Episode 122 Refuse Fascism

Sun, 8/14 3:32PM • 59:47

Henry Giroux 00:00

Fascism is rooted in a kind of anti-intellectualism that’s a lot smarter than simply saying somebody’s stupid — that personalizes the problem. It’s about an ignorance that’s manufactured. It’s about a culture that’s no longer able to question itself. Anti-intellectualism has been weaponized. It’s no longer just an attribute. It’s a weapon of political power. We’re not just talking about a government that wants to put fascism into play. We’re talking about a government that wants to legitimate itself through a formative culture of fascism, for which it won’t be questioned.

Sam Goldman 00:50

Welcome to Episode 122 of the Refuse Fascism podcast, a podcast brought to you by volunteers with Refuse Fascism. I’m Sam Goldman, one of those volunteers and host of the show. Refuse Fascism exposes, analyzes, and stands against the very real danger and threat of fascism coming to power in the United States.

Thanks to everyone who goes the extra step and rates and reviews on Apple podcasts, shares and comments on social media or YouTube. It helps us reach more listeners and we read every one. After listening, go, go, help us find more people who want to refuse fascism, by rating and reviewing on Apple podcasts or your listening platform of choice, and encouraging your friends, family who listen to do the same. Subscribe/follow so you never miss an episode and of course continue all that sharing and commenting on social media.

Sam Goldman 01:51

In today’s episode, we’re sharing a conversation I had with Henry Giroux a couple of weeks back regarding the nazification of American education. Henry is an author and professor at McMaster University. His latest book is “Pedagogy of Resistance Against Manufactured Ignorance.”

Sam Goldman 02:09

But before that, we need to talk about the dramatic escalation and intensification in the divisions in the ruling powers, with one side the Republi-fascist party of Trump no longer believing in or upholding the norms that have held this country together since the time of the Civil War, and going completely bonkers. The FBI raid of Trump’s Mar a Lago on Monday is increasing pressure on Trump.

The gravity of the probe cannot be overstated. Never before has there been necessary an investigation into a former president stealing national secrets, potentially nuclear codes. Yeah, FBI agents siezed at least 20 boxes, including 11 sets of classified documents. The now unsealed warrant details that federal agents were investigating potential violations of federal laws, things like transmitting or losing defense information under the Espionage Act. The other statutes address the concealment, mutilation or removal of records and the destruction, alteration or falsification of records in federal investigations. In this situation, there is continuing danger and positive potential for the people to weaken a fascist leader and movement, but left on its own without a mass opposition to what Trump stands for, this will not be enough.
Trump and his GOP have been incredibly resilient, finding opportunities to turn their “defeats” into further hardening of the fascist core. Just look at how the Republi-fascist movement and Trump supporters are responding to this warranted search and seizure. Fox News and other fascist media outlets continue to churn out stories right up until an hour before this recording on Sunday, so much that CNN ran a piece titled: We thought Murdoch’s news outlets were abandoning Trump, then the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago.

Alongside lead editorials in the Wall Street Journal and New York Post, Fox News primetime host Jesse Waters stated: “I’ve never seen the base more energized. I’ve never seen the base more angry. I’m angry. I feel violated, the whole country feels violated. This is disgusting. They’ve declared war on us, and now it’s game on.” Fox News has also been leading the charge against Judge Bruce Reinhart, who authorized the FBI search warrant on grounds that he represented clients with ties to Jeffrey Epstein — note, this happened over a decade ago. On Thursday night, Fox host Brian Kilmeade displayed a totally photoshopped very easily noted fake picture of Reinhard on a plane with Epstein confidante Ghislaine Maxwell. Little wonder then that Reinhart and his synagogue have been targeted and receiving threats.

On Friday for instance, Temple Beth David, the South Florida synagogue attended by Judge Reinhart, who, again, authorized the search, was scheduled to host evening services on the beach, but a member of the synagogue on Thursday said that the beach Shabbat event was canceled amid anti-semitic threats linked to the FBI raid. The Judge’s involvement in the synagogue had been publicly identified in a Tuesday Twitter post by Lenny Dykstra, a former New York Mets outfielder and convicted felon who followed up with anti-semitic comments about Beth David’s religious practices. What we are seeing is shocking. But, let’s be honest, it’s part of a pattern that we have been repeatedly seeing for now six years.

Trump engages in some kind of totally egregious, often outright criminal behavior, prompting official scrutiny and condemnation of his actions. He treats those totally normal actions as unjustified persecution — proof that the deep state is out to get him. This then gets echoed by the Republi-fascist Party and the fascist news network, and his most fanatical supporters become even more fanatical, even more rabid, often not just contemplating but carrying out violence. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, the leading non-Trump prospective candidate in the 2024 GOP primary, called the warranted search, “another escalation in the weaponization of federal agencies against the regime’s political opponents.” Florida Senator Rick Scott, who also heads the National Republican Senatorial Committee, casted the FBIs actions as, “third world country stuff.”

New York representative Elise Stefanik, who serves as the third ranking House Republican, called for, “an immediate investigation and accountability into Joe Biden and his administration’s weaponizing this Justice Department against their political opponents.” That should honestly — yes, it’s ominous and threatening, but it’s also hilarious considering what the Trump/Pence regime did against their political opponents. Just putting that out there. For her part. Marjorie Taylor Greene is now claiming that the FBI planted classified materials at Mar-a-Lago, par for the course and without any evidence whatsoever.

Trump’s supporters have been threatening FBI officers, including gathering outside FBI field offices, as they did in Phoenix, Arizona, displaying their range of guns along with Confederate and Trump flags. Trump’s Truth Social social media platform, along with other platforms that fascists gather in, have been swarming with explicit violent threats against the FBI and talk of civil war, asking: “When does the shooting start?” On Thursday, Ricky Shiffer, a Trump supporter who participated in the January 6th coup, attacked an FBI building in Cincinnati, Ohio, ultimately dying in a shootout with police. On Truth Social, he made a call to be ready for combat to kill the FBI on sight. When asked whether he was proposing terrorism, he answered, No, I am proposing war — “be ready to kill the enemy.” He went on to say, “Kill the FBI on sight and be ready to take down the other active enemies of the people and those who tried to prevent you from doing it.”

