “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exists.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Conclusion</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The historian David Blight has written that Trump’s “greatest threat to our society and to our democracy is not necessarily his authoritarianism, but his essential ignorance — of history, of policy, of political process, of the Constitution.” Blight is only partly right, in that the greatest threat to our society is a collective ignorance that legitimates forms of organized forgetting, modes of social amnesia, and the death of civic literacy.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Under the Trump regime, historical amnesia is used as a weapon of (mis)education, politics, and power. The notion that the past is a burden that must be forgotten is a centerpiece of authoritarian regimes, one that allows public memory to wither and the threads of fascism to become normalized. While some critics eschew the comparison of Trump with the Nazi era, it is crucial to recognize the alarming signs in this administration that echo a fascist politics of the past. As Jonathan Freedland points out, “the signs are there, if only we can bear to look.” Rejecting the Trump-Nazi comparison makes it easier to believe that we have nothing to learn from history and to take comfort in the assumption that it cannot happen once again. No democracy can survive without an informed and educated citizenry.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The lessons of impeachment far exceed its stated limited aims as a form of civic education. It not only ignores the most serious of Trump’s crimes, it fails to examine a number of political threads that together constitute elements common to a global crisis in democracy. The impeachment process, when viewed as part of a broader crisis of democracy, cannot be analyzed and removed from the connecting ideological, economic and cultural threads that weave through often isolated issues such as white nationalism, the rise of a Republican Party dominated by right-wing extremists, the collapse of the two-party system, and the ascent of a corporate-controlled media as a disimagination machine and corrosive system of power.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Crucial to any politics of resistance is the necessity to analyze Trump’s use of politics as a spectacle and how to address it not in splendid isolation but as a form of diversion and political theater, but also as part of a more comprehensive political project in which updated forms of authoritarianism and contemporary versions of fascism are being mobilized and gaining traction both in the United States and across the globe. Federico Mayor, the former director general of UNESCO, once stated that <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">“You cannot expect anything from uneducated citizens except unstable democracy.” In the current historical moment and age of Trump, it might be more appropriate to say that from a society in which ignorance is a virtue and civic literacy and education are viewed as a liability, you cannot expect anything but fascism.</span></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/trump-is-mentally-ill-but-our-real-sickness-runs-much-deeper/"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/trump-is-mentally-ill-but-our-real-sickness-runs-much-deeper/</font></a></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">no lnx</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Trump is mentally ill — but our real sickness runs much deeper</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Written by Chauncey DeVega / Salon January 1, 2020</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Sick societies normalize the aberrant and abhorrent behavior of their leaders and other elites. This behavior in turn becomes a type of pathology the infects the general public.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This article first appeared in Salon.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Last week, Dr. Bandy Lee, a professor of psychiatry at the Yale University School of Medicine and editor of the bestselling book”The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump,” told Salon that Nancy Pelosi could have Donald Trump involuntarily evaluated, because he may be a threat to public safety:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As a coworker, she has the right to have him submit to an involuntary evaluation, but she has not…. Anyone can call 911 to report someone who seems dangerous, and family members are the most typical ones to do so. But so can coworkers, and even passersby on the street. The law dictates who can determine right to treatment, or civil commitment, and in all 50 U.S. states this includes a psychiatrist.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The advantage of a coworker starting this process is that a court can mandate a mental capacity evaluation before the dangerous person returns to work. The committing physician is preferably the patient’s treater, but does not have to be.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Predictably, Lee’s suggestion became the outrage of the day across the right-wing disinformation echo chamber. But she is clearly not alone in her concerns about Donald Trump.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Lee is one of many hundreds of prominent mental health experts, historians, attorneys, and other professionals who since 2016 have tried to sound the alarm about the dire threat that Donald Trump and his regime represent to America and the world.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Is it legal at this time to commit Donald Trump to a mental institution? The answer is no. But is Trump a threat to the United States and the world? The answer to that is absolutely yes.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The abundance of public evidence suggests that President Trump is mentally unwell.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Will the Republican Party and its followers place the good of the country over partisan fealty and an addiction to (white) power? Of course not.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Lee and other mental health professionals’ repeated warnings about Trump’s state of mind and behavior should, of course, be of great public concern. But such warnings no longer cause public panic and mass action — and never did. That fact carries ominous implications for the present and future of America.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Last week on Twitter, journalist Aaron Rupar summarized this disturbing state of affairs:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The President of the United States has, today alone, retweeted 2 QAnon fan accounts, a Pizzagate account, an account that compared his following to a cult, and an account that described Obama as “Satan’s Muslim Scum.” And this insanity isn’t even a blip on the news radar.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The Age of Trump is also a symptom of a much deeper and larger societal problem. It is a function of what philosopher<b> Henry Giroux describes as a “disimagination machine”:</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">I argue that the politics of disimagination refers to images</span>, and I would argue institutions, discourses, and other modes of representation, that undermine the capacity of individuals to bear witness to a different and critical sense of remembering, agency, ethics and collective resistance.</b> The “disimagination machine” is both a set of cultural apparatuses extending from schools and mainstream media to the new sites of screen culture, and a public pedagogy that functions primarily to undermine the ability of individuals to think critically, imagine the unimaginable, and engage in thoughtful and critical dialogue: put simply, to become critically informed citizens of the world….</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The rise of the Tea Party and the renewal of the culture wars have resulted in a Republican Party which is now considered the party of anti-science. Similarly, right-wing politicians, media, talk show hosts and other conservative pundits loudly and widely spread the message that a culture of questioning is antithetical to the American way of life.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>It is strange yet somehow predictable that this nadir in American history was so presciently described by political journalist Fletcher Knebel in his 1965 thriller “Night of Camp David: What if the President of the United States Went Stark-Raving Mad?”</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Knebel’s book offers a scenario where the protagonist reflects on the nation’s predicament:...</font></div></div></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">long interview, cult studies, freedom to hate and to buy; education; language/rhet/M</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div><a href="https://kpfa.org/episode/talkies-september-11-2019/"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">https://kpfa.org/episode/talkies-september-11-2019/</font></a></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Scholar and critic Henry Giroux warns on the dangers of left populism, how it aids fascism.</font></span></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">ignorance is not innocence
</font><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/patriotism-truth-and-fascism-donald-trump-is-creating-a-subjective-reality/"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/patriotism-truth-and-fascism-donald-trump-is-creating-a-subjective-reality/</font></a></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">no lnx</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Patriotism, truth and fascism: Donald Trump is creating a subjective reality</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Written by<b> Chauncey DeVega / Salon</b> September 3, 2019</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">At some point in high school, Donald Trump’s new White House press secretary and communications director Stephanie Grisham must have read George Orwell’s “1984.” Instead of understanding Orwell’s book as a warning about totalitarianism, however, Grisham took it as a “how to” guide.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This is from a profile of Grisham, published last week in the Washington Post:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Does Grisham think Trump ever lies? After all, as of Aug. 5, The Washington Post Fact Checker had documented 12,019 false or misleading claims made by Trump during his presidency.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">“No,” she responds without hesitation. “I don’t think they’re lies. .?.?. I think the president communicates in a way that some people, especially the media, aren’t necessarily comfortable with. A lot of times they take him so literally. I know people will roll their eyes if I say he was just kidding or was speaking in hypotheticals, but sometimes he is. What I’ve learned about him is that he loves this country and he’s not going to lie to this country.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Despite the thousands of documented lies Trump has told since becoming president, his media sycophants at Fox News and elsewhere continue to claim that he is an honest and truthful person. Because they are authoritarians who are comfortable with their leaders lying to them, Trump’s voters and other Republicans also believe that he is honest.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Grisham’s recent comments to the Post are also another example of a very dangerous overlap between Donald Trump’s subjective reality, politics and truth. When Grisham says, “What I’ve learned about him is that he loves this country and he’s not going to lie to this country,” she is asserting that patriotism — always a subjective and normative quality — is a litmus test for the truth. Given his egomania and narcissism, Trump certainly agrees with her. Objective reality is to be made secondary, if not wholly replaced and usurped by, the whims of a mercurial, unstable authoritarian.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The real world is swallowed up by TrumpWorld; Trump’s critics and other detractors are then excluded from reality itself — which in turn legitimates their silencing by any means available.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">In total, Trump’s lies, and the media and political machine that disseminates and sustains them, are antithetical to democracy. This is not a precondition for fascism. It is fascism in action.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Moreover, those people and organizations who aid, abet and enforce his lies are also enemies of a good and humane society. Philosopher Hannah Arendt warned of this in her 1971 essay “Lying in Politics”</span>:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[T]he historian knows how vulnerable is the whole texture of facts in which we spend our daily life …. [I]t is always in danger of being perforated by single lies or torn to shreds by the organized lying of groups, nations, or classes, or denied and distorted, often carefully covered up by reams of falsehoods or simply allowed to fall into oblivion. Facts need testimony to be remembered and trustworthy witnesses to be established in order to find a secure dwelling place in the domain of human affairs.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Washington Post’s profile of Stephanie Grisham also reveals the worldview and collective character of the Trump regime and those people willing to serve it. In Grisham’s comments about her job as press secretary and communications director there is no mention of a commitment to public service, the common good or the well-being of the American people. <b>Loyalty to Donald Trump is all that matters. </b>The framers of the United States Constitution rejected the divine right of kings and queens and the idea of a hereditary nobility in America. Donald Trump is the human exemplar of why the framers put safeguards in the Constitution to remove such an authoritarian.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Donald Trump’s lies are a tool. They help him to assault the rule of law, cut away at democracy, profit from corruption and greed, normalize his illegitimate regime, and stay in power by distracting the American people and the news media from his political agenda, which presents a dire threat to the existence of America’s multiracial democracy.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Donald Trump’s lies represent another type of threat as well. <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">Philosopher Henry Giroux </span>demonstrates in his new book “American Nightmare” how Trump and his movement imperil the American people’s relationship to history and reality:</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>
</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b>History not only grounds us in the past by showing how democratic institutions rise and fall, it is also replete with memories and narratives of resistance that pose a dangerous threat for any fascist system</b>. This is particularly true today given the deep ideological features and legacies of fascism that are deeply worn into Trumpism’s rhetoric of retribution, intolerance, and demonization; its mix of schlock pageantry, coercion, violence, and impunity; and the constant stoking of ultra-nationalism and racial agitation.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Keeping historical memory alive is a form of resistance because it questions everything and complicates one’s relationship to power, oneself, others, and the large community. It also functions “to give witness to the truth of the past so that the politics of today is vibrantly democratic.” Historical memory matters because it offers a form of moral witnessing, and serves as a crucial asset in preventing new forms of fascism from becoming normalized. The conditions leading to fascism do not exist outside of history in some ethereal space in which everything is measured against the degree of distraction it promises. Historical memory is a prerequisite to the political and moral awakening necessary to successfully counter authoritarianism in the United States today.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">What can good Americans and other people of conscience do to survive and eventually triumph over Donald Trump and his movement’s full-spectrum assault on democracy and empirical reality?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">First, they must vote in overwhelming numbers for the Democratic candidate for president — whoever that may be — in 2020. Democratic voters (and liberals and progressives more generally) must reject purity tests and unite behind their party’s presidential nominee. Supporting the candidate who is most likely to defeat Donald Trump and the Republican Party must be the overriding principle in 2020. Already imperiled, the future of the United States is at literal risk if Donald Trump is re-elected.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Good Americans and other people of conscience must also make a personal moral accounting. They need to ask themselves, “What am I doing in my day-to-day life to resist Donald Trump’s fascist movement?” Yes, sustained collective action is critical if the American people are to beat back this national and global crisis. But individuals must also stop waiting for other people to save them. Personal inaction is not a viable option. Passivity is complicity.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">As others have suggested, all Americans — and all people around the world who are living through this global right-wing authoritarian moment — should maintain a journal or use some other means to document how the world around them is changing</span>. Trumpism and similar movements are assaulting the very nature of reality itself. The Age of Trump is both a moral and political crisis that gains momentum and wins final power by shattering norms and creating a type of malignant reality and state of moral inversion. By documenting these changes, individuals can stay grounded and not be swept away by the lies and corrupting influence of Trump and his movement.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The personal must be the political, if Donald Trump and his version of American fascism are to be defeated. People of conscience should cease all communications with their relatives, friends, and other people in their lives who support Donald Trump and his movement</b>. If that is not an option they should not discuss politics with anyone who supports Donald Trump. These people are willing members of a political cult. Trumpists cannot be freed until they choose to free themselves. Good Americans and other people of conscience should instead spend their energy supporting candidates and causes who are working to remove Donald Trump from office, blunting the harm he and his movement are doing in the present, and preparing to rehabilitate American democracy once Trump and other Republicans are removed from office.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>
</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>You are not crazy. Trump’s defenders and other enablers accuse his critics of suffering from “Trump derangement syndrome.</b>” Such accusations are acts of projection. In reality, it is Trump and his supporters and enablers who are politically deranged, wallowing in a state of moral inversion, lost to malignant reality and mass political psychosis. They are waging a war on reality and truth, here in America and around the world.</font></div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> =</font></p><p><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2019/05/our-culture-of-ignorance-has-made-possible-the-rise-of-a-terrible-new-political-blend-neoliberal-fascism/"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">https://www.alternet.org/2019/05/our-culture-of-ignorance-has-made-possible-the-rise-of-a-terrible-new-political-blend-neoliberal-fascism/</font></a></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">T<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">he ghosts of a fascist past are with us once again resurrecting the discourses of hatred, exclusion and ultra-nationalism in countries such as the United States, Hungary, Brazil, Poland, Turkey and the Philippines. In addition, right-wing extremist parties are on the move politically in Spain, Italy, Denmark, Sweden and Germany. The designers of a new breed of fascism increasingly dominate major political formations and other commanding political and economic institutions across the globe.<b> They have infused a fascist ideology with new energy through a right-wing populism that constructs the nation through a series of racist and nativist exclusions, all the while feeding off the chaos produced by neoliberalism.</b></span></font></p><div class="p1_25" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Their nightmarish reign of misery, violence and disposability is legitimated, in part, in their control of a diverse number of cultural apparatuses that produce a vast machinery of <b>manufactured consent.</b> <b>This reactionary educational formation includes the mainstream broadcast media, digital platforms, the Internet and print culture, all of which participate in an ongoing spectacle of violence, the aestheticization of politics, the legitimation of opinions over facts, and an embrace of a culture of ignorance. Under the reign of this normalized architecture of neoliberal ideology, literacy is now regarded with disdain, words are reduced to data, and science is confused with pseudo-science. <a href="https://www.truthdig.com/articles/creeping-toward-tyranny/" target="blank" rel="noopener" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">Chris Hedges is right to argue</a> that both the rule of law and the institutions that make democracy possible are being undermined. </b>He is worth quoting at length:</font></p><div class="p2_25" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div class="alt_ad_block story-page-in-content-graph-2" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div class="teadsNative" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 10px 20px 10px 24px; position: relative; line-height: 1.7; overflow: hidden; background: rgb(245, 245, 245); border: none !important;"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.7;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The mechanisms that once made democracy possible have withered and died.</b> We no longer have elections free of corporate control; real legislative debate; an independent press rooted in verifiable fact that lifts up the voices and concerns of the citizens rather than peddling conspiracy theories such as “Russiagate” or cheerleading for disastrous military interventions and occupations; academic institutions that vigorously examine and critique the nature of power; or diplomacy, negotiation, détente and compromise.<b> Puffed up by self-importance, intoxicated by the ability to wield police and military power, despots and their grotesque courtiers are freed with the collapse of the rule of law to carry out endless vendettas against enemies real and imagined until their own paranoia and fear define the lives of those they subjugate. This is where we have come, not because of Trump, who is the grotesque product of our failed democracy, but because the institutions that were designed to prevent tyranny no longer function.</b></font></p><div class="p3_25" style="font-style: italic; box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" /></blockquote><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><b style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Ignorance has lost its innocence and is no longer synonymous with the absence of knowledge. It has become malicious in its refusal to know, to disdain criticism, and render invisible important social issues that lie on the side of social and economic justice.</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> </span></b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">James Baldwin was certainly right in issuing the stern warning in “No Name in the Street” that “Ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.”</span></font></p><div class="p4_25" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As is well known, President Trump’s ignorance lights up the Twitter landscape almost every day. He denies climate change along with the dangers that it poses to humanity, shuts down the government because he cannot get the funds for his wall — a grotesque symbol of nativism — and heaps disdain on the heads of his intelligence agencies because they provide proof of the lies and misinformation that shapes his love affair with tyrants. This kind of power-drunk ignorance is comparable to a bomb with a fuse that is about to explode in a crowded shopping center. Ignorance now fuses with a reckless use of state power that holds both human life and the planet hostage. Under such circumstances, thinking becomes dangerous and becomes the object of organized disgust for any vestige of the truth.</font></p><div class="p5_25" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">However, there is more at stake here than the production of a toxic form of illiteracy and the shrinking of political horizons. What we are witnessing is a closing of the political coupled with explicit expressions of cruelty and “<a href="https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/05/22/the-culture-of-cruelty/" target="blank" rel="noopener" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">widely sanctioned ruthlessness</a>.”</b> <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> Moreover, the very conditions that enable people to make informed decisions are under siege as schools are defunded, media becomes more corporatized, oppositional journalists are killed, and <b>reality TV becomes the model for mass entertainment</b></span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. Under such circumstances, there is a full-scale attack on thoughtful reasoning, empathy, collective resistance and the compassionate imagination. In some ways, the </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">dictatorship of ignorance resembles what the writer John Berger calls “ethicide” and <a href="https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/05/09/john-berger-ways-of-being" target="blank" rel="noopener" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">Joshua Sperling defines</a> as “The blunting of the senses; the hollowing out of language; the <b>erasure of connection with the past, the dead, place, the land, the soil; possibly, too, the erasure even of certain emotions,</b> whether pity, compassion, consoling, mourning or hoping."</span></font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large">After decades of the neoliberal nightmare both in the United States and abroad, the mobilizing passions of fascism have been unleashed unlike anything we have seen since the 1930s. The ruling elite and managers of extreme capitalism have used the crises of economic inequality and immigration and what Paul Gilroy has called its “manifestly brutal and <b>exploitative arrangements</b>” to sow social divisions and resurrect the discourse of racial cleansing and white supremacy. In doing so, they have tapped into the growing collective suffering and anxieties of millions in order to redirect their anger and despair through a culture of fear and discourse of dehumanization; they have also turned critical ideas to ashes by disseminating a toxic mix of racialized categories, ignorance and a militarized spirit of white nationalism.</span></p><div class="p7_25" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">In this instance,<b> neoliberalism and fascism conjoin and advance in a comfortable and mutually compatible project</b> and movement that connects the exploitative values and cruel austerity policies of “casino capitalism” with fascist ideals</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. These ideals include the veneration of war, anti-intellectualism, dehumanization, a populist celebration of ultra-nationalism and racial purity, the <b>suppression</b> of freedom and dissent, a culture of lies, a politics of hierarchy, the spectacularization of emotion over reason, the weaponization of language, a discourse of decline, and state violence in heterogeneous forms. Fascism is never entirely interred in the past and the conditions that produce its central assumptions are with us once again, ushering in a period of modern barbarity that </span><a href="https://stateofnatureblog.com/one-question-fascism-part-one/" target="blank" rel="noopener" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">appears to be reaching towards homicidal extremes</a><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">, especially in the United States.