literacy critical think educ

education is corporate and religious interference in schools

oops see other

no merri

RELATED TO EMPATHY? MADDOW UBC 2 26 DEMOC IS PROCESS, FACTS EXPERTS HELP US DECIDE WHAT IS BEST, SLOW vS STRoNG MAN APPEal

see uber1

https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/6950F840-FB80-FCB0-D505-8AB1FA685F08#-5178

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AHA NOT MINE EMPATHY // CRITICAL THINKING

AN 3 26

Since assuming the self-titled role of “Secretary of War,” machismo has been at the core of Pete Hegseth’s military leadership. According to a new op-ed by the i Paper columnist Ian Dunt, Hegseth’s “fragile masculinity” is not only an “insecure” projection, but an “embarrassment” to the United States that makes the country “weaker.”

Machismo has always been at the core of the Trump administration’s ethos, Dunt explained, as it has sought to promote executive authority while denigrating women and LGBTQ people, and no one in the administration better represents that than “moron” Pete Hegseth. Not only is he unqualified and “perhaps the least complex individual ever given high office,” but he has “translated his personal flaws into the operating manual for the US armed forces.”

Dunt argued that this issue dates back to the earliest days of Hegseth’s tenure, which he launched with complaints about pronouns, “climate change obsession,” and “dudes in dresses.” Then in what Dunt called “one of the weirdest single moments in American military history,” Hegseth gathered the majority of the nation’s generals and other defense leaders to chastise them about facial hair and various culture war talking points as “they sat in baffled silence.”

As Dunt pointed out, while most recognize his “fragile” overcompensation, “Only in Trump-land would he be considered a sensible candidate for anything.” But the problem with having someone like Hegseth in power isn’t just a matter of morality, but a question of effectiveness.

“This personality type does not plan,” wrote Dunt. “In fact, planning is considered distinctly effeminate. Evidence-seeking, briefings, assessments of vulnerabilities, scrutinising your expectations, critically assessing your strategic objectives, using deep domain knowledge to establish geopolitical reality, understanding the motivation of your opponent: these are the qualities which win conflicts.”

But as the Trump administration is now discovering as the war in Iran expands, Hegseth's approach does not deliver the rapid results that they hoped for. Dunt cites reports that the Iranian regime has turned down two US requests seeking a ceasefire while closing the Strait of Hormuz, throwing the global energy market into chaos.

The impact of all this, Dunt argued, is being felt economically, politically, and beyond, not only weakening the United States but emboldening its greatest foes like Russia and China. What’s more, “It is an embarrassment for a great nation like the US.”

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1 24

Over the last two decades, and in particular over the last five years, there has been a growing scientific interest in conspiracy theories and people who believe in them. Although, some may think belief in such stories is linked to intelligence, research is beginning to show that how people think could be more important.

Scientists agree that having a measure of skepticism about official accounts of events is healthy and important, but conspiracy theorising can lead to dangerous consequences for the individual and for society.

Some conspiracy theories, for example the QAnon conspiracy, can be considered a minority belief, with a 2021 YouGov poll showing that 8% of those polled in the UK endorsed this conspiracy theory. However, some beliefs are more widespread. A 2018 survey of people from around Europe found 60% of British participants endorsed at least one conspiracy theory. So, who are the people who are more susceptible to conspiracy theorising?

There is a dramatically growing body of research endeavouring to understand this question. First, let’s re-examine those assumptions about who engages with conspiracy theories.

People with high education levels, such as doctors and nurses, have been reported to propagate conspiracy theories. So it’s not just about intelligence – education won’t necessarily make you immune.

Critical thinking

Research shows that our thinking style can be predictive of susceptibility to conspiracy theories. The dual processing theory of cognitive style suggests that we have two routes which we can use to process information.

One route is the fast, intuitive route which leans more on personal experiences and gut feelings. The other route is a slower, more analytical route which instead relies on elaborative and detailed processing of information.

Conspiracy theory belief seems to be linked to thinking style.

What you tend to see is that people who are not necessarily smarter but who favour the more effortful, analytical thinking style are more resistant to conspiracy beliefs. For example, a British 2014 study found that those who scored highly for questions such as “I enjoy problems that require hard thinking” were less likely to accept conspiracy beliefs. It also found those who were less likely to engage in effortful thinking styles and more likely to use intuitive thinking showed a higher belief in conspiracy theories.

Similarly, a 2022 study across 45 countries used a cognitive reflection test, which measured engagement in analytical thinking in three questions. It found that participants who engaged in the labour intensive thinking style were less likely to endorse COVID 19 conspiracy theories.

Critical thinking is a valuable skill, particularly within education, and has been shown to buffer susceptibility to conspiracy beliefs. This is probably because this more arduous thinking style allows people time to identify inconsistencies in theories and look to additional resources to verify information.

Thinking style is not the same as intelligence

A 2021 meta-analysis study indicates that an intuitive thinking style is unrelated to intelligence. So, even really smart people could be susceptible to conspiracy beliefs – if they are more inclined to revert to faster, intuitive thinking styles.

Research shows that belief in conspiracy theories is predicted by cognitive biases that come from a reliance on mental shortcuts when processing information. First, conspiracy beliefs seem to be predicted by the flawed belief that big events must have big consequences.

This is known in psychology as proportionality bias. It is difficult to accept that events which have such world-changing consequences (for example, the death of a president or the COVID-19 outbreak) can really be caused by comparably “small” causes (for example, a lone gunman or a virus). This is how thinking styles reliant on gut feelings and intuition can lead people to endorse conspiracy theories.

Another example of intuitive thinking styles influencing conspiracy beliefs is the conjunction fallacy. A conjunction fallacy is the erroneous belief that the likelihood of two independent events occurring together is higher than the probability of the events occurring alone. Have a try at the Linda Problem:

*Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations. Which is more probable?

a) Linda is a bank teller.

b) Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.

The most probable is a) Linda is a bank teller as, statistically, the probably probability of one event occurring is always higher than the combination. However, research shows that higher conjunction fallacy errors are associated with stronger conspiracy beliefs. So people prone to conspiratorial thinking would be more likely to say b.

Exposure to conspiracy beliefs have also consistently been shown to increase people’s susceptibility to them, even if they don’t realise that they have had a change in belief.

It may sound concerning that anyone could be susceptible to conspiracy beliefs. However, these studies are helping researchers find interventions which can increase analytical and critical thinking styles and so buffer against susceptibility to such beliefs. A 2023 review of 25 different studies found these types of interventions were a promising tool to tackle the dangerous consequences of conspiracy beliefs.

The more we understand about the psychology behind conspiracy theories, the better equipped we are to tackle them.

Darel Cookson, Lecturer in Psychology, *Nottingham Trent University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

ref

The efficacy of interventions in reducing belief in conspiracy theories: A systematic review | PLOS ONE

abstract

Conspiracy beliefs have become a topic of increasing interest among behavioural researchers. While holding conspiracy beliefs has been associated with several detrimental social, personal, and health consequences, little research has been dedicated to systematically reviewing the methods that could reduce conspiracy beliefs. We conducted a systematic review to identify and assess interventions that have sought to counter conspiracy beliefs.