This is ominous stuff, and that is not BS. What I just mentioned, is tip of the iceberg in a comprehensive fascist response. These fascists are determined to crush — yes, yes, as violently as necessary — anyone and anything, anywhere in society that stands in their way of implementing their horror show. Every setback Trump has weathered has led to more vengeance and violence. This is a key lesson off of January 6th. That is not saying that we don’t need to hold him accountable, that we do not need to stop this fascist horror show. There is no lack of evidence against Trump, but the problem with Trump and company has never been finding stuff. There is, if anything, a glut of evidence. News is not yet clear and people must be tense to the reality that this is a highly volatile situation. That he leads the movement despite all this evidence is part of why he is so effective and celebrated by his supporters.

Right now, the corrupt ex-president of South Korea is serving a 20 year sentence. In 2016 and 2017, it took 20 successive Saturday night rallies bringing 16 million into the streets to get her impeached. She was arrested shortly after being driven out of office. Trump and his GOP are planning coup 2.0, and it’s not off brand for them to advance through this. If we allow the coup 2.0 to go down, they will be all out for revenge and the stakes for humanity will be exponentially higher. Fascism can and is happening here and it can’t simply be voted away. Relying on official channels or voting alone or on the Democrats to remedy this, instead of taking to the streets in a sustained way has led to inaction and conciliation with fascism. The question remains, what will the decent people do? Will the future be fascist? Or will we act? As this is still an unfolding situation with the Republi-fascists gunning for all-out civil war, we will have more to say on all of this in future episodes.

On a totally different note. We have to talk briefly about Celeste Burgess and her mother Jessica Burgess, the 18 year old woman and her mother who have been charged with a series of felonies and misdemeanors regarding medication abortion. Law enforcement was first tipped off that a teen had a stillbirth and buried the remains. The state’s case relies on the teenagers, private Facebook DMs [direct messages] with her mom, obtained from Facebook by court order. This case is yet another horrific harbinger of what is to come in the hellscape that is our post Roe USA.

The reality is that abortion bans require a surveillance state. While stillbirth is not a crime, it has been turned into one by a state presuming every pregnancy must result in the delivery of a healthy baby for the state. Let’s get real. A society that shames, stigmatizes, and puts so many obstacles in the way of a woman getting an abortion — abortion bans spreading across the country with sanction from the highest court — is criminal. The state has no right to force women to have children against their will, to treat women’s wombs as sites of surveillance, to hunt down, put on trial and imprison women for pregnancy outcomes that do not end in the birth of a healthy infant. The problem this case poses is clear and ominous: the state and patriarchal control. We will return to the subject more in future episodes.

Okay, we’re gonna get there, I promise. In this interview, we get deep into some extremely prescient parallels between the 21st century American fascism and the rise of Hitler’s Germany. But I want to go out of my way to reiterate that what we are facing is not a foreign threat by any means, but when deeply rooted in the United States. In the interview, we mention previous discussion on the show on Neo McCarthyism. It was in reference to the attacks on Rise Up for Abortion Rights, and the RevComms, and the episode was 119, titled Post Roe Reality Check. Now, here’s my interview with Henry.

Today I am honored to welcome back to the show Henry Giroux. He is a university professor for scholarship in the public interests, and Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. He is the author of numerous books, including ‘America at War With Itself’; ‘On Critical Pedagogy’; and ‘American Nightmare Facing the Challenge of Fascism’; Race, Politics, and Pandemic Pedagogy’; ‘Education at a Time of Crisis’ published by Bloomsbury. I was listening to our last conversation, which took place January 2021, following the coup attempt.

We talked about the danger of downplaying Trumpism, post Trump leaving office, how Trumpism is more than Trump, and that Trumpism was far from dead, how close we came to full-blown fascism and what we’re faced with now. Here we are 19 months later, where, as you wrote in your recent Truth Out piece, “The United States has increasingly come closer to a tipping point into the abyss of a new fascist politics.” I want to just get your thoughts on how do you see that unfolding now, in ways that may have been different to our conversation 19 months ago.

Henry Giroux 14:09

I see it unfolding in two particular ways. One is the allegiance to fascism tends to authoritarianism in its various forms. It is now unapologetically part of the Republican playbook — unapologetically. Not only is it a part of the playbook in that the language of fascism now is integral to the language of the GOP, but it’s also integral to how they define the relationships that they have with other powers that are unequivocally fascist, whether we’re talking about Orban in Hungary, or whether we’re talking about a move into categories such as white replacement theory, or the support for Bolsonaro.

Secondly, it seems the range of policies that have been produced and are being argued for, and in some ways legitimated, such as the repudiation of Roe versus Wade and the increasing call to prevent contraceptions, make it illegal. To claim that women can either have babies or go to jail, the claim that they don’t have the freedom to travel wherever they want to travel to within the United States, the book burning, the attack on education — which I think is really the central key issue — it seems to be the Supreme Court, the potential reversal of gay rights — it’s actually mind blowing in terms of this assault, because it unapologetically speaks to another history.

This speaks to a history that we saw in the 1930s. Somebody, I think it was Heinrich Heine, who made a comment once, 100 years before the fascists, he said: You know, first comes the book burnings, he said, whenever they burn books, they’re just going to end up burning human beings. I think in some way one could apply that to every law that’s being argued for, that I just talked about. Once they ban gay marriage, what’s the next step — to put people in jail? I mean, to put people in prison? To execute people? These are not unreasonable thoughts. We’re not talking about the world of fantasy here, that’s for sure. You’ve got a Supreme Court and you potentially have a Congress and a President in 2024, that will have such a lockstep grip on the American political system in terms of pushing it into fascism, that in some ways, it may be too mild to say that we’ve tipped over.