</span></font></p><div class="p8_25" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The deep grammar of violence now shapes all aspects of cultural production and becomes visceral in its ongoing generation of domestic terrorism, mass shootings, the mass incarceration of people of color and the war on undocumented immigrants. Not only has it become more gratuitous, random and in some cases trivialized through the monotony of repetition, it has also become the official doctrine of the Trump administration in shaping its domestic and security policies. Trump’s violence has become both promiscuous in its reach and emboldening in its nod to right-wing extremist groups. The mix of white nationalism and expansion of policies that benefit the rich, big corporations and the financial elite are increasingly legitimated and normalized in a new political formation that <a href="https://truthout.org/articles/henry-a-giroux-the-nightmare-of-neoliberal-fascism/" target="blank" rel="noopener" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">I have termed neoliberal fascism</a>.</font></p><div class="p9_25" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The urgency of addressing the rise of fascism both in the United States and abroad might begin with the regime of untruth and manufactured illiteracy that allows and normalizes the catastrophic conditions that make neoliberal fascism a potent source of identity, fantasy and pleasure. One place to start would be a critical analysis of the Trump administration’s efforts to abandon and discredit traditional sources of evidence, facts and analysis in its attempt to normalize fake news, a culture of lying and the world of alternative facts. At issue here is making visible a radical new relationship between the public and truth and the ensuing demise of civic culture and the public institutions that make it possible. As the public’s grip on civic literacy weakens, language is emptied of any substantive meaning and the shared standards necessary for developing informed judgments and sustained convictions are undermined. In a world where nothing is true, all that is left to choose from are competing fictions. One consequence is that everything begins to look like a lie.</font></p><div class="p10_25" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As the historian <a href="https://inthesetimes.com/article/19658/20-lessons-from-the-20th-century-on-how-to-survive-in-trumps-america" target="blank" rel="noopener" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">Timothy Snyder points out</a>, “To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle.” More startling is the assumption that what matters in an age of deep divisions, exploitation and precarity is not whether something is true or false but the promise of a consistent narrative which calls upon people to commit to a newfound sense of unity while willing to “<a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/arendt-matters-revisiting-origins-totalitarianism/" target="blank" rel="noopener" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">abolish their capacity for distinguishing between the truth and falsehood, between reality and fiction</a>.” Of course, there is more at stake here than the creation and normalization of a culture of lying and what Walter Benjamin, Guy Debord and others identified as the theatricalization and aestheticization of politics. There is also the threat to democracy itself.</font></p><div class="p11_25" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The entrepreneurs of hate are no longer confined to the dustbin of history, particularly the proto-fascist era of 1930s and 1940s. They are with us once again, producing dystopian fantasies out of the decaying communities produced by 40 years of a savage capitalism. White male rage has emerged out of the destruction of social bonds and the gutting of the welfare state and intensified with the neoliberal unleashing of destructive energies of “<a href="https://www.eurozine.com/where-the-fires-are/" target="blank" rel="noopener" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">deracination, displacement, and disintegration.</a>” Angry white male loners looking for a cause, a place to put their agency into play, are fodder for cult leaders. They have found one in Trump, for whom the relationship between the language of fascism and its toxic worldview of “blood and soil” and the “fear of inferior blood” has moved to the center of power in the United States.</font></p><div class="p12_25" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Thinking is now viewed as an act of stupidity, and ignorance a virtue. All traces of critical thought appear only at the margins of the culture, as ignorance becomes the primary organizing principle of American society. For instance, two-thirds of the American public believe that creationism should be taught in schools and most of the Republican Party in Congress do not believe that climate change is caused by human activity, making the U.S. the laughingstock of the world. Politicians endlessly lie, knowing that the public is addicted to extreme violence and shock, which allow them to drown in overstimulation and live in an ever-accelerating overflow of information and images. News has become entertainment and echoes reality rather than interrogating it. Unsurprisingly, education in the larger culture has become a disimagination machine, a tool for legitimating ignorance that now plays a central role in the formation of an authoritarian politics that has gutted the ideologies, policies and institutions that are crucial to a substantive and thriving democracy.</font></p><div class="p13_25" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">I am not talking about the kind of anti-intellectualism that has a long history in the United States. I am pointing to a more lethal form of ignorance fueled by a manufactured type of illiteracy that is often ignored. What I am referring to is a mode of illiteracy that is both a scourge and a political tool power designed primarily to make war on language, meaning, thinking, and the capacity for critical thought</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">. <a href="https://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090928_the_war_on_language/" target="blank" rel="noopener" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">Chris Hedges is right to state</a> that “the emptiness of language is a gift to demagogues and the corporations that saturate the landscape with manipulated images and the idiom of mass culture.” Words such as love, trust, freedom, responsibility and choice have been deformed by a market logic that narrows their meaning to either a relationship to a commodity or a reductive notion of self-interest.</span></font></p><div class="p14_25" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b style="">Freedom now means removing one’s self from any sense of social responsibility so one can retreat into privatized orbits of self-indulgence</b>. And so it goes. The new form of illiteracy does not simply constitute an absence of learning, ideas or knowledge. Nor can it be solely attributed to what has been called the “<a href="https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/03/smartphone-usage-technology-aschoff/" target="blank" rel="noopener" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">smartphone society</a>.” On the contrary, it is a willful practice and goal used to actively depoliticize people and make them complicit with the forces that impose misery and suffering upon their lives.</font></p><div class="p15_25" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The writer and social critic Gore Vidal once called America the United States of Amnesia. The title should be extended to the United States of Amnesia and Willful Illiteracy.</b> Illiteracy no longer simply marks populations immersed in poverty with little access to quality education; nor does it only suggest the lack of proficient skills enabling people to read and write with a degree of understanding and fluency. More profoundly, illiteracy is about what it means not to be able to act from a position of thoughtfulness, informed judgment and critical agency.</font></p><div class="p16_25" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In this instance, manufactured illiteracy has become a form of political repression that discourages a culture of questioning, renders agency inoperable as an act of intervention, and restages power as a mode of domination. Illiteracy serves to depoliticize people because it reproduces conditions that make it difficult for individuals to develop informed judgments, analyze complex relationships and draw upon a range of sources to understand how power works and how they might be able to shape the forces that bear down on their lives.</font></p><div class="p17_25" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Think about the defunding of public education or the assault on truth and civic literacy by the Trump administration in the U.S. and the Jair Bolsonaro administration in Brazil.</b> Illiteracy provides the foundation for being governed, not how to govern. It is precisely this mode of illiteracy that now constitutes the modus operandi of a society that both privatizes and kills the imagination by poisoning it with falsehoods, consumer fantasies, data loops, propaganda machines and the need for instant gratification. This mode of manufactured illiteracy and education has no language for relating the self to public life, social responsibility or the demands of citizenship.</font></p><div class="p18_25" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It is important to recognize that the rise of this new mode of illiteracy is not simply about the failure of public and higher education to create critical and active citizens; it is about a society that eliminates those public spheres that make thinking possible while imposing a culture of fear in which there is the looming threat that anyone who holds power accountable will be punished. Literacy is dangerous to tyrants because they recognize that it is not only about learning critical competencies and an essential step towards agency, it is also the precondition for intervening in the world by being able to critique common-sense assumptions that legitimate apparatuses of persuasion and power. In the absence of a culture of literacy, the preconditions disappear for confronting not only the crisis of memory, ethics and agency but also the crisis of democracy itself.</font></p><div class="p19_25" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">At a time of growing fascist movements across the globe, power, culture, politics, finance and everyday life now merge in ways that are unprecedented and pose a threat to democracies all over the world. As cultural apparatuses are concentrated in the hands of the ultra-rich and major tech companies, the educative force of culture has taken on a powerful anti-democratic turn. <b>This can be seen in the rise of new digitally driven systems of production and consumption that produce, shape and sustain ideas, desires and social relations that contribute to the disintegration of democratic social bonds and promote a form of social Darwinism in which misfortune is seen as a weakness and the Hobbesian rule of “war of all against all” replaces any vestige of shared responsibility and compassion for others</b>. Think of the power of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire as an anti-democratic disimagination machine, <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/03/11/the-making-of-the-fox-news-white-house" target="blank" rel="noopener" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">especially in its ability to influence the Trump presidency</a>.</font></p><div class="p20_25" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The era of post-truth is in reality a period of crisis which, as Antonio Gramsci observed, “consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born [and that] in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">” Those morbid symptoms are evident in Trump’s mainstreaming of a fascist politics in which there is an attempt to normalize the language of racial purification, the politics of disposability and social sorting while exaggerating a culture of fear and a militarism reminiscent of past and current dictatorships.</span></font></p><div class="p21_25" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">I want to argue that any viable attempt at developing a radical politics must begin to address the role of education and civic literacy and what I have termed public pedagogy, or more precisely the educational force of the wider culture, as central not only to politics but also to the creation of subjects capable of becoming individual and social agents willing to struggle against injustices and fight to reclaim and develop those institutions crucial to the functioning and promises of a substantive democracy. One place to begin to think through such a project is by addressing the meaning and role of <b>pedagogy </b>as part of the broader struggle for economic justice and practice of freedom.</font></p><div class="p22_25" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The reach of pedagogy extends from schools to diverse cultural apparatuses such as the mainstream media, the expanding digital screen culture, and alternative old and new media outlets</b>. Accordingly, pedagogy is at the heart of any understanding of politics and the ideological scaffolding of those framing mechanisms that mediate our everyday lives. Across the globe, the forces of free-market fundamentalism are using media establishments and public and higher education to reproduce the corporate-driven culture of neoliberalism. In addition, they are waging an assault on the historically guaranteed social provisions and civil rights provided by the welfare state, public schools, unions, feminist organizations and social services, among others, all the while undercutting public faith in the defining institutions of democracy.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[REDUCTIONISM]</font></p><div class="p23_25" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">As market mentalities and moralities tighten their grip on all aspects of society, democratic institutions and public spheres are being downsized, if not altogether disappearing. As these institutions vanish — from public schools and alternative media to health care centers — there is also a serious erosion of the discourses of community, justice, equality, public values and the <b>common good</b>. This grim reality has been called by Alex Honneth a <b>“failed sociality” — a failure in the power of the civic imagination, political will and open democracy. It is also part of a politics that strips the social of any democratic ideals and undermines any understanding of education as a public good and pedagogy as an <i style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">empowering</i> practice</b>.</span></font></p><div class="p24_25" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">One of the challenges facing the current generation of educators, students, progressives and other cultural workers is the need to address the role they might play in educating students to be critically engaged agents, attentive to addressing important social issues and alert to the responsibility of deepening and expanding the meaning and practices of a vibrant democracy. At the heart of such a challenge is the question of what education should accomplish not simply in a democracy but at a historical moment when society is about to slip into the dark night of authoritarianism. What work do educators have to do to create the economic, political and ethical conditions necessary to endow young people and the public with the capacities to think, question, doubt, imagine the unimaginable, and defend education as essential for inspiring and energizing the citizens necessary for the existence of a robust democracy? In a world in which there is an increasing abandonment of egalitarian and democratic impulses, what will it take to educate young people and the broader polity to challenge authority and hold power accountable?</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">henry giroux</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></p><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://kpfa.org/episode/talkies-april-3-2019/">https://kpfa.org/episode/talkies-april-3-2019/</a></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">fascism and white supreme roots in neo-lib</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">---</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">ref 4/19</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://www.tikkun.org/rethinking-the-normalization-of-fascism-in-the-post-truth-era">https://www.tikkun.org/rethinking-the-normalization-of-fascism-in-the-post-truth-era</a></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://www.tikkun.org/henry-a-giroux-the-ghost-of-fascism-in-the-age-of-trump">https://www.tikkun.org/henry-a-giroux-the-ghost-of-fascism-in-the-age-of-trump</a></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">----</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><u>Am Nightmare</u> book city lights</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><div class="g" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 30px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div data-hveid="CAYQAA" data-ved="2ahUKEwicrbWEwrThAhVLiqwKHdKuBTQQFSgAMAB6BAgGEAA"><div class="rc" style="position: relative;"><div class="r" style="margin: 0px; line-height: 1.54;"><h3 class="LC20lb" style="font-weight: normal; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; display: inline-block; line-height: 1.33;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://monthlyreview.org/press/fascism-in-donald-trumps-united-states-by-henry-giroux-via-truthout/" ping="/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://monthlyreview.org/press/fascism-in-donald-trumps-united-states-by-henry-giroux-via-truthout/&ved=2ahUKEwicrbWEwrThAhVLiqwKHdKuBTQQFjAAegQIBhAB" style="cursor: pointer; text-decoration-line: none;">“Fascism in Donald Trump's United States,” by Henry A. Giroux, via</a></font></h3><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font><div class="TbwUpd" style="display: inline-block; line-height: 1.54; padding-bottom: 1px; padding-top: 1px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><cite class="iUh30" style="font-style: normal; padding-top: 1px; line-height: 1.43;">https://monthlyreview.org/.../fascism-in-donald-trumps-united-states-by-henry-giroux...</cite></font></div><div class="action-menu ab_ctl" style="display: inline; position: relative; margin: 1px 3px 0px; user-select: none; vertical-align: middle;"><a class="GHDvEf ab_button" href="https://www.google.com/search?q=henry+girous+jacobin+facism&oq=henry+girous+jacobin+facism&aqs=chrome..69i57.9887j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#" id="am-b0" aria-label="Result Options" aria-expanded="false" aria-haspopup="true" role="button" jsaction="m.tdd;keydown:m.hbke;keypress:m.mskpe" data-ved="2ahUKEwicrbWEwrThAhVLiqwKHdKuBTQQ7B0wAHoECAYQAg" style="border-radius: 0px; cursor: default; font-weight: bold; height: 12px; line-height: 27px; margin: 1px 0px 2px; min-width: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: center; transition: none 0s ease 0s; user-select: none; background-image: none; border: 0px; box-shadow: 0px 0px 0px 0px; filter: none; width: 13px; text-decoration-line: none; display: inline-block;"><span class="mn-dwn-arw" style="border-color: rgb(0, 102, 33) transparent; border-style: solid; border-width: 5px 4px 0px; width: 0px; height: 0px; margin-left: 3px; top: 7.5px; margin-top: -4px; position: absolute; left: 0px;" /></a><div class="action-menu-panel ab_dropdown" role="menu" tabindex="-1" jsaction="keydown:m.hdke;mouseover:m.hdhne;mouseout:m.hdhue" data-ved="2ahUKEwicrbWEwrThAhVLiqwKHdKuBTQQqR8wAHoECAYQAw" style="background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; border: 1px solid rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.2); padding: 0px; position: absolute; right: auto; top: 12px; white-space: nowrap; z-index: 3; transition: opacity 0.218s ease 0s; box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.2) 0px 2px 4px; left: 0px; visibility: hidden;"><ol style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px;"><li class="action-menu-item ab_dropdownitem" role="menuitem" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; list-style: none; user-select: none; cursor: pointer;">
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</li></ol></div></div></div><div class="s" style="max-width: 48em; line-height: 1.54;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a class="fl" href="https://www.google.com/search?q=related:https://monthlyreview.org/press/fascism-in-donald-trumps-united-states-by-henry-giroux-via-truthout/+henry+giroux+jacobin+fascism&tbo=1&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwicrbWEwrThAhVLiqwKHdKuBTQQHzAAegQIBhAF" style="text-decoration-line: none; cursor: pointer; display: block; padding: 7px 18px; outline: 0px;"><span class="st" style="line-height: 1.54; overflow-wrap: break-word;">Donald Trump's blatant appeal to <span style="font-weight: bold;">fascist</span> ideology and policy considerations took a more ... “<span style="font-weight: bold;">Fascism</span>in Donald Trump's United States,” by <span style="font-weight: bold;">Henry</span> A. <span style="font-weight: bold;">Giroux</span>, via Truthout ... Gerald Horne interviewed about Confronting Black <span style="font-weight: bold;">Jacobins</span> on CCPTV.</span></a></font></div></div></div></div><div class="g" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 30px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div data-hveid="CAUQAA" data-ved="2ahUKEwicrbWEwrThAhVLiqwKHdKuBTQQFSgAMAF6BAgFEAA"><div class="rc" style="position: relative;"><div class="r" style="margin: 0px; line-height: 1.54;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" /><h3 class="LC20lb" style="font-weight: normal; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; display: inline-block; line-height: 1.33;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://www.tikkun.org/henry-a-giroux-the-ghost-of-fascism-in-the-age-of-trump" ping="/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.tikkun.org/henry-a-giroux-the-ghost-of-fascism-in-the-age-of-trump&ved=2ahUKEwicrbWEwrThAhVLiqwKHdKuBTQQFjABegQIBRAB" style="cursor: pointer; text-decoration-line: none;">Henry A. Giroux | The Ghost of Fascism in the Age of Trump | Tikkun</a></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></h3>
<div class="TbwUpd" style="display: inline-block; line-height: 1.54; padding-bottom: 1px; padding-top: 1px;"><cite class="iUh30" style="font-style: normal; padding-top: 1px; line-height: 1.43;">https://www.tikkun.org/henry-a-giroux-the-ghost-of-fascism-in-the-age-of-trump</cite></div><div class="action-menu ab_ctl" style="display: inline; position: relative; margin: 1px 3px 0px; user-select: none; vertical-align: middle;"><a class="GHDvEf ab_button" href="https://www.google.com/search?q=henry+girous+jacobin+facism&oq=henry+girous+jacobin+facism&aqs=chrome..69i57.9887j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#" id="am-b1" aria-label="Result Options" aria-expanded="false" aria-haspopup="true" role="button" jsaction="m.tdd;keydown:m.hbke;keypress:m.mskpe" data-ved="2ahUKEwicrbWEwrThAhVLiqwKHdKuBTQQ7B0wAXoECAUQAg" style="border-radius: 0px; cursor: default; font-weight: bold; height: 12px; line-height: 27px; margin: 1px 0px 2px; min-width: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: center; transition: none 0s ease 0s; user-select: none; background-image: none; border: 0px; box-shadow: 0px 0px 0px 0px; filter: none; width: 13px; text-decoration-line: none; display: inline-block;"><span class="mn-dwn-arw" style="border-color: rgb(0, 102, 33) transparent; border-style: solid; border-width: 5px 4px 0px; width: 0px; height: 0px; margin-left: 3px; top: 7.5px; margin-top: -4px; position: absolute; left: 0px;" /></a><div class="action-menu-panel ab_dropdown" role="menu" tabindex="-1" jsaction="keydown:m.hdke;mouseover:m.hdhne;mouseout:m.hdhue" data-ved="2ahUKEwicrbWEwrThAhVLiqwKHdKuBTQQqR8wAXoECAUQAw" style="background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; border: 1px solid rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.2); padding: 0px; position: absolute; right: auto; top: 12px; white-space: nowrap; z-index: 3; transition: opacity 0.218s ease 0s; box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.2) 0px 2px 4px; left: 0px; visibility: hidden;"><ol style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px;"><li class="action-menu-item ab_dropdownitem" role="menuitem" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; list-style: none; user-select: none; cursor: pointer;">