Out of 25 studies (total N = 7179), we found that while the majority of interventions were ineffective in terms of changing conspiracy beliefs, several interventions were particularly effective. Interventions that fostered an analytical mindset or taught critical thinking skills were found to be the most effective in terms of changing conspiracy beliefs. Our findings are important as we develop future research to combat conspiracy beliefs.

...

implications for research / practice / design

This review identified a number of directions for future research. Firstly, we recommend that future studies on conspiracy belief interventions focus on using longitudinal designs. Understanding the effects of these interventions beyond their immediate changes is important in terms of identifying how effective they are at challenging conspiracy beliefs. Second, we recommend that future studies be conducted with non-western populations, with more of a focus on cross-cultural sampling. Conspiracy beliefs may often be specific to cultural context, as such we recommend that research be expanded beyond British and American samples.

In terms of practical implications for challenging conspiracy beliefs, we recommend that those with an interest in reducing the misinformation that conspiracy theories spread should do the following:

Avoid appealing to emotions and affect: Interventions that manipulated the emotional state of participants, or appealed to feelings of empathy had small effects in terms of changing conspiracy beliefs.

2.Counterarguments are not effective: Counterarguments against specific conspiracy beliefs that are given after participants have been exposed to a conspiracy theory tend not to be particularly effective.}:

Prevention is the best cure: Interventions that provided counterarguments for conspiracy theories were most effective when the counterargument came before the participants were exposed to the particular conspiracy theories that the study focused on. The findings suggest it is more difficult to challenge conspiracy beliefs once participants have started to believe in them. If participants have been taught why certain conspiracy theories are implausible before they have been exposed to conspiratorial media they are much more resistant to conspiracy beliefs.

An analytical mindset and critical thinking skills are the most effective means of challenging conspiracy beliefs: Participants who were primed to have an analytical mindset were less likely to have conspiracy beliefs than controls. Furthermore, when interventions moved beyond putting participants in an analytical mindset, and actually explicitly taught them how to evaluate conspiracy beliefs using specific critical thinking skills, they were much less likely to have conspiracy beliefs.

Conclusion

In conclusion, this review sought to investigate how effective current interventions are at changing conspiracy beliefs. We found that overall, the majority of current conspiracy interventions are ineffective in terms of changing conspiracy beliefs. Despite this, we have identified several promising interventions that may be fruitful to pursue in future studies. We propose that a focus on inoculation-based and critical thinking interventions will bear more promising results for future research, though further efforts are needed to reduce participant burden and more easily implement these interventions in the real world.

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aha-let best defense from fascism, note henry is systemic

an ah 12 22

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.

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 2022 midterms. And some right-wing pundits, including author Ann Coulter, are urging the GOP to nominate DeSantis, not Trump, in the 2024 presidential election — assuming that DeSantis decides to run.

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 scathing article published by Truthout on December 16, and he doesn’t sugarcoat anything. DeSantis, Giroux warns, is “fueling the emergence of fascist politics in the United States.”

“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.”

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. 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.”

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.

“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, 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…. 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.”

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.”

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, a far-right authoritarian, has drawn a great deal of admiration among MAGA Republicans — including Fox News’ Tucker Carlson.And Giroux outlines some parallels between DeSantis and Orbán.

“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.”

https://www.alternet.org/meadows-2658957827/

an raw 12 22

The massive trove of text messages turned over by Mark Meadows to the House select committee show Republican elected officials were willing to violate the U.S. Constitution on "bizarre" and obviously phony evidence.

Talking Points Memo reporter Hunter Walker obtained the messages, which show the former White House chief of staff communicating with GOP officials at all levels of government about far-fetched conspiracy theories to justify overturning Donald Trump's election loss, and he told MSNBC's "Morning Joe" that their lack of sophistication was genuinely shocking.

"We're touching on something that is really a central thing here," Walker said. "I covered the Trump White House, and a big question is how many people are in on the joke and how many people are true believers. I first, you know, became familiar with the text log when i was working on my book, The Breach, which is about the Jan. 6 investigation. I co-wrote it with [former GOP lawmaker] Denver Riggleman. He knows a lot of these people, and he was shocked when he opened the text log. He led the [select committee's] phone team, it was like looking into the mouth of madness, and even with that introduction, I had a similar reaction."

"Adults in government, not only engaging in frighteningly undemocratic language, but their base intelligence is called into question," Walker continued. "You're talking about the wild Italian theory, people were taking it seriously. We see another instance where someone has a bizarre theory from a Romanian YouTube video that any of us would know not to tweet, based on stuff from 2005 that they somehow thought carried over to 2022.The information literacy of our members of Congress is called into question here, and that's part of why we thought it was more important to present more of the totality of the these texts you have seen anywhere before, and our text team made sure you can see them in a phone as they were received, because the typos, the wild links, all of this is really important."

"One last point, and this is something that shouldn't be lost in this discussion," he added. "We see the pressure, we see it in real time in these texts on people like Doug Ducey, that was on people like Brad Raffensperger, that was on people like the Arizona attorney general. Scott Perry, the same guy sending this Italian theory, is talking about lobbying to have Trump pressure the Italian government and Pennsylvania legislatures, and you know, I think one of the things we see is if these people had given into the pressure, all of this plotting just might have worked."

Watch belowor at the link

From Bill Rieken to Everyone:

The February 2022 issue of Scientific American has a paper on how to teach students to evaluate the news stories they read so they won't be fooled by propaganda. In today's profit-driven media industry there is a need for media literacy education more than ever. In a 2016 study involving nearly 8,000 U.S. students, Stanford University researchers found that more than 80 percent of middle schoolers believed that an advertisement labeled as sponsored content was actually a news story.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/schoolkids-are-falling-victim-to-disinformation-and-conspiracy-fantasies/?fbclid=IwAR2WmWLgrZJXLlA-xIzpySf_Biz70PHwN7pI_d01cPvwUeQpPCmgXgPYrgM

...middle school outside of Seattle last year, she did not anticipate teaching students who denied that the Holocaust happened, argued that COVID is a hoax and told their teacher that the 2020 presidential election was rigged. Yet some children insisted that these conspiracy fantasies were true. Both misinformation, which includes honest mistakes, and disinformation, which involves an intention to mislead, have had “a growing impact on students over the past 10 to 20 years,” Gardner says, yet many schools do not focus on the issue. “Most high schools probably do some teaching to prevent plagiarism, but I think that’s about it.”