Maybe the question now is, how do we get ourselves out of it? — which is a much more ominous intervention into what we’re talking about. But I think maybe the third thing is we have an attack on consciousness that I’ve never seen before in my life; any kind of critical consciousness, any attempt to articulate ideas to power that are critical, the attack on the common good, the attack on the social contract, the attack on unions, you attack on working people, the attack on the poor, the attack on veterans who basically are sick because of drug hits, and now claiming we refuse to fund any form of support for them, while, at the same time, arguing for the reduction of taxes for the 1%. This is really about a culture of cruelty that speaks to the collapse of conscience — a collapse of conscience directly related to the rise of fascist ideology.

Sam Goldman 17:03

And for people who may not think in these terms, can you clarify for our listeners when you speak of consciousness, what that means?

Henry Giroux 17:12

I’ll do it by quoting a liberal, John Dewey. You know, John Dewey was very clear when he said that you can’t have a democracy of any sort without an informed consciousness. He understood that. He understood that the basis for, in a sense, being an active, engaged individual, or an active engaged organization, or an active engaged social movement, is you have to have an understanding of the problem. If you don’t have it historically, if you’re not able to connect the dots, if you’re not able to basically align power with consequences that are utterly deadly and undemocratic, then basically you’ve lost your sense of political agency.

So what we’re talking about here is a collapse of consciousness that’s at the basis for the collapse of political agency, individually and collectively. And without the foundation for critical agency — which is an informed public, or critical public, or public that learns how to govern rather than be governed — you have the foundation for fascism. Fascism is rooted in a kind of anti-intellectualism, that’s a lot smarter than simply saying somebody’s stupid. That personalizes the problem. It’s about an ignorance that’s manufactured. It’s about a culture that’s no longer able to question itself. It’s about a culture that aligns itself with strong men — and I use that word, the masculine version, very purposely, with strong men — who basically have all the answers, strong men who hate women, strong men who basically are waging a war on young people, strong men who hate the other, strong men who really believe that white replacement theory is true; that they are their victims, that the public should only be occupied by basically the purification of what we would call racial blood.

We’ve heard this before. We not only saw it in the 1930s, we saw it in the 1970s. We saw it in under Pinochet. And now we’re hearing it from politicians. We’re hearing it from pundits. We’re hearing it from think tanks that were set up to destroy democracy in the United States. It’s ongoing. It’s a flood in the ecosystem that’s comparable to a hurricane that’s unimaginable.

Sam Goldman 19:13

I really appreciate that breakdown, Henry. I think it’s very helpful for people to see where this goes and how it’s like there’s a domino effect when you take that out. You’ve consistently written about this connection between people’s understanding, including the important understanding of history, which in this country, how quickly there’s historical amnesia is really unprecedented in the world, I think, and the history of fascism and people’s agency — people’s understanding and their agency — to be in the world to create worlds.

On the flip side, what role could a full accurate understanding of history contribute to a people right now? I was thinking even if you consider people’s ability if they were able to understand something like January 6th and the storming of the Capitol within a context of a rolling coup and had more of a historical understanding, what difference would that make?

Henry Giroux 20:14

I think that when you look at history as a resource, and you try to understand that most of the things that we have to face with the outcomes or struggles that have already taken place in history. Some of them we win, and some of them we lose. I think that what those histories do is offer a resource, both understanding how domination and all of its complexity has worked, and works itself out. And also how people resist this stuff. You know, how basically Jim Crow was resisted by the Civil Rights Movement, how the women’s movement — I think of Ellen Willis in the 1960s who I loved, I thought she was 50 years ahead of her time as a feminist who was able to forecast in light of the history she occupied something about the possibility of what could happen in the future.

It’s a resource that in some way allows us to be sensitive, and to align ourselves with something that we see coming that we ordinarily, if we don’t have that history, we have no way to understand it in two ways, conceptually and relationally; how it fits into a broader picture of history, and how it fits into a broader picture that allows these different elements of violence, political, social, economic, educational, the various fundamentalisms, and what they mean historically, and what they might mean in the present and what they might mean in the future.

This kind of understanding is not just about being smart. It’s not just about saying, I’m an historian. It’s about enlarging your sense of political agency. Agency, when it matters, does not just live in the present. It’s not frozen in the moment. When you freeze the moment, you freeze a sense of agency, because you have no understanding of how to recognize what’s aligning with the past that might tell us something about the present and the future.

When, for instance, the most obvious example, in 1933, you know, Goebbels made the statement that it’s time to rid Germany of literature that is un-German, and 20,000 people in 1933, sort of got together in a particular plaza at that particular time, and they burned books. We know where that led: left intellectuals had to flee from Germany. People who were found with those books in their houses were put into concentration camps or prisons. Young people were told to spy on their parents.

Not to know this, not to understand what the language of racial superiority and the language of censorship and the language of the police state mean when the state begins to say: Here are a whole range of basic freedoms that you can no longer occupy, we’re going to take those away from you, we have to ask ourselves, where did this happened before? And what were the consequences of that? Not to understand these forces. I hate the cliche: not to know history is to repeat it, but there’s an element of truth in this. I mean, it’s not a matter of simply repeating. It’s a matter of taking yourself out of history, no longer being informed by it and stunting your own sense of political agency.

The key word that we need to grasp here is agency, and how fundamental it is education, how fundamental it is to historical memory, how fundamental it is to remembering and how fundamental it is to act on those ideas in ways that don’t make the claim: they only matter if they’re utterly precise, but they matter if they point to things that, in a certain kind of direction, suggests we are repeating something that is really ominous. Although, it comes in different forms. Fascism lives in different forms. It never dies in a society. It always lives in different forms, and the correlation between the death of conscience, the death of education, the death of historical consciousness, basically, in my estimation, from history, tell us that we have now set the groundwork for the reemergence of a rebranded form of fascism that wraps itself in flags, patriotic education, ultra nationalism, racial cleansing. We’ve heard this before.