</li></ol></div></div></div><div class="s" style="max-width: 48em; line-height: 1.54;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a class="fl" href="https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:16-X0pAyuGUJ:https://www.tikkun.org/henry-a-giroux-the-ghost-of-fascism-in-the-age-of-trump+&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us" ping="/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search%3Fq%3Dcache:16-X0pAyuGUJ:https://www.tikkun.org/henry-a-giroux-the-ghost-of-fascism-in-the-age-of-trump%2B%26cd%3D2%26hl%3Den%26ct%3Dclnk%26gl%3Dus&ved=2ahUKEwicrbWEwrThAhVLiqwKHdKuBTQQIDABegQIBRAE" style="text-decoration-line: none; cursor: pointer; display: block; padding: 7px 18px; outline: 0px;"><span class="st" style="line-height: 1.54; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span class="f" style="line-height: 1.54;">Feb 15, 2018 - </span>In the age of Trump, history neither informs the present nor haunts it with repressed memories of the past. It simply disappears. Memory has ...</span></a></font><div class="TXwUJf"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a class="fl" href="https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:16-X0pAyuGUJ:https://www.tikkun.org/henry-a-giroux-the-ghost-of-fascism-in-the-age-of-trump+&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us" ping="/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search%3Fq%3Dcache:16-X0pAyuGUJ:https://www.tikkun.org/henry-a-giroux-the-ghost-of-fascism-in-the-age-of-trump%2B%26cd%3D2%26hl%3Den%26ct%3Dclnk%26gl%3Dus&ved=2ahUKEwicrbWEwrThAhVLiqwKHdKuBTQQIDABegQIBRAE" style="text-decoration-line: none; cursor: pointer; display: block; padding: 7px 18px; outline: 0px;">Missing: <s>jacobin</s> | Must include: </a><a class="fl" href="https://www.google.com/search?q=henry+giroux+%22jacobin%22+fascism&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwicrbWEwrThAhVLiqwKHdKuBTQQ5t4CMAF6BAgFEAc" style="text-decoration-line: none; cursor: pointer;">jacobin</a></font></div></div></div></div></div><div class="g" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 30px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div data-hveid="CAQQAA" data-ved="2ahUKEwicrbWEwrThAhVLiqwKHdKuBTQQFSgAMAJ6BAgEEAA"><div class="rc" style="position: relative;"><div class="r" style="margin: 0px; line-height: 1.54;"><h3 class="LC20lb" style="font-weight: normal; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; display: inline-block; line-height: 1.33;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://truthout.org/articles/fascism-in-donald-trump-s-united-states/" ping="/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://truthout.org/articles/fascism-in-donald-trump-s-united-states/&ved=2ahUKEwicrbWEwrThAhVLiqwKHdKuBTQQFjACegQIBBAB" style="cursor: pointer; text-decoration-line: none;">Henry A. Giroux | Fascism in Donald Trump's United States - Truthout</a></font></h3><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font><div class="TbwUpd" style="display: inline-block; line-height: 1.54; padding-bottom: 1px; padding-top: 1px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><cite class="iUh30" style="font-style: normal; padding-top: 1px; line-height: 1.43;">https://truthout.org/articles/fascism-in-donald-trump-s-united-states/</cite></font></div><div class="action-menu ab_ctl" style="display: inline; position: relative; margin: 1px 3px 0px; user-select: none; vertical-align: middle;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a class="GHDvEf ab_button" href="https://www.google.com/search?q=henry+girous+jacobin+facism&oq=henry+girous+jacobin+facism&aqs=chrome..69i57.9887j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#" id="am-b2" aria-label="Result Options" aria-expanded="false" aria-haspopup="true" role="button" jsaction="m.tdd;keydown:m.hbke;keypress:m.mskpe" data-ved="2ahUKEwicrbWEwrThAhVLiqwKHdKuBTQQ7B0wAnoECAQQAg" style="border-radius: 0px; cursor: default; font-weight: bold; height: 12px; line-height: 27px; margin: 1px 0px 2px; min-width: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: center; transition: none 0s ease 0s; user-select: none; background-image: none; border: 0px; box-shadow: 0px 0px 0px 0px; filter: none; width: 13px; text-decoration-line: none; display: inline-block;"><span class="mn-dwn-arw" style="border-color: rgb(0, 102, 33) transparent; border-style: solid; border-width: 5px 4px 0px; width: 0px; height: 0px; margin-left: 3px; top: 7.5px; margin-top: -4px; position: absolute; left: 0px;" /></a></font><div class="action-menu-panel ab_dropdown" role="menu" tabindex="-1" jsaction="keydown:m.hdke;mouseover:m.hdhne;mouseout:m.hdhue" data-ved="2ahUKEwicrbWEwrThAhVLiqwKHdKuBTQQqR8wAnoECAQQAw" style="background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; border: 1px solid rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.2); padding: 0px; position: absolute; right: auto; top: 12px; white-space: nowrap; z-index: 3; transition: opacity 0.218s ease 0s; box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.2) 0px 2px 4px; left: 0px; visibility: hidden;"><ol style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px;"><li class="action-menu-item ab_dropdownitem" role="menuitem" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; list-style: none; user-select: none; cursor: pointer;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></li></ol></div></div></div><div class="s" style="max-width: 48em; line-height: 1.54;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a class="fl" href="https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:A6nX8hcoaBoJ:https://truthout.org/articles/fascism-in-donald-trump-s-united-states/+&cd=3&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us" ping="/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search%3Fq%3Dcache:A6nX8hcoaBoJ:https://truthout.org/articles/fascism-in-donald-trump-s-united-states/%2B%26cd%3D3%26hl%3Den%26ct%3Dclnk%26gl%3Dus&ved=2ahUKEwicrbWEwrThAhVLiqwKHdKuBTQQIDACegQIBBAE" style="text-decoration-line: none; cursor: pointer; display: block; padding: 7px 18px; outline: 0px;"><span class="st" style="line-height: 1.54; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span class="f" style="line-height: 1.54;">Dec 8, 2015 - </span>Donald Trump's blatant appeal to <span style="font-weight: bold;">fascist</span> ideology and policy considerations took a more barefaced and dangerous turn this week when he ...</span></a></font><div class="TXwUJf"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a class="fl" href="https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:A6nX8hcoaBoJ:https://truthout.org/articles/fascism-in-donald-trump-s-united-states/+&cd=3&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us" ping="/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search%3Fq%3Dcache:A6nX8hcoaBoJ:https://truthout.org/articles/fascism-in-donald-trump-s-united-states/%2B%26cd%3D3%26hl%3Den%26ct%3Dclnk%26gl%3Dus&ved=2ahUKEwicrbWEwrThAhVLiqwKHdKuBTQQIDACegQIBBAE" style="text-decoration-line: none; cursor: pointer; display: block; padding: 7px 18px; outline: 0px;">Missing: <s>jacobin</s> | Must include: </a><a class="fl" href="https://www.google.com/search?q=henry+giroux+%22jacobin%22+fascism&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwicrbWEwrThAhVLiqwKHdKuBTQQ5t4CMAJ6BAgEEAc" style="text-decoration-line: none; cursor: pointer;">jacobin</a></font></div></div></div></div></div><div class="g" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 30px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div data-hveid="CAIQAA" data-ved="2ahUKEwicrbWEwrThAhVLiqwKHdKuBTQQFSgAMAN6BAgCEAA"><div class="rc" style="position: relative;"><div class="r" style="margin: 0px; line-height: 1.54;"><h3 class="LC20lb" style="font-weight: normal; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; display: inline-block; line-height: 1.33;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://truthout.org/articles/challenging-trumps-language-of-fascism/" ping="/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://truthout.org/articles/challenging-trumps-language-of-fascism/&ved=2ahUKEwicrbWEwrThAhVLiqwKHdKuBTQQFjADegQIAhAB" style="cursor: pointer; text-decoration-line: none;">Henry A. Giroux | Challenging Trump's Language of Fascism - Truthout</a></font></h3><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font><div class="TbwUpd" style="display: inline-block; line-height: 1.54; padding-bottom: 1px; padding-top: 1px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><cite class="iUh30" style="font-style: normal; padding-top: 1px; line-height: 1.43;">https://truthout.org/articles/challenging-trumps-language-of-fascism/</cite></font></div><div class="action-menu ab_ctl" style="display: inline; position: relative; margin: 1px 3px 0px; user-select: none; vertical-align: middle;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a class="GHDvEf ab_button" href="https://www.google.com/search?q=henry+girous+jacobin+facism&oq=henry+girous+jacobin+facism&aqs=chrome..69i57.9887j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#" id="am-b3" aria-label="Result Options" aria-expanded="false" aria-haspopup="true" role="button" jsaction="m.tdd;keydown:m.hbke;keypress:m.mskpe" data-ved="2ahUKEwicrbWEwrThAhVLiqwKHdKuBTQQ7B0wA3oECAIQAg" style="border-radius: 0px; cursor: default; font-weight: bold; height: 12px; line-height: 27px; margin: 1px 0px 2px; min-width: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: center; transition: none 0s ease 0s; user-select: none; background-image: none; border: 0px; box-shadow: 0px 0px 0px 0px; filter: none; width: 13px; text-decoration-line: none; display: inline-block;"><span class="mn-dwn-arw" style="border-color: rgb(0, 102, 33) transparent; border-style: solid; border-width: 5px 4px 0px; width: 0px; height: 0px; margin-left: 3px; top: 7.5px; margin-top: -4px; position: absolute; left: 0px;" /></a></font><div class="action-menu-panel ab_dropdown" role="menu" tabindex="-1" jsaction="keydown:m.hdke;mouseover:m.hdhne;mouseout:m.hdhue" data-ved="2ahUKEwicrbWEwrThAhVLiqwKHdKuBTQQqR8wA3oECAIQAw" style="background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; border: 1px solid rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.2); padding: 0px; position: absolute; right: auto; top: 12px; white-space: nowrap; z-index: 3; transition: opacity 0.218s ease 0s; box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.2) 0px 2px 4px; left: 0px; visibility: hidden;"><ol style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px;"><li class="action-menu-item ab_dropdownitem" role="menuitem" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; list-style: none; user-select: none; cursor: pointer;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></li></ol></div></div></div><div class="s" style="max-width: 48em; line-height: 1.54;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a class="fl" href="https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:hWKkIENva8IJ:https://truthout.org/articles/challenging-trumps-language-of-fascism/+&cd=4&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us" ping="/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search%3Fq%3Dcache:hWKkIENva8IJ:https://truthout.org/articles/challenging-trumps-language-of-fascism/%2B%26cd%3D4%26hl%3Den%26ct%3Dclnk%26gl%3Dus&ved=2ahUKEwicrbWEwrThAhVLiqwKHdKuBTQQIDADegQIAhAE" style="text-decoration-line: none; cursor: pointer; display: block; padding: 7px 18px; outline: 0px;"><span class="st" style="line-height: 1.54; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span class="f" style="line-height: 1.54;">Jan 9, 2018 - </span>To read more articles by <span style="font-weight: bold;">Henry</span> A. <span style="font-weight: bold;">Giroux</span> and other authors in the Public Intellectual Project, click here. With the advent of the Trump presidency ...</span></a></font><div class="TXwUJf"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a class="fl" href="https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:hWKkIENva8IJ:https://truthout.org/articles/challenging-trumps-language-of-fascism/+&cd=4&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us" ping="/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search%3Fq%3Dcache:hWKkIENva8IJ:https://truthout.org/articles/challenging-trumps-language-of-fascism/%2B%26cd%3D4%26hl%3Den%26ct%3Dclnk%26gl%3Dus&ved=2ahUKEwicrbWEwrThAhVLiqwKHdKuBTQQIDADegQIAhAE" style="text-decoration-line: none; cursor: pointer; display: block; padding: 7px 18px; outline: 0px;">Missing: <s>jacobin</s> | Must include: </a><a class="fl" href="https://www.google.com/search?q=henry+giroux+%22jacobin%22+fascism&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwicrbWEwrThAhVLiqwKHdKuBTQQ5t4CMAN6BAgCEAc" style="text-decoration-line: none; cursor: pointer;">jacobin</a></font></div></div></div></div></div><div class="g" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 30px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div data-hveid="CAEQAA" data-ved="2ahUKEwicrbWEwrThAhVLiqwKHdKuBTQQFSgAMAR6BAgBEAA"><div class="rc" style="position: relative;"><div class="r" style="margin: 0px; line-height: 1.54;"><h3 class="LC20lb" style="font-weight: normal; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; display: inline-block; line-height: 1.33;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/American-Nightmare-Facing-Challenge-Fascism-ebook/dp/B0778W8WT7" ping="/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.amazon.com/American-Nightmare-Facing-Challenge-Fascism-ebook/dp/B0778W8WT7&ved=2ahUKEwicrbWEwrThAhVLiqwKHdKuBTQQFjAEegQIARAB" style="cursor: pointer; text-decoration-line: none;">American Nightmare: Facing the Challenge of Fascism (City Lights ...</a></font></h3><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font><div class="TbwUpd" style="display: inline-block; line-height: 1.54; padding-bottom: 1px; padding-top: 1px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><cite class="iUh30" style="font-style: normal; padding-top: 1px; line-height: 1.43;">https://www.amazon.com/American-Nightmare-Facing...Fascism.../B0778W8WT7</cite></font></div><div class="action-menu ab_ctl" style="display: inline; position: relative; margin: 1px 3px 0px; user-select: none; vertical-align: middle;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a class="GHDvEf ab_button" href="https://www.google.com/search?q=henry+girous+jacobin+facism&oq=henry+girous+jacobin+facism&aqs=chrome..69i57.9887j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#" id="am-b4" aria-label="Result Options" aria-expanded="false" aria-haspopup="true" role="button" jsaction="m.tdd;keydown:m.hbke;keypress:m.mskpe" data-ved="2ahUKEwicrbWEwrThAhVLiqwKHdKuBTQQ7B0wBHoECAEQAg" style="border-radius: 0px; cursor: default; font-weight: bold; height: 12px; line-height: 27px; margin: 1px 0px 2px; min-width: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: center; transition: none 0s ease 0s; user-select: none; background-image: none; border: 0px; box-shadow: 0px 0px 0px 0px; filter: none; width: 13px; text-decoration-line: none; display: inline-block;"><span class="mn-dwn-arw" style="border-color: rgb(0, 102, 33) transparent; border-style: solid; border-width: 5px 4px 0px; width: 0px; height: 0px; margin-left: 3px; top: 7.5px; margin-top: -4px; position: absolute; left: 0px;" /></a></font><div class="action-menu-panel ab_dropdown" role="menu" tabindex="-1" jsaction="keydown:m.hdke;mouseover:m.hdhne;mouseout:m.hdhue" data-ved="2ahUKEwicrbWEwrThAhVLiqwKHdKuBTQQqR8wBHoECAEQAw" style="background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; border: 1px solid rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.2); padding: 0px; position: absolute; right: auto; top: 12px; white-space: nowrap; z-index: 3; transition: opacity 0.218s ease 0s; box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.2) 0px 2px 4px; left: 0px; visibility: hidden;"><ol style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px;"><li class="action-menu-item ab_dropdownitem" role="menuitem" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; list-style: none; user-select: none; cursor: pointer;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></li></ol></div></div></div><div class="s" style="max-width: 48em; line-height: 1.54;"><div class="slp f" style="line-height: 1.54;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a class="fl" href="https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:t1Tx2TXiu6oJ:https://www.amazon.com/American-Nightmare-Facing-Challenge-Fascism-ebook/dp/B0778W8WT7+&cd=5&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us" ping="/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search%3Fq%3Dcache:t1Tx2TXiu6oJ:https://www.amazon.com/American-Nightmare-Facing-Challenge-Fascism-ebook/dp/B0778W8WT7%2B%26cd%3D5%26hl%3Den%26ct%3Dclnk%26gl%3Dus&ved=2ahUKEwicrbWEwrThAhVLiqwKHdKuBTQQIDAEegQIARAE" style="text-decoration-line: none; cursor: pointer; display: block; padding: 7px 18px; outline: 0px;"><g-review-stars><span class="fTKmHE99XE4__star-default" aria-label="Rated 5.0 out of 5," style="display: inline-block; overflow: hidden; top: 1px; position: relative; background: url(" images="images" nav_logo242.png="nav_logo242.png" px="px" no-repeat="no-repeat" height="height" width="width"><span style="display: block; background: url(" images="images" nav_logo242.png="nav_logo242.png" px="px" no-repeat="no-repeat" height="height" width="width" /></span></g-review-stars> Rating: 5 - 11 reviews</a></font></div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a class="fl" href="https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:t1Tx2TXiu6oJ:https://www.amazon.com/American-Nightmare-Facing-Challenge-Fascism-ebook/dp/B0778W8WT7+&cd=5&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us" ping="/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search%3Fq%3Dcache:t1Tx2TXiu6oJ:https://www.amazon.com/American-Nightmare-Facing-Challenge-Fascism-ebook/dp/B0778W8WT7%2B%26cd%3D5%26hl%3Den%26ct%3Dclnk%26gl%3Dus&ved=2ahUKEwicrbWEwrThAhVLiqwKHdKuBTQQIDAEegQIARAE" style="text-decoration-line: none; cursor: pointer; display: block; padding: 7px 18px; outline: 0px;"><span class="st" style="line-height: 1.54; overflow-wrap: break-word;">Editorial Reviews. Review. Praise for American Nightmare: "<span style="font-weight: bold;">Giroux</span> eloquently yet forcefully ... American Nightmare: Facing the Challenge of <span style="font-weight: bold;">Fascism</span> (City Lights Open Media) - Kindle edition by <span style="font-weight: bold;">Henry</span> A. <span style="font-weight: bold;">Giroux</span>, George Yancy. Download it ...</span></a></font><div class="TXwUJf"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a class="fl" href="https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:t1Tx2TXiu6oJ:https://www.amazon.com/American-Nightmare-Facing-Challenge-Fascism-ebook/dp/B0778W8WT7+&cd=5&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us" ping="/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search%3Fq%3Dcache:t1Tx2TXiu6oJ:https://www.amazon.com/American-Nightmare-Facing-Challenge-Fascism-ebook/dp/B0778W8WT7%2B%26cd%3D5%26hl%3Den%26ct%3Dclnk%26gl%3Dus&ved=2ahUKEwicrbWEwrThAhVLiqwKHdKuBTQQIDAEegQIARAE" style="text-decoration-line: none; cursor: pointer; display: block; padding: 7px 18px; outline: 0px;">Missing: <s>jacobin</s> | Must include: </a><a class="fl" href="https://www.google.com/search?q=henry+giroux+%22jacobin%22+fascism&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwicrbWEwrThAhVLiqwKHdKuBTQQ5t4CMAR6BAgBEAc" style="text-decoration-line: none; cursor: pointer;">jacobin</a></font></div></div></div></div></div></div><div><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">=</font></font></p></div><div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">behind the mask of chivlry nancy mclean yale stanley fascism is set of strategies, not an ideology</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">kkk said union jewish plot (to integrate?)</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">unions connect us across race; fascism sep via race or gender.</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://kpfa.org/episode/letters-and-politics-december-11-2018/" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">https://kpfa.org/episode/letters-and-politics-december-11-2018/</a></font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">1st came for soc, then trade unionists...</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">alone econ anxiety, cvan't trust fellow citizens lok for fak ID hannah arendt</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">at last loyalty to fuhrer is ult ID</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">must be demonized out group (diseased, lazy etc [cf newt lang memo] corruption = impurity</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">bizzaroworld anti-corrupt campaign used to steal from jews; putin runs, may be richest in world</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">takes 5-6 years for talk to become violence /genocide klemperer</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://theconversation.com/shithole-countries-trump-uses-the-rhetoric-of-dictators-89850">https://theconversation.com/shithole-countries-trump-uses-the-rhetoric-of-dictators-89850</a></font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style=""><p style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px 0px 18px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">...Orwell warns us in his dystopian novel 1984 that authoritarianism begins with language. In the novel, “newspeak” is language twisted to deceive, seduce and undermine the ability of people to think critically and freely.</font></p><p style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px 0px 18px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Donald Trump’s unapologetic bigoted language made headlines again Thursday when it was reported he told lawmakers working on a new immigration policy that the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-attacks-protections-for-immigrants-from-shithole-countries-in-oval-office-meeting/2018/01/11/bfc0725c-f711-11e7-91af-31ac729add94_story.html?hpid=hp_hp-top-table-main_trumpmeeting-445pm%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.a6146ac46b16" style="outline: none; white-space: pre-wrap; overflow-wrap: break-word;">United States shouldn’t accept people from “shithole countries” like Haiti</a>. Given his support for white nationalism and his coded call to “Make America Great (White) Again,” Trump’s overt racist remarks reinforce echoes of white supremacy reminiscent of fascist dictators in the 1930s.</font></p><p style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px 0px 18px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">His remarks about accepting people from Norway smack of an appeal to the sordid discourse of racial purity. There is much more at work here than a politics of incivility. Behind Trump’s use of vulgarity and his disparagement of countries that are poor and non-white lies the terrifying discourse of white supremacy, ethnic cleansing and the politics of disposability. This is a vocabulary that considers some individuals and groups not only faceless and voiceless, but excess, redundant and subject to expulsion. The endpoint of the language of disposability is a form of social death, or even worse.</font></p><p style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px 0px 18px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As authoritarianism gains strength, the formative cultures that give rise to dissent become more embattled, along with the public spaces and institutions that make conscious critical thought possible.</font></p><p style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px 0px 18px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Words that speak to the truth to reveal injustices and provide informed critical analysis begin to disappear, making it all the more difficult, if not dangerous, to judge, think critically and hold dominant power accountable. Notions of virtue, honour, respect and compassion are policed, and those who advocate them are punished.</font></p><p style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px 0px 18px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">I think it’s fair to argue that Orwell’s nightmare vision of the future is no longer fiction in the United States. Under Trump, <a href="https://theconversation.com/scientific-information-is-the-key-to-democracy-88620?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Latest%20from%20The%20Conversation%20for%20January%204%202018&utm_content=Latest%20from%20The%20Conversation%20for%20January%204%202018+CID_c92244b9da5fa91dfaa10c6cbd4fe095&utm_source=campaign_monitor_ca&utm_term=waging%20a%20war%20against%20scientific%20information" style="outline: none; white-space: pre-wrap; overflow-wrap: break-word;">language is undergoing a shift</a>: It now treats dissent, critical media coverage and scientific evidence as a species of “fake news.”</font></p><p style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px 0px 18px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Trump administration, in fact, views the critical media as the “enemy of the American people.” Trump has repeated this view of the media so often that <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/americans-media-poll-trust-trump-fake-news-attacks-a8091991.html" style="outline: none; white-space: pre-wrap; overflow-wrap: break-word;">almost a third of Americans now believe it</a> and support government-imposed restrictions on the media, according to a Poynter survey.</font></p><h2 style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px 0px 12px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; text-rendering: optimizelegibility;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Thought crimes and fake news</font></h2><p style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px 0px 18px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Trump’s cries of “fake news” work incessantly to set limits on what is thinkable. Reason, standards of evidence, consistency and logic no longer serve the truth, according to Trump, because the latter are crooked ideological devices used by enemies of the state. Orwell’s “thought crimes” are Trump’s “fake news.” Orwell’s “Ministry of Truth” is Trump’s “Ministry of Fake News.”</font></p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{" tweetid="tweetId" style="background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><div style="background: transparent; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><twitter-widget class="twitter-tweet twitter-tweet-rendered" id="twitter-widget-0" data-tweet-id="950014185299210240" style="position: static; visibility: visible; display: block; transform: rotate(0deg); max-width: 100%; width: 500px; min-width: 220px; margin-top: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;" /></font><div data-twitter-event-id="0" class="SandboxRoot env-bp-350" 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size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a class="TweetAuthor-avatar Identity-avatar u-linkBlend" data-scribe="element:user_link" href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump" aria-label="Donald J. Trump (screen name: realDonaldTrump)" style="background-color: transparent; text-decoration: inherit; -webkit-box-flex: 0; flex: 0 0 auto; height: 36px; margin-right: 9px; outline: 0px; font-weight: inherit;"><img class="Avatar" data-scribe="element:avatar" data-src-2x="https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/874276197357596672/kUuht00m_bigger.jpg" alt="" data-src-1x="https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/874276197357596672/kUuht00m_normal.jpg" src="https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/874276197357596672/kUuht00m_normal.jpg" style="border: 0px; max-width: 100%; max-height: 100%; border-radius: 50%;" 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face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a class="TweetAuthor-link Identity u-linkBlend" data-scribe="element:user_link" href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump" aria-label="Donald J. Trump (screen name: realDonaldTrump)" style="background-color: transparent; text-decoration: inherit; display: flex; -webkit-box-align: start; align-items: flex-start; outline: 0px; font-weight: inherit;"><span class="TweetAuthor-decoratedName" style="display: flex; -webkit-box-align: center; align-items: center; min-width: 0px;"><span class="TweetAuthor-name Identity-name customisable-highlight" title="Donald J. Trump" data-scribe="element:name" style="font-weight: 700; overflow: hidden; text-overflow: ellipsis; white-space: nowrap; padding-right: 4px;">Donald J. Trump</span><span class="TweetAuthor-verifiedBadge" data-scribe="element:verified_badge" style="position: static; -webkit-box-flex: 0; flex: 0 0 auto; padding-right: 4px;" /></span></a><span class="u-hiddenVisually" style="position: absolute !important; overflow: hidden !important; width: 1px !important; height: 1px !important; padding: 0px !important; border: 0px !important; clip: rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px) !important;">✔</span><span class="TweetAuthor-screenName Identity-screenName" title="@realDonaldTrump" data-scribe="element:screen_name" dir="ltr" style="overflow: hidden; text-overflow: ellipsis; white-space: nowrap; flex-shrink: 1;">@realDonaldTrump</span></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></div></div></div><div class="Tweet-body e-entry-content" data-scribe="component:tweet" style="margin-top: 14px;"><div class="u-hiddenVisually js-inViewportScribingTarget" style="position: absolute !important; overflow: hidden !important; width: 1px !important; height: 1px !important; padding: 0px !important; border: 0px !important; clip: rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px) !important;"><p class="Tweet-text e-entry-title" dir="ltr" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; list-style: none; border: none; white-space: pre-wrap; cursor: text; overflow-wrap: break-word; direction: ltr;" lang="en">I’ve had to put up with the Fake News from the first day I announced that I would be running for President. Now I have to put up with a Fake Book, written by a totally discredited author. Ronald Reagan had the same problem and handled it well. So will I!