Children, it turns out, are ripe targets for fake news. Age 14 is when kids often start believing in unproven conspiratorial ideas, according to a study published in September 2021 in the British Journal of Developmental Psychology. Many teens also have trouble assessing the credibility of online information. In a 2016 study involving nearly 8,000 U.S. students, Stanford University researchers found that more than 80 percent of middle schoolers believed that an advertisement labeled as sponsored content was actually a news story. The researchers also found that less than 20 percent of high schoolers seriously questioned spurious claims in social media, such as a Facebook post that said images of strange-looking flowers, supposedly near the site of a nuclear power plant accident in Japan, proved that dangerous radiation levels persisted in the area. When college students in the survey looked at a Twitter post touting a poll favoring gun control, more than two thirds failed to note that the liberal antigun groups behind the poll could have influenced the data.

Disinformation campaigns often directly go after young users, steering them toward misleading content. A 2018 Wall Street Journal investigation found that YouTube’s recommendation algorithm, which offers personalized suggestions about what users should watch next, is skewed to recommend videos that are more extreme and far-fetched than what the viewer started with. For instance, when researchers searched for videos using the phrase “lunar eclipse,” they were steered to a video suggesting that Earth is flat.YouTube is one of the most popular social media site among teens: After Zeynep Tufekci, an associate professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, School of Information and Library Science, spent time searching for videos on YouTube and observed what the algorithm told her to watch next, she suggested that it was “one of the most powerful radicalizing instruments of the 21st century.”....

Some programs, such as Schneider’s Stony Brook program and the nonprofit, Washington, D.C.–based News Literacy Project,teach students to discern the quality of the information in part by learning how responsible journalism works. They study how journalists pursue news, how to distinguish between different kinds of information and how to judge evidence behind reported stories. The goal, Schneider wrote in a 2007 article for Nieman Reports, is to shape students into “consumers who could differentiate between raw, unmediated information coursing through the Internet and independent, verified journalism.”

Yet some media literacy scholars doubt the efficacy of these approaches. Hobbs, for instance, wrote a 2010 paper arguing that these methods glorify journalism, ignore its many problems and do little to instill critical thinking skills. “All that focus on the ideals of journalism is mere propaganda if it is blind to the realities of contemporary journalism, where partisan politics and smear fests are the surest way to build audiences,” she stated.

Other approaches teach students methods for evaluating the credibility of news and information sources, in part by determining the goals and incentives of those sources. They teach students to ask: Who created the content and why? And what do other sources say? But these methods are relatively new and have not been widely studied....

Kathleen Hall Jamieson has a good "how to debunk COVID misinformation" that can be generalized to fake news. She builds a list of trusted websites that she can use to refute false claims.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-to-debunk-misinformation-about-covid-vaccines-and-masks/

...quipped with a few tools, we can each become part of a larger misinformation-fighting system—as I like to call it, a science defense system. To see the power of such a role, consider the limitations of the first line of defense against online deception: the willingness of platforms to block it. Even when this happens, there is a lag between the appearance of harmful content, its detection and its removal. Take the 26-minute viral video “Plandemic” that appeared online last May. Despite efforts by the major platforms to remove it, within weeks that video managed to reach millions with dangerously false claims (example: certain flu vaccines contain the coronavirus, and wearing a mask activates it). Like a game of Whac-A-Mole, when one platform bans a piece of content, the purveyors of deception simply repost it on another one or share it in invitation-only corners of a platform or in private groups. Last March even as Facebook was clamping down on misinformation and conspiracy theories about COVID, a Politico report on thousands of posts found that the supposedly interdicted content was still on the platform, surviving and spreading harm.

Fact-checking organizations such as PolitiFact and FactCheck.org (which I co-founded in 2003) provide a second barrier in the science defense system. Facebook surfaces the work of many of these groups when a user searches for content that has been flagged for containing misinformation. In a 2015 study, Leticia Bode and Emily K. Vraga, both then at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, found that this kind of corrective juxtapositioning can reduce users’ misperceptions. Later, in a 2018 study, Bode and Vraga found that corrections offered by someone’s contacts on a simulated social media platform also reduced misperceptions. That conclusion led them to recommend that when it comes to emerging health issues, knowledgeable people online should employ material from appropriate health sources to “refute false or misleading health information clearly, simply, and with evidence.” A team of medical doctors at CriticaScience is pioneering this form of online engagement. With support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, my FactCheck.org colleagues and I are seeking to develop new ways to arm the public against COVID-related deception.

When misinformation circumvents blocking, fact-checking and response by online interlocutors—as it too often does—the last line of defense is real-world relationships: family, friends and office buddies. Enlisting in a science defense system requires a commitment to make health-promoting practices the norm in one’s community, a willingness to bookmark and turn to public health and fact-checking sites for knowledge about COVID and vaccination, a few premises about the nature and limits of scientific claims, a set of realistic goals, and a strategy for depoliticizing the science if the situation requires it.

Every layer in the model—blocking on platforms, fact-checking, online engagement and creation of a science-friendly community—has limitations. Each additional layer of defense, however, slows the advance of deceptions that, to appropriate a truism, will otherwise get halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots on. And in the case of COVID-19, there are at least two areas where the benefits are so great that they are worthy of concentrated attention: masking and vaccination....

As psychological reactance theory predicts, injunctions are more likely to elicit counterargument than acceptance; as the proverb tells us, you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. An effective science defender will listen to a person’s reasons for not masking or vaccinating and share counterevidence without questioning their competence, good will or intelligence.

“The Battle Between The Masked And The Masked-Nots Unveils Political Rifts,” an NPR headline noted last May. Because mask avoidance has for some become a sign of commitment to conservative politics, the artful science advocate will marshal instances in which those of like ideological bent have championed the behavior, as former senate majority leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky did in 2020 and as former New Jersey governor Chris Christie did in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, explaining how getting infected with COVID-19 led him to conclude, as the headline said, “I Should Have Worn a Mask.” Conversion narratives like Christie’s or, on the vaccination front, like that of physician Eugenia South (“I’m a Black doctor who didn’t trust the Covid vaccine. Here’s what changed my mind”) can be powerful. My co-authors and I saw that power in action in our study of how people reacted to environmental activist Mark Lynas’s explanation of why he once opposed but now favors genetically modified crops. The people exposed to his conversion account were significantly more likely to change their attitudes about genetically modified crops than those who were presented only with his arguments about their benefits.

5 CONSIDER BEFORE YOU “LIKE”

When we click a “like” button on social media, we signal that the content is both acceptable and accepted. By sharing, we invest it with our credibility. Not only do the thumbs-up icon and the retweet symbol serve as signals of community approval, but they also invite our friends to join us in reinforcing the sentiments of our in-group. This process of signaling agreement is agnostic about whether it is used to spread science or viral deception (VD).