I’m gonna give you one small example: My friend, Jeffrey Sinclair, at Counterpunch — brilliant guy — made a point the other day. He says the right wing now is creating T-shirts with the picture of Pinochet on and it says underneath: He was right. Think about this. You’re young, you’re uninformed, say that’s a cool t-shirt. You put it on, you’re walking around school with a picture of Pinochet on your chest, and you haven’t a clue as to what this means. Think about you being 15 or 16 years old, you’re lonely, you’re alienated in this neoliberal capitalist society, you’re on the internet, and all of a sudden, you’re getting these emails saying: Hey, John, or Jean, you don’t have to be isolated. We know who you are, join our club, let’s meet on Instagram, and all of a sudden you’re getting racist literature. And all of a sudden, you’re being basically recruited into a white supremacist group. You have no history to alert yourself to that. You’ve been told that it’s okay to be ignorant — or, actually, it’s a value in our state of mind — you’ve been told that conformity matters, and you can’t defend yourself.

So when we make the claim that we’re protecting children by making them ignorant, what we’re actually doing is setting them up to be basically Nazis, to be basically fascist, to be basically authoritarians, to be basically sexist, anti-gay. So it seems to me that this question of historical consciousness, its relation to questions of political agency, and education and institutions that make all that possible, and the attempts to eliminate them, we need to connect the dots here. We’re not just talking about a government that wants to put fascism into play. We’re talking about a government that wants to legitimate itself through a formative culture of fascism, for which it won’t be questioned.

Sam Goldman 25:41

Yeah. People don’t have a full sense of the scope and the scale of what this means for our people, to be deprived of history, and I’ll talk about this later, but not just a series of facts, but actually how to approach the world critically; which is a methodological point, which is separate from the facts that you have, but how you go about and understand the world. The assault on that I think is even more ominous, because people don’t know how to figure out what’s true, and that is devastating. And that comes not just from the fascists, but that comes from sections of the so-called left too in a way that only paralyzes people and prevents them from acting in the ways that I think are so, so necessary. I was thinking when you were talking about the youth, and the wearing of the shirt, I was thinking about the work that you’ve done recently in exploring the nazification of American education.

You did a series of articles really hammering at the danger posed by what I call the fascist laboratory that is Florida, under the tutelage of Governor Ron DeSantis. I was hoping you could talk a little bit about how you — you said this earlier, you — said that you see the crisis in education as a key front in this assault; that is perhaps the most dangerous. You spoke a little bit to it just now on how you see that providing the foundation for the emergence of a fascist state, but I was thinking if you could talk more about what is going on in Florida. Why do you think that is an example of what they want to do more broadly? Why is it both a key front for them? But also, why does it need to be something that we pay attention to as people who don’t want it?

Henry Giroux 27:28

I think they’re really two questions there, and they’re interrelated. I think for DeSantis, it’s an enormously important winning political strategy. He saw what happened in Virginia, he saw what has happened across the country around this phony attack on critical race theory — which doesn’t exist in public schools. And he picked up on it, and he picked up on it in a way to not only, in a sense, put into play a long-standing element of fascist Republican playbooks, and that is the elimination of public schools. They call them government schools, they call them socialism factories. They claim that, of course, in higher education, everybody who teaches anything critical is on the left — which I wish was true. And it goes on and on.

But beneath all of that, beyond the fact that he’s claimed to a base that loves this stuff, because it gives them a sense of what it means to be actors. They can go to school boards, they can attack people, they can make phony claims. They can stand up — remember, when politics becomes theater, you have to provide an idiom, you have to provide a banner and a space for that theater to be sort of worked out, as Trump taught us all. I think for DeSantis, the educational issue is perfect theater. Think of the language: parents should have control over their kids. Parents should not allow educators to groom their students, educators who basically are dealing with any issue that deals with questions of sexual orientation, race, social issues, they’re grooming kids to be seduced by pedophiles.

My God, I mean, the language is like going off the roof. But what DeSantis is doing that’s very smart, is he’s destroying the institutions that would make it possible for people to learn how to hold power accountable, and he knows that. He knows it plays well. He knows that mass ignorance has a certain currency in an enormously anti-intellectual culture that’s been weaponized. Anti-intellectualism has been weaponized. It’s no longer just an attribute. It’s a weapon of political power. I think that he’s done a number of things. He starts with the school with the banning of books. He starts it with terrorizing teachers by claiming that they could be fired if they teach certain things. He’s eliminated tenure; done everything he can to eliminate tenure in higher education. He uses the language of McCarthyism, he terrorizes LGBTQ students, because he knows they’re relatively powerless as a bloc, and it goes on and on.

So it seems to me that he has basically brought together two things. A political strategy: he sees it as having enormous valence among his base, preparing himself for the elections for 2024. Secondly, he knows that the institutions that threaten him the most are those that basically are involved in the form of criticism that could expose how empty he is, how fascistic he is, how right wing he is, and what the consequences could be. He has completely shut off, increasingly, not just the schools, which are a laboratory for fascism, but he’s shut off, he’s now moved to any institution that will take critical thinking seriously, and holding power accountable seriously: the press, corporations that don’t, like Disney — Disney, no less — that don’t support his racist policies. And of course, going after teachers unions, he hates teachers.

The groups that he supports that are involved in this are all funded by big money. Really want to talk about fascism? Talk about capitalism. This is the end game. We’re now in a period of neoliberal fascism. Fascism can’t legitimate itself anymore, theoretically. So now it has to look for enemies that it can point to to divert people away from understanding what exactly is going on. The other side of this is that until we take this question of education seriously, which he does, as being simple to politics, or politics of fascism — we have to take it seriously dialectically, both as a form of domination and as a form of empowerment — we’re in big trouble if the left is not organized around this issue.