</p><div class="TweetInfo" style="display: flex; margin-top: 3.2px;"><div class="TweetInfo-like"><a class="TweetInfo-heart" title="Like" href="https://twitter.com/intent/like?tweet_id=950014185299210240" data-scribe="component:actions" style="background-color: transparent; text-decoration-line: none; display: flex; outline: 0px;"><span class="TweetInfo-heartStat" data-scribe="element:heart_count" style="margin-left: 3px;">145K</span></a></div><div class="TweetInfo-timeGeo" style="margin-left: 12px;"><a class="u-linkBlend u-url customisable-highlight long-permalink" data-datetime="2018-01-07T14:40:06+0000" data-scribe="element:full_timestamp" href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/950014185299210240" style="background-color: transparent; text-decoration: inherit; outline: 0px; font-weight: inherit;">6:40 AM - Jan 7, 2018</a></div><div class="tweet-InformationCircle--bottomWithCTA tweet-InformationCircle" data-scribe="element:notice" style="position: absolute; right: 20px;"><a href="https://support.twitter.com/articles/20175256" class="Icon Icon--informationCircleWhite js-inViewportScribingTarget" title="Twitter Ads info and privacy" data:image="data:image" svg="svg" xml="xml" charset="utf-8,%3Csvg%20xmlns%3D%22http%3A%2F%2Fwww.w3.org%2F2000%2Fsvg%22%20viewBox%3D%220%200%2072%2072%22%3E%3Cg%20transform%3D%22translate(8%208)%22%3E%3Cpath%20fill%3D%22%23657786%22%20fill-opacity%3D%22.8%22%20d%3D%22M28%203.11C14.278%203.11%203.11%2014.276%203.11%2028c0%2013.723%2011.166%2024.887%2024.89%2024.887S52.89%2041.723%2052.89%2028C52.89%2014.274%2041.724%203.11%2028%203.11z%22%2F%3E%3Cpath%20fill%3D%22%23FFF%22%20d%3D%22M28%2044.593c-1.718%200-3.11-1.393-3.11-3.112V30.076c0-1.718%201.392-3.11%203.11-3.11s3.11%201.392%203.11%203.11V41.48c0%201.72-1.392%203.113-3.11%203.113z%22%2F%3E%3Ccircle%20fill%3D%22%23FFF%22%20cx%3D%2228%22%20cy%3D%2218.148%22%20r%3D%224.667%22%2F%3E%3Cpath%20fill%3D%22%23FFF%22%20d%3D%22M28%2056C12.56%2056%200%2043.44%200%2028S12.56%200%2028%200s28%2012.56%2028%2028-12.56%2028-28%2028zm0-49.778C15.99%206.222%206.222%2015.992%206.222%2028S15.992%2049.778%2028%2049.778c12.01%200%2021.778-9.77%2021.778-21.778S40.008%206.222%2028%206.222z%22%2F%3E%3C%2Fg%3E%3C%2Fsvg%3E" outline="outline" px="px" style="background-color: transparent; text-decoration-line: none; display: inline-block; height: 18px; background-repeat: no-repeat; background-size: contain; vertical-align: text-bottom; width: 18px; background-image: url(" xmlns:data="data"><span class="u-hiddenVisually" style="position: absolute !important; overflow: hidden !important; width: 1px !important; height: 1px !important; padding: 0px !important; border: 0px !important; clip: rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px) !important;">Twitter Ads info and privacy</span></a></div></div></div></div></blockquote></div><a class="CallToAction-icon CallToAction" title="View the conversation on Twitter" href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/950014185299210240" data-scribe="section:cta component:news" style="background-color: transparent; text-decoration-line: none; display: flex; -webkit-box-align: center; align-items: center; border-color: rgb(225, 232, 237); border-style: solid; border-radius: 0px 0px 4px 4px; border-width: 1px 0px 0px; padding: 9px 20px; outline: 0px;"><span class="CallToAction-text" data-scribe="element:conversation_text" style="margin-left: 4px;">77.7K people are talking about this</span></a><div class="Icon Icon--chevronRightCTA CallToAction-chevron" role="img" data-scribe="element:cta_chevron" data:image="data:image" svg="svg" xml="xml" charset="utf-8,%3Csvg%20xmlns%3D%22http%3A%2F%2Fwww.w3.org%2F2000%2Fsvg%22%20width%3D%2224%22%20height%3D%2224%22%20viewBox%3D%220%200%2024%2024%22%3E%3Cpath%20class%3D%22icon%22%20fill%3D%22%23697882%22%20d%3D%22M17.207%2011.293l-7.5-7.5c-.39-.39-1.023-.39-1.414%200s-.39%201.023%200%201.414L15.086%2012l-6.793%206.793c-.39.39-.39%201.023%200%201.414.195.195.45.293.707.293s.512-.098.707-.293l7.5-7.5c.39-.39.39-1.023%200-1.414z%22%2F%3E%3C%2Fsvg%3E" transform="transform" scalex="scaleX" margin-left="margin-left" auto="auto" style="display: inline-block; height: 1.25em; background-repeat: no-repeat; background-size: contain; vertical-align: text-bottom; width: 1.25em; background-image: url(" xmlns:data="data"><div class="tweet-InformationCircle" data-scribe="element:notice" style="position: absolute; right: 0px;"><a href="https://support.twitter.com/articles/20175256" class="Icon Icon--informationCircleWhite js-inViewportScribingTarget" title="Twitter Ads info and privacy" data:image="data:image" svg="svg" xml="xml" charset="utf-8,%3Csvg%20xmlns%3D%22http%3A%2F%2Fwww.w3.org%2F2000%2Fsvg%22%20viewBox%3D%220%200%2072%2072%22%3E%3Cg%20transform%3D%22translate(8%208)%22%3E%3Cpath%20fill%3D%22%23657786%22%20fill-opacity%3D%22.8%22%20d%3D%22M28%203.11C14.278%203.11%203.11%2014.276%203.11%2028c0%2013.723%2011.166%2024.887%2024.89%2024.887S52.89%2041.723%2052.89%2028C52.89%2014.274%2041.724%203.11%2028%203.11z%22%2F%3E%3Cpath%20fill%3D%22%23FFF%22%20d%3D%22M28%2044.593c-1.718%200-3.11-1.393-3.11-3.112V30.076c0-1.718%201.392-3.11%203.11-3.11s3.11%201.392%203.11%203.11V41.48c0%201.72-1.392%203.113-3.11%203.113z%22%2F%3E%3Ccircle%20fill%3D%22%23FFF%22%20cx%3D%2228%22%20cy%3D%2218.148%22%20r%3D%224.667%22%2F%3E%3Cpath%20fill%3D%22%23FFF%22%20d%3D%22M28%2056C12.56%2056%200%2043.44%200%2028S12.56%200%2028%200s28%2012.56%2028%2028-12.56%2028-28%2028zm0-49.778C15.99%206.222%206.222%2015.992%206.222%2028S15.992%2049.778%2028%2049.778c12.01%200%2021.778-9.77%2021.778-21.778S40.008%206.222%2028%206.222z%22%2F%3E%3C%2Fg%3E%3C%2Fsvg%3E" outline="outline" px="px" style="background-color: transparent; text-decoration-line: none; display: inline-block; height: 18px; background-repeat: no-repeat; background-size: contain; vertical-align: text-bottom; width: 18px; background-image: url(" xmlns:data="data"><span class="u-hiddenVisually" style="position: absolute !important; overflow: hidden !important; width: 1px !important; height: 1px !important; padding: 0px !important; border: 0px !important; clip: rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px) !important;">Twitter Ads info and privacy</span></a></div></div><div class="resize-sensor" style="position: absolute; left: 0px; top: 0px; right: 0px; bottom: 0px; overflow: hidden; z-index: -1; visibility: hidden;"><div class="resize-sensor-expand" style="position: absolute; left: 0px; top: 0px; right: 0px; bottom: 0px; overflow: hidden; z-index: -1; visibility: hidden;"><div style="position: absolute; left: 0px; top: 0px; transition: all 0s ease 0s; width: 510px; height: 263px;"><div class="resize-sensor-shrink" style="position: absolute; left: 0px; top: 0px; right: 0px; bottom: 0px; overflow: hidden; z-index: -1; visibility: hidden;"><div style="position: absolute; left: 0px; top: 0px; transition: all 0s ease 0s; width: 1000px; height: 506.375px;"><p style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px 0px 18px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The notion of truth is viewed by this president as a corrupt tool used by the critical media to question his dismissal of legal checks on his power, particularly his attacks on judges, courts and any other governing institutions that will not promise him complete and unchecked loyalty.</p><p style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px 0px 18px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">For Trump, <a href="http://time.com/4665755/donald-trump-fear/" style="outline: none; white-space: pre-wrap; overflow-wrap: break-word;">intimidation takes the place of unquestioned loyalty</a> when he does not get his way, revealing a view of the presidency that is more about winning than about governing.</p><p style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px 0px 18px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">One consequence is the myriad practices by which Trump gleefully humiliates and punishes his critics, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/31/us/politics/trump-reinventing-presidency.html" style="outline: none; white-space: pre-wrap; overflow-wrap: break-word;">wilfully engages in shameful acts of self-promotion</a> and unapologetically enriches his financial coffers.</p><p style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px 0px 18px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Under Trump, the language of civic literacy and democracy has become unmoored from critical reason, informed debate and the weight of scientific evidence, and is now being reconfigured and tied to pageantry, political theatre and a deep-seated anti-intellectualism.</p><p style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px 0px 18px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">One consequence, as language begins to function as a tool of state repression, is that matters of moral and political responsibility disappear and injustices proliferate.</p><h2 style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px 0px 12px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; text-rendering: optimizelegibility;">Fascism starts with words</h2><p style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px 0px 18px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">What is crucial to remember here, as authoritarianism expert <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/democracy-post/wp/2017/12/21/beware-of-president-trumps-nefarious-language-games/?utm_term=.dc9e11b2d2c9" style="outline: none; white-space: pre-wrap; overflow-wrap: break-word;">Ruth Ben-Ghiat notes</a>, is that fascism starts with words. Trump’s use of language and his manipulative use of the media as political spectacle are disturbingly similar to earlier periods of propaganda, censorship and repression.</p><p style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px 0px 18px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Under fascist regimes, the language of brutality and culture of cruelty was normalized through the proliferation of strident metaphors of war, battle, expulsion, racial purity and demonization.</p><p style="background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; margin: 0px 0px 18px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><font style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">As German historians such as Richard J. Evans and Victor Klemperer have made clear, <a href="http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/nazi-germany/censorship-in-nazi-germany/" style="outline: none; white-space: pre-wrap; overflow-wrap: break-word;">dictators like Adolf Hitler</a> did more than simply corrupt the language of a civilized society, they also banned words.</font></p><p style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px 0px 18px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Soon afterwards, the Nazis banned books and the critical intellectuals who wrote them. They then imprisoned those individuals who challenged Nazi ideology and the state’s systemic violations of civil rights.</p><p style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px 0px 18px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The end point was an all-embracing discourse of disposability — the emergence of concentration camps and genocide fuelled by a politics of racial purity and social cleansing.</p><p style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px 0px 18px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Echoes of the formative stages of such actions are upon us now. An American-style neo-fascism appears to be engulfing the United States after simmering in the dark for years.</p><p style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px 0px 18px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
</p><div class="grid-ten grid-prepend-two large-grid-nine grid-last content-topics topic-list" style="margin: 0px 0px 12px 172px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: rgb(255, 255, 255); float: left; width: 754px; font-style: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-color: initial;"><div class="grid-ten large-grid-nine grid-last content-body content entry-content instapaper_body" itemprop="articleBody" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 12px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 1.8; float: left; width: 754px; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-color: initial;"><p style="font-style: normal; margin: 0px 0px 18px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent;">More than any other president, Trump has normalized the notion that the meaning of words no longer matters, nor do traditional sources of facts and evidence. In doing so, he has undermined the relationship between engaged citizenship and the truth, and has relegated matters of debate and critical assessment to a spectacle of bombast, threats, intimidation and sheer fakery.</p><p style="font-style: normal; margin: 0px 0px 18px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent;">This language of fascism does more than normalize falsehoods and ignorance. It also promotes a larger culture of short-term attention spans, immediacy and sensationalism. At the same time, it makes fear and anxiety the normalized currency of exchange and communication.</p><p style="font-style: normal; margin: 0px 0px 18px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent;">In a throwback to the language of fascism, Trump has repeatedly positioned himself as the only one who can save the masses — reproducing the tired script of the model of the saviour endemic to authoritarianism.</p><p style="font-style: normal; margin: 0px 0px 18px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent;">There is more at work here than an oversized ego. Trump’s authoritarianism is also fuelled by braggadocio and misdirected rage as he undermines the bonds of solidarity,<span> </span><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/03/business/dealbook/trump-congress-financial-regulations.html?r=0" style="text-decoration: underline; outline: none; white-space: pre-wrap; overflow-wrap: break-word;">abolishes institutions meant to protect the vulnerable</a><span> </span>and launches a full-fledged<span> </span><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/04/climate/trump-offshore-drilling.html" style="text-decoration: underline; outline: none; white-space: pre-wrap; overflow-wrap: break-word;">assault on the environment</a>.</p><p style="font-style: normal; margin: 0px 0px 18px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent;">Trump is also the master of manufactured illiteracy, and his obsessive tweeting and public relations machine aggressively engages in the theatre of self-promotion and distractions. Both of these are designed to whitewash any version of a history that might expose the close alignment between his own language and policies and the dark elements of a fascist past. [twit]</p><p style="font-style: normal; margin: 0px 0px 18px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent;"><span style="background-color: transparent;">Trump also revels in an unchecked mode of self-congratulation bolstered by a limited vocabulary filled with words like “historic,” “best,” “the greatest,” “tremendous” and “beautiful.”</span></p><p style="font-style: normal; margin: 0px 0px 18px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent;">Those exaggerations suggest more than hyperbole or the self-indulgent use of language. When he<span> </span><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/10/04/17-issues-that-donald-trump-knows-better-than-anyone-else-according-to-donald-trump/" style="text-decoration: underline; outline: none; white-space: pre-wrap; overflow-wrap: break-word;">claims</a><span> </span>he “knows more about ISIS than the generals,” “knows more about renewables than any human being on Earth” or that nobody knows the U.S. system of government better than he does, he’s using the rhetoric of fascism.</p><p style="font-style: normal; margin: 0px 0px 18px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent;">As the aforementioned historian Richard J. Evans writes in<span> </span><em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent; font-style: italic;">The Third Reich in Power</em>:</p><blockquote style="margin: 0px 0px 18px; padding: 9px 18px 12px; border-width: 0px 0px 0px 8px; border-top-style: initial; border-right-style: initial; border-bottom-style: initial; border-left-style: solid; border-top-color: initial; border-right-color: initial; border-bottom-color: initial; border-left-color: rgb(232, 232, 232); border-image: initial; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent; quotes: " clear="clear" both="both" text-align="text-align" left="left" text-rendering="text-rendering" optimizelegibility="optimizelegibility"><p style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent;"><span style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent;">“The German language became a language of superlatives, so that everything the regime did became the best and the greatest, its achievements unprecedented, unique, historic and incomparable …. The language used about Hitler … was shot through and through with religious metaphors; people ‘believed in him,’ he was the redeemer, the savior, the instrument of Providence, his spirit lived in and through the German nation…. Nazi institutions domesticated themselves [through the use of a language] that became an unthinking part of everyday life.”</span></p></blockquote><p style="font-style: normal; margin: 0px 0px 18px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent;">Sound familiar?</p><p style="font-style: normal; margin: 0px 0px 18px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent;">Under the Trump regime, memories inconvenient to his authoritarianism are now demolished in the domesticated language of superlatives so the future can be shaped to become indifferent to the crimes of the past.</p><p style="font-style: normal; margin: 0px 0px 18px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent;">Trump’s endless daily tweets, his recklessness, his adolescent disdain for a measured response, his unfaltering anti-intellectualism and his utter ignorance of history work in the United States. Why? Because they not only cater to what<span> </span><a href="https://www.salon.com/2017/12/19/author-brian-klaas-is-trump-an-aspiring-despot-or-a-bumbling-showman-yes/" style="text-decoration: underline; outline: none; white-space: pre-wrap; overflow-wrap: break-word;">historian Brian Klaas refers to as</a>“the tens of millions of Americans who have authoritarian or fascist leanings,” they also enable what he calls Trump’s attempt at “mainstreaming fascism.”</p><p style="font-style: normal; margin: 0px 0px 18px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent;">The language of fascism revels in forms of theatre that mobilize fear, hatred and violence. Author<span> </span><a href="http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/43017-how-a-culture-of-fear-helped-propel-trump-into-the-white-house" style="text-decoration: underline; outline: none; white-space: pre-wrap; overflow-wrap: break-word;">Sasha Abramsky</a><span> </span>is on target in claiming that Trump’s words amount to more than empty slogans.</p><p style="font-style: normal; margin: 0px 0px 18px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent;">Instead, his language comes “with consequences, and they legitimize bigotries and hatreds long harbored by many but, for the most part, kept under wraps by the broader society.”</p><p style="font-style: normal; margin: 0px 0px 18px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent;">Surely, the<span> </span><a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-islam-muslim-islamophobia-worse-911-says-leader-a8113686.html" style="text-decoration: underline; outline: none; white-space: pre-wrap; overflow-wrap: break-word;">increase in hate crimes</a><span> </span>during Trump’s first year of his presidency testifies to the truth of Abramsky’s argument.</p><h2 style="font-style: normal; margin: 0px 0px 12px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; font-weight: bold;">Fighting Trump’s fascist language</h2><p style="font-style: normal; margin: 0px 0px 18px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent;">The history of fascism teaches us that language operates in the service of violence, desperation and troubling landscapes of hatred, and carries the potential for inhabiting the darkest moments of history.</p><p style="font-style: normal; margin: 0px 0px 18px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent;">It erodes our humanity, and makes too many people numb and silent in the face of ideologies and practices that are hideous acts of ethical atrocity.</p><p style="font-style: normal; margin: 0px 0px 18px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent;">Trump’s language, like that of older fascist regimes, mutilates contemporary politics, empathy and serious moral and political criticism, and makes it more difficult to criticize dominant relations of power.</p><p style="font-style: normal; margin: 0px 0px 18px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent;">His fascistic language also fuels the rhetoric of war, toxic masculinity, white supremacy, anti-intellectualism and racism. But it’s not his alone.</p><p style="font-style: normal; margin: 0px 0px 18px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent;">It is the language of a nascent fascism that has been brewing in the United States for some time. It is a language that is comfortable viewing the world as a combat zone, a world that exists to be plundered and a view of those deemed different as a threat to be feared, if not eliminated.</p><p style="font-style: normal; margin: 0px 0px 18px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent;">A new language aimed at fighting Trump’s romance with fascism must make power visible, uncover the truth, contest falsehoods and create a formative and critical culture that can nurture and sustain collective resistance to the oppression that has overtaken the United States, and increasingly many other countries.</p><p style="font-style: normal; margin: 0px 0px 18px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent;">No form of oppression can be overlooked. And with that critical gaze must emerge a critical language, a new narrative and a different story about what a socialist democracy will look like in the United States.</p><h2 style="font-style: normal; margin: 0px 0px 12px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; font-weight: bold;">Reclaiming language as a force for good</h2><p style="font-style: normal; margin: 0px 0px 18px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent;">There is also a need to strengthen and expand the reach and power of established public spheres, such as higher education and the critical media, as sites of critical learning.</p><p style="font-style: normal; margin: 0px 0px 18px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent;">We must encourage artists, intellectuals, academics and other cultural workers to talk, educate, make oppression visible and challenge the common-sense vocabulary of<span> </span><a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/casino-capitalism-trump-style_us_59c9127ae4b0cdc77332f26a" style="text-decoration: underline; outline: none; white-space: pre-wrap; overflow-wrap: break-word;">casino capitalism,</a><span> </span>white supremacy and fascism.</p><p style="font-style: normal; margin: 0px 0px 18px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent;">Language is not simply an instrument of fear, violence and intimidation; it is also a vehicle for critique, civic courage and resistance.</p><p style="font-style: normal; margin: 0px 0px 18px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent;">A critical language can<span> </span><a href="https://medium.com/quote-of-the-week/american-politics-and-the-crystallization-of-totalitarian-practices-464e1f02f514#.fyuncour9" style="text-decoration: underline; outline: none; white-space: pre-wrap; overflow-wrap: break-word;">guide us</a><span> </span>in our thinking about the relationship between older elements of fascism and how such practices are emerging in new forms.</p><p style="font-style: normal; margin: 0px 0px 18px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent;">Without a faith in intelligence, critical education and the power to resist, humanity will be powerless to challenge the threat that fascism and right-wing populism pose to the world.</p><p style="font-style: normal; margin: 0px 0px 18px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent;">Those of us willing to fight for a just political and economic society need to formulate a new language and fresh narratives about freedom, the power of collective struggle, empathy, solidarity and the promise of a real socialist democracy.</p><p style="font-style: normal; margin: 0px 0px 18px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent;">We would do well to heed the words of the great Nobel Prize-winning novelist, J.M. Coetzee,<span> </span><a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/12/21/lies/" style="text-decoration: underline; outline: none; white-space: pre-wrap; overflow-wrap: break-word;">who states in a work of fiction</a><span> </span>that “there will come a day when you and I will need to be told the truth, the real truth ….no matter how hard it may be.”</p><p style="font-style: normal; margin: 0px 0px 18px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent;">Democracy, indeed, can only survive with a critically informed and engaged public attentive to a language in which truth, rather than lies, become the currency of citizenship.</p></div></div></div></div></div><div style=""><font style=""><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
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</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">d'souza tries to make hitler leftist b/c he hated jewsish banks etc?</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px;"></p></div></div></div></div></div></div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/donald-trump-brett-kavanaugh-and-path-neoliberal-fascism">https://www.alternet.org/donald-trump-brett-kavanaugh-and-path-neoliberal-fascism</a></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</div><div><b>Donald Trump, Brett Kavanaugh and the Path to Neoliberal Fascism</b></div><div><b>
</b></div><div>Even in the darkest of times we have the right to some illumination. -- Hannah Arendt</div><div>By Henry A. Giroux / Salon October 10, 2018, 2:10 AM GMT</div><div>
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</div><div>The threads of a general political and ideological crisis run deep in American history, and with each tweet and policy decision Donald Trump pushes the United States closer to a full-fledged fascist state. His words sting, but his policies can kill people. Trump’s endless racist taunts, dehumanizing expressions of misogyny, relentless attacks on all provisions of the social state and ongoing contempt for the rule of law serve to normalize a creeping fascist politics. Moreover, his criminogenic disdain for any viable sense of civic and moral responsibility gives new meaning to an ethos of selfishness and a culture of cruelty, if not terror, that has run amok. Yet it is becoming more difficult for the mainstream media and pundits to talk about fascism as a looming threat in the United States in spite of the fact that, as Michelle Goldberg observes, for some groups, such as "undocumented immigrants, it's already here.”</div><div>
</div><div>The smell of death is everywhere under this administration. The erosion of public values and the rule of law is now accompanied by a developing state of emergency with regards to a looming global environmental catastrophe. An ecological disaster due to human-caused climate change has accelerated under the Trump administration and appears imminent. Trump’s ongoing attempt to pollute the planet through his rollback of environmental protections will result in the deaths of thousands of children who suffer from asthma and other lung problems. Moreover, his privatized and punitive approach to health care will shorten the lives of millions of poor people, uninsured youth, undocumented immigrants, the unemployed and the elderly. His get-tough "law and order" policies will result in more police violence against blacks while his support for the arms industry, military budget and gun laws will accelerate the death of the marginalized both at home and abroad. Under the Trump regime all bets are off regarding the sustainability of democracy.</div><div>
</div><div>The appointment of Brett Kavanaugh, a right-wing ideologue, to the U.S. Supreme Court, in spite of allegations of sexually assaulting at least two women, further reveals both the dangerous politicization of the judicial nomination process and the authoritarian politics that now dominate American society. The control of the court by ideological fundamentalists has been a long-sought goal of Republican Party extremists. And now the American people, especially women, the poor and people of color, will pay a terrible price for Kavanaugh’s appointment. The Kavanaugh affair is a symptom of the deeper roots of a fascist politics at work in American society. Kavanaugh is not only a blatant symbol of a toxic masculinity, he is also emblematic of a boisterous and unchecked expression of ruling-class white privilege. This is especially true given the racist double standard that characterizes America’s justice system. As Amanda Klonsky put it in the Chicago Sun Times:</div><div> </div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>Why does Judge Brett Kavanaugh, accused of sexual assault, feel entitled to a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court of the United States, while my formerly incarcerated students — often jailed for crimes like battery from fistfights — are left unemployed, sometimes for life, banned from even the most entry-level work? That Kavanaugh is under consideration for appointment to the Supreme Court at all throws the racist double standard in our justice system into sharp relief. There is one standard of behavior for African-American and Latinx young people, who are harshly punished for crimes in adolescence, and quite another for wealthy white boys, who can be accused of sexual assault and still go on to be nominated to serve on the most important court in the world.</div><div>