In a fashion analogous to that of the original VD, venereal disease, viral deception is contagious and socially transmitted. So, as the editors of Scientific American recommended in September 2019, “Before you click ‘like,’ hit ‘pause.’ ” If the message is VD, quarantine it. If the science comes from a reliable source and is consistent with what you see on the Web sites of the CDC or the National Institutes of Health, give it a boost by clicking “send,” “like” and “share....

https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/texas-education-bill/

no lnx twt

Texas’ divisive bill restricting how students learn about current events, history, and racism passed by Senate

Kate McGee and The Texas Tribune May 22, 2021

After hours of passionate debate about how Texas teachers can instruct school children about America's history of subjugating people of color, the state Senate early Saturday morning advanced a new version of a controversial bill aimed at banning critical race theory in public and open-enrollment charter schools.

Sen. Bryan Hughes, R-Mineola, introduced a reworked version of House Bill 3979 that also requires the State Board of Education to develop new state standards for civics education with a corresponding teacher training program to start in the 2022-23 school year. The Senate approved the bill in an 18-13 vote over opposition from educators, school advocacy groups and senators of color who worry it limits necessary conversation about the roles race and racism play in U.S. history.

The bill now heads back to the Texas House, which can either accept the Senate's changes or call for a conference committee made up of members from both chambers to iron out their differences.

The Senate-approved version revives specific essential curriculum standards that students are required to understand, including the Declaration of Independence and the Federalist Papers. But it stripped more than two dozen requirements to study the writings or stories of multiple women and people of color that were also previously approved by the House, despite attempts by Democratic senators to reinstate some of those materials in the bill.

The Senate did vote to include the Federal Civil Rights Act of 1964, the 13th 14th and 19th amendments to the U.S. Constitution and the complexity of the relationship between Texas and Mexico to the list of required instruction.

Yet the most controversial aspects of the bill remain, including that teachers must explore current events from multiple positions without giving "deference to any one perspective." It also bars students from getting course credit for civic engagement efforts, including lobbying for legislation or other types of political activism.

Educators, historians and school advocacy groups who fiercely oppose the bill remained unswayed by arguments that the bill is merely meant to ensure students are taught that one race or gender is not superior to another.

"Giving equal weight to all sides concerning current events would mean that the El Paso terrorist ideology would have to be given equal weight to the idea that racism is wrong," said Trinidad Gonzales, a history professor and assistant chair of the dual enrollment program at South Texas College. "That is the problem, white supremacy would be ignored or given deference if addressed. That is the problem with the bill."

Hughes denied that the bill would require teachers give moral equivalency to perpetrators of horrific violence.

Sen. Brandon Creighton, R-Conroe, who sponsored the Senate version of the bill, said in a statement to the Tribune thatTexas schools should emphasize "traditional history, focusing on the ideas that make our country great and the story of how our country has risen to meet those ideals."

But Sen. Royce West, D-Dallas, raised concerns on the Senate floor that the historical documents required in the bill only reflect the priorities of white senators.

"There were documents that were chosen, not by Hispanics, not by African Americans in this body, but by Anglos," he said. "No input from us in terms of what founding documents should in fact be considered by all children in this state."

Hughes also told members there have been instances in various school districts where parents have raised concerns about lessons where students have been taught one race is inherently superior to another. He pointed to a particular instance in Highland Park Independent School District where parents were concerned about a book called Not My Idea: A Book About Whiteness.

"We do have teaching now that we want to get out that one race or sex is inherently superior to another, or the individual by virtue of the individual's race or sex is inherently racist, sexist or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously," Hughes said. "I think we agree we don't want that taught in schools. That's why we need this bill."

But Sen. Borris Miles, D-Houston, pushed back against that premise, reading a passage from the book's author about its intent to help children dismantle white supremacy.

"My point is that we cannot just pick and choose what we are going to teach as history and expect to change things and make things better," Miles said. "It doesn't work that way. This bill is eliminating and excluding some things, and including what you want to say."

Educators also worry the legislation will change how teachers can engage students in hard, but important, conversations about American current events that teachers often use to trace back to historical events.

"Kids get engaged and kids want to dig into your class when they get the relevance and they have some buy-in," said Jocelyn Foshay, a Dallas Independent School District middle school teacher.

The bill, which mirrors legislation making its way through state legislatures across the country, has been coined the Critical Race Theory bill, though neither the House or Senate versions explicitly mention the academic discipline, which studies the way race and racism has impacted America's legal and social systems.

The latest version of the bill also reintroduced an explicit ban of the teaching of The New York Times' 1619 Project, which examines U.S. history from the date when enslaved people first arrived on American soil, marking that year as the country's foundational date. That 2019 work from journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones won the Pulitzer Prize and was recently thrust back into the national spotlight after the University of North Carolina did not grant her tenure after conserative criticism of her work.

"To suggest that America is so racist at its core to be irredeemable and to suggest that people based on the color of their skin can never overcome biases and can never treat each other fairly, that's a real problem," Hughes said of the project.

Educators also worry the bill language is too vague and will allow students and parents to potentially use the legislation against them if they disagree with how they're teaching history curriculum, regardless of the primary sources and historical texts teachers use to back up their lessons. It's also unclear who would enforce these requirements and how schools or districts would handle these issues.

"It makes it so open for anyone to interpret it the way they want to interpret it," said Juan Carmona, a history teacher in the Rio Grande Valley town of Donna

He sees this bill as a pushback to including more historical voices and perspectives in the teaching of history. In recent years, Texas started to offer Mexican American and African American studies courses to all high school students.

Over the past year, the phrase "critical race theory" has turned into a Republican rallying cry in an apparent pushback against increased conversations about diversity and inclusion and unpacking implicit bias.

This week, 20 state attorneys general sent a letter to U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona and expressed concern with critical race theory and, specifically, the 1619 Project. The letter says critical race theory analyzes history through "the narrow prism of race."

Georgina Perez, who serves on the State Board of Education, slammed the bill and its supporters, saying they are using buzzwords for political gain rather than to improve education.

"They have no idea what critical race theory is, what it does, who the founders are. They've never read a book, much less a paragraph on it," said Perez. "I understand that maybe some white people are uncomfortable. Well, dammit, when Black people were being lynched, they sure as hell weren't comfortable. Native Americans being removed from their land and Mexican Americans being shot to death in the middle of the night, that shit wasn't comfortable either."

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Texas House gives early approval to bill that would punish Wall ... ›

Katie Davis: Who is the Learner of Tomorrow?