I really believe and other people have said this, I believe that schools, education in the United States is on the forefront of the fascist attack. I mean, women’s reproductive rights? Absolutely. You know, the attacks on transgender youth, absolutely. Attack on teachers, absolutely. But if people support this ideologically, these issues don’t mean anything. The door is not open for getting at the roots of what it would mean to produce a mass consciousness, a social imagination, a radical imagination, a series of educational policies in which all of a sudden people can connect the dots and somehow come together and be able to recognize — and that opens up a different conversation. I mean, a conversation around what education is, and how you want to talk about it.

A lot of people say we need new methods. No, we don’t. We need a new language. We need a vision of what education is for. It’s not about workers, just simply training workers. The neoliberals under Clinton and, of course, Obama, they had a vision of education that just paved the way for this. That’s all they did. You can’t say that these liberals are basically removed from this. They paved the way. They turned education into what I call instrumental rational factories. They’re factories, they have nothing to do with critical thinking. They have nothing to do with educating students to be in control, to learn how to govern rather than be governed. They don’t prepare them for being self-reflective, working with others, understanding the larger world, developing historical consciousness. They eliminated all of that. And all of a sudden, it was very easy for the right to step in and take it a step further, and say, Yeah, you’re right. But now we don’t care about simply educating workers. We believe that they shouldn’t be allowed to think, at all. That’s really the next step, and that’s why it’s so important.

Sam Goldman 32:52

Yes… yes, yes, yes. As you were talking, I was thinking that we’re seeing a total fascist assault on education, on teaching, on the ability to have people look at what’s happening and be able to act and understand patterns. One of those things that I think is really key and undergirds it to me is the history of this country, and people not wanting young people to think about or question this country. And I think that’s why it’s right that they call it patriotic education. People may have different versions of patriotism.

There is wanting to kind of not just whitewash, but to deprive people of the roots of what this country was founded on, and what it means. If people look at the history of this country, in particular, the experience of Black people in this country. They were forced through the horrendous conditions of slavery for centuries, and that their physical being was legally enshrined as less than human being. And that that is a thread throughout all of this society, including in the present, that makes kids question, everything.

Henry Giroux 34:10

I think there are a couple of things are really incisive interventions. I mean, I don’t know if I said this earlier, but I didn’t mean to say fascism can no longer legitimate itself. I meant to say capitalism can no longer legitimate itself. And I think that because it can no longer legitimate itself, and it begins to look for ways to politically divert people away from serious questions — race baiting, baiting LGBTQ students, and so forth and so on. I think there’s one thing missing from this analysis that we haven’t talked about, whether we’re talking about the death of historical consciousness, or we’re talking about the complete eclipse of their forms of domination in which the country was founded, from genocide of Native Americans, of course, to slavery, to the internment of Japanese Americans during the war, let’s be serious, right, and it goes on and on.

The other side of this is that the educational apparatuses that have basically been fundamental in producing this stuff in the past were basically schools; higher education and public education. Your generation lives in a world in which the educational apparatuses that now shape mass consciousness are no longer confined to schools. C. Wright Mills is absolutely right. Raymond Williams, that whole cultural studies tradition got it right when they said: Look, there are cultural apparatuses that have now emerged, that basically link technology power in everyday life. In education, in ways we’ve never seen before. The culture is the most powerful educational force we have ever seen, and I think that if we don’t understand that, and if we reduce discourse about education being central to politics to schooling, I think we’ve really missed something. Murdoch is an educational institution. It’s a fascist educational institution. It’s a propaganda mill.

The right wing, ultra right foundations — and there are a range of them — these are really sick institutions that are doing terrible damage educationally. And they work in the education of the schooling sector, as you know. So it seems to me that there are three things here: one is the myth of history. This is the mythic ideology that produces a kind of exceptionalism in the United States, that seems to think that not only was the country founded in democracy, but it’s reached its apogee. There’s no other place to go, right?

Secondly, is a language of individualism that has a long history in the United States that basically is the most de-politicizing language other than the divine right of kings. It basically says there are no social problems, all private issues are basically exactly that. You can’t translate systemic consideration without private issues into larger systemic considerations. And thirdly, there is the assumption that problems are all isolated and that there’s no way to connect them. You’re not an isolated individual, you think systemically, you can make connections, and you understand how valuable education and mass consciousness are in creating a public imagination that offers the space for dialogue, critique, and the ability to marry ideas to action and power. That’s the key.

Sam Goldman 37:04

Thank you for that. It’s extremely helpful, especially how things do change is important to recognize. When I was reading your article about the nazi-ification of American education, I was thinking about how, personally, I think patriotic education in this country, the way that it takes its form is very uniquely American. [HG: Yeah]

There’s things about it that are, in my opinion, undeniably, could only happen here. –And I’m not saying that in a great way for people that are listening, who may be confused. I’m not saying that as a positive. There’s also the very true point that you leaned into, that it also takes a page right out of the Third Reich’s playbook. I was wondering if you could give people a little insight into that, and why you think that’s important to recognize?

Henry Giroux 37:51

When you read that history, what jumps out at you are the parallels, which are basically mind blowing. First of all, the book burning, the attack on universities, the anti-intellectualism, the attempt by Hitler and Goebbels — who make the claim that youth have to be conquered, we have to make sure they never think again — the claim to ultra nationalism and racial purification. Nothing can exist in the curriculum, which is un-German the firing first of all Jewish professors, then the firing of anybody who disagreed, the intervention into the curriculum, the rewriting of history, the claim that it could only be patriotic German history, the ongoing attempt to create organizations outside of the schools that reinforce the schools, the urging of students and other faculty in both the high schools in higher education to basically spy on each other, the signing of loyalty oaths — you can’t ignore this stuff. And you can’t ignore the larger project, which is really fundamental in what took place.