</div><div>Kavanaugh perfectly aligns with Trump’s racism and his decisions on matters of civil rights and racial justice will more than likely further reproduce a long legacy of white racism and state violence in the United States. This is especially tragic and ominous given that Trump’s contempt for people of color appears boundless and legitimates the notion of whiteness as a site of terror. He slanders and humiliates black athletes, black women and any other person of color who calls him on his racism and white supremacist views. Moreover, his thuggery in support of police brutality and mass incarceration further accelerates the growth of a racialized carceral state.</div><div>
</div><div>Most recently, in a brutish and deeply troubling display of misogyny, Trump viciously mocked the testimony of Christine Blasey Ford, who accused Kavanaugh of a sexual assault. Drawing laughter and shouts from a crowd in Southaven, Mississippi, Trump went further, following up his vile remarks by stating that men were the real victims of the #MeToo movement because they were being unfairly accused of sexual harassment, and that many males would lose their jobs. It is hard to miss the irony of this statement coming from a man who has been accused of sexual misconduct by at least 22 women and has been caught on tape bragging about grabbing women by the crotch. What is worth noting here is not only his indifference to the shocking levels violence waged against women but also the degree to which misogyny has always been endemic to fascist politics.</div><div>
</div><div>While it is easy for the mainstream press to go after those politicians who remain silent in the face of Trump’s sexism and racism, there is little interest in situating his misogyny and white supremacy within a neoliberal fascist politics that is aligned with neo-Nazis, white nationalists and other militant groups who argue for racial cleansing and increasingly commit violent acts against people of color who oppose their views. Trump’s politics are endlessly whitewashed in the mainstream media, which too often views his policy decisions more as the infantilized outbursts of an impetuous tweeting teenage bully rather than as a shock and threat to the laws and values that constitute a democracy currently in peril. The mainstream press argues that Trump’s rhetoric is divisive, humiliating and hateful, but rarely is it associated with the rhetoric of fascist politics or for that matter with the power of moneyed interests of the financial elite.</div><div>
</div><div>This evasion is all the more frightening since Trump, not to mention most of his critics, seem unaware of the accumulated terror unleashed by past fascists. Trump appears reckless when implementing policies that echo faintly the genocidal practices used by Nazis in their concentration camps, such as separating children from their undocumented parents and putting both in caged prisons. While Trump has not gassed tens of thousands of children as Hitler did, putting children in cages suggests crossing a moral and political line that opens the door to even more extreme forms of barbarism. -At the same time, his anti-democratic proclivities are on display almost every day. For instance, Trump’s open infatuation with demagogues such as Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un is matched only by his consistent vilification of America’s democratic allies. One clear cut example is his ludicrous claim that trade wars with Canada are justified because Canada represents a threat to America’s national security. The latter is uttered at the same time that Trump calls Kim Jong-un terrific.</div><div>
</div><div>Trump has not only normalized racism in the United States and given new legitimacy to the hate filled rants and ideologies of neo-Nazis and white nationalists, he has deepened the crisis of democracy by elevating emotion over reason and turning civic illiteracy into a virtue. Ignorance turns deadly when embraced by the powerful and removed from any notion of the material consequences it has for those who have to suffer from a practices of abandonment, terminal exclusion, and state violence.</div><div>
</div><div>State-sanctioned ignorance is more than fodder for late night comedy shows, it also provides the psychological conditions for certain individuals and groups to associate “pollution” and disposability with what Richard A. Etlin calls “a biologically racialist worldview, which divides the human race according to the dichotomy of the pure and impure, the life-enhancing and the life-polluting.” This is a language mobilized by the energies of the ethically dead, and echoes strongly with the anti-Semitism that was at the center of the genocidal policies of the Third Reich. This poisonous anti-Semitic discourse has returned with a vengeance in Hungary, Poland and a number of other countries now moving towards fascism. It is also surfacing among alt-right and other neo-Nazi groups in the United States. Unsurprisingly, there are also coded hints of it in Trump’s language. Trump is more careful with his displays of anti-Semitism, especially given the uproar that followed his comments stating that there were decent people marching with neo-Nazis in Charlottesville. </div><div>
</div><div>One of the most revealingly ideological comments made by Trump during the Kavanaugh affair was contained in a tweet aimed at the women who had confronted Sen. Jeff Flake and other Republican senators over their support for Kavanaugh. Trump stated that “the very rude elevator screamers are paid professionals only looking to make Senators look bad. Don’t fall for it. Also, look at all the professional made identical signs. Paid for by Soros and others. These are not signs made in the basement from love.” </div><div>
</div><div>Trump exposed more than the level of political corruption and hatred of women that now defines American politics, he also appropriated an anti-Semitic discourse to discredit both the women to whom he is referring and dissent in general. Many conservative pundits and commentators have also followed Trump’s lead and claimed that protesters were paid by George Soros. This display of anti-Semitism directed at Soros is not new for Trump. As Greg Sargent pointed out in the Washington Post, this vile piece of anti-Semitism directed at Soros played a “starring role in Trump’s 2016 closing ad, which was the perfect expression of this type of exclusionary populist demagoguery.” Not only do Trump’s comments and the earlier ad mirror anti-Semitic propaganda from the 1930s, it also legitimates the vicious attacks on Soros in a number of Eastern European countries, including Poland, Romania and Serbia. But it is President Viktor Orbán of Hungary who is leading the pack in his attack on Soros as part of a larger attack on Jews.</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>Report Advertisement</div><div>Trump’s coded endorsement of Orbán’s attack on Jews, whom he appears to blame for all of Hungary’s problems, is particularly repellent given its viciousness and the horrors of the past it echoes. For instance, recalling the genocidal rhetoric aimed at Jews in the past by the Nazis, Orban commemorated the 170th anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution of 1848 by stating the following (without mentioning Jews directly):</div><div>
</div><div>They do not fight directly, but by stealth; they are not honorable, but unprincipled; they are not national, but international; they do not believe in work, but speculate with money; they have no homeland, but feel the whole world is theirs. They are not generous but vengeful and always attack the heart — especially if it is red, white and green [the colors of the Hungarian flag]. </div><div>
</div><div>Prior to the recent election in Hungary, Orbán plastered images of George Soros throughout the country. Soros is both a Hungarian citizen and a Jew, and was a perfect symbol for Orbán to vilify in his efforts to take over the country. Soros is dangerous to Orbán because of his promotion of the open society, open borders, cosmopolitanism, human rights and democracy. That he is Jewish made it easier for Orbán to attack him personally without having to openly express his hatred of democracy.</div><div>
</div><div>That Trump would use a reference taken out of the poisonous playbook of this fascist leader is both revealing and dangerous. Not only because such rhetoric indexes a fascist politics and the potential dangers that follow, but also because of the silence that surrounded Trump’s reference to Soros, with all of its toxic implications. Even if Trump is not consciously anti-Semitic, he should know better since, as journalist Ron Kampeas points out, his comments traffic “in conspiracies of control and destruction identified with classical anti-Semitism.” Trump’s consistently coded support for an ideology embraced by neo-Nazis and other white nationalists is not new. It is the discourse of blood and soil that propelled an emotionally charged language of hate, reification, dehumanization and eventually mass murder. Forgetting this history is less an act of historical ignorance than a complicitous practice of reviving the conditions that give birth to the horrors of the past.</div><div>
</div><div>Trump’s defenders might argue that Trump is not an anti-Semite because two of his former lawyers were Jewish — Roy Cohn and Michael Cohen. Moreover, his daughter converted to Judaism. This may be true, and Trump may just be so stupid to know and not to care when he is producing an anti-Semitic stereotype, and so ignorant of history that he can’t put together the threat of rising anti-Semitism in Europe and the history of genocide that it produced. But if we are to believe writers such as Michael Wolff and Bob Woodward who have chronicled the post-2016 chaos in the White House that Trump has overt white supremacists such as Stephen Miller making decisions for him, the Kavanaugh hearings may signal a danger that far exceeds the misogyny and Vichy-type silence revealed by the spineless Republican Party and the Trump administration.</div><div>
</div><div>Mitch McConnell and the other gravediggers of democracy in the Congress could care less about Trump’s crude language, governing style, character or potential revelations of criminal acts. They have no qualms or reservations about supporting a fascist politics as long as they get what they want from their alliance with the racists, xenophobic ultra-nationalists and white nationalists. According to historian Christopher R. Browning, the Republican Party, in particular has received a big payoff in selling its soul to Trump’s worldview:</div><div>
</div><div>[H]uge tax cuts for the wealthy, financial and environmental deregulation, the nominations of two conservative Supreme Court justices (so far) and a host of other conservative judicial appointments, and a significant reduction in government-sponsored health care (though not yet the total abolition of Obamacare they hope for). Like Hitler’s conservative allies, McConnell and the Republicans have prided themselves on the early returns on their investment in Trump.</div><div>
</div><div>The Kavanaugh appointment exposes more than what commentators such as Robert Reich and historians such as Timothy Snyder view as alarming and frightening parallels between the United States and Hitler’s regime, or what the Yale historian Jason Stanley calls an accelerating fascist politics. Their analyses seem overly cautious. There is little doubt that Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Supreme Court is an abomination not only because of his alleged sexual assaults, but his equally revealing and right-wing ideological rant against the left, Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party during his Senate hearing. More ominous, when comprehended within the context of an emerging fascist politics, is the recognition that his appointment is part of a broader effort on the part of the Trump administration to radically modify the rule of law and individual rights, further depriving them of any meaning and cutting them off from any viable humanitarian standards.</div><div>
</div><div>We are in the midst of an American version of fascism, which is not to suggest a fascism modeled exclusively after Nazi Germany. Fascist rhetoric has become normalized in the United States, white terror is no longer coded, and ultra-nationalism has merged into a love affair between the U.S. and a host of ruthless dictators. Of course the U.S. has a long tradition of civil liberties but it also has a long tradition of lawlessness, and the latter is now winning out. It thrives under the guise of a neoliberalism that has fueled for the past 40 years vast inequalities in wealth and power, producing a level of political and economic corruption that signals not just a hatred of democracy, but a unique style of American fascism. </div><div>
</div><div>The Kavanaugh hearings should serve to remind us that we live in increasingly dangerous times. It is important to remember that fascism begins not with violence, police assaults or mass killings, but with language. Not only have we learned this from the rise of fascism in the 1930s in Europe but also in the current historical moment -- a moment in which lawlessness, misogyny, white nationalism and racism are resurgent all over the globe. If fascism begins with language so does a strong resistance willing to challenge it.</div><div>
</div><div>This is all the more reason for individuals, institutions, labor unions, educators, young people and others not to be silent in the face of the current fascist turn in the United States and elsewhere. In the face of the hatred, racism, misogyny and deceit that have become part of a state-sanctioned public dialogue, no one can afford to look away, fail to speak out, and risk silence. This is especially true at a time when history is used to hide rather than illuminate the past, when it becomes difficult to translate private issues into larger systemic considerations and people willingly allow themselves to be both seduced and trapped into spectacles of violence, cruelty and authoritarian impulses. Under such circumstances, the terror of the unforeseen becomes all the more ominous.</div><div>
</div><div>Any viable notion of change will have to reject the notion that capitalism and democracy are synonymous and that participatory democracy begins and ends with elections. Doing so is crucial to undoing the myth that political power is separate from economic power -- a myth that upholds the false assumption that whatever problems currently exist under the Trump administration are endemic to Trump’s alleged mental health, ignorance and other character flaws. In actuality, the fascist politics now shaping the United States have been in the making for decades and are systemic to neoliberal capitalism and deeply entwined with iniquitous relations of power. Rob Urie illuminates the issue, particularly in relation to class divisions. He writes:</div><div>
</div><div>The class relations of American political economy are antithetical to the notion of a unified public interest. The point isn’t to suggest that this or that authoritarian leader isn’t authoritarian, but rather to sketch in the political backdrop to argue that the lived experience of social, economic and political repression is lived experience, not academic theories or bourgeois fantasies. The circumstances of investment bankers stripping assets, industrialists relocating factories built by workers to low-wage locations and tech ‘pioneers’ using licenses and patents to extract economic rents is systemically ‘authoritarian’ in the sense that democratic consent to do so was neither sought nor given.</div><div>
</div><div>It is time for a broad-based social movement to reject finance capitalism, embrace education as central to a politics willing to fight to persuade people to reclaim their sense of agency and push at the frontiers of the ethical imagination, connect what they learn to addressing social issues, taking risks and challenging the destructive narratives that are seeping into the public realm and becoming normalized. Any dissatisfaction with injustice necessitates combining the demands of moral witnessing with the pedagogical power of persuasion and the call to address the tasks of emancipation. We need individuals and social movements willing to disturb the normalization of a fascist politics, and to oppose racist, sexist and neoliberal orthodoxy. As Robin D.G. Kelley observes, we cannot confuse catharsis and momentary outrage for revolution. In a time of increasing tyranny, resistance appears to have lost its usefulness as a call to action.</div><div>
</div><div>For instance, the novelist Teju Cole has argued that “‘resistance’ is back in vogue, and it describes something rather different now. The holy word has become unexceptional. Faced with a vulgar, manic and cruel regime, birds of many different feathers are eager to proclaim themselves members of the Resistance. It is the most popular game in town.” Cole's critique appears to be borne out by the fact that the most unscrupulous of liberal and conservative politicians, such as Madeline Albright, Hillary Clinton and even James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence, are now claiming that they have joined the resistance against Trump fascist politics.</div><div>
</div><div>Even Michael Hayden, the former NSA chief and CIA director under George W. Bush, has joined the ranks of Albright and Clinton in condemning Trump as a proto-fascist. Writing in the New York Times, Hayden chastised Trump as a serial liar and in doing so quoted the renowned historian Timothy Snyder, who stated in reference to the Trump regime that “Post-Truth is pre-fascism.” The irony here is hard to miss. Not only did Hayden head Bush’s illegal National Security Agency warrantless wiretapping program while head of the NSA, he also lied repeatedly about his role in Bush’s sanction and implementation of state torture in Afghanistan and Iraq.</div><div>
</div><div> This tsunami of banal resistance was on full display when an anonymous member of the Trump’s inner circle published an op-ed in the New York Times claiming that he or she and other senior officials were part of “the resistance within the Trump administration.” The author was quick to qualify the statement by insisting such resistance had nothing to do with “the popular ‘resistance’ of the left.” To prove the point, it was noted by the author that the members of this insider resistance liked some of Trump’s policies such as “effective deregulation, historic tax reform, a more robust military and more.” Combining resistance with the endorsements of such reactionary policies reads like fodder for late-night comics.</div><div>
</div><div>The Democratic Party now defines itself as the most powerful political force opposing Trump’s fascist politics. What it has forgotten is the role it has played under the Clinton and Obama presidencies in creating the economic, political and social conditions for Trump’s election in 2016. Such historical and political amnesia allows them to make the specious claim that they are now the party of resistance. Resistance in these instances has little to do with civic courage, a defense of human dignity, and the willingness to not just bear witness to the current injustices but to struggle to overcome them. Of course, the issue is not to disavow resistance as much as to redefine it as inseparable from fundamental change that calls for the overthrow of capitalism itself.</div><div>
</div><div>While the call to resist neoliberal fascism is to be welcomed, it has to be interrogated and not aligned with individuals and ideological forces that helped put in place the racist, economic, religious and educational forces that helped produce it. What all of these calls to resistance have in common is a opposition to Trump rather than to the conditions that created him. Trump’s election and the Kavanaugh affair make clear that what is needed is not only a resistance to the established order of neoliberal capitalism but a radical restructuring of society itself. That is not about resisting oppression in its diverse forms but overcoming it — in short, changing it.</div><div>
</div><div>While it is crucial to condemn the Kavanaugh hearings for their blatant disregard for the Constitution, expressed hatred of women, and symbolic expression and embrace of white privilege and power, it is necessary to enlarge our criticism to include the system that made the Kavanaugh appointment possible. Kavanaugh represents not only the deep-seated rot of misogyny but also, as Grace Lee Boggs has stated, “a government of, by, and for corporate power.” We need to see beyond the white nationalists and neo-Nazis demonstrating in the streets in order to recognize the terror of the unforeseen, the terror that is state sanctioned, and hides in the shadows of power.</div><div>
</div><div>Such a struggle means more than engaging material relations of power or the economic architecture of neoliberal fascism, it also means taking on the challenge of producing the tools and tactics necessary to rethink and create the conditions for a new kind of subjectivity as the basis for a new kind of democratic socialist politics. We need a comprehensive politics that brings together various single-interest movements so that the threads that connect them become equally as important as the particular forms of oppression that define their singularity. In addition, we need intellectuals willing to combine intellectual complexity with clarity and accessibility, embrace the high-stakes investment in persuasion, and cross disciplinary borders in order to theorize and speak with what Rob Nixon calls the “cunning of lightness” and a “methodological promiscuity” that keeps language attuned to the pressing claims for justice.</div><div>
</div><div>Trump has surfaced the dire anti-democratic threats that have been expanding under an economic system stripped of any political, social and ethical responsibility. This is a form of neoliberal fascism that has redrawn and expanded the parameters of what after the genocidal practices and hate-filled politics of the 1930s and 40s in Europe was once thought impossible to happen again. The threat has returned and is now on our doorsteps, and it needs to be named, exposed, and overcome by those who believe that the stakes are much too high to look away and not engage in organized political and pedagogical struggles.</div><div>
</div><div>II</div><div>
</div><div>Hannah Arendt once wrote that terror was the essence of totalitarianism. She was right and we are now witnessing the dystopian visions of the new authoritarians who now trade in fear, hatred, demonization, violence and racism. This will be Trump’s legacy. It is easy to despair in times of tyranny, but it is much more productive to be politically and morally outraged and to draw upon such anger as a source of hope and action. Without hope even in the most dire of times, there is no possibility for resistance, dissent and struggle. </div><div>
</div><div>A critical consciousness is the prerequisite for informed agency and hope is the basis for individual and collective resistance. Moreover, when combined with collective action, hope translates into a dynamic sense of possibility, enabling one to join with others for the long haul of fighting systemic forms of domination. Courage in the face of tyranny is a necessity and not an option and we can learn both from the past and the present about resistance movements and the power of civic courage and collective struggle and how such modes of resistance are emerging among a number of groups across a wide variety of landscapes.</div><div>
</div><div>What is crucial is the necessity of not facing such struggles alone, allowing ourselves to feel defeated in our isolation or giving in to the crippling neoliberal survival-of-the-fittest ethos that dominates everyday relations. Radical politics begins when one refuses to face one’s fate alone, learns about the workings and mechanisms of power, and rejects the dominant mantra of social isolation. </div><div>
</div><div>There is strength in numbers. One of the most important things we can do to sustain a sense of courage and dignity is to imagine a new social order. That is, we must constantly work to revive a radical political imaginary by talking with others in order to rethink what a new politics and society would look like, one that is fundamentally anti-capitalist and dedicated to creating the conditions for new democratic political and social formations. This suggests creating new public spheres that make such a dialogue and notion of solidarity possible while simultaneously struggling against the forces that gave rise to Trump, particularly those that suggest that totalitarian forms are still with us.</div><div>
</div><div>As I have stressed, rethinking politics anew also suggests the possibility of building broad-based alliances in order to create a robust economic and political agenda that connects democracy with a serious effort to interrogate the sources and structures of inequality, racism and authoritarianism that now plague the United States. This points to opening up new lines of understanding, dialogue and radical empathy. It means, as the philosopher George Yancy suggests, learning “how to love with courage.”</div><div>
</div><div>A nonviolent movement for democratic socialism does not need vanguards, political purity or the seductions of ideological orthodoxy. On the contrary, it needs an informed and energized politics without guarantees, one that is open to new ideas, self-reflection and understanding. Instead of ideologies of certainty, unchecked moralism and a politics of shaming, we need to understand the conditions that make it possible for people to internalize forms of domination, and that means interrogating forgotten histories and existing pedagogies of oppression. Recent polls indicate that two-thirds of Americans say this is the lowest point in American politics that they can recall. Such despair offers the possibility of a pedagogical intervention, one that provides a political opening to create a massive movement for organized struggle in the United States.</div><div>
</div><div>Rebecca Solnit has rightly argued that while we live in an age of despair, hope is a gift we that we cannot surrender because it amplifies the power of alternative visions, offers up stories in which we can imagine the unimaginable, enables people to “move from depression to outrage,” and positions people to take seriously what they are for and what they are against. This suggests trying to understand how the very processes of learning constitute the political mechanisms through which identities — individual and collective — are shaped, desired, mobilized and take on the worldly practices of autonomy, self-reflection and self-determination as part of a larger struggle for economic and social justice. </div><div>
</div><div>First, it is crucial to develop a language in which it becomes possible to imagine a future much different from the present, one that refuses to privatize hope with a crude individualism. Second, it is crucial to develop a discourse of critique and possibility that rejects the ongoing normalizing of existing relations of domination and control while simultaneously repudiating the notion that capitalism and democracy are synonymous. It would be wise to heed the words of the late science-fiction visionary Ursula K. Le Guin when she wrote, “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Nay, human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.”</div><div>
</div><div>Third, it is imperative to reject the notion that all problems are individual issues and can only be solved as a matter of individual action and responsibility. This is one of neoliberalism’s most powerful ideological tenets, working to make the personal the only politics that matters while detaching private troubles from the wider world. All three of these assumptions serve to depoliticize people and erase both what it means to make power visible and to organize collectively to address such problem. Fourth, there is a need, I believe, for a discourse that is both historical, relational and comprehensive. Memory matters both in terms of reclaiming lost narratives of struggle and for assessing visions, strategies and tactics that still hold enormous possibilities in the present.</div><div>