Katie Davis is an assistant professor at the University of Washington's iSchool, a researcher, and co-author (with Howard Gardner) of the acclaimed, "The App Generation: How Today's Youth Navigate Identity, Intimacy, and Imagination in a Digital World." She investigates the role of digital technologies in the academic, social, and moral lives of today's youth, bringing this research into practice with educators, parents, business leaders, and policymakers throughout the U.S. We interviewed Katie in June 2014 to discuss how technology is changing the nature of learning, for better and for worse. (Interview posted: June 10, 2014)

Eric Gordon: How Games Promote Lifelong Learning and Civic Engagement

Eric Gordon studies civic media, mediated cities, and playful engagement as an associate professor in the Department of Visual and Media Arts at Emerson College in Boston and as Executive Director of the Engagement Lab. We talked to him about his investigations into games and social media and asked, "Can playing a game lead to civic change?" (Interview posted: May 1, 2014)

Russell Poldrack: May I Have Your Attention? The Brain, Multitasking, and Information Overload

Dr. Russell Poldrack, a renowned neuroscientist, who heads the Imaging Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin where he and his team use MRI scanners with the inordinate power to study the human brain, multitasking, learning ability, and the effects of information overload. In this PIL interview, we talked to Russ about new discoveries about the effects of multitasking on the human brain and the capacity for "deep learning." (Interview posted: October 12, 2011)

Across the Great Divide: How Today's College Students Engage with News,"Alison J. Head, Erica DeFrain, Barbara Fister and Margy MacMillan, First Monday, August 2019. This lead article from the PIL Team in the August 2019 First Monday issue asks: How can college students and young voters be prepared with the information skills they need to assess news quality and credibility of the information found online and in print as the threats of “fake news,” propaganda, and bias multiply and intensify?

"How Students Engage with News": The October 2018 report from our yearlong study of students and their news engagement practices, commissioned by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Association of College and Research Libraries, and Harvard Graduate School of Education is available here.

>> Read the press release

>> Watch the (2:35 mins.)

>> Read media coverage of the study

https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/trump-is-mentally-ill-but-our-real-sickness-runs-much-deeper/

no lnx

Trump is mentally ill — but our real sickness runs much deeper

Written by Chauncey DeVega / Salon January 1, 2020

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.

This article first appeared in Salon.

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The abundance of public evidence suggests that President Trump is mentally unwell.

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.

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.

Last week on Twitter, journalist Aaron Rupar summarized this disturbing state of affairs:

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.

The Age of Trump is also a symptom of a much deeper and larger societal problem. It is a function of what philosopherHenry Giroux describes as a “disimagination machine”:

I argue that the politics of disimagination refers to images, 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. 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….

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.

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?”

Knebel’s book offers a scenario where the protagonist reflects on the nation’s predicament:...

mickey huff diablo vly

2nd 1/2 new bk nolan higdin

US of distraction

sunday shows? ralph says spivak old days, now breaking news? todd says tough questions drive ppl to brnnose pundits

https://kpfa.org/episode/the-ralph-nader-radio-hour-september-9-2019/

https://theconversation.com/too-many-people-think-satirical-news-is-real-121666

https://theconversation.com/:{too-many-people-think-satirical-news-is-real:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:-121666

In July, the website Snopes published a piece fact-checking a story posted on The Babylon Bee, a popular satirical news site with a conservative bent.

Conservative columnist David French criticized Snopes for debunking what was, in his view, “obvious satire. Obvious.” A few days later, Fox News ran a segment featuring The Bee’s incredulous CEO.

But does everyone recognize satire as readily as French seems to?

Our team of communication researchers has spent years studying misinformation, satire and social media. Over the last several months, we’ve surveyed Americans’ beliefs about dozens of high-profile political issues. We identified news stories – both true and false – that were being shared widely on social media.

We discovered that many of the false stories weren’t the kind that were trying to intentionally deceive their readers; they actually came from satirical sites, and many people seemed to believe them.

Fool me once

People have long mistaken satire for real news.

On his popular satirical news show “The Colbert Report,” comedian Stephen Colbert assumed the character of a conservative cable news pundit. However, researchers found that conservatives regularly misinterpreted Colbert’s performance to be a sincere expression of his political beliefs.

The Onion, a popular satirical news website, is misunderstood so often that there’s a large online community dedicated to ridiculing those who have been fooled.

But now more than ever, Americans are worried about their ability to distinguish between what’s true and what isn’t and think made-up news is a significant problem facing the country.

Sometimes satire is easy to spot, like when The Babylon Bee reported that President Donald Trump had appointed Joe Biden to head up the Transportation Security Administration based on “Biden’s skill getting inappropriately close to people and making unwanted physical advances.” But other headlines are more difficult to assess.

For example, the claim that John Bolton described an attack on two Saudi oil tankers as “an attack on all Americans” might sound plausible until you’re told that the story appeared in The Onion.

The truth is, understanding online political satire isn’t easy. Many satirical websites mimic the tone and appearance of news sites. You have to be familiar with the political issue being satirized. You have to understand what normal political rhetoric looks like, and you have to recognize exaggeration. Otherwise, it’s pretty easy to mistake a satirical message for a literal one.

Do you know it when you see it?

Our study on misinformation and social media lasted six months. Every two weeks, we identified 10 of the most shared fake political stories on social media, which included satirical stories. Others were fake news reports meant to deliberately mislead readers.

We then asked a representative group of over 800 Americans to tell us if they believed claims based on those trending stories. By the end of the study, we had measured respondents’ beliefs about 120 widely shared falsehoods.

Satirical articles like those found on The Babylon Bee frequently showed up in our survey. In fact, stories published by The Bee were among the most shared factually inaccurate content in almost every survey we conducted. On one survey, The Babylon Bee had articles relating to five different falsehoods.

For each claim, we asked people to tell us whether it was true or false and how confident they were in their belief. Then we computed the proportion of Democrats and of Republicans who described these statements as “definitely true.”

If we zero in on The Babylon Bee, a few patterns stand out.

Members of both parties failed to recognize that The Babylon Bee is satire, but Republicans were considerably more likely to do so. Of the 23 falsehoods that came from The Bee, eight were confidently believed by at least 15% of Republican respondents. One of the most widely believed falsehoods was based on a series of made-up quotes attributed to Rep. Ilhan Omar. A satirical article that suggested that Sen. Bernie Sanders had criticized the billionaire who paid off Morehouse College graduates’ student debt was another falsehood that Republicans fell for.

Our surveys also featured nine falsehoods that emerged from The Onion. Here, Democrats were more often fooled, though they weren’t quite as credulous. Nonetheless, almost 1 in 8 Democrats was certain that White House counselor Kellyanne Conway had questioned the value of the rule of law.

It’s no surprise that, depending on the headline, satire might be more likely to deceive members of one political party over another. Individuals’ political worldviews consistently color their perceptions of facts. Still, Americans’ inability to agree on what is true and what is false is a problem for democracy.

Flagging satire

The larger question, though, is what we should do about this problem.

In other recent work, we compared the effectiveness of different ways of flagging inaccurate social media content.

We tested a couple of different methods. One involved including a warning that fact-checkers had determined the inaccuracy of a post. Another had a message indicating that the content was from a satirical site.

We found that labeling an article as “satire” was uniquely effective. Users were less likely to believe stories labeled as satire, were less likely to share them and saw the source as less credible. They also valued the warning.

Facebook tested this feature itself a few years ago, and Google News has started to label some satirical content.

[pix]

The New Yorker’s Borowitz Report – a satirical column written by Andy Borowtiz – is labeled ‘satire’ when it appears in Google News searches. Google News Screenshot

This suggests that clearly labeling satirical content as satire can help social media users navigate a complex and sometimes confusing news environment.