These are not simply ad hoc policies that happened to come out of nowhere. It was systemic. They wanted to build institutions that produced a consciousness of utter conformity, loyalty and racial superiority. And I think that what strikes me the most about that curriculum, and what strikes me the most about those educational policies, is not just the attempt to make people ignorant, but the racial cleansing, the white supremacy. At the heart of this curriculum was white supremacy and racial cleansing. Ask yourself what is going on in the schools today that suggest the same thing? It’s impossible, it’s impossible to separate these policies in the United States from white supremacy. It’s impossible. The call for vouchers, the call for getting rid of government schools, the claim that teachers are pedophiles, who believe in anything critical. The claim that basically you have to eliminate from the universities and from high schools, and the elementary schools, any teacher who basically is willing to hold power accountable.

This is about creating a systemic formative culture that ensures that fascism will thrive in those institutions that threaten it most. The first casualty of authoritarianism, of the minds that would oppose it, and fascism begins with language. It begins with the language of dehumanization, it moves to the language of exclusion, it embodies the language of racial cleansing, and it moves them into camps. And the camp is a metaphor. It’s a metaphor, not simply for genocide, it’s a metaphor for developing what I would call a politics of disposability in which the punishing state overrides the social state, and all problems now that you disagree with are criminalized, i.e., for instance, Ron DeSantis, passes a law in Florida that says a protest is too close to certain areas, particularly in suburban white neighborhoods, people have the right to run them over; literally run them over — they passed a law.

The gun violence that we see everywhere — fascism thrives on fear. That’s why I really believe these people, they love the mass shootings, because the mass shootings tie right in to their ideology. They reduce fear to a personal problem, bodily fear, fear of being mugged or raped, killed, shot by walking into school. What’si the answer? Arm yourself, create a strong government, increase your police forces, be happy with the national security state. These are the pieces that all have to be put together, it seems to me, and I think when you do that, you’ll come out with an image overall, that’s absolutely irrefutably tied to history; the history of fascism in its different forms.

Sam Goldman 41:42

You’ve talked through this conversation and in your writing overall, regarding the shaping of public understanding, in the broadest sense: education. I call it education; other people call it all sorts of things, consciousness, whatever. Whether people in a society have the tools and ability to understand what’s going on, and how we got there and engage with that reality meaningfully, including engaging with each other meaningfully, the ability to have dialogue, to seek to understand, to know how to question and interrogate their own thinking, to reflect through that process and to, yes, change through it, but more importantly, change the world together.

I want to lean in a bit more to how do we do this important work of fighting back against the DeSantis horror show in the concrete, as it’s happening now, as it’s doing harm right now, as school is about to go back in session, you know, these very draconian education policies, but also what else, especially those of us not in schools or in formal education institutions, how can we be standing up to help people critically.

Henry Giroux 42:51

There are a number of factors that need to be reconsidered, in light of the urgency of the problem. And I think the first is we need a new language we need a language has basically is about civic life, civic virtue, civic culture, democracy, radical democracy, socialist democracy, and institutions that basically are crucial for it to survive. We need to talk about how the planet and political life as we know it is — in the image of the promise and ideas of a radical democracy — are enormously under siege. We have to make visible — power that often is dominating and oppressive power sustains itself by his invisibility, and that invisibility is always couched in language. It’s couched in language, drama, performance, theater, politics, turns into theater and spectacle — so you need a new language for this.

Secondly, you need a language, particularly for people on the left progressives, we need a language that speaks to people, you know, that recognizes their needs in some fundamental way. We need to hear from them, we need to talk to them and with them in ways that they can recognize themselves, and not a language that’s just so abstract, or just so totally concerned only with, for instance, economics, that we don’t recognize that domination comes in particular forms. And often it’s lived culturally before it moves into the world of the abstract. I mean, the fact that Pablo said, politics follows culture, I want to know about people’s everyday lives and how we can talk to them about that, and what that means.

Thirdly, we need to create educational institutions all across the country that are alternative, whether in the form of media like this, or in the form of newspapers, anything we can to begin to expand the sites of education, that absolutely speak to something new. I have a great fear, of course, the digital world because I know that it’s a tool, but that tool is linked to power. And at the same time there is something called a kind of digital democracy that we need to think about, how we use these tools that young people occupy and teach them how to be cultural producers and not just simply cultural consumers.

I want to create 1000 people, basically hundreds and thousands of young people who can produce their own radio shows who can produce their own media who can produce in the name of a political imaginary. They can make it clear that the present doesn’t have to emulate the future that they’ve been written out of democracy and it’s time to mobilize on multiple fronts, all connected in some way to raising consciousness. Teachers, particularly educators, we have seen in the last two years, educators mobilizing, and in sometimes against their own conservative unions, which I think is fabulous; against gun violence against a whole range of issues, being dehumanized, being de-skilled being attacked.

Librarians are starting to mobilize. They have to create a national movement, first of all, that basically is on the side of what I call direct justice. What I mean by direct justice is direct action. We have got to shut these institutions down. I don’t mean we need to go to vote. That’s fine. We need to take over school boards, do everything you can to make the school boards democratic. That’s okay. But we need a policy of direct action. This is nonviolent. I’m not calling for violence. I’m calling for direct action. Occupy banks, occupy schools, occupy the institutions that stop everyday life, and use that pedagogically to educate people, and to make clear that people are oppressed, being exploited, and the world is coming to an end.

I’m sorry, the planet is in danger. This is not an abstract issue anymore. If we have 10 years to be able to endure this without food wars, water wars, the entire militarization of the planet, we’ll be lucky. So time is running out. Lastly, it seems to me these social movements have got to come together. And they’ve got to come together under the fear of fascism in the promise of a socialist democracy. We’ve got to stop running away from this word, socialism. This is insane. We want socialism. We don’t want anybody to be poor. We don’t believe that education should not be free. We don’t believe that equality doesn’t matter. We don’t believe that rich people should… five people should organize or have more wealth than half the planet, sorry.

No. Why should we be apologetic? Capitalism is a death-march. It’s a machinery that produces misery, massive inequality; 21,000 people die a day from poverty. How can any system justify that? Any system? How can we justify the Elon Musks of the world? There’s no sense in it, not because it’s abhorrent, but because we don’t have a language of social responsibility anymore. What capitalism has done besides individualizing everything is it’s made it difficult because it’s claimed that economic activity, if not all activity, is divorced from social responsibility. And in doing that, it’s erased the ethical grammar of justice.

