It is so vital to listen to the wisdom and truth embodied by those like Henry Giroux. Please heed his words. And silence is complicity. We all need to be speaking the truth again and again and again and peacefully but relentlessly standing up to the spread of fascism across our nation and beyond. There comes a time when silence is betrayal, and that time is now. — Molly
By Henry Giroux
The irony is unbearable. Trump has drenched public life in lies, turned immigrants and Black citizens into targets of contempt, and made corruption and violence the grammar of governance. He pledges loyalty to dictators, surrounds himself with sycophants and thugs, and now, having abducted foreign students and hounded immigrants, has declared war on the so-called left, whom he falsely and grotesquely blames for Charlie Kirk’s tragic death. What should be a moment of grief has been twisted into a weaponized spectacle. Trump, Miller, Rubio, and their allies rush to script Kirk’s assassination not as the bitter harvest of the culture of violence they themselves have sown, but as proof of alleged leftist extremism. In their poisonous narrative, the real "enemies within" are not the architects of hate, the racists, the thugs who stormed the Capital, or the masked agents abducting citizens from the streets, but the critics of authoritarian power. Their response to such critics is a war on First Amendment freedoms. Freedom of speech is no longer a bulwark of democracy, but its enemy.
Dissenting voices, independent organizations, comedians, newspapers, student groups, and critical educators suddenly find themselves cast as conspirators in crimes they allegedly commit-because they are critical of injustice, lawlessness, and a culture of lies and cruelty. Thinking has become dangerous, satire that pokes at injustice are viewed as un-American, cultural institutions that teach people about history, the evils of the past, and the various movements for freedom are now threatened with mob-like language.
This is not merely distortion; it is fascism’s signature maneuver: the exploitation of tragedy to expand repression. It is McCarthyism reborn with a vengeance. Trump, Rubio, Miller, Bondi, and their cohort of democracy-haters now threaten to strip Americans of their passports, revoke citizenship, and criminalize dissent. They howl in outrage when likened to Nazis, even as their actions mirror the same grim playbook: militarizing society, crushing dissent, concentrating power in the hands of a cult leader, and reanimating the legacy of white supremacy and racial cleansing.
Trump praises Netanyahu, a war criminal, as a war hero while arming Israel in its slaughter of more than 60,000 Palestinians, yet with grotesque irony, he denounces the left as the true perpetrator of violence. At the same time, he boasts of pressuring ABC to fire Jimmy Kimmel, a petty act of vengeance that amounts to his own assault on the First Amendment and a chilling reminder of how easily free speech can be crushed under authoritarian whim. At the same time, neither Trump's FCC head nor Trump himself were alarmed over Fox News host Brian Kilmeade stating that "instead of jail [homeless] people should be killed with an "involuntary lethal injection, or something. Just kill 'em."
Such acts of silencing are never isolated; they are instruments of power that legitimate broader forms of state violence, teaching the public that repression is both normal and justified. In this way, censorship, propaganda, and the glorification of war criminals converge to create a formative culture where state violence appears not only acceptable but necessary, eroding not only the foundations but the very idea of democracy.
The agents of monopoly capitalism. from sprawling law firms to global corporations that monopolize the media, announce with ruthless clarity that profit outranks truth. Their homage to Trump's authoritarianism is not merely born of fear but of an insatiable greed: they willingly sacrifice every shred of public responsibility to feed an unending hunger for power and capital. Nowhere is this capitulation to fascist politics more tragic than in higher education, where universities bow to the dictates of the Trump regime, crushing dissent and, in some cases, betraying their own students by handing over the names of those fighting against genocide. The echo is haunting: a new McCarthyism of campus informants, a reprise of the shameful complicities of fascist-era universities. This is not merely an institutional failure but a moral collapse, a repudiation of knowledge, conscience, and the very democratic commitments that should define the purpose of the academy.
American society stands in a moment of crisis in which every vestige of culture, public life, and collective good that dares hold power accountable is marked for elimination. The attack on the so-called left is not simply an assault on free speech, it is the rumble of the boxcar waiting to be filled, the prelude to concentration camps reimagined for our time. The ghost of a authoritarian past now shapes American society, and the future looks more like the horrors present in Hungary, India, and Argentina--where authoritarianism is in full swing.
In all these countries including the Unites States, the leaders of the new authoritarianism and fascism speak with vomit in their mouths and blood on their hands;. Language becomes weaponized, functioning as a powerful force for manufactured ignorance. They turn grief into a rallying cry for repression. The imagination is now doused with the fire of conspiracy theories and civic stupidity. At home, Trump and his political hacks imagine themselves as victims while they spread violence, misery, cruelty, and moral decay both at home and abroad. The stakes could not be clearer: silence is complicity, and to speak is now the most urgent act of resistance and precondition for building powerful modes of collective resistance. The lights are going out fast, but there is still time to make justice, equality, and freedom the foundation for a radical democracy.
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