</div><div>Developing a relational discourse means connecting the dots around issues that are often viewed in isolated terms. For instance, one cannot study the attack on public schools and higher education as sutured internal issues that focus exclusively on the teaching methods and strategies. What is needed are analyses that link such attacks to the broader issue of inequality, the dynamics of casino capitalism and the pervasive racism active in promoting new forms of segregation both within and outside of schools.</div><div>
</div><div>A comprehensive politics is one that does at least two things. On the one hand, it tries to understand a plethora of problems from massive poverty to the despoiling of the planet within a broader understanding of politics. That is, it connects the dots among diverse forms of oppression. In this instance, the focus is on the totality of politics, one that focuses on the power relations of global capitalism, the rise of illiberal democracy, the archives of authoritarianism and the rise of financial capital. A totalizing view of oppression allows the development of a language that is capable of making visible the ideological and structural forces of the new forms of domination at work in the United States and across the globe. On the other hand, such a comprehensive understanding of politics makes it possible to bring together a range of crucial issues and movements so as to expand the range of oppressions while at the same time providing a common ground for these diverse groups to be able to work together in the interest of the common good and a broad struggle for democratic socialism. </div><div>
</div><div>Finally, any viable language of emancipation needs to develop a discourse of what Ron Aronson calls social hope. He writes:</div><div>
</div><div>Social hope, the disposition to act collectively to change a situation, entails that we act not blindly but with a sense of possibility. The cold stream demands that we prepare ourselves and assess the conditions under which we are operating. The hope of social movements calls for objective, clearheaded organization and action, and an appreciation of the circumstances in which we may be successful. This realistic stream of hope mingles with the visionary stream that motivates us; without both, there is no hope. Hope uniquely combines our longing, our own real intention, and our sense of potency with real possibility, the subjective and the objective.</div><div>
</div><div>Aronson is right in arguing that naming what is wrong in a society is important but it is not enough, because such criticism can sometimes be overpowering and lead to a paralyzing despair or, even worse, a crippling cynicism. Hope speaks to imagining a life beyond capitalism, and combines a realistic sense of limits with a lofty vision of demanding the impossible. As Ariel Dorfman has argued, progressives need a language that is missing from our political vocabulary, one that insists that “alternative worlds are possible, that they are within reach if we’re courageous enough, and smart enough, and daring enough to take control of our own lives.” Reason, justice, and change cannot blossom without hope because educated hope taps into our deepest experiences and longing for a life of dignity with others, a life in which it becomes possible to imagine a future that does not mimic the present.</div><div>
</div><div>I am not referring to a romanticized and empty notion of hope, but to a notion of informed social hope that faces the concrete obstacles and realities of domination but continues the ongoing task of realizing a future in which matters of justice, equality, freedom and joy matter. Casino capitalism is a toxin that has created a predatory class of unethical zombies who are producing dead zones of the imagination and massive ecologies of immiseration that even George Orwell could not have envisioned, while waging a fierce fight against the possibilities of a democratic future.</div><div>
</div><div>The time has come to develop a political language in which civic values, social responsibility and the institutions that support them become central to invigorating and fortifying a new era of civic imagination, a renewed sense of social agency and an impassioned international social movement with a vision, organization and set of strategies to challenge the neoliberal nightmare engulfing the planet. Such a strategy would have to revive the radical imagination and the task of thinking about a future without capitalism and oppression; launch a comprehensive education program to provide alternative narratives, memories and histories that enable the capacities for informed judgment, ethical responsibilities and civic courage; and last but not least create those alternative public spheres where a new conversation can be opened up about the creation of a new progressive and socialist political formation. As Karl Marx said, there is nothing to lose but our chains.</div><div>
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</font><div><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://www.truthdig.com/articles/anti-politics-and-the-plague-of-disorientation-welcome-to-the-age-of-trump/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">Philosopher Henry Giroux explains</a> the role of time in this moment of global economic, social and political crisis this way:</font></p><blockquote style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Maybe this is all understandable in a corporate-controlled neoliberal society that uses new communication technologies that erase history by producing a notion of time wedded to a culture of immediacy, speed, simultaneity and endless flows of fragmented knowledge. As Manuel Castells writes in "Communication Power," this is a form of “digital time” in which everything that happens only takes place in the present, a time that “has no past and no future.” Time is accelerated in this new information-saturated culture, and it also flattens out “experience, competence and knowledge,” and the capacity for informed judgment. Time has thus been transformed to provide the ideological support that neoliberal values and a fast-food, temp-worker economy require to survive.</font></p></blockquote><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">What then is the ideal year and final destination for Donald Trump and the right wing's time machine?</font></p><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="http://www.alternet.org/human-rights/why-are-us-universities-arming-themselves-grenade-launchers">http://www.alternet.org/human-rights/why-are-us-universities-arming-themselves-grenade-launchers</a></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Sending an ominous signal to student protest movements nationwide,<b> universities across the US are once again able to equip their police forces with castoff military gear, tying them ever more intimately into the military-industrial complex.</b></font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In August, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced at a Fraternal Order of Police convention that Program 1033 would resume providing ex-military equipment to police organizations, including university police departments.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Program 1033 has been running since the 1990s but was stopped two years ago by President Obama. Part of the program’s initial aim was for “<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/true-crime/wp/2017/08/27/trump-restores-program-sending-surplus-military-weapons-equipment-to-police/?utm_term=.32680269c828" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">use in drug enforcement by federal and state law enforcement</a>.” As we well know, the “war on drugs” has been an abysmal failure.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">As part of the program, already at least <a href="http://www.chronicle.com/article/On-Campus-Grenade-Launchers/148749" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">117 colleges and universities received surplus-military gear</a>.</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> At least 117 places of higher education felt they needed military gear. At least 117 educational institutions are now armed and armored. This is the state of higher education in the US.</span></font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Jen Day Shaw, associate vice president and dean of students at the University of Florida, <a href="http://www.chronicle.com/article/On-Campus-Grenade-Launchers/148749" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">told The Chronicle of Higher Education</a>, “For me, this is a cost savings for taxpayers.”</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Meanwhile, Michael Qualls, an associate professor of criminal justice at Fort Valley State University, <a href="http://www.chronicle.com/article/On-Campus-Grenade-Launchers/148749" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">said</a>, “If we continue on with the 1033 program, as those items become obsolete at the military level and if they become available, why not get ’em? It’s better to be prepared than not prepared.'” The flimsy — if paranoid — excuse for obtaining these items is boiled down to its purest essence: <em>Why not?</em></font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">What Universities Are Receiving</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The list of items that are included in these transfers includes things as mundane as gauze — yes, gauze — and some standard pickup trucks. The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee <a href="http://www.chronicle.com/article/On-Campus-Grenade-Launchers/148749" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">received</a> mundane items, such as four adapter sockets, two key set socket heads and fours shelves for food service. No one, I would guess, has any problem with a university owning these items.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">At the other end of the spectrum are armored vehicles. As part of the program, throughout the US, in total nine armored vehicles were exchanged — some being armored pickup trucks, and others being “</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Mine Resistant Vehicles.” MRAPS, as they’re known, were originally designed to withstand improvised explosive devices in Iraq and Afghanistan. The University of Florida was one of the recipients of an armored truck.</span></font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important;"><font style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);" size="4" face="Times New Roman">Across the country, numerous universities also received guns and ammunition. These include small arms (pistols) and rifles (M-14), as well as assault rifles (M-16). And two universities — Hinds Community College and University of Central Florida — obtained grenade launchers. For scale, the 2014 <a href="http://www.chronicle.com/article/On-Campus-Grenade-Launchers/148749" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">report</a> states that 930 guns were provided in total to 87 different universities.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This supply of military gear is part of the process of universities throughout the US taking on various policing roles outside of their buildings. At many universities, these roles addressed issues that fell under the label “public safety” — often mostly about alcohol. In the past 20 or 30 years, universities have begun having increasingly active, working police forces dedicated solely to policing the life and boundaries of the university. It is these organizations that are receiving these weapons and vehicles.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Concerns about this supply of military gear is exacerbated by the reality that many campus police organizations are privatized, leading to less oversight and accountability in many </span><a href="http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/30467-the-rise-of-privatized-policing-in-the-us-how-crisis-capitalism-created-crisis-cops" target="blank" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); text-decoration-line: none;">cases</a><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">A 2014 Vice article laid out the difficulties faced regarding the University of Chicago Police force, which is privatized, and the fact that these private police forces often have <a href="https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/4w7p8b/why-does-a-campus-police-department-have-jurisdiction-over-65000-chicago-residents-1112" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">“the legal status of a private police force and the powers of a public one.”</a></span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> How these privatized police forces are themselves policed is a critical question that is still, in many ways, unanswered.</span></font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Reinstituting Program 1033</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The assertion that this is about fiscal responsibility seeks to waylay the reality that arming police on campuses has a dramatic impact on the campus community, and an even greater impact on the engagement with communities outside of the student body. The increased policing in all communities is worrying. When on campus, this increased policing acts as a deterrent to student resistance, and as an obstacle between dialogue within and outside of the university communities.All of this is crucial, as President Trump and Jeff Sessions, making good on a campaign promise, stated that they would be resuming the transfer of weapons to police departments across the country. Jeff Sessions said, “We will not put superficial concerns above public safety…. The executive order the president will sign today will ensure that you can get the lifesaving gear that you need to do your job and send a strong message that we will not allow criminal activity, violence and lawlessness to become the new normal. And we will save taxpayer money in the meantime.”</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important;"><font style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);" size="4" face="Times New Roman">All of this is part of a broader pattern of police enforcement, and is simultaneously connected to unemployment. At this juncture in history, the system is producing not simply excess workers, as capitalism almost always has, but <a href="http://www.zero-books.net/books/falling-rate-learning-neoliberal-endgame" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">completely expendable</a> workers to a degree that it never has before. And in the US, we are asking many of these expendable workers to pay tens of thousands of dollars to attend university. The <a href="https://studentloanhero.com/student-loan-debt-statistics/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">average</a> student who graduated in 2016 is left with $37,172 in student loan debt.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important;"><font style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);" size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>It should not be surprising that the majority of the military gear requisitions went to states with the <a href="https://www.census.gov/prod/2013pubs/p60-247.pdf" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">highest poverty rate</a>.</b> High levels of poverty with increases in military-grade equipment is a recipe for disaster. These weapons are not only designed to keep students in line, they also perpetuate a racial and class divide between campus and community. This is especially true for urban campuses, where brand new multimillion-dollar buildings sit comfortably just inside the invisible walls of campus, while run-down houses and apartments sit precariously just outside. This invisible wall is where many of these police acquisitions will be utilized, as the wall is the most common route for squad cars on many campuses.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">University Campuses as Police Zones</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The US public should be outraged that colleges are undertaking a militarization of their campuses and that higher education administrators are actively supporting this process. Administrators are actively engaged in violently assaulting and bludgeoning our 17-22-year-olds, demonstrating to them the force of the state.</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> Henry Giroux has written previously about these changes in higher education in his prescient <a href="https://www.amazon.com/University-Chains-Confronting-Military-industrial-academic-Imagination/dp/1594514224/ref=mt_hardcover?encoding=UTF8&me=" target="_blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">book</a> “University in Chains: Confronting the Military-industrial-academic Complex.”</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> The continued supplying of weapons to universities now moves the connections between higher education and the military industrial complex even closer.</span></font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Academia is now becoming an even more direct part of the violent controlling arm of the neoliberal state apparatus by enmeshing itself in the military-industrial complex. Nowhere is this more clear than in the continuation of Program 1033, where “money savings” is used as a way of introducing the military to campus, and where administrators oversee the elaboration of a system whereby dissent is quelled by a show of direct force. For what else is an armored vehicle besides a show of force? Bringing the military to campus is providing students an education in living in a police state, and giving them a front-row seat in the classroom of neoliberal politics in the 21st century.</font></p></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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<a href="http://www.alternet.org/education/manufactured-illiteracy-and-miseducation-long-process-decline-led-president-donald-trump">http://www.alternet.org/education/manufactured-illiteracy-and-miseducation-long-process-decline-led-president-donald-trump</a>
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Education
<b>Manufactured Illiteracy and Miseducation: A Long Process of Decline Led to President Donald Trump</b>
A deep-rooted crisis in education, and a long cultural and political decline, is what got us here. There's hope!</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
By Henry A. Giroux / Salon
June 25, 2017, 1:16 PM GMT
Donald Trump’s ascendancy in American politics has made visible a plague of deep-seated civic illiteracy, a corrupt political system and a contempt for reason that has been decades in the making. It also points to the withering of civic attachments, the undoing of civic culture, the decline of public life and the erosion of any sense of shared citizenship. As Trump has galvanized his base of true believers in post-election demonstrations, the world is witnessing how a politics of bigotry and hate is transformed into a spectacle of demonization, division and disinformation. Under President Trump, the scourge of mid-20th century authoritarianism has returned not only in the menacing plague of populist rallies, fear-mongering, threats and humiliation, but also in an emboldened culture of war, militarization and violence that looms over society like a rising storm.
The reality of Trump’s election may be the most momentous development of the age because of its enormity and the shock it has produced. The whole world is watching, pondering how such a dreadful event could have happened. How have we arrived here? What forces have allowed education, if not reason itself, to be undermined as crucial public and political resources, capable of producing the formative culture and critical citizens that could have prevented such a catastrophe from happening in an alleged democracy? We get a glimpse of this failure of education, public values and civic literacy in the willingness and success of the Trump administration to empty language of any meaning, a practice that constitutes a flight from historical memory, ethics, justice and social responsibility.
Under such circumstances and with too little opposition, the Trump administration has taken on the workings of a dis-imagination machine, characterized by an utter disregard for the truth and often accompanied by the president’s tweet-storm of “primitive schoolyard taunts and threats.” In this instance, George Orwell’s famous maxim from “Nineteen Eighty-four,” “Ignorance is Strength,” materializes in the administration’s weaponized attempt not only to rewrite history but also to obliterate it. What we are witnessing is not simply a political project but also a reworking of the very meaning of education as both a crucial institution and a democratizing and empowering cultural force.
Truth is now viewed as a liability and ignorance a virtue. Under the reign of this normalized architecture of alleged common sense, literacy is regarded with disdain, words are reduced to data and science is confused with pseudo-science. All traces of critical thought appear only at the margins of the culture as ignorance becomes the primary organizing principle of American society. For instance, two-thirds of the American public believe that creationism should be taught in schools and a majority of Republicans in Congress do not believe that climate change is caused by human activity, making the U.S. the laughing stock of the world. Politicians endlessly lie, knowing that the public can be easily seduced by exhortations, emotional outbursts and sensationalism, all of which mimic the fatuous spectacle of celebrity culture and reality TV. Image-selling now entails lying on principle, making it easier for politics to dissolve into entertainment, pathology and a unique brand of criminality.
The corruption of both the truth and politics is abetted by the fact that much of the American public has become habituated to overstimulation and lives in an ever-accelerating overflow of information and images. Experience no longer has the time to crystallize into mature and informed thought. Opinion now trumps reason and evidence-based arguments. News has become entertainment and echoes reality rather than interrogating it. Popular culture revels in the spectacles of shock and violence. Defunded and corporatized, many institutions of public and higher education have been all too willing to make the culture of business the business of education, and this transformation has corrupted their mission.
As a result, many colleges and universities have been McDonald-ized as knowledge is increasingly viewed as a commodity, resulting in curricula that resemble a fast-food menu. In addition, faculty are subjected increasingly to a Walmart model of labor relations designed “to reduce labor costs and to increase labor servility.” Students are relegated to the status of customers and clients.
In addition, public education is under siege to an almost unprecedented degree. Both political parties have implemented reforms that “teach for the test,” weaken unions, deskill teachers, and wage a frontal assault on the imagination of students through disciplinary measures that amount to pedagogies of repression. Moreover, students marginalized by class and color find themselves in schools increasingly modeled after prisons. As more and more security guards and police personnel occupy schools, a wider range of student behaviors are criminalized, and students increasingly find themselves on a conveyor belt that has appropriately been described as the school-to-prison pipeline.
On a policy level, the Trump administration has turned its back on schools as public goods. How else to explain the president’s appointment of Betsy DeVos as secretary of education? DeVos, who has spent most of her career attempting to privatize public schools while acting as a champion for charter schools. It gets worse: As a religious Christian extremist, DeVos not only supports religious indoctrination in public schools but has gone so far as to argue that the purpose of public education is “to help advance God’s Kingdom.” Not exactly a policy that supports critical thinking, dialogue or analytical reasoning, or that understands schooling as a public good. DeVos is Trump’s gift to the billionaires, evangelicals, hedge fund managers and bankers, who view schools strictly as training and containment centers — and as sources of profit.
On a larger scale, the educational force of the wider culture has been transformed into a spectacle for violence and trivialized entertainment, and a tool for legitimating ignorance. Cultural apparatuses that extend from the mainstream media and the diverse platforms of screen culture now function as neoliberal modes of public pedagogy parading as entertainment or truthful news reporting. As “teaching machines,” these apparatuses — as C. Wright Mills once predicted — have become the engines of manufactured illiteracy while producing identities, desires and values compatible with the crudest market ideologies.
Under these circumstances, illiteracy becomes the norm and education becomes central to a version of zombie politics that functions largely to remove democratic values, social relations,and compassion from the ideology, policies and commanding institutions that now control American society. Welcome to the land of the walking dead.
I am not referring here to only the kind of anti-intellectualism that theorists such as Richard Hofstadter, Ed Herman, Noam Chomsky and Susan Jacoby have documented, however insightful their analyses might be. I am pointing to a more lethal form of manufactured illiteracy that has become a scourge and a political tool designed primarily to make war on language, meaning, thinking and the capacity for critical thought. Chris Hedges captures this demagogic attack on thoughtfulness in stating that “the emptiness of language is a gift to demagogues and the corporations that saturate the landscape with manipulated images and the idioms of mass culture.” Freedom now means removing one’s self from any sense of social responsibility so one can retreat into privatized orbits of self-indulgence, unbridled self-interest and the never-ending whirlwind of consumption.
This updated form of illiteracy does not simply constitute an absence of learning, ideas or knowledge. Nor can it be solely attributed to what has been called the “smartphone society.” On the contrary, it is a willful practice and goal used to actively depoliticize people and make them complicit with the political and economic forces that impose misery and suffering upon their lives. At the same time, illiteracy bonds people: It offers the pretense of a community bound by a willful denial of facts and its celebration of ignorance.
How else to explain the popular support for someone like Donald Trump who boldly proclaims his love for the “poorly educated”? Or, for that matter, the willingness of his followers to put up with his contemptuous and boisterous claim that science and evidence-based truths are “fake news,” his dismissal of journalists who hold power accountable as the opposition party, and his willingness to bombard the American public with an endless proliferation of peddled falsehoods that reveal his contempt for intellect, reason and truth.
What are we to make of the fact that a person who holds the office of the presidency has praised popular “rage addict” Alex Jones publicly, and thanked him for the role he played in his presidential election victory? Jones is a conspiracy trafficker who runs the website InfoWars. He has suggested that the 9/11 attacks were an “inside job” and that the massacre of children at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut was faked.
Illiteracy is no longer restricted to populations immersed in poverty with little access to quality education; nor does it only suggest the lack of proficient skills enabling people to read and write with a degree of understanding and fluency. More profoundly, illiteracy is also about refusing to act from a position of thoughtfulness, informed judgment, and critical agency.