Despite French’s criticism of Snopes for fact-checking The Babylon Bee, he ends his essay by noting that “Snopes can serve a useful purpose. And there’s a space for it to remind readers that satire is satire.”

On this point, we couldn’t agree more.

https://theconversation.com/what-orwells-1984-tells-us-about-todays-world-70-years-after-it-was-published-116940

...Orwell’s telescreen was based in the technologies of television pioneered prior to World War II and could hardly be seen as science fiction. In the 1930s Germany had a working videophone system in place, and television programs were already being broadcast in parts of the United States, Great Britain and France.

Past, present and future

The dominant reading of “1984” has been that it was a dire prediction of what could be. In the words of Italian essayist Umberto Eco, “at least three-quarters of what Orwell narrates is not negative utopia, but history.”

Additionally, scholars have also remarked how clearly “1984” describes the present.

In 1949, when the novel was written, Americans watched on average four and a half hours of television a day; in 2009, almost twice that. In 2017, television watching was slightly down, to eight hours, more time than we spent asleep.

In the U.S. the information transmitted over television screens came to constitute a dominant portion of people’s social and psychological lives.

‘1984’ as present day

In the year 1984, however, there was much self-congratulatory coverage in the U.S. that the dystopia of the novel had not been realized. But media studies scholar Mark Miller argued how the famous slogan from the book, “Big Brother Is Watching You” had been turned to “Big Brother is you, watching” television.

Miller argued that television in the United States teaches a different kind of conformity than that portrayed in the novel. In the novel, the telescreen is used to produce conformity to the Party. In Miller’s argument, television produces conformity to a system of rapacious consumption – through advertising as well as a focus on the rich and famous. It also promotes endless productivity, through messages regarding the meaning of success and the virtues of hard work.

...

What Orwell’s ‘1984’ tells us about today’s world, 70 years after it was published

Stephen Groening, University of Washington

In the year 1984, there was self-congratulatory coverage that the dystopia of the novel had not been realized. However, an expert argues that the technologies described in the novel are here and watching us.

henry g wicked smart:

https://www.alternet.org/2019/05/our-culture-of-ignorance-has-made-possible-the-rise-of-a-terrible-new-political-blend-neoliberal-fascism/

The 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.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.

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 manufactured consent. 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. Chris Hedges is right to argue that both the rule of law and the institutions that make democracy possible are being undermined.He is worth quoting at length:

The mechanisms that once made democracy possible have withered and died. 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.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.

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. 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.”

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.

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 “widely sanctioned ruthlessness.” 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 reality TV becomes the model for mass entertainment. Under such circumstances, there is a full-scale attack on thoughtful reasoning, empathy, collective resistance and the compassionate imagination. In some ways, the dictatorship of ignorance resembles what the writer John Berger calls “ethicide” and Joshua Sperling defines as “The blunting of the senses; the hollowing out of language; the erasure of connection with the past, the dead, place, the land, the soil; possibly, too, the erasure even of certain emotions, whether pity, compassion, consoling, mourning or hoping."

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 exploitative arrangements” 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.

In this instance,neoliberalism and fascism conjoin and advance in a comfortable and mutually compatible project and movement that connects the exploitative values and cruel austerity policies of “casino capitalism” with fascist ideals. These ideals include the veneration of war, anti-intellectualism, dehumanization, a populist celebration of ultra-nationalism and racial purity, the suppression 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 appears to be reaching towards homicidal extremes, especially in the United States.

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 I have termed neoliberal fascism.

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.

As the historian Timothy Snyder points out, “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 “abolish their capacity for distinguishing between the truth and falsehood, between reality and fiction.” 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.

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 “deracination, displacement, and disintegration.” 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.

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.

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. Chris Hedges is right to state 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.

Freedom now means removing one’s self from any sense of social responsibility so one can retreat into privatized orbits of self-indulgence. 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 “smartphone society.” 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.

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. 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.

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.

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. 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.

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.

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. 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. Think of the power of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire as an anti-democratic disimagination machine, especially in its ability to influence the Trump presidency.

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.” 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.

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 pedagogyas part of the broader struggle for economic justice and practice of freedom.

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. 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.

[REDUCTIONISM]

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 common good. This grim reality has been called by Alex Honneth a “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 empowering practice.

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?

henry giroux

http://time.com/5362183/the-real-fake-news-crisis/

KATY STEINMETZ

August 9, 2018

Sitting in front of a computer not long ago, a tenured history professor faced a challenge that billions of us do every day: deciding whether to believe something on the Internet.

On his screen was an article published by a group called the American College of Pediatricians that discussed how to handle bullying in schools. Among the advice it offered: schools shouldn’t highlight particular groups targeted by bullying because doing so might call attention to “temporarily confused adolescents.”

Scanning the site, the professor took note of the “.org” web address and a list of academic-looking citations. The site’s sober design, devoid of flashy, autoplaying videos, lent it credibility, he thought. After five minutes, he had found little reason to doubt the article. “I’m clearly looking at an official site,” he said.

What the professor never realized as he focused on the page’s superficial features is that the group in question is a socially conservative splinter faction that broke in 2002 from the mainstream American Academy of Pediatrics over the issue of adoption by same-sex couples. It has been accused of promoting antigay policies, and the Southern Poverty Law Center designates it as a hate group.

Trust was the issue at hand. The bookish professor had been asked to assess the article as part of an experiment run by Stanford University psychologist Sam Wineburg. His team, known as the Stanford History Education Group, has given scores of subjects such tasks in hopes of answering two of the most vexing questions of the Internet age: Why are even the smartest among us so bad at making judgments about what to trust on the web? And how can we get better?

Wineburg’s team has found that Americans of all ages, from digitally savvy tweens to high-IQ academics, fail to ask important questions about content they encounter on a browser, adding to research on our online gullibility. Other studies have shown that people retweet links without clicking on them and rely too much on search engines. A 2016 Pew poll found that nearly a quarter of Americans said they had shared a made-up news story. In his experiments, MIT cognitive scientist David Rand has found that, on average, people are inclined to believe false news at least 20% of the time. “We are all driving cars, but none of us have licenses,” Wineburg says of consuming information online.

Our inability to parse truth from fiction on the Internet is, of course, more than an academic matter. The scourge of “fake news” and its many cousins–from clickbait to “deep fakes” (realistic-looking videos showing events that never happened)–have experts fearful for the future of democracy. Politicians and technologists have warned that meddlers are trying to manipulate elections around the globe by spreading disinformation. That’s what Russian agents did in 2016, according to U.S. intelligence agencies. And on July 31, Facebook revealed that it had found evidence of a political-influence campaign on the platform ahead of the 2018 midterm elections. The authors of one now defunct page got thousands of people to express interest in attending a made-up protest that apparently aimed to put white nationalists and left-wingers on the same streets.

