HENRY GIROUX: PROTESTING FOR THE FREEDOM TO KILL OTHERS

This is spot on. Deep bow of gratitude, as always, for the strong, wise, and essential voice of truth that Henry Giroux has embodied for decades.

I’m also moved to add this comment by Julian Friedland, an excellent response — “The social distancing equaling communism meme is interesting and revealing for it suggests that the anger comes from merely being asked to consider the interests of others. And this is indeed what is occurring. So the stakes are high in this sense of undermining self interest as the only drive. If it succeeds, we may come out of this transformed into a more virtuous economic attitude in which we tend to act through greater moral self awareness. So this is quite accurately what the protester above is desperately hostile to. The idea of having to actually stop being entirely selfish all the time.” 

This is what neoliberal fascism looks like with its combined registers of stupidity, ideological fundamentalism, and lack of any sense of social responsibility. Moral depravity fueled by a culture of privatized individuals and the notion that the government is the enemy of freedom.

What this means is that anything that interferes with the market is outside of the boundaries of freedom. This type of market fundamentalism is one of the hallmarks of an updated fascism propelled by conservative disimagination machines. Its organizing principles push the ideas that economic activity is unburdened by social costs and individual liberty in its pursuit of freedom has no moral constraints, including being accountable for the death of others who interfere with reducing individuals to consumers and consumption as the only act of citizenship.

At the same time, it has no problem with allowing the government to be taken over by the power of big corporations and the financial elite and the use of the government to restrict the rights of workers, women's control over their bodies, the civil liberties of undocumented immigrants, and the power of the carceral state to impose racialized mass incarceration.

— Henry Giroux