Illiteracy has become a political weapon and form of political repression that works to render critical agency inoperable, and restages power as a mode of domination. Illiteracy in the service of violence now functions to depoliticize people by making it difficult for individuals to develop informed judgments, analyze complex relationships and draw upon a range of sources to understand how power works and how they might be able to shape the forces that bear down on their lives. As a depoliticizing force, illiteracy works to make people powerless, and reinforces their willingness to accept being governed rather than learn how to govern.
This mode of illiteracy now constitutes the modus operandi of a society that both privatizes and kills the imagination by poisoning it with falsehoods, consumer fantasies, data loops and the need for instant gratification. This is a mode of illiteracy and education that has no language for relating the self to public life, social responsibility or the demands of citizenship. It is important to recognize that the prevalence of such manufactured illiteracy is not simply about the failure of colleges and universities to create critical and active citizens. It is about an authoritarian society that eliminates public spheres that make thinking possible while imposing a culture of fear in which there is the looming threat that anyone who holds power accountable will be punished. At stake here is not only a crisis of education, memory, ethics and agency but a crisis that reaches into the very foundation of a strong democracy.
In the present moment, it becomes particularly important for progressives, educators and concerned citizens to protect and enlarge the formative cultures and public spheres that make democracy possible. The relentless attack on truth, honesty and the ethical imagination makes it all the more imperative for the public to think dangerously, especially in societies that appear increasingly amnesiac — that is, countries where forms of historical, political and moral forgetting are not only willfully practiced but celebrated. All of which becomes all the more threatening at a time when a country such as the United States has tipped over into a mode of authoritarianism that views critical thought as both a liability and a threat.
Not only is manufactured illiteracy obvious in the presence of a social order and government that collapses the distinction between the serious and frivolous, it is also visible in media platforms marked by the proliferation of anti-intellectual discourses among a range of politicians and anti-public intellectuals who are waging a war on science, reason and the legacy of the Enlightenment. How else to explain the present historical moment, with its collapse of civic culture and the future it cancels out? What is to be made of the assault on civic literacy and the institutions and conditions that produce an active citizenry at a time when massive self-enrichment and a gangster morality are operative at the highest reaches of the U.S. government, all of which serves to undermine the public realm as a space of freedom, liberty, dialogue and deliberative consensus?
One of the challenges facing the current generation of leftists, progressives and cultural workers is the need to address the question of what counts as education, and what it should accomplish in a society that is slipping into the dark night of authoritarianism. In a world in which there is an increasing abandonment of egalitarian and democratic impulses, what will it take to educate young people and the broader polity to challenge authority and hold power accountable? Such a vision suggests resurrecting a democratic project that provides the basis for imagining a life beyond a social order immersed in massive inequality and endless assaults on the environment, a social order that elevates war and militarization to the highest and most sanctified national ideals.
At issue here is the need for educators, progressives, artists and other cultural workers to recognize the power of education both in schools and the wider culture in creating the formative spaces being mobilized against the ideas of justice and democracy. At the same time, there is a need for the left and others to fight for those public spheres that offer alternative modes of identity, thinking and social relations that support democratic socialism and radical democracy.
At the very least, this requires that education be regarded as central to politics, and that cultural apparatuses such as the mainstream media, digital culture and Hollywood films be perceived as powerful teaching machines and not only as sources of information or entertainment. Such sites should be viewed as spheres of struggle that need to be removed from the control of the financial elite and corporations who use them as work stations for propagandizing a culture of vulgarity, self-absorption and commodification while eroding any sense of shared citizenship and civic culture.
There is an urgent political need for the left and progressives to understand and combat an authoritarian society that uses education to weaponize and trivialize the discourse, vocabularies, images and aural means of communication in a variety of cultural sites. Or, for that matter, to grasp that a market-driven discourse does not and cannot provide the intellectual, ethical and political tools for civic education and the expansion of the social imagination.
On the contrary, the pedagogical machinery of capitalism uses language and other modes of representation to relegate citizenship to the singular pursuit of unbridled self-interests, to legitimate shopping as the ultimate expression of one’s identity, to portray essential public services as reinforcing and weakening any viable sense of individual responsibility, and to organize society for the production of violence as the primary method of addressing a vast array of social problems.
One of the most serious challenges facing progressives, educators and diverse cultural workers is the task of grasping education as a crucial political tool that can be used to enhance the capacities of people to translate their hidden despair and private grievances into public transcripts. At best, such transcripts can be transformed into forms of public dissent or what might be called a moment of rupture, one that has important implications for public action in a time of impending tyranny and authoritarianism.
In taking up this project, individuals and cultural workers can attempt to create the conditions that give the wider public an opportunity to acquire the knowledge and courage necessary to make desolation and cynicism unconvincing and hope practical. In a world in which there is an increasing abandonment of egalitarian and democratic impulses, what will it take to educate young people and the broader polity to challenge authority and hold power accountable?
In the age of financial and political zombies, the ability of finance capitalism to cloak itself in a warped discourse of freedom and choice has been weakened. Its willingness to separate toxic economic, cultural and political policies from their social costs has ruptured neoliberalism’s ability to normalize its worldview. The contradictions between its promises and its harsh effects have become too visible as its poisonous policies have put millions out of work, turned many black and brown communities into war zones, destroyed public education, undermined the democratic mission of higher education, flagrantly pursued war as the greatest of national ideals, turned the prison system into a default institution for punishing minorities of race and class, pillaged the environment and blatantly imposed a new mode of racism under the fanciful notion of a post-racial society.
The crisis of capitalism and the production of widespread misery has opened up new political opportunities to reclaim education as a central element of politics and resistance. Education as it functions on multiple levels and through diverse registers matters. It is one of the most powerful sources for changing consciousness, desires and agency itself.
Pierre Bourdieu was right to argue that leftists “must recognize that the most important forms of domination are not only economic but also intellectual and pedagogical and lie on the side of belief and persuasion.” Bourdieu’s concerns about leftists underestimating “the pedagogical and symbolic dimensions of struggle” are more relevant today than ever, given the accelerated political merger of power, culture and everyday life.
Too often leftists and other progressives have focused on domination as mostly an economic or structural issue and in doing so have forgotten about the political role of education and consciousness-raising in providing a language and narrative in which people can recognize themselves, make identifications that speak to the conditions that bear down on them in new ways, and rethink the future so as not to mimic the present. Yet matters of subjectivity, identity and desire are not only central to politics, they are the crucial underpinning through which new theoretical and political horizons can be imagined and acted upon.
In an age in which authoritarianism is dismantling the foundations of democracy across the globe, the ideological and subjective conditions that make individual and collective modes of agency possible — and capable of engaging in powerful and broad-based movements of resistance — are no longer an option. They are a necessity.
Henry A. Giroux's most recent books include The Violence of Organized Forgetting and America's Addiction to Terrorism. A prolific writer and political commentator, he has appeared in a wide range of media, including The New York Times and Bill Moyers.
=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://truthout.org/articles/beyond-the-politics-of-the-big-lie-the-education-deficit-and-the-new-authoritarianism/">https://truthout.org/articles/beyond-the-politics-of-the-big-lie-the-education-deficit-and-the-new-authoritarianism/</a></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The </font></b><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>American public is suffering from an education deficit.</b> By this I
mean it exhibits a growing inability to think critically, question
authority, be reflective, weigh evidence, discriminate between reasoned
arguments and opinions, listen across differences and engage the
mutually informing relationship between private problems and broader
public issues. This growing political and cultural illiteracy is not
merely a problem of the individual, one that points to simple ignorance.
It is a collective and social problem that goes to the heart of the
increasing attack on democratic public spheres and supportive public
institutions that promote analytical capacities, thoughtful exchange and
a willingness to view knowledge as a resource for informed modes of
individual and social agency<b>. One of the major consequences of the
current education deficit and the pervasive culture of illiteracy that
sustains it is what I call the ideology of the big lie – which
propagates the myth that the free-market system is the only mechanism to
ensure human freedom and safeguard democracy.
</b></font></span><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The education deficit, along with declining levels of civic literacy,
is also part of the American public’s collective refusal to know – a
focused resistance on the part of many members of society to deal with
knowledge that challenges common sense, or to think reflectively about
facts and truths that are unsettling in terms of how they disturb some
of our most cherished beliefs, especially those that denounce the sins
of big government, legitimize existing levels of economic insecurity,
social inequality and reduced or minimal government intervention in the
field of welfare legislation.</span>”<a href="https://truthout.org/articles/beyond-the-politics-of-the-big-lie-the-education-deficit-and-the-new-authoritarianism/#a1">(1)</a>
The decline of civility and civic literacy in American society is a
political dilemma, the social production of which is traceable to a
broader constellation of forces deeply rooted in the shifting nature of
education and the varied cultural apparatuses that produce it, extending
from the new digital technologies and online journals to the mainstream
media of newspapers, magazines and television. Politics is now held
hostage to what the late Raymond Williams called the “force of permanent
education,” a kind of public pedagogy spread through a plethora of
teaching machines that are shaping how our most powerful ideas are
formed.<a href="https://truthout.org/articles/beyond-the-politics-of-the-big-lie-the-education-deficit-and-the-new-authoritarianism/#a2">(2)</a> For Williams, the concept of “permanent education” was a central political insight:</font></p>
<blockquote>
<p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">What it valuably stresses is the educational force of our whole
social and cultural experience. It is therefore concerned, not only with
continuing education, of a formal or informal kind, but with what the
whole environment, its institutions and relationships, actively and
profoundly teaches…. [Permanent education also refers to] the field in
which our ideas of the world, of ourselves and of our possibilities, are
most widely and often most powerfully formed and disseminated. To work
for the recovery of control in this field is then, under any pressures, a
priority. For who can doubt, looking at television or newspapers, or
reading the women’s magazines, that here, centrally, is <em>teaching</em> and teaching financed and distributed in a much larger way than is formal education.<a href="https://truthout.org/articles/beyond-the-politics-of-the-big-lie-the-education-deficit-and-the-new-authoritarianism/#a3">[3]</a></font></p>
</blockquote>
<p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">William’s insight about the relationship between education and
politics is more important today than it was in the 1960s when he
developed the idea. The educational force of the wider culture is now
one of the primary, if not most powerful, determinants of what counts as
knowledge, agency, politics and democracy itself. The machinery of
permanent education and the public pedagogical relationships these
create have become the main framing mechanisms in determining what
information gets included, who speaks, what stories are told, what
representations translate into reality and what is considered normal or
subversive. The cultural apparatuses of popular education and public
pedagogy play a powerful role in framing how issues are perceived, what
values and social relations matter and whether any small ruptures will
be allowed to unsettle the circles of certainty that now reign as common
sense. But education is never far from the reach of power and ideology.
As the major cultural apparatuses and technologies of public pedagogy
are concentrated in a few hands, the educational force of the culture
becomes a powerful ideological tool for legitimating market-driven
values and social relations, based on omissions, deceptions, lies,
misrepresentations and falsehoods benefiting the apostles of a range of
economic, educational and religious fundamentalisms.</font></p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">For the first time in modern
history, centralized commercial institutions that extend from
traditional broadcast culture to the new interactive screen cultures –
rather than parents, churches or schools – tell most of the stories that
shape the lives of the American public. This is no small matter since
the stories a society tells about its history, civic life, social
relations, education, children and human imagination are a measure of
how it values itself, the ideals of democracy and its future. Most of
the stories now told to the American public are about the necessity of
neoliberal capitalism, permanent war and the virtues of a never-ending
culture of fear. The domestic front revels in the welcome death of the
social state, the necessary all-embracing reach of the market to
determine every aspect of our lives, the reduction of freedom to the
freedom to consume, the pathology of social relations not under the rule
of commodities and finance capital and the notion that everyone is
ultimately responsible for their own fate in a world that now resembles a
shark tank.
</font><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Democracies need informed citizens to make them work and they can
only survive amid a formative culture that produces individuals willing
to think critically, imagine otherwise and act responsibly. America
seems to have moved away from that possibility, that willingness to
think through and beyond the systemic production of the given, the pull
of conformity, the comforting assurance of certainty and the painless
retreat into a world of common sense. Hannah Arendt understood the
danger of such a state, which she famously called the banality of evil
and described as a “curiously quite authentic inability to think.”<a href="https://truthout.org/articles/beyond-the-politics-of-the-big-lie-the-education-deficit-and-the-new-authoritarianism/#a4">(4)</a>
For Arendt, this was more than mere stupidity, it was a mode of
manufactured thoughtlessness that pointed both to the disappearance of
politics and constituted one of the most serious threats facing
democracy. That threat is no longer merely a despairing element of
philosophical reflection – it has become the new reality in American
life. The political, economic and social coordinates of authoritarianism
are all around us and through the educational force of the broader
culture they are becoming more normalized and more dangerous.</font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>There is little distance between what I am calling an education
deficit and the reigning market authoritarianism, with its claim to be
both synonymous with democracy and unquestionable in its assumptions and
policies.</b> The education deficit, a hallmark achievement of neoliberal
capitalism, has produced a version of authoritarianism with a soft edge,
a kind of popular authoritarianism that spreads its values through
gaming, reality TV, celebrity culture, the daily news, talk radio and a
host of other media outlets now aggressively engaged in producing
subjects, desires and dreams that reflect a world order dominated by
corporations and “free markets.” This a world that only values narrow
selfish-interests, isolated competitive individuals, finance capital,
the reign of commodities and the alleged “natural” laws of free-market
fundamentalism. This type of turbo capitalism with its crushing cultural
apparatuses of legitimation does more than destroy the public good; it
empties democracy of any substance and renders authoritarian politics
and culture an acceptable state of affairs. As the boundaries between
markets and democratic values collapse, civil life becomes warlike and
the advocates of market fundamentalism rail against state protections
while offering an unbridled confirmation of the market as a template for
all social relations.</font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Notwithstanding the appeal to formalistic election rituals, democracy
as a substantive mode of public address and politics is all but dead in
the United States. The forces of authoritarianism are on the march and
they seem at this point only to be gaining power politically,
economically and educationally. Politicians at every level of government
are in collusion with corporate power. Many have been bought by
industry lobbyists. This despicable state of affairs was particularly
evident in the 2010 elections. Commenting on the colonization of
politics by big money in that election, Charles Pierce captures the
power dynamic and ideological relations that were in play at that time
and have intensified since. He writes:</font></p>
<blockquote>
<p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In 2010, in addition to handing the House of Representatives over to a
pack of nihilistic vandals, the Koch brothers and the rest of the sugar
daddies of the Right poured millions into various state campaigns. This
produced a crop of governors and state legislators wholly owned and
operated by those corporate interests and utterly unmoored from the
constituencies they were elected to serve. In turn, these folks enacted
various policies and produced various laws, guaranteed to do nothing
except reinforce the power of the people who put them in office.<a href="https://truthout.org/articles/beyond-the-politics-of-the-big-lie-the-education-deficit-and-the-new-authoritarianism/#a5">[5]</a></font> </p>
</blockquote>
<p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">More recently, The New York Times reported that soon after President
Obama took office, “he cut a closed-door deal with the powerful
pharmaceutical lobby [abandoning] his support for the reimportation of
prescription medicines at lower prices.”<a href="https://truthout.org/articles/beyond-the-politics-of-the-big-lie-the-education-deficit-and-the-new-authoritarianism/#a6">(6)</a>
For the Times, this back-door deal signified “to some disillusioned
liberal supporters a loss of innocence, or perhaps even the triumph of
cynicism.”<a href="https://truthout.org/articles/beyond-the-politics-of-the-big-lie-the-education-deficit-and-the-new-authoritarianism/#a7">(7)</a>
In actuality, it signified a powerful new mode of capitalism that not
only controls the commanding heights of the economy, but has now also
replaced political sovereignty with an aggressive form of corporate
governance</span>. The state and elite market forces, perhaps inseparable
before, have become today both inseparable and powerfully aligned. From
Reagan’s assault on the values of the welfare state to Obama’s bailout
of the mega banks and the refusal to end the Bush tax cuts, corporate
sovereignty as the pre-eminent mode of US politics is hard to miss. And
the surrender of politics to corporate rule and an amalgam of
antidemocratic forces is not a one party affair. As Bill Moyers and
Michael Winship have argued, “since 1979, 377 members of the Forbes 400
list or richest Americans have given almost half a billion dollars to
candidates of both parties, most of it in the last decade. The median
contribution was $355,100 each.”<a href="https://truthout.org/articles/beyond-the-politics-of-the-big-lie-the-education-deficit-and-the-new-authoritarianism/#a8">(8)</a></font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>As is well known, President Clinton implemented deregulation policies
that led directly to the economic crisis of 2008,</b> while at the same
time enacting welfare reforms that turned a war on poverty into a war on
the poor. In fact, the most radical economic measures that Clinton
undertook “related to further deregulation of the economy [amounting to]
some of the most comprehensive deregulatory reforms of the 20th
century.”<a href="https://truthout.org/articles/beyond-the-politics-of-the-big-lie-the-education-deficit-and-the-new-authoritarianism/#a9">(9)</a>
Similarly, the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy not only increased the
power of mega corporations and financial services to influence policy
for the benefit of Wall Street titans and the rich more generally, but
also largely punished the middle class and the poor. The Citizens United
Supreme Court ruling made especially visible the hidden operations
behind contemporary politics: big money translates into political power.
The economist Joseph Stiglitz is correct in insisting that, “We’ve
moved from a democracy, which is supposed to be based on one person, one
vote, to something much more akin to one dollar, one vote. When you
have that kind of democracy, it’s not going to address the real needs of
the 99%.”<a href="https://truthout.org/articles/beyond-the-politics-of-the-big-lie-the-education-deficit-and-the-new-authoritarianism/#a10">(10)</a>
Stiglitz’s point is right in one sense, though the current political
system has nothing substantively to do with democracy and everything to
do with a new form of authoritarianism shaped by the converging
interests of the financial elite, religious fundamentalists, anti-public
intellectuals and corporate political powerbrokers.</font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>This new mode of authoritarian governance is distinct from the
fascism that emerged in Germany and Italy in the mid part of the
twentieth century</b>. As Sheldon Wolin has pointed out, big business in
this new mode of authoritarianism is not subordinated to a political
regime and the forces of state sovereignty, but now replaces political
sovereignty with corporate rule. In addition, the new authoritarianism
does not strive “to give the masses a sense of collective power and
strength, [but] promotes a sense of weakness, of collective futility
[through] a pervasive atmosphere of fear abetted by a corporate economy
of ruthless downsizing, withdrawal or reduction of pension and health
benefits; a corporate political system that relentlessly threatens to
privatize Social Security and the modest health benefits available,
especially to the poor.”<a href="https://truthout.org/articles/beyond-the-politics-of-the-big-lie-the-education-deficit-and-the-new-authoritarianism/#a11">(11)</a>
According to Wolin, all the elements are in place today for a
contemporary form of authoritarianism, which he calls “inverted
totalitarianism.”</font></p>
<blockquote>
<p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Thus the elements are in place: a weak legislative body, a legal
system that is both compliant and repressive, a party system in which
one part, whether in opposition or in the majority, is bent upon
reconstituting the existing system so as to permanently favor a ruling
class of the wealthy, the well-connected and the corporate, while
leaving the poorer citizens with a sense of helplessness and political
despair and, at the same time, keeping the middle classes dangling
between fear of unemployment and expectations of fantastic rewards once
the new economy recovers. That scheme is abetted by a sycophantic and
increasingly concentrated media; by the integration of universities with
their corporate benefactors; by a propaganda machine institutionalized
in well-funded think tanks and conservative foundations; by the
increasingly closer cooperation between local police and national law
enforcement agencies aimed at identifying terrorists, suspicious aliens
and domestic dissidents.<a href="https://truthout.org/articles/beyond-the-politics-of-the-big-lie-the-education-deficit-and-the-new-authoritarianism/#a12">[12]</a></font> </p>
</blockquote>
<p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The democratic deficit is not, as many commentators have argued,
reducible to the growing (and unparalleled) inequality gap in the United
States, the pervasiveness of lending fraud, favorable tax treatment for
the wealthy, or the lack of adequate regulation of the financial
sector. These are important issues, but they are more symptomatic than
causal in relation to the democratic decline and rise of an uncivil
culture in America. The democratic deficit is closely related, however,
to an unprecedented deficit in critical education. </span>The power of finance
capital in recent years has not only targeted the realm of official
politics, but also directed its attention toward a range of educational
apparatuses – really, a vast and complex ideological ecosystem that
reproduces itself through nuance, distraction, innuendo, myths, lies and
misrepresentations. This media ecosystem not only changes our sense of
time, space and information; it also redefines the very meaning of the
social and this is far from a democratic process, especially as the
architecture of the Internet and other media platforms are largely in
the hands of private interests.<a href="https://truthout.org/articles/beyond-the-politics-of-the-big-lie-the-education-deficit-and-the-new-authoritarianism/#a13">(13)</a>
The educational pipelines for corporate messages and ideology are
everywhere and have for the last twenty-five years successfully drowned
out any serious criticism and challenge to market fundamentalism.</font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The current corrupt and dysfunctional state of American politics is
about a growing authoritarianism tied to economic, political and
cultural formations that have hijacked democracy and put structural and
ideological forces in place that constitute a new regime of politics,
not simply a series of bad policies.</b> The solution in this case does not
lie in promoting piecemeal reforms, such as a greater redistribution of
wealth and income, but in dismantling all the institutional, ideological
and social formations that make gratuitous inequality and other
antidemocratic forces possible at all. Even the concept of reform has
been stripped of its democratic possibilities and has become a euphemism
to “cover up the harsh realities of draconian cutbacks in wages,
salaries, pensions and public welfare and the sharp increases in
regressive taxes.”<a href="https://truthout.org/articles/beyond-the-politics-of-the-big-lie-the-education-deficit-and-the-new-authoritarianism/#a14">(14)</a></font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Instead of reversing progressive changes made by workers, women,
young people, and others, the American public needs a new understanding
of what it would mean to advance the ideological and material relations
of a real democracy, while removing American society from the grip of
“an authoritarian political culture.”<a href="https://truthout.org/articles/beyond-the-politics-of-the-big-lie-the-education-deficit-and-the-new-authoritarianism/#a15">(15)</a>
This will require new conceptions of politics, social responsibility,
power, civic courage, civil society and democracy itself.</span> If we do not
safeguard the remaining public spaces that provide individuals and
social movements with new ways to think about and participate in
politics, then authoritarianism will solidify its hold on the American
public. In doing so, it will create a culture that criminalizes dissent,
and those who suffer under antidemocratic ideologies and policies will
be both blamed for the current economic crisis and punished by ruling
elites.</font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">What is crucial to grasp at the current historical moment is that the
fate of democracy is inextricably linked to a profound crisis of
contemporary knowledge, characterized by its increasing commodification,
fragmentation, privatization and a turn toward racist and jingoistic
conceits. As knowledge becomes abstracted from the rigors of civic
culture and is reduced to questions of style, ritual and image, it
undermines the political, ethical and governing conditions for
individuals to construct those viable public spheres necessary for
debate, collective action and solving urgent social problems. As public
spheres are privatized, commodified and turned over to the crushing
forces of turbo capitalism, the opportunities for openness,
inclusiveness and dialogue that nurture the very idea and possibility of
a discourse about democracy cease to exist.</font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The lesson to be learned in this instance is that political agency
involves learning how to deliberate, make judgments and exercise
choices, particularly as the latter are brought to bear on critical
activities that offer the possibility of change</b>. Civic education as it
is experienced and produced throughout an ever-diminishing number of
institutions provides individuals with opportunities to see themselves
as capable of doing more than the existing configurations of power of
any given society would wish to admit. And it is precisely this notion
of civic agency and critical education that has been under aggressive
assault within the new and harsh corporate order of casino capitalism.</font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong>Anti-Public Intellectuals and the Conservative Re-Education Machine</strong></font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The conservative takeover of public pedagogy with its elite codifiers
of neoliberal ideology has a long history extending from the work of
the “Chicago Boys” at the University of Chicago to the various
conservative think tanks that emerged after the publication of the
Powell memo in the early seventies</span>.<a href="https://truthout.org/articles/beyond-the-politics-of-the-big-lie-the-education-deficit-and-the-new-authoritarianism/#a16">(16)</a>
The Republican Party will more than likely win the next election and
take full control over all aspects of policymaking in the United States.
This is especially dangerous given that the Republican Party is now
controlled by extremists. If they win the 2012 election, they will not
only extend the Bush/Obama legacy of militarism abroad, but likely
intensify the war at home as well. Political scientist Frances Fox Piven
rightly argues that, “We’ve been at war for decades now – not just in
Afghanistan or Iraq, but right here at home. Domestically, it’s been a
war [a]gainst the poor [and as] devastating as it has been, the war
against the poor has gone largely unnoticed until now.”<a href="https://truthout.org/articles/beyond-the-politics-of-the-big-lie-the-education-deficit-and-the-new-authoritarianism/#a17">(17)</a>
And the war at home now includes more than attacks on the poor, as
campaigns are increasingly waged against the rights of women, students,
workers, people of color and immigrants, especially Latino Americans. As
the social state collapses, the punishing state expands its power and
targets larger portions of the population. The war in Afghanistan is now
mimicked in the war waged on peaceful student protesters at home. It is
evident in the environmental racism that produces massive health
problems for African-Americans. The domestic war is even waged on
elementary school children, who now live in fear of the police
handcuffing them in their classrooms and incarcerating them as if they
were adult criminals.<a href="https://truthout.org/articles/beyond-the-politics-of-the-big-lie-the-education-deficit-and-the-new-authoritarianism/#a18">(18)</a>
It is waged on workers by taking away their pensions, bargaining rights
and dignity. The spirit of militarism is also evident in the war waged
on the welfare state and any form of social protection that benefits the
poor, disabled, sick, elderly, and other groups now considered
disposable, including children.</font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The soft side of authoritarianism in the United States does not need
to put soldiers in the streets, though it certainly follows that script.
As it expands its control over the commanding institutions of
government, the armed forces and civil society in general, it hires
anti-public intellectuals and academics to provide ideological support
for its gated communities, institutions and modes of education. <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">As Yasha
Levine points out, it puts thousands of dollars in the hands of
corporate shills such as Malcolm Gladwell, who has become a “one man
branding and distribution pipeline for valuable corporate messages,
constructed on the public’s gullibility in trusting his probity and
intellectual honesty.”<a href="https://truthout.org/articles/beyond-the-politics-of-the-big-lie-the-education-deficit-and-the-new-authoritarianism/#a19">(19)</a>
Gladwell (who is certainly not alone) functions as a bought-and-paid
mouthpiece for “Big Tobacco Pharma and defend[s] Enron-style financial
fraud … earning hundreds of thousands of dollars as a corporate speaker,
sometimes from the same companies and industries that he covers as a
journalist.</span>”<a href="https://truthout.org/articles/beyond-the-politics-of-the-big-lie-the-education-deficit-and-the-new-authoritarianism/#a20">(20)</a></font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Corporate power uses these “pay to play” academics, anti-public
intellectuals, the mainstream media, and other educational apparatuses
to discredit the very people that it simultaneously oppresses, while
waging an overarching war on all things public.</span> As Charles Ferguson has
noted, an entire industry has been created that enables the “sale of
academic expertise for the purpose of influencing government policy, the
courts and public opinion [and] is now a multibillion-dollar business.”<a href="https://truthout.org/articles/beyond-the-politics-of-the-big-lie-the-education-deficit-and-the-new-authoritarianism/#a21">(21)</a>
It gets worse, in that “Academic, legal, regulatory and policy
consulting in economics, finance and regulation is dominated by a half
dozen consulting firms, several speakers’ bureaus and various industry
lobbying groups that maintain large networks of academics for hire
specifically for the purpose of advocating industry interests in policy
and regulatory debates.”<a href="https://truthout.org/articles/beyond-the-politics-of-the-big-lie-the-education-deficit-and-the-new-authoritarianism/#a22">(22)</a></font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Such anti-public intellectuals create what William Black has called a
“criminogenic environment” that spreads disease and fraud in the
interest of bolstering the interests, profits and values of the super
wealthy</b>.<a href="https://truthout.org/articles/beyond-the-politics-of-the-big-lie-the-education-deficit-and-the-new-authoritarianism/#a23">(23)</a><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
There is more at work here than carpet bombing the culture with lies,
deceptions and euphemisms. Language in this case does more than
obfuscate or promote propaganda. It creates framing mechanisms, cultural
ecosystems and cultures of cruelty, while closing down the spaces for
dialogue, critique and thoughtfulness. At its worst, it engages in the
dual processes of demonization and distraction. The rhetoric of
demonization takes many forms: for example, calling firefighters,
teachers, and other public servants greedy because they want to hold
onto their paltry benefits. It labels students as irresponsible because
of the large debts they are forced to incur as states cut back funding
to higher education (this, too, is part of a broader effort by
conservatives to hollow out the social state). Poor people are insulted
and humiliated because they are forced to live on food stamps, lack
decent health care and collect unemployment benefits because there are
no decent jobs available. Poor minorities are now subject to overt
racism in the right-wing media and outright violence in the larger
society.</span></font></p><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</span><p><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Anti-public intellectuals rail against public goods and public
values; they undermine collective bonds and view social responsibility
as a pathology, while touting the virtues of a survival-of-the-fittest
notion of individual responsibility. Fox News and its embarrassingly
blowhard pundits tell the American people that Gov. Scott Walker’s
victory over Tom Barrett in the Wisconsin recall election was a fatal
blow against unions, while in reality “his win signals less a loss for
the unions than a loss for our democracy in this post-Citizens United
era, when elections can be bought with the help of a few billionaires.”<a href="https://truthout.org/articles/beyond-the-politics-of-the-big-lie-the-education-deficit-and-the-new-authoritarianism/#a24">(24)</a>
How else to explain that Tea Party favorite Walker raised over $30.5
million during the election – more than seven times Barrett’s reported
$3.9 million – largely from 13 out-of-state billionaires?<a href="https://truthout.org/articles/beyond-the-politics-of-the-big-lie-the-education-deficit-and-the-new-authoritarianism/#a25">(25)</a>
This was corporate money enlisted for use in a pedagogical blitz
designed to carpet bomb voters with the rhetoric of distraction and
incivility.</font></span>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The same pundits who rail against the country’s economic deficit fail
to connect it to the generous tax cuts they espouse for corporations
and the financial institutions and services that take financial risks,
which sometimes generate capital, but more often produce debts and
instability that only serve to deepen the national economic crisis.</b> Nor
do they connect the US recession and global economic crisis to the
criminal activities enabled by an unregulated financial system marked by
massive lending fraud, high risk speculation, a corrupt credit system
and pervasive moral and economic dishonesty. The spokespersons for the
ultrarich publish books arguing that we need even more inequality
because it benefits not only the wealthy, but everyone else.<a href="https://truthout.org/articles/beyond-the-politics-of-the-big-lie-the-education-deficit-and-the-new-authoritarianism/#a26">(26)</a>
This is a form of authoritarian delusion that appears to meet the
clinical threshold for being labeled psychopathic given its proponents’
extreme investment in being “indifferent to others, incapable of guilt,
exclusively devoted to their own interests.”<a href="https://truthout.org/articles/beyond-the-politics-of-the-big-lie-the-education-deficit-and-the-new-authoritarianism/#a27">(27)</a>
Nothing is said in this pro-market narrative about the massive human
suffering caused by a growing inequality in which society’s resources
are squandered at the top, while salaries for the middle and working
classes stagnate, consumption dries up, social costs are ignored, young
people are locked out of jobs and any possibility of social mobility and
the state reconfigures its power to punish rather than protect the vast
majority of its citizens.</font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The moral coma that appears characteristic of the elite who inhabit
the new corporate ethic of casino capitalism has attracted the attention
of scientists, whose studies recently reported that “members of the
upper class are more likely to behave unethically, to lie during
negotiations, to drive illegally and to cheat when competing for a
prize.”<a href="https://truthout.org/articles/beyond-the-politics-of-the-big-lie-the-education-deficit-and-the-new-authoritarianism/#a28">(28)</a>
But there is more at stake here than the psychological state of those
who inhabit the boardrooms of Wall Street. We must also consider the
catastrophic effects produced by their values and policies. In fact,
Stiglitz has argued that, “Most Americans today are worse off than they
were fifteen years ago. A full-time worker in the US is worse off today
then he or she was 44 years ago. That is astounding – half a century of
stagnation. The economic system is not delivering. It does not matter
whether a few people at the top benefitted tremendously – when the
majority of citizens are not better off, the economic system is not
working.”<a href="https://truthout.org/articles/beyond-the-politics-of-the-big-lie-the-education-deficit-and-the-new-authoritarianism/#a29">(29)</a>
The economic system may not be working, but the ideological rationales
used to justify its current course appear immensely successful, managing
as they do to portray a casino capitalism that transforms democracy
into its opposite – a form of authoritarianism with a soft edge – as
utterly benign, if not also beneficial, to society at large.</font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong>Democratic Decline and the Politics of Distraction</strong></font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Democracy withers, public spheres disappear and the forces of
authoritarianism grow when a family, such as the Waltons of Walmart
fame, is allowed “to amass a combined wealth of some $90 billion, which
is equivalent to the wealth of the entire bottom 30 percent of US
society.”<a href="https://truthout.org/articles/beyond-the-politics-of-the-big-lie-the-education-deficit-and-the-new-authoritarianism/#a30">(30)</a>
Such enormous amounts of wealth translate into equally vast amounts of
power, as is evident in the current attempts of a few billionaires to
literally buy local, state and federal elections. Moreover, a
concentration of wealth deepens the economic divide among classes,
rendering more and more individuals incapable of the most basic
opportunities to move out of poverty and despair. This is especially
true in light of a recent survey indicating that, “Nearly half of all
Americans lack economic security, meaning they live above the federal
poverty threshold but still do hot have enough money to cover housing,
food, healthcare and other basic expenses…. 45 percent of US residents
live in households that struggle to make ends meet. That breaks down to
39 percent of all adults and 55 percent of all children.”<a href="https://truthout.org/articles/beyond-the-politics-of-the-big-lie-the-education-deficit-and-the-new-authoritarianism/#a31">(31)</a>
The consequential impacts on civic engagement are more difficult to
enumerate, but it does not require much imagination to think about how
democracy might flourish if access to health care, education,
employment, and other public benefits was ensured equally throughout a
society and not restricted to the rich and wealthy alone. And yet, as
power and wealth accrue to the upper 1 percent, the American public is
constantly told that the poor, the unions, feminists, critical
intellectuals and public servants are waging class warfare to the
detriment of civility and democracy.</font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The late Tony Judt stated that he was less concerned about the slide
of American democracy into something like authoritarianism than American
society moving toward something he viewed as even <b>more corrosive: “a
loss of conviction, a loss of faith in the culture of democracy, a sense
of skepticism and withdrawal” that diminishes the capacity of a
democratic formative culture to resist and transform those
antidemocratic ideologies that benefit only the mega corporations, the
ultrawealthy and ideological fundamentalist</b>s.</span><a href="https://truthout.org/articles/beyond-the-politics-of-the-big-lie-the-education-deficit-and-the-new-authoritarianism/#a32">(32)</a>
Governance has turned into a legitimation for enriching the already
wealthy elite, bankers, hedge fund managers, mega corporations and
executive members of the financial service industries. Americans now
live in a society in which only the thinnest conception of democracy
frames what it means to be a citizen – one which equates the obligations
of citizenship with consumerism and democratic rights with alleged
consumer freedoms. Antidemocratic forms of power do not stand alone as a
mode of force or the force of acting on others; they are also deeply
aligned with cultural apparatuses of persuasion, extending their reach
through social and digital media, sophisticated technologies, the rise
of corporate intellectuals and a university system that now produces and
sanctions intellectuals aligned with private interests – all of which,
as Randy Martin points out, can be identified with a form of casino
capitalism that is about “permanent vigilance, activity and
intervention.”<a href="https://truthout.org/articles/beyond-the-politics-of-the-big-lie-the-education-deficit-and-the-new-authoritarianism/#a33">(33)</a></font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Indeed, many institutions that provide<b> formal education in the United
States have become co-conspirators with a savage casino capitalism,
</b>whose strength lies in producing, circulating and legitimating market
values that promote the narrow world of<b> commodity worship, celebrity
culture, bare-knuckle competition, a retreat from social responsibility
and a war-of-all-against-all mentality that destroys any viable notion
of community, the common good</b> and the interrelated notions of political,
social and economic rights. </span>University presidents now make huge
salaries sitting on corporate boards, while faculty sell their knowledge
to the highest corporate bidder and, in doing so, turn universities
into legitimation centers for casino capitalism.<a href="https://truthout.org/articles/beyond-the-politics-of-the-big-lie-the-education-deficit-and-the-new-authoritarianism/#a34">(34)</a>
Of course, such academics also move from the boardrooms of major
corporations to talk shows and op-ed pages of major newspapers, offering
commentary in journals and other modes of print and screen culture.
They are the new traveling intellectuals of casino capitalism, doing
everything they can to make the ruthless workings of power invisible, to
shift the blame for society’s failures onto the very people who are its
victims and to expand the institutions and culture of
anti-intellectualism and distraction into every aspect of American life.</font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Across all levels, politics in the United States now suffers from an
education deficit that enables a pedagogy of distraction to dictate with
little accountability how crucial social problems and issues are named,
discussed and acted upon. The conservative re-education machine appears
shameless in its production of lies that include insane assertions such
as: Obama’s health care legislation would create death panels; liberals
are waging a war on Christmas; Obama is a socialist trying to
nationalize industries; the founding fathers tried to end slavery; and
Obama is a Muslim sympathizer and not a US citizen.</span> Other
misrepresentations and distortions include: the denial of global
warming; the government cannot create jobs; cuts in wages and benefits
create jobs; Obama has created massive deficits; Obama wants to raise
the taxes of working- and middle-class people; Obama is constantly
“apologizing” for America; and the assertion that Darwinian evolution is
a myth.<a href="https://truthout.org/articles/beyond-the-politics-of-the-big-lie-the-education-deficit-and-the-new-authoritarianism/#a35">(35)</a>
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney continues spinning this
spider web of lies unapologetically, even when members of his own party
point out the inconsistencies in his claims. For instance, he has
claimed that, “Obamacare increases the deficit,”<a href="https://truthout.org/articles/beyond-the-politics-of-the-big-lie-the-education-deficit-and-the-new-authoritarianism/#a36">(36)</a>
argued that Obama has “increased the national debt more than all other
presidents combined” and insisted that Obama has lied about “his record
on gay rights.” He has falsely claimed that, “Obama promised
unemployment below eight percent,”<a href="https://truthout.org/articles/beyond-the-politics-of-the-big-lie-the-education-deficit-and-the-new-authoritarianism/#a37">(37)</a>
dodged the truth regarding “his position on climate change” and
blatantly misrepresented the truth in stating that, “he pays a 50% tax
rate.”<a href="https://truthout.org/articles/beyond-the-politics-of-the-big-lie-the-education-deficit-and-the-new-authoritarianism/#a38">(38)</a>
Diane Ravitch has recently pointed out that in making a case for
vouchers, Romney has made false claims about the success of the DC
voucher program.<a href="https://truthout.org/articles/beyond-the-politics-of-the-big-lie-the-education-deficit-and-the-new-authoritarianism/#a39">(39)</a></font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The politics of distraction should not be reduced merely to a
rhetorical ploy used by the wealthy and influential to promote their own
interests and power. It is a form of market-driven politics in which
educational force of the broader culture is used to create ideologies,
policies, individuals and social agents who lack the knowledge, critical
skills and discriminatory judgments to question the rule of casino
capitalism and the values, social practices and power formations it
legitimates. Politics and education have always mutually informed each
other as pedagogical sites proliferate and circulate throughout the
cultural landscape.<a href="https://truthout.org/articles/beyond-the-politics-of-the-big-lie-the-education-deficit-and-the-new-authoritarianism/#a40">(40)</a>
But today, distraction is the primary element being used to suppress
democratically purposeful education by pushing critical thought to the
margins of society.</span> As a register of power, distraction becomes central
to a pedagogical landscape inhabited by rich conservative foundations,
an army of well-funded anti-public intellectuals from both major
parties, a growing number of amply funded conservative campus
organizations, increasing numbers of academics who hock their services
to corporations and the military-industrial complex, and others who
promote the ideology of casino capitalism and the corporate right’s
agenda. Academics who make a claim to producing knowledge and truth in
the public interest are increasingly being replaced by academics for
hire who move effortlessly among industry, government and academia.</font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Extreme power is now showcased through the mechanisms of
ever-proliferating cultural/educational apparatuses and the anti-public
intellectuals who support them and are in turn rewarded by the elites
who finance such apparatu</b>ses. The war at home is made visible in the
show of force aimed at civilian populations, including students,
workers, and others considered disposable or a threat to the new
authoritarianism. Its most powerful allies appear to be the
intellectuals, institutions, cultural apparatuses and new media
technologies that constitute the sites of public pedagogy, which produce
the formative culture necessary for authoritarianism to thrive.</font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">While a change in consciousness does not guarantee a change in either
one’s politics or society, it is a crucial precondition for connecting
what it means to think otherwise to conditions that make it possible to
act otherwise. The education deficit must be seen as intertwined with a
political deficit, serving to make many oppressed individuals complicit
with oppressive ideologies. As the late Cornelius Castoriadis made
clear, democracy requires “critical thinkers capable of putting existing
institutions into question…. while simultaneously creating the
conditions for individual and social autonomy.”<a href="https://truthout.org/articles/beyond-the-politics-of-the-big-lie-the-education-deficit-and-the-new-authoritarianism/#a41">(41)</a>
Nothing will change politically or economically until new and emerging
social movements take seriously the need to develop a language of
radical reform and create new public spheres that support the knowledge,
skills and critical thought that are necessary features of a democratic
formative culture.</font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Getting beyond the big lie as a precondition for critical thought,
civic engagement and a more realized democracy will mean more than
correcting distortions, misrepresentations and falsehoods produced by
politicians, media talking heads and anti-public intellectuals. It will
also require addressing how new sites of pedagogy have become central to
any viable notion of agency, politics and democracy itself. This is not
a matter of elevating cultural politics over material relations of
power as much as it is a rethinking of how power deploys culture and how
culture as a mode of education positions power.</font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">James Baldwin, the legendary African-American writer and civil rights
activist, argued that the big lie points to a crisis of American
identity and politics and is symptomatic of “a backward society” that
has descended into madness, “especially when one is forced to lie about
one’s aspect of anybody’s history, [because you then] must lie about it
all.”<a href="https://truthout.org/articles/beyond-the-politics-of-the-big-lie-the-education-deficit-and-the-new-authoritarianism/#a42">(42)</a>
He goes on to argue “that<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> one of the paradoxes of education [is] that
precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience, you must
find yourself at war with your society. It is your responsibility to
change society if you think of yourself as an educated person.</span>”<a href="https://truthout.org/articles/beyond-the-politics-of-the-big-lie-the-education-deficit-and-the-new-authoritarianism/#a43">(43)</a>
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">What Baldwin recognizes is that learning has the possibility to trigger
a critical engagement with oneself, others and the larger society –
education becomes in this instance more than a method or tool for
domination but a politics, a fulcrum for democratic social change.
Tragically, in our current climate “learning” merely contributes to a
vast reserve of manipulation and self-inflicted ignorance.</span> Our education
deficit is neither reducible to the failure of particular types of
teaching nor the decent into madness by the spokespersons for the new
authoritarianism. Rather, it is about how matters of knowledge, values
and ideology can be struggled over as issues of power and politics.
Surviving the current education deficit will depend on progressives
using history, memory and knowledge not only to reconnect intellectuals
to the everyday needs of ordinary people, but also to jumpstart social
movements by making education central to organized politics and the
quest for a radical democracy.</font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Footnotes:</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">==
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