But the stakes are even bigger than elections. Our ability to vet information matters every time a mother asks Google whether her child should be vaccinated and every time a kid encounters a Holocaust denial on Twitter. In India, false rumors about child kidnappings that spread on WhatsApp have prompted mobs to beat innocent people to death.“It’s the equivalent of a public-health crisis,” says Alan Miller, founder of the nonpartisan News Literacy Project.

There is no quick fix, though tech companies are under increasing pressure to come up with solutions. Facebook lost more than $120 billion in stock value in a single day in July as the company dealt with a range of issues limiting its growth, including criticism about how conspiracy theories spread on the platform. But engineers can’t teach machines to decide what is true or false in a world where humans often don’t agree.

In a country founded on free speech, debates over who adjudicates truth and lies online are contentious. Many welcomed the decision by major tech companies in early August to remove content from florid conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who has alleged that passenger-jet contrails are damaging people’s brains and spread claims that families of Sandy Hook massacre victims are actors in an elaborate hoax. But others cried censorship. And even if law enforcement and intelligence agencies could ferret out every bad actor with a keyboard, it seems unwise to put the government in charge of scrubbing the Internet of misleading statements.

What is clear, however, is that there is another responsible party. The problem is not just malicious bots or chaos-loving trolls or Macedonian teenagers pushing phony stories for profit. The problem is also us, the susceptible readers. And experts like Wineburg believe that the better we understand the way we think in the digital world, the better chance we have to be part of the solution.

We don’t fall for false news just because we’re dumb. Often it’s a matter of letting the wrong impulses take over. In an era when the average American spends 24 hours each week online–when we’re always juggling inboxes and feeds and alerts–it’s easy to feel like we don’t have time to read anything but headlines. We are social animals, and the desire for likes can supersede a latent feeling that a story seems dicey. Political convictions lead us to lazy thinking. But there’s an even more fundamental impulse at play: our innate desire for an easy answer.

Humans like to think of themselves as rational creatures, but much of the time we are guided by emotional and irrational thinking. Psychologists have shown this through the study of cognitive shortcuts known as heuristics. It’s hard to imagine getting through so much as a trip to the grocery store without these helpful time-savers. “You don’t and can’t take the time and energy to examine and compare every brand of yogurt,” says Wray Herbert, author of On Second Thought: Outsmarting Your Mind’s Hard-Wired Habits. So we might instead rely on what is known as the familiarity heuristic, our tendency to assume that if something is familiar, it must be good and safe.

These habits of mind surely helped our ancestors survive. The problem is that relying on them too much can also lead people astray, particularly in an online environment. In one of his experiments, MIT’s Rand illustrated the dark side of the fluency heuristic, our tendency to believe things we’ve been exposed to in the past. The study presented subjects with headlines–some false, some true–in a format identical to what users see on Facebook. Rand found that simply being exposed to fake news (like an article that claimed President Trump was going to brink back the draft) made people more likely to rate those stories as accurate later on in the experiment. If you’ve seen something before, “your brain subconsciously uses that as an indication that it’s true,” Rand says.

This is a tendency that propagandists have been aware of forever. The difference is that it has never been easier to get eyeballs on the message, nor to get enemies of the message to help spread it. The researchers who conducted the Pew poll noted that one reason people knowingly share made-up news is to “call out” the stories as fake. That might make a post popular among like-minded peers on social media, but it can also help false claims sink into the collective consciousness.

Academics are only beginning to grasp all the ways our brains are shaped by the Internet, a key reason that stopping the spread of misinformation is so tricky. One attempt by Facebook shows how introducing new signals into this busy domain canbackfire. With hopes of curtailing junk news, the company started attaching warnings to posts that contained claims that fact-checkers had rated as false. But a study found that this can make users more likely to believe any unflagged post. Tessa Lyons-Laing, a product manager who works on Facebook’s News Feed, says the company toyed with the idea of alerting users to hoaxes that were traveling around the web each day before realizing that an “immunization approach” might be counterproductive. “We’re really trying to understand the problem and to be thoughtful about the research and therefore, in some cases, to move slower,” she says.

Part of the issue is that people are still relying on outdated shortcuts, the kind we were taught to use in a library. Take the professor in Wineburg’s study. A list of citations means one thing when it appears in a book that has been vetted by a publisher, a fact-checker and a librarian. It means quite another on the Internet, where everyone has access to a personal printing press. Newspapers used to physically separate hard news and commentary, so our minds could easily grasp what was what. But today two-thirds of Americans get news from social media, where posts from publishers get the same packaging as birthday greetings and rants. Content that warrants an emotional response is mixed with things that require deeper consideration. “It all looks identical,” says Harvard researcher Claire Wardle, “so our brain has to work harder to make sense of those different types of information.”

Instead of working harder, we often try to outsource the job. Studies have shown that people assume that the higher something appears in Google search results, the more reliable it is. But Google’s algorithms are surfacing content based on keywords, not truth. If you ask about using apricot seeds to cure cancer, the tool will dutifully find pages asserting that they work. “A search engine is a search engine,” says Richard Gingras, vice president of news at Google. “I don’t think anyone really wants Google to be the arbiter of what is or is not acceptable expression.”

That’s just one example of how we need to retrain our brains. We’re also inclined to trust visuals, says Wardle. But some photos are doctored, and other legitimate ones are put in false contexts. On Twitter, people use the size of others’ followings as a proxy for reliability, yet millions of followers have been paid for (and an estimated 10% of “users” may be bots). In his studies, Wineburg found that people of all ages were inclined to evaluate sources based on features like the site’s URL and graphic design, things that are easy to manipulate.

It makes sense that humans would glom on to just about anything when they’re so worn out by the news. But when we resist snap judgments, we are harder to fool. “You just have to stop and think,” Rand says of the experiments he has run on the subject. “All of the data we have collected suggests that’s the real problem. It’s not that people are being super-biased and using their reasoning ability to trick themselves into believing crazy stuff. It’s just that people aren’t stopping. They’re rolling on.”

That is, of course, the way social-media platforms have been designed. The endless feeds and intermittent rewards are engineered to keep you reading. And there are other environmental factors at play, like people’s ability to easily seek out information that confirms their beliefs. But Rand is not the only academic who believes that we can take a big bite out of errors if we slow down.

Wineburg, an 18-year veteran of Stanford, works out of a small office in the center of the palm-lined campus. His group’s specialty is developing curricula that teachers across the nation use to train kids in critical thinking. Now they’re trying to update those lessons for life in a digital age. With the help of funding from Google, which has devoted $3 million to the digital-literacy project they are part of, the researchers hope to deploy new rules of the road by next year, outlining techniques that anyone can use to draw better conclusions on the web.

His group doesn’t just come up with smart ideas; it tests them. But as they set out to develop these lessons, they struggled to find research about best practices. “Where are the studies about what superstars do, so that we might learn from them?” Wineburg recalls thinking, sitting in the team’s office beneath a print of the Tabula Rogeriana, a medieval map that pictures the world in a way we now see as upside-down. Eventually, a cold email to an office in New York revealed a promising model: professional fact-checkers.

Fact-checkers, they found, didn’t fall prey to the same missteps as other groups. When presented with the American College of Pediatricians task, for example, they almost immediately left the site and started opening new tabs to see what the wider web had to say about the organization. Wineburg has dubbed thislateral reading:if a person never leaves a site–as the professor failed to do–they are essentially wearing blinders. Fact-checkers not only zipped to additional sources, but also laid their references side by side, to better keep their bearings.

In another test, the researchers asked subjects to assess the website MinimumWage.com. In a few minutes’ time, 100% of fact-checkers figured out that the site is backed by a PR firm that also represents the restaurant industry, a sector that generally opposes raising hourly pay. Only 60% of historians and 40% of Stanford students made the same discovery, often requiring a second prompt to find out who was behind the site.

Another tactic fact-checkers used that others didn’t is what Wineburg calls “click restraint.”They would scan a whole page of search results–maybe even two–before choosing a path forward. “It’s the ability to stand back and get a sense of the overall territory in which you’ve landed,” he says, “rather than promiscuously clicking on the first thing.” This is important, because people or organizations with an agenda cangame search results by packing their sites with keywords, so that those sites rise to the top and more objective assessments get buried.

The lessons they’ve developed include such techniques and teach kids to always start with the same question: Who is behind the information? Although it is still experimenting, a pilot that Wineburg’s team conducted at a college in California this past spring showed that such tiny behavioral changes can yield significant results. Another technique he champions is simpler still: just read it.

One study found that 6 in 10 links get retweeted without users’ reading anything besides someone else’s summation of it. Another found that false stories travel six times as fast as true ones on Twitter, apparently because lies do a better job of stimulating feelings of surprise and disgust. But taking a beat can help us avoid knee-jerk reactions, so that we don’t blindly add garbage to the vast flotillas already clogging up the web. “What makes the false or hyperpartisan claims do really well is they’re a bit outlandish,” Rand says. “That same thing that makes them successful in spreading online is the same thing that, on reflection, would make you realize it wasn’t true.”

Tech companies have a big role to play in stemming the tide of misinformation, and they’re working on it. But they have also realized that what Harvard’s Wardle calls our “information disorder” cannot be solved by engineers alone. Algorithms are good at things like identifying fake accounts, and platforms are flagging millions of them every week. Yet machines could only take Facebook so far in identifying the most recent influence campaign.

One inauthentic page, titled “Resisters,” ginned up a counterprotest to a “white civil rights” rally planned for August in Washington, D.C., and got legitimate organizations to help promote it. More than 2,600 people expressed interest in going before Facebook revealed that the page was part of a coordinated operation, disabled the event and alerted users. The company has hired thousands of content reviewers that have the sophistication to weed through tricky mixes of truth and lies. But Facebook can’t employ enough humans to manually review the billions of posts that are put up each day, across myriad countries and languages.

Many misleading posts don’t violate tech companies’ terms of service. Facebook, one of the firms that removed content from Jones, said the decision did not relate to “false news” but prohibitions against rhetoric such as “dehumanizing language.” Apple and Spotify cited rules against hate speech, which is generally protected by the First Amendment. “With free expression, you get the good and the bad, and you have to accept both,” says Google’s Gingras. “And hopefully you have a society that can distinguish between the two.”

You also need a society that cares about that distinction. Schools make sense as an answer, but it will take money and political will to get new curricula into classrooms. Teachers must master new material and train students to be skeptical without making them cynical.“Once you start getting kids to question information,” says Stanford’s Sarah McGrew, “they can fall into this attitude where nothing is reliable anymore.” Advocates want to teach kids other defensive skills, like how to reverse-search an image (to make sure a photo is really portraying what someone says it is) and how to type a neutral query into the search bar. But even if the perfect lessons are dispersed for free online, anyone who has already graduated will need to opt in. They will have to take initiative and also be willing to question their prejudices, to second-guess information they might like to believe. And relying on open-mindedness to defeat tribal tendencies has not proved a winning formula in past searches for truth.

That is why many advocates are suggesting that we reach for another powerful tool: shame. Wardle says we need to make sharing misinformation as shameful as drunk driving. Wineburg invokes the environmental movement, saying we need to cultivate an awareness of “digital pollution” on the Internet. “We have to get people to think that they are littering,” Wineburg says, “by forwarding stuff that isn’t true.” The idea is to make people see the aggregate effect of little actions, that one by one, ill-advised clicks contribute to the web’s being a toxic place. Having a well-informed citizenry may be, in the big picture, as important to survival as having clean air and water. “If we can’t come together as a society around this issue,” Wineburg says, “it is our doom.”

This appears in the August 20, 2018 issue of TIME.

last segm nolan higden global crit __ literacy pjt

pundits endless recycled // pension plan

pjt censor jones deplatform: napalm girl, blm ? met with bibi; nat am dapl pix?

calls himself performance artist [rodeo clown?] joe roggin show drunk?

https://kpfa.org/episode/project-censored-august-24-2018/

video:

https://projectcensored.org/video-critical-media-literacy-education-antidote-fake-news-propaganda-censorship-post-truth-world/

roject Censored director, professor Mickey Huff, recently gave a keynote presentation for the 3rd Annual Social Justice Week events at Sonoma State University. His talk was on “Critical Media Literacy Education: The Antidote to ‘Fake’ News, Propaganda, and Censorship in a Post-Truth World.”

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/republicans-cant-tell-difference-between-honesty-and-truth-and-theyre-putting-us

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/heres-how-tell-difference-between-persuasion-and-manipulation

COLLEGE OF MARIN

OCT 26 & 27, 2018

College of Marin

835 College Avenue

Kentfield, CA, 94904

RESERVE YOUR SPOT TODAY

Register Here

Project Censored cordially invites you to the The Media Freedom Summit 2.0: Critical Media Literacy for Social Justice, to be held at College of Marin (COM) just north of San Francisco on October 26-27, 2018. The Summit will be an opportunity for journalists, students, faculty, activists, and community members to identify and address crucial threats to media freedom, to learn about and share effective strategies for advancing media freedom, and to promote critical media literacy education in service of social justice, civic engagement, and positive, meaningful change in local communities and larger society. Facilitators will lead discussion sections whose findings will be published in an essay that expresses the goals for media freedom and approaches for critical media education to foster social justice and equity. This event will adopt more of an un-conference approach in that we expect presentations to be interactive and inclusive of both presenters and attendees. We intend to use the conversation cafe model to engage all participants in the process based on the group agreements: www.conversationcafe.org.

http://www.alternet.org/education/manufactured-illiteracy-and-miseducation-long-process-decline-led-president-donald-trump

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Education

Manufactured Illiteracy and Miseducation: A Long Process of Decline Led to President Donald Trump

A deep-rooted crisis in education, and a long cultural and political decline, is what got us here. There's hope!

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.