That’s why when you had said earlier: Oh, the lies are everywhere, you can’t discern the truth from facts. That’s true, but the basis for that is because the entire ethical grammar of social responsibility under capitalism has literally been destroyed; self interest is all that matters, who cares what the consequences are, as long as you get rich, you don’t want to get a vaccine, that’s okay, you’ll probably just kill your grandmother. It’s all about being hurt, and it goes on and on. That whole notion of the social has been decapitated. The world of the social, the world of ethics, the world of social responsibility has basically been eliminated under capitalism.

Capitalism is now on steroids; unapologetic, cruel, devastating wrecking the planet, and filled with people and celebrities who are simply — I don’t want to say buffoons, who I want to call — legitimating agents, and their buffoonery is a performance to legitimate themselves.

Henry Giroux 48:11

I think that there are a couple of things that you said that are enormously important that I’d like to just contextualize in a slightly different language, if I may. I think that modes of domination operate in various registers, and they’re all interrelated. You’re right, the economic system is basically capitalist, it has to go. We’re not talking about reform, we’re talking about a revolution, in the best sense. We’re talking about a complete restructuring of the system. You have to develop an anti-capitalist consciousness in order for this movement to work. It cannot be a capitalist performance consciousness; it doesn’t work. Robert Reich seems like a nice guy, he’s very honest, but personally I’m not about saving capitalism.

I think the urgency of the problem is much greater than that, and I think the consequences of capitalism can’t be wished away by claiming it can be more compassionate. Secondly, I think we need to make a distinction between crisis and catastrophe. A catastrophe is always on the side of cynicism and inevitability. It seems to suggest nothing can be done, we’re dead, you know, let’s just sit back and enjoy ourselves existentially, have a beer and go home. But a crisis suggests that this is human made, it needs to be addressed, and we need to combine a language or critique with the language of hope. Matters of hope, matter — to inspire people, to energize people, to inform people, to work with them, to be energized and informed.

You have to believe that another world is possible. You have to believe that. Hope is the basis of agency. Without hope, there’s no agency. Without agency, there’s no hope. So, we want to talk about Disneyland hope, you know. We’re not talking about the Disneyfication of hope. We’re talking about hope rooted in real material structures, real ideological structures, and how they come together to produce a moment in history, and a particular social formation that’s on the verge of destroying everything, everything. And that’s the urgency. The urgency is to say, this is not a catastrophe, it’s a crisis, and as Marx said, history is always open, you know, we have to find resistance. Power is not simply about domination. It’s also about resistance. We have to expand the registers of resistance. One way to expand them is just as you’ve said, we can’t lock ourselves into silos. Another language has to be reinvented and re-energized is the language of solidarity; not just social responsibility, not just the critical consciousness, not just an appreciation for the social contract — but solidarity. How do we work together? If we can’t work together, how can we talk about a world that we celebrate in terms of its interrelationship that can’t work without a democratic notion of the social? Not gonna work.

Sam Goldman

I appreciate the fire and the stepping back and pulling back the lens and looking at this particular assault in the broader picture of the state of the world, and where things are and where things are headed if we do not intervene. I share a lot of common understanding and common cause with you and in the sense that I truly believe that radical change is coming and right now without a serious intervention, that that is going to be a unspeakable horror and could be and very likely will be the end of humanity, end of our species, and not just our species, but whole ecosystem collapse. so I think that understanding the stakes is really important.

You talk about the way people think, and the system that we live under and, of course, listeners of the show don’t need to share Henry’s or my analysis to unite very forcefully around refusing fascism, but I I do want to wade into that a little bit more, because I think that it is very important that people understand that the way we think, that the mode of thinking, of us, yes, as individuals, but as a people overall, whether we want to admit it or not, is shaped by the mode of production, the economic system. [HG: Yeah] That is the foundation of this society, and I think that what we’ve been talking about in terms of how people fight for change, or fight the powers that be however you want to, to word it in and transforming people’s understanding is really pivotal work. I think that we can make tremendous change in unshackling the way people think the way that people refuse to think critically the way that people think about me, me, me, me, me above all else.

I think that there’s a lot of work that we can do around that something that I concern a lot of my thinking on right now too is how we can overcome the the shackles of identity politics that really serves only to further silo each other and perpetuate the status quo. Even if people don’t think that they’re doing it, it’s ultimately, in my opinion, what it serves. But I think ultimately, as long as this system remains in power and force, and by that, personally, again, this is my opinion, not the opinion of all of Refuse Fascism, but you know, the system of capitalism/imperialism, the pull of this system will continue to reassert, and people’s thinking then gets pushed down in line with that mode of production, and sets the terms for all of life, including the daily life that people live in — that’s just my personal thought. Which doesn’t mean that the work that Henry and I concern ourselves with, in changing the way people think, right now in the present doesn’t matter. It matters profoundly.

Henry Giroux 48:11

I think that there are a couple of things that you said that are enormously important that I’d like to just contextualize in a slightly different language, if I may. I think that modes of domination operate in various registers, and they’re all interrelated. You’re right, the economic system is basically capitalist, it has to go. We’re not talking about reform, we’re talking about a revolution, in the best sense. We’re talking about a complete restructuring of the system. You have to develop an anti-capitalist consciousness in order for this movement to work. It cannot be a capitalist performance consciousness; it doesn’t work. Robert Reich seems like a nice guy, he’s very honest, but personally I’m not about saving capitalism. I think the urgency of the problem is much greater than that, and I think the consequences of capitalism can’t be wished away by claiming it can be more compassionate.

Secondly, I think we need to make a distinction between crisis and catastrophe. A catastrophe is always on the side of cynicism and inevitability. It seems to suggest nothing can be done, we’re dead, you know, let’s just sit back and enjoy ourselves existentially, have a beer and go home. But a crisis suggests that this is human made, it needs to be addressed, and we need to combine a language or critique with the language of hope. Matters of hope, matter — to inspire people, to energize people, to inform people, to work with them, to be energized and informed. You have to believe that another world is possible. You have to believe that. Hope is the basis of agency. Without hope, there’s no agency. Without agency, there’s no hope.

So, we want to talk about Disneyland hope, you know. We’re not talking about the Disneyfication of hope. We’re talking about hope rooted in real material structures, real ideological structures, and how they come together to produce a moment in history, and a particular social formation that’s on the verge of destroying everything, everything. And that’s the urgency. The urgency is to say, this is not a catastrophe, it’s a crisis, and as Marx said, history is always open, you know, we have to find resistance.

Power is not simply about domination. It’s also about resistance. We have to expand the registers of resistance. One way to expand them is just as you’ve said, we can’t lock ourselves into silos. Another language has to be reinvented and re-energized is the language of solidarity; not just social responsibility, not just the critical consciousness, not just an appreciation for the social contract — but solidarity. How do we work together? If we can’t work together, how can we talk about a world that we celebrate in terms of its interrelationship that can’t work without a democratic notion of the social? Not gonna work.

Sam Goldman 53:23

Yeah. I appreciate that insight, and I did want to — returning to your other comments — I think that it speaks to a lot of what I see needed in the battle around education and the fascist assault is the role of direct action. Whether you think that this system is reformable, or whether you think we need revolution, I think that direct action to stop this assault is something that many, many more people can and should need to get behind and be part of. I think that people throughout this country need to be stepping up to defend those who are under attack, whether it be school boards, whether it be at public meetings, whether they’re being terrorized and be part of defeating these assaults.

Henry Giroux 54:08

The question here is what’s the larger narrative that brings people together? Let’s broaden the narrative in which we can take these particular forms of oppression and be able to say: I’m a feminist; I believe in a world without sexism. Okay, but if you’re a feminist and you believe in a world without sexism, how do you feel about a democracy in a world in which you have racism, or you have ecological destruction or you have capitalism? You can’t do it.

I think that where certain forms of politics are central to one’s identity, grow up! Let’s just get beyond this. This is not just simply about my identity, it’s about the planet. It’s about death worlds. It’s about machinery of death. that’s engulfing everyone. It’s about something we haven’t seen before, in terms of its potential disruption and urgency. The right knows how to come together. They have umbrellas. We’re against the government. We believe in life. You know, these endless platitudes, but they have a unifying force in their broadness and in their scope that works for them. We need to understand what that means pedagogically and politically.

Sam Goldman 55:06

In a previous episode, we talked about how McCarthyism — in the sense that that we were talking was like this neo-McCarthyism, right, but we were using history to help people understand the present. We were talking about how it didn’t simply ruin people’s lives, which it did, but it put a limit on people’s imagination about how the world could be, and enlisted anti-communist so-called progressives to help define and police that limit. And even as McCarthy was disgraced, that never went away.

This made me think, when I was reading your nazification of American education piece, about your dis-imagination machine, that if anything has built on that, anti-communist basis, a whole deeply distorted house of mirrors. When people can’t even recognize the right questions, let alone any meaningful answers when their horizons are so narrow. Do you have any final thoughts on how we break through that?

Henry Giroux 56:07

It’s funny, maybe I’ll use something that might be considered a platitude. I remember when I was, in the 60s, I was at Appalachian State, and we were protesting against the war, and these football players were attacking us literally, physically. They said: You’re a communist, you’re a communist. And they said: Why are you a communist? And I said: Because they ask the right questions. You see what I’m getting at is that we need a political philosophy that asks the right questions.

If we ask the right questions, you won’t have McCarthyism. If you’re asking the right questions, you’ll understand how McCarthyism becomes a cheap metaphor for simply political repression. If you ask the right questions, and you have the right institutions, and you have the right sort of elements of daily life that give people the opportunity not just to survive, but to be able to be real individual and collective agents, then the question of politics following culture begins to make more sense.

Sam Goldman 56:53

Well, Henry, I want to thank you so much for spending the time with us sharing your expertise, your perspective, and continuing to do the writing that you do to help us understand and refuse fascism together. So I just want to thank you again.

You can find the articles by Henry referenced in today’s episode in the show notes along with a link to his site. You can follow Henry on Twitter @HenryGiroux. Since we recorded the interview, most Florida students returned to school this past week where draconian anti-gay anti-black anti-history anti-truth policies are now in place. See a link in the Show Notes for a helpful snapshot on how the DeSantis policies are reshaping the educational landscape in Florida, featuring testimonials from teachers’ perspectives.

If you are a student, teacher, administrator in Florida with a story to share or thoughts on this episode, please get in touch, we want to hear from you. For those interested in learning more on their perspective that this is a rare time when revolution is possible, recommend checking out the RnL Revolution Nothing Less show on YouTube hosted by Andy Zee and co-hosted by Sunsara Taylor. Thanks for listening to Refuse Fascism. We want to hear from you. Share your thoughts, questions, ideas for topics or guests, or lend a skill, share your art, comics whatever you got. Tweet Sam (me) @SamBGoldman, or you can drop me a line at [email protected]. Or, of course, leave a voicemail by visiting anchor.com/RefuseFascism and hitting the message button.

Want to support the show? Amazing, it’s simple. Show us some love by reading and reviewing on Apple podcasts or your listening platform of choice. And of course, be sure to follow this show so you never miss an episode. Chip in to support our pod and content creation to help people understand and act to stop the fascist threat. You can donate by visiting RefuseFascism.org and hitting the donate button. Thanks as always to Richie Marini, Lina Thorne and Mark Tinkleman for helping produce this episode. Thanks as well to incredible volunteers. We have transcripts available for each and every episode, so be sure to visit Refuse Fascism and sign up to get them your inbox each week. We’ll be back next Sunday. Until then, in the name of humanity, we refuse to accept a